A photograph, small and worn. Jordan brought it nearly to her nose. Definitely Anneliese, some years younger and considerably more carefree, trim figured and tousle haired in a bathing suit. Ankle deep in lapping water, the ripples of a pond or a lake stretching behind her, a man at her side. Considerably older than she, broad shouldered and smiling, also in a bathing suit, one arm raised as if to wave to someone in the distance. Anneliese’s handwriting on the back, but all she had written was März, 1942.
A vacation picture, Jordan thought flatly. All this trouble and suspicion to find a picture of Anneliese and what was probably her first husband, on a lakeside vacation. Well done, J. Bryde. You’ll be getting a Pulitzer for this for sure.
She began to slide the photograph back into its hiding place, disappointment bitter on her tongue, and paused. Took another good hard stare. The date. März, 1942.
März. March.
And something else, besides the date. Some sort of mark under the man’s upraised arm . . . A memory scratched at the edge of Jordan’s mind, and she peered closer. Definitely a mark. A tattoo? Hard to be certain.
Jordan laid the photograph on the bed where the light was strongest and took several careful shots with the Leica. A photograph of a photograph; the detail wouldn’t be as good as she wanted, but she couldn’t take the original. If Anneliese had hidden it in her bedside Bible, then she reached for it often, even if only to feel the picture’s edge through the leather. So Jordan slid the photo back into place, pressed the leather back down, replaced the Bible, and ran a hasty search over the rest of the room. No sign of the Iron Cross; either it was gone or hidden elsewhere, but Jordan didn’t dare stay longer. She slipped out of the bedroom, easing the door shut, and dashed into the bathroom, turning the lock and sinking back against the bathtub.
“Jordan?” Anneliese’s voice down the hall.
“Just a moment!” Hastily she turned the taps on, dashing cold water on her cheeks, which she could see in the mirror were flaming. Not with shame, with triumph.
The voice came nearer. “I was going to ask Garrett to stay for supper.”
“Of course,” Jordan called back, patting the water off her face. In the mirror she let herself have one smile, hearing her stepmother’s heels click away. A date, a mark on a man’s arm, and a medal. Three things, but all caught on camera—and cameras didn’t lie.
Chapter 14
Ian
April 1950
Salzburg
Gretchen Vogt. Respectable, widowed, lived all her life in Salzburg.” Tony summed up his discreet survey of the mail, the city records, and the neighbors at the Lindenplatz. “One daughter recorded, Lorelei Vogt, of the right age to be our girl.”
“Any photographs?” Ian asked as the three of them cut through the formal gardens at Schloss Mirabell, a pretty little palace like a marble wedding cake surrounded by fountains.
“None I could find on public record.”
“Lorelei Vogt.” Ian tasted the name, wondering if it really was the woman they sought. Die Jägerin. She might have lied to the Ziegler girl who carried her letter here; there was no guarantee Gretchen Vogt really was her mother, but . . . “Even if it does turn out to be her birth name, it won’t be much use—she’ll have changed it to flee. Still, I’d like to have a name for her other than the huntress.” Take her down from a mythic villain to just another common sieg-heiling Fräulein.
“Names, they’re powerful,” Nina agreed. “Is why Comrade Stalin doesn’t like being called the Red Tsar.” She stopped to pluck a red begonia from the nearest flower bed, sticking it through her lapel. My wife, the Red Menace, Ian thought with a grin.
“Let me tackle Gretchen Vogt alone,” Tony proposed as they passed out of the gardens. The Vogt house lay across the toffee-colored Salzach River, near the Mozartplatz. “If you and I go in together against die Jägerin’s mother and get the stone wall, that’s it. Let me try the carrot first—if I fail, you come in heavy with the stick.”
“Agreed. You take first crack. The old inheritance trick?”
“How much money can we spare?”
Ian pulled a packet from inside his coat. Tony counted notes, eyebrows rising. It was the whole of Ian’s monthly annuity, including the center’s rent. Ian nodded. “Use it.” He got the racing chill across his nerves he remembered from poker games with fellow war correspondents during Blitz attacks, throwing every shilling on the next hand because the bombs were getting closer and the odds were good the roof was coming down. Throw it all on the line, because this was it.
Don’t be reckless, he warned himself. “If we both fail, and neither carrot nor stick works on Frau Vogt?”
“I cut her thumbs off,” Nina said cheerfully, flicking her straight razor. “Then she talks. Carrot, then stick, then razor. Is simple.”
“You had better be joking, because that is not how this works,” Ian said. “That is not how any of this works.” But Tony was tossing some gibe at Nina in Russian, and she answered with a rude gesture, so Ian lengthened his stride toward their quarry, amused and irritated at the same time. “Let’s go.”
The Lindenplatz was a small square around a statue of some obscure Austrian saint with a sour face, the expected line of lime trees green veiled with new leaves. An old, gracious neighborhood made for the prosperous and the well educated. Families here would attend church in immaculate Sunday hats, summer on the Salzkammergut, and have nothing to do with jazz music. Number twelve was a graceful white house: spacious walled garden, well-tended window boxes spilling pink geraniums. Tony stood on that scrubbed front step, hat in hand as he awaited an answer to his knock. Nina and Ian watched discreetly from the square’s center, blocked from number twelve’s view by the stone-carved saint. “Don’t stare, Nina,” Ian murmured. “Put your arm through mine, and look like a tourist.” He had an old Baedeker guidebook in hand, saved for occasions when he had to loiter without looking suspicious. Austria, Together with Budapest, Prague, Karlsbad, and Marienbad.
“Saint . . .” Nina squinted at the statue’s plaque.
“Liutberga.” From the corner of his eye, Ian saw the door at number twelve opening.
“Tvoyu mat, what kind of name is that?”
“A very holy anchoress, circa 870. What does that mean, ‘tvoyu mat’?”
“‘Fuck your mother.’”
“Bloody hell, the mouth on you—”
“I can’t see, what’s Antochka doing?”
“Someone’s answered the door. Housewife, white apron. He’s going into his speech now . . . What does that mean, ‘Antochka’?”
“From Anton. In Russian, Anton would be nicknamed Antochka, not Tony. I don’t see how you get Tony from Anton.”
“I don’t see how you get Antochka from Anton either,” Ian couldn’t help saying, eyes locked on his partner. “He’s been invited in . . .”
“What now?” Nina whispered.
Ian looked at number twelve’s innocuous door. “We wait.”
“How long?”
“However long it takes.”
“We stand here for hours? You, me, and Liutberga?”