Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Cook, Thomas H

  He was halfway out the door before he remembered the cyanide. He raced back into Anna’s room, glanced about until he saw it sitting completely uncovered beneath her bedside lamp, snatched it from its place, and pressed it hurriedly into the pocket of his jacket.

  The elevator was rising toward the eighth floor. He could hear it clattering upward. He would not be able to reach the stairs before it arrived at the landing. There was nothing to do but continue down the corridor. He had gone nearly all the way down it before he heard the rattling sound of the elevator door opening, just around the corner.

  The men turned the corner just seconds before Danforth reached it, Anna now held stiffl y by the two men at her sides. Her eyes met his as they drew toward each other. They were without sparkle and gave no hint of recognition as she swept by him. He might have been a traveling salesman for all her features betrayed, just another nameless man in a world filled with them. He kept his pace steady as he continued toward the elevator, and he did not look back when he reached the end of the corridor, just turned the corner, as he knew she wished him to, and also as he knew she wished him to, he vanished from sight.

  On the street, for the first time in his life, he had nowhere to turn. There was nothing his money or his family could do for him. He was without means, without connections, powerless save for the pistol he’d snatched from Anna’s room and which he now thought he should get rid of, and on that thought he hurried over to a nearby wastebasket and tossed it inside.

  Now what? he asked himself in silent frenzy.

  He had no idea what Anna was being asked, or of what she was being accused, but he knew that interceding might only deepen whatever suspicions had already been aroused.

  He thought of Bannion and decided to go to him. It was not a long walk to the building where he’d rented a room, but when Danforth reached it, he saw another black car pulled up beside the curb in front of it, as well as two men stationed at the entrance of the building.

  There was a small park across from the building, its grove of trees his only place of concealment, and so he quickly took a seat on one of its benches, careful to face away from the building, but glancing toward it from time to time. He had no idea what to do now, and it seemed to him that he’d come to Bannion in a state of total confusion, expecting that by some miracle the two of them could find a way to help Anna escape the peril she was in.

  He heard a vague commotion and turned back toward the building. Bannion was being led to the car, and even from a distance Danforth could see that he’d not gone quietly. One eye was nearly swollen shut, and blood trickled from his nose. For a time, he slumped, almost casually, against the wall. Then, as if seized by a sudden stiffening of will, he straightened himself, sank one hand into the pocket of his trousers, and with no hint of hesitation, brought that same hand to his mouth.

  “Herr Danforth?”

  He turned to find a tall man standing before him accompanied by two other men, all of them in long leather coats.

  “I am Gustav Volker,” he said. “Gestapo. There are some questions we’d like to ask you.”

  “About what?”

  “Would you come with me, please?” Volker said, and with a nod he ordered the other men to take up positions to Danforth’s left and right. “I’m sure you can explain everything, Herr Dan-forth.”

  Danforth glanced back toward the building. A knot of men had now gathered around where Bannion lay face-up on the sidewalk, his body utterly still.

  “This way,” Volker ordered, and he jerked Danforth around. “Please.”

  He tried to remain entirely calm as he was escorted to the car, but once they were inside Gestapo headquarters, he felt the old terror creep over him. He had no doubt that they’d brought him here because they’d discovered the plot and were looking for him to confirm what they already knew. He recalled the earlier “interrogation” Bannion had ordered carried out, all the pain he’d endured, how near he’d come to breaking before it had been abruptly halted.

  That had all turned out to be a ruse, of course, but this was not a ruse, as he well knew, and they would stop at nothing, and in the end, he knew that he would break, that their names would spill from him, along with every element of the plot.

  He reached into his jacket pocket as unobtrusively as possible, fingered the folded handkerchief and retrieved the tablet that had been meant for Anna.

  Later it would seem to him that his decision had come not because he feared torture or that he might break under it, but because it offered the only way to bring their deepest suspicions to himself and thus divert them from Anna. They would find no pistol on Anna, after all, or in her room. They would find no cyanide tablet save the one crushed between his teeth. He knew that his death was no guarantee of her escape, but it offered the only slender service he could render her, and as he placed the tablet between his lips and then bit down, he felt that surge of ancient knighthood he’d read about in books. This he would do for the woman he loved, the only act of true sacrifice he had ever known.

  “Herr Danforth.”

  Danforth turned toward Volker, the severed tablet in his mouth. Why, he wondered, had he not yet felt the slightest effect of the cyanide? He was by no means a student of lethal poisons, but he’d heard that this one acted almost instantly.

  “Come in,” Volker said.

  Danforth followed him into the offi ce, expecting to collapse at any moment, his body rocked by seizures during the few seconds it would take for him to die.

  “Sit down, Herr Danforth,” Volker said.

  Danforth did as he was told.

  “Allow me,” Volker said, and before Danforth could stop him, he lit a cigarette and handed it to Danforth.

  “Now,” Volker said as he opened the folder on his desk. “Let us proceed.”

  During the next few minutes Danforth waited for the cyanide to kill him until it became clear that whatever he’d bitten into had not been cyanide at all. By then Volker was well into his interrogation, and Danforth had learned that there was not a single element of the plot of which he was unaware save that Dan-forth had known of it.

