The Quest for Anna Klein

Washington Square Park, New York City, 1974

“Smoke, smoke, smoke,” the young man whispered as Danforth passed by, an illegal solicitation Danforth found amusing given his steel-gray hair and clean-shaven face, the conservative look of his three-button suit. Danforth was now sixty-four years old, after all, a lowly language teacher, hardly the usual customer for a park-bench pot dealer.

For a time he watched as the young man made his rounds, then, like one entering a neighborhood much changed since his youth, Danforth headed farther into the park.

This time it was LaRoche who’d arrived first, now dressed in a gray suit that couldn’t completely hide his considerably expanded waistline. He no longer glanced about, no longer seemed on edge, but instead looked almost like a member of the old burgher class, well-fed and well-heeled. But for all that, something of the dispossessed still clung to him, an Old-World melancholy that both his years and his New-World success had failed to shake. De Tocqueville had called them “the habits of the heart,” and LaRoche seemed proof that they were harder to change than one’s country or one’s circumstances.

“Hello,” LaRoche said with a smile that seemed hard-won.

“Mr. LaRoche,” Danforth replied with a nod. “It’s been a long time.”

“How did you find me? I forgot to ask.”

“You’re in the book,” Danforth said. “LaRoche Wholesalers. You specialize in Middle Eastern sweets.”

“I always had a taste for honey,” LaRoche said in an English that now bore only the hint of an accent.

They talked briefly of the old days, when Winterset was clothed in snow and, later, strewn with spring flowers.

Danforth knew that LaRoche had been told of Anna’s arrest and Bannion’s suicide, but whether he’d been told more than that, Danforth couldn’t say.

“I saw Anna only one time after Munich,” he said. “She was in Russia.”

He told LaRoche about the final encounter, how he’d tried to get some small kernel of information about a German agent the Soviets believed had betrayed them, how she’d suddenly transmogrified into the ardent Nazi she had no doubt always been, a narrative that still wounded him despite all the time that had passed.

LaRoche listened silently through it all and remained quiet for a time after Danforth finished, so they simply sat, speechless, staring straight ahead, looking curiously desolate, as if recognizing at last that all their riches had been spent.

Then LaRoche said, “And they let you go after this last meeting with Anna?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Danforth shrugged. “What would have been the point of keeping me? They must have realized that all I was ever looking for was Anna. And now I had found her. I suppose they simply had no more use for me.”

“Perhaps,” LaRoche said, his tone cautious, like one hazarding an unlikely guess, “perhaps, unless this last meeting had a hidden purpose.” He appeared quite pensive, as if turning over all Danforth had just told him.

“When you left her, what was your feeling?” he asked after a moment.

“That it was over,” Danforth said. “My quest.”

“Your quest for what?”

“I suppose you could call it my quest for Anna Klein.”

“Hmm,” LaRoche said with a slow nod.

Danforth looked at him closely. “What’s going on?” he asked. “What are you thinking?”

“That maybe she was acting,” LaRoche said.

“Acting? Why?”

LaRoche laughed. “It’s a little mind game I play with myself,” he said. “Coming up with other ways of looking at things, no matter what crazy direction it takes me.”

“What crazy direction is it taking you now?” Danforth asked.

“Well, I was just thinking that maybe Anna was forced to do what she did when she saw you,” LaRoche answered. “Maybe there was something she wanted to protect.”

“Rache is what she wanted to protect,” Danforth said bitterly.

“Unless the Bolshies were playing an old game with you,” LaRoche answered casually. “It’s one they know well and play very often.”

Danforth could see that LaRoche was playing a game of his own, offering a wild supposition for no other reason than to demonstrate the twisted world of intrigue he’d once known.

“What game?” Danforth asked, going along with him.

“It’s an old ploy,” LaRoche said. “They let you find one thing in order to keep something else hidden, something more valuable to them than what you were looking for.”

“I was never looking for anything but Anna,” Danforth told him.

“But was it her you really found?” LaRoche asked.

“What I found was a Nazi spy,” Danforth said bitterly.

