The Quest for Anna Klein

PART IV

The Scent of Almonds

~ * ~

Century Club, New York City, 2001

“Why almonds?” I asked.

“Because that is the odor of cyanide,” Danforth said, and then he glanced around like a man either recalling the place where a murder had been committed or looking for a place where one might be carried out.

“We should leave here now, I think,” he said.

I looked toward the window. “But it’s still snowing quite hard,” I warned him.

He smiled at a young man’s alarm that an old one should venture out in such weather. “I have learned to be sure-footed,” he said. His face took on that familiar expression of an old man teaching a young one the rules of the road. “What do you think is the most important characteristic of a predator?” he asked.

I thought of the spider, still and silent in its web. “Patience,” I answered.

Danforth smiled. “Very good. And what is the prey’s most important characteristic?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

“Resignation,” Danforth said. “Which can only be achieved if the prey understands the purpose of its death.”

“You’re speaking in human terms then,” I said.

A hint of cruelty glittered in Danforth’s eyes. “I am speaking, Paul, of revenge.”

With that he rose in a way that made him seem already somewhat ghostly, a dark cloud, but a cloud nonetheless, as if he were no longer entirely alive because at his great age he was so very near to death.

“Come,” he said. “I have a quiet spot in mind.”

The spot wasn’t very far, as it turned out, though we’d accumulated a fair amount of snow on the shoulders of our coats before we got there.

“The Blue Bar,” he said with a nod to the awning up ahead. “In the Algonquin Hotel. You must have heard of the Algonquin?

“Yes, of course,” I said. “The Round Table. Those famous wits. Dorothy Parker and —”

“Yes, yes,” Danforth said sharply, as if all their worldly talk had never been worldly at all. “They were Manhattan provincials, and what could be more provincial than that?” He added a sly wink, but his tone turned somber. “Cleverness is the death of wisdom, Paul.”

We reached the bar, and rather than allowing me to do it, Danforth stepped briskly forward, opened the door, and let me enter first. It was an old man’s way of demonstrating that although he was old, he was not dependent, and I found myself admiring his determination to assert himself in such a graceful and unoffending manner.

“Thank you,” I said as I passed in front of him and gave him a courtly nod. “Most kind.”

Danforth smiled. “You are a very polite young man.” He said it as if he were suspicious of such formality, as if it were the knife inside the glove.

We took a table by the window, from which we could watch the city’s hardworking pedestrians shoulder through this inclement day in this wounded city, a scene that played in Danforth’s eyes and seemed, in the way of sorrow, to both darken and enlighten them.

“The tragic irony is that it is the people who seek heaven in the future who create hell in the present,” he said. With that, he summoned a waiter, and we each ordered a glass of wine, he a white, I a red, both whatever the house suggested.

“Tell me, Paul,” Danforth said once the waiter had departed. “Have you been to Moscow?”

“I have, actually,” I was pleased to tell him. “But a long time ago. When I was a little boy. On the grand tour I made with my grandfather. He knew the city quite well.”

“Really,” Danforth said. “Did he happen to show you the city’s swimming pool?”

“Swimming pool? No. It was the middle of winter.”

“Too bad,” Danforth said. “I don’t know this for a fact, but I can’t imagine that it isn’t the largest swimming pool in the world. And it has quite a history, that pool. Quite a story of its own.”

And then he told it.

In the summer of 1931, he said, Pravda announced that the Palace of the Soviets was to be built in Moscow. The planned physical dimensions of this palace were stupendous. It was to be six times the size of the Empire State Building, and at its completion, it would be crowned with a gigantic statue of Lenin three times as high as the Statue of Liberty. This was Stalin’s answer to capitalism, and he intended it to be a very powerful one. Equally important to this aim, the Palace of the Soviets was to be built next to the Kremlin on the huge piece of real estate at that time occupied by the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, itself a monumental structure thirty stories tall with walls more than three meters thick and whose bronze cupola alone weighed 176 tons.

“All this, of course, had to be torn down before the Palace of the Soviets could be built,” Danforth said.

