Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Thomas H. Cook

  “But why tell the Germans anything?” Bannion asked.

  “That is not for us to ask,” the man said. “It has been decided that the woman will be needed.”

  “Only the woman?” Bannion asked.

  “Yes,” the man said. “She will be . . . interrogated until she exposes this American plot.” He laughed. “Then we will ask for her. They will turn her over because they don’t want the world to know that their leader is constantly a target. It will all be done secretly, and at some point after she has broken, she will be released.” He took a small envelope from his jacket pocket. “One is for you. The other is for the woman. Neither is real.”

  Bannion said nothing, which clearly alarmed the agent.

  “It is important that the Germans trust us,” the man said emphatically. “What better way for us to prove ourselves to them than by exposing a silly group of American adventurers?”

  Bannion would all his life recall what happened next, the quiet argument the Soviet agent made, how much depended upon this plot, the dark consequences that would surely flow should it not be carried out. What was one man or one woman in the long view of history? No individual could be allowed to stand in the way of so important a mission. Later he would remember how silently he had listened to all this, and how easily he had been persuaded by it.

  “All right,” he said at last, and with those words accepted his role in this far different plot. He listened as the rest of it was revealed: Danforth was to be sent to Hamburg and from there to London, where he would serve as a witness to the failure of the plot. Bannion was to be “arrested,” in order to shield him from later suspicion of having betrayed the plot. He was to fake his own suicide and then be carted away; later he’d be released into Soviet hands.

  “So only . . . Anna,” he said.

  The man’s smile was clearly meant to ease Bannion’s lingering concerns.

  “Don’t look so sad,” he said. “She is just a little spy.”

  With that, he left, and for a long time afterward, Bannion sat by the window and thought of Anna. He saw the little girl with her many languages, then the young woman she’d become, and in seeing both, he reviewed the dark past of which he was only dimly aware even as he envisioned the yet darker future that awaited her.

  Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983

  “I later learned that it was the Russo-German pact they were determined to protect,” Bannion said. “Moscow called off several similar plots at the same time because they needed Hitler to trust them.” He shrugged. “After that, they became great allies, Berlin and Moscow, and when that happened, I finally lost hope in Russia.”

  But before that, he had pretended to revile a god he continued to revere, Danforth thought.

  “You fed Anna to the wolves,” Danforth said icily. “There was never a Rache. It was always you.”

  “It’s an old game,” Bannion said. “Get the other side to pursue a man who doesn’t actually exist. And so we made him up. And made everyone believe he existed. The Russians pretended to distrust him, which made him that much more real. It was quite an effective ruse. It fooled Clayton, and it fooled you.”

  “It fooled Anna too,” Danforth said. “She spent her life protecting this . . . phantom.” He pulled out the pistol and felt his finger draw down upon the trigger. “Because she thought she was protecting you.”

  Bannion squinted at the pistol, then looked at Danforth. “Can you kill a man for believing in something that turned out to be terrible?”

  “Yes, I can,” Danforth said.

  “How?” Bannion demanded. “Answer that one question, Tom. How can you kill someone for being fooled into following a false god and doing terrible things in the service of it? How can you condemn a man for that?”

  Danforth drew back the hammer on the pistol and answered Bannion with the only genuine truth his life had revealed. “I can, yes,” he said, “because in the end, it is a moral responsibility to be wise.”

  Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001

  The feeling was exactly as the cliché described it, I realized: a stopping of the heart.

  “You shot him?” I murmured.

  “No,” Danforth answered. “But I would have, Paul, if that grandson of his hadn’t appeared.” His look had all the force of a barrel pointed at my head. “He came running through the front door.”

  I heard one of my earliest questions: Innocence, that’s a hard thing to nail down, don’t you think? Then Danforth’s reply: We always know who the innocent are. I glanced at the pistol that rested in his lap and knew that the question had never been whether I would live or die, for that had been decided long ago.

