The Quest for Anna Klein

Berlin, Germany, 1939

Anna smiled. “Istanbul is like that,” she said. “Crumbling palaces along the Bosporus. My father called it an ‘aged courtesan.’”

It surprised Danforth that she mentioned her father, since she had spoken so rarely of her past, and many years later, he would wonder if this had been a line skillfully cast out, spare yet bearing just the sort of bait she knew would lure him deeper into the current, with its hint of the foreign, the exotic. She revealed herself in little flashes of her past in the way some lady of a royal court might allow a brief glimpse of her ankle.

“He seems to have been quite the traveler, your father,” Danforth said.

“He was, yes,” Anna said with so much aridness that she gave off the sense of a field scattered with his dust. “I loved him very much.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died.”

With that she took up the menu and appeared, in that gesture, to secrete herself behind it. “I’m talking too much about myself,” she said.

“Not at all,” Danforth told her. “As a matter of fact, you’d think you were some kind of criminal, the way I have to pry things out of you.” He gave her a knowing look. “Or do you just want to seem mysterious?”

She lowered the menu, and he saw that she had taken him seriously. “It’s not that at all. It’s just that I think we should stay apart, Tom. Because of what we’re doing.”

“I understand,” Danforth told her.

And he did understand her point, that given the nature of their circumstances, they should remain aloof from each other. And yet, just at that moment, he felt a terrible urge to touch her, one more powerful than at any time before, and he knew that the more he suppressed that urge, the more it would assert itself.

He could say none of this, of course, and so he quickly changed the subject.

“So,” he said as he took up the menu. “What shall we have?” They ordered, ate, finished with tea, then strolled out of the hotel, down the street, and into a small square. It was a warm summer night, and the lights from nearby biergartens flickered all around them. The crowds were large, almost teeming, and nothing in their movements seemed controlled by anything more than the traffic signals.

They found a bench and sat down together, silent still, watching the passing parade. In such a pose they might have looked like a pair of young lovers, he in pursuit, she coming near to giving in to his advances, and had their purpose not been so grave, Danforth thought, he might have reached out to her as he so much wanted to do.

It was a surge of desire she clearly sensed.

“We should start to get the materials,” she said starkly, a line that returned him to the cold matter at hand.

She meant the ones for the bomb, of course, though they had never discussed where it would be planted.

“We’ll also need to plan a way to get out of Germany once we know it went off,” Danforth told her.

“But there’s only one way to know,” Anna said. “To be there when it does. To be one of those women who rush up to him with flowers in their hands.”

By the methodical and unyielding way she said it, Danforth knew that such had always been her plan, that she would conceal the bomb beneath her coat or behind a great spray of flowers, and by that means die with the man she murdered, join with him in the same red blast.

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

“So she was to be a suicide bomber,” I said, almost as stunned as Danforth had described himself on the heels of this revelation.

“Yes,” Danforth said.

“But why not plant the bomb,” I asked, “in a piece of coal, or something like it, the way LaRoche suggested?”

“For the very reason Anna gave me,” Danforth answered. “Because you can’t be sure it will go off at the right moment or if the target will be in place when it does go off.” He shrugged. “And she was right, Paul. We know now that there were at least forty-two plots to kill Adolf Hitler. Von Stauffenberg’s plot is the most famous, of course, because it came closest to actual success. But by the time Count von Stauffenberg planted his little briefcase a few feet from Hitler, his target had already wreaked havoc on Europe, ravaged whole countries, exterminated millions. Even if von Stauffenberg’s attempt had succeeded, it would have been too late to save anything but a small, shredded bit of German pride. The war was already coming to a close, with Germany in certain defeat, and so to the people who’d already gone up the chimney, it would have meant nothing. To the people rotting in death pits or buried in the rubble of countless bombed-out towns and villages, it would have meant nothing. Hitler had already done his worst.” He offered a small shrug. “But Paul, imagine what would have happened if Johann Georg Elser’s bomb had succeeded.”

“It might have changed history,” I said.

“Indeed it might have,” Danforth agreed, then continued. “Elser was a cabinetmaker who’d joined the Red Front Fighters’ Organization,” he said. “Is that name familiar to you, Paul?”

The tone of the question struck me as almost probing, as if Danforth actually thought I might have heard of such an organization.

