The Huntress
Kate Quinn
Shining a light on a shadowy corner of history, The Huntress is an epic, sweeping Second World War novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Alice Network.In the aftermath of war, the hunter becomes the hunted . . .On the icy edge of Soviet Russia, bold and reckless Nina Markova joins the infamous Night Witches – an all-female bomber regiment – wreaking havoc on Hitler’s eastern front. But when she is downed behind enemy lines and thrown across the path of a lethal Nazi murderess known as the Huntress, Nina must use all her wits to survive.British war correspondent Ian Graham has witnessed the horrors of war from Omaha Beach to the Nuremburg Trials. He abandons journalism after the war to become a Nazi hunter, yet one target eludes him: the Huntress. Fierce, disciplined Ian must join forces with reckless, cocksure Nina, the only witness to escape the Huntress alive.In post-war Boston, seventeen-year-old Jordan McBride is delighted when her long-widowed father brings home a fiancée. But Jordan grows increasingly disquieted by the soft-spoken German widow who seems to be hiding something. Delving into her new stepmother’s past, Jordan slowly realizes that a Nazi killer may be hiding in plain sight.
Copyright (#u179fff11-81c1-520b-a9e5-d1b5a9459ac7)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in the United States by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Kate Quinn 2019
Cover design by Elsie Lyons © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photographs © Harry Todd/Getty Images (woman in station); © Shutterstock.com (http://www.Shutterstock.com) (plane and textures)
Kate Quinn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008326173
Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008326180
Version: 2019-01-21
Praise for The Huntress (#u179fff11-81c1-520b-a9e5-d1b5a9459ac7)
“With magnificently audacious heroines who will haunt you long after the final page, The Huntress is a powerful and groundbreaking story of sisterhood that puts women back into history where they belong. Without a doubt, the best book I’ve read this year.”
—Stephanie Dray, New York Times bestselling author
“Quinn deftly braids the stories of a female Russian bomber pilot, Nazi hunters, and a young Bostonian girl staring down evil in the most unthinkable of places. The result is a searing tale of predator and prey, transgression and redemption, and the immutable power of the truth. An utter triumph!”
—Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan’s Tale
“Prepare to be spellbound! The Huntress masterfully draws you in and doesn’t let you go. Another brilliant work of historical fiction by the incomparable Kate Quinn.”
—Susan Meissner, USA Today bestselling author of As Bright as Heaven
“The Huntress left me breathless with delight … Kate Quinn has created nothing less than a masterpiece of historical fiction.”
—Jennifer Robson, bestselling author of
Goodnight from London
“The Huntress is a triumph of a novel! Nina Markova is a veritable force of nature who would have had the Night Witches themselves cackling with glee at her wild daring in this tale of revenge and justice, truth and secrets during the aftermath of the world’s most devastating war.”
—Stephanie Thornton, author of
American Princess
“A thoroughly immersive page-turner, The Huntress captures readers from the first page, leading them on an explosive journey that shines a spotlight on the horrors of war and the legacy it leaves for those who survive. Impeccably written, richly detailed, tautly paced, and filled with compelling and intricate characters, Quinn’s novel is both poignant and thrilling. This book will take hold of you and stay with you long after you have finished. You don’t just read a Kate Quinn novel, you live it.”
—Chanel Cleeton, author of Next Year in Havana
“An impressive historical novel sure to harness WWII-fiction fans’ attention … Laced with Russian folklore allusions and deliciously witty banter, Quinn’s tale refreshingly avoids contrived situations while portraying three touching, unpredictable love stories; the suspenseful quest for justice; and the courage involved in confronting one’s greatest fears.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Well-researched and vivid segments are interspersed detailing Nina’s backstory as one of Russia’s sizable force of female combat pilots (dubbed The Night Witches by the Germans), establishing her as a fierce yet vulnerable antecedent to Lisbeth Salander. Quinn’s language is evocative of the period, and her characters are good literary company. With any luck, the Nazi hunting will go on for a sequel or two.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Quinn delivers a suspenseful WWII tale of murder and revenge. This exciting thriller vividly reveals how people face adversity and sacrifice while chasing justice and retribution.”
—Publishers Weekly
Dedication (#u179fff11-81c1-520b-a9e5-d1b5a9459ac7)
For my father—
How I miss you!
Contents
Cover (#ud48253fb-53b6-518a-ba5f-549b3738bc08)
Title Page (#u57cc1d7a-799a-5056-b18d-82331c8e0b90)
Copyright
Praise for The Huntress
Dedication
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1: Jordan
Chapter 2: Ian
Chapter 3: Nina
Chapter 4: Jordan
Chapter 5: Ian
Chapter 6: Nina
Chapter 7: Jordan
Chapter 8: Ian
Chapter 9: Nina
Chapter 10: Jordan
Chapter 11: Ian
Chapter 12: Nina
Chapter 13: Jordan
Chapter 14: Ian
Chapter 15: Nina
Chapter 16: Jordan
Chapter 17: Ian
Chapter 18: Nina
Chapter 19: Jordan
Chapter 20: Ian
Part II
Chapter 21: Nina
Chapter 22: Jordan
Chapter 23: Ian
Chapter 24: Nina
Chapter 25: Jordan
Chapter 26: Ian
Chapter 27: Nina
Chapter 28: Jordan
Chapter 29: Ian
Chapter 30: Nina
Chapter 31: Jordan
Chapter 32: Ian
Chapter 33: Jordan
Chapter 34: Nina
Chapter 35: Ian
Chapter 36: Jordan
Chapter 37: Ian
Chapter 38: Nina
Chapter 39: Jordan
Chapter 40: Ian
Chapter 41: Nina
Chapter 42: Jordan
Chapter 43: Ian
Chapter 44: Nina
Chapter 45: Jordan
Chapter 46: Ian
Chapter 47: Jordan
Chapter 48: Ian
Part III
Chapter 49: Jordan
Chapter 50: Ian
Chapter 51: Jordan
Chapter 52: Ian
Chapter 53: Nina
Chapter 54: Ian
Chapter 55: Jordan
Chapter 56: Nina
Chapter 57: Ian
Chapter 58: Jordan
Chapter 59: Ian
Epilogue: Nina
Author’s Note
Reading Group Questions
Further Reading
About the Author
Also by Kate Quinn
About the Publisher
Prologue (#u179fff11-81c1-520b-a9e5-d1b5a9459ac7)
Autumn 1945
Altaussee, Austria
She was not used to being hunted.
The lake stretched slate blue, glittering. The woman gazed over it, hands lying loose in her lap. A folded newspaper sat beside her on the bench. The headlines all trumpeted arrests, deaths, forthcoming trials. The trials would be held in Nuremberg, it seemed. She had never been to Nuremberg, but she knew the men who would be tried there. Some she knew by name only, others had touched champagne flutes to hers in friendship. They were all doomed. Crimes against peace. Crimes against humanity. War crimes.
By what law? she wanted to scream, beating her fists against the injustice of it. By what right? But the war was over, and the victors had won the right to decide what was a crime and what was not. What was humanity, and what was not.
It was humanity, she thought, what I did. It was mercy. But the victors would never accept that. They would pass judgment at Nuremberg and forever after, decreeing what acts committed in a lawful past would put a man’s head in a noose.
Or a woman’s.
She touched her own throat.
Run, she thought. If they find you, if they realize what you’ve done, they will lay a rope around your neck.
But where was there to go in this world that had taken everything she loved? This world of hunting wolves. She used to be the hunter, and now she was the prey.
So hide, she thought. Hide in the shadows until they pass you by.
She rose, walking aimlessly along the lake. It reminded her painfully of Lake Rusalka, her haven in Poland, now ruined and lost to her. She made herself keep moving, putting one foot after the other. She did not know where she was going, only that she refused to huddle here paralyzed by fear until she was scooped onto the scales of their false justice. Step by step the resolve hardened inside her.
Run.
Hide.
Or die.
THE HUNTRESS
BY IAN GRAHAM
APRIL 1946
SIX SHOTS.
She fired six times on the shore of Lake Rusalka, not attempting to hide what she did. Why would she? Hitler’s dream of empire had yet to crumble and send her fleeing for the shadows. That night under a Polish moon, she could do whatever she wanted—and she murdered six souls in cold blood.
Six shots, six bullets, six bodies falling into the dark water of the lake.
They had been hiding by the water, shivering, eyes huge with fear—escapees from one of the eastbound trains, perhaps, or survivors fleeing one of the region’s periodic purges. The dark-haired woman found them, comforted them, told them they were safe. She took them into her house by the lake and fed them a meal, smiling.
Then she led them back outside—and killed them.
Perhaps she lingered there, admiring the moon on the water, smelling gun smoke.
That nighttime slaughter of six at the height of the war was only one of her crimes. There were others. The hunting of Polish laborers through dense woods as a party game. The murder, near the war’s end, of a young English prisoner of war escaped from his stalag. Who knows what other crimes lie on her conscience?
They called her die Jägerin—the Huntress. She was the young mistress of an SS officer in German-occupied Poland, the hostess of grand parties on the lake, a keen shot. Perhaps she was the rusalka the lake was named for—a lethal, malevolent water spirit.
I think of her as I sit among the ranks of journalists in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, watching the war crimes trials grind on. The wheel of justice turns; the gray-faced men in the defendants’ box will fall beneath it. But what about the smaller fish, who escape into the shadows as we aim our brilliant lights on this courtroom? What about the Huntress? She vanished at the war’s end. She was not worth pursuing—a woman with the blood of only a dozen or so on her hands, when there were the murderers of millions to be found. There were many like her—small fish, not worth catching.
Where will they go?
Where did she go?
And will anyone take up the hunt?
PART I (#u179fff11-81c1-520b-a9e5-d1b5a9459ac7)
Chapter 1 (#u179fff11-81c1-520b-a9e5-d1b5a9459ac7)
JORDAN (#u179fff11-81c1-520b-a9e5-d1b5a9459ac7)
April 1946
Selkie Lake, three hours west of Boston
Who is she, Dad?”
Jordan McBride had timed the question perfectly: her father jerked in surprise midcast, sending his fishing line flying not into the lake, but into the branch of the overhanging maple. Jordan’s camera went click as his face settled into comic dismay. She laughed as her father said three or four words he then told her to forget.
“Yes, sir.” She’d heard all his curse words before, of course. You did, when you were the only daughter of a widowed father who took you fishing on fine spring weekends instead of the son he didn’t have. Jordan’s father rose from the end of the little dock and tugged his fishing line free. Jordan raised the Leica for another shot of his dark silhouette, framed against the feathery movement of trees and water. She’d play with the image in the darkroom later, see if she could get a blurred effect on the leaves so they seemed like they were still moving in the photograph …
“Come on, Dad,” she prompted. “Let’s hear about the mystery woman.”
He adjusted his faded Red Sox cap. “What mystery woman?”
“The one your clerk tells me you’ve been taking out to dinner, those nights you said you were working late.” Jordan held her breath, hoping. She couldn’t remember the last time her father had been on a date. Ladies were always fluttering their gloved fingers at him after Mass on the rare occasions he and Jordan went to church, but to Jordan’s disappointment he never seemed interested.
“It’s nothing, really …” He hemmed and hawed, but Jordan wasn’t fooled for a minute. She and her father looked alike; she’d taken enough photographs to see the resemblance: straight noses, level brows, dark blond hair cut close under her father’s cap and spilling out under Jordan’s in a careless ponytail. They were even the same height now that she was nearly eighteen; medium for him and tall for a girl—but far beyond physical resemblance, Jordan knew her father. It had just been the two of them since she was seven years old and her mother died, and she knew when Dan McBride was working up to tell her something important.
“Dad,” she broke in sternly. “Spill.”
“She’s a widow,” her father said at last. To Jordan’s delight, he was blushing. “Mrs. Weber first came to the shop three months ago.” During the week her father stood three-piece-suited and knowledgeable behind the counter of McBride’s Antiques off Newbury Street. “She’d just come to Boston, selling her jewelry to get by. A few gold chains and lockets, nothing unusual, but she had a string of gray pearls, a beautiful piece. She held herself together until then, but she started crying when it came time to part with the pearls.”
“Let me guess. You gave them back, very gallantly, then padded your price on her other pieces so she still walked out with the same amount.”
He reeled in his fishing line. “She also walked out with an invitation for dinner.”
“Look at you, Errol Flynn! Go on—”
“She’s Austrian, but studied English at school so she speaks it almost perfectly. Her husband died in ’43, fighting—”
“Which side?”
“That kind of thing shouldn’t matter anymore, Jordan. The war’s over.” He fixed a new lure. “She got papers to come to Boston, but times have been hard. She has a little girl—”
“She does?”
“Ruth. Four years old, hardly says a word. Sweet little thing.” Giving a tweak of Jordan’s cap. “You’ll love her.”
“So it’s already serious, then,” Jordan said, startled. Her father wouldn’t have met this woman’s child if he wasn’t serious. But how serious …?
“Mrs. Weber’s a fine woman.” He cast his line out. “I want her to come to supper at the house next week, her and Ruth. All four of us.”
He gave her a wary look, as if waiting for her to bristle. And part of her did just a tiny bit, Jordan admitted. Ten years of having it be just her and her dad, being pals with him the way so few of her girlfriends were with their fathers … But against that reflexive twinge of possessiveness was relief. He needed a woman in his life; Jordan had known that for years. Someone to talk to; someone to scold him into eating his spinach. Someone else to lean on.
If he has someone else in his life, maybe he won’t be so stubborn about not letting you go to college, the thought whispered, but Jordan shoved it back. This was the moment to be happy for her father, not hoping things might change for her own benefit. Besides, she was happy for him. She’d been taking photographs of him for years, and no matter how wide he smiled at the lens, the lines of his face when they came up ghostlike out of the developing fluid said lonely, lonely, lonely.
“I can’t wait to meet her,” Jordan said sincerely.
“She’ll bring Ruth next Wednesday, six o’clock.” He looked innocent. “Invite Garrett, if you want. He’s family too, or he could be—”
“Subtle as a train wreck, Dad.”
“He’s a fine boy. And his parents adore you.”
“He’s looking ahead toward college now. He might not have much time for high school girlfriends. Though you could send me to BU with him,” Jordan began. “Their photography courses—”
“Nice try, missy.” Her father looked out over the lake. “The fish aren’t biting.” And neither was he.
Taro, Jordan’s black Labrador, raised her muzzle from where she’d been sunning on the dock as Jordan and her dad walked back to shore. Jordan snapped a shot of their side-by-side silhouettes thrown across the water-warped wood, wondering what four silhouettes would look like. Please, Jordan prayed, thinking of the unknown Mrs. Weber, please let me like you.
A SLIM HAND extended as blue eyes smiled. “How lovely to meet you at last.”
Jordan shook hands with the woman her father had just ushered into the sitting room. Anneliese Weber was small and slender, dark hair swept into a glossy knot at her nape, a string of gray pearls her only jewelry. A dark floral dress, darned but spotless gloves, quiet elegance with touches of wear and tear. Her face was young—she was twenty-eight, according to Jordan’s dad—but her eyes looked older. Of course they did; she was a war widow with a young child, starting over in a new country.
“Very pleased to meet you,” Jordan said sincerely. “This must be Ruth!” The child at Anneliese Weber’s side was darling; blond pigtails and a blue coat and a grave expression. Jordan extended a hand, but Ruth shrank back.
“She’s shy,” Anneliese apologized. Her voice was clear and low, almost no trace of a German accent. Just a little softness on the V’s. “Ruth’s world has been very unsettled.”
“I didn’t like strangers at your age either,” Jordan told Ruth. Not true, really, but something about Ruth’s wary little face made Jordan long to put her at ease. She also longed to take Ruth’s picture—those round cheeks and blond braids would just eat up the lens. Jordan’s father took the coats, and Jordan dashed into the kitchen to check the meatloaf. By the time she came out, whipping off the towel she’d tucked around her waist to protect her green Sunday taffeta, her father had poured drinks. Ruth sat on the couch with a glass of milk, as Anneliese Weber sipped sherry and surveyed the room. “A lovely home. You’re young to keep house for your father, Jordan, but you do it very well.”
Nice of her to lie, Jordan approved. The McBride house always looked mussed: a narrow brownstone three stories up and down on the lace-curtain side of South Boston; the stairs steep, the couches worn and comfortable, the rugs always skidding askew. Anneliese Weber did not seem like the type who approved of anything being askew, with her spine ramrod straight and every hair in place, but she looked around the room with approval. “Did you take this?” She gestured to a photograph of the Boston Common, mist wrapped and tilted at an angle that made everything look otherworldly, a dream landscape. “Your father tells me you are quite a … What is the word? A snapper?”
“Yes.” Jordan grinned. “Can I take your picture later?”
“Don’t encourage her.” Jordan’s dad guided Anneliese to the couch with a reverent touch to the small of her back, smiling. “Jordan already spends too much time staring through a lens.”
“Better than staring at a mirror or at a film screen,” Anneliese replied unexpectedly. “Young girls should have more on their minds than lipstick and giggling, or they will grow from silly girls to sillier women. You take classes for it—picture-taking?”
“Wherever I can.” Since Jordan was fourteen she’d been signing up for whatever photography classes she could pay for out of her allowance, and sneaking into college courses wherever she could find a professor willing to wink at the presence of a knock-kneed junior high schooler lurking in the back row. “I take classes, I study on my own, I practice—”
“One has to be serious about something in order to be good at it,” Anneliese said, approving. A warm glow started in Jordan’s chest. Serious. Good. Her father never saw Jordan’s photography that way. “Messing about with a camera,” he’d say, shaking his head. “Well, you’ll grow out of it.” I’m not going to grow out of it, Jordan had replied at fifteen. I’m going to be the next Margaret Bourke-White.
Margaret who? he’d responded, laughing. He laughed nicely, indulgently—but he’d still laughed.
Anneliese didn’t laugh. She looked at Jordan’s photograph and nodded approval. For the first time Jordan allowed herself to think the word: Stepmother …?
At the dining room table Jordan had set with the Sunday china, Anneliese asked questions about the antiques shop as Jordan’s father heaped her plate with the choicest cuts of everything. “I know an excellent treatment to make colored glass shine,” she said as he talked about a set of Tiffany lamps acquired at an estate sale. She quietly corrected Ruth’s grip on her fork as she listened to Jordan talk about her school’s forthcoming dance. “Surely you have a date, a pretty girl like you.”
“Garrett Byrne,” Jordan’s father said, forestalling her. “A nice young man, joined up to be a pilot at the end of the war. He never saw combat, though. Got a medical discharge when he broke his leg during training. You’ll meet him Sunday, if you’d care to accompany us to Mass.”
“I would like that. I’ve been trying so hard to make friends in Boston. You go every week?”
“Of course.”
Jordan coughed into her napkin. She and her father hardly went to Mass more than twice a year, Easter and Christmas, but now he sat there at the head of the table positively radiating piety. Anneliese smiled, also radiating piety, and Jordan mused about courting couples on their best behavior. She saw it every day in the halls at school, and apparently the older generation was no different. Maybe there was a photo-essay in that: a series of comparison photographs, courting couples of all ages, highlighting the similarities that transcended age. With the right titles and captions, it might make a piece strong enough to submit to a magazine or newspaper …
Plates were cleared, coffee brought out. Jordan cut the Boston cream pie Anneliese had brought. “Though I don’t know why you call it pie,” she said, blue eyes sparkling. “It’s cake, and don’t tell an Austrian any differently. We know cake, in Austria.”
“You speak such good English,” Jordan ventured. She couldn’t tell yet about Ruth, who hadn’t spoken a word.
“I studied it at school. And my husband spoke it for business, so I practiced with him.”
Jordan wanted to ask how Anneliese had lost her husband, but her father shot her a warning glance. He’d already given clear instructions: “You’re not to ask Mrs. Weber about the war, or her husband. She’s made it quite clear it was a painful time.”
“But don’t we want to know everything about her?” Much as Jordan wanted her father to have someone special in his life, it still had to be the right someone. “Why is that wrong?”
“Because people aren’t obliged to drag out their old hurts or dirty laundry just because of your need to know,” he answered. “No one wants to talk about a war after they’ve lived through it, Jordan McBride. So don’t go prying where you’ll be hurting feelings, and no wild stories either.”
Jordan had flushed then. Wild stories—that was a bad habit going back ten years. When her barely remembered mother had gone into the hospital, seven-year-old Jordan had been packed off to stay with some well-meaning dimwit of an aunt who told her, Your mother’s gone away, and then wouldn’t say where. So Jordan made up a different story every day: She’s gone to get milk. She’s gone to get her hair done. Then when her mother still didn’t come back, more fanciful stories: She’s gone to a ball like Cinderella. She’s gone to California to be a movie star. Until her father came home weeping to say, Your mother’s gone to the angels, and Jordan didn’t understand why his story got to be the real one, so she kept making up her own. “Jordan and her wild stories,” her teacher had joked. “Why does she do it?”
Jordan could have said, Because no one told me the truth. Because no one told me “She’s sick and you can’t see her because you might catch it” so I made up something better to fill the gap.
Maybe that was why she’d latched so eagerly onto her first Kodak at age nine. There weren’t gaps in photographs; there wasn’t any need to fill them up with stories. If she had a camera, she didn’t need to tell stories; she could tell the truth.
Taro lolloped into the dining room, breaking Jordan’s thoughts. For the first time, she saw little Ruth grow animated. “Hund!”
“English, Ruth,” her mother said, but Ruth was already on the floor holding out shy hands.
“Hund,” she whispered, stroking Taro’s ears. Jordan’s heart melted completely. “I’m getting a picture,” she said, slipping out of her own chair and going for the Leica on the hall table. When she came back in and started clicking, Ruth had Taro piled over her lap as Anneliese spoke softly. “If Ruth seems very quiet to you, or flinches, or acts odd—well, you should know that in Altaussee before we left Austria, we had a very upsetting encounter by the lake. A refugee woman who tried to rob us … It’s made Ruth wary and strange around new people.” That seemed to be all Anneliese was going to say. Jordan stamped down her questions before her dad could shoot her another glance. He was perfectly correct, after all, when he pointed out that Anneliese Weber wasn’t the only person who didn’t care to discuss the war—no one did now. First everyone had celebrated, and now all anyone wanted to do was forget. Jordan found it hard to believe that at this time last year there had still been wartime news and stars hanging in windows; victory gardens and boys at school talking about whether it would all be over before they got old enough to join up.
Anneliese smiled down at her daughter. “The dog likes you, Ruth.”
“Her name is Taro,” said Jordan, clicking away: the little girl with her small freckled nose against the dog’s damp one.
“Taro.” Anneliese tasted the word. “What kind of name is that?”
“After Gerda Taro—the first female photographer to cover the front lines of a war.”
“And she died doing it, so that’s enough about women taking pictures in war zones,” Jordan’s father said.
“Let me get a few shots of you two—”
“Please don’t.” Anneliese turned her face away with a camerashy frown. “I hate having my picture taken.”
“Just family snaps,” Jordan reassured. She liked close-camera candids over formal shots. Tripods and lighting equipment made camera-shy people even more self-conscious; they put a mask on and then the photograph wasn’t real. She preferred to hover unobtrusively until people forgot she was there, until they forgot the mask and relaxed into who they really were. There was no hiding the real you from a camera.
Anneliese rose to clear the table, Jordan’s father assisting with the heavy dishes as Jordan quietly moved and snapped. Ruth was coaxed away from Taro to carry the butter dish, and Dad was soon describing their hunting cabin. “It’s a lovely spot; my father built it. Jordan likes to snap the lake; I go for the fishing and the odd bit of shooting.”
Anneliese half turned away from the sink. “You hunt?”
Jordan’s father looked anxious. “Some women hate the noise and the mess—”
“Not at all …”
Jordan put down her camera and went to help with the washing up. Anneliese offered to dry, but Jordan turned her down so she’d have the chance to admire Daniel McBride’s deftness with a dish towel. No woman could possibly fail to be charmed by a man who could properly dry Spode.
Anneliese said good-bye soon after. Jordan’s father gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek, but his arm stole around her waist for just an instant, making Jordan smile. Anneliese then squeezed Jordan’s hand warmly, and Ruth offered her fingers this time, well slimed by Taro’s affectionate tongue. They descended the steep brownstone steps to the cool spring night, and Jordan’s father shut the door. Before he could ask, Jordan came and kissed his cheek. “I like her, Dad. I really do.”
BUT SHE COULDN’T SLEEP.
The tall narrow brownstone had a small basement with its own private entrance to the street. Jordan had to walk outside the house and then down the very steep outer stairs to the tiny door set below ground level under the stoop, but the privacy and the lack of light made it perfect for her purposes. When she was fourteen and learning to print her own negatives, her dad had allowed her to sweep out the rubbish and make herself a proper darkroom.
