“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 J?gerin’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?”
“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, gn?dige 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, gn?dige 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.