“No,” I answered. “I’m not a student of modern German history.”

“Of course not,” Danforth said, as if reminding himself of that fact. “Well, anyway, Elser decided on a bomb and built one. Then the question was how to get the bomb close enough to Hitler. He chose the beer hall where Hitler always spoke during Putsch celebration in Munich. And so he went there, drank, stayed late, and as closing time neared, he hid in a closet. After everyone left the hall, he went to work digging into one of the building’s supporting columns. He dug all night, then repaired the front of the column, hid himself again, and left the beer hall when it opened the next day. He repeated this process every night for more than a month until he’d made a place for the bomb. He set it to go off at precisely nine twenty on the evening of Wednesday, November eighth, 1939.” He shrugged. “But Hitler wanted to be back in Berlin that night. He couldn’t fly there because a dense fog had grounded his airplane, so he made his speech earlier than planned and then took a train back. He left at eight ten, and so he was nowhere near the beer hall when Elser’s bomb went off.”

The explosion had gone off right on time, however, Danforth said. It had been quite powerful. In fact, it had killed eight people and wounded sixty-five. As it turned out, one of the wounded was none other than Eva Braun’s father.

“As for Elser, he was arrested and later executed at Dachau, on April sixth, 1945, just two weeks before the end of the war. By then he’d seen all that might have been prevented if the fog had not crowded in on Munich on that November night.”

He stopped, and by the change in his expression, I knew that he had returned to some memory of Anna.

“It was true, what Anna said,” he added finally. “To kill a snake, you must strike the head.” He thought a moment, then continued. “But something else is no less true: you must strike early at this head, before the snake has coiled and focused its yellow eyes and done the worst it can do.” He paused again, then looked at me pointedly. “And so we began to assemble the materials for the bomb.”

“But you still had no plan,” I said.

“Most assassins don’t,” Danforth said. “At least, the successful ones don’t. Oswald had no plan, save to be at the right place at the right time.” He thought this over, then added, “The men who killed Garfield and McKinley didn’t have plans either, not beyond having an idea of where the target might be and going there.”

“But surely you need a plan of some sort,” I insisted. “A way to get close to the target.”

“Yes, we needed that,” Danforth said. “And for a moment — long shot though it was — I thought I might have found it.”

~ * ~

Berlin, Germany, 1939

“He wanted to be a painter,” Anna said. “He tried to get into the Vienna Academy of Art but he was rejected.” They were walking in a small square, a summer breeze playing in the leaves. “You could say that you were interested in looking at his work.”

“Interested?” Danforth asked. “In what way? He sells very well here in Germany. Why would he be interested in an American buyer?”

“Because he’s vain,” Anna answered. “All I would need is one meeting. You could be out of the country before it happens.”

Out of the country, yes, Danforth thought, out of the country and back to America and a life he felt no desire to resume.

But it was a good idea, and so he nodded his assent, and later that same afternoon composed the letter on his personal stationery. It was simple, and very direct. There was an audience for Hitler’s work in the United States, he wrote, patrons of the arts who have no interest in crude Expressionism. Hitler’s painting, he said, would certainly appeal to such people. To this he added, Of course, the chancellor’s place in the world, not to mention his recent appearance on the cover of Time magazine, would no doubt boost interest, but I believe that the paintings would find an audience here even if they didn’t carry so famous a signature.

“Okay,” Danforth said. “Now, who do we send it to?”

“No one,” Anna said. “Just put it in the general mail, addressed to the Reich Chancellery. It’ll be less suspicious that way.”

They expected no response, of course, but while they waited they became more familiar with Berlin, walking its streets and parks, strolling through its most prominent buildings, observing places where their target might at some point appear.

There was an unreal quality to this interval, as Danforth would often recall, so that he sometimes imagined them as newlyweds on their honeymoon.

Then the honeymoon abruptly ended.

“It’s from the interior ministry,” Danforth said when he showed Anna the letter. He opened the letter and read it with ever-increasing astonishment. “It’s from someone named Ernst Kruger. He says that the chancellor welcomes my interest in his work. A car will be waiting for us at Wannsee Station on July nineteenth at ten in the morning.” He lowered the letter and stared at Anna in utter amazement. “We’re going to be shown some of the chancellor’s paintings.”

