“Chasing war criminals is a great deal of waiting and paperwork. No one will ever make a thrilling film out of it.” Ian turned her away from the statue. “We’ll meander awhile, admire the trees . . .”
“What is meander? I don’t know this meander.”
“Wander, dawdle. Play tourist. If he’s very long inside, we’ll—”
Nina tugged her hand from Ian’s arm and strolled across the square, around the side of number twelve. The stone wall enclosing the back garden came up to the side of the house; the ground-floor window was shut, and Nina stood studying it as though she had a perfect right to be there. Ian reached her in a few long strides, taking her arm and pointing at the window box as though they’d come to admire the geraniums. “Get away from here before someone sees you,” he muttered through gritted teeth.
“No windows this side”—jerking her chin at the next house—“and no one in square to see but Liutberga. She won’t tattle on us, dismal stone bitch.”
“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.”