“But wait a moment,” I interrupted. “Romanchuk said that Anna was giving the Russians a wrong turn.”
“Yes.”
“So, you were now convinced that this woman was working for the Germans?”
“Completely convinced,” Danforth said. “And I was also convinced that this woman was Anna.”
“So why did you continue looking for her?” I asked. “She had probably betrayed you. Probably gotten Bannion killed. Maybe even Christophe. She was a —”
“She was a Nazi pretending to be a Jew,” Danforth interrupted.
“Then why look for her?” I asked.
“Well, wouldn’t you look for the person who had used you and betrayed you while all the time working for a cause that killed millions of innocent people?” Danforth asked.
It was at that moment I saw the deep hatred he had harbored for so long.
“You were going to kill her?” I asked, more astonished by this notion than by anything Danforth had revealed so far.
“Yes,” Danforth said brutally. “Faced with such a betrayal, nothing should stay your hand, don’t you agree, Paul?”
“No, nothing,” I said, in an admiring tone I hadn’t used with him before.
“But it was no longer love that drove me,” Danforth said. “It was hatred.”
He let me ponder this stark reversal for a time, then he added darkly, “And so to Moscow, because there seemed no place else to go.”
He arrived there in November of 1952, he told me, a thin, weary man who’d developed pneumonia on the way and had spent several days in a barely heated room in Kiev, then yet more time idly strolling about and working to improve his Russian before he reached Moscow.
Moscow was a long way from the rest of the world, not only in miles, but in its steadily deepening paranoia.
“Everyone was terrified of everyone else,” Danforth said. “Brock’s contacts in Moscow were afraid that any help they extended to me would put them under suspicion. I knew that my time was running out, but I didn’t care. In fact, I had lost the capacity to care, Paul. And there is no place darker than that place.” He paused a moment, then added, “So dark I was almost glad when they came for me.” Suddenly he smiled, as if greeting a brighter turn in his tale. “It was snowing that day.” He glanced toward the window, layers of white deepening on the streets and sidewalks. “Like now.”
Moscow, Soviet Union, 1952
The snow was falling heavily as Danforth made his way toward Gorky Street that morning, but nonetheless a long line of freezing Russians snaked from the entrance of the Lenin mausoleum, as it had every morning since his arrival in Moscow. It was as if a new list were published each evening telling you, you, and you that you must pay your respects to Comrade Lenin at an appointed moment on the following day, as if hundreds had been ordered to appear at the exact same time, guaranteeing an endlessly extended line and the continuation of the absurd pretense that Lenin and the frightful society he had helped create were still universally beloved.
He had disliked Moscow from his first day. Its one majestic vista was Kremlin Square, but that majesty had been dulled by the horrendous sprawl around it. Added to this was the sheer weight of oppression that turned each minute into a dull throb and that seemed to lace the air with molten lead.
Once on Gorky Street, Danforth headed for the Aragvi, the restaurant Brock’s contact had suggested, probably because it was one of the city’s most luxurious, and thus hardly likely to be chosen for a meeting anyone would want kept secret from the KGB.
A squat little Pobeda drew up alongside him; it moved slowly at the same pace as him and then spurted forward and stopped. A tall man in a long overcoat got out, nodded toward Danforth, then motioned him forward, smiling quite broadly as he did.
“Kiryukha,” the man said as he thrust out his hand.
The word meant “old friend” or “pal” or something of that sort, and it could not have surprised Danforth more.
Then in English the man said, “Get in car.”
Danforth did as he was told, and seconds later found himself cruising down Gorky Street, the big man at the wheel.
“You know what pobeda mean?” he asked.
Danforth admitted that he didn’t.
“‘Victory,’” the man said. “You call me . . . Flynn, okay?”
“Whatever you say,” Danforth replied dryly. “I’m Thomas Danforth.”
“Thomas Danforth your real name?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
The man grinned. “You spy maybe?”