Anna took the letter and read it, then handed it back to Danforth.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s get started.”

For the next few days they did what they could to familiarize themselves with Hitler’s work. It was on display in several places throughout the city, small galleries and public buildings, and they spent long hours peering at the paintings, Danforth trying to place them within a school he thought Herr Kruger might find favorable but without resorting to obvious undeserved flattery.

“He has talent,” Anna said at one point. She was staring at a painting of a cathedral in Vienna.

Danforth nodded. “He can draw at least.”

The following days included other tours, and during these quiet days of waiting, Danforth gave Anna a crash course on the sort of art Hitler appeared to favor and imitate, a style heavy on traditional representation that ignored entirely any modernist influence.

On the appointed morning, they met in the hotel lobby for the trip to Wannsee, and when Danforth saw her emerge from the elevator he nearly swooned at the transformation. She looked every bit the worldly assistant to a major American art dealer. The clothes were the same she’d worn in Paris, but she’d lifted her collar, padded the shoulders of her jacket, and added a discreet white ruffle to each sleeve.

It was the art of an actress and the art of a seamstress, Danforth thought, both now applied to the art of murder.

“You look very” — he stopped and waited until he found the right word — “appropriate.”

In Wannsee, a black sedan was waiting for them, complete with a driver who was clearly not a driver at all but a security agent. A second man stood beside the military officer and appeared to be in charge. He was dressed in the long leather trench coat Danforth associated with the Gestapo.

“My name is Klaus Wald,” he said in German as he thrust out his hand.

Danforth greeted him in German, then introduced Anna.

“I was expecting only one person,” Wald said.

“Miss Collier is the real expert on American naturalism,” Danforth explained.

Danforth was relieved to see that Wald quite clearly had no idea what American naturalism was.

“She is a great lover of landscapes,” Danforth explained. “Which appear to be a favorite subject of Chancellor Hitler.”

Wald nodded crisply, then turned to Anna. “Good. Well, then. Shall we go?”

They got into the back seat, then waited for the officer to take his place at the wheel, Wald beside him. Anna peered out at the station. “Quite a lovely town,” she said in German as the car pulled away.

Neither of the two men spoke during the short drive from the station, but by prearrangement, Danforth and Anna kept up a steady stream of talk, all of it about art, and all of it in German.

Since it was well known that Hitler was quite prolific, Danforth had expected a warehouse, scores and scores of still-life paintings of flowers, bridges, and the like, only a small portion of which, he assumed, had ever been on public display.

Instead, Wald brought the car to a halt before a large stone building that, in a less suburban atmosphere, Danforth would have called a villa. It had two stories and was constructed of a light gray stone and included a welcoming half-circle portico, a design he’d be reminded of years later when he found himself at 56-58 Am Grossen, where the terrible decisions of the Wannsee Conference had been made and where he would once again confront the possibility that Anna’s fate might have been worse than he’d previously supposed.

But on that morning, in the summer sunlight, with the lovely facade of the villa in front of him and with Anna splendid at his side, he allowed himself another slip into unreality, as if it were all a novel or a movie, this drama he was living through, he and Anna merely characters in it, neither of them made of flesh that could be torn or blood that could be spilled, beyond the grasp of such human fates. It was an unreality that had often seized him in the past and that would seize him once more in the future but then, after that, would leave him forever captive to the cold reality of things.

“Herr Danforth?”

The man who spoke stood at the bottom of the stairs outside the house, dressed in a brown double-breasted suit, on the lapel of which, as if to add color, there was a swastika pin, black on a red background.

Danforth took the man’s hand and shook it.

“Welcome to Wannsee,” the man said in German. “I am Ernst Kruger.” He looked at Anna and offered his hand.

“Anna Collier,” she said.

“Most pleased to meet you, fraulein,” Kruger said. He turned and gestured toward the double doors that led into the building. “Please.”

The military officer stationed himself at the door after they passed through it, but Wald accompanied them into the building and up the stairs, always at a discreet distance, so although he was often out of sight, he was always somehow present, like a noise in the woodwork.

The paintings were in a large room; upon entering, Danforth estimated that there were perhaps forty of them. They had been framed tastefully and with obvious professionalism in the sort of frames used by the best museums.

