Quest for Anna Klein, The (40 page)

“¿Vive usted solo ahora?”
Danforth asked cautiously, needing to make sure that the old man lived alone.

“Sí,”
the old man said.
“Soy soltero.”

So he lived alone, Danforth thought, with a daughter far away.

Perfect.

Danforth noticed a large drinking mug, topped with a pewter flask. “Th at mug with the milkmaid,” he said in English. “I saw one like it in Germany.”

“Germany, yes,” the old man said with a smooth shift to English. “I was there during the war.”

“I was there briefly,” Danforth said. “In Berlin. Near the Landwehr Canal.”

“Ah, yes,” the old man said. “A sad place. They tossed the body of Rosa Luxemburg into those waters.”

And Danforth instantly recalled that moment years before when they'd all been strolling along the Spree: how Bannion had stopped and looked out toward a particular bridge, the strange combination of rage and sorrow that had swept into his face.

“Why did you betray us, Ted?”

The old man blinked slowly, as if in all the years of his concealment he'd known that the hinge on traitor's gate would one
day sound. Now, with its small creak, he would realize, as Dan-forth thought Bannion surely did at that moment, that whether he would live or die had been decided long ago.

“Tom,” Bannion whispered.

Danforth wondered why he did not simply draw the pistol and do what he had come to do. What was the point of any further conversation, after all? What would he be looking for? He could find no answers to these questions, and as if to provide one, he felt his hand reach inside his coat, hold a moment, then curl around the handle of the pistol.

“You were a German agent all along,” Danforth said. “You never meant to carry out the plot.”

Bannion shifted in his chair, a jagged, achy movement Dan-forth recognized as the way he himself now moved, along with most men of a certain age.

“I was never a German agent,” Bannion said. “And I would have killed Hitler without a blink. I would have done everything I said I would do. It was Anna's idea to kill him, remember? It was a good one, and it came from her sense of purpose, which I admired.”

There was a curious confidence in him now, Danforth observed, as if his old skills were returning to him, the dead powers of his long deceit lifting from their graves, walking the earth.

“I was never a German agent,” he declared again.

“Soviet then?” Danforth asked.

“Of course, Tom,” he said. “And I was loyal to the end. Which is why they've always protected me.” He stopped as if in sudden recognition. “Until now, that is.” He seemed to understand that history had turned against him. “When a great house falls, only the rats get out alive. Which one came to you, Tom?”

“It was I who came to him,” Danforth said. “Because I never stopped looking for Anna.”

Bannion's smile bore something between admiration and contempt;
he seemed in awe that Danforth had so relentlessly responded to so empty a call.

“With you, it was always her, Tom,” he said. “But with me, it was always something greater.”

Then he told his tale.

Bannion parted the curtains at his window and peered down at the street. It was a gesture that had long served to calm him, a simple gazing down onto the life below. He remembered the time when he'd walked the girders above Broadway, always with men who'd walked them far longer and with more grace, and how he'd felt lifted by their simple decency, the way they laughed and told stories, the true salt of the earth. It was in these men he'd first glimpsed the world his comrades in the east were already making and that he hoped to help them create. He knew that many Americans had already made the journey to Russia, were already working there, building the new world. He'd read about them in
New Masses
and heard their praises sung by countless street- corner speakers. At some point, he pledged a new allegiance, and he was now the secret sharer of their mission. He knew he would not see the castle finished, but he also knew that in what he had set himself to do, he would add to its measure. That Anna and Danforth and Clayton knew nothing of this continued connection, believing that he'd broken it and still lived in the bitterness of that break, seemed to him only a small deceit. It had been her idea, after all, this murder. He had only relayed her plan to his superiors and gained their approval to help her carry it out.

He jumped at the rap at his door, giving in to the fear that gripped him each time a stranger arrived or drew alongside him as he walked the street. It was always impossible to tell if a plot
had been discovered until it was too late to do anything about it, and now that he was approaching what would no doubt be the last act of his life, he felt all the more fearful that something would stand in his way.

The second rap at the door was more insistent, but this time he gave no outward sign of fear.

The pistol was in his jacket, but there'd be no use in reaching for it. If the men on the other side of the door had come to arrest him, then arrest him they would. He had long ago cast aside the dramatics of self-defense, the idea of shooting his way out of such a spot. Such notions were for amateurs and people whose only concept of intrigue came from the movies.

And so he merely grabbed his jacket, hung it in the closet, then with studied calm opened the door.

The face that greeted him was familiar, almost fatherly, the agent who had handled him during all his Party life.

“There has been a change in plan,” the man said in German.

“It's very late for that,” Bannion answered in a German no less precise.

“There has been a change,” the man said. “There is to be no attempt.”

“No attempt?” Bannion asked unbelievingly.

He had little doubt that this decision had been made in Moscow and that the leaders in charge there knew what they were doing. He was but a small cog in that great machine, and he would move as those who drove the gears demanded.

“All right,” he said, and thought this was the end of it. “But how do I explain this change to the others?”

“There is no need to explain it,” the man said. “Arrests will be made.”

“For what?” Bannion asked.

“They are assassins.”

Bannion was not sure he had heard correctly. “But if there
is to be no assassination, then why should the others be arrested?”

“To expose their plot,” the man answered. “We will alert the Germans that we have a source inside an American plot. You are that source, of course, so you will not be harmed.”

“But why tell the Germans anything?” Bannion asked.

“That is not for us to ask,” the man said. “It has been decided that the woman will be needed.”

“Only the woman?” Bannion asked.

