by Kate Quinn
“Get away from there—” Ian cut himself off, hearing the sound of a door opening on the other side of the high garden wall.
“—discuss your business outside, young man?” A woman’s voice, middle-aged, accented with the lazy Austrian vowels. It had to be Frau Vogt. “It’s such a lovely day.”
Tony: “I would be delighted, gnädige Frau.”
Ian hesitated, wanting to listen here under the wall, but someone might pass by and notice. He turned, ready to haul Nina back into the square, and that was when he saw that the window was open, and his wife’s disreputable boots were disappearing with eel-like silence into the house.
He made a grab, but all he got was a fistful of lace curtain. Get out of there, he mouthed soundlessly, keeping his attention on the flow of niceties Tony was issuing on the other side of the wall. Inside the dark hallway Nina was only a shadow—all Ian could see was the gleam of her teeth as she crooked a finger, beckoning. Then she padded noiselessly down Frau Vogt’s hall carpet and disappeared round a corner. Her smile seemed to hang disembodied in the air like that of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat.
I’m going to kill my wife, Ian thought. I’m going to kill her before I even get round to divorcing her. He tucked the Baedeker away, wondering if Austria, Together with Budapest, Prague, Karlsbad, and Marienbad listed “house-breaking” on its page of recommended local activities. Then he took one final look for watchers, saw none, and shinned up through the window.
Nina was in the parlor, flicking through Frau Vogt’s mail. “This is illegal entry,” Ian snapped in a whisper.
“Antochka confirmed she lives alone. He has her busy out there. Let’s see what we find.”
This is not what we do, Ian wanted to say. This is not what I do. He should have been hauling Nina back out the window they’d unlawfully entered, yet that same reckless thrill was running along his nerves the way it had earlier. The urge to throw it all on the line. Don’t be reckless, he’d already warned himself today, but the two of them were already here, inside the house . . . “Five minutes,” he warned Nina, cursing himself. “Disturb nothing. I’ll keep watch on the garden. Bloody hell, you’re a bad influence—”
“No pictures of her. Not grown, anyway.” Nina indicated the mantel, where a stiff wedding portrait had pride of place—Frau Vogt and her husband in the fashions of a generation past. Several smaller photographs of a little girl, all round cheeks and curly dark hair. Ian searched the childhood face of his brother’s murderess, if it was she, but from the corner of his eye he saw movement at the back door. “. . . some coffee?” Frau Vogt said as the hinges creaked. Ian pulled Nina back behind the door, both of them freezing until the footfalls had retreated the other way, with more clattering of china. “And a slice of Linzer torte. I don’t know a young man yet to say no to a slice of cake!”
Clearly Tony was softening the widow up nicely. Ian let out a long breath, realizing he was bathed in sweat, realizing that he was also grinning. Nina grinned back, then ghosted past him out of the parlor toward the stairs. He followed, taking the stairs two at a time.
Care had been taken downstairs to keep up the appearance of gracious living, but upstairs Ian saw chipped paint, dust, faded squares on the walls where pictures had hung. If Frau Vogt was living in straitened circumstances, that boded well for Tony’s proposed bribe. Ian moved past Nina, who was examining the hall photographs, and went to the window overlooking the back garden. He could see a wedge of wicker table, a tray, Tony’s dark head nodding, Frau Vogt in three-quarter view: an apple-cheeked doll of a woman in her starched apron. Ian held his breath and eased the casement open a crack.
“. . . this business matter on my daughter’s behalf, Herr Krauss. How well did you know her?”
Krauss? Nina mouthed. Ian mouthed back, His favorite alias. Krauss sounded so solidly German, turning Tony from an Eastern European undesirable to a good clean-cut Aryan boy—a role embraced with savage irony by Ian’s Jewish partner.
“I confess I didn’t know your daughter well, gnädige Frau,” Tony confessed with earnest deprecation. “We met only a few times. Do you know where she’s settled now?”
“No.” A hint of sharpness from Frau Vogt. “She thought it best not to come back to Salzburg; it would bring gossip. There was such talk when the Americans came through making arrests and accusations.” Pause. Ian held his breath.
