Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Cook, Thomas H

  Now came the construction of the Palace of the Soviets. It was to be over four hundred meters high, weigh 1.5 million tons, and enclose an area greater than the six largest skyscrapers currently towering above the streets of New York. Lenin’s gigantic statue was to crown this spectacular edifice. His index finger alone would stretch to six meters.

  “But this statue never rose, nor the building to support it,” Danforth continued. “Everything sank into a morass of bad planning. The foundation was dug, but then the rains came, and then the snow, and in the spring, rivers of melting ice, and so the vast foundation filled with water. The water became infested with frogs and choked with duckweed, and worst of all, the whole disaster was now quite visible because the huge wooden fence that had concealed the earlier destruction had been dismantled by Muscovites desperate for firewood.”

  “My God,” I said. “What a mess.”

  “The years passed,” Danforth said. “Children fished in the depths of the old foundation. Stalin died. Khrushchev replaced him, and one day he looked out over this huge stinking lake of stagnant water and decided, Well, maybe a swimming pool.”

  With that he laughed softly, but I didn’t.

  “What, Paul, you find nothing funny in this tale?” Danforth asked pointedly.

  “No,” I said. “No, it seems very sad to me, that people can become so deluded, destroy so wantonly out of some crazy ideology.”

  “It rather makes you suspect that true belief is always false,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yes, I think that’s true.”

  The expression on Danforth’s face relaxed slightly, as if he’d been given a signal that it was safe to go on. “Then you are ready to hear more of my story,” he said.

  “Good,” I said with an enthusiasm that surprised me. “Well, in our last episode, Anna was in league . . .”

  Danforth lifted his hand in a cautionary gesture. “Anna was in league, yes.” His smile was thoroughly enigmatic. “But with whom?”

  Orléans, France, 1939

  Danforth would relive the sight of that morning on many occasions over the next sixty years. He would sometimes remember that they stood very near each other, Bannion’s entire profile visible but Anna’s face obscured by the slender trunk of the sapling in the foreground.

  At other times, however, he’d remember them standing somewhat farther apart, Bannion with a scrap of paper in his hand, one he quickly — rather too quickly? — sank into the pocket of his jacket as Danforth approached. In this remembrance, Anna reaches for the paper and then hastily — too hastily? — draws back her hand so that it is covered by the folds of her long, black skirt.

  But in every recollection of this moment, the two of them, Bannion and Anna, would turn toward him smoothly and in unison, both with oddly drawn faces whose expressions would seem to him, in countless grave reenactments, like those of lovers plotting murder.

  “Hello, Tom,” Bannion said.

  He had been in England when he’d received their message of Christophe’s murder, Bannion told him, and of their subsequent flight to Orléans. Clayton had dispatched him immediately with orders to find out if Christophe’s death had entirely compromised the Project and, if it had, what steps should be taken.

  “We could certainly attempt to carry on with our earlier plans,” Bannion added. “But Anna tells me that you two have been thinking of something much more . . . grand.”

  “Yes,” Danforth said.

  “I’m not sure Clayton would approve this new idea,” Bannion said.

  “Perhaps it’s not up to Clayton,” Danforth said.

  “A rogue operation?” Bannion asked. “I wouldn’t try it if I were you.”

  Cautioning though Bannion’s remark was, he seemed to understand that a great plot was like a huge stone: once in motion, it took on a direction and velocity of its own, the plotters forever running in front of it while it closed in on them from behind, urging them forward and forward until, at a certain point, they feared their own failure to act more than they feared the consequences of their action.

  “But if Clayton goes along,” Bannion added, “then we can begin to make our plans.”

  With that one remark, his use of we and our, it seemed to Danforth that Bannion had insinuated himself into what had been a league of two. It was as if he had barged into an intimate conversation and then proceeded to dominate it.

  “This will have to be a very tight circle,” Bannion said. He looked at Anna. “But yes, it is worth doing, I think. And I can probably persuade Clayton to approve it.”

