Quest for Anna Klein, The (24 page)

The paintings were in a large room; upon entering, Danforth estimated that there were perhaps forty of them. They had been framed tastefully and with obvious professionalism in the sort of frames used by the best museums.

The windows of the hall were high, so exterior light streamed in with crystal clarity. No other source was necessary, and it seemed to Danforth that someone had probably thought this through, the fact that natural scenes, which most of the paintings depicted, should be illuminated by the closest one could get to outdoor light.

“You may walk about at your leisure,” Ernst said. “And, please, take as long as you wish.” He looked at his watch, then nodded to Wald, who now stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him.

“One has to have time with a painting,” Ernst added with a courtly smile. “One cannot be rushed in such things.”

“Thank you,” Danforth said.

Danforth stepped forward with Anna at his side; she was now thoroughly in her role as special assistant, studying the same painting Danforth studied, saying nothing, as if waiting for him to speak.

He stopped at a small painting of a bridge, its double arches made of stone, unthreatening woods behind it, everything done in the muted colors to which the artist seemed most inclined.

As if to test her, he said, in German, “What do you think of this?”

She peered at the painting for a moment, then said, “Constable.”

Danforth felt a wave of boyish playfulness wash over him. “Any Constable painting in particular?” he asked.

“The Cornfield,”
Anna answered with complete authority, as if she hadn't learned of both the artist and the painting only days before.

Danforth decided to press the issue. “The browns?” he asked.

Anna shook her head. “The peace,” she answered. “The sense that even if things turn out badly later, still, for a moment” — she drew her eyes away from the painting and looked at Danforth — “there was this.”

She said it softly, and it was correct enough as a description of the painting, but in Danforth it produced that romantic shock of recognition when a man knows with all the certainty that life allows that although he might one day love again, it will never be like this.

He knew that she was still looking at him, but he did not turn to her, instead moving on to the next painting, this one very ordinary, a vase of flowers.

She followed him as he progressed along the line of paintings: more buildings, more flowers, more landscapes, each curiously impersonal, as if the painter were determined to strip all feeling from his subjects.

They'd reached the back wall when the great doors swung open and Wald, accompanied this time by four soldiers and a woman in a long wool coat, strode into the room.

“Put your hands up,” Wald ordered in German as he closed in on them. “And turn around. Face the wall.”

A trap, Danforth thought, they had been caught in a trap.

“Do not move,” Wald said.

Danforth obeyed instantly, Anna somewhat more slowly, though Danforth couldn't tell if her less rapid response was the product of terror, shock, or some aspect of a new role she'd decided to play.

The woman now stepped forward. She took Anna firmly by one shoulder, and with her other hand, she patted down the opposite side; she found nothing, reversed the process, again found nothing, and then stepped back behind Wald.

One of the soldiers then moved forward and did the same to Danforth, with the same result.

“Turn around,” Wald commanded them after the soldier took his place with the others.

Danforth and Anna turned to face him.

“Passports,” he said.

They gave them to him.

“You came by way of France?” Wald asked as he looked at Danforth's passport.

Danforth nodded.

“Your purpose there?”

“I am an art dealer,” Danforth answered.

“Art?” Wald said. “You are an importer, is that not so?”

“Yes, and art is one of the things I import,” Danforth said coolly.

Wald's eyes ranged over the paintings that hung on the surrounding walls. “What do you have to say of these paintings?” he asked.

“German naturalism,” Danforth answered. “They remind me of the work of a great American naturalist, William Bliss Baker.”

“What is this painter's most famous work?” Wald demanded.

“Fallen Monarchs.”

“Fallen kings?” Wald asked as if he'd caught Danforth in a political opinion.

“No, it's a painting of fallen trees,” Danforth answered. “A very beautiful painting.”

Wald simply stared at Danforth a moment, then turned and left the room with his accompanying entourage.

“Don't act as if anything has happened,” Danforth told Anna.

“Let's just go on around the room.”

With that, they continued to move along the side of the room, and though Danforth knew she must have been as shaken by Wald's interrogation as he'd been, she appeared quite calm.

