I imagined the head of this particular snake as he proceeded in the march, lifting his arm in return salute to the crowd, but curiously indifferent to their adoration, as if determined not to let even the people’s idolatry sway him from his purpose.
“Bavaud finally caught sight of him,” Danforth said. “Can you imagine what that must have been like, watching the target move toward you, oblivious to the danger, distant at first, but coming nearer and nearer? And you have this pistol in your belt and your hand crawls toward it, and as you do that, a kind of tunnel vision sets in, so that everything on the periphery of the target blurs and all the cheering and horns and drums go silent, and there is just you and the one you’ve come to kill.”
At that moment in his narrative, I believed that Danforth was describing himself, rather than Bavaud, and I felt certain that at some point he had aimed a pistol at close range and felt his finger pull back on the trigger.
“But just as the target is in range,” he continued, “just as you grip the handle of the pistol and ease it from your belt—just at that moment, with the man himself so close you can almost feel his breath on your face — at just that moment, Paul, the crowd shifts and surges and a hundred arms are raised, and in that press and tangle, your target vanishes from sight, and by the time you see him clearly again, he is passing beneath the little arch and into the square . . . and into his future, and the world’s.”
“Is that what happened?” I asked. “To Bavaud?”
“Yes,” Danforth answered.
“How do you know that?”
“Because he said so,” Danforth replied.
“So he was caught?”
“Yes, but not before returning to Bertesgarten, shooting at more trees —without a silencer, I might add —and generally stalking around town. He even once asked a policeman how he might get closer to Hitler.”
“And no one noticed him?” I asked, astonished.
“No one,” Danforth said with a shrug. “Security is a human thing, Paul, carried out by humans, and with all the human imperfections.”
“Did he ever get close to Hitler again?”
Danforth shook his head. “And so he started back. Unfortunately, he had run out of money, and so he found it necessary to stow away on a train. He was discovered and questioned. During the course of this, the authorities found his notebook. He’d taken the trouble to record his intention to kill Hitler in that notebook. They found the little Schmeisser six-point-five too. Of course he was arrested. After that, the usual stages. Interrogation. Torture. Execution. In Bavaud’s case, by guillotine in Plötzensee Prison.”
“He seems rather hapless,” I said. “Pitiful in a way. So naive that—”
“No more than we were, really,” Danforth interrupted. “And Bavaud had a more passionate reason for attempting to kill Hitler than I did. Frankly, Paul, my whole purpose by that time had become simply to be near Anna.” He shrugged. “At one moment, under the sway of such feelings, a man buys flowers. At another moment, under the sway of those same feelings, he takes a step toward murder.”
“So it was always her,” I said softly.
“Always her,” Danforth said. “Yes.”
Then his voice returned to its familiar narrative tone, driving slowly forward, carrying me along with it, so that, like them, I felt the train lurch forward then move smoothly out of Orléans station.
~ * ~
Orléans, France, 1939
The train lurched forward, and in that movement, Danforth felt that he was no longer a little spy but a man moving inexorably toward an earth-shattering act.
Later, as his train drew ever closer to the German border, Danforth still more intensely considered the astonishing fact that he was now committed to a supremely perilous scheme. He knew this clearly, and from time to time, he reviewed the weight of the task before him, how surreal it was, along with its surpassing dangers. But for all that, he could imagine no alternative course, and years later, in the frozen wastes of his long pursuit, when he came to describe these events, he characterized his feelings as “intractable, irreducible, and adamantine.” Anna’s resolve had fortified his own. They were iron and steel, and he felt their strength conjoined. But there was a magic that went beyond the familiar notion of one person’s courage giving courage to another. He thought of it as alchemy, a mysterious mixture made from peril and purpose and infused with a romance that every day grew more intense. For he was falling in love, and he knew it, and it seemed to him that to be in love and at war simultaneously was surely to live life at the top.
At the border, the first German official approached them, his uniform thoroughly Germanic in its starched and neatly pressed precision. He asked for their passports, opened each, then returned them.
“What is your purpose in coming to Germany?” he asked Danforth.
“We are here on business,” Danforth answered in his perfect German. “I am an importer.” He nodded toward Anna. “Miss Collier is my assistant.”
“Herr Danforth, Fraulein Collier,” the officer said with a polite nod to each of them. “Willkommen nach Deutschland
“Well,” Danforth said once the officer had departed, “that went well, don’t you think?”
Anna returned her passport to her small leather purse. “The really dangerous border stations,” she said, “are the ones where the guards are wearing only parts of their uniforms.”
It was a curious comment, one that suggested to Danforth that Anna had known such bleak and poorly supplied border crossings, sun-baked and remote, as he imagined them, with sweltering guardhouses of windowless concrete, the border itself merely a dusty line drawn between two vast but equally impoverished wastes.
There were no other official inquiries after that first polite officer, and they reached Berlin, and at last their hotel just off Unter den Linden, without further intrusions.
That evening they had their first dinner in Berlin. They were both tired from the journey and so decided to dine in the hotel restaurant, a faded affair with too much drapery and crystal, little more than a sepia photograph from the belle époque.
“I’ve been thinking about the letters you wrote the businesspeople here,’’ Anna said. “Perhaps we shouldn’t make contact with any of them, Tom.”
“Why not?”
“Because they might get into trouble later for knowing us,” Anna answered.
It was a realistic appraisal of Germany at that moment, of course, and so Danforth thought nothing of it at the time, though later he would wonder if she’d sought to isolate him, keep him within the tight circle that enclosed her plot. If so, he hadn’t sensed it then and had simply nodded and said, “Yes, I think you’re right.”
Anna glanced from the restaurant toward the lobby of the hotel. Two men were standing at the desk, both in long coats. “We’ll need cyanide,” she said. “I asked Bannion to get it for us.”
Danforth thought of the Connecticut warehouse, how close he had come to betraying her. “Yes,” he said. “We will. But maybe we won’t have to use it.”