“Hey, I knew plenty of boys in the ranks who lived for your column. Said it was the only one out there besides Ernie Pyle’s that wrote for the dogface with boots on the ground and not the generals in tents.”
Ian shrugged. “If I’d bought it on a bombing run over Berlin when I went out with a Lancaster crew, or got torpedoed on the way back from Egypt, there’d have been a hundred other scribblers to fill my place. People want to read about war. But there’s no war now, and no one wants to hear about war criminals walking free.” Ian made the same gesture at the four walls of the office. “We don’t write headlines now, we make them, one arrest at a time. One grudging drop of newspaper ink at a time. And unlike all those columns I wrote about war, there aren’t too many people queuing up behind us to do this work. What we do here? We accomplish something a good deal more important than anything I ever managed to say with a byline. Because no one wants to hear what we have to say, and someone has to make them listen.”
“So why won’t you write up any of our catches?” Tony had shot back. “More people might listen if they see your byline front and center.”
“I’m done writing instead of doing.” Ian hadn’t written a word since the Nuremberg trials, even though he’d been a journalist since he was nineteen, a lanky boy storming out of his father’s house shouting he was going to damned well work for a living and not spend his life sipping scotch at the club and droning about how the country was going to the dogs. More than fifteen years spent over a typewriter, honing and stropping his prose until it could cut like a razor’s edge, and now Ian didn’t think he’d ever put his name on an article again.
He blinked, realizing how long he’d been woolgathering with the telephone pressed to his ear. “What was that, Fritz?”
“I said, three arrests in a year is something to celebrate,” Fritz Bauer repeated. “Get a drink and a good night’s sleep.”
“I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since the Blitz,” Ian joked, and rang off.
The nightmares that night were particularly bad. Ian dreamed of twisting parachutes tangled in black trees, waking with a muffled shout in the hotel room’s anonymous darkness. “No parachute,” he said, hardly hearing himself over the hammering of his own heart. “No parachute. No parachute.” He walked naked to the window, threw open the shutters to the night air, and lit a cigarette that tasted like a petrol can. He exhaled smoke, leaning against the sill to look out over a dark city. He was thirty-eight, he had chased two wars across half the globe, and he stood till dawn thinking in boundless rage-filled hunger of a woman standing on the shore of Lake Rusalka.
“YOU NEED TO get laid,” Tony advised.
Ian ignored him, typing up a quick report for Bauer on the typewriter he’d carried since running around the desert after Patton’s boys. They were back in Vienna, gray and bleak with its burned-out shell of the state opera house still bearing witness to the war’s passing, but a vast improvement on Cologne, which had been bombed to rubble and was still little more than a building site around a chain of lakes.
Tony balled up a sheet of foolscap and threw it at Ian. “Are you listening to me?”
“No.” Ian flung the ball back. “Chuck that in the bin, we haven’t got a secretary to pick up after you.” The Vienna Refugee Documentation Center on the Mariahilferstrasse didn’t have a lot of things. The war crimes investigation teams Ian had worked with just after the war had called for officers, drivers, interrogators, linguists, pathologists, photographers, typists, legal experts—a team of at least twenty, well appointed, well budgeted. (Not that the teams ever got all those things, but at least they tried.) The center here had only Tony, who acted as driver, interrogator, and linguist, and Ian, who took the mantle of typist, clerk, and very poor photographer. Ian’s annuity from his long-dead father barely covered rent and living expenses. Two men and two desks, and we expect to move mountains, Ian thought wryly.
“You’re brooding again. You always do when we make an arrest. You go off in a Blue Period like a goddamn Picasso.” Tony sorted through a stack of newspapers in German, French, English, and something Cyrillic Ian couldn’t read. “Take a night off. I’ve got a redhead in Ottakring, and she has a knockout roommate. Take her out, tell her a few stories about throwing back shots with Hemingway and Steinbeck after Paris was liberated—”
“It wasn’t nearly as picturesque as you make it sound.”
“So? Talk it up! You’ve got glamour, boss. Women love ’em tall, dark, and tragic. You’re six long-lean-and-mean feet of heroic war stories and unhappy past—”
“Oh, for God’s sake—”
“—all buttoned up behind English starch and a thousand-yard stare of you can’t possibly understand the things that haunt me. That’s absolute catnip for the ladies, believe me—”
“Are you finished?” Ian drew the sheet out of the typewriter, tipping his chair back on two legs. “Go through the mail, then pull the file on the Bormann assistant.”
“Fine, die a monk.”
“Why do I put up with you?” Ian wondered. “Feckless cretinous Yank . . .”
“Joyless Limey bastard,” Tony shot back, rummaging in the file cabinet. Ian hid a grin, knowing perfectly well why he put up with Tony. Ranging across three fronts of the war with a typewriter and notepad, Ian had met a thousand Tonys: achingly young men in rumpled uniforms, heading off into the mouth of the guns. American boys jammed on troopships and green with seasickness, English boys flying off in Hurricanes with a one in four chance of making it back . . . after a while Ian couldn’t bear to look at any of them too closely, knowing better than they did what their chances were of getting out alive. It had been just after the war ended that he met Tony, slouching along as an interpreter in the entourage of an American general who clearly wanted him court-martialed and shot for insubordination and slovenliness. Ian sympathized with the feeling now that Sergeant A. Rodomovsky worked for him and not the United States Army, but Tony was the first young soldier Ian had been able to befriend. He was brash, a practical joker, and a complete nuisance, but when Ian shook his hand for the first time, he’d been able to think, This one won’t die.
Unless I kill him, Ian thought now, next time he gets on my nerves. A distinct possibility.
He finished the report for Bauer and rose, stretching. “Get your earplugs,” he advised, reaching for his violin case.
“You’re aware you don’t have a future as a concert violinist?” Tony leafed through the stack of mail that had accumulated in their absence.
“I play poorly yet with great lack of feeling.” Ian brought the violin to his chin, starting a movement of Brahms. Playing helped him think, kept his hands busy as his brain sorted through the questions that rose with every new chase. Who are you, what did you do, and where would you go to get away from it? He was drawing out the last note as Tony let out a whistle.
“Boss,” he called over his shoulder, “I’ve got news.”
Ian lowered his bow. “New lead?”
“Yes.” Tony’s eyes sparked triumph. “Die J?gerin.”
A trapdoor opened in Ian’s stomach, a long drop over the bottomless pit of rage. He put the violin back in its case, slow controlled movements. “I didn’t give you that file.”
“It’s the one at the back of the drawer you look at when you think I’m not paying attention,” Tony said. “Believe me, I’ve read it.”
“Then you know it’s a cold trail. We know she was in Poznań as late as November ’44, but that’s all.” Ian felt excitement starting to war with caution. “So what did you find?”
Tony grinned. “A witness who saw her later than November ’44. After the war, in fact.”
“What?” Ian had been pulling out his file on the woman who was his personal obsession; he nearly dropped it. “Who? Someone from the Poznań region, or Frank’s staff?” It had been during the first Nuremberg trial that Ian caught die J?gerin’s scent, hearing a witness testify against Hans Frank—the governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, whom Ian would later (as one of the few journalists admitted to the execution room) watch swing from a rope for war crimes. In the middle of the information about the Jews Frank was shipping east, the clerk had testified about a certain visit to Poznań. One of the high-ranking SS officers had thrown a party for Frank out by Lake Rusalka, at a big ocher-colored house . . .