The Huntress, Page 2

  Jordan wanted to ask how Anneliese had lost her husband, but her father shot her a warning glance. He’d already given clear instructions: “You’re not to ask Mrs. Weber about the war, or her husband. She’s made it quite clear it was a painful time.”

  “But don’t we want to know everything about her?” Much as Jordan wanted her father to have someone special in his life, it still had to be the right someone. “Why is that wrong?”

  “Because people aren’t obliged to drag out their old hurts or dirty laundry just because of your need to know,” he answered. “No one wants to talk about a war after they’ve lived through it, Jordan McBride. So don’t go prying where you’ll be hurting feelings, and no wild stories either.”

  Jordan had flushed then. Wild stories—that was a bad habit going back ten years. When her barely remembered mother had gone into the hospital, seven-year-old Jordan had been packed off to stay with some well-meaning dimwit of an aunt who told her, Your mother’s gone away, and then wouldn’t say where. So Jordan made up a different story every day: She’s gone to get milk. She’s gone to get her hair done. Then when her mother still didn’t come back, more fanciful stories: She’s gone to a ball like Cinderella. She’s gone to California to be a movie star. Until her father came home weeping to say, Your mother’s gone to the angels, and Jordan didn’t understand why his story got to be the real one, so she kept making up her own. “Jordan and her wild stories,” her teacher had joked. “Why does she do it?”

  Jordan could have said, Because no one told me the truth. Because no one told me “She’s sick and you can’t see her because you might catch it” so I made up something better to fill the gap.

  Maybe that was why she’d latched so eagerly onto her first Kodak at age nine. There weren’t gaps in photographs; there wasn’t any need to fill them up with stories. If she had a camera, she didn’t need to tell stories; she could tell the truth.

  Taro lolloped into the dining room, breaking Jordan’s thoughts. For the first time, she saw little Ruth grow animated. “Hund!”

  “English, Ruth,” her mother said, but Ruth was already on the floor holding out shy hands.

  “Hund,” she whispered, stroking Taro’s ears. Jordan’s heart melted completely. “I’m getting a picture,” she said, slipping out of her own chair and going for the Leica on the hall table. When she came back in and started clicking, Ruth had Taro piled over her lap as Anneliese spoke softly. “If Ruth seems very quiet to you, or flinches, or acts odd—well, you should know that in Altaussee before we left Austria, we had a very upsetting encounter by the lake. A refugee woman who tried to rob us . . . It’s made Ruth wary and strange around new people.” That seemed to be all Anneliese was going to say. Jordan stamped down her questions before her dad could shoot her another glance. He was perfectly correct, after all, when he pointed out that Anneliese Weber wasn’t the only person who didn’t care to discuss the war—no one did now. First everyone had celebrated, and now all anyone wanted to do was forget. Jordan found it hard to believe that at this time last year there had still been wartime news and stars hanging in windows; victory gardens and boys at school talking about whether it would all be over before they got old enough to join up.

  Anneliese smiled down at her daughter. “The dog likes you, Ruth.”

  “Her name is Taro,” said Jordan, clicking away: the little girl with her small freckled nose against the dog’s damp one.

  “Taro.” Anneliese tasted the word. “What kind of name is that?”

  “After Gerda Taro—the first female photographer to cover the front lines of a war.”

  “And she died doing it, so that’s enough about women taking pictures in war zones,” Jordan’s father said.

  “Let me get a few shots of you two—”

  “Please don’t.” Anneliese turned her face away with a camera-shy frown. “I hate having my picture taken.”

  “Just family snaps,” Jordan reassured. She liked close-camera candids over formal shots. Tripods and lighting equipment made camera-shy people even more self-conscious; they put a mask on and then the photograph wasn’t real. She preferred to hover unobtrusively until people forgot she was there, until they forgot the mask and relaxed into who they really were. There was no hiding the real you from a camera.

  Anneliese rose to clear the table, Jordan’s father assisting with the heavy dishes as Jordan quietly moved and snapped. Ruth was coaxed away from Taro to carry the butter dish, and Dad was soon describing their hunting cabin. “It’s a lovely spot; my father built it. Jordan likes to snap the lake; I go for the fishing and the odd bit of shooting.”

  Anneliese half turned away from the sink. “You hunt?”

  Jordan’s father looked anxious. “Some women hate the noise and the mess—”

  “Not at all . . .”

