“Why do I put up with you?” Ian wondered. “Feckless cretinous Yank …”
“Joyless Limey bastard,” Tony shot back, rummaging in the file cabinet. Ian hid a grin, knowing perfectly well why he put up with Tony. Ranging across three fronts of the war with a typewriter and notepad, Ian had met a thousand Tonys: achingly young men in rumpled uniforms, heading off into the mouth of the guns. American boys jammed on troopships and green with seasickness, English boys flying off in Hurricanes with a one in four chance of making it back … after a while Ian couldn’t bear to look at any of them too closely, knowing better than they did what their chances were of getting out alive. It had been just after the war ended that he met Tony, slouching along as an interpreter in the entourage of an American general who clearly wanted him court-martialed and shot for insubordination and slovenliness. Ian sympathized with the feeling now that Sergeant A. Rodomovsky worked for him and not the United States Army, but Tony was the first young soldier Ian had been able to befriend. He was brash, a practical joker, and a complete nuisance, but when Ian shook his hand for the first time, he’d been able to think, This one won’t die.
Unless I kill him, Ian thought now, next time he gets on my nerves. A distinct possibility.
He finished the report for Bauer and rose, stretching. “Get your earplugs,” he advised, reaching for his violin case.
“You’re aware you don’t have a future as a concert violinist?” Tony leafed through the stack of mail that had accumulated in their absence.
“I play poorly yet with great lack of feeling.” Ian brought the violin to his chin, starting a movement of Brahms. Playing helped him think, kept his hands busy as his brain sorted through the questions that rose with every new chase. Who are you, what did you do, and where would you go to get away from it? He was drawing out the last note as Tony let out a whistle.
“Boss,” he called over his shoulder, “I’ve got news.”
Ian lowered his bow. “New lead?”
“Yes.” Tony’s eyes sparked triumph. “Die Jägerin.”
A trapdoor opened in Ian’s stomach, a long drop over the bottomless pit of rage. He put the violin back in its case, slow controlled movements. “I didn’t give you that file.”
“It’s the one at the back of the drawer you look at when you think I’m not paying attention,” Tony said. “Believe me, I’ve read it.”
“Then you know it’s a cold trail. We know she was in Poznań as late as November ’44, but that’s all.” Ian felt excitement starting to war with caution. “So what did you find?”
Tony grinned. “A witness who saw her later than November ’44. After the war, in fact.”
“What?” Ian had been pulling out his file on the woman who was his personal obsession; he nearly dropped it. “Who? Someone from the Poznań region, or Frank’s staff?” It had been during the first Nuremberg trial that Ian caught die Jägerin’s scent, hearing a witness testify against Hans Frank—the governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, whom Ian would later (as one of the few journalists admitted to the execution room) watch swing from a rope for war crimes. In the middle of the information about the Jews Frank was shipping east, the clerk had testified about a certain visit to Poznań. One of the high-ranking SS officers had thrown a party for Frank out by Lake Rusalka, at a big ocher-colored house …
Ian, at that point, had already had a very good reason to be searching for the woman who had lived in that house. And the clerk on the witness stand had been a guest at that party, where the SS officer’s young mistress had played hostess.
“Who did you find?” Ian rapped out at Tony, mouth dry with sudden hope. “Someone who remembers her? A name, a bloody photograph—” It was the most frustrating dead end of this file: the clerk at Nuremberg had met the woman only once, and he’d been drunk through most of the party. He didn’t remember her name, and all he could describe was a young woman, dark haired, blue eyed. Difficult to track a woman without knowing anything more than her nickname and her coloring. “What did you find?”
“Stop cutting me off, dammit, and I’ll tell you.” Tony tapped the file. “Die Jägerin’s lover fled to Altaussee in ’45. No sign he took his mistress with him from Poznań—but now, it’s looking like he did. Because I’ve located a girl in Altaussee whose sister worked a few doors down from the same house where our huntress’s lover had holed up with the Eichmanns and the rest of that crowd in May ’45. I haven’t met the sister yet, but she apparently remembers a woman who looked like die Jägerin.”
“That’s all?” Ian’s burst of hope ebbed as he recalled the pretty little spa town on a blue-green lake below the Alps, a bolt-hole for any number of high-ranking Nazis as the war ended. By May ’45 it had been crawling with Americans making arrests. Some fugitives submitted to handcuffs, some managed to escape. Die Jägerin’s SS officer had died in a hail of bullets rather than be taken—and there had been no sign of his mistress. “I’ve already combed Altaussee looking for leads. Once I knew her lover had died there, I went looking—if she’d been there too, I would have found her trail.”
“Look, you probably came on like some Hound of Hell from the Spanish Inquisition, and everyone clammed up in terror. Subtlety is not your strong suit. You come on like a wrecking ball that went to Eton.”
