The Quest for Anna Klein

by Thomas H. Cook

  With that, they walked back to Clayton’s car and said goodbye to each other. Danforth returned to the house, took a seat at the small table where he and LaRoche and Anna had shared their first meal. Then in his mind he journeyed farther back, to the tavern where he’d first seen Anna, frantic and befuddled, a street grotesque in the making, and finally back to that first bit of conversation with Clayton, the small fuse he’d lit, which was now burning more brightly than he’d ever expected. How odd that his own good fortune could prove so hollow, he thought, that the life of a secret agent could attract him so, that for him the pursuit of happiness would seek its measure in the pursuit of peril, and that in this pursuit he would feel for this new life — as he suddenly realized he did —a surprisingly charged tingle of desire.

  ~ * ~

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  Desire?

  The curious emergence of this word in the context of his story must have been visible in my face, because Danforth suddenly grew very still, then said, “They are strange, the erotics of intrigue.”

  The erotics of intrigue? I wondered if Danforth was now leading me into the boudoir of his mind.

  “I would sometimes imagine myself endlessly strolling the old streets of Gion at dusk,” Danforth continued, “forever strolling among the geisha and the maiko.”

  “When would you feel this?” I asked.

  “In the prisons and on the trains,” Danforth said. “When I thought of her.”

  “Of Anna?”

  He was clearly reaching for something whose touch still pained him.

  “Geisha means ‘artist’ in Japanese,” he said.

  For a moment he seemed to dissolve into his own memory. “Love as performance, as something . . . acted.”

  It was obvious to me that this was too sensitive a subject for anyone but Danforth alone to pursue, and so I said nothing.

  “The ‘smile of smiles,’ Blake called it,” Danforth added. “It’s where love and deception meet.”

  After this, he fell silent for a time. Then, quite surprisingly, he smiled. “Tell me, Paul, have you ever seen North by Northwest?”

  This question, along with his abrupt change in mood, sent my mind spinning. “The old Hitchcock movie?” I asked. “The one with Cary Grant?”

  “Yes,” Danforth said. His tone took on a slight eeriness, as if his story had now become one of strange occurrences, though the sort that were more ironic than supernatural, the freakishness of real life. “It happened just like that.” He nodded in the general direction of the club’s entrance. “Right there.”

  ~ * ~

  Century Club, New York City, 1939

  The rain had begun just as Danforth stepped out of the Century Club. He didn’t have an umbrella, and so he turned to the left, toward Fifth Avenue, planning to sprint to the corner, find a shop, buy an umbrella. That was when he felt a grip on his arm that was sharper than any he had ever known; when he looked down toward the grasp that held him, he half expected to see black talons rather than a hand. Then he felt a similar grip on his other arm.

  He saw two men, one on either side of him.

  “Don’t speak,” the man to his left said gruffly. He was dressed in a dark blue double-breasted suit and wore a gray fedora. “You’re dead if you do.”

  The second man wore a brown suit, also double-breasted, but no hat. He nodded toward a car that idled beside the curb just at the club’s entrance. A third man, this one in a dark green single-breasted suit and wearing a brown hat, had already opened the door and seemed to be grimly awaiting Danforth’s decision.

  “Move forward and don’t speak,” the man in the fedora said.

  The one in the brown suit tightened his grip but then added a slight, surprisingly warm smile. “You’re too young to die, Mr. Danforth.”

  It was dread, and dread alone, that swept over Danforth in what he would always remember as an intense wave of heat that emptied and confused him and in an instant sucked away his will to resist these men. It was as if the sun had suddenly focused all its fiery blast upon the tiny puddle of himself, leaving him dry and dusty, and strangely dead to any sense of himself other than the physical. He was no longer mind or heart. He was only the body that encased his life, which was in dire peril.

  “Move,” the man in the dark blue suit said sharply.

  Almost without willing it, Danforth drifted forward like a dazed creature floating in the aftermath of some shock, and seconds later he was seated snugly between the men who’d grabbed him, the man in the green suit at the wheel.

  He had not spoken, and this muteness surprised him. He felt like a child between two enormously imposing and unstable parents, unable to question what they did or in any way predict their behavior.

  The car headed north on Broadway, and as it moved, Danforth strung enough of his senses together to begin to contemplate the silent, stern-faced men between whom he was tightly wedged. Who were they? What were they after? Was he being kidnapped? He briefly tried to guess what his father’s reaction might be to that first phone call, how much ransom he might actually pay. This idea gave way to the equally far-fetched notion that this bizarre abduction might be the result of some business dispute of his father’s. The elder Danforth often handled people quite roughly, so it seemed possible that some dissatisfied client or subcontractor might have decided that the usual avenues of redress against his father’s high-handedness were far too slow and uncertain.

