something never reported and that must have rarely been glimpsed: the sufferings of his youth, the grim poverty and the unbearable rejection, the abyss of failure that must have yawned before him during all his years in Vienna and that could be held back only by the wildly self-inflated fantasy he had hatched about himself and that later, and against all odds, he had managed to make true.
Then, in a blink, all of that passed from him like fizz from a bottle, and he was once again the chancellor of the German Reich and the Fuhrer of the German people, the visionary he proclaimed himself to be, a busy, busy man, too busy for sentimentality, too busy even for reminiscence, and thus one who now found the musings of this young American woman a simple waste of time.
And so, with a quick nod, he turned; his entourage closed in around him, and . . .
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“. . . and he was gone,” Danforth said.
I couldn’t entirely conceal my surprise at this part of Danforth’s tale, and certainly not my uneasiness at how Anna had behaved.
“Was she . . . flirting with him?” I asked cautiously.
“Flirting?” Danforth asked. “Far from it, believe me.”
“Then why did she speak to him that way?” I asked.
“Because she wanted him to notice her,” Danforth answered. “So that if he ever saw her in a crowd, he would not feel the slightest alarm if she approached him. She knew that we would never get another audience with him after Wannsee. He had seen us and had no reason to see us again. So any further meeting would have to be in public. If he recognized her face, he might allow her to go up to him.” A deep gravity settled over him, and for a moment, he seemed lost in its aching cloud. “And to win the digger’s game.”
~ * ~
PART V
The Digger’s Game
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“What is the digger’s game?” I asked.
Danforth started to answer, then stopped, clearly refusing to enter a room that had not yet been prepared to receive him. “The Landwehr Canal runs parallel to the river Spree,” he said. “That’s where we walked that day. It was a very popular place and there were always people strolling along the canal, but it had a grim history, as I later discovered.”
“The Landwehr Canal?” I asked. “Why would that interest you?”
“Because that was where the three of us strolled the day Bannion rejoined us,” Danforth answered. “And where the last of our plans were laid.”
This remark sounded a deeper note, and I found I was suddenly steeling myself against the dark end that seemed always to be coming nearer as Danforth’s tale progressed.
“The light was so clear it made you think you could see through it,” Danforth added. “It was like the best deception in that way, made invisible by transparency.”
~ * ~
Berlin, Germany, 1939
“Clayton has approved the mission,” Bannion said.
But Clayton had left the question of how the mission should be carried out for them to answer, Bannion told them, and to Danforth’s surprise, they began to discuss various methods. Bannion had reviewed several assassinations, and although he didn’t press the point, it was clear that bombs rarely worked. It was pistols that had killed Lincoln, McKinley, Garfield, the king of Yugoslavia, and Franz Ferdinand, the last having been assassinated only after an earlier bomb attempt had failed.
“So it seems to me that the most effective means,” Bannion said, “is a gun.”
“But none of those assassins escaped,” Danforth reminded him cautiously.
“Is the point to escape?” Bannion asked him. “Or to get the job done?” Before Danforth could answer, Bannion turned to Anna. “And two assassins will be better than one,” he added. “So we will do this together, Anna.”
For the rest of his life, Danforth would replay the startling intimacy of those words, how clearly they excluded him, so that in the juvenile way of a challenged boy, he’d blurted, “All of us together.”
“No,” Bannion said.
“Why not?” Danforth asked.
“Because you don’t know how to shoot,” Bannion answered.
No one spoke for a moment; then, as if to close the possibility of any further discussion of the matter, Bannion looked out over the narrow expanse of the canal, the placid green waters of the Spree. His gaze focused with a curious tenderness on one of its bridges, a tenderness Danforth noticed and would many times recall.
“So,” Bannion said crisply as he returned his attention to the plot, “we’ll have to act very quickly.” With that, he turned from the bridge, and the three of them moved farther along the canal. “We will have only one chance.” He was now speaking to Anna alone. “And we should fire at different angles with as little obstruction as possible. Not in big crowds, for example, where anyone could suddenly step in front of us.”
