The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  “McBride’s Antiques.” Tony flung his jacket over a nail by the door, which was all they had for a hat rack. “Frau Vogt said the Boston shop dealing documents to war criminals under the counter was McCall Antiques, McBain Antiques, Mc-Something. The only remotely close match in the city is McBride’s Antiques. You are looking at their newest clerk.”

  Ian started to get up, but Nina swung her legs back inside the windowsill, dropping her boots on his back. “Seven more.”

  “Bugger off,” he said, but lowered himself down toward the floor again. Ninety-four . . . ninety-five . . .

  Tony flung himself down at the table, moving a paperback of Nina’s called The Spanish Bride. “I’ll need to supply references. Write me something glowing, boss?”

  Ian finished the last press-up, shoved his wife’s boots away, and flopped on his back on the floor. “What name?”

  “Run ’em for my real name. Tony R, born and raised in Queens, enlisted right out of Grover Cleveland High School the day after Pearl Harbor—what’s more trustworthy than that?” Tony struck a patriotic pose. “I can stake out the shop, and we can use the salary.”

  “Yes, we can.” Between Ian’s annuity and Tony’s savings, they’d managed to rent a top-floor two-room apartment overlooking Scollay Square, which mostly seemed to be crammed with drunken university students pressing into Joe & Nemo’s for hot dogs, and drunken sailors on leave pressing into the Half Dollar Bar. The apartment smelled like grease and shoe polish, but it was cheaper than a hotel and worth putting up with the broken door lock and the three-legged table whose corner sat on a nonfunctional radiator. Any income would, Ian had to admit, be welcome.

  “That twitchy German clerk I ran into last week at the McBride shop?” Tony grabbed a pad, began scribbling notes. “I’ve got a name now, Kolb. I hate to play the game of Let’s automatically blame the Kraut, but that Kraut was twitchy as hell. He does the shop’s restoration work—”

  “How you find that out?” Nina swung her legs back outside the windowsill. It made Ian queasy, watching her swing her boots over a four-story drop. “You don’t start work yet.”

  “The owner’s daughter told me, the one who offered the job. A man good at restoring antiques might mean one good with documents. This Kolb could have a sideline going under the table, hooking money out of war criminals. Lorelei Vogt’s mother told us people like her daughter could get papers there, identification, new names.”

  “Why would they need new papers to begin with?” Ian rose, thinking aloud on something that had been nagging at him since this chase took its America-bound turn. “The United States is more obsessed with Communists than Nazis. There hasn’t been a single extradited war criminal, and they’ve welcomed war refugees from Europe since ’48—”

  “As long as they aren’t Jewish war refugees,” Tony muttered. “Oh, no, we don’t want the Yids here, anyone but them—”

  “—so anyone who came here under their own name wouldn’t need to bother with new papers.”

  “Smart ones would.” Nina sounded matter-of-fact. “You keep your name, it’s on file. If someone wants, they look you up, including your war record. Today, no one cares about looking. Tomorrow, who knows? Next year, five years, ten years—is still there, if anyone looks.”

  “My wife is a professional paranoid,” Ian observed.

  “I’m Soviet.”

  “Same thing, you teapot desecrator.”

  “A name gets on a list, it stays there forever in a drawer. Maybe nobody ever looks at it. Or maybe someone decides list matters. Then the black van rolls up for you.” Nina shrugged. “If I leave my country with things to hide, I would change name, background, everything, to be safe.”

  You did leave your country with things to hide, Ian thought. He and his wife had spent most of the Atlantic crossing rolling around the sheets, but that didn’t mean he knew much more about her. She wouldn’t sleep next to him, looked wary at any sign of affection outside a bed, and was not interested in answering most of the questions he wanted to ask. Like why she’d left her homeland . . .

  “Well, whatever McBride’s Antiques might be dealing out of the back room to paranoid war criminals,” Tony said, “I’ll bet my next month’s salary Kolb’s the one dealing it.”

  “See what you can find out.” Ian sat, tilting his chair back on two legs. “Check out the owners as well. They might be complicit, they might not.”

  “A peaches-and-cream Boston co-ed helped the huntress get a new identity and disappear?” Tony linked his hands behind his head. “I’m doubtful.”

  “You think girls of twenty-one can’t be dangerous?” Nina drank off the last of the oil in the sardine tin. “In war I know plenty; call most of them sestra. Don’t discount just because she’s pretty.”

  “Who said she was pretty?” Tony countered. “I have no idea if she’s pretty. She was crying her eyes out over her dad—I was passing her handkerchiefs, not eyeing her up and down like some street-corner lothario.”

