“Rache,” he said. “Vengeance.”
He let this word drift like acrid smoke in the air around us.
“When you need something to hate, you will find it, believe me,” Danforth said now. “You will find it and you will paint it in whatever colors you choose. With no place else to turn, I turned to Rache. He became my Moriarty, my antichrist. I thought of nothing but discovering once and for all if he had betrayed us.”
With that conclusion, Danforth abruptly returned to his earlier self, all reason and careful analysis, his brain no longer boiling with suppositions that fired vengeful fantasies but now trained on a method by which he might answer the last burning question of his life.
“I racked my brain to find some small chink in all this,” he said, “and the one thing that kept returning to me was the fact that during Romanchuk’s interrogation, there’d been an older man with the Order of Lenin on his lapel to whom Anna had spoken Turkish. I remembered that in a conversation with LaRoche, Anna had recalled Baku, which is the capital of Azerbaijan, a part of Russia that shares a border with Turkey.”
“Those are rather disparate elements,” I cautioned.
“Yes, but the investigation of a plot is about finding intersections within the plot,” Danforth said. “Coordinates that allow you to zero in on what really happened.”
As absurd as it seemed to me now, and as absurd as it had seemed to him then, Danforth had embarked upon a huge research project. It was a search to find what he called coordinates by which he might connect the Order of Lenin, knowledge of Turkish, and familiarity with Baku.
“As it turned out, Romanchuk was wrong,” Danforth told me. “At least as far as the Order of Lenin is concerned. It wasn’t a big deal, really. Lots of people had been given the Order of Lenin. Pilots and scientists and aircraft designers. There were engineers and nuclear-power experts. There was a polar explorer. It was even given to Pravda at one point, and at other times to whole regions of the country for some service that region had rendered to the state. Lots of people got it several times.”
And so the research had turned into a monumentally tedious and time-consuming task, Danforth said, but he had never relented, and each day after he finished teaching, he headed for the library. For weeks, months, years, he walked between the two sober lions and entered the great reading room with its long tables and green-shaded lamps. He worked each night until the library closed, and each night as he wearily headed home, he reminded himself that he was doing this for Anna. “Love has many faces, Paul,” he said, by way of explanation, “but lost love has only one.”
It struck me that Danforth’s quest had been driven by a need that had been momentarily fulfilled on that one night in Munich but ultimately unrequited for all the nights after that. He was a man with a chronic illness, doomed to live forever with the incurable affliction of having loved at a moment of supreme peril a woman of supreme mystery, and this love had annihilated any hope that he might ever love again.
“It took me many years,” Danforth said, “but in the end I found my coordinates in a Soviet general who had dealt with the ethnic conflict that was always breaking out in Azerbaijan.” He shook his head. “Bathed in blood, that part of the world.”
For a moment he seemed to drift down that red river.
“You were talking about a Soviet general,” I reminded him.
“Yes,” Danforth answered. “His name was Sergei Lukudovich Solotoff, and after the war, he returned to Baku. When I finally made it to his door, he was eighty-six years old.”
~ * ~
Baku, Azerbaijan, 1981
The general lived in a building that had once been the elegant townhouse of an oil baron but was now just another crumbling structure in the old part of Baku. The Maiden Tower was visible at one end of the street, and beyond it, the blue Caspian swept out to the horizon. Danforth had been here only once, so many years in the past that he was scarcely able to remember anything but the carpet merchants who’d draped their heavy wares over ancient walls, which, to his surprise, they still did. But the great castle had faded, as had the minarets; his memories were now as weathered as the little stone statue that still rested in the market square.
Solotoff had not fallen into disfavor as so many of Stalin’s generals had, and because of that, Danforth was surprised that his letter had been answered at all. He suspected that the old general might well be cocooned in the loneliness of old age and so welcomed the opportunity to tell his story.
In his letter, Danforth had portrayed himself as something of a historian, a gatherer of oral histories having to do with the war. In his return letter, the general had written in quite elegant Russian of his participation in the heroic defense of Stalingrad and of his many medals and honors and decorations. He had not spoken of anything having to do with intelligence work, and given the extensive nature of the general’s military service, Danforth doubted that he’d done much of it, a fact that suggested the general had become involved in the Rache investigation for some specific reason, after which he’d returned, unscathed, to his military duties.
“Ah, most welcome,” the old general said in Russian when he opened his townhouse door to Danforth, his manner so pleasant and amiable that it reminded Danforth of the Russian Errol Flynn.
Danforth returned the greeting in Russian, then followed Solotoff into a small room that looked out onto what was called a woman’s view in that part of the world, by which was meant an enclosed terrace where cloistered females could gaze, unseen, at a universe otherwise denied them.
“Such a long way to come for my story,” Solotoff said.
