“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