Quest for Anna Klein, The (39 page)

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 Solo-toff 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,” Dan-forth 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.”

“And so the arrangements were made, and I returned to New York and waited to hear from this old hero of the Soviets,” Dan-forth 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,” Dan-forth 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.”

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 Solotoffhad 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, Dan-forth 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 Dan-forth should do the same in the chair that rested opposite his.

“Hace calor,”
the old man said. It's warm.

“Sí,”
Danforth replied.

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

“Nueva York.”

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

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