Jordan paused on the threshold, inhaling the familiar scents of chemicals and equipment. This was her room, much more than the cozy bedroom upstairs with its narrow bed and the desk for homework. This room was where she ceased being Jordan McBride with her messy ponytail and bag of schoolbooks, and became J. Bryde, professional photographer. J. Bryde was going to be her byline someday, when she became a professional like her idols whose faces looked down from the darkroom wall: Margaret Bourke-White kneeling with her camera on a massive decorative eagle’s head sixty-one floors up on the Chrysler Building, impervious to the height; Gerda Taro crouched behind a Spanish soldier against a heap of rubble, peering for the best angle.
Normally Jordan would have taken a moment to salute her heroines, but something was gnawing at her. She wasn’t sure what, so she just started laying out trays and chemicals with the speed of long practice.
She loaded the negatives for the pictures she’d taken at dinner, running the images onto the paper one at a time. Sliding them through the developer under the red glow of the safelight, Jordan watched the images come up through the fluid one by one, like ghosts. Ruth playing with the dog; Anneliese Weber turning away from the camera; Anneliese from behind, doing dishes … Jordan rotated the sheets through the stop bath, the fixer bath, gently agitating the liquids in their trays, transferring the prints to the little sink for washing, then clipping them up on the clothesline to dry. She walked down the line one by one.
“What are you looking for?” Jordan wondered aloud. She had a habit of talking to herself down here all alone; she wished she had a fellow photographer to share darkroom conversation with, ideally some smoldering Hungarian war correspondent. She walked the line of prints again. “What caught your eye, J. Bryde?” It wasn’t the first time she’d had this niggling feeling about a shot before it had even been printed. It was like the camera saw something she didn’t, nagging her until she saw it with her own eyes and not just through the lens.
Half the time, of course, that feeling was completely off base.
“That one,” Jordan heard herself saying. The one of Anneliese Weber by the sink, half turned toward the lens. Jordan squinted, but the image was too small. She ran it again, enlarging it. Midnight. She didn’t care, working away until the enlarged print hung on the line.
Jordan stood back, hands on hips, staring at it. “Objectively,” she said aloud, “that is one of the best shots you’ve ever taken.” The click of the Leica had captured Anneliese as she stood framed by the arch of the kitchen window, half turned toward the camera for once rather than away from it, the contrast between her dark hair and pale face beautifully rendered. But …
“Subjectively,” Jordan continued, “that shot is goddamn spooky.” She didn’t often swear—her father didn’t tolerate bad language—but if there was ever an occasion for a goddamn, this was it.
It was the expression on the Austrian woman’s face. Jordan had sat across from that face all evening, and she’d seen nothing but pleasant interest and calm dignity, but in the photograph a different woman emerged. She wore a smile, but not a pleasant one. The eyes were narrowed, and her hands around the dish towel suddenly clenched in some reflexive death grip. All evening Anneliese had looked gentle and frail and ladylike, but she didn’t look like that here. Here, she looked lovely and unsettling and—
“Cruel.” The word popped out of Jordan’s mouth before she knew she was thinking it, and she shook her head. Because anyone could take an unflattering photo: unlucky timing or lighting caught you midblink and you looked sly, caught you with your mouth open and you looked half-witted. Shoot Hedy Lamarr the wrong way, and she turned from Snow White to the Wicked Queen. Cameras didn’t lie, but they could certainly mislead.
Jordan reached for the clothespins clipping the print, meeting that razor-edged gaze. “What were you saying, right at this minute?” Her father had been talking about the cabin …
You hunt?
Some women hate the noise and the mess—
Not at all …
Jordan shook her head again, moving to throw the print away. Her dad wouldn’t like it; he’d think she was twisting the image to see something that wasn’t there. Jordan and her wild stories.
But I didn’t twist it, Jordan thought. That’s how she looked.
She hesitated, then slipped the photograph into a drawer. Even if it was misleading, it was still one of the best pictures she’d ever taken. She couldn’t quite bring herself to throw it away.
Chapter 2 (#u179fff11-81c1-520b-a9e5-d1b5a9459ac7)
IAN (#u179fff11-81c1-520b-a9e5-d1b5a9459ac7)
April 1950
Cologne, Germany
About half the time, they tried to run.
For a moment Ian Graham’s partner kept up with him, but though Tony was more than a decade younger than Ian he was half a head shorter, and Ian’s longer stride pulled him ahead toward their quarry: a middle-aged man in a gray suit dodging desperately around a German family heading away from the swimming beach with wet towels. Ian put on a burst of speed, feeling his hat blow away, not bothering to shout at the man to stop. They never stopped. They’d sprint to the end of the earth to get away from the things they’d done.
The puzzled German family had halted, staring. The mother had an armful of beach toys—a shovel, a red bucket brimming with wet sand. Veering, Ian snatched the bucket out of her hand with a shouted “Pardon me—,” slowed enough to aim, and slung it straight and hard at the running man’s feet. The man stumbled, staggered, lurched back into motion, and by then Tony blew past Ian and took the man down in a flying tackle. Ian skidded to a halt as the two men rolled over, feeling his own chest heave like a bellows. He retrieved the bucket and handed it back to the astonished German mother with a bow and a half smile. “Your servant, ma’am.” Turning back toward the prey, he saw the man curled on the path whimpering as Tony leaned over him.
“You’d better not have put a fist on him,” Ian warned his partner.
“The weight of his sins caught up to him, not my fist.” Tony Rodomovsky straightened: twenty-six years old with the olive-skinned, dark-eyed intensity of a European, and the untidy swagger of a Yank. Ian had first come across him after the war, a young sergeant with Polish-Hungarian blood and a Queens upbringing wearing the most carelessly ironed uniform Ian had ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on.
“Nice curveball with that bucket,” Tony went on cheerfully. “Don’t tell me you pitched for the Yankees.”
“Bowled against Eton in the house match in ’29.” Ian retrieved his battered fedora, cramming it down over dark hair that had been salted with gray since Omaha Beach. “You have it from here?”
Tony looked at the man on the ground. “What do you say, sir? Shall we continue the conversation we were having before I brought up a certain forest in Estonia and your various activities there, and you decided to practice your fifty-yard dash?”
The man began to cry, and Ian looked at the blue sparkle of the lake, fighting his usual sense of anticlimax. The man dissolving in tears on the ground had been an SS Sturmbannführer in Einsatzgruppe D, who had ordered the shooting of a hundred and fifty men in Estonia in 1941. More than that, Ian thought. Those eastern death squads had put hundreds of thousands in the ground in shallow trenches. But one hundred and fifty was what he had the documentation for in his office back in Vienna: testimony from a shaky-handed, gray-faced pair of survivors who had managed to flee. One hundred and fifty was enough to bring the man to trial, perhaps put a rope around a monster’s neck.
Moments like this should have been glorious, and they never were. The monsters always looked so ordinary and pathetic, in the flesh.
“I didn’t do it,” the man gulped through his tears. “Those things you said I did.”
Ian just looked at him.
“I only did what the others did. What I was ordered to do. It was legal—”
Ian took a knee beside the man, raising his chin with one finger. Waited until those red-rimmed eyes met his own. “I have no interest in your orders,” he said quietly. “I have no interest if it was legal at the time. I have no interest in your excuses. You’re a cringing soulless trigger-pulling lackey, and I will see you face a judge.”
The man flinched. Ian rose and turned away, swallowing the rage red and raw before it burst out of him and he beat the man to a pulp. It was always the damned line about orders that made him want to tear throats open. They all say it, don’t they? That was when he wanted to sink his hands around their throats and stare into their bewildered eyes as they died choking on their excuses.
Judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason … Ian let out a slow, controlled breath. But not me. Control was what separated men from beasts, and they were the beasts.
“Sit on him until the arrest,” he told Tony tersely, and he went back to their hotel to make a telephone call.
“Bauer,” a voice rasped.
Ian crooked the receiver to his right ear, the one that wasn’t faintly hearing-damaged from an unlucky air raid in Spain in ’37, and switched to German, which he knew still had a wintry British tang despite all his years abroad. “We got him.”
“Heh. I’ll start putting pressure on the state prosecutor in Bonn, push to put the Hurensohn on trial.”
“Put that prosecutor’s feet to the fire, Fritz. I want this son of a bitch in front of the hardest judge in Bonn.”
Fritz Bauer grunted. Ian envisioned his friend, sitting behind his desk in Braunschweig, puffs of gray hair around his balding head, smoking his perpetual cigarettes. He’d run from Germany to Denmark to Sweden during the war, steps ahead of having a yellow star slapped on his arm and being shipped east. He and Ian had met after the first of the Nuremberg trials—and a few years ago, when the official war crimes investigation teams were being shut down for lack of funding, and Ian had started his own operation with Tony, he’d turned to Bauer. “We find the guilty,” Ian proposed over a tumbler of scotch and half a pack of cigarettes, “and you see them prosecuted.”
“We won’t make friends,” Bauer had warned with a mirthless smile, and he was right. The man they’d caught today might see a prison cell for his crimes, he might get off with a slap, or he might never be tried at all. It was five years after the end of the war, and the world had moved on. Who cared anymore about punishing the guilty? “Let them alone,” a judge had advised Ian not long ago. “The Nazis are beaten and done. Worry about the Russkies now, not the Germans.”
“You worry about the next war,” Ian had replied evenly. “Someone has to sweep up the muck of the last one.”
“Who’s next on your list?” Bauer asked now over the telephone.
Die Jägerin, Ian thought. The huntress. But there were no leads to her whereabouts, not for years. “There’s a Sobibór guard I’m tracing. I’ll update his file when I get back to Vienna.”
“Your center is getting a reputation. Third arrest this year—”
“None of them big fish.” Eichmann, Mengele, Stangl—the bigger names were far beyond Ian’s limited reach, but that didn’t bother him much. He couldn’t put pressure on foreign governments, couldn’t fight massive deportation battles, but what he could do was search for the lesser war criminals gone to ground in Europe. And there were so many of them, clerks and camp guards and functionaries who had played their part in the great machine of death during the war. They couldn’t all be tried at Nuremberg; there hadn’t been the manpower, the money, or even the interest in anything so huge in scale. So a few were put on trial—however many would fit on the bench, in some cases, which Ian found starkly, darkly ironic—and the rest just went home. Returned to their families after the war, hung up their uniforms, perhaps took a new name or moved to a new town if they were cautious … but still just went back to Germany and pretended it had all never happened.
People asked Ian sometimes why he’d left the gritty glamour of a war correspondent’s work for this dogged, tedious slog after war criminals. A life spent chasing the next battle and the next story wherever it led, from Franco’s rise in Spain to the fall of the Maginot Line to everything that followed—hammering out a column on deadline while hunched under a tarp that barely kept off the beating desert sun, playing poker in a bombed-out hotel waiting for transport to arrive, sitting up to his shins in seawater and vomit as a landing craft crammed with green-faced soldiers neared a stretch of beach … Terror to tedium, tedium to terror, forever vibrating between both for the sake of a byline.
He’d traded all that for a tiny office in Vienna piled with lists; for endless interviews with cagey witnesses and grieving refugees; for no byline at all. “Why?” Tony had asked soon after they began working together, gesturing around the four walls of their grim office. “Why go to this, from that?”
Ian had given a brief, slanted smile. “Because it’s the same work, really. Telling the world that terrible things happened. But when I was hammering out columns during the war, what did all those words accomplish? Nothing.”
“Hey, I knew plenty of boys in the ranks who lived for your column. Said it was the only one out there besides Ernie Pyle’s that wrote for the dogface with boots on the ground and not the generals in tents.”
Ian shrugged. “If I’d bought it on a bombing run over Berlin when I went out with a Lancaster crew, or got torpedoed on the way back from Egypt, there’d have been a hundred other scribblers to fill my place. People want to read about war. But there’s no war now, and no one wants to hear about war criminals walking free.” Ian made the same gesture at the four walls of the office. “We don’t write headlines now, we make them, one arrest at a time. One grudging drop of newspaper ink at a time. And unlike all those columns I wrote about war, there aren’t too many people queuing up behind us to do this work. What we do here? We accomplish something a good deal more important than anything I ever managed to say with a byline. Because no one wants to hear what we have to say, and someone has to make them listen.”
“So why won’t you write up any of our catches?” Tony had shot back. “More people might listen if they see your byline front and center.”
“I’m done writing instead of doing.” Ian hadn’t written a word since the Nuremberg trials, even though he’d been a journalist since he was nineteen, a lanky boy storming out of his father’s house shouting he was going to damned well work for a living and not spend his life sipping scotch at the club and droning about how the country was going to the dogs. More than fifteen years spent over a typewriter, honing and stropping his prose until it could cut like a razor’s edge, and now Ian didn’t think he’d ever put his name on an article again.
He blinked, realizing how long he’d been woolgathering with the telephone pressed to his ear. “What was that, Fritz?”
“I said, three arrests in a year is something to celebrate,” Fritz Bauer repeated. “Get a drink and a good night’s sleep.”
“I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since the Blitz,” Ian joked, and rang off.
The nightmares that night were particularly bad. Ian dreamed of twisting parachutes tangled in black trees, waking with a muffled shout in the hotel room’s anonymous darkness. “No parachute,” he said, hardly hearing himself over the hammering of his own heart. “No parachute. No parachute.” He walked naked to the window, threw open the shutters to the night air, and lit a cigarette that tasted like a petrol can. He exhaled smoke, leaning against the sill to look out over a dark city. He was thirty-eight, he had chased two wars across half the globe, and he stood till dawn thinking in boundless rage-filled hunger of a woman standing on the shore of Lake Rusalka.
“YOU NEED TO get laid,” Tony advised.
Ian ignored him, typing up a quick report for Bauer on the typewriter he’d carried since running around the desert after Patton’s boys. They were back in Vienna, gray and bleak with its burned-out shell of the state opera house still bearing witness to the war’s passing, but a vast improvement on Cologne, which had been bombed to rubble and was still little more than a building site around a chain of lakes.
Tony balled up a sheet of foolscap and threw it at Ian. “Are you listening to me?”
“No.” Ian flung the ball back. “Chuck that in the bin, we haven’t got a secretary to pick up after you.” The Vienna Refugee Documentation Center on the Mariahilferstrasse didn’t have a lot of things. The war crimes investigation teams Ian had worked with just after the war had called for officers, drivers, interrogators, linguists, pathologists, photographers, typists, legal experts—a team of at least twenty, well appointed, well budgeted. (Not that the teams ever got all those things, but at least they tried.) The center here had only Tony, who acted as driver, interrogator, and linguist, and Ian, who took the mantle of typist, clerk, and very poor photographer. Ian’s annuity from his long-dead father barely covered rent and living expenses. Two men and two desks, and we expect to move mountains, Ian thought wryly.
“You’re brooding again. You always do when we make an arrest. You go off in a Blue Period like a goddamn Picasso.” Tony sorted through a stack of newspapers in German, French, English, and something Cyrillic Ian couldn’t read. “Take a night off. I’ve got a redhead in Ottakring, and she has a knockout roommate. Take her out, tell her a few stories about throwing back shots with Hemingway and Steinbeck after Paris was liberated—”
“It wasn’t nearly as picturesque as you make it sound.”
“So? Talk it up! You’ve got glamour, boss. Women love ’em tall, dark, and tragic. You’re six long-lean-and-mean feet of heroic war stories and unhappy past—”
“Oh, for God’s sake—”
“—all buttoned up behind English starch and a thousand-yard stare of you can’t possibly understand the things that haunt me. That’s absolute catnip for the ladies, believe me—”
“Are you finished?” Ian drew the sheet out of the typewriter, tipping his chair back on two legs. “Go through the mail, then pull the file on the Bormann assistant.”
“Fine, die a monk.”
“Why do I put up with you?” Ian wondered. “Feckless cretinous Yank …”
“Joyless Limey bastard,” Tony shot back, rummaging in the file cabinet. Ian hid a grin, knowing perfectly well why he put up with Tony. Ranging across three fronts of the war with a typewriter and notepad, Ian had met a thousand Tonys: achingly young men in rumpled uniforms, heading off into the mouth of the guns. American boys jammed on troopships and green with seasickness, English boys flying off in Hurricanes with a one in four chance of making it back … after a while Ian couldn’t bear to look at any of them too closely, knowing better than they did what their chances were of getting out alive. It had been just after the war ended that he met Tony, slouching along as an interpreter in the entourage of an American general who clearly wanted him court-martialed and shot for insubordination and slovenliness. Ian sympathized with the feeling now that Sergeant A. Rodomovsky worked for him and not the United States Army, but Tony was the first young soldier Ian had been able to befriend. He was brash, a practical joker, and a complete nuisance, but when Ian shook his hand for the first time, he’d been able to think, This one won’t die.
Unless I kill him, Ian thought now, next time he gets on my nerves. A distinct possibility.
He finished the report for Bauer and rose, stretching. “Get your earplugs,” he advised, reaching for his violin case.
“You’re aware you don’t have a future as a concert violinist?” Tony leafed through the stack of mail that had accumulated in their absence.
“I play poorly yet with great lack of feeling.” Ian brought the violin to his chin, starting a movement of Brahms. Playing helped him think, kept his hands busy as his brain sorted through the questions that rose with every new chase. Who are you, what did you do, and where would you go to get away from it? He was drawing out the last note as Tony let out a whistle.
“Boss,” he called over his shoulder, “I’ve got news.”
Ian lowered his bow. “New lead?”
“Yes.” Tony’s eyes sparked triumph. “Die Jägerin.”
A trapdoor opened in Ian’s stomach, a long drop over the bottomless pit of rage. He put the violin back in its case, slow controlled movements. “I didn’t give you that file.”
“It’s the one at the back of the drawer you look at when you think I’m not paying attention,” Tony said. “Believe me, I’ve read it.”
“Then you know it’s a cold trail. We know she was in Poznań as late as November ’44, but that’s all.” Ian felt excitement starting to war with caution. “So what did you find?”
Tony grinned. “A witness who saw her later than November ’44. After the war, in fact.”
“What?” Ian had been pulling out his file on the woman who was his personal obsession; he nearly dropped it. “Who? Someone from the Poznań region, or Frank’s staff?” It had been during the first Nuremberg trial that Ian caught die Jägerin’s scent, hearing a witness testify against Hans Frank—the governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, whom Ian would later (as one of the few journalists admitted to the execution room) watch swing from a rope for war crimes. In the middle of the information about the Jews Frank was shipping east, the clerk had testified about a certain visit to Poznań. One of the high-ranking SS officers had thrown a party for Frank out by Lake Rusalka, at a big ocher-colored house …
Ian, at that point, had already had a very good reason to be searching for the woman who had lived in that house. And the clerk on the witness stand had been a guest at that party, where the SS officer’s young mistress had played hostess.
“Who did you find?” Ian rapped out at Tony, mouth dry with sudden hope. “Someone who remembers her? A name, a bloody photograph—” It was the most frustrating dead end of this file: the clerk at Nuremberg had met the woman only once, and he’d been drunk through most of the party. He didn’t remember her name, and all he could describe was a young woman, dark haired, blue eyed. Difficult to track a woman without knowing anything more than her nickname and her coloring. “What did you find?”
“Stop cutting me off, dammit, and I’ll tell you.” Tony tapped the file. “Die Jägerin’s lover fled to Altaussee in ’45. No sign he took his mistress with him from Poznań—but now, it’s looking like he did. Because I’ve located a girl in Altaussee whose sister worked a few doors down from the same house where our huntress’s lover had holed up with the Eichmanns and the rest of that crowd in May ’45. I haven’t met the sister yet, but she apparently remembers a woman who looked like die Jägerin.”
“That’s all?” Ian’s burst of hope ebbed as he recalled the pretty little spa town on a blue-green lake below the Alps, a bolt-hole for any number of high-ranking Nazis as the war ended. By May ’45 it had been crawling with Americans making arrests. Some fugitives submitted to handcuffs, some managed to escape. Die Jägerin’s SS officer had died in a hail of bullets rather than be taken—and there had been no sign of his mistress. “I’ve already combed Altaussee looking for leads. Once I knew her lover had died there, I went looking—if she’d been there too, I would have found her trail.”
“Look, you probably came on like some Hound of Hell from the Spanish Inquisition, and everyone clammed up in terror. Subtlety is not your strong suit. You come on like a wrecking ball that went to Eton.”
“Harrow.”
“Same thing.” Tony fished for his cigarettes. “I’ve been doing some lighter digging. All that driving around Austria we did last December, looking for the Belsen guard who turned out to have gone to Argentina? I took weekends, went to Altaussee, asked questions. I’m good at that.”
He was. Tony could talk to anyone, usually in their native language. It was what made him good at this job, which so often hinged on information eased lightly out of the suspicious and the wary. “Why did you put in all this effort on your own time?” Ian asked. “A cold case—”
“Because it’s the case you want. She’s your white whale. All these bastards”—Tony waved a hand at the filing cabinets crammed with documentation on war criminals—“you want to nab them all, but the one you really want is her.”
He wasn’t wrong. Ian felt his fingers tighten on the edge of the desk. “White whale,” he managed to say, wryly. “Don’t tell me you’ve read Melville?”
“Of course not. Nobody’s read Moby-Dick; it just gets assigned by overzealous teachers. I went to a recruiter’s office the day after Pearl Harbor; that’s how I got out of reading Moby-Dick.” Tony shook out a cigarette, black eyes unblinking. “What I want to know is, why die Jägerin?”
“You’ve read her file,” Ian parried.
“Oh, she’s a nasty piece of work, I’m not arguing that. That business about the six refugees she killed after feeding them a meal—”
“Children,” Ian said quietly. “Six Polish children, somewhere between the ages of four and nine.”
Tony stopped in the act of lighting his cigarette, visibly sickened. “Your clipping just said refugees.”
“My editor considered the detail too gruesome to include in the article. But they were children, Tony.” That had been one of the harder articles Ian had ever forced himself to write. “The clerk at Frank’s trial said that, at the party where he met her, someone told the story about how she’d dispatched six children who had probably escaped being shipped east. An amusing little anecdote over hors d’oeuvres. They toasted her with champagne, calling her the huntress.”
“Goddamn,” Tony said, very softly.
Ian nodded, thinking not only of the six unknown children who had been her victims, but of two others. A fragile young woman in a hospital bed, all starved eyes and grief. A boy just seventeen years old, saying eagerly I told them I was twenty-one, I ship out next week! The woman and the boy, one gone now, the other dead. You did that, Ian thought to the nameless huntress who filled up his sleepless nights. You did that, you Nazi bitch.
Tony didn’t know about them, the girl and the young soldier. Even now, years later, Ian found it difficult. He started marshaling the words, but Tony was already scribbling an address, moving from discussion to action. For now, Ian let it go, fingers easing their death grip on the desk’s edge.
“That’s where the girl in Altaussee lives, the one whose sister might have seen die Jägerin,” Tony was saying. “I say it’s worth going to talk in person.”
Ian nodded. Any lead was worth running down. “When did you get her name?”
“A week ago.”
“Bloody hell, a week?”
“We had the Cologne chase to wrap up. Besides, I was waiting for one more confirmation. I wanted to give you more good news, and now I can.” Tony tapped the letter from their mail stack, scattering ash from his cigarette. “It arrived while we were in Cologne.”
Ian scanned the letter, not recognizing the black scrawl. “Who’s this woman and why is she coming to Vienna …” He got to the signature at the bottom, and the world stopped in its tracks.
“Our one witness who actually met die Jägerin face-to-face and lived,” Tony said. “The Polish woman—I pulled her statement and details from the file.”
“She emigrated to England, why did you—”
“The telephone number was noted. I left a message. Now she’s coming to Vienna.”
“You really shouldn’t have contacted Nina,” Ian said quietly.
“Why not? Besides this potential Altaussee lead, she’s the only eyewitness we’ve got. Where’d you find her, anyway?”
“In Poznań after the German retreat in ’45. She was in hospital when she gave me her statement, with all the details she could remember.” Vividly Ian recalled the frail girl in the ward cot, limbs showing sticklike from a smock borrowed from the Polish Red Cross. “You shouldn’t have dragged her halfway across Europe.”
“It was her idea. I only wanted to talk by telephone, see if I could get any more detail about our mark. But if she’s willing to come here, let’s make use of her.”
“She also happens to be—”
“What?”
Ian paused. His surprise and disquiet were fading, replaced by an unexpected flash of devilry. He so rarely got to see his partner nonplussed. You spring a surprise like this on me, Ian thought, you deserve to have one sprung on you. Ian wouldn’t have chosen to yank the broken flower that was Nina Markova halfway across the continent, but she was already on the way, and there was no denying her presence would be useful for any number of reasons … including turning the tables on Tony, which Ian wasn’t too proud to admit he enjoyed doing. Especially when his partner started messing about with cases behind Ian’s back. Especially this case.
