The story was a razor in print form.
Ian had thought he’d never write again, that war had used up all his words. Now, sitting in a deck chair outside the locked third-class cabin where Lorelei Vogt would wait out the Atlantic crossing, he wrote the story of the capture, the story begun in Boston on Jordan’s typewriter. Finishing it longhand on a notepad, he hammered it into shape: the article he was determined would make die J?gerin famous.
Lake Rusalka: a lake in Poland named for a creature of the night, and during the darkest years of the war, a woman lived on her shores far more fearful than any witch who crawled from a lake’s depths.
That was his lede, and in the paragraphs that followed Ian vivisected the woman born as Lorelei Vogt, reborn in murder as Anneliese Weber, rechristened in deception as Anna McBride, and identified by nature—primitive, primal nature red in tooth and claw—as a huntress. He knew every pulse point to push in those paragraphs, every emotional trigger to pull. Women would cry at this article; men would shake their heads; newspaper editors would see banknotes. Ian looked down at his final copy and thought, Dynamite in ink.
It felt good, not to be done with words, after all.
The ship stopped in New York before starting across the Atlantic. Ian took the chance to wire the story to Tony, told him to pitch it to every major newspaper in Boston, and promptly wrote a follow-up memorializing his brother and the Jewish children and poor Daniel McBride. Ian barely slept and neither did Nina, one or the other of them on continuous watch outside Lorelei Vogt’s door.
Not until the very end, after they’d left the ship behind in Cannes and boarded a series of trains that would take them to Vienna, did the huntress speak to him. Ian had been too tense for conversation or scribbling once they left the security of the ship, far too aware Lorelei Vogt could make a panicked run the moment his attention lapsed—but she passed through the train travel passive and silent as a wax doll. On the final train to Vienna, hearing the wheels slow beneath them, she looked at Ian suddenly as if realizing this limbo time of traveling was coming to an end. “I still don’t know who you are, Mr. Graham.”
Ian raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t know you, so why did you come looking for me?” She sounded so puzzled. “You crossed half a world to catch me. What did I do to you?”
How many times had he envisioned sitting down with this woman and telling her in biting words what she’d taken from him? Telling her about a little brother who dreamed of flight and did not know what distrust was. How he’d yearned to do that. Yearned for something else too—for any memories she might have of Seb, the way he looked bolting his stew when she took him inside her ocher-walled house, the things they had talked about in her warm kitchen. The last look on his face before she shot him . . .
But Nina had recounted with quiet poignancy what the last look on Seb’s face had been, had sketched him in the end as he stood in the moonlight warm and well fed, looking at the sky and never dreaming he was about to die. I won’t replace that memory with whatever poisoned image you might have, Ian thought, looking at die J?gerin’s puzzled blue eyes. I want to remember my brother through Nina’s eyes, not yours. The eyes of a woman who saw a friend, not a murderer who saw prey.
So Ian just gave a smile like his wife’s razor. “You’ll find out at the trial,” he said. “If I am called to testify.”
“You should have let me die,” the huntress answered, low voiced. “You should have let me shoot myself.”
“You don’t get to die,” Ian said. “I am not that merciful.”
Lorelei Vogt bowed her head. It stayed bowed through the commotion and paperwork that greeted their arrival in Austria. Fritz Bauer came from Braunschweig in a whirl of suits and uniforms to witness the arrest. Bauer’s greeting had been a fierce smile around his ever-present cigarette, but Ian hadn’t been surprised to see the blend of curiosity and resentment their colleagues aimed at them.
“Sour faces,” Nina commented, puzzled.
“No one wants to arrest Nazis anymore,” Bauer said, not caring a jot for the glares. “Sweep it all under the rug, live and let live. Your girl may not get more than a few years in prison,” he warned Ian. “Maybe even the case thrown out. Judges don’t like locking up pretty young widows.”
“I’ll make her so famous they won’t have a choice.” Tony had said on Ian’s last telephone call that the first story had exploded in Boston like a V-2 rocket. Ian already had the stories to follow it up, paced to land like a sequence of punches in a boxing ring. Once the nationals picked up the story, even the hidebound Austrians with their distaste for scandal wouldn’t be able to slide away from their duty.
Ian watched die J?gerin walk away, disappearing into a cloud of homburgs and Polizei caps as she was finally taken off his hands. He supposed the next time he saw her it would be her trial. Jordan McBride, he guessed, would be at his side, the lens of her eye poised behind the lens of her camera. She needs answers more than I. Or if she didn’t, Ruth would someday, when she was old enough to ask the difficult questions about the woman who had raised her.
“I have a question for you, comrade.” Ian looked down at Nina, strolling along at his side. They were staying at a hotel on the Graben, but he wasn’t eager to return yet. They hadn’t really talked, he and his wife, since the night on the beach in Florida. After that the chase had swamped them, and the tense need to watch their prey. “You could have killed Lorelei Vogt, out there on Selkie Lake. She had a pistol, she was moving to use it. You disarmed her rather than cutting her down. Why?” Nina’s restraint had surprised him. Since when had she ever been restrained, in the matter of capture over vengeance?
“Dying, that is easier for her. She wants it, because justice is harder. So I don’t cut her down. Is difficult,” Nina conceded, a glint of fury in her blue eyes. “I think for a moment, when I dive into the lake and the shot goes off, that she’s killed you.”
Ian stopped. “And you wanted to cut her to ribbons to avenge me?” From Nina that was practically a valentine.
“But I don’t,” Nina said, virtuous. “I just disarm her. I think maybe you are right, luchik. Justice over vengeance.”
“Bloody hell, woman, have I actually made a dent in you?”
She jabbed him in the ribs. “I make a few in you too.”
Yes, you have, Ian thought. And not just the fact that I am now addicted to your paperback Regency tosh. He tugged her arm through his, and Nina let him. The beginning of autumn nipped the air, and a few chestnut sellers were out, but the city looked tired and gray. Ian missed the hum of energy from Boston, the brashness, even the accents.
“You go back to Boston soon?” Nina asked as if reading his mind.
“Yes.” Not forever, perhaps, but there was no doubt his reception in Vienna was going to be cool for some time. He’d burned every favor he’d ever stored up ensuring Lorelei Vogt’s arrest—it would be no bad thing to absent himself and pursue war criminals in America for a few years. Jordan had said on his last telephone call that he could have the workroom over the antiques shop rent-free, if he would just go on giving Ruth the occasional lesson. With a thrum of quiet delight Ian envisioned it: a bright space with a window over Newbury Street, the smells of beeswax and silver polish drifting from the workshop where Mr. Kolb no longer worked. Taking half an hour every day to stretch his back and teach Ruth a new tune when she was let out of school, drinking tea afterward with Tony and Jordan as they talked above the sound of scales, then back to work. Building a case, maybe, against Vernon Waggoner of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who looked like he might have buried a few corpses in shallow graves back in his day. “Yes, I’m going back.” Ian looked at Nina. “Are you?”
“Is nice place, the decadent West.” Nina sounded noncommittal. “I like decadent.”
“Come back, Nina. Stay with the team.” Ian held up a hand before she could bristle. “I’m not asking you to stay married to me. I’m asking you to stay with the center. You belong with this team. You know you do.”
“You want me?” She looked suddenly vulnerable, Nina who normally faced the world behind shields of serenity or prickliness, with the occasional switch to barbarism. “I think how I left Seb behind, think maybe you wouldn’t want me to stay. Once huntress is caught.”