Quest for Anna Klein, The (33 page)

There was nothing particularly horrendous in this tale compared to other stories of anti-German reprisals Danforth had heard by then, and yet this scene had haunted him for the rest of his journey. He'd come to realize by the time he reached Lemberg that, as with Anna, it was the unknown fate that moved him. What tormented him was not what had definitely been destroyed but what had mysteriously vanished into time and space; not someone who without doubt had been shot in a prison courtyard but that other one — lost in night and fog — who'd last been seen strolling in a park or buying apples from a stand.

Night had fallen by the time he reached what appeared to be a shoemaker's shop. A yellow glow came from the front window, a color Danforth recognized as candlelight because he'd seen so much of it radiating softly from the otherwise pitch-dark streets of the shattered cities through which he'd passed.

He knocked at the door and waited. It opened slightly and a thin shaft of light crossed the threshold. A small eye floated like a rheumy brown bubble in that same narrow slit, and to this eye Danforth presented his now-defunct military credentials.

In the German he hoped the man understood, he said, “I'm Captain Thomas Danforth. United States Army. I'm looking for Rudy Romanchuk on a matter of great urgency.”

The eye blinked once, slowly and wearily and even a bit resignedly, and Danforth saw the many crimes for which Roman-chuk now thought he was at last to pay the price.

With no word, the door opened and Danforth stepped inside a badly damaged room, precariously supported by cracked walls and splintered wood, and with a disturbing droop in the ceiling. Water marks spread across that ceiling and then down the peeling walls to a bare concrete floor, broken and stained, on which stood old furniture and a few crippled machines. The room's shattered appearance echoed the mood of Central Europe, danforth thought as he glanced about: crumbling, torn, a thing of jagged borders, more or less idle.

“American? So far?” Romanchuk asked in very broken German, making it clear that the man had probably spent very little time in that country. Romanchuk's grin flashed like pieces of silver. “You have plenty money.”

When Danforth didn't answer, Romanchuk grabbed a spindly wooden chair and drew it over to the coal stove that rested in the center of the room. Beside it an old crate contained the few chunks of coal he'd managed to procure by God only knew what illicit means.

Danforth sat without taking off his coat; the room was too cold for that, as a film of ice on the window made clear. He could see that Romanchuk was frightened, as if he expected to be arrested, hauled back to the American sector, tried for some crime of which he was no doubt guilty, then hanged or sent to prison. But he could also see that Romanchuk had been in such tight spots before and that he'd grown confident in his ability to slither out of them.

“I'm not here to arrest you,” Danforth told him. “I'm looking for a woman.”

Relief flooded Romanchuk's face. “I can get woman,” he said.

Years later, when Danforth read of the thriving sex slave trade
in Moldova, he'd wondered if Romanchuk was still alive, a wrinkled old pimp who'd slipped across the border to steal Moldovan girls from their small villages and sell them in the back-alley clubs of Chisinau. It would have been typical, he'd thought then, Romanchuk at last become some version of Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz, evil the undying fuel that powered and sustained him.

“Woman. Young girl,” Romanchuk added.

Danforth restrained the violent urge that swept over him and said, “I'm looking for a particular woman. You may not have heard her name, but when the Soviets interrogated you in Warsaw, she was the one who translated your answers.”

Danforth could see that Romanchuk was still trying to read the situation and somehow use it for his own gain. He was a criminal through and through, Danforth recognized, the sort of man who never once got up in the morning and asked himself how he might make an honest living. Danforth had encountered scores of such people in his postwar interrogations, a whole criminal class the Germans had used to carry out some of their most dreadful crimes: rapists and murderers who'd been taken from their cells in countless eastern towns, supplied with whips and truncheons and ax handles, and then unleashed to storm through streets and hospitals. During a particular atrocity he now recalled, a schoolyard full of children still in their uniforms had been attacked. Remembering the dreadful photographs he'd seen, the knots of terrified little boys and girls, hulking brutes still in their prison clothes raging among them, their truncheons in midstrike or already making contact, he found himself amazed that such miscreants, along with the nation that had unleashed them, had not been exterminated at the end of the war.

