He was squinting hard, and by that squint, Danforth realized that the old man’s vision was so impaired he could probably see only a blur at his door.
“My car has broken down,” he told him in Spanish. “I wonder if I might use your phone.”
The old man nodded and opened the door wider.
Danforth stepped inside the house, then followed the old man into his cramped living quarters, a small room cluttered with books and papers, though what Danforth most noticed was a small table filled with an array of medications: sprays, ointments, pills, the full ordnance of old age.
There was a phone on a second table and the old man shuffled over to it, plucked the receiver from its cradle, and offered it to Danforth with a palsied hand that kept its cord dancing frantically.
Danforth faked a call, then handed the old man back the phone. “They’re sending someone,” he said.
The old man nodded toward a chair, a gesture indicating he should wait inside until help arrived. Then he slumped down in a ragged wicker chair, indicating with a similar nod that Danforth should do the same in the chair that rested opposite his.
“Hace calor’’ the old man said. It’s warm.
“Si,” Danforth replied.
“¿De donde es usted?” Where are you from?
“Nueva York’.’
“Ah,” the old man said. “Tengo una hija qué aún vive alii’.’
A daughter living in New York, Danforth thought, and so he had had it all, this man: a wife, a child.
“¿Vive usted solo ahora?” Danforth asked cautiously, needing to make sure that the old man lived alone.
“Si” the old man said. “Soy soltero.”
So he lived alone, Danforth thought, with a daughter far away.
Perfect.
Danforth noticed a large drinking mug, topped with a pewter flask. “That mug with the milkmaid,” he said in English. “I saw one like it in Germany.”
“Germany, yes,” the old man said with a smooth shift to English. “I was there during the war.”
“I was there briefly,” Danforth said. “In Berlin. Near the Landwehr Canal.”
“Ah, yes,” the old man said. “A sad place. They tossed the body of Rosa Luxemburg into those waters.”
And Danforth instantly recalled that moment years before when they’d all been strolling along the Spree: how Bannion had stopped and looked out toward a particular bridge, the strange combination of rage and sorrow that had swept into his face.
“Why did you betray us, Ted?”
The old man blinked slowly, as if in all the years of his concealment he’d known that the hinge on traitor’s gate would one day sound. Now, with its small creak, he would realize, as Danforth thought Bannion surely did at that moment, that whether he would live or die had been decided long ago.
“Tom,” Bannion whispered.
Danforth wondered why he did not simply draw the pistol and do what he had come to do. What was the point of any further conversation, after all? What would he be looking for? He could find no answers to these questions, and as if to provide one, he felt his hand reach inside his coat, hold a moment, then curl around the handle of the pistol.
“You were a German agent all along,” Danforth said. “You never meant to carry out the plot.”
Bannion shifted in his chair, a jagged, achy movement Danforth recognized as the way he himself now moved, along with most men of a certain age.
“I was never a German agent,” Bannion said. “And I would have killed Hitler without a blink. I would have done everything I said I would do. It was Anna’s idea to kill him, remember? It was a good one, and it came from her sense of purpose, which I admired.”
There was a curious confidence in him now, Danforth observed, as if his old skills were returning to him, the dead powers of his long deceit lifting from their graves, walking the earth.
“I was never a German agent,” he declared again.
“Soviet then?” Danforth asked.
“Of course, Tom,” he said. “And I was loyal to the end. Which is why they’ve always protected me.” He stopped as if in sudden recognition. “Until now, that is.” He seemed to understand that history had turned against him. “When a great house falls, only the rats get out alive. Which one came to you, Tom?”
“It was I who came to him,” Danforth said. “Because I never stopped looking for Anna.”
Bannion’s smile bore something between admiration and contempt; he seemed in awe that Danforth had so relentlessly responded to so empty a call.
“With you, it was always her, Tom,” he said. “But with me, it was always something greater.”
Then he told his tale.
~ * ~
Munich, Germany, 1939
Bannion parted the curtains at his window and peered down at the street. It was a gesture that had long served to calm him, a simple gazing down onto the life below. He remembered the time when he’d walked the girders above Broadway, always with men who’d walked them far longer and with more grace, and how he’d felt lifted by their simple decency, the way they laughed and told stories, the true salt of the earth. It was in these men he’d first glimpsed the world his comrades in the east were already making and that he hoped to help them create. He knew that many Americans had already made the journey to Russia, were already working there, building the new world. He’d read about them in New Masses and heard their praises sung by countless street-corner speakers. At some point, he pledged a new allegiance, and he was now the secret sharer of their mission. He knew he would not see the castle finished, but he also knew that in what he had set himself to do, he would add to its measure. That Anna and Danforth and Clayton knew nothing of this continued connection, believing that he’d broken it and still lived in the bitterness of that break, seemed to him only a small deceit. It had been her idea, after all, this murder. He had only relayed her plan to his superiors and gained their approval to help her carry it out.
He jumped at the rap at his door, giving in to the fear that gripped him each time a stranger arrived or drew alongside him as he walked the street. It was always impossible to tell if a plot had been discovered until it was too late to do anything about it, and now that he was approaching what would no doubt be the last act of his life, he felt all the more fearful that something would stand in his way.
The second rap at the door was more insistent, but this time he gave no outward sign of fear.
The pistol was in his jacket, but there’d be no use in reaching for it. If the men on the other side of the door had come to arrest him, then arrest him they would. He had long ago cast aside the dramatics of self-defense, the idea of shooting his way out of such a spot. Such notions were for amateurs and people whose only concept of intrigue came from the movies.
And so he merely grabbed his jacket, hung it in the closet, then with studied calm opened the door.