Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Cook, Thomas H

  Then Bannion stepped very near to her, apparently for an intimate communication; he spoke, and it caused Anna to glance up to where Danforth stood concealed in the darkness behind his window. The distance was long. Danforth’s room was on the fourth floor; Anna’s face, only half illuminated by the street-lamp, was anything but clear. And yet for all that, Danforth saw a shadow pass over her face, something grave and curiously indelicate, as if an unbearable thought had crossed her mind. Then she turned to Bannion again, and a dreadful stillness fell over her, one that lingered for a time. At last she shook her head, and then nodded, as if, exhausted and depleted, she had finally allowed her no to give way to yes.

  With that, Bannion stepped away, and the two of them exchanged a look that reminded Danforth of the doomed characters in movies and popular novels who, torn apart by war or some other fearful circumstance, seemed to know at the moment of their parting that they would never see each other again. Then Bannion turned and, like a character exiting the stage, vanished into the shadowy wings of Munich, leaving Anna alone.

  She had never looked more intensely solitary, Danforth thought; she briefly seemed as if she had been driven to the most remote corner of the world. It was an aloneness that was dense and impenetrable, and horribly unfair, and it made Dan-forth suddenly hate Adolf Hitler, not for his aggression, his cruelty, his dreadful loathing of the Jews and the Communists, the Poles and the Slavs, not for the threat he posed to all that was kind and well reasoned in human life, but simply because the ending of that squalid, repellent life would take from him the one woman he knew, now with utter certainty, he would ever love.

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  “You think you know the depth of selfishness when you look into your own heart and realize that you want someone dead because that person slighted you in some way, made you feel small or stupid or something of that sort,” Danforth said. “Or you want someone dead because of an inheritance or because you want a higher post in some university faculty, neither of which can be achieved until someone dies.” He offered a small, rather desolate laugh. “But at that moment in Munich, standing at that window, watching Anna, I learned how deep selfishness could go.” He stared at his empty glass. “For me, Adolf Hitler was not a megalomaniac who threatened to destroy the world but rather, strangely and perversely, my rival for Anna, the other man in her life, the one who’d stolen her from me.” He lifted his eyes from the glass and settled his gaze on me. “I was not just a romantic. I was a bourgeois solipsist, utterly incapable of seeing history as anything but a personal narrative.” His laugh was pure self-accusation. “I was like the obsessed man in some cheap thriller.”

  He looked like that man even now, affl icted by old torments, his gaze more intense than before, and with something of self-loathing in it.

  “I wanted to be like Anna,” he continued. “Like Bannion. I wanted to die for some great cause. But at that instant, I knew that I was nothing but a lovesick fool who would have rushed Anna out of Munich and back to New York and let the whole world go up in flames if he could.” He laughed again, this time even more bitterly. “Aristotle defined an evil man as one who cannot distinguish between what he wants and the universal good.” He pointed to himself. “That was me. I wanted Anna. I cared for nothing else.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “You wanted to know what it was, the digger’s game?”

  “Yes.”

  “It came from Clayton.”

  Clayton had come back to New York after Pearl Harbor, Dan-forth went on to tell me, and by the middle of 1942, he was working in military intelligence. He’d never actually run agents, but he’d evaluated trainees for their potential as agents.

  “His job was to find out if they had the right stuff,” Danforth said. “Clayton was always fond of strategies and so he devised a little test. It was called the digger’s game. He had a number of small brass pieces inscribed with various words and phrases: losing your wife, losing your child, poverty, illness, that sort of thing. These pieces were put in an urn filled with sand, and the applicant was to dig until he found the thing he most dreaded, at which point the applicant was to stop digging.” Danforth picked up his empty glass and twirled it slowly between his hands. “There was only one piece that mattered to Clayton. If the potential agent stopped digging before he reached it, Clayton would no longer consider him. Do you know what that piece had written on it, Paul?” He smiled. “Failure.” He paused, a man reevaluating an earlier conclusion. “I think Anna would not have stopped digging until she found failure,” he said. “But I would have stopped digging at losing Anna.” His mind turned inward, remained there for a time, then swept out to me again.

  “And so I decided not to lose her,” he said.

  Munich, Germany, 1939

  He knew that it would negate everything she had worked for. He knew that it would be abandoning his own great drive to make a mark. He knew that it would be a lost opportunity to change the course of history. He knew all this, and didn’t care. He had gone over every other route he might take through life after losing Anna, and not one of them made sense or had meaning or filled the void within him that she filled. Years later, as he sought the pieces of the plot, he would sometimes tell himself that he had fallen victim to a strange form of romantic imprinting, and he would blame this on his youth and on the intensity of the times and on the mission they’d shared and the danger, and that all of this had created an overdetermined situation in his heart. He would say this to himself in icy hotel rooms and in rattling railway carriages and once as, pale and stricken, he passed beneath the wrought-iron gate with the words Arbeit macht frei, but he would never forget the irresistible force that had driven him to hatch so many arguments so desperately, and he would always call it love.

