The Quest for Anna Klein

Southern France, 1942.

Below him, the fields of night-bound France spread out like a gloved hand. He was falling into its darkness, the earth rising toward him like a blessing in disguise.

They were waiting for him below, and when he reached them he thanked them in their native language, then gathered up and buried his parachute as he had been taught in the long sweltering summer of his training.

They were French farmers who greeted him, and for the rest of his life, the memory of their rugged courage would remain with him, the rough texture of their hands when he shook them, the heartbreaking care in their hushed voices as they guided him across the fields and into the small house where they hid him until the next night, when he set off, alone, for the Spanish border.

On that long walk, he thought of Gurs, the train journey he had made with Anna, the ragged clothes of the withered Spaniard who’d met them, and at last the look on Anna’s face as the trees had parted and she’d gotten her first glimpse of the camp. A thousand years ago, he thought, a different man than he was now.

For the next year he played the vagabond Spaniard as effectively as Anna had played the disordered street grotesque on that long-ago night in the Old Town Bar. He wandered from village to village as he’d been instructed. To appear Spanish, he dyed his hair and darkened his skin beneath the Spanish sun. From mountain outcrops and village alleys, he watched the roads and railway stations and lived as an itinerant farm hand and sweeper; he slept in barns and back rooms and storage sheds, always speaking the low Spanish of the poor and dispossessed and in every way acting the part of one of Goya’s pobrecitas.

During these nomadic days, he killed two men, one with a knife and the other with a garrote, both German intelligence operatives, and in both cases he felt as little for their deaths as he’d felt for their lives, and he told himself as he thrust the knife or tightened the garrote that this he did for Anna.

By the early months of 1943, it was clear that his work in Spain was done. Spanish neutrality was enforced by Spain’s utter poverty. As a country, it was as starved and desolate as the Spanish refugees of Gurs had been, which was exactly what Danforth reported. There was no point to his remaining in Spain, he told his superiors. They agreed, and on their orders, he’d made his way to Gijon, hired an old fisherman and his ragtag boat, and through surprisingly calm waters sailed to England.

Once in London, Danforth learned that Clayton had been shipped to the Pacific, the commander of a Marine regiment. Clayton’s letters had accumulated in the mailroom of Danforth Imports, collected by Danforth’s father, who with the outbreak of war had thrown all his resources into the effort. No longer a friend of Germany, he’d purchased thousands of war bonds and provided his country with every imaginable trade secret for the smuggling of supplies and information. Then, in April of 1943, the senior Danforth died in his lofty aerie overlooking Central Park, still baffled by the son who had briefly returned from Europe after a long, mysterious stay, returned distant and aloof, seeming to have lost not only his will to live, as he’d told his father one long, sorrowful evening, but also his will to love.

It was this loveless and unloving man who now occupied the tiny desk in the tiny cubicle of an otherwise nondescript building in Hammersmith, his assignment to translate messages from various sources that poured into London from Calais to Istanbul. The messages were frequently in error, and some were no doubt intended to misinform, but more often than not, they were simply of no use to those planning the invasion that everyone knew was coming and in which effort Danforth felt himself once again sidelined.

But inconsequential as his work seemed to him, Danforth remained at his desk, hoping, always hoping, to find some shred of information as to where Anna had been buried so that after the war, he might find her body and bring it home. But even as he sought such information, some crazed part of his mind harbored the hope that she was still alive, though this hope caused him to envision a still darker end for Anna: in February of 1944 he read about a number of women executed in Natzweiler-Struthof, and he could not stop wondering if she had been among them. In April he read of the mass execution of Nacht und Nebel, prisoners, mostly foreign spies and resistance fighters, and again imagined Anna lined up against a wall and shot or hung from communal gallows.

All of these nightmare visions continually assailed him, but it was one in particular he found he could not shake:

Escaped prisoner from Pforzheim reports seeing a small dark female, very badly beaten. Reports female chained nude outside and left through night. Reports SS officer returned and gave her more “rough treatment.” Reports prisoner was kicked and beaten and was “all blood.” Reports prisoner left till afternoon. Reports SS officer returned and shot prisoner. Reports prisoner was conscious when executed.

Could this small dark female have been Anna?

It was an absurd question, and there was no way for Danforth to answer it, and yet the brief record of this incident refused to let him go, continually urging him to find a way to return to Europe so he could exact yet more revenge.

