Ian brushed that aside, looking at Tony. “What did you find?”
“A tattoo gun. Tucked away very carefully in Kolb’s workshop.” Tony had been using his work shifts to discreetly search the premises for anything Kolb might have hidden. If he kept information on his former clients, and was cautious enough not to stash it at home, what better place than the McBride shop? “I’ve learned a fair amount about the antiques business in the last few weeks, and there is no reason why that workroom would need a tattoo gun.”
“He’s probably covering up blood-type tattoos.” Someone paranoid enough to pay for a new name and background would be paranoid enough to cover a tattoo. “Something to hold over his head if we take another crack at him.”
“When?”
“Not yet. I don’t want him warning anyone, I just want him nervous.” Nervous people made mistakes.
“Start on these while you’re waiting.” Tony fished some papers out of his pocket.
“Bloody hell, I haven’t even got through your first batch—”
“Put your foot on the gas, boss.” Lists were the main thing Tony was looking for, on his careful searches through the McBride files. If I were hiding information in that shop on the location and identities of war criminals, Ian had speculated last week, I’d list the names and addresses as buyers, customers, or dealers. False names tucked among real names. Lorelei Vogt’s new name and address could very well be in one of those drawers, hiding in plain sight.
Tony slapped down a stack of lists copied over in his untidy scrawl. He never took the originals—if and when police became involved, Ian had no intention of seeing their evidence muddied up with accusations of theft. Tony asked permission every time he accessed the file cabinets and took nothing that wasn’t put back. Gray territory, but they were used to working in those shadows. “Besides,” Tony had pointed out, “if we need to act legally on any information we find, that’s when we go to the McBride family, lay out everything, play on their civic duty in the apprehension of a criminal, and obtain full permission to act on the information we’ve found. My persuasiveness, your gravitas—always works like a charm.”
Flipping through the new sets of lists, Ian reached for the telephone. Names of antiques sellers and customers: they’d all have to be cross-checked and confirmed that they were what the list said they were. So far all the names had checked out as legitimate, but they’d only been at it a week. The telephone bill was going to be astronomical. Slow and steady, Ian reminded himself. Most chases took months.
“I’m not combing any shop files further back than last year.” Tony was trying to impose some order on the worktable, layered with maps and notes like an archaeological dig. “Kolb arrived in Boston with the early waves of refugees coming after the Displaced Persons Act; I slipped that out of Miss McBride. So it’s doubtful he could have helped our huntress until early ’49 at the soonest.”
“According to Frau Vogt, her daughter left Europe late ’45.” Ian crossed off the name of an auction house in Dutchess County. “But if die J?gerin arrived in Boston before the Displaced Persons Act—”
“—it was probably something shady through Italy or the church routes,” Tony finished. “No sponsor or family here, she’d have scrambled to establish herself.”
“Unless she came with wads of cash, which isn’t likely.” Ian had never yet found a war criminal who had managed to flee his homeland and then set up in luxury. “So Lorelei Vogt spent some years getting by. Kolb came in late ’48 or early ’49; she found him and learned he could provide assistance . . .”
“Only then does she write urging her mother to join her. Do you think—no,” Tony interrupted himself, leveling a finger at Ian. “Absolutely not.”
Ian paused, reaching up to pin the latest list to the wall. “We’re running out of room.”
“Next it’ll be taped-up photographs and colored string crisscrossing to connect different theories, and before you know it we’re stuck in one of those god-awful flicks where some general is jabbing at a map saying ‘The Yanks are here, the Limeys are here, and the Jerries are here.’ No,” Tony repeated, and Ian grinned.
