The Quest for Anna Klein

PART VI

The Nightingale Floor

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

The Japanese word was uguisubari, Danforth told me, a floor designed to make a chirping sound when anyone walked on it. “The sound of a nightingale,” he added.

Then another drink arrived, and he took a small sip before returning to the reference toward which, seconds before, his tale had abruptly careened.

“Any wooden floor will creak a little when it’s walked on, of course,” Danforth continued, “but in a nightingale floor, it’s not the wood that gives off a sound, it’s nails rubbing against clamps. That’s why the floor chirps rather than creaks.”

“Why would anyone want a chirping floor?” I asked.

“For security,” Danforth explained. “The floors were laid in hallways that led to conference rooms and the like. If anyone tried to creep close to the rooms, the nightingale floor would give off its distinctive call, and the people in council would be alerted to a spy or, perhaps, an assassin.”

He took another short sip from his glass, and I saw he was being careful now to take in only a small amount of alcohol.

“I walked the nightingale floor in Nijo Castle,” he went on. “Remember, Kyoto was spared the first atomic bomb because the secretary of war had been there and knew it was beautiful.”

Another circling back, I thought, to distant references.

Danforth drew in a long, recuperative breath. “Older castles had been designed to conceal the rooms of the bodyguards, but the Tokugawa shogunate, the one who built Nijo, displayed these rooms quite prominently” He smiled. “Because power that does not show itself, Paul, diminishes itself.” He took another small sip from his glass. “Unless concealment is an integral part of the power in question, of course.”

I looked at him quizzically.

“The success of a traitor, for example, is built on never having his treachery discovered,” Danforth said. He leaned forward slightly “Do you know who the greatest spy of all time was, Paul?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No, I don’t,” I confessed.

He leaned back again. “Neither does anyone else.”

“I see your point,” I said, then attempted my own circling back to earlier references. “But what does a nightingale floor have to do with cyanide?”

“The fact that Anna’s cyanide didn’t work, and that Bannion’s did,” Danforth said. “That’s what kept sounding in my mind on the Channel crossing. It was like a creeping footfall on a nightingale floor. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. All the way to London.”

~ * ~

London, England, 1939

Clayton’s face had never looked more deeply troubled; Danforth would later wonder, from the depths of his own steadily building suspicion, if his friend had already known what he had come to tell him.

It was raining, and Danforth had walked quickly to the tavern near Whitehall where they were to meet. He’d expected to find Clayton already waiting, but it was some minutes before he arrived. From his place at the rear of the tavern, Danforth had watched Clayton strip off his very English raincoat and close and fasten his very English black umbrella. Even so, he’d looked distinctively American, though in a way Danforth could not exactly describe save by the observation that his movements, quick and decisive, gave off a certain New-World energy.

“Good to see you, Tom,” Clayton said when he reached the rear table.

“Hello, Robert.”

Clayton’s tone was grave. “Clearly something’s happened,” he said.

“There was no attempt,” Danforth told him flatly. “Anna was arrested outside her hotel yesterday morning. I saw it myself. By the time I got to Bannion’s place, he’d been arrested too. As they were taking him out, I saw him put something in his mouth. The cyanide. He collapsed in a few seconds.”

Clayton appeared genuinely stricken by this news. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I don’t know where Anna is,” Danforth said. He kept his voice even, and years later, he would recall that at that moment he’d managed to be no less an actor than Anna, merging with his role as a failed conspirator, cool in the wake of failure, giving no hint of the storm inside him.

“This was always a very dangerous action,” Clayton said wearily.

“Then why did you approve it?” Danforth asked.

Even as he spoke, Danforth was mindful of his own failure to stop the plot, but he remained too uncertain of his own footing to reveal that he had wanted to do exactly that. Still, he wondered why Clayton hadn’t put a halt to so reckless a scheme early on.

“Because I’m as susceptible to the grand action as anyone else, I suppose,” Clayton answered. “And Bannion was sure that Rache could supply the sort of inside information that might make it possible.”

“The security system around Hitler, that all came from Rache?” Danforth asked.

“Yes,” Clayton answered. He glanced toward the front of the room, where a gust of wind had suddenly sent a sheet of rain loudly against the window. “Rache had saved Bannion’s life in Spain.” He looked at Danforth. “You trust a man who saves your life.” He shrugged. “But maybe Bannion shouldn’t have trusted Rache with his life this time.”

“You think Rache may have betrayed us?” Danforth asked.

“Well, he’s the last one standing, isn’t he?” Clayton answered. “Except for me, of course.” He gave Danforth a curiously distant glance. “And you.”

“Me?”

Clayton nodded. “I was just wondering why you were released.”

“Because they said my father was a friend of Germany,” Danforth told him.

Clayton leaned forward. “Did your father ever know anything about the Project?”

“Absolutely not.”

