26
Puget Sound
September 21, 6:30 p.m. PDT
Guy and I sat on the sundeck. I switched on Redemption ’s string of fairy lights, dug out a bottle of Glenlivet, and collected cheese and crackers from the galley. I poured a finger of whisky for each of us, then took the cushioned sunbed next to his, kicking off my deck shoes and tucking my feet beneath me. I spread a blanket over our laps as a damp chill filled the evening.
“Goddamned miserable day.” Guy swallowed half his Glenlivet, glanced sidelong at me, and cleared his throat. “I hate this.”
I felt a childish lick of satisfaction. “Suck it up, buttercup.” Words I’d heard often enough as a kid, whether it was a skinned knee or a broken heart.
Guy set down his glass and smacked my thigh. It felt like the brush of a bird’s wing. “Buttercup, my ass. I don’t know where to start.”
“Why don’t I make it easy for you.” I fixed him with a grave stare. “Are we Jewish?”
He looked at me from beneath thinning eyebrows. “What makes you think that?”
“Pop’s mezuzah. I saw him with it when I was little. Then I found it in Cass’s condo.”
Guy shook his head. “No, Naughty. We’re not Jewish. We’re ...”
He paused. Reluctantly, the idea like lead in my stomach, I moved to the next conclusion. “We’re Nazis.”
“Seems like you’ve already got the story.”
The weight morphed into burning coals in my gut. Nazis. Was this what Charlie Han had been alluding to when he talked about our immoral past? And if so, how had he learned about it?
I stared down at my glass. “Did Cass know?”
“I never talked to her. And Rob would sooner shoot himself than tell anyone. He’s haunted by the idea that any surviving Kleins might come after us for reparation. How’d you guess?”
“I followed breadcrumbs. But I’d like to hear the full story.”
“I don’t think I know the full story. Rob might. Our past always mattered more to him.”
Guy reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a small velvet pouch and tossed it to me.
I snatched it out of the air. “What is this?”
“Your inheritance.”
I untied the thin blue ribbon and upended the contents of the pouch into my palm. I gasped. Shining in the fairy lights, a painting of a woman’s face gazed up at me. She wore a crown and necklace and a half smile. Her eyes were kind. The painting was set in a brooch of gold adorned with tiny emeralds and diamonds.
“Is she family?”
“Maybe. That’s Sisi, also known as Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who died under an assassin’s knife. Family legend says that Sisi gifted the brooch to a distant cousin, a young man, who passed it along to a beautiful servingwoman whom he wooed, married, and impregnated. Not necessarily in that order.”
I nodded. This much of the story I knew, although I’d never seen the brooch. “The servingwoman was Josef’s mother. The family forced an annulment.”
“And the young man fled for distant parts. Here’s the thing, Naughty. I don’t know if the story is true, or if Josef stole that brooch. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.”
“There are DNA tests.”
He shrugged. “That’s up to you. To me, whether we have royalty in our background or Nazis, or both, doesn’t matter. What matters is who we are now.”
I slid the glittering brooch back into the pouch. When Guy gestured for me to keep it, I dropped it inside a zippered pocket.
“You’re unraveling my identity,” I said. “Gone are the aristocratic Brenners. In their place, monsters.”
“But I’m not, little lion,” he said, using my other childhood nickname. “Your identity doesn’t depend on your family.”
“Rob would say Ocean House is built on a lie.”
“He’s wrong. Ocean House is built on hard work and talent.”
I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my shins. “Tell me what you know about our Nazi past.”
“You’re sure you want the gory details?” I nodded, and he settled himself against the cushions. “Fine. You know the first part of the story. Your great-grandfather Josef, whom all of us called Pop, was a carpenter for Klein Marine in the Austrian town of Mattsee. Klein specialized in yachts for the gilded crowd. Any given day, you could spot a flotilla of Klein yachts on Mattsee Lake, sails rippling, a white wake behind them—the most beautiful sight in the world, my father said.”