The windows of the hall were high, so exterior light streamed in with crystal clarity. No other source was necessary, and it seemed to Danforth that someone had probably thought this through, the fact that natural scenes, which most of the paintings depicted, should be illuminated by the closest one could get to outdoor light.

“You may walk about at your leisure,” Ernst said. “And, please, take as long as you wish.” He looked at his watch, then nodded to Wald, who now stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him.

“One has to have time with a painting,” Ernst added with a courtly smile. “One cannot be rushed in such things.”

“Thank you,” Danforth said.

Danforth stepped forward with Anna at his side; she was now thoroughly in her role as special assistant, studying the same painting Danforth studied, saying nothing, as if waiting for him to speak.

He stopped at a small painting of a bridge, its double arches made of stone, unthreatening woods behind it, everything done in the muted colors to which the artist seemed most inclined.

As if to test her, he said, in German, “What do you think of this?”

She peered at the painting for a moment, then said, “Constable.”

Danforth felt a wave of boyish playfulness wash over him. “Any Constable painting in particular?” he asked.

“The Cornfield,” Anna answered with complete authority, as if she hadn’t learned of both the artist and the painting only days before.

Danforth decided to press the issue. “The browns?” he asked.

Anna shook her head. “The peace,” she answered. “The sense that even if things turn out badly later, still, for a moment” — she drew her eyes away from the painting and looked at Danforth — “there was this.”

She said it softly, and it was correct enough as a description of the painting, but in Danforth it produced that romantic shock of recognition when a man knows with all the certainty that life allows that although he might one day love again, it will never be like this.

He knew that she was still looking at him, but he did not turn to her, instead moving on to the next painting, this one very ordinary, a vase of flowers.

She followed him as he progressed along the line of paintings: more buildings, more flowers, more landscapes, each curiously impersonal, as if the painter were determined to strip all feeling from his subjects.

They’d reached the back wall when the great doors swung open and Wald, accompanied this time by four soldiers and a woman in a long wool coat, strode into the room.

“Put your hands up,” Wald ordered in German as he closed in on them. “And turn around. Face the wall.”

A trap, Danforth thought, they had been caught in a trap.

“Do not move,” Wald said.

Danforth obeyed instantly, Anna somewhat more slowly, though Danforth couldn’t tell if her less rapid response was the product of terror, shock, or some aspect of a new role she’d decided to play.

The woman now stepped forward. She took Anna firmly by one shoulder, and with her other hand, she patted down the opposite side; she found nothing, reversed the process, again found nothing, and then stepped back behind Wald.

One of the soldiers then moved forward and did the same to Danforth, with the same result.

“Turn around,” Wald commanded them after the soldier took his place with the others.

Danforth and Anna turned to face him.

“Passports,” he said.

They gave them to him.

“You came by way of France?” Wald asked as he looked at Danforth’s passport.

Danforth nodded.

“Your purpose there?”

“I am an art dealer,” Danforth answered.

“Art?” Wald said. “You are an importer, is that not so?”

“Yes, and art is one of the things I import,” Danforth said coolly.

Wald’s eyes ranged over the paintings that hung on the surrounding walls. “What do you have to say of these paintings?” he asked.

“German naturalism,” Danforth answered. “They remind me of the work of a great American naturalist, William Bliss Baker.”

“What is this painter’s most famous work?” Wald demanded.

“Fallen Monarchs.”

“Fallen kings?” Wald asked as if he’d caught Danforth in a political opinion.

“No, it’s a painting of fallen trees,” Danforth answered. “A very beautiful painting.”

Wald simply stared at Danforth a moment, then turned and left the room with his accompanying entourage.

“Don’t act as if anything has happened,” Danforth told Anna. “Let’s just go on around the room.”

With that, they continued to move along the side of the room, and though Danforth knew she must have been as shaken by Wald’s interrogation as he’d been, she appeared quite calm.

Seconds later, they heard footsteps coming, the hard precision of military boots, but when they turned around, they saw only a few soldiers standing guard as a group of civilians came through the door.

As the group moved forward, its ranks thinned, and suddenly the wall broke entirely, and there he was, coming toward them. His head was turned and he was talking to Ernst, saying something amusing, evidently, because there was a very slight smile on Ernst’s face when he turned to them, a smile that was still there when he made the introductions.