He had put out goat cheese and some dried fruit, along with slivers of dried meat Danforth didn’t recognize, and together they sat, facing each other, on small woven chairs. There was vodka, but Danforth politely refused it, which seemed a relief to the old man since tea was certainly cheaper. He was clearly in fallen circumstances, an old soldier whom the new order considered little more than a Stalinist relic. His pension was probably precarious, Danforth thought, if not reduced or halted altogether. He had outlived his time and his ideology, and the revolution he had served had sunk into a mire of corruption and inefficiency so deep it had begun to generate public outcry and even strikes, Russian workers at last grown impatient with the workers’ paradise.
For the next three hours, Danforth listened more or less without interrupting as the old general told his war stories, mostly concerning the horrors of Stalingrad, how Khrushchev had conducted the city’s defense with an iron hand.
“We set up machine guns behind our own troops,” he said, “and if they tried to return after a charge, we shot them.” He shrugged away the bloodcurdling horror of this. “So they either took the position they were ordered to take, or they were killed for failure to take it.” His grimaced. “War is a terrible thing,” he said, then asked a question that gave Danforth his entry. “Were you in the war?”
“Yes,” Danforth said.
Here was the opening, he thought, and he took it.
“I was a spy.”
“A spy?” Solotoff asked. He did not seem in the least troubled by this.
“And I helped plot an assassination,” Danforth added. “But it failed.”
Solotoff appeared no more troubled by this than by Danforth’s initial answer. “Who did you fail to kill?”
“Hitler,” Danforth answered flatly.
Something registered in Solotoff’s eyes, a glimmer he quickly doused with a loud laugh. “I wish you hadn’t failed. It was forty degrees below zero when those German bastards retreated. We went after them like wolves. The big, brave German Fifth Army. We slaughtered them like little frozen lambs. Whoever attacks you in your homeland deserves to die. That’s what I believe.”
Danforth smiled. “So do I, believe me.” He attempted to appear long perplexed by a curious and unsolved little mystery. “As far as Hitler was concerned, we almost did it. Or at least, we almost tried. But the Germans caught on to us. I
’ve always wondered how.”
Solotoff said nothing, but Danforth could see his mind working behind his eyes.
“I always thought we were betrayed,” Danforth continued.
“You probably were,” Solotoff said casually. “A spy swims in a sea full of sharks.”
“A certain name has always floated in that water,” Danforth said. “Rache.”
The name clearly registered in Solotoff’s mind, Danforth saw, and he leaned forward slightly. “Tell me, were you ever in Warsaw, General?”
“I have been to Warsaw many times,” Solotoff answered. “And you?
“After the war,” Danforth answered. “I saw a lot of the East after the war.”
“Did you?”
“Dubno,” Danforth said. “Lemberg. Kiev. Moscow.” He stopped, waited, then said, “Magadan.”
“Ah,” Solotoff said. “That is very far to the east.”
“But you can see it from Adult World,” Danforth said.
Solotoff’s gaze hardened. “When were you released?”
Danforth could hardly believe the answer he gave. “A lifetime ago.”
“And why have you returned to our sad country?” Solotoff asked.
“Because I want to know who betrayed me,” Danforth said.
Danforth did not mention Anna because he had reached that point when a man looks back and feels that in his lifelong quest — whatever it might have been— he has betrayed himself, squandered his days, and to reveal the nature of that squandering would expose him as a madman or a fool.
“I want vengeance,” Danforth said, a motive he was certain Solotoff would understand. “For my life.”
“How would you get it?” Solotoff asked.
“By killing a traitor,” Danforth answered flatly.
“You are rather old for such a mission,” the general said.
“I have nothing else,” Danforth said.
“And so you’ve come all this way,” the general said in a bemused voice.
“Yes.”
Danforth saw a glint of the old Russian wolf in Solotoff’s eyes and realized that this was a man whose past had betrayed him and whose once fierce loyalties had faded; now he was simply a poor old man in search of a score, one who had nothing left to sell but his memories.
“Tell me more about Warsaw,” Solotoff said.
“There was a forger named Romanchuk,” Danforth told him. “I had some dealings with him after the war. I think you may have interrogated him in Warsaw.”
“Why would you think such a thing?” Solotoff asked.
“Because one of the interrogators wore the Order of Lenin,” Danforth said. “And he spoke Turkish.” Danforth kept his demeanor entirely casual. “I know you have the Order of Lenin and that you were once very powerful here in Azerbaijan, so you probably speak Turkish. I put that together, and you came up as the man who was most likely to have been in Warsaw when Romanchuk was interrogated.”
“In the first two of these things you are right,” Solotoff said, as if the facts bored him. “But why should I tell you if you are right in the last of them?”