“Unless they made her do what she did,” LaRoche cautioned.

“You said that before,” Danforth said, a little impatiently. “Why would they have done that?”

LaRoche’s gaze seemed threaded with a thousand complicated plots.

“You’d proven yourself very relentless in this whole business,” LaRoche said. “So suppose they were being pressured to release you. Or maybe they were simply tired of having you on the books, as they say. For whatever reason, they decided to release you. But they wanted to neutralize you first. The only way they could do that was by letting you see Anna. Once you saw she was this crazy Nazi, you could go home and live your life and they’d never have to bother with you again.”

“But why would they care whether or not I stopped looking for Anna?” Danforth said.

LaRoche looked like a man explaining evil to a child. “Because in looking for Anna, you might find whoever it was they were still protecting. Some old agent of theirs. Or maybe a mole, someone who still provided information for them. Or someone who helped them long ago.”

“Like who?” Danforth asked.

LaRoche shrugged, now quite obviously reaching for a wildcard. “Like Rache,” he said.

“But Rache was a German agent,” Danforth said. “The Soviets would only care about Rache if he were . . .” He stopped. “If he were . . .”

“One of their own,” LaRoche said, as if he’d played a trump card. “But that’s how this ploy works.” He smiled softly. “Suppose Rache posed as an anti-Nazi German, and in that way fooled Bannion, and in fooling Bannion fooled Anna, who ended up spending her life protecting the very one who had betrayed her.” He smiled at his own cleverness. “Now that would be a great game. And he would have played it perfectly. So that the Germans continued to believe he was a German agent and Anna continued to believe he was an American agent when in fact he was always a Soviet agent.” He looked at Danforth knowingly. “All that worked. Only you continued to be a problem for them, Tom.”

“In what way?”

“Because you kept looking for Anna, and in doing that, you kept looking for Rache,” LaRoche said, clearly pleased with himself for coming up with this scenario. “If you were going to be released, they wanted you to stop searching. And so they played one of their old games.” He smiled at how it all hung together. “It is called the traitor’s gate.”

~ * ~

Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001

“And I might have walked right through it,” Danforth said. His eyes flared with familiar fire. “So was Anna acting the night she came to me in Munich? Or was she acting in Magadan?” He shrugged. “It seemed to me that only one person would know the answer to that. Code name: Rache.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me that you took what LaRoche said seriously?”

“Yes.”

“But it was pure speculation,” I reminded him.

“And done as rather a devil’s advocate, I think,” Danforth agreed. “And even if it was true, how would it be possible to find Rache? He might be anywhere in the Soviet Union. He might be in East Germany.”

I glanced at the bookshelf that rose behind Danforth’s chair, its ample space packed with books on East Germany, the Stasi, the whole network of Cold War intrigue that spread out from gray offices of East Berlin. I had little doubt that Danforth had pored over each of these books, studied every tiny detail, created flowcharts of countless hierarchies, looking for some clue to where in this swarming hive of agents he might find a single bee.

Danforth saw the trajectory of my gaze and took the cue.

“I had to assume that Rache was a master spy,” he said. “An adroit triple agent who’d played an American agent and fooled Bannion, a German agent who’d fooled the Nazis, and all along he’d actually been working for the Russians.”

A glimmer of the old Stalinist paranoia he’d earlier described glittered in his eyes, and I wondered if the sanity he had so far displayed might be an act as clever and beguiling as the kind he’d previously ascribed to Anna.

“Rache,” he said. “Vengeance.”

He let this word drift like acrid smoke in the air around us.

“When you need something to hate, you will find it, believe me,” Danforth said now. “You will find it and you will paint it in whatever colors you choose. With no place else to turn, I turned to Rache. He became my Moriarty, my antichrist. I thought of nothing but discovering once and for all if he had betrayed us.”

With that conclusion, Danforth abruptly returned to his earlier self, all reason and careful analysis, his brain no longer boiling with suppositions that fired vengeful fantasies but now trained on a method by which he might answer the last burning question of his life.