And so various methods for carrying out this destruction were endlessly discussed. It was even proposed that the building be bombed, but accuracy was a problem, and so during the course of a single night, a huge wooden barrier was erected around the cathedral, after which the interior of the church was stripped of a half a ton of gold, along with an incalculable treasure of diamonds, silver, topaz, amethyst, emeralds, and ornately carved enamels, all of which disappeared into government warehouses or the vaults of the Soviet secret police.

“The demolition was completed in early December,” Danforth said. “In four months one of the great architectural jewels of Moscow had been completely razed.”

Now came the construction of the Palace of the Soviets. It was to be over four hundred meters high, weigh 1.5 million tons, and enclose an area greater than the six largest skyscrapers currently towering above the streets of New York. Lenin’s gigantic statue was to crown this spectacular edifice. His index finger alone would stretch to six meters.

“But this statue never rose, nor the building to support it,” Danforth continued. “Everything sank into a morass of bad planning. The foundation was dug, but then the rains came, and then the snow, and in the spring, rivers of melting ice, and so the vast foundation filled with water. The water became infested with frogs and choked with duckweed, and worst of all, the whole disaster was now quite visible because the huge wooden fence that had concealed the earlier destruction had been dismantled by Muscovites desperate for firewood.”

“My God,” I said. “What a mess.”

“The years passed,” Danforth said. “Children fished in the depths of the old foundation. Stalin died. Khrushchev replaced him, and one day he looked out over this huge stinking lake of stagnant water and decided, Well, maybe a swimming pool.”

With that he laughed softly, but I didn’t.

“What, Paul, you find nothing funny in this tale?” Danforth asked pointedly.

“No,” I said. “No, it seems very sad to me, that people can become so deluded, destroy so wantonly out of some crazy ideology.”

“It rather makes you suspect that true belief is always false,” he said.

I nodded. “Yes, I think that’s true.”

The expression on Danforth’s face relaxed slightly, as if he’d been given a signal that it was safe to go on. “Then you are ready to hear more of my story,” he said.

“Good,” I said with an enthusiasm that surprised me. “Well, in our last episode, Anna was in league . . .”

Danforth lifted his hand in a cautionary gesture. “Anna was in league, yes.” His smile was thoroughly enigmatic. “But with whom?”

~ * ~

Orléans, France, 1939

Danforth would relive the sight of that morning on many occasions over the next sixty years. He would sometimes remember that they stood very near each other, Bannion’s entire profile visible but Anna’s face obscured by the slender trunk of the sapling in the foreground.

At other times, however, he’d remember them standing somewhat farther apart, Bannion with a scrap of paper in his hand, one he quickly —rather too quickly? — sank into the pocket of his jacket as Danforth approached. In this remembrance, Anna reaches for the paper and then hastily —too hastily? — draws back her hand so that it is covered by the folds of her long, black skirt.

But in every recollection of this moment, the two of them, Bannion and Anna, would turn toward him smoothly and in unison, both with oddly drawn faces whose expressions would seem to him, in countless grave reenactments, like those of lovers plotting murder.

“Hello, Tom,” Bannion said.

He had been in England when he’d received their message of Christophe’s murder, Bannion told him, and of their subsequent flight to Orléans. Clayton had dispatched him immediately with orders to find out if Christophe’s death had entirely compromised the Project and, if it had, what steps should be taken.

“We could certainly attempt to carry on with our earlier plans,” Bannion added. “But Anna tells me that you two have been thinking of something much more . . . grand.”

“Yes,” Danforth said.

“I’m not sure Clayton would approve this new idea,” Bannion said.

“Perhaps it’s not up to Clayton,” Danforth said.

“A rogue operation?” Bannion asked. “I wouldn’t try it if I were you.”

Cautioning though Bannion’s remark was, he seemed to understand that a great plot was like a huge stone: once in motion, it took on a direction and velocity of its own, the plotters forever running in front of it while it closed in on them from behind, urging them forward and forward until, at a certain point, they feared their own failure to act more than they feared the consequences of their action.

“But if Clayton goes along,” Bannion added, “then we can begin to make our plans.”

With that one remark, his use of we and our, it seemed to Danforth that Bannion had insinuated himself into what had been a league of two. It was as if he had barged into an intimate conversation and then proceeded to dominate it.

“This will have to be a very tight circle,” Bannion said. He looked at Anna. “But yes, it is worth doing, I think. And I can probably persuade Clayton to approve it.”