  So it was really going to happen, Danforth thought; they were going to do it. Up to that moment, the actual attempt had seemed distant in the way that all peril seems distant until it is upon you. But now he saw that the spiral was tightening, that it was very, very serious, the game no longer a game, and he was reminded of a line from Bion he’d once had to memorize in the original Greek: Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs die in earnest.

  He said none of this as they walked to the hotel, where only days before he’d sat at the little desk in his room and written several letters to business associates in Berlin. He was seeking African antiquities he’d told them, particularly items acquired from Germany’s former colonies in east and southwest Africa. He’d made it a point to express his displeasure with Germany’s loss of these colonies, along with “other confiscations of Versailles.” At the time, this had seemed very far from the carrying out of an assassination, though it had no doubt moved the plot along. Now the letters seemed little more than props in a high-school play.

  At the hotel, Bannion shook their hands, then said, “I’ll be back after I’ve talked to Clayton. If he goes along with this, I can get us some very useful information.”

  With that, he left them so quickly he seemed hardly to have been there at all.

  Danforth glanced toward the small outdoor café next to the hotel. “Would you like some tea?”

  “Yes,” Anna answered.

  Once seated, she drew the scarf from her head and let her hair fall wildly, now reaching all the way to her shoulders, a gesture that seemed intimate and that Danforth would later believe she had made on purpose, creating a mood she then used — was it cunningly? — to reveal more of herself to him.

  “Did Mr. LaRoche ever mention Baku?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Danforth said. “He talked about how beautiful it had once been and about what the Bolsheviks did to it.”

  “My father once took me there,” Anna said. She smiled. “I was very young at the time, but Baku is a place that leaves lifelong impressions. I remember roasted cumin seeds and the sacks of spices, turmeric, how yellow it was in that sun.” The smile dissolved. “And the caravans,” she added. “Some had come all the way across the Caucasus Mountains. The animals looked so tired. I remember feeling very sorry for them.”

  “How long were you in Baku?” Danforth asked.

  “Only a day or so,” Anna answered. “Then we returned to Erzinghan.”

  The name itself returned Danforth to one of the darkest of his father’s tales. “Erzinghan? In Turkey?” Danforth asked.

  “I was born there,” Anna said.

  Danforth felt the horror fall over him. “Erzinghan,” he said softly.

  She noticed the glimmer in Danforth’s eyes. “You know about it then?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Danforth said. “One of our buyers had been there. He said that near Erzinghan, at a bend in the Euphrates, the river had become so clogged with the dead, it briefly changed its course.”

  “Those were terrible times,” Anna said. She thought a moment, and while she thought, something in her eyes deepened and darkened, as if she were moving backward into a dimmer light. “I’ve been thinking about them a lot in the last few days.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there was a man in our region,” she answered. “His name was Demir. He was a writer and a scholar, but he had ter rible things in his mind and he did terrible th
ings because of it, and no one ever stopped him.” She paused and let her gaze deepen further. “What I mean is that no one killed Kulli Demir. That’s the point I’m making, Tom. There must have been lots of people who had the chance, but no one did. And so other men saw that Demir could do whatever he pleased and get away with it. Then they started to do the same things he did. They rounded up the men and killed them, and when the men were gone, they did whatever they wanted to the women and the girls. And the ones they didn’t kill, they drove into Syria. Most of them died on the way, but a few made it to Aleppo.”

