“Sit on him until the arrest,” he told Tony tersely, and he went back to their hotel to make a telephone call.
“Bauer,” a voice rasped.
Ian crooked the receiver to his right ear, the one that wasn’t faintly hearing-damaged from an unlucky air raid in Spain in ’37, and switched to German, which he knew still had a wintry British tang despite all his years abroad. “We got him.”
“Heh. I’ll start putting pressure on the state prosecutor in Bonn, push to put the Hurensohn on trial.”
“Put that prosecutor’s feet to the fire, Fritz. I want this son of a bitch in front of the hardest judge in Bonn.”
Fritz Bauer grunted. Ian envisioned his friend, sitting behind his desk in Braunschweig, puffs of gray hair around his balding head, smoking his perpetual cigarettes. He’d run from Germany to Denmark to Sweden during the war, steps ahead of having a yellow star slapped on his arm and being shipped east. He and Ian had met after the first of the Nuremberg trials—and a few years ago, when the official war crimes investigation teams were being shut down for lack of funding, and Ian had started his own operation with Tony, he’d turned to Bauer. “We find the guilty,” Ian proposed over a tumbler of scotch and half a pack of cigarettes, “and you see them prosecuted.”
“We won’t make friends,” Bauer had warned with a mirthless smile, and he was right. The man they’d caught today might see a prison cell for his crimes, he might get off with a slap, or he might never be tried at all. It was five years after the end of the war, and the world had moved on. Who cared anymore about punishing the guilty? “Let them alone,” a judge had advised Ian not long ago. “The Nazis are beaten and done. Worry about the Russkies now, not the Germans.”
“You worry about the next war,” Ian had replied evenly. “Someone has to sweep up the muck of the last one.”
“Who’s next on your list?” Bauer asked now over the telephone.
Die Jägerin, Ian thought. The huntress. But there were no leads to her whereabouts, not for years. “There’s a Sobibór guard I’m tracing. I’ll update his file when I get back to Vienna.”
“Your center is getting a reputation. Third arrest this year—”
“None of them big fish.” Eichmann, Mengele, Stangl—the bigger names were far beyond Ian’s limited reach, but that didn’t bother him much. He couldn’t put pressure on foreign governments, couldn’t fight massive deportation battles, but what he could do was search for the lesser war criminals gone to ground in Europe. And there were so many of them, clerks and camp guards and functionaries who had played their part in the great machine of death during the war. They couldn’t all be tried at Nuremberg; there hadn’t been the manpower, the money, or even the interest in anything so huge in scale. So a few were put on trial—however many would fit on the bench, in some cases, which Ian found starkly, darkly ironic—and the rest just went home. Returned to their families after the war, hung up their uniforms, perhaps took a new name or moved to a new town if they were cautious . . . but still just went back to Germany and pretended it had all never happened.
People asked Ian sometimes why he’d left the gritty glamour of a war correspondent’s work for this dogged, tedious slog after war criminals. A life spent chasing the next battle and the next story wherever it led, from Franco’s rise in Spain to the fall of the Maginot Line to everything that followed—hammering out a column on deadline while hunched under a tarp that barely kept off the beating desert sun, playing poker in a bombed-out hotel waiting for transport to arrive, sitting up to his shins in seawater and vomit as a landing craft crammed with green-faced soldiers neared a stretch of beach . . . Terror to tedium, tedium to terror, forever vibrating between both for the sake of a byline.
He’d traded all that for a tiny office in Vienna piled with lists; for endless interviews with cagey witnesses and grieving refugees; for no byline at all. “Why?” Tony had asked soon after they began working together, gesturing around the four walls of their grim office. “Why go to this, from that?”
Ian had given a brief, slanted smile. “Because it’s the same work, really. Telling the world that terrible things happened. But