“Frankly, yes,” I said. “And why not? If Rache is a traitor, he deserves to die.”
“Yes, of course,” Danforth said. “And if vengeance cannot be exacted on Rache, perhaps there is someone else. At any rate, I end up the hero, don’t I?”
“Yes,” I said. “And we all need to be heroes.” I glanced toward the open wound of Lower Manhattan. “Especially now.”
“Indeed that’s true, Paul,” Danforth said. “With one small caveat.”
“Which is?”
Danforth looked at me almost sadly, like a man who’d expended great effort in an unworthy cause. “That the need to be a hero is not a hero’s need.”
I felt that I had proved myself to be as young and callow at the end of his story as I had been at the beginning.
“So, tell me, then,” I asked with a sincerity that surprised me. “What is truly heroic?”
“Facing the complexity of things,” Danforth said solemnly. He looked at me as if he were making a final evaluation, a judgment that would determine whether or not I would hear the final chapters of his tale. “Collateral damage is inevitable,” he said, almost to himself. He drew in a disturbingly tense breath, held it for a moment, then released it slowly; it seemed to carry with it the last full measure of his strength. “The letter that finally came from the general was in Russian, of course. It said simply Which means ‘Do with him as you wish.’” Just below it, the old general had written a name and address. Danforth drew in yet another slow, ponderous breath that seemed to carry with it the full weight of murder.
“And so I set off to find a man I had never seen,” he said. He twisted to the side, opened the drawer of the little table that rested between us, and took out an old service revolver. “And, if he had betrayed Anna, to kill him.”
~ * ~
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983
He had vaguely expected to find Rache living in Krakow or Budapest, or perhaps even the old spy haven of Vienna, where Rache could sit with his pastry and afternoon tea and stare at the Plague Monument and recall the sweet days of his treachery, the best triple agent in the world because he’d gotten away with it.
But once Solotoff had provided the man’s address, along with, surprisingly, a German name, Danforth had changed his earlier notion, and on the flight from New York he imagined him as all such figures had been imagined since the war: sitting on some cool veranda, listening to the call of tropical birds, the smell of fresh mango rich in the air around them; these men who had brought winter to the world safe in their sunlit splendor.
That his purpose still burned so brightly surprised him, for in every other way he felt the steady weathering of time, death’s unyielding approach. Life, at last, was a stalker, waiting for the moment, and he knew that his would come soon. Perhaps this was his true freedom, he thought, that he could murder in certain knowledge that whatever followed would be short-lived.
And so, if Rache was a traitor, this he would do . . . for Anna.
He took a cab to his hotel on Avenida Florida, unpacked, then lay down on the bed for a fitful night’s sleep. In dreams, he returned to his many ages: the callow youth, the shallow adventurist, the amateur assassin, the tormented romantic obsessive, and now this lonely man on his last mission, this hate-filled man who might at last personify the thing he sought: vengeance.
Morning did not become him; in the mirror he saw the deep lines, the heavy bags, the snow-white hair comic in its disarray. Time, in the end, is a drowning pool, and as he peered at his withered face, Danforth felt himself suffocating beneath the many regrets that pressed in on him. Shouldn’t he have known from the beginning that it was all a foolish enterprise and that like all such exploits it would end in disaster? At the first firings of his love for Anna, shouldn’t he have done everything he could to rescue her from this tomfoolery, thus saving both their lives? Had he missed some subtle sign of treachery that, had he seen it, might have saved her? Had Rache ever walked past him or sat, a silent figure behind a potted plant, peering at Bannion or Anna, or even Danforth himself, knowing full well that they were only little spies, silly in their hope and expendable for its dashing?
After Clayton’s funeral, his wife had given Danforth her husband’s old service revolver, a gesture his old friend had requested only hours before his death. It would be fitting, Danforth thought now, for Clayton’s gun to bring down the curtain on a drama he had begun so many years before.
He had visited Buenos Aires only once, in company with his father, but he faintly recalled the old neighborhood of La Locanda, with its small, colorfully painted buildings. He had read that here, in these quaint and quite lovely streets, there were houses where the victims of the ongoing repression were kept and tormented before they disappeared, and he wondered if Rache had found a place for himself in this world of pain. He knew that certain men were drawn to life’s dungeons and death chambers. He had met them during his own interrogations, and he had met them as he himself was interrogated. They were the sewer’s most pernicious flotsam, and he had learned enough of the world to understand that they were as numerous as grains of sand. But he was no longer a man of the world, he thought, no longer one inclined to inject himself into its great affairs. He had given himself over to this only once, and disastrously, and now he felt at home in the concentrated measure of his need for reprisal. He had not saved the world, but he was unquestionably prepared to remove one villain from it.