  Danforth offered no response to this, but years later, still seeking the truth through the bramble left behind, he would come upon this passage in the memoir of an American who’d found himself in Turkey at the time of Anna’s early girlhood:

  The pattern was usually the same, according to reports, and it was corroborated by the one incident I witnessed myself. The local authorities would notify the Kurdish tribes and Turkish peasants that a caravan was on the way. The caravan was women and children, and they would be set upon by these Kurds and Turks and Chetes, along with various bands of thugs and criminals. These women and girls had no defense against these men because those who would have defended them, their fathers and husbands and brothers, had already been killed, and so they could be attacked without fear of reprisal. Many times these women did not survive the tortures and rapes that were inflicted upon them. They were “guarded” by the gendarmes, but these men not only did nothing to protect the women and girls, they sometimes joined the others in tormenting them. They seemed to hate the ones who survived, and when it was time to move on, they rained blows upon them with whips and truncheons, stabbed at them with bayonets, deprived them of food, and made no attempt to return the clothing, mostly rags, that had been ripped off their bodies, so that when the caravan I personally witnessed finally reached Syria, the women were starved and naked, and many were crazed and raving. I saw a group of these poor female skeletons stagger across the border one afternoon and I thought that they could not have come from any place on earth and must have somehow dragged themselves out of hell. The last of them, stumbling behind, were the most lost of the lost, very young girls, from twelve to as young as three, bereft of both mothers and fathers, with no one to help them even among their own people. Dirty, naked, unimaginably alone at the far end of the caravan, these little girls made their way into the desert wastes of Aleppo.

  Reading that passage years later as he sat in the stillness of the New York Public Library, Danforth would wonder, darkly and incessantly, if one of those lost little girls had been Anna Klein.

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  “Because she’d had this haunted look when she spoke of what she’d seen in Turkey, you see,” Danforth said. “I had seen that look a few times before that afternoon, but her personal history had never seemed so tragic as it did at that moment, which made me come to believe that she herself had suffered the outrages she described.”

  “This is the Armenian genocide, correct?” I asked.

  Danforth nodded. “Have you read much about it, Paul?”

  “A little,” I answered. “But I didn’t know Jews were massacred as well.”

  Danforth clearly appreciated my response. “Very good, Paul,” he said. “That would be the question, wouldn’t it?”

  “Question?”

  “If you ever came to doubt any part of Anna’s story,” Danforth explained in a coolly inquisitorial tone. “You’d have to ask yourself whether a young Jewish girl might have been rounded up and marched into Syria along with the Armenians.” He took a slow sip from his glass. “Well, I looked into this very question, and I found that as a matter of fact, by the time of the Armenian genocide, Jews had lived in what later became the Armenian provinces of Turkey for thousands of years. They had probably first come in flight, some from Assyria, others from Samaria, still others from God knows where.” Then, quite abruptly, he blinked a thousand years of Diaspora from his eyes and was miraculously returned to modern times. “Anna saw the assassination of the king of Yugoslavia, you know.”

  Danforth saw my surprise at this fact and laughed.

  “Not with her own eyes, of course,” he said. “But in the news-reels. He was killed in Marseille in 1934. The first assassination to be recorded on film. She once mentioned how easy it looked.” He shrugged. “Maurice Bavaud probably saw that newsreel too.”

  “Maurice Bavaud?”

  “In pictures, he never had the smile of an assassin,” Danforth said. “In fact, he didn’t seem to know how to smile. Or maybe it was that he simply couldn’t bring himself to smile in a world as chaotic as Europe was in 1938.”

  This was one of Danforth’s divergences, and earlier I would have been eager to get past it, but by then I’d come to realize that his asides were always closely related to his tale, and so I simply heard him out.

  Bavaud was a devout Catholic, Danforth told me, a young man who had been a seminarian at Saint-Brieuc in Brittany when he was seized by the insane notion that in order for Christianity to be saved, the Romanovs had to be returned to power in Russia. He was equally convinced that killing Adolf Hitler would set the wheels in motion.

  In the fall of 1938, he’d traveled first to Baden-Baden and then on to Basel, where he bought a Schmeisser 6.5-millimeter semi-automatic pistol, Danforth told me.

  It struck me that Danforth had studied Bavaud’s plot to kill Hitler in great detail, as if he’d been in search of some small element that might explain how his own had failed.

