“Yes,” I said. “And we all need to be heroes.” I glanced toward the open wound of Lower Manhattan. “Especially now.”
“Indeed that’s true, Paul,” Danforth said. “With one small caveat.”
“Which is?”
Danforth looked at me almost sadly, like a man who’d expended great effort in an unworthy cause. “That the need to be a hero is not a hero’s need.”
I felt that I had proved myself to be as young and callow at the end of his story as I had been at the beginning.
“So, tell me, then,” I asked with a sincerity that surprised me. “What is truly heroic?”
“Facing the complexity of things,” Danforth said solemnly. He looked at me as if he were making a final evaluation, a judgment that would determine whether or not I would hear the final chapters of his tale. “Collateral damage is inevitable,” he said, almost to himself. He drew in a disturbingly tense breath, held it for a moment, then released it slowly; it seemed to carry with it the last full measure of his strength. “The letter that finally came from the general was in Russian, of course. It said simply 
Which means ‘Do with him as you wish.’” Just below it, the old general had written a name and address. Danforth drew in yet another slow, ponderous breath that seemed to carry with it the full weight of murder.
“And so I set off to find a man I had never seen,” he said. He twisted to the side, opened the drawer of the little table that rested between us, and took out an old service revolver. “And, if he had betrayed Anna, to kill him.”
~ * ~
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983
He had vaguely expected to find Rache living in Krakow or Budapest, or perhaps even the old spy haven of Vienna, where Rache could sit with his pastry and afternoon tea and stare at the Plague Monument and recall the sweet days of his treachery, the best triple agent in the world because he’d gotten away with it.
But once Solotoff had provided the man’s address, along with, surprisingly, a German name, Danforth had changed his earlier notion, and on the flight from New York he imagined him as all such figures had been imagined since the war: sitting on some cool veranda, listening to the call of tropical birds, the smell of fresh mango rich in the air around them; these men who had brought winter to the world safe in their sunlit splendor.
That his purpose still burned so brightly surprised him, for in every other way he felt the steady weathering of time, death’s unyielding approach. Life, at last, was a stalker, waiting for the moment, and he knew that his would come soon. Perhaps this was his true freedom, he thought, that he could murder in certain knowledge that whatever followed would be short-lived.
And so, if Rache was a traitor, this he would do . . . for Anna.
He took a cab to his hotel on Avenida Florida, unpacked, then lay down on the bed for a fitful night’s sleep. In dreams, he returned to his many ages: the callow youth, the shallow adventurist, the amateur assassin, the tormented romantic obsessive, and now this lonely man on his last mission, this hate-filled man who might at last personify the thing he sought: vengeance.
Morning did not become him; in the mirror he saw the deep lines, the heavy bags, the snow-white hair comic in its disarray. Time, in the end, is a drowning pool, and as he peered at his withered face, Danforth felt himself suffocating beneath the many regrets that pressed in on him. Shouldn’t he have known from the beginning that it was all a foolish enterprise and that like all such exploits it would end in disaster? At the first firings of his love for Anna, shouldn’t he have done everything he could to rescue her from this tomfoolery, thus saving both their lives? Had he missed some subtle sign of treachery that, had he seen it, might have saved her? Had Rache ever walked past him or sat, a silent figure behind a potted plant, peering at Bannion or Anna, or even Danforth himself, knowing full well that they were only little spies, silly in their hope and expendable for its dashing?
After Clayton’s funeral, his wife had given Danforth her husband’s old service revolver, a gesture his old friend had requested only hours before his death. It would be fitting, Danforth thought now, for Clayton’s gun to bring down the curtain on a drama he had begun so many years before.
He had visited Buenos Aires only once, in company with his father, but he faintly recalled the old neighborhood of La Locanda, with its small, colorfully painted buildings. He had read that here, in these quaint and quite lovely streets, there were houses where the victims of the ongoing repression were kept and tormented before they disappeared, and he wondered if Rache had found a place for himself in this world of pain. He knew that certain men were drawn to life’s dungeons and death chambers. He had met them during his own interrogations, and he had met them as he himself was interrogated. They were the sewer’s most pernicious flotsam, and he had learned enough of the world to understand that they were as numerous as grains of sand. But he was no longer a man of the world, he thought, no longer one inclined to inject himself into its great affairs. He had given himself over to this only once, and disastrously, and now he felt at home in the concentrated measure of his need for reprisal. He had not saved the world, but he was unquestionably prepared to remove one villain from it.
And this he would do for Anna.
So it is here, he thought as the bus drew to a halt at the cross street, that the story ends.
The house he located a few minutes later struck him as extraordinarily modest. If life followed art, an epic tale spanning decades and continents would have an epic setting for its final scene. But the house was small and in bad repair, with a cramped, weedy yard and a roof saddened by broken tiles.
Suddenly, Danforth recalled the times he’d killed, and it seemed to him that it was his memory acting as a buttress to his courage, reminding him that he had taken life at close quarters. He was not new to murder, he told himself, and despite his years, his trigger finger remained strong. When the moment came, he would make his will match his muscles. That had always been the key to action, and as he stepped forward and drew open the rusty iron gate that opened onto the narrow pathway that led to the cottage’s door, he told himself that he must be the man he’d been all those many years ago: This I do for Anna.
The walkway was of uneven brick, treacherous for a man his age, but Danforth maneuvered along it slowly and carefully, his gaze on the path until he reached the door. Once there, he drew in a long, steadying breath and knocked.
The man who opened the door was pale and bald, his eyes vague and watery, with nothing of the malevolent deceit Danforth’s imagination had added to them. He had imagined Rache as still in the fullness of his youth, muscular and erect. To these characteristics, his mind had lately added features that were sometimes Slavic, sometimes Aryan, but always diabolically cruel and lit with low cunning. He knew that it was his hatred that had removed age and weariness and decrepitude from this portrait, and that in a thousand thousand ways other men did this every day, shading in the demonic in accordance with their fierce need for vengeance.
“¿Qué pasa?” the old man asked. What’s the matter?