The Quest for Anna Klein

by Thomas H. Cook

  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 Romanchuk’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 officer 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 officer?”

  “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.

  ~ * ~

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  “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 office. Strakhkassa means ‘insurance office.’ 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 con
ducted 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.”

  ~ * ~

  Moscow, Soviet Union, 1952.

  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.

  He had disliked Moscow from his first day. Its one majestic vista was Kremlin Square, but that majesty had been dulled by the horrendous sprawl around it. Added to this was the sheer weight of oppression that turned each minute into a dull throb and that seemed to lace the air with molten lead.

  Once on Gorky Street, Danforth headed for the Aragvi, the restaurant Brock’s contact had suggested, probably because it was one of the city’s most luxurious, and thus hardly likely to be chosen for a meeting anyone would want kept secret from the KGB.

  A squat little Pobeda drew up alongside him; it moved slowly at the same pace as him and then spurted forward and stopped. A tall man in a long overcoat got out, nodded toward Danforth, then motioned him forward, smiling quite broadly as he did.

  “Kiryukha,” the man said as he thrust out his hand.

  The word meant “old friend” or “pal” or something of that sort, and it could not have surprised Danforth more.

  Then in English the man said, “Get in car.”

  Danforth did as he was told, and seconds later found himself cruising down Gorky Street, the big man at the wheel.

  “You know what pobeda mean?” he asked.

  Danforth admitted that he didn’t.

  “‘Victory,’” the man said. “You call me . . . Flynn, okay?”

  “Whatever you say,” Danforth replied dryly. “I’m Thomas Danforth.”

  “Thomas Danforth your real name?” the man asked.

  “Yes.”

  The man grinned. “You spy maybe?”

  “No.”

  The man laughed heartily. “I Errol Flynn. American movie star.” He laughed again. “See, I give you my real name too. Real name and real what I do. So we always tell truth, right, buddy?”

  They moved on down the street, then made what seemed to Danforth a series of random turns, Flynn whistling for a time, then humming something that sounded vaguely like a Slavic version of “Dixie.” They passed the Central Telegraph Office with its great clock, and then went along Pushechnaya and onto Dzerzhinsky Square, where the gray facade of Lubyanka loomed ahead.

  “You know where you are, Thomas Danforth?” Flynn asked.

  “Yes,” Danforth answered.

  “Good,” Flynn said cheerfully. “Good you should know where you are.”

  With that, he gave the steering wheel a violent jerk, and the Pobeda abruptly turned into the wide entrance to Lubyanka, then stopped before its forbidding steel doors. The doors were on rails, which Danforth had not known, so he watched in surreal and curiously untroubled surprise as they slid open to reveal the building’s broad central courtyard.

  During all this, Flynn sat silently, staring straight ahead. It was not until the doors had disappeared into the walls that he spoke again. “Kiryukha,” he repeated as he pressed down on the little car’s accelerator. “You are here.”

  Minutes later, Danforth found himself in a small office looking at a man in a military uniform behind a metal desk flipping through pages of a file.

  “So, you’re looking for an American woman,” the man said in an English that was as perfect as an Oxford don’s. Before Danforth could answer, the man smiled widely and said, “Did you think we Russians are all illiterate peasants, Captain Danforth?”

  Danforth shook his head.

  “You know the story by Dostoyevsky?” the man asked.

  “Which one?” Danforth asked.

  “About a man in prison. All the other prisoners are talking about the Russian peasant. He is a type to them. A brute. That is what these men think. But the hero of the story remembers when he was a boy, there was a peasant who worked on his father’s estate, and on one occasion, and at the risk of his own life, this ‘peasant’ had put himself between this boy and a wolf.”

  He watched to see if the moral of his tale had sunk into Danforth’s mind. “So, what is the meaning of this story, Captain Danforth?”

  “That all Russians are not the same,” Danforth answered.

  He laughed. “Some can read . . . and speak a fine English, is that not so?”

  “Clearly,” Danforth said.

  “I am Comrade Stanik,” the man said. “What can you tell me about this woman you are looking for?”

  “She spoke quite a few languages,” Danforth said. “She was described by our contact as dark, young, pretty.”

  “Why are you looking for her?” Stanik asked.

>   “Because we have some evidence that she gave false translations to your agents. We believe she did this in order to protect a German who later fled Germany.”

  “And you think she has information about this agent?”

  “Yes.”

  “He must be very important to you then.”

  “We lost a good man because of this German agent “ Danforth said. “We want him to pay for it. Her too.”