Adult World, Danforth thought, a term he’d picked up from his many interrogations, the comical Russian nickname for Lubyanka.
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“Adult World because there was a famous toy store across the square from Lubyanka Prison,” Danforth explained. “Children’s World, it was called.”
“Funny,” I said grimly.
“Lubyanka was also said to be Moscow’s tallest building,” Danforth added without the slightest glimmer of humor, “because from its basement windows you could see Siberia.”
“Even funnier,” I said darkly.
“It had once been the gos strakhkassa,” Danforth continued. “The government insurance office. Strakhkassa means ‘insurance office.’ But strakh means ‘fear’ in Russian, so later people called it gos strakha, the ‘government terror.’”
“But of course, this was something Romanchuk only claimed to have overheard,” I said.
“Which meant I had nothing to go forward on,” Danforth said. “But I also had nothing to go back to, Paul.” He shrugged. “And so I went east.”
“East,” I said, as if I’d stumbled on a clue. “Where your story always seems to be tending. A story that is sort of a haunted-house tale now, it seems to me. With the protagonist searching from room to room, looking for that ghost.”
“Anna’s ghost,” Danforth said in a tone that gave me the impression that I was being led down a road whose end Danforth knew well, being conducted step by step, carefully and thoughtfully, toward some fateful final moment.
“From room to room, yes,” I said, “but always to the east.”
“Always to the east,” Danforth repeated. “How right you are, Paul.” His smile was paper thin. “Where you’ve never been, I think you said. The Middle East, I mean.”
“No, never to the Middle East,” I said a little defensively. “But as I told you, I’ve been to Moscow.”
“Ah, yes, Moscow,” Danforth said, and on that word resumed his tale. “I arrived there —”
“But wait a moment,” I interrupted. “Romanchuk said that Anna was giving the Russians a wrong turn.”
“Yes.”
“So, you were now convinced that this woman was working for the Germans?”
“Completely convinced,” Danforth said. “And I was also convinced that this woman was Anna.”
“So why did you continue looking for her?” I asked. “She had probably betrayed you. Probably gotten Bannion killed. Maybe even Christophe. She was a —”
“She was a Nazi pretending to be a Jew,” Danforth interrupted.
“Then why look for her?” I asked.
“Well, wouldn’t you look for the person who had used you and betrayed you while all the time working for a cause that killed millions of innocent people?” Danforth asked.
It was at that moment I saw the deep hatred he had harbored for so long.
“You were going to kill her?” I asked, more astonished by this notion than by anything Danforth had revealed so far.
“Yes,” Danforth said brutally. “Faced with such a betrayal, nothing should stay your hand, don’t you agree, Paul?”
“No, nothing,” I said, in an admiring tone I hadn’t used with him before.
“But it was no longer love that drove me,” Danforth said. “It was hatred.”
He let me ponder this stark reversal for a time, then he added darkly, “And so to Moscow, because there seemed no place else to go.”
He arrived there in November of 1952, he told me, a thin, weary man who’d developed pneumonia on the way and had spent several days in a barely heated room in Kiev, then yet more time idly strolling about and working to improve his Russian before he reached Moscow.
Moscow was a long way from the rest of the world, not only in miles, but in its steadily deepening paranoia.
“Everyone was terrified of everyone else,” Danforth said. “Brock’s contacts in Moscow were afraid that any help they extended to me would put them under suspicion. I knew that my time was running out, but I didn’t care. In fact, I had lost the capacity to care, Paul. And there is no place darker than that place.” He paused a moment, then added, “So dark I was almost glad when they came for me.” Suddenly he smiled, as if greeting a brighter turn in his tale. “It was snowing that day.” He glanced toward the window, layers of white deepening on the streets and sidewalks. “Like now.”
~ * ~
Moscow, Soviet Union, 1952.
The snow was falling heavily as Danforth made his way toward Gorky Street that morning, but nonetheless a long line of freezing Russians snaked from the entrance of the Lenin mausoleum, as it had every morning since his arrival in Moscow. It was as if a new list were published each evening telling you, you, and you that you must pay your respects to Comrade Lenin at an appointed moment on the following day, as if hundreds had been ordered to appear at the exact same time, guaranteeing an endlessly extended line and the continuation of the absurd pretense that Lenin and the frightful society he had helped create were still universally beloved.
He had disliked Moscow from his first day. Its one majestic vista was Kremlin Square, but that majesty had been dulled by the horrendous sprawl around it. Added to this was the sheer weight of oppression that turned each minute into a dull throb and that seemed to lace the air with molten lead.
Once on Gorky Street, Danforth headed for the Aragvi, the restaurant Brock’s contact had suggested, probably because it was one of the city’s most luxurious, and thus hardly likely to be chosen for a meeting anyone would want kept secret from the KGB.
A squat little Pobeda drew up alongside him; it moved slowly at the same pace as him and then spurted forward and stopped. A tall man in a long overcoat got out, nodded toward Danforth, then motioned him forward, smiling quite broadly as he did.
“Kiryukha,” the man said as he thrust out his hand.
The word meant “old friend” or “pal” or something of that sort, and it could not have surprised Danforth more.
Then in English the man said, “Get in car.”
Danforth did as he was told, and seconds later found himself cruising down Gorky Street, the big man at the wheel.
“You know what pobeda mean?” he asked.
Danforth admitted that he didn’t.
“‘Victory,’” the man said. “You call me . . . Flynn, okay?”
“Whatever you say,” Danforth replied dryly. “I’m Thomas Danforth.”
“Thomas Danforth your real name?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
The man grinned. “You spy maybe?”
“No.”
The man laughed heartily. “I Errol Flynn. American movie star.” He laughed again. “See, I give you my real name too. Real name and real what I do. So we always tell truth, right, buddy?”