Quest for Anna Klein, The (28 page)

So what was really the point of Danforth's story? I wondered in the brief silence that fell over him now. Was it a cautionary tale about the profoundly unsmooth running of true love? Or was it a warning about the twisting course of intelligence work, how plots evolve and deepen as if by their own volition, each step
in some way unwilled? Could it be that I was being lectured — however metaphorically — about the passion of youth or the fierce nature of desire? Or did his instruction touch on the injustices of class, the way his own favorable circumstances had protected him from what had no doubt befallen Anna and Bannion?

I was still considering these many possibilities when Danforth's question brought me up short.

“You've never killed anyone, have you, Paul?”

He asked this casually, as he might have asked if I'd ever eaten duck confit or sipped Meursault.

“Killed anyone?” I was obviously taken aback by the question. “No, I've never killed anyone.”

“I didn't think so,” Danforth said.

So was Danforth's tale a murder story? I wondered now.

“Have you?” I asked him, hesitantly.

“Oh, sure,” Danforth answered calmly, revealing no sense of regret at having done so.

“Really?”

“Well, there was a war, after all,” Danforth said.

“Oh, you mean in the war,” I said with rather obvious relief. “Of course.”

“I remember one fellow,” Danforth went on in the same breezy tone, as if he were relating the story of a camping trip in the Berkshires. “A British intelligence offi cer. He'd tracked this Nazi bastard to a hunting lodge in Bavaria. He knew his crimes. The Nazi tried to explain himself, tell him why he'd done what he'd done, but in the end, he couldn't keep that mask in place, and with all the contempt in the world, he sneered at my British friend.” He lifted his hand to get the waiter's attention, then quite casually, he added, “So the Brit shot him right between the eyes.” He laughed. “The British did a lot of that sort of thing after the war, you know. We wanted trials, we Americans. We
wanted due process. But not the Brits. They shot those Nazi bastards wherever they found them. They shot them in barns and animal stalls. They shot them in the woods and on deserted roads. They shot them in their little town squares and dragged them out of basements and root cellars and caves and shot them in broad daylight, with their fat wives and little milkmaid daughters looking on.” His laugh was surprisingly brutal. “There are certain things a human being cannot do and still expect another human being to let him live.” He looked at me with the weariness born of this conclusion. “For certain crimes, there should be no protection. Even love, as they say, must have an end.”

I found something curiously touching in this last remark, perhaps because it had been so hard won, given the failure of the plot, how heart-struck he'd been by Anna, their one night of passion, her capture the next day, Bannion's too, then Danforth's own escape, along with whatever dark and bloody things he'd known after that, a whole world at war. It made for the grave mosaic one saw in his face and that returned me to his time.

And yet, suddenly, he laughed. “The Old Bulldog,” he said. “It was Churchill who wanted them shot without trial, you know, those Nazi bastards. He had been in a war, you see. Roosevelt had not. Do you think that might have made the difference?”

“That, along with the fact that England had been terribly hurt and we hadn't been,” I said.

“The Germans would have flattened the whole of England if they could have,” Danforth said. “And even as it was, Canterbury Cathedral was lost and much of London was in ruins.” He shook his head. “To see the fires burning in your own land. That fills a man with rage. And add to the bombings those other German crimes. The camps and the pits. Those bulldozers.” Something in his soul appeared to sour. “We should have killed them all, don't you think, Paul?”

“I can certainly understand the rage,” I said, then added a
short, admittedly nervous laugh. “Of course, my father would never have been born.”

“Nor you,” Danforth said. “So it was good for you that something stayed our hand.”

I felt a chill, as if a wintry blast had stopped me. “Yes,” I said, then glanced at my notes to avoid the icy probing of Danforth's eyes. “So, I suppose you left Munich that day?”

“I left Germany that day,” Danforth said.

The events of that morning returned to me, Anna's capture, Danforth's attempt at suicide, the evidence that would have been found on him had he succeeded.

“Anna's scarf,” I said suddenly. “What did you do with it?”

“I left it in my room,” Danforth answered. “What, Paul, did you expect me to keep it as some sort of love token?”

“I suppose I did,” I admitted.

Danforth laughed. “You've seen too many movies.” He was quiet for a time, then he said, “I expected you to ask me about the cyanide.”

“What about it?”

“Why it didn't work.”

“Yes, I should have asked about that.”

He waved his hand. “Not to worry. I was well on my way to England before I asked it myself. Sitting on the ferry, thinking everything through again. Not just the events of that last terrible day in Munich, but everything. Clayton's first approach. Anna in the Old Town Bar. LaRoche. Bannion. Everything we'd shared and endured, all of which had come to nothing.” He shrugged. “And of course that last night with Anna. Then her arrest and Bannion's. The fact that I wasn't arrested at all. Then, suddenly, I thought of the cyanide, that it hadn't worked.” He smiled. “It just came like a soft creak into my mind.”

I expected him to go on from there, follow the linear line of his tale, but he stopped instead, abruptly stopped, as if some
quite different progress had suddenly occurred to him. Then, as if deciding to take an alternative route through well-known terrain, he said, “A soft creak. Yes, it came to me just like that.” He paused again, his eyes on his empty glass. “A soft creak,” he repeated. When he looked up at me, his eyes sparkled icily in the room's dim light. “Like a nightingale floor.”

The Japanese word was
uguisubari,
Danforth told me, a floor designed to make a chirping sound when anyone walked on it.

