“But Olga Chekhova survived only because she’d been a Soviet agent all along,” I said.
Danforth now seemed a creature formed of shadows. “True enough, Paul,” he said quietly. “A Soviet agent all along. As Rache was too. Which meant that only Bannion had been what he seemed.”
“Only Bannion,” I said softly. “And so he was completely expendable.”
“As the innocent always are,” Danforth said. “Because they are of no importance to either side. And so we can kill them without losing anything save the value we once gave to innocence.”
“But you couldn’t know that any of this was true,” I said.
“No, I couldn’t,” Danforth admitted. “Because the best conspiracies work like nesting dolls, Paul. They hide inside each other.” He smiled, but it was a dark, painful smile that gave him a rather wizened look. “It took me years and a great deal of moving around, mostly in those rattling trains that wound through Eastern Europe, but I finally found Rudy Romanchuk,” he said, by way of returning to his tale. “He’d gone back to the Ukraine, just as Brock had thought, a town the Germans called Lemberg.”
~ * ~
Lemberg, Ukraine, 1951
Danforth had started in Warsaw, which still lay in ruins, went on to Radom, and then continued farther eastward in long torturous rides on belching, coal-fired trains and groaning buses, all of them crowded with peasants who ate bread and cheese and washed it down with bottles of
“You speak not bad Polish,” an old man said to him on the road out of Zamosc, Danforth on this occasion riding in a horse-drawn lorry with a group of former Polish prisoners, all of them huddled together on a layer of wet hay. The old man held up the bottle the others had been passing around. “Vodka come from old word,” he said,
Danforth shook his head.
The old man placed his gnarled hands on either side of his face, rocked his head left and right, smiled widely, and fluttered his eyes almost girlishly. “It mean,” he said, “‘to glow.’”
This had been the brightest moment of Danforth’s eastward journey. The rest had been a long ordeal of bone-battering travel through a landscape he’d last visited many years before the war, and the vast sweep of its destruction amazed him, even though he’d followed the Third Army through France and walked the charred remains of Dresden and the rubble of Berlin. War is one thing, as he would later realize, but massacre is another, and in town after wasted town he’d seen the cruel arrogance of the German invasion and the cruel vengeance of the Soviet reoccupation. He’d walked the pit of death in Dubno and valley of death in Bydgoszcz, and once he’d reached Lemberg it was beneath the bridge of death he’d walked to find Romanchuk’s freezing hovel on Peltewna Street.
As he traveled along that winding way, Soviet soldiers had been anything but welcoming, and he was stopped repeatedly and interrogated in small concrete rooms pocked with bullet holes and ripped by shrapnel. But the old art of bribery still possessed its ancient power, and he’d been free in the dispensing of it, softening these war-weary men with meals and liquor and speaking his precarious Russian in ways that made them laugh and drink more and in their sad stupor remove whatever was barring his movement east.
They’d been boys, for the most part, the soldiers and border guards who’d detained him, and in their faces Danforth had seen the youth that war had taken from them. They were cynical and cunning and something in them had been deflowered so that on a whim and in an instant they could become unimaginably brutal. In every town, he’d heard stories of men slit open at the abdomen and then made to dance until their bowels unraveled, of herds of women driven down roads and across fields and over bridges as human mine detectors, of villagers arranged in towering pyramids until those who formed its base were crushed to death. But it was an old woman’s tale of a teenage girl taken from her father’s house near the camp at Lambinowice that he’d never forgotten. She’d been an ethnic German, the old woman said, her parents killed in the anti-German reprisals that had been unleashed by the conquering Russians and thereafter swept the eastern territories. The girl had been entirely naked and radiantly blond, the perfect Aryan victim. A rope had been tied around her neck and she’d been tugged forward like an animal on a leash and loaded into the back of a truck filled with Polish partisans, all of them, as Danforth imagined it, “glowing.” She’d never been seen again.
There was nothing particularly horrendous in this tale compared to other stories of anti-German reprisals Danforth had heard by then, and yet this scene had haunted him for the rest of his journey. He’d come to realize by the time he reached Lemberg that, as with Anna, it was the unknown fate that moved him. What tormented him was not what had definitely been destroyed but what had mysteriously vanished into time and space; not someone who without doubt had been shot in a prison courtyard but that other one — lost in night and fog — who’d last been seen strolling in a park or buying apples from a stand.
Night had fallen by the time he reached what appeared to be a shoemaker’s shop. A yellow glow came from the front window, a color Danforth recognized as candlelight because he’d seen so much of it radiating softly from the otherwise pitch-dark streets of the shattered cities through which he’d passed.
He knocked at the door and waited. It opened slightly and a thin shaft of light crossed the threshold. A small eye floated like a rheumy brown bubble in that same narrow slit, and to this eye Danforth presented his now- defunct military credentials.
In the German he hoped the man understood, he said, “I’m Captain Thomas Danforth. United States Army. I’m looking for Rudy Romanchuk on a matter of great urgency.”
The eye blinked once, slowly and wearily and even a bit resignedly, and Danforth saw the many crimes for which Romanchuk now thought he was at last to pay the price.
With no word, the door opened and Danforth stepped inside a badly damaged room, precariously supported by cracked walls and splintered wood, and with a disturbing droop in the ceiling. Water marks spread across that ceiling and then down the peeling walls to a bare concrete floor, broken and stained, on which stood old furniture and a few crippled machines. The room’s shattered appearance echoed the mood of Central Europe, Danforth thought as he glanced about: crumbling, torn, a thing of jagged borders, more or less idle.
“American? So far?” Romanchuk asked in very broken German, making it clear that the man had probably spent very little time in that country. Romanchuk’s grin flashed like pieces of silver. “You have plenty money.”
When Danforth didn’t answer, Romanchuk grabbed a spindly wooden chair and drew it over to the coal stove that rested in the center of the room. Beside it an old crate contained the few chunks of coal he’d managed to procure by God only knew what illicit means.