So it was really going to happen, Danforth thought; they were going to do it. Up to that moment, the actual attempt had seemed distant in the way that all peril seems distant until it is upon you. But now he saw that the spiral was tightening, that it was very, very serious, the game no longer a game, and he was reminded of a line from Bion he’d once had to memorize in the original Greek: Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs die in earnest.

He said none of this as they walked to the hotel, where only days before he’d sat at the little desk in his room and written several letters to business associates in Berlin. He was seeking African antiquities he’d told them, particularly items acquired from Germany’s former colonies in east and southwest Africa. He’d made it a point to express his displeasure with Germany’s loss of these colonies, along with “other confiscations of Versailles.” At the time, this had seemed very far from the carrying out of an assassination, though it had no doubt moved the plot along. Now the letters seemed little more than props in a high-school play.

At the hotel, Bannion shook their hands, then said, “I’ll be back after I’ve talked to Clayton. If he goes along with this, I can get us some very useful information.”

With that, he left them so quickly he seemed hardly to have been there at all.

Danforth glanced toward the small outdoor cafe next to the hotel. “Would you like some tea?”

“Yes,” Anna answered.

Once seated, she drew the scarf from her head and let her hair fall wildly, now reaching all the way to her shoulders, a gesture that seemed intimate and that Danforth would later believe she had made on purpose, creating a mood she then used — was it cunningly? — to reveal more of herself to him.

“Did Mr. LaRoche ever mention Baku?” she asked.

“Yes,” Danforth said. “He talked about how beautiful it had once been and about what the Bolsheviks did to it.”

“My father once took me there,” Anna said. She smiled. “I was very young at the time, but Baku is a place that leaves lifelong impressions. I remember roasted cumin seeds and the sacks of spices, turmeric, how yellow it was in that sun.” The smile dissolved. “And the caravans,” she added. “Some had come all the way across the Caucasus Mountains. The animals looked so tired. I remember feeling very sorry for them.”

“How long were you in Baku?” Danforth asked.

“Only a day or so,” Anna answered. “Then we returned to Erzinghan.”

The name itself returned Danforth to one of the darkest of his father’s tales. “Erzinghan? In Turkey?” Danforth asked.

“I was born there,” Anna said.

Danforth felt the horror fall over him. “Erzinghan,” he said softly.

She noticed the glimmer in Danforth’s eyes. “You know about it then?” she asked.

“Yes,” Danforth said. “One of our buyers had been there. He said that near Erzinghan, at a bend in the Euphrates, the river had become so clogged with the dead, it briefly changed its course.”

“Those were terrible times,” Anna said. She thought a moment, and while she thought, something in her eyes deepened and darkened, as if she were moving backward into a dimmer light. “I’ve been thinking about them a lot in the last few days.”

“Why?”

“Because there was a man in our region,” she answered. “His name was Demir. He was a writer and a scholar, but he had terrible things in his mind and he did terrible things because of it, and no one ever stopped him.” She paused and let her gaze deepen further. “What I mean is that no one killed Kulli Demir. That’s the point I’m making, Tom. There must have been lots of people who had the chance, but no one did. And so other men saw that Demir could do whatever he pleased and get away with it. Then they started to do the same things he did. They rounded up the men and killed them, and when the men were gone, they did whatever they wanted to the women and the girls. And the ones they didn’t kill, they drove into Syria. Most of them died on the way, but a few made it to Aleppo.”

Danforth offered no response to this, but years later, still seeking the truth through the bramble left behind, he would come upon this passage in the memoir of an American who’d found himself in Turkey at the time of Anna’s early girlhood:

The pattern was usually the same, according to reports, and it was corroborated by the one incident I witnessed myself. The local authorities would notify the Kurdish tribes and Turkish peasants that a caravan was on the way. The caravan was women and children, and they would be set upon by these Kurds and Turks and Chetes, along with various bands of thugs and criminals. These women and girls had no defense against these men because those who would have defended them, their fathers and husbands and brothers, had already been killed, and so they could be attacked without fear of reprisal. Many times these women did not survive the tortures and rapes that were inflicted upon them. They were “guarded” by the gendarmes, but these men not only did nothing to protect the women and girls, they sometimes joined the others in tormenting them. They seemed to hate the ones who survived, and when it was time to move on, they rained blows upon them with whips and truncheons, stabbed at them with bayonets, deprived them of food, and made no attempt to return the clothing, mostly rags, that had been ripped off their bodies, so that when the caravan I personally witnessed finally reached Syria, the women were starved and naked, and many were crazed and raving. I saw a group of these poor female skeletons stagger across the border one afternoon and I thought that they could not have come from any place on earth and must have somehow dragged themselves out of hell. The last of them, stumbling behind, were the most lost of the lost, very young girls, from twelve to as young as three, bereft of both mothers and fathers, with no one to help them even among their own people. Dirtyy, naked, unimaginably alone at the far end of the caravan, these little girls made their way into the desert wastes of Aleppo.

Reading that passage years later as he sat in the stillness of the New York Public Library, Danforth would wonder, darkly and incessantly, if one of those lost little girls had been Anna Klein.

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

“Because she’d had this haunted look when she spoke of what she’d seen in Turkey, you see,” Danforth said. “I had seen that look a few times before that afternoon, but her personal history had never seemed so tragic as it did at that moment, which made me come to believe that she herself had suffered the outrages she described.”

“This is the Armenian genocide, correct?” I asked.

Danforth nodded. “Have you read much about it, Paul?”

“A little,” I answered. “But I didn’t know Jews were massacred as well.”

Danforth clearly appreciated my response. “Very good, Paul,” he said. “That would be the question, wouldn’t it?”

“Question?”

“If you ever came to doubt any part of Anna’s story,” Danforth explained in a coolly inquisitorial tone. “You’d have to ask yourself whether a young Jewish girl might have been rounded up and marched into Syria along with the Armenians.” He took a slow sip from his glass. “Well, I looked into this very question, and I found that as a matter of fact, by the time of the Armenian genocide, Jews had lived in what later became the Armenian provinces of Turkey for thousands of years. They had probably first come in flight, some from Assyria, others from Samaria, still others from God knows where.” Then, quite abruptly, he blinked a thousand years of Diaspora from his eyes and was miraculously returned to modern times. “Anna saw the assassination of the king of Yugoslavia, you know.”

Danforth saw my surprise at this fact and laughed.

“Not with her own eyes, of course,” he said. “But in the newsreels. He was killed in Marseille in 1934. The first assassination to be recorded on film. She once mentioned how easy it looked.” He shrugged. “Maurice Bavaud probably saw that newsreel too.”

“Maurice Bavaud?”

“In pictures, he never had the smile of an assassin,” Danforth said. “In fact, he didn’t seem to know how to smile. Or maybe it was that he simply couldn’t bring himself to smile in a world as chaotic as Europe was in 1938.”

This was one of Danforth’s divergences, and earlier I would have been eager to get past it, but by then I’d come to realize that his asides were always closely related to his tale, and so I simply heard him out.

Bavaud was a devout Catholic, Danforth told me, a young man who had been a seminarian at Saint-Brieuc in Brittany when he was seized by the insane notion that in order for Christianity to be saved, the Romanovs had to be returned to power in Russia. He was equally convinced that killing Adolf Hitler would set the wheels in motion.

In the fall of 1938, he’d traveled first to Baden-Baden and then on to Basel, where he bought a Schmeisser 6.5-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, Danforth told me.

It struck me that Danforth had studied Bavaud’s plot to kill Hitler in great detail, as if he’d been in search of some small element that might explain how his own had failed.

“After Basel, Bavaud boarded another train, this time heading for Berlin,” he continued.

He had planned — if his movements and intentions could be called a plan at all — simply to shoot Hitler in his capital, but he’d later decided to do it in Munich during the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch.

“The celebration always included a march,” Danforth said. “With Hitler himself at the head of the parade.”

And so once in Munich, Bavaud obtained a complimentary ticket to the stand in front of the Holy Ghost Church, at the western end of Talstrasse, a site that seemed quite well situated to watch the march as it turned into Marienplatz, a turn, Bavaud correctly reasoned, that would slow things down considerably because everyone would have to squeeze through the small archway that led to the square.

