The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  “I gave up my name for Ruth, so no one could take her from me. I was so terrified she’d be taken away . . .” Anneliese wiped her eyes. “I didn’t want my old name, anyway. My father’s name felt tainted. Weber was easier for Americans to pronounce. The name was something I never lied about.”

  “You did—”

  “No.” It wasn’t Anneliese who spoke this time; it was Jordan’s father. “She told me the day we met that her name was different now, that she had wanted something easier for Americans to say. Something to give her a fresh start.”

  Jordan’s heart knocked. “Dad—”

  “Don’t be angry with her,” Anneliese interrupted, touching his cheek again. “She was only trying to protect her father.”

  I am still trying to protect him. Jordan clutched after that instinctive shiver of fear that had touched her at the beginning of these accusations, meeting Anneliese’s eyes, but she couldn’t find it, not even a trace. Anneliese didn’t look dangerous. She looked like a broken doll.

  “I’m sorry.” Her eyes were swimming. “I’m so sorry. I should have told you.”

  Jordan’s lips parted, but she couldn’t speak.

  “You should talk.” Anneliese looked from her husband to Jordan. “If you don’t wish me to—” Her voice broke. “Du meine Güte, I’m sorry—”

  She rushed out of the room, shoulders hunched as though expecting a blow. The first sob came just before the sound of the bedroom door closing.

  Jordan looked at her father numbly. He stood with his hands hanging at his sides, wearing the good shirt he’d donned for Thanksgiving dinner. The table’s bright silver and holiday pumpkins looked like festive flags decorating a shipwreck. Jordan dragged a breath into her frozen lungs and realized she was smelling smoke from the kitchen. Their Thanksgiving dinner was burning.

  Her father was staring at her. She took a step forward, eyes blurring. Not knowing what to say. Not knowing what to think, except that this had all gone horribly wrong. “Dad . . .”

  Dad, I still don’t know if I believe her or not. Dad, I was just trying to protect you . . .

  But she couldn’t get past that first word. Her throat stopped, choked up with tears and the smell of burned turkey and ruined Thanksgiving. Feebly, she gestured to the two photographs. “Pictures don’t lie,” she forced out. “I believed what I saw.”

  But the thought reverberated through her head like a tolling bell now:

  You saw wrong.

  Chapter 17

  Ian

  April 1950

  Salzburg

  It should have been a night to sleep happy and triumphant, a night to dream of die Jägerin in handcuffs, but the nightmare didn’t care. Vaulted out of sleep by the familiar dream, Ian tried to be amused at the utter predictability of night terrors but he was shaking too much. “Why the parachute?” he asked aloud of his dark hotel room, needing to hear a voice even if only his own. “Why the bloody parachute?”

  Fruitless question. A nightmare was a needle plunging through the net of human memory; it slipped past one strand and caught up another on its point, stitching up dark dreams out of the unlikeliest recollections. The parachute wasn’t the worst thing he’d seen in his career by any means, so why dream of it? Why not Spain, that day in Teruel when he’d carried his notepad up shell-pocked stairs into the Republican-attacked Civil Governor’s building, listening to the terrible single shots of men killing themselves? Why not that schoolhouse in Naples after the German retreat, the coffins heaped with flowers that didn’t cover the dirty bare feet of the children in them? Why not dream about Omaha Beach, for God’s sake? “That would be the obvious nightmare to have,” Ian muttered, leaning on the open window to drag in a shaky breath of geranium-scented air. Clinging to wet sand, watching blood swirl past through shallow waves, deafened by German fire but feeling the impact through his bones as the shells hit all around him . . . he’d seen the first gray in his dark hair within a week of Omaha Beach. Surely that should have been the worst dream in his nighttime arsenal.

  No. It was the parachute under the emerald-green trees, peacefully swaying, and the endless drop below.

  Stop. Ian gave the fear a brutal kick. There is no parachute, no fall. No bloody nightmare either, because you have no right to it. You were just a journalist. A goddamn writer, not a soldier. They carried guns; you carried pens. They fought, you didn’t. They bled and died, you wrote and lived. You haven’t earned the nightmares.

