And he did understand her point, that given the nature of their circumstances, they should remain aloof from each other. And yet, just at that moment, he felt a terrible urge to touch her, one more powerful than at any time before, and he knew that the more he suppressed that urge, the more it would assert itself.
He could say none of this, of course, and so he quickly changed the subject.
“So,” he said as he took up the menu. “What shall we have?” They ordered, ate, finished with tea, then strolled out of the hotel, down the street, and into a small square. It was a warm summer night, and the lights from nearby
They found a bench and sat down together, silent still, watching the passing parade. In such a pose they might have looked like a pair of young lovers, he in pursuit, she coming near to giving in to his advances, and had their purpose not been so grave, Danforth thought, he might have reached out to her as he so much wanted to do.
It was a surge of desire she clearly sensed.
“We should start to get the materials,” she said starkly, a line that returned him to the cold matter at hand.
She meant the ones for the bomb, of course, though they had never discussed where it would be planted.
“We’ll also need to plan a way to get out of Germany once we know it went off,” Danforth told her.
“But there’s only one way to know,” Anna said. “To be there when it does. To be one of those women who rush up to him with flowers in their hands.”
By the methodical and unyielding way she said it, Danforth knew that such had always been her plan, that she would conceal the bomb beneath her coat or behind a great spray of flowers, and by that means die with the man she murdered, join with him in the same red blast.
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“So she was to be a suicide bomber,” I said, almost as stunned as Danforth had described himself on the heels of this revelation.
“Yes,” Danforth said.
“But why not plant the bomb,” I asked, “in a piece of coal, or something like it, the way LaRoche suggested?”
“For the very reason Anna gave me,” Danforth answered. “Because you can’t be sure it will go off at the right moment or if the target will be in place when it does go off.” He shrugged. “And she was right, Paul. We know now that there were at least forty-two plots to kill Adolf Hitler. Von Stauffenberg’s plot is the most famous, of course, because it came closest to actual success. But by the time Count von Stauffenberg planted his little briefcase a few feet from Hitler, his target had already wreaked havoc on Europe, ravaged whole countries, exterminated millions. Even if von Stauffenberg’s attempt had succeeded, it would have been too late to save anything but a small, shredded bit of German pride. The war was already coming to a close, with Germany in certain defeat, and so to the people who’d already gone up the chimney, it would have meant nothing. To the people rotting in death pits or buried in the rubble of countless bombed-out towns and villages, it would have meant nothing. Hitler had already done his worst.” He offered a small shrug. “But Paul, imagine what would have happened if Johann Georg Elser’s bomb had succeeded.”
“It might have changed history,” I said.
“Indeed it might have,” Danforth agreed, then continued. “Elser was a cabinetmaker who’d joined the Red Front Fighters’ Organization,” he said. “Is that name familiar to you, Paul?”
The tone of the question struck me as almost probing, as if Danforth actually thought I might have heard of such an organization.
“No,” I answered. “I’m not a student of modern German history.”
“Of course not,” Danforth said, as if reminding himself of that fact. “Well, anyway, Elser decided on a bomb and built one. Then the question was how to get the bomb close enough to Hitler. He chose the beer hall where Hitler always spoke during Putsch celebration in Munich. And so he went there, drank, stayed late, and as closing time neared, he hid in a closet. After everyone left the hall, he went to work digging into one of the building’s supporting columns. He dug all night, then repaired the front of the column, hid himself again, and left the beer hall when it opened the next day. He repeated this process every night for more than a month until he’d made a place for the bomb. He set it to go off at precisely nine twenty on the evening of Wednesday, November eighth, 1939.” He shrugged. “But Hitler wanted to be back in Berlin that night. He couldn’t fly there because a dense fog had grounded his airplane, so he made his speech earlier than planned and then took a train back. He left at eight ten, and so he was nowhere near the beer hall when Elser’s bomb went off.”
The explosion had gone off right on time, however, Danforth said. It had been quite powerful. In fact, it had killed eight people and wounded sixty-five. As it turned out, one of the wounded was none other than Eva Braun’s father.
“As for Elser, he was arrested and later executed at Dachau, on April sixth, 1945, just two weeks before the end of the war. By then he’d seen all that might have been prevented if the fog had not crowded in on Munich on that November night.”
He stopped, and by the change in his expression, I knew that he had returned to some memory of Anna.
“It was true, what Anna said,” he added finally. “To kill a snake, you must strike the head.” He thought a moment, then continued. “But something else is no less true: you must strike early at this head, before the snake has coiled and focused its yellow eyes and done the worst it can do.” He paused again, then looked at me pointedly. “And so we began to assemble the materials for the bomb.”
“But you still had no plan,” I said.
“Most assassins don’t,” Danforth said. “At least, the successful ones don’t. Oswald had no plan, save to be at the right place at the right time.” He thought this over, then added, “The men who killed Garfield and McKinley didn’t have plans either, not beyond having an idea of where the target might be and going there.”