“She’s what?” Tony asked.
“Nothing,” Ian answered. Aside from pulling the ground out from under Tony, it might be good to see Nina. They did have matters to discuss that had nothing to do with the case, after all. “Just handle her carefully when she arrives,” he added, that part nothing but truthful. “She had a bad war.”
“I’ll be gentle as a lamb.”
FOUR DAYS PASSED, and a flood of refugee testimony came in that needed categorizing. Ian forgot all about their coming visitor, until an unholy screeching sounded in the corridor.
Tony looked up from the statement he was translating from Yiddish. “Our landlady getting her feathers ruffled again?” he said as Ian went to the office door.
His view down the corridor was blocked by Frau Hummel’s impressive bulk in her flowered housedress, as she pointed to some muddy footprints on her floor. Ian got a bare impression of a considerably smaller woman beyond his landlady, and then Frau Hummel seized the mud-shod newcomer by the arm. Her bellows turned to shrieks as the smaller woman yanked a straight razor out of her boot and whipped it up in unmistakable warning. The newcomer’s face was obscured by a tangle of bright blond hair; all Ian could really take in was the razor held in an appallingly determined fist.
“Ladies, please!” Tony tumbled into the hall.
“Kraut suka said she’d call police on me—” The newcomer was snarling.
“Big misunderstanding,” Tony said brightly, backing Frau Hummel away and waving the strange woman toward Ian. “If you’ll direct your concerns to my partner here, Fräulein—”
“This way.” Ian motioned her toward his door, keeping a wary eye on the razor. Rarely did visitors enter quite this dramatically. “You have business with the Refugee Documentation Center, Fräulein?”
The woman folded up that lethally sharp razor and tucked it back into her boot. “Arrived an hour less ago,” she said in hodgepodge English as Ian closed the office door. Her accent was strange, somewhere between English and something farther east than Vienna. It wasn’t until she straightened and brushed her tangled hair from a pair of bright blue eyes that Ian’s heart started to pound.
“Still don’t know me from Tom, Dick, or Ivan?” she asked.
Bloody hell, Ian thought, frozen. She’s changed.
Five years ago she’d lain half starved in a Red Cross hospital bed, all brittle silence and big blue eyes. Now she looked capable and compact in scuffed trousers and knee boots, swinging a disreputable-looking sealskin cap in one hand. The hair he remembered as dull brown was bright blond with dark roots, and her eyes had a cheery, wicked glitter.
Ian forced the words through numb lips. “Hello, Nina.”
Tony came banging back in. “The gnädige Frau’s feathers are duly smoothed down.” He gave Nina a rather appreciative glance. “Who’s our visitor?”
She looked annoyed. “I sent a letter. You didn’t get?” Her English has improved, Ian thought. Five years ago they’d barely been able to converse; she spoke almost no English and he almost no Polish. Their communication in between then and now had been strictly by telegram. His heart was still thudding. This was Nina …?
“So you’re—” Tony looked puzzled, doubtless thinking of Ian’s description of a woman who needed gentle handling. “You aren’t quite what I was expecting, Miss Markova.”
“Not Miss Markova.” Ian raked a hand through his hair, wishing he’d explained it all four days ago, wishing he hadn’t had the impulse to turn the tables on his partner. Because if anyone in this room had had the tables turned on them, it was Ian. Bloody hell. “The file still lists her birth name. Tony Rodomovsky, allow me to introduce Nina Graham.” The woman in the hospital bed, the woman who had seen die Jägerin face-to-face and lived, the woman now standing in the same room with him for the first time in five years, a razor in her boot and a cool smile on her lips. “My wife.”
Chapter 3 (#ulink_43d8b110-b11b-523b-8bd7-8a759f211be4)
NINA (#ulink_43d8b110-b11b-523b-8bd7-8a759f211be4)
Before the war
Lake Baikal, Siberia
She was born of lake water and madness.
To have the lake in her blood, that was to be expected. They all did, anyone born on the shore of Baikal, the vast rift lake at the eastern edge of the world. Any baby who came into the world beside that huge lake lying like a second sky across the taiga knew the iron tang of lake water before they ever knew the taste of mother’s milk. But Nina Borisovna Markova’s blood was banded with madness, like the deep striations of winter lake ice. Because the Markovs were all madmen, everyone knew that—every one of them swaggering and wild-eyed and savage as wolverines.
“I breed lunatics,” Nina’s father said when he was deep into the vodka he brewed in his hunting shack behind the house. “My sons are all criminals and my daughters are all whores—” and he’d lay about him with huge grimed fists, and his children hissed and darted out of the way like sharp-clawed little animals, and Nina might get an extra clout because she was the only tiny blue-eyed one in a litter of tall dark-eyed sisters and taller dark-eyed brothers. Her father’s gaze narrowed whenever he looked at her. “Your mother was a rusalka,” he’d growl, huddled in his shirt half covered by a clotted black beard.
“What’s a rusalka?” Nina finally asked at ten.
“A lake witch who comes to shore trailing her long green hair, luring men to their deaths,” her father replied, dealing a blow Nina ducked with liquid speed. It was the first thing a Markov child learned, to duck. Then you learned to steal, scrabbling for your own portion of watery borscht and hard bread, because no one shared, not ever. Then you learned to fight—when the other village boys were learning to net fish and hunt seals, and the girls were learning to cook and mend fishing nets, the Markov boys learned to fight and drink, and the Markova girls learned to fight and screw. That led to the last thing they learned, which was to leave.
“Get a man who will take you away,” Nina’s next-oldest sister told her. Olga was gathering her clothes: fifteen, her body rounding, eyes already trained west in the direction of Irkutsk, the nearest city, hours away beyond the Siberian horizon. Nina couldn’t imagine what a city looked like. All she’d ever seen was the collection of ramshackle huts that could barely be called a village; fishing boats silvery and pungent with fish scales; the endless spread of the lake. “Get a man,” Olga repeated, “because that’s the only way you’ll get out.”
“I’ll find a different way,” Nina said. Olga gave her a spiteful scratch in farewell and was gone. None of Nina’s siblings ever came back; it was everyone for themselves, and she didn’t miss them until the last brother left, and it was just her and her father. “Little rusalka bitch”—he slung Nina around the hut as she hissed and scratched at the huge hand tangled in her wild hair—“I should give you back to the lake.” He didn’t frighten Nina much. Weren’t all fathers like hers? He loomed as large in her world as the lake. In a way, he was the lake. The villagers sometimes called the lake “the Old Man.” One Old Man stretched blue and rippling on the doorstep, and the other old man banged her around the hut.
He wasn’t always wild. In mellow moods he sang old songs of Father Frost and Baba Yaga, stropping the straight razor that always swung at his belt. In those moods he’d show Nina how to tan a pelt from the seals he shot with the ancient rifle over the door; took her hunting with him and taught her how to move over the snow in perfect silence. Then he didn’t call her a rusalka; he tugged her ear and called her a little huntress. “If I teach you anything,” he whispered, “let it be how to move through the world without making a sound, Nina Borisovna. If they can’t hear you coming, they’ll never lay hands on you. They haven’t caught me yet.”
“Who, Papa?”
“Stalin’s men,” he spat. “The ones who stand you against a wall and shoot you for saying the truth—that Comrade Stalin is a lying, murdering pig who shits on the common man. They kill you for saying things like that, but only if they can find you. So keep silent feet and they’ll never hunt you down. You’ll hunt them down instead.”
He’d go on like that for hours, until Nina dozed off. Comrade Stalin is a Georgian swine, Comrade Stalin is a murdering sack of shit. “Stop him saying those things,” the old women who bartered clothes whispered to Nina when she came to trade. “We’re not so far out on the edge of the world that the wrong ears can’t hear us. That father of yours will get himself shot, and his neighbors.”
“He says the tsar was a murdering sack of shit too,” Nina pointed out. “And Jews, and the natives, and any seal hunters who leave carcasses on our section of shore. He thinks everything and everyone is shit.”
“It’s different to say it about Comrade Stalin!”
Nina shrugged. She wasn’t afraid of anything. It was another curse in the Markov family; none of them feared blood or darkness or even the legend of Baba Yaga hiding in the trees. “Baba Yaga is afraid of me,” Nina said to another village child when they were scrapping ferociously over a broken doll. “You’d better be afraid of me too.” She got the doll, thrust at her by the child’s mother who crossed herself in the old way, the way the people did before they learned that religion was the opiate of the masses.
“Fearlessness, heh,” Nina’s father said when he heard. “It’s why my children will all die before me. You fear nothing, you get stupid. It’s better to fear one thing, Nina Borisovna. Put all the terror into that, and it leaves you just careful enough.”
Nina looked at her father wonderingly. He was so enormous, wild as a wolf; she could not imagine him afraid of anything. “What’s your fear, Papa?”
He put his lips to her ear. “Comrade Stalin. Why else live on a lake the size of the sea, as far east in the world as you can go before falling off?”
“What’s as far west as you can go before falling off?” The sun went west to die, and most of the world was west of here, but beyond that Nina hardly knew. There was only one schoolmaster in the village, and he was almost as ignorant as the children he taught. “What’s all the way west?”
“America?” Nina’s father shrugged. “Godless devils. Worse than Stalin. Stay clear of Americans.”
“They’ll never catch me.” Tapping her toes. “Silent feet.”
He toasted that with a swallow of vodka and one of his rare knife-edged smiles. A good day. His good days always came back to bad ones, but that never bothered her because she was fast and silent and feared nothing, and she could always keep out of reach.
Until the day she turned sixteen, when her father tried to drown her in the lake.
Nina was standing on the shore in a pure, cold twilight. The lake was frozen in a sheet of dark green glass, so clear you could see the bottom far below. When the surface ice warmed during the day, crevasses would open, crackling and booming as if the lake’s rusalki were fighting a war in the depths. Close to shore, hummocks of turquoise-colored ice heaved up over each other in blocks taller than Nina, shoved onto the bank by the winter wind. A few years ago, those frozen waves had crawled so far ashore that Tankhoy Station had been entirely swallowed in wind-flung blue ice. Nina stood in her shabby winter coat, hands thrust into her pockets, wondering if she would still be here to see the lake freeze next year. She was sixteen years old; all her sisters had left home before they reached that age, mostly with swelling bellies. All the same, Markov’s daughters, came the whisper in the village. They all go bad.
“I don’t care if I go bad,” Nina said aloud. “I just don’t want a big belly.” But there didn’t seem to be anything else her father’s daughters did, except grow up, start breeding, and run away. Nina kicked restlessly at the shore, and her father came lurching out of the hut, naked to the waist, oblivious to the cold. Clumsy inked dragons and serpents writhed over his arms, and his body steamed. He’d been on one of his binges, guzzling vodka and muttering mad things for days, but now he seemed lucid again. He gazed at her, seeing her for the first time all day, and his eyes had an odd gleam. “The Old Man wants you back,” he said conversationally.
And he was after her like a wolf, though Nina got three sprinting strides toward the trees before the huge hand snatched at her hair and yanked her off her feet. She hit the ground so hard the world slipped sideways, and when it came to rights she was on her back, boots scrabbling on the ground as her father dragged her onto the glass-smooth lake.
The ice this time of year was thicker than a man was tall, but there were gaps where the ice thinned. The village schoolmaster, less ignorant about the lake than about most of the things he taught, said something about warmer water channels winding upward from the deeper rift, enough to make holes in the surface—and now, her father dragged her across the ice to one of the spring holes, dropped to his knees, broke the thin crust, and thrust her head under the freezing water.
Fear slapped Nina then, alien and spiky as new-forming frost. Even being dragged across the lake by the hair she had not been afraid; it had all happened too fast. But as the dark water swallowed her, terror descended like an avalanche. The water’s cold gripped her; she could see the depths of the lake stretching away below, blue green and fathomless, and she opened her mouth to scream but the lake’s iron fist punched into her mouth with another paralyzing burst of cold.
On the surface, her body thrashed against her father’s grip in her hair. His stone-hard hand thrust her head down deeper, deeper, but she flailed a leg free and slammed one boot into his ribs. He brought her up with a curse, and Nina got one sobbing gasp of air that stabbed her lungs like hot knives. Her father cursed blurrily; he released Nina’s sodden hair and flipped her onto her back, seizing her by the throat instead. “Go back to the lake,” he whispered, “go home.” Again her head went down under the water. This time she could see up through the ripples, up past her father to the twilight sky. Get there, she thought incoherently through another wash of fear, just get up there—and her hand stretched blindly … But it wasn’t the sky her fingers brushed. It was the unfolded razor swinging at her father’s belt.
She couldn’t feel her fingers wrapping around the handle. The cold had her in its jaws, clamping down. But she watched herself move through the ripples of the lake that was drowning her, watched her hand jerk the razor free and bring it around in a savage swipe across her father’s hand. Then he was gone, and Nina came roaring up out of the water, a shard of broken ice on the edge slicing along her throat, but she had the razor in her fist and she was free.
They lay gasping on opposite sides of the ice hole. Her father clutched his hand, which Nina had sliced nearly to the bone, sending curling ribbons of scarlet across the frozen lake. Nina huddled on her side, racked by bone-deep shudders of cold and terror, ice crystals already forming on her lashes and through her hair, a similar ribbon of blood winding down the side of her throat from the ice cut. She still held the razor extended toward her father.
“If you touch me again,” she said through chattering teeth, “I’ll kill you.”
“You’re a rusalka,” he mumbled, looking bewildered at her fury. “The lake won’t hurt you.”
A violent shudder racked her. I am no rusalka, she wanted to scream. I’ll die before I ever let water close over my head again. But all she said was, “I’ll kill you, Papa. Believe it.” And she managed to stumble back to the hut, where she bolted the door, peeled away her ice-crusted clothes, built up the fire, and crawled naked and shuddering under a pile of silver-gray seal pelts. Had it been deep winter the shock of the cold would have killed her, she realized later, but winter’s bite was easing toward spring, and she managed not to die. Her father slept it off in the hunting shack while Nina lay shivering under her furs, still gripping the razor, breaking into hiccuping little sobs whenever she thought of the water lapping over her face, filling her mouth and nose with its iron tang.
I have my one fear, she thought. From that day forward, as far as Nina Markova was concerned, if it wasn’t death by drowning it wasn’t worth being afraid of. Get away from here, she thought, unpeeling from the furs long enough to find her father’s vodka and take several enormous gulps of the oily, peppery stuff. Get out. The thought pounded. Go where? What is the opposite of a lake? What is the opposite of drowning? What lies all the way west? Nonsensical questions. Nina realized she was half drunk. She crawled under the furs again, slept like the dead, and woke with a crust of blood on her throat where the lake’s icy fingers had tried to kill her, and that one clear, cold thought.
Get out.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_4fc509ac-5c77-5370-bbcd-df3ef64a9815)
JORDAN (#ulink_4fc509ac-5c77-5370-bbcd-df3ef64a9815)
April 1946
Boston
Aaaaand it gets away! Line drive past the diving Johnny Pesky—”
“Garrett,” Jordan told her boyfriend as groans rose around them across the stands of Fenway Park, “I know the line drive got past Johnny Pesky. I’m right here, watching the line drive get past Johnny Pesky. You don’t need to give me the play-by-play.”
It was a perfect spring day: the smell of outfield grass, the murmur and rush of the crowd, the scratch of pencils on scorecards. Garrett grinned. “Admit it, you missed our baseball dates when I was in training. Even my play-by-play.” Jordan couldn’t resist raising the Leica for a snap. With his dimples, his broad shoulders, and his Red Sox cap tipped down over short brown hair, Garrett looked about as all-American cute as a Coca-Cola ad. Or a recruitment poster: he’d enlisted at the end of his senior year, giving Jordan his class ring, but a badly broken leg during pilot training and the abrupt end of the war with Japan not long afterward had cut his stint in the army air force very short. She knew Garrett regretted that—he’d been dreaming of dogfights over the Pacific when he signed up, not of being cut loose on a medical discharge before even making it overseas.
“Sure, I missed our baseball dates,” Jordan said playfully. “Maybe not as much as I missed having Ted Williams batting in the three-spot during the war, but—”
Garrett flicked a peanut shell into her ponytail. “Bet I looked better in an army air force uniform than Ted Williams.”
“I’m sure you did, because Ted Williams was a marine.”
“The marines were only invented so the army has someone to take to the prom.”
“I wouldn’t tell any marines that.”
“Too dumb to get the joke.”
The next Yankee came to bat, and Jordan raised the Leica. Only in the darkroom would she know if she missed the high point of the bat’s swing. Flawless timing; every great photographer needed it.
“Come to lunch this Sunday?” Garrett rooted through his bag of peanuts. “My parents are dying to see you.”
“Aren’t they hoping you’ll start dating some Boston University sorority girl in the fall?”
“Come on, you know they love you.”
They did, and so did Garrett, which surprised Jordan. They’d been together since she was a junior, and from the start she’d been determined not to get her heart broken once he moved on. High school seniors went off to college or war, but either way they moved on. And that was just fine, because this business of getting married right after graduation to your high school sweetheart was ridiculous as far as Jordan was concerned (no matter what her dad said about it working perfectly well for him). No, Garrett Byrne would move on to a new girl at some point, and Jordan’s heart was going to be a little bit broken but then she’d toss her head back, sling her Leica around her neck, and go work in European war zones and have affairs with Frenchmen.
But Garrett hadn’t moved on. He’d come back from his medical discharge, still on crutches, and picked up their afternoon baseball dates and Sunday lunches with his parents, who beamed at Jordan as much as her dad beamed at Garrett. The knee-buckling weight of all that parental expectation made everything seem so firm, so settled, that a trip around European war zones taking pictures for LIFE seemed about as likely as a trip to the moon.
“C’mon.” Garrett sneaked an arm around her waist, nuzzled her ear in that way that also made her knees buckle. “Sunday lunch. We can go for a drive afterward, park somewhere …”
“I can’t,” Jordan said, regretful. “Mass with Dad and Mrs. Weber.”
“It must be serious.” Garrett grinned again. “So, how is this Fräulein of your father’s?”
“She’s very nice.” There had been another dinner, this time at Anneliese Weber’s tiny spotless apartment; she had been warm and welcoming, and made crisp fried schnitzel and some kind of pink-iced Austrian cake soaked in rum. Jordan’s father had gone all soft around the edges as Anneliese served him, and Jordan already adored little Ruth, who had asked in a whispery voice how der Hund was. It had all been fine, absolutely fine.
Jordan didn’t know why, but she kept thinking back to that picture. Anneliese Weber looking by a strange twist of light and lens to be about as soft and welcoming as a straight razor.
“She’s very nice,” Jordan said again. The Sox went down 4–2, and soon Jordan and Garrett were streaming out of Fenway with the rest of the fans, crunching peanut shells and discarded scorecards underfoot. “It’s our year,” Jordan proclaimed. “This year we win it all, I can feel it. Walk me to the shop? I promised Dad I’d swing by.”
Hand in hand, they made their way through the game crowd and finally turned onto Commonwealth, Jordan stretching her steps to match Garrett’s, who still walked with a slight limp. It was that day, she thought, the sudden spring day coming at the end of a too-long winter. As they turned down the central mall on Commonwealth, it seemed like all Boston had tossed their heavy coats and come outside, winter-pale faces blissfully skyward as they stumbled along absolutely drunk on the warmth. It was why Jordan loved Boston—there was something about its citizens that was curiously welded together, more like a small town than a big city. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, their heartaches and their secrets … And that brought a frown to Jordan’s face.
“I wish I knew more about her,” she heard herself say.
“Who?” Garrett had been talking about the classes he’d take in the fall.
“Mrs. Weber.” Jordan fiddled with the Leica’s strap.
“What do you want to know?” Garrett asked reasonably. They were passing the Hotel Vendome, and Jordan nearly stepped in front of a Chevrolet coupe. Garrett pulled her back. “Careful—”
“That,” Jordan said. “She’s careful. She doesn’t say much about herself. And I caught the strangest expression on her face when I took her picture …”
Garrett laughed. “You don’t take a dislike to someone just because of a funny expression.”
“Girls do it all the time. Sometimes you catch a boy looking at you in the hall at school, when he thinks you can’t see him. I don’t mean looking at girls the way all boys do,” Jordan clarified. “I mean looking at you in a way that gives you the shivers. He doesn’t mean for you to see, and maybe that expression only lasts a second, but it’s enough to make you think, I don’t want to be alone with you.”
“Girls think that?” Garrett sounded mystified.
“I don’t know a single girl who hasn’t had that thought,” Jordan stated. “I’m just saying, sometimes you catch the wrong look on someone’s face and it puts you off. It makes you not want to take chances, getting to know them.”
“But this isn’t a boy leering around the locker door at school. It’s a woman your father is inviting home to dinner. You have to give her a chance.”
“I know.”
“Your dad’s really serious about her.” Garrett tweaked Jordan’s ponytail. “Maybe that’s the whole problem.”
“I am not jealous,” Jordan flashed. Then amended, “All right, maybe I am. A tiny, tiny bit. But I want Dad happy, I do. And Mrs. Weber is good for him. I can see that. But before I trust her with my father, I want to know more about her.”
“So just ask her.”
McBride’s Antiques sat on the corner of Newbury and Clarendon—not the best shopping district in Boston, but distinguished enough. Every morning, as long as Jordan could remember, her father had walked the three miles from their home to the shop that had been his father’s, mounting those worn stone steps toward the door with its ancient bronze knocker, unlocking the shutters to unveil the big giltlettered window. Jordan frowned at the window display as it came into view today, seeing that the tasseled lamps and Victorian hatstand from yesterday had been swapped for a tailor’s dummy in a wedding dress of antique lace, and a display of cabochon rings sparkling on a velvet tray. Jordan mounted the steps ahead of Garrett, hearing the sweet tinkle of the bell as she pushed the door open. She wasn’t really surprised to see her father beside the long counter, holding Anneliese Weber’s hand with a proprietary air. “I’ve got wonderful news, missy!”
Jordan couldn’t describe the mix of emotions that rose in her—why her heart squeezed in honest pleasure, seeing the happiness on her father’s face as he looked down at the Austrian widow’s left hand with its cluster of antique garnets and pearls … and why at the same time her stomach tightened as she came to give her soon-to-be stepmother a hug.
JUST ASK HER, Garrett had said. Jordan got her chance two days later, when Mrs. Weber invited her to go shopping for wedding clothes after she came home from school. As they sallied down Boylston Street, Jordan was still trying to find a casual segue into the questions she wanted to ask when Mrs. Weber took the initiative.
“Jordan, I hope you don’t feel you must call me—well, not Mutti, I suppose for you it would be Mother or Mama.” A smile at Jordan’s expression. “At your age that seems silly.”
“A little.”
“Well, you certainly don’t have to call me either. I don’t mean to take the place of your mother. Your father has told me about her, and she sounds like a lovely woman.”
“I don’t remember her very well.” Just her absence once she got sick, really. And all the reasons why, which they wouldn’t tell me, so I made them up for myself. Jordan wished she remembered more than that. She looked sideways at Anneliese, gliding along in her blue spring coat, pocketbook in gloved hands, heels hardly clicking on the sidewalk. Jordan felt large and clumping beside her, naked without her camera.
“I thought we’d go to Priscilla of Boston,” Anneliese suggested. “Usually I make up my own clothes, but for a wedding one needs something special. I don’t know if your father discussed the plans with you, men can be so vague about wedding details. We thought a quiet day wedding three weeks from now, just the four of us at the chapel and a few of your father’s friends.”
“And on your side?”
“No one. I haven’t been in Boston long enough to make friends.”
“Really?” For a woman who’d said she was trying so hard to make friends in a new country—and whose English was so good—it seemed odd. “Not even a next-door neighbor, or someone at the beauty shop, or another mother at the park?”
“I find it hard, talking with strangers.” A tentative smile. “I hoped you would be my maid of honor?”
“Of course.” Though Jordan couldn’t stop wondering. Months in Boston, and you don’t have one single acquaintance?
“Your father and I planned for a honeymoon weekend in Concord,” Anneliese continued, “if you could watch Ruth.”
“Of course.” Jordan’s smile was unforced this time. “Ruth’s a darling. I love her already.”
“She has that effect on people,” Anneliese agreed.
Jordan took a silent breath. “Does she get that beautiful fair hair from her father?”
A pause. “Yes, she does.”
“What did you say his name was—Kurt?”