“No.”
The man laughed heartily. “I Errol Flynn. American movie star.” He laughed again. “See, I give you my real name too. Real name and real what I do. So we always tell truth, right, buddy?”
They moved on down the street, then made what seemed to Danforth a series of random turns, Flynn whistling for a time, then humming something that sounded vaguely like a Slavic version of “Dixie.” They passed the Central Telegraph Offi ce with its great clock, and then went along Pushechnaya and onto Dzerzhinsky Square, where the gray façade of Lubyanka loomed ahead.
“You know where you are, Thomas Danforth?” Flynn asked.
“Yes,” Danforth answered.
“Good,” Flynn said cheerfully. “Good you should know where you are.”
With that, he gave the steering wheel a violent jerk, and the Pobeda abruptly turned into the wide entrance to Lubyanka, then stopped before its forbidding steel doors. The doors were on rails, which Danforth had not known, so he watched in surreal and curiously untroubled surprise as they slid open to reveal the building’s broad central courtyard.
During all this, Flynn sat silently, staring straight ahead. It was not until the doors had disappeared into the walls that he spoke again. “Kiryukha,” he repeated as he pressed down on the little car’s accelerator. “You are here.”
Minutes later, Danforth found himself in a small offi ce looking at a man in a military uniform behind a metal desk flipping through pages of a file.
“So, you’re looking for an American woman,” the man said in an English that was as perfect as an Oxford don’s. Beforedanforth could answer, the man smiled widely and said, “Did you think we Russians are all illiterate peasants, Captain Danforth?”
Danforth shook his head.
“You know the story by Dostoyevsky?” the man asked.
“Which one?” Danforth asked.
“About a man in prison. All the other prisoners are talking about the Russian peasant. He is a type to them. A brute. That is what these men think. But the hero of the story remembers when he was a boy, there was a peasant who worked on his father’s estate, and on one occasion, and at the risk of his own life, this ‘peasant’ had put himself between this boy and a wolf.”
He watched to see if the moral of his tale had sunk into Danforth’s mind. “So, what is the meaning of this story, Captain Danforth?”
“That all Russians are not the same,” Danforth answered.
He laughed. “Some can read . . . and speak a fine English, is that not so?”
“Clearly,” Danforth said.
“I am Comrade Stanik,” the man said. “What can you tell me about this woman you are looking for?”
“She spoke quite a few languages,” Danforth said. “She was described by our contact as dark, young, pretty.”
“Why are you looking for her?” Stanik asked.
“Because we have some evidence that she gave false translations to your agents. We believe she did this in order to protect a German who later fled Germany.”
“And you think she has information about this agent?”
“Yes.”
“He must be very important to you then.”
“We lost a good man because of this German agent,” danforth said. “We want him to pay for it. Her too.”
“But you do not know the identity of this agent?” Stanik asked.
“We only know his code name: Rache.”
Something glinted in
Stanik’s eyes. “Rache?” he asked. “And if you find this woman, you wish to interrogate her?”
“Interrogate her, then bring her back to hang,” Danforth answered coldly.
He saw that this blunt sense of justice appealed to Stanik, and so he gathered himself in, fully playing the part now. “We Americans don’t like traitors any more than the Russians do.”
Stanik looked satisfied by this statement, though it was clear that something continued to nag at him. “And you think this woman is in Soviet territory.”
“Yes.”
“What makes you think this?”
“Because she was last seen in Warsaw,” Danforth said. “With Soviet authorities. One of them was wearing the Order of Lenin.”
Stanik glanced down at the file. “Romanchuk, Rudolph. Now resident in Lemberg. You spent an evening together some months ago, after which you were taken ill in Kiev.” He looked up and smiled. “I like to make sure our information is up to date. Have you anything to add?”
“No.”
Stanik closed the file. “Maybe you should stay here for a while,” he said, by which he clearly meant in Lubyanka.