“Herr Danforth,” he said, “it is my honor to present the chancellor of the German Reich and the Führer of the German people.”

Danforth had never heard the word Führer spoken, but what surprised him was how profoundly serious the man seemed, despite the comical Charlie Chaplin mustache. He clearly had little time for this.

“So,” the chancellor said, “what do you think of these paintings?”

There was a brusque quality to his voice, though Danforth heard nothing threatening in it, only the tone of a man who was very busy but who had found the time to drop in on these Americans because he couldn’t help but be curious about what they made of his work.

“I find them quite interesting,” Danforth said, working very hard to keep his voice and manner relaxed, looking for all the world as if he weren’t trembling at the very thought of the man who now faced him. “As I said to Herr Kruger, I think many Americans would find them quite to their liking.”

The chancellor nodded but seemed suddenly to lose interest, as if Danforth’s answer had been neither more nor less than he’d expected.

Still, Danforth had no choice but to soldier on, and so he did. “Your subjects, as I told Herr Kruger — fields and dells and the like — they are very natural, and this has great appeal for Americans.” He allowed himself a nervous laugh. “Because so much of the American landscape has been taken over by cities, there is nostalgia for the countryside.”

The chancellor no longer appeared to be in the least interested in what Danforth was saying; he seemed impatient with the commonplace and banal remarks, which were unworthy of any further expenditure of his time. He glanced at his watch, then turned to Ernst. “Well…” he began.

“The subject is you,” Anna said suddenly.

The chancellor turned to her and waited.

“Not impressionistically, of course,” Anna continued. “What your paintings show is your condition when you painted them.”

The chancellor said nothing but listened as Anna continued.

“They are the paintings of someone struggling to live.” She held her gaze on a painting that seemed to fade away at the edges. “A painter rushed ... by hunger.” She might have left it there, and Danforth, cringing inside, certainly hoped she would. But instead she turned boldly toward her target. “Were you hungry when you painted them, mein Führer?”

Danforth would forever poignantly recall the look in the chancellor’s small round eyes at that moment, something never reported and that must have rarely been glimpsed: the sufferings of his youth, the grim poverty and the unbearable rejection, the abyss of failure that must have yawned before him during all his years in Vienna and that could be held back only by the wildly self-inflated fantasy he had hatched about himself and that later, and against all odds, he had managed to make true.

Then, in a blink, all of that passed from him like fizz from a bottle, and he was once again the chancellor of the German Reich and the Fuhrer of the German people, the visionary he proclaimed himself to be, a busy, busy man, too busy for sentimentality, too busy even for reminiscence, and thus one who now found the musings of this young American woman a simple waste of time.

And so, with a quick nod, he turned; his entourage closed in around him, and . . .

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

“. . . and he was gone,” Danforth said.

I couldn’t entirely conceal my surprise at this part of Danforth’s tale, and certainly not my uneasiness at how Anna had behaved.

“Was she . . . flirting with him?” I asked cautiously.

“Flirting?” Danforth asked. “Far from it, believe me.”

“Then why did she speak to him that way?” I asked.

“Because she wanted him to notice her,” Danforth answered. “So that if he ever saw her in a crowd, he would not feel the slightest alarm if she approached him. She knew that we would never get another audience with him after Wannsee. He had seen us and had no reason to see us again. So any further meeting would have to be in public. If he recognized her face, he might allow her to go up to him.” A deep gravity settled over him, and for a moment, he seemed lost in its aching cloud. “And to win the digger’s game.”

~ * ~

PART V

The Digger’s Game

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

“What is the digger’s game?” I asked.

Danforth started to answer, then stopped, clearly refusing to enter a room that had not yet been prepared to receive him. “The Landwehr Canal runs parallel to the river Spree,” he said. “That’s where we walked that day. It was a very popular place and there were always people strolling along the canal, but it had a grim history, as I later discovered.”

“The Landwehr Canal?” I asked. “Why would that interest you?”

“Because that was where the three of us strolled the day Bannion rejoined us,” Danforth answered. “And where the last of our plans were laid.”

This remark sounded a deeper note, and I found I was suddenly steeling myself against the dark end that seemed always to be coming nearer as Danforth’s tale progressed.