Clayton seemed to take this at face value. “Then it’s Rache we have to suspect, because he was the only one outside our circle.”

“And as far as you know, he hasn’t been arrested?”

“As far as I know,” Clayton answered. “But they could fake an arrest. And if they thought we suspected him, they probably would, and with that he’d disappear.” He shrugged. “There’s nothing you can do, Tom. The Project is over.” He touched Danforth’s hand, as if offering condolence to a mourner. “You should go back to New York.”

Danforth drew back his hand. “I can’t,” he said firmly. “Not until I know what happened to Anna.”

That was the moment he betrayed himself, as he understood immediately. He could see clearly what Clayton saw when he looked at him: it was not his failure to make a mark or to change history that gripped him but his desperate need to find out what had happened to Anna.

“My God,” Clayton said. “You fell in love with her.”

Danforth nodded. “Yes,” he admitted. “Was that your plan?”

“No,” Clayton said. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t think you were capable of that kind of feeling.”

Danforth peered at Clayton intently. “The cyanide Anna was supposed to take if she was captured,” he said. “She didn’t have it with her when she was arrested. But I had it when they detained me. I took it.”

“You what?” Clayton asked. He was clearly astonished.

“I was taken to Gestapo headquarters in Munich,” Danforth added. “I thought they were going to do exactly what you’d expect, and so I took the cyanide.” He looked at Clayton pointedly. “But it didn’t work.”

“Bannion’s worked, but not Anna’s?” Clayton asked.

“Yes,” Danforth said. “Did you supply the tablets?”

“No,” Clayton said.

“Who did?”

“Bannion got them from Rache,” Clayton answered. He suddenly looked like a man who’d just grasped the thread of a fabric he wanted to unravel. “Why would Rache have given Bannion one cyanide tablet that worked and one that didn’t?” He considered his own question briefly, then said, “Obviously he wanted one of them to live, and it didn’t matter which one.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, they weren’t marked his and hers, Tom,” Clayton said. “So how would Rache know which of them would get the dummy tablet?”

Abruptly, Danforth found himself again at the window, peering down at the little plaza in Munich, watching Bannion and Anna the night before their arrest, how Bannion had opened his hand, the way Anna had frozen as she looked at the tablets, hesitated, then made her selection, all of which he now described to Clayton.

For a time, Clayton remained silent, but Danforth could see that his mind was working through its own dark logic.

“What are you thinking?” he asked after a moment.

“That one of the tablets might have been marked in some way,” Clayton answered. “Dimpled. A slightly different shape or shade.” He thought a few seconds longer, then waved his hand, as if dismissing his own preposterous idea. “It’s nothing, Tom. Really. Just spy-novel stuff that starts going through my head.”

Danforth leaned forward. “Tell me,” he demanded.

Clayton started to speak but stopped suddenly, as if addled by the direction his mind was taking. “Okay, just now, thinking over what you told me, the way Anna had hesitated ... isn’t that the word you used?”

“Yes.”

“And thinking about marked pills and all that, I just happened to remember something LaRoche once said,” he went on. “I didn’t think anything about it at the time. But with this business of her pill not working, it came back to me.” He looked like a sea captain pondering how his ship had sunk. “LaRoche said he’d once talked to Anna about Azerbaijan. About how he’d often taken the bus from Baku to Tbilisi.”

It was a route Danforth had once taken with his father, though he had little memory of it now save that it had been very bumpy, the old bus wheezing painfully as it made its way through an endless series of mountain passes.

“On the way, the bus always stopped at a little town called Tovuz,” Clayton said. “LaRoche talked about how charming it was. Lovely vineyards, that sort of thing. Anna listened in that quiet way of hers, then said, ‘Yes, it must have been lovely at that time in Traubenfeld.’”

“Traubenfeld?” Danforth asked.

“That’s what LaRoche noticed,” Clayton said. “That Anna called Tovuz Traubenfeld, which was its German name. He thought only a German, or someone raised by Germans, would have known that Tovuz had begun as a German settlement.”

“What does that have to do with Anna’s cyanide not working?” Danforth asked.

“Probably nothing at all,” Clayton answered. “It’s just that Traubenfeld has remained very German, and several people from there have risen to quite high positions in a pro-Hitler group called the Gray Wolf Society. It’s based in Ankara but we suspect its funds come directly from Berlin.” He shrugged. “Anyway, because the Germans in Traubenfeld have always been just an enclave inside Turkey, they need to know what the Turks are up to, and so they’ve gotten very good at planting moles.” He paused, then added, “They start training them when they’re children, and one of the things they concentrate on . . . is languages.”

“What are you saying, Robert?” Danforth asked. “Are you saying that Anna was in league with Rache?”

