The Quest for Anna Klein

by Thomas H. Cook

  “I’m so very sorry, Tom,” Clayton said.

  Danforth found that beyond the three words he had already said, he could add only: “Are you sure?”

  Clayton nodded. “According to my sources, she never betrayed you or Bannion or anything about the Project,” he added by way of consolation. “She was a heroic woman.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “It was Rache who betrayed us.”

  Rache, Danforth thought. In German it meant “vengeance,” and at that moment the need for vengeance seemed to him the only thing he had left.

  For a time, Clayton said nothing, as if warned from speaking any further word by the look on Danforth’s face.

  “You have to go on, Tom,” he said finally. “You have to go back to New York, put Anna’s death behind you.”

  Which was the best advice he could have gotten, and which Danforth had briefly hoped to follow, but never could.

  ~ * ~

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  “Never could,” Danforth said now.

  Though he had tried, as he went on to tell me. He returned to New York and resumed his command of Danforth Imports. In that role, he immersed himself, working long hours, then trudging home to his bed. He tried to find pleasure in the old pleasures, in reading and going to plays. He went out with this woman and that one, but with each failed attempt to rekindle that part of his life, he felt himself fall farther and farther from any capacity to do so. In the middle of a luxurious dinner, he would find himself again at the Old Town Bar, fixed upon his ghostly memory of Anna. While Amy or Sandy or Marian prattled on about this or that, he would hear her whispered voice: What is the most beautiful thing you never saw? And with that question, he would think of all the many places he had dreamed of seeing with her and that he now no longer wished to see because he was without her.

  “It was like Eve’s love for Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost,” Danforth said. “That simple, gorgeous line of Eve’s: ‘with him all deaths / I could endure; without him live no life.’”

  As the months passed, he worked to ease the ceaseless ache of Anna’s loss. But nothing soothed him or dulled the vividness of his incessant memories of her. At night he would sometimes awaken in the midst of reaching for her, and when he found only emptiness, he would lie on his back and stare at the ceiling and accept the hard fact that nothing could fill this void.

  “It was romantic anguish,” Danforth said. He looked as if that very agony had been reignited. “It was passion without an object. I was like a starving man whom no food could satisfy.”

  “But you can’t love a dead woman forever, can you?” I asked.

  The question appeared to move Danforth, and he immediately turned from it and retreated into his old redoubt of academic discussion.

  “The guillotine is an interesting mechanism, Paul,” he said. “It’s supposed to be very fast and entirely painless.” He glanced toward the window, where the snow was still falling steadily, though it had begun to lighten. “But then there’s the problem of Henri Languille.”

  This was clearly a signal that I should make further inquiry, and so I did.

  “Henri Languille?” I asked.

  “A condemned prisoner,” Danforth said. “He was executed by guillotine in 1905. His death was meticulously recorded by a certain Dr. Beaurieux.”

  “I see.”

  “Dr. Beaurieux’s observations called the guillotine’s efficacy into serious question,” Danforth continued, now completely in that lecturing tone he used to escape, however briefly, from the more emotional parts of his tale. “Of course, there’d been other observers before Beaurieux. For example, when Charlotte Corday was beheaded, someone grabbed her severed head out of the basket and slapped her face. The people who saw this later said that Charlotte had glared at her assailant with what they described as unequivocal indignation.’”

  I shivered. “That’s rather ghastly.”

  “Indeed, but getting back to Dr. Beaurieux,” Danforth went on. “He said that immediately after the decapitation, Henri Languille’s eyelids and lips continued to move for five or six seconds. When those movements stopped, the doctor called to Languille in a loud, sharp tone, as if he were summoning him. At that summons, Languille’s eyes opened languidly, as if awakened from a light sleep. According to Beaurieux, there was no spasmodic movement in the eyes at all. They stared at him very evenly, then, after a moment, they closed. At that point, the doctor called to Languille again, and once again his eyes opened. He looked like someone torn from his thoughts, Beaurieux said. The eyes were motionless and the pupils were focused. There was nothing dull about their appearance. Nothing vague or faraway in their look. The doctor was convinced that Languille was staring directly at him. After several seconds, the eyes closed again, this time about halfway. Beaurieux called out for a third time, but Languille’s eyes didn’t open, and they began to take on the glazed look of the truly dead.”

  All of this struck me as a gruesome excursion, a reaction Danforth recognized and immediately addressed.

  “The question is why I would read about such an incident,” Danforth said. “It’s because I could not stop thinking about Anna, and this incessant thinking sent me off in odd, nearly crazed directions. She’d been executed by guillotine, so I read everything I could find about that process. Scores of eyewitness accounts. The history of the thing. It’s called a Fallbeil in German, by the way. ‘Falling ax.’ Between 1933 and 1945 about sixteen thousand people were executed by Fallbeil in Germany and Austria. Hitler liked the method so much he ordered twenty new ones.”