“I racked my brain to find some small chink in all this,” he said, “and the one thing that kept returning to me was the fact that during Romanchuk’s interrogation, there’d been an older man with the Order of Lenin on his lapel to whom Anna had spoken Turkish. I remembered that in a conversation with LaRoche, Anna had recalled Baku, which is the capital of Azerbaijan, a part of Russia that shares a border with Turkey.”

“Those are rather disparate elements,” I cautioned.

“Yes, but the investigation of a plot is about finding intersections within the plot,” Danforth said. “Coordinates that allow you to zero in on what really happened.”

As absurd as it seemed to me now, and as absurd as it had seemed to him then, Danforth had embarked upon a huge research project. It was a search to find what he called coordinates by which he might connect the Order of Lenin, knowledge of Turkish, and familiarity with Baku.

“As it turned out, Romanchuk was wrong,” Danforth told me. “At least as far as the Order of Lenin is concerned. It wasn’t a big deal, really. Lots of people had been given the Order of Lenin. Pilots and scientists and aircraft designers. There were engineers and nuclear-power experts. There was a polar explorer. It was even given to Pravda at one point, and at other times to whole regions of the country for some service that region had rendered to the state. Lots of people got it several times.”

And so the research had turned into a monumentally tedious and time-consuming task, Danforth said, but he had never relented, and each day after he finished teaching, he headed for the library. For weeks, months, years, he walked between the two sober lions and entered the great reading room with its long tables and green-shaded lamps. He worked each night until the library closed, and each night as he wearily headed home, he reminded himself that he was doing this for Anna. “Love has many faces, Paul,” he said, by way of explanation, “but lost love has only one.”

It struck me that Danforth’s quest had been driven by a need that had been momentarily fulfilled on that one night in Munich but ultimately unrequited for all the nights after that. He was a man with a chronic illness, doomed to live forever with the incurable affliction of having loved at a moment of supreme peril a woman of supreme mystery, and this love had annihilated any hope that he might ever love again.

“It took me many years,” Danforth said, “but in the end I found my coordinates in a Soviet general who had dealt with the ethnic conflict that was always breaking out in Azerbaijan.” He shook his head. “Bathed in blood, that part of the world.”

For a moment he seemed to drift down that red river.

“You were talking about a Soviet general,” I reminded him.

“Yes,” Danforth answered. “His name was Sergei Lukudovich Solotoff, and after the war, he returned to Baku. When I finally made it to his door, he was eighty-six years old.”

~ * ~

Baku, Azerbaijan, 1981

The general lived in a building that had once been the elegant townhouse of an oil baron but was now just another crumbling structure in the old part of Baku. The Maiden Tower was visible at one end of the street, and beyond it, the blue Caspian swept out to the horizon. Danforth had been here only once, so many years in the past that he was scarcely able to remember anything but the carpet merchants who’d draped their heavy wares over ancient walls, which, to his surprise, they still did. But the great castle had faded, as had the minarets; his memories were now as weathered as the little stone statue that still rested in the market square.

Solotoff had not fallen into disfavor as so many of Stalin’s generals had, and because of that, Danforth was surprised that his letter had been answered at all. He suspected that the old general might well be cocooned in the loneliness of old age and so welcomed the opportunity to tell his story.

In his letter, Danforth had portrayed himself as something of a historian, a gatherer of oral histories having to do with the war. In his return letter, the general had written in quite elegant Russian of his participation in the heroic defense of Stalingrad and of his many medals and honors and decorations. He had not spoken of anything having to do with intelligence work, and given the extensive nature of the general’s military service, Danforth doubted that he’d done much of it, a fact that suggested the general had become involved in the Rache investigation for some specific reason, after which he’d returned, unscathed, to his military duties.

“Ah, most welcome,” the old general said in Russian when he opened his townhouse door to Danforth, his manner so pleasant and amiable that it reminded Danforth of the Russian Errol Flynn.

Danforth returned the greeting in Russian, then followed Solotoff into a small room that looked out onto what was called a woman’s view in that part of the world, by which was meant an enclosed terrace where cloistered females could gaze, unseen, at a universe otherwise denied them.