Clayton lifted his hand to silence him. “I’m not saying anything for sure, Tom. But in this kind of thing, there are shadows, and any time you encounter something unexpected, your mind begins to eat at you, and you begin to wonder if—”

“If Anna was a traitor?” Danforth interrupted.

“Hold on, Tom,” Clayton said cautiously. “Look, all I know is that Rache supplied one tablet that worked and one that didn’t, and that somehow Anna got the one that was designed not to kill her.” His gaze took on the paranoid glitter Danforth would later see in a thousand thousand eyes. “And now, Bannion is dead. Just like Christophe. And with them, the Project died. Only Anna, or so it seems, has survived.”

And so the question had never been whether she would live or die, Danforth thought suddenly, for that had been decided long ago.

It was at that instant, Danforth later came to realize, that his whole life abruptly shifted in a way that threw everything he’d known, or thought he’d known, about Anna into shadow. He thought of his last night with her, how she’d come to his room, all that had happened, and he felt the sweetness of that encounter, the genuineness, drain away. Had she sabotaged the original project because that had been her purpose all along? Had she hatched the plot against Hitler as a diversion, then betrayed them all? Had she faked everything? Again he thought of that last night. Even love?

Clayton shrugged. “But none of this matters now. Because if Anna was something other than we thought, then she’s run her game, and so she’ll vanish.”

“No,” Danforth told him bluntly. “No, I want you to find out what you can about where she is right now. Whether she’s still in custody. Whether she’s alive or dead.”

“All right,” Clayton said wearily. “But you should face the fact that you may never know more about her than you do right now.”

The last of what Danforth thought he would ever know about Anna came to him two weeks later.

He had spent part of that day at the British Museum, vacantly staring at the Elgin Marbles, wondering how his father might have smuggled such massive blocks of stone out of Greece and brought them safely to the New Jersey warehouse of Danforth Imports, and this in turn had led to other fanciful speculations as to how such devices might be employed to bring Anna safely home, should he ever find her. This, of course, presumed that all along she’d been what she claimed, a belief Danforth was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain. It was as if she were a statue he had erected in his mind, bold and solid but now steadily eroding because of his own suspicions. And yet, for all that, he sometimes dreamed of a secret train that would carry her to a secret boat that would carry her across the darkened Channel, where he would wait for her by the cliffs of Dover.

Then, on a clear fall night, in a small tavern on Oxford Street, all such fanciful speculation abruptly ended.

“Anna was interrogated for several days,” Clayton told him. “Then she was executed “

Danforth would later be astonished that he had not swooned with this news but had instead abruptly straightened himself and asked for a meaningless detail.

“Shot?”

Clayton shook his head. “They use a guillotine at Plötzensee.”

“A guillotine,” Danforth whispered.

It would be many years before Danforth visited the execution room at Plötzensee, and on that occasion, the room would strike him as small and plain. The guillotine by then had mysteriously disappeared; it was never found. He knew that a gallows had finally been installed in the room, but that had come long after Anna, and so he’d simply imagined how the guillotine’s many victims had knelt upon the wooden bed, felt its hard, flat surface beneath them, then lifted their heads and stretched their necks over the semicircular cradle that awaited them. There they had knelt with their hands tied behind them, knelt for God only knew how many seconds or minutes before the blade that hung above them finally whistled down. The floor where the vanished guillotine had once rested was bare on the day Danforth came to Plotzensee, but its place was marked, and for that reason Danforth had been able to see what the now long dead must also have seen during the last minutes of their lives: the unremarkable door, the bare walls, the arched windows that, oddly, gave the room the feel of a chapel. A single red cord had been stretched across the width of the room, and beyond it, just beneath the arched windows, a wreath had been placed, and next to it was a second spray of flowers. “So viele Todesfälle,” someone said just behind him, but he didn’t look to see who’d spoken. So many deaths.

“I’m so very sorry, Tom,” Clayton said.

Danforth found that beyond the three words he had already said, he could add only: “Are you sure?”

Clayton nodded. “According to my sources, she never betrayed you or Bannion or anything about the Project,” he added by way of consolation. “She was a heroic woman.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “It was Rache who betrayed us.”

Rache, Danforth thought. In German it meant “vengeance,” and at that moment the need for vengeance seemed to him the only thing he had left.

For a time, Clayton said nothing, as if warned from speaking any further word by the look on Danforth’s face.

“You have to go on, Tom,” he said finally. “You have to go back to New York, put Anna’s death behind you.”

Which was the best advice he could have gotten, and which Danforth had briefly hoped to follow, but never could.

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

“Never could,” Danforth said now.

