Danforth glanced back toward the building. A knot of men had now gathered around where Bannion lay face-up on the sidewalk, his body utterly still.
“This way,” Volker ordered, and he jerked Danforth around. “Please.”
He tried to remain entirely calm as he was escorted to the car, but once they were inside Gestapo headquarters, he felt the old terror creep over him. He had no doubt that they’d brought him here because they’d discovered the plot and were looking for him to confirm what they already knew. He recalled the earlier “interrogation” Bannion had ordered carried out, all the pain he’d endured, how near he’d come to breaking before it had been abruptly halted.
That had all turned out to be a ruse, of course, but this was not a ruse, as he well knew, and they would stop at nothing, and in the end, he knew that he would break, that their names would spill from him, along with every element of the plot.
He reached into his jacket pocket as unobtrusively as possible, fingered the folded handkerchief and retrieved the tablet that had been meant for Anna.
Later it would seem to him that his decision had come not because he feared torture or that he might break under it, but because it offered the only way to bring their deepest suspicions to himself and thus divert them from Anna. They would find no pistol on Anna, after all, or in her room. They would find no cyanide tablet save the one crushed between his teeth. He knew that his death was no guarantee of her escape, but it offered the only slender service he could render her, and as he placed the tablet between his lips and then bit down, he felt that surge of ancient knighthood he’d read about in books. This he would do for the woman he loved, the only act of true sacrifice he had ever known.
“Herr Danforth.”
Danforth turned toward Volker, the severed tablet in his mouth. Why, he wondered, had he not yet felt the slightest effect of the cyanide? He was by no means a student of lethal poisons, but he’d heard that this one acted almost instantly.
“Come in,” Volker said.
Danforth followed him into the office, expecting to collapse at any moment, his body rocked by seizures during the few seconds it would take for him to die.
“Sit down, Herr Danforth,” Volker said.
Danforth did as he was told.
“Allow me,” Volker said, and before Danforth could stop him, he lit a cigarette and handed it to Danforth.
“Now,” Volker said as he opened the folder on his desk. “Let us proceed.”
During the next few minutes Danforth waited for the cyanide to kill him until it became clear that whatever he’d bitten into had not been cyanide at all. By then Volker was well into his interrogation, and Danforth had learned that there was not a single element of the plot of which he was unaware save that Danforth had known of it.
“We are told she is a Jew and we know her companion is a Communist,” Volker said, “but we know you are neither, and your father assures us that you are not a political person.”
“My father?” Danforth asked.
“Your father, yes,” Volker said. “We contacted him when we learned of your association with this woman — her real name is Klein, I believe?”
“Why would my father tell you anything about her?”
“Because your father has been a great friend to Germany for a long time, Herr Danforth.”
“A friend of Germany?” Danforth asked hesitantly.
“He shares many of our beliefs, as I’m sure you know,” Volker said. “That the Reds must be stopped and, of course, that the Jews are a poisonous tribe.”
Danforth felt the last grain of the fake cyanide dissolve beneath his tongue. “I see.”
“He sends you his best regards, by the way,” Volker added. He absently glanced through the papers in the folder. When he looked up it was clear to Danforth that something darker was on his mind. “It is because your father has been such a friend to us that we are — how shall I say this? — overlooking your associations.” He closed the folder. “We have more than enough information to detain you, Herr Danforth, but we see no reason to keep you from leaving Germany as soon as possible.” He leaned forward with a force whose violent threat could not be mistaken. “You will be leaving our country very soon, is that not so, Herr Danforth?”
Danforth nodded.
“Very soon,” Volker added pointedly “At once, in fact.”
This was an order, of course, and one about which no appeal would be tolerated. In no uncertain terms, Danforth was being spared because he was young and stupid, young and not a Jew, young and not a Communist, and most of all because he was young and the son of a man who hated both Communists and Jews. His father’s support of those who would destroy those groups had reached out to save Danforth’s life.
“You have been granted much good fortune,” Volker told him in a voice that was not unlike his father’s. “Be careful how you use it.” He reached into the drawer of his desk, took out the passport that had earlier been taken from him, and returned it.
“Thank you,” Danforth said. He reached to draw it from Volker’s hand and then stopped as Volker’s fingers clamped down on it.
“At once,” Volker repeated.
“Yes,” Danforth said.
Volker released the passport and Danforth placed it in his jacket pocket.
Neither bothered to say goodbye.
Once dismissed, Danforth headed down the stairs and into the building’s lobby. It was an ornate affair, with the sort of woodwork that had been the pride of an older age, now almost entirely covered in bunting, the interior festooned with Nazi flags.
A car waited outside the building, and as Danforth came into the daylight again, the driver quickly pulled himself from behind the wheel and opened the back door. “This way, sir.”
He was driven — or was it escorted — back to his hotel, and once they were there, the driver again got out and opened the door for him. “I am to wait for you, sir.”
“Wait for me?”
“You are going to the train station, yes?” the man said. “You are leaving Germany today?”
So he would be watched at every step of his departure, Danforth realized, and after he was gone, his name would be added to a list of people no longer permitted to enter Germany.
“Yes, leaving,” Danforth said quietly.
He took the clattering old elevator up to the fourth floor, packed his bags, and headed for the door. He had nearly reached it when he turned back and saw Anna’s scarf still draped over the chair where she’d left it the night before. It was all he would ever have of her, he thought, and in the despair that swept over him at that moment, he drew it from the chair and buried his face in its dark folds and felt in the grimly merging way of grief the full and unbearable weight of both her presence and her loss.
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
So what was really the point of Danforth’s story? I wondered in the brief silence that fell over him now. Was it a cautionary tale about the profoundly unsmooth running of true love? Or was it a warning about the twisting course of intelligence work, how plots evolve and deepen as if by their own volition, each step in some way unwilled? Could it be that I was being lectured — however metaphorically —about the passion of youth or the fierce nature of desire? Or did his instruction touch on the injustices of class, the way his own favorable circumstances had protected him from what had no doubt befallen Anna and Bannion?