He stopped, and by the change in his expression, I knew that he had returned to some memory of Anna.
“It was true, what Anna said,” he added finally. “To kill a snake, you must strike the head.” He thought a moment, then continued. “But something else is no less true: you must strike early at this head, before the snake has coiled and focused its yellow eyes and done the worst it can do.” He paused again, then looked at me pointedly. “And so we began to assemble the materials for the bomb.”
“But you still had no plan,” I said.
“Most assassins don’t,” Danforth said. “At least, the successful ones don’t. Oswald had no plan, save to be at the right place at the right time.” He thought this over, then added, “The men who killed Garfield and McKinley didn’t have plans either, not beyond having an idea of where the target might be and going there.”
“But surely you need a plan of some sort,” I insisted. “A way to get close to the target.”
“Yes, we needed that,” Danforth said. “And for a moment — long shot though it was — I thought I might have found it.”
Berlin, Germany, 1939
“He wanted to be a painter,” Anna said. “He tried to get into the Vienna Academy of Art but he was rejected.” They were walking in a small square, a summer breeze playing in the leaves. “You could say that you were interested in looking at his work.”
“Interested?” Danforth asked. “In what way? He sells very well here in Germany. Why would he be interested in an American buyer?”
“Because he’s vain,” Anna answered. “All I would need is one meeting. You could be out of the country before it happens.”
Out of the country, yes, Danforth thought, out of the country and back to America and a life he felt no desire to resume.
But it was a good idea, and so he nodded his assent, and later that same afternoon composed the letter on his personal stationery. It was simple, and very direct. There was an audience for Hitler’s work in the United States, he wrote, patrons of the arts who have no interest in crude Expressionism. Hitler’s painting, he said, would certainly appeal to such people. To this he added, Of course, the chancellor’s place in the world, not to mention his recent appearance on the cover of Time magazine, would no doubt boost interest, but I believe that the paintings would find an audience here even if they didn’t carry so famous a signature.
“Okay,” Danforth said. “Now, who do we send it to?”
“No one,” Anna said. “Just put it in the general mail, addressed to the Reich Chancellery. It’ll be less suspicious that way.”
They expected no response, of course, but while they waited they became more familiar with Berlin, walking its streets and parks, strolling through its most prominent buildings, observing places where their target might at some point appear.
There was an unreal quality to this interval, as Danforth would often recall, so that he sometimes imagined them as newlyweds on their honeymoon.
Then the honeymoon abruptly ended.
“It’s from the interior ministry,” Danforth said when he showed Anna the letter. He opened the letter and read it with ever-increasing astonishment. “It’s from someone named Ernst Kruger. He says that the chancellor welcomes my interest in his work. A car will be waiting for us at Wannsee Station on July nineteenth at ten in the morning.” He lowered the letter and stared at Anna in utter amazement. “We’re going to be shown some of the chancellor’s paintings.”
Anna took the letter and read it, then handed it back to Danforth.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s get started.”
For the next few days they did what they could to familiarize themselves with Hitler’s work. It was on display in several places throughout the city, small galleries and public buildings, and they spent long hours peering at the paintings, Danforth trying to place them within a school he thought Herr Kruger might find favorable but without resorting to obvious undeserved flattery.
“He has talent,” Anna said at one point. She was staring at a painting of a cathedral in Vienna.
Danforth nodded. “He can draw at least.”
The following days included other tours, and during these quiet days of waiting, Danforth gave Anna a crash course on the sort of art Hitler appeared to favor and imitate, a style heavy on traditional representation that ignored entirely any modernist influence.
On the appointed morning, they met in the hotel lobby for the trip to Wannsee, and when Danforth saw her emerge from the elevator he nearly swooned at the transformation. She looked every bit the worldly assistant to a major American art dealer. The clothes were the same she’d worn in Paris, but she’d lifted her collar, padded the shoulders of her jacket, and added a discreet white ruffl e to each sleeve.
It was the art of an actress and the art of a seamstress, Danforth thought, both now applied to the art of murder.
“You look very” — he stopped and waited until he found the right word — “appropriate.”
In Wannsee, a black sedan was waiting for them, complete with a driver who was clearly not a driver at all but a security agent. A second man stood beside the military offi cer and appeared to be in charge. He was dressed in the long leather trench coat Danforth associated with the Gestapo.
“My name is Klaus Wald,” he said in German as he thrust out his hand.
Danforth greeted him in German, then introduced Anna.
“I was expecting only one person,” Wald said.
“Miss Collier is the real expert on American naturalism,” Danforth explained.
Danforth was relieved to see that Wald quite clearly had no idea what American naturalism was.
“She is a great lover of landscapes,” Danforth explained.
“Which appear to be a favorite subject of Chancellor Hitler.”
Wald nodded crisply, then turned to Anna. “Good. Well, then. Shall we go?”
They got into the back seat, then waited for the offi cer to take his place at the wheel, Wald beside him. Anna peered out at the station. “Quite a lovely town,” she said in German as the car pulled away.