“Yes. What color do you fancy wearing for the wedding?” Anneliese turned through the doors of the boutique, moving through the ivory bridal gowns and floral bridesmaid dresses, waving away salesgirls. “This blue? So lovely with your skin.”
She took off her gloves to test the fabric between her fingertips, and Jordan eyed her hands, naked of rings except for the engagement cluster of garnets. She tried to remember if she’d ever seen Anneliese wearing a wedding ring and was certain she had not. “You could wear your old ring, you know,” she threw out, trying a new tack.
Anneliese looked startled. “What?”
“Dad would never mind if you kept wearing your husband’s ring. He was a part of your life—I hope you don’t feel we expect you to forget him.”
“Kurt never gave me a wedding ring.”
“Is it not customary in Austria?”
“No, it was, he—” Anneliese sounded almost flustered for a moment. “We were rather poor, that’s all.”
Or maybe you lied about being married, Jordan couldn’t stop herself thinking. Maybe it’s not the only thing you’ve lied about either …
Her father’s voice, scolding: Wild stories.
“I think you’re right about this dress.” Jordan looked at the pale blue frock, full skirted and simple. “Ruth would look pretty in blue too, with her dark eyes. Most blondes have blue eyes like yours. She must have gotten her eyes from her father too.”
“Yes.” Anneliese fingered the sleeve of a pale pink suit, face smooth again.
“Well, it’s very striking.” Jordan tried to think where to tug the discussion next. It wasn’t just Ruth or Anneliese’s first husband she was interested in, it was everything—but something about the wedding ring had jarred Anneliese’s poise. “Did Ruth ever know her father, or—”
“No, she doesn’t remember him. He was very handsome, though. So is your young man. Would you like to bring Garrett to the wedding?”
“He’ll be working if it’s a day wedding—he’s putting in hours for his father’s boss until he starts at Boston University in the fall. His parents want him to join the business, though all he wants to do now is fly planes. Garrett never saw combat; he broke his leg too badly during training, and the war ended before he was anywhere near healed, so he was discharged early. Was your husband in the war?”
“Yes.” Anneliese picked up a cream straw hat, examining its blue ribbon. Jordan tried a question about Anneliese’s family next, but she didn’t seem to hear it. “Do you plan to follow Garrett to Boston University this fall?” she asked instead.
“Well—” Jordan blinked, sidetracked. “I’d like to, but Dad isn’t keen. With a business in the family, he doesn’t think college is necessary.” Especially for a girl. “He never went, and always says he didn’t regret it.”
“I’m sure he didn’t. But you have your own path, like any young person. Perhaps we might try to change his mind, you and I. Even the best men sometimes require steering.” Anneliese gave a conspiratorial smile, perching the hat on Jordan’s head. “That’s lovely. Why don’t you try on the dress? For myself, I think this pink suit …”
Jordan slipped into a changing cubicle, diverted despite herself. She’d first thought of a stepmother as something wonderful for her father and his loneliness—then, given all she didn’t know about this woman and her life even as she moved into theirs, as something to be uneasy about. It had never occurred to Jordan to think a stepmother could be … well, an ally. Perhaps we might try to change his mind, you and I. That made Jordan smile as she fastened up the blue dress with its snug waist and swirl of skirt, hearing the rustle of clothing as Anneliese changed on the other side of the wall. Did you mean it? Jordan wondered. Or were you trying to derail me from asking about you?
“Beautiful,” Anneliese approved as Jordan came out. “Against that blue, your skin is pure American peaches and cream.”
“You look lovely too,” Jordan said honestly. Petite and elegant in a suit the color of baby roses, Anneliese revolved before the triple mirror. An assistant fluttered with pins, and Jordan moved closer, straightening Anneliese’s sleeve. “Would you really help me with Dad, changing his mind about college? Most people tell me it’s a silly thing to want, when I’ve got a nice boyfriend and a place in the shop waiting for me, and I’m already working the counter on weekends.”
“Nonsense.” Anneliese smoothed the jacket over her waist. “Clever girls like you—another dart here?—should be encouraged to want more, not less.”
“Did you, at my age?” Jordan couldn’t help the question that popped out next. “You said you went to college. Where was that?”
Anneliese’s blue eyes met hers in the mirror for a thoughtful moment. “You don’t entirely trust me, Jordan,” she said at last in her very-faintly-accented English. “No, don’t protest. It’s quite all right. You love your father; you want the best for him. So do I.”
“It’s not that I—” Jordan felt her cheeks flame. Why do you have to probe things? she chastised herself. Why can’t you just flutter and squeal like a normal girl in a bridal shop? “I don’t distrust you—I just don’t know you, and …”
Anneliese let her struggle into silence. “I’m not easy to know,” she said at last. “The war was difficult for me. I don’t enjoy talking about it. And we Germans are more reserved than Americans even at the best of times.”
“I thought you were Austrian,” Jordan said before she could stop herself.
“I am.” Anneliese turned to examine the skirt hem in the mirror. “But I went to Heidelberg as a young girl—for university, to answer your question. I studied English there and met my husband.” A smile. “Now you know something more about me, so shall we make our purchase and look for a dress for Ruth? There’s a children’s boutique not far away.”
Jordan’s cheeks stayed hot as they left the shop with their parcels. I am a worm, she thought, kicking herself, but Anneliese seemed to hold no grudge, swinging her handbag and tilting her nose up to the breeze. “My former husband would say this is hunting weather,” she exclaimed, reminiscent. “I’m no good at hunting, but I always did like heading to the woods on such days. Spring breezes bringing every scent right to your nose …”
Jordan wondered why her stomach had tightened again, when Anneliese was chatting away in a perfectly forthcoming fashion. Because you’re jealous, she told herself witheringly. Because you don’t want to share your father, and you resent her for it. That’s a mean, nasty little feeling to have, Jordan McBride. And you’re going to get over it, right now.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_2869afa2-1f1c-57a4-9c94-635745a8dc09)
IAN (#ulink_2869afa2-1f1c-57a4-9c94-635745a8dc09)
April 1950
Vienna
You have a wife?” Tony dragged Ian into the corner for a quick, hissed discussion. “Since when?”
Ian contemplated the woman now sitting at his desk, boots propped on the blotter, crunching down biscuits straight from the tin. “It’s complicated,” he said eventually.
“No, it isn’t. At some point you and this woman stood up together and said a lot of stuff about to have and to hold, and there was an I do. It’s pretty definitive. And why didn’t you tell me four days ago when I said she was coming here? Did you just forget?”
“Call it a sadly misplaced impulse to have a joke at your expense.”
Tony glowered. “Was the part about her being such a fragile flower a joke too?”
No, that turned out to be a joke on me. Ian remembered Nina stumbling over the foreign words of the marriage service, swaying on her feet from weakness. The entire wedding had taken less than ten minutes: Ian had rushed through his own vows, pushed his signet ring onto Nina’s fourth finger where it hung like a hoop, taken her back to her hospital bed, and promptly headed off to fill out paperwork and finish a column on the occupation of Poznań. Now, five years later, he watched Nina suck biscuit crumbs off her fingertip and saw she was still wearing the ring. It fit much better. “I came across Nina in Poznań after the German retreat,” Ian said, realizing his partner was waiting for answers. “The Polish Red Cross picked her up half dead from double pneumonia. She’d been living rough in the woods after her run-in with die Jägerin. She looked like a stiff breeze would kill her.”
It hadn’t just been her physical state either. Her eyes had been so haunted, she looked a step from shattering altogether. Logically, Ian understood she would have changed in five years, but he couldn’t stop trying to reconcile the woman in his office with the frail girl of his memory.
Tony still looked unbelieving. “You fell in love at first sight with our Nazi huntress’s only surviving victim?”
“I didn’t—” Ian raked a hand through his hair, wondering where to begin. “I’ve seen Nina exactly four times. The day I found her, the day I proposed, the day we married, and the day I put her on a train toward England. She had nothing to her name and she was desperate to get as far from the war zone as she could.” They’d hardly been able to communicate, but her desperation had needed no translator. It had tugged at Ian’s heart despite himself. “The region was an utter mess, she had no identification, there were only so many strings I could pull to get her out of the limbo she was in. So I married her.”
Tony eyed him. “Chivalrous of you.”
“I owed her a debt. Besides, we intended to divorce once her British citizenship came through.”
“So why didn’t you? And how is it we’ve worked together several years, yet this is the first I’m hearing about a wife?”
“I said it was complicated.”
“Whisper, whisper,” Nina interrupted. “You’re done?”
“Yes.” Ian threw himself down in the chair opposite and looked her over, his wife. Mrs. Ian Graham. Bloody hell. “I thought you were working in Manchester,” he said at last. Their last exchange of telegrams had been four months ago.
“Whoever do you work for?” Tony added, getting Nina a cup of tea. He still looked flummoxed, and Ian would have enjoyed that if he hadn’t shared the feeling.
“I work for English pilot. He comes out of RAF, starts a little airfield. I help.” Nina stirred her tea. “You have jam?” She wasn’t precisely rude, Ian decided, just abrupt. She had to be what, thirty-two now?
Her eyes flicked at him. The blue eyes, he thought—those hadn’t changed. Very, very watchful.
“Why are you here?” he asked quietly.
“The message.” She tilted her head at Tony. “He asks me to help find your huntress. I help.”
“You dropped everything and caught the nearest train across half Europe, all because you heard we might have a lead on die Jägerin?”
His wife looked at him as though he were an idiot. “Yes.”
Tony fetched the jam pot, then leaned back against the desk. “I hope you’ll tell me more about yourself, Mrs. Graham. Your devoted husband has not exactly been forthcoming.”
“Just Nina. Mrs. Graham is only for passport.”
“‘Nina,’ that’s a pretty name. You’re Polish?”
He switched languages, asking something. Nina answered, then switched back. “I do English now. Who are you again? I forget to write name down.”
“Anton Rodomovsky.” Tony took her hand that didn’t have a teacup in it and bowed, all his charm coming to the fore. “Formerly Sergeant Rodomovsky of the United States Army, but both me and the US of A thought that was a failed experiment. Now I’m just Tony: interpreter, paper pusher, all around dogsbody.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Interpreter?”
“Grow up in Queens with as many babushkas as I did, you pick up a few languages.” Lazily. “Polish, German, Hungarian, French. Some Czech, Russian, Romanian …”
Nina transferred her gaze to Ian. “Interpreter,” she said as if Tony wasn’t there. “Is useful. When do we leave?”
“Pardon?” Ian was transfixed by the way she was dropping heaping spoons of strawberry jam into her teacup. He’d never seen anyone do that to an innocent cup of tea in his life. Bloody hell, it was barbaric.
“I help look for the bitch,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “When do we leave, and where do we go?”
“There’s a witness in Altaussee who might have information on where die Jägerin went after the war,” Tony said.
Nina drank off her jam-clotted tea in three long gulps, then rose and stretched like an untidy little alley cat. Ian rose too, feeling enormous; she barely came up to his shoulder. “We leave tomorrow,” she said. “Where can I sleep?”
“Your husband lives upstairs,” Tony said. “Shall I take up your things?” Ian shot him a withering look. “What, no passionate reunion?” he remarked, innocent.
“Very funny,” Ian said, unamused. It had been the hardest thing to communicate to Nina five years ago when he proposed marriage—that he expected nothing from her, that he was honoring a debt and not looking to collect payment in return. The mere idea of pressing physical attentions on an illness-weakened, war-ravaged woman made him feel like a debaucher out of a Dickens novel. Nina had spent her wedding night in a hospital cot, and he’d spent his filling out paperwork in the name of Nina Graham so she could get to England as soon as she was released.
“I doubt our landlady will be too keen on you staying under this roof,” Tony was saying. “I rent a room two blocks down from a nice little hausfrau. I’ll walk you over, see if I can get you into her spare room.”
Nina nodded, sauntering toward the door. For all her crumb scattering and sprawling limbs, she moved absolutely soundlessly—that too Ian remembered from five years ago; how his bride even while shaky with weakness had moved over a hospital floor silent as a winter fox.
Tony held the door for her, the speculative gleam back in his eye. “So tell me,” he began as the door closed.
Ian turned, contemplating his office. One short visit had turned it to chaos: muddy footprints, rings of drying tea on the files, a sticky spoon staining the blotter. Ian shook his head, half irritated and half amused. This is what you get for putting off the divorce paperwork, Graham. The entire marriage should have been over within a year of the vows—he and Nina had agreed, in a combination of English, Polish, and hand gestures on the way back from the registry office, on a divorce as soon as her British citizenship was finalized. But that had taken so long, and he’d been heading out with the war crime investigation units, and Nina had been struggling to get used to ration-locked postwar England, and time had passed. Every six months or so Ian telegrammed to ask if she needed anything—he might not know his wife, but he’d felt a certain responsibility to make sure the frail woman he’d got out of Poland wasn’t utterly lost in her new country. Yet she always refused help, and most of the time he forgot he was married at all. He certainly had no woman in his life with designs on Nina’s place.
He had cleaned up the mess and gone back to his files by the time Tony returned. “You have an interesting wife,” he said without preamble. “Please tell me you’re aware she’s not Polish.”
Ian blinked. “What?”
“She’s no native speaker. Her grammar’s terrible and her accent’s worse. Didn’t you notice she swapped back to English the minute she could?”
Ian leaned back, hooking an elbow around the back of his chair and reevaluating everything all over again. How many surprises was this day going to lob at him? “If she isn’t Polish, what is she?”
Tony looked ruminative. “You know how many grandmothers and great-aunts I had whacking me with wooden spoons when I was growing up? All these old ladies in shawls nagging their daughters and quarreling over goulash recipes?”
“Will you get to the point?”
“Hundreds, because the women in my family all live forever, and when you add in the godparents and in-laws—not just the Rodomovskys but the Rolskas and the Popas and the Nagys and all the rest—they came off the boat from everywhere east of the Rhine. There was one particularly mean old cow, my grandmother’s cousin by marriage, who talked about winter in Novosibirsk and put jam in her tea …” Tony shook his head. “I don’t know what else your wife is lying about, but if she’s from Poland, I’m a Red Sox fan. I know a Russian when I hear one.”
Ian felt his eyebrows shoot up. “Russian?”
“Da, tovarische.”
Silence fell. Ian turned a pen over slowly between two fingers. “Perhaps it doesn’t matter,” he said more to himself than his partner. “She was a refugee when I met her in Poznań, and refugees are rarely fleeing happy pasts. I doubt her story is any prettier for starting in the Soviet Union than in Poland.”
“Do you even know what her story is?”
“Not really.” The language barrier had made it so difficult to exchange more than basic information, and besides, Nina hadn’t been a source he’d been interrogating to get a story. She’d been a woman in trouble. “She was desperate, and I owed her a debt. It was that simple.”
“What debt?” Tony asked. “You’d never met her before; how could you owe her anything?”
Ian took a long breath. “When I came to the Polish Red Cross, I was looking for someone else. His name was Sebastian.” A boy in an ill-fitting uniform, seventeen the last time Ian had seen him. I told them I was twenty-one, I ship out next week! Even now, that memory made Ian catch his breath in pain. “Seb had been a prisoner of war since Dunkirk, held at the stalag near Poznań. I didn’t find him, but I found Nina—she had his tags, his jacket. She knew him. She was able to tell me how he died.”
“How do you know she told the truth about that?” Tony asked quietly. “She lied about being Soviet. She could have lied about anything else. Everything else.”
Ian turned the pen over again. “I think I need to have a chat with my wife,” he said at last.
Tony nodded. “After Altaussee?”
“Altaussee first.” The witness, the hunt, die Jägerin. Nothing came before that.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Tony said eventually. “What debt did you owe Nina that you married her without a second’s hesitation to get her to England?”
“Seb had promised to get her there. I kept his promise for him.” Ian looked at his partner. “He was my little brother. The only family I had left. And Nina watched die Jägerin murder him at Lake Rusalka.”
But the poisonous doubt had crept in. If she had lied about one thing, why not this? That night when Ian sat awake in his dark bedroom with his mind consumed by a woman, it wasn’t the huntress. He leaned on his windowsill with a half-smoked cigarette, looking out over moonlit Vienna and wondering, Who the hell did I marry?
Chapter 6 (#ulink_93b3f774-ce40-58a6-8b32-6234936308e7)
NINA (#ulink_93b3f774-ce40-58a6-8b32-6234936308e7)
May 1937
Lake Baikal, Siberia
Nina broke the rabbit’s neck with a fast twist, feeling the last tremor of its heart under her fingertips. Spring had come to the lake, the air alive with the squeal and groan of ice as the lake’s surface broke apart into rainbow shards. Icicles dripped and water lapped on the shore as the air warmed, but ice floes still drifted in the farther depths. The Old Man had control of the seasons here, and he kept a long grip on winter.
Nina reset the rabbit snare under the trees. She was nineteen now, her blue eyes wary under a shapeless rabbit-fur cap, razor never far from her hand. Her father was too drunk much of the time now to set snares or to stalk game, so Nina did it. The rabbit in her hand would go into the stewpot, and the pelt could line a pair of gloves or be traded. Hunting let her make a living without a man, but Nina still glowered restlessly across the lake. It had been three years since she lay gasping on the ice with her eyelashes freezing together, looking up into the vast sky thinking Get out of here. Three years of waking up with the choking feeling of cold water closing over her head, the terrible drowning sensation. But where was there for a girl like her to go, little and wolverine-mad and knowing nothing except how to stalk and kill and move without a sound?
She didn’t know, but she had to find it, or else she would die here. Stay, and Nina knew the lake would take her in the end.
She stood swinging the dead rabbit by the ears and pondering her useless questions as she’d done for so many mornings, and the day might have ended as so many did: with her stamping back to the house, and skirting her father as he lay snoring. But today, Nina heard a rumble from the sky.
The gornaya? she wondered—but it was too early in the year for the mountain-bred wind that could whirl out of the northwest from a warm sky, whipping the lake into a frenzy and hurling waves three times the height of a man across the shores. Besides, this was a droning mechanical sound that seemed to rise from everywhere. Nina shaded her eyes, hunting for the strange buzz, and her jaw dropped as a shape rose sleek and dark from the horizon and glided down over the trees. An airplane? she thought. The village traders who had been to Irkutsk claimed to have seen them, but she never had. It might as well have been a firebird rising from myth.
She thought it would streak across the sky and be gone, but there was a skipping sound in the drone of its engines. Nina had a moment’s terror the machine would crash into the lake. But it banked stiffly, descending below the tree line, and Nina began to run. For once she didn’t bother to move quietly, just crashed through underbrush and squelching mud. At some point she realized she had lost the rabbit, but she didn’t care.
The plane had touched down in a long clearing in the taiga. The pilot was standing by the cockpit with a toolbox, cursing, and Nina stared at him, mesmerized. He looked as tall as a god in his overalls and flying cap. She didn’t dare come closer, just sank to her heels in a stand of brush and watched him work on the engine. She couldn’t stop looking at the plane, its long lines, its proud wings.
It took her a long time to work up the courage to approach. But she moved out from the brush, slowly came forward. The pilot turned and found Nina under his nose.
He jumped back, boots slipping in icy mud. “Fuck your mother, you scared me.” His Russian was clipped, strangely accented. “Who are you?”
“Nina Borisovna,” she said, dry mouthed. She raised a hand in greeting, and saw his eyes dance over the dried rabbit blood showing under her nails. “I live here.”
“Who lives in a mud splat like this?” The pilot looked at her a little longer. “A real little savage, aren’t you?” he said, turning back to his toolbox.
Nina shrugged.
“This isn’t even Listvyanka, is it?”
“No.” Even Listvyanka was bigger than her village.
The pilot swore some more. “Hours off course from Irkutsk …”
“Planes don’t land here,” Nina managed to say. “Where are you from?”
“Moscow,” he grunted, slinging tools. “I fly the mail route, Moscow to Irkutsk. Longest route in the Motherland,” he added, unbending. “Detoured past Irkutsk in the fog, had some engine trouble. Nothing serious. I could fly this girl home on one wing if I had to.”
“What kind of—I mean—” Nina wished she could stop blushing and stammering. She could have eaten the local boys for breakfast, but here she was tripping over her words like a lovesick girl. Only she wasn’t in love with a man, but a machine. “What kind of plane is this?”
“A Pe-5.”
“She’s beautiful,” Nina whispered.
“She’s a brick,” the pilot said dismissively. “But a good Soviet brick. Eh, get back, little girl!” he barked as Nina reached toward the wing.
“I’m not a little girl,” she flashed. “I’m nineteen.”
He chuckled, went on working. Nina wished she understood what he was doing. She could have opened up a rabbit or a seal or a deer and known every organ and bone, but the Pe-5’s innards were strange to her. Masses of wires and gears, the smell of oil. She breathed it in as though it were wildflowers. “Where did you learn to fly?”
“Air club.”
“Where are there air clubs?”
“Everywhere from Moscow to Irkutsk, coucoushka! Everybody wants to fly. Even little girls.” He winked. “Ever heard of Marina Raskova?”
“No.”
“An aviatrix who just set the distance record. Moscow to … Well, somewhere. Comrade Stalin himself sent congratulations.” Another wink. “Probably because she’s pretty, Raskova is.”
Nina nodded. Her heart had stopped its pitter-pat, settled to a purposeful rhythm. “Take me with you,” she said when he finally shut up his toolbox and rose. She wasn’t surprised when he guffawed. “Just an idea. I’m a good screw,” she lied. She hadn’t screwed a man before—most of the ones she knew were nervous around her, and anyway she was too wary of getting pregnant—but she’d do it right here in this clearing if it got her into that plane.
“A good screw?” The pilot looked at the blood under her fingernails. “Do you pick your teeth with a man’s bones afterward?” He shook his head, stowing his tools. “Good luck, coucoushka. You’ll need it, stuck out here on the edge of the world.”
“I won’t be stuck here much longer,” Nina said, but he was swinging up into the cockpit and didn’t hear. Before he could start up the engines, she darted close and laid her hand against the wing. It seemed warm to her, pulsing under her palm like a living thing. Hello, it seemed to say.
“Hello,” Nina breathed back, and she darted away before the pilot could shout at her. She raced to the edge of the clearing as the deafening sound of the engines filled the air and sent birds spiraling up from the trees. Then she watched, delighted, as the plane slowly turned toward the long treeless edge, straightened, began to gather speed. Her breath caught when it lifted into the air, rising into the pool of blue that was the sky—aiming west. She stood there long after it had disappeared, crying a little, because at last she had answers.
What is the opposite of a lake?
The sky.
What is the opposite of drowning?
Flying. Because if you were soaring free in the air, water could never close over your head. You might fall, you might die, but you would never drown.
What lies all the way west?
An air club. Maybe it wasn’t all the way west, but just a few hours west lay everything Nina had not known she needed.
She ran all the way home, feet already so light she could feel herself straining to take wing, and packed everything she owned—a few clothes, her identity cards, the razor—into a satchel. Without hesitation, she emptied every kopeck out of the jar her father kept as a money tin. “I’ve been making all the money anyway,” she told her father, snoring on his filthy bed. “Besides, you tried to drown me in the lake.”
She turned away to pick up her satchel. When she looked back, she saw one wolflike eye open a slit, regarding her silently.
“Where you going?” he slurred.
“Home,” she heard herself say.
“The lake?”
Nina sighed. “I’m not a rusalka, Papa.”
“Then where are you going?”
“The sky.” I never knew I could have the sky, Nina thought. But now I know.
His snores started again. Nina almost leaned down and brushed her lips over his forehead, but instead, she took the half-empty jug of vodka from the kitchen table and set it by the bed. Then she flung her satchel over her shoulder, hiked to the station in Listvyanka, and slept on the platform waiting for the next train. The ride was cold and malodorous, dumping her into Irkutsk the following twilight. At any other time she might have gasped at the sheer grubby expanse that was a city and not a ramshackle village—there were more people visible here in the blink of an eye than she was used to seeing in the course of an entire week. But she was honed sharp and straight as her razor on only one thing. It took all night, but after being laughed at or shrugged off by half the people in Irkutsk, she found it: an ugly block building off the Angara River.
At dawn, the director of the Irkutsk air club came to work yawning and found someone had beaten him there. Bundled in her coat, blue eyes barely visible between rabbit-fur cap and scarf, Nina Markova sat curled in a ball on the top step. “Good morning,” she said. “Is this where I learn to fly?”
Chapter 7 (#ulink_e42899fd-2afb-54d4-9526-92af5d22c6ef)
JORDAN (#ulink_e42899fd-2afb-54d4-9526-92af5d22c6ef)
May 1946
Boston
You deserve a grander honeymoon,” Dan McBride objected.
“A weekend in Concord is all we need,” Anneliese insisted. “It wouldn’t be fair to leave the girls alone too long.”
