Then he told me who she was.
She’d been born in Armenia in 1897, a niece by marriage to the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov. She’d gotten married quite young to a Jewish man, and she’d borne him a daughter. She later divorced him but she never lost interest in the welfare of her daughter. The Russian Revolution drove her to Germany. She went by train to Vienna in the company of a Soviet agent, then on to Berlin, where she managed to get work as an actress. By 1930, she’d become one of the brightest stars in German cinema. She’d also attracted the notice of Adolf Hitler, in whose company she’d been photographed. Olga looked quite lovely as she sat next to the man himself, and the picture’s significance had not been lost on Soviet intelligence.
“From that picture, the Communists knew that Olga was a member of the true in crowd, familiar with all the Nazi big-wigs,” Danforth said, “and since she had family still in Russia, they decided she could be pressured into the spy game.”
They were right, and Olga Chekhova became a sleeper agent, Danforth told me. At one point she’d even been discussed as a critical figure in a Russian secret police plot to assassinate Hitler.
“Rather like Anna, don’t you think, Paul?” Danforth said at the conclusion of this narrative.
“A little too much like Anna,” I agreed. “What happened to Olga?”
“She was never discovered by the Germans,” Danforth answered. “Once Berlin fell, she was flown to Moscow, where she was debriefed. Then she went back to Germany, where she lived quite well under Soviet protection.” He smiled. “Her last words were ‘Life is beautiful.’”
“When did she die?”
“In 1980,” Danforth answered. He saw my astonishment and added, “So you see, Paul, it was quite possible for a young woman who was gifted at languages and something of an actress to survive the war. Even one with deep Jewish connections whose name was later connected to a plot to kill Hitler.”
I nodded. “Well, Anna was a good actress. That can’t be denied.”
“No, it can’t,” Danforth agreed. “She acted a New York nut case and she acted the perfect assistant to an importer. She acted the art critic when the target was standing right in front of her. She acted the dedicated assassin up to the moment she was arrested.” All of this appeared to build darkly in Danforth’s mind, but he continued anyway. “She acted like she could kill a man,” he said, and then, after a grim pause that seemed to renew every ancient ache within him, he added, “and perhaps she also acted like she could love one.”
“But Olga Chekhova survived only because she’d been a Soviet agent all along,” I said.
Danforth now seemed a creature formed of shadows. “True enough, Paul,” he said quietly. “A Soviet agent all along. As Rache was too. Which meant that only Bannion had been what he seemed.”
“Only Bannion,” I said softly. “And so he was completely expendable.”
“As the innocent always are,” Danforth said. “Because they are of no importance to either side. And so we can kill them without losing anything save the value we once gave to innocence.”
“But you couldn’t know that any of this was true,” I said.
“No, I couldn’t,” Danforth admitted. “Because the best conspiracies work like nesting dolls, Paul. They hide inside each other.” He smiled, but it was a dark, painful smile that gave him a rather wizened look. “It took me years and a great deal of moving around, mostly in those rattling trains that wound through Eastern Europe, but I finally found Rudy Romanchuk,” he said, by way of returning to his tale. “He’d gone back to the Ukraine, just as Brock had thought, a town the Germans called Lemberg.”
Lemberg, Ukraine, 1951
Danforth had started in Warsaw, which still lay in ruins, went on to Radom, and then continued farther eastward in long torturous rides on belching, coal-fired trains and groaning buses, all of them crowded with peasants who ate bread and cheese and washed it down with bottles of miód pitny, which they passed from one to another as if it were a favored grandchild.
“You speak not bad Polish,” an old man said to him on the road out of Zamość, Danforth on this occasion riding in a horse-drawn lorry with a group of former Polish prisoners, all of them huddled together on a layer of wet hay. The old man held up the bottle the others had been passing around. “Vodka come from old word,” he said, “gorzalka. You know what means gorzalka?”
Danforth shook his head.