“Such a long way to come for my story,” Solotoff said.

He had put out goat cheese and some dried fruit, along with slivers of dried meat Danforth didn’t recognize, and together they sat, facing each other, on small woven chairs. There was vodka, but Danforth politely refused it, which seemed a relief to the old man since tea was certainly cheaper. He was clearly in fallen circumstances, an old soldier whom the new order considered little more than a Stalinist relic. His pension was probably precarious, Danforth thought, if not reduced or halted altogether. He had outlived his time and his ideology, and the revolution he had served had sunk into a mire of corruption and inefficiency so deep it had begun to generate public outcry and even strikes, Russian workers at last grown impatient with the workers’ paradise.

For the next three hours, Danforth listened more or less without interrupting as the old general told his war stories, mostly concerning the horrors of Stalingrad, how Khrushchev had conducted the city’s defense with an iron hand.

“We set up machine guns behind our own troops,” he said, “and if they tried to return after a charge, we shot them.” He shrugged away the bloodcurdling horror of this. “So they either took the position they were ordered to take, or they were killed for failure to take it.” His grimaced. “War is a terrible thing,” he said, then asked a question that gave Danforth his entry. “Were you in the war?”

“Yes,” Danforth said.

Here was the opening, he thought, and he took it.

“I was a spy.”

“A spy?” Solotoff asked. He did not seem in the least troubled by this.

“And I helped plot an assassination,” Danforth added. “But it failed.”

Solotoff appeared no more troubled by this than by Danforth’s initial answer. “Who did you fail to kill?”

“Hitler,” Danforth answered flatly.

Something registered in Solotoff’s eyes, a glimmer he quickly doused with a loud laugh. “I wish you hadn’t failed. It was forty degrees below zero when those German bastards retreated. We went after them like wolves. The big, brave German Fifth Army. We slaughtered them like little frozen lambs. Whoever attacks you in your homeland deserves to die. That’s what I believe.”

Danforth smiled. “So do I, believe me.” He attempted to appear long perplexed by a curious and unsolved little mystery. “As far as Hitler was concerned, we almost did it. Or at least, we almost tried. But the Germans caught on to us. I’ve always wondered how.”

Solotoff said nothing, but Danforth could see his mind working behind his eyes.

“I always thought we were betrayed,” Danforth continued.

“You probably were,” Solotoff said casually. “A spy swims in a sea full of sharks.”

“A certain name has always floated in that water,” Danforth said. “Rache.”

The name clearly registered in Solotoff’s mind, Danforth saw, and he leaned forward slightly. “Tell me, were you ever in Warsaw, General?”

“I have been to Warsaw many times,” Solotoff answered. “And you?

“After the war,” Danforth answered. “I saw a lot of the East after the war.”

“Did you?”

“Dubno,” Danforth said. “Lemberg. Kiev. Moscow.” He stopped, waited, then said, “Magadan.”

“Ah,” Solotoff said. “That is very far to the east.”

“But you can see it from Adult World,” Danforth said.

Solotoff’s gaze hardened. “When were you released?”

Danforth could hardly believe the answer he gave. “A lifetime ago.”

“And why have you returned to our sad country?” Solotoff asked.

“Because I want to know who betrayed me,” Danforth said.

Danforth did not mention Anna because he had reached that point when a man looks back and feels that in his lifelong quest — whatever it might have been— he has betrayed himself, squandered his days, and to reveal the nature of that squandering would expose him as a madman or a fool.

“I want vengeance,” Danforth said, a motive he was certain Solotoff would understand. “For my life.”

“How would you get it?” Solotoff asked.

“By killing a traitor,” Danforth answered flatly.

“You are rather old for such a mission,” the general said.

“I have nothing else,” Danforth said.

“And so you’ve come all this way,” the general said in a bemused voice.

“Yes.”

