never write again, that war had used up all his words. Now, sitting in a deck chair outside the locked third-class cabin where Lorelei Vogt would wait out the Atlantic crossing, he wrote the story of the capture, the story begun in Boston on Jordan’s typewriter. Finishing it longhand on a notepad, he hammered it into shape: the article he was determined would make die Jägerin famous.
Lake Rusalka: a lake in Poland named for a creature of the night, and during the darkest years of the war, a woman lived on her shores far more fearful than any witch who crawled from a lake’s depths.
That was his lede, and in the paragraphs that followed Ian vivisected the woman born as Lorelei Vogt, reborn in murder as Anneliese Weber, rechristened in deception as Anna McBride, and identified by nature—primitive, primal nature red in tooth and claw—as a huntress. He knew every pulse point to push in those paragraphs, every emotional trigger to pull. Women would cry at this article; men would shake their heads; newspaper editors would see banknotes. Ian looked down at his final copy and thought, Dynamite in ink.
It felt good, not to be done with words, after all.
The ship stopped in New York before starting across the Atlantic. Ian took the chance to wire the story to Tony, told him to pitch it to every major newspaper in Boston, and promptly wrote a follow-up memorializing his brother and the Jewish children and poor Daniel McBride. Ian barely slept and neither did Nina, one or the other of them on continuous watch outside Lorelei Vogt’s door.
Not until the very end, after they’d left the ship behind in Cannes and boarded a series of trains that would take them to Vienna, did the huntress speak to him. Ian had been too tense for conversation or scribbling once they left the security of the ship, far too aware Lorelei Vogt could make a panicked run the moment his attention lapsed—but she passed through the train travel passive and silent as a wax doll. On the final train to Vienna, hearing the wheels slow beneath them, she looked at Ian suddenly as if realizing this limbo time of traveling was coming to an end. “I still don’t know who you are, Mr. Graham.”
Ian raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t know you, so why did you come looking for me?” She sounded so puzzled. “You crossed half a world to catch me. What did I do to you?”
How many times had he envisioned sitting down with this woman and telling her in biting words what she’d taken from him? Telling her about a little brother who dreamed of flight and did not know what distrust was. How he’d yearned to do that. Yearned for something else too—for any memories she might have of Seb, the way he looked bolting his stew when she took him inside her ocher-walled house, the things they had talked about in her warm kitchen. The last look on his face before she shot him . . .
But Nina had recounted with quiet poignancy what the last look on Seb’s face had been, had sketched him in the end as he stood in the moonlight warm and well fed, looking at the sky and never dreaming he was about to die. I won’t replace that memory with whatever poisoned image you might have, Ian thought, looking at die Jägerin’s puzzled blue eyes. I want to remember my brother through Nina’s eyes, not yours. The eyes of a woman who saw a friend, not a murderer who saw prey.
So Ian just gave a smile like his wife’s razor. “You’ll find out at the trial,” he said. “If I am called to testify.”
“You should have let me die,” the huntress answered, low voiced. “You should have let me shoot myself.”
“You don’t get to die,” Ian said. “I am not that merciful.”
Lorelei Vogt bowed her head. It stayed bowed through the commotion and paperwork that greeted their arrival in Austria. Fritz Bauer came from Braunschweig in a whirl of suits and uniforms to witness the arrest. Bauer’s greeting had been a fierce smile around his ever-present cigarette, but Ian hadn’t been surprised to see the blend of curiosity and resentment their colleagues aimed at them.
“Sour faces,” Nina commented, puzzled.
“No one wants to arrest Nazis anymore,” Bauer said, not caring a jot for the glares. “Sweep it all under the rug, live and let live. Your girl may not get more than a few years