  This was all decidedly off the point, I thought, save for the way it exposed the obsessive nature of Danforth’s research, the fact that he’d been driven to do it as a way of. . . what?

  “It was a way of not abandoning Anna or allowing her simply to be erased,” Danforth said as if he’d heard the question I’d posed in my mind. “My purpose in doing all this reading was to keep her with me, keep her alive, prevent her from sinking into obscurity, becoming one of history’s nameless victims.” He shrugged. “But of course, reading can only take a man so far, and so, in the end, it was something else that saved me.”

  I suddenly feared that Danforth might have fallen to some predictable form of redemption. Religion, perhaps, or another woman.

  Hesitantly, I asked, “Which was?”

  “War,” Danforth answered. “I was still a young man when it broke out, and so I might have used it to accomplish some noble end or do some great, heroic deed.” His smile was as soft as the white flakes that fell beyond the window. “But for me it only intensified what soon became my single purpose.”

  “Which was?” I asked.

  “To make the Germans pay,” Danforth answered. His gaze darkened. “To kill as many as I could because they had killed Anna.” He let his lethal gaze sink into me. “I had left Europe as a grieving lover,” he stated. “I returned to it as a murderer.”

  ~ * ~

  Southern France, 1942.

  Below him, the fields of night-bound France spread out like a gloved hand. He was falling into its darkness, the earth rising toward him like a blessing in disguise.

  They were waiting for him below, and when he reached them he thanked them in their native language, then gathered up and buried his parachute as he had been taught in the long sweltering summer of his training.

  They were French farmers who greeted him, and for the rest of his life, the memory of their rugged courage would remain with him, the rough texture of their hands when he shook them, the heartbreaking care in their hushed voices as they guided him across the fields and into the small house where they hid him until the next night, when he set off, alone, for the Spanish border.

  On that long walk, he thought of Gurs, the train journey he had made with Anna, the ragged clothes of the withered Spaniard who’d met them, and at last the look on Anna’s face as the trees had parted and she’d gotten her first glimpse of the camp. A thousand years ago, he thought, a dif
ferent man than he was now.

  For the next year he played the vagabond Spaniard as effectively as Anna had played the disordered street grotesque on that long-ago night in the Old Town Bar. He wandered from village to village as he’d been instructed. To appear Spanish, he dyed his hair and darkened his skin beneath the Spanish sun. From mountain outcrops and village alleys, he watched the roads and railway stations and lived as an itinerant farm hand and sweeper; he slept in barns and back rooms and storage sheds, always speaking the low Spanish of the poor and dispossessed and in every way acting the part of one of Goya’s pobrecitas.

  During these nomadic days, he killed two men, one with a knife and the other with a garrote, both German intelligence operatives, and in both cases he felt as little for their deaths as he’d felt for their lives, and he told himself as he thrust the knife or tightened the garrote that this he did for Anna.

  By the early months of 1943, it was clear that his work in Spain was done. Spanish neutrality was enforced by Spain’s utter poverty. As a country, it was as starved and desolate as the Spanish refugees of Gurs had been, which was exactly what Danforth reported. There was no point to his remaining in Spain, he told his superiors. They agreed, and on their orders, he’d made his way to Gijon, hired an old fisherman and his ragtag boat, and through surprisingly calm waters sailed to England.

  Once in London, Danforth learned that Clayton had been shipped to the Pacific, the commander of a Marine regiment. Clayton’s letters had accumulated in the mailroom of Danforth Imports, collected by Danforth’s father, who with the outbreak of war had thrown all his resources into the effort. No longer a friend of Germany, he’d purchased thousands of war bonds and provided his country with every imaginable trade secret for the smuggling of supplies and information. Then, in April of 1943, the senior Danforth died in his lofty aerie overlooking Central Park, still baffled by the son who had briefly returned from Europe after a long, mysterious stay, returned distant and aloof, seeming to have lost not only his will to live, as he’d told his father one long, sorrowful evening, but also his will to love.

  It was this loveless and unloving man who now occupied the tiny desk in the tiny cubicle of an otherwise nondescript building in Hammersmith, his assignment to translate messages from various sources that poured into London from Calais to Istanbul. The messages were frequently in error, and some were no doubt intended to misinform, but more often than not, they were simply of no use to those planning the invasion that everyone knew was coming and in which effort Danforth felt himself once again sidelined.

