Quest for Anna Klein, The

  All of this struck me as a gruesome excursion, a reaction Dan-forth recognized and immediately addressed.

  “The question is why I would read about such an incident,” Danforth said. “It’s because I could not stop thinking about Anna, and this incessant thinking sent me off in odd, nearly crazed directions. She’d been executed by guillotine, so I read everything I could find about that process. Scores of eyewitness accounts. The history of the thing. It’s called a Fallbeil in German, by the way. ‘Falling ax.’ Between 1933 and 1945 about sixteen thousand people were executed by Fallbeil in Germany and Austria. Hitler liked the method so much he ordered twenty new ones.”

  This was all decidedly off the point, I thought, save for the way it exposed the obsessive nature of Danforth’s research, the fact that he’d been driven to do it as a way of . . . what?

  “It was a way of not abandoning Anna or allowing her simply to be erased,” Danforth said as if he’d heard the question I’d posed in my mind. “My purpose in doing all this reading was to keep her with me, keep her alive, prevent her from sinking into obscurity, becoming one of history’s nameless victims.” He shrugged. “But of course, reading can only take a man so far, and so, in the end, it was something else that saved me.”

  I suddenly feared that Danforth might have fallen to some predictable form of redemption. Religion, perhaps, or another woman.

  Hesitantly, I asked, “Which was?”

  “War,” Danforth answered. “I was still a young man when it broke out, and so I might have used it to accomplish some noble end or do some great, heroic deed.” His smile was as soft as the white flakes that fell beyond the window. “But for me it only in-tensified what soon became my single purpose.”

  “Which was?” I asked.

  “To make the Germans pay,” Danforth answered. His gaze darkened. “To kill as many as I could because they had killed Anna.” He let his lethal gaze sink into me. “I had left Europe as a grieving lover,” he stated. “I returned to it as a murderer.”

  Southern France, 1942

  Below him, the fields of night-bound France spread out like a gloved hand. He was falling into its darkness, the earth rising toward him like a blessing in disguise.

  They were waiting for him below, and when he reached them he thanked them in their native language, then gathered up and buried his parachute as he had been taught in the long sweltering summer of his training.

  They were French farmers who greeted him, and for the rest of his life, the memory of their rugged courage would remain with him, the rough texture of their hands when he shook them, the heartbreaking care in their hushed voices as they guided him across the fields and into the small house where they hid him until the next night, when he set off, alone, for the Spanish border.

  On that long walk, he thought of Gurs, the train journey he had made with Anna, the ragged clothes of the withered Spaniard who’d met them, and at last the look on Anna’s face as the trees had parted and she’d gotten her first glimpse of the camp. A thousand years ago, he thought, a different man than he was now.

  For the next year he played the vagabond Spaniard as effe-ctively as Anna had played the disordered street grotesque on that long-ago night in the Old Town Bar. He wandered from village to village as he’d been instructed. To appear Spanish, he dyed his hair and darkened his skin beneath the Spanish sun. From mountain outcrops and village alleys, he watched the roads and railway stations and lived as an itinerant farm hand and sweeper; he slept in barns and back rooms and storage sheds, always speaking the low Spanish of the poor and dispossessed and in every way acting the part of one of Goya’s pobrecitas.

  During these nomadic days, he killed two men, one with a knife and the other with a garrote, both German intelligence operatives, and in both cases he felt as little for their deaths as he’d felt for their lives, and he told himself as he thrust the knife or tightened the garrote that this he did for Anna.

  By the early months of 1943, it was clear that his work in Spain was done. Spanish neutrality was enforced by Spain’s utter poverty. As a country, it was as starved and desolate as the Spanish refugees of Gurs had been, which was exactly what Danforth reported. There was no point to his remaining in Spain, he told his superiors. They agreed, and on their orders, he’d made his way to Gijon, hired an old fisherman and his ragtag boat, and through surprisingly calm waters sailed to England.

  Once in London, Danforth learned that Clayton had been shipped to the Pacific, the commander of a Marine regiment. Clayton’s letters had accumulated in the mailroom of Danforth Imports, collected by Danforth’s father, who with the outbreak of war had thrown all his resources into the effort. No longer a friend of Germany, he’d purchased thousands of war bonds and provided his country with every imaginable trade secret for the smuggling of supplies and information. Then, in April of 1943, the senior Danforth died in his lofty aerie overlooking Central Park, still baffl ed by the son who had briefly returned from Europe after a long, mysterious stay, returned distant and aloof, seeming to have lost not only his will to live, as he’d told his father one long, sorrowful evening, but also his will to love.

  It was this loveless and unloving man who now occupied the tiny desk in the tiny cubicle of an otherwise nondescript building in Hammersmith, his assignment to translate messages from various sources that poured into London from Calais to Istan bul. The messages were frequently in error, and some were no doubt intended to misinform, but more often than not, they were simply of no use to those planning the invasion that everyone knew was coming and in which effort Danforth felt himself once again sidelined.

