around seven. The British agent had even been able to provide the fact that it was the table to the right of the entrance he preferred, an odd choice, Bannion noted, since it was by a window that looked out onto the street. The final elements of the plan had been put in place that very morning, Bannion went on, a reservation made in Anna’s name. The only thing that remained was for Danforth to keep the pistol in his room until the following morning, when he would transfer it to Anna.
“What about the cyanide?” Danforth asked.
Bannion patted the blue handkerchief in his jacket pocket. “In here,” he said. “Mine and hers.”
“You don’t want me to give it to her with the pistol?” Danforth asked.
“No,” Bannion said. “I’ll give it to her. It’s the last test. Rache says it works every time.”
“Works how?”
“If the person takes the tablet, he will complete the mission,” Bannion said.
In his memory, Danforth would later see Anna’s tablet many times, always with wonder at how very small it was, no larger than a pea, the poison contained in a thin-walled ampoule coated with rubber to prevent it from breaking under anything less forceful than a human bite.
“What about mine?” Danforth asked.
Bannion smiled. “Giving you a cyanide tablet would just be drama, Tom. After you give Anna the pistol, you’re to go directly to the station and take the train to Hamburg. Passage has already been booked for you to Copenhagen, and from there to London.”
He walked to the door, started to open it, then hesitated. “I know you love her, Tom. For you, it’s only her.”
“Yes,” Danforth admitted.
For a time they talked only about Anna, and it became clear to Danforth that Bannion had closely observed her though even he could not say what had moved her to do the thing she was soon to do.
“There’s something I still don’t know,” Bannion said at last. Then, with a shrug, he said, “Tell her story, Tom.”
Danforth had never felt so entirely diminished. He was to be the chronicler of Anna’s martyrdom, and Bannion’s. He was to share their plot but not their peril. But he had sworn to do as he was ordered, and so he said, “I will, Ted.”
Bannion looked unexpectedly moved by Danforth’s sincerity but said nothing further before he closed the door.
Once Bannion had departed, a curious drive took Danforth to the window. He looked out and felt almost as if he’d been expecting to see what was there: Anna, standing beneath a street-lamp. Bannion approached her, and for a time they talked. He was giving her some final words of encouragement, Danforth assumed, or perhaps offering his admiration for what she was to do. He would no doubt have a good speech. He’d given it often enough to miners and timber men, urging them toward the revolutionary ideal he had later so completely abandoned.
Then Bannion reached into his pocket and drew out the blue handkerchief Danforth had seen earlier. He was speaking softly as he opened it. Even from the distance, Danforth saw how intently Anna peered at the two tablets Bannion’s handkerchief had concealed. For a time she seemed frozen in dread; she stood like a frightened child, her hand poised over the ampoules, unable to reach down. Then, very slowly, she drew one from the folds of the handkerchief and sank it into the pocket of her skirt.
Then Bannion stepped very near to her, apparently for an intimate communication; he spoke, and it caused Anna to glance up to where Danforth stood concealed in the darkness behind his window. The distance was long. Danforth’s room was on the fourth floor; Anna’s face, only half illuminated by the street-lamp, was anything but clear. And yet for all that, Danforth saw a shadow pass over her face, something grave and curiously indelicate, as if an unbearable thought had crossed her mind. Then she turned to Bannion again, and a dreadful stillness fell over her, one that lingered for a time. At last she shook her head, and then nodded, as if, exhausted and depleted, she had finally allowed her
With that, Bannion stepped away, and the two of them exchanged a look that reminded Danforth of the doomed characters in movies and popular novels who, torn apart by war or some other fearful circumstance, seemed to know at the moment of their parting that they would never see each other again. Then Bannion turned and, like a character exiting the stage, vanished into the shadowy wings of Munich, leaving Anna alone.
She had never looked more intensely solitary, Danforth thought; she briefly seemed as if she had been driven to the most remote corner of the world. It was an aloneness that was dense and impenetrable, and horribly unfair, and it made Danforth suddenly hate Adolf Hitler, not for his aggression, his cruelty, his dreadful loathing of the Jews and the Communists, the Poles and the Slavs, not for the threat he posed to all that was kind and well reasoned in human life, but simply because the ending of that squalid, repellent life would take from him the one woman he knew, now with utter certainty, he would ever love.
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“You think you know the depth of selfishness when you look into your own heart and realize that you want someone dead because that person slighted you in some way, made you feel small or stupid or something of that sort,” Danforth said. “Or you want someone dead because of an inheritance or because you want a higher post in some university faculty, neither of which can be achieved until someone dies.” He offered a small, rather desolate laugh. “But at that moment in Munich, standing at that window, watching Anna, I learned how deep selfishness could go.” He stared at his empty glass. “For me, Adolf Hitler was not a megalomaniac who threatened to destroy the world but rather, strangely and perversely, my rival for Anna, the other man in her life, the one who’d stolen her from me.” He lifted his eyes from the glass and settled his gaze on me. “I was not just a romantic. I was a bourgeois solipsist, utterly incapable of seeing history as anything but a personal narrative.” His laugh was pure self-accusation. “I was like the obsessed man in some cheap thriller.”
He looked like that man even now, afflicted by old torments, his gaze more intense than before, and with something of self-loathing in it.
“I wanted to be like Anna,” he continued. “Like Bannion. I wanted to die for some great cause. But at that instant, I knew that I was nothing but a lovesick fool who would have rushed Anna out of Munich and back to New York and let the whole world go up in flames if he could.” He laughed again, this time even more bitterly. “Aristotle