“Stay here?” Danforth feigned a dismissive laugh. “I’m an American citizen.”
Stanik’s laughter was not feigned. “American citizen? We have plenty of American citizens staying here.” He leaned forward. “You have been in Moscow many days. Have you seen our people? Have you seen them in the lines, in the cold, holding their little bags?” He leaned forward even farther. “Do you know what they call these bags, hmm?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Avoski. Your Russian is not so good, so I will tell what it means. Avoski means ‘perhaps.’ Because it is their hope, you see. My people hold their little bags because perhaps they will have a little fish or a little potato or a little piece of hard bread to put in it.” He opened his desk drawer and put the file inside it. “My people have learned that they can be harmed and that nothing can save them from this harm,” Stanik said as if in conclusion. “And you, my American friend, are going to learn that too.” He shook his head. “No eastern front for the Americans and the British. Never an Eastern Front because you wanted the Germans to kill every last one of us.” He glanced toward the door and called out in Russian, a sentence spoken too rapidly for Danforth to catch anything but the , the Russian word for “cockroach.”
With a speed he would always remember as unreal, Danforth suddenly found himself in a small room of no more than four feet by nine feet, which he would later learn was called a bok. It had a metal door with a peephole and a food slot, and above the door there was a naked light bulb in a metal cage, very bright and very intense and that he guessed to be no less than 1,500 watts. A wooden bench had been pushed up against the wall opposite the door, and when Danforth finally sat down on it, he saw a single eye watching him through the peephole. At intervals over the next ten hours, this same eye came and went and came and went, as if it were not real at all but a glass eye slowly spun on some mechanical device, the Lubyanka version of a lazy Susan.
During this time he was fed black bread and a thin soup that tasted like water strained through barley.
At some point he heard the metal door clang open, and a small bald man in a lab coat stood before him with a guard on either side, each of them with a cap that seemed too small for him and that bore a distinctive red star.
The man in the lab coat said something in Russian; part of it had to do with clothes, but the rest Danforth couldn’t make out.
“What?” Danforth asked.
The man made a gesture of unbuttoning his lab coat and then repeated the command.
“Undress?” Danforth said. “I will do no such thing.”
The man gave a quick nod, and instantly the guards stepped forward, grabbed Danforth by his arms, whirled him around, and pressed him hard against the wall.
They held him there for a few minutes, one of them pulling up on Danforth’s right arm all the while, sending a streaking ache down his shoulder that seemed to settle, like a burning coal, somewhere near his wrist. Then they jerked him around to face the man in the lab coat once again.
The man repeated his earlier command, though he added the Russian version of Do it now, a phrase Danforth understood.
“All right,” he said, and with that removed his shirt and undershirt, his shoes and socks and trousers, and at last stood in his shorts.
The man pointed to the shorts and made a sign of dragging them down.
“Do it now,” he said.
“All right,” Danforth said again, convinced, despite so grave a humiliation, that he was somehow the subject of an old parlor game. “All right.”
Once naked, Danforth stood silent and unmoving as the man looked in his mouth. With another gesture he demanded that Danforth lift his testicles, which Danforth did, then he waited as the man peered under them as if expecting to find a folder of state secrets. A third gesture instructed Danforth to face the wall, which he also did, and after which he endured the probing he expected. A fourth gesture directed him to sit down on the bench.
As he sat, the man in the lab coat handed his jacket to one of the guards, who methodically slit open its lining and pawed about, looking for whatever might be hidden there. The second guard did the same with Danforth’s shoes, slicing the soles open and digging out the heels before tossing them under the bench.
With these tasks completed, the man in the lab coat left, looking satisfied, and Danforth, still naked, was taken down the hallway, a guard on either side, to a room where he was told to shower.
He’d expected to be returned to his small room after the shower, but instead he was escorted, now by only one guard, down a long corridor with metal doors on either side. He suddenly felt the immensity of Lubyanka, how long and wide and deep it was, how easily one could disappear into its labyrinthine vastness.
