“That’s true, you don’t,” Danforth said. He glanced at the clock to his right. “You only have to believe that it might be true.” He watched me a moment, then added, “We know what to do with evil, Paul. It’s innocence that perplexes us.” His smile was a reed struggling to hold its own against a stormy sea. “And so I thought it was over at last,” he whispered, and with those words stepped back into the past. “But I was wrong.”
He had retired from teaching his classes not long after returning from Buenos Aires, he said, but had continued to tutor on the side in order to afford the few luxuries he enjoyed, mainly books and an occasional visit to the theater, what he rightly called “the semiretirement of a simple life.” Several of these students were part of the influx of Russians to New York City, a very ambitious group, according to Danforth, hell-bent on learning English. One of them had been a young woman from Vladivostok who wore thick glasses and spoke very rapidly and who greatly enjoyed lambasting the old Communist regime as the crooks and thugs they were. These had been replaced by an equally repellent cadre of Party hacks, she said, men who enjoyed the fruits of the old system’s vast corruption even as Russia attempted to reform itself. Still, there were good changes, she’d told Danforth, lots of entrepreneurs creating lots of wealth. In fact, she said, quite a few entirely new professions had sprouted from the soil of Communism’s rot. She listed them in Russian and asked Danforth to give her the words for them in English.
she said.
“Accountant,” Danforth told her.
“Investment banker.”
It was this third one that caused Danforth to feel what I had felt only moments before, the silent stricture of a suddenly stopped heart.
“Private investigator,” he said.
Could it be, he wondered, with all the recent opening up of files from various Russian agencies — a few even from the black maw of the KGB — could it be that it was not too late for one last quest?
“With the last of my little savings, I hired a Russian gumshoe,” Danforth said with a small, sad laugh.
He had gone to Little Odessa, he said, where the immigrant Russians thrived, and there inquired at various social clubs of anyone who might know a 
who would take his case. A name at last surfaced, one Fydor Slezak, and Danforth wrote to him in his quite exquisite Russian. The case was taken, and for weeks it continued. Bills came, and a little doubtful information that reminded Danforth of the rumors that had plagued him so many years before, tales of this woman hewing wood, that one in a quarry
Then, on a fine April day, an envelope arrived, bearing its brief report on a piece of paper that would forever after seem to Danforth as slender as her bones.
the note said.
Found.
~ * ~
Magadan, Russia, 1986
He flew out of Kennedy to Moscow, and from there to Vladivostok, where he waited as one flight after another was delayed and the terminal filled with people who reminded him of the peasants of old. There was something in their patient waiting, their anticipation of delay, the way they absorbed hardship and inconvenience into their very blood that recalled his first journeys to the east, the frigid towns where the forebears of these same indomitable people had congregated beside the rails in hopes of gathering up a little coal or some miraculously tumbled sack of grain. He’d heard of trains that used frozen fish as fuel, and along the rail lines where they ran, vast crowds of the starving waited for the blackened fish heads that were sometimes belched from these trains’ explosive funnels. He’d never known if this was true, but the curious thing was that at the time, it had seemed to him entirely believable.
The plane to Magadan at last took off a full three days after his arrival in Vladivostok, and by that time his old bones had seemed almost to pierce his skin.
Once in Magadan, he’d gone to the same hotel where he’d stayed after being released years before; he’d even, with the manager’s permission, been admitted once again to room 304, where he sat by the window and recalled as best he could that one last time with Anna.
He’d hired Slezak to take him up the Road of Skulls, but he’d been held up for a reason he had not made clear, and so Danforth had remained in Magadan a little longer than planned. While there, he often walked down to the sea, where he sat on the once-hellish docks and watched the workers loading and unloading supplies. Zeks no longer emerged from the black depths of these boats, but from time to time, Danforth would see some old man or woman who had doubtless once suffered that debased condition. He could sense their long serfdom in the slope of their shoulders, the heaviness of their weary gait. The camps had closed long ago, but where could such people have gone with their closing? They had no family left, no one to whom they might return, and so, as he could see, they had become the Gulag ghosts of Magadan.
She would not be among them, Danforth had been told, and so he no longer searched for her as he’d once searched, his needful eyes trained on each new shuffling group of zeks, forever hopeful that she would suddenly appear within their ranks, small and brown, with such large black eyes.
Slezak at last arrived. He stopped his mud-caked truck in front of the hotel, and its engine gurgled fitfully, like an old man with fluid in his lungs.
“Long trip,” Slezak warned him in Russian.
Danforth could see that he’d expected to find a younger man and now feared that the one before him would not be up to so arduous a journey.
“Six hundred kilometers to Susuman,” he added. “Bad road.”
Bad, yes, Danforth thought later, but nothing compared to his earlier journey up the Road of Skulls. There was mud, and the region’s gigantic mosquitoes attacked with the same aggressiveness of old.
He was not sure he had ever been in Susuman. Certainly he recalled nothing of the buildings that greeted him, though their ramshackle appearance, along with a few surviving relics of that earlier time, mostly faded murals exhorting the exhausted zeks to work harder for the motherland, reminded him of other villages through which he’d passed. Whole towns had been lost in snowdrifts, he now recalled, a vast world locked in frigid darkness.
He had been told where she lay and went directly there, a small cemetery that rested among a grove of trees not far from town. Slezak had told Danforth that a woman would meet them at the entrance to the cemetery, and there she was, standing between two concrete pylons that had once served as a gate.
Danforth greeted her in Russian, then deposited the money into the rough palm of her hand.
“She is just through there,” the woman said.
“Did you know her?” Danforth asked.
The woman shook her head, then nodded toward Slezak as if to tell him that answering questions had not been part of the deal.
“She worked at the power station in Kadykchan,” Slezak said. “When the town was abandoned, some camp records ended up there. I gave her the name, and she looked through them. That’s what the money’s for.” He grinned. “Research.”