At the border, the first German official approached them, his uniform thoroughly Germanic in its starched and neatly pressed precision. He asked for their passports, opened each, then returned them.
“What is your purpose in coming to Germany?” he asked Danforth.
“We are here on business,” Danforth answered in his perfect German. “I am an importer.” He nodded toward Anna. “Miss Collier is my assistant.”
“Herr Danforth, Fraulein Collier,” the officer said with a polite nod to each of them.
“Well,” Danforth said once the officer had departed, “that went well, don’t you think?”
Anna returned her passport to her small leather purse. “The really dangerous border stations,” she said, “are the ones where the guards are wearing only parts of their uniforms.”
It was a curious comment, one that suggested to Danforth that Anna had known such bleak and poorly supplied border crossings, sun-baked and remote, as he imagined them, with sweltering guardhouses of windowless concrete, the border itself merely a dusty line drawn between two vast but equally impoverished wastes.
There were no other official inquiries after that first polite officer, and they reached Berlin, and at last their hotel just off Unter den Linden, without further intrusions.
That evening they had their first dinner in Berlin. They were both tired from the journey and so decided to dine in the hotel restaurant, a faded affair with too much drapery and crystal, little more than a sepia photograph from the belle epoque.
“I’ve been thinking about the letters you wrote the businesspeople here,’’ Anna said. “Perhaps we shouldn’t make contact with any of them, Tom.”
“Why not?”
“Because they might get into trouble later for knowing us,” Anna answered.
It was a realistic appraisal of Germany at that moment, of course, and so Danforth thought nothing of it at the time, though later he would wonder if she’d sought to isolate him, keep him within the tight circle that enclosed her plot. If so, he hadn’t sensed it then and had simply nodded and said, “Yes, I think you’re right.”
Anna glanced from the restaurant toward the lobby of the hotel. Two men were standing at the desk, both in long coats. “We’ll need cyanide,” she said. “I asked Bannion to get it for us.”
Danforth thought of the Connecticut warehouse, how close he had come to betraying her. “Yes,” he said. “We will. But maybe we won’t have to use it.”
Which seemed entirely possible to Danforth, as they had previously decided on a bomb as the best method, a device Anna had been trained to make and use and hide, so it was feasible that they might both accomplish their mission and survive it.
She drew in a long breath as she turned back to him. “You would miss it, wouldn’t you?”
“Miss what?”
“Life.”
“Of course,” Danforth said with a sudden sense of alarm. “Wouldn’t you?”
She nodded.
Danforth thought of the odd question she had asked in what now seemed almost an earlier life.
“Speaking of life, what’s the most beautiful place you’ve never seen?” he asked her.
She smiled. “There are more of them than I can name, Tom,” she answered.
“Try.”
She did, and as she moved from place to place, it seemed to Danforth that she had never looked more eager to live. So much so that it would be many years before he wondered if even this — the hunger she showed for the world — had been but another of her many masquerades.
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
I knew Danforth had related this conversation for a reason, and that for some other reason, he did not elaborate upon it but instead eased himself back slightly, as if trying to get a clearer view of some far-distant scene. “There is a little town called Dubno, Paul.”
This village had enjoyed a more or less quiet life, he told me, a small town that rested along the equally tranquil Ikva River. It was surrounded by a few rolling hills in that part of the Ukraine that was sometimes Poland, sometimes Russia, depending on the politics of the time. The Soviets had seized it in 1939 and then been driven eastward by a German onslaught that, as Danforth reminded me, had seemed near invincible at the time.
“When the Germans took over Dubno,” Danforth went on, “about half its population was Jewish. There were fourteen synagogues in the town. Jewish doctors, lawyers, teachers.”
His voice took on the quiet intensity that marked these asides, an old-man Scheherezade,
“On October fifth, 1942, if a little girl on a certain street had looked out her bedroom window, she would have seen hundreds of people passing by as they headed out of town toward the old airfield an hour’s walk away,” Danforth continued. “They would have been dressed according to their class, some quite fine, some in hand-me- downs. Witnesses said they walked slowly and in great order, with only a few soldiers and dogs keeping watch.” To my surprise, I could hear the muffled steps of these hundreds; even without my knowing that the street they’d walked had been made of flagstone, I heard the rhythm of their feet over them, along with bits of indecipherable talk: the urging forward of the old, the calming down of the young.
“There was a shallow chasm three kilometers out of town,” Danforth went on. “This is where they stopped and stripped. Hermann Graebe, a German construction engineer who witnessed the event, saw great mounds of shoes and underwear and clothing. He said they stood in family groups, that people too old or sick or disoriented to
