“Kann ich—can I help?” Kolb was a small man inside a suit that hung badly on thin shoulders; he blinked rapidly. They’d timed it well; he hadn’t even had time to remove his jacket. “Sir?”
Ian let the silence stretch. They had to be nervous before he said a word. Too nervous to ask for identification, too nervous to think about whether he had authority to be here, too nervous to think about what their rights actually were.
“Jurgen Kolb?” he asked at last in his most superior English tone. His father’s voice, the too-loud, too-confident drawl Ian had grown up hearing as a boy. The voice of a man who assumed the world was his oyster because he’d gone to the right schools and mixed with the right people; a man who knew the sun never set on the British Empire, and you had to make the Krauts and Wops and Dagos remember that, by God. “I’m Ian Graham of—” Ian rattled off a meaningless series of acronyms that he counted on Herr Kolb and his spotty English not absorbing and flashed his passport, which had enough seals and stamps to intimidate anyone with a guilty conscience.
Kolb’s hand stretched out for the passport. “May I—”
Ian stared coldly. “I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?”
For a moment it hung in the balance. Kolb could have shut the door in their faces; he could have demanded to see proper credentials. But he folded, stepping back. Ian sauntered in, Nina following with a steely glare as if prepared to ship Kolb to a gulag on the spot. A rented apartment, stifling hot and smelling of cooking oil and rust, furnished with little more than a cot, a table, and an icebox.
“What is this?” Kolb summoned some indignation. “I haf done nothing wrong.”
“We’ll see about that.” Ian took his time, strolling about hands in pockets. A bottle of cheap scotch on the table, a drink already poured. He’d poured a drink as soon as he got home, before even taking off his jacket . . . “I have a few questions for you, Fritz. Do be a good chap and cooperate.”
“My name is not Fritz. Ist Jurgen, Jurgen Kolb—”
“No, it isn’t,” Ian said pleasantly. “You runty little Kraut.”
“Ich verstehe nicht—”
“You verstehe just fine. Show me your identification.”
Kolb slowly dug out his wallet, his passport, his various bits of paper. Ian flipped through, passing everything to Nina, who took notes as though copying down state secrets. “Good fakes,” Ian said, admiring the passport. “Really top-class work.” It was. Either Kolb was the man’s real name, which Ian doubted, or his guess that the McBride shop clerk was some kind of documents expert was looking better and better.
“Ich verstehe nicht,” Kolb repeated, sullen.
Ian dropped into his accented but fluent German, which made Kolb twitch miserably. “Your papers are false. You’re a war criminal. You came to the United States without reporting your crimes in Europe, which imperils your legal status here.”
The man stared at his lap. “No.”
“Yes. You’re helping other war criminals like yourself, probably in the back room of that antiques shop on Newbury and Clarendon.”
Kolb’s eyes flicked to the drink sitting on the table, then back down to his lap. “How’d you get the job, Fritzie?” Ian picked up the glass, swirling the scotch to draw Kolb’s eyes to it. “Bamboozle the widowed mother into thinking you were a rare books expert? Take a backroom key out of the daughter’s purse while she’s off canoodling with her fiancé, so you can carve out a backdoor operation getting money out of your old National Socialist friends?” Ian shook his head. “Funny thing about Americans. They don’t care much about ex-Nazis, they get more worked up these days about the Reds. But for all their fuss about give me your huddled masses, Yanks don’t really like refugees, especially the kind who take advantage of widows and orphans.” Pause. “Like you.”
“It isn’t true,” Kolb muttered. Nina shook her head as if she’d never heard such lies.
“It is true. It’s just a question of what I decide to do about it.” Ian swallowed the scotch, grimacing. “Bloody hell, doesn’t forgery pay well enough for single malt? Tell me who you’ve helped. Whom you’ve made papers for.”
Kolb’s chin jerked, but his lips stayed pressed shut.
“You don’t seem to realize you’re in luck today.” Ian picked up the bottle, watching Kolb’s eyes go to it. “I’m not really interested in you, Fritzie. Give me some names, and I’ll forget I know yours.”
The German moistened his lips. “I don’t know any names. I come to start a new life. I wasn’t a Nazi—”
“Ich bin kein Nazi, ich bin kein Nazi.” Ian looked at Nina, setting down the bottle. “They all say that, don’t they?”
She nodded ominously, pencil flying.
“I was a member of the party,” Kolb burst out in German, suddenly talkative. “But it wasn’t like you make it sound. You had to be a party member just to get by. I was just doing my job.”
Ah, the sweet sound of justifications. Once they started to justify themselves, you were getting somewhere. Ian sat back. “What job?”
“An assessor. Rare books, musical instruments. My advice was sought.” Straightening his tie. “I examined antiques that had been gathered and sent to Austria, on the way to private collections in Berlin. That is all.”
“Gathered. That’s a nice word for stolen.”
“That wasn’t my job.” Stubbornly. “I only assessed items that came to me. Restoring anything damaged, seeing it crated for travel. I wasn’t responsible for confiscations.”
“That was someone else’s job,” Ian sympathized. “Of course. Well, a man who can spot a forgery usually isn’t too bad at making them.”
“I use my skills honestly to make a living, that’s all.”
“I want names. Who you helped. Where they are now.” Lorelei Vogt. The name was on the tip of Ian’s tongue, but he swallowed it. He didn’t want Kolb knowing there was someone specific they were looking for, if there was even the remotest chance he might warn her. He might warn her anyway that someone is sniffing for war criminals. But that was a chance they’d have to take; without Kolb they had no lead at all.
The German moistened his lips again. “I helped no one. I am hiding nothing.”
“Then you won’t object if my secretary has a look around.” Kolb opened his mouth, but Ian gave a freezing glare. “An innocent man would give his permission without hesitation.”
Kolb shrugged, sullen. “There’s nothing to find.”
“All entirely cricket, eh?” Ian said as Nina slapped her notebook down and stamped into the bedroom. Kolb looked scared, but his eyes followed Ian, not his supposed secretary. Ian’s hopes that Nina would find something incriminating began to sink.
“Have a drink,” he said instead, pouring a splash of scotch into the glass. Just enough to wet the tongue, get a drunk’s thirst really roaring, and from the eager way Kolb grabbed the glass, Ian suspected he was a thoroughgoing boozer. “Let’s go over this again. Your real name, to start. Why hide it? It’s not illegal here to take a new name. Normally you Jerries go for Smith or Jones, but I suppose given your pathetic English, you didn’t see the point in trying to pretend you weren’t German.” Ian let contempt filter into his voice. “Or maybe you just shortened your real name? Was it Kolbaum, Kolbmann? There are a lot of Jews in the antiques business, are you a Jew? Helping out the Nazis to get yourself a pass—”