I relaxed into the story. I’d listened to Pop talk about the lake’s teal-blue waters, its grassy shores studded with trees, the red-roofed village homes, the Benedictine abbey’s Gothic steeple.
And, of course, the boats.
“It was good work, a solid paycheck,” Guy went on. “But although your great-grandfather put himself through night school and worked harder than anyone else in the shipyard, the Klein family didn’t promote him. The engineering positions he longed for were reserved for members of the family. A peasant like Josef Brenner was not welcome into their exalted ranks.”
“Josef didn’t tell them about his aristocratic past?”
Guy shrugged. “We’ll never know. If he had, they probably would have laughed. Josef was hired in 1932, when he was only seventeen. This was the year before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. In Austria, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was illegal, but it carried huge appeal for working-class men like Josef. People whose ambitions were thwarted by the wartime economy and who found themselves unable to get ahead.”
“Were the Kleins Jewish?”
“As Jewish as Mother Mary and Joseph.”
I took a hefty swallow of the whisky, then set my glass aside. I was tonight’s designated driver. Guy could drink for the both of us.
“When the government weakened under hyperinflation,” my father continued, “the Austrian middle class, including Josef and Hedy, struggled to obtain basic goods. While Josef labored for the Kleins, my young grandmother began bartering for daily necessities—milk, eggs, flour. She turned bitter at the family’s loss of economic security and their former standing in the community. When a German immigrant whispered to Josef that it was the Jews holding him back, Josef resisted. But as the economy bottomed out and people said it was the fault of the Jews, Josef had a change of heart. He joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, otherwise known as—”
“The Nazi Party. He was—”
“Card carrying.”
The wake from a passing coast guard vessel lifted Redemption and gently resettled her. Guy nodded toward the bottle of Glenlivet. “Pour. And this time, be generous.”
I poured.
Guy continued, “The Workers’ Party was, as I said, illegal. But it offered Josef what he wanted—the assurance that he was superior to the very men keeping him down. After Austria was annexed into the German Reich, the government seized Klein Marine, which they considered vital to the war effort. Officials sent the family’s women and children to Ravensbrück, most of the men to Mauthausen, and turned the entire enterprise over to an Aryan businessman. That businessman anointed the top-ranking Nazi Party employee to manage the factory and shipyard.”
“Josef.”
“It’s ugly, Nadia. But what else could he do?” Guy’s voice was oddly gentle. “My grandfather accepted the position, but in doing so, he managed to save three members of the family and a handful of Jewish workers. As Klein Marine was retooled to build marine engines for the war effort, Josef convinced the party to let him retain Asher Klein and his sons, Ethan and Elias, along with a few others. He risked his own standing by going before the state inspector—the Landesinspekteur—to argue that the Nazi Party needed these men’s expertise.”
“A real Oskar Schindler,” I said. I’d meant it to sound snarky. But my voice was only sad.
Guy leaned in, his eyes dark. “People do what they must to survive. He could have buried those men.”
“And they agreed to work, even as their wives and daughters went to the gas chambers?”
Guy held my gaze another moment, then turned away. “They wouldn’t have known the true purpose of the camps. Not then. I imagine Asher Klein and his sons thought they’d be reunited with their families after the war ended. Eventually, though, when Josef could no longer protect them, the Klein men were also sent to their deaths.”
“An entire family.” For a moment, I couldn’t find air. “Simply ... wiped out.”
“Possibly there are other Kleins, perhaps in Israel or America. But of Asher’s extended family in Mattsee ... as far as I know, all of them perished.”
Speechless, I stared into the gloaming. Another loon, or perhaps the same one, cried from the water. Stars fanned overhead, a spray of diamonds like the ones on Sisi’s brooch. Water lapped at the Redemption ’s hull, a soothing sound that had rocked me to sleep many a night when I was a child, but which offered no solace now.
After a time I said, “Ocean House is built on the blood and bones of people we helped kill.”
“We didn’t help kill them.”
“Neither did we help them escape.”
“I know, Naughty. It’s a horrible story. Now you understand why Rob has worked so hard to hide it from both competitors and clients. He’s afraid it will destroy us.”