  Then, quite suddenly, it became obvious that both of these surmises were dead wrong. It was then and only then that he thought of the Project and considered the possibility that the fear Bannion had expressed and LaRoche had later seconded had been justified all along, that they were truly out there, these American storm troopers, and that Danforth was now in their hands.

  The northern reaches of Manhattan faded behind him, and he suddenly felt unmoored from New York. The city had seemed permanent before, a castle that protected him, and he had thought it changeless and certain. Now it was just a place weakened by events, no longer able to provide the slightest comfort, and in that incapacity, it seemed almost to mock him, as if all his life he’d been fooled by the city, lulled into a pleasant sleep from which he had now been roughly awakened.

  The Bronx came and went, and after it, the squat streets of Yonkers. An hour passed, perhaps more. They were in Connecticut, the outskirts of one of its industrial towns, an area of crumbling and abandoned warehouses, with dark brick and black roofs and everywhere a dull patina of grime and soot.

  The car bumped violently over a badly pitted street, then made a sharp left toward a large brick building with a loading dock and concrete ramp that led into the black bowels of the building. Once inside, they sat in that near total darkness for a few seconds, and then, as if responding to a signal Danforth couldn’t see, Fedora got out of the car and turned to Danforth.

  “You can get out now,” Fedora said with unexpected gentleness, as if it were an option rather than an order.

  Danforth pulled himself out of the car and stood very stiffly in the darkness, fully a child now, awaiting orders, afraid that any move he made would be the wrong one.

  “Come with me,” Fedora commanded.

  By then the other two men were at his side and behind him, and in this formation they moved toward a metal door that opened just before they reached it.

  The room was very small, with an iron bed and a bare mattress. A single lightbulb hung from a black cord. The walls were bare, and the ceiling was streaked with water stains. The sweet smell of mold thickened the air and gave it a musty taste. There was no sink or toilet, and so Danforth knew he would not be held there long, that this was a kind of purgatory, the place where he was to wait.

  “If you choose to be a spy,” Fedora told him as he closed the door, “you should get used to the life.”

  He would never be sure how long he remained alone in this room, but years later, as he stood before the starvation cells of Auschwitz, he would recall
the terrible sense of confinement that had overtaken him, and how much more confined the Auschwitz prisoners must have felt with not even the space needed to sit down, able only to stand and face bare concrete walls until they died.

  Time passed, but the men had taken his watch and his wallet before leaving him in the room, and so he had no idea how much time had passed, though he felt sure that the sun had gone down before the door of the room finally swung open again.

  “Time for a chat,” Fedora said. He had taken off his suit jacket and now wore dark blue flannel trousers and a light blue open-collared shirt.

  Danforth rose and followed the man down a short corridor, at the end of which he opened the door, stepped away, and motioned Danforth inside.

  The look of this room was unmistakable. It had a small, rectangular wooden desk with chairs that faced each other. A narrow table rested behind the desk, bare save for a pitcher and a few white towels.

  “Sit down,” Fedora told him, and on those words, closed the door, walked to the desk, and sat down behind it.

  “Where is Anna Klein?” he asked casually and with an almost bored air, as he might have asked after the whereabouts of a lost cat.

  Danforth sat down but said nothing, and years later, first in the interrogation rooms of Plötzensee in Berlin, and later in Lubyanka, he would marvel that all such places gave off the same sweaty dread, fear like an odor coming from the walls.

  Fedora peered at him grimly. “I’m not going to ask you this question over and over again. I won’t have to, believe me. But before I ask it again, take some time and think things through.”

  Danforth glanced toward the door. One of the other men opened it, came in, and stood in place in front of it, arms folded over his chest and wearing a strange expression, like a dog eager to be fed. They must seek out and find such men as this, Danforth thought, perfect for their purposes, the sort able to relish what others abhor.

  Danforth remained unaware of time, and he wondered if this too was part of the game, to remove a man completely from the ordinary signals of life, his inner bearings weakened by the loss of all outer ones.

  To resist that far-from-subtle ploy, Danforth focused on his cufflinks. They were gold with small sapphires, and he’d bought them in Paris, at a little shop near the Luxembourg Gardens. Now he recalled the great expanse of that garden, how it had been so very French in that the children had not been permitted to play on the grass but instead had dashed and fallen and briefly wallowed in the dust of its wide, pebbled walkways. Paris in the morning, he thought, and saw the gardens in bright sunlight. Paris in the afternoon. Paris at night. So that is what it is, he thought, time.

  “Where is Anna Klein?” Fedora asked.

  This was the second time the question had been asked, and Danforth knew that whatever came next would be either the making or the undoing of him, that at the end of it, he would have either the highest regard for himself or the lowest, and that either way, in all likelihood he would never be so tested again.