But each of his requests was denied, and so Danforth continued to work in his London basement cubicle, translating more communications from which he learned more details of the much earlier Parisian roundups of the city’s Jews, their herding together in the transit camp at Drancy, the terrible conditions there, the priest who’d claimed to hear the cry of children, though he could not have, from the steps of Sacré Coeur. He read about Ravensbrück, where female prisoners were gassed, about the massacres at Ascq in France and Vinkt in Belgium and Cephalonia in Greece, then farther east, where hell grew hotter in the children’s camp as Sisak and the women’s camp at Stara Gradiška.

But the dark preponderance of messages came from Poland, a steady stream of accounts that caused Danforth at last to lift his eyes from the most recent of them late on a rainy evening, still unable to take in a fact he was sure had long ago been accepted by others far more informed than himself, and which he finally mentioned to Colonel Broderick.

“The Germans are systematically killing all the Jews,” he said. “Does everyone know this?”

Broderick nodded grimly. “Yes, we know. And so when the war is over, we’re going to need German-speaking interrogators who are very skilled. Like you, Tom. Because we’re going to find out everything they did and make them pay for it.”

The sweet prospect of the world’s revenge fed the dark animal inside Danforth’s soul, and so he remained in London and there read of more and more outrages, and with each new report felt his heart harden, his spirit grow arid, and something like winter settle into him, an inner death that was deepened because in every report of torture and murder, every account of people shot or hanged or driven into gas chambers, he saw among them Anna.

The invasion came in early June, and two weeks later he at last crossed the Channel and set foot again in France to begin his work as an interrogator. It was there he met the first of what were called the Ritchie boys, the Jews who’d fled Nazi Germany, been trained in Camp Ritchie, Maryland, parachuted or made beach landings on D-day, then slogged through the countryside broadcasting surrender offers to retreating Germans or questioning those who’d already surrendered.

His first job was to break down a Wehrmacht officer named Werner Kruger, a short, stocky little man who smoked continuously during the interrogation. By then they’d learned that the Germans were terrified of being handed over to the Russians, and so they’d dressed a couple of the Ritchie boys in Russian army uniforms on the pretense that should the prisoner not cooperate, he would be turned over to Comrade Stalin. The Ritchie boys had played their parts to the hilt, and it had been effective in a surprising number of cases, Werner Kruger’s chief among them.

There’d been scores of others like Kruger, an army of prisoners from whom Danforth had sought information, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but within each new interrogation still seeking some clue to Anna. Months passed, and summer became fall, and the army marched eastward, and France was liberated and Germany defeated, so that it was amid the ruins of Nuremberg several weeks after the end of the war that he finally met Horst Dieter.

SS captain Horst Dieter had been brought to Danforth’s office for what was described as a “thorough going-over.” Danforth had expected the usual SS type, still arrogant in defeat, lips locked in perpetual sneer, eyes brimming with contempt. Instead, Dieter had affected a nearly jaunty gait as he walked to the chair across the table from Danforth and sat down. He was loose-limbed and gave off an inexplicable casualness, not to say indifference, and it was this oddity in demeanor that Danforth first addressed.

“You don’t seem to realize the situation you’re in,” Danforth told him in his unaccented German.

“I speak English, Captain,” Dieter said. “I lived for two years in Virginia.” He shrugged. “And I know quite well what my situation is. I’m going to be shot. So what? I’m used to executions.”

This was the sort of casual remark that had opened the door on horrendous crimes in earlier interrogations, and so Danforth pursued it like a lead. “Used to executions?” he asked in as similar a tone as he could muster. “Okay, so how during the war did you happen to get used to executions?”

“I was used to them well before the war,” Dieter answered with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“Before the war?”

“Because I was a prison guard,” Dieter answered. He leaned back so far in his chair that its front legs lifted off the floor. “We executed God knows how many.”

“Executing criminals before the war wouldn’t get you shot now,” Danforth said pointedly.

“They weren’t all criminals,” Dieter said. “Unless you call some kid handing out pamphlets a criminal.”

“Are you talking about political criminals?” Danforth asked.

“Reds, mostly,” Dieter said. “One day you Americans will be sorry we didn’t kill them all.”

Danforth was getting nowhere with this and knew it, and so he decided to do as he had been trained to do, take one small piece of information, presumably innocent, then have the prisoner expand on it.

“You were in Berlin before the war,” Danforth said as he glanced at Dieter’s folder.

“Yes.”

“Is this where you worked as a guard?”

“Yes.”

“At Stadtheim?” Danforth asked.

“No. Plötzensee.”

Danforth’s gaze lifted. “Plötzensee?”

