Dieter shook his head.
“You’re sure you never saw a woman like that at Plotzensee?” Danforth asked emphatically. “In the yard or in the cells?”
Dieter dropped forward in his chair. “No.”
Danforth’s mind was working feverishly to determine if Dieter’s testimony, or even his memory, could be trusted. “Anna was her name,” he added. “She might have been called Anna Collier, or maybe Anna Klein.”
“Klein?” Dieter asked. “She was a Jew?”
Danforth’s gaze turned as lethal as his tone of voice. “She was an American,” he said.
Dieter briefly searched his memory for a moment, then he shrugged. “No,” he said. “There was never an Anna Klein.”
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
It was obvious that these words had brought Danforth to a strange precipice, or perhaps to a doorway that had opened onto an unexpected land.
“If Dieter was right, then Anna had never been taken to Plotzensee Prison,” Danforth said. His tone was now uncertain, as if he were still feeling the aftershocks of this discovery. “And she certainly hadn’t been executed there.”
“So you must have wondered who Clayton’s sources had been for this information,” I said.
“Very good, Paul,” Danforth said. “Yes, that would have been the question. Who were they? And why had they told him what they did?” He shrugged. “Unfortunately, Clayton was still in the Pacific, fighting his way south on Okinawa. And so I went to Plotzensee Prison to see if I could find any record of Anna having been there. It was in the Soviet sector, and the Russians were completely out of control, ripping the plumbing out of the walls, toilet bowls, and sinks, and loading everything onto trucks.” He waved dismissively. “But it was Germany they were destroying, so as far as I was concerned, the Russians could have a free hand.”
“You hated them that much?” I asked.
“They were dust to me,” Danforth said. “They had killed the only woman I would ever love, along with millions of innocent people.”
I started to speak, but the flash in Danforth’s eyes stopped me cold.
“If the crimes of a people go on through time, then why shouldn’t our revenge?” he asked. He seemed to realize that his arctic chill had frozen me, and to warm the atmosphere, he sat back casually, like a man about to tell a lighthearted fireside story. “Anyway, by the time I was allowed to visit Plotzensee, it had pretty much been cleared out. It had been badly damaged from the bombings. There was a lot of charred brick and rubble, and for a carton of cigarettes one of the Russian guards let me walk around the place.”
I imagined Danforth in his army uniform, a pistol strapped to his side, moving through the blackened ruins, then into the old cell blocks of Plotzensee, where, as he told me, many of the doors had been blown off and left lying in the wide corridors.
He had not been sure what he was looking for, he said, but in his rambling he found what appeared to be the prison’s record room. There were still file cabinets, and he searched through the papers he found inside them for quite a few hours. There were prisoner lists and execution lists, along with the usual detritus of the Nazi bureaucracy, petitions for clemency almost always stamped
“Most of what I found was of no value to me, but I did discover that at least one thing Dieter had told me was true,” Danforth went on. “He’d even gotten the nickname right: Lilo.”
As it turned out, Lilo was Liselotte Herrmann, a German Communist who’d joined the Roter Studentenbund, the Red Students League, in 1931, participated in all sorts of anti-Hitler actions, and gotten herself kicked out of the University of Stuttgart.
To my surprise, he drew a photograph from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. “This is Liselotte,” he said.
In the picture, Liselotte Herrmann wore a plain white blouse and was holding a small child. She had straight hair, cut very short, and bottle-bottom glasses with thick, black frames, a woman who could not possibly have been mistaken for a dark, curly-haired Anna Klein.
“The child is her son,” Danforth said. “He was four years old when his mother was executed.” He drew the picture from my hand and returned it to his pocket. “Anyway, I went through the records I found — which were by no means all the records, of course; God knows how many had been burned or blown to bits or used for toilet paper by the Russians — but there was no mention at all of Anna. Which meant that although I couldn’t prove what Dieter had told me, I’d found nothing to disprove it, and so for me the mystery of what had become of Anna only deepened.”
“But she’d surely been killed,” I said. “You had to assume that.”
“Of course,” Danforth said. “But a certain kind of devotion— of obsession — demands to know what really happened, and I was stricken in that way, Paul. I simply had to know.”
Danforth’s had been a sad passion, it seemed to me, and clearly a futile one; even now he struck me as a man with much love and no one to give it to.
“You never fell in love again?” I asked.
“No,” Danforth said,
“But surely your love for Anna faded over time,” I said.
“That’s exactly what Clayton believed would happen eventually,” Danforth said. “That in the end Anna would pass into memory, and I would find a way to make a good life without her. Which was why he’d made up the whole
