His mouth was suddenly dry as paper, and the world sounded as though it had retreated underwater. Don’t be a coward, Graham. He hadn’t always been petrified of high places, after all. But the day he acquired the nightmare about a parachute had been the day that changed. Do not be a coward.
The gondolas of the Prater were famous: compact cars with a center bench and windows all around to see the panoramic scope of Vienna’s steep roofs and church domes, now shrinking to the size of dolls. Nina was wandering along the line of windows, as Tony pointed out landmarks. Bile rose in Ian’s throat and he swallowed as the car rose higher. If they’d been climbing up the stairway of a tall cathedral or walking the parapet of a rooftop, he’d have been all right—put a solid rail or a steady floor between him and the void, and he was fine. But swaying along through the air in this flimsy shell . . .
Better than an airplane, he told himself, hands linking so tight he saw the knuckles whiten. To think you once queued up for the privilege of jumping out of a bomber over Germany. Now he’d rather be flayed alive.
“. . . open these windows?” Nina was saying. “Is boring, sailing up and up like a sedate old kite.”
“What are you going to do, climb on the roof?” Tony laughed, clearly not worried as she dropped the top sill of the observation window. Nina hauled herself up, hanging her head and shoulders out into the sky. She was just trying to get a better view, Ian knew that, but his nerves didn’t. He imagined his wife falling from the gondola like a bird shot down in flight, glass shattering around her, and he lunged across the swaying floor. Seizing her around the waist, he wrenched her down so fast she almost flew across the gondola. She fell against the bench with a crash and came instantly to her feet, blue eyes flaring. Ian turned his back, shoving the window up with a violence that cracked the pane. A silver line ran in a sudden ping across the glass and he couldn’t help flinching, seeing the crack and then the tilted view of Vienna beyond it. They were at the wheel’s apex, sixty-five meters up, five times as high as the day he’d—
Ian turned away and threw up in the corner.
When he straightened, Nina and Tony were both staring at him. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his mouth, realizing with a flash of shame that his hands were shaking. His voice wasn’t, though. “Parachute jump, ’45,” he said, as the gondola began its descent. “Ever since then, you might say I’ve had a little trouble with heights. So next time I tell you to leave me on the ground, leave me on the goddamned ground.”
Tony cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“I know,” Ian cut him off, wishing this ride was over, wishing they’d stop looking at him. Wishing he weren’t a coward.
“I say go again,” Nina said.
“What?”
“Is what I would do. Ride this wheel around a hundred more times. All day. All night. Till I wasn’t afraid.”
“No,” Ian said. The thought of going round even one more time made him want to vomit all over again.
“You go down your list of fears.” Her eyes had a distant compassion, as if she knew what he was thinking. “Stamp them out, one after other, till there’s only one. Is good to have one fear, luchik, but just one. I think the fear you want to keep is the fear you never find die J?gerin, yes? So get rid of this one.”
Ian stared at his wife. She was retying the scarf around her neck, a homemade white thing embroidered in blue stars. She smiled.
“Come,” she challenged, patting the bench. “I ride with you, long as it takes. Let’s kill a fear today.”
“Get between me and the door when we finally stop,” Ian said, “and I will pitch you through that bloody window.”
He didn’t know how long that ghastly ride lasted, but it passed in utter silence.
BY THE TIME they reached the Refugee Documentation Center it was midafternoon, the shakes were gone from Ian’s hands, and the humiliation at his loss of control was subsiding. “Right,” he said as they came into the stale-smelling office. “I have a call to make. Nina, if you’d be good enough to sort post; Tony, catalog and file anything new. We have a dozen other files open besides Lorelei Vogt’s, after all.” The office filled with the crackle of paper and the hiss of the kettle, and Ian picked up the telephone. “What do you have, Bauer?” Let it be good news.
“The United States naturally has no jurisdiction over crimes committed overseas, so if you found your huntress—proved who she was and what she’d done—she’d have to be extradited for trial.” Ian heard the rustle of paper on Bauer’s end. “To Austria, possibly, as her birth nation, or to Poland as that’s where her crimes were largely committed.”