And this he would do for Anna.
So it is here, he thought as the bus drew to a halt at the cross street, that the story ends.
The house he located a few minutes later struck him as extraordinarily modest. If life followed art, an epic tale spanning decades and continents would have an epic setting for its final scene. But the house was small and in bad repair, with a cramped, weedy yard and a roof saddened by broken tiles.
Suddenly, Danforth recalled the times he’d killed, and it seemed to him that it was his memory acting as a buttress to his courage, reminding him that he had taken life at close quarters. He was not new to murder, he told himself, and despite his years, his trigger finger remained strong. When the moment came, he would make his will match his muscles. That had always been the key to action, and as he stepped forward and drew open the rusty iron gate that opened onto the narrow pathway that led to the cottage’s door, he told himself that he must be the man he’d been all those many years ago: This I do for Anna.
The walkway was of uneven brick, treacherous for a man his age, but Danforth maneuvered along it slowly and carefully, his gaze on the path until he reached the door. Once there, he drew in a long, steadying breath and knocked.
The man who opened the door was pale and bald, his eyes vague and watery, with nothing of the malevolent deceit Danforth’s imagination had added to them. He had imagined Rache as still in the fullness of his youth, muscular and erect. To these characteristics, his mind had lately added features that were sometimes Slavic, sometimes Aryan, but always diabolically cruel and lit with low cunning. He knew that it was his hatred that had removed age and weariness and decrepitude from this portrait, and that in a thousand thousand ways other men did this every day, shading in the demonic in accordance with their fierce need for vengeance.
“¿Qué pasa?” the old man asked. What’s the matter?
He was squinting hard, and by that squint, Danforth realized that the old man’s vision was so impaired he could probably see only a blur at his door.
“My car has broken down,” he told him in Spanish. “I wonder if I might use your phone.”
The old man nodded and opened the door wider.
Danforth stepped inside the house, then followed the old man into his cramped living quarters, a small room cluttered with books and papers, though what Danforth most noticed was a small table filled with an array of medications: sprays, ointments, pills, the full ordnance of old age.
There was a phone on a second table and the old man shuffled over to it, plucked the receiver from it
s cradle, and offered it to Danforth with a palsied hand that kept its cord dancing frantically.
Danforth faked a call, then handed the old man back the phone. “They’re sending someone,” he said.
The old man nodded toward a chair, a gesture indicating he should wait inside until help arrived. Then he slumped down in a ragged wicker chair, indicating with a similar nod that Danforth should do the same in the chair that rested opposite his.
“Hace calor’’ the old man said. It’s warm.
“Si,” Danforth replied.
“¿De donde es usted?” Where are you from?
“Nueva York’.’
“Ah,” the old man said. “Tengo una hija qué aún vive alii’.’
A daughter living in New York, Danforth thought, and so he had had it all, this man: a wife, a child.
“¿Vive usted solo ahora?” Danforth asked cautiously, needing to make sure that the old man lived alone.
“Si” the old man said. “Soy soltero.”
So he lived alone, Danforth thought, with a daughter far away.
Perfect.
Danforth noticed a large drinking mug, topped with a pewter flask. “That mug with the milkmaid,” he said in English. “I saw one like it in Germany.”
“Germany, yes,” the old man said with a smooth shift to English. “I was there during the war.”
“I was there briefly,” Danforth said. “In Berlin. Near the Landwehr Canal.”
“Ah, yes,” the old man said. “A sad place. They tossed the body of Rosa Luxemburg into those waters.”
And Danforth instantly recalled that moment years before when they’d all been strolling along the Spree: how Bannion had stopped and looked out toward a particular bridge, the strange combination of rage and sorrow that had swept into his face.
“Why did you betray us, Ted?”
The old man blinked slowly, as if in all the years of his concealment he’d known that the hinge on traitor’s gate would one day sound. Now, with its small creak, he would realize, as Danforth thought Bannion surely did at that moment, that whether he would live or die had been decided long ago.
“Tom,” Bannion whispered.
Danforth wondered why he did not simply draw the pistol and do what he had come to do. What was the point of any further conversation, after all? What would he be looking for? He could find no answers to these questions, and as if to provide one, he felt his hand reach inside his coat, hold a moment, then curl around the handle of the pistol.
“You were a German agent all along,” Danforth said. “You never meant to carry out the plot.”
Bannion shifted in his chair, a jagged, achy movement Danforth recognized as the way he himself now moved, along with most men of a certain age.
“I was never a German agent,” Bannion said. “And I would have killed Hitler without a blink. I would have done everything I said I would do. It was Anna’s idea to kill him, remember? It was a good one, and it came from her sense of purpose, which I admired.”
