Danforth would many times recall these words of Clayton’s, the bitter tone that entered his voice as he’d said them, how they’d filled him with so much of his own remembered ire.
“Yes, all right,” he said stonily.
With that, they headed back to the hotel, then down the corridor to room 304.
In years to come, he would recall the dry shuffle of his feet along the faded carpet, the jumpy movement of his eyes as he’d approached the two men who stood on either side of the door, one of them clearly in command of the other.
They had been expecting him, had immediately recognized him, and in a way that was very nearly warm, the first had nodded to him as the second turned and, with a gentle motion, like a father fearing to wake a child, opened the door, then stepped back to let him in.
Danforth said nothing to either man, nor did they speak to him; he simply moved past them and into a room where a single small lamp cast a faded yellow light, and in that light he saw her, sitting at the window just as she had sat in Paris so many years before, saw her in full, dressed in a zek’s gray smock, her hair cut very short and salted with gray. As he drew nearer, he saw the ravages of her long detention, the deep creases along her cheeks and her cold-cracked lips, saw all the features of premature old age that mocked her middle years, and he cared for none of her sufferings because he knew what she was and what she had done, and he recalled in a single, blistering memory the deception she had carried out in Munich, Rache perhaps more her lover than he had ever been.
Now it was his time to make a counterfeit of love.
And so he said, “Hello, Anna,” in the soft, lover’s tone he’d decided to use.
She seemed not at all surprised to see him.
“Rise!” one of the guards shouted in Russian.
At this rough command, Anna struggled to her feet.
“It’s Tom,” he told her as he came forward.
She seemed to see through his deception and stared at him without the slightest spark of affection. “They told me you were coming,” she said stiffly. “What do you want?”
“A favor,” Danforth answered. He struggled to bring a tiny smile to his lips. “For old times.”
She glared at him starkly. “Old times,” she muttered.
“Munich,” he added.
Her lips smiled, but her eyes didn’t, and it seemed to him that everything soft he remembered about her had been replaced by the rock-hard figure who now stood before him.
“Munich,” she repeated.
He thought he heard contempt in her voice but decided to ignore it. “I never stopped loving you, Anna,” he lied. “And I never stopped looking for you.”
He opened his arms to her tenderly, a gesture meant to draw her into his embrace, but she instantly stepped back as if from a repulsive approach, then glanced toward the still-open door, the guards who stood on either side of it, now peering in.
“Anna,” Danforth said in a voice that seemed jarringly loud. “Whatever you were then…”
She lifted her hand to silence him and he saw how rough it was, scarred by hard labor.
“I have nothing for you,” she said, then looked again toward the guards at the door.
Her eyes widened and he saw something terrible come over her, a brutal ferocity. It was as if a wholly different human being had always lived inside this other shell and was only now fully revealing itself, the old skin falling away, a different creature slithering out of it, alive and squirming before him, as frightful as Aaron’s serpent.
“Heil Hitler,” she said coldly. Her eyes glimmered with fanatical zeal as she lifted her arm in salute and stood before him as stiffly as any SS fiend. “Heil Hitler,” she repeated.
Danforth suddenly realized how right Bannion had been so many years before when he’d told him that he was a romantic fool; he was, and so much so that even during these last seconds, he’d hoped to find a happy ending for the long waste of his life, a moment of redemption for both himself and Anna, the revelation that she had never, never been what he now knew her to be.
“Heil Hitler,” she said a third time, words that brought back all his memories of the trials and the camps along with Anna’s vile treachery, and at last the boiling wave crested, and in what Danforth knew would be his last gesture toward her, he stepped forward, and with all the force of lost romance, and with all the passion of what he’d hoped to be a kiss, he slapped her face.
~ * ~
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
“Slapped her face,” Danforth repeated. He remained quiet for a moment, then said, “Were you expecting some great love scene, Paul?”
I stared at him in shocked silence.
“A happy ending?” Danforth asked.
“I suppose I was,” I admitted shakily. “I mean, one always hopes for that.”
“Oh, how true,” Danforth said grimly. “But false illusion is life’s chief ally, don’t you think, Paul?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“Believing you know a person or can control the final outcome of your life,” Danforth said. “I certainly know what that happy ending would have been in my case: that Anna would begin to talk, tell me all about Rache, a story that would make clear that she had never been in league with him. It didn’t matter how absurdly improbable this story might be. In my romantic fantasy, I would believe it, and so would the Russians. They would be so won over by it that they would release Anna from the clutches of the Gulag, and I would whisk her back to New York, where we would grow old together, a silver-haired couple strolling arm in arm through Central Park.” He released a weary sigh. “I’m afraid that was not to be.” He looked at me quite piercingly. “Do you know what the one great fact of life is, Paul?”
“No,” I admitted.
“How easily it is wasted,” Danforth said. “All our precious little days.”
An old fury rocked him, and he appeared barely able to suppress it. A few seconds passed, and during that time an uneasy calm returned to him, after which he said, “I came home at last, but there was nothing left of my old world. Danforth Imports had limped along in my absence, but by the time I got back, it was heavily in debt. I sold it, along with Winterset, and paid off the company’s bills. I knew that I no longer had a heart or a head for business, so I took a job in a language school here in New York. I tutored students on the side.” He glanced toward the table where two places had been set, making it clear that he’d long planned to bring me here. “And I thought of Anna, of course.” A coldness came into his eyes. “But never again in the grip of a delusion, and never again with love.”
“But wait,” I said. “You didn’t get any information about Rache out of Anna, did you?”
“No.”
“Then why did the Russians let you go?”
Danforth smiled. “Ah, a chirp from the nightingale floor.”
But rather than going on to answer my question, Danforth simply shrugged and resumed his tale.