“Which was?” I asked.
“To make the Germans pay,” Danforth answered. His gaze darkened. “To kill as many as I could because they had killed Anna.” He let his lethal gaze sink into me. “I had left Europe as a grieving lover,” he stated. “I returned to it as a murderer.”
~ * ~
Southern France, 1942.
Below him, the fields of night-bound France spread out like a gloved hand. He was falling into its darkness, the earth rising toward him like a blessing in disguise.
They were waiting for him below, and when he reached them he thanked them in their native language, then gathered up and buried his parachute as he had been taught in the long sweltering summer of his training.
They were French farmers who greeted him, and for the rest of his life, the memory of their rugged courage would remain with him, the rough texture of their hands when he shook them, the heartbreaking care in their hushed voices as they guided him across the fields and into the small house where they hid him until the next night, when he set off, alone, for the Spanish border.
On that long walk, he thought of Gurs, the train journey he had made with Anna, the ragged clothes of the withered Spaniard who’d met them, and at last the look on Anna’s face as the trees had parted and she’d gotten her first glimpse of the camp. A thousand years ago, he thought, a different man than he was now.
For the next year he played the vagabond Spaniard as effectively as Anna had played the disordered street grotesque on that long-ago night in the Old Town Bar. He wandered from village to village as he’d been instructed. To appear Spanish, he dyed his hair and darkened his skin beneath the Spanish sun. From mountain outcrops and village alleys, he watched the roads and railway stations and lived as an itinerant farm hand and sweeper; he slept in barns and back rooms and storage sheds, always speaking the low Spanish of the poor and dispossessed and in every way acting the part of one of Goya’s pobrecitas.
During these nomadic days, he killed two men, one with a knife and the other with a garrote, both German intelligence operatives, and in both cases he felt as little for their deaths as he’d felt for their lives, and he told himself as he thrust the knife or tightened the garrote that this he did for Anna.
By the early months of 1943, it was clear that his work in Spain was done. Spanish neutrality was enforced by Spain’s utter poverty. As a country, it was as starved and desolate as the Spanish refugees of Gurs had been, which was exactly what Danforth reported. There was no point to his remaining in Spain, he told his superiors. They agreed, and on their orders, he’d made his way to Gijon, hired an old fisherman and his ragtag boat, and through surprisingly calm waters sailed to England.
Once in London, Danforth learned that Clayton had been shipped to the Pacific, the commander of a Marine regiment. Clayton’s letters had accumulated in the mailroom of Danforth Imports, collected by Danforth’s father, who with the outbreak of war had thrown all his resources into the effort. No longer a friend of Germany, he’d purchased thousands of war bonds and provided his country with every imaginable trade secret for the smuggling of supplies and information. Then, in April of 1943, the senior Danforth died in his lofty aerie overlooking Central Park, still baffled by the son who had briefly returned from Europe after a long, mysterious stay, returned distant and aloof, seeming to have lost not only his will to live, as he’d told his father one long, sorrowful evening, but also his will to love.
It was this loveless and unloving man who now occupied the tiny desk in the tiny cubicle of an otherwise nondescript building in Hammersmith, his assignment to translate messages from various sources that poured into London from Calais to Istanbul. The messages were frequently in error, and some were no doubt intended to misinform, but more often than not, they were simply of no use to those planning the invasion that everyone knew was coming and in which effort Danforth felt himself once again sidelined.
But inconsequential as his work seemed to him, Danforth remained at his desk, hoping, always hoping, to find some shred of information as to where Anna had been buried so that after the war, he might find her body and bring it home. But even as he sought such information, some crazed part of his mind harbored the hope that she was still alive, though this hope caused him to envision a still darker end for Anna: in February of 1944 he read about a number of women executed in Natzweiler-Struthof, and he could not stop wondering if she had been among them. In April he read of the mass execution of Nacht und Nebel, prisoners, mostly foreign spies and resistance fighters, and again imagined Anna lined up against a wall and shot or hung from communal gallows.
All of these nightmare visions continually assailed him, but it was one in particular he found he could not shake:
Escaped prisoner from Pforzheim reports seeing a small dark female, very badly beaten. Reports female chained nude outside and left through night. Reports SS officer returned and gave her more “rough treatment.” Reports prisoner was kicked and beaten and was “all blood.” Reports prisoner left till afternoon. Reports SS officer returned and shot prisoner. Reports prisoner was conscious when executed.
Could this small dark female have been Anna?
It was an absurd question, and there was no way for Danforth to answer it, and yet the brief record of this incident refused to let him go, continually urging him to find a way to return to Europe so he could exact yet more revenge.
But each of his requests was denied, and so Danforth continued to work in his London basement cubicle, translating more communications from which he learned more details of the much earlier Parisian roundups of the city’s Jews, their herding together in the transit camp at Drancy, the terrible conditions there, the priest who’d claimed to hear the cry of children, though he could not have, from the steps of Sacré Coeur. He read about Ravensbrück, where female prisoners were gassed, about the massacres at Ascq in France and Vinkt in Belgium and Cephalonia in Greece, then farther east, where hell grew hotter in the children’s camp as Sisak and the women’s camp at Stara Gradiška.
But the dark preponderance of messages came from Poland, a steady stream of accounts that caused Danforth at last to lift his eyes from the most recent of them late on a rainy evening, still unable to take in a fact he was sure had long ago been accepted by others far more informed than himself, and which he finally mentioned to Colonel Broderick.
“The Germans are systematically killing all the Jews,” he said. “Does everyone know this?”
Broderick nodded grimly. “Yes, we know. And so when the war is over, we’re going to need German-speaking interrogators who are very skilled. Like you, Tom. Because we’re going to find out everything they did and make them pay for it.”
The sweet prospect of the world’s revenge fed the dark animal inside Danforth’s soul, and so he remained in London and there read of more and more outrages, and with each new report felt his heart harden, his spirit grow arid, and something like winter settle into him, an inner death that was deepened because in every report of torture and murder, every account of people shot or hanged or driven into gas chambers, he saw among them Anna.