Jordan and Ruth were swiftly becoming the girls—Jordan could see her father’s smile deepen every time he heard it. Anything was worth seeing him this happy. In truth, Jordan was happy too. She’d thrown herself into wedding preparations: clearing space in her dad’s closet for Anneliese’s things, pressing his wedding suit. Anneliese would stay the night before the wedding, sharing the guest room with Ruth, and then two different cabs would take them to the church the following morning. “You can’t see your bride dressed for the wedding, Dad. You take the first cab, and Anneliese and Ruth and I will follow.”
“Whatever you say, missy.” He squeezed her cheek. “I’m proud of the way you handle things. There aren’t many seventeen-year-old girls I’d trust with their new sister for a weekend alone.” He twisted his old wedding ring, moved to his other hand. “I used to worry I hadn’t done right by you, after your mother died. I didn’t handle it as I should have.”
“Dad—”
“I didn’t. Little girl with a wild imagination, taking her mother’s death hard—I worried I wasn’t enough to raise you right.” He took her in now, approvingly. “I don’t know if I did anything right or if it was all you, but look at you now. All grown up with a good head on your shoulders.”
I don’t feel it, Jordan thought. Every time she met Anneliese’s opaque blue eyes over the dinner table, speculation began raging inside, even as she chided herself. This is ridiculous, J. Bryde. You like Anneliese. (She did.) She’s lovely. (She was.) She didn’t even tell Dad on you when you were rude enough to go prying about her past. (She had not.) So why are you still …?
Because you’re still jealous, and still trying to find fault, Jordan told herself with a mental kick, and kept doing her level best to squash the feeling out of existence.
“You’re so distracted,” Garrett said a few days before the wedding, when Jordan’s dad had all but ordered her to stop cleaning and go out for a date. “Do you even want to make out?”
“Not really,” Jordan confessed, and Garrett sat up as Jordan finger-combed her hair back into place. Ten minutes of kissing in the backseat of his Chevrolet had pulled it out of its blue band. “Sorry.”
“You’re killing me,” he said with big soulful eyes, but he hopped out of the backseat fishing for his keys. He wasn’t one of those boys to keep pushing if a girl said no; he groaned, but he backed off. Maybe this year we … Jordan thought, trailing off.
“What’s on your mind?” Garrett asked as they rearranged themselves in the front seat and he turned the car for home. “Wedding stuff?”
“It’ll be easier when it’s done,” Jordan admitted. Surely it would. Anneliese Weber would be Anneliese McBride, her stepmother. They’d be a family. That would be that.
THE WEDDING MORNING dawned bright and beautiful. Jordan was up first, pressing her dad to swallow some toast. He looked so sweetly nervous as she slipped a white rosebud into his buttonhole, smiling from under those straight dark-blond brows just like her own. “I thought I’d be the one walking you down the aisle.”
“Not for a while yet, Dad.” She stood back. “There.”
“You’ve been a brick, welcoming Anneliese like this. It means a lot.”
“Better catch your cab,” Jordan managed to say despite her choked-up throat. “If Father Harris shows up tipsy, pour some coffee into him. No postponing this wedding; I’m not stuffing you into this suit twice!”
She snapped a few shots off, then saw her father into his cab before dashing up to the guest room.
Ruth answered her knock, putting a smile on Jordan’s face. “Ruthie, you look like a princess! Twirl for me?” Ruth twirled solemnly, blond hair brushed out over the lace collar of her new blue velvet dress. I’m going to get a laugh out of you this weekend if it’s the last thing I do, Jordan vowed.
“There you are.” Anneliese stood before the mirror patting her face and neck with a powder puff, perfectly composed in her pink suit and broad-brimmed cream hat, not a bridal nerve in sight. “We’re almost ready.”
“You’re a vision,” Jordan said. “Dad will be speechless.”
“You look lovely too.” Anneliese turned, looking Jordan over in her blue dress, and for once she seemed to speak impulsively. “I look forward to making you things, Jordan. I make all our day clothes, Ruth’s and mine—I could run up a summer dress for you if you liked. Something not fussy, you aren’t a fussy girl. Three-quarter length, nothing floral printed …” Anneliese stopped herself with a laugh, looking suddenly rueful. “Du meine Güte, I swore I wouldn’t start offering to dress you, like you were a child! It’s the opposite, you see—it would be a pleasure to make a dress for someone who isn’t a child and wanting everything ruffled.”
Jordan felt herself startled into genuine laughter. “It sounds like we’d better set up the sunroom for you as a sewing room, then. But first”—she reached into her blue clutch for something she’d meant to offer days ago but hadn’t quite been able to manage—“I thought you might like to wear this today.” She held out the gold bracelet her father had given her on her sixteenth birthday.
“I would be honored,” Anneliese said quietly.
The last knot in Jordan’s stomach melted away. “Now you have something borrowed—”
“Something old—” Anneliese patted the string of gray pearls around her neck.
“Something new—” Jordan fastened the bracelet around her soon-to-be stepmother’s wrist. “Your pink suit—”
“And something blue,” Anneliese finished, lifting her bouquet of creamy roses with stems wrapped in pale blue satin ribbon.
Jordan smiled. “The cab’s waiting.”
Anneliese straightened her hat and glided downstairs. She glided into the chapel with the same silent grace, and Jordan saw tears in her father’s eyes. This makes it all worth it, she thought. Father Harris’s voice rolled across the chapel, and it was done.
THERE WAS CAKE and champagne in the vestry afterward, corks popping as friends crowded around. Soon the newlyweds would take a cab to South Station and be off to their honeymoon; Jordan had already prepared little bags of rice to throw. Anneliese chatted with some neighbors, and Jordan’s father swung Ruth up to his shoulder. “You want to hold your mama’s bouquet?”
“Don’t, she’ll drop it,” Anneliese began.
“She’ll be careful, won’t you, little missy?” He plucked Anneliese’s bouquet from her hands and settled it into Ruth’s. Jordan got an adorable snap of Ruth in his arms, burying her face in roses, looking cautiously thrilled with her new life.
More glasses being drained, more laughter. Jordan’s father set Ruth down, hearing himself called over by a colleague. Ruth looked around, chewing her lip, and Jordan captured her hand. “What do you need, Ruthie? Oh—” As Ruth made a certain clamped-knees gesture. “Let me take you to the powder room.” Ruth protested as Jordan took the bridal bouquet from her hands. “Mama said don’t let go of it—”
“You can hardly take it into the toilet!” Ruth disappeared into the stall, and Jordan laid the roses down before the powder room mirror, snapping a close-up of the flowers. The pale blue satin ribbon was coming undone around the bouquet; Jordan started to rewrap it, but there was a hard little lump in among the stems. Some wedding charm for good luck? Jordan fished down into the roses and drew out the wedged object. The little piece of metal lay in her hand, glittering in the soft powder room light, and Jordan stood as if turned to ice.
A war medal. Not an American medal, but Jordan still recognized it. All through the war, Hollywood actors wore them if they were cast as the Nazi villain. An Iron Cross, black swastika gleaming.
She dropped it as though it were red hot. It lay among the bridal roses and loops of pale blue ribbon like a drop of poison. Something old, something new, Jordan thought, waves of bewildered horror crawling down her spine, something Nazi, something blue.
The toilet flushed; Ruth would be coming out. Anneliese could walk in at any moment. Hardly aware of what she was doing, Jordan raised the Leica. Click—the swastika lurking among the wedding flowers. What kind of woman walked down the aisle carrying a swastika? Why would she risk that? Swiftly, Jordan bundled the roses back together, burying the Iron Cross exactly where it had been before, then she rewrapped the ribbon. Her hands trembled.
Ruth came out, trotting to the sink to wash her hands. Who is your mother? Jordan thought, staring at the little girl. She put the roses back in Ruth’s hands, looked at herself in the mirror, and saw the spots of color flushing in her cheeks. Smile, she told herself, smile—and went back outside.
“There you are!” Anneliese exclaimed, swiftly reclaiming her bouquet. “Ruth takes my flowers and just disappears. Mäuschen, I told you—”
Jordan gripped her father’s sleeve, drawing him aside. “Dad—”
“Cab’s here,” he said, reaching for Anneliese’s traveling case. “You have the telephone number of our hotel in Concord if there’s any trouble. Though I don’t see how much trouble my girls could get into in just two nights!”
I think we may be in a lot of trouble. “Dad,” Jordan said, gripping his sleeve harder.
The crowd was already carrying them outside. He pulled Jordan along. “What is it?”
Jordan’s tongue dried up. What on earth was she going to do, rip Anneliese’s bouquet to bits on the church steps? What would that prove?
Anneliese’s laughing voice exclaimed behind her: “Jordan, catch!”
Jordan turned at the top of the church steps, and the bridal bouquet came flying into her hands.
“For my maid of honor,” Anneliese twinkled as guests clapped. “The train, Dan, we’ll be late—” There was a whirl of luggage and flying skirts as he loaded the cab and Anneliese slid her pocketbook over her arm, and Jordan stood feeling frozen all over again. Because she could feel quite clearly that there was no hard little lump among the stems now. Anneliese must have slid the Iron Cross out before throwing the bouquet.
It must be something very precious, Jordan thought, if she’d risk carrying it today, and only take it out at the last minute.
Or it was never there at all, another thought whispered, and for one horrible moment Jordan thought she was going crazy. Jordan and her wild stories. She’d concocted the wildest theory imaginable out of thin air and jealousy, and this time her mind was furnishing evidence.
But the strap of the Leica reassured her. The Iron Cross had been there; she’d snapped a shot of it. She’d go down to the darkroom the minute she got home and look at the film. Already she was shivering, imagining the black arms of the swastika emerging skull-like through the developing fluid. Proof.
Of what? Jordan thought, staring at Anneliese as her father opened the cab door. By itself, it’s not proof of anything.
Except that this woman was hiding something.
Ruth opened her bag of rice, flinging grains everywhere. A final flurry of hugs, and Jordan’s father and his new wife slid into their taxi. Guests cheered as they rolled away, as confusion and horror swept over Jordan.
Dad, she thought, oh, Dad, what have you brought into our family?
Chapter 8 (#ulink_103dcef6-2511-5a24-b9e2-ce66e071febd)
IAN (#ulink_103dcef6-2511-5a24-b9e2-ce66e071febd)
April 1950
Altaussee
Nina was not happy to be left behind in Vienna. “No. I go with you.”
“I have to sweet-talk a girl in Altaussee,” Tony said with his most persuasive smile. “How’s it going to look if I’ve got another girl with me already?”
Nina shrugged. She had been filled in on most aspects of the chase ahead and was clearly eager to begin. Ian put his oar in the water. “We need someone to look after the office.”
“You get to chase the huntress and I get to answer phone?” Nina said ominously. “Is horseshit.”
“Yes,” Ian stated. “But I am having a blunt conversation with you before I bring you along on the most important chase of my life, Nina, and since we don’t have time for that conversation right now, you’re staying in the bloody office.”
Her blue eyes narrowed. He stared back unblinking, impatience pulsing through him. The train left in an hour.
“Okay,” Nina finally said, still glowering. “I stay this time. Next time, you take me.”
“Try not to burn down the building while we’re gone.” Ian seized his battered fedora, ignoring Nina’s dirty look, and a moment later he and Tony were speeding down the Mariahilferstrasse in a cab. Vienna slid past outside, war raked but still lovely. A beautiful city, Ian thought, but not home. He hadn’t really had a home since Sebastian died. Home wasn’t merely an address.
“Well,” Tony said, speaking English so the driver wouldn’t understand. “Another day, another hunt.”
“This one is different,” Ian said, still thinking of his little brother. Scabby-kneed, earnest, eleven years younger—with such an age difference they shouldn’t have been close, yet they had been. Perhaps because their mother had died so soon after Seb was born, and the house had become such a mausoleum, their father interested in nothing but long lunches at the club and acting as if the Graham family still had money. “You’re the only thing good about coming home for hols,” the thirteen-year-old Seb had said frankly, back from school one summer. “You’re the only reason I bother coming home for hols,” Ian had replied, twenty-four himself, long moved out from under his father’s roof. “Let’s get out for some fishing before the old man starts going on about how I’d better not go to Spain and muck around with Reds and Dagos.”
Ian had headed to Barcelona not long after that, packing a notebook and a typewriter to cover Franco’s uprising, but even when he came back, sunburned and half a stone lighter, there had been time for his little brother. Teaching Seb to skip stones on a pond, Seb showing him bird calls. The two of them talking about the rumblings in Germany …
Sebastian dead in Poland, never to see the end of the war.
“This chase is different,” Ian said again, and his yearning to catch die Jägerin was a hunger so vast it could have swallowed the world.
Tony flipped through the file on their target as the cab rumbled along. “You’re lucky, you know.”
“Lucky?” Ian looked at him. “My brother would be about your age now if he’d lived, but he didn’t. I don’t have a brother, Tony. That Nazi bitch took him away.”
“You have a single person to blame. One.” Tony looked Ian in the eye, meeting the flare of anger he could probably see there. “Lots of us don’t have that.”
“Us?”
“My mother had family in Kraków, whole flotillas of Jewish cousins and aunts and uncles who didn’t emigrate when her parents did,” Tony said. “I’d never met them in my life, but I promised my mother I’d look them up if I was ever in Poland. When I was demobbed, I went looking …” He blew out a long breath. “Gone. All of them.”
Ian’s flash of anger faded. “I see.” He already knew Tony’s background, of course; his partner had flung that at him the day they started working together. I may be a born-and-raised Catholic boy from Queens, but my mother’s side is Polish Jew. Is that going to be a problem, Graham? “No,” Ian had replied, and that was that. He’d always wondered if Tony lost family in the horror of the camps, but he had never asked. You didn’t ask for information like that. You just listened, if someone decided to tell you. “I’m sorry,” he said simply.
“The maw took them—the machine. There’s no one person to find and accuse. All I can do is go after all of them, the thousands who staffed the machine, and there’s no such thing as catching all the bastards.” Tony smiled faintly. “But you, you’re lucky. You know exactly who killed your brother. One person. And we have a lead where she is.”
“You’re right,” Ian said. “That is lucky.”
They fell into silence until the cab pulled up before the train station. A busy throng crowded the steps: Austrian businessmen in homburgs, mothers towing children in dirndls and lederhosen. And us, Ian thought, on the trail of a murderess. As much as he tried to avoid undue optimism, he was suddenly, absolutely certain. They were going to find her. Sebastian might be gone, but his story would be told within the passionless confines of a courtroom—his story, and the story of the children die Jägerin had murdered before she ever crossed Seb’s path.
The world will know your name, Ian told her, going with lighter feet toward the first bread crumb Fate had thrown his way. And that is a promise.
THEY WERE TO meet Helga Ziegler and her sister on the southern shore of Lake Altaussee at noon. “Play the quasi-police angle,” Tony said as they strolled the path, snow-capped mountains towering behind. “I’ve flirted with Helga and she likes me, but her sister might be more wary. It’ll come across better if they think we’re looking for witnesses to question, not war criminals to put in handcuffs. Austrians get so cagey if they think they’re suspected as former Nazis—”
“Which none of them ever were, of course,” Ian said dryly.
“If that’s their line, we take it without batting an eye.”
“I have done this before, you know.” Many times, in fact. “Usual roles, Tony. You be charming, I’ll be imposing.”
“Right.” Tony looked Ian over from the gray overcoat stirring at his knees to the wintry frown he always adopted for these moments. “You’re so obviously an upstanding Brit on the side of the righteous, no one would dream of asking to see your credentials.”
Ian slanted his hat at a more severe angle. “If they get the impression we’re allied with the police, I shan’t correct the notion.” They’d played that card before many times, given the legal no-man’s-land the center occupied: an independent service allied with no nations, given no government authority. Ian had connections inside police, law, and bureaucracy, but there was no legal way to force any witness to cooperate with the center’s questioning. And not being flush with cash, he thought with a wry smile, we can’t exactly offer enormous rewards to loosen tongues either.
They reached the appointed bench on the south shore, overlooking the flat sparkling expanse of lake. Tony pointed. “There they are.”
Two women approached along the path. As they drew closer Ian saw the family resemblance: both blond and rosy, the younger in a pink dirndl and white blouse with a sparkle in her eye as she caught sight of Tony, the other taller and cooler in a green spring coat. She led a little boy by the hand, perhaps two years old, trundling along sturdily in short pants. Ian bowed as Tony made introductions with a few semi-misleading words about the center. Ian maintained an authoritative frown, flipping his wallet to show a meaningless bit of English identification that nevertheless looked tremendously official. “Grüss Gott, ladies.”
“This is my sister,” answered Helga, hand already looped through Tony’s arm. “Klara Gruber.”
The older woman met Ian’s gaze. “What is it you wish to know, Herr Graham?”
Ian took a deep breath, seeing Tony’s tiny nod at the corner of his eye. “May 1945. You worked as a maid for the family living at number three Fischerndorf?”
“Yes.”
“Did you notice the family living at number eight?”
“Hard to avoid noticing them,” Klara Gruber said tartly. “Americans tramping in and out.”
Ian said what she was avoiding. “Making arrests?”
A nod as she smoothed her son’s hair.
“After the arrests were done?”
“Most of the women went elsewhere, but Frau Liebl and her sons stayed on.”
“You mean Frau Eichmann,” Ian said quietly. Wife to Adolf Eichmann—he and an entire cabal of Nazi leadership had fled here in the chaos after Hitler’s suicide. Among them, die Jägerin’s SS lover, Manfred von Altenbach, who had died resisting arrest. Some of his companions had submitted to handcuffs; some like Eichmann had managed to flee uncaught … But however the men ended up, they’d left a number of wives and girlfriends behind.
“Frau Liebl,” Klara corrected. “She took her birth name back, after the war. So there wouldn’t be talk.”
“Is Frau Liebl still there?” Tony asked, tone casual.
“Yes.” Helga shrugged. “Now that I have taken over Klara’s job at number three, I see her sons running up and down every afternoon, playing.”
“And their father?” Ian couldn’t resist asking. Adolf Eichmann was a far, far bigger fish than those the center had the resources to chase, but if something could be learned here, perhaps in the future …
Head shakes from the two sisters. “You’re not looking to bother Frau Liebl, are you? It all happened years ago.”
A familiar flare of anger warmed Ian’s chest. The excuses people were willing to make, the things they were willing to forget, all for the sake of it happened years ago. “I have no intention of bothering Frau Liebl,” he said lightly, smiling. “It’s someone else who interests me. I know that in ’45, a group of women came to stay at number eight. One was blue eyed, dark haired, small, in her twenties. She had a scar on the back of her neck, reddened, fairly recent.”
His heart pounded, and Ian thought what a slender thread this really was. How many women of that description did the world hold? Who could guarantee a scar would ever be seen?
“I remember her,” Klara said. “I only talked with her once, but I noticed the scar. A pink line across the back of her neck, trailing under her collar.”
“What was her name?” Ian’s mouth had gone dry. Beside him he felt Tony coiled taut as wire.
“Frau Becker, she called herself.” A little smile. “Not her real name, we all knew that.”
Ian couldn’t keep the sharpness out of his voice. “You never asked?”
“One didn’t.” She pulled her son closer, smoothing his collar. “Not during the war.”
No name. Ian swallowed bitter disappointment, hearing Tony press on.
“Anything else you can tell us about her, gnädige Frau.” He made a discreet gesture of reaching for his wallet. “It’s important that we locate this woman. We would be very grateful.”
Klara Gruber hesitated, eyeing the notes Tony had conjured. The center might not have the cash for large rewards, but Ian was perfectly willing to give up the week’s supper budget to grease a few wheels. She nodded, whisking the money away as if it had never been there at all. “Frau Becker stayed at the Liebl household a few months after—well, everything.” A vague gesture Ian took to mean the arrests, the Americans, the end of the war. The unpleasantness they could all pretend had not happened. “She kept to herself. I’d see her in the garden sometimes, on my way to market. I’d say hello, she’d smile.” Pause. “I don’t think Frau Liebl liked her.”
“Why?”
A very female shrug. “Two women in one house, wartime shortages having to be shared. Everybody staring at them, knowing who their men were. I think Frau Liebl asked her to leave—she left Altaussee in the fall of ’45. September, maybe.”
The bitter taste came back to Ian’s mouth. “Do you know where she went?”
“No.”
He hadn’t really thought she would.
“But Frau Becker asked me something, the day she left.” Klara Gruber hoisted her fussing son to one hip. “She called me over to the yard at number eight as I came back from the market. She must have noticed me going by at the same time every morning, because she was waiting for me.”
“What did she ask?”
“To deliver a letter for her in a few days. I asked why didn’t she post it before she left, and she said she was leaving Austria, almost immediately.” A pause. “That’s why I think she and Frau Liebl didn’t like each other. If they had, she wouldn’t have given her letter to a maid down the street.”
“A letter to whom?” Ian’s heart thudded all over again; Tony had turned back into a stretched-taut wire.
“Her mother in Salzburg. Frau Becker said she’d pay me to deliver it myself, not put it in the post. She didn’t trust the post.” A shrug. “I needed the money. I took Frau Becker’s letter, went to the address in Salzburg the week after she’d gone, put it under the door, and didn’t think about it again.”
“You didn’t actually see her mother? Was there a name on the envelope, or—”
“No name. I was told to put it under the door, not knock.” A hesitation. “She was being very careful, I suppose. But everyone was, Herr Graham.”
Helga chimed in, defensive. “You don’t know what it was like here in ’45. Everyone looking for visas, papers, food. Everyone kept their business to themselves.”
Because none of you wanted to know anything, Ian thought. That kind of thinking had made it quite easy for die Jägerin to cover her tracks.
Without hope, he asked, “I don’t suppose you remember the address.” Who would remember a strange address visited once five years ago?
“Number twelve, the Lindenplatz,” Klara Gruber said.
Ian stared, could feel Tony staring. “How …?”
She gave the first real smile of the interview. “When I came back into the square in front of the house, a young man on a bicycle knocked me down. He apologized and introduced himself—his name was Wolfgang Gruber. Four months later he took me back to that same spot when he proposed. That’s how I remember the address.”
Bloody hell, Ian thought. They had just got very, very lucky.
“Ladies,” Tony said with a warm smile, pressing a few more notes on them, “you’ve been more helpful than you can possibly know.” Helga blushed, but her older sister looked apprehensive.
“Are you going to make trouble for Frau Becker?” Now you ask, Ian thought, after you pocket our cash. “She couldn’t have done anything wrong. Such a nice woman—”
“It’s an inquiry related to someone else entirely,” Tony said, his standard soothing reply when hearing the inevitable He couldn’t have hurt a flea objection. But Ian looked down at Klara Gruber a long moment and asked, “What makes you so sure she was a nice woman?”
“Well, you know. She had a pretty way of speaking. She was a lady. And it’s not a woman’s fault, if her husband got involved with all that.”
“Involved with what?” Ian said. “The Nazi Party?”
The sisters both squirmed. No one had said that word yet. He could feel Tony giving him a quelling look.
“No one in our family were party members,” Helga said quickly. “We didn’t know anyone like that.”
“Of course not,” Tony said with a smile of melting sincerity.
“Of course not,” Ian echoed, stretching a hand toward Klara Gruber’s young son. He gurgled, reaching out, and Ian felt the baby fingers curl warmly round his thumb. “He’s a nice little chap, your boy. Frau Becker killed one not much older than him. Bullet to the back of the head. He was probably a nice little chap too.”
The two women stared, no longer quite so rosy. Helga put a hand to her mouth. Klara pulled her child back, and Ian saw the flash in her eyes he’d seen many times before—a kind of sullen, stubborn anger. Why did you make me know that? her eyes asked. I didn’t want to know that.
He smiled, tipping his hat. “Thank you again, ladies.”
“YOU CAN BE a real bastard sometimes,” Tony said conversationally.
Ian shrugged. “Their eyes are a little more open now.”
They were walking back to the hotel where they’d taken rooms for the night. Ian would have headed for Salzburg at once, but Tony wanted to question Frau Liebl in the morning. Ian thought Adolf Eichmann’s deserted wife would be far warier than a couple of former maidservants about talking to strange men, but Tony was right; they couldn’t leave it unexplored. “I’ll buy supper,” he said, since Tony still looked disapproving.
“No, I’ve got to take Helga Ziegler out tonight, show her a good time. And she’s in a sulk thanks to you, so it’s going to take all my very considerable charm.”
“Why take her out?”
“Spend weeks buttering up a girl only to drop her as soon as you have the information you need, and girls tend to feel used.”
“That’s because she was used, Tony. She was also paid.”