  “After Basel, Bavaud boarded another train, this time heading for Berlin,” he continued.

  He had planned — if his movements and intentions could be called a plan at all — simply to shoot Hitler in his capital, but he’d later decided to do it in Munich during the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch.

  “The celebration always included a march,” Danforth said.

  “With Hitler himself at the head of the parade.”

  And so once in Munich, Bavaud obtained a complimentary ticket to the stand in front of the Holy Ghost Church, at the western end of Talstrasse, a site that seemed quite well situated to watch the march as it turned into Marienplatz, a turn, Bavaud correctly reasoned, that would slow things down considerably because everyone would have to squeeze through the small archway that led to the square.

  “But there was plenty of time before the march,” Danforth continued. “And at that point it seemed to occur to Bavaud that in view of what he intended to do, a little target practice might be in order.”

  A few days later, Bavaud bought some extra ammunition and rented a boat on Lake Ammer, not far outside of Munich. He rowed out onto the water and practiced shooting at little paper targets he launched from his boat. Later, he practiced again, this time aiming at trees in the forest.

  “Like Anna at Winterset,” I blurted, as if I’d discovered the reason for this divergence, the thing that connected it, however tangentially, to his tale.

  “Yes,” Danforth answered crisply, then continued.

  When he returned to Munich, Bavaud obtained a detailed map of the route of the march, then walked its entire length in order to ascertain whether there was any better vantage point than the one he had. He found none better, and no doubt thought that here was the hand of God assisting him. What else could explain his seat near the archway of Marienplatz, a perfect bottleneck?

  “And so at last the moment had come,” Danforth said. “Bavaud took his place on the reviewing stand, and shortly after that, the man he’d come to kill took his place in the line of the march.”

  I imagined the head of this particular snake as he proceeded in the march, lifting his arm in return salute to the crowd, but curiously indifferent to their adoration, as if determined not to let even the people’s idolatry sway him from his purpose.

  “Bavaud finally caught sight of him,” Danforth said. “Can you imagine what that must have been like, watching the target move toward you, ob
livious to the danger, distant at first, but coming nearer and nearer? And you have this pistol in your belt and your hand crawls toward it, and as you do that, a kind of tunnel vision sets in, so that everything on the periphery of the target blurs and all the cheering and horns and drums go silent, and there is just you and the one you’ve come to kill.”

  At that moment in his narrative, I believed that Danforth was describing himself, rather than Bavaud, and I felt certain that at some point he had aimed a pistol at close range and felt his finger pull back on the trigger.

  “But just as the target is in range,” he continued, “just as you grip the handle of the pistol and ease it from your belt — just at that moment, with the man himself so close you can almost feel his breath on your face — at just that moment, Paul, the crowd shifts and surges and a hundred arms are raised, and in that press and tangle, your target vanishes from sight, and by the time you see him clearly again, he is passing beneath the little arch and into the square . . . and into his future, and the world’s.”

  “Is that what happened?” I asked. “To Bavaud?”

  “Yes,” Danforth answered.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he said so,” Danforth replied.

  “So he was caught?”

  “Yes, but not before returning to Bertesgarten, shooting at more trees — without a silencer, I might add — and generally stalking around town. He even once asked a policeman how he might get closer to Hitler.”

  “And no one noticed him?” I asked, astonished.

  “No one,” Danforth said with a shrug. “Security is a human thing, Paul, carried out by humans, and with all the human imperfections.”

  “Did he ever get close to Hitler again?”

  Danforth shook his head. “And so he started back. Unfortunately, he had run out of money, and so he found it necessary to stow away on a train. He was discovered and questioned. During the course of this, the authorities found his notebook. He’d taken the trouble to record his intention to kill Hitler in that notebook. They found the little Schmeisser six-point-five too. Of course he was arrested. After that, the usual stages. Interrogation. Torture. Execution. In Bavaud’s case, by guillotine in Plötzensee Prison.”