So he’d heard nothing more. It was, he supposed, unsurprising, but also as painful as having gas in your lungs, a kind of searing agony that left invisible scars, scars that burned in the middle of the night, that ached in the cold, that stung every time he had to leave the office and return to his home.

“Mr. Hallworth?” His secretary, Constance, a sensible woman whose instincts he’d grown to trust over the past few months, opened the door after a quick tap.

He turned from his usual place by the window, staring out at skyscraper spires, bayonets of steel tearing into the sky. “Yes,” he said, pulling his mind back into the present, to his role as Editor in Chief of one of New York’s biggest daily newspapers, a role his father had gladly handed to him the moment Dan stepped back onto American soil.

“This came in over the wire,” Constance said. “Addressed to you. I don’t recognize the sender’s name. Have we put on a new stringer to cover Nuremberg? Apparently there are pictures too.”

Dan held out his hand, frowning. “As far as I know, Gareth Hogan’s still our stringer. But he doesn’t send pictures.” He glanced at the sheet of paper in front of him, expecting it was a mistake, that the cable operator had entered the wrong number and he was about to read a dispatch meant for the New York Post or the New York Times. But the page clearly stated both his name and the name of his newspaper. His frown deepened as he read the piece.

“This is good,” he said at last. “Gareth is always too concerned with everyone’s name, rank and serial number to get to what the story is all about. Who did you say it’s from?”

Constance consulted her notepad. “An I. Durant. Do you know him?”

“Never heard of him.”

Dan reread the page in front of him. Monsieur I. Durant was well informed and had thought to speak to the spectators, the people who filed into the courts at Nuremberg to watch the trials, had thought to ask them why they were there, for whom they mourned, and whether any kind of retribution would be enough. There was even a direct quote from one of the Nazis on trial. He was a lesser personage than Goering or Hess for sure, but still. A quote from one of those to be tried was gold.

“Can you get Gareth on the line?” he said to Constance. “I need to find out what’s going on.”

“Sure.” Constance disappeared and, by some miracle, it only took her half an hour to locate their stringer.

She put him through and Dan didn’t waste words. “Why am I getting high-quality stories from a Monsieur I. Durant, with quotes from former Nazi officials, when I haven’t seen anything from you all day?”

Dan listened without sympathy to his stringer’s tale of a broken leg from a drunken jeep accident which would put him out of action for at least a month. “I survived an entire war without a drunken jeep accident,” he said curtly to Gareth. “Someone who can’t survive a couple of months in a hotel room covering a trial isn’t someone I need on my service. You can make it up to me by finding out who Monsieur Durant is and I’ll give you a reference that’ll get you another job.”