Frau Vogt went on. “I received a letter from her after the war, hand delivered. She wrote that it would be better for me if she stayed away.”
Ian wanted to shout, dance, punch the air in triumph. The Ziegler girl had been paid to deliver that letter by one Lorelei Vogt. We have a name. We have a name—
Tony: “Did your daughter tell you where she was going?”
“She said she didn’t want me to have to lie, if people asked questions. Naturally a mother misses her only child, but it was still most considerate of her. There has never been any talk about me, and for that I’m very grateful. I’m just a simple widow, living quietly. The war had nothing to do with me. My daughter made sure it stayed that way.”
Disappointing. Ian leaned one elbow up against the window frame, keeping well out of sight, listening to Tony tack a new course.
“You know, your daughter and I talked of books once, at one of her parties in Posen? I think she sensed a young soldier like me was a long way from home, so she tried to put me at ease. She spoke such beautiful English—”
“Yes, she was always clever!” Frau Vogt’s stiffness eased. “She studied literature at Heidelberg, her father insisted on an education for her . . .”
“Why isn’t he pushing?” Nina whispered. “Where’s the bribe?”
“She was getting defensive. He’s smoothing her down, letting her ramble.”
“This is carrot method? It takes too long.” Nina padded down the hall, disappearing into the first bedroom where Ian heard the sound of drawers sliding. Below, Tony was talking of university between bites of Frau Vogt’s cake.
“. . . my dream to continue my studies, but the war . . . It was right from the HJ to the army for me, and then Poland.” Tony hit just the right note of tacit awkwardness, his face anxious under the untidy hair he’d razor-parted and oiled back like a proper lad who’d grown up in the Hitler Youth. It wasn’t the first time he’d presented himself as a former soldier for the Reich. It took more than a German name and details about a regiment. It was all in the things one didn’t say, Ian thought. The veiled phrases that said You know it wasn’t my fault, don’t you? “You understand, of course,” Tony said, all schoolboy earnestness. “The war didn’t have anything to do with me either, not really. I just did my duty, I was very young.”
“Those were difficult times,” Frau Vogt said with the same tacit note in her voice. “People forget that now. Another piece of cake?”
“If you’ll join me in an aperitif. Just a dash of brandy for your coffee—” Tony produced the flask he always carried to lubricate such interviews.
“Oh, I shouldn’t . . .”
“Of course you should, Frau Vogt!” Tony scolded, and die Jägerin’s mother let him add a generous splash to her cup. He began admiring her china as she cut him a second slab, and he dug in with the kind of schoolboy enthusiasm that had made mothers all across Europe pinch his cheek fondly. Ian sensed Nina’s soundless snort at his shoulder.
“He lies better than a Muscovite fishmonger,” she whispered. “Help me look in her room now—”
“I may have broken into this house, but I will not ransack a stranger’s bedroom.”
“Just stand by while I do it,” Nina said, amused. “You’re a hypocrite, luchik.”
Ian slanted an eyebrow. “I will cling nevertheless to my shreds of the moral high ground.”
“Shreds are on the ground at your feet.”
“Noted.”
Frau Vogt was chattering freely below. Ian was willing to bet she hadn’t had such an appreciative audience in a long time. Loneliness was as effective a tong
ue loosener as brandy. “My daughter studied English literature, though I hoped she’d prefer Schiller and Heine as I did. It was Heine where I got her name, of course! Lorelei the water nymph. The maiden on the rock.”
“Your Lorelei was far from just a maiden on a rock to be rescued. What a wonderful shot she was—I remember a hunt at one party—”
“Yes, she was her father’s daughter. His father was a Freiherr in Bavaria, you know—my husband was the younger son, he didn’t inherit the family Wasserburg, but he used to hunt there as a young man. He taught Lorelei to shoot.”
“I thought she was Diana herself. I admit I was quite starry-eyed!”
Frau Vogt sighed. “She should have brought a nice young man like you home from Heidelberg. I was not always approving of the choices she made.” Another tacit silence, broken by a sniff. “Her Obergruppenführer was very dashing, but he was old enough to be her father, and not to mention, well . . .”
