She nods. “This I can do. But if I had to see him . . . I don’t think . . .” Her voice trails off.

I nod, respecting her decision. On impulse, I kiss her good-bye on the cheek. “You’re a class act, Minka.”

In the car, Sage pounces. “So? What happens next? You got what you needed, right?”

“We got more than we needed. Your grandmother was a gold mine. It’s one thing to give eyewitness identification and to have her point out the Schutzhaftlagerführer. But she did something even better. She told us about something in his SS file that no one—except my office—would have known.”

Sage shakes her head. “I don’t understand.”

“It seems almost ludicrous, but there was a right way and wrong way to kill the prisoners at the concentration camps. Officers who did not follow the rules would find themselves written up with disciplinary infractions. It was one thing to shoot a prisoner who didn’t have the strength to stand up anymore, but to kill a prisoner for no reason was to kill a worker, and the Nazis needed those workers. Granted, no one in charge cared enough about the prisoners to do much more than give the offending officer a slap on the hand, but every now and then in an SS man’s file, there’s a mention of the disciplinary proceeding.” I look up at Sage. “In Reiner Hartmann’s file, there’s a paragraph about him going in front of a review committee for an unauthorized shooting of a female prisoner.”

Darija?” Sage asks.

I nod. “With your grandmother’s testimony that’s a pretty airtight lock that this particular guy she identified—and the man who told you his name used to be Reiner Hartmann—are one and the same.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that was in the file?”

“Because you don’t have government clearance,” I say. “And because I couldn’t risk you influencing what your grandmother had to say.”

She sinks back in the passenger seat. “So he was telling me the truth. Josef. Reiner. Whatever his name is.”

“It looks that way.” I can see a flurry of emotions move like storms across her face, as she tries to reconcile Josef Weber with his previous persona. It’s different, somehow, once that confirmation’s been made. And in Sage’s case, she is wrestling, too, with betraying a man she had considered a friend. “You did the right thing,” I say. “Coming to me. What he asked you to do for him—that isn’t justice. This is.”

She doesn’t look up. “Do you arrest him right away?”

“No. I go home.”

At that, Sage’s head snaps up. “Now?”

I nod. “There’s a lot I have to do before we move forward.”

I don’t want to go. I’d like to ask Sage out to dinner, actually. I’d like to watch her bake something from scratch. I’d just like to watch her, period.

So you’re going to go to the airport?” Sage asks.

Does it seem like she’s a little disappointed, too, to hear that I’m leaving?

Дата добавления: 2015-10-21