Those movements only lead to destruction. Look at Germany after the war. Millions dead, women and girls raped by Soviet savages, cities laid waste, a country divided for fifty years. That will happen again with people like the Purity League in charge. If they’re willing to kill a kind old man for a simple document, think what else they will do. We have to stop them.”

“I thought you were hiring me to solve your husband’s murder.”

“I already know who murdered him. Not the individual member, but I know it was the Purity League. Punishing them will be good enough, and if we get the treasure, we can help the victims of the Third Reich.”

“The gypsies and homos. Yeah, you mentioned that. I’m surprised you care.”

“The Nazis went too far. It’s one thing to reestablish sound morals. It’s another to wipe out people for being who they are.”

Heinrich almost brought up the Jews again but decided against it. He didn’t want another argument. Didn’t want one because she had convinced him. Smacking down the Purity League and getting paid to do it was the most appealing offer he’d gotten in a long, long time.

Not that he trusted her.

“I need all this in writing.”

He hadn’t finished his sentence before she laid a contract in front of him.

He read it. It said everything she had promised—the money, his cut, and the promise that the rest of it would go to charities benefitting gypsies and homosexuals in Europe. There were even architectural plans for several monuments to those killed in the Holocaust.

She handed him a pen.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “You’re convinced there’s millions of bucks hidden in the Polish woods somewhere and you want to give it all away. Don’t tell me you’ve got lots of gypsy and gay friends because I don’t believe it.”

“My reasons for doing this are my private affair, Mr. Müller, just as yours would be if they weren’t so obvious.”

“You don’t know me, lady.”

But she did. Oh, but she did.

CHAPTER FOUR

So there it was. The old bag had put her cards on the table. She had gotten one thing wrong though. Grandpa Otto hadn’t turned him into a juvenile delinquent; he had saved him from being one and then turned him into a screwed up adult.

Mom and Dad had been the ones who turned him into a little thug. Mom with her oceans of gin and bedridden wailings about how no one appreciated her, Dad with his oceans of whiskey and barely hidden philandering. Heinrich did what most kids in that situation would have done—started smoking weed and shoplifting. When he was fourteen, he graduated to snorting coke and stealing cars and got arrested after wrapping a Trans Am around a telephone pole. He still had a scar on his hand where it had gone through the windshield.

He’d spent a year and a half in juvvie. His parents refused to pull him out and ended up getting divorced and disappearing from his life. They never visited and only called twice.

And then came a savior.