Quest for Anna Klein, The (20 page)

Anna watched them go for a time, then said something Danforth had never expected and found extraordinary.

“It's too late for the Project,” she said. “And it was never enough anyway.”

“Never enough to what?” Danforth asked.

“To matter,” Anna said.

She looked at him in a way that made him suddenly recall a night in Paris, how he'd left her apartment and walked across the square at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and then stopped, glanced up, and noticed her silhouette in the window. He'd thought then, and it returned to him now, that she had all her life been intent upon some purpose, that her current situation was merely the implementation of that long-imagined act.

“Then what do you propose?” Danforth asked.

“I don't know,” Anna admitted.

For the first time, she seemed at sea, as if some earlier certainty had been taken from her. She was silent for a time, then, as they slowly walked the square, she began to question not only the Project but any other scheme that would reduce her to a “little spy.” If war broke out, what good would it do to send reports of this troop movement or that when the point was to stop those movements? In the same vein, what would be the point of blowing up a bridge or mangling railway tracks? Another bridge would soon replace it, and mangled tracks could be taken up and replaced within hours. And finally, what was the point of waiting for the war to begin at all?

Her expression changed then in a way that Danforth would often think of in the coming years. He would remember how she'd drawn in a long breath, as if undecided about how to voice the idea that had come to her; apparently anticipating that it would be thought absurd, she'd broached the topic at a slant.

“When I was a little girl, we had a nice garden,” she said. “I often played in it. One day, a snake came into the garden. My father killed it with a hoe. He showed me the remains of the snake,
picking up the head in one hand and the body in the other. ‘To kill a snake,' he told me, ‘you must chop off the head.'”

She paused, as if the conclusion she'd just come to had stopped her cold. “Do you understand what I mean, Tom?”

He did not understand, and so he simply looked at her, quite baffl ed.

Very deliberately she added, “I saw a picture of him in Prague. He rides in an open touring car.”

Suddenly, Danforth saw the unreality, the sheer absurdity, of what she was getting at.

“Hitler?” he asked in an astonished whisper.

She nodded but added nothing else. Danforth saw immediately that he was trapped: either doomed to be a little spy or compelled to reach for something larger than he'd ever dreamed of. The latter prospect seemed so fantastical and at the same time so alluring that he felt its dark attraction as a kind of lust.

“Lust?” I asked.

Danforth nodded. “A lust to matter. To do something that mattered.”

“But surely you knew that what Anna was proposing was completely insane,” I said, no less stunned by Anna's suggestion than Danforth must have been when he first heard it.

“Insane, yes,” Danforth admitted. “And to think that the idea began to germinate practically within sight of that little Fascist Deloncle.” He took a sip from his glass. “It was the Gestapo who killed him, by the way.”

“The Gestapo?” I asked. “Why would the Germans want Deloncle dead?”

“He had gotten a little too close to the Abwehr,” Danforth answered. “There was always a great rivalry between Hitler and the German army.”

With this, Danforth dismissed any further discussion of Eugène Deloncle's death.

“But we had taken a step,” Danforth said. “And I have to confess that for all the fear and dread, there was also a feeling of . . . passion. Very physical. It was as if a beautiful woman had walked into the room, strolled over to me, slipped a knife into my hand, nodded toward some fat old minister of state, and whispered, ‘Kill him and I'm yours.'”

I stared at Danforth, genuinely aghast that a history-transforming act could be reduced to so primitive an instinct.

“That's what you must factor in, Paul, the narcotic effect of plotting a stupendous act,” Danforth added. “It produces a kind of sustained ecstasy.”

I couldn't help but wonder how long Danforth had felt the erotic effects of this narcotic before reality swept in and set him straight.

“Ecstasy, yes,” Danforth said, and with those words returned to his story, more tensely and a little more fearfully. But was it the fear a soldier might have as he moved into a region where enemy forces lurked? Or was it the fear of some old Lothario as he opened the door of a murderess's boudoir?

“Ecstasy, but also terror at the very thought of what was in our minds,” Danforth said. His smile seemed to reflect the fate he'd glimpsed at that moment long ago. “But I knew that, despite all that, I would see it through to the end.” He glanced away, then back at me. “Strange, Paul, but for the rest of my life, when I thought of that moment,” he added softly, “I would recall the scent of almonds.”

“Why almonds?” I asked.

“Because that is the odor of cyanide,” Danforth said, and then he glanced around like a man either recalling the place where a murder had been committed or looking for a place where one might be carried out.

“We should leave here now, I think,” he said.

I looked toward the window. “But it's still snowing quite hard,” I warned him.

He smiled at a young man's alarm that an old one should venture out in such weather. “I have learned to be sure-footed,” he said. His face took on that familiar expression of an old man teaching a young one the rules of the road. “What do you think is the most important characteristic of a predator?” he asked.

I thought of the spider, still and silent in its web. “Patience,” I answered.

Danforth smiled. “Very good. And what is the prey's most important characteristic?”

I shrugged. “I'm not sure.”

“Resignation,” Danforth said. “Which can only be achieved if the prey understands the purpose of its death.”

“You're speaking in human terms then,” I said.

A hint of cruelty glittered in Danforth's eyes. “I am speaking, Paul, of revenge.”

With that he rose in a way that made him seem already some
what ghostly, a dark cloud, but a cloud nonetheless, as if he were no longer entirely alive because at his great age he was so very near to death.

“Come,” he said. “I have a quiet spot in mind.”