With that thought, Danforth's still-fuming hatred of the Germans spiked, and on its hurtling flame he burst forward and grabbed Romanchuk by the throat.

“Now you listen to me,” he snarled. “You're going to tell me all
you know about this woman, and you're going to do it because if you don't, I'll kill you.” He pressed his face close to Roman-chuk's and released every spark of his hatred and contempt. “Do we understand each other?”

Romanchuk stared at Danforth unbelievingly, a man who had seen many forms of hurt and hatred but never like this.

“This woman translated for you when the Soviets held you in Warsaw,” Danforth repeated, still speaking German. Then, using a Ukrainian word he'd been careful to learn at the beginning of his journey, he said,
“Chutka!”

Talk!

With no further prompting, Romanchuk told Danforth that he'd forged a passport for a man the Soviets were desperately trying to find, a German agent they believed had betrayed them. “I tell them this guy want passport and identity card just before Germans make pact with Russia.”

“Did you know his name?” Danforth asked.

Romanchuk shook his head. “He was big deal, because Russian offi cer was wearing Order of Lenin.”

“Tell me about the woman who translated for you,” Danforth said.

“Small woman,” Romanchuk said. “Dark. Good-looking.”

“And her hair?” Danforth asked.

“It was very short,” Romanchuk said. “From behind, she could be boy.”

“Did you get any impression of where she was from?” danforth asked. “Whether she was German or something else?”

“She was American,” Romanchuk answered without hesitation.

“How do you know?”

“When I was sit in the room, wait for questions, there was guard. Regular clothes, but he was guard, you know what I mean.”

Danforth said nothing.

“Another guard come in and just loud enough, he say, ‘She here, the American girl.' And maybe in a minute she come into room with three men.”

Like many others Danforth had interrogated, Romanchuk seemed lost in surreal recollection. Danforth had seen the same look in the faces of both the witnesses and the defendants at Nuremberg, in the architects of the chimneys and in those who'd barely missed going up them. It gave the sense that they believed they could not possibly have done or suffered what they had done or suffered, that it had all happened in some unreal space, all been something . . . beyond.

“She didn't say nothing to me,” Romanchuk went on. “She translate. My German not so good. My Russian not so good. We speak in Ukrainian, and she translate to Russian.” His eyes narrowed. “No. She was . . . saying wrong. Well, not exact wrong, she leave out important things.”

“Why would she do that?” Danforth asked.

“I don't know. Maybe she protect this guy the Russians want.”

“She was protecting a German agent?” Danforth asked starkly.

“Yes,” Romanchuk said. “For example, she don't say it was Argentina passport he want. She just say passport. They look for this man, but she don't say where.” His grin was like the slavering of a dog. “I say nothing. Maybe he her lover or something.”

In years to come, Danforth would often try to re-create the storm of feeling that broke over him at that moment and that left him utterly desolate. It was as if he had seen the whirlwind from the inside, the terrible violence of its swirl.

Romanchuk laughed again. “She give Soviets false turn. They don't know that. She act different.”

“How?”

“Like she was with them,” Romanchuk said. “Like she was on
their side, a good comrade. Very friendly. Especially with the guy with the Order of Lenin. She even speak to him in Turkish.”

“Turkish?” Danforth asked.

“I hear, I know. I once work in Ankara,” Romanchuk explained.

“Did you understand what they were talking about?” danforth asked. “This woman and the Soviet offi cer?”

“Moscow,” Romanchuk answered. “She ask him about city. He say it is crowded.” He laughed, then he said, “But there's always room in Adult World.”

Adult World,
Danforth thought, a term he'd picked up from his many interrogations, the comical Russian nickname for Lubyanka.

“Adult World because there was a famous toy store across the square from Lubyanka Prison,” Danforth explained. “Children's World, it was called.”

“Funny,” I said grimly.