The old man placed his gnarled hands on either side of his face, rocked his head left and right, smiled widely, and fluttered his eyes almost girlishly. “It mean,” he said, “‘to glow.’”
This had been the brightest moment of Danforth’s eastward journey. The rest had been a long ordeal of bone-battering travel through a landscape he’d last visited many years before the war, and the vast sweep of its destruction amazed him, even though he’d followed the Third Army through France and walked the charred remains of Dresden and the rubble of Berlin. War is one thing, as he would later realize, but massacre is another, and in town after wasted town he’d seen the cruel arrogance of the German invasion and the cruel vengeance of the Soviet re-occupation. He’d walked the pit of death in Dubno and valley of death in Bydgoszcz, and once he’d reached Lemberg it was beneath the bridge of death he’d walked to find Romanchuk’s freezing hovel on Pełtewna Street.
As he traveled along that winding way, Soviet soldiers had been anything but welcoming, and he was stopped repeatedly and interrogated in small concrete rooms pocked with bullet holes and ripped by shrapnel. But the old art of bribery still possessed its ancient power, and he’d been free in the dispensing of it, softening these war-weary men with meals and liquor and speaking his precarious Russian in ways that made them laugh and drink more and in their sad stupor remove whatever was barring his movement east.
They’d been boys, for the most part, the soldiers and border guards who’d detained him, and in their faces Danforth had seen the youth that war had taken from them. They were cynical and cunning and something in them had been deflowered so that on a whim and in an instant they could become unimaginably brutal. In every town, he’d heard stories of men slit open at the abdomen and then made to dance until their bowels unraveled, of herds of women driven down roads and across fields and over bridges as human mine detectors, of villagers arranged in towering pyramids until those who formed its base were crushed to death. But it was an old woman’s tale of a teenage girl taken from her father’s house near the camp at Łambinowice that he’d never forgotten. She’d been an ethnic German, the old woman said, her parents killed in the anti-German reprisals that had been unleashed by the conquering Russians and thereafter swept the eastern territories. The girl had been entirely naked and radiantly blond, the perfect Aryan victim. A rope had been tied around her neck and she’d been tugged forward like an animal on a leash and loaded into the back of a truck filled with Polish partisans, all of them, as Danforth imagined it, “glowing.” She’d never been seen again.
There was nothing particularly horrendous in this tale compared to other stories of anti-German reprisals Danforth had heard by then, and yet this scene had haunted him for the rest of his journey. He’d come to realize by the time he reached Lemberg that, as with Anna, it was the unknown fate that moved him. What tormented him was not what had definitely been destroyed but what had mysteriously vanished into time and space; not someone who without doubt had been shot in a prison courtyard but that other one — lost in night and fog — who’d last been seen strolling in a park or buying apples from a stand.
Night had fallen by the time he reached what appeared to be a shoemaker’s shop. A yellow glow came from the front window, a color Danforth recognized as candlelight because he’d seen so much of it radiating softly from the otherwise pitch-dark streets of the shattered cities through which he’d passed.
He knocked at the door and waited. It opened slightly and a thin shaft of light crossed the threshold. A small eye floated like a rheumy brown bubble in that sa
me narrow slit, and to this eye Danforth presented his now-defunct military credentials.
In the German he hoped the man understood, he said, “I’m Captain Thomas Danforth. United States Army. I’m looking for Rudy Romanchuk on a matter of great urgency.”
The eye blinked once, slowly and wearily and even a bit resignedly, and Danforth saw the many crimes for which Roman-chuk now thought he was at last to pay the price.
With no word, the door opened and Danforth stepped inside a badly damaged room, precariously supported by cracked walls and splintered wood, and with a disturbing droop in the ceiling. Water marks spread across that ceiling and then down the peeling walls to a bare concrete floor, broken and stained, on which stood old furniture and a few crippled machines. The room’s shattered appearance echoed the mood of Central Europe, danforth thought as he glanced about: crumbling, torn, a thing of jagged borders, more or less idle.