“Still, no one likes to be fobbed off the minute they’re not useful. And she’s not a bad sort. Her sister isn’t either.” Pause. “They aren’t wrong, you know. Things were complicated during the war. Survival in occupied territories is never as black and white as you might think.”
“Did they give aid to the resistance? Shelter refugees? Pass information to the Allies? Do anything to combat what was happening around them?” Ian paused. “If the answer is no, then as far as I’m concerned they have a measure of guilt. I’ll be damned if I pretend otherwise.”
“We don’t know what they might have done to help. We can’t assume.”
“From the pattern of their squirming, we can assume quite a bit.”
Tony snapped a mocking salute. “How pretty that worldview of yours must look, no shades of gray mucking anything up.”
“You lost whole branches of your family, in large part because so many people—people like the Ziegler sisters—were willing to bury their heads in the sand,” Ian shot back. “I find it hard to see shades of gray in that.”
“Don’t be such a hanging judge. We’re standing in the ashes of a war like no other—if we don’t try harder to see the shades of gray involved, we’ll find ourselves in the thick of a new one.”
“Call me a hanging judge if you like. I witnessed the hangings after Nuremberg and slept easy that night.”
“You haven’t slept too well since then, have you?” Tony parried.
“No, but it’s got nothing to do with seeing right and wrong as matters of black and white,” Ian said, getting off the last shot as they parted ways. He watched over his shoulder as Tony shook his head and strolled off, hands in pockets. They had their differences in opinion, Ian and his partner, but so far it hadn’t prevented them working together. He wondered if it ever would.
Ian didn’t go back to the hotel. He meandered until he stood across the street from 8 Fischerndorf. Five years ago, might he have seen die Jägerin standing on the doorstep? With an envelope in her hand, perhaps, waiting for the maid down the street to pass by?
I may not have your name, Ian thought to that long-gone figure, but I have your mother’s address in Salzburg. And if you sent your mother a letter before leaving Austria, surely you told her where you were going. He’d caught more than one war criminal that way over the past few years—most found it difficult to cut ties with their families.
There was a little boy in the house’s front yard, playing with pebbles. One of Adolf Eichmann’s sons, perhaps ten years old. Seb had been a few years older when he went off to Harrow, skinny and nervous. It had fallen to Ian to take Seb and his trunk to the station; their father needed the world to know My sons go to Harrow, chips off the old block! but details like train schedules didn’t interest him. “School is hell, but it’s manageable,” Ian had told Seb frankly. “Punch anyone who gives you guff, just like I showed you. And if the bigger boys have a go, I’ll make a special trip just to drag them out behind the cricket pitch and give them a pasting.”
“You can’t beat up everybody who comes at me,” Seb said forlornly.
“Yes, I can. Promise you’ll write?” And Seb did write. Long screeds about bird-watching and eventually a passion for Pushkin chased Ian to Spain as he tramped after the International Brigade, scolding him to be more careful when an air raid near Málaga took the hearing from Ian’s left ear for a week. Seb’s letters had followed him to Paris afterward when he was writing articles about the coming conference in Munich, and a year later there had been the fortnight they spent together after their father died in a road accident. Sixteen-year-old Seb had got drunk for the first time, and Ian had to pour him into bed … then came the day not six months later when Seb turned up on Ian’s doorstep in London, where he was writing about German U-boats sinking a British destroyer near Orkney, and said that he’d run away from school and enlisted.
“You idiot,” Ian had shouted.
“Just because you can’t fight doesn’t mean I can’t,” Seb flared. Ian’s hearing on the left side had mostly come back after Málaga, but not quite up to enlistment standards. Seb saw the look on Ian’s face and muttered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” The only quarrel that had ever erupted between them, over before it began.
“You’re still an idiot for enlisting,” Ian had retorted. “All your bird-watching left you bird-witted.”
He wondered now if his little brother had looked for birds in the sky that May morning when he was captured, a few months later. If he’d wished for wings when his battalion was forced, outgunned and ill-equipped, to surrender on the Doullens–Arras road. Realizing, as he became a prisoner, that his war was over almost before it had begun—that he would sit out the rest of the fight in a cage, like any captive bird.
But you still fought, Ian thought. Sebastian Vincent Graham had escaped his stalag, had tried to escape occupied Poland, and he’d died doing it—died at die Jägerin’s hands. And you made her pay.
Seb had been the one to give her the scar on her neck.
So Nina had said, anyway, in her almost incomprehensible combination of broken English and hand gestures. Ian wasn’t sure how she and Seb had met, how they’d stumbled across the huntress’s ocher-walled house at Lake Rusalka—Nina couldn’t explain it clearly—but there had been a struggle; there had been shots; there had been a blade. Seb had put up a heroic fight so Nina could get away.
If she told me the truth, Ian thought as he turned away from the Eichmann house.
“Let’s have that talk now, Nina,” he said aloud to the twilight.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_c2fde8ea-1a80-5606-a001-cd30eab9164c)
NINA (#ulink_c2fde8ea-1a80-5606-a001-cd30eab9164c)
June 1941
Irkutsk, Siberia
When war came to the Soviet Union, Nina was putting a Polikarpov U-2 through its paces, riding a cloud-scented breeze high over Irkutsk. Not that a U-2 had many paces—a dual-cockpit biplane open to the sky, crafted of linen over wood, cruising along at a pace so sedate that newer, faster planes would have stalled trying to match speed. But the old bird was maneuverable; she could turn on a razor edge without cutting herself. Nina had been happy to take her up for a solo spin to check for the mechanics if the controls needed adjustment.
It had been in a U-2 that Nina took her first flight shortly after joining the air club. That liquid excitement when the instructor allowed her to take the stick and make her first gentle, banking turn; the plane’s answering wobble as though aware of the uncertain new hands that guided it … She was four years past that first awkward turn now, an impressive number of flying hours under her belt, and she sent the U-2 looping and rolling among the clouds. The sky was Nina’s lake. She’d felt that on her first flight as she dove into the air like a green-haired rusalka diving into a lake. Diving not down but up, with a feeling of I am home. She had cried on that first flight, tears fogging her flight goggles.
It hadn’t been easy, getting in the air. “It’s going to take more than that, girl,” the air club’s director had sniffed when Nina pushed her application and birth record across his desk. “You’ll need a medical certificate, education certificate, references from the Komsomol, and only then can you even submit to the credentials committee for consideration. Do you know anyone in Irkutsk?”
“No.” Nina had no one who could pull strings for the paperwork and approvals she needed, but luckily, the head of the local Komsomol had taken a liking to her. “Here you see the epitome of proletarian spirit,” he proclaimed after one look at Nina’s hardscrabble background. “A girl who in tsarist days would have spilled the blood of her life in the field, now seeking the skies! The glorification of the state lies in the ability of its laborers to rise—” There had been a great many more slogans after that, and Nina was allowed to apply for the Komsomol with all its interviews and political literacy exams. She didn’t know much about political history, but she knew to nod fervently whenever anyone asked if she wished to exalt the Motherland by participating in the recent aviation drive to match the aeronautics of the decadent West, and alongside that, she had impeccable peasant lineage. The first time my father ever did me a favor, Nina reflected. If he’d been a prosperous kulak or highbrow intelligentsia rather than a Siberian peasant with barely a kopeck to his name, the Komsomol would have turned up their nose. But an untutored peasant with ambition was looked on with enough approval for a membership card, and with that, a good many doors opened. Komsomol girls were sought after, presumed to be aspiring Communist Party members. Nina didn’t care about policy or Party politics as long as she could get in the air.
And now here she was, dancing in the clouds.
Nina came out of her spiral, lining up the air club below. Nothing wrong with this old duck’s flight controls. She began the descent, feeling no place where the plane left off and she began; it was as though her arms had lengthened into the span of the wings and her feet had stretched down into the wheels, the sun warming her hair the way it warmed the linen over the wooden struts.
She brought the U-2 down soft as a snowflake alighting on dark water—perfect three-point touchdown, not even a bounce—smiling as she felt the tail skid brake them to a halt. Maybe that was another reason Nina liked the U-2, because it had been designed without brakes. So was I. She hoisted herself out of the cockpit, sitting on the rim atop the plane as she unbuckled her half-bald rabbit-fur cap. Nina Borisovna Markova was twenty-three now, still small, compact, and sturdy as a gymnast; she had engine grease under her nails instead of blood, and she breathed exhaust fumes instead of lake water. She might still be a little crazy, she acknowledged, because all Markovs were, but at least she’d won a place for herself in this world, on her wings and not on her back. She knew what she loved, she knew what she feared, and what she feared didn’t matter because there was no lake anywhere nearby to drown in. Nina sat atop her plane a moment longer, tilting her face up to the sun, then slid to the wing and down to the ground in one easy motion.
Looking around, she saw that something was wrong.
The runway should have bustled with students, mechanics, pilots. Even in Irkutsk, flying was such a craze that the air club was always busy. But Nina saw no one, and even the bustle of the city beyond—the noise of the streets, the sound of raised voices and feet in mass-produced boots trudging back and forth from work—seemed muted. Puzzled, she secured her plane—the process of checking her switches and mags, securing her flight controls, and taking care of the tie-downs all as automatic now as breathing—and headed for the nearest hangar. The sun stood directly overhead—high noon on a perfect June Sunday.
She found a silent crowd inside. Pilots, students, fellow instructors, all crowded together with faces lifted toward the loudspeaker high on the wall. Flying goggles and oilcans dangled from hands, and no one so much as cleared their throat. Everyone listened to the flat drone of the words coming from the radio.
“—to the effect that the German government had decided to launch war against the U.S.S.R.—”
Nina sucked in her breath. Coming to the fringe of the crowd, she saw the coal-black hair of Vladimir Ilyich and pushed up beside him—he was the best pilot in the air club besides Nina; they slept together sometimes. “Was there an attack?” she breathed.
“Fucking Fritzes bombed Kiev, Sebastopol, Kaunas—”
Someone shushed him. Nina pointed at the loudspeaker, the flat cadences of whoever was speaking. Vladimir mouthed back Comrade Molotov.
The public address continued. “—now that the attack on the Soviet Union has already been committed, the Soviet government has ordered our troops to repulse the predatory assault and to drive German troops from the territory of our country …”
So much for the Soviet-German pact, Nina thought. In truth she wasn’t surprised. War had been hovering in the air for months like the smell of dynamite. Now, war was here. Everyone knew Hitler and his fascists were crazy, but crazy enough to take on Comrade Stalin?
“—government of the Soviet Union expresses its unshakable confidence that our valiant army and navy and brave falcons of the Soviet Air Force will acquit themselves with honor—”
The Soviet Air Force. Nina did a rapid calculation. She had more flying hours than almost any pilot at the club; she’d scraped through two years of advanced training at the nearest pilot school and had been sent back as an aviation instructor. Already there were rumors of new fighter planes coming off the lines; to get in the cockpit of one of those …
“—This is not the first time that our people have had to deal with an attack of an arrogant foe. At the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia—” Hoots and cheers momentarily drowned out Comrade Molotov. Nina tried to imagine Hitler’s swastika being unfurled over the Old Man on the far edge of the world and shook her head in amused contempt. This land was too much for outsiders; Napoleon could tell you that. Too cold, too vast, and too unforgiving for anyone not seasoned to it from birth. A little fascist with a scrubbing-brush mustache thought he’d march on Moscow? He’d have better luck emptying Baikal with a pail.
Comrade Molotov evidently agreed with her, blaring on through the loudspeaker. “It will be the same with Hitler, who in his arrogance has proclaimed a new crusade against our country. The Red Army and our whole people will again wage victorious war for the Motherland—” Cheers rose again, until Nina could barely hear his final “The enemy shall be defeated. Victory will be ours.”
The crowd erupted, some racing across the airfield to take the news to others, some flinging arms around each other. Maybe in the streets there were tears and dread, Nina thought, but this was the air club—if war was here, they’d all be in the air, and there was nowhere any of them would rather be. Vladimir Ilyich turned with a fierce smile, and Nina kissed him so hard their teeth clashed. “I’m going to enlist tomorrow,” he said when they came up for air.
“So am I.” Her blood was running hot as gasoline; she couldn’t close her eyes even after she and Vladimir went back to his room and spent the night drinking vodka and rolling around his old sheets. She lay there with Vladimir’s arm across her middle, staring through the dark, hearing a couple arguing on the other side of the wall, imagining a chain of ice floes drifting across the surface of the Old Man, one after the other leading over the blue horizon. The train from her village to Irkutsk had been the step from shore to the first floe as she thought I can fly. Now here was a step to the second floe, as she thought I can fight Germans.
“War isn’t a game,” Nina’s roommate, Tania, said when Nina came home in the morning long enough to change her shirt. They’d been assigned to each other as roommates, sharing an eleven-square-meter room in a communal apartment with eight other apartment-mates. Nina thought it was a hole, but Tania said they’d been lucky to get it. “You shouldn’t be smiling and humming like you’re going to a dance.”
Nina shrugged. Tania was an aspiring Party member, a staunch believer in order and virtue and the state; the only thing she and Nina had in common was a room. “Wars are terrible, but they need people like me.”
“‘People like you.’” Tania picked up her pocketbook, ready for her shift as a blast-furnace operator. “You’re an individualist.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You don’t volunteer for outside work.” Tania was forever volunteering—collecting state procurement quotas from the collective farms, carrying out exercises to improve labor discipline in factories. “You don’t participate in Komsomol meetings—I see you sitting there doing your navigation figuring! You don’t make an effort to participate in proletarian life—”
“It’s not worth the effort.”
“See? The state has no use for individualism. Try to enlist, and they won’t take you,” Tania said with a certain satisfaction.
“Yes, they will.” Nina grinned in that way she knew unsettled her roommate. “They need people who are a little bit crazy. Because crazy people do well in wars.” Her father had said that, whenever he whispered tales of the tsarists he’d killed in the revolution. It was the first time she’d thought of her father in a while—she hadn’t seen him since she left home. She’d wondered often if leaving him meant killing him, if he’d pickle to death in rotgut vodka without someone to bring home game for the stewpot. That had given Nina a twinge of guilt, but she wasn’t going home, not ever, not for a father who tried to drown her. Yet she still wondered from time to time how he was, if he was alive. I hope you are, she thought, because if the Hitlerites get past me in my plane—if they get all the way to the Old Man—then you’re just the old man to bring them to a halt. She could see her father slipping through the trees with his rifle, his knives, his sharp-toothed grin that was just like Nina’s, cutting German throats in utter silence.
“Not just an individualist but a slut,” Tania muttered, stamping out. “I know you were out with Vladimir Ilyich again last night—”
“Do you want to join us next time?” Nina called after her as the door slammed. She was out that door herself a few minutes later, meeting Vladimir and two of their fellow air club pilots. They sang as they trooped down the street, bellowing an old worker’s march that Nina had never learned as a child. There was so much she had never learned, growing up in near-total isolation out by the lake. It was the kind of thing that still put a distance between her and most of the people she knew. It was better at the air club than among the Komsomol girls like Tania; at least at the club there was the unifying passion for flight. Even so, people like Vladimir and his friends had grown up knowing what a city looked like; they knew Party history and could recite Comrade Stalin’s most famous speeches because they’d studied all the right state-mandated subjects. Growing up a peasant was a bonus, but growing up a complete savage, Nina thought not for the first time, had its disadvantages.
Not anymore. As Nina and the others joined the line outside the recruitment office, which already stretched down the street, she could feel that sense of distance draining away. The four of them talked eagerly about the new planes coming, the fighters that would put Hitler’s Messerschmitts and Fokkers into the ground, and Nina belonged. She couldn’t stop smiling.
But when the four of them emerged from their turn in the office, her smile was gone. Vladimir put a hand on her arm. “You can still do your part—”
“Not as a pilot!” The officer who had taken their applications had been brusque: no women to be taken in aviation units. “I have more flight hours than any of them!” Nina had protested, waving at Vladimir and the others.
“Your enthusiasm to serve the state will not go unassuaged. We have need of nurses, communications operators, antiaircraft gunners—”
“Why can’t I be a pilot?” Fumbling for arguments, Nina fell back on Stalin. No one argued with the Boss. “Comrade Stalin himself has commended the drive of women pilots. I have been a flight instructor for—”
“Then do your job, girl,” the officer said sternly. “There will be plenty of training work for you.” And he moved to the next in line.
Vladimir tried now to sneak an arm around Nina’s waist. “Don’t be sour, dousha. Come celebrate with us!” Nina just glowered, slipping back to her shared room where she had taped a single three-year-old newspaper clipping to the mirror: Marina Raskova, Polina Osipenko, and Valentina Grizodubova standing in front of their twin-engine Tupolev ANT-37, grinning like fiends because they had just set the distance record. Nearly six thousand five hundred kilometers in twenty-six hours and twenty-nine minutes. Nina’s heroines, everyone’s heroines—even Comrade Stalin’s, because he’d bestowed the Hero of the Soviet Union award on them all and said “today these women have avenged the heavy centuries of the oppression of women.”
I’m not avenging the heavy centuries of anything by being a damn nurse, Nina thought. But none of the other girls who flew at the air club were taken as pilots either, even as the men were snapped up down to the last spotty boy.
“What did you expect, Ninochka?” Vladimir shrugged. “Only one in four flying at the club is a girl anyway.”
“But I’m better than any of the men they took,” Nina said bluntly. “I’m better than you.”
She said it as a simple statement of fact, not an insult, but he looked offended. “Keep talking like that, dousha, and I won’t offer to marry you before I go.”
Nina blinked. “Since when do you want to marry me?”
“Every man wants a woman to wave good-bye when he goes to war. We could go down to the office, it would be easy.” He flung a careless arm around her waist. “Don’t you love me?”
“You’re a great lay, Vlodya, and you’re a good pilot but you’re not better than me,” Nina said. “I’d only fall in love with someone who can fly better than me.”
“Bitch,” he said, and stamped off to spend his last few nights in some other bed than Nina’s.
All through the summer, the ranks at the air club thinned. The days marched toward fall and newspapers reported Hitler’s barbaric swastika-clad army murdering babies and torturing Soviet women on the western front. Even as far east as Irkutsk the tide of patriotism swelled, war news traded with relish if it was a Soviet victory or fury if it was a treacherous German advance, and Nina’s frustration ate her alive. There wasn’t an aviation unit that would have her; there wasn’t a commanding officer who would give her a plane; there wasn’t a use for what Nina did best—she spent her days training seventeen-year-old boys who barely listened long enough to get a handful of flight hours before they were off to enlist. All the fine talk on the radio and in Comrade Stalin’s speeches about the women of the Motherland proving their worth—what did it come down to? Be a nurse, or train the men.
And then it was September; Hitler’s forces still advancing implacably east, and Nina walked the Angara River, looking over the railings across that swift blue ribbon that threaded the city. Mentally she was flying high in one of the new fighters, screaming through the clouds at a speed to make her ears bleed … All at once the skin between her shoulder blades twitched, and she knew she was being tracked. She stopped to fiddle with her boot, slipping her razor up into her hand, and unfolding it inside her sleeve before turning with a mild expression, ready for anything. Anything, that is, but the knife-edged smile that greeted her.
“Careless, little huntress,” her father said. “I tracked you all the way from the air club.”
THEY STOOD LEANING against the railing with their backs to the river, regarding each other. Nina left enough space between them to dodge, though his eyes didn’t have the lunatic gleam they’d had the last time he tried to kill her. Still, she kept the razor between her fingers. Her father smiled again when he saw it.
“Mine,” he said.
“Mine now. What are you doing in Irkutsk?”
He indicated a bundle at his feet. “A good hunting year. Prize pelts fetch more in the city.”
“How did you find me?”
“I can track wolverines, girl. You think I can’t track my lake witch of a daughter?”
“Sky witch now,” Nina retorted.
“I heard. They let girls fly?”
“Three girls set the long-distance record.” Nina studied her father, who seemed steady on his feet. “I thought you might be dead by now. Pickled in your own vodka.”
A shrug. “It was easier letting you fill the stewpot when you were home—girls are supposed to look after their fathers. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do it myself.”
“I’m not sorry for leaving.”
A wintry smile. “You stole every kopeck I had on your way out. Are you sorry for that?”
“No.”
“Thieving little bitch.” He said it with a kind of grim amusement, and Nina grinned. So strange to see him here; he looked as out of place as a wolf would have looked sauntering under the streetlamps.
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” Nina said, surprised to find she meant it. She could easily hate the man who tried to drown her. But she rather liked the man who had taught her to hunt and told her stories, and she felt a wary respect for the man seemingly too iron-hard to die. The feelings bobbed alongside each other separate and comfortable, no need to rank one over the other. If any feeling about her father came first, it was the urge not to turn her back on him.
Her father was saying something about the war now, regretting that he was too old to join up and kill fascists. “Wonder if they die easier than tsarists,” he mused. “Did I ever tell you about that Muscovite son of a bitch whose liver I prised out with a spade?”
“Many times, Papa.”
“You always liked that story.” He looked at her from under shaggy brows. “I should have at least one child in this war killing Germans. Your brothers are all in prisons or gangs, and your sisters are all whores. Will you go?”
“They won’t put women in aviation units.”
“Do they think you’re too soft?” He barked a laugh. “I saw women in the revolution who could saw a man’s head off without batting an eye.”
“Revolutions talk big about women being the same as men,” Nina said. “Now when you ask permission to join up, they tell you to go be a nurse.”
“There’s your trouble. Asking.” Her father leaned toward her, and Nina smelled the feral reek of his breath. “There’ll be a chance, Nina Borisovna. Don’t ask, when you see it. Just fucking take it.”
“That shows a calculated antisocial disdain for the collectivist principle.” Nina quoted the kind of rubbish Tania was always parroting. “Antithetical to the principles of proletarian life.”
“Fuck proletarian life.”
Despite herself, Nina winced. “Keep saying things like that on a city street and you’ll be in trouble, you crazy bastard. You’ll end up with a bullet in your ear.”
“No, because I’m a Markov. Trouble always finds us, but we eat trouble alive.” Her father rummaged in his pack, tossing her something soft and bulky. Nina caught it, surprised. A lake-seal pelt, and it was a beauty—steely gray with a sheen like new ice, soft as snow. “Make a new cap if you’re going to go fly fighters,” he said, twitching an eyebrow at her old rabbit-fur cap. “That one looks like shit.”
Nina smiled. “Thank you, Papa.”
He shouldered his pack. “Don’t come back to the lake,” he said in farewell. “Next time I get a skinful of vodka I’ll drown you for good, little rusalka.”
“Or I’ll cut your throat this time and not your hand.”
“Either way.” He nodded at the razor’s edge, still showing between her fingers. “Kill a German for me with that.”
She waited till he was out of sight, that tall shaggy form sliding into the crowd as noiselessly as he vanished into the taiga around the Old Man. Will I ever see you again? she wondered, and somehow thought not. There was some relief in the thought, some regret, some pleasure. No need to rank one over the other.
She was sitting cross-legged on her bed that night, cutting carefully into the seal pelt to fashion herself a new cap, when Tania turned on the radio. “They’re broadcasting a women’s antifascist meeting in Moscow.” Nina barely listened, cutting away at the sealskin. A proper flying cap with flaps to tie down over the ears, just the thing for open-cockpit flights.
“… The Soviet woman is the hundreds of drivers, tractor operators, and pilots who are ready at any moment to sit down in a combat machine and plunge into battle.”
Nina paused. “Who’s that?”
“Marina Raskova,” Tania said. Nina glanced at the cutout newspaper photograph on her mirror. The woman on the right, dark hair, sparkling eyed, very easy and capable in front of her Tupolev ANT-37. Nina had devoured every word about Raskova, but never heard her speak. Her voice came through the radio warmly intimate, clear as crystal. Nina would have followed that voice off a cliff.
“Dear sisters!” Marina Raskova cried. “The hour has come for harsh retribution! Stand in the ranks of the warriors for freedom!”
Tell me how, Nina thought.
THE ANSWER CAME, not that night but in a matter of weeks, the day Soviet troops were driven back to the Mozhaisk Line only eighty kilometers from Moscow. The day another piece of news swept over the air club: Comrade Stalin had ordered the formation of three regiments to be trained for combat aviation under Marina Raskova, Hero of the Soviet Union.
Three regiments of women.
“The local Komsomols have been asked to screen and interview volunteers,” Nina heard a fellow pilot saying. “I’ve submitted all my paperwork already. Only the best recruits will be sent to Moscow—”
How can I make them choose me? Nina thought. A little barbarian from the taiga with patched-together schooling and a record of individualism, when women everywhere would be clamoring to join—women with university backgrounds, impeccable records, Party connections.
There’ll be a chance, Nina Borisovna, her father had said. Don’t ask, when you see it. Just fucking take it.