  “You do remember, don’t you?” Danforth asked.

  It had been a hot summer day, I recalled. I’d been tired of the heat, eager to throw myself beneath the fan that turned so languidly in my grandfather’s house. My mother had stopped a block behind to chat with a neighbor, certain that I was safe once I’d gone through my grandfather’s gate.

  “That was you?” I asked, now quite vividly remembering the old man I’d found sitting opposite my grandfather, the way he’d turned and looked at me brokenly, like a man who’d just been told that the last small thing he’d hoped for never would be his. “You just got up and left,” I said.

  Danforth’s hand crawled over to the pistol. “You were just a little boy, Paul,” he said.

  “Yes,” I agreed softly.

  “A child,” Danforth said. He picked up the pistol with a hand that had begun to tremble and returned it to the drawer. “And so you were completely innocent.”

  “I don’t have to believe that what you say is true,” I said, with a bit of feigned bravado that I suddenly realized I must have gotten from my grandfather.

  “That’s true, you don’t,” Danforth said. He glanced at the clock to his right. “You only have to believe that it might be true.” He watched me a moment, then added, “We know what to do with evil, Paul. It’s innocence that perplexes us.” His smile was a reed struggling to hold its own against a stormy sea. “And so I thought it was over at last,” he whispered, and with those words stepped back into the past. “But I was wrong.”

  He had retired from teaching his classes not long after returning from Buenos Aires, he said, but had continued to tutor on the side in order to afford the few luxuries he enjoyed, mainly books and an occasional visit to the theater, what he rightly called “the semiretirement of a simple life.” Several of these students were part of the influx of Russians to New York City, a very ambitious group, according to Danforth, hell-bent on learning English. One of them had been a young woman from Vladivostok who wore thick glasses and spoke very rapidly and who greatly enjoyed lambasting the old Communist regime as the crooks and thugs they were. These had been replaced by an equally repellent cadre of Party hacks, she said, men who enjoyed the fruits of the old system’s vast corruption even as Russia attempted to reform itself. Still, there were good changes, she’d told Danforth, lots of entrepreneurs creating lots of wealth. In fact, she said, quite a few entirely new professions had sprouted from the soil of Communism’s rot. She listed them in Russian and asked Danforth to give her the words for them in English.

  “,” she said.

  “Accountant,” Danforth told her.

  “.”

  “Investment banker.”

  “.”

  It was this third one that caused Danforth to feel what I had felt only moments before, the silent stricture of a suddenly stopped heart.

  “Private investigator,” he said.

  Could it be, he wondered, with all the recent opening up of files from various Russian agencies — a few even from the black maw of the KGB — could it be that it was not too late for one last quest?

  “With the last of my little savings, I hired a Russian gumshoe,” Danforth said with a small, sad laugh.

  He had gone to Little Odessa, he said, where the immigrant Russians thrived, and there inquired at various social clubs of a
nyone who might know a who would take his case. A name at last surfaced, one Fydor Slezak, and Dan-forth wrote to him in his quite exquisite Russian. The case was taken, and for weeks it continued. Bills came, and a little doubtful information that reminded Danforth of the rumors that had plagued him so many years before, tales of this woman hewing wood, that one in a quarry.

  Then, on a fine April day, an envelope arrived, bearing its brief report on a piece of paper that would forever after seem to Danforth as slender as her bones.

  , the note said.

  Found.

  Magadan, Russia, 1986

  He flew out of Kennedy to Moscow, and from there to Vladivostok, where he waited as one flight after another was delayed and the terminal filled with people who reminded him of the peasants of old. There was something in their patient waiting, their anticipation of delay, the way they absorbed hardship and inconvenience into their very blood that recalled his first journeys to the east, the frigid towns where the forebears of these same indomitable people had congregated beside the rails in hopes of gathering up a little coal or some miraculously tumbled sack of grain. He’d heard of trains that used frozen fish as fuel, and along the rail lines where they ran, vast crowds of the starving waited for the blackened fish heads that were sometimes belched from these trains’ explosive funnels. He’d never known if this was true, but the curious thing was that at the time, it had seemed to him entirely believable.

