The Huntress. Kate Quinn
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There’s no one person to find and accuse. All I can do is go after all of them, the thousands who staffed the machine, and there’s no such thing as catching all the bastards.” Tony smiled faintly. “But you, you’re lucky. You know exactly who killed your brother. One person. And we have a lead where she is.”
“You’re right,” Ian said. “That is lucky.”
They fell into silence until the cab pulled up before the train station. A busy throng crowded the steps: Austrian businessmen in homburgs, mothers towing children in dirndls and lederhosen. And us, Ian thought, on the trail of a murderess. As much as he tried to avoid undue optimism, he was suddenly, absolutely certain. They were going to find her. Sebastian might be gone, but his story would be told within the passionless confines of a courtroom—his story, and the story of the children die Jägerin had murdered before she ever crossed Seb’s path.
The world will know your name, Ian told her, going with lighter feet toward the first bread crumb Fate had thrown his way. And that is a promise.
THEY WERE TO meet Helga Ziegler and her sister on the southern shore of Lake Altaussee at noon. “Play the quasi-police angle,” Tony said as they strolled the path, snow-capped mountains towering behind. “I’ve flirted with Helga and she likes me, but her sister might be more wary. It’ll come across better if they think we’re looking for witnesses to question, not war criminals to put in handcuffs. Austrians get so cagey if they think they’re suspected as former Nazis—”
“Which none of them ever were, of course,” Ian said dryly.
“If that’s their line, we take it without batting an eye.”
“I have done this before, you know.” Many times, in fact. “Usual roles, Tony. You be charming, I’ll be imposing.”
“Right.” Tony looked Ian over from the gray overcoat stirring at his knees to the wintry frown he always adopted for these moments. “You’re so obviously an upstanding Brit on the side of the righteous, no one would dream of asking to see your credentials.”
Ian slanted his hat at a more severe angle. “If they get the impression we’re allied with the police, I shan’t correct the notion.” They’d played that card before many times, given the legal no-man’s-land the center occupied: an independent service allied with no nations, given no government authority. Ian had connections inside police, law, and bureaucracy, but there was no legal way to force any witness to cooperate with the center’s questioning. And not being flush with cash, he thought with a wry smile, we can’t exactly offer enormous rewards to loosen tongues either.
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