Married. Ian shared Frau Vogt’s wish that he hadn’t been, just as devoutly, because if die Jägerin had been Obergruppenführer von Altenbach’s wife rather than his mistress, she would have been much easier to trace. Paperwork flew like confetti at SS weddings; her name and photograph would have been filed in a hundred places.
Tony allowed a tactful silence to fall, not saying a word about the daughter who had become a married man’s mistress. He tipped a little more brandy into both coffee cups, murmuring instead, “Obergruppenführer von Altenbach was much admired. His work in Poland was exemplary, and his generosity unmatched. In fact, that’s what brings me here today, Frau Vogt.” Straightening his tie; the young man of business at last coming to the matter in hand. “Before his death, the Obergruppenführer laid certain provisions in place, looking to the future. Financial provisions for friends and loved ones. And no one, of course, was more important to him than your daughter.”
Ian’s fingers tightened on the curtain’s lace edge. Here it was . . .
“The Obergruppenführer set money aside for your daughter, gnädige Frau. So you see why I’m looking for her.”
Silence below. Ian craned his gaze as far as he could, but all he could see was Frau Vogt’s neat head, the sudden stillness of her shoulders. “Money,” she said at last, and the prickles were back in her voice. “After five years?”
“You know how slowly legalities move.” Tony sighed. “No one was even certain if Lorelei Vogt was alive, especially after the Obergruppenführer’s . . . unfortunate end, in Altaussee. So many people disappearing, so many opportunists. There was a real danger of fraud, with no way to identify your daughter even if she could be found. Which is why it took so long to find someone who knew her.” He gave a modest bow. “Naturally I am being compensated, but truly, it would make me most happy to know I could aid your daughter in claiming what is rightfully hers. She was once kind to a lonely young soldier when he was very far from home—if I can aid her to a life of comfort as the Obergruppenführer wished, it would be my pleasure.”
It wasn’t the first time Ian and Tony had used an inheritance as a lure. In the straitened aftermath of a war, everyone dreamed of unexpected money descending on their lives. The whisper of wealth from dead Nazis was especially potent because everyone had heard of the fortunes squirreled away by the powerful and the prescient high in the Reich. Never mind that I never found a single war criminal living in luxury behind gold-gated estates, Ian thought wryly. Everyone had still heard stories of secret Swiss accounts, priceless paintings down mine shafts, gold held in reserve for . . . someone.
Why not your daughter? Tony’s confiding tone implied. Why not you?
Damn, but you’re good at this, Ian thought with a flash of pride in his partner.
“I wouldn’t expect you to take my word,” Tony went on, slipping a card across the table. “The firm who hired me would be pleased to reassure you.”
“A quick telephone call . . .” Her voice was a blend of caution and appeasement. She wanted to trust this nice young man and everything he was telling her . . . But she wasn’t a stupid woman.
Tony smiled, sitting back. “I’m happy to wait.”
Frau Vogt rose, bustling inside. Ian prepared to dive behind the nearest door if she came up, but the telephone was downstairs; he heard the muffled sound of her voice as she picked up. Outside, Ian saw Tony add another slug from his flask to his hostess’s coffee, pour his own out in the flower bed, and replace it with undoctored coffee from the pot. Frau Vogt’s voice fluttered, sounding reassured. Ian smothered a laugh, imagining Fritz Bauer’s avuncular rasp on the other end—it wasn’t the first time he’d backed them up if a story needed verification.
The receiver clicked below, and she came back out to the garden. “Thank you, Herr Krauss. I don’t mean to imply you were trying to . . .”
“A lady’s trust must be earned,” Tony said with another boyish laugh. “I hope Herr Bauer was able to reassure you? There is also, of course, the matter of your compensation.”
She’d been reaching for her coffee cup; her hand paused. “Mine?”
“Of course. The funds in trust can’t be released to anyone but your daughter, but your time in helping us locate her would be valuable.” An envelope slid across the table, containing almost every shilling to Ian’s name. “Even the tiniest detail—one never knows what might be helpful. Is there anything you remember about where your daughter might have gone?”