Danforth saw a glint of the old Russian wolf in Solotoff’s eyes and realized that this was a man whose past had betrayed him and whose once fierce loyalties had faded; now he was simply a poor old man in search of a score, one who had nothing left to sell but his memories.

“Tell me more about Warsaw,” Solotoff said.

“There was a forger named Romanchuk,” Danforth told him. “I had some dealings with him after the war. I think you may have interrogated him in Warsaw.”

“Why would you think such a thing?” Solotoff asked.

“Because one of the interrogators wore the Order of Lenin,” Danforth said. “And he spoke Turkish.” Danforth kept his demeanor entirely casual. “I know you have the Order of Lenin and that you were once very powerful here in Azerbaijan, so you probably speak Turkish. I put that together, and you came up as the man who was most likely to have been in Warsaw when Romanchuk was interrogated.”

“In the first two of these things you are right,” Solotoff said, as if the facts bored him. “But why should I tell you if you are right in the last of them?”

Danforth’s earliest memories of the east returned, the abyss of corruption his father had many times described, along with the eternal miseries of the Balkans. He recalled the bandits on the railway, that long-ago crucifixion, the leader of that ruthless band, how he’d walked among the terrified passengers, nodding at watches, bracelets, cuff links, the glint in his soulless eyes that Danforth now saw in Solotoff’s. He was a dead soul, and dead souls can be bought.

“Because I’ll pay you,” he said. “I’ll pay you if you tell me where Rache is.”

Solotoff took a slow, meditative sip of tea. “What else do you know about this interrogation in Warsaw?”

“There was a woman,” Danforth said. “An American. She was brought in to translate from Ukrainian for Romanchuk.”

Solotoff slowly put down the cup and gazed at it as if he were a pawnbroker studying its every crack and chink. “How much would you pay?”

“Are you the man who was sent to interrogate Romanchuk?” Danforth asked. “Did you speak to the American woman in Turkish?”

Solotoff grinned. “Perhaps. It is a long chain that stretches back so far. I would have to make inquiries. It might take some time. And my contacts are not without needs. I would have to be generous.”

Generous. By which he meant, Danforth knew, there would be many payments.

Solotoff’s smile had a canine sparkle, and at that instant, Danforth recalled the soldiers at Plötzensee, the many border guards whose palms he’d greased, their drunken delight in the power they had over him, and after these, he remembered the long line of interrogators he’d faced beneath a naked bulb, the blows that had rained down upon him in the camp, always with some brute grinning as he delivered them. Russians, he thought with a surging hatred he could barely suppress, and he knew that at that moment, he could cheerfully have killed them all.

Solotoff drained the last of his tea, returned the cup to the table, then sat back and waited. “Twenty thousand American dollars.”

“How would this payment be made?” Danforth asked.

Solotoff laughed. “Oil seeps through many holes in Baku.”

It was a typically metaphorical response, and by it, Danforth understood the great sieve of Soviet corruption, General Solotoff a surly man with many conduits, a rabbit warren of little deals and old favors with an untold number of escape routes.

“I will have to be sure of any information you give me,” Danforth warned him.

“There will be only one piece of information,” Solotoff said as if closing a negotiation with a nervous buyer. “A name. An address. That is all.” His eyes glittered like sunlight on the bloodstained snows of Stalingrad. “Once we have an understanding, you will have to wait. But in the end, you will hear from me.”

~ * ~

Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001

“And so the arrangements were made, and I returned to New York and waited to hear from this old hero of the Soviets,” Danforth said with undisguised contempt. “I had no doubt that eventually I would.”

Danforth read my incredulity as he had so often done during his narrative, and he immediately provided a corollary tale that made clear that his own was entirely believable.

“Foreign intelligence keeps track of their old agents,” he said by way of proving his story. “Take the case of Engelbert Broda, for example.”

For ten years, from 1938 to 1948, a Soviet spy code-named Eric had sent Britain’s nuclear secrets to the Soviets, Danforth said. During that time, he’d been the Soviets’ main source for information on Britain’s atomic-bomb research.

“MI Five suspected him for years,” Danforth told me. “They opened his mail and watched his every move.”

