“We’re to meet in the square,” she said, as if confirming an insignificant detail. “You’ll give me everything I need.”
“Yes.”
She said nothing else, and in that silence, the terrible solitude in her eyes swept over him, and as it swept, it reduced to dust all the arguments he might have made against her dying and left him bare of everything but anguish. This boiled up and would have burst from him had he not been able to suppress it at the last second and say only, “I’ll miss you, Anna.”
For a moment she seemed locked in a great inner turmoil, as if powerfully drawn in two opposite directions. Then an unexpected sigh broke from her, and she came toward him with a force that he would forever recall as tidal.
In the years to come, he would witness what happened next in countless renderings. He would see it flicker with increasing graphicness on movie screens and read of it in the increasingly clinical language of books. He would hear it sung by crooners and folksingers and rock bands, the movements of that night recounted at various times by swelling violins and by the pounding beat of electric bass guitars. He would see and hear that night’s events reimagined and reorchestrated in theaters, opera houses, museums, and concert halls; in countless ways and by countless means, he would attempt to resume the rapture he felt during those brief minutes of his life . . . and each time, he would fail.
When the last shudder had subsided, he felt like a character in a Russian novel, love and death mingled in that darkly Slavic way, and he wanted to turn to her, run his fingers down the length of her naked body, and say something so profound neither of them would ever forget it.
But silence was all he could offer, a silence that struck him as sweet and tender and that, as it lengthened, convinced him she would now relent. For he was a romantic, after all, and no romantic could believe that a woman who was loved as Anna now had to know she was loved could choose to go out and die.
Then she said, “Where is the pistol?”
When he didn’t answer, she rolled over and faced him, her head still on the pillow. “I should take it with me when I leave.”
“I’m supposed to give it to you tomorrow,” Danforth told her.
“It is tomorrow, Tom,” she said.
“Bannion said not to give it to you until just before you go into the restaurant.”
She shook her head. “No, now.”
“Why?”
“Because this should be our last time together,” Anna said firmly.
She rolled away from him and lay on her back, the sheet modestly pulled up over her naked breasts so that she seemed already enshrouded.
“Where is it?” she asked.
He nodded toward the bureau, expecting that she would immediately go to it. But instead, she remained in place, very still, her eyes cast toward the ceiling, and for a moment she actually seemed to consider letting this cup pass from her. This gave him the brief hope that in a simple, quiet way, he had saved the woman he was certain was the only love he would ever know. It was a certainty common to youth, as he would many times admit, but in his later age, it would prove in his case to have been starkly true.
“Goodbye, Tom,” she said.
Her voice now held that old steeliness, and so it didn’t surprise him that she rose, wrapped the sheet around her body, and began to gather up her clothes. There was a quickness in all this, however, and he saw in that quickness that she was having to fight the deep current of her own conviction. For that reason, he expected her to rush from the room, like some heroine in a film, but instead of doing anything so dramatic, she simply and quite slowly turned away, then disappeared into the adjoining bathroom.
He could hear water running, her feet padding about, then the rustle of her clothes as she dressed herself behind the closed door, and in the soft intimacy of these sounds he understood with complete fullness how deep his love for her actually ran, knew without doubt that he wanted to live his life with her, wanted them to drift together into maturity and from there into age and then move inexorably toward that moment of supreme mourning when one of them would know that it was not just a dream, that one could, in fact, love another person for one’s whole life through.
She was fully dressed when she came back into the room, and he could see that she had used the time to steel herself against any further argument.
“Is it loaded?” she asked.
“Yes,” Danforth said.
He turned away as she headed for the bureau and kept his face to the wall during the time it took her to open the drawer, walk to the door of his room, and open it.
“Tom,” she said.
He turned to her.
“Remember me” was all she said.
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
He would always remember the gently falling rain of that next morning, Danforth told me, how the drops had moved jaggedly down the windows of his hotel room, and how he’d heard the low rumble of thunder that rolled over Munich as he sat there alone.
“Things were dark enough without an omen, of course,” he added.
“Dark, yes,” I said.
He reached for the handkerchief in his jacket pocket, and I saw that his fingers were trembling.
“It’s easy to hide something in a handkerchief, Paul,” he said.
With that, he spread the handkerchief out on the table, took a dime from his pocket, placed it at the center of the handkerchief, folded the handkerchief neatly over it, then returned the handkerchief, peak down, to his jacket pocket.
“It’s called the TV fold now,” he informed me. “Because it was the sort of fold men used in the forties and fifties.”
“The sort of fold you must have used then,” I said.
“Yes.” He patted the front pocket of his jacket. “The concealed item is at the bottom of the fold.”
He was obviously speaking about the cyanide tablet Bannion had concealed in a similar handkerchief.
“What about you?” I asked. “Did you have a tablet?”
“Me? No,” Danforth said. “I was to flee. I was the rat leaping from the sinking ship. There was no need for me to have cyanide.” He looked at me significantly. “You know, Paul, quite a few people who tried to kill Hitler were captured. Some remained alive for years. Held in prison for years, as I later learned. But not one of them survived the war.”
“So in a sense, it was just as you said at the beginning of your story,” I reminded him. “The question was never whether she would live or die. For that had been decided long ago.”
“Hmm,” Danforth breathed, and on that breath returned me to Munich in the rain.
~ * ~
Munich, Germany, 1939
For a time he could only sit in the chair by the window and watch the rain cascade down the glass panes. He felt numb and deflated and without resources. Bannion had made it clear that they would have only one chance, and on the wave of that urgency, any hope for escape had closed. If Anna got close enough, she would fire, and after that, if the target was still alive and rushing from the restaurant, Bannion would fire, and then each would die either in the hail of bullets that followed or by biting down on the cyanide.