Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Cook, Thomas H

  Thus the days passed, and as they passed, Danforth grew stronger, though he remained thin and would often be overcome by sudden bouts of exhaustion. From out of nowhere, a great weight would fall upon him, heavy as the logs he’d carried on his shoulders, and he would drop into a chair or onto the bed and feel this same weight press him down and down until he flattened into sleep.

  Nearly two weeks passed and Danforth made no further inquiry into why he’d been released. Captivity, it seemed, had taught him patience. And so he simply listened as Clayton brought him up to date on the events of his missing years. During these talks, he was surprised to learn of a young president’s assassination but even more surprised to learn that he had been a Catholic.

  Then one evening, Clayton appeared at Danforth’s door. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  They left the hotel, walked several blocks, then turned toward the bay and continued on.

  “Tom, you’ve been released because the Soviets want to find out about Rache,” Clayton said quite suddenly.

  “I don’t know anything about Rache,” Danforth said.

  “They believe you were looking for him,” Clayton told him. He drew in a breath that was short and struck Danforth as somewhat labored. “They don’t believe it was ever Anna.”

  “But it was always Anna,” Danforth told him. “Because I believe she betrayed me.”

  “And was in league with Rache all along,” Clayton said.

  “In league with Rache,” Danforth repeated softly.

  He felt it rise again, rise then hang like a foul odor in the air around him, Anna’s treachery. He thought of her veiled past, the Gray Wolf Society of Ankara, her inexplicable familiarity with the environs of Baku and the German settlements of Azerbaijan, along with other less fully elaborated clues to a life whose coordinates he still could not determine.

  Clayton seemed aware that Danforth’s mind was swirling with memories of Anna, and for a time he allowed his old friend to lose himself in that swirl, then said, “The Russians have long memories,” he said. “They’re still looking for Rache because they want to kill him. They think you can help them.”

  “How?”

  “By interrogating Anna,” Clayton said.

  “Anna?” Danforth whispered.

  They had reached the banks of the Sea of Okhotsk, its docks inexpressibly dreary, and which Danforth now recalled was the place he’d disembarked from a steamship all those many years before. It had been a late-night arrival and an immediate departure, and so he’d seen only a few lights as he’d been led down the boat’s snow-covered gangplank and into the back of the truck that had taken him up the Road of Skulls.

  “Anna’s here, Tom,” Clayton said. He peered into Danforth’s emaciated face. “Here in Magadan,” he added. “They brought her to the hotel last night. She’s in room three-oh-four.”

  Danforth realized that his mind had been so long numbed and disengaged it now had to struggle for pathways by which it might absorb so profound a revelation.

  “It’s the price for letting you go,” Clayton added.

  Danforth stared at him unbelievingly. “I thought I was already let go.”

  Clayton shook his head. “They wanted you to have a taste of freedom,” he said. “So you’d know what you’re missing.”

  “What will they do with Anna?” Danforth asked.

  “Nothing they haven’t already done,” Clayton answered. He let this settle into Danforth’s brain before he spoke again. “But who cares, Tom? She was nothing but a little Nazi.”

  Danforth would many times recall these words of Clayton’s, the bitter tone that entered his voice as he’d said them, how they’d filled him with so much of his own remembered ire.

  “Yes, all right,” he said stonily.

  With that, they headed back to the hotel, then down the corridor to room 304.

  In years to come, he would recall the dry shuffl e of his feet along the faded carpet, the jumpy movement of his eyes as he’d approached the two men who stood on either side of the door, one of them clearly in command of the other.

  They had been expecting him, had immediately recognized him, and in a way that was very nearly warm, the first had nodded to him as the second turned and, with a gentle motion, like a father fearing to wake a child, opened the door, then stepped back to let him in.

  Danforth said nothing to either man, nor did they speak to him; he simply moved past them and into a room where a single small lamp cast a faded yellow light, and in that light he saw her, sitting at the window just as she had sat in Paris so many years before, saw her in full, dressed in a zek’s gray smock, her hair cut very short and salted with gray. As he drew nearer, he saw the ravages of her long detention, the deep creases along her cheeks and her cold-cracked lips, saw all the features of premature old age that mocked her middle years, and he cared for none of her sufferings because he knew what she was and what she had done, and he recalled in a single, blistering memory the deception she had carried out in Munich, Rache perhaps more her lover than he had ever been.

  Now it was his time to make a counterfeit of love.

  And so he said, “Hello, Anna,” in the soft, lover’s tone he’d decided to use.

  She seemed not at all surprised to see him.

  “Rise!” one of the guards shouted in Russian.

  At this rough command, Anna struggled to her feet.

  “It’s Tom,” he told her as he came forward.

  She seemed to see through his deception and stared at him without the slightest spark of affection. “They told me you were coming,” she said stiffl y. “What do you want?”

  “A favor,” Danforth answered. He struggled to bring a tiny smile to his lips. “For old times.”

  She glared at him starkly. “Old times,” she muttered.

  “Munich,” he added.

  Her lips smiled, but her eyes didn’t, and it seemed to him that everything soft he remembered about her had been replaced by the rock-hard figure who now stood before him.

