Dad, I still don’t know if I believe her or not. Dad, I was just trying to protect you . . .
But she couldn’t get past that first word. Her throat stopped, choked up with tears and the smell of burned turkey and ruined Thanksgiving. Feebly, she gestured to the two photographs. “Pictures don’t lie,” she forced out. “I believed what I saw.”
But the thought reverberated through her head like a tolling bell now:
You saw wrong.
Chapter 17
Ian
April 1950
Salzburg
It should have been a night to sleep happy and triumphant, a night to dream of die J?gerin in handcuffs, but the nightmare didn’t care. Vaulted out of sleep by the familiar dream, Ian tried to be amused at the utter predictability of night terrors but he was shaking too much. “Why the parachute?” he asked aloud of his dark hotel room, needing to hear a voice even if only his own. “Why the bloody parachute?”
Fruitless question. A nightmare was a needle plunging through the net of human memory; it slipped past one strand and caught up another on its point, stitching up dark dreams out of the unlikeliest recollections. The parachute wasn’t the worst thing he’d seen in his career by any means, so why dream of it? Why not Spain, that day in Teruel when he’d carried his notepad up shell-pocked stairs into the Republican-attacked Civil Governor’s building, listening to the terrible single shots of men killing themselves? Why not that schoolhouse in Naples after the German retreat, the coffins heaped with flowers that didn’t cover the dirty bare feet of the children in them? Why not dream about Omaha Beach, for God’s sake? “That would be the obvious nightmare to have,” Ian muttered, leaning on the open window to drag in a shaky breath of geranium-scented air. Clinging to wet sand, watching blood swirl past through shallow waves, deafened by German fire but feeling the impact through his bones as the shells hit all around him . . . he’d seen the first gray in his dark hair within a week of Omaha Beach. Surely that should have been the worst dream in his nighttime arsenal.
No. It was the parachute under the emerald-green trees, peacefully swaying, and the endless drop below.
Stop. Ian gave the fear a brutal kick. There is no parachute, no fall. No bloody nightmare either, because you have no right to it. You were just a journalist. A goddamn writer, not a soldier. They carried guns; you carried pens. They fought, you didn’t. They bled and died, you wrote and lived. You haven’t earned the nightmares.
He went back to bed, closed his eyes, pounded the pillow. Rolled on his back and stared at the ceiling. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, rising again to pull a shirt over chilly sweat-slicked skin, and went downstairs to the hotel desk. After a protracted wrangle with the sleepy night clerk, Ian was finally put through to the only other man he could count on to be awake at this hour. “Bauer, what do you know about extradition law in America?”
“Guten Morgen to you too,” Fritz Bauer rasped. “Don’t tell me you’re following a chase overseas.”
Ian turned his back on the night clerk. “Perhaps.” The staggering complications of that had only begun to register this evening, as he sat over the remains of a scrounged supper listening to Nina and Tony wrangle about how best to track die J?gerin now that they had a name, a photograph, and a destination. “What would we be in for?” He only knew in the most general terms; Bauer could be counted on for specifics.
“It would be hell,” his friend said succinctly. Ian could imagine the flash of light off his glasses as he leaned back in his leather chair. “An ocean of paperwork, money, and time.”
Which was, of course, why, Ian thought, the Refugee Documentation Center didn’t pursue cases overseas. As little jurisdiction as they had in Europe, they’d have even less across the Atlantic. For a ramshackle one-room operation, the cases that led overseas became dead ends, sinkholes for money and time. Who could afford that when there was always someone else to pursue here in Europe? Ian rubbed his eyes, willing that voice of cold logic to go away, but it proceeded remorselessly. To go to such marathon lengths for one target is pure, self-indulgent obsession. Even if she did kill your brother, and nearly kill your wife.
Bauer’s gruff voice again. “American extradition details—that will take digging. I have a friend or two over there; let me put in a few calls once their offices are open.”
“Thank you.” Ian rang off, but the cold voice of logic was still talking.
There are criminals in Germany whom you have a much better chance of catching than Lorelei Vogt in America. Shove them all aside for a long shot at her—a long shot that will probably eat up everything you have, including your center—then this impartial search for justice you’re so proud of turns into ordinary, commonplace vengeance.
And if there was anything Ian Graham didn’t believe in, it was vengeance.
What now? he thought, but the night had no answers. Only, eventually, more dreams.
“IS MORE TO FIND here in Europe before going to Boston,” Nina was saying. She shared Ian’s seat in the train compartment, sitting with her back to the window and her disreputable boots propped in his lap. He pushed them off periodically, but she just plopped them back—his wife apparently had no more sense of individual space than individual property. “School friends from Heidelberg days,” Nina went on, flipping through their increasingly frayed file. “And her lover, the SS mudak, what about him? He’s dead, but what about his wife? She might be willing to talk about her husband’s whore—”
“Von Altenbach’s wife is dead too,” Tony answered. “She ran with high Reich society, childhood friends with Magda Goebbels back when she was Magda Ritschel. That was why von Altenbach couldn’t divorce her for our girl Lorelei. He took her to Poznań and left the Frau in Berlin, and the Frau committed suicide at the war’s end. One of the true believers who couldn’t face the world without their Führer.”
“Lorelei’s friends in Germany.” Ian focused through the gray blur of sleep deprivation, trying to match his companions’ energy. “She might write to her friends as well as her mother; wouldn’t that be considerate of her?” He answered their smiles with one of his own, but it was an effort. The difficulties ahead were piling up in his mind like storm clouds.
No storms in the sky above as they disembarked the train in Vienna, though. “Tvoyu mat,” Nina breathed, stopping at the top of the train station steps. “I want to be up there—” She pointed at the huge sailing clouds overhead. “Up high!”
“I can’t get you that high, but I can get you sixty-five meters up.” Tony stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Ever ridden the Prater wheel, Nina?”
“What is it, this Prater?”
Ian smiled too. “Our famous Viennese amusement park, you miniature Soviet housebreaker.”
“We had a lucky break in the case yesterday,” Tony urged. “Let’s celebrate. We can scrounge enough change between us for a trip to the Prater.”
Ian looked down at Nina, pushing the looming extradition problem aside. “We never did have a honeymoon, you and I. Shall I show you a few Viennese sights before we divorce?”
They took a cab to the amusement park in the Leopoldstadt where the great Ferris wheel loomed and children were already shrieking with excitement, pursued by fond, exasperated mothers up and down the rows of food vendors and shooting galleries. Nina pushed toward the line for the wheel, Tony betting her she’d lose her nerve at the top. She laughed so hard she staggered into Ian’s shoulder. “I don’t lose nerve,” she said, as Ian righted her with a hand at the elbow. “Not at sixty-five meters.”
“What does make you lose your nerve?” Ian asked, wondering again just what it was she’d been assigned to do at the Soviet front during the war. But Nina had come to the front of the line for the wheel, not hearing him, and Ian stepped to one side. “You two go. I’m no good with heights.”
“You’re coming along, luchik,” Nina said, and somehow she and Tony had an arm each and were yanking Ian into the gondola. As it swayed under his feet, his vision swayed with it and he turned back, but the attendant was already slamming the door shut. They were the last to load, getting the gondola all to themselves—and before Ian could leap out, the wheel was lifting them skyward.