“It is a horrible story.” I turned to face him. “But you and Rob weren’t born. Your father was a baby. How can anyone blame you for the actions of your grandfather? Pop is long dead. And some might even argue that he was a mere cog in a cruel machine, condemned to accept that cruelty to save himself and his family.”
“Ah, my little lion. Now you’re being naive.” Guy’s cynical laugh cut the air. “You know what they’ll say. That no one held a gun to Josef’s head and forced him to be one of the first Austrians to join the party. As it says in the Bible, the sins of the father will be visited upon the children and their children’s children. If word of this gets out, the trolls and social justice fundamentalists will tear us apart. Not a single one of our well-heeled clients will risk having their name associated with Nazis.”
Unnerved, queasy, I tossed the blanket aside and stood. I paced the deck, scanning the pink-stained horizon as the last of the light faded. I pulled my hood up over my beanie and resumed my seat. Gnats swarmed the fairy lights.
“Do you know Phil Weber?”
Guy palmed his head. “The Nazi hunter? That’s going back years. What makes you ask about him?”
“I read an article.”
Guy grunted. “Phil came sniffing after Josef decades ago. Because of Phil’s relationship with Rob, he let our grandfather’s past remain in the shadows. But men like Phil Weber don’t give away anything for free. I’ve always wondered when that bill will come due.”
“Phil works for the CIA now.” I tucked my hands in my pockets, felt the lump of the brooch. “Rob and Cass made an agreement with him to also work with the CIA. Or, at least, I think that’s what happened.”
Guy had sunk into the cushions as we spoke, but now he bolted upright. “That son of a bitch. It finally came time to pay the piper, and he did it with my daughter .”
“You know Cass wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want to do. As for Phil ... Rob didn’t say much. Almost nothing, really. A few texts he sent after I boarded the plane in Singapore.” I was babbling.
Guy watched me, his eyes glued to mine, waiting for me to sort it out. But I couldn’t tell him the truth. There was George Mèng and his family to protect. And perhaps it was better for Guy to think that Cass—in the end—had chosen her own way out.
I settled on, “It’s complicated.”
“Working with the CIA usually is.”
“You can ask Rob about that. I’m not working with them.”
“Right.” He clicked his tongue. “You can leave out the details, little lion. But can you tell me some of what happened in Singapore that has you so jumpy? I’ve been watching you, and I know there’s something more than Cass’s death. If Rob dragged you into his business, I might finally kill the son of a bitch.”
“Rob didn’t drag me into anything. I’m not involved with the CIA.”
He took my arm. “Your entire life and Cass’s, I’ve worried about plane accidents or car accidents or—God—that you’ll drop your hair dryer in the bath. I’ve worried about date rape and salmonella poisoning. All the usual things that give a father nightmares. But I never worried that you or your sister would get swept up in a geopolitical fight.”
It would have been funny if it weren’t true. With superhuman effort I dug a laugh up from the coals burning my belly. “I’d worry more about salmonella.”
He smiled, too, even if there was no mirth in his eyes. Then he sighed, a sound that echoed through the quiet air like surrender. He tapped his glass. “It’s a full-bottle night.”
I reached for the Glenlivet. In the distance, a single light off our starboard side emerged from the sound, the first vessel I’d seen since the coast guard cutter had zipped by an hour earlier. The boat was dark save for its stern light. It wasn’t illegal to fish in Puget Sound at night, so long as you weren’t hunting sturgeon. But it was illegal—and risky—to do so without sidelights and a masthead light.
The boat motored until it was less than a mile off Redemption ’s starboard side. From inside the bridge came a soft beep—an alert telling me that a moving object had entered the one-half-nautical-mile safety zone I’d set. I stood and walked onto the bridge and checked the radar. A blip on the screen showed a vessel four-tenths of a mile away, with a “trail” suggesting the boat had followed the same path as Redemption . The boat had turned off their AIS transponder—the automatic identification system.
