Kate Quinn - The Huntress

“You didn’t actually see her mother? Was there a name on the envelope, or—”

“No name. I was told to put it under the door, not knock.” A hesitation. “She was being very careful, I suppose. But everyone was, Herr Graham.”

Helga chimed in, defensive. “You don’t know what it was like here in ’45. Everyone looking for visas, papers, food. Everyone kept their business to themselves.”

Because none of you wanted to know anything , Ian thought. That kind of thinking had made it quite easy for die Jägerin to cover her tracks.

Without hope, he asked, “I don’t suppose you remember the address.” Who would remember a strange address visited once five years ago?

“Number twelve, the Lindenplatz,” Klara Gruber said.

Ian stared, could feel Tony staring. “How …?”

She gave the first real smile of the interview. “When I came back into the square in front of the house, a young man on a bicycle knocked me down. He apologized and introduced himself—his name was Wolfgang Gruber. Four months later he took me back to that same spot when he proposed. That’s how I remember the address.”

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 BEa 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.