The Quest for Anna Klein

by Thomas H. Cook

  The Digger’s Game

  ~ * ~

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  “What is the digger’s game?” I asked.

  Danforth started to answer, then stopped, clearly refusing to enter a room that had not yet been prepared to receive him. “The Landwehr Canal runs parallel to the river Spree,” he said. “That’s where we walked that day. It was a very popular place and there were always people strolling along the canal, but it had a grim history, as I later discovered.”

  “The Landwehr Canal?” I asked. “Why would that interest you?”

  “Because that was where the three of us strolled the day Bannion rejoined us,” Danforth answered. “And where the last of our plans were laid.”

  This remark sounded a deeper note, and I found I was suddenly steeling myself against the dark end that seemed always to be coming nearer as Danforth’s tale progressed.

  “The light was so clear it made you think you could see through it,” Danforth added. “It was like the best deception in that way, made invisible by transparency.”

  ~ * ~

  Berlin, Germany, 1939

  “Clayton has approved the mission,” Bannion said.

  But Clayton had left the question of how the mission should be carried out for them to answer, Bannion told them, and to Danforth’s surprise, they began to discuss various methods. Bannion had reviewed several assassinations, and although he didn’t press the point, it was clear that bombs rarely worked. It was pistols that had killed Lincoln, McKinley, Garfield, the king of Yugoslavia, and Franz Ferdinand, the last having been assassinated only after an earlier bomb attempt had failed.

  “So it seems to me that the most effective means,” Bannion said, “is a gun.”

  “But none of those assassins escaped,” Danforth reminded him cautiously.

  “Is the point to escape?” Bannion asked him. “Or to get the job done?” Before Danforth could answer, Bannion turned to Anna. “And two assassins will be better than one,” he added. “So we will do this together, Anna.”

  For the rest of his life, Danforth would replay the startling intimacy of those words, how clearly they excluded him, so that in the juvenile way of a challenged boy, he’d blurted, “All of us together.”

  “No,” Bannion said.

  “Why not?” Danforth asked.

  “Because you don’t know how to shoot,” Bannion answered.

  No one spoke for a moment; then, as if to close the possibility of any further discussion of the matter, Bannion looked out over the narrow expanse of the canal, the placid green waters of the Spree. His gaze focused with a curious tenderness on one of its bridges, a tenderness Danforth noticed and would many times recall.

  “So,” Bannion said crisply as he returned his attention to the plot, “we’ll have to act very quickly.” With that, he turned from the bridge, and the three of them moved farther along the canal. “We will have only one chance.” He was now speaking to Anna alone. “And we should fire at different angles with as little obstruction as possible. Not in big crowds, for example, where anyone could suddenly step in front of us.”

  Against every resentful impulse, Danforth admired the cool way Bannion dealt with murder, not just the tools to carry it out, but the geometries of it, how a woman with a baby might suddenly move toward the target and in that moment be torn to shreds, leaving the target no more than inconvenienced by the blood on his uniform. It is hard sailing that makes a seaman, one of Danforth’s ancestors had once written, and at this moment Danforth felt himself but a weekend yachtsman in comparison to the two others.

  “Rache has provided a lot of information,” Bannion said. “And he can also supply the weapons and whatever else we need.”

  With that, they went directly to Anna’s room, and there Bannion offered the information he’d gotten from Rache.

  “It’s very general,” Bannion said. “But it’s worth knowing.”

  He was speaking almost exclusively to Anna, the two of them united by the deadly plot, a couple as mutually murderous, Danforth thought, as any in noir fiction.

  Bannion opened a notebook and drew several concentric circles, at the center of which he made a large, black X.

  “At the outer rim you have the SS,” he said. “Black uniform. Death’s-head on the cap. They patrol, stand around, do drawings of the places our friend is to make an appearance, check things like bridges and water towers. They seem to be focused on a long shot. They’re convinced the British are spying on everything.”

  Anna and Danforth stared at his crude drawing.

  “Closer in you have something called the Führerschutzkommando,” Bannion continued. “This group is in charge of providing security at all public events. They wear gray uniforms and tend to stand around in clusters.” He traced the third, most inner circle with a crooked finger. “Closest of all is the RSD. Himmler runs this group, so they can pretty much do anything they want, including wearing the uniforms of the other security forces or just dressing in plain clothes.”

  This was very detailed information, and it struck Danforth that Rache and his Communist comrades must surely be plotting the same murder, a conviction that buoyed him with hope. If they struck first, and succeeded, then Anna would be saved.

  “But none of this matters if he’s simply stepping out of a car and the crowd surges forward,” Bannion continued matter-of-factly. “We’d just need to be at the front of that crowd. As a rule, aim for the back of the head. It’s a more likely shot because once a target moves past, security tends to focus on what lies ahead of him, not what’s behind. And if possible, we should fire at the same time.”

