A silence fell over them, until Anna said quite softly, “Done.”
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“And so we approached the last days,” Danforth said. “We would all go to Munich. Bannion would keep an eye on Braunes Haus at Briennerstrasse forty-five, near the Konigsplatz, the Nazi headquarters where Hitler was likely to spend a good deal of his time while he was in Munich. I would station myself in a hotel room within view of the Osteria Bavaria. Anna would remain in a nearby hotel until it was time for her to go to the restaurant. The idea was that she would go there every day for lunch and dinner. If the target showed up, and she could get in range, she would shoot him.”
“With Bannion always waiting outside the restaurant if she failed,” I said.
Danforth drained the last of his drink. “Simple as that, Paul.”
“Simple, yes.” I hesitated before my next remark. “Forgive me, but it sounds very . . . haphazard.”
“Does it?”
“Well, you have no specific intelligence component,” I said. “Other than that information Bannion got from Rache and this unnamed British agent.”
“His name was Alexander Foote, as I found out later,” Danforth said. “You can look him up, if you like.”
“I don’t doubt that he existed,” I assured Danforth quickly. “But the nature of his intelligence was so general that it couldn’t have been of much use.”
“It was of no use at all really,” Danforth agreed. “Except that it was clear it was possible to get quite close to the target at the Osteria Bavaria because Foote had already done it.”
“But that is hardly actionable intelligence,” I insisted.
“Well, certainly no more ‘actionable intelligence’ than Oswald had,” Danforth said casually. “Not much more than John Wilkes Booth had. In fact, not much more than any of those boy assassins in Sarajevo who waited for Franz Ferdinand’s car to go by. Just to be at the right place at the right time.”
I looked at him quizzically. “So you don’t believe in elaborate planning?”
“What I believe in, Paul, is human incompetence,” Danforth said. “You can simply depend on incompetence within the security system to give you an opening at some point. You wait for that opening, and then you strike.” He smiled. “All the training at my country house, all Bannion’s information about Hitler’s layers of security, all my traipsing around Berlin pretending that I could find just the right place, all of that finally came down to one thing: a guy likes to eat at a certain restaurant, and if you’re in that restaurant when he eats there, you can kill him.”
Something in Danforth’s demeanor darkened, and the tone of his voice became intimate, as if he were speaking not to a think-tank freshman young enough to be his grandson but to someone who was tied to this ancient conspiracy. “Which brings me to the final act of this part of my story, Paul.” His gaze took on a troubled wonder. “The trick love plays in life.”
~ * ~
Munich, Germany, 1939
The pistol was the same model and caliber LaRoche had used at Winterset, and Bannion’s manner was quite casual when he drew it from his jacket and handed it to Danforth.
The instructions that followed were simple: Danforth was to meet Anna in the square outside the restaurant as the dinner hour approached. He was to give her the pistol. She would take it into the restaurant.
“She should never have the gun until she goes into the restaurant,” Bannion said “Since she’s the only one of us who has a reservation at the Osteria, it would be her room they’d search.”
The target was scheduled to arrive in the city that same afternoon, and Bannion had found out —either from Rache or Foote — that he was inclined to have dinner at the Osteria Bavaria on his second day in Munich, usually around seven. The British agent had even been able to provide the fact that it was the table to the right of the entrance he preferred, an odd choice, Bannion noted, since it was by a window that looked out onto the street. The final elements of the plan had been put in place that very morning, Bannion went on, a reservation made in Anna’s name. The only thing that remained was for Danforth to keep the pistol in his room until the following morning, when he would transfer it to Anna.
“What about the cyanide?” Danforth asked.
Bannion patted the blue handkerchief in his jacket pocket. “In here,” he said. “Mine and hers.”
“You don’t want me to give it to her with the pistol?” Danforth asked.
“No,” Bannion said. “I’ll give it to her. It’s the last test. Rache says it works every time.”
“Works how?”
“If the person takes the tablet, he will complete the mission,” Bannion said.
In his memory, Danforth would later see Anna’s tablet many times, always with wonder at how very small it was, no larger than a pea, the poison contained in a thin-walled ampoule coated with rubber to prevent it from breaking under anything less forceful than a human bite.
“What about mine?” Danforth asked.
Bannion smiled. “Giving you a cyanide tablet would just be drama, Tom. After you give Anna the pistol, you’re to go directly to the station and take the train to Hamburg. Passage has already been booked for you to Copenhagen, and from there to London.”
He walked to the door, started to open it, then hesitated. “I know you love her, Tom. For you, it’s only her.”
“Yes,” Danforth admitted.
For a time they talked only about Anna, and it became clear to Danforth that Bannion had closely observed her though even he could not say what had moved her to do the thing she was soon to do.
“There’s something I still don’t know,” Bannion said at last. Then, with a shrug, he said, “Tell her story, Tom.”
Danforth had never felt so entirely diminished. He was to be the chronicler of Anna’s martyrdom, and Bannion’s. He was to share their plot but not their peril. But he had sworn to do as he was ordered, and so he said, “I will, Ted.”
Bannion looked unexpectedly moved by Danforth’s sincerity but said nothing further before he closed the door.
Once Bannion had departed, a curious drive took Danforth to the window. He looked out and felt almost as if he’d been expecting to see what was there: Anna, standing beneath a street-lamp. Bannion approached her, and for a time they talked. He was giving her some final words of encouragement, Danforth assumed, or perhaps offering his admiration for what she was to do. He would no doubt have a good speech. He’d given it often enough to miners and timber men, urging them toward the revolutionary ideal he had later so completely abandoned.
Then Bannion reached into his pocket and drew out the blue handkerchief Danforth had seen earlier. He was speaking softly as he opened it. Even from the distance, Danforth saw how intently Anna peered at the two tablets Bannion’s handkerchief had concealed. For a time she seemed frozen in dread; she stood like a frightened child, her hand poised over the ampoules, unable to reach down. Then, very slowly, she drew one from the folds of the handkerchief and sank it into the pocket of her skirt.