“You see honesty perish and honesty survive,” he said. “You see startling acts of kindness and unspeakable acts of depravity, just in the way Bardach writes about them in Man Is Wolf to Man. In later years, you read these accounts from your warm little apartment and remember that you didn’t have to work when the temperature fell below negative forty-one degrees and how while you were shivering in your bunk you hoped for the temperature to drop just enough so that you could stay in that frigid room a little longer. You expect this to go on forever, Paul. You expect to die and be buried in that frozen tundra. You stop believing there’s a world beyond the camp because that world no longer exists for you. You watch the Kolyma River freeze and briefly thaw. You notice the return of the mosquitoes, and you hate them so much you look forward to winter. Every blessing brings a curse, even the gift of another day of life. Because you are already dead, Paul.”
He stopped suddenly, and his face took on the expression of one abruptly touched by a miracle.
“Then, one afternoon, just as you’ve gotten back from the woods, barely able to peel those wretched mittens from your fingers,” he said, “you are summoned to the camp commander’s office, and there, to your amazement, you see what you think must be a ghost, because it could only have come from the life you had before you died. You stare at it, speechless, blinking. You cannot believe this ghost will speak. And then it does.”
“A ghost?” I asked, with a caught breath. “Anna?”
Danforth appeared to see that very ghost, though whether in the guise of a disordered young woman in a Greenwich Village bar, an art dealer’s assistant speaking perfect German, an assassin, or a spy, I couldn’t guess.
“Anna?” Danforth asked softly. “Ah, Paul, how different my little parable would be if that had truly been her name.”
~ * ~
PART VII
Traitor’s Gate
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Danforth looked at his watch. “Do you mind if we catch a cab?” he asked. “I should be getting home.”
“Home?” I asked. “Now?”
I was certain that Danforth’s story was drawing to an end and saw no need to interrupt it.
“One should know how another person lives, don’t you think, Paul?” Danforth said quite firmly “It helps the moral understanding.”
Moral understanding?
I immediately felt the approach of a didactic remark, but before I could voice this queasy supposition or even protest the abrupt breaking off of his tale, Danforth was on his feet, pulling on his coat and twining his scarf around his neck with the determination of a man whose methods could not be questioned or his final aim deterred.
“Come, Paul,” he said. “It’s not far.”
This turned out to be true, though it was farther than I’d expected, since I’d reasonably supposed that Danforth lived near the Century Club. But our cab turned south onto Fifth Avenue, rather than north toward the swankier regions surrounding Central Park, and a few minutes later we arrived at a rather commonplace apartment building at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street.
“It would be a long walk to your club,” I said as we approached the building’s inelegant entrance.
“Oh, I’m not a member of the club,” Danforth said casually. “Clayton was a member and his wife still is, so she very kindly allowed me use it as a meeting place today.”
“I see,” I muttered.
The lobby of Danforth’s building was entirely beige with a few plastic plants sprouting from plaster vases.
“Not what you expected, Paul?” Danforth asked.
“I guess not,” I admitted.
A small elevator lifted us to the fourteenth floor, and Danforth led me through an unrelentingly charmless corridor and into a cramped apartment whose one luxury was a wide southern view of Manhattan, the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan twinkling brightly in the distance, a horrible gap separating them.
“It must be a painful view now,” I said.
“And enraging,” Danforth said. “Sometimes I want to kill them all.” He peered out the window for a moment, then said, “But as you noted before, if we’d done that to the Germans, you wouldn’t be here, would you, Paul?”
“No,” I said.
“Because we would have killed that grandfather of yours,” Danforth added. “Where was he from, by the way?”
“Augsburg.”
“Hmm,” Danforth said. “There was a subcamp of Dachau near there.”
I could not deny that this mention of the Dachau concentration camp chilled me.
Danforth’s smile seemed only to add a layer of deeper cold. “So how do you want it, Paul?” he asked.
“Want what?” I asked.
“Your coffee,” Danforth said.
“Oh, uh, w-with cream,” I stammered.
“But milk will do, I hope?”
“Yes, of course.”
Danforth made his way to the tiny kitchen that adjoined the almost equally tiny living area. While he made the coffee, I sat down and took in my surroundings. They were very humble, with little to lift their ordinariness but the large bookshelves that lined the room’s four walls, which, I noticed, mainly held books about spying, the tricks of that trade, along with a surprising number of titles about Germany, though not that country in the 1930s and 1940s, when Danforth was there, but during the Cold War, from its beginnings to the bringing down of the Wall. Some volumes contained an unexpected focus on the activities of the infamous Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. Could it be, I wondered, that Anna had somehow used her charms and her linguistic talents to make her way up the pecking order of that evil force and then become the perfect servant of East Germany’s version of the KGB? And if so, what had she been? A Nazi agent? A Soviet agent? Both?
“There you are, Paul,” Danforth said as he handed me a cup of coffee, sat down in the chair opposite me with his own cup, and took a sip. “This should return me to sobriety.”
“I doubt you ever left it,” I said to him. “Despite your youthful adventure, you strike me as a cautious man.”
“Not always,” Danforth said with a telling glance at the bookshelf to his right, all those volumes of an East Germany firmly in the grip of a now-displaced Communism. “No, not always,” he repeated, then sank back deeply into his chair. “Especially when it comes to revenge.”
Revenge, I thought, the emotion that seemed still to inflame him and with which he returned us to his tale.
~ * ~
Kolyma, Soviet Union, 1964
“Robert?” Danforth asked tentatively. Many years had passed, and Clayton’s face, if indeed it was Clayton’s, was now webbed with wrinkles, his hair sprinkled with silver.
“Yes,” Clayton said. He was clearly stricken by the figure before him, Danforth’s ragged clothes and matted beard, his body so emaciated it was all but skeletal. “The commandant doesn’t speak English so ask him when we can leave,” he said.