Even so, he himself did not expect to disappear, and so, during the many days that followed, through all the interrogations and deprivations, the few blows and the long torture of enforced sleeplessness, he continued to believe that on this day or the next or the one after that, he would be released. It was an unreality that defied what he would later think of as Lubyanka’s greatest torture: the cries of the other prisoners on his block. They were loud and they were ceaseless, women crying for their children, children for their parents, offi cials for their superiors, some even for Stalin, who they seemed to believe knew nothing of this cruelty and would never have permitted it if he did. They came in such variety, these endless cries, that in the midst of his own hallucination, Danforth began to conceive of Lubyanka as the place where man’s immemorial complaints were gathered up and eternally stored in its echoing maze of metal and concrete.
Just stay sane, he told himself, just stay sane until they let you go.
Then, on a morning he calculated was three months after the start of his detention — he never allowed himself to call it an arrest — the door of his cell opened and he was led down a different corridor and into a different room to face a man he’d never seen.
“Please to sit yourself,” the man said in heavily accented English.
Danforth took a seat. “So, a new interrogator,” he said.
“I Comrade Ustinov.” He did not look up from the papers on his desk. “I do not have no questions,” he said.
“Really?” Danforth said with a small chuckle of the lightheartedness he’d incorporated into his general demeanor. “Then why am I here?”
“To go now,” Ustinov said. His pen whispered across a page in the routine way of a man who had thousands of times made the same notations on identical pages. “Please to sign this.”
Danforth took the paper the man slid toward him. “What is it?”
“List what you to possess when are come here,” the man said. He began to work on another page, filling in blanks, making checks.
An inventory, Danforth thought, at last I am to be freed. “Why not just give it all back to me?” he asked.
“Other place?” Danforth asked. “I’m not being released? Where am I being sent?”
Ustinov slid the paper farther toward Danforth. “Please to sign” was all he said.
Danforth glanced at the paper. “It’s in Russian. I won’t sign anything I can’t read.”
Ustinov stared at Danforth a long moment, then reached for the papers and returned them to the open file folder. “You wait unless-till time,” he said, and he immediately started scribbling on yet another paper.
“Unless-till time?” Danforth asked. He laughed. “Isn’t there someone who speaks English better than you?”
Ustinov’s face turned bright red, and he screamed, “Nye plozhna!”
Shut up!
At that instant, Danforth realized that he was never going to be released, and with the abandonment of that hope, he felt what all men feel at every moment they are not free, when they are fixed in a world in which there is nothing so pure it cannot be stained, nothing so sacred it cannot be defiled, no right so inalienable it cannot be usurped, no possession so justly earned it cannot be expropriated, no part of the body so private it cannot be violated, no particle of one’s identity so established that it cannot be erased.
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“That, Paul,” Danforth said, “was Stalinism.”
It was a dramatic litany and Danforth had delivered it dramatically, clearly determined that I should feel the fist that had closed around the many millions, and which I surely did. Then he suddenly said, “But freedom is nothing, Paul. Or at least, it can come to feel like nothing when all you want is to survive.” He watched me a moment, letting what he’d just said sink in. Then, with a glance toward the other people in the bar to assure himself they were no longer listening, he added, “Cutlets. I will always remember that it was written in Russian, English, French, and German.”
“Written where?” I asked.
“On the side of the chernyi voron,” Danforth answered. “How would I translate that? The . . . black raven. It was black, that’s for sure. A black delivery van. They ran back and forth from Lubyanka to the railway station. Sometimes they ‘delivered’ bread, sometimes meat, sometimes fruit and vegetables. The one they shoved me into had Moscow Cutlets painted on the sides.” He laughed. “Not much of a disguise, but in Moscow it didn’t matter if people knew what was in those vans. Nothing could be done about it anyway.”
Quest for Anna Klein, The Page 26