The Quest for Anna Klein

In years to come, Danforth would often try to re-create the storm of feeling that broke over him at that moment and that left him utterly desolate. It was as if he had seen the whirlwind from the inside, the terrible violence of its swirl.

Romanchuk laughed again. “She give Soviets false turn. They don’t know that. She act different.”

“How?”

“Like she was with them,” Romanchuk said. “Like she was on their side, a good comrade. Very friendly. Especially with the guy with the Order of Lenin. She even speak to him in Turkish.”

“Turkish?” Danforth asked.

“I hear, I know. I once work in Ankara,” Romanchuk explained.

“Did you understand what they were talking about?” Danforth asked. “This woman and the Soviet officer?”

“Moscow,” Romanchuk answered. “She ask him about city. He say it is crowded.” He laughed, then he said, “But there’s always room in Adult World.”

Adult World, Danforth thought, a term he’d picked up from his many interrogations, the comical Russian nickname for Lubyanka.

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

“Adult World because there was a famous toy store across the square from Lubyanka Prison,” Danforth explained. “Children’s World, it was called.”

“Funny,” I said grimly.

“Lubyanka was also said to be Moscow’s tallest building,” Danforth added without the slightest glimmer of humor, “because from its basement windows you could see Siberia.”

“Even funnier,” I said darkly.

“It had once been the gos strakhkassa,” Danforth continued. “The government insurance office. Strakhkassa means ‘insurance office.’ But strakh means ‘fear’ in Russian, so later people called it gos strakha, the ‘government terror.’”

“But of course, this was something Romanchuk only claimed to have overheard,” I said.

“Which meant I had nothing to go forward on,” Danforth said. “But I also had nothing to go back to, Paul.” He shrugged. “And so I went east.”

“East,” I said, as if I’d stumbled on a clue. “Where your story always seems to be tending. A story that is sort of a haunted-house tale now, it seems to me. With the protagonist searching from room to room, looking for that ghost.”

“Anna’s ghost,” Danforth said in a tone that gave me the impression that I was being led down a road whose end Danforth knew well, being conducted step by step, carefully and thoughtfully, toward some fateful final moment.

“From room to room, yes,” I said, “but always to the east.”

“Always to the east,” Danforth repeated. “How right you are, Paul.” His smile was paper thin. “Where you’ve never been, I think you said. The Middle East, I mean.”

“No, never to the Middle East,” I said a little defensively. “But as I told you, I’ve been to Moscow.”

“Ah, yes, Moscow,” Danforth said, and on that word resumed his tale. “I arrived there —”

“But wait a moment,” I interrupted. “Romanchuk said that Anna was giving the Russians a wrong turn.”

“Yes.”

“So, you were now convinced that this woman was working for the Germans?”

“Completely convinced,” Danforth said. “And I was also convinced that this woman was Anna.”

“So why did you continue looking for her?” I asked. “She had probably betrayed you. Probably gotten Bannion killed. Maybe even Christophe. She was a —”

“She was a Nazi pretending to be a Jew,” Danforth interrupted.

“Then why look for her?” I asked.

“Well, wouldn’t you look for the person who had used you and betrayed you while all the time working for a cause that killed millions of innocent people?” Danforth asked.

It was at that moment I saw the deep hatred he had harbored for so long.

“You were going to kill her?” I asked, more astonished by this notion than by anything Danforth had revealed so far.

“Yes,” Danforth said brutally. “Faced with such a betrayal, nothing should stay your hand, don’t you agree, Paul?”

“No, nothing,” I said, in an admiring tone I hadn’t used with him before.

“But it was no longer love that drove me,” Danforth said. “It was hatred.”

He let me ponder this stark reversal for a time, then he added darkly, “And so to Moscow, because there seemed no place else to go.”