The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  They reached the appointed bench on the south shore, overlooking the flat sparkling expanse of lake. Tony pointed. “There they are.”

  Two women approached along the path. As they drew closer Ian saw the family resemblance: both blond and rosy, the younger in a pink dirndl and white blouse with a sparkle in her eye as she caught sight of Tony, the other taller and cooler in a green spring coat. She led a little boy by the hand, perhaps two years old, trundling along sturdily in short pants. Ian bowed as Tony made introductions with a few semi-misleading words about the center. Ian maintained an authoritative frown, flipping his wallet to show a meaningless bit of English identification that nevertheless looked tremendously official. “Grüss Gott, ladies.”

  “This is my sister,” answered Helga, hand already looped through Tony’s arm. “Klara Gruber.”

  The older woman met Ian’s gaze. “What is it you wish to know, Herr Graham?”

  Ian took a deep breath, seeing Tony’s tiny nod at the corner of his eye. “May 1945. You worked as a maid for the family living at number three Fischerndorf?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you notice the family living at number eight?”

  “Hard to avoid noticing them,” Klara Gruber said tartly. “Americans tramping in and out.”

  Ian said what she was avoiding. “Making arrests?”

  A nod as she smoothed her son’s hair.

  “After the arrests were done?”

  “Most of the women went elsewhere, but Frau Liebl and her sons stayed on.”

  “You mean Frau Eichmann,” Ian said quietly. Wife to Adolf Eichmann—he and an entire cabal of Nazi leadership had fled here in the chaos after Hitler’s suicide. Among them, die Jägerin’s SS lover, Manfred von Altenbach, who had died resisting arrest. Some of his companions had submitted to handcuffs; some like Eichmann had managed to flee uncaught . . . But however the men ended up, they’d left a number of wives and girlfriends behind.

  “Frau Liebl,” Klara corrected. “She took her birth name back, after the war. So there wouldn’t be talk.”

  “Is Frau Liebl still there?” Tony asked, tone casual.

  “Yes.” Helga shrugged. “Now that I have taken over Klara’s job at number three, I see her sons running up and down every afternoon, playing.”

  “And their father?” Ian couldn’t resist asking. Adolf Eichmann was a far, far bigger fish than those the center had the resources to chase, but if something could be learned here, perhaps in the future . . .

  Head shakes from the two sisters. “You’re not looking to bother Frau Liebl, are you? It all happened years ago.”

  A familiar flare of anger warmed Ian’s chest. The excuses people were willing to make, the things they were willing to forget, all for the sake of it happened years ago. “I have no intention of bothering Frau Liebl,” he said lightly, smiling. “It’s someone else who interests me. I know that in ’45, a group of women came to stay at number eight. One was blue eyed, dark haired, small, in her twenties. She had a scar on the back of her neck, reddened, fairly recent.”

  His heart pounded, and Ian thought what a slender thread this really was. How many women of that description did the world hold? Who could guarantee a scar would ever be seen?

  “I remember her,” Klara said. “I only talked with her once, but I noticed the scar. A pink line across the back of her neck, trailing under her collar.”

  “What was her name?” Ian’s mouth had gone dry. Beside him he felt Tony coiled taut as wire.

  “Frau Becker, she called herself.” A little smile. “Not her real name, we all knew that.”

  Ian couldn’t keep the sharpness out of his voice. “You never asked?”

  “One didn’t.” She pulled her son closer, smoothing his collar. “Not during the war.”

  No name. Ian swallowed bitter disappointment, hearing Tony press on.

  “Anything else you can tell us about her, gnädige Frau.” He made a discreet gesture of reaching for his wallet. “It’s important that we locate this woman. We would be very grateful.”

  Klara Gruber hesitated, eyeing the notes Tony had conjured. The center might not have the cash for large rewards, but Ian was perfectly willing to give up the week’s supper budget to grease a few wheels. She nodded, whisking the money away as if it had never been there at all. “Frau Becker stayed at the Liebl household a few months after—well, everything.” A vague gesture Ian took to mean the arrests, the Americans, the end of the war. The unpleasantness they could all pretend had not happened. “She kept to herself. I’d see her in the garden sometimes, on my way to market. I’d say hello, she’d smile.” Pause. “I don’t think Frau Liebl liked her.”