Seconds later, they heard footsteps coming, the hard precision of military boots, but when they turned around, they saw only a few soldiers standing guard as a group of civilians came through the door.

As the group moved forward, its ranks thinned, and suddenly the wall broke entirely, and there he was, coming toward them. His head was turned and he was talking to Ernst, saying something amusing, evidently, because there was a very slight smile on Ernst's face when he turned to them, a smile that was still there when he made the introductions.

“Herr Danforth,” he said, “it is my honor to present the chancellor of the German Reich and the Führer of the German people.”

Danforth had never heard the word
Führer
spoken, but what surprised him was how profoundly serious the man seemed, despite the comical Charlie Chaplin mustache. He clearly had little time for this.

“So,” the chancellor said, “what do you think of these paintings?”

There was a brusque quality to his voice, though Danforth heard nothing threatening in it, only the tone of a man who was very busy but who had found the time to drop in on these
Americans because he couldn't help but be curious about what they made of his work.

“I find them quite interesting,” Danforth said, working very hard to keep his voice and manner relaxed, looking for all the world as if he weren't trembling at the very thought of the man who now faced him. “As I said to Herr Kruger, I think many Americans would find them quite to their liking.”

The chancellor nodded but seemed suddenly to lose interest, as if Danforth's answer had been neither more nor less than he'd expected.

Still, Danforth had no choice but to soldier on, and so he did. “Your subjects, as I told Herr Kruger — fields and dells and the like — they are very natural, and this has great appeal for Americans.” He allowed himself a nervous laugh. “Because so much of the American landscape has been taken over by cities, there is nostalgia for the countryside.”

The chancellor no longer appeared to be in the least interested in what Danforth was saying; he seemed impatient with the commonplace and banal remarks, which were unworthy of any further expenditure of his time. He glanced at his watch, then turned to Ernst. “Well . . .” he began.

“The subject is you,” Anna said suddenly.

The chancellor turned to her and waited.

“Not impressionistically, of course,” Anna continued. “What your paintings show is your condition when you painted them.”

The chancellor said nothing but listened as Anna continued.

“They are the paintings of someone struggling to live.” She held her gaze on a painting that seemed to fade away at the edges. “A painter rushed . . . by hunger.” She might have left it there, and Danforth, cringing inside, certainly hoped she would. But instead she turned boldly toward her target. “Were you hungry when you painted them,
mein Führer
?”

Danforth would forever poignantly recall the look in the chancellor's small round eyes at that moment, something never reported and that must have rarely been glimpsed: the sufferings of his youth, the grim poverty and the unbearable rejection, the abyss of failure that must have yawned before him during all his years in Vienna and that could be held back only by the wildly self-inflated fantasy he had hatched about himself and that later, and against all odds, he had managed to make true.

Then, in a blink, all of that passed from him like fizz from a bottle, and he was once again the chancellor of the German Reich and the Führer of the German people, the visionary he proclaimed himself to be, a busy, busy man, too busy for sentimentality, too busy even for reminiscence, and thus one who now found the musings of this young American woman a simple waste of time.

And so, with a quick nod, he turned; his entourage closed in around him, and . . .

“. . . and he was gone,” Danforth said.

I couldn't entirely conceal my surprise at this part of Danforth's tale, and certainly not my uneasiness at how Anna had behaved.

“Was she . . . flirting with him?” I asked cautiously.

“Flirting?” Danforth asked. “Far from it, believe me.”

“Then why did she speak to him that way?” I asked.

“Because she wanted him to notice her,” Danforth answered.

“So that if he ever saw her in a crowd, he would not feel the slightest alarm if she approached him. She knew that we would never get another audience with him after Wannsee. He had
seen us and had no reason to see us again. So any further meeting would have to be in public. If he recognized her face, he might allow her to go up to him.” A deep gravity settled over him, and for a moment, he seemed lost in its aching cloud. “And to win the digger's game.”

“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.”

“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 geometrics 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.