“The light was so clear it made you think you could see through it,” Danforth added. “It was like the best deception in that way, made invisible by transparency.”

~ * ~

Berlin, Germany, 1939

“Clayton has approved the mission,” Bannion said.

But Clayton had left the question of how the mission should be carried out for them to answer, Bannion told them, and to Danforth’s surprise, they began to discuss various methods. Bannion had reviewed several assassinations, and although he didn’t press the point, it was clear that bombs rarely worked. It was pistols that had killed Lincoln, McKinley, Garfield, the king of Yugoslavia, and Franz Ferdinand, the last having been assassinated only after an earlier bomb attempt had failed.

“So it seems to me that the most effective means,” Bannion said, “is a gun.”

“But none of those assassins escaped,” Danforth reminded him cautiously.

“Is the point to escape?” Bannion asked him. “Or to get the job done?” Before Danforth could answer, Bannion turned to Anna. “And two assassins will be better than one,” he added. “So we will do this together, Anna.”

For the rest of his life, Danforth would replay the startling intimacy of those words, how clearly they excluded him, so that in the juvenile way of a challenged boy, he’d blurted, “All of us together.”

“No,” Bannion said.

“Why not?” Danforth asked.

“Because you don’t know how to shoot,” Bannion answered.

No one spoke for a moment; then, as if to close the possibility of any further discussion of the matter, Bannion looked out over the narrow expanse of the canal, the placid green waters of the Spree. His gaze focused with a curious tenderness on one of its bridges, a tenderness Danforth noticed and would many times recall.

“So,” Bannion said crisply as he returned his attention to the plot, “we’ll have to act very quickly.” With that, he turned from the bridge, and the three of them moved farther along the canal. “We will have only one chance.” He was now speaking to Anna alone. “And we should fire at different angles with as little obstruction as possible. Not in big crowds, for example, where anyone could suddenly step in front of us.”

Against every resentful impulse, Danforth admired the cool way Bannion dealt with murder, not just the tools to carry it out, but the geometries of it, how a woman with a baby might suddenly move toward the target and in that moment be torn to shreds, leaving the target no more than inconvenienced by the blood on his uniform. It is hard sailing that makes a seaman, one of Danforth’s ancestors had once written, and at this moment Danforth felt himself but a weekend yachtsman in comparison to the two others.

“Rache has provided a lot of information,” Bannion said. “And he can also supply the weapons and whatever else we need.”

With that, they went directly to Anna’s room, and there Bannion offered the information he’d gotten from Rache.

“It’s very general,” Bannion said. “But it’s worth knowing.”

He was speaking almost exclusively to Anna, the two of them united by the deadly plot, a couple as mutually murderous, Danforth thought, as any in noir fiction.

Bannion opened a notebook and drew several concentric circles, at the center of which he made a large, black X.

“At the outer rim you have the SS,” he said. “Black uniform. Death’s-head on the cap. They patrol, stand around, do drawings of the places our friend is to make an appearance, check things like bridges and water towers. They seem to be focused on a long shot. They’re convinced the British are spying on everything.”

Anna and Danforth stared at his crude drawing.

“Closer in you have something called the Führerschutzkommando,” Bannion continued. “This group is in charge of providing security at all public events. They wear gray uniforms and tend to stand around in clusters.” He traced the third, most inner circle with a crooked finger. “Closest of all is the RSD. Himmler runs this group, so they can pretty much do anything they want, including wearing the uniforms of the other security forces or just dressing in plain clothes.”

This was very detailed information, and it struck Danforth that Rache and his Communist comrades must surely be plotting the same murder, a conviction that buoyed him with hope. If they struck first, and succeeded, then Anna would be saved.

“But none of this matters if he’s simply stepping out of a car and the crowd surges forward,” Bannion continued matter-of-factly. “We’d just need to be at the front of that crowd. As a rule, aim for the back of the head. It’s a more likely shot because once a target moves past, security tends to focus on what lies ahead of him, not what’s behind. And if possible, we should fire at the same time.”

To this last bit of rudimentary instruction, Bannion added, “So now the task is to find the right place and right moment.”

