The Quest for Anna Klein

defined an evil man as one who cannot distinguish between what he wants and the universal good.” He pointed to himself. “That was me. I wanted Anna. I cared for nothing else.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “You wanted to know what it was, the digger’s game?”

“Yes.”

“It came from Clayton.”

Clayton had come back to New York after Pearl Harbor, Danforth went on to tell me, and by the middle of 1942, he was working in military intelligence. He’d never actually run agents, but he’d evaluated trainees for their potential as agents.

“His job was to find out if they had the right stuff,” Danforth said. “Clayton was always fond of strategies and so he devised a little test. It was called the digger’s game. He had a number of small brass pieces inscribed with various words and phrases: losing your wife, losing your child, poverty, illness, that sort of thing. These pieces were put in an urn filled with sand, and the applicant was to dig until he found the thing he most dreaded, at which point the applicant was to stop digging.” Danforth picked up his empty glass and twirled it slowly between his hands. “There was only one piece that mattered to Clayton. If the potential agent stopped digging before he reached it, Clayton would no longer consider him. Do you know what that piece had written on it, Paul?” He smiled. “Failure” He paused, a man reevaluating an earlier conclusion. “I think Anna would not have stopped digging until she found failure,” he said. “But I would have stopped digging at losing Anna.” His mind turned inward, remained there for a time, then swept out to me again.

“And so I decided not to lose her,” he said.

~ * ~

Munich, Germany, 1939

He knew that it would negate everything she had worked for. He knew that it would be abandoning his own great drive to make a mark. He knew that it would be a lost opportunity to change the course of history. He knew all this, and didn’t care. He had gone over every other route he might take through life after losing Anna, and not one of them made sense or had meaning or filled the void within him that she filled. Years later, as he sought the pieces of the plot, he would sometimes tell himself that he had fallen victim to a strange form of romantic imprinting, and he would blame this on his youth and on the intensity of the times and on the mission they’d shared and the danger, and that all of this had created an overdetermined situation in his heart. He would say this to himself in icy hotel rooms and in rattling railway carriages and once as, pale and stricken, he passed beneath the wrought-iron gate with the words Arbeit macht frei, but he would never forget the irresistible force that had driven him to hatch so many arguments so desperately, and he would always call it love.

“Anna,” he said that night in Munich as he opened his door and saw her standing there.

“I don’t mean to disturb you, Tom,” she said.

“No one would want to be alone ... on such a night,” he said. “Come in.”

She walked into his room. She had been there before, of course, but now she seemed unsettled, as if she were uncertain what she should do next.

“Shall I call down for…tea ... or ... ?”

She shook her head. “No, nothing.”

She glanced toward the bureau across the room, and he wondered if by some gift of intuition she knew that was where he’d placed her pistol, wrapped in a white handkerchief.

“Please, sit,” Danforth said.

She took a seat in the little chair a few feet from the bed. Her movement was slow and graceful, and had he not been convinced of the unlikelihood of such a thing, he might have even thought it vaguely seductive.

“Actually, I was hoping to see you . . . before,” he told her.

She looked away, drew the scarf from her head and draped it over the back of the chair. When she looked back at him, she smiled, but her smile was quick and formless, as if she were an actress not yet completely in character.

“We’re to meet in the square,” she said, as if confirming an insignificant detail. “You’ll give me everything I need.”

“Yes.”

She said nothing else, and in that silence, the terrible solitude in her eyes swept over him, and as it swept, it reduced to dust all the arguments he might have made against her dying and left him bare of everything but anguish. This boiled up and would have burst from him had he not been able to suppress it at the last second and say only, “I’ll miss you, Anna.”

For a moment she seemed locked in a great inner turmoil, as if powerfully drawn in two opposite directions. Then an unexpected sigh broke from her, and she came toward him with a force that he would forever recall as tidal.

In the years to come, he would witness what happened next in countless renderings. He would see it flicker with increasing graphicness on movie screens and read of it in the increasingly clinical language of books. He would hear it sung by crooners and folksingers and rock bands, the movements of that night recounted at various times by swelling violins and by the pounding beat of electric bass guitars. He would see and hear that night’s events reimagined and reorchestrated in theaters, opera houses, museums, and concert halls; in countless ways and by countless means, he would attempt to resume the rapture he felt during those brief minutes of his life . . . and each time, he would fail.

When the last shudder had subsided, he felt like a character in a Russian novel, love and death mingled in that darkly Slavic way, and he wanted to turn to her, run his fingers down the length of her naked body, and say something so profound neither of them would ever forget it.

But silence was all he could offer, a silence that struck him as sweet and tender and that, as it lengthened, convinced him she would now relent. For he was a romantic, after all, and no romantic could believe that a woman who was loved as Anna now had to know she was loved could choose to go out and die.