Anna kept up a steady stream of talk, all of it about art, and all of it in German.
Since it was well known that Hitler was quite prolific, Danforth had expected a warehouse, scores and scores of still-life paintings of flowers, bridges, and the like, only a small portion of which, he assumed, had ever been on public display.
Instead, Wald brought the car to a halt before a large stone building that, in a less suburban atmosphere, Danforth would have called a villa. It had two stories and was constructed of a light gray stone and included a welcoming half-circle portico, a design he’d be reminded of years later when he found himself at 56-58 Am Grossen, where the terrible decisions of the Wannsee Conference had been made and where he would once again confront the possibility that Anna’s fate might have been worse than he’d previously supposed.
But on that morning, in the summer sunlight, with the lovely facade of the villa in front of him and with Anna splendid at his side, he allowed himself another slip into unreality, as if it were all a novel or a movie, this drama he was living through, he and Anna merely characters in it, neither of them made of flesh that could be torn or blood that could be spilled, beyond the grasp of such human fates. It was an unreality that had often seized him in the past and that would seize him once more in the future but then, after that, would leave him forever captive to the cold reality of things.
“Herr Danforth?”
The man who spoke stood at the bottom of the stairs outside the house, dressed in a brown double-breasted suit, on the lapel of which, as if to add color, there was a swastika pin, black on a red background.
Danforth took the man’s hand and shook it.
“Welcome to Wannsee,” the man said in German. “I am Ernst Kruger.” He looked at Anna and offered his hand.
“Anna Collier,” she said.
“Most pleased to meet you, fraulein,” Kruger said. He turned and gestured toward the double doors that led into the building. “Please.”
The military officer stationed himself at the door after they passed through it, but Wald accompanied them into the building and up the stairs, always at a discreet distance, so although he was often out of sight, he was always somehow present, like a noise in the woodwork.
The paintings were in a large room; upon entering, Danforth estimated that there were perhaps forty of them. They had been framed tastefully and with obvious professionalism in the sort of frames used by the best museums.
The windows of the hall were high, so exterior light streamed in with crystal clarity. No other source was necessary, and it seemed to Danforth that someone had probably thought this through, the fact that natural scenes, which most of the paintings depicted, should be illuminated by the closest one could get to outdoor light.
“You may walk about at your leisure,” Ernst said. “And, please, take as long as you wish.” He looked at his watch, then nodded to Wald, who now stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him.
“One has to have time with a painting,” Ernst added with a courtly smile. “One cannot be rushed in such things.”
“Thank you,” Danforth said.
Danforth stepped forward with Anna at his side; she was now thoroughly in her role as special assistant, studying the same painting Danforth studied, saying nothing, as if waiting for him to speak.
He stopped at a small painting of a bridge, its double arches made of stone, unthreatening woods behind it, everything done in the muted colors to which the artist seemed most inclined.
As if to test her, he said, in German, “What do you think of this?”
She peered at the painting for a moment, then said, “Constable.”
Danforth felt a wave of boyish playfulness wash over him. “Any Constable painting in particular?” he asked.
Danforth decided to press the issue. “The browns?” he asked.
Anna shook her head. “The peace,” she answered. “The sense that even if things turn out badly later, still, for a moment” — she drew her eyes away from the painting and looked at Danforth — “there was this.”
She said it softly, and it was correct enough as a description of the painting, but in Danforth it produced that romantic shock of recognition when a man knows with all the certainty that life allows that although he might one day love again, it will never be like this.
He knew that she was still looking at him, but he did not turn to her, instead moving on to the next painting, this one very ordinary, a vase of flowers.
She followed him as he progressed along the line of paintings: more buildings, more flowers, more landscapes, each curiously impersonal, as if the painter were determined to strip all feeling from his subjects.
They’d reached the back wall when the great doors swung open and Wald, accompanied this time by four soldiers and a woman in a long wool coat, strode into the room.
“Put your hands up,” Wald ordered in German as he closed in on them. “And turn around. Face the wall.”
A trap, Danforth thought, they had been caught in a trap.
“Do not move,” Wald said.
Danforth obeyed instantly, Anna somewhat more slowly, though Danforth couldn’t tell if her less rapid response was the product of terror, shock, or some aspect of a new role she’d decided to play.
The woman now stepped forward. She took Anna firmly by one shoulder, and with her other hand, she patted