There was a curious confidence in him now, Danforth observed, as if his old skills were returning to him, the dead powers of his long deceit lifting from their graves, walking the earth.
“I was never a German agent,” he declared again.
“Soviet then?” Danforth asked.
“Of course, Tom,” he said. “And I was loyal to the end. Which is why they’ve always protected me.” He stopped as if in sudden recognition. “Until now, that is.” He seemed to understand that history had turned against him. “When a great house falls, only the rats get out alive. Which one came to you, Tom?”
“It was I who came to him,” Danforth said. “Because I never stopped looking for Anna.”
Bannion’s smile bore something between admiration and contempt; he seemed in awe that Danforth had so relentlessly responded to so empty a call.
“With you, it was always her, Tom,” he said. “But with me, it was always something greater.”
Then he told his tale.
~ * ~
Munich, Germany, 1939
Bannion parted the curtains at his window and peered down at the street. It was a gesture that had long served to calm him, a simple gazing down onto the life below. He remembered the time when he’d walked the girders above Broadway, always with men who’d walked them far longer and with more grace, and how he’d felt lifted by their simple decency, the way they laughed and told stories, the true salt of the earth. It was in these men he’d first glimpsed the world his comrades in the east were already making and that he hoped to help them create. He knew that many Americans had already made the journey to Russia, were already working there, building the new world. He’d read about them in New Masses and heard their praises sung by countless street-corner speakers. At some point, he pledged a new allegiance, and he was now the secret sharer of their mission. He knew he would not see the castle finished, but he also knew that in what he had set himself to do, he would add to its measure. That Anna and Danforth and Clayton knew nothing of this continued connection, believing that he’d broken it and still lived in the bitterness of that break, seemed to him only a small deceit. It had been her idea, after all, this murder. He had only relayed her plan to his superiors and gained their approval to help her carry it out.
He jumped at the rap at his door, giving in to the fear that gripped him each time a stranger arrived or drew alongside him as he walked the street. It was always impossible to tell if a plot had been discovered until it was too late to do anything about it, and now that he was approaching what would no doubt be the last act of his life, he felt all the more fearful that something would stand in his way.
The second rap at the door was more insistent, but this time he gave no outward sign of fear.
The pistol was in his jacket, but there’d be no use in reaching for it. If the men on the other side of the door had come to arrest him, then arrest him they would. He had long ago cast aside the dramatics of self-defense, the idea of shooting his way out of such a spot. Such notions were for amateurs and people whose only concept of intrigue came from the movies.
And so he merely grabbed his jacket, hung it in the closet, then with studied calm opened the door.
The face that greeted him was familiar, almost fatherly, the agent who had handled him during all his Party life.
“There has been a change in plan,” the man said in German.
“It’s very late for that,” Bannion answered in a German no less precise.
“There has been a change,” the man said. “There is to be no attempt.”
“No attempt?” Bannion asked unbelievingly.
He had little doubt that this decision had been made in Moscow and that the leaders in charge there knew what they were doing. He was but a small cog in that great machine, and he would move as those who drove the gears demanded.
“All right,” he said, and thought this was the end of it. “But how do I explain this change to the others?”
“There is no need to explain it,” the man said. “Arrests will be made.”
“For what?” Bannion asked.
“They are assassins.”
Bannion was not sure he had heard correctly. “But if there is to be no assassination, then why should the others be arrested?”
“To expose their plot,” the man answered. “We will alert the Germans that we have a source inside an American plot. You are that source, of course, so you will not be harmed.”
“But why tell the Germans anything?” Bannion asked.
“That is not for us to ask,” the man said. “It has been decided that the woman will be needed.”
“Only the woman?” Bannion asked.
“Yes,” the man said. “She will be…interrogated until she exposes this American plot.” He laughed. “Then we will ask for her. They will turn her over because they don’t want the world to know that their leader is constantly a target. It will all be done secretly, and at some point after she has broken, she will be released.” He
took a small envelope from his jacket pocket. “One is for you. The other is for the woman. Neither is real.”
Bannion said nothing, which clearly alarmed the agent.
“It is important that the Germans trust us,” the man said emphatically. “What better way for us to prove ourselves to them than by exposing a silly group of American adventurers?”
Bannion would all his life recall what happened next, the quiet argument the Soviet agent made, how much depended upon this plot, the dark consequences that would surely flow should it not be carried out. What was one man or one woman in the long view of history? No individual could be allowed to stand in the way of so important a mission. Later he would remember how silently he had listened to all this, and how easily he had been persuaded by it.
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