“American? So far?” Romanchuk asked in very broken German, making it clear that the man had probably spent very little time in that country. Romanchuk’s grin flashed like pieces of silver. “You have plenty money.”
When Danforth didn’t answer, Romanchuk grabbed a spindly wooden chair and drew it over to the coal stove that rested in the center of the room. Beside it an old crate contained the few chunks of coal he’d managed to procure by God only knew what illicit means.
Danforth sat without taking off his coat; the room was too cold for that, as a film of ice on the window made clear. He could see that Romanchuk was frightened, as if he expected to be arrested, hauled back to the American sector, tried for some crime of which he was no doubt guilty, then hanged or sent to prison. But he could also see that Romanchuk had been in such tight spots before and that he’d grown confident in his ability to slither out of them.
“I’m not here to arrest you,” Danforth told him. “I’m looking for a woman.”
Relief flooded Romanchuk’s face. “I can get woman,” he said.
Years later, when Danforth read of the thriving sex slave trade in Moldova, he’d wondered if Romanchuk was still alive, a wrinkled old pimp who’d slipped across the border to steal Moldovan girls from their small villages and sell them in the back-alley clubs of Chisinau. It would have been typical, he’d thought then, Romanchuk at last become some version of Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz, evil the undying fuel that powered and sustained him.
“Woman. Young girl,” Romanchuk added.
Danforth restrained the violent urge that swept over him and said, “I’m looking for a particular woman. You may not have heard her name, but when the Soviets interrogated you in Warsaw, she was the one who translated your answers.”
Danforth could see that Romanchuk was still trying to read the situation and somehow use it for his own gain. He was a criminal through and through, Danforth recognized, the sort of man who never once got up in the morning and asked himself how he might make an honest living. Danforth had encountered scores of such people in his postwar interrogations, a whole criminal class the Germans had used to carry out some of their most dreadful crimes: rapists and murderers who’d been taken from their cells in countless eastern towns, supplied with whips and truncheons and ax handles, and then unleashed to storm through streets and hospitals. During a particular atrocity he now recalled, a schoolyard full of children still in their uniforms had been attacked. Remembering the dreadful photographs he’d seen, the knots of terrified little boys and girls, hulking brutes still in their prison clothes raging among them, their truncheons in midstrike or already making contact, he found himself amazed that such miscreants, along with the nation that had unleashed them, had not been exterminated at the end of the war.
With that thought, Danforth’s still-fuming hatred of the Germans spiked, and on its hurtling flame he burst forward and grabbed Romanchuk by the throat.
“Now you listen to me,” he snarled. “You’re going to tell me all you know about this woman, and you’re going to do it because if you don’t, I’ll kill you.” He pressed his face close to Roman-chuk’s and released every spark of his hatred and contempt. “Do we understand each other?”
Romanchuk stared at Danforth unbelievingly, a man who had seen many forms of hurt and hatred but never like this.
“This woman translated for you when the Soviets held you in Warsaw,” Danforth repeated, still speaking German. Then, using a Ukrainian word he’d been careful to learn at the beginning of his journey, he said, “Chutka!”
Talk!
With no further prompting, Romanchuk told Danforth that he’d forged a passport for a man the Soviets were desperately trying to find, a German agent they believed had betrayed them. “I tell them this guy want passport and identity card just before Germans make pact with Russia.”
“Did you know his name?” Danforth asked.
Romanchuk shook his head. “He was big deal, because Russian offi cer was wearing Order of Lenin.”
“Tell me about the woman who translated for you,” Danforth said.
“Small woman,” Romanchuk said. “Dark. Good-looking.”
“And her hair?” Danforth asked.
“It was very short,” Romanchuk said. “From behind, she could be boy.”
“Did you get any impression of where she was from?” danforth asked. “Whether she was German or something else?”
