The Quest for Anna Klein

“No,” Danforth told him bluntly. “No, I want you to find out what you can about where she is right now. Whether she’s still in custody. Whether she’s alive or dead.”

“All right,” Clayton said wearily. “But you should face the fact that you may never know more about her than you do right now.”

The last of what Danforth thought he would ever know about Anna came to him two weeks later.

He had spent part of that day at the British Museum, vacantly staring at the Elgin Marbles, wondering how his father might have smuggled such massive blocks of stone out of Greece and brought them safely to the New Jersey warehouse of Danforth Imports, and this in turn had led to other fanciful speculations as to how such devices might be employed to bring Anna safely home, should he ever find her. This, of course, presumed that all along she’d been what she claimed, a belief Danforth was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain. It was as if she were a statue he had erected in his mind, bold and solid but now steadily eroding because of his own suspicions. And yet, for all that, he sometimes dreamed of a secret train that would carry her to a secret boat that would carry her across the darkened Channel, where he would wait for her by the cliffs of Dover.

Then, on a clear fall night, in a small tavern on Oxford Street, all such fanciful speculation abruptly ended.

“Anna was interrogated for several days,” Clayton told him. “Then she was executed “

Danforth would later be astonished that he had not swooned with this news but had instead abruptly straightened himself and asked for a meaningless detail.

“Shot?”

Clayton shook his head. “They use a guillotine at Plotzensee.”

“A guillotine,” Danforth whispered.

It would be many years before Danforth visited the execution room at Plotzensee, and on that occasion, the room would strike him as small and plain. The guillotine by then had mysteriously disappeared; it was never found. He knew that a gallows had finally been installed in the room, but that had come long after Anna, and so he’d simply imagined how the guillotine’s many victims had knelt upon the wooden bed, felt its hard, flat surface beneath them, then lifted their heads and stretched their necks over the semicircular cradle that awaited them. There they had knelt with their hands tied behind them, knelt for God only knew how many seconds or minutes before the blade that hung above them finally whistled down. The floor where the vanished guillotine had once rested was bare on the day Danforth came to Plotzensee, but its place was marked, and for that reason Danforth had been able to see what the now long dead must also have seen during the last minutes of their lives: the unremarkable door, the bare walls, the arched windows that, oddly, gave the room the feel of a chapel. A single red cord had been stretched across the width of the room, and beyond it, just beneath the arched windows, a wreath had been placed, and next to it was a second spray of flowers. “So viele Todesfalle,” someone said just behind him, but he didn’t look to see who’d spoken. So many deaths.

“I’m so very sorry, Tom,” Clayton said.

Danforth found that beyond the three words he had already said, he could add only: “Are you sure?”

Clayton nodded. “According to my sources, she never betrayed you or Bannion or anything about the Project,” he added by way of consolation. “She was a heroic woman.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “It was Rache who betrayed us.”

Rache, Danforth thought. In German it meant “vengeance,” and at that moment the need for vengeance seemed to him the only thing he had left.

For a time, Clayton said nothing, as if warned from speaking any further word by the look on Danforth’s face.

“You have to go on, Tom,” he said finally. “You have to go back to New York, put Anna’s death behind you.”

Which was the best advice he could have gotten, and which Danforth had briefly hoped to follow, but never could.

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

“Never could,” Danforth said now.

Though he had tried, as he went on to tell me. He returned to New York and resumed his command of Danforth Imports. In that role, he immersed himself, working long hours, then trudging home to his bed. He tried to find pleasure in the old pleasures, in reading and going to plays. He went out with this woman and that one, but with each failed attempt to rekindle that part of his life, he felt himself fall farther and farther from any capacity to do so. In the middle of a luxurious dinner, he would find himself again at the Old Town Bar, fixed upon his ghostly memory of Anna. While Amy or Sandy or Marian prattled on about this or that, he would hear her whispered voice: What is the most beautiful thing you never saw? And with that question, he would think of all the many places he had dreamed of seeing with her and that he now no longer wished to see because he was without her.

“It was like Eve’s love for Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost,” Danforth said. “That simple, gorgeous line of Eve’s: ‘with him all deaths / I could endure; without him live no life.’”

As the months passed, he worked to ease the ceaseless ache of Anna’s loss. But nothing soothed him or dulled the vividness of his incessant memories of her. At night he would sometimes awaken in the midst of reaching for her, and when he found only emptiness, he would lie on his back and stare at the ceiling and accept the hard fact that nothing could fill this void.

“It was romantic anguish,” Danforth said. He looked as if that very agony had been reignited. “It was passion without an object. I was like a starving man whom no food could satisfy.”

“But you can’t love a dead woman forever, can you?” I asked.

The question appeared to move Danforth, and he immediately turned from it and retreated into his old redoubt of academic discussion.

“The guillotine is an interesting mechanism, Paul,” he said. “It’s supposed to be very fast and entirely painless.” He glanced toward the window, where the snow was still falling steadily, though it had begun to lighten.