But they had never caught him, and so it wasn’t until a full seventy years later, when KGB files were finally opened, that the British found out they’d been right all along.

“Bertie Broda had even given the Russians the blueprint for the early nuclear reactor used in the Manhattan Project,” Danforth said. “He single-handedly allowed the Soviets to catch up with the West and in so doing changed the face of foreign policy for decades to come.” He smiled. “So you see, what you’d call a large geopolitical purpose can be brought about by a little spy.”

“What happened when they caught Broda?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Danforth answered. “He was already dead. And he died a very respected scientist. He has a special grave in an honored section of a Vienna cemetery.” He seemed suddenly to drift into some colder region. “Odd, what a cemetery can reveal.” For a moment he remained in that distant place. Then, as he had so many times during our talk, he abruptly returned to the present.

“Anyway, Broda was never discovered,” he said.

“Too bad,” I said, almost lightly, as if treason were a mist easily wiped from a window. “Very clever to have outsmarted everyone for so long.”

“Clever?” Danforth asked. “Perhaps. But the curious thing I’ve discovered about spies is that they must trust so many to keep their secrets. They have handlers, but who handles the handlers? No Soviet spy was ever handled by Stalin personally. There were layers and layers of people who knew this agent or that one, people whose identity the agent never knew.” The irony of what Danforth said next clearly did not escape him. “A spy may never be uncovered, Paul, but he can never be completely hidden either. Deceit always leaves a trail.”

“Which Solotoff was now pursuing?” I asked.

“Undoubtedly,” Danforth said. He looked at me in a way that let me know he’d read my mind. “Ah, you are looking for that big dramatic ending. Perhaps a chase over the rooftops? Or some final scene of two old men grappling with each other, like Holmes and Moriarty slugging it out at Reichenbach Falls? Is that what you want, Paul, at the end of my tale?”

“Frankly, yes,” I said. “And why not? If Rache is a traitor, he deserves to die.”

“Yes, of course,” Danforth said. “And if vengeance cannot be exacted on Rache, perhaps there is someone else. At any rate, I end up the hero, don’t I?”

“Yes,” I said. “And we all need to be heroes.” I glanced toward the open wound of Lower Manhattan. “Especially now.”

“Indeed that’s true, Paul,” Danforth said. “With one small caveat.”

“Which is?”

Danforth looked at me almost sadly, like a man who’d expended great effort in an unworthy cause. “That the need to be a hero is not a hero’s need.”

I felt that I had proved myself to be as young and callow at the end of his story as I had been at the beginning.

“So, tell me, then,” I asked with a sincerity that surprised me. “What is truly heroic?”

“Facing the complexity of things,” Danforth said solemnly. He looked at me as if he were making a final evaluation, a judgment that would determine whether or not I would hear the final chapters of his tale. “Collateral damage is inevitable,” he said, almost to himself. He drew in a disturbingly tense breath, held it for a moment, then released it slowly; it seemed to carry with it the last full measure of his strength. “The letter that finally came from the general was in Russian, of course. It said simply Which means ‘Do with him as you wish.’” Just below it, the old general had written a name and address. Danforth drew in yet another slow, ponderous breath that seemed to carry with it the full weight of murder.

“And so I set off to find a man I had never seen,” he said. He twisted to the side, opened the drawer of the little table that rested between us, and took out an old service revolver. “And, if he had betrayed Anna, to kill him.”

~ * ~

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983

He had vaguely expected to find Rache living in Krakow or Budapest, or perhaps even the old spy haven of Vienna, where Rache could sit with his pastry and afternoon tea and stare at the Plague Monument and recall the sweet days of his treachery, the best triple agent in the world because he’d gotten away with it.

But once Solotoff had provided the man’s address, along with, surprisingly, a German name, Danforth had changed his earlier notion, and on the flight from New York he imagined him as all such figures had been imagined since the war: sitting on some cool veranda, listening to the call of tropical birds, the smell of fresh mango rich in the air around them; these men who had brought winter to the world safe in their sunlit splendor.