  “We are told she is a Jew and we know her companion is a Communist,” Volker said, “but we know you are neither, and your father assures us that you are not a political person.”

  “My father?” Danforth asked.

  “Your father, yes,” Volker said. “We contacted him when we learned of your association with this woman — her real name is Klein, I believe?”

  “Why would my father tell you anything about her?”

  “Because your father has been a great friend to Germany for a long time, Herr Danforth.”

  “A friend of Germany?” Danforth asked hesitantly.

  “He shares many of our beliefs, as I’m sure you know,” Volker said. “That the Reds must be stopped and, of course, that the Jews are a poisonous tribe.”

  Danforth felt the last grain of the fake cyanide dissolve beneath his tongue. “I see.”

  “He sends you his best regards, by the way,” Volker added. He absently glanced through the papers in the folder. When he looked up it was clear to Danforth that something darker was on his mind. “It is because your father has been such a friend to us that we are — how shall I say this? — overlooking your associations.” He closed the folder. “We have more than enough information to detain you, Herr Danforth, but we see no reason to keep you from leaving Germany as soon as possible.” He leaned forward with a force whose violent threat could not be mistaken. “You will be leaving our country very soon, is that not so, Herr Danforth?”

  Danforth nodded.

  “Very soon,” Volker added pointedly. “At once, in fact.”

  This was an order, of course, and one about which no appeal would be tolerated. In no uncertain terms, Danforth was being spared because he was young and stupid, young and not a Jew, young and not a Communist, and most of all because he was young and the son of a man who hated both Communists and Jews. His father’s suppo
rt of those who would destroy those groups had reached out to save Danforth’s life.

  “You have been granted much good fortune,” Volker told him in a voice that was not unlike his father’s. “Be careful how you use it.” He reached into the drawer of his desk, took out the passport that had earlier been taken from him, and returned it.

  “Thank you,” Danforth said. He reached to draw it from Volker’s hand and then stopped as Volker’s fingers clamped down on it.

  “At once,” Volker repeated.

  “Yes,” Danforth said.

  Volker released the passport and Danforth placed it in his jacket pocket.

  Neither bothered to say goodbye.

  Once dismissed, Danforth headed down the stairs and into the building’s lobby. It was an ornate affair, with the sort of wood-work that had been the pride of an older age, now almost entirely covered in bunting, the interior festooned with Nazi flags.

  A car waited outside the building, and as Danforth came into the daylight again, the driver quickly pulled himself from behind the wheel and opened the back door. “This way, sir.”

  He was driven — or was it escorted — back to his hotel, and once they were there, the driver again got out and opened the door for him. “I am to wait for you, sir.”

  “Wait for me?”

  “You are going to the train station, yes?” the man said. “You are leaving Germany today?”

  So he would be watched at every step of his departure, Dan-forth realized, and after he was gone, his name would be added to a list of people no longer permitted to enter Germany.

  “Yes, leaving,” Danforth said quietly.

  He took the clattering old elevator up to the fourth floor, packed his bags, and headed for the door. He had nearly reached it when he turned back and saw Anna’s scarf still draped over the chair where she’d left it the night before. It was all he would ever have of her, he thought, and in the despair that swept over him at that moment, he drew it from the chair and buried his face in its dark folds and felt in the grimly merging way of grief the full and unbearable weight of both her presence and her loss.

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  So what was really the point of Danforth’s story? I wondered in the brief silence that fell over him now. Was it a cautionary tale about the profoundly unsmooth running of true love? Or was it a warning about the twisting course of intelligence work, how plots evolve and deepen as if by their own volition, each step in some way unwilled? Could it be that I was being lectured — however metaphorically — about the passion of youth or the fierce nature of desire? Or did his instruction touch on the injustices of class, the way his own favorable circumstances had protected him from what had no doubt befallen Anna and Bannion?

  I was still considering these many possibilities when Danforth’s question brought me up short.

  “You’ve never killed anyone, have you, Paul?”

  He asked this casually, as he might have asked if I’d ever eaten duck confit or sipped Meursault.

  “Killed anyone?” I was obviously taken aback by the question. “No, I’ve never killed anyone.”

  “I didn’t think so,” Danforth said.

  So was Danforth’s tale a murder story? I wondered now.

  “Have you?” I asked him, hesitantly.

  “Oh, sure,” Danforth answered calmly, revealing no sense of regret at having done so.

  “Really?”

  “Well, there was a war, after all,” Danforth said.

  “Oh, you mean in the war,” I said with rather obvious relief. “Of course.”

  “I remember one fellow,” Danforth went on in the same breezy tone, as if he were relating the story of a camping trip in the Berkshires. “A British intelligence offi cer. He’d tracked this Nazi bastard to a hunting lodge in Bavaria. He knew his crimes. The Nazi tried to explain himself, tell him why he’d done what he’d done, but in the end, he couldn’t keep that mask in place, and with all the contempt in the world, he sneered at my British friend.” He lifted his hand to get the waiter’s attention, then quite casually, he added, “So the Brit shot him right between the eyes.” He laughed. “The British did a lot of that sort of thing after the war, you know. We wanted trials, we Americans. We wanted due process. But not the Brits. They shot those Nazi bastards wherever they found them. They shot them in barns and animal stalls. They shot them in the woods and on deserted roads. They shot them in their little town squares and dragged them out of basements and root cellars and caves and shot them in broad daylight, with their fat wives and little milkmaid daughters looking on.” His laugh was surprisingly brutal. “There are certain things a human being cannot do and still expect another human being to let him live.” He looked at me with the weariness born of this conclusion. “For certain crimes, there should be no protection. Even love, as they say, must have an end.”

