cleverness. “Now that would be a great game. And he would have played it perfectly. So that the Germans continued to believe he was a German agent and Anna continued to believe he was an American agent when in fact he was always a Soviet agent.” He looked at Danforth knowingly. “All that worked. Only you continued to be a problem for them, Tom.”
“In what way?”
“Because you kept looking for Anna, and in doing that, you kept looking for Rache,” LaRoche said, clearly pleased with himself for coming up with this scenario. “If you were going to be released, they wanted you to stop searching. And so they played one of their old games.” He smiled at how it all hung together. “It is called the traitor’s gate.”
~ * ~
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
“And I might have walked right through it,” Danforth said. His eyes flared with familiar fire. “So was Anna acting the night she came to me in Munich? Or was she acting in Magadan?” He shrugged. “It seemed to me that only one person would know the answer to that. Code name: Rache.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me that you took what LaRoche said seriously?”
“Yes.”
“But it was pure speculation,” I reminded him.
“And done as rather a devil’s advocate, I think,” Danforth agreed. “And even if it was true, how would it be possible to find Rache? He might be anywhere in the Soviet Union. He might be in East Germany.”
I glanced at the bookshelf that rose behind Danforth’s chair, its ample space packed with books on East Germany, the Stasi, the whole network of Cold War intrigue that spread out from gray offices of East Berlin. I had little doubt that Danforth had pored over each of these books, studied every tiny detail, created flowcharts of countless hierarchies, looking for some clue to where in this swarming hive of agents he might find a single bee.
Danforth saw the trajectory of my gaze and took the cue.
“I had to assume that Rache was a master spy,” he said. “An adroit triple agent who’d played an American agent and fooled Bannion, a German agent who’d fooled the Nazis, and all along he’d actually been working for the Russians.”
A glimmer of the old Stalinist paranoia he’d earlier described glittered in his eyes, and I wondered if the sanity he had so far displayed might be an act as clever and beguiling as the kind he’d previously ascribed to Anna.
“Rache,” he said. “Vengeance.”
He let this word drift like acrid smoke in the air around us.
“When you need something to hate, you will find it, believe me,” Danforth said now. “You will find it and you will paint it in whatever colors you choose. With no place else to turn, I turned to Rache. He became my Moriarty, my antichrist. I thought of nothing but discovering once and for all if he had betrayed us.”
With that conclusion, Danforth abruptly returned to his earlier self, all reason and careful analysis, his brain no longer boiling with suppositions that fired vengeful fantasies but now trained on a method by which he might answer the last burning question of his life.
“I racked my brain to find some small chink in all this,” he said, “and the one thing that kept returning to me was the fact that during Romanchuk’s interrogation, there’d been an older man with the Order of Lenin on his lapel to whom Anna had spoken Turkish. I remembered that in a conversation with LaRoche, Anna had recalled Baku, which is the capital of Azerbaijan, a part of Russia that shares a border with Turkey.”
“Those are rather disparate elements,” I cautioned.
“Yes, but the investigation of a plot is about finding intersections within the plot,” Danforth said. “Coordinates that allow you to zero in on what really happened.”
As absurd as it seemed to me now, and as absurd as it had seemed to him then, Danforth had embarked upon a huge research project. It was a search to find what he called coordinates by which he might connect the Order of Lenin, knowledge of Turkish, and familiarity with Baku.
“As it turned out, Romanchuk was wrong,” Danforth told me. “At least as far as the Order of Lenin is concerned. It wasn’t a big deal, really. Lots of people had been given the Order of Lenin. Pilots and scientists and aircraft designers. There were engineers and nuclear-power experts. There was a polar explorer. It was even given to
And so the research had turned into a monumentally tedious and time-consuming task, Danforth said, but he had never relented, and each day after he finished teaching, he headed for the library. For weeks, months, years, he walked between the two sober lions and entered the great reading room with its long tables and green-shaded lamps. He worked each night until the library closed, and each night as he wearily headed home, he reminded himself that he was doing this for Anna. “Love has many faces, Paul,” he said, by way of explanation, “but lost love has only one.”
It struck me that Danforth’s quest had been driven by a need that had been momentarily fulfilled on that one night in Munich but ultimately unrequited for all the nights after that. He was a man with a chronic illness, doomed to live forever with the incurable affliction of having loved at a moment of supreme peril a woman of supreme mystery, and this love had annihilated any hope that he might ever love again.
“It took me many years,” Danforth said, “but in the end I found my coordinates in a Soviet general who had dealt with the ethnic conflict that was always breaking out in Azerbaijan.” He shook his head. “Bathed in blood, that part of the world.”
For a moment he seemed to drift down that red river.
“You were talking about a Soviet general,” I reminded him.
“Yes,” Danforth answered. “His name was Sergei Lukudovich Solotoff, and after the war, he returned to Baku. When I finally made it to his door, he was eighty-six years old.”