  “Anna,” he said that night in Munich as he opened his door and saw her standing there.

  “I don’t mean to disturb you, Tom,” she said.

  “No one would want to be alone . . . on such a night,” he said. “Come in.”

  She walked into his room. She had been there before, of course, but now she seemed unsettled, as if she were uncertain what she should do next.

  “Shall I call down for . . . tea . . . or . . . ?”

  She shook her head. “No, nothing.”

  She glanced toward the bureau across the room, and he wondered if by some gift of intuition she knew that was where he’d placed her pistol, wrapped in a white handkerchief.

  “Please, sit,” Danforth said.

  She took a seat in the little chair a few feet from the bed. Her movement was slow and graceful, and had he not been convinced of the unlikelihood of such a thing, he might have even thought it vaguely seductive.

  “Actually, I was hoping to see you . . . before,” he told her.

  She looked away, drew the scarf from her head and draped it over the back of the chair. When she looked back at him, she smiled, but her smile was quick and formless, as if she were an actress not yet completely in character.

  “We’re to meet in the square,” she said, as if confirming an in-significant detail. “You’ll give me everything I need.”

  “Yes.”

  She said nothing else, and in that silence, the terrible solitude in her eyes swept over him, and as it swept, it reduced to dust all the arguments he might have made against her dying and left him bare of everything but anguish. This boiled up and would have burst from him had he not been able to suppress it at the last second and say only, “I’ll miss you, Anna.”

  For a moment she seemed locked in a great inner turmoil, as if powerfully drawn in two opposite directions. Then an unexpected sigh broke from her, and she came toward him with a force that he would forever recall as tidal.

  In the years to come, he would witness what happened next in countless renderings. He would see it flicker with increasing graphicness on movie screens and read of it in the increasingly clinical language of books. He would hear it sung by crooners and folksingers and rock bands, the move
ments of that night recounted at various times by swelling violins and by the pounding beat of electric bass guitars. He would see and hear that night’s events reimagined and reorchestrated in theaters, opera houses, museums, and concert halls; in countless ways and by countless means, he would attempt to relume the rapture he felt during those brief minutes of his life . . . and each time, he would fail.

  When the last shudder had subsided, he felt like a character in a Russian novel, love and death mingled in that darkly Slavic way, and he wanted to turn to her, run his fingers down the length of her naked body, and say something so profound neither of them would ever forget it.

  But silence was all he could offer, a silence that struck him as sweet and tender and that, as it lengthened, convinced him she would now relent. For he was a romantic, after all, and no romantic could believe that a woman who was loved as Anna now had to know she was loved could choose to go out and die.

  Then she said, “Where is the pistol?”

  When he didn’t answer, she rolled over and faced him, her head still on the pillow. “I should take it with me when I leave.”

  “I’m supposed to give it to you tomorrow,” Danforth told her.

  “It is tomorrow, Tom,” she said.

  “Bannion said not to give it to you until just before you go into the restaurant.”

  She shook her head. “No, now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this should be our last time together,” Anna said firmly.

  She rolled away from him and lay on her back, the sheet modestly pulled up over her naked breasts so that she seemed already enshrouded.

  “Where is it?” she asked.

  He nodded toward the bureau, expecting that she would immediately go to it. But instead, she remained in place, very still, her eyes cast toward the ceiling, and for a moment she actually seemed to consider letting this cup pass from her. This gave him the brief hope that in a simple, quiet way, he had saved the woman he was certain was the only love he would ever know. It was a certainty common to youth, as he would many times admit, but in his later age, it would prove in his case to have been starkly true.

  “Goodbye, Tom,” she said.

  Her voice now held that old steeliness, and so it didn’t surprise him that she rose, wrapped the sheet around her body, and began to gather up her clothes. There was a quickness in all this, however, and he saw in that quickness that she was having to fight the deep current of her own conviction. For that reason, he expected her to rush from the room, like some heroine in a film, but instead of doing anything so dramatic, she simply and quite slowly turned away, then disappeared into the adjoining bathroom.

  He could hear water running, her feet padding about, then the rustle of her clothes as she dressed herself behind the closed door, and in the soft intimacy of these sounds he understood with complete fullness how deep his love for her actually ran, knew without doubt that he wanted to live his life with her, wanted them to drift together into maturity and from there into age and then move inexorably toward that moment of supreme mourning when one of them would know that it was not just a dream, that one could, in fact, love another person for one’s whole life through.

  She was fully dressed when she came back into the room, and he could see that she had used the time to steel herself against any further argument.

  “Is it loaded?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Danforth said.

  He turned away as she headed for the bureau and kept his face to the wall during the time it took her to open the drawer, walk to the door of his room, and open it.

  “Tom,” she said.

  He turned to her.

  “Remember me” was all she said.

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  He would always remember the gently falling rain of that next morning, Danforth told me, how the drops had moved jaggedly down the windows of his hotel room, and how he’d heard the low rumble of thunder that rolled over Munich as he sat there alone.

