head nodding, Frau Vogt in three-quarter view: an apple-cheeked doll of a woman in her starched apron. Ian held his breath and eased the casement open a crack.
“. . . this business matter on my daughter’s behalf, Herr Krauss. How well did you know her?”
Krauss? Nina mouthed. Ian mouthed back, His favorite alias. Krauss sounded so solidly German, turning Tony from an Eastern European undesirable to a good clean-cut Aryan boy—a role embraced with savage irony by Ian’s Jewish partner.
“I confess I didn’t know your daughter well, gnädige Frau,” Tony confessed with earnest deprecation. “We met only a few times. Do you know where she’s settled now?”
“No.” A hint of sharpness from Frau Vogt. “She thought it best not to come back to Salzburg; it would bring gossip. There was such talk when the Americans came through making arrests and accusations.” Pause. Ian held his breath.
Frau Vogt went on. “I received a letter from her after the war, hand delivered. She wrote that it would be better for me if she stayed away.”
Ian wanted to shout, dance, punch the air in triumph. The Ziegler girl had been paid to deliver that letter by one Lorelei Vogt. We have a name. We have a name—
Tony: “Did your daughter tell you where she was going?”
“She said she didn’t want me to have to lie, if people asked questions. Naturally a mother misses her only child, but it was still most considerate of her. There has never been any talk about me, and for that I’m very grateful. I’m just a simple widow, living quietly. The war had nothing to do with me. My daughter made sure it stayed that way.”
Disappointing. Ian leaned one elbow up against the window frame, keeping well out of sight, listening to Tony tack a new course.
“You know, your daughter and I talked of books once, at one of her parties in Posen? I think she sensed a young soldier like me was a long way from home, so she tried to put me at ease. She spoke such beautiful English—”
“Yes, she was always clever!” Frau Vogt’s stiffness eased. “She studied literature at Heidelberg, her father insisted on an education for her . . .”
“Why isn’t he pushing?” Nina whispered. “Where’s the bribe?”
“She was getting defensive. He’s smoothing her down, letting her ramble.”
“This is carrot method? It takes too long.” Nina padded down the hall, disappearing into the first bedroom where Ian heard the sound of drawers sliding. Below, Tony was talking of university between bites of Frau Vogt’s cake.
“. . . my dream to continue my studies, but the war . . . It was right from the HJ to the army for me, and then Poland.” Tony hit just the right note of tacit awkwardness, his face anxious under the untidy hair he’d razor-parted and oiled back like a proper lad who’d grown up in the Hitler Youth. It wasn’t the first time he’d presented himself as a former soldier for the Reich. It took more than a German name and details about a regiment. It was all in the things one didn’t say, Ian thought. The veiled phrases that said You know it wasn’t my fault, don’t you? “You understand, of course,” Tony said, all schoolboy earnestness. “The war didn’t have anything to do with me either, not really. I just did my duty, I was very young.”
“Those were difficult times,” Frau Vogt said with the same tacit note in her voice. “People forget that now. Another piece of cake?”
“If you’ll join me in an aperitif. Just a dash of brandy for your coffee—” Tony produced the flask he always carried to lubricate such interviews.
“Oh, I shouldn’t . . .”
“Of course you should, Frau Vogt!” Tony scolded, and die Jägerin’s mother let him add a generous splash to her cup. He began admiring her china as she cut him a second slab, and he dug in with the kind of schoolboy enthusiasm that had made mothers all across Europe pinch his cheek fondly. Ian sensed Nina’s soundless snort at his shoulder.
“He lies better than a Muscovite fishmonger,” she whispered. “Help me look in her room now—”
“I may have broken into this house, but I will not ransack a stranger’s bedroom.”
“Just stand by while I do it,” Nina said, amused. “You’re a hypocrite, luchik.”
Ian slanted an eyebrow. “I will cling nevertheless to my shreds of the moral high ground.”
“Shreds are on the ground at your feet.”
“Noted.”
Frau Vogt was chattering freely below. Ian was willing to bet