was puzzled: the office, with its closed door, would have seemed the perfect place to talk. Who, she wondered, did Mick think might be listening?
“It’s Kriegler,” he said when they were outside. It was completely dark now and the air seemed to have grown even more frigid. Mick’s breath rose before him in great puffs as he spoke. “The case against him isn’t as strong as we’d like it to be,” he admitted finally. “Kriegler hid his tracks remarkably well and the few of his underlings we’ve got in custody have been reluctant to testify against him.” The SD were a tight-knit, disciplined bunch. They would sooner go to the grave than betray their former boss. “We’ve had a dickens of a time getting anything from him. We’ve turned all the screws. Applied pressure. He won’t break.” Kriegler was a master interrogator himself, knew better than anyone how to hold out. Eleanor, in point of fact, had never broken anyone. But she had spent enough time at SOE to know how to tear apart a witness.
Mick continued, “The War Crimes Tribunal thinks the case is too big for us to handle here. They want to transfer it to Nuremberg. But we’re getting a lot of pressure from Third Army headquarters in Munich to keep the case here and get a win for the Dachau trials.”
“I can help,” Eleanor offered, without considering whether she actually could. She leaned in close. She pictured Kriegler’s dossier back in London, the recounting of his cruelty. “You need the background on Kriegler, the lines of questioning, the details for cross-examination. I’ve got it.” Eleanor had watched the moves of Kriegler and the SD bastards unfold from London like a game of chess. While she still didn’t have the answers she was seeking as to how the girls had been betrayed, she knew the crimes of Kriegler and the others all too well. “I can get you documents.” Another bluff; the proof she could offer had all burned along with Norgeby House. And she couldn’t have gotten it for him in a trial not two days away. “I’ll testify for you, sign an affidavit. And you need to get inside his head, figure out what matters most, where his dark places are.”
“Then tell me how.”
She shook her head. “Not until you give me what I need. Ten minutes alone with him.”
“What makes you think he will speak to you?”
“Because I know him,” she said, hearing how ridiculous it sounded.
“You’ve never met him.”
“And the Nazis you’ve hunted across Europe? You never met them either, right? But you knew them, their family histories, their backgrounds, their crimes.” Mick nodded. “That’s Kriegler for me.”
“He’s different. He won’t break.”
“It can’t hurt to try.”
“This is nuts!”
“Most unorthodox,” she agreed. “Do you want the trial or not?” He didn’t answer. “Look, I don’t have time for this. If you aren’t going to give me access, then I’ll be on my way to my next lead.” It was a calculated bluff. Dachau was her last shot. She only prayed he didn’t know this.
“Anyway, it’s impossible to give you access. He’s being transferred to Nuremberg at first light.”
She had made it here just in time, Eleanor realized. She never would have gotten access to Kriegler at Nuremberg. “Then let me talk to him now.”
“Ten minutes,” he relented. “And I get to be present.”
“Fifteen,” she countered. “And you can listen outside the door.”
“Are you always this difficult?”
She ignored the comment. She’d spent the better part of her life being called difficult just for doing what the men did. “He won’t talk if you’re there,” she explained.
He stared at her for one beat and then another. “I don’t see how you can do it,” he said. She held her breath, waiting to be told no, to be turned away as she had been so many times these past months and years. “But I’m out of other options. Not now,” he said slowly. “Turning up in the middle of the night will attract too much attention. We’ll leave at five in the morning. We need to be there before the transport comes to take him to Nuremberg.” She wanted to see Kriegler now. But she nodded, knowing it was better not to push.
Mick led her into another building and down a hall. It had been freshly painted since the war, she could tell, cleaned to make it suitable for the Allied officers to stay, to erase the awful things that had happened here. He opened a door