  He went back to bed, closed his eyes, pounded the pillow. Rolled on his back and stared at the ceiling. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, rising again to pull a shirt over chilly sweat-slicked skin, and went downstairs to the hotel desk. After a protracted wrangle with the sleepy night clerk, Ian was finally put through to the only other man he could count on to be awake at this hour. “Bauer, what do you know about extradition law in America?”

  “Guten Morgen to you too,” Fritz Bauer rasped. “Don’t tell me you’re following a chase overseas.”

  Ian turned his back on the night clerk. “Perhaps.” The staggering complications of that had only begun to register this evening, as he sat over the remains of a scrounged supper listening to Nina and Tony wrangle about how best to track die Jägerin now that they had a name, a photograph, and a destination. “What would we be in for?” He only knew in the most general terms; Bauer could be counted on for specifics.

  “It would be hell,” his friend said succinctly. Ian could imagine the flash of light off his glasses as he leaned back in his leather chair. “An ocean of paperwork, money, and time.”

  Which was, of course, why, Ian thought, the Refugee Documentation Center didn’t pursue cases overseas. As little jurisdiction as they had in Europe, they’d have even less across the Atlantic. For a ramshackle one-room operation, the cases that led overseas became dead ends, sinkholes for money and time. Who could afford that when there was always someone else to pursue here in Europe? Ian rubbed his eyes, willing that voice of cold logic to go away, but it proceeded remorselessly. To go to such marathon lengths for one target is pure, self-indulgent obsession. Even if she did kill your brother, and nearly kill your wife.

  Bauer’s gruff voice again. “American extradition details—that will take digging. I have a friend or two over there; let me put in a few calls once their offices are open.”

  “Thank you.” Ian rang off, but the cold voice of logic was still talking.

  There are criminals in Germany whom you have a much better chance of catching than Lorelei Vogt in America. Shove them all aside for a long shot at her—a long shot that will probably eat up everything you have, including your center—then this impartial search for justice you’re so proud of turns into ordinary, commonplace vengeance.

  And if there was anything Ian Graham didn’t believe in, it was vengeance.

  What now? he thought, but the night had no answers. Only, eventually, more dreams.

  “IS MORE TO FIND here in Europe before going to Boston,” Nina was saying. She shared Ian’s seat in the train compartment, sitting with her back to the window and her disreputable boots propped in his lap. He pushed them off periodically, but she just plopped them back—his wife apparently had no more sense of individual space than individual property. “School friends from Heidelberg days,” Nina went on, flipping through their increasingly frayed file. “And her lover, the SS mudak, what about him? He’s dead, but what about his wife? She might be willing to talk about her husband’s whore—”

  “Von Altenbach’s wife is dead too,” Tony answered. “She ran with high Reich society, childhood friends with Magda Goebbels back when she was Magda Ritschel. That was why von Altenbach couldn’t divorce her for our girl Lorelei. He took her to Poznań and left the Frau in Berlin, and the Frau committed suicide at the war’s end. One of the true believers who couldn’t face the world without their Führer.”

  “Lorelei’s friends in Germany.” Ian focused through the gray blur of sleep deprivation, trying to match his companions’ e
nergy. “She might write to her friends as well as her mother; wouldn’t that be considerate of her?” He answered their smiles with one of his own, but it was an effort. The difficulties ahead were piling up in his mind like storm clouds.

  No storms in the sky above as they disembarked the train in Vienna, though. “Tvoyu mat,” Nina breathed, stopping at the top of the train station steps. “I want to be up there—” She pointed at the huge sailing clouds overhead. “Up high!”

  “I can’t get you that high, but I can get you sixty-five meters up.” Tony stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Ever ridden the Prater wheel, Nina?”

  “What is it, this Prater?”

  Ian smiled too. “Our famous Viennese amusement park, you miniature Soviet housebreaker.”

  “We had a lucky break in the case yesterday,” Tony urged. “Let’s celebrate. We can scrounge enough change between us for a trip to the Prater.”