That his purpose still burned so brightly surprised him, for in every other way he felt the steady weathering of time, death’s unyielding approach. Life, at last, was a stalker, waiting for the moment, and he knew that his would come soon. Perhaps this was his true freedom, he thought, that he could murder in certain knowledge that whatever followed would be short-lived.

And so, if Rache was a traitor, this he would do . . . for Anna.

He took a cab to his hotel on Avenida Florida, unpacked, then lay down on the bed for a fitful night’s sleep. In dreams, he returned to his many ages: the callow youth, the shallow adventurist, the amateur assassin, the tormented romantic obsessive, and now this lonely man on his last mission, this hate-filled man who might at last personify the thing he sought: vengeance.

Morning did not become him; in the mirror he saw the deep lines, the heavy bags, the snow-white hair comic in its disarray. Time, in the end, is a drowning pool, and as he peered at his withered face, Danforth felt himself suffocating beneath the many regrets that pressed in on him. Shouldn’t he have known from the beginning that it was all a foolish enterprise and that like all such exploits it would end in disaster? At the first firings of his love for Anna, shouldn’t he have done everything he could to rescue her from this tomfoolery, thus saving both their lives? Had he missed some subtle sign of treachery that, had he seen it, might have saved her? Had Rache ever walked past him or sat, a silent figure behind a potted plant, peering at Bannion or Anna, or even Danforth himself, knowing full well that they were only little spies, silly in their hope and expendable for its dashing?

After Clayton’s funeral, his wife had given Danforth her husband’s old service revolver, a gesture his old friend had requested only hours before his death. It would be fitting, Danforth thought now, for Clayton’s gun to bring down the curtain on a drama he had begun so many years before.

He had visited Buenos Aires only once, in company with his father, but he faintly recalled the old neighborhood of La Locanda, with its small, colorfully painted buildings. He had read that here, in these quaint and quite lovely streets, there were houses where the victims of the ongoing repression were kept and tormented before they disappeared, and he wondered if Rache had found a place for himself in this world of pain. He knew that certain men were drawn to life’s dungeons and death chambers. He had met them during his own interrogations, and he had met them as he himself was interrogated. They were the sewer’s most pernicious flotsam, and he had learned enough of the world to understand that they were as numerous as grains of sand. But he was no longer a man of the world, he thought, no longer one inclined to inject himself into its great affairs. He had given himself over to this only once, and disastrously, and now he felt at home in the concentrated measure of his need for reprisal. He had not saved the world, but he was unquestionably prepared to remove one villain from it.

And this he would do for Anna.

So it is here, he thought as the bus drew to a halt at the cross street, that the story ends.

The house he located a few minutes later struck him as extraordinarily modest. If life followed art, an epic tale spanning decades and continents would have an epic setting for its final scene. But the house was small and in bad repair, with a cramped, weedy yard and a roof saddened by broken tiles.

Suddenly, Danforth recalled the times he’d killed, and it seemed to him that it was his memory acting as a buttress to his courage, reminding him that he had taken life at close quarters. He was not new to murder, he told himself, and despite his years, his trigger finger remained strong. When the moment came, he would make his will match his muscles. That had always been the key to action, and as he stepped forward and drew open the rusty iron gate that opened onto the narrow pathway that led to the cottage’s door, he told himself that he must be the man he’d been all those many years ago: This I do for Anna.

The walkway was of uneven brick, treacherous for a man his age, but Danforth maneuvered along it slowly and carefully, his gaze on the path until he reached the door. Once there, he drew in a long, steadying breath and knocked.

The man who opened the door was pale and bald, his eyes vague and watery, with nothing of the malevolent deceit Danforth’s imagination had added to them. He had imagined Rache as still in the fullness of his youth, muscular and erect. To these characteristics, his mind had lately added features that were sometimes Slavic, sometimes Aryan, but always diabolically cruel and lit with low cunning. He knew that it was his hatred that had removed age and weariness and decrepitude from this portrait, and that in a thousand thousand ways other men did this every day, shading in the demonic in accordance with their fierce need for vengeance.