“Yes,” the man said. “She will be . . . interrogated until she exposes this American plot.” He laughed. “Then we will ask for her. They will turn her over because they don't want the world to know that their leader is constantly a target. It will all be done secretly, and at some point after she has broken, she will be released.” He took a small envelope from his jacket pocket. “One is for you. The other is for the woman. Neither is real.”

Bannion said nothing, which clearly alarmed the agent.

“It is important that the Germans trust us,” the man said emphatically. “What better way for us to prove ourselves to them than by exposing a silly group of American adventurers?”

Bannion would all his life recall what happened next, the quiet argument the Soviet agent made, how much depended upon this plot, the dark consequences that would surely flow should it not be carried out. What was one man or one woman in the long view of history? No individual could be allowed to stand in the way of so important a mission. Later he would remember how silently he had listened to all this, and how easily he had been persuaded by it.

“All right,” he said at last, and with those words accepted his role in this far different plot. He listened as the rest of it was revealed: Danforth was to be sent to Hamburg and from there to London, where he would serve as a witness to the failure of the plot. Bannion was to be “arrested,” in order to shield him from
later suspicion of having betrayed the plot. He was to fake his own suicide and then be carted away; later he'd be released into Soviet hands.

“So only . . . Anna,” he said.

The man's smile was clearly meant to ease Bannion's lingering concerns.

“Don't look so sad,” he said. “She is just a little spy.”

With that, he left, and for a long time afterward, Bannion sat by the window and thought of Anna. He saw the little girl with her many languages, then the young woman she'd become, and in seeing both, he reviewed the dark past of which he was only dimly aware even as he envisioned the yet darker future that awaited her.

“I later learned that it was the Russo-German pact they were determined to protect,” Bannion said. “Moscow called off several similar plots at the same time because they needed Hitler to trust them.” He shrugged. “After that, they became great allies, Berlin and Moscow, and when that happened, I finally lost hope in Russia.”

But before that, he had pretended to revile a god he continued to revere, Danforth thought.

“You fed Anna to the wolves,” Danforth said icily. “There was never a Rache. It was always you.”

“It's an old game,” Bannion said. “Get the other side to pursue a man who doesn't actually exist. And so we made him up. And made everyone believe he existed. The Russians pretended to distrust him, which made him that much more real. It was quite an effective ruse. It fooled Clayton, and it fooled you.”

“It fooled Anna too,” Danforth said. “She spent her life protecting
this . . . phantom.” He pulled out the pistol and felt his finger draw down upon the trigger. “Because she thought she was protecting you.”

Bannion squinted at the pistol, then looked at Danforth. “Can you kill a man for believing in something that turned out to be terrible?”

“Yes, I can,” Danforth said.

“How?” Bannion demanded. “Answer that one question, Tom. How can you kill someone for being fooled into following a false god and doing terrible things in the service of it? How can you condemn a man for that?”

Danforth drew back the hammer on the pistol and answered Bannion with the only genuine truth his life had revealed. “I can, yes,” he said, “because in the end, it is a moral responsibility to be wise.”

The feeling was exactly as the cliché described it, I realized: a stopping of the heart.

“You shot him?” I murmured.

“No,” Danforth answered. “But I would have, Paul, if that grandson of his hadn't appeared.” His look had all the force of a barrel pointed at my head. “He came running through the front door.”

I heard one of my earliest questions:
Innocence, that's a hard thing to nail down, don't you think?
Then Danforth's reply:
We always know who the innocent are.
I glanced at the pistol that rested in his lap and knew that the question had never been whether I would live or die, for that had been decided long ago.

“You do remember, don't you?” Danforth asked.

It had been a hot summer day, I recalled. I'd been tired of the heat, eager to throw myself beneath the fan that turned so languidly in my grandfather's house. My mother had stopped a block behind to chat with a neighbor, certain that I was safe once I'd gone through my grandfather's gate.

“That was you?” I asked, now quite vividly remembering the old man I'd found sitting opposite my grandfather, the way he'd turned and looked at me brokenly, like a man who'd just been told that the last small thing he'd hoped for never would be his. “You just got up and left,” I said.

Danforth's hand crawled over to the pistol. “You were just a little boy, Paul,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed softly.

“A child,” Danforth said. He picked up the pistol with a hand that had begun to tremble and returned it to the drawer. “And so you were completely innocent.”

“I don't have to believe that what you say is true,” I said, with a bit of feigned bravado that I suddenly realized I must have gotten from my grandfather.

“That's true, you don't,” Danforth said. He glanced at the clock to his right. “You only have to believe that it might be true.” He watched me a moment, then added, “We know what to do with evil, Paul. It's innocence that perplexes us.” His smile was a reed struggling to hold its own against a stormy sea. “And so I thought it was over at last,” he whispered, and with those words stepped back into the past. “But I was wrong.”

He had retired from teaching his classes not long after returning from Buenos Aires, he said, but had continued to tutor on the side in order to afford the few luxuries he enjoyed, mainly books and an occasional visit to the theater, what he rightly called “the semiretirement of a simple life.” Several of these students were part of the influx of Russians to New York City, a very ambitious group, according to Danforth, hell-bent
on learning English. One of them had been a young woman from Vladivostok who wore thick glasses and spoke very rapidly and who greatly enjoyed lambasting the old Communist regime as the crooks and thugs they were. These had been replaced by an equally repellent cadre of Party hacks, she said, men who enjoyed the fruits of the old system's vast corruption even as Russia attempted to reform itself. Still, there were good changes, she'd told Danforth, lots of entrepreneurs creating lots of wealth. In fact, she said, quite a few entirely new professions had sprouted from the soil of Communism's rot. She listed them in Russian and asked Danforth to give her the words for them in English.