  Ian looked down at Nina, pushing the looming extradition problem aside. “We never did have a honeymoon, you and I. Shall I show you a few Viennese sights before we divorce?”

  They took a cab to the amusement park in the Leopoldstadt where the great Ferris wheel loomed and children were already shrieking with excitement, pursued by fond, exasperated mothers up and down the rows of food vendors and shooting galleries. Nina pushed toward the line for the wheel, Tony betting her she’d lose her nerve at the top. She laughed so hard she staggered into Ian’s shoulder. “I don’t lose nerve,” she said, as Ian righted her with a hand at the elbow. “Not at sixty-five meters.”

  “What does make you lose your nerve?” Ian asked, wondering again just what it was she’d been assigned to do at the Soviet front during the war. But Nina had come to the front of the line for the wheel, not hearing him, and Ian stepped to one side. “You two go. I’m no good with heights.”

  “You’re coming along, luchik,” Nina said, and somehow she and Tony had an arm each and were yanking Ian into the gondola. As it swayed under his feet, his vision swayed with it and he turned back, but the attendant was already slamming the door shut. They were the last to load, getting the gondola all to themselves—and before Ian could leap out, the wheel was lifting them skyward.

  His mouth was suddenly dry as paper, and the world sounded as though it had retreated underwater. Don’t be a coward, Graham. He hadn’t always been petrified of high places, after all. But the day he acquired the nightmare about a parachute had been the day that changed. Do not be a coward.

  The gondolas of the Prater were famous: compact cars with a center bench and windows all around to see the panoramic scope of Vienna’s steep roofs and church domes, now shrinking to the size of dolls. Nina was wandering along the line of windows, as Tony pointed out landmarks. Bile rose in Ian’s throat and he swallowed as the car rose higher. If they’d been climbing up the stairway of a tall cathedral or walking the parapet of a rooftop, he’d have been all right—put a solid rail or a steady floor between him and the void, and he was fine. But swaying along through the air in this flimsy shell . . .

  Better than an airplane, he told himself, hands linking so tight he saw the knuckles whiten. To think you once queued up for the privilege of jumping out of a bomber over Germany. Now he’d rather be flayed alive.

  “. . . open these windows?” Nina was saying. “Is boring, sailing up and up like a sedate old kite.”

  “What are you going to do, climb on the roof?” Tony laughed, clearly not worried as she dropped the top sill of the observation window. Nina hauled herself up, hanging her head and shoulders out into the sky. She was just trying to get a better view, Ian knew that, but his nerves didn’t. He imagined his wife falling from the gondola like a bird shot down in flight, glass shattering around her, and he lunged across the swaying floor. Seizing her around the waist, he wrenched her down so fast she almost flew across the gondola. She fell against the bench with a crash and came instantly to her feet, blue eyes flaring. Ian turned his back, shoving the window up with a violence that cracked the pane. A silver line ran in a sudden ping across the glass and he couldn’t help flinching, seeing the crack and then the tilted view of Vienna beyond it. They were at the wheel’s apex, sixty-five meters up, five times as high as the day he’d—

  Ian turned away and threw up in the corner.

  When he straightened, Nina and Tony were both staring at him. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his mouth, realizing with a flash of shame that his hands were shaking. His voice wasn’t, though. “Parachute jump, ’45,” he said, as the gondola began its descent. “Ever since then, you might say I’ve had a little trouble with heights. So next time I tell you to leave me on the ground, leave me on the goddamned ground.”

  Tony cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

  “I know,” Ian cut him off, wishing this ride was over, wishing they’d stop looking at him. Wishing he weren’t a coward.

  “I say go again,” Nina said.

  “What?”

  “Is what I would do. Ride this wheel around a hundred more times. All day. All night. Till I wasn’t afraid.”

  “No,” Ian said. The thought of going round even one more time made him want to vomit all over again.

  “You go down your list of fears.” Her eyes had a distant compassion, as if she knew what he was thinking. “Stamp them out, one after other, till there’s only one. Is good to have one fear, luchik, but just one. I think the fear you want to keep is the fear you never find die Jägerin, yes? So get rid of this one.”