She didn’t bother filling out paperwork. Instead she went home to collect her essentials—passport, Komsomol membership card, certificates for completing pilot training and glider training—then crammed a few clothes into a bag, stuffed her hair into her new sealskin cap, and went running under an iron October sky for the train station. She threw every ruble she had onto the counter and said, “One way. Moscow.”
Chapter 10 (#ulink_c147f537-2ddf-5765-a8d6-6af832ccb983)
JORDAN (#ulink_c147f537-2ddf-5765-a8d6-6af832ccb983)
May 1946
Boston
The day after Jordan’s father escorted Anneliese off on their honeymoon, Jordan took Ruth to the Public Garden. Nothing like ice cream and a swan boat ride to get a little girl smiling … and talking.
“Chocolate or strawberry?” Ruth chewed her lip in indecision. “Both,” Jordan decided. “You deserve it.” That got a shy smile from Ruth, who was still hanging on to Taro’s leash like a safety harness, but who seemed to be unfolding into something like trust.
Which you’re taking advantage of, Jordan thought grimly, but pushed that aside. People aren’t obliged to drag out their old hurts or dirty laundry just because of your need to know, her father had told her not long ago, but he was off on his honeymoon with a woman who had carried a swastika down the aisle, and Jordan’s need to know was burning her up.
Licking their ice creams, Jordan and Ruth wandered down to the duck pond, Taro wagging between them. The water reflected the summer tourists throwing bread down from the bridge, but for once Jordan had no impulse to capture the moment on film. “See that flicker, Ruth? That’s a dragonfly. Did you see dragonflies at the lake in Altaussee?” Ruth looked puzzled. “That was where you were, wasn’t it? Before you came here.”
Nod.
“What else do you remember, cricket? I’d like to know more about you, now that you’re my sister.” Squeezing Ruth’s hand. “What do you remember before coming to Boston?”
“The lake,” Ruth said in her soft voice. Her trace of a German accent was already fading. With her blond braids and blue jumper, she could have been any little American girl. “Seeing the lake every day through the window.”
“Every day?” Anneliese hadn’t said they were in Altaussee very long. “How many days?”
Ruth shrugged.
“Do you remember your father? How he died?”
“Mama said he went east.”
“Where east?”
Another shrug.
“What else do you remember?” Jordan asked as gently as she knew how.
“The violin,” Ruth said even more softly. “Mama playing.”
Jordan blinked. “But she doesn’t play the violin.”
“She did.” Ruth’s eyebrows pulled together, and she reached for Taro’s soft back. “She did!”
“I believe you, Ruthie—”
“She did,” Ruth said fiercely. “She played for me.”
Never had Anneliese said she could play an instrument. She never asked to turn on the radio to listen to music either. And she didn’t own any violin—Jordan had seen her things carried in to be unpacked after the honeymoon, and there was no instrument case. Maybe she had to sell it?
Jordan looked down at Ruth. “Your mama said there was an incident by the lake in Altaussee. A refugee woman who, um, wasn’t very nice to you both.”
“There was blood,” Ruth whispered. “My nose bled.”
Jordan paused, heart thumping. “Do you remember any more?”
Ruth dropped her melting ice cream, looking upset, and Jordan couldn’t keep pushing. She just couldn’t. She opened her arms and Ruth burrowed into them. “Never mind, cricket. You don’t have to remember if you don’t want to.”
“That’s what she said,” Ruth mumbled into Jordan’s middle.
“Who?”
A pause. Then, “Mama.”
But her voice lifted as though she wasn’t entirely certain, and her small shoulders hitched. Jordan bit her tongue on any further questions—what could she even ask?—and hugged her new sister tight. “Let’s go for a swan boat ride. You’ll love that.”
“But I dropped my ice cream.”
“You can have mine.”
Ruth calmed down by the time they got to the boats with their paddle-operated swans. Jordan still felt like a monster. Wasn’t that productive? she scolded herself. You upset your brand-new little sister, all to learn that maybe Anneliese played the violin, and that a refugee woman made Ruth’s nose bleed in Altaussee. That’s proof of nothing, J. Bryde.
Anneliese had brought very few belongings to the house, hardly suspicious for a woman fleeing the wreckage of a war. Jordan had already looked through her closet and drawers, guiltily, but there was nothing to be found. If the new Mrs. McBride had anything incriminating, it had gone on her honeymoon along with the Iron Cross.
Watch and wait. As much as she wanted to run to her father, Jordan knew she’d need more proof than two photographs, or he might just shake his head and say, Jordan and her wild stories.
By Monday the new Mr. and Mrs. McBride were back, laden with presents. Jordan couldn’t help a shiver of relief to see her dad hale and hearty, although what had she been fearing? That the dainty Anneliese would do him harm? That was the wildest idea yet, surely.
“I missed my girls!” He swooped Ruth up in a hug, and Anneliese’s smile for Jordan was so infectious Jordan couldn’t help smiling back.
“Come help me unpack, Jordan. I’ll show you the scarf I found in Concord, just your color.” She was so warm and open, Jordan couldn’t help but wonder if she’d imagined the Iron Cross altogether.
“I wondered,” Jordan asked casually as they unpacked upstairs, shawls and lace handkerchiefs piled around the bed, “did you ever play the violin?”
“No, why?”
“No reason. Oh, that scarf is pretty, Anneliese—” She let her stepmother loop the fringed blue-sequined ends around her neck.
“Anna,” corrected Anneliese, arranging the scarf across Jordan’s shoulder. “Now that I’m a proper American housewife, I’d like a proper American name!”
Yes, let’s just erase your past, Jordan thought, even as Anneliese tugged her to look in the mirror. Because there’s something there you don’t want us to know.
“WE HAVE A SUITE at the Copley Plaza Hotel,” Ginny Reilly was saying. “My sister had her honeymoon there, it’s gorgeous. So when I have my wedding night there, Sean will carry me across the threshold—”
“You should carry him across the threshold,” Jordan observed, keeping one ear on the kitchen where Anneliese was clattering dishes. “Sean’s a string bean.”
“Shut up, it’s my fantasy.” Stifled laughter from the girls sitting around the parlor floor with a stack of magazines. “He opens the champagne while I change into a negligee. Bias-cut ivory satin—”
More suppressed laughter, up until Ginny finished with a whispered, “When the light goes out he just rips my negligee off …” They all exploded, Jordan laughing too.
She lifted the Leica and snapped her friends, mentally titling it June 1946: A Study in Feminine Frustration. Graduation had come and gone just after Jordan’s eighteenth birthday, and now that school was done, she found herself sitting around with a good many friends who wanted to plan their fantasy weddings—and wedding nights. They were all good girls with lace-curtain-and-Sunday-lunch parents, so nobody here had Done It, but they talked about Doing It. What else was there to fantasize about now that school was done? Ginny worked at Filene’s, and Susan was going to Boston College in the fall but had already said she’d only stay till she got engaged. And Jordan, who had yearned for high school to be done, now found herself wondering what the point was. Her father still wouldn’t budge about the question of college, when she brought it up last week. “Let me talk to him later,” Anneliese had whispered afterward, with a smile of friendly complicity that gave Jordan a guilty twinge.
“Your turn, Jor,” Ginny laughed. “How does your first time go?”
Jordan gave up fretting for the moment. “All right, here it goes.” This was all very silly, but it was their time to be silly, wasn’t it? “We’re at war with the Soviets, and I’m filming the bombing of Moscow. I meet a glamorous Frenchman working for Reuters, and after the bombing he drags me off to an abandoned tank—”
“You want to Do It in a tank?”
“There are bullets flying. It’s very romantic. Then my photo of the bombing makes the cover of TIME—”
“If I had Garrett, I wouldn’t be daydreaming about Frenchmen,” Susan said. “Is he going to give you his college ring?”
“He won’t have one until he starts this fall,” Jordan evaded. But Garrett probably would offer it to her, and if she took it, everyone would expect her to wear it around her neck on a chain, because that was the next step. The trouble with steps was that the more you took in a certain direction, the more people assumed that you would continue on, which Jordan wasn’t sure she wanted to do. She was barely eighteen; how was she supposed to know if Garrett Byrne was the One and Only? Jordan wasn’t even sure she believed in the entire idea of the One and Only.
Anneliese glided in with a tray. “Would you girls like some cake?”
“Please, Mrs. McBride!” Jordan’s friends chimed, and then when she had retreated: “Your stepmother is the best.”
“So elegant—never a hair out of place. My mother always looks so frazzled.”
“She’s wonderful,” Jordan said. If I could be certain she wasn’t a Nazi, she’d be absolutely perfect.
“Just because she has an Iron Cross,” Jordan argued to herself, down in the darkroom after her friends had left, “doesn’t mean she’s a Nazi.” Trying to be fair, unbiased, like the level-headed J. Bryde who could always find truth in the middle of sensationalism. “Maybe Anneliese’s husband was a Nazi, and the medal was his. She said he was in the war, but she’s avoided saying if he followed Hitler or not. That’s the kind of thing you would keep to yourself, if you moved to America.”
Perfectly reasonable. Entirely possible.
“Even if he was a Nazi, it doesn’t mean she was. She could have carried his old medal because it was a reminder of him, not because she’s a fascist.”
Also entirely possible.
“Moreover,” Jordan went on, pacing the length of the darkroom, “maybe she’s not even keeping this background of hers a secret. Just because she didn’t tell me doesn’t mean she hasn’t told Dad. He might already know. A little secret between husband and wife.”
So ask him, Jordan thought. But something gut-deep held her back. Anneliese made Jordan’s father happy; she had seen that very clearly over the past weeks of watching and waiting. The cheery way he whistled when he shaved in the morning, the bounce in his step when he came home from work. And though Jordan had no urge to imagine what happened behind her father’s bedroom door, that side of things was clearly going very well too. Last week Jordan had knocked on their bedroom door in the afternoon and come in to see Anneliese straightening the bedclothes as her husband fastened his cuffs—Jordan had seen the private smile that passed between them. Maybe she was just an eighteen-year-old high school graduate who had never gone further than taking off her blouse in her boyfriend’s car, but it was perfectly clear that elegant Anneliese with her impeccable housekeeping and starched handkerchiefs had a less impeccable, less starched side, one that Jordan’s father was very happy with after so many years of sleeping alone. And everyone had multiple sides, really, so should she really worry like this about the various sides of Anneliese?
Jordan frowned, fighting the dread that she really was just making up wild stories again—that same part of her that had to fantasize about war-zone men and whistling bullets rather than honeymoon suites and bias-cut ivory satin.
“There you are.” Anneliese looked up from her sewing machine as Jordan came into the upstairs sunroom, now a sewing room. “What do you think?” Shaking out a half-stitched lilac cotton dress for Ruth.
“More ruffles. Ruth always wants more ruffles.” Anneliese had made Jordan’s graduation dress in this room: green silk molded tight to the waist, a wide neckline, elbow sleeves; the most stunning dress in the graduating class. Jordan’s father had mopped his eyes, and Anneliese had given her an armload of cream roses to carry. Jordan felt that squirm of guilt again and flopped down at the sewing table with a sigh.
“Restless?” Anneliese smiled. “It’s a hard time in a girl’s life, out of school but not moved to the next stage yet.”
“Are you going to tell me to stop moping around and get engaged?” Because Jordan’s father was thinking it, she could tell.
“No, because the last thing a girl your age needs is to be—what’s the word? Bossed.” Anneliese pronounced it with precision; her quest to conquer American slang was unceasing. “My mother lectured me day and night when I was your age, and it just made me stubborn and resentful.”
“You’re so nice to me,” Jordan couldn’t help saying. Strategy, or because you really are as good as you seem?
Anneliese bit off a thread, eyes sparkling. “I have no wish to be a wicked stepmother.”
I keep watching you, Jordan thought desperately, and you don’t give me anything to see. Nothing but reasons to like you.
Until the afternoon months later, on Selkie Lake.
Chapter 11 (#ulink_549c1c48-d6e6-58ee-84ea-ea4a7dc08702)
IAN (#ulink_549c1c48-d6e6-58ee-84ea-ea4a7dc08702)
April 1950
Vienna
That bitch,” Tony fumed, kicking the legs of their bench on the railway station. “That goddamn Nazi bitch. I know she knew something.”
“Agreed,” Ian said, scanning his newspaper. “I’d be willing to wager she knew quite a lot.”
The morning expedition to 8 Fischerndorf had not gone well. No combination of plausible half-lies, Tony’s charm, or money had pried anything useful from Vera Eichmann née Liebl. She didn’t know any woman with dark hair and a scar on the neck. No such woman had stayed with her after the war. If the neighbors said so, she couldn’t be responsible for what they thought. They were only too eager to make up evil things about a widow struggling to make ends meet. Yes, she considered herself a widow. She had not laid eyes on her husband in five years. She wished to be left alone. The door had then banged in their faces.
Ian hadn’t expected it to go much better, so he remained sanguine, reading while his partner raged. At last Tony stopped pacing and dropped onto the bench. “What I’d have given to drag that woman into her own cellar and beat the truth out of her.”
“You wouldn’t do that, and you know it.”
“Wouldn’t I?” Tony raised an eyebrow. “I don’t have a lot of chivalric feeling for a woman like that. It’s not like trying to understand the compromises little people like the Ziegler sisters might have made to get through the war—Adolf Eichmann’s wife was at the top level. She had to know something about how her husband was shipping Jews east by the million. Believe me, I could bounce her off a wall or two and still sleep well at night if it got us the information we needed.”
“What if it didn’t? Would you start to break bones? Threaten her children? Where does it stop?” Ian folded his newspaper, feeling the spring breeze ruffle his hair. “That’s why we don’t operate that way.”
They’d had this same conversation the first week they worked together, on the trail of a Gauleiter responsible for a number of atrocities in occupied France. After one particularly unproductive interview, Tony had murmured, “Let me drag him into the back alley, I’ll get him talking.”
Ian had with great calm taken his new partner by the collar, applied a half twist that cut off the breath, and lifted him up onto his toes so they stood eye to eye. “Do I have your attention?” he said quietly and waited for Tony’s nod. “Good. Because we do not beat up witnesses. Not now. Not ever. And if you can’t wrap your mind around that, get out now. Am I in any way unclear?” He let Tony go, and the younger man shrugged, eyes wary. “Your call, boss.”
Now, Tony looked at Ian with curiosity in those dark eyes. “I’m not saying we’d ever go at a man’s nails with pliers. There are degrees. When all it would take is a good shaking and a few slaps—”
“Anyone who would spill that easily can be loosened up without violence.”
“It doesn’t always work that way, and you know it. Don’t tell me you’ve never been tempted to make a witness cough up.”
“Of course I’ve been tempted,” Ian said flatly. “I’ve been tempted to degrees you would not believe. But it isn’t just about catching war criminals. How we catch them—that matters.”
“Does it?”
Ian rested his elbows on his knees, looking down the train tracks. “I worked with an American team not long after the war ended,” he said at last. “Investigating cases where German civilians were suspected of murdering downed airmen. The Americans used to detain the local Burgermeister until he coughed up a list of witnesses, then stand the witnesses up against a wall and threaten to shoot them unless they talked. They always talked, we’d get our man, and no witness was ever shot. But I hated it.” Ian looked at his colleague. “There are more war criminals out there than we will ever be able to find. If I have to let go of the ones that won’t get found unless we turn into torturers, I’m at ease with that decision.”
“Will you be at ease with it if you have to let go of die Jägerin?” Tony asked. “What if the woman who killed your brother and nearly killed your wife lies on the other side of beating the shit out of a witness?”
Ian thought in stark honesty, I don’t know.
He breathed away the instinctive flare of defensive anger, saw an approaching plume of smoke, and rose. “Train’s here.” It was a long, silent ride back to Vienna.
“YOU ARE EVICTED,” Frau Hummel greeted them at the door, crimson with rage. “You and that barbarian Hure—”
She continued to shout, but Ian pushed past and threw open the door to the center. “Bloody hell …”
In one day, the office had gone from an orderly oasis to an utter disaster. Files were scattered everywhere in heaps, paper drifted like snow across the desk, and empty cups sat on every surface. The air smelled like scalded tea, and the jam pot was attracting flies. The author of all this anarchy sat in Ian’s chair, bare feet swinging, blond head bent over a file she was leafing with jamsticky fingers.
“No more biscuits,” Nina greeted them without looking up. “Or tea.”
Ian gave his desecrated office another long stare. Tony surveyed the chaos too, eyes dancing. “Nina,” Ian said eventually, waiting until she looked up. “Why are we being evicted, and why are you wearing one of my shirts?”
“Mine is hanging to dry.” She pushed Ian’s cuff up her arm, fanning the file in her hand. “This case, the Schleicher mudak—my reading isn’t so good, but it looks like the wife is lying. Why didn’t you threaten to cut her nose off?”
“Is Frau Hummel really evicting us?”
“She threatened.” Nina tossed the file down, picked up another. “I tell her I cut her nose off.”
“Wonderful.” Ian suppressed the urge to throttle his wife where she sat. “Nina, you were only supposed to take care of the post, answer the telephone—”
“Is boring.” Nina picked up her tea, looked around for a spoon, and stirred it with the end of Ian’s fountain pen instead. “I review your old chases, see how you work. Useful, for when we go after die Jägerin.”
“Useful?” He folded his arms across his chest. “You unleashed chaos in my office, you little savage.”
“Is my office too. Until target’s bombed flat, what’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is mine.” She gulped some tea, then rose and stretched, the hem of Ian’s shirt falling nearly to her knees. “What do you find in Altaussee? Where do we go next?”
“Salzburg.” Ian glared. “Give me my shirt back.”
“Nu, ladno.” She shrugged, began unbuttoning.
“Bloody hell,” he growled again and yanked open the door to the tiny washroom. It smelled of peroxide; evidently she’d used the sink to touch up her hair. An improvised laundry line had been hung with a rinsed-out blouse and a set of silky blue knickers. “Your blouse is dry,” Ian said, ignoring the underwear.
“You’re easy to shock, luchik. Is very funny.” She patted his arm, amused, and closed the washroom door. Ian turned to find Tony chortling.
“She collectivized the office,” he said. “Definitely a Russki.”
Ian bit back a snort. The urge to throttle his wife was now warring with the urge to laugh. “Well, help me clear up my Soviet bride’s mess.”
“She was putting files away as she read. It’s not that bad.”
“Without order lies madness.” Ian believed that in his bones.
With order came peace and law; without it lay war and blood. He’d seen enough of both to know it was true.
He locked that thought away as Tony sat back on his heels and asked, “When do we head for Salzburg, and are we taking your Soviet bride?”
“I don’t know.” Ian paused. “What does luchik mean?”
Tony grinned. “‘Little ray of sunshine.’”
“Does it bother you that she’s a Soviet?” Ian knew how suspicious the Yanks were of the Reds these days. Five short years from the end of the war, and benevolent ally Uncle Joe had become everyone’s enemy, but the Americans seemed more paranoid about the Communist Menace than anyone.
“She hasn’t gone around quoting Das Kapital. She hasn’t done anything except desecrate your tea and lie about her origins, and there are plenty of reasons for people to do the latter.” Tony slid a cabinet drawer shut. “We listen to lies day in and day out, not just from war criminals. Refugees and good guys lie too. About whether they’re Jewish or gentile, about their war record or their imprisonment record, about their health and their age and how they got their papers. Good reasons or bad, everybody lies.”
“Maybe.” Ian rose. “It’s time I talked to Nina. Will you smooth Frau Hummel over, make sure we aren’t being evicted?”
“Some glamour in this job,” Tony groused amiably, slouching out. “Become a Nazi hunter for the thrills, and it’s all paperwork and sweet-talking the landlady …”
Nina padded out of the washroom, tossing Ian’s shirt at his desk and sending more papers to the floor in a shower. Ian ignored that, fixing his wife with a level stare.
“You aren’t Polish. Let’s dispense with that lie first. You’re Russian.”
Nina looked up at him, wariness falling across her face. Then she shrugged. “Yes.”
Ian blinked, so braced for a denial that her acknowledgment caught him off guard. “You aren’t denying it?”
“Why?”
“You told me you were Polish. In the Red Cross hospital—”
“No.” Her eyes were as opaque and bottomless as two blue lakes. “You assumed. I let you.”
He tried to remember. Nineteen forty-five, the steely hospital scent of antiseptic over blood. Nina still half starved and woozy from pneumonia, Ian desperate for answers about his brother. The language barrier, the chaos all around. No, Ian thought, she hadn’t said she was Polish. A girl found near Poznań, with the name Nina, which was so common in Poland … everyone assumed. “Why did you let everyone think you were Polish?”
“Easier.” She flopped into his chair, propping her disreputable boots on the desk. “I wasn’t going home. I say I’m Soviet, is where they’d send me.”
“Where is home, exactly?”
“Go east through Siberia until you fall off the world edge into a lake as big as the sky. All taiga and water witches and ice eating railway stations whole; everything needs you dead and everybody wants to leave.” Amusement gleamed in her eyes. “Would you go back?”
“If my family were there.” He’d cross Siberia barefoot if his brother were at the end of it.
“My family isn’t.” If there was pain in her eyes, it flickered by too fast for Ian to catch. “I spend my whole life going as far west as I can from that lake. Poland? Is just the next stop.”
“Dangerous. You were nearly dead when the Red Cross found you.”
“I’m hard to kill.”
Ian pulled up a chair, gazing at Nina across the desk. She gazed back, unblinking. “Where were you trying to go after Poland?”
“As far west as I can without falling off that edge of the world. You help me get to England, I look around and think not bad. It’s ugly, there’s rationing, but the ice in winter doesn’t eat you alive.”
“How does a Soviet girl end up in Poland in the first place?”
“Assigned to the front. Surprised? Soviets, they use women in their wars, not just for factory jobs or behind desks.”
Ian knew something about that. One of his fellow war correspondents, a motherly-looking American woman with nerves of gunmetal, had written a pointed article for her paper about how Soviet women were employed as tank drivers and machine gunners, whereas the great and enlightened United States of America just told their women to plant Victory gardens, and be thrifty with their bacon grease. Ian looked at his wife from the Siberian wastes and wasn’t terribly surprised to discover she had been assigned to the front. No wonder we won the war.
“So,” he said at last, “you defected.”
“Not so official as that, luchik.” She grinned. “You think I go to an embassy, ask for asylum? I see chance in chaos, I take it.”
“Not very patriotic,” he couldn’t help observing. “Walking away from your countrymen in the middle of a war.”
Her smile disappeared. “My countrymen, they want to stand me against a wall and shoot me.”
“Why?”
“Is Stalin’s world, Stalin’s rule. Who needs a why?”
“I do.”
“Not your business.”
“Yes, it is.” He linked his hands behind his head, not backing down from their stare. “You’re my wife. I gave you my name, you got your citizenship through me. You and your past and anything else I helped you bring to my country are very much my business.”
Her lips remained sealed.
“Did my brother know?” Ian asked, changing tack. “When he promised he’d get you safe to England if you both lived, did he know you were a Soviet?”
“Yes.” No hesitation there.
“Why would he make such a promise? Was it an affair? Love in a time of war?” Ian held his breath, waiting. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard of desperate women escaping war zones by finding a dead soldier’s belongings and making up a tragic wartime romance when his grieving family came around. Only Ian knew that for his little brother, that was unlikely. He waited for Nina to step into the lie … hoping, he realized, that she wouldn’t. So far she’d only misdirected him. Now, he realized just how badly he wanted his wife not to be a liar.
“Lovers, Seb and me?” Nina laughed outright, shaking her head. “No. He liked the boys.”
Ian let out his breath. “Yes, he did.” Seb had told him that the night their father died, so drunk he could hardly stand. It hadn’t shocked Ian particularly. You didn’t spend years in an English public school without knowing exactly what two males could do together if they had the inclination. You don’t look surprised, Seb had slurred, not only drunk but in tears by then.
I’m not, Ian had answered. Chagrined, maybe—he knew full well how this would complicate and endanger his little brother’s life—but not surprised. I’ve never seen you even look at a girl, Seb.
I don’t know anything about girls. A hazy wave indicating the all-male household where they’d grown up, the all-boys’ schools. Maybe I’ll grow out of it?
Maybe you will. If you don’t, well, you’ll have to keep your head down and be careful, but it’s more common than you think.
It is?
Ian had poured them both another measure of whiskey and delivered a blunt, mildly drunken lecture on all the various combinations of the sexes he had seen tearing at belt buckles in Spanish hospital supply closets or going at it under Hyde Park bushes during blackouts—any prudishness Ian had carried out of school had died as soon as he went to war. Seb had passed out from whiskey and relief not five minutes later.
I was the first one he told, Ian thought now, painfully. And Nina, if she spoke truly, was the last. “He really told you?”