  But inconsequential as his work seemed to him, Danforth remained at his desk, hoping, always hoping, to find some shred of information as to where Anna had been buried so that after the war, he might find her body and bring it home. But even as he sought such information, some crazed part of his mind harbored the hope that she was still alive, though this hope caused him to envision a still darker end for Anna: in February of 1944 he read about a number of women executed in Natzweiler-Struthof, and he could not stop wondering if she had been among them. In April he read of the mass execution of Nacht und Nebel, prisoners, mostly foreign spies and resistance fighters, and again imagined Anna lined up against a wall and shot or hung from communal gallows.

  All of these nightmare visions continually assailed him, but it was one in particular he found he could not shake:

  Escaped prisoner from Pforzheim reports seeing a small dark female, very badly beaten. Reports female chained nude outside and left through night. Reports SS offi cer returned and gave her more “rough treatment.” Reports prisoner was kicked and beaten and was “all blood.” Reports prisoner left till afternoon. Reports SS offi cer returned and shot prisoner. Reports prisoner was conscious when executed.

  Could this small dark female have been Anna?

  It was an absurd question, and there was no way for Danforth to answer it, and yet the brief record of this incident refused to let him go, continually urging him to find a way to return to Europe so he could exact yet more revenge.

  But each of his requests was denied, and so Danforth continued to work in his London basement cubicle, translating more communications from which he learned more details of the much earlier Parisian roundups of the city’s Jews, their herding together in the transit camp at Drancy, the terrible conditions there, the priest who’d claimed to hear the cry of children, though he could not have, from the steps of Sacré Coeur. He read about Ravensbrück, where female prisoners were gassed, about the massacres at Ascq in France and Vinkt in Belgium and Cephalonia in Greece, then farther east, where hell grew hotter in the children’s camp as Sisak and the women’s camp at Stara Gradiška.

  But the dark preponderance of messages came from Poland, a steady stream of accounts that caused Danforth at last to lift his eyes from the most recent of them late on a rainy evening, still unable to take in a fact he was sure had long ago been accepted by others far more informed t
han himself, and which he finally mentioned to Colonel Broderick.

  “The Germans are systematically killing all the Jews,” he said. “Does everyone know this?”

  Broderick nodded grimly. “Yes, we know. And so when the war is over, we’re going to need German-speaking interrogators who are very skilled. Like you, Tom. Because we’re going to find out everything they did and make them pay for it.”

  The sweet prospect of the world’s revenge fed the dark animal inside Danforth’s soul, and so he remained in London and there read of more and more outrages, and with each new report felt his heart harden, his spirit grow arid, and something like winter settle into him, an inner death that was deepened because in every report of torture and murder, every account of people shot or hanged or driven into gas chambers, he saw among them Anna.

  The invasion came in early June, and two weeks later he at last crossed the Channel and set foot again in France to begin his work as an interrogator. It was there he met the first of what were called the Ritchie boys, the Jews who’d fled Nazi Germany, been trained in Camp Ritchie, Maryland, parachuted or made beach landings on D-day, then slogged through the countryside broadcasting surrender offers to retreating Germans or questioning those who’d already surrendered.

  His first job was to break down a Wehrmacht offi cer named Werner Kruger, a short, stocky little man who smoked continuously during the interrogation. By then they’d learned that the Germans were terrified of being handed over to the Russians, and so they’d dressed a couple of the Ritchie boys in Russian army uniforms on the pretense that should the prisoner not cooperate, he would be turned over to Comrade Stalin. The Ritchie boys had played their parts to the hilt, and it had been effective in a surprising number of cases, Werner Kruger’s chief among them.

  There’d been scores of others like Kruger, an army of prisoners from whom Danforth had sought information, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but within each new interrogation still seeking some clue to Anna. Months passed, and summer became fall, and the army marched eastward, and France was liberated and Germany defeated, so that it was amid the ruins of Nuremberg several weeks after the end of the war that he finally met Horst Dieter.

  SS captain Horst Dieter had been brought to Danforth’s office for what was described as a “thorough going-over.” Dan-forth had expected the usual SS type, still arrogant in defeat, lips locked in perpetual sneer, eyes brimming with contempt. Instead, Dieter had affected a nearly jaunty gait as he walked to the chair across the table from Danforth and sat down. He was loose-limbed and gave off an inexplicable casualness, not to say indifference, and it was this oddity in demeanor that Danforth first addressed.

  “You don’t seem to realize the situation you’re in,” Danforth told him in his unaccented German.

  “I speak English, Captain,” Dieter said. “I lived for two years in Virginia.” He shrugged. “And I know quite well what my situation is. I’m going to be shot. So what? I’m used to executions.”

  This was the sort of casual remark that had opened the door on horrendous crimes in earlier interrogations, and so Danforth pursued it like a lead. “Used to executions?” he asked in as similar a tone as he could muster. “Okay, so how during the war did you happen to get used to executions?”

  “I was used to them well before the war,” Dieter answered with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  “Before the war?”