“You take over the telephoning, then.” It had been a while since Ian took out his violin, and playing helped his mind find its way through a thicket of possibilities. He pulled the instrument out, musing as Tony dialed a number and slid into practiced disarming patter. One of those names, listed innocuously under the heading of Dutchess County antiques dealers or Becket, Massachusetts, china sellers, might be a former war criminal, Ian thought. A camp guard fleeing a legacy of violence in Belsen, a paper pusher who had documented the roundup of Berlin’s socialists . . . or die J?gerin. It was tedious and it might not turn up anything, but the chase had stalled while they waited for Kolb to lead them to something new, and the rule when a chase stalled was to sift through the ordinary and find something that didn’t fit, then follow that.
Tony went from one call to the next as Ian began to play, trying to remember the song Nina had been singing on the rooftop two nights ago. He’d sat up there with her listening, leaned back on his elbows, wondering why she refused to think of staying with the center when she clearly liked the teamwork, knowing better than to ask. She couldn’t storm off a four-story building like she’d stormed out of the diner, but she might just try.
Abandoning that question for now, he switched to Saint-Sa?ns. The music and Tony’s telephone patter must have drowned out the sound of the door opening. When Ian drew out the final note and turned around, he saw a little girl in the doorway, bird boned and huge eyed.
Even as he lowered the bow in puzzlement and Tony turned around midcall, the blond child took a step into the room, gaze fixed on the violin as though hunting for where the music had gone. “Ruth!” A woman’s voice called from outside, floating up the stairs, but the girl ignored it, looking at Ian. He looked back. The name he was hearing was Ruth, but the name imprinted in his mind was Seb.
“What was that?” the little girl said. Seven or eight years old, blond hair falling over a crisp blouse—Ian’s dark-eyed dark-haired younger brother had looked nothing like her, so why the painful stab of familiarity?
Then Ian remembered Sebastian standing before their father one Christmas, looking stricken as he heard he was being sent away to school a year early, aren’t you a lucky chap! That was the similarity: both his brother and this little girl were two bandbox-neat children with well-shined shoes, yet the forlorn puzzlement in their eyes was like that of the war orphans Ian later saw in Naples, in London—children gripped in the throes of shock, huddled on hospital cots or in bombed-out buildings, eyes searching for their homes. Sebastian had looked up at their father, blurting out, Can’t I go live with Ian instead? Seb got a clip on the ear for that, and a lecture about not letting down the side like a pansy.
I wish you could live with me, Seb, Ian had said. But he’s our father. Until you’re of age, it’s his roof.
But it’s not home, Seb had muttered.
The little girl in front of Ian now was staring at the violin as though she thought it was home. “What was the music?” she breathed.
“Saint-Sa?ns,” Ian heard himself reply. “The Swan movement, from Carnival of the Animals. G major, six-four time. Who might you be?”
Someone who has already been failed in her rather short life, Ian couldn’t help thinking, even though he knew nothing about this girl. He thought later that he was already predisposed in that moment, whatever Ruth McBride asked, to say yes.
Chapter 36
Jordan
July 1950
Boston
Ruth beat Jordan to the door of Tony Rodomovsky’s apartment, racing up the stairs as soon as she heard the faint strains of music. By the time Jordan made it to the top, Tony was standing in the doorway looking down at the little girl bemusedly. Behind him was a man Jordan didn’t know, standing with a violin tucked under his chin. Jordan gave an apologetic smile for interrupting, turning to Tony. “I’m sorry to intrude—”
“Not at all. The lock on that door’s so flimsy, it opens with a jiggle.” He smiled, still puzzled.
“I was so busy bringing the shop manager up to date on my routine, I didn’t see you’d left without your paycheck,” Jordan said. “You’re lucky I had your address on file, and didn’t mind a detour on the way home.” Handing the check over, she turned to call Ruth, mind already racing ahead to the open afternoon beckoning now that the capable Mrs. Weir had returned to manage the shop—not just today but for the rest of the summer. Jordan could finally sink into those rolls of film waiting to be developed, the bakers at Mike’s Pastries, all those shots of white aprons and kneading hands . . . But then Jordan saw Ruth’s face and stopped short.