The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  He’d traded all that for a tiny office in Vienna piled with lists; for endless interviews with cagey witnesses and grieving refugees; for no byline at all. “Why?” Tony had asked soon after they began working together, gesturing around the four walls of their grim office. “Why go to this, from that?”

  Ian had given a brief, slanted smile. “Because it’s the same work, really. Telling the world that terrible things happened. But when I was hammering out columns during the war, what did all those words accomplish? Nothing.”

  “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 Jägerin.”

  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 Jägerin’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 . . .

  Ian, at that point, had already had a very good reason to be searching for the woman who had lived in that house. And the clerk on the witness stand had been a guest at that party, where the SS officer’s young mistress had played hostess.

  “Who did you find?” Ian rapped out at Tony, mouth dry with sudden hope. “Someone who remembers her? A name, a bloody photograph—” It was the most frustrating dead end of this file: the clerk at Nuremberg had met the woman only once, and he’d been drunk through most of the party. He didn’t remember her name, and all he could describe was a young woman, dark haired, blue eyed. Difficult to track a woman without knowing anything more than her nickname and her coloring. “What did you find?”

  “Stop cutting me off, dammit, and I’ll tell you.” Tony tapped the file. “Die Jägerin’s lover fled to Altaussee in ’45. No sign he took his mistress with him from Poznań—but now, it’s looking like he did. Because I’ve located a girl in Altaussee whose sister worked a few doors down from the same house where our huntress’s lover had holed up with the Eichmanns and the rest of that crowd in May ’45. I haven’t met the sister yet, but she apparently remembers a woman who looked like die Jägerin.”

  “That’s all?” Ian’s burst of hope ebbed as he recalled the pretty little spa town on a blue-green lake below the Alps, a bolt-hole for any number of high-ranking Nazis as the war ended. By May ’45 it had been crawling with Americans making arrests. Some fugitives submitted to handcuffs, some managed to escape. Die Jägerin’s SS officer had died in a hail of bullets rather than be taken—and there had been no sign of his mistress. “I’ve already combed Altaussee looking for leads. Once I knew her lover had died there, I went looking—if she’d been there too, I would have found her trail.”

  “Look, you probably came on like some Hound of Hell from the Spanish Inquisition, and everyone clammed up in terror. Subtlety is not your strong suit. You come on like a wrecking ball that went to Eton.”

  “Harrow.”

  “Same thing.” Tony fished for his cigarettes. “I’ve been doing some lighter digging. All that driving around Austria we did last December, looking for the Belsen guard who turned out to have gone to Argentina? I took weekends, went to Altaussee, asked questions. I’m good at that.”

  He was. Tony could talk to anyone, usually in their native language. It was what made him good at this job, which so often hinged on information eased lightly out of the suspicious and the wary. “Why did you put in all this effort on your own time?” Ian asked. “A cold case—”

  “Because it’s the case you want. She’s your white whale. All these bastards”—Tony waved a hand at the filing cabinets crammed with documentation on war criminals—“you want to nab them all, but the one you really want is her.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Ian felt his fingers tighten on the edge of the desk. “White whale,” he managed to say, wryly. “Don’t tell me you’ve read Melville?”

  “Of course not. Nobody’s read Moby-Dick; it just gets assigned by overzealous teachers. I went to a recruiter’s office the day after Pearl Harbor; that’s how I got out of reading Moby-Dick.” Tony shook out a cigarette, black eyes unblinking. “What I want to know is, why die Jägerin?”

  “You’ve read her file,” Ian parried.

  “Oh, she’s a nasty piece of work, I’m not arguing that. That business about the six refugees she killed after feeding them a meal—”

  “Children,” Ian said quietly. “Six Jewish children, somewhere between the ages of four and nine.”

  Tony stopped in the act of lighting his cigarette, visibly sickened. “Your clipping just said refugees.”

  “My editor considered the detail too gruesome to include in the article. But they were children, Tony.” That had been one of the harder articles Ian had ever forced himself to write. “The clerk at Frank’s trial said that, at the party where he met her, someone told the story about how she’d dispatched six children who had probably escaped being shipped east. An amusing little anecdote over hors d’oeuvres. They toasted her with champagne, calling her the huntress.”

  “Goddamn,” Tony said, very softly.

