the formal gardens at Schloss Mirabell, a pretty little palace like a marble wedding cake surrounded by fountains.
“None I could find on public record.”
“Lorelei Vogt.” Ian tasted the name, wondering if it really was the woman they sought. Die Jägerin. She might have lied to the Ziegler girl who carried her letter here; there was no guarantee Gretchen Vogt really was her mother, but . . . “Even if it does turn out to be her birth name, it won’t be much use—she’ll have changed it to flee. Still, I’d like to have a name for her other than the huntress.” Take her down from a mythic villain to just another common sieg-heiling Fräulein.
“Names, they’re powerful,” Nina agreed. “Is why Comrade Stalin doesn’t like being called the Red Tsar.” She stopped to pluck a red begonia from the nearest flower bed, sticking it through her lapel. My wife, the Red Menace, Ian thought with a grin.
“Let me tackle Gretchen Vogt alone,” Tony proposed as they passed out of the gardens. The Vogt house lay across the toffee-colored Salzach River, near the Mozartplatz. “If you and I go in together against die Jägerin’s mother and get the stone wall, that’s it. Let me try the carrot first—if I fail, you come in heavy with the stick.”
“Agreed. You take first crack. The old inheritance trick?”
“How much money can we spare?”
Ian pulled a packet from inside his coat. Tony counted notes, eyebrows rising. It was the whole of Ian’s monthly annuity, including the center’s rent. Ian nodded. “Use it.” He got the racing chill across his nerves he remembered from poker games with fellow war correspondents during Blitz attacks, throwing every shilling on the next hand because the bombs were getting closer and the odds were good the roof was coming down. Throw it all on the line, because this was it.
Don’t be reckless, he warned himself. “If we both fail, and neither carrot nor stick works on Frau Vogt?”
“I cut her thumbs off,” Nina said cheerfully, flicking her straight razor. “Then she talks. Carrot, then stick, then razor. Is simple.”
“You had better be joking, because that is not how this works,” Ian said. “That is not how any of this works.” But Tony was tossing some gibe at Nina in Russian, and she answered with a rude gesture, so Ian lengthened his stride toward their quarry, amused and irritated at the same time. “Let’s go.”
The Lindenplatz was a small square around a statue of some obscure Austrian saint with a sour face, the expected line of lime trees green veiled with new leaves. An old, gracious neighborhood made for the prosperous and the well educated. Families here would attend church in immaculate Sunday hats, summer on the Salzkammergut, and have nothing to do with jazz music. Number twelve was a graceful white house: spacious walled garden, well-tended window boxes spilling pink geraniums. Tony stood on that scrubbed front step, hat in hand as he awaited an answer to his knock. Nina and Ian watched discreetly from the square’s center, blocked from number twelve’s view by the stone-carved saint. “Don’t stare, Nina,” Ian murmured. “Put your arm through mine, and look like a tourist.” He had an old Baedeker guidebook in hand, saved for occasions when he had to loiter without looking suspicious. Austria, Together with Budapest, Prague, Karlsbad, and Marienbad.
“Saint . . .” Nina squinted at the statue’s plaque.
“Liutberga.” From the corner of his eye, Ian saw the door at number twelve opening.
“Tvoyu mat, what kind of name is that?”
“A very holy anchoress, circa 870. What does that mean, ‘tvoyu mat’?”
“‘Fuck your mother.’”
“Bloody hell, the mouth on you—”
“I can’t see, what’s Antochka doing?”
“Someone’s answered the door. Housewife, white apron. He’s going into his speech now . . . What does that mean, ‘Antochka’?”
“From Anton. In Russian, Anton would be nicknamed Antochka, not Tony. I don’t see how you get Tony from Anton.”
“I don’t see how you get Antochka from Anton either,” Ian couldn’t help saying, eyes locked on his partner. “He’s been invited in . . .”
“What now?” Nina whispered.
Ian looked at number twelve’s innocuous door. “We wait.”
“How long?”
“However long it takes.”
“We stand here for hours? You, me, and Liutberga?”
“Chasing war criminals is a great deal of waiting and paperwork. No one will ever make a thrilling film out of it.” Ian turned her away from the statue. “We’ll meander awhile, admire the trees . . .”
“What is meander? I don’t know this meander.”
“Wander, dawdle. Play tourist. If he’s very long inside,