Quest for Anna Klein, The (23 page)

She lowered the menu, and he saw that she had taken him seriously. “It's not that at all. It's just that I think we should stay apart, Tom. Because of what we're doing.”

“I understand,” Danforth told her.

And he did understand her point, that given the nature of their circumstances, they should remain aloof from each other. And yet, just at that moment, he felt a terrible urge to touch her, one more powerful than at any time before, and he knew that the more he suppressed that urge, the more it would assert itself.

He could say none of this, of course, and so he quickly changed the subject.

“So,” he said as he took up the menu. “What shall we have?”

They ordered, ate, finished with tea, then strolled out of the hotel, down the street, and into a small square. It was a warm summer night, and the lights from nearby
biergartens
flickered all around them. The crowds were large, almost teeming, and nothing in their movements seemed controlled by anything more than the traffi c signals.

They found a bench and sat down together, silent still, watching the passing parade. In such a pose they might have looked like a pair of young lovers, he in pursuit, she coming near to giv
ing in to his advances, and had their purpose not been so grave, Danforth thought, he might have reached out to her as he so much wanted to do.

It was a surge of desire she clearly sensed.

“We should start to get the materials,” she said starkly, a line that returned him to the cold matter at hand.

She meant the ones for the bomb, of course, though they had never discussed where it would be planted.

“We'll also need to plan a way to get out of Germany once we know it went off,” Danforth told her.

“But there's only one way to know,” Anna said. “To be there when it does. To be one of those women who rush up to him with flowers in their hands.”

By the methodical and unyielding way she said it, Danforth knew that such had always been her plan, that she would conceal the bomb beneath her coat or behind a great spray of flowers, and by that means die with the man she murdered, join with him in the same red blast.

“So she was to be a suicide bomber,” I said, almost as stunned as Danforth had described himself on the heels of this revelation.

“Yes,” Danforth said.

“But why not plant the bomb,” I asked, “in a piece of coal, or something like it, the way LaRoche suggested?”

“For the very reason Anna gave me,” Danforth answered. “Because you can't be sure it will go offat the right moment or if the target will be in place when it does go off.” He shrugged. “And she was right, Paul. We know now that there were at least forty-two plots to kill Adolf Hitler. Von Stauffenberg's plot is the most famous, of course, because it came closest to actual success. But
by the time Count von Stauffenberg planted his little briefcase a few feet from Hitler, his target had already wreaked havoc on Europe, ravaged whole countries, exterminated millions. Even if von Stauffenberg's attempt had succeeded, it would have been too late to save anything but a small, shredded bit of German pride. The war was already coming to a close, with Germany in certain defeat, and so to the people who'd already gone up the chimney, it would have meant nothing. To the people rotting in death pits or buried in the rubble of countless bombed-out towns and villages, it would have meant nothing. Hitler had already done his worst.” He offered a small shrug. “But Paul, imagine what would have happened if Johann Georg Elser's bomb had succeeded.”

“It might have changed history,” I said.

“Indeed it might have,” Danforth agreed, then continued. “Elser was a cabinetmaker who'd joined the Red Front Fighters' Organization,” he said. “Is that name familiar to you, Paul?”

The tone of the question struck me as almost probing, as if Danforth actually thought I might have heard of such an organization.

“No,” I answered. “I'm not a student of modern German history.”

“Of course not,” Danforth said, as if reminding himself of that fact. “Well, anyway, Elser decided on a bomb and built one. Then the question was how to get the bomb close enough to Hitler. He chose the beer hall where Hitler always spoke during Putsch celebration in Munich. And so he went there, drank, stayed late, and as closing time neared, he hid in a closet. After everyone left the hall, he went to work digging into one of the building's supporting columns. He dug all night, then repaired the front of the column, hid himself again, and left the beer hall when it opened the next day. He repeated this process every night for more than a month until he'd made a place for the
bomb. He set it to go off at precisely nine twenty on the evening of Wednesday, November eighth, 1939.” He shrugged. “But Hitler wanted to be back in Berlin that night. He couldn't fly there because a dense fog had grounded his airplane, so he made his speech earlier than planned and then took a train back. He left at eight ten, and so he was nowhere near the beer hall when Elser's bomb went off.”

The explosion had gone off right on time, however, Danforth said. It had been quite powerful. In fact, it had killed eight people and wounded sixty-five. As it turned out, one of the wounded was none other than Eva Braun's father.

“As for Elser, he was arrested and later executed at Dachau, on April sixth, 1945, just two weeks before the end of the war. By then he'd seen all that might have been prevented if the fog had not crowded in on Munich on that November night.”

He stopped, and by the change in his expression, I knew that he had returned to some memory of Anna.

“It was true, what Anna said,” he added finally. “To kill a snake, you must strike the head.” He thought a moment, then continued. “But something else is no less true: you must strike early at this head, before the snake has coiled and focused its yellow eyes and done the worst it can do.” He paused again, then looked at me pointedly. “And so we began to assemble the materials for the bomb.”

“But you still had no plan,” I said.

“Most assassins don't,” Danforth said. “At least, the successful ones don't. Oswald had no plan, save to be at the right place at the right time.” He thought this over, then added, “The men who killed Garfield and McKinley didn't have plans either, not beyond having an idea of where the target might be and going there.”

“But surely you need a plan of some sort,” I insisted. “A way to get close to the target.”

“Yes, we needed that,” Danforth said. “And for a moment — long shot though it was — I thought I might have found it.”

“He wanted to be a painter,” Anna said. “He tried to get into the Vienna Academy of Art but he was rejected.” They were walking in a small square, a summer breeze playing in the leaves. “You could say that you were interested in looking at his work.”

