“And why have you returned to our sad country?” Solotoff asked.
“Because I want to know who betrayed me,” Danforth said.
Danforth did not mention Anna because he had reached that point when a man looks back and feels that in his lifelong quest — whatever it might have been— he has betrayed himself, squandered his days, and to reveal the nature of that squandering would expose him as a madman or a fool.
“I want vengeance,” Danforth said, a motive he was certain Solotoff would understand. “For my life.”
“How would you get it?” Solotoff asked.
“By killing a traitor,” Danforth answered flatly.
“You are rather old for such a mission,” the general said.
“I have nothing else,” Danforth said.
“And so you’ve come all this way,” the general said in a bemused voice.
“Yes.”
Danforth saw a glint of the old Russian wolf in Solotoff’s eyes and realized that this was a man whose past had betrayed him and whose once fierce loyalties had faded; now he was simply a poor old man in search of a score, one who had nothing left to sell but his memories.
“Tell me more about Warsaw,” Solotoff said.
“There was a forger named Romanchuk,” Danforth told him. “I had some dealings with him after the war. I think you may have interrogated him in Warsaw.”
“Why would you think such a thing?” Solotoff asked.
“Because one of the interrogators wore the Order of Lenin,” Danforth said. “And he spoke Turkish.” Danforth kept his demeanor entirely casual. “I know you have the Order of Lenin and that you were once very powerful here in Azerbaijan, so you probably speak Turkish. I put that together, and you came up as the man who was most likely to have been in Warsaw when Romanchuk was interrogated.”
“In the first two of these things you are right,” Solotoff said, as if the facts bored him. “But why should I tell you if you are right in the last of them?”
Danforth’s earliest memories of the east returned, the abyss of corruption his father had many times described, along with the eternal miseries of the Balkans. He recalled the bandits on the railway, that long-ago crucifixion, the leader of that ruthless band, how he’d walked among the terrified passengers, nodding at watches, bracelets, cuff links, the glint in his soulless eyes that Danforth now saw in Solotoff’s. He was a dead soul, and dead souls can be bought.
“Because I’ll pay you,” he said. “I’ll pay you if you tell me where Rache is.”
Solotoff took a slow, meditative sip of tea. “What else do you know about this interrogation in Warsaw?”
“There was a woman,” Danforth said. “An American. She was brought in to translate from Ukrainian for Romanchuk.”
Solotoff slowly put down the cup and gazed at it as if he were a pawnbroker studying its every crack and chink. “How much would you pay?”
“Are you the man who was sent to interrogate Romanchuk?” Danforth asked. “Did you speak to the American woman in Turkish?”
Solotoff grinned. “Perhaps. It is a long chain that stretches back so far. I would have to make inquiries. It might take some time. And my contacts are not without needs. I would have to be generous.”
Generous. By which he meant, Danforth knew, there would be many payments.
Solotoff’s smile had a canine sparkle, and at that instant, Danforth recalled the soldiers at Plotzensee, the many border guards whose palms he’d greased, their drunken delight in the power they had over him, and after these, he remembered the long line of interrogators he’d faced beneath a naked bulb, the blows that had rained down upon him in the camp, always with some brute grinning as he delivered them.
Solotoff drained the last of his tea, returned the cup to the table, then sat back and waited. “Twenty thousand American dollars.”
“How would this payment be made?” Danforth asked.
Solotoff laughed. “Oil seeps through many holes in Baku.”
It was a typically metaphorical response, and by it, Danforth understood the great sieve of Soviet corruption, General Solotoff a surly man with many conduits, a rabbit warren of little deals and old favors with an untold number of escape routes.
“I will have to be sure of any information you give me,” Danforth warned him.
“There will be only one piece of information,” Solotoff said as if closing a negotiation with a nervous buyer. “A name. An address. That is all.” His eyes glittered like sunlight on the bloodstained snows of Stalingrad. “Once we have an understanding, you will have to wait. But in the end, you will hear from me.”
~ * ~
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
“And so the arrangements were made, and I returned to New York and waited to hear from this old hero of the Soviets,” Danforth said with undisguised contempt. “I had no doubt that eventually I would.”
Danforth read my incredulity as he had so often done during his narrative, and he immediately provided a corollary tale that made clear that his own was entirely believable.