“In the suburbs,” Dieter added with a shrug. “It’s mostly blown up now. But it was a busy place before and during the war.”

Danforth gave no sign that the very name Plötzensee was like a hook in his skin.

“Busy with executions?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Danforth decided to test Dieter’s veracity. “These executions, they were by firing squad?”

“No,” Dieter said. “They put up a gallows later.” He chuckled. “But before that, can you believe it, Captain? We had a . . . what’s the word in English? A Fallbeil.”

“A guillotine,” Danforth said.

“That’s it, yes: guillotine.”

“When were you at Plötzensee?” Danforth asked.

“From June of 1936 until the war began,” Dieter answered. “That was in ...”

“September 1939,” Danforth said.

Dieter nodded.

“And you participated in executions during this time?” Danforth asked.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

Dieter shrugged. “Many. I don’t remember. I walked them to the room, that’s all. But that won’t matter, they’re going to kill us all. It’s going to be a big show.”

Danforth worked to keep his tone entirely even despite the storm building within him. “These prisoners that you ... walked, were there any women?”

“Sure.”

“Do you remember any of them?”

Dieter grinned. “A man always remembers the women.”

Danforth faced him stonily. “Who do you remember?”

“There were only two,” Dieter answered. “Benita von Falkenhayn. She was the daughter-in-law of some big shot on the general’s staff. A wild one. Divorced the big shot’s son and got into bed with a Polack spy.” He shrugged. “They killed her with an ax. Like some English queen.”

Catching his breath, Danforth asked, “And the other one?” “She wore thick glasses, the other one,” Dieter answered. “Not very attractive, I must say.” Her unattractiveness seemed to make her life less dear to Dieter. “She was the first woman they used a guillotine on. Another Red. I don’t remember her name, but they called her Lilo.”

“What was her crime?” Danforth asked.

“She wouldn’t stop being a Red,” Dieter answered. “Probably other things as well, but I don’t remember what they were.” He leaned back again and released a slow, relaxing breath. “That’s all. Just two women, like I said.”

“Just two?” Danforth asked. “Are you sure no other woman was executed while you were at Plötzensee?”

Dieter looked at Danforth closely. “Someone you knew, Captain?”

“She was dark,” Danforth said sternly. “She had very curly hair.”

Dieter shook his head.

“You’re sure you never saw a woman like that at Plötzensee?” Danforth asked emphatically. “In the yard or in the cells?”

Dieter dropped forward in his chair. “No.”

Danforth’s mind was working feverishly to determine if Dieter’s testimony, or even his memory, could be trusted. “Anna was her name,” he added. “She might have been called Anna Collier, or maybe Anna Klein.”

“Klein?” Dieter asked. “She was a Jew?”

Danforth’s gaze turned as lethal as his tone of voice. “She was an American,” he said.

Dieter briefly searched his memory for a moment, then he shrugged. “No,” he said. “There was never an Anna Klein.”

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

There was never an Anna Klein.

It was obvious that these words had brought Danforth to a strange precipice, or perhaps to a doorway that had opened onto an unexpected land.

“If Dieter was right, then Anna had never been taken to Plötzensee Prison,” Danforth said. His tone was now uncertain, as if he were still feeling the aftershocks of this discovery. “And she certainly hadn’t been executed there.”

“So you must have wondered who Clayton’s sources had been for this information,” I said.

“Very good, Paul,” Danforth said. “Yes, that would have been the question. Who were they? And why had they told him what they did?” He shrugged. “Unfortunately, Clayton was still in the Pacific, fighting his way south on Okinawa. And so I went to Plötzensee Prison to see if I could find any record of Anna having been there. It was in the Soviet sector, and the Russians were completely out of control, ripping the plumbing out of the walls, toilet bowls, and sinks, and loading everything onto trucks.” He waved dismissively. “But it was Germany they were destroying, so as far as I was concerned, the Russians could have a free hand.”

“You hated them that much?” I asked.

“They were dust to me,” Danforth said. “They had killed the only woman I would ever love, along with millions of innocent people.”

I started to speak, but the flash in Danforth’s eyes stopped me cold.

“If the crimes of a people go on through time, then why shouldn’t our revenge?” he asked. He seemed to realize that his arctic chill had frozen me, and to warm the atmosphere, he sat back casually, like a man about to tell a lighthearted fireside story. “Anyway, by the time I was allowed to visit Plötzensee, it had pretty much been cleared out. It had been badly damaged from the bombings. There was a lot of charred brick and rubble, and for a carton of cigarettes one of the Russian guards let me walk around the place.”

