Quest for Anna Klein, The (29 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Clayton said.

“Who did?”

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

“How do you know that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“Traubenfeld?” Danforth asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“If Anna was a traitor?” Danforth interrupted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shot?”

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

“A guillotine,” Danforth whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Never could,” Danforth said now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Henri Languille?” I asked.

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

“I see.”

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

I shivered. “That's rather ghastly.”

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