  “But you already think she can’t be involved. Is what you want to think.” Nina looked at Ian. “Means she’s pretty, yes?”

  “Definitely,” he said, pulling out the notes they’d made on the McBride family.

  “I resent that,” Tony remarked. “I am not some slavering GI who turns to jelly at the first pair of shapely female legs that walks by. I am perfectly capable of objectivity here.”

  “‘Shapely,’” Nina said.

  “Telling,” Ian agreed.

  “Now that you two are screwing, you gang up on me. Completely unfair.” Tony flung a wadded-up scrap of paper at Ian. Nina bounced the sardine tin off his chest. “Fine. I’ll keep an eye on the daughter.”

  “Look at the mother too.” Ian’s notes on the McBride widow were brief, coming from the obituary and the short newspaper article about the deceased antiques dealer and his family, including one Mrs. Anna McBride, born and raised in Boston. “And the shop files—there could be records of the others helped under the table. We know there are more besides die Jägerin.”

  “Would they be stupid enough to keep records for something illicit?” Tony kept scribbling.

  “You always keep records,” Nina said firmly. “Is not stupid, is something to trade. Someone to throw out of the sleigh for the wolves, if the police come knocking.”

  “More Stalinist paranoia . . .”

  Despite all the banter, Ian could feel the crackle of energy whipping through the room now that the chase was underway. It was a new office here, a new feeling in the air. In Vienna there had been a separation between work and leisure: in the evening Tony went home to his rented rooms, and Ian retired upstairs to his cot and violin. Here in Boston, there was no separation; they were all underfoot from dawn to dusk. Once they’d exhausted the topic of Herr Kolb and how to proceed, they elbowed the scribbled notes aside and made room for bowls of soup heated up from tins and ate with elbows knocking—and even then, the fierce concentration in the air still hummed. Lorelei Vogt belonged equally to all three of them, and now there was no ocean in the way.

  We are going to find her, Ian thought. She is no match for the three of us.

  IT WAS NEARLY DAWN, and Nina was up on the roof.

  Ian and Tony shared the one bedroom, which had two cots against opposite walls; Nina insisted on the couch under the skylight in the sitting room. “I don’t sleep next to anyone,” she told Ian when he offered her the other bedroom cot, rather hoping they could push them together. Now it was four in the morning, the sitting room was empty, and the skylight was open. Ian climbed onto the arm of the couch. It would be a jump for Nina, but he grabbed the lip of the skylight and levered himself skyward.

  The rooftop was a flat barren square with a raised ledge running around at knee height. The sky was still dark overhead, a creeping edge of pink starting to outline the city horizon. Nina lay on her back on the ledge, gazing up at the fading stars. Wearing, Ian saw with amusement, her own patched trousers, one of Tony’s old sweaters, and
a pair of Ian’s socks.

  “Will you stop collectivizing the laundry?” he demanded, not moving toward her. He wasn’t getting anywhere near the edge; his stomach was already churning at the drop on Nina’s other side.

  “You have nicer socks than me.”

  “Harrods,” Ian said. “The key to surviving most of the things life throws at you is taking care of your feet. Something I learned tramping around in Spanish mud in the thirties. You’re going to fall off,” he added as she stretched her feet up into the air. Her toes flexed and arched like a bird’s tail fanning.

  “No, I won’t.” Nina extended her arms out on either side, moving them dreamily up and down as if on air currents. Ian averted his eyes from the edge. The sounds of morning traffic drifted up: tires on pavement, the occasional shout from a drunk heading home, shouts back from respectable people heading for work. This was a young city, brash and confident, and Ian liked it.

  Nina’s eyes were still on the stars above. “Tvoyu mat.” She sighed. “I miss the night sky.”

  “From your pilot days?” Getting information out of Nina was like interviewing a porcupine, all prickles and defensively lashing tail, but he couldn’t help probing anyway. The journalist’s urge to ask questions, which hadn’t died along with his urge to write articles. “You haven’t said much about your flying days in the war.”

  “Was a navigator. I fly bombing runs in the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. Later known as Forty-Sixth Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment.” She sat up, slanting an eyebrow. “You look surprised.”

  “I am,” he said honestly.

  “What, you think girls don’t fly?”

  “I know perfectly well that women fly. I am surprised you were a navigator, because it’s a job that relies on obedience, teamwork, and precision. Not exactly qualities that spring to mind when I look at you, you little anarchist.”