  “Things were dark enough without an omen, of course,” he added.

  “Dark, yes,” I said.

  He reached for the handkerchief in his jacket pocket, and I saw that his fingers were trembling.

  “It’s easy to hide something in a handkerchief, Paul,” he said.

  With that, he spread the handkerchief out on the table, took a dime from his pocket, placed it at the center of the handkerchief, folded the handkerchief neatly over it, then returned the handkerchief, peak down, to his jacket pocket.

  “It’s called the TV fold now,” he informed me. “Because it was the sort of fold men used in the forties and fifties.”

  “The sort of fold you must have used then,” I said.

  “Yes.” He patted the front pocket of his jacket. “The concealed item is at the bottom of the fold.”

  He was obviously speaking about the cyanide tablet Bannion had concealed in a similar handkerchief.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Did you have a tablet?”

  “Me? No,” Danforth said. “I was to flee. I was the rat leaping from the sinking ship. There was no need for me to have cyanide.” He looked at me significantly. “You know, Paul, quite a few people who tried to kill Hitler were captured. Some remained alive for years. Held in prison for years, as I later learned. But not one of them survived the war.”

  “So in a sense, it was just as you said at the beginning of your story,” I reminded him. “The question was never whether she would live or die. For that had been decided long ago.”

  “Hmm,” Danforth breathed, and on that breath returned me to Munich in the rain.

  Munich, Germany, 1939

  For a time he could only sit in the chair by the window and watch the rain cascade down the glass panes. He felt numb and deflated and without resources. Bannion had made it clear that they would have only one chance, and on the wave of that urgency, any hope for escape had closed. If Anna got close enough, she would fire, and after that, if the target was still alive and rushing from the restaurant, Bannion would fire, and then each would die either in the hail of bullets that followed or by biting down on the cyanide.

  He knew that all this would transpire within a few hours, and yet he still dreamed of somehow averting it, of them all meeting at the railway station, taking the next train for Hamburg, then going by sea to Copenhagen and from there to Dover, where Bannion would go one way and he and Anna another, perhaps north to Scotland, where a great green forest would enfold them and they would live out their days in a forest fantasy, like Robin Hood and Maid Marian.

  It was a fantasy that urged its false reality on him so powerfully that at one point he walked to the closet, grabbed his traveling bag, and tossed it onto a bed that still bore, he noticed, the imprint of Anna’s body. The sight was so painful, that outline of his loss, that he spun away from it and yanked open the top drawer of the bureau as if to remind himself that it was all truly determined, that she had taken the pistol and the poison and would almost certainly use them both before the sun rose again on Munich.

  He sat down and looked at his watch and was forced to confront a reality that slashed at him with all the violence of a physical attack, and as the minutes passed, he discovered that he simply could not allow his last sight of her to be wreathed in the shadowy darkness of his room, could not permit the last physical impression he would have of her to be the rumpled sheets where she’d lain.

  On the wave of that decision, he leaped to his feet and headed out of his room, then down the corridor toward the elevator. He had to see her one last time, he told himself. He had to hold her one last time. This simple moment of final physical contact he wanted more ardently than he had ever wanted anything.

  He reached the eighth floor minutes later, strode down the long hallway, then knocked at her door.

  “Anna,” he called softly when there was no answer.

  He waited, then knocked again and again, and when there was still no answer, he went to the hotel lobby, so dazed by the
need to see her, hold her, that he could do nothing but stand at the window and search the street outside, waiting for her to return.

  He would never be sure of how long he waited, only that time itself seemed a malicious force that was relentlessly pressing him toward inestimable loss.

  And so an hour might have passed, or two, before he saw Anna strolling back toward the hotel, and then the black car that suddenly drew up to the curb beside her. Four men got out.

  They approached her unhurriedly, and the tallest of them removed his brown hat as he spoke to her. She nodded toward the hotel as if in answer to a question, and Danforth immediately shrank back into the lobby of the building so as not to be seen.

  For a time, the man in the brown hat continued to question her, the other men now drawing in more closely as if expecting her to bolt away. At one point she reached into the pocket of her dress and drew out her passport, which the tallest of the men examined with a quick, desultory air, as if it were only a formality.

  Then, almost like dancers, two of the men took her quite gently by the arms, one on her right, the other on her left, and in that formation, with the tallest in the lead and a fourth man behind her, they began to move toward the hotel.

  The gun, Danforth thought. If they found it in her room, she would be doomed.

  He raced up the stairs, bounded to her door, stepped back, and then with far more force than he’d ever applied to anything, he kicked open the door, rushed inside the room, and searched until he found the pistol in the third drawer of her bureau. Now, he thought as he sank it into his pocket, she is safe. No, she was more than safe; she had come close to discovery, and because of that closeness she would be forced to abandon the plot, as would they all. With that thought, what was to be the last great joy of his life swept over him, a surging happiness, fierce and dazzling, that he would never know again.