“Harrow.”
“Same thing.” Tony fished for his cigarettes. “I’ve been doing some lighter digging. All that driving around Austria we did last December, looking for the Belsen guard who turned out to have gone to Argentina? I took weekends, went to Altaussee, asked questions. I’m good at that.”
He was. Tony could talk to anyone, usually in their native language. It was what made him good at this job, which so often hinged on information eased lightly out of the suspicious and the wary. “Why did you put in all this effort on your own time?” Ian asked. “A cold case—”
“Because it’s the case you want. She’s your white whale. All these bastards”—Tony waved a hand at the filing cabinets crammed with documentation on war criminals—“you want to nab them all, but the one you really want is her.”
He wasn’t wrong. Ian felt his fingers tighten on the edge of the desk. “White whale,” he managed to say, wryly. “Don’t tell me you’ve read Melville?”
“Of course not. Nobody’s read Moby-Dick; it just gets assigned by overzealous teachers. I went to a recruiter’s office the day after Pearl Harbor; that’s how I got out of reading Moby-Dick.” Tony shook out a cigarette, black eyes unblinking. “What I want to know is, why die Jägerin?”
“You’ve read her file,” Ian parried.
“Oh, she’s a nasty piece of work, I’m not arguing that. That business about the six refugees she killed after feeding them a meal—”
“Children,” Ian said quietly. “Six Polish children, somewhere between the ages of four and nine.”
Tony stopped in the act of lighting his cigarette, visibly sickened. “Your clipping just said refugees.”
“My editor considered the detail too gruesome to include in the article. But they were children, Tony.” That had been one of the harder articles Ian had ever forced himself to write. “The clerk at Frank’s trial said that, at the party where he met her, someone told the story about how she’d dispatched six children who had probably escaped being shipped east. An amusing little anecdote over hors d’oeuvres. They toasted her with champagne, calling her the huntress.”
“Goddamn,” Tony said, very softly.
Ian nodded, thinking not only of the six unknown children who had been her victims, but of two others. A fragile young woman in a hospital bed, all starved eyes and grief. A boy just seventeen years old, saying eagerly I told them I was twenty-one, I ship out next week! The woman and the boy, one gone now, the other dead. You did that, Ian thought to the nameless huntress who filled up his sleepless nights. You did that, you Nazi bitch.
Tony didn’t know about them, the girl and the young soldier. Even now, years later, Ian found it difficult. He started marshaling the words, but Tony was already scribbling an address, moving from discussion to action. For now, Ian let it go, fingers easing their death grip on the desk’s edge.
“That’s where the girl in Altaussee lives, the one whose sister might have seen die Jägerin,” Tony was saying. “I say it’s worth going to talk in person.”
Ian nodded. Any lead was worth running down. “When did you get her name?”
“A week ago.”
“Bloody hell, a week?”
“We had the Cologne chase to wrap up. Besides, I was waiting for one more confirmation. I wanted to give you more good news, and now I can.” Tony tapped the letter from their mail stack, scattering ash from his cigarette. “It arrived while we were in Cologne.”
Ian scanned the letter, not recognizing the black scrawl. “Who’s this woman and why is she coming to Vienna …” He got to the signature at the bottom, and the world stopped in its tracks.
“Our one witness who actually met die Jägerin face-to-face and lived,” Tony said. “The Polish woman—I pulled her statement and details from the file.”
“She emigrated to England, why did you—”
“The telephone number was noted. I left a message. Now she’s coming to Vienna.”
“You really shouldn’t have contacted Nina,” Ian said quietly.
“Why not? Besides this potential Altaussee lead, she’s the only eyewitness we’ve got. Where’d you find her, anyway?”
“In Poznań after the German retreat in ’45. She was in hospital when she gave me her statement, with all the details she could remember.” Vividly Ian recalled the frail girl in the ward cot, limbs showing sticklike from a smock borrowed from the Polish Red Cross. “You shouldn’t have dragged her halfway across Europe.”
“It was her idea. I only wanted to talk by telephone, see if I could get any more detail about our mark. But if she’s willing to come here, let’s make use of her.”
“She also happens to be—”
“What?”
Ian paused. His surprise and disquiet were fading, replaced by an unexpected flash of devilry. He so rarely got to see his partner nonplussed. You spring a surprise like this on me, Ian thought, you deserve to have one sprung on you. Ian wouldn’t have chosen to yank the broken flower that was Nina Markova halfway across the continent, but she was already on the way, and there was no denying her presence would be useful for any number of reasons … including turning the tables on Tony, which Ian wasn’t too proud to admit he enjoyed doing. Especially when his partner started messing about with cases behind Ian’s back. Especially this case.
“She’s what?” Tony asked.