“But there was plenty of time before the march,” Danforth continued. “And at that point it seemed to occur to Bavaud that in view of what he intended to do, a little target practice might be in order.”

A few days later, Bavaud bought some extra ammunition and rented a boat on Lake Ammer, not far outside of Munich. He rowed out onto the water and practiced shooting at little paper targets he launched from his boat. Later, he practiced again, this time aiming at trees in the forest.

“Like Anna at Winterset,” I blurted, as if I’d discovered the reason for this divergence, the thing that connected it, however tangentially, to his tale.

“Yes,” Danforth answered crisply, then continued.

When he returned to Munich, Bavaud obtained a detailed map of the route of the march, then walked its entire length in order to ascertain whether there was any better vantage point than the one he had. He found none better, and no doubt thought that here was the hand of God assisting him. What else could explain his seat near the archway of Marienplatz, a perfect bottleneck?

“And so at last the moment had come,” Danforth said. “Bavaud took his place on the reviewing stand, and shortly after that, the man he’d come to kill took his place in the line of the march.”

I imagined the head of this particular snake as he proceeded in the march, lifting his arm in return salute to the crowd, but curiously indifferent to their adoration, as if determined not to let even the people’s idolatry sway him from his purpose.

“Bavaud finally caught sight of him,” Danforth said. “Can you imagine what that must have been like, watching the target move toward you, oblivious to the danger, distant at first, but coming nearer and nearer? And you have this pistol in your belt and your hand crawls toward it, and as you do that, a kind of tunnel vision sets in, so that everything on the periphery of the target blurs and all the cheering and horns and drums go silent, and there is just you and the one you’ve come to kill.”

At that moment in his narrative, I believed that Danforth was describing himself, rather than Bavaud, and I felt certain that at some point he had aimed a pistol at close range and felt his finger pull back on the trigger.

“But just as the target is in range,” he continued, “just as you grip the handle of the pistol and ease it from your belt—just at that moment, with the man himself so close you can almost feel his breath on your face — at just that moment, Paul, the crowd shifts and surges and a hundred arms are raised, and in that press and tangle, your target vanishes from sight, and by the time you see him clearly again, he is passing beneath the little arch and into the square . . . and into his future, and the world’s.”

“Is that what happened?” I asked. “To Bavaud?”

“Yes,” Danforth answered.

“How do you know that?”

“Because he said so,” Danforth replied.

“So he was caught?”

“Yes, but not before returning to Bertesgarten, shooting at more trees —without a silencer, I might add —and generally stalking around town. He even once asked a policeman how he might get closer to Hitler.”

“And no one noticed him?” I asked, astonished.

“No one,” Danforth said with a shrug. “Security is a human thing, Paul, carried out by humans, and with all the human imperfections.”

“Did he ever get close to Hitler again?”

Danforth shook his head. “And so he started back. Unfortunately, he had run out of money, and so he found it necessary to stow away on a train. He was discovered and questioned. During the course of this, the authorities found his notebook. He’d taken the trouble to record his intention to kill Hitler in that notebook. They found the little Schmeisser six-point-five too. Of course he was arrested. After that, the usual stages. Interrogation. Torture. Execution. In Bavaud’s case, by guillotine in Plötzensee Prison.”

“He seems rather hapless,” I said. “Pitiful in a way. So naive that—”

“No more than we were, really,” Danforth interrupted. “And Bavaud had a more passionate reason for attempting to kill Hitler than I did. Frankly, Paul, my whole purpose by that time had become simply to be near Anna.” He shrugged. “At one moment, under the sway of such feelings, a man buys flowers. At another moment, under the sway of those same feelings, he takes a step toward murder.”

“So it was always her,” I said softly.

“Always her,” Danforth said. “Yes.”

Then his voice returned to its familiar narrative tone, driving slowly forward, carrying me along with it, so that, like them, I felt the train lurch forward then move smoothly out of Orléans station.

~ * ~

Orléans, France, 1939

The train lurched forward, and in that movement, Danforth felt that he was no longer a little spy but a man moving inexorably toward an earth-shattering act.

