“She certainly is,” Ian said, straight-faced. “We’ll take it.”
Nina scowled. “Why?”
“Can’t I buy my wife a dress?”
“We divorce, remember?”
“Wear the dress to the divorce,” Ian said, and bought it. He couldn’t afford it, but he didn’t care.
Soon after, he and his pseudo-secretary were walking down Summer Street, looking for a cab. The street was wet and shiny; while they were inside, a shower of rain must have passed over in one of those fleeting summer storms so common in Boston. Nina noted the sky with her usual upward glance. “Good flying weather?” Ian asked.
“More rain coming, not good. But clouds for losing Messers, very good.” She smiled. “What it is, is good hunting weather.”
He offered his arm. “So let’s go hunting.”
WHEN HERR KOLB opened his door, Ian knew exactly what he saw, because a good many guilty men had seen the same thing over the past few years: a tall inquisitor in a knife-ironed suit, smiling with no humor whatsoever. Kolb did what most of them did when confronted by that man: took a nervous shuffle sideways as if he already wanted to hide.
Ian liked it when they did that. I like it far too much, he thought.
“Kann ich—can I help?” Kolb was a small man inside a suit that hung badly on thin shoulders; he blinked rapidly. They’d timed it well; he hadn’t even had time to remove his jacket. “Sir?”
Ian let the silence stretch. They had to be nervous before he said a word. Too nervous to ask for identification, too nervous to think about whether he had authority to be here, too nervous to think about what their rights actually were.
“Jurgen Kolb?” he asked at last in his most superior English tone. His father’s voice, the too-loud, too-confident drawl Ian had grown up hearing as a boy. The voice of a man who assumed the world was his oyster because he’d gone to the right schools and mixed with the right people; a man who knew the sun never set on the British Empire, and you had to make the Krauts and Wops and Dagos remember that, by God. “I’m Ian Graham of—” Ian rattled off a meaningless series of acronyms that he counted on Herr Kolb and his spotty English not absorbing and flashed his passport, which had enough seals and stamps to intimidate anyone with a guilty conscience.
Kolb’s hand stretched out for the passport. “May I—”
Ian stared coldly. “I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?”
For a moment it hung in the balance. Kolb could have shut the door in their faces; he could have demanded to see proper credentials. But he folded, stepping back. Ian sauntered in, Nina following with a steely glare as if prepared to ship Kolb to a gulag on the spot. A rented apartment, stifling hot and smelling of cooking oil and rust, furnished with little more than a cot, a table, and an icebox.
“What is this?” Kolb summoned some indignation. “I haf done nothing wrong.”
“We’ll see about that.” Ian took his time, strolling about hands in pockets. A bottle of cheap scotch on the table, a drink already poured. He’d poured a drink as soon as he got home, before even taking off his jacket . . . “I have a few questions for you, Fritz. Do be a good chap and cooperate.”
“My name is not Fritz. Ist Jurgen, Jurgen Kolb—”
“No, it isn’t,” Ian said pleasantly. “You runty little Kraut.”
“Ich verstehe nicht—”
“You verstehe just fine. Show me your identification.”
Kolb slowly dug out his wallet, his passport, his various bits of paper. Ian flipped through, passing everything to Nina, who took notes as though copying down state secrets. “Good fakes,” Ian said, admiring the passport. “Really top-class work.” It was. Either Kolb was the man’s real name, which Ian doubted, or his guess that the McBride shop clerk was some kind of documents expert was looking better and better.
“Ich verstehe nicht,” Kolb repeated, sullen.
Ian dropped into his accented but fluent German, which made Kolb twitch miserably. “Your papers are false. You’re a war criminal. You came to the United States without reporting your crimes in Europe, which imperils your legal status here.”
The man stared at his lap. “No.”
“Yes. You’re helping other war criminals like yourself, probably in the back room of that antiques shop on Newbury and Clarendon.”
Kolb’s eyes flicked to the drink sitting on the table, then back down to his lap. “How’d you get the job, Fritzie?” Ian picked up the glass, swirling the scotch to draw