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“Hardly.” Gerlich walked over to the bars of the cell. “They found our bag at the flat.”

“They did?” Helldorff drew back. “But… how?”

“I must have been followed,” said Gerlich.

“You weren’t followed.” Bauer pushed himself off the bench and joined Gerlich at the bars. “I know how they did it.” Bauer waved Helldorff closer.

Helldorff leaned in. Bauer shot his hands through the cell bars and gripped his shirt, the boy’s face slamming against the bars. “I think you know, too, Peter.”

“Let go of me!” he cried.

“Bauer, what are you doing?” Gerlich tried to intervene, but Bauer wouldn’t budge.

“What did they promise you?” Bauer hissed. “A promotion? Money?”

“You’ve got this all wrong!” Gerlich shouted.

“Are you even Jewish, Helldorff? Or was that a lie, too?”

Bauer released the kriminalassistent with a shove. Helldorff stood for a moment, stunned, then straightened his shirt, fixed his hair, touched his nose, and checked his finger for blood. He wouldn’t make eye contact with either Bauer or Gerlich. The silence hung heavy between them.

Finally, Helldorff’s chin dropped. “That’s the first time you ever called me by my real name,” he said quietly.

“Peter, tell Bauer he’s wrong,” said Gerlich, his anxiety clearly growing.

But Helldorff remained silent. A sheen appeared in his eyes, his face reddening. He cleared his throat, readying to speak, but kept his eyes down. “It wasn’t what they promised me if I cooperated but… what would happen if I didn’t. I’ve just become a cop. It’s all I ever wanted to be. I didn’t want it to end before it even began—”

“You have no idea what you’ve done, kid. You have no idea how you’ve hurt your country. Get out of my sight.” Bauer turned his back on Helldorff. Fritz Gerlich was still too stunned to speak. Bauer walked to the back of the cell and placed his head against the wall.

“Maybe you’re right, Fritz,” he said. “Maybe it is over.”

48

Present Day

Vienna

“ELEANOR, LISTEN TO ME. You have to stop this research business before you get yourself killed.”

“Come on now, Ty,” I say into my phone to my brother Tyson. “Nobody cares that much about a fifty-eight-year-old history professor on sabbatical.” Almost by instinct, by self-deprecation if not outright denial, I brush aside Ty’s concerns, though I can’t deny having the same thoughts.

“Your purse was stolen,” Tyson says. “Your hotel room was ransacked, and your computer was swiped. Not to mention that awful white supremacist Heil Hitler graffiti was spray-painted on your wall. Who’s to say you won’t be hurt next?”

“I’m being careful,” I say, which is true—if by careful I meant following the instructions given to me in Munich. I’d been told to take a certain route to the train station; to purchase a ticket to Vienna on my credit card but actually travel via an earlier Railjet train ticket bought in cash; to not communicate with anyone via email or text about my comings and goings. Oh, and to purchase a burner phone, which is what I’m using to talk to my brother right now.

All the cloak-and-dagger is exhausting. But it will all be worth it if the man I’m going to meet here in Vienna, Francis Linderman’s grandfather, can deliver to me the contents of Adolf Hitler’s safe.

“Are you trying to prove something, El? It seems like you are.”

You have no idea, I think. Maybe this search is what I needed after an uneventful life in academia. Maybe I’d like to make some history instead of just teaching it.

I check the burner phone for the time. I’m due at the meeting point soon. I’m staying on the main strip in the center of Vienna, Kärntner Straße, not far from the Casino Wien and a number of glitzy shops that remind me of the Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

My instructions were to wear a brown coat and orange hat. The latter I purchased from a souvenir shop, a silly Euro Disney cap that looks ridiculous on a woman my age, but I already had a beige corduroy jacket. I’ve had it for seven years. It was a gift from my daughter Annabelle.

She’d bought it for me while shopping for antiques in the Netherlands. Thrifting was one of her favorite hobbies. The seller claimed that the jacket had once belonged to Johanna Naber, a Dutch feminist historian. I laughed when Annabelle related that to me, for who could verify such an assertion? But then again, who would lie about it? Johanna Naber was a personal hero of mine but hardly a household name.

I’ve worn it ever since.