Nod.
“Tell me how you two met, what happened.” Ian’s voice sounded rough to his own ears; he cleared his throat. “I didn’t get much detail when we spoke of it five years ago. Difficult to get a lot of nuance from a conversation that’s half pantomime.”
“I’m in Poland, getting clear of Soviet lines.” No hint how or why she’d done that, and from her barbed smile, Ian thought it was a sticking point she wouldn’t give way on. For now he let it go. “I head into Polish forest, aim west. Avoid towns, people. Not far from Poznań, I run into Sebastian. He’s just made a break out of POW camp.” She shook her head. “City boy, stumbling around the trees. I take him on.”
“Out of the goodness of your heart?” Ian didn’t exactly see Nina swooning with pity for an English stranger.
“Two get by better than one. I know how to survive. He knows German, Polish—Russian too, is how we talk.”
“How did he know Russian?”
“Some Soviets at his camp. Prisoners have long hours to fill; they talk.” Nina’s smile lost its edge, the affection unmistakable. “Trying to teach me English, Seb talks about birds. I only know how to kill birds, and he’s asking if the lake where I grow up has puffins.” She linked her thumbs together and flapped her fingers each in sequence. “Puffins! Is even a real bird?”
Ian nodded, throat suddenly thick at the memory of Seb at nine, fingers linked in exactly that gesture as he described a robin in midair. All children flapped their hands to mimic flight, but not quite like that. You know he liked boys rather than girls, and you know his gestures, Ian thought. Yes, you must have known my brother. What’s more, he must have trusted you.
“Puffins.” Nina sighed, and both affection and sadness were clear in that sigh. “Thought he was joking me. Tvoyu mat, that boy was a joker.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” Ian asked. “It’s been five years, Nina.”
“When do I have chance? We marry, you put me on a train to England and say you’ll be there in six months to start divorce. I think, ‘I tell you then.’ But you stay in Europe, I stay in England, we talk by telegram. When am I supposed to start this talk, over last five years?”
“Fair point,” Ian admitted. “We should start up divorce proceedings, now that we’re finally at the same table to discuss them.”
She nodded, matter-of-fact. “Has been long enough. You want your ring back?”
“Keep it.” His father’s signet, gold and ornate like something an earl would wear. His father always liked to imply there were lords in the family line, but there weren’t, just defunct English gentlemen who bankrupted themselves to mix with the right people and marry the right girls from other defunct English families. The ring somehow suited Nina’s sun-browned workmanlike hand, and Ian smothered a moment’s dark humor thinking how apoplectic his father would have been to see it on the finger of a Communist blonde from the wastes of Siberia.
“Tell me one more thing. Just one.” Ian put his musing aside, looking at the puzzle that was his temporary wife. She stared back, blue eyes giving away nothing. “What happened with you and Seb and die Jägerin? How did you come across her? What—”
“Nyet,” Nina said sharply.
“What?”
“No. Not for you. Is mine. And Seb’s.”
“Until the target is down, what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.” Ian shot her own words back at her. “I have a right to know what happened at Lake Rusalka.”
“No. I lived it; I don’t have to tell it all. Seb fights her, he cuts her, he saves me, she kills him. It happens fast. He dies a hero. That’s enough.”
“It is not enough.” Ian heard his voice sinking toward a whisper. “This isn’t just a man’s right to hear how his brother died. You are helping us hunt down the woman who killed him. Anything you know about her could be essential.”
“And I tell you already—what she looks like, how she moves, how she speaks English, all of it. I tell you anything about her. Not the rest. That’s mine,” Nina repeated.
“If you jeopardize this hunt by holding back something important—”
“I’m not. What you want from me is knowing her if I see her, yes? To bring me out when you have her in your sight, so I can say if we have the right one?” Ian gave a reluctant nod. “That I can do. I saw her. I know her face anywhere. I remember her till I die.”
Ian looked at Nina, feeling anger flare. She stared back with a gaze like flint.
Seb saved you? he thought. His life was worth twice yours. How dare you live and not him? But he stamped that terrible thought down as hard as he could. It was not Nina’s fault Sebastian had died; it was die Jägerin’s fault. Only hers.
“You find something in Altaussee,” Nina said, dispensing with the duel of eyes. “What?”
Ian could have been as cagey with her as she’d been with him, but he suppressed the urge to be spiteful. “Die Jägerin’s mother lives in Salzburg, and we know where.”
“We go to Salzburg, then. I go this time,” Nina added. “I want the huntress dead.”
“We don’t do that.” Ian thought of the train station conversation with Tony—that there were lines not to be crossed. How close to those lines is this chase going to lead you? the thought whispered. Because you’re already skirting a very high cliff.
“If not dead, caught.” Nina shrugged. “I come to Salzburg with you.”
“All right. We’ll settle on an approach, and you’ll do things our way.”
“Why?”
“Because we’ve been doing this for years, and that’s how it goes. And if what’s yours is mine, just as what’s mine is now apparently yours, you get my rules as well as my tea.”
Nina’s eyes suddenly twinkled. She looked impish and young all of a sudden, cheeks creasing in an infectious smile. “‘My rules, my tea.’ Marina said something like that once.”
“Who?”
Chapter 12 (#ulink_12d2c04f-3a26-5585-af11-7be46489d9fc)
NINA (#ulink_12d2c04f-3a26-5585-af11-7be46489d9fc)
October 1941
Moscow
Marina Mikhailovna Raskova, Hero of the Soviet Union and most famous aviatrix of the Motherland, had dark hair and rosy cheeks and a gleaming white smile. Her blue eyes were like lakes, and Nina fell into them like she was drowning.
“So—” Raskova looked Nina up and down, visibly amused. “You’re the girl who’s been making Comrade Colonel Moriakin’s life hell the past few days?”
Nina nodded, suddenly speechless. They stood in a borrowed office in Moscow’s aviation headquarters, an ugly box of a room with the usual desk heaped with folders and the usual portrait of Comrade Stalin on the wall. Raskova had sauntered in with a tossed comment over her shoulder to someone unseen—“You don’t mind if I take ten minutes, Seryosha?”—her voice as warm and crystalline as it had sounded over the radio. Nina followed that voice into the office every bit as blindly as she had followed it to Moscow in the first place, and now stood twisting her sealskin hat between her hands, desperately trying to summon the speech she had practiced all those long, monotonous hours on the train from Siberia to Moscow.
“You come from Irkutsk?” Raskova prompted when it became clear Nina wasn’t going to speak first.
“Yes. No,” Nina blushed. “Baikal. Then Irkutsk.”
Raised eyebrows. “You’ve come a long way to see me.”
More than four thousand kilometers. From train windows Nina had seen vast gold sunsets over stretches of taiga, followed by endless kilometers of towering dark trees where it was all too easy to imagine Baba Yaga’s witch house moving along on stalky chicken legs. Country stations where women in flowered shawls herded goats off the tracks were followed by city stations where railway officials rushed about in brass-buttoned coats. Farmland and pastureland, factories and tenement blocks, horse carts and cars, all whisking past Nina’s wide eyes.
“Your first time in Moscow?”
“Yes.” Her first glimpse of the city had been so terrifying—the vast spread of boxlike buildings, the peaks of distant spires and domes from old imperialist palaces and cathedrals, the spread of Three Stations Square where trains fed their passengers into the city—that her overwhelming urge had been to leap back onto the railcar. You do not belong here, the panicky thought pounded, looking at the overwhelming crush of uniformed soldiers, kerchiefed women, and slab-booted men. It wasn’t just the size and scale of it all, it was the pulsation of fear at being so much closer to the advancing enemy. Houses were draped with camouflage; flak guns crowned rooftops like long-legged cranes; streets were lined with barricades of welded railway girders. There was nothing like it in Irkutsk. You don’t belong here, go back east—
But she wasn’t going east again, not ever. You don’t belong here, Nina Borisovna, she had told herself, pushing through the crowd. You belong up there, in the sky. And if going through here is the only way there, then through here is where you’ll go. So she tunneled her vision, shut out Moscow, and stamped out into the sour-breathed cold-hunched press of humanity to find the aviation headquarters. “I didn’t pay much attention to Moscow,” she managed to tell Raskova. “I won’t be here long enough to make it worthwhile.”
“You won’t?”
“I’ll either join your new regiment, or go home.” Though Nina had barely a ruble left in her pocket, so how she was going to manage fare back to Irkutsk if she was rejected, she had no idea.
Raskova laughed, the sound warm and easy. “Why didn’t you apply through your Komsomol or your air club?”
“They would have said no. They were picking university girls, educated girls.” Nina heard her voice coming stronger, but her hands still had a death grip around the sealskin hat. “So I came direct to you.”
Raskova leaned against the edge of the desk, peeling off her gloves. She looked like she’d come right in from the airfield, still wearing boots and overalls. Her hands were fine and white, but she had oil smudges across her knuckles just like any pilot. “Colonel Moriakin says you camped in the chair outside his office for four days until he agreed to see you.”
“It was the fastest way to get an appointment.” Nina was surprised when Raskova burst out laughing. “He said I was crazy, but that I should talk to you, Comrade Raskova.”
“You’re not the first girl to come to me directly rather than through official channels.” Raskova folded her arms. “How many flying hours do you have?”
Nina embellished her record by a few hundred hours, presenting her certificates and detailing her training. Raskova listened with warm attention, but her next words hit Nina in the gut.
“Good numbers. But do you know how many girls have applied with numbers just as good or better?”
Nina’s hopes went into a tailspin, but she persisted. “I’m a born pilot. Made for the air.”
“So are all the girls I’ve picked. So are many of the ones I’ve turned away.”
Raskova was gearing up a gentle refusal; Nina could feel it. She stepped forward, pushing down the dread. “This is about more than a flying record.” Fighting to find the right words. “The girls in your regiments won’t be training students or flying mail routes. They’ll be bombing fascists, making nighttime runs, dogfighting with Messerschmitts. Your girls need—” What was the word, the right word? “They need to be tougher than old boots,” Nina finished.
“And you’re tougher than old boots?”
“Yes. You are too, Comrade Raskova.” Nina lifted her chin. “Three years ago, making the cross-country flight for the long-distance record, when your team couldn’t find the final runway due to visibility, you parachuted out. You were separated from your pilot and copilot and spent ten days alone in the taiga. No emergency kit. No food.”
“I made do.” Raskova said it easily, well accustomed to gushing girls and their hero worship—but in a moment’s sudden reminiscence, she wrinkled her nose. “I still remember the cold. Like sleeping cheek to cheek with Father Frost.”
“I grew up in that taiga.” Nina took another step. “You survived ten days there. I survived nineteen years. Cold, ice, a landscape that wants you dead—none of it scares me. Flying at night doesn’t scare me either, or bombs exploding, or fascists trying to shoot me down. Nothing scares me. I am tougher than any university girl with a perfect record and a thousand hours of flying time.”
“Are you?” Raskova studied her. “Think twice about what you’re asking for, Nina Borisovna. Going to the front—it’s a very hard thing. Many think it a waste, giving planes to girls when there are already more than enough men to fly them. I have told Comrade Stalin himself that my women will be better, and so they must be.”
“I am better.” Nina could feel her heart beating hard in her chest, like a propeller whipping up to speed. “Let me prove it.”
Another long moment. Nina hung suspended in agony. There’ll be a chance, her father had said. Don’t ask, when you see it. Just fucking take it. But Marina Raskova was the end of her chance—beyond this room, there was nothing to seize. It either all ended here, or all began here—and drowning in Marina Raskova’s blue eyes, Nina began to feel desolation choking her throat.
The most famous aviatrix in the Motherland rummaged through her colleague’s desk, found a pen and some official-looking paper, began to scribble. “This is a pass to the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy. You’ll have to follow the rules once you get there,” she warned with a twinkle, “but at least there’s tea to go with the rules.”
Nina felt her wings lift. “What else is at the academy?”
“Aviation Group 122.” Raskova pressed the pass into Nina’s outstretched hand with one of her knee-buckling smiles. “Your sisters-in-arms.”
NINA STOOD A MOMENT gaping at the academy’s palatial redbrick facade and imposing gates before braving the steps. Inside she found a rushing mass of trainee pilots dashing everywhere: women in flying caps and overalls, girls with curled hair and heels as though they were going dancing, female officers with cigarettes and taut faces shouting orders. Nina showed her pass and identification to the nearest officer and received a grunt. “We leave for training in a few days. You’ll be issued a uniform—”
“Where do I sleep?” Nina asked, but the officer had already turned away. Nina wandered for a while, having no idea where to go, still dazed with her triumph. She had done it; she was here. A bone-cracking yawn overtook her as she meandered down a vacant corridor; after sleeping four nights in a chair, she was desperate for a nap. Throwing her coat down beside an unlit heating stove, Nina curled up on it and dropped into sleep like falling into a black pit. It seemed only seconds later when a girl’s laughing voice said, “You look lost, sleepyhead!”
Nina pried open her eyelids. She’d been having some hazy dream of dogfighting through piled clouds as Marina Raskova’s voice whispered encouragement in her ear, and she said the first thing that came into her mind. “Are you my sister?”
“What?” The voice sounded even more amused.
Nina rubbed her eyes. The figure bent over her was a blur against the harsh corridor lights. “She said my sisters-in-arms were here.”
“Comrade Raskova said the same to me.” A hand grasped Nina’s elbow. “Welcome, sestra.”
It was the same word for “sister” that Nina had grown up speaking, but the Moscow tang in the girl’s voice made it different, a new kind of sister. That’s good, Nina reflected, since I didn’t like any of my blood sisters. She let herself be helped up, and the shadow resolved itself into a girl a year or two younger than Nina but half a head taller, porcelain skinned and smiling, ink-dark hair in a plait past her waist. “Yelena Vassilovna Vetsina,” she said. “From Ukraine, but I came to Moscow at twelve. Glider school when I was sixteen, then air club. I was studying at the Moscow Aviation Institute when the call went up for the regiments.” She rattled off a very impressive number of flying hours.
A pedigreed candidate, Nina thought. Educated, polished, impeccable record, probably a model Komsomol member. The kind whose application would have been stamped and moved to the top of the pile. A little warily, Nina nodded back. “Nina Borisovna Markova, from Baikal. Flight instructor at the Irkutsk air club.”
A dimple appeared in Yelena’s chin. “How many flying hours did you tell Raskova you had?”
“Three hundred more than I actually do.”
“I improved mine by two hundred. I felt so guilty, but then I met the other girls here and realized we all embellished our records. A regiment of liars, that’s what Raskova’s getting. Good thing we can all fly like eagles.” The dimple blossomed into an outright grin. “Did you faint, meeting Raskova? I swear I nearly swooned. She’s been my hero since I was seventeen.”
Nina couldn’t help smiling back. “Mine too.”
“Where are you classed for training, pilot, navigator, mechanic, or armorer?”
“Navigator.” Nina had hoped for a pilot classification, but Raskova had explained that there were enough pilots already. Nina was disappointed, but she wasn’t going to quibble. It was enough just to be here.
“Pilot for me. I can’t wait to get my hands on the new Pe-2s.” Yelena looked at Nina’s old coat. “Have you got your uniform yet?”
“No—”
“I’ll show you where. It’s horrible, the same standard issue they give the men. The bigger girls are all right, but little ones like you are swimming. And we’re all clumping around in the boots, even my new roommate who has feet like pontoons.”
Nina’s uniform came in a bulky packet, and she began to swear the minute she unfolded it. “Even men’s underwear?” Unfolding a pair of vast blue briefs.
“Even men’s underwear.” Yelena laughed. “Wait till you’ve worn it for a few hours—”
“Or walked a runway in it in zero degrees,” grumped another woman’s voice. “You would not believe the chafing.” Several more trainee pilots had gathered, looking interested. To a chorus of “Go on, get suited up!” Nina went into an empty storeroom and shuffled out shortly afterward. Even more girls had clustered in her absence, and they all went into a unison gale of laughter at the sight of Nina’s massive trousers puddling over huge clumping boots.
For a moment Nina bristled. Normally when she heard female laughter it was unkind or it was uncomprehending: girls like Tania mocking her flyaway hair or provincial accent. But this laughter was merry, and looking around, Nina saw that a good many of the girls looked every bit as ridiculous in their own enormous uniforms.
“We can cuff and stitch the hems, but you are out of luck on the boots.” Yelena shook her head. “Have you got some cloth to stuff into the toes?” Nina’s scarf went into the right boot, as Yelena unwound her own.
“I can’t take yours.”
“Nonsense! What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine, Ninochka.”
Another reflexive bristle—Nina never heard fond nicknames except from men trying to get her into bed. But Yelena had finished stuffing Nina’s boots and was making introductions, and everyone seemed to be on a first name basis. “Lidia Litvyak, we call her Lilia … Serafima here is from Siberia like you—”
“Not as far off as the Old Man, though!” came the friendly reply. Cautiously, Nina smiled back. Yelena kept rattling off names, and Nina knew she would hardly remember any of them, but there was a similar look to these women Raskova had recruited, no matter how different they seemed on the surface. Some looked barely eighteen and some approached thirty; some were little like Nina, others tall and strapping; some had city accents and some had provincial burrs … But they all looked like they were used to the feel of engine grease under their nails, Nina thought as they crowded around her bright-eyed and friendly, welcoming her to the ranks.
Questions were pelting now, as they asked Nina how she had come to flying. “I saw my first plane, and I fell in love with it.” Heads nodded.
“My father was furious when I went to pilot school in Kherson,” one girl said. “The women in our family all work in the steel factory—”
“I told my mother I’d fly someday,” another said. “She asked me ‘Where, from the kitchen stove to the floor?’”
Something in Nina’s chest expanded. Sestra, she thought, giving the plain word the twist that had made it something unique when she heard it in Yelena’s voice. Nina had not felt this burgeoning warmth since the day she walked singing with Vladimir and the other pilots to enlist—the warm feeling of belonging. Only these women would not leave her behind.
Nina’s fellow pilots hauled her off to find a meal then, talking away, and they were still talking three days later on the train platform, on their way out of Moscow. To some unknown airdrome for training, where the first female pilots of the Red Air Force would learn to be lethal.
Chapter 13 (#ulink_63bb7b22-540e-5296-b181-498ee2d6698f)
JORDAN (#ulink_63bb7b22-540e-5296-b181-498ee2d6698f)
October 1946
Selkie Lake
The end of October meant autumn leaves and duck-hunting season, and Anneliese seemed enthusiastic when Jordan’s father proposed a day at the cabin. Now Jordan watched her stepmother look at the red and gold trees reflecting in the surface of Selkie Lake, exclaiming, “Beautiful!”
“Our first time here as a family.” Dan McBride fished out the big square key that locked the cabin. “I thought you’d like it.”
“Don’t count on me to bag anything,” Anneliese warned. “I can’t hit a target to save my life.”
“Now, I don’t believe that—”
“Would I lie?” She made a rueful face. “Kurt tried over and over to teach me, but I’m hopeless. You’ll get far more ducks without me.”
“Ducks?” Ruth’s brows furrowed as she climbed out of the car after Taro. “Dead ducks?”
“You don’t need to see them, Ruthie,” Jordan reassured. “They can take the guns out to the far side of the lake, and you’ll stay with me. The only thing we’ll shoot is pictures.”
Ruth looked relieved. Still too quiet for a little girl, Jordan thought, but after a summer’s worth of diner sundaes and trips to the movies, at least she was talking and smiling at the dinner table.
“How lovely!” Anneliese was enthusing as her husband unlocked the hunting cabin his father had built on the shore. She went inside, looking at the stock of firewood, the narrow cots and blankets, the kerosene lamps. “Everything necessary if one needed to hide.”
“Who needs to hide?” Jordan asked, following her inside.
A shrug. “It’s the way someone who has been a refugee continues to think, even when danger is over. Wanting a place with a door that locks and something to protect oneself with.” Nodding at the rack of hunting rifles on the wall. “I suppose those will need cleaning after a season on the wall. That’s what Manfred always used to say.”
“You mean Kurt?” Jordan said.
Pause. “Yes. My father was Manfred; he first took me out on the occasional hunt, before I ever met Kurt.”
You call your father by his first name? Jordan wondered. Or did you just make a slip?
She wanted to follow her dad and Anneliese, but there was no way to do it with Ruth in tow. They went off with their guns broken over their arms, and Jordan took her sister out to the dock where they sat with their feet swinging above the water, watching Taro bark at the ducks. “You know you’re going to be my real sister, cricket? Dad is going to adopt you. You’ll have our name.” Jordan had helped her father lay out the paperwork that would make it official: Ruth’s birth certificate, and the various visas and other bits of paper that had allowed her into the country. “You’ll be Ruth McBride.” Ruth’s broad smile was somehow breathless. How can I love you so much, Jordan wondered, when I’m watching your mother like she’s a criminal?
In a few hours Jordan’s father and Anneliese were back, cheeks red from cold. “I’ve been thoroughly outclassed,” Anneliese said, laughing as Jordan and Ruth came down the dock. “I warned you all I was a terrible shot.” How natural she looked here in the woods, Jordan thought. The dry leaves didn’t even seem to crunch under her feet. “Did you have a nice time, Mäuschen?” Anneliese said to Ruth, stretching out a hand.
She had duck blood in a smear across her palm, not quite dry. Very clearly, Jordan saw Ruth’s blind recoil.
“Mama,” she said, but turned away from Anneliese, back toward Jordan.
“Ruth—” But Ruth was shivering, not listening to her mother. She just clung to Jordan, who stroked the smooth blond hair.
“The blood must have scared her.” Jordan’s dad swung the game bag over one arm. “I’ll get this stowed away so she doesn’t see any dead ducks, poor little missy.” He went to the car, and Jordan looked up from Ruth’s shaking shoulders to Anneliese. She didn’t have the Leica to record it this time, but she heard the click very clearly in her mind as she snapped an image of her stepmother’s expression. Not a mother’s concern as she looked at her crying child, but eyes full of hard, cool consideration. Like a fisherman deciding whether an inferior catch should just be tossed back in the lake.
Then her usual warm smile came back, and she bent down to tug Ruth gently but firmly into her arms. “Poor Mäuschen. Mutti ist hier—” She went on murmuring in German, and gradually Ruth calmed, arms stealing about her mother again.
“What is she remembering?” Jordan asked quietly. “The refugee woman who tried to rob you in Altaussee?”
It was a shot in the dark, but Anneliese nodded. “Very upsetting,” she said, clearly done with the subject. “Take Ruth to the car? We should be on our way.”
Jordan acquiesced, settling Ruth in the backseat. “Here’s your book, cricket. We’ll just be a minute.” Jordan’s father was in the cabin stowing the rifles, as Anneliese scraped mud off her boots. Her face was placid, and Jordan saw in her mind’s eye that other expression. Cool, considering, hard.
She had not imagined it.
“What happened at Altaussee?” Jordan spoke low and bluntly at her stepmother’s side, persisting when Anneliese made a little retiring gesture. “I’m sorry to ask about something unpleasant, but I don’t ever want to accidentally upset Ruth as happened today.”
It was the first time she’d pushed so forthrightly, but watching and waiting hadn’t worked. Jordan raised her eyebrows, making it clear she expected an answer.
“A woman attacked Ruth and me,” Anneliese said at last. “We were sitting by the lake, passing time until our train that afternoon. A refugee woman struck up a conversation, and then she made a grab for our papers and train tickets. Ruth was knocked over, her nose bled everywhere. She hit her head very hard.”
“Ruth said there was a knife.” Ruth hadn’t said any such thing, but Jordan wanted to know if Anneliese would agree with her. If she does, I’ll know she’s lying.
But Anneliese just shrugged. “I don’t remember, it all happened so fast. The woman saw the blood from Ruth’s nose and ran away. I suppose she was desperate. So many people were.”
“You don’t sound very concerned,” Jordan probed.
“It was quite some time ago. I told Ruth to forget about it. Someday she will. Much better for her.” Anneliese shaded her eyes, looking across the lake. “So beautiful here. Why is it called Selkie Lake?”
Not your best deflection, Jordan thought. For once I surprised you. Or Ruth did. She filed that away for later. “The name came from Scottish settlers. A selkie is some kind of Scottish water nymph. Like a mermaid, or—”
“A rusalka?”
Jordan tilted her head. Her stepmother, she noticed, had almost seemed to flinch. I’ve never seen you flinch before, not once. Of all the things to rattle Anneliese, why this? “What’s a rusalka?”
“A lake spirit. A night witch that comes out of the water looking for blood.” Anneliese waved a dismissive hand, but the gesture looked jerky. “A horrid old fairy tale, I can’t imagine why I thought of it. Don’t tell Ruth, or she’ll never sleep again.”
“… I won’t.”
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