  To this last bit of rudimentary instruction, Bannion added, “So now the task is to find the right place and right moment.”

  And so for the next few days Danforth moved about Berlin, scouting places the target might have some likelihood to appear. There were the steps of the Reichstag, of course, but they were blanketed in security. He walked the length of Unter den Linden as well, since at any point Hitler might drive along this route in his open touring car. But the car would be moving, and the target’s exposure would be limited in time and narrow in space, and there would be guards on the running boards, any one of whom might shift and in that movement receive a bullet in the thigh or stomach or wrist that had been destined for the target’s head.

  During the same time, Rache provided Bannion with yet more information about schedules and public appearances and how to get access to the railway station where Hitler’s special train awaited his often quite arbitrary travel plans.

  Years later, still working to uncover the pattern of the plot, Danforth would come across a book that meticulously recorded the Fiihrer’s movements in September of 1939: trips to Bad Polzin, quick tours of Komierowo, Topolno, Vistula, special trains to Plietnitz, journeys to Gross-Born and Ilnau, then on to the front lines at Bialaczow, Konskie, Kielce, Maslow, on to Lodz, on to Breslau-Lauenburg, on to Danzig, Wiskitki, Davidy, Stucewice, on and on and on to the very outskirts of Warsaw, frenetic journeys into the heart of a war it had been Anna’s hope — or claim of hope — to stop.

  All this research was carried out in the early days of August amid yet more rumors of impending war and with a sense of urgency that continued to build until, in what seemed to Danforth a kind of exhaustion, Bannion made a surprising choice.

  “There is only one place we can be sure of,” he said.

  They were sitting in the small pension where Bannion had taken a room and through whose tiny windows light barely penetrated.

  “A place in Munich,” Bannion added. “A restaurant.” He laughed. “An Italian restaurant, of all things.” He glanced at the paper where he’d written the name. “It’s called the Osteria Bavaria. It’s at Schellingstrasse sixty-two.” He looked up from the paper, his gaze directly on Anna. “He goes there quite often when he is in Munich, and he will be in Munich for some sort of celebration next week.”

  “A restaurant?” Danforth asked.
“Won’t it be crowded outside?”

  “It wouldn’t be done from the outside,” Bannion said. Again he turned his attention to Anna, a gesture that struck Danforth as a cue for her to take over.

  “I would be inside the dining room, Tom,” she said.

  “How would you manage that?” Danforth asked. “Won’t the restaurant be closed for him?”

  “No,” Bannion answered with complete authority. “And last April, a British agent filed a report that said he was able to get very close to Hitler in this same restaurant.”

  “A woman would be even less likely to be thought of as a threat,” Anna said.

  Now Bannion took over again. “She’ll book a table at Osteria Bavaria for every night he’s in Munich.”

  “But booking a table every night — won’t that be noticed?” Danforth asked.

  “Of course it will,” Bannion answered. “There’s an organization called Group Nine. They’re responsible for checking out any foreigners who suddenly appear before or during a visit. Anna’s name will certainly show up.”

  “But my name will already have appeared in an earlier investigation,” Anna added. “As an assistant art dealer from America, a woman who met the Führer in Wannsee.”

  “So the plan is for him to see you,” Danforth said.

  Anna nodded.

  “To see you and remember you as the woman who made that strange remark in Wannsee.”

  “That’s right,” Anna said. “So if I come over to his table, he won’t be suspicious.”

  “And the pistol?” Danforth asked. He looked at Bannion. “You don’t expect her to be searched?”

  “Probably not,” Bannion said. “According to the British agent, the restaurant reservation list is screened, but the real fear is bombs, and so whole crews go through the place before the first customers arrive.”

  There was a moment of silence, as each of them looked at the others and waited.

  “What about you?” Danforth asked. “Where will you be?”

  “In the crowd outside the restaurant,” Bannion answered. “If Anna fails, they’ll rush him out the front door where his car is always waiting. Things will be pretty confused, I’m sure. They’ll be dashing around, and I could get an opening between the front door and the car.”

  “And if you don’t?” Danforth asked.

  “I’ll make one,” Bannion said. “I’ll fire into his entourage. There’ll be more confusion. Another chance for an opening, and even a wild shot will be better than no shot at all.” He shrugged with an indifference Danforth found shocking and in which he saw the fearful courage of the truly committed. “One way or the other, we’re going to die, Anna and I,” he said. “We’ll both have cyanide in case we’re captured.” Then he looked at her like a suitor at last betrothed. “Maybe this was always the plan for us,” he said.

  A silence fell over them, until Anna said quite softly, “Done.”

