The northern reaches of Manhattan faded behind him, and he suddenly felt unmoored from New York. The city had seemed permanent before, a castle that protected him, and he had thought it changeless and certain. Now it was just a place weakened by events, no longer able to provide the slightest comfort, and in that incapacity, it seemed almost to mock him, as if all his life he’d been fooled by the city, lulled into a pleasant sleep from which he had now been roughly awakened.
The Bronx came and went, and after it, the squat streets of Yonkers. An hour passed, perhaps more. They were in Connecticut, the outskirts of one of its industrial towns, an area of crumbling and abandoned warehouses, with dark brick and black roofs and everywhere a dull patina of grime and soot.
The car bumped violently over a badly pitted street, then made a sharp left toward a large brick building with a loading dock and concrete ramp that led into the black bowels of the building. Once inside, they sat in that near total darkness for a few seconds, and then, as if responding to a signal Danforth couldn’t see, Fedora got out of the car and turned to Danforth.
“You can get out now,” Fedora said with unexpected gentleness, as if it were an option rather than an order.
Danforth pulled himself out of the car and stood very stiffly in the darkness, fully a child now, awaiting orders, afraid that any move he made would be the wrong one.
“Come with me,” Fedora commanded.
By then the other two men were at his side and behind him, and in this formation they moved toward a metal door that opened just before they reached it.
The room was very small, with an iron bed and a bare mattress. A single lightbulb hung from a black cord. The walls were bare, and the ceiling was streaked with water stains. The sweet smell of mold thickened the air and gave it a musty taste. There was no sink or toilet, and so Danforth knew he would not be held there long, that this was a kind of purgatory, the place where he was to wait.
“If you choose to be a spy,” Fedora told him as he closed the door, “you should get used to the life.”
He would never be sure how long he remained alone in this room, but years later, as he stood before the starvation cells of Auschwitz, he would recall the terrible sense of confinement that had overtaken him, and how much more confined the Auschwitz prisoners must have felt with not even the space needed to sit down, able only to stand and face bare concrete walls until they died.
Time passed, but the men had taken his watch and his wallet before leaving him in the room, and so he had no idea how much time had passed, though he felt sure that the sun had gone down before the door of the room finally swung open again.
“Time for a chat,” Fedora said. He had taken off his suit jacket and now wore dark blue flannel trousers and a light blue open-collared shirt.
Danforth rose and followed the man down a short corridor, at the end of which he opened the door, stepped away, and motioned Danforth inside.
The look of this room was unmistakable. It had a small, rectangular wooden desk with chairs that faced each other. A narrow table rested behind the desk, bare save for a pitcher and a few white towels.
“Sit down,” Fedora told him, and on those words, closed the door, walked to the desk, and sat down behind it.
“Where is Anna Klein?” he asked casually and with an almost bored air, as he might have asked after the whereabouts of a lost cat.
Danforth sat down but said nothing, and years later, first in the interrogation rooms of Plötzensee in Berlin, and later in Lubyanka, he would marvel that all such places gave off the same sweaty dread, fear like an odor coming from the walls.
Fedora peered at him grimly. “I’m not going to ask you this question over and over again. I won’t have to, believe me. But before I ask it again, take some time and think things through.”
Danforth glanced toward the door. One of the other men opened it, came in, and stood in place in front of it, arms folded over his chest and wearing a strange expression, like a dog eager to be fed. They must seek out and find such men as this, Danforth thought, perfect for their purposes, the sort able to relish what others abhor.
Danforth remained unaware of time, and he wondered if this too was part of the game, to remove a man completely from the ordinary signals of life, his inner bearings weakened by the loss of all outer ones.
To resist that far-from-subtle ploy, Danforth focused on his cufflinks. They were gold with small sapphires, and he’d bought them in Paris, at a little shop near the Luxembourg Gardens. Now he recalled the great expanse of that garden, how it had been so very French in that the children had not been permitted to play on the grass but instead had dashed and fallen and briefly wallowed in the dust of its wide, pebbled walkways. Paris in the morning, he thought, and saw the gardens in bright sunlight. Paris in the afternoon. Paris at night. So that is what it is, he thought, time.
“Where is Anna Klein?” Fedora asked.
This was the second time the question had been asked, and Danforth knew that whatever came next would be either the making or the undoing of him, that at the end of it, he would have either the highest regard for himself or the lowest, and that either way, in all likelihood he would never be so tested again.
He felt a kind of stiffness overtake him, a leathery thickening of his skin, a hardening of his bones, as if his body were preparing for the ordeal to come. But it was the innermost part of him he sensed most physically at that moment, something solidifying at the center of himself, so that he realized that although he’d many times felt the beat of his heart, the expansion of his lungs, the banal shift and quiver of all his other organs, he had not until that moment of inward reckoning felt the palpable workings of his soul.
“Put your hands behind your back,” Fedora commanded.
Danforth hesitated, less out of any genuine will to resist than as a child would hesitate before taking his place in a dentist’s chair.
“Put your hands behind your back,” Fedora repeated.
Danforth knew that he was being asked to be complicit in his own torture, but he could find no way to resist doing as he was told that didn’t seem both futile and foolish. Perhaps this was part of the torturer’s strategy, he thought, to break your spirit a little before he begins to break your body. Had all the great legions of victims cooperated with their torturers, he wondered, and instantly imagined them in the dungeons of the Inquisition, all meekly placing themselves onto the rack, lying back, positioning their feet and hands.
Even thinking this, Danforth found himself unable to refuse, though he stood, lifted his head, and manfully straightened his shoulders as he brought his hands behind his back.
The other man stepped forward and tied them, then grabbed Danforth by his shirt collar and hauled him out if the room, Fedora following behind.
Seconds later, they entered a different room off the corridor. It was completely bare save for a rope whose two loose ends dangled from a pulley.