  Jordan put down her camera and went to help with the washing up. Anneliese offered to dry, but Jordan turned her down so she’d have the chance to admire Daniel McBride’s deftness with a dish towel. No woman could possibly fail to be charmed by a man who could properly dry Spode.

  Anneliese said good-bye soon after. Jordan’s father gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek, but his arm stole around her waist for just an instant, making Jordan smile. Anneliese then squeezed Jordan’s hand warmly, and Ruth offered her fingers this time, well slimed by Taro’s affectionate tongue. They descended the steep brownstone steps to the cool spring night, and Jordan’s father shut the door. Before he could ask, Jordan came and kissed his cheek. “I like her, Dad. I really do.”

  BUT SHE COULDN’T SLEEP.

  The tall narrow brownstone had a small basement with its own private entrance to the street. Jordan had to walk outside the house and then down the very steep outer stairs to the tiny door set below ground level under the stoop, but the privacy and the lack of light made it perfect for her purposes. When she was fourteen and learning to print her own negatives, her dad had allowed her to sweep out the rubbish and make herself a proper darkroom.

  Jordan paused on the threshold, inhaling the familiar scents of chemicals and equipment. This was her room, much more than the cozy bedroom upstairs with its narrow bed and the desk for homework. This room was where she ceased being Jordan McBride with her messy ponytail and bag of schoolbooks, and became J. Bryde, professional photographer. J. Bryde was going to be her byline someday, when she became a professional like her idols whose faces looked down from the darkroom wall: Margaret Bourke-White kneeling with her camera on a massive decorative eagle’s head sixty-one floors up on the Chrysler Building, impervious to the height; Gerda Taro crouched behind a Spanish soldier against a heap of rubble, peering for the best angle.

  Normally Jordan would have taken a moment to salute her heroines, but something was gnawing at her. She wasn’t sure what, so she just started laying out trays and chemicals with the speed of long practice.

  She loaded the negatives for the pictures she’d taken at dinner, running the images onto the paper one at a time. Sliding them through the developer under the red glow of the safelight, Jordan watched the images come up through the fluid one by one, like ghosts. Ruth playing with the dog; Anneliese Weber turning away from the camera; Anneliese from behind, doing dishes . . . Jordan rotated the sheets through the stop bath, the fixer bath, gently agitating the liquids in their trays, transferring the prints to the little sink for washing, then clipping them up on the clothesline to dry. She walked down the line one by one.

  “What are you looking for?” Jordan wondered aloud. She had a habit of talking to herself down here all alone; she wished she had a fellow photographer to share darkroom conversation with, ideally some smoldering Hungarian war correspondent. She walked the line of prints again. “What caught your eye, J. Bryde?” It wasn’t the first time she’d had this niggling feeling about a shot before it had even been printed. It was like the camera saw something she didn’t, nagging her until she saw it with her own eyes and not just through the lens.

  Half the time, of
course, that feeling was completely off base.

  “That one,” Jordan heard herself saying. The one of Anneliese Weber by the sink, half turned toward the lens. Jordan squinted, but the image was too small. She ran it again, enlarging it. Midnight. She didn’t care, working away until the enlarged print hung on the line.

  Jordan stood back, hands on hips, staring at it. “Objectively,” she said aloud, “that is one of the best shots you’ve ever taken.” The click of the Leica had captured Anneliese as she stood framed by the arch of the kitchen window, half turned toward the camera for once rather than away from it, the contrast between her dark hair and pale face beautifully rendered. But . . .

  “Subjectively,” Jordan continued, “that shot is goddamn spooky.” She didn’t often swear—her father didn’t tolerate bad language—but if there was ever an occasion for a goddamn, this was it.

  It was the expression on the Austrian woman’s face. Jordan had sat across from that face all evening, and she’d seen nothing but pleasant interest and calm dignity, but in the photograph a different woman emerged. She wore a smile, but not a pleasant one. The eyes were narrowed, and her hands around the dish towel suddenly clenched in some reflexive death grip. All evening Anneliese had looked gentle and frail and ladylike, but she didn’t look like that here. Here, she looked lovely and unsettling and—

  “Cruel.” The word popped out of Jordan’s mouth before she knew she was thinking it, and she shook her head. Because anyone could take an unflattering photo: unlucky timing or lighting caught you midblink and you looked sly, caught you with your mouth open and you looked half-witted. Shoot Hedy Lamarr the wrong way, and she turned from Snow White to the Wicked Queen. Cameras didn’t lie, but they could certainly mislead.