Later, as his train drew ever closer to the German border, Danforth still more intensely considered the astonishing fact that he was now committed to a supremely perilous scheme. He knew this clearly, and from time to time, he reviewed the weight of the task before him, how surreal it was, along with its surpassing dangers. But for all that, he could imagine no alternative course, and years later, in the frozen wastes of his long pursuit, when he came to describe these events, he characterized his feelings as “intractable, irreducible, and adamantine.” Anna’s resolve had fortified his own. They were iron and steel, and he felt their strength conjoined. But there was a magic that went beyond the familiar notion of one person’s courage giving courage to another. He thought of it as alchemy, a mysterious mixture made from peril and purpose and infused with a romance that every day grew more intense. For he was falling in love, and he knew it, and it seemed to him that to be in love and at war simultaneously was surely to live life at the top.

At the border, the first German official approached them, his uniform thoroughly Germanic in its starched and neatly pressed precision. He asked for their passports, opened each, then returned them.

“What is your purpose in coming to Germany?” he asked Danforth.

“We are here on business,” Danforth answered in his perfect German. “I am an importer.” He nodded toward Anna. “Miss Collier is my assistant.”

“Herr Danforth, Fraulein Collier,” the officer said with a polite nod to each of them. “Willkommen nach Deutschland

“Well,” Danforth said once the officer had departed, “that went well, don’t you think?”

Anna returned her passport to her small leather purse. “The really dangerous border stations,” she said, “are the ones where the guards are wearing only parts of their uniforms.”

It was a curious comment, one that suggested to Danforth that Anna had known such bleak and poorly supplied border crossings, sun-baked and remote, as he imagined them, with sweltering guardhouses of windowless concrete, the border itself merely a dusty line drawn between two vast but equally impoverished wastes.

There were no other official inquiries after that first polite officer, and they reached Berlin, and at last their hotel just off Unter den Linden, without further intrusions.

That evening they had their first dinner in Berlin. They were both tired from the journey and so decided to dine in the hotel restaurant, a faded affair with too much drapery and crystal, little more than a sepia photograph from the belle époque.

“I’ve been thinking about the letters you wrote the businesspeople here,’’ Anna said. “Perhaps we shouldn’t make contact with any of them, Tom.”

“Why not?”

“Because they might get into trouble later for knowing us,” Anna answered.

It was a realistic appraisal of Germany at that moment, of course, and so Danforth thought nothing of it at the time, though later he would wonder if she’d sought to isolate him, keep him within the tight circle that enclosed her plot. If so, he hadn’t sensed it then and had simply nodded and said, “Yes, I think you’re right.”

Anna glanced from the restaurant toward the lobby of the hotel. Two men were standing at the desk, both in long coats. “We’ll need cyanide,” she said. “I asked Bannion to get it for us.”

Danforth thought of the Connecticut warehouse, how close he had come to betraying her. “Yes,” he said. “We will. But maybe we won’t have to use it.”

Which seemed entirely possible to Danforth, as they had previously decided on a bomb as the best method, a device Anna had been trained to make and use and hide, so it was feasible that they might both accomplish their mission and survive it.

She drew in a long breath as she turned back to him. “You would miss it, wouldn’t you?”

“Miss what?”

“Life.”

“Of course,” Danforth said with a sudden sense of alarm. “Wouldn’t you?”

She nodded.

Danforth thought of the odd question she had asked in what now seemed almost an earlier life.

“Speaking of life, what’s the most beautiful place you’ve never seen?” he asked her.

She smiled. “There are more of them than I can name, Tom,” she answered.

“Try.”

She did, and as she moved from place to place, it seemed to Danforth that she had never looked more eager to live. So much so that it would be many years before he wondered if even this — the hunger she showed for the world — had been but another of her many masquerades.

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

I knew Danforth had related this conversation for a reason, and that for some other reason, he did not elaborate upon it but instead eased himself back slightly, as if trying to get a clearer view of some far-distant scene. “There is a little town called Dubno, Paul.”

This village had enjoyed a more or less quiet life, he told me, a small town that rested along the equally tranquil Ikva River. It was surrounded by a few rolling hills in that part of the Ukraine that was sometimes Poland, sometimes Russia, depending on the politics of the time. The Soviets had seized it in 1939 and then been driven eastward by a German onslaught that, as Danforth reminded me, had seemed near invincible at the time.