  He felt a kind of stiffness overtake him, a leathery thickening of his skin, a hardening of his bones, as if his body were preparing for the ordeal to come. But it was the innermost part of him he sensed most physically at that moment, something solidifying at the center of himself, so that he realized that although he’d many times felt the beat of his heart, the expansion of his lungs, the banal shift and quiver of all his other organs, he had not until that moment of inward reckoning felt the palpable workings of his soul.

  “Put your hands behind your back,” Fedora commanded.

  Danforth hesitated, less out of any genuine will to resist than as a child would hesitate before taking his place in a dentist’s chair.

  “Put your hands behind your back,” Fedora repeated.

  Danforth knew that he was being asked to be complicit in his own torture, but he could find no way to resist doing as he was told that didn’t seem both futile and foolish. Perhaps this was part of the torturer’s strategy, he thought, to break your spirit a little before he begins to break your body. Had all the great legions of victims cooperated with their torturers, he wondered, and instantly imagined them in the dungeons of the Inquisition, all meekly placing themselves onto the rack, lying back, positioning their feet and hands.

  Even thinking this, Danforth found himself unable to refuse, though he stood, lifted his head, and manfully straightened his shoulders as he brought his hands behind his back.

  The other man stepped forward and tied them, then grabbed Danforth by his shirt collar and hauled him out if the room, Fedora following behind.

  Seconds later, they entered a different room off the corridor. It was completely bare save for a rope whose two loose ends dangled from a pulley.

  Another push and Danforth stood with his back to the dangling ropes, waiting silently as Fedora attached the pulley’s ropes to the one that bound his hands together.

  When it was done, the other man stepped back and gave a hard yank on the rope.

  Danforth cried out as his body bent forward and a terrible pain streaked down his arms.

  “Remember the question,” the man said as he yanked the rope a second time, more violently, so that the pain became a flame that shot up and down Danforth’s arms, circled his neck, then hurtled like a bolt of fire along his spine, legs, all the way down to the feet.

  “Remember the question as we go along,” the man said.

  He did not speak again for half an hour.

  ~ * ~

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  “Father Grandier,” Danforth said in a sudden, typically disorienting aside. “Now that was an interrogation.”

  I saw a memory of pain flicker in Danforth’s eyes and felt the discomfort one always feels in the presence of someone whose experience of suffering is vastly deeper than one’s own.

  “I’m afraid I’ve never heard of him,” I said.

  Even so, I thought that Father Grandier must be some heroic priest who had resisted the Nazis during the war, as a few had. Perhaps he had aided Anna in her exploits, or helped Danforth in some way.

  “Loudon, France, August 1634,” Danforth added. “Satan signed a diabolical pact with him, according to Grandier’s accusers. A few other demons signed it as well, Astaroth and Baalberith. The highest of the devils signed.” He smiled. “But Grandier never did.”

  Had we been two men upon a stage, the lights would have dimmed at that moment save for the single beam trained on Danforth; it would have softened and been touched by a blue as intense as the blue of Danforth’s eyes as he began to speak.

  “He was accused of bewitching nuns and brought to trial by a man very jealous of his power,” Danforth said. “He refused to confess to any of the charges against him, and so he was ordered to endure what is called ‘the question.’”

  The question.

  I recalled Fedora’s ominous method, his insistence on asking only one question, and again recognized the winding through and winding back of Danforth’s mind, how later words were linked to earlier words, recent allusions to more distant ones, all his small stories but stepping-stones to a greater one.

  “Father Grandier was a very handsome man,” he continued. “His torturers were about to crush his legs. He knew that his face would never be the same once that process began. Agony would contort it. And so he asked for a mirror. The mirror was given to him and he looked at himself for a long time. According to witnesses, there was no hint of vanity in his expression. What they saw, they said, was peace.”

  I could not imagine that peace was what Fedora had seen on Danforth’s face, a suspicion he immediately confirmed.

  “What my tormentor saw was terror,” Danforth said without hesitation. “I was acting bravely, of course. What else could I do? But it’s convulsive, pain like that. And I remember thinking how important it was for me not to vomit.” He laughed. “I’d just had a nice lunch right here in this club. Lamb with mint sauce. Very good. And port. A little too much port. I had this ni
ghtmare vision of spraying it all over the floor, then looking up to see Fedora staring at me with absolute contempt.” He lifted his glass and rolled it in his arthritic hands. “The root of the word terror is an Indo-European word meaning ‘to shake.’ And I was shaken, believe me, down to that root word. Because that’s what terror does. It shakes you until you collapse.”

  “Did you collapse?” I blurted before I could stop myself.

  Danforth didn’t answer immediately, but instead regarded the glass he was still rolling back and forth in his gnarled hands.

  “There are torture museums throughout Europe,” he said finally. “I visited one in Amsterdam. Very elaborate affairs, the instruments of the Inquisition.” He mentioned a few of these elaborations, the virginal face carved into the iron maiden, the brightly polished wood of the Spanish horse. “Ah, but Paul,” he added softly, “to break a man you need only a little spoon.”