  “I was good navigator!” Nettled into reacting, as he hoped, she peeled off his socks, showing the tattoos on the soles of her feet—a red star across the arch of one, spiky lettering across the arch of the other. Ian had asked about them before, but received only a shrug. Now, she stretched out her left foot, placing it in his hands as he came closer, and translating the letters: шестьсот шестнадцать. “‘Six hundred sixteen,’” Nina said. “Is how many bombing runs I flew in the war.”

  “You cannot be serious.” English bomber pilots were considered lucky if they survived twenty runs.

  “Six hundred sixteen.” Nina smirked. “Us little Soviet girls worked harder than your English flyboys.” Ian meditated a cutting retort—he’d devoted much newsprint ink to those English flyboys—but Nina pulled her foot out of his hands, replacing it with the foot that had the red star. “Order of the Red Star, awarded January ’43.”

  Ian looked from his wife’s tattooed foot up to her amused, knowing eyes. “I’m . . . impressed, comrade.”

  “The Hitlerites said a squadron of U-2s at night sounded like witches on broomsticks.” Her sharp teeth showed in a smile as she pulled her foot out of his hands. “So they called us the Nachthexen.”

  “Night Witches? That sounds rather grandiose to have come from pragmatic German imaginations.”

  “We scared the piss out of them.” She pretzeled her feet under her on the rooftop ledge, propping her elbows on her knees. She had a scar on her forearm, a knot of old scar tissue, like something had pierced all the way through her arm. Ian knew how to make her back arch if he ran his lips along that scar, but nothing else about it. “What about that?” he asked. “Since we’re telling stories.”

  “Are we?”

  “I certainly hope so, Scheherazade.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The fascinating tale-telling wife of another fellow who didn’t know what he was getting into when he married her.”

  Nina snorted, but inspected the scar. “Just a flying accident. Two weeks I wasn’t allowed to fly. Also,” she added, “the reason I met Comrade Stalin.”

  Chapter 27

  Nina

  January 1943

  Moscow

  They had all cried, weeping into one another’s shoulders at the airdrome on the North Caucasus front. From Major Bershanskaia to the newest little mechanic, they wept.

  “To Marina Mikhailovna Raskova,” Bershanskaia said at last.

  Wrung with grief, the regiment she had founded echoed the toast. “Marina Mikhailovna Raskova.”

  Dead at thirty-three, her Pe-2 crashing on its way to an airfield near Stalingrad. Surviving so much, only to die in a common aviation accident on the banks of the Volga.

  “She will be buried in two days’ time,” Bershanskaia said later. “Full military honors in Red Square. The first state funeral of the war to be held in Moscow, awarded to our commander.”

  Three fierce nods answered her. Nina and two other regiment pilots grounded by injury had been summoned to Bershanskaia’s office, and she was scribbling a set of passes. The Night Witches had flown off for tonight’s target; a mission couldn’t be put off just because their founder was dead. Raskova herself would have been outraged at the thought. Bershanskaia had no tears in her eyes now when she addressed Nina and the other two.

  “An honor guard will stand watch over her remains during the vigil,” Bershanskaia went on. “It is unthinkable that her regiments will not be represented. I will not pull active fliers from their duty, but the three injured officers with the best records are to be sent from each regiment. You three will depart tomorrow.”

  A new dress uniform landed on Nina’s bed by dawn. She unfolded it and stared in horror. “Fuck your mother . . .” She was struggling into it, yanking at the stiff buttons, when the Night Witches trailed in exhausted and frost rimed. “What’s this?” Yelena walked around Nina. “Are they finally giving us uniforms designed for women?” Smiles came out over tear-smudged faces as a dozen women in bulky overalls contemplated Nina in her dress uniform, complete with skirt and heels. Nina stared back at them in utter panic.

  “I’ve never owned a pair of heels in my life,” she wailed. “I’m going to fall on my face in the middle of Red Square!”

  It brought the laugh they all needed so sorely. A watery laugh, but still a laugh. “Ninochka needs us, rabbits,” Yelena announced, rummaging for her sewing needles. “It’s time for the Night Witches to work some magic.”

  Dusia hemmed the too-long uniform skirt, bucktoothed Zoya transferred Nina’s insignia and polished everything diamond bright, and a lanky navigator who had once been a hairdresser in Novgorod produced combs and towels. “We’re doing something with this hair, Nina Borisovna.” Fluffing the flyaway mane that had grown out to Nina’s collar. “You aren’t representing the 588th under a mouse-brown haystack. Irusha, I know you’re stashing a bottle of peroxide, hand it over.”

  “Who cares about hair as long as it’s tidy?” Nina demanded, wobbling on her new heels. But the girls had the bit between their teeth; their grief for Raskova too raw for more tears but demanding some kind of focus. “