  “Munich,” she repeated.

  He thought he heard contempt in her voice but decided to ignore it. “I never stopped loving you, Anna,” he lied. “And I never stopped looking for you.”

  He opened his arms to her tenderly, a gesture meant to draw her into his embrace, but she instantly stepped back as if from a repulsive approach, then glanced toward the still-open door, the guards who stood on either side of it, now peering in.

  “Anna,” Danforth said in a voice that seemed jarringly loud. “Whatever you were then . . .”

  She lifted her hand to silence him and he saw how rough it was, scarred by hard labor.

  “I have nothing for you,” she said, then looked again toward the guards at the door.

  Her eyes widened and he saw something terrible come over her, a brutal ferocity. It was as if a wholly different human being had always lived inside this other shell and was only now fully revealing itself, the old skin falling away, a different creature slithering out of it, alive and squirming before him, as frightful as Aaron’s serpent.

  “Heil Hitler,” she said coldly. Her eyes glimmered with fanatical zeal as she lifted her arm in salute and stood before him as stiffl y as any SS fiend. “Heil Hitler,” she repeated.

  Danforth suddenly realized how right Bannion had been so many years before when he’d told him that he was a romantic fool; he was, and so much so that even during these last seconds, he’d hoped to find a happy ending for the long waste of his life, a moment of redemption for both himself and Anna, the revelation that she had never, never been what he now knew her to be.

  “Heil Hitler,” she said a third time, words that brought back all his memories of the trials and the camps along with Anna’s vile treachery, and at last the boiling wave crested, and in what Danforth knew would be his last gesture toward her, he stepped forward, and with all the force of lost romance, and with all the passion of what he’d hoped to be a kiss, he slapped her face.

  Lexington
Avenue, New York City, 2001

  “Slapped her face,” Danforth repeated. He remained quiet for a moment, then said, “Were you expecting some great love scene, Paul?”

  I stared at him in shocked silence.

  “A happy ending?” Danforth asked.

  “I suppose I was,” I admitted shakily. “I mean, one always hopes for that.”

  “Oh, how true,” Danforth said grimly. “But false illusion is life’s chief ally, don’t you think, Paul?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  “Believing you know a person or can control the final outcome of your life,” Danforth said. “I certainly know what that happy ending would have been in my case: that Anna would begin to talk, tell me all about Rache, a story that would make clear that she had never been in league with him. It didn’t matter how absurdly improbable this story might be. In my romantic fantasy, I would believe it, and so would the Russians. They would be so won over by it that they would release Anna from the clutches of the Gulag, and I would whisk her back to New York, where we would grow old together, a silver-haired couple strolling arm in arm through Central Park.” He released a weary sigh. “I’m afraid that was not to be.” He looked at me quite piercingly. “Do you know what the one great fact of life is, Paul?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “How easily it is wasted,” Danforth said. “All our precious little days.”

  An old fury rocked him, and he appeared barely able to suppress it. A few seconds passed, and during that time an uneasy calm returned to him, after which he said, “I came home at last, but there was nothing left of my old world. Danforth Imports had limped along in my absence, but by the time I got back, it was heavily in debt. I sold it, along with Winterset, and paid off the company’s bills. I knew that I no longer had a heart or a head for business, so I took a job in a language school here in New York. I tutored students on the side.” He glanced toward the table where two places had been set, making it clear that he’d long planned to bring me here. “And I thought of Anna, of course.” A coldness came into his eyes. “But never again in the grip of a delusion, and never again with love.”

  “But wait,” I said. “You didn’t get any information about Rache out of Anna, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did the Russians let you go?”

  Danforth smiled. “Ah, a chirp from the nightingale floor.”

  But rather than going on to answer my question, Danforth simply shrugged and resumed his tale.

  And so the years passed, Danforth said, and his first students grew older and became fathers and mothers while he remained alone, moving through the faceless crowds as skirts shortened and hair lengthened, and the niceties of language, along with all that he had once called reticence, faded in the glare of new therapies, and the old verities of his class and kind proved insufficient to command the age.

  “Do you know what Burke called manners, Paul?” Danforth asked. “The ‘decent drapery of life.’”

  I smiled at the quaintness of both the phrase and the sentiment. “So you still believe in knight-errantry?” I asked.

  “Well, someone has to, don’t you think?” Danforth replied. “Otherwise each generation would awaken to utter emptiness.”

  This might or might not be true, I thought, but it was far from his tale. “Anyway,” I said, “you were at least released from Anna.”

  I was far from a starry-eyed romantic, and yet I couldn’t help but be impressed by Danforth’s long pursuit, Victorian though it seemed in an age of e-mail hook-ups and speed dating. To feel so deeply even once in the course of life struck me as a blessing, mixed though Danforth’s had surely been.

