when I was hammering out columns during the war, what did all those words accomplish? Nothing.”
“Hey, I knew plenty of boys in the ranks who lived for your column. Said it was the only one out there besides Ernie Pyle’s that wrote for the dogface with boots on the ground and not the generals in tents.”
Ian shrugged. “If I’d bought it on a bombing run over Berlin when I went out with a Lancaster crew, or got torpedoed on the way back from Egypt, there’d have been a hundred other scribblers to fill my place. People want to read about war. But there’s no war now, and no one wants to hear about war criminals walking free.” Ian made the same gesture at the four walls of the office. “We don’t write headlines now, we make them, one arrest at a time. One grudging drop of newspaper ink at a time. And unlike all those columns I wrote about war, there aren’t too many people queuing up behind us to do this work. What we do here? We accomplish something a good deal more important than anything I ever managed to say with a byline. Because no one wants to hear what we have to say, and someone has to make them listen.”
“So why won’t you write up any of our catches?” Tony had shot back. “More people might listen if they see your byline front and center.”
“I’m done writing instead of doing.” Ian hadn’t written a word since the Nuremberg trials, even though he’d been a journalist since he was nineteen, a lanky boy storming out of his father’s house shouting he was going to damned well work for a living and not spend his life sipping scotch at the club and droning about how the country was going to the dogs. More than fifteen years spent over a typewriter, honing and stropping his prose until it could cut like a razor’s edge, and now Ian didn’t think he’d ever put his name on an article again.
He blinked, realizing how long he’d been woolgathering with the telephone pressed to his ear. “What was that, Fritz?”
“I said, three arrests in a year is something to celebrate,” Fritz Bauer repeated. “Get a drink and a good night’s sleep.”
“I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since the Blitz,” Ian joked, and rang off.
The nightmares that night were particularly bad. Ian dreamed of twisting parachutes tangled in black trees, waking with a muffled shout in the hotel room’s anonymous darkness. “No parachute,” he said, hardly hearing himself over the hammering of his own heart. “No parachute. No parachute.” He walked naked to the window, threw open the shutters to the night air, and lit a cigarette that tasted like a petrol can. He exhaled smoke, leaning against the sill to look out over a dark city. He was thirty-eight, he had chased two wars across half the globe, and he stood till dawn thinking in boundless rage-filled hunger of a woman standing on the shore of Lake Rusalka.
“YOU NEED TO get laid,” Tony advised.
Ian ignored him, typing up a quick report for Bauer on the typewriter he’d carried since running around the desert after Patton’s boys. They were back in Vienna, gray and bleak with its burned-out shell of the state opera house still bearing witness to the war’s passing, but a vast improvement on Cologne, which had been bombed to rubble and was still little more than a building site around a chain of lakes.
Tony balled up a sheet of foolscap and threw it at Ian. “Are you listening to me?”
“No.” Ian flung the ball back. “Chuck that in the bin, we haven’t got a secretary to pick up after you.” The Vienna Refugee Documentation Center on the Mariahilferstrasse didn’t have a lot of things. The war crimes investigation teams Ian had worked with just after the war had called for officers, drivers, interrogators, linguists, pathologists, photographers, typists, legal experts—a team of at least twenty, well appointed, well budgeted. (Not that the teams ever got all those things, but at least they tried.) The center here had only Tony, who acted as driver, interrogator, and linguist, and Ian, who took the mantle of typist, clerk, and very poor photographer. Ian’s annuity from his long-dead father barely covered rent and living expenses. Two men and two desks, and we expect to move mountains, Ian thought wryly.
“You’re brooding again. You always do when we make an arrest. You go off in a Blue Period