  “Why?”

  A very female shrug. “Two women in one house, wartime shortages having to be shared. Everybody staring at them, knowing who their men were. I think Frau Liebl asked her to leave—she left Altaussee in the fall of ’45. September, maybe.”

  The bitter taste came back to Ian’s mouth. “Do you know where she went?”

  “No.”

  He hadn’t really thought she would.

  “But Frau Becker asked me something, the day she left.” Klara Gruber hoisted her fussing son to one hip. “She called me over to the yard at number eight as I came back from the market. She must have noticed me going by at the same time every morning, because she was waiting for me.”

  “What did she ask?”

  “To deliver a letter for her in a few days. I asked why didn’t she post it before she left, and she said she was leaving Austria, almost immediately.” A pause. “That’s why I think she and Frau Liebl didn’t like each other. If they had, she wouldn’t have given her letter to a maid down the street.”

  “A letter to whom?” Ian’s heart thudded all over again; Tony had turned back into a stretched-taut wire.

  “Her mother in Salzburg. Frau Becker said she’d pay me to deliver it myself, not put it in the post. She didn’t trust the post.” A shrug. “I needed the money. I took Frau Becker’s letter, went to the address in Salzburg the week after she’d gone, put it under the door, and didn’t think about it again.”

  “You didn’t actually see her mother? Was there a name on the envelope, or—”

  “No name. I was told to put it under the door, not knock.” A hesitation. “She was being very careful, I suppose. But everyone was, Herr Graham.”

  Helga chimed in, defensive. “You don’t know what it was like here in ’45. Everyone looking for visas, papers, food. Everyone kept their business to themselves.”

  Because none of you wanted to know anything, Ian thought. That kind of thinking had made it quite easy for die Jägerin to cover her tracks.

  Without hope, he asked, “I don’t suppose you remember the address.” Who would remember a strange address visited once five years ago?

  “Number twelve, the Lindenplatz,” Klara Gruber said.

  Ian stared, could feel Tony staring. “How . . . ?”

  She gave the first real smile of the interview. “When I came back into the square in front of the house, a young man on a bicycle knocked me down. He apologized and introduced himself—his name was Wolfgang Gruber. Four months later he took me back to that same spot when he proposed. That’s how I remember the address.”

  Bloody hell, Ian thought. They had just got very, very lucky.

  “Ladies,” Tony said with a warm smile, pressing a few more notes on them, “you’ve been more helpful than you can possibly know.” Helga blushed, but her older sister looked apprehensive.

  “Are you going to make trouble for Frau Becker?” Now you ask, Ian thought, after you pocket our cash. “She couldn’t have done anything wrong. Such a nice woman—”

  “It’s an inquiry related to someone else entirely,” Tony said, his standard soothing reply when hearing the inevitable He couldn’t have hurt a flea objection. But Ian looked down at Klara Gruber a long moment and asked, “What makes you so sure she was a nice woman?”

  “Well, you kn
ow. She had a pretty way of speaking. She was a lady. And it’s not a woman’s fault, if her husband got involved with all that.”

  “Involved with what?” Ian said. “The Nazi Party?”

  The sisters both squirmed. No one had said that word yet. He could feel Tony giving him a quelling look.

  “No one in our family were party members,” Helga said quickly. “We didn’t know anyone like that.”

  “Of course not,” Tony said with a smile of melting sincerity.

  “Of course not,” Ian echoed, stretching a hand toward Klara Gruber’s young son. He gurgled, reaching out, and Ian felt the baby fingers curl warmly round his thumb. “He’s a nice little chap, your boy. Frau Becker killed one not much older than him. Bullet to the back of the head. He was probably a nice little chap too.”

  The two women stared, no longer quite so rosy. Helga put a hand to her mouth. Klara pulled her child back, and Ian saw the flash in her eyes he’d seen many times before—a kind of sullen, stubborn anger. Why did you make me know that? her eyes asked. I didn’t want to know that.

  He smiled, tipping his hat. “Thank you again, ladies.”

  “YOU CAN BE a real bastard sometimes,” Tony said conversationally.