  The plane to Magadan at last took off a full three days after his arrival in Vladivostok, and by that time his old bones had seemed almost to pierce his skin.

  Once in Magadan, he’d gone to the same hotel where he’d stayed after being released years before; he’d even, with the manager’s permission, been admitted once again to room 304, where he sat by the window and recalled as best he could that one last time with Anna.

  He’d hired Slezak to take him up the Road of Skulls, but he’d been held up for a reason he had not made clear, and so Dan-forth had remained in Magadan a little longer than planned. While there, he often walked down to the sea, where he sat on the once-hellish docks and watched the workers loading and unloading supplies. Zeks no longer emerged from the black depths of these boats, but from time to time, Danforth would see some old man or woman who had doubtless once suffered that debased condition. He could sense their long serfdom in the slope of their shoulders, the heaviness of their weary gait. The camps had closed long ago, but where could such people have gone with their closing? They had no family left, no one to whom they might return, and so, as he could see, they had become the Gulag ghosts of Magadan.

  She would not be among them, Danforth had been told, and so he no longer searched for her as he’d once searched, his needful eyes trained on each new shuffl ing group of zeks, for-ever hopeful that she would suddenly appear within their ranks, small and brown, with such large black eyes.

  Slezak at last arrived. He stopped his mud-caked truck in front of the hotel, and its engine gurgled fitfully, like an old man with fluid in his lungs.

  “Long trip,” Slezak warned him in Russian.

  Danforth could see that he’d expected to find a younger man and now feared that the one before him would not be up to so arduous a journey.

  “Six hundred kilometers to Susuman,” he added.

  “Bad road.” Bad, yes, Danforth thought later, but nothing compared to his earlier journey up the Road of Skulls. There was mud, and the region’s gigantic mosquitoes attacked with the same aggressiveness of old.

  He was not sure he had ever been in Susuman. Certainly he recalled nothing of the buildings that greeted him, though their ramshackle appearance, along with a few surviving relics of that earlier time, mostly faded murals exhorting the exhausted zeks to work harder for the motherland, reminded him of other villages through which he’d passed. Whole towns had been lost in snowdrifts, he now recalled, a vast world locked in frigid darkness.

  He had been told where she lay and went directly there, a small cemetery that rested among a grove of trees not far from town. Slezak had told Danforth that a woman would meet them at the entrance to the cemetery, and there she was, standing between two concrete pylons that had once served as a gate.

  Danforth greeted her in Russian, then deposited the money into the rough palm of her hand.

  “She is just through there,” the woman said.

  “Did you know her?” Danforth asked.

  The woman shook her head, then nodded toward Slezak as if to tell him that answering questions had not been part of the deal.

  “She worked at the power station in Kadykchan,” Slezak said. “When the town was abandoned, some camp records ended up there. I gave her the name, and she looked through them. That’s what the money’s for.” He grinned. “Research.”

  “It took much time,” the woman said gruffly.

  “But you’re sure it’s her?” Danforth asked.

  “It’s her,” the woman said, then turned and headed down the narrow path and into an open field, muddy and overgrown but dotted with a few squat stone slabs etched with Cyrillic letters.

  “How do you know?” Danforth asked.

  The woman once again nodded to Slezak, clearly refusing to give any unpaid-for information.

  “It’s the woman you are seeking,” Slezak said with a certainty that seemed uncertain.

  As if given a signal to back Slezak up, the woman said, “It is her. I have proof.”

  She had spoken defensively, like one accused of a crime she had not committed, and Danforth glimpsed the terrible sense of both distrust and being distrusted that was another of Stalin’s grotesque legacies.

  “It’s her,” the woman repeated firmly, this time in a tone that was almost surly. “I don’t cheat you.”