Ian could well imagine a courtroom of vengeful Poles eager to levy justice against the woman who had hunted their citizens on the banks of Lake Rusalka. “What else?”
“Before you could even think of getting her a trial in Europe, she’d probably have to be tried in the United States in a civil court, and you’d need clear proof of her crimes.”
“We have it. Witnesses.” Nina, eyewitness to Sebastian’s murder, and the clerk who had provided the statement at Nuremberg about die J?gerin’s execution of the Jewish children.
“It would still be heavy lifting,” Bauer warned, and he launched into a flurry of legal technicalities that lost Ian on the third turn. So many things this team needed, he thought—photographers, drivers, pathologists—but surely what they could have used most of all was more legal experts. Ian heard his friend sigh on the other end, aware he’d lost his audience. “The United States hasn’t extradited a single Nazi for war crimes,” Bauer finished bluntly. “Not one. Are they even aware they have any? Or perhaps the question is, do they care?”
The leaden feeling returned to Ian’s stomach as he rang off. Tony’s voice was quiet. “What’s the bad news?”
“I am pondering the realities of American extradition law,” Ian replied. Die J?gerin. Learning her real name hadn’t brought her down to human size, after all. She remained the huntress, remote and uncatchable. Ian forced the words out. “It’s time we faced facts. We aren’t going to Boston.”
Two sets of eyes regarded him, dismayed. Russian blue and Polish-American black.
“It’s over.” Ian looked back and forth between them. “She got away.”
“No, she got to Boston,” Tony said. “Who knows where from there?”
“It doesn’t matter. She might as well have gone to the moon.” Ian gestured at the four walls of the center, biting his words off. “We are three people in a one-room office with two desks and four filing cabinets. Even if we found her in America, we could not possibly get her extradited for trial. We lack the man power, the money, the influence, and the resources to mount an overseas search. It is impossible. I was hoping otherwise, but Bauer convinced me. We’re finished.”
“Bauer hasn’t convinced me,” Tony said. “We’re not finished until we fail, and we haven’t failed yet.”
“We will, if we pursue this.”
“I’ll admit, it’s a long shot. But we might pull it off if—”
“This is not a debate.” Ian cut him off in a wintry voice. “I started this documentation center, Tony. I say how and where we choose our targets.”
“And we both know you wouldn’t get half your arrests if not for me. So let’s not pretend my mingy salary makes you my boss.” Tony folded his arms across his chest, and Ian realized he was angry too. “We can catch Lorelei Vogt.”
“Drop your everlasting Yank optimism!” Ian’s temper flared to match Tony’s, sweeping disappointment away. Anger hurt, but at least it was a satisfying pain. “This tin-pot office stapled together with sweat and ink does not have the resources to—”
“So you’re willing to give up?” Tony’s eyes bored into him. “When she killed your brother?”
“A lot of brothers have been lost in this war,” Ian clipped. “My loss is no more worthy of special consideration than anyone else’s. And I’m not willing to burn up everything in my life for vengeance.”
“You’ve already burned up everything in your life, Ian. You just didn’t do it for vengeance; that’s for commoners who never went to Harrow.” Tony gave a thin, edged smile. “You burned up everything in your life for this office, that monk’s cell you live in, and three arrests a year.”
Ian took a shallow breath. He spread his hands on the surface of the desk, leaning forward. “This center may be ramshackle, but it means something. My handful of arrests every year means something. Even if just a handful of reminders to the world that the guilty will face justice for what they’ve done. To me, that is worth it.” He gestured at the four walls again. “If I go overseas and throw everything into a fruitless hunt for die J?gerin, this center will probably collapse. So I’ll stay here and go on with the cases I have some chance of winning. And I will do that with or without you.”
Nina had been silent up till now, straddling the back of her chair, idly flicking her razor open and closed, watching them spit insults. Now she rose. “I say we go to Boston.”
“Have you heard anything I’ve said?” Ian transferred his gaze to her. “Even if we find her, we cannot put her on trial—”