Silence. Ian stood barely breathing, looking down at Frau Vogt’s braced shoulders. He realized Nina was standing beside him, not breathing either. Frau Vogt took a long swallow of brandied coffee, fingertips sitting beside the envelope, and without meaning to, Ian’s fingers linked through Nina’s and squeezed fiercely.
“I don’t know where Lorelei is,” the woman below said slowly. “But she has started to write letters.”
Nina squeezed back.
“Where do the letters come from?” Tony was all earnestness.
“And where are they now?” Nina muttered. “I find no letters here—”
“They’re all posted from America, over the last year or so.” Ian heard the distaste running through Frau Vogt’s voice. “Lorelei wanted to get far away from Germany, from Austria. The postmarks are all different, I don’t know the cities.” Tony patted her hand as she swallowed the last of her spiked coffee. “Lorelei’s last letter came just a month or so ago, from a place called Ames—she said she could bring me over. Not to Ames, to an antiques shop in Boston, wherever that is. McCall Antiques. Or maybe McBain Antiques. Mc-something. People like her and me can get papers there, identification, new names, and then they move on. But how do I move on? I’ve lived in Salzburg all my life; how am I supposed to go to America? All those Jews and Negroes—”
America. That kicked Ian in the stomach, a sickening blow. To feel he was getting close and find out there was still an ocean in the way . . . His hand clenched at his side, and he realized Nina had tugged free, fingers drumming against her leg.
“Boston!” Tony marveled, pouring more coffee, more brandy. “Where did your daughter go after Boston?”
“She said it would be better for me not to know.”
“Do you know what name Lorelei uses?”
“She said it would be better for me not to know that either.”
Grimly, Ian admired die Jägerin’s caution, even as he hated her for it. If all war criminals were so careful, the center would have collapsed in months.
“Even without knowing details, it must be a comfort to hear from her.” Tony slid the envelope of money forward. “A great comfort.”
“Not so much as you would think.” Frau Vogt’s voice was starting to blur around the edges. She clearly wasn’t used to brandy in the afternoon. “She never says much except that she’s safe, that she’s well, and that I should burn the letter when I’m done. A mother—a mother would like to know more. My only child, I miss my daughter—”
Ian felt a stab of pity for her, but let it die. I miss my brother too, but I don’t have
the comfort of knowing he’s safe and well. He wondered if Frau Vogt had any idea at all what her daughter had done.
“Did you burn all the letters?” Tony asked softly.
“Lorelei told me to. The letters, her old things, all the photographs of her as a grown woman.”
“And did you?”
A pause. “My daughter is very sweet, Herr Krauss. But she can be very forceful. I don’t . . . like to cross her.” Another pause. “Yes, I burned everything.”
“Liar.”
Nina paused, looking at Ian. He hadn’t realized he’d muttered it aloud.
“She’s lying.” He leaned down to whisper into Nina’s ear, brushing her hair out of the way. “No parent would destroy every photograph of their only child.”
“Mine would,” Nina whispered back. “But he tried to drown me when I was sixteen, so . . .”
Ian barely heard her, pacing down the hall now despite himself. A photograph would be invaluable—they wouldn’t be able to use it in any legal capacity, not if it was acquired through means like today’s, but just for private identification so they weren’t relying solely on Nina’s memory of what their target looked like . . . “There has to be a photograph here somewhere.”
“Isn’t. I scoured.” Nina was pacing too; they brushed past each other shoulder to shoulder and when he saw her look up, he did too.
On the hallway ceiling was a hatch. Very likely to an attic.
“Come on, luchik,” Nina breathed. “Boost me—” But he had already seized his wife around the waist and lifted her toward the ceiling. He heard her fumbling a latch, heard the hatch lift, and then Nina was wriggling up through his arms like a serpent, hoisting herself into the ceiling. You cannot claim even a shred of moral high ground here, Ian thought, and at the moment didn’t greatly care. He was not leaving this house empty-handed.
A quick check at the window. Frau Vogt had tucked the envelope of money away. “I don’t have anything else to tell you—”
“Two minutes,” Ian called low-voiced into the hatch. Tony was rising from his chair, dripping reassurances. “Hear me, Nina?”