Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Cook, Thomas H

  “He seems rather hapless,” I said. “Pitiful in a way. So naive that —”

  “No more than we were, really,” Danforth interrupted. “And Bavaud had a more passionate reason for attempting to kill Hitler than I did. Frankly, Paul, my whole purpose by that time had become simply to be near Anna.” He shrugged. “At one moment, under the sway of such feelings, a man buys flowers. At another moment, under the sway of those same feelings, he takes a step toward murder.”

  “So it was always her,” I said softly.

  “Always her,” Danforth said. “Yes.”

  Then his voice returned to its familiar narrative tone, driving slowly forward, carrying me along with it, so that, like them, I felt the train lurch forward then move smoothly out of Orléans station.

  Orléans, France, 1939

  The train lurched forward, and in that movement, Danforth felt that he was no longer a little spy but a man moving inexorably toward an earth-shattering act.

  Later, as his train drew ever closer to the German border, Danforth still more intensely considered the astonishing fact that he was now committed to a supremely perilous scheme. He knew this clearly, and from time to time, he reviewed the weight of the task before him, how surreal it was, along with its surpassing dangers. But for all that, he could imagine no alternative course, and years later, in the frozen wastes of his long pursuit, when he came to describe these events, he characterized his feelings as “intractable, irreducible, and adamantine.” Anna’s resolve had fortified his own. They were iron and steel, and he felt their strength conjoined. But there was a magic that went beyond the familiar notion of one person’s courage giving courage to another. He thought of it as alchemy, a mysterious mix ture made from peril and purpose and infused with a romance that every day grew more intense. For he was falling in love, and he knew it, and it seemed to him that to be in love and at war simultaneously was surely to live life at the top.

  At the border, the first German offi cial approached them, his uniform thoroughly Germanic in its starched and neatly pressed precision. He asked for their passports, opened each, then returned them.

  “What is your purpose in coming to Germany?” he asked Danforth.

  “We are here on business,” Danforth answered in his perfect German. “I am an importer.” He nodded toward Anna. “Miss Collier is my assistant.”

  “Herr Danforth, Fraulein Collier,” the offi cer said with a polite nod to each of them. “Willkommen nach Deutschland.”

  “Well,” Danforth said once the offi cer had departed, “that went well, don’t you think?”

  Anna returned her passport to her small leather purse. “The really dangerous border stations,” she said, “are the ones where the guards are wearing only parts of their uniforms.”

  It was a curious comment, one that suggested to Danforth that Anna had known such bleak and poorly supplied border crossings, sun-baked and remote, as he imagined them, with sweltering guardhouses of windowless concrete, the border itself merely a dusty line drawn between two vast but equally impoverished wastes.

  There were no other offi cial inquiries after that first polite offi cer, and they reached Berlin, and at last their hotel just off Unter den Linden, without further intrusions.

  That evening they had their first dinner in Berlin. They were both tired from the journey and so decided to dine in the hotel restaurant, a faded affair with too much drapery and crystal, little more than a sepia photograph from the belle époque.

  “I’ve been thinking about the letters you wrote the business-people here,” Anna said. “Perhaps we shouldn’t make contact with any of them, Tom.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they might get into trouble later for knowing us,” Anna answered.

  It was a realistic appraisal of Germany at that moment, of course, and so Danforth thought nothing of it at the time, though later he would wonder if she’d sought to isolate him, keep him within the tight circle that enclosed her plot. If so, he hadn’t sensed it then and had simply nodded and said, “Yes, I think you’re right.”

  Anna glanced from the restaurant toward the lobby of the hotel. Two men were standing at the desk, both in long coats. “We’ll need cyanide,” she said. “I asked Bannion to get it for us.”

  Danforth thought of the Connecticut warehouse, how close he had come to betraying her. “Yes,” he said. “We will. But maybe we won’t have to use it.”

  Which seemed entirely possible to Danforth, as they had previously decided on a bomb as the best method, a device Anna had been trained to make and use and hide, so it was feasible that they might both accomplish their mission and survive it.

  She drew in a long breath as she turned back to him. “You would miss it, wouldn’t you?”

  “Miss what?”

  “Life.”

  “Of course,” Danforth said with a sudden sense of alarm. “Wouldn’t you?”

  She nodded.

  Danforth thought of the odd question she had asked in what now seemed almost an earlier life.

  “Speaking of life, what’s the most beautiful place you’ve never seen?” he asked her.

  She smiled. “There are more of them than I can name, Tom,” she answered.

  “Try.”

  She did, and as she moved from place to place, it seemed to Danforth that she had never looked more eager to live. So much so that it would be many years before he wondered if even this — the hunger she showed for the world — had been but another of her many masquerades.

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  I knew Danforth had related this conversation for a reason, and that for some other reason, he did not elaborate upon it but instead eased himself back slightly, as if trying to get a clearer view of some far-distant scene. “There is a little town called Dubno, Paul.”