  Ian shrugged. “Their eyes are a little more open now.”

  They were walking back to the hotel where they’d taken rooms for the night. Ian would have headed for Salzburg at once, but Tony wanted to question Frau Liebl in the morning. Ian thought Adolf Eichmann’s deserted wife would be far warier than a couple of former maidservants about talking to strange men, but Tony was right; they couldn’t leave it unexplored. “I’ll buy supper,” he said, since Tony still looked disapproving.

  “No, I’ve got to take Helga Ziegler out tonight, show her a good time. And she’s in a sulk thanks to you, so it’s going to take all my very considerable charm.”

  “Why take her out?”

  “Spend weeks buttering up a girl only to drop her as soon as you have the information you need, and girls tend to feel used.”

  “That’s because she was used, Tony. She was also paid.”

  “Still, no one likes to be fobbed off the minute they’re not useful. And she’s not a bad sort. Her sister isn’t either.” Pause. “They aren’t wrong, you know. Things were complicated during the war. Survival in occupied territories is never as black and white as you might think.”

  “Did they give aid to the resistance? Shelter refugees? Pass information to the Allies? Do anything to combat what was happening around them?” Ian paused. “If the answer is no, then as far as I’m concerned they have a measure of guilt. I’ll be damned if I pretend otherwise.”

  “We don’t know what they might have done to help. We can’t assume.”

  “From the pattern of their squirming, we can assume quite a bit.”

  Tony snapped a mocking salute. “How pretty that worldview of yours must look, no shades of gray mucking anything up.”

  “You lost whole branches of your family, in large part because so many people—people like the Ziegler sisters—were willing to bury their heads in the sand,” Ian shot back. “I find it hard to see shades of gray in that.”

  “Don’t be such a hanging judge. We’re standing in the ashes of a war like no other—if we don’t try harder to see the shades of gray involved, we’ll find ourselves in the thick of a new one.”

  “Call me a hanging judge if you like. I witnessed the hangings after Nuremberg and slept easy that night.”

  “You haven’t slept too well since then, have you?” Tony parried.

  “No, but it’s got nothing to do with seeing right and wrong as matters of black and white,” Ian said, getting off the last shot as they parted ways. He watched over his shoulder as Tony shook his head and strolled off, hands in pockets. They had their differences in opinion, Ian and his partner, but so far it hadn’t prevented them working together. He wondered if it ever would.

  Ian didn’t go back to the hotel. He meandered until he stood across the street from 8 Fischerndorf. Five years ago, might he have seen die Jägerin standing on the doorstep? With an envelope in her hand, perhaps, waiting for the maid down the street to pass by?

  I may not have your name, Ian thought to that long-gone figure, but I have your mother’s address in Salzburg. And if you sent your mother a letter before leaving Austria, surely you told her where you were going. He’d caught more than one war criminal that way over the past few years—most found it difficult to cut ties with their families.

  There was a little boy in the house’s front yard, playing with pebbles. One of Adolf Eichmann’s sons, perhaps ten years old. Seb had been a few years older when he went off to Harrow, skinny and nervous. It had fallen to Ian to take Seb and his trunk to the station; their father needed the world to know My sons go to Harrow, chips off the old block! but details like train schedules didn’t interest him. “School is hell, but it’s manageable,” Ian had told Seb frankly. “Punch anyone who gives you guff, just like I showed you. And if the bigger boys have a go, I’ll make a special trip just to drag them out behind the cricket pitch and give them a pasting.”

  “You can’t beat up everybody who comes at me,” Seb said forlornly.

  “Yes, I can. Promise you’ll write?” And Seb did write. Long screeds about bird-watching and eventually a passion for Pushkin chased Ian to Spain as he tramped after the International Brigade, scolding him to be more careful when an air raid near Málaga took the hearing from Ian’s left ear for a week. Seb’s letters had followed him to Paris afterward when he was writing articles about the coming conference in Munich, and a year later there had been the fortnight they spent together after their father died in a road accident. Sixteen-year-old Seb had got drunk for the first time, and Ian had to pour him into bed . . . then came the day not six months later when Seb turned up on Ian’s doorstep in London, where he was writing about German U-boats sinking a British destroyer near Orkney, and said that he’d run away from school and enlisted.