“When the Germans took over Dubno,” Danforth went on, “about half its population was Jewish. There were fourteen synagogues in the town. Jewish doctors, lawyers, teachers.”

His voice took on the quiet intensity that marked these asides, an old-man Scheherezade,

“On October fifth, 1942, if a little girl on a certain street had looked out her bedroom window, she would have seen hundreds of people passing by as they headed out of town toward the old airfield an hour’s walk away,” Danforth continued. “They would have been dressed according to their class, some quite fine, some in hand-me-downs. Witnesses said they walked slowly and in great order, with only a few soldiers and dogs keeping watch.” To my surprise, I could hear the muffled steps of these hundreds; even without my knowing that the street they’d walked had been made of flagstone, I heard the rhythm of their feet over them, along with bits of indecipherable talk: the urging forward of the old, the calming down of the young.

“There was a shallow chasm three kilometers out of town,” Danforth went on. “This is where they stopped and stripped. Hermann Graebe, a German construction engineer who witnessed the event, saw great mounds of shoes and underwear and clothing. He said they stood in family groups, that people too old or sick or disoriented to disrobe were stripped by their younger relatives. One man bent down to his little boy, pointed to the sky, and seemed to be telling him something very important. A young woman, completely naked, came very near to Graebe as she made her way toward the execution pit. She pointed to herself as she passed by. ‘Twenty-three,’ she said. Twenty-three.”

I shook my head at this sad tale, though I had no idea why Danforth had now taken me so far east.

“German stock,” Danforth said suddenly. “Suppose, Paul, that I knew that twenty-three-year-old girl. Suppose it was ... Anna. Suppose I also knew the man who carried out the massacre at Dubno. Suppose that after the war I tracked him down, only to find that he’d died years before.” He smiled. “But suppose he had a son, a daughter, grandchildren. Should I kill them all?”

“Of course not,” I answered. “They had nothing to do with what happened at Dubno.”

“But they’re all I have left, Paul,” Danforth said. “They’re all I have left to get even with the man who killed the woman I loved.”

“Perhaps so, but it would be unreasonable to kill these other people,” I said.

“You’re right, it would be quite unreasonable,” Danforth agreed. “But vengeance is a passion of the heart, isn’t it? And as Pascal said, the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.” Before I could answer, he added, “And in that article you wrote, didn’t you say that in the current situation, our acts should flow from passion?”

“Yes,” I said softly.

Danforth’s eyes appeared to harden. “I agree,” he said.

For a moment, he peered at me silently. Then, like a driver abruptly realizing he’d missed a turn, he swung back to his earlier narrative.

“When I heard about Dubno, heard that story of the girl pointing at herself, crying out her age as she was heading toward her death, it reminded me of Anna,” Danforth said. “It reminded me of the way she was in the hotel that night in Berlin, talking about Venice or Vienna or some other place she one day hoped to see. She seemed like that girl in Dubno. Too young to die.”

The stricken look on Danforth’s face at that moment warned me away from asking about Anna directly. And so I said, “Where did you hear about Dubno?”

“I heard about it when Hermann Graebe testified at the trials.”

“The trials?”

“Nuremberg,” Danforth said. “When I was working at the war crimes trials. Graebe’s testimony was particularly interesting to me because it was at Dubno that a man with the daunting name of Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche-Streithorst changed. He was a German soldier who saw the massacre at Dubno, and because of it, he decided to kill Hitler.”

“So your interest is in his motivation?” I asked.

“Yes,” Danforth answered. “I studied them all. Every attempt on Hitler’s life.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to know the variety of motivations,” Danforth said. “In discovering them, I thought I might also discover Anna’s.”

“But why not just accept that she was a Jew, and Hitler was persecuting Jews?” I said.

“That motivation, or a thousand other ones, Paul,” Danforth said. “It would have been easy if she had been easy.” His gaze became piercing. “It’s what you don’t know that destroys you.” He drew in a sharp breath. “And believe me,” he added, “I did not know Anna Klein.” Danforth seemed almost to dissolve into this fog of unknowing, then he gathered himself once again. “But where were we, Paul?” he asked. “Yes. Berlin. That old hotel. So long in the tooth. I told her it reminded me of an old woman who’d once been beautiful.”

~ * ~