  This village had enjoyed a more or less quiet life, he told me, a small town that rested along the equally tranquil Ikva River. It was surrounded by a few rolling hills in that part of the Ukraine that was sometimes Poland, sometimes Russia, depending on the politics of the time. The Soviets had seized it in 1939 and then been driven eastward by a German onslaught that, as Danforth reminded me, had seemed near invincible at the time.

  “When the Germans took over Dubno,” Danforth went on, “about half its population was Jewish. There were fourteen synagogues in the town. Jewish doctors, lawyers, teachers.”

  His voice took on the quiet intensity that marked these asides, an old-man Scheherezade.

  “On October fifth, 1942, if a little girl on a certain street had looked out her bedroom window, she would have seen hundreds of people passing by as they headed out of town toward the old airfield an hour’s walk away,” Danforth continued. “They would have been dressed according to their class, some quite fine, some in hand-me-downs. Witnesses said they walked slowly and in great order, with only a few soldiers and dogs keeping watch.”

  To my surprise, I could hear the muffl ed steps of these hundreds; even without my knowing that the street they’d walked had been made of flagstone, I heard the rhythm of their feet over them, along with bits of indecipherable talk: the urging forward of the old, the calming down of the young.

  “There was a shallow chasm three kilometers out of town,” Danforth went on. “This is where they stopped and stripped. Hermann Graebe, a German construction engineer who witnessed the event, saw great mounds of shoes and underwear and clothing. He said they stood in family groups, that people too old or sick or disoriented to disrobe were stripped by their younger relatives. One man bent down to his little boy, pointed to the sky, and seemed to be telling him something very important. A young woman, completely naked, came very near to Graebe as she made her way toward the execution pit. She pointed to herself as she passed by. ‘Twenty-three,’ she said. Twenty-three.”

  I shook my head at this sad tale, though I had no idea why Danforth had now taken me so far east.

  “German stock,” Danforth said suddenly. “Suppose, Paul, that
I knew that twenty-three-year-old girl. Suppose it was . . . Anna. Suppose I also knew the man who carried out the massacre at Dubno. Suppose that after the war I tracked him down, only to find that he’d died years before.” He smiled. “But suppose he had a son, a daughter, grandchildren. Should I kill them all?”

  “Of course not,” I answered. “They had nothing to do with what happened at Dubno.”

  “But they’re all I have left, Paul,” Danforth said. “They’re all I have left to get even with the man who killed the woman I loved.”

  “Perhaps so, but it would be unreasonable to kill these other people,” I said.

  “You’re right, it would be quite unreasonable,” Danforth agreed. “But vengeance is a passion of the heart, isn’t it? And as Pascal said, the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.” Before I could answer, he added, “And in that article you wrote, didn’t you say that in the current situation, our acts should flow from passion?”

  “Yes,” I said softly.

  Danforth’s eyes appeared to harden. “I agree,” he said.

  For a moment, he peered at me silently. Then, like a driver abruptly realizing he’d missed a turn, he swung back to his earlier narrative.

  “When I heard about Dubno, heard that story of the girl pointing at herself, crying out her age as she was heading toward her death, it reminded me of Anna,” Danforth said. “It reminded me of the way she was in the hotel that night in Berlin, talking about Venice or Vienna or some other place she one day hoped to see. She seemed like that girl in Dubno. Too young to die.”

  The stricken look on Danforth’s face at that moment warned me away from asking about Anna directly. And so I said, “Where did you hear about Dubno?”

  “I heard about it when Hermann Graebe testified at the trials.”

  “The trials?”

  “Nuremberg,” Danforth said. “When I was working at the war crimes trials. Graebe’s testimony was particularly interesting to me because it was at Dubno that a man with the daunting name of Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche-Streithorst changed. He was a German soldier who saw the massacre at Dubno, and because of it, he decided to kill Hitler.”

  “So your interest is in his motivation?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Danforth answered. “I studied them all. Every attempt on Hitler’s life.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to know the variety of motivations,” Danforth said. “In discovering them, I thought I might also discover Anna’s.”

  “But why not just accept that she was a Jew, and Hitler was persecuting Jews?” I said.

  “That motivation, or a thousand other ones, Paul,” Danforth said. “It would have been easy if she had been easy.” His gaze became piercing. “It’s what you don’t know that destroys you.” He drew in a sharp breath. “And believe me,” he added, “I did not know Anna Klein.” Danforth seemed almost to dissolve into this fog of unknowing, then he gathered himself once again. “But where were we, Paul?” he asked. “Yes. Berlin. That old hotel. So long in the tooth. I told her it reminded me of an old woman who’d once been beautiful.”

  Berlin, Germany, 1939

  Anna smiled. “Istanbul is like that,” she said. “Crumbling palaces along the Bosporus. My father called it an ‘aged courtesan.’”

  It surprised Danforth that she mentioned her father, since she had spoken so rarely of her past, and many years later, he would wonder if this had been a line skillfully cast out, spare yet bearing just the sort of bait she knew would lure him deeper into the current, with its hint of the foreign, the exotic. She revealed herself in little flashes of her past in the way some lady of a royal court might allow a brief glimpse of her ankle.

  “He seems to have been quite the traveler, your father,” Danforth said.