“The sound of a nightingale,” he added.

Then another drink arrived, and he took a small sip before returning to the reference toward which, seconds before, his tale had abruptly careened.

“Any wooden floor will creak a little when it's walked on, of course,” Danforth continued, “but in a nightingale floor, it's not the wood that gives off a sound, it's nails rubbing against clamps. That's why the floor chirps rather than creaks.”

“Why would anyone want a chirping floor?” I asked.

“For security,” Danforth explained. “The floors were laid in hallways that led to conference rooms and the like. If anyone tried to creep close to the rooms, the nightingale floor would give off its distinctive call, and the people in council would be alerted to a spy or, perhaps, an assassin.”

He took another short sip from his glass, and I saw he was being careful now to take in only a small amount of alcohol.

“I walked the nightingale floor in Nijo Castle,” he went on. “Remember, Kyoto was spared the first atomic bomb because the secretary of war had been there and knew it was beautiful.”

Another circling back, I thought, to distant references.

Danforth drew in a long, recuperative breath. “Older castles
had been designed to conceal the rooms of the bodyguards, but the Tokugawa shogunate, the one who built Nijo, displayed these rooms quite prominently.” He smiled. “Because power that does not show itself, Paul, diminishes itself.” He took another small sip from his glass. “Unless concealment is an integral part of the power in question, of course.”

I looked at him quizzically.

“The success of a traitor, for example, is built on never having his treachery discovered,” Danforth said. He leaned forward slightly. “Do you know who the greatest spy of all time was, Paul?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No, I don't,” I confessed.

He leaned back again. “Neither does anyone else.”

“I see your point,” I said, then attempted my own circling back to earlier references. “But what does a nightingale floor have to do with cyanide?”

“The fact that Anna's cyanide didn't work, and that Bannion's did,” Danforth said. “That's what kept sounding in my mind on the Channel crossing. It was like a creeping footfall on a nightingale floor. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. All the way to London.”

Clayton's face had never looked more deeply troubled; Danforth would later wonder, from the depths of his own steadily building suspicion, if his friend had already known what he had come to tell him.

It was raining, and Danforth had walked quickly to the tavern near Whitehall where they were to meet. He'd expected to find Clayton already waiting, but it was some minutes before he arrived. From his place at the rear of the tavern, Danforth had watched Clayton strip off his very English raincoat and close and
fasten his very English black umbrella. Even so, he'd looked distinctively American, though in a way Danforth could not exactly describe save by the observation that his movements, quick and decisive, gave off a certain New-World energy.

“Good to see you, Tom,” Clayton said when he reached the rear table.

“Hello, Robert.”

Clayton's tone was grave. “Clearly something's happened,” he said.

“There was no attempt,” Danforth told him flatly. “Anna was arrested outside her hotel yesterday morning. I saw it myself. By the time I got to Bannion's place, he'd been arrested too. As they were taking him out, I saw him put something in his mouth. The cyanide. He collapsed in a few seconds.”

Clayton appeared genuinely stricken by this news. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“I don't know where Anna is,” Danforth said. He kept his voice even, and years later, he would recall that at that moment he'd managed to be no less an actor than Anna, merging with his role as a failed conspirator, cool in the wake of failure, giving no hint of the storm inside him.

“This was always a very dangerous action,” Clayton said wearily.

“Then why did you approve it?” Danforth asked.

Even as he spoke, Danforth was mindful of his own failure to stop the plot, but he remained too uncertain of his own footing to reveal that he had wanted to do exactly that. Still, he wondered why Clayton hadn't put a halt to so reckless a scheme early on.

“Because I'm as susceptible to the grand action as anyone else, I suppose,” Clayton answered. “And Bannion was sure that Rache could supply the sort of inside information that might make it possible.”

“The security system around Hitler, that all came from Rache?” Danforth asked.

“Yes,” Clayton answered. He glanced toward the front of the room, where a gust of wind had suddenly sent a sheet of rain loudly against the window. “Rache had saved Bannion's life in Spain.” He looked at Danforth. “You trust a man who saves your life.” He shrugged. “But maybe Bannion shouldn't have trusted Rache with his life this time.”

“You think Rache may have betrayed us?” Danforth asked.

“Well, he's the last one standing, isn't he?” Clayton answered. “Except for me, of course.” He gave Danforth a curiously distant glance. “And you.”

“Me?”

Clayton nodded. “I was just wondering why you were released.”

“Because they said my father was a friend of Germany,” Dan-forth told him.

Clayton leaned forward. “Did your father ever know anything about the Project?”

“Absolutely not.”

Clayton seemed to take this at face value. “Then it's Rache we have to suspect, because he was the only one outside our circle.”

“And as far as you know, he hasn't been arrested?”

“As far as I know,” Clayton answered. “But they could fake an arrest. And if they thought we suspected him, they probably would, and with that he'd disappear.” He shrugged. “There's nothing you can do, Tom. The Project is over.” He touched Danforth's hand, as if offering condolence to a mourner. “You should go back to New York.”

Danforth drew back his hand. “I can't,” he said firmly. “Not until I know what happened to Anna.”

That was the moment he betrayed himself, as he understood
immediately. He could see clearly what Clayton saw when he looked at him: it was not his failure to make a mark or to change history that gripped him but his desperate need to find out what had happened to Anna.

“My God,” Clayton said. “You fell in love with her.”

Danforth nodded. “Yes,” he admitted. “Was that your plan?”