I imagined Danforth in his army uniform, a pistol strapped to his side, moving through the blackened ruins, then into the old cell blocks of Plötzensee, where, as he told me, many of the doors had been blown off and left lying in the wide corridors.

He had not been sure what he was looking for, he said, but in his rambling he found what appeared to be the prison’s record room. There were still file cabinets, and he searched through the papers he found inside them for quite a few hours. There were prisoner lists and execution lists, along with the usual detritus of the Nazi bureaucracy, petitions for clemency almost always stamped Denied.

“Most of what I found was of no value to me, but I did discover that at least one thing Dieter had told me was true,” Danforth went on. “He’d even gotten the nickname right: Lilo.”

As it turned out, Lilo was Liselotte Herrmann, a German Communist who’d joined the Roter Studentenbund, the Red Students League, in 1931, participated in all sorts of anti-Hitler actions, and gotten herself kicked out of the University of Stuttgart.

To my surprise, he drew a photograph from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. “This is Liselotte,” he said.

In the picture, Liselotte Herrmann wore a plain white blouse and was holding a small child. She had straight hair, cut very short, and bottle-bottom glasses with thick, black frames, a woman who could not possibly have been mistaken for a dark, curly-haired Anna Klein.

“The child is her son,” Danforth said. “He was four years old when his mother was executed.” He drew the picture from my hand and returned it to his pocket. “Anyway, I went through the records I found — which were by no means all the records, of course; God knows how many had been burned or blown to bits or used for toilet paper by the Russians — but there was no mention at all of Anna. Which meant that although I couldn’t prove what Dieter had told me, I’d found nothing to disprove it, and so for me the mystery of what had become of Anna only deepened.”

“But she’d surely been killed,” I said. “You had to assume that.”

“Of course,” Danforth said. “But a certain kind of devotion— of obsession — demands to know what really happened, and I was stricken in that way, Paul. I simply had to know.”

Danforth’s had been a sad passion, it seemed to me, and clearly a futile one; even now he struck me as a man with much love and no one to give it to.

“You never fell in love again?” I asked.

“No,” Danforth said,

“But surely your love for Anna faded over time,” I said.

“That’s exactly what Clayton believed would happen eventually,” Danforth said. “That in the end Anna would pass into memory, and I would find a way to make a good life without her. Which was why he’d made up the whole business of Anna’s execution.”

“Made it up?” I asked, astonished.

“Yes,” Danforth said. “As he admitted after the war. He’d done it because he believed that I would never stop looking for her if I thought she was alive. It was the action of a friend for the benefit of a friend, he said. Then he asked me to forgive him, and I did. It was as simple as that.” He shrugged. “To save a man from a fruitless passion, I’d probably do the same. After all, a passion can die. But not a mystery, Paul, unless you solve it.” He smiled softly. “Odd, though, that the next clue would find me working on the war crimes trials. On the Oswald Rothaug prosecution. He’d been the presiding judge in the Katzenberger case.”

Leo Katzenberger was a sixty-two-year-old shoe magnate, Danforth told me. He’d lived and prospered in Nuremberg. A friend had written to tell him that his daughter, twenty-two-year-old Irene Scheffler, was coming to Nuremberg in order to pursue her career as a photographer. Scheffler ended up taking an apartment in the same building as Katzenberger’s office, and over the next few weeks, neighbors became certain that the two were having an affair.

“But this was not just some commonplace May-December fling,” Danforth said, “because Katzenberger was a Jew, and Scheffler was an Aryan, and the Nuremberg laws expressly forbade this kind of association.”

Once alerted to official interest, Katzenberger and Scheffler had denied the affair. And since there was no evidence for it other than the speculation of neighbors, the case had been dismissed by the first investigating judge.

“But by then a judge by the name of Oswald Rothaug had gotten wind of the case,” Danforth said. “Rothaug was a rabid Nazi, and he found Katzenberger and Scheffler guilty on no evidence but rumor.”

At that time, the “crime” did not carry the penalty of death. But Judge Rothaug knew that the death penalty could be imposed on anyone who used wartime regulations to commit a crime. A single witness had testified that Katzenberger had taken advantage of the wartime blackout regulations to carry on his affair, and for this, Katzenberger was sentenced to death.