I watched for a moment to verify that the vessel was no longer moving, then grabbed the binoculars and returned to the sundeck. I braced my arms on the railing.
“What is it?” Guy asked.
“Maybe nothing.” I glassed the horizon until I found the boat. It was a familiar type of speedboat—a thirty-nine-foot Nor-Tech Sport with top speeds over one hundred miles per hour—faster than we could manage. Two men sat in the front.
It was hard to be sure, but based on the man’s bulk, I thought one of them was Dai Shujun.
The hair rose on the back of my neck.
There was no time to wonder about Dai’s motive. Whether he’d come only to observe or he had something worse in mind, out here, we were sitting ducks. I lowered the binoculars and pulled Guy to his feet. “Dad, we need to go.”
He shook me off. He grabbed the binoculars and scanned the horizon until he found the Nor-Tech. “Those men are Asian,” he said. “Is this about Singapore?”
“Yes.” I headed into the bridge, and he followed.
“Do they want to kill you or capture you?” His voice was eerily calm.
“It’s a guess.”
I turned the display lights on the console to red so they wouldn’t be as visible. Not that it helped in the moment since Dai likely had military-grade night vision goggles. But if I played this well, it would matter soon enough. I entered the Port Townsend Yacht Club as my destination on the chartplotter and turned off our own AIS.
“That’s a fast boat they’ve got,” he said. “You going to try and outrun it? Or hide?”
“Both. We don’t need to go far.”
Guy glanced at the radar. Then, while I went fore to bring in the electric anchor, he disappeared below. He returned with a rifle and came to stand next to me at the helm station. He didn’t force the helm away from me, but he stayed close, the rifle leaning nearby, one hand gripping the console’s grab rail.
“I know this island,” he said. “There’s a deep draft all the way around. The cliffs drop straight into the water. You can launch from the other side.”
I nodded and started the engines, then took a final glance through the binoculars. Dai had motored closer; he was little more than a quarter mile away. He had confirmed my guess by lifting night vision goggles. NVGs kill depth perception, but even so it felt as if Dai were looking straight at me from only a few yards away.
As I watched, he drew the flat blade of his hand across his throat.
I killed our lights and watched the radar and sonar screens as I pulled out.
“Wait.” Guy’s voice stopped me. “He’s moving again.”
My pulse fluttered. “Where?”
“Away.”
I idled the boat and glanced at the radar screen. Guy was right. Dai had turned the speedboat around and was heading southwest. Perhaps back to Seattle or Bainbridge. I turned the radar to long range, but Dai vanished behind a curve in Whidbey Island, his message delivered.
I slumped into the helm seat and stared at the empty horizon as my blood pulsed behind my eyes. Dai’s presence was a warning. Only that.
But it could have been much worse.
“The hell was that about?” Guy asked.
I stirred and grabbed my phone. I dialed the private security company we used for protection at yacht shows and when working with high-profile clients and their accompanying paparazzi. I asked the person who picked up to send two men to our home immediately, make sure Isabeth was fine, and post the men on the property until I said otherwise.
When I hung up, Guy’s face had collapsed, as if his skull had turned to sand.
His eyes glittered. “Did those bastards kill Cass?”
I hesitated, then said, “I think so.”
The deck chair scraped on teak as he fell against it. I gripped him, easing him into the chair. He grasped my arms.
“Promise me, Nadia.” His voice was cotton. “Promise me you won’t go back to Singapore.”
I snugged a pillow behind his head. His grip on me tightened until it hurt.
People who knew my father only a little thought his personality consisted of a switch that toggled between mean and meaner. But it was simply that Guy went all in. When he loved, he grabbed hold with the strength of a python. When he loathed, he sank his fangs into the object of his ire.
“I won’t go back, Guy.”
A high-pitched wailing came from him, a sound that turned my blood to ice. Guy was scared and he was dying and he couldn’t protect his children. I held him tight, finding my own python strength.
After a time, he turned into my hug and quieted. We sat like that for a long while as I stared into the deepening night, watching the stars burn brighter.