  “Because I was a prison guard,” Dieter answered. He leaned back so far in his chair that its front legs lifted off the floor. “We executed God knows how many.”

  “Executing criminals before the war wouldn’t get you shot now,” Danforth said pointedly.

  “They weren’t all criminals,” Dieter said. “Unless you call some kid handing out pamphlets a criminal.”

  “Are you talking about political criminals?” Danforth asked.

  “Reds, mostly,” Dieter said. “One day you Americans will be sorry we didn’t kill them all.”

  Danforth was getting nowhere with this and knew it, and so he decided to do as he had been trained to do, take one small piece of information, presumably innocent, then have the prisoner expand on it.

  “You were in Berlin before the war,” Danforth said as he glanced at Dieter’s folder.

  “Yes.”

  “Is this where you worked as a guard?”

  “Yes.”

  “At Stadtheim?” Danforth asked.

  “No. Plötzensee.”

  Danforth’s gaze lifted. “Plötzensee?”

  “In the suburbs,” Dieter added with a shrug. “It’s mostly blown up now. But it was a busy place before and during the war.”

  Danforth gave no sign that the very name Plötzensee was like a hook in his skin.

  “Busy with executions?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  Danforth decided to test Dieter’s veracity. “These executions, they were by firing squad?”

  “No,” Dieter said. “They put up a gallows later.” He chuckled. “But before that, can you believe it, Captain? We had a . . . what’s the word in English? A Fallbeil.”

  “A guillotine,” Danforth said.

  “That’s it, yes: guillotine.”

  “When were you at Plötzensee?” Danforth asked.

  “From June of 1936 until the war began,” Dieter answered.

  “That was in . . .”

  “September 1939,” Danforth said.

  Dieter nodded.

  “And you participated in executions during this time?” Dan-forth asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  Dieter shrugged. “Many. I don’t remember. I walked them to the room, that’s all. But that won’t matter, they’re going to kill us all. It’s going to be a big show.”

  Danforth worked to keep his tone entirely even despite the storm building within him. “These prisoners that you . . . walked, were there any women?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you remember any of them?”

  Dieter grinned. “A man always remembers the women.”

  Danforth faced him stonily. “Who do you remember?”

  “There were only two,” Dieter answered. “Benita von Falkenhayn. She was the daughter-in-law of some big shot on the general’s staff. A wild one. Divorced the big shot’s son and got into bed with a Polack spy.” He shrugged. “They killed her with an ax. Like some English queen.”

  Catching his breath, Danforth asked, “And the other one?”

  “She wore thick glasses, the other one,” Dieter answered. “Not very attractive, I must say.” Her unattractiveness seemed to make her life less dear to Dieter. “She was the first woman they used a guillotine on. Another Red. I don’t remember her name, but they called her Lilo.”

  “What was her crime?” Danforth asked.

  “She wouldn’t stop being a Red,” Dieter answered. “Probably other things as well, but I don’t remember what they were.” He leaned back again and released a slow, relaxing breath. “That’s all. Just two women, like I said.”

  “Just two?” Danforth asked. “Are you sure no other woman was executed while you were at Plötzensee?”

  Dieter looked at Danforth closely. “Someone you knew, Captain?”

  “She was dark,” Danforth said sternly. “She had very curly hair.”

  Dieter shook his head.

  “You’re sure you never saw a woman like that at Plötzensee?” Danforth asked emphatically. “In the yard or in the cells?”

  Dieter dropped forward in his chair. “No.”

  Danforth’s mind was working feverishly to determine if Dieter’s testimony, or even his memory, could be trusted. “Anna was her name,” he added. “She might have been called Anna Collier, or maybe Anna Klein.”

  “Klein?” Dieter asked. “She was a Jew?”

  Danforth’s gaze turned as lethal as his tone of voice. “She was an American,” he said.

  Dieter briefly searched his memory for a moment, then he shrugged. “No
,” he said. “There was never an Anna Klein.”

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  There was never an Anna Klein.

  It was obvious that these words had brought Danforth to a strange precipice, or perhaps to a doorway that had opened onto an unexpected land.

  “If Dieter was right, then Anna had never been taken to Plötzensee Prison,” Danforth said. His tone was now uncertain, as if he were still feeling the aftershocks of this discovery. “And she certainly hadn’t been executed there.”

  “So you must have wondered who Clayton’s sources had been for this information,” I said.

  “Very good, Paul,” Danforth said. “Yes, that would have been the question. Who were they? And why had they told him what they did?” He shrugged. “Unfortunately, Clayton was still in the Pacific, fighting his way south on Okinawa. And so I went to Plötzensee Prison to see if I could find any record of Anna having been there. It was in the Soviet sector, and the Russians were completely out of control, ripping the plumbing out of the walls, toilet bowls, and sinks, and loading everything onto trucks.” He waved dismissively. “But it was Germany they were destroying, so as far as I was concerned, the Russians could have a free hand.”