The Quest for Anna Klein

“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.