“Very soon,” Volker added pointedly “At once, in fact.”
This was an order, of course, and one about which no appeal would be tolerated. In no uncertain terms, Danforth was being spared because he was young and stupid, young and not a Jew, young and not a Communist, and most of all because he was young and the son of a man who hated both Communists and Jews. His father’s support of those who would destroy those groups had reached out to save Danforth’s life.
“You have been granted much good fortune,” Volker told him in a voice that was not unlike his father’s. “Be careful how you use it.” He reached into the drawer of his desk, took out the passport that had earlier been taken from him, and returned it.
“Thank you,” Danforth said. He reached to draw it from Volker’s hand and then stopped as Volker’s fingers clamped down on it.
“At once,” Volker repeated.
“Yes,” Danforth said.
Volker released the passport and Danforth placed it in his jacket pocket.
Neither bothered to say goodbye.
Once dismissed, Danforth headed down the stairs and into the building’s lobby. It was an ornate affair, with the sort of woodwork that had been the pride of an older age, now almost entirely covered in bunting, the interior festooned with Nazi flags.
A car waited outside the building, and as Danforth came into the daylight again, the driver quickly pulled himself from behind the wheel and opened the back door. “This way, sir.”
He was driven — or was it escorted — back to his hotel, and once they were there, the driver again got out and opened the door for him. “I am to wait for you, sir.”
“Wait for me?”
“You are going to the train station, yes?” the man said. “You are leaving Germany today?”
So he would be watched at every step of his departure, Danforth realized, and after he was gone, his name would be added to a list of people no longer permitted to enter Germany.
“Yes, leaving,” Danforth said quietly.
He took the clattering old elevator up to the fourth floor, packed his bags, and headed for the door. He had nearly reached it when he turned back and saw Anna’s scarf still draped over the chair where she’d left it the night before. It was all he would ever have of her, he thought, and in the despair that swept over him at that moment, he drew it from the chair and buried his face in its dark folds and felt in the grimly merging way of grief the full and unbearable weight of both her presence and her loss.
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
So what was really the point of Danforth’s story? I wondered in the brief silence that fell over him now. Was it a cautionary tale about the profoundly unsmooth running of true love? Or was it a warning about the twisting course of intelligence work, how plots evolve and deepen as if by their own volition, each step in some way unwilled? Could it be that I was being lectured — however metaphorically —about the passion of youth or the fierce nature of desire? Or did his instruction touch on the injustices of class, the way his own favorable circumstances had protected him from what had no doubt befallen Anna and Bannion?
I was still considering these many possibilities when Danforth’s question brought me up short.
“You’ve never killed anyone, have you, Paul?”
He asked this casually, as he might have asked if I’d ever eaten duck confit or sipped Meursault.
“Killed anyone?” I was obviously taken aback by the question. “No, I’ve never killed anyone.”
“I didn’t think so,” Danforth said.
So was Danforth’s tale a murder story? I wondered now.
“Have you?” I asked him, hesitantly.
“Oh, sure,” Danforth answered calmly, revealing no sense of regret at having done so.
“Really?”
“Well, there was a war, after all,” Danforth said.
“Oh, you mean in the war,” I said with rather obvious relief. “Of course.”
“I remember one fellow,” Danforth went on in the same breezy tone, as if he were relating the story of a camping trip in the Berkshires. “A British intelligence officer. He’d tracked this Nazi bastard to a hunting lodge in Bavaria. He knew his crimes. The Nazi tried to explain himself, tell him why he’d done what he’d done, but in the end, he couldn’t keep that mask in place, and with all the contempt in the world, he sneered at my British friend.” He lifted his hand to get the waiter’s attention, then quite casually, he added, “So the Brit shot him right between the eyes.” He laughed. “The British did a lot of that sort of thing after the war, you know. We wanted trials, we Americans. We wanted due process. But not the Brits. They shot those Nazi bastards wherever they found them. They shot them in barns and animal stalls. They shot them in the woods and on deserted roads. They shot them in their little town squares and dragged them out of basements and root cellars and caves and shot them in broad daylight, with their fat wives and little milkmaid daughters looking on.” His laugh was surprisingly brutal. “There are certain things a human being cannot do and still expect another human being to let him live.” He looked at me with the weariness born of this conclusion. “For certain crimes, there should be no protection. Even love, as they say, must have an end.”
I found something curiously touching in this last remark, perhaps because it had been so hard won, given the failure of the plot, how heart-struck he’d been by Anna, their one night of passion, her capture the next day, Bannion’s too, then Danforth’s own escape, along with whatever dark and bloody things he’d known after that, a whole world at war. It made for the grave mosaic one saw in his face and that returned me to his time.
