Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Thomas H. Cook

  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 stiffl y 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 cuff links. 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 nightmare 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.”

  New Brunswick, Connecticut, 1939

  He heard the snap of the pulley’s release and felt himself collapse onto the hard floor. In the aching blur that settled over him, he could feel the chill of the concrete. Perhaps at some point the pain had simply unstrung his senses, ripped out the wiring that connected him to time.

  The door opened, then closed, but Danforth didn’t know if his torturer had left or if someone else had entered. He listened for footsteps but heard none, and so, after a time, he decided that he was alone. He wanted to move but couldn’t.

  “Get him up.”

  Then he was lifted from the floor, the muscles of his arms so unnaturally stretched they’d lost their power to flex, his hands like weights at the end of a burning tangle of ligament and bone.

  Now he was moving down the hallway, carried like a broken toy in his torturer’s arms, then plopped down in the chair before Fedora’s desk.

  He sat, slumped and drained, barely able to keep himself in the chair, and waited as Fedora took his place behind the desk.

  “Are you passing?” he asked. “Are you a secret Jew?”

  Danforth didn’t answer.

  “What else can explain it?” Fedora asked. “This . . . stubbornness.” He seemed amused by the taunting. “Do you think England will stop the Communists? France? America?” He laughed. “Perhaps you don’t want them to be stopped. Perhaps you are a secret Communist and a secret Jew.”

  Danforth stared at Fedora silently.

  “Do you know what they are doing, the Reds?” Fedora asked. “They are ripping down everything. They are waiting to swarm over Europe, and then they will swarm over us.” He leaned forward slightly and looked closely at Danforth, his gaze probing, a man digging through a cluttered box. “Why are you helping them? America and Germany have the same enemy. Even the English know that.”

  Danforth knew that the slightest movement would send sheets of pain through his rib cage, and so he sat motionlessly and stared straight ahead. After a moment, he felt sensation in his toes, then his fingers, a glimmer of power returning to the far reaches of his body. It was like the first fibrous tingling of a phantom limb, and he experienced it as an awakening, the sure and certain evidence that for all the damage done, it was not irrevocable.

  “Listen to me,” Fedora said sharply.

  Danforth tried to focus on the man behind the desk.

  “Pay attention to what I am saying.”

  Danforth’s head lolled back slightly, but with effort he drew it up again.

  “I think you believe that somehow you’re going to get out of this without any real damage,” Fedora said. “Get out of it and go back to your nice warm little club.”

  Danforth felt his muscles moving like tiny insects beneath his skin, a delicate tremble that quickened his flesh with soft, regenerative spasms, and by that movement shook him to a somewhat greater clarity of mind. The haze of pain was lifting, and in its departing mists, the room took on its familiar proportions and no longer seemed skewed and off balance. His mind was returning to him like an old friend.

  “But that’s not true,” Fedora said.

  The clouds of pain continued to part, and as they did so, Danforth steadily regained his bearings, remembering things he had forgotten, the way at one point Fedora had splashed his body with ice-cold water, the stinging feel of being slapped.

  Fedora opened the desk drawer to his right, took out a small spoon, and laid it down on the table. “I’m going to scoop out your eyes, my dear fellow. First one, then the other.” He allowed Danforth to focus his starkly clarifying consciousness upon the spoon, then he picked it up and pointed it directly at Danforth’s eyes.

  “Where is Anna Klein?” Fedora asked.

  It was at that moment the gorgeous vistas of Danforth’s life turned against him as insidiously as a traitor in the ranks. For he instantly recalled in scores of simultaneous images all the magnificent things his eyes had seen: the snowcapped heights of Fuji, the walls of Avila, Hong Kong from the Peak, Uluru impossibly radiant in a sunset glow.

  “Tie his hands,” Fedora said.

  Someone stepped behind Danforth’s chair, drew his hands around the back of the chair, and tied them.

  “So,” Fedora said when this was done. He lifted the spoon, and it glinted in the light. “So.”

  The first wave of panic came in an uncontrollable shaking of his legs, a quaking Danforth experienced as an inward disintegration of his will. It was as if the little island of himself had been struck by a boiling wave that instantly dissolved whatever it touched.

  In a suspended instant of intensely clear thought, he saw that he could have faced a pistol without faltering. To die, given the pains that still racked him, would not at that moment have seemed so great a forfeit. Death was only darkness, after all, an oblivion that offered no reminders of what had been lost. But to lose his sight? To see nothing more of this earth forever?

  It was a crazed distinction, and he was not unaware of how crazed it was. And yet he felt himself helplessly melting in the curled fist of this one engulfing dread, all that was solid, all that had held up, now evaporating in the impossible heat of a terror he had not expected and against which he could offer no resistance: the love he had for things as yet unseen.

  And what’s the most beautiful thing you’ve never seen?

  The qu
estion returned to him in Anna’s voice, her words so clear that he all but expected Anna suddenly to materialize before him, and the fact that it was this memory of her that most weakened and tormented him seemed the cruelest of ironies.

  Fedora was beside him now, his fingers wrapped around the handle of the spoon. His fingers were long and thin; perfect, Danforth thought, for playing the piano.

  Fedora drew in a long breath. “So.” He pressed the tip of the spoon beneath Danforth’s left eye. “Where is Anna Klein?”

  Danforth thought of the Atlas Mountains, the plains of Kilimanjaro, and last of the Seto Sea from the heights of Miyajima, that storied place his father had said no man should die without seeing.

  “Where is Anna Klein?” Fedora repeated.

  Danforth felt the answer well up from below, like a swollen gorge rising from his belly, surging up into his throat.

  “For the last time,” Fedora said. “Where is Anna Klein?”

  Danforth felt the edge of the spoon press down then tilt upward, and with that tiny, otherwise insignificant pinch, Anna’s address exploded toward his mouth so that he could feel his lips forming them, his breath ready to release them, all of them . . . now.

  “Well done.”

  It was a vaguely familiar voice, and as if at its command, Fedora drew back the spoon and almost immediately untied Danforth’s hands, then gently turned his swivel chair toward the door, where Danforth saw Bannion standing like a guardian of the gate, Clayton beside him, both staring at him with unmistakable admiration.

  There were footsteps outside the door, and at the sound, both Clayton and Bannion straightened themselves, as if ordered to attention.

  The door opened and she was there, Anna, standing stiffl y, like a soldier. She seemed hardly to notice the other men in the room. Her attention was entirely on Danforth, and for a moment her eyes moved over him soothingly, like fingertips.

  “We’ll go to France together then,” she said.