Bloody hell, Ian thought. They had just got very, very lucky.
“Ladies,” Tony said with a warm smile, pressing a few more notes on them, “you’ve been more helpful than you can possibly know.” Helga blushed, but her older sister looked apprehensive.
“Are you going to make trouble for Frau Becker?” Now you ask, Ian thought, after you pocket our cash. “She couldn’t have done anything wrong. Such a nice woman—”
“It’s an inquiry related to someone else entirely,” Tony said, his standard soothing reply when hearing the inevitable He couldn’t have hurt a flea objection. But Ian looked down at Klara Gruber a long moment and asked, “What makes you so sure she was a nice woman?”
“Well, you know. She had a pretty way of speaking. She was a lady. And it’s not a woman’s fault, if her husband got involved with all that.”
“Involved with what?” Ian said. “The Nazi Party?”
The sisters both squirmed. No one had said that word yet. He could feel Tony giving him a quelling look.
“No one in our family were party members,” Helga said quickly. “We didn’t know anyone like that.”
“Of course not,” Tony said with a smile of melting sincerity.
“Of course not,” Ian echoed, stretching a hand toward Klara Gruber’s young son. He gurgled, reaching out, and Ian felt the baby fingers curl warmly round his thumb. “He’s a nice little chap, your boy. Frau Becker killed one not much older than him. Bullet to the back of the head. He was probably a nice little chap too.”
The two women stared, no longer quite so rosy. Helga put a hand to her mouth. Klara pulled her child back, and Ian saw the flash in her eyes he’d seen many times before—a kind of sullen, stubborn anger. Why did you make me know that? her eyes asked. I didn’t want to know that.
He smiled, tipping his hat. “Thank you again, ladies.”
“YOU CAN BE a real bastard sometimes,” Tony said conversationally.
Ian shrugged. “Their eyes are a little more open now.”
They were walking back to the hotel where they’d taken rooms for the night. Ian would have headed for Salzburg at once, but Tony wanted to question Frau Liebl in the morning. Ian thought Adolf Eichmann’s deserted wife would be far warier than a couple of former maidservants about talking to strange men, but Tony was right; they couldn’t leave it unexplored. “I’ll buy supper,” he said, since Tony still looked disapproving.
“No, I’ve got to take Helga Ziegler out tonight, show her a good time. And she’s in a sulk thanks to you, so it’s going to take all my very considerable charm.”
“Why take her out?”
“Spend weeks buttering up a girl only to drop her as soon as you have the information you need, and girls tend to feel used.”
“That’s because she was used, Tony. She was also paid.”
“Still, no one likes to be fobbed off the minute they’re not useful. And she’s not a bad sort. Her sister isn’t either.” Pause. “They aren’t wrong, you know. Things were complicated during the war. Survival in occupied territories is never as black and white as you might think.”
“Did they give aid to the resistance? Shelter refugees? Pass information to the Allies? Do anything to combat what was happening around them?” Ian paused. “If the answer is no, then as far as I’m concerned they have a measure of guilt. I’ll be damned if I pretend otherwise.”
“We don’t know what they might have done to help. We can’t assume.”
“From the pattern of their squirming, we can assume quite a bit.”
Tony snapped a mocking salute. “How pretty that worldview of yours must look, no shades of gray mucking anything up.”
“You lost whole branches of your family, in large part because so many people—people like the Ziegler sisters—were willing to bury their heads in the sand,” Ian shot back. “I find it hard to see shades of gray in that.”
“Don’t be such a hanging judge. We’re standing in the ashes of a war like no other—if we don’t try harder to see the shades of gray involved, we’ll find ourselves in the thick of a new one.”
“Call me a hanging judge if you like. I witnessed the hangings after Nuremberg and slept easy that night.”
“You haven’t slept too well since then, have you?” Tony parried.
“No, but it’s got nothing to do with seeing right and wrong as matters of black and white,” Ian said, getting off the last shot as they parted ways. He watched over his shoulder as Tony shook his head and strolled off, hands in pockets. They had their differences in opinion, Ian and his partner, but so far it hadn’t prevented them working together. He wondered if it ever would.
Ian didn’t go back to the hotel. He meandered until he stood across the street from 8 Fischerndorf. Five years ago, might he have seen die Jägerin standing on the doorstep? With an envelope in her hand, perhaps, waiting for the maid down the street to pass by?
I may not have your name, Ian thought to that long-gone figure, but I have your mother’s address in Salzburg. And if you sent your mother a letter before leaving Austria, surely you told her where you were going. He’d caught more than one war criminal that way over the past few years—most found it difficult to cut ties with their families.