  Ian stared at his wife. She was retying the scarf around her neck, a homemade white thing embroidered in blue stars. She smiled.

  “Come,” she challenged, patting the bench. “I ride with you, long as it takes. Let’s kill a fear today.”

  “Get between me and the door when we finally stop,” Ian said, “and I will pitch you through that bloody window.”

  He didn’t know how long that ghastly ride lasted, but it passed in utter silence.

  BY THE TIME they reached the Refugee Documentation Center it was midafternoon, the shakes were gone from Ian’s hands, and the humiliation at his loss of control was subsiding. “Right,” he said as they came into the stale-smelling office. “I have a call to make. Nina, if you’d be good enough to sort post; Tony, catalog and file anything new. We have a dozen other files open besides Lorelei Vogt’s, after all.” The office filled with the crackle of paper and the hiss of the kettle, and Ian picked up the telephone. “What do you have, Bauer?” Let it be good news.

  “The United States naturally has no jurisdiction over crimes committed overseas, so if you found your huntress—proved who she was and what she’d done—she’d have to be extradited for trial.” Ian heard the rustle of paper on Bauer’s end. “To Austria, possibly, as her birth nation, or to Poland as that’s where her crimes were largely committed.”

  Ian could well imagine a courtroom of vengeful Poles eager to levy justice against the woman who had hunted their citizens on the banks of Lake Rusalka. “What else?”

  “Before you could even think of getting her a trial in Europe, she’d probably have to be tried in the United States in a civil court, and you’d need clear proof of her crimes.”

  “We have it. Witnesses.” Nina, eyewitness to Sebastian’s murder, and the clerk who had provided the statement at Nuremberg about die Jägerin’s execution of the Jewish children.

  “It would still be heavy lifting,” Bauer warned, and he launched into a flurry of legal technicalities that lost Ian on the third turn. So many things this team needed, he thought—photographers, drivers, pathologists—but surely what they could have used most of all was more legal experts. Ian heard his friend sigh on the other end, aware he’d lost his audience. “The United States hasn’t extradited a single Nazi for war crimes,” Bauer finished bluntly. “Not one. Are they even aware they have any? Or perhaps the question is, do they care?”

  The leaden feeling returned to Ian’s stomach as he rang off. Tony’s voice was q
uiet. “What’s the bad news?”

  “I am pondering the realities of American extradition law,” Ian replied. Die Jägerin. Learning her real name hadn’t brought her down to human size, after all. She remained the huntress, remote and uncatchable. Ian forced the words out. “It’s time we faced facts. We aren’t going to Boston.”

  Two sets of eyes regarded him, dismayed. Russian blue and Polish-American black.

  “It’s over.” Ian looked back and forth between them. “She got away.”

  “No, she got to Boston,” Tony said. “Who knows where from there?”

  “It doesn’t matter. She might as well have gone to the moon.” Ian gestured at the four walls of the center, biting his words off. “We are three people in a one-room office with two desks and four filing cabinets. Even if we found her in America, we could not possibly get her extradited for trial. We lack the man power, the money, the influence, and the resources to mount an overseas search. It is impossible. I was hoping otherwise, but Bauer convinced me. We’re finished.”

  “Bauer hasn’t convinced me,” Tony said. “We’re not finished until we fail, and we haven’t failed yet.”

  “We will, if we pursue this.”

  “I’ll admit, it’s a long shot. But we might pull it off if—”

  “This is not a debate.” Ian cut him off in a wintry voice. “I started this documentation center, Tony. I say how and where we choose our targets.”

  “And we both know you wouldn’t get half your arrests if not for me. So let’s not pretend my mingy salary makes you my boss.” Tony folded his arms across his chest, and Ian realized he was angry too. “We can catch Lorelei Vogt.”

  “Drop your everlasting Yank optimism!” Ian’s temper flared to match Tony’s, sweeping disappointment away. Anger hurt, but at least it was a satisfying pain. “This tin-pot office stapled together with sweat and ink does not have the resources to—”