The spot wasn't very far, as it turned out, though we'd accumulated a fair amount of snow on the shoulders of our coats before we got there.

“The Blue Bar,” he said with a nod to the awning up ahead. “In the Algonquin Hotel. You must have heard of the Algonquin?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “The Round Table. Those famous wits. Dorothy Parker and —”

“Yes, yes,” Danforth said sharply, as if all their worldly talk had never been worldly at all. “They were Manhattan provincials, and what could be more provincial than that?” He added a sly wink, but his tone turned somber. “Cleverness is the death of wisdom, Paul.”

We reached the bar, and rather than allowing me to do it, Danforth stepped briskly forward, opened the door, and let me enter first. It was an old man's way of demonstrating that although he was old, he was not dependent, and I found myself admiring his determination to assert himself in such a graceful and unoffending manner.

“Thank you,” I said as I passed in front of him and gave him a courtly nod. “Most kind.”

Danforth smiled. “You are a very polite young man.” He said it as if he were suspicious of such formality, as if it were the knife inside the glove.

We took a table by the window, from which we could watch the city's hardworking pedestrians shoulder through this inclement day in this wounded city, a scene that played in Danforth's eyes and seemed, in the way of sorrow, to both darken and enlighten them.

“The tragic irony is that it is the people who seek heaven in the future who create hell in the present,” he said. With that, he summoned a waiter, and we each ordered a glass of wine, he a white, I a red, both whatever the house suggested.

“Tell me, Paul,” Danforth said once the waiter had departed. “Have you been to Moscow?”

“I have, actually,” I was pleased to tell him. “But a long time ago. When I was a little boy. On the grand tour I made with my grandfather. He knew the city quite well.”

“Really,” Danforth said. “Did he happen to show you the city's swimming pool?”

“Swimming pool? No. It was the middle of winter.”

“Too bad,” Danforth said. “I don't know this for a fact, but I can't imagine that it isn't the largest swimming pool in the world. And it has quite a history, that pool. Quite a story of its own.”

And then he told it.

In the summer of 1931, he said,
Pravda
announced that the Palace of the Soviets was to be built in Moscow. The planned physical dimensions of this palace were stupendous. It was to be six times the size of the Empire State Building, and at its completion, it would be crowned with a gigantic statue of Lenin three times as high as the Statue of Liberty. This was Stalin's answer to capitalism, and he intended it to be a very powerful one. Equally important to this aim, the Palace of the Soviets was to be built next to the Kremlin on the huge piece of real estate at that time occupied by the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, itself a monumental structure thirty stories tall with walls more than three meters thick and whose bronze cupola alone weighed 176 tons.

“All this, of course, had to be torn down before the Palace of the Soviets could be built,” Danforth said.

And so various methods for carrying out this destruction were
endlessly discussed. It was even proposed that the building be bombed, but accuracy was a problem, and so during the course of a single night, a huge wooden barrier was erected around the cathedral, after which the interior of the church was stripped of a half a ton of gold, along with an incalculable treasure of diamonds, silver, topaz, amethyst, emeralds, and ornately carved enamels, all of which disappeared into government warehouses or the vaults of the Soviet secret police.

“The demolition was completed in early December,” Danforth said. “In four months one of the great architectural jewels of Moscow had been completely razed.”

Now came the construction of the Palace of the Soviets. It was to be over four hundred meters high, weigh 1.5 million tons, and enclose an area greater than the six largest skyscrapers currently towering above the streets of New York. Lenin's gigantic statue was to crown this spectacular edifice. His index finger alone would stretch to six meters.

“But this statue never rose, nor the building to support it,” Danforth continued. “Everything sank into a morass of bad planning. The foundation was dug, but then the rains came, and then the snow, and in the spring, rivers of melting ice, and so the vast foundation filled with water. The water became infested with frogs and choked with duckweed, and worst of all, the whole disaster was now quite visible because the huge wooden fence that had concealed the earlier destruction had been dismantled by Muscovites desperate for firewood.”

“My God,” I said. “What a mess.”

“The years passed,” Danforth said. “Children fished in the depths of the old foundation. Stalin died. Khrushchev replaced him, and one day he looked out over this huge stinking lake of stagnant water and decided, Well, maybe a swimming pool.”

With that he laughed softly, but I didn't.

“What, Paul, you find nothing funny in this tale?” Danforth asked pointedly.

“No,” I said. “No, it seems very sad to me, that people can become so deluded, destroy so wantonly out of some crazy ideology.”

“It rather makes you suspect that true belief is always false,” he said.

I nodded. “Yes, I think that's true.”

The expression on Danforth's face relaxed slightly, as if he'd been given a signal that it was safe to go on. “Then you are ready to hear more of my story,” he said.

“Good,” I said with an enthusiasm that surprised me. “Well, in our last episode, Anna was in league . . .”

Danforth lifted his hand in a cautionary gesture. “Anna was in league, yes.” His smile was thoroughly enigmatic. “But with whom?”

Danforth would relive the sight of that morning on many occasions over the next sixty years. He would sometimes remember that they stood very near each other, Bannion's entire profile visible but Anna's face obscured by the slender trunk of the sapling in the foreground.

At other times, however, he'd remember them standing somewhat farther apart, Bannion with a scrap of paper in his hand, one he quickly — rather too quickly? — sank into the pocket of his jacket as Danforth approached. In this remembrance, Anna reaches for the paper and then hastily — too hastily? — draws back her hand so that it is covered by the folds of her long, black skirt.