Then Bannion stepped very near to her, apparently for an intimate communication; he spoke, and it caused Anna to glance up to where Danforth stood concealed in the darkness behind his window. The distance was long. Danforth’s room was on the fourth floor; Anna’s face, only half illuminated by the street-lamp, was anything but clear. And yet for all that, Danforth saw a shadow pass over her face, something grave and curiously indelicate, as if an unbearable thought had crossed her mind. Then she turned to Bannion again, and a dreadful stillness fell over her, one that lingered for a time. At last she shook her head, and then nodded, as if, exhausted and depleted, she had finally allowed her no to give way to yes.
With that, Bannion stepped away, and the two of them exchanged a look that reminded Danforth of the doomed characters in movies and popular novels who, torn apart by war or some other fearful circumstance, seemed to know at the moment of their parting that they would never see each other again. Then Bannion turned and, like a character exiting the stage, vanished into the shadowy wings of Munich, leaving Anna alone.
She had never looked more intensely solitary, Danforth thought; she briefly seemed as if she had been driven to the most remote corner of the world. It was an aloneness that was dense and impenetrable, and horribly unfair, and it made Danforth suddenly hate Adolf Hitler, not for his aggression, his cruelty, his dreadful loathing of the Jews and the Communists, the Poles and the Slavs, not for the threat he posed to all that was kind and well reasoned in human life, but simply because the ending of that squalid, repellent life would take from him the one woman he knew, now with utter certainty, he would ever love.
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“You think you know the depth of selfishness when you look into your own heart and realize that you want someone dead because that person slighted you in some way, made you feel small or stupid or something of that sort,” Danforth said. “Or you want someone dead because of an inheritance or because you want a higher post in some university faculty, neither of which can be achieved until someone dies.” He offered a small, rather desolate laugh. “But at that moment in Munich, standing at that window, watching Anna, I learned how deep selfishness could go.” He stared at his empty glass. “For me, Adolf Hitler was not a megalomaniac who threatened to destroy the world but rather, strangely and perversely, my rival for Anna, the other man in her life, the one who’d stolen her from me.” He lifted his eyes from the glass and settled his gaze on me. “I was not just a romantic. I was a bourgeois solipsist, utterly incapable of seeing history as anything but a personal narrative.” His laugh was pure self-accusation. “I was like the obsessed man in some cheap thriller.”
He looked like that man even now, afflicted by old torments, his gaze more intense than before, and with something of self-loathing in it.
“I wanted to be like Anna,” he continued. “Like Bannion. I wanted to die for some great cause. But at that instant, I knew that I was nothing but a lovesick fool who would have rushed Anna out of Munich and back to New York and let the whole world go up in flames if he could.” He laughed again, this time even more bitterly. “Aristotle defined an evil man as one who cannot distinguish between what he wants and the universal good.” He pointed to himself. “That was me. I wanted Anna. I cared for nothing else.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “You wanted to know what it was, the digger’s game?”
“Yes.”
“It came from Clayton.”
Clayton had come back to New York after Pearl Harbor, Danforth went on to tell me, and by the middle of 1942, he was working in military intelligence. He’d never actually run agents, but he’d evaluated trainees for their potential as agents.
“His job was to find out if they had the right stuff,” Danforth said. “Clayton was always fond of strategies and so he devised a little test. It was called the digger’s game. He had a number of small brass pieces inscribed with various words and phrases: losing your wife, losing your child, poverty, illness, that sort of thing. These pieces were put in an urn filled with sand, and the applicant was to dig until he found the thing he most dreaded, at which point the applicant was to stop digging.” Danforth picked up his empty glass and twirled it slowly between his hands. “There was only one piece that mattered to Clayton. If the potential agent stopped digging before he reached it, Clayton would no longer consider him. Do you know what that piece had written on it, Paul?” He smiled. “Failure” He paused, a man reevaluating an earlier conclusion. “I think Anna would not have stopped digging until she found failure,” he said. “But I would have stopped digging at losing Anna.” His mind turned inward, remained there for a time, then swept out to me again.
“And so I decided not to lose her,” he said.
~ * ~
Munich, Germany, 1939
He knew that it would negate everything she had worked for. He knew that it would be abandoning his own great drive to make a mark. He knew that it would be a lost opportunity to change the course of history. He knew all this, and didn’t care. He had gone over every other route he might take through life after losing Anna, and not one of them made sense or had meaning or filled the void within him that she filled. Years later, as he sought the pieces of the plot, he would sometimes tell himself that he had fallen victim to a strange form of romantic imprinting, and he would blame this on his youth and on the intensity of the times and on the mission they’d shared and the danger, and that all of this had created an overdetermined situation in his heart. He would say this to himself in icy hotel rooms and in rattling railway carriages and once as, pale and stricken, he passed beneath the wrought-iron gate with the words Arbeit macht frei, but he would never forget the irresistible force that had driven him to hatch so many arguments so desperately, and he would always call it love.
“Anna,” he said that night in Munich as he opened his door and saw her standing there.
“I don’t mean to disturb you, Tom,” she said.
“No one would want to be alone ... on such a night,” he said. “Come in.”
She walked into his room. She had been there before, of course, but now she seemed unsettled, as if she were uncertain what she should do next.
“Shall I call down for…tea ... or ... ?”
She shook her head. “No, nothing.”
She glanced toward the bureau across the room, and he wondered if by some gift of intuition she knew that was where he’d placed her pistol, wrapped in a white handkerchief.
“Please, sit,” Danforth said.
She took a seat in the little chair a few feet from the bed. Her movement was slow and graceful, and had he not been convinced of the unlikelihood of such a thing, he might have even thought it vaguely seductive.
“Actually, I was hoping to see you . . . before,” he told her.
She looked away, drew the scarf from her head and draped it over the back of the chair. When she looked back at him, she smiled, but her smile was quick and formless, as if she were an actress not yet completely in character.