Danforth sat without taking off his coat; the room was too cold for that, as a film of ice on the window made clear. He could see that Romanchuk was frightened, as if he expected to be arrested, hauled back to the American sector, tried for some crime of which he was no doubt guilty, then hanged or sent to prison. But he could also see that Romanchuk had been in such tight spots before and that he’d grown confident in his ability to slither out of them.
“I’m not here to arrest you,” Danforth told him. “I’m looking for a woman.”
Relief flooded Romanchuk’s face. “I can get woman,” he said.
Years later, when Danforth read of the thriving sex slave trade in Moldova, he’d wondered if Romanchuk was still alive, a wrinkled old pimp who’d slipped across the border to steal Moldovan girls from their small villages and sell them in the back-alley clubs of Chisinau. It would have been typical, he’d thought then, Romanchuk at last become some version of Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz, evil the undying fuel that powered and sustained him.
“Woman. Young girl,” Romanchuk added.
Danforth restrained the violent urge that swept over him and said, “I’m looking for a particular woman. You may not have heard her name, but when the Soviets interrogated you in Warsaw, she was the one who translated your answers.”
Danforth could see that Romanchuk was still trying to read the situation and somehow use it for his own gain. He was a criminal through and through, Danforth recognized, the sort of man who never once got up in the morning and asked himself how he might make an honest living. Danforth had encountered scores of such people in his postwar interrogations, a whole criminal class the Germans had used to carry out some of their most dreadful crimes: rapists and murderers who’d been taken from their cells in countless eastern towns, supplied with whips and truncheons and ax handles, and then unleashed to storm through streets and hospitals. During a particular atrocity he now recalled, a schoolyard full of children still in their uniforms had been attacked. Remembering the dreadful photographs he’d seen, the knots of terrified little boys and girls, hulking brutes still in their prison clothes raging among them, their truncheons in midstrike or already making contact, he found himself amazed that such miscreants, along with the nation that had unleashed them, had not been exterminated at the end of the war.
With that thought, Danforth’s still-fuming hatred of the Germans spiked, and on its hurtling flame he burst forward and grabbed Romanchuk by the throat.
“Now you listen to me,” he snarled. “You’re going to tell me all you know about this woman, and you’re going to do it because if you don’t, I’ll kill you.” He pressed his face close to Romanchuk’s and released every spark of his hatred and contempt. “Do we understand each other?”
Romanchuk stared at Danforth unbelievingly, a man who had seen many forms of hurt and hatred but never like this.
“This woman translated for you when the Soviets held you in Warsaw,” Danforth repeated, still speaking German. Then, using a Ukrainian word he’d been careful to learn at the beginning of his journey, he said,
With no further prompting, Romanchuk told Danforth that he’d forged a passport for a man the Soviets were desperately trying to find, a German agent they believed had betrayed them. “I tell them this guy want passport and identity card just before Germans make pact with Russia.”
“Did you know his name?” Danforth asked.
Romanchuk shook his head. “He was big deal, because Russian officer was wearing Order of Lenin.”
“Tell me about the woman who translated for you,” Danforth said.
“Small woman,” Romanchuk said. “Dark. Good-looking.”
“And her hair?” Danforth asked.
“It was very short,” Romanchuk said. “From behind, she could be boy.”
“Did you get any impression of where she was from?” Danforth asked. “Whether she was German or something else?”
“She was American,” Romanchuk answered without hesitation.
“How do you know?”
“When I was sit in the room, wait for questions, there was guard. Regular clothes, but he was guard, you know what I mean.”
Danforth said nothing.
“Another guard come in and just loud enough, he say, ‘She here, the American girl.’ And maybe in a minute she come into room with three men.”
Like many others Danforth had interrogated, Romanchuk seemed lost in surreal recollection. Danforth had seen the same look in the faces of both the witnesses and the defendants at Nuremberg, in the architects of the chimneys and in those who’d barely missed going up them. It gave the sense that they believed they could not possibly have done or suffered what they had done or suffered, that it had all happened in some unreal space, all been something . . . beyond.
“She didn’t say nothing to me,” Romanchuk went on. “She translate. My German not so good. My Russian not so good. We speak in Ukrainian, and she translate to Russian.” His eyes narrowed. “No. She was . . . saying wrong. Well, not exact wrong, she leave out important things.”
“Why would she do that?” Danforth asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe she protect this guy the Russians want.”
“She was protecting a German agent?” Danforth asked starkly.
“Yes,” Romanchuk said. “For example, she don’t say it was Argentina passport he want. She just say passport. They look for this man, but she don’t say where.” His grin was like the slavering of a dog. “I say nothing. Maybe he her lover or something.”