“Interested?” Danforth asked. “In what way? He sells very well here in Germany. Why would he be interested in an American buyer?”

“Because he's vain,” Anna answered. “All I would need is one meeting. You could be out of the country before it happens.”

Out of the country, yes, Danforth thought, out of the country and back to America and a life he felt no desire to resume.

But it was a good idea, and so he nodded his assent, and later that same afternoon composed the letter on his personal stationery. It was simple, and very direct. There was an audience for Hitler's work in the United States, he wrote, patrons of the arts who have no interest in crude Expressionism. Hitler's painting, he said, would certainly appeal to such people. To this he added,
Of course, the chancellor's place in the world, not to mention his recent appearance on the cover of
Time
magazine, would no doubt boost interest, but I believe that the paintings would find an audience here even if they didn't carry so famous a signature.

“Okay,” Danforth said. “Now, who do we send it to?”

“No one,” Anna said. “Just put it in the general mail, addressed to the Reich Chancellery. It'll be less suspicious that way.”

They expected no response, of course, but while they waited they became more familiar with Berlin, walking its streets and
parks, strolling through its most prominent buildings, observing places where their target might at some point appear.

There was an unreal quality to this interval, as Danforth would often recall, so that he sometimes imagined them as newlyweds on their honeymoon.

Then the honeymoon abruptly ended.

“It's from the interior ministry,” Danforth said when he showed Anna the letter. He opened the letter and read it with ever-increasing astonishment. “It's from someone named Ernst Kruger. He says that the chancellor welcomes my interest in his work. A car will be waiting for us at Wannsee Station on July nineteenth at ten in the morning.” He lowered the letter and stared at Anna in utter amazement. “We're going to be shown some of the chancellor's paintings.”

Anna took the letter and read it, then handed it back to Danforth.

“All right,” she said. “Let's get started.”

For the next few days they did what they could to familiarize themselves with Hitler's work. It was on display in several places throughout the city, small galleries and public buildings, and they spent long hours peering at the paintings, Danforth trying to place them within a school he thought Herr Kruger might find favorable but without resorting to obvious undeserved flattery.

“He has talent,” Anna said at one point. She was staring at a painting of a cathedral in Vienna.

Danforth nodded. “He can draw at least.”

The following days included other tours, and during these quiet days of waiting, Danforth gave Anna a crash course on the sort of art Hitler appeared to favor and imitate, a style heavy on traditional representation that ignored entirely any modernist influence.

On the appointed morning, they met in the hotel lobby for the trip to Wannsee, and when Danforth saw her emerge from the elevator he nearly swooned at the transformation. She looked every bit the worldly assistant to a major American art dealer. The clothes were the same she'd worn in Paris, but she'd lifted her collar, padded the shoulders of her jacket, and added a discreet white ruffl e to each sleeve.

It was the art of an actress and the art of a seamstress, Danforth thought, both now applied to the art of murder.

“You look very” — he stopped and waited until he found the right word — “appropriate.”

In Wannsee, a black sedan was waiting for them, complete with a driver who was clearly not a driver at all but a security agent. A second man stood beside the military offi cer and appeared to be in charge. He was dressed in the long leather trench coat Danforth associated with the Gestapo.

“My name is Klaus Wald,” he said in German as he thrust out his hand.

Danforth greeted him in German, then introduced Anna.

“I was expecting only one person,” Wald said.

“Miss Collier is the real expert on American naturalism,” Danforth explained.

Danforth was relieved to see that Wald quite clearly had no idea what American naturalism was.

“She is a great lover of landscapes,” Danforth explained.

“Which appear to be a favorite subject of Chancellor Hitler.”

Wald nodded crisply, then turned to Anna. “Good. Well, then. Shall we go?”

They got into the back seat, then waited for the offi cer to take his place at the wheel, Wald beside him. Anna peered out at the station. “Quite a lovely town,” she said in German as the car pulled away.

Neither of the two men spoke during the short drive from the station, but by prearrangement, Danforth and Anna kept up a steady stream of talk, all of it about art, and all of it in German.

Since it was well known that Hitler was quite prolific, Danforth had expected a warehouse, scores and scores of still-life paintings of flowers, bridges, and the like, only a small portion of which, he assumed, had ever been on public display.

Instead, Wald brought the car to a halt before a large stone building that, in a less suburban atmosphere, Danforth would have called a villa. It had two stories and was constructed of a light gray stone and included a welcoming half-circle portico, a design he'd be reminded of years later when he found himself at 56-58 Am Grossen, where the terrible decisions of the Wannsee Conference had been made and where he would once again confront the possibility that Anna's fate might have been worse than he'd previously supposed.

But on that morning, in the summer sunlight, with the lovely façade of the villa in front of him and with Anna splendid at his side, he allowed himself another slip into unreality, as if it were all a novel or a movie, this drama he was living through, he and Anna merely characters in it, neither of them made of flesh that could be torn or blood that could be spilled, beyond the grasp of such human fates. It was an unreality that had often seized him in the past and that would seize him once more in the future but then, after that, would leave him forever captive to the cold reality of things.

“Herr Danforth?”

The man who spoke stood at the bottom of the stairs outside the house, dressed in a brown double-breasted suit, on the lapel of which, as if to add color, there was a swastika pin, black on a red background.

Danforth took the man's hand and shook it.

“Welcome to Wannsee,” the man said in German. “I am Ernst Kruger.” He looked at Anna and offered his hand.

“Anna Collier,” she said.

“Most pleased to meet you, fräulein,” Kruger said. He turned and gestured toward the double doors that led into the building. “Please.”

The military officer stationed himself at the door after they passed through it, but Wald accompanied them into the building and up the stairs, always at a discreet distance, so although he was often out of sight, he was always somehow present, like a noise in the woodwork.