There was a little boy in the house’s front yard, playing with pebbles. One of Adolf Eichmann’s sons, perhaps ten years old. Seb had been a few years older when he went off to Harrow, skinny and nervous. It had fallen to Ian to take Seb and his trunk to the station; their father needed the world to know My sons go to Harrow, chips off the old block! but details like train schedules didn’t interest him. “School is hell, but it’s manageable,” Ian had told Seb frankly. “Punch anyone who gives you guff, just like I showed you. And if the bigger boys have a go, I’ll make a special trip just to drag them out behind the cricket pitch and give them a pasting.”
“You can’t beat up everybody who comes at me,” Seb said forlornly.
“Yes, I can. Promise you’ll write?” And Seb did write. Long screeds about bird-watching and eventually a passion for Pushkin chased Ian to Spain as he tramped after the International Brigade, scolding him to be more careful when an air raid near Málaga took the hearing from Ian’s left ear for a week. Seb’s letters had followed him to Paris afterward when he was writing articles about the coming conference in Munich, and a year later there had been the fortnight they spent together after their father died in a road accident. Sixteen-year-old Seb had got drunk for the first time, and Ian had to pour him into bed … then came the day not six months later when Seb turned up on Ian’s doorstep in London, where he was writing about German U-boats sinking a British destroyer near Orkney, and said that he’d run away from school and enlisted.
“You idiot,” Ian had shouted.
“Just because you can’t fight doesn’t mean I can’t,” Seb flared. Ian’s hearing on the left side had mostly come back after Málaga, but not quite up to enlistment standards. Seb saw the look on Ian’s face and muttered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” The only quarrel that had ever erupted between them, over before it began.
“You’re still an idiot for enlisting,” Ian had retorted. “All your bird-watching left you bird-witted.”
He wondered now if his little brother had looked for birds in the sky that May morning when he was captured, a few months later. If he’d wished for wings when his battalion was forced, outgunned and ill-equipped, to surrender on the Doullens–Arras road. Realizing, as he became a prisoner, that his war was over almost before it had begun—that he would sit out the rest of the fight in a cage, like any captive bird.
But you still fought, Ian thought. Sebastian Vincent Graham had escaped his stalag, had tried to escape occupied Poland, and he’d died doing it—died at die Jägerin’s hands. And you made her pay.
Seb had been the one to give her the scar on her neck.
So Nina had said, anyway, in her almost incomprehensible combination of broken English and hand gestures. Ian wasn’t sure how she and Seb had met, how they’d stumbled across the huntress’s ocher-walled house at Lake Rusalka—Nina couldn’t explain it clearly—but there had been a struggle; there had been shots; there had been a blade. Seb had put up a heroic fight so Nina could get away.
If she told me the truth, Ian thought as he turned away from the Eichmann house.
“Let’s have that talk now, Nina,” he said aloud to the twilight.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_c2fde8ea-1a80-5606-a001-cd30eab9164c)
NINA (#ulink_c2fde8ea-1a80-5606-a001-cd30eab9164c)
June 1941
Irkutsk, Siberia
When war came to the Soviet Union, Nina was putting a Polikarpov U-2 through its paces, riding a cloud-scented breeze high over Irkutsk. Not that a U-2 had many paces—a dual-cockpit biplane open to the sky, crafted of linen over wood, cruising along at a pace so sedate that newer, faster planes would have stalled trying to match speed. But the old bird was maneuverable; she could turn on a razor edge without cutting herself. Nina had been happy to take her up for a solo spin to check for the mechanics if the controls needed adjustment.
It had been in a U-2 that Nina took her first flight shortly after joining the air club. That liquid excitement when the instructor allowed her to take the stick and make her first gentle, banking turn; the plane’s answering wobble as though aware of the uncertain new hands that guided it … She was four years past that first awkward turn now, an impressive number of flying hours under her belt, and she sent the U-2 looping and rolling among the clouds. The sky was Nina’s lake. She’d felt that on her first flight as she dove into the air like a green-haired rusalka diving into a lake. Diving not down but up, with a feeling of I am home. She had cried on that first flight, tears fogging her flight goggles.
It hadn’t been easy, getting in the air. “It’s going to take more than that, girl,” the air club’s director had sniffed when Nina pushed her application and birth record across his desk. “You’ll need a medical certificate, education certificate, references from the Komsomol, and only then can you even submit to the credentials committee for consideration. Do you know anyone in Irkutsk?”
