CHAPTER 32

VIENNA, AUSTRIA

MARCH 1939

Ernst Schmid spent more than three torturous months in Vienna’s General Hospital, recovering first from his bullet wound and then from the infection that infiltrated his body. He’d heard the doctors whispering when he pretended to sleep, saying the infection would kill him, but he’d conquered it. Just as he would conquer Max Dornbach when he got out of this prison.

Major Rosch didn’t acknowledge Ernst’s return to the Hotel Metropole, but he cared nothing about recognition. The doctors thought they and their medicines had cured him, but no medicine could cure like the drive of revenge. His focus, sharper than the tip of his knife, killed the infection.

The Gestapo commander didn’t speak to him, but the other agents whispered as he stepped off the elevator to the upper floor of their headquarters, wondering who had shot him and why. When Major Rosch visited him in the hospital, Ernst had told the man that he didn’t know who wounded him, that he was checking on a complaint about a Jewish family who’d refused to leave their home and someone shot him from behind.

The office windows overlooked the streetcars and pedestrians and parades of tanks and soldiers that marched up Morzinplatz every day. Life in Vienna was much more ordered now, the things of frivolity in the past. Their Führer was focused on conquering the world, but Ernst wanted to conquer only one man.

He would find Max Dornbach and make him pay.

Ernst picked up the telephone on his desk and called the commandants at Dachau and Mauthausen. Dr. Weiss had died at Dachau, but no one could tell him if they’d taken Max to one of the camps. Or where Luzi had gone.

Next he tried to phone his mother at the house where she worked in Munich, but no one answered. He hadn’t told her that Max tried to kill him, but she would cooperate with any investigation against the Dornbach family.

When Ernst was younger, his mother hoped each summer that the Dornbachs would extend an invitation for her and Ernst to join their staff at the family estate near Salzburg, but they never did. Instead his mother waited faithfully for them to return, taking in ironing to support herself and her son through those hot summer months.

They hadn’t been nearly as faithful to her.

He sent a telegram to Munich.

Need to find the Dornbach family. What is the name of their summer house?

Ernst spent the rest of his morning addressing memorandums to commandants across the Third Reich. If they found a man named Max Dornbach from Vienna or a woman named Luzi Weiss, he wanted to know. Then he spent his afternoon visiting the new tenants in the Weiss apartment, the rooms all clean and tidy now.

They left him alone in their parlor as he tried to replay what happened that night he’d come for Luzi. His expectations had been high—he’d waited so long to have her—and she’d disappointed him. The disappointment he remembered well, but the moments after were a blur.

Max had shuffled through the door, interrupting him, and Ernst had been livid until it occurred to him that he could have two things he wanted that very night—Luzi and the life of this man who loved her.

And he would’ve had both if Max hadn’t shot him first.

Ernst pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to remember. Luzi had distracted him—he hadn’t even seen the gun in Max’s hand. But he remembered the shock of it, the explosion of pain.

Next he took a taxi to the fancy Stadtpalais off Ringstrasse where Max and his family lived, the small palace where his mother had scrubbed floors until her hands swelled, set silverware for the finest of meals while she was eating leftover schnitzel in the kitchen. The apartment where she’d washed laundry for a family who soiled their clothing like the common man but wouldn’t remove their own dirt.

The upper floor was vacant, and the neighbor below said that Klara Dornbach was visiting her sister in France. Herr Dornbach had been reassigned to Berlin.

In the morning, Ernst sent a telegram to Germany, but Herr Dornbach’s short reply was clear. He didn’t know the whereabouts of his son, though he suspected Max had joined Klara in Paris.

If Max had made it to France, had he taken Luzi with him?

Ernst riffled through files. The paperwork was a beast of its own, thousands upon thousands of records trying to track who’d left Austria and who’d stayed behind. Luzi, he discovered, had been approved for a visa to America, to attend Juilliard, but the permit had come after Max had shot him. He couldn’t find any record of her leaving Vienna.

A messenger found him amid the files, delivering a two-word reply from his mother.

Schloss Schwansee.

The name of the Dornbach estate.

Ernst smoothed the yellow paper on his desk. Then he called the headquarters office in Salzburg and asked them to pay a visit to the castle of swans.

He wouldn’t hurt Max when he found him, at least not at first.

First he would eliminate what Max prized most.