And so for the next few days Danforth moved about Berlin, scouting places the target might have some likelihood to appear. There were the steps of the Reichstag, of course, but they were blanketed in security. He walked the length of Unter den Linden as well, since at any point Hitler might drive along this route in his open touring car. But the car would be moving, and the target’s exposure would be limited in time and narrow in space, and there would be guards on the running boards, any one of whom might shift and in that movement receive a bullet in the thigh or stomach or wrist that had been destined for the target’s head.

During the same time, Rache provided Bannion with yet more information about schedules and public appearances and how to get access to the railway station where Hitler’s special train awaited his often quite arbitrary travel plans.

Years later, still working to uncover the pattern of the plot, Danforth would come across a book that meticulously recorded the Fiihrer’s movements in September of 1939: trips to Bad Polzin, quick tours of Komierowo, Topolno, Vistula, special trains to Plietnitz, journeys to Gross-Born and Ilnau, then on to the front lines at Bialaczow, Konskie, Kielce, Maslow, on to Lodz, on to Breslau-Lauenburg, on to Danzig, Wiskitki, Davidy, Stucewice, on and on and on to the very outskirts of Warsaw, frenetic journeys into the heart of a war it had been Anna’s hope — or claim of hope — to stop.

All this research was carried out in the early days of August amid yet more rumors of impending war and with a sense of urgency that continued to build until, in what seemed to Danforth a kind of exhaustion, Bannion made a surprising choice.

“There is only one place we can be sure of,” he said.

They were sitting in the small pension where Bannion had taken a room and through whose tiny windows light barely penetrated.

“A place in Munich,” Bannion added. “A restaurant.” He laughed. “An Italian restaurant, of all things.” He glanced at the paper where he’d written the name. “It’s called the Osteria Bavaria. It’s at Schellingstrasse sixty-two.” He looked up from the paper, his gaze directly on Anna. “He goes there quite often when he is in Munich, and he will be in Munich for some sort of celebration next week.”

“A restaurant?” Danforth asked. “Won’t it be crowded outside?”

“It wouldn’t be done from the outside,” Bannion said. Again he turned his attention to Anna, a gesture that struck Danforth as a cue for her to take over.

“I would be inside the dining room, Tom,” she said.

“How would you manage that?” Danforth asked. “Won’t the restaurant be closed for him?”

“No,” Bannion answered with complete authority. “And last April, a British agent filed a report that said he was able to get very close to Hitler in this same restaurant.”

“A woman would be even less likely to be thought of as a threat,” Anna said.

Now Bannion took over again. “She’ll book a table at Osteria Bavaria for every night he’s in Munich.”

“But booking a table every night — won’t that be noticed?” Danforth asked.

“Of course it will,” Bannion answered. “There’s an organization called Group Nine. They’re responsible for checking out any foreigners who suddenly appear before or during a visit. Anna’s name will certainly show up.”

“But my name will already have appeared in an earlier investigation,” Anna added. “As an assistant art dealer from America, a woman who met the Führer in Wannsee.”

“So the plan is for him to see you,” Danforth said.

Anna nodded.

“To see you and remember you as the woman who made that strange remark in Wannsee.”

“That’s right,” Anna said. “So if I come over to his table, he won’t be suspicious.”

“And the pistol?” Danforth asked. He looked at Bannion. “You don’t expect her to be searched?”

“Probably not,” Bannion said. “According to the British agent, the restaurant reservation list is screened, but the real fear is bombs, and so whole crews go through the place before the first customers arrive.”

There was a moment of silence, as each of them looked at the others and waited.

“What about you?” Danforth asked. “Where will you be?”

“In the crowd outside the restaurant,” Bannion answered. “If Anna fails, they’ll rush him out the front door where his car is always waiting. Things will be pretty confused, I’m sure. They’ll be dashing around, and I could get an opening between the front door and the car.”

“And if you don’t?” Danforth asked.

“I’ll make one,” Bannion said. “I’ll fire into his entourage. There’ll be more confusion. Another chance for an opening, and even a wild shot will be better than no shot at all.” He shrugged with an indifference Danforth found shocking and in which he saw the fearful courage of the truly committed. “One way or the other, we’re going to die, Anna and I,” he said. “We’ll both have cyanide in case we’re captured.” Then he looked at her like a suitor at last betrothed. “Maybe this was always the plan for us,” he said.

A silence fell over them, until Anna said quite softly, “Done.”

~ * ~