The Huntress. Kate Quinn
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help saying. Strategy, or because you really are as good as you seem?
Anneliese bit off a thread, eyes sparkling. “I have no wish to be a wicked stepmother.”
I keep watching you, Jordan thought desperately, and you don’t give me anything to see. Nothing but reasons to like you.
Until the afternoon months later, on Selkie Lake.
April 1950
Vienna
That bitch,” Tony fumed, kicking the legs of their bench on the railway station. “That goddamn Nazi bitch. I know she knew something.”
“Agreed,” Ian said, scanning his newspaper. “I’d be willing to wager she knew quite a lot.”
The morning expedition to 8 Fischerndorf had not gone well. No combination of plausible half-lies, Tony’s charm, or money had pried anything useful from Vera Eichmann née Liebl. She didn’t know any woman with dark hair and a scar on the neck. No such woman had stayed with her after the war. If the neighbors said so, she couldn’t be responsible for what they thought. They were only too eager to make up evil things about a widow struggling to make ends meet. Yes, she considered herself a widow. She had not laid eyes on her husband in five years. She wished to be left alone. The door had then banged in their faces.
Ian hadn’t expected it to go much better, so he remained sanguine, reading while his partner raged. At last Tony stopped pacing and dropped onto the bench. “What I’d have given to drag that woman into her own cellar and beat the truth out of her.”
“You wouldn’t do that, and you know it.”
“Wouldn’t I?” Tony raised an eyebrow. “I don’t have a lot of chivalric feeling for a woman like that. It’s not like trying to understand the compromises little people like the Ziegler sisters might have made to get through the war—Adolf Eichmann’s wife was at the top level. She had to know something about how her husband was shipping Jews east by the million. Believe me, I could bounce her off a wall or two and still sleep well at night if it got us the information we needed.”
“What if it didn’t? Would you start to break bones? Threaten her children? Where does it stop?” Ian folded his newspaper, feeling the spring breeze ruffle his hair. “That’s why we don’t operate that way.”
They’d had this same conversation the first week they worked together, on the trail of a Gauleiter responsible for a number of atrocities in occupied France. After one particularly unproductive interview, Tony had murmured, “Let me drag him into the back alley, I’ll get him talking.”
Ian had with great calm taken his new partner by the collar, applied a half twist that cut off the breath, and lifted him up onto his toes so they stood eye to eye. “Do I have your attention?” he said quietly and waited for Tony’s nod. “Good. Because we do not beat up witnesses. Not now. Not ever. And if you can’t wrap your mind around that, get out now. Am I in any way unclear?” He let Tony go, and the younger man shrugged, eyes wary. “Your call, boss.”
Now, Tony looked at Ian with curiosity in those dark eyes. “I’m not saying we’d ever go at a man’s nails with pliers. There are degrees. When all it would take is a good shaking and a few slaps—”
“Anyone who would spill that easily can be loosened up without violence.”
“It doesn’t always work that way, and you know it. Don’t tell me you’ve never been tempted to make a witness cough up.”
“Of course I’ve been tempted,” Ian said flatly. “I’ve been tempted to degrees you would not believe. But it isn’t just about catching war criminals. How we catch them—that matters.”
“Does it?”
Ian rested his elbows on his knees, looking down the train tracks. “I worked with an American team not long after the war ended,” he said at last. “Investigating cases where German civilians were suspected of murdering downed airmen. The Americans used to detain the local Burgermeister until he coughed up a list of witnesses, then stand the witnesses up against a wall and threaten to shoot them unless they talked. They always talked, we’d get our man, and no witness was ever shot. But I hated it.” Ian looked at his colleague. “There are more war criminals out there than we will ever be able to find. If I have to let go of the ones that won’t get found unless we turn into torturers, I’m at ease with that decision.”
“Will you be at ease with it if you have to let go of die Jägerin?” Tony asked. “What if the woman who killed your brother and nearly killed your wife lies on the other side of beating the shit out of a witness?”
Ian thought in stark honesty, I don’t know.
He breathed away the instinctive flare of defensive anger, saw an approaching plume of smoke, and rose. “Train’s here.” It was a long, silent ride back to Vienna.
“YOU ARE EVICTED,” Frau Hummel greeted them at the door, crimson with rage. “You and that barbarian Hure—”
She continued to shout, but Ian pushed past and threw open the door to the center. “Bloody hell …”
In one day, the office had gone from an orderly oasis to an utter disaster. Files were scattered everywhere in heaps, paper drifted like snow across the desk, and empty cups sat on every surface. The air smelled like scalded tea, and the jam pot was attracting flies. The author of all this anarchy sat in Ian’s chair, bare feet swinging, blond head bent over a file she was leafing with jamsticky fingers.
“No more biscuits,” Nina greeted them without looking up. “Or tea.”
Ian gave his desecrated office another long stare. Tony surveyed the chaos too, eyes dancing. “Nina,” Ian said eventually, waiting until she looked up. “Why are we being evicted, and why are you wearing one of my shirts?”
“Mine is hanging to dry.” She pushed Ian’s cuff up her arm, fanning the file in her hand. “This case, the Schleicher mudak—my reading isn’t so good, but it looks like the wife is lying. Why didn’t you threaten to cut her nose off?”
“Is Frau Hummel really evicting us?”
“She threatened.” Nina tossed the file down, picked up another. “I tell her I cut her nose off.”
“Wonderful.” Ian suppressed the urge to throttle his wife where she sat. “Nina, you were only supposed to take care of the post, answer the telephone—”
“Is boring.” Nina picked up her tea, looked around for a spoon, and stirred it with the end of Ian’s fountain pen instead. “I review your old chases, see how you work. Useful, for when we go after die Jägerin.”
“Useful?” He folded his arms across his chest. “You unleashed chaos in my office, you little savage.”
“Is my office too. Until target’s bombed flat, what’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is mine.” She gulped some tea, then rose and stretched, the hem of Ian’s shirt falling nearly to her knees. “What do you find in Altaussee? Where do we go next?”
“Salzburg.” Ian glared. “Give me my shirt back.”
“Nu, ladno.” She shrugged, began unbuttoning.
“Bloody hell,” he growled again and yanked open the door to the tiny washroom. It smelled of peroxide; evidently she’d used the sink to touch up her hair. An improvised laundry line had been hung with a rinsed-out blouse and a set of silky blue knickers. “Your blouse is dry,” Ian said, ignoring the underwear.
“You’re