surprisingly calm waters sailed to England.
Once in London, Danforth learned that Clayton had been shipped to the Pacific, the commander of a Marine regiment. Clayton’s letters had accumulated in the mailroom of Danforth Imports, collected by Danforth’s father, who with the outbreak of war had thrown all his resources into the effort. No longer a friend of Germany, he’d purchased thousands of war bonds and provided his country with every imaginable trade secret for the smuggling of supplies and information. Then, in April of 1943, the senior Danforth died in his lofty aerie overlooking Central Park, still baffled by the son who had briefly returned from Europe after a long, mysterious stay, returned distant and aloof, seeming to have lost not only his will to live, as he’d told his father one long, sorrowful evening, but also his will to love.
It was this loveless and unloving man who now occupied the tiny desk in the tiny cubicle of an otherwise nondescript building in Hammersmith, his assignment to translate messages from various sources that poured into London from Calais to Istanbul. The messages were frequently in error, and some were no doubt intended to misinform, but more often than not, they were simply of no use to those planning the invasion that everyone knew was coming and in which effort Danforth felt himself once again sidelined.
But inconsequential as his work seemed to him, Danforth remained at his desk, hoping, always hoping, to find some shred of information as to where Anna had been buried so that after the war, he might find her body and bring it home. But even as he sought such information, some crazed part of his mind harbored the hope that she was still alive, though this hope caused him to envision a still darker end for Anna: in February of 1944 he read about a number of women executed in Natzweiler-Struthof, and he could not stop wondering if she had been among them. In April he read of the mass execution of
All of these nightmare visions continually assailed him, but it was one in particular he found he could not shake:
Escaped prisoner from Pforzheim reports seeing a small dark female, very badly beaten. Reports female chained nude outside and left through night. Reports SS officer returned and gave her more “rough treatment.” Reports prisoner was kicked and beaten and was “all blood.” Reports prisoner left till afternoon. Reports SS officer returned and shot prisoner. Reports prisoner was conscious when executed.
Could this small dark female have been Anna?
It was an absurd question, and there was no way for Danforth to answer it, and yet the brief record of this incident refused to let him go, continually urging him to find a way to return to Europe so he could exact yet more revenge.
But each of his requests was denied, and so Danforth continued to work in his London basement cubicle, translating more communications from which he learned more details of the much earlier Parisian roundups of the city’s Jews, their herding together in the transit camp at Drancy, the terrible conditions there, the priest who’d claimed to hear the cry of children, though he could not have, from the steps of Sacre Coeur. He read about Ravensbruck, where female prisoners were gassed, about the massacres at Ascq in France and Vinkt in Belgium and Cephalonia in Greece, then farther east, where hell grew hotter in the children’s camp as Sisak and the women’s camp at Stara Gradiska.
But the dark preponderance of messages came from Poland, a steady stream of accounts that caused Danforth at last to lift his eyes from the most recent of them late on a rainy evening, still unable to take in a fact he was sure had long ago been accepted by others far more informed than himself, and which he finally mentioned to Colonel Broderick.
“The Germans are systematically killing all the Jews,” he said. “Does everyone know this?”
Broderick nodded grimly. “Yes, we know. And so when the war is over, we’re going to need German-speaking interrogators who are very skilled. Like you, Tom. Because we’re going to find out everything they did and make them pay for it.”
The sweet prospect of the world’s revenge fed the dark animal inside Danforth’s soul, and so he remained in London and there read of more and more outrages, and with each new report felt his heart harden, his spirit grow arid, and something like winter settle into him, an inner death that was deepened because in every report of torture and murder, every account of people shot or hanged or driven into gas chambers, he saw among them Anna.
The invasion came in early June, and two weeks later he at last crossed the Channel and set foot again in France to begin his work as an interrogator. It was there he met the first of what were called the Ritchie boys, the Jews who’d fled Nazi Germany, been trained in Camp Ritchie, Maryland, parachuted or made beach landings on D- day, then slogged through the countryside broadcasting surrender offers to retreating Germans or questioning those who’d already surrendered.
His first job was to break down a Wehrmacht officer named Werner Kruger, a short, stocky little man who smoked continuously during the interrogation. By then they’d learned that the Germans were terrified of being handed over to the Russians, and so they’d dressed a couple of the Ritchie boys in Russian army uniforms on the pretense that should the prisoner not cooperate, he would be turned over to Comrade Stalin. The Ritchie boys had played their parts to the hilt, and it had been effective in a surprising number of cases, Werner Kruger’s chief among them.
There’d been scores of others like Kruger, an army of prisoners from whom Danforth had sought information, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but within each new interrogation still seeking some clue to Anna. Months passed, and summer became fall, and the army marched eastward, and France was liberated and Germany defeated, so that it was amid the ruins of Nuremberg several weeks after the end of the war that he finally met Horst Dieter.
SS captain Horst Dieter had been brought to Danforth’s office for what was described as a “thorough going- over.” Danforth had expected the usual SS type, still arrogant in defeat, lips locked in perpetual sneer, eyes brimming with contempt. Instead, Dieter had affected a nearly jaunty gait as he walked to the chair across the table from Danforth and sat down. He was loose-limbed and gave off an inexplicable casualness, not to say indifference, and it was this oddity in demeanor that Danforth first addressed.
“You don’t seem to realize the situation you’re in,” Danforth told him in his unaccented German.
“I speak English, Captain,” Dieter said. “I lived for two years in Virginia.” He shrugged. “And I know quite well what my situation is. I’m going to be shot. So what? I’m used to executions.”
This was the sort of casual remark that had opened the door on horrendous crimes in earlier interrogations, and so Danforth pursued it like a lead. “Used to executions?” he asked in as similar a tone as he could muster. “Okay, so how during the war did you happen to get used to executions?”
“I was used to them well before the war,” Dieter answered with a dismissive wave of his hand.