“He was beheaded at Stadelheim Prison,” Danforth said. “After the war, Rothaug was arrested and put on trial. By then I was working as an interpreter for the war crimes tribunal, so when it came time to interview witnesses I was transferred to Nuremberg.” He took a brief pause in this narrative, as if he knew that what he was about to tell me — the next twist in his story — would surprise me as much as it had surprised him. “One of the men I was assigned to question was named Gustav Teitler,” he continued. “A seedy little character. I hated him immediately.” Danforth’s gaze hardened. “I could have shot him without a blink.”

~ * ~

Nuremberg, Germany, 1946

“You are Gustav Teitler,” Danforth said with the unrelenting hardness of the man he had become.

“I am, yes.”

Teitler was a pudgy little fellow with the mild look of depart-ment-store clerk, and as he sat down in the chair in front of Danforth’s desk, he offered a smile that proclaimed his great willingness to cooperate. To this he added the usual look of hapless innocence Danforth had seen in a thousand German faces by then, all bafflement and consternation, as if their malign recent history had caught them completely by surprise.

“I am pleased to meet you, Herr Danforth,” Teitler said amiably.

They took their seats in a room just a few yards away from where an American tank sat idly in the square and American soldiers lounged about absent-mindedly smoking cigarettes, a fact that was not wasted on Gustav Teitler.

“The Russians are treating Germany like a dead whore,” he said. “We are fortunate that you Americans are —”

“The Russians are treating you better than you deserve,” Danforth interrupted sharply.

Danforth’s hatred of the Germans had been intensified by his recent visit to Plötzensee and his finding no clue of what had happened to Anna, a dead end that over the past days had caused him to conjure up a hundred dreadful fates for her. The grim speculations were made even more painful by the release of yet more terrible images from the trials, all of which had turned the language he loved and spoke so well into an object of repulsion.

“You’re here because you are associated with a judge who is going to be tried as a war criminal,” Danforth said sternly. “And you’re going to answer my questions fully. Do we understand each other?”

This was not a pose, and Teitler seemed to comprehend that he faced something volcanic in the man who sat opposite him.

“Of course, Captain Danforth,” Teitler said.

“Oswald Rothaug,” Danforth said briskly. “You were a stenographer in his courtroom.”

“Yes,” Teitler answered.

“At the Leo Katzenberger trial,” Danforth added.

“That was a terrible thing,” Teitler said. “The poor man couldn’t believe what was happening to him, that his life was at stake simply because —”

“Yes, yes,” Danforth interrupted curtly. He was not interested in any German show of sympathy for the fate of Leo Katzenberger. He began a series of questions designed to discover any incriminating evidence against Rothaug that might have been gained by such a lowly functionary as Gustav Teitler.

There wasn’t much, as the next hour proved, but Danforth slogged on through Teitler’s asides, how he had only “by chance” ended up as a court stenographer, as he’d once hoped to be a civil engineer. This dream had been dashed by the Great War, in which he’d been wounded; his career hopes had been destroyed, along with the Germany of his youth, and the country had been “ripe” for what happened next.

It was an old story, and Danforth had no sympathy.

“Did you see Rothaug at any point after the trial?” he asked by way of ending the tiresome and unenlightening interview.

“Once, yes,” Teitler answered. “In Berlin.”

“Did he say anything about Leo Katzenberger?”

Teitler took a moment to think before he answered. “They weren’t so happy with that trial, you know, the higher-ups,” he said. “So they moved Judge Rothaug to Berlin. He was just a low official when I ran into him. Working for the prosecutor’s office. A nothing. A rat sniffing around. Students, mostly. What they were doing. The Red Orchestra, that sort of thing.”

“The Red Orchestra?”

“You know, Commies,” Teitler said. “Students. They were young; they had no idea what they were up against.”

Young and with no idea of what they were up against, Danforth thought. As he once had been.

“Rothaug was talking about a traitor the Gestapo had arrested,” Teitler said. ‘“Like Katzenberger,’ he’d said, ‘another head cut off.’ He seemed to take a particular delight in it.”

“Why?” Danforth asked dryly. “They’d already cut off lots of heads.”

“This was a woman, and an American,” Teitler said. “Rothaug said that killing her would show these foreigners that their necks weren’t any thicker than the necks of German traitors.”

“When did you have this conversation?” Danforth asked.

“It was in the summer of 1943,” Teitler answered. “I was only in Berlin for a few days. There was no work in the courts for me, so I went back to Nuremberg.”

Danforth’s pen remained still. “Did he mention the woman’s name?”

Teitler shook his head.

“Did he describe her?”

“No.”

“Did he say anything else at all about her?”