“She was American,” Romanchuk answered without hesitation.
“How do you know?”
“When I was sit in the room, wait for questions, there was guard. Regular clothes, but he was guard, you know what I mean.”
Danforth said nothing.
“Another guard come in and just loud enough, he say, ‘She here, the American girl.’ And maybe in a minute she come into room with three men.”
Like many others Danforth had interrogated, Romanchuk seemed lost in surreal recollection. Danforth had seen the same look in the faces of both the witnesses and the defendants at Nuremberg, in the architects of the chimneys and in those who’d barely missed going up them. It gave the sense that they believed they could not possibly have done or suffered what they had done or suffered, that it had all happened in some unreal space, all been something . . . beyond.
“She didn’t say nothing to me,” Romanchuk went on. “She translate. My German not so good. My Russian not so good. We speak in Ukrainian, and she translate to Russian.” His eyes narrowed. “No. She was . . . saying wrong. Well, not exact wrong, she leave out important things.”
“Why would she do that?” Danforth asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe she protect this guy the Russians want.”
“She was protecting a German agent?” Danforth asked starkly.
“Yes,” Romanchuk said. “For example, she don’t say it was Argentina passport he want. She just say passport. They look for this man, but she don’t say where.” His grin was like the slavering of a dog. “I say nothing. Maybe he her lover or something.”
In years to come, Danforth would often try to re-create the storm of feeling that broke over him at that moment and that left him utterly desolate. It was as if he had seen the whirlwind from the inside, the terrible violence of its swirl.
Romanchuk laughed again. “She give Soviets false turn. They don’t know that. She act different.”
“How?”
“Like she was with them,” Romanchuk said. “Like she was on their side, a good comrade. Very friendly. Especially with the guy with the Order of Lenin. She even speak to him in Turkish.”
“Turkish?” Danforth asked.
“I hear, I know. I once work in Ankara,” Romanchuk explained.
“Did you understand what they were talking about?” danforth asked. “This woman and the Soviet offi cer?”
“Moscow,” Romanchuk answered. “She ask him about city. He say it is crowded.” He laughed, then he said, “But there’s always room in Adult World.”
Adult World, Danforth thought, a term he’d picked up from his many interrogations, the comical Russian nickname fo
r Lubyanka.
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“Adult World because there was a famous toy store across the square from Lubyanka Prison,” Danforth explained. “Children’s World, it was called.”
“Funny,” I said grimly.
“Lubyanka was also said to be Moscow’s tallest building,” Danforth added without the slightest glimmer of humor, “because from its basement windows you could see Siberia.”
“Even funnier,” I said darkly.
“It had once been the gos strakhkassa,” Danforth continued. “The government insurance offi ce. Strakhkassa means ‘insurance offi ce.’ But strakh means ‘fear’ in Russian, so later people called it gos strakha, the ‘government terror.’”
“But of course, this was something Romanchuk only claimed to have overheard,” I said.
“Which meant I had nothing to go forward on,” Danforth said. “But I also had nothing to go back to, Paul.” He shrugged. “And so I went east.”
“East,” I said, as if I’d stumbled on a clue. “Where your story always seems to be tending. A story that is sort of a haunted-house tale now, it seems to me. With the protagonist searching from room to room, looking for that ghost.”
“Anna’s ghost,” Danforth said in a tone that gave me the impression that I was being led down a road whose end Danforth knew well, being conducted step by step, carefully and thoughtfully, toward some fateful final moment.
“From room to room, yes,” I said, “but always to the east.”
“Always to the east,” Danforth repeated. “How right you are, Paul.” His smile was paper thin. “Where you’ve never been, I think you said. The Middle East, I mean.”
“No, never to the Middle East,” I said a little defensively. “But as I told you, I’ve been to Moscow.”
“Ah, yes, Moscow,” Danforth said, and on that word resumed his tale. “I arrived there —”
Quest for Anna Klein, The Page 25