  Jordan reached for the clothespins clipping the print, meeting that razor-edged gaze. “What were you saying, right at this minute?” Her father had been talking about the cabin . . .

  You hunt?

  Some women hate the noise and the mess—

  Not at all . . .

  Jordan shook her head again, moving to throw the print away. Her dad wouldn’t like it; he’d think she was twisting the image to see something that wasn’t there. Jordan and her wild stories.

  But I didn’t twist it, Jordan thought. That’s how she looked.

  She hesitated, then slipped the photograph into a drawer. Even if it was misleading, it was still one of the best pictures she’d ever taken. She couldn’t quite bring herself to throw it away.

  Chapter 2

  Ian

  April 1950

  Cologne, Germany

  About half the time, they tried to run.

  For a moment Ian Graham’s partner kept up with him, but though Tony was more than a decade younger than Ian he was half a head shorter, and Ian’s longer stride pulled him ahead toward their quarry: a middle-aged man in a gray suit dodging desperately around a German family heading away from the swimming beach with wet towels. Ian put on a burst of speed, feeling his hat blow away, not bothering to shout at the man to stop. They never stopped. They’d sprint to the end of the earth to get away from the things they’d done.

  The puzzled German family had halted, staring. The mother had an armful of beach toys—a shovel, a red bucket brimming with wet sand. Veering, Ian snatched the bucket out of her hand with a shouted “Pardon me—,” slowed enough to aim, and slung it straight and hard at the running man’s feet. The man stumbled, staggered, lurched back into motion, and by then Tony blew past Ian and took the man down in a flying tackle. Ian skidded to a halt as the two men rolled over, feeling his own chest heave like a bellows. He retrieved the bucket and handed it back to the astonished German mother with a bow and a half smile. “Your servant, ma’am.” Turning back toward the prey, he saw the man curled on the path whimpering as Tony leaned over him.

  “You’d better not have put a fist on him,” Ian warned his partner.

  “The weight of his sins caught up to him, not my fist.” Tony Rodomovsky straightened: twenty-six years old with the olive-skinned, dark-eyed intensity of a European, and the untidy swagger of a Yank. Ian had first come across him after the war, a young sergeant with Polish-Hungarian blood and a Queens upbringing wearing the most carelessly ironed uniform Ian had ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on.

  “Nice curveball with that bucket,” Tony went on cheerfully. “Don’t tell me you pitched for the Yankees.”

  “Bowled against Eton in the house match in ’29.” Ian retrieved his battered fedora, cramming it down over dark hair that had been salted with gray since Omaha Beach. “You have it from here?”

  Tony looked at the man on the ground. “What do you say, sir? Shall we continue the conversation we were having before I brought up a certain forest in Estonia and your various activities there, and you decided to practice your fifty-yard dash?”

  The man began to cry, and Ian looked at the blue sparkle of the lake, fighting his usual sense of anticlimax. The man dissolving in tears on the ground had been an SS Sturmbannführer in Einsatzgruppe D, who had ordered the shooting of a hundred and fifty men in Estonia in 1941. More than that, Ian thought. Those eastern death squads had put hundreds of thousands in the ground in shallow trenches. But one hundred and fifty was what he had the documentation for in his office back in Vienna: testimony from a shaky-handed, gray-faced pair of survivors who had managed to flee. One hundred and fifty was enough to bring the man to trial, perhaps put a rope around a monster’s neck.

  Moments like this should have been glorious, and they never were. The monsters always looked so ordinary and pathetic, in the flesh.

  “I didn’t do it,” the man gulped through his tears. “Those things you said I did.”

  Ian just looked at him.

  “I only did what the others did. What I was ordered to do. It was legal—”

  Ian took a knee beside the man, raising his chin with one finger. Waited until those red-rimmed eyes met his own. “I have no interest in your orders,” he said quietly. “I have no interest if it was legal at the time. I have no interest in your excuses. You’re a cringing soulless trigger-pulling lackey, and I will see you face a judge.”

  The man flinched. Ian rose and turned away, swallowing the rage red and raw before it burst out of him and he beat the man to a pulp. It was always the damned line about orders that made him want to tear throats open. They all say it, don’t they? That was when he wanted to sink his hands around their throats and stare into their bewildered eyes as they died choking on their excuses.

  Judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason . . . Ian let out a slow, controlled breath. But not me. Control was what separated men from beasts, and they were the beasts.

  “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.