  They moved farther into the field of stones until they reached its far border, and there they came to a halt. The stone had toppled over, and time and the elements had weathered it badly, but Danforth could make out its faded lettering: Ana Khalisah. Another stone rose hard by it; its inscription indicated that it was the grave of the woman’s daughter.

  He felt a desolate heaviness press down on him. It was not simply that he had made a long and arduous journey only to find the grave of some unknown woman but also that he now knew he would never find Anna Klein. He had not succeeded in avenging her; he had not even managed to find her and, in one last gesture of his knight-errantry, bring her home. He had grown old in his long effort, and he suddenly felt the full weight of those many years.

  “This is not the woman I was looking for,” he said.

  The old woman stared at him sternly. “I don’t cheat you,” she said. She looked at Slezak. “I have proof.”

  But Danforth knew that there could be no proof, that anything the old woman might produce — a death certificate, a tattered document, even some physical artifact — would be either erroneous or falsified.

  “I’m tired,” he said with a slight smile by which he wished to communicate to the old woman that he would not call her honesty into question, that she had done her best, that we are all, in the end, the final products of our errors.

  He turned to Slezak. “We’ll head back to Magadan in the morning.”

  Slezak nodded, and they both turned to leave the grave, but the old woman grabbed Danforth’s coat and fiercely turned him to face her. “Wait, you see,” she said.

  Slezak looked to Danforth for instructions.

  “All right,” Danforth said to the old woman. “Show me your proof.”

  They walked back to Slezak’s car in silence, and then the old woman motioned that they should head down the barely passable road. “Twenty minutes,” she said.

  It took a bit more than twenty minutes, but at last they arrived at one of Susuman’s larger public buildings, though it was hardly imposing. Inside, the old woman led Danforth up a flight of creaking stairs and to what appeared to be some sort of library, though the walls were lined with stacks of files, rather than books. If the proof was here, Danforth th
ought, who could find it?

  The old woman directed him to the front of a long counter and disappeared into an adjoining room. Behind the counter, women in faded smocks, their heads wrapped in scarves, moved about the stacks of files and papers. The Gulag had been an assiduous compiler, and Danforth imagined that with the current thaw, thousands upon thousands of people were now seeking their lost kindred. In that paper graveyard and in others like it throughout Russia, the millions of dead lay in the mass coffi ns of filing cabinets.

  “Okay, come,” the woman said as she emerged from the room. She motioned Danforth down a corridor, past several rooms where children sat at small desks, making him realize that the building also served as a school.

  When they reached the end of the corridor, the old woman led Danforth inside a room where perhaps thirty children sat facing an ancient blackboard. The lesson had to do with Russian history, but now there were no pictures of Lenin or Stalin.

  “You wait,” the old woman said, then marched up the center aisle and spoke briefly to the teacher. Danforth couldn’t make out what was being said, but after a short conversation, the teacher, a small, squat man in a threadbare suit, walked halfway up the aisle, then bent forward and whispered into the ear of one of the students. For a moment, the little girl sat quite still, then, as if in response to the teacher’s urging, she rose, turned, and walked toward Danforth. She wore a white shirt and gray skirt, as did all the other little girls, but her hair was shorter, and very curly.

  “Hello, sir,” she said in perfect English when she reached him. She stretched out her hand. “A pleasure to meet you.”

  It seemed to Danforth that he had never held so slender a hand. “Where did you learn such perfect English?” he asked.

  “From my grandmother,” she said.

  Danforth saw her startlingly blue eyes and knew that they were his; he saw her tightly curled hair and knew that it was hers, and in seeing this, he recalled that long-lost night, and under the weight of that remembrance, he sank to his knees and gathered his granddaughter into his arms. A great seizure of weeping shook him and he cried in a way that returned him to all the many ages he had known: the young man who had loved her, the middle-aged man who had sought her, and now the old man who had found her in the only way she could still be found.