  “You idiot,” Ian had shouted.

  “Just because you can’t fight doesn’t mean I can’t,” Seb flared. Ian’s hearing on the left side had mostly come back after Málaga, but not quite up to enlistment standards. Seb saw the look on Ian’s face and muttered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” The only quarrel that had ever erupted between them, over before it began.

  “You’re still an idiot for enlisting,” Ian had retorted. “All your bird-watching left you bird-witted.”

  He wondered now if his little brother had looked for birds in the sky that May morning when he was captured, a few months later. If he’d wished for wings when his battalion was forced, outgunned and ill-equipped, to surrender on the Doullens–Arras road. Realizing, as he became a prisoner, that his war was over almost before it had begun—that he would sit out the rest of the fight in a cage, like any captive bird.

  But you still fought, Ian thought. Sebastian Vincent Graham had escaped his stalag, had tried to escape occupied Poland, and he’d died doing it—died at die Jägerin’s hands. And you made her pay.

  Seb had been the one to give her the scar on her neck.

  So Nina had said, anyway, in her almost incomprehensible combination of broken English and hand gestures. Ian wasn’t sure how she and Seb had met, how they’d stumbled across the huntress’s ocher-walled house at Lake Rusalka—Nina couldn’t explain it clearly—but there had been a struggle; there had been shots; there had been a blade. Seb had put up a heroic fight so Nina could get away.

  If she told me the truth, Ian thought as he turned away from the Eichmann house.

  “Let’s have that talk now, Nina,” he said aloud to the twilight.

  Chapter 9

  Nina

  June 1941

  Irkutsk, Siberia

  When war came to the Soviet Union, Nina was putting a Polikarpov U-2 through its paces, riding a cloud-scented breeze high over Irkutsk. Not that a U-2 had many paces—a dual-cockpit biplane open to the sky, crafted of li
nen over wood, cruising along at a pace so sedate that newer, faster planes would have stalled trying to match speed. But the old bird was maneuverable; she could turn on a razor edge without cutting herself. Nina had been happy to take her up for a solo spin to check for the mechanics if the controls needed adjustment.

  It had been in a U-2 that Nina took her first flight shortly after joining the air club. That liquid excitement when the instructor allowed her to take the stick and make her first gentle, banking turn; the plane’s answering wobble as though aware of the uncertain new hands that guided it . . . She was four years past that first awkward turn now, an impressive number of flying hours under her belt, and she sent the U-2 looping and rolling among the clouds. The sky was Nina’s lake. She’d felt that on her first flight as she dove into the air like a green-haired rusalka diving into a lake. Diving not down but up, with a feeling of I am home. She had cried on that first flight, tears fogging her flight goggles.

  It hadn’t been easy, getting in the air. “It’s going to take more than that, girl,” the air club’s director had sniffed when Nina pushed her application and birth record across his desk. “You’ll need a medical certificate, education certificate, references from the Komsomol, and only then can you even submit to the credentials committee for consideration. Do you know anyone in Irkutsk?”

  “No.” Nina had no one who could pull strings for the paperwork and approvals she needed, but luckily, the head of the local Komsomol had taken a liking to her. “Here you see the epitome of proletarian spirit,” he proclaimed after one look at Nina’s hardscrabble background. “A girl who in tsarist days would have spilled the blood of her life in the field, now seeking the skies! The glorification of the state lies in the ability of its laborers to rise—” There had been a great many more slogans after that, and Nina was allowed to apply for the Komsomol with all its interviews and political literacy exams. She didn’t know much about political history, but she knew to nod fervently whenever anyone asked if she wished to exalt the Motherland by participating in the recent aviation drive to match the aeronautics of the decadent West, and alongside that, she had impeccable peasant lineage. The first time my father ever did me a favor, Nina reflected. If he’d been a prosperous kulak or highbrow intelligentsia rather than a Siberian peasant with barely a kopeck to his name, the Komsomol would have turned up their nose. But an untutored peasant with ambition was looked on with enough approval for a membership card, and with that, a good many doors opened. Komsomol girls were sought after, presumed to be aspiring Communist Party members. Nina didn’t care about policy or Party politics as long as she could get in the air.