“Lubyanka was also said to be Moscow's tallest building,” Danforth added without the slightest glimmer of humor, “because from its basement windows you could see Siberia.”

“Even funnier,” I said darkly.

“It had once been the
gos strakhkassa,
” Danforth continued. “The government insurance offi ce.
Strakhkassa
means ‘insurance offi ce.' But
strakh
means ‘fear' in Russian, so later people called it
gos strakha,
the ‘government terror.'”

“But of course, this was something Romanchuk only claimed to have overheard,” I said.

“Which meant I had nothing to go forward on,” Danforth
said. “But I also had nothing to go back to, Paul.” He shrugged. “And so I went east.”

“East,” I said, as if I'd stumbled on a clue. “Where your story always seems to be tending. A story that is sort of a haunted-house tale now, it seems to me. With the protagonist searching from room to room, looking for that ghost.”

“Anna's ghost,” Danforth said in a tone that gave me the impression that I was being led down a road whose end Danforth knew well, being conducted step by step, carefully and thoughtfully, toward some fateful final moment.

“From room to room, yes,” I said, “but always to the east.”

“Always to the east,” Danforth repeated. “How right you are, Paul.” His smile was paper thin. “Where you've never been, I think you said. The Middle East, I mean.”

“No, never to the Middle East,” I said a little defensively. “But as I told you, I've been to Moscow.”

“Ah, yes, Moscow,” Danforth said, and on that word resumed his tale. “I arrived there —”

“But wait a moment,” I interrupted. “Romanchuk said that Anna was giving the Russians a wrong turn.”

“Yes.”

“So, you were now convinced that this woman was working for the Germans?”

“Completely convinced,” Danforth said. “And I was also convinced that this woman was Anna.”

“So why did you continue looking for her?” I asked. “She had probably betrayed you. Probably gotten Bannion killed. Maybe even Christophe. She was a —”

“She was a Nazi pretending to be a Jew,” Danforth interrupted.

“Then why look for her?” I asked.

“Well, wouldn't you look for the person who had used you
and betrayed you while all the time working for a cause that killed millions of innocent people?” Danforth asked.

It was at that moment I saw the deep hatred he had harbored for so long.

“You were going to kill her?” I asked, more astonished by this notion than by anything Danforth had revealed so far.

“Yes,” Danforth said brutally. “Faced with such a betrayal, nothing should stay your hand, don't you agree, Paul?”

“No, nothing,” I said, in an admiring tone I hadn't used with him before.

“But it was no longer love that drove me,” Danforth said. “It was hatred.”

He let me ponder this stark reversal for a time, then he added darkly, “And so to Moscow, because there seemed no place else to go.”

He arrived there in November of 1952, he told me, a thin, weary man who'd developed pneumonia on the way and had spent several days in a barely heated room in Kiev, then yet more time idly strolling about and working to improve his Russian before he reached Moscow.

Moscow was a long way from the rest of the world, not only in miles, but in its steadily deepening paranoia.

“Everyone was terrified of everyone else,” Danforth said. “Brock's contacts in Moscow were afraid that any help they extended to me would put them under suspicion. I knew that my time was running out, but I didn't care. In fact, I had lost the capacity to care, Paul. And there is no place darker than that place.” He paused a moment, then added, “So dark I was almost glad when they came for me.” Suddenly he smiled, as if greeting a brighter turn in his tale. “It was snowing that day.” He glanced toward the window, layers of white deepening on the streets and sidewalks. “Like now.”

The snow was falling heavily as Danforth made his way toward Gorky Street that morning, but nonetheless a long line of freezing Russians snaked from the entrance of the Lenin mausoleum, as it had every morning since his arrival in Moscow. It was as if a new list were published each evening telling you, you, and you that you must pay your respects to Comrade Lenin at an appointed moment on the following day, as if hundreds had been ordered to appear at the exact same time, guaranteeing an endlessly extended line and the continuation of the absurd pretense that Lenin and the frightful society he had helped create were still universally beloved.