A small elevator lifted us to the fourteenth floor, and Danforth led me through an unrelentingly charmless corridor and into a cramped apartment whose one luxury was a wide southern view of Manhattan, the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan twinkling brightly in the distance, a horrible gap separating them.
“It must be a painful view now,” I said.
“And enraging,” Danforth said. “Sometimes I want to kill them all.” He peered out the window for a moment, then said, “But as you noted before, if we’d done that to the Germans, you wouldn’t be here, would you, Paul?”
“No,” I said.
“Because we would have killed that grandfather of yours,” Danforth added. “Where was he from, by the way?”
“Augsburg.”
“Hmm,” Danforth said. “There was a subcamp of Dachau near there.”
I could not deny that this mention of the Dachau concentration camp chilled me.
Danforth’s smile seemed only to add a layer of deeper cold. “So how do you want it, Paul?” he asked.
“Want what?” I asked.
“Your coffee,” Danforth said.
“Oh, uh, w-with cream,” I stammered.
“But milk will do, I hope?”
“Yes, of course.”
Danforth made his way to the tiny kitchen that adjoined the almost equally tiny living area. While he made the coffee, I sat down and took in my surroundings. They were very humble, with little to lift their ordinariness but the large bookshelves that lined the room’s four walls, which, I noticed, mainly held books about spying, the tricks of that trade, along with a surprising number of titles about Germany, though not that country in the 1930s and 1940s, when Danforth was there, but during the Cold War, from its beginnings to the bringing down of the Wall. Some volumes contained an unexpected focus on the activities of the infamous Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. Could it be, I wondered, that Anna had somehow used her charms and her linguistic talents to make her way up the pecking order of that evil force and then become the perfect servant of East Germany’s version of the KGB? And if so, what had she been? A Nazi agent? A Soviet agent? Both?
“There you are, Paul,” Danforth said as he handed me a cup of coffee, sat down in the chair opposite me with his own cup, and took a sip. “This should return me to sobriety.”
“I doubt you ever left it,” I said to him. “Despite your youthful adventure, you strike me as a cautious man.”
“Not always,” Danforth said with a telling glance at the bookshelf to his right, all those volumes of an East Germany firmly in the grip of a now-displaced Communism. “No, not always,” he repeated, then sank back deeply into his chair. “Especially when it comes to revenge.”
Revenge, I thought, the emotion that seemed still to inflame him and with which he returned us to his tale.
~ * ~
Kolyma, Soviet Union, 1964
“Robert?” Danforth asked tentatively. Many years had passed, and Clayton’s face, if indeed it was Clayton’s, was now webbed with wrinkles, his hair sprinkled with silver.
“Yes,” Clayton said. He was clearly stricken by the figure before him, Danforth’s ragged clothes and matted beard, his body so emaciated it was all but skeletal. “The commandant doesn’t speak English so ask him when we can leave,” he said.
“Leave.” Danforth couldn’t be sure he’d heard this.
“Yes, leave,” Clayton said. “Go ahead, Tom, ask him.”
Danforth turned to the commandant and asked the question in Russian.
“There is a supply truck to Magadan in an hour,” the commandant answered. He did not seem pleased by the paper in his hand. “It says you are to be released immediately, so be on your way.”
The commandant did not leave them alone and would not allow them to talk to each other, and so Danforth simply stared at his old friend until the truck arrived.
“Go,” the commandant said. He looked at Danforth sternly, and then something broke in his face, something that softened him and made him look almost wistful. “Give regard Broadway,” he said.
Later, as they sat on mounds of empty sacks in the back of the truck, Clayton said, “I’ve been looking for you for twelve years.”
“Twelve years,” Danforth repeated in English, a language that now seemed foreign to him. He made a quick calculation, the result of which astonished him. “I am . . . fifty-four years old.”
“Yes,” Clayton said softly.
Danforth realized that he had yet to ask Clayton a single question, and so he asked his first.
“Why did they release me?”
Clayton placed his finger to his lips and softly shook his head.
The failure of Danforth’s final mission suddenly pierced him. “Anna got away with it,” he said.