“¿Qué pasa?” the old man asked. What’s the matter?

He was squinting hard, and by that squint, Danforth realized that the old man’s vision was so impaired he could probably see only a blur at his door.

“My car has broken down,” he told him in Spanish. “I wonder if I might use your phone.”

The old man nodded and opened the door wider.

Danforth stepped inside the house, then followed the old man into his cramped living quarters, a small room cluttered with books and papers, though what Danforth most noticed was a small table filled with an array of medications: sprays, ointments, pills, the full ordnance of old age.

There was a phone on a second table and the old man shuffled over to it, plucked the receiver from its cradle, and offered it to Danforth with a palsied hand that kept its cord dancing frantically.

Danforth faked a call, then handed the old man back the phone. “They’re sending someone,” he said.

The old man nodded toward a chair, a gesture indicating he should wait inside until help arrived. Then he slumped down in a ragged wicker chair, indicating with a similar nod that Danforth should do the same in the chair that rested opposite his.

“Hace calor’’ the old man said. It’s warm.

“Si,” Danforth replied.

“¿De donde es usted?” Where are you from?

“Nueva York’.’

“Ah,” the old man said. “Tengo una hija qué aún vive alii’.’

A daughter living in New York, Danforth thought, and so he had had it all, this man: a wife, a child.

“¿Vive usted solo ahora?” Danforth asked cautiously, needing to make sure that the old man lived alone.

“Si” the old man said. “Soy soltero.”

So he lived alone, Danforth thought, with a daughter far away.

Perfect.

Danforth noticed a large drinking mug, topped with a pewter flask. “That mug with the milkmaid,” he said in English. “I saw one like it in Germany.”

“Germany, yes,” the old man said with a smooth shift to English. “I was there during the war.”

“I was there briefly,” Danforth said. “In Berlin. Near the Landwehr Canal.”

“Ah, yes,” the old man said. “A sad place. They tossed the body of Rosa Luxemburg into those waters.”

And Danforth instantly recalled that moment years before when they’d all been strolling along the Spree: how Bannion had stopped and looked out toward a particular bridge, the strange combination of rage and sorrow that had swept into his face.

“Why did you betray us, Ted?”

The old man blinked slowly, as if in all the years of his concealment he’d known that the hinge on traitor’s gate would one day sound. Now, with its small creak, he would realize, as Danforth thought Bannion surely did at that moment, that whether he would live or die had been decided long ago.

“Tom,” Bannion whispered.

Danforth wondered why he did not simply draw the pistol and do what he had come to do. What was the point of any further conversation, after all? What would he be looking for? He could find no answers to these questions, and as if to provide one, he felt his hand reach inside his coat, hold a moment, then curl around the handle of the pistol.

“You were a German agent all along,” Danforth said. “You never meant to carry out the plot.”

Bannion shifted in his chair, a jagged, achy movement Danforth recognized as the way he himself now moved, along with most men of a certain age.

“I was never a German agent,” Bannion said. “And I would have killed Hitler without a blink. I would have done everything I said I would do. It was Anna’s idea to kill him, remember? It was a good one, and it came from her sense of purpose, which I admired.”

There was a curious confidence in him now, Danforth observed, as if his old skills were returning to him, the dead powers of his long deceit lifting from their graves, walking the earth.

“I was never a German agent,” he declared again.

“Soviet then?” Danforth asked.

“Of course, Tom,” he said. “And I was loyal to the end. Which is why they’ve always protected me.” He stopped as if in sudden recognition. “Until now, that is.” He seemed to understand that history had turned against him. “When a great house falls, only the rats get out alive. Which one came to you, Tom?”

“It was I who came to him,” Danforth said. “Because I never stopped looking for Anna.”

Bannion’s smile bore something between admiration and contempt; he seemed in awe that Danforth had so relentlessly responded to so empty a call.

“With you, it was always her, Tom,” he said. “But with me, it was always something greater.”

Then he told his tale.

~ * ~