  Ian nodded, thinking not only of the six unknown children who had been her victims, but of two others. A fragile young woman in a hospital bed, all starved eyes and grief. A boy just seventeen years old, saying eagerly I told them I was twenty-one, I ship out next week! The woman and the boy, one gone now, the other dead. You did that, Ian thought to the nameless huntress who filled up his sleepless nights. You did that, you Nazi bitch.

  Tony didn’t know about them, the girl and the young soldier. Even now, years later, Ian found it difficult. He started marshaling the words, but Tony was already scribbling an address, moving from discussion to action. For now, Ian let it go, fingers easing their death grip on the desk’s edge.

  “That’s where the girl in Altaussee lives, the one whose sister might have seen die Jägerin,” Tony was saying. “I say it’s worth going to talk in person.”

  Ian nodded. Any lead was worth running down. “When did you get her name?”

  “A week ago.”

  “Bloody hell, a week?”

  “We had the Cologne chase to wrap up. Besides, I was waiting for one more confirmation. I wanted to give you more good news, and now I can.” Tony tapped the letter from their mail stack, scattering ash from his cigarette. “It arrived while we were in Cologne.”

  Ian scanned the letter, not recognizing the black scrawl. “Who’s this woman and why is she coming to Vienna . . .” He got to the signature at the bottom, and the world stopped in its tracks.

  “Our one witness who actually met die Jägerin face-to-face and lived,” Tony said. “The Polish woman—I pulled her statement and details from the file.”

  “She emigrated to England, why did you—”

  “The telephone number was noted. I left a message. Now she’s coming to Vienna.”

  “You really shouldn’t have contacted Nina,” Ian said quietly.

  “Why not? Besides this potential Altaussee lead, she’s the only eyewitness we’ve got. Where’d you find her, anyway?”

  “In Poznań after the German retreat in ’45. She was in hospital when she gave me her statement, with all the details she could remember.” Vividly Ian recalled the frail girl in the ward cot, limbs showing sticklike from a smock borrowed from the Polish Red Cross. “You shouldn’t have dragged her halfway across Europe.”

  “It was her idea. I only wanted to talk by telephone, see if I could get any more detail about our mark. But if she’s willing to come here, let’s make use of her.”

  “She also happens to be—”

  “What?”

  Ian paused. His surprise and disquiet were fading, replaced by an unexpected flash of devilry. He so rarely got to see his partner nonplussed. You spring a surprise like this on me, Ian thought, you deserve to have one sprung on you. Ian wouldn’t have chosen to yank the broken flower that was Nina Markova halfway across the continent, but she was already on the way, and there was no denying her presence would be useful for any number of reasons . . . including turning the tables on Tony, which Ian wa
sn’t too proud to admit he enjoyed doing. Especially when his partner started messing about with cases behind Ian’s back. Especially this case.

  “She’s what?” Tony asked.

  “Nothing,” Ian answered. Aside from pulling the ground out from under Tony, it might be good to see Nina. They did have matters to discuss that had nothing to do with the case, after all. “Just handle her carefully when she arrives,” he added, that part nothing but truthful. “She had a bad war.”

  “I’ll be gentle as a lamb.”

  FOUR DAYS PASSED, and a flood of refugee testimony came in that needed categorizing. Ian forgot all about their coming visitor, until an unholy screeching sounded in the corridor.

  Tony looked up from the statement he was translating from Yiddish. “Our landlady getting her feathers ruffled again?” he said as Ian went to the office door.

  His view down the corridor was blocked by Frau Hummel’s impressive bulk in her flowered housedress, as she pointed to some muddy footprints on her floor. Ian got a bare impression of a considerably smaller woman beyond his landlady, and then Frau Hummel seized the mud-shod newcomer by the arm. Her bellows turned to shrieks as the smaller woman yanked a straight razor out of her boot and whipped it up in unmistakable warning. The newcomer’s face was obscured by a tangle of bright blond hair; all Ian could really take in was the razor held in an appallingly determined fist.

  “Ladies, please!” Tony tumbled into the hall.

  “Kraut suka said she’d call police on me—” The newcomer was snarling.

  “Big misunderstanding,” Tony said brightly, backing Frau Hummel away and waving the strange woman toward Ian. “If you’ll direct your concerns to my partner here, Fräulein—”