“Ah, then never mind.” It had been a wild idea anyway, to think there might be a connection.

“Never mind what?”

“Well, you know Karina Klein?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve been doing some research on her.”

“You have?”

Perhaps Max wasn’t the only one who had been underestimating his brother. “Yes. I wanted to revisit some letters of hers I knew were at Oxford. An archivist there has been digitizing them for me.” He’d started looking into it after The Nutcracker, when the fictional tale he’d spun of Karina’s New York adventure had so delighted Dani. He’d hoped to find something about a real New York trip, to what end he wasn’t sure—perhaps merely to entertain Dani. But as was so often the way with historical research, looking for one thing led to another. “I ended up reading about a mine near Innsbruck that was used by the Austrian resistance toward the end of the war. I found some letters between Karina and some of its leaders.”

Seb raised his eyebrows. “Look at you, turning up new information on a national hero.” The praise warmed Max. “I didn’t realize there was an organized Austrian resistance.”

“It was small and sometimes internally at odds, but they were arming local insurgencies in the spring of 1945, and it sounds from these letters as though they were hiding supplies and arms in an abandoned mine. I idly wondered if it had been one of ours, but clearly not if they’re quartz mines. You can’t hide things in open-pit mines.”

“We used to have tungsten mines there!” Sebastien said excitedly, and for a moment his face looked exactly like six-year-old Seb when Max agreed to take a role in a play Seb wanted to stage. “They’ve long since closed, but tungsten was mined underground.”

“Well, then, perhaps it’s worth looking into,” Max said with a casualness he did not feel. He was getting excited, both about the mystery of the historical question and about the niggling feeling that perhaps this could be his calling. “Would those old mines still be there? Could we find them?”

“They should be. We still own the land. Actually, Oma owned the land, so it’s part of the holdings of her trust.”

Their father’s mother had been Austrian and had come to her marriage with their grandfather with a trove of exploitable lands. This was exactly what Max had meant when he’d told Dani that marriages in their family were often made for strategic reasons.

“Finding the mines should be straightforward,” Seb said, “but how would we ever discover if one of them was used by the resistance?”

“We’d look for diaries and letters. Perhaps eventually ancestors of the people involved.”

“I can put you on the payroll as a historian. Or a cultural officer or something,” Seb said.

“Oh that’s—”

“Father will never notice.”