  ~ * ~

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  “And so we approached the last days,” Danforth said. “We would all go to Munich. Bannion would keep an eye on Braunes Haus at Briennerstrasse forty-five, near the Konigsplatz, the Nazi headquarters where Hitler was likely to spend a good deal of his time while he was in Munich. I would station myself in a hotel room within view of the Osteria Bavaria. Anna would remain in a nearby hotel until it was time for her to go to the restaurant. The idea was that she would go there every day for lunch and dinner. If the target showed up, and she could get in range, she would shoot him.”

  “With Bannion always waiting outside the restaurant if she failed,” I said.

  Danforth drained the last of his drink. “Simple as that, Paul.”

  “Simple, yes.” I hesitated before my next remark. “Forgive me, but it sounds very . . . haphazard.”

  “Does it?”

  “Well, you have no specific intelligence component,” I said. “Other than that information Bannion got from Rache and this unnamed British agent.”

  “His name was Alexander Foote, as I found out later,” Danforth said. “You can look him up, if you like.”

  “I don’t doubt that he existed,” I assured Danforth quickly. “But the nature of his intelligence was so general that it couldn’t have been of much use.”

  “It was of no use at all really,” Danforth agreed. “Except that it was clear it was possible to get quite close to the target at the Osteria Bavaria because Foote had already done it.”

  “But that is hardly actionable intelligence,” I insisted.

  “Well, certainly no more ‘actionable intelligence’ than Oswald had,” Danforth said casually. “Not much more than John Wilkes Booth had. In fact, not much more than any of those boy assassins in Sarajevo who waited for Franz Ferdinand’s car to go by. Just to be at the right place at the right time.”

  I looked at him quizzically. “So you don’t believe in elaborate planning?”

  “What I believe in, Paul, is human incompetence,” Danforth said. “You can simply depend on incompetence within the security system to give you an opening at some point. You wait for that opening, and then you strike.” He smiled. “All the training at my country house, all Bannion’s information about Hitler’s layers of security, all my traipsing around Berlin pretending that I could find just the right place, all of that finally came down to one thing: a guy likes to eat at a certain restaurant, and if you’re in that restaurant when he eats there, you can kill him.”

  Something in Danforth’s demeanor darkened, and the tone of his voice became intimate, as if he were speaking not to a think-tank freshman young enough to be his grandson but to someone who was tied to this ancient conspiracy. “Which brings me to the final act of this part of my story, Paul.” His gaze took on a troubled wonder. “The trick love plays in life.”

  ~ * ~

  Munich, Germany, 1939

  The pistol was the same model and caliber LaRoche had used at Winterset, and Bannion’s manner was quite casual when he drew it from his jacket and handed it to Danforth.

  The instructions that followed were simple: Danforth was to meet Anna in the square outside the restaurant as the dinner hour approached. He was to give her the pistol. She would take it into the restaurant.

  “She should never have the gun until she goes into the restaurant,” Bannion said “Since she’s the only one of us who has a reservation at the Osteria, it would be her room they’d search.”

  The target was scheduled to arrive in the city that same afternoon, and Bannion had found out —either from Rache or Foote — that he was inclined to have dinner at the Osteria Bavaria on his second day in Munich, usually around seven. The British agent had even been able to provide the fact that it was the table to the right of the entrance he preferred, an odd choice, Bannion noted, since it was by a window that looked out onto the street. The final elements of the plan had been put in place that very morning, Bannion went on, a reservation made in Anna’s name. The only thing that remained was for Danforth to keep the pistol in his room until the following morning, when he would transfer it to Anna.

  “What about the cyanide?” Danforth asked.

  Bannion patted the blue handkerchief in his jacket pocket. “In here,” he said. “Mine and hers.”

  “You don’t want me to give it to her with the pistol?” Danforth asked.

  “No,” Bannion said. “I’ll give it to her. It’s the last test. Rache says it works every time.”

  “Works how?”

  “If the person takes the tablet, he will complete the mission,” Bannion said.

  In his memory, Danforth would later see Anna’s tablet many times, always with wonder at how very small it was, no larger than a pea, the poison contained in a thin-walled ampoule coated with rubber to prevent it from breaking under anything less forceful than a human bite.

  “What about mine?” Danforth asked.

  Bannion smiled. “Giving you a cyanide tablet would just be drama, Tom. After you give Anna the pistol, you’re t
o go directly to the station and take the train to Hamburg. Passage has already been booked for you to Copenhagen, and from there to London.”

  He walked to the door, started to open it, then hesitated. “I know you love her, Tom. For you, it’s only her.”

  “Yes,” Danforth admitted.

  For a time they talked only about Anna, and it became clear to Danforth that Bannion had closely observed her though even he could not say what had moved her to do the thing she was soon to do.

  “There’s something I still don’t know,” Bannion said at last. Then, with a shrug, he said, “Tell her story, Tom.”