Neither of the two men spoke during the short drive from the station, but by prearrangement, Danforth and Anna kept up a steady stream of talk, all of it about art, and all of it in German.
Since it was well known that Hitler was quite prolific, Danforth had expected a warehouse, scores and scores of still-life paintings of flowers, bridges, and the like, only a small portion of which, he assumed, had ever been on public display.
Instead, Wald brought the car to a halt before a large stone building that, in a less suburban atmosphere, Danforth would have called a villa. It had two stories and was constructed of a light gray stone and included a welcoming half-circle portico, a design he’d be reminded of years later when he found himself at 56-58 Am Grossen, where the terrible decisions of the Wannsee Conference had been made and where he would once again confront the possibility that Anna’s fate might have been worse than he’d previously supposed.
But on that morning, in the summer sunlight, with the lovely façade of the villa in front of him and with Anna splendid at his side, he allowed himself another slip into unreality, as if it were all a novel or a movie, this drama he was living through, he and Anna merely characters in it, neither of them made of flesh that could be torn or blood that could be spilled, beyond the grasp of such human fates. It was an unreality that had often seized him in the past and that would seize him once more in the future but then, after that, would leave him forever captive to the cold reality of things.
“Herr Danforth?”
The man who spoke stood at the bottom of the stairs outside the house, dressed in a brown double-breasted suit, on the lapel of which, as if to add color, there was a swastika pin, black on a red background.
Danforth took the man’s hand and shook it.
“Welcome to Wannsee,” the man said in German. “I am Ernst Kruger.” He looked at Anna and offered his hand.
“Anna
Collier,” she said.
“Most pleased to meet you, fräulein,” Kruger said. He turned and gestured toward the double doors that led into the building. “Please.”
The military officer stationed himself at the door after they passed through it, but Wald accompanied them into the building and up the stairs, always at a discreet distance, so although he was often out of sight, he was always somehow present, like a noise in the woodwork.
The paintings were in a large room; upon entering, Danforth estimated that there were perhaps forty of them. They had been framed tastefully and with obvious professionalism in the sort of frames used by the best museums.
The windows of the hall were high, so exterior light streamed in with crystal clarity. No other source was necessary, and it seemed to Danforth that someone had probably thought this through, the fact that natural scenes, which most of the paintings depicted, should be illuminated by the closest one could get to outdoor light.
“You may walk about at your leisure,” Ernst said. “And, please, take as long as you wish.” He looked at his watch, then nodded to Wald, who now stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him.
“One has to have time with a painting,” Ernst added with a courtly smile. “One cannot be rushed in such things.”
“Thank you,” Danforth said.
Danforth stepped forward with Anna at his side; she was now thoroughly in her role as special assistant, studying the same painting Danforth studied, saying nothing, as if waiting for him to speak.
He stopped at a small painting of a bridge, its double arches made of stone, unthreatening woods behind it, everything done in the muted colors to which the artist seemed most inclined.
As if to test her, he said, in German, “What do you think of this?”
She peered at the painting for a moment, then said, “Constable.”
Danforth felt a wave of boyish playfulness wash over him. “Any Constable painting in particular?” he asked.
“The Cornfield,” Anna answered with complete authority, as if she hadn’t learned of both the artist and the painting only days before.
Danforth decided to press the issue. “The browns?” he asked.
Anna shook her head. “The peace,” she answered. “The sense that even if things turn out badly later, still, for a moment” — she drew her eyes away from the painting and looked at Danforth — “there was this.”
She said it softly, and it was correct enough as a description of the painting, but in Danforth it produced that romantic shock of recognition when a man knows with all the certainty that life allows that although he might one day love again, it will never be like this.
He knew that she was still looking at him, but he did not turn to her, instead moving on to the next painting, this one very ordinary, a vase of flowers.
She followed him as he progressed along the line of paintings: more buildings, more flowers, more landscapes, each curiously impersonal, as if the painter were determined to strip all feeling from his subjects.
They’d reached the back wall when the great doors swung open and Wald, accompanied this time by four soldiers and a woman in a long wool coat, strode into the room.
“Put your hands up,” Wald ordered in German as he closed in on them. “And turn around. Face the wall.”
A trap, Danforth thought, they had been caught in a trap.
“Do not move,” Wald said.
Danforth obeyed instantly, Anna somewhat more slowly, though Danforth couldn’t tell if her less rapid response was the product of terror, shock, or some aspect of a new role she’d decided to play.
The woman now stepped forward. She took Anna firmly by one shoulder, and with her other hand, she patted down the opposite side; she found nothing, reversed the process, again found nothing, and then stepped back behind Wald.
One of the soldiers then moved forward and did the same to Danforth, with the same result.
“Turn around,” Wald commanded them after the soldier took his place with the others.
Danforth and Anna turned to face him.
“Passports,” he said.
They gave them to him.
“You came by way of France?” Wald asked as he looked at Danforth’s passport.