  I found something curiously touching in this last remark, perhaps because it had been so hard won, given the failure of the plot, how heart-struck he’d been by Anna, their one night of passion, her capture the next day, Bannion’s too, then Danforth’s own escape, along with whatever dark and bloody things he’d known after that, a whole world at war. It made for the grave mosaic one saw in his face and that returned me to his time.

  And yet, suddenly, he laughed. “The Old Bulldog,” he said. “It was Churchill who wanted them shot without trial, you know, those Nazi bastards. He had been in a war, you see. Roosevelt had not. Do you think that might have made the difference?”

  “That, along with the fact that England had been terribly hurt and we hadn’t been,” I said.

  “The Germans would have flattened the whole of England if they could have,” Danforth said. “And even as it was, Canterbury Cathedral was lost and much of London was in ruins.” He shook his head. “To see the fires burning in your own land. That fills a man with rage. And add to the bombings those other German crimes. The camps and the pits. Those bulldozers.” Something in his soul appeared to sour. “We should have killed them all, don’t you think, Paul?”

  “I can certainly understand the rage,” I said, then added a short, admittedly nervous laugh. “Of course, my father would never have been born.”

  “Nor you,” Danforth said. “So it was good for you that something stayed our hand.”

  I felt a chill, as if a wintry blast had stopped me. “Yes,” I said, then glanced at my notes to avoid the icy probing of Danforth’s eyes. “So, I suppose you left Munich that day?”

  “I left Germany that day,” Danforth said.

  The events of that morning returned to me, Anna’s capture, Danforth’s attempt at suicide, the evidence that would have been found on him had he succeeded.

  “Anna’s scarf,” I said suddenly. “What did you do with it?”

  “I left it in my room,” Danforth answered. “What, Paul, did you expect me to keep it as some sort of love token?”

  “I suppose I did,” I admitted.

  Danforth laughed. “You’ve seen too many movies.” He was quiet for a time, then he said, “I expected you to ask me about the cyanide.”

  “What about it?”

  “Why it didn’t work.”

  “Yes, I should have asked about that.”

  He waved his hand. “Not to worry. I was well on my way to England before I asked it myself. Sitting on the ferry, thinking everything through again. Not just the events of that last terrible day in Munich, but everything. Clayton’s first approach. Anna in the Old Town Bar. LaRoche. Bannion. Everything we’d shared and endured, all of which had come to nothing.” He shrugged. “And of course that last night with Anna. Then her arrest and Bannion’s. The fact that I wasn’t arrested at all. Then, suddenly, I thought of the cyanide, that it hadn’t worked.” He smiled. “It just came like a soft creak into my mind.”

  I expected him to go on from there, follow the linear line of his tale, but he stopped instead, abruptly stopped, as if some quite different progress had suddenly occurred to him. Then, as
if deciding to take an alternative route through well-known terrain, he said, “A soft creak. Yes, it came to me just like that.” He paused again, his eyes on his empty glass. “A soft creak,” he repeated. When he looked up at me, his eyes sparkled icily in the room’s dim light. “Like a nightingale floor.”

  PART VI

  The Nightingale Floor

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  The Japanese word was uguisubari, Danforth told me, a floor designed to make a chirping sound when anyone walked on it.

  “The sound of a nightingale,” he added.

  Then another drink arrived, and he took a small sip before returning to the reference toward which, seconds before, his tale had abruptly careened.

  “Any wooden floor will creak a little when it’s walked on, of course,” Danforth continued, “but in a nightingale floor, it’s not the wood that gives off a sound, it’s nails rubbing against clamps. That’s why the floor chirps rather than creaks.”

  “Why would anyone want a chirping floor?” I asked.

  “For security,” Danforth explained. “The floors were laid in hallways that led to conference rooms and the like. If anyone tried to creep close to the rooms, the nightingale floor would give off its distinctive call, and the people in council would be alerted to a spy or, perhaps, an assassin.”

  He took another short sip from his glass, and I saw he was being careful now to take in only a small amount of alcohol.

  “I walked the nightingale floor in Nijo Castle,” he went on. “Remember, Kyoto was spared the first atomic bomb because the secretary of war had been there and knew it was beautiful.”

  Another circling back, I thought, to distant references.

  Danforth drew in a long, recuperative breath. “Older castles had been designed to conceal the rooms of the bodyguards, but the Tokugawa shogunate, the one who built Nijo, displayed these rooms quite prominently.” He smiled. “Because power that does not show itself, Paul, diminishes itself.” He took another small sip from his glass. “Unless concealment is an integral part of the power in question, of course.”