This time Teitler shrugged. “Only that before they chopped off her head, they should shave off her hair.”

Danforth was careful not to allow himself to consider the possibility that this woman might have been Anna. And yet, over the following days, he could not stop thinking about what Teitler had told him. It was like the Spanish idiom for relentless worrying over a single thought: dar vueltas,“ incessant circling.” The prospect had led Danforth to an incessant circling of particular scenes: Anna at their first meeting; Anna strolling among the tombs of Père-Lachaise. She might have survived until the summer of 1943: this was the thought that awakened him each morning after he returned to Nuremberg following his interview with Teitler, and it was the thought that faded at last with sleep, though only after it had kept him up until nearly dawn.

For the next few days, Danforth went about his work, interviewing others distantly involved in the Katzenberger case, mostly judges who claimed to have had nothing but contempt for Rothaug, whom they described as a clown, a buffoon, a climber, and a toady. Teitler’s tiny clue continued to work like a needle in Danforth’s mind, consuming his every free moment, keeping him in his office until the early hours of the morning going through files, ledgers, accounting books, old newspapers, anything he could find that might hold, however distantly, a clue to the identity of the woman Rothaug had mentioned.

It was three o’clock in the morning, but the man Danforth saw when he glanced up from his desk looked freshly shaved and ready for the new day with none of Danforth’s hollow exhaustion in his eyes.

The man sat down in the chair across from Danforth’s desk. “My name is Edward Brock. I understand you’ve been looking for an American woman who you think was executed by the Germans.”

Danforth nodded.

“I can save you some work,” Brock said. “Her name was Mildred Harnack. She was an American who lived in Germany and spoke and wrote fluent German. She was a Communist, but — get this — she was also a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.” He drew a paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to Danforth. “The State Department kept an eye on her.” He nodded toward the paper. “Here in a nutshell is what we know.”

Harnack had moved to Germany with her husband in 1929, Danforth read. She’d gotten interested in Communism and later toured the Soviet Union. By 1933 she’d begun teaching English literature at night-school classes in Berlin. Still later she’d published articles in the Berliner Tageblatt and Die Literatur, but the work had dried up once the Nazis came to power. It was then she’d stepped over the line and become what amounted to a Soviet agent, a fact the Gestapo had discovered and for which both she and her husband had been arrested in the fall of 1943. Her husband had been sentenced to death, but for some reason Mildred had received a mere six-year imprisonment, a sentence that was not to Hitler’s liking and which he’d ordered to be reviewed. The review had ended with a predicable result, and Mildred Harnack had been executed at Plötzensee on February 16, 1943-

Most decidedly, Mildred Harnack had not been Anna Klein.

Danforth gave the paper back to Brock. “Thank you,” he said wearily. “You’re right, that will save me a lot of time.”

Brock folded the paper and returned it to his jacket pocket. “Who are you looking for?” he asked. “Because I might be able to help you there too. We have quite a few documents from German intelligence, you know.” He lit a cigarette. “So, who was this woman?”

“Her name was Anna Klein,” Danforth said. “She worked for me before the war. We were in Berlin in August of 1939. She was arrested by the Gestapo. I never saw her again.”

“What can you tell me about her?” Brock asked.

Danforth told him that she was Jewish, that she was in her twenties, small, dark, with curly hair.

“That’s not a lot to go on,” Brock said.

“She was brilliant with languages,” Danforth added. It was little more than a futile aside, and he was surprised to see that this suddenly spurred Brock’s interest.

“How many did she speak?” he asked.

“Nine that I know of.”

“Was Ukrainian one of them?” Brock asked significantly.

“Yes,” Danforth said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I have an intelligence report on a Ukrainian named Rudy Romanchuk. He was a forger who specialized in fake documents for people who were trying to get out of Germany He was working for the Russians too. A low-level informant. But they began to suspect that he was working for the Germans. So they picked Rudy up and took him to Warsaw for interrogation. Rudy’s Russian wasn’t so great, so they brought in an interpreter. An American. In her twenties. Quite pretty, according to Rudy.”

“When was this interrogation?” Danforth asked.

“A week or two before the Germans attacked Russia,” Brock answered. “Which means she could be anywhere now.” He let this sink in, then added, “As you know, we’re not that chummy with the Russians anymore, so we’d be interested in tracking down any American citizen who might be in their hands.” He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and crushed it into the ashtray on Danforth’s desk. “So, this woman. The one who was in Warsaw. Could she have been Anna Klein?”

~ * ~