Danforth nodded.
“Your purpose there?”
“I am an art dealer,” Danforth answered.
“Art?” Wald said. “You are an importer, is that not so?”
“Yes, and art is one of the things I import,” Danforth said coolly.
Wald’s eyes ranged over the paintings that hung on the surrounding walls. “What do you have to say of these paintings?” he asked.
“German naturalism,” Danforth answered. “They remind me of the work of a great American naturalist, William Bliss Baker.”
“What is this painter’s most famous work?” Wald demanded.
“Fallen Monarchs.”
“Fallen kings?” Wald asked as if he’d caught Danforth in a political opinion.
“No, it’s a painting of fallen trees,” Danforth answered. “A very beautiful painting.”
Wald simply stared at Danforth a moment, then turned and left the room with his accompanying entourage.
“Don’t act as if anything has happened,” Danforth told Anna.
“Let’s just go on around the room.”
With that, they continued to move along the side of the room, and though Danforth knew she must have been as shaken by Wald’s interrogation as he’d been, she appeared quite calm.
Seconds later, they heard footsteps coming, the hard precision of military boots, but when they turned around, they saw only a few soldiers standing guard as a group of civilians came through the door.
As the group moved forward, its ranks thinned, and suddenly the wall broke entirely, and there he was, coming toward them. His head was turned and he was talking to Ernst, saying something amusing, evidently, because there was a very slight smile on Ernst’s face when he turned to them, a smile that was still there when he made the introductions.
“Herr Danforth,” he said, “it is my honor to present the chancellor of the German Reich and the Führer of the German people.”
Danforth had never heard the word Führer spoken, but what surprised him was how profoundly serious the man seemed, despite the comical Charlie Chaplin mustache. He clearly had little time for this.
“So,” the chancellor said, “what do you think of these paintings?”
There was a brusque quality to his voice, though Danforth heard nothing threatening in it, only the tone of a man who was very busy but who had found the time to drop in on these Americans because he couldn’t help but be curious about what they made of his work.
“I find them quite interesting,” Danforth said, working very hard to keep his voice and manner relaxed, looking for all the world as if he weren’t trembling at the very thought of the man who now faced him. “As I said to Herr Kruger, I think many Americans would find them quite to their liking.”
The chancellor nodded but seemed suddenly to lose interest, as if Danforth’s answer had been neither more nor less than he’d expected.
Still, Danforth had no choice but to soldier on, and so he did. “Your subjects, as I told Herr Kruger — fields and dells and the like — they are very natural, and this has great appeal for Americans.” He allowed himself a nervous laugh. “Because so much of the American landscape has been taken over by cities, there is nostalgia for the countryside.”
The chancellor no longer appeared to be in the least interested in what Danforth was saying; he seemed impatient with the commonplace and banal remarks, which were unworthy of any further expenditure of his time. He glanced at his watch, then turned to Ernst. “Well . . .” he began.
“The subject is you,” Anna said suddenly.
The chancellor turned to her and waited.
“Not impressionistically, of course,” Anna continued. “What your paintings show is your condition when you painted them.”
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The chancellor said nothing but listened as Anna continued.
“They are the paintings of someone struggling to live.” She held her gaze on a painting that seemed to fade away at the edges. “A painter rushed . . . by hunger.” She might have left it there, and Danforth, cringing inside, certainly hoped she would. But instead she turned boldly toward her target. “Were you hungry when you painted them, mein Führer?”
Danforth would forever poignantly recall the look in the chancellor’s small round eyes at that moment, something never reported and that must have rarely been glimpsed: the sufferings of his youth, the grim poverty and the unbearable rejection, the abyss of failure that must have yawned before him during all his years in Vienna and that could be held back only by the wildly self-inflated fantasy he had hatched about himself and that later, and against all odds, he had managed to make true.
Then, in a blink, all of that passed from him like fizz from a bottle, and he was once again the chancellor of the German Reich and the Führer of the German people, the visionary he proclaimed himself to be, a busy, busy man, too busy for sentimentality, too busy even for reminiscence, and thus one who now found the musings of this young American woman a simple waste of time.
And so, with a quick nod, he turned; his entourage closed in around him, and . . .
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“. . . and he was gone,” Danforth said.
I couldn’t entirely conceal my surprise at this part of Danforth’s tale, and certainly not my uneasiness at how Anna had behaved.
“Was she . . . flirting with him?” I asked cautiously.
“Flirting?” Danforth asked. “Far from it, believe me.”
“Then why did she speak to him that way?” I asked.
“Because she wanted him to notice her,” Danforth answered.
“So that if he ever saw her in a crowd, he would not feel the slightest alarm if she approached him. She knew that we would never get another audience with him after Wannsee. He had seen us and had no reason to see us again. So any further meeting would have to be in public. If he recognized her face, he might allow her to go up to him.” A deep gravity settled over him, and for a moment, he seemed lost in its aching cloud. “And to win the digger’s game.”