Kate Quinn - The Huntress

“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.

“Nothing,” Ian answered. Aside from pulling the ground out from under Tony, it might be good to see Nina. They did have matters to discuss that had nothing to do with the case, after all. “Just handle her carefully when she arrives,” he added, that part nothing but truthful. “She had a bad war.”

“I’ll be gentle as a lamb.”

FOUR DAYS PASSED,and a flood of refugee testimony came in that needed categorizing. Ian forgot all about their coming visitor, until an unholy screeching sounded in the corridor.

Tony looked up from the statement he was translating from Yiddish. “Our landlady getting her feathers ruffled again?” he said as Ian went to the office door.

His view down the corridor was blocked by Frau Hummel’s impressive bulk in her flowered housedress, as she pointed to some muddy footprints on her floor. Ian got a bare impression of a considerably smaller woman beyond his landlady, and then Frau Hummel seized the mud-shod newcomer by the arm. Her bellows turned to shrieks as the smaller woman yanked a straight razor out of her boot and whipped it up in unmistakable warning. The newcomer’s face was obscured by a tangle of bright blond hair; all Ian could really take in was the razor held in an appallingly determined fist.

“Ladies, please!” Tony tumbled into the hall.

“Kraut suka said she’d call police on me—” The newcomer was snarling.