  “Released, yes,” Danforth said. “And so I settled into an uneventful middle age that might placidly have followed its course year by year until I reached old age, then further still until at last I was laid to rest. But something happened to change my course, something that wouldn’t have happened had I not been standing on the curb at Lincoln Center one evening. A cab pulled up and a passenger got out. He wore a red fez, and the driver spoke to him in Turkish, and at the sound of that language, I recalled that when I’d loved Anna, she had once spoken of Baku.” He seemed to marvel in the twists of his own mind. “For some reason, a burning nostalgia seized me, Paul. I knew what Anna was, and I no longer cared where she was or how she was being treated. And yet, for all that, I felt an overwhelming need simply to see someone she had once seen, someone who had seen her, heard her voice. By then there was only one person left in the world who’d done that.” He smiled. “LaRoche.”

  “LaRoche?” I asked, surprised that he’d resurfaced in Danforth’s story.

  “After the war, he’d become quite successful as a sweets wholesaler,” Danforth said. “He agreed to meet me at the same place we’d met so many years before.”

  Washington Square Park, New York City, 1974

  “Smoke, smoke, smoke,” the young man whispered as Danforth passed by, an illegal solicitation Danforth found amusing given his steel-gray hair and clean-shaven face, the conservative look of his three-button suit. Danforth was now sixty-four years old, after all, a lowly language teacher, hardly the usual customer for a park-bench pot dealer.

  For a time he watched as the young man made his rounds, then, like one entering a neighborhood much changed since his youth, Danforth headed farther into the park.

  This time it was LaRoche who’d arrived first, now dressed in a gray suit that couldn’t completely hide his considerably expanded waistline. He no longer glanced about, no longer seemed on edge, but instead looked almost like a member of the old burgher class, well-fed and well-heeled. But for all that, something of the dispossessed still clung to him, an Old-World melancholy that both his years and his New-World success had failed to shake. De Tocqueville had called them “the habits of the heart,” and LaRoche seemed proof that they were harder to change than one’s country or one’s circumstances.

  “Hello,” LaRoche said with a smile that seemed hard-won.

  “Mr. LaRoche,” Danforth replied with a nod. “It’s been a long time.”

  “How did you find me? I forgot to ask.”

  “You’re in the book,” Danforth said. “LaRoche Wholesalers. You specialize in Middle Eastern sweets.”

  “I always had a taste for honey,” LaRoche said in an English that now bore only the hint of an accent.

  They talked briefly of the old days, when Winterset was clothed in snow and, later, strewn with spring flowers.

  Danforth knew that LaRoche had been told of Anna’s arrest and Bannion’s suicide, but whether he’d been told more than that, Danforth couldn’t say.

  “I saw Anna only one time after Munich,” he said. “She was in Russia.”

  He told LaRoche about the final encounter, how he’d tried to get some small kernel of information about a German agent the Soviets believed had betrayed them, how she’d suddenly transmogrified into the ardent Nazi she had no doubt always been, a narrative that still wounded him despite all the time that had passed.

  LaRoche listened silently through it all and remained quiet for a time after Danforth finished, so they simply sat, speechless, staring straight ahead, looking curiously desolate, as if recognizing at last that all their riches had been spent.

  Then LaRoche said, “And they let you go after this last meeting with Anna?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Danforth shrugged. “What would have been the point of keeping me? They must have realized that all I was ever looking for was Anna. And now I had found her. I suppose they simply had no more use for me.”

  “Perhaps,” LaRoche said, his tone cautious, like one hazarding an unlikely guess, “perhaps, unless this last meeting had a hidden purpose.” He appeared quite pensive, as if turning over all Danforth had just told him.

  “When you left her, what was your feeling?” he asked after a moment.

  “That it was over,” Danforth said. �
�My quest.”

  “Your quest for what?”

  “I suppose you could call it my quest for Anna Klein.”

  “Hmm,” LaRoche said with a slow nod.

  Danforth looked at him closely. “What’s going on?” he asked. “What are you thinking?”

  “That maybe she was acting,” LaRoche said.

  “Acting? Why?”

  LaRoche laughed. “It’s a little mind game I play with myself,” he said. “Coming up with other ways of looking at things, no matter what crazy direction it takes me.”

  “What crazy direction is it taking you now?” Danforth asked.

  “Well, I was just thinking that maybe Anna was forced to do what she did when she saw you,” LaRoche answered. “Maybe there was something she wanted to protect.”

  “Rache is what she wanted to protect,” Danforth said bitterly.

  “Unless the Bolshies were playing an old game with you,” LaRoche answered casually. “It’s one they know well and play very often.”

  Danforth could see that LaRoche was playing a game of his own, offering a wild supposition for no other reason than to demonstrate the twisted world of intrigue he’d once known.

  “What game?” Danforth asked, going along with him.

  “It’s an old ploy,” LaRoche said. “They let you find one thing in order to keep something else hidden, something more valuable to them than what you were looking for.”

  “I was never looking for anything but Anna,” Danforth told him.

  “But was it her you really found?” LaRoche asked.

  “What I found was a Nazi spy,” Danforth said bitterly.

  “Unless they made her do what she did,” LaRoche cautioned.

  “You said that before,” Danforth said, a little impatiently. “Why would they have done that?”

  LaRoche’s gaze seemed threaded with a thousand complicated plots.