Danforth’s earliest memories of the east returned, the abyss of corruption his father had many times described, along with the eternal miseries of the Balkans. He recalled the bandits on the railway, that long-ago crucifixion, the leader of that ruthless band, how he’d walked among the terrified passengers, nodding at watches, bracelets, cuff links, the glint in his soulless eyes that Danforth now saw in Solotoff’s. He was a dead soul, and dead souls can be bought.
“Because I’ll pay you,” he said. “I’ll pay you if you tell me where Rache is.”
Solotoff took a slow, meditative sip of tea. “What else do you know about this interrogation in Warsaw?”
“There was a woman,” Danforth said. “An American. She was brought in to translate from Ukrainian for Romanchuk.”
Solotoff slowly put down the cup and gazed at it as if he were a pawnbroker studying its every crack and chink. “How much would you pay?”
“Are you the man who was sent to interrogate Romanchuk?” Danforth asked. “Did you speak to the American woman in Turkish?”
Solotoff grinned. “Perhaps. It is a long chain that stretches back so far. I would have to make inquiries. It might take some time. And my contacts are not without needs. I would have to be generous.”
Generous. By which he meant, Danforth knew, there would be many payments.
Solotoff’s smile had a canine sparkle, and at that instant, Danforth recalled the soldiers at Plötzensee, the many border guards whose palms he’d greased, their drunken delight in the power they had over him, and after these, he remembered the long line of interrogators he’d faced beneath a naked bulb, the blows that had rained down upon him in the camp, always with some brute grinning as he delivered them. Russians, he thought with a surging hatred he could barely suppress, and he knew that at that moment, he could cheerfully have killed them all.
Solotoff drained the last of his tea, returned the cup to the table, then sat back and waited. “Twenty thousand American dollars.”
“How would this payment be made?” Danforth asked.
Solotoff laughed. “Oil seeps through many holes in Baku.”
It was a typically metaphorical response, and by it, Danforth understood the great sieve of Soviet corruption, General Solotoff a surly man with many conduits, a rabbit warren of little deals and old favors with an untold number of escape routes.
“I will have to be sure of any information you give me,” Danforth warned him.
“There will be only one piece of information,” Solotoff said as if closing a negotiation with a nervous buyer. “A name. An address. That is all.” His eyes glittered like sunlight on the bloodstained snows of Stalingrad. “Once we have an understanding, you will have to wait. But in the end, you will hear from me.”
~ * ~
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
“And so the arrangements were made, and I returned to New York and waited to hear from this old hero of the Soviets,” Danforth said with undisguised contempt. “I had no doubt that eventually I would.”
Danforth read my incredulity as he had so often done during his narrative, and he immediately provided a corollary tale that made clear that his own was entirely believable.
“Foreign intelligence keeps track of their old agents,” he said by way of proving his story. “Take the case of Engelbert Broda, for example.”
For ten years, from 1938 to 1948, a Soviet spy code-named Eric had sent Britain’s nuclear secrets to the Soviets, Danforth said. During that time, he’d been the Soviets’ main source for information on Britain’s atomic-bomb research.
“MI Five suspected him for years,” Danforth told me. “They opened his mail and watched his every move.”
But they had never caught him, and so it wasn’t until a full seventy years later, when KGB files were finally opened, that the British found out they’d been right all along.
“Bertie Broda had even given the Russians the blueprint for the early nuclear reactor used in the Manhattan Project,” Danforth said. “He single-handedly allowed the Soviets to catch up with the West and in so doing changed the face of foreign policy for decades to come.” He smiled. “So you see, what you’d call a large geopolitical purpose can be brought about by a little spy.”
“What happened when they caught Broda?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Danforth answered. “He was already dead. And he died a very respected scientist. He has a special grave in an honored section of a Vienna cemetery.” He seemed suddenly to drift into some colder region. “Odd, what a cemetery can reveal.” For a moment he remained in that distant place. Then, as he had so many times during our talk, he abruptly returned to the present.
“Anyway, Broda was never discovered,” he said.
“Too bad,” I said, almost lightly, as if treason were a mist easily wiped from a window. “Very clever to have outsmarted everyone for so long.”
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br /> “Clever?” Danforth asked. “Perhaps. But the curious thing I’ve discovered about spies is that they must trust so many to keep their secrets. They have handlers, but who handles the handlers? No Soviet spy was ever handled by Stalin personally. There were layers and layers of people who knew this agent or that one, people whose identity the agent never knew.” The irony of what Danforth said next clearly did not escape him. “A spy may never be uncovered, Paul, but he can never be completely hidden either. Deceit always leaves a trail.”
“Which Solotoff was now pursuing?” I asked.
“Undoubtedly,” Danforth said. He looked at me in a way that let me know he’d read my mind. “Ah, you are looking for that big dramatic ending. Perhaps a chase over the rooftops? Or some final scene of two old men grappling with each other, like Holmes and Moriarty slugging it out at Reichenbach Falls? Is that what you want, Paul, at the end of my tale?”
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