  “He was, yes,” Anna said with so much aridness that she gave off the sense of a field scattered with his dust. “I loved him very much.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died.”

  With that she took up the menu and appeared, in that gesture, to secrete herself behind it. “I’m talking too much about myself,” she said.

  “Not at all,” Danforth told her. “As a matter of fact, you’d think you were some kind of criminal, the way I have to pry things out of you.” He gave her a knowing look. “Or do you just want to seem mysterious?”

  She lowered the menu, and he saw that she had taken him seriously. “It’s not that at all. It’s just that I think we should stay apart, Tom. Because of what we’re doing.”

  “I understand,” Danforth told her.

  And he did understand her point, that given the nature of their circumstances, they should remain aloof from each other. And yet, just at that moment, he felt a terrible urge to touch her, one more powerful than at any time before, and he knew that the more he suppressed that urge, the more it would assert itself.

  He could say none of this, of course, and so he quickly changed the subject.

  “So,” he said as he took up the menu. “What shall we have?”

  They ordered, ate, finished with tea, then strolled out of the hotel, down the street, and into a small square. It was a warm summer night, and the lights from nearby biergartens flickered all around them. The crowds were large, almost teeming, and nothing in their movements seemed controlled by anything more than the traffi c signals.

  They found a bench and sat down together, silent still, watching the passing parade. In such a pose they might have looked like a pair of young lovers, he in pursuit, she coming near to giv ing in to his advances, and had their purpose not been so grave, Danforth thought, he might have reached out to her as he so much wanted to do.

  It was a surge of desire she clearly sensed.

  “We should start to get the materials,” she said starkly, a line that returned him to the cold matter at hand.

  She meant the ones for the bomb, of course, though they had never discussed where it would be planted.

  “We’ll also need to plan a way to get out of Germany once we know it went off,” Danforth told her.

  “But there’s only one way to know,” Anna said. “To be there when it does. To be one of those women who rush up to him with flowers in their hands.”

  By the methodical and unyielding way she said it, Danforth knew that such had always been her plan, that she would conceal the bomb beneath her coat or behind a great spray of flowers, and by that means die with the man she murdered, join with him in the same red blast.

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  “So she was to be a suicide bomber,” I said, almost as stunned as Danforth had described himself on the heels of this revelation.

  “Yes,” Danforth said.

  “But why not plant the bomb,” I asked, “in a piece of coal, or something like it, the way LaRoche suggested?”

  “For the very reason Anna gave me,” Danforth answered. “Because you can’t be sure it will go offat the right moment or if the target will be in place when it does go off.” He shrugged. “And she was right, Paul. We know now that there were at least forty-two plots to kill Adolf Hitler. Von Stauffenberg’s plot is the most famous, of course, because it came closest to actual success. But by the time Count von Stauffenberg planted his little briefcase a few feet from Hitler, his target had already wreaked havoc on Europe, ravaged whole countries, exterminated millions. Even if von Stauffenberg’s attempt had succeeded, it would have been too late to save anything but a small, shredded bit of German pride. The war was already coming to a close, with Germany in certain defeat, and so to the people who’d already gone up the chimney, it would have meant nothing. To the people rotting in death pits or buried in the rubble of countless bombed-out towns and villages, it would have meant nothing. Hitler had already done his worst.” He offered a small shrug. “But Paul, imagine what would have happened if Johann Georg Elser’s bomb had succeeded.”

  “It might have changed history,” I said.

  “Indeed it might have,” Danfor
th agreed, then continued. “Elser was a cabinetmaker who’d joined the Red Front Fighters’ Organization,” he said. “Is that name familiar to you, Paul?”

  The tone of the question struck me as almost probing, as if Danforth actually thought I might have heard of such an organization.

  “No,” I answered. “I’m not a student of modern German history.”

  “Of course not,” Danforth said, as if reminding himself of that fact. “Well, anyway, Elser decided on a bomb and built one. Then the question was how to get the bomb close enough to Hitler. He chose the beer hall where Hitler always spoke during Putsch celebration in Munich. And so he went there, drank, stayed late, and as closing time neared, he hid in a closet. After everyone left the hall, he went to work digging into one of the building’s supporting columns. He dug all night, then repaired the front of the column, hid himself again, and left the beer hall when it opened the next day. He repeated this process every night for more than a month until he’d made a place for the bomb. He set it to go off at precisely nine twenty on the evening of Wednesday, November eighth, 1939.” He shrugged. “But Hitler wanted to be back in Berlin that night. He couldn’t fly there because a dense fog had grounded his airplane, so he made his speech earlier than planned and then took a train back. He left at eight ten, and so he was nowhere near the beer hall when Elser’s bomb went off.”

  The explosion had gone off right on time, however, Danforth said. It had been quite powerful. In fact, it had killed eight people and wounded sixty-five. As it turned out, one of the wounded was none other than Eva Braun’s father.

  “As for Elser, he was arrested and later executed at Dachau, on April sixth, 1945, just two weeks before the end of the war. By then he’d seen all that might have been prevented if the fog had not crowded in on Munich on that November night.”