  But inconsequential as his work seemed to him, Danforth remained at his desk, hoping, always hoping, to find some shred of information as to where Anna had been buried so that after the war, he might find her body and bring it home. But even as he sought such information, some crazed part of his mind harbored the hope that she was still alive, though this hope caused him to envision a still darker end for Anna: in February of 1944 he read about a number of women executed in Natzweiler-Struthof, and he could not stop wondering if she had been among them. In April he read of the mass execution of Nacht und Nebel, prisoners, mostly foreign spies and resistance fighters, and again imagined Anna lined up against a wall and shot or hung from communal gallows.

  All of these nightmare visions continually assailed him, but it was one in particular he found he could not shake:

  Escaped prisoner from Pforzheim reports seeing a small dark female, very badly beaten. Reports female chained nude outside and left through night. Reports SS officer returned and gave her more “rough treatment.” Reports prisoner was kicked and beaten and was “all blood.” Reports prisoner left till afternoon. Reports SS officer returned and shot prisoner. Reports prisoner was conscious when executed.

  Could this small dark female have been Anna?

  It was an absurd question, and there was no way for Danforth to answer it, and yet the brief record of this incident refused to let him go, continually urging him to find a way to return to Europe so he could exact yet more revenge.

  But each of his requests was denied, and so Danforth continued to work in his London basement cubicle, translating more communications from which he learned more details of the much earlier Parisian roundups of the city’s Jews, their herding together in the transit camp at Drancy, the terrible conditions there, the priest who’d claimed to hear the cry of children, though he could not have, from the steps of Sacré Coeur. He read about Ravensbrück, where female prisoners were gassed, about the massacres at Ascq in France and Vinkt in Belgium and Cephalonia in Greece, then farther east, where hell grew hotter in the children’s camp as Sisak and the women’s camp at Stara Gradiška.

  But the dark preponderance of messages came from Poland, a steady stream of accounts that caused Danforth at last to lift his eyes from the most recent of them late on a rainy evening, still unable to take in a fact he was sure had long ago been accepted by others far more informed than himself, and which he finally mentioned to Colonel Broderick.

  “The Germans are systematically killing all the Jews,” he said. “Does everyone know this?”

  Broderick nodded grimly. “Yes, we know. And so when the war is over, we’re going to need German-speaking interrogators who are very skilled. Like you, Tom. Because we’re going to find out everything they did and make them pay for it.”

  The sweet prospect of the world’s revenge fed the dark animal inside Danforth’s soul, and so he remained in London and there read of more and more outrages, and with each new report felt his heart harden, his spirit grow arid, and something like winter settle into him, an inner death that was deepened because in every report of torture and murder, every account of people shot or hanged or driven into gas chambers, he saw among them Anna.

  The invasion came in early June, and two weeks later he at last crossed the Channel and set foot again in France to begin his work as an interrogator. It was there he met the first of what were called the Ritchie boys, the Jews who’d fled Nazi Germany, been trained in Camp Ritchie, Maryland, parachuted or made beach landings on D-day, then slogged through the countryside broadcasting surrender offers to retreating Germans or questioning those who’d already surrendered.

  His first job was to break down a Wehrmacht officer named Werner Kruger, a short, stocky little man who smoked continuously during the interrogation. By then they’d learned that the Germans were terrified of being handed over to the Russians, and so they’d dressed a couple of the Ritchie boys in Russian army uniforms on the pretense that should the prisoner not cooperate, he would be turned over to Comrade Stalin. The Ritchie boys had played their parts to the hilt, and it had been effective in a surprising number of cases, Werner Kruger’s chief among them.

  There’d been scores of others like Kruger, an army of prisoners from whom Danforth had sought information, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but within each new interrogation still seeking some clue to Anna. Months passed, and summer became fall, and the army marched eastward, and France was liberated and Germany defeated, so that it was amid the ruins of Nuremberg several weeks after the end of the war that he finally met Horst Dieter.

  SS captain Horst Dieter had been brought to Danforth’s office for what was described as a “thorough going-over.” Danforth had expected the usual SS type, still arrogant in defeat, lips locked in perpetual sneer, eyes brimming with contempt. Instead, Dieter had affected a nearly jaunty gait as he walked to the chair across the table from Danforth and sat down. He was loose-limbed and gave off an inexplicable casualness, not to say indifference, and it was this oddity in demeanor that Danforth first addressed.

  “You don’t seem to realize the situation you’re in,” Danforth told him in his unaccented German.

  “I speak English, Captain,” Dieter said. “I lived for two years in Virginia.” He shrugged. “And I know quite well what my situation is. I’m going to be shot. So what? I’m used to executions.”

  This was the sort of casual remark that had opened the door on horr
endous crimes in earlier interrogations, and so Danforth pursued it like a lead. “Used to executions?” he asked in as similar a tone as he could muster. “Okay, so how during the war did you happen to get used to executions?”