She won’t talk to you, either,” Sage says.

I smile. “Grandmothers find me especially charming.”

She folds her arms. “If you hurt her I’ll—”

“Note to self: don’t threaten a federal agent. And second note to self: don’t worry. I give you my word, I won’t push her if she isn’t able to open up about it.”

“And if she does? Then what? You arrest Josef?”

I shake my head. “We don’t have any criminal jurisdiction over Nazis,” I explain. “We can’t incarcerate your man, or set him free. The crimes took place outside the United States long before we had extraterritorial jurisdiction statutes. It wasn’t until 2007 that the U.S. Genocide Statute was amended to cover more than genocides perpetrated by non-Americans outside the United States. Prior to that, it basically covered U.S. citizens other than General Custer’s actions against the Native Americans. All we can do is try to catch him on immigration charges, and get him deported. And even then, I’ve been trying for years to get Europeans to develop a moral backbone and take Nazis back and prosecute, and it hardly ever happens.”

So we’re doing all this for nothing?” Sage asks.

“We’re doing all this because your grandmother made her home in the United States, and we owe her peace of mind.”

Sage looks at me for a long moment. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll take you to her condo.”

• • •

There are things in Reiner Hartmann’s file that Sage Singer doesn’t know about.

It’s my job to tell her as little as possible, to instead coax out of her what she can tell me. And even then, I cannot be sure that a court will be able to connect the dots and prosecute him. I cannot be sure that Hartmann will survive long enough to receive his comeuppance.

So far, what Sage has relayed to me is information that could be gleaned from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archives, or from poring through a book. Military actions and dates; company units, career trajectories. Even the blood group tattoos are something you’d know about, if you study Third Reich history. As untenable as it seems that someone is making up a false guilty identity, stranger things have happened.

But in this file, there are specifics about Reiner Hartmann that only Reiner Hartmann—and his superiors, and maybe his closest confidants —should know.

None of which Sage Singer has said yet.

Which could mean that Josef Weber hasn’t gotten around to telling her those stories. Or that Josef Weber isn’t Reiner Hartmann.

At any rate, getting an ID from Sage’s grandmother Minka is just one more piece of the puzzle. Which is how I find myself driving back toward Boston—on the exact same route I just traveled from Logan Airport to New Hampshire—with Sage sitting beside me in the car.

“That’s a new one,” I say. “No one in my department has ever been so upset by a testimony that they went out and hit a deer with their car.”

Дата добавления: 2015-10-21