disrobe were stripped by their younger relatives. One man bent down to his little boy, pointed to the sky, and seemed to be telling him something very important. A young woman, completely naked, came very near to Graebe as she made her way toward the execution pit. She pointed to herself as she passed by. ‘Twenty-three,’ she said. Twenty-three.”
I shook my head at this sad tale, though I had no idea why Danforth had now taken me so far east.
“German stock,” Danforth said suddenly. “Suppose, Paul, that I knew that twenty-three-year-old girl. Suppose it was ... Anna. Suppose I also knew the man who carried out the massacre at Dubno. Suppose that after the war I tracked him down, only to find that he’d died years before.” He smiled. “But suppose he had a son, a daughter, grandchildren. Should I kill them all?”
“Of course not,” I answered. “They had nothing to do with what happened at Dubno.”
“But they’re all I have left, Paul,” Danforth said. “They’re all I have left to get even with the man who killed the woman I loved.”
“Perhaps so, but it would be unreasonable to kill these other people,” I said.
“You’re right, it would be quite unreasonable,” Danforth agreed. “But vengeance is a passion of the heart, isn’t it? And as Pascal said, the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.” Before I could answer, he added, “And in that article you wrote, didn’t you say that in the current situation, our acts should flow from passion?”
“Yes,” I said softly.
Danforth’s eyes appeared to harden. “I agree,” he said.
For a moment, he peered at me silently. Then, like a driver abruptly realizing he’d missed a turn, he swung back to his earlier narrative.
“When I heard about Dubno, heard that story of the girl pointing at herself, crying out her age as she was heading toward her death, it reminded me of Anna,” Danforth said. “It reminded me of the way she was in the hotel that night in Berlin, talking about Venice or Vienna or some other place she one day hoped to see. She seemed like that girl in Dubno. Too young to die.”
The stricken look on Danforth’s face at that moment warned me away from asking about Anna directly. And so I said, “Where did you hear about Dubno?”
“I heard about it when Hermann Graebe testified at the trials.”
“The trials?”
“Nuremberg,” Danforth said. “When I was working at the war crimes trials. Graebe’s testimony was particularly interesting to me because it was at Dubno that a man with the daunting name of Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche-Streithorst changed. He was a German soldier who saw the massacre at Dubno, and because of it, he decided to kill Hitler.”
“So your interest is in his motivation?” I asked.
“Yes,” Danforth answered. “I studied them all. Every attempt on Hitler’s life.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to know the variety of motivations,” Danforth said. “In discovering them, I thought I might also discover Anna’s.”
“But why not just accept that she was a Jew, and Hitler was persecuting Jews?” I said.
“That motivation, or a thousand other ones, Paul,” Danforth said. “It would have been easy if she had been easy.” His gaze became piercing. “It’s what you don’t know that destroys you.” He drew in a sharp breath. “And believe me,” he added, “I did not know Anna Klein.” Danforth seemed almost to dissolve into this fog of unknowing, then he gathered himself once again. “But where were we, Paul?” he asked. “Yes. Berlin. That old hotel. So long in the tooth. I told her it reminded me of an old woman who’d once been beautiful.”
~ * ~
Berlin, Germany, 1939
Anna smiled. “Istanbul is like that,” she said. “Crumbling palaces along the Bosporus. My father called it an ‘aged courtesan.’”
It surprised Danforth that she mentioned her father, since she had spoken so rarely of her past, and many years later, he would wonder if this had been a line skillfully cast out, spare yet bearing just the sort of bait she knew would lure him deeper into the current, with its hint of the foreign, the exotic. She revealed herself in little flashes of her past in the way some lady of a royal court might allow a brief glimpse of her ankle.
“He seems to have been quite the traveler, your father,” Danforth said.
“He was, yes,” Anna said with so much aridness that she gave off the sense of a field scattered with his dust. “I loved him very much.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died.”
With that she took up the menu and appeared, in that gesture, to secrete herself behind it. “I’m talking too much about myself,” she said.
“Not at all,” Danforth told her. “As a matter of fact, you’d think you were some kind of criminal, the way I have to pry things out of you.” He gave her a knowing look. “Or do you just want to seem mysterious?”
She lowered the menu, and he saw that she had taken him seriously. “It’s not that at all. It’s just that I think we should stay apart, Tom. Because of what we’re doing.”
“I understand,” Danforth told her.