Though he had tried, as he went on to tell me. He returned to New York and resumed his command of Danforth Imports. In that role, he immersed himself, working long hours, then trudging home to his bed. He tried to find pleasure in the old pleasures, in reading and going to plays. He went out with this woman and that one, but with each failed attempt to rekindle that part of his life, he felt himself fall farther and farther from any capacity to do so. In the middle of a luxurious dinner, he would find himself again at the Old Town Bar, fixed upon his ghostly memory of Anna. While Amy or Sandy or Marian prattled on about this or that, he would hear her whispered voice: What is the most beautiful thing you never saw? And with that question, he would think of all the many places he had dreamed of seeing with her and that he now no longer wished to see because he was without her.

“It was like Eve’s love for Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost,” Danforth said. “That simple, gorgeous line of Eve’s: ‘with him all deaths / I could endure; without him live no life.’”

As the months passed, he worked to ease the ceaseless ache of Anna’s loss. But nothing soothed him or dulled the vividness of his incessant memories of her. At night he would sometimes awaken in the midst of reaching for her, and when he found only emptiness, he would lie on his back and stare at the ceiling and accept the hard fact that nothing could fill this void.

“It was romantic anguish,” Danforth said. He looked as if that very agony had been reignited. “It was passion without an object. I was like a starving man whom no food could satisfy.”

“But you can’t love a dead woman forever, can you?” I asked.

The question appeared to move Danforth, and he immediately turned from it and retreated into his old redoubt of academic discussion.

“The guillotine is an interesting mechanism, Paul,” he said. “It’s supposed to be very fast and entirely painless.” He glanced toward the window, where the snow was still falling steadily, though it had begun to lighten. “But then there’s the problem of Henri Languille.”

This was clearly a signal that I should make further inquiry, and so I did.

“Henri Languille?” I asked.

“A condemned prisoner,” Danforth said. “He was executed by guillotine in 1905. His death was meticulously recorded by a certain Dr. Beaurieux.”

“I see.”

“Dr. Beaurieux’s observations called the guillotine’s efficacy into serious question,” Danforth continued, now completely in that lecturing tone he used to escape, however briefly, from the more emotional parts of his tale. “Of course, there’d been other observers before Beaurieux. For example, when Charlotte Corday was beheaded, someone grabbed her severed head out of the basket and slapped her face. The people who saw this later said that Charlotte had glared at her assailant with what they described as unequivocal indignation.’”

I shivered. “That’s rather ghastly.”

“Indeed, but getting back to Dr. Beaurieux,” Danforth went on. “He said that immediately after the decapitation, Henri Languille’s eyelids and lips continued to move for five or six seconds. When those movements stopped, the doctor called to Languille in a loud, sharp tone, as if he were summoning him. At that summons, Languille’s eyes opened languidly, as if awakened from a light sleep. According to Beaurieux, there was no spasmodic movement in the eyes at all. They stared at him very evenly, then, after a moment, they closed. At that point, the doctor called to Languille again, and once again his eyes opened. He looked like someone torn from his thoughts, Beaurieux said. The eyes were motionless and the pupils were focused. There was nothing dull about their appearance. Nothing vague or faraway in their look. The doctor was convinced that Languille was staring directly at him. After several seconds, the eyes closed again, this time about halfway. Beaurieux called out for a third time, but Languille’s eyes didn’t open, and they began to take on the glazed look of the truly dead.”

All of this struck me as a gruesome excursion, a reaction Danforth recognized and immediately addressed.

“The question is why I would read about such an incident,” Danforth said. “It’s because I could not stop thinking about Anna, and this incessant thinking sent me off in odd, nearly crazed directions. She’d been executed by guillotine, so I read everything I could find about that process. Scores of eyewitness accounts. The history of the thing. It’s called a Fallbeil in German, by the way. ‘Falling ax.’ Between 1933 and 1945 about sixteen thousand people were executed by Fallbeil in Germany and Austria. Hitler liked the method so much he ordered twenty new ones.”

This was all decidedly off the point, I thought, save for the way it exposed the obsessive nature of Danforth’s research, the fact that he’d been driven to do it as a way of. . . what?

“It was a way of not abandoning Anna or allowing her simply to be erased,” Danforth said as if he’d heard the question I’d posed in my mind. “My purpose in doing all this reading was to keep her with me, keep her alive, prevent her from sinking into obscurity, becoming one of history’s nameless victims.” He shrugged. “But of course, reading can only take a man so far, and so, in the end, it was something else that saved me.”

I suddenly feared that Danforth might have fallen to some predictable form of redemption. Religion, perhaps, or another woman.

Hesitantly, I asked, “Which was?”

“War,” Danforth answered. “I was still a young man when it broke out, and so I might have used it to accomplish some noble end or do some great, heroic deed.” His smile was as soft as the white flakes that fell beyond the window. “But for me it only intensified what soon became my single purpose.”

“Which was?” I asked.

“To make the Germans pay,” Danforth answered. His gaze darkened. “To kill as many as I could because they had killed Anna.” He let his lethal gaze sink into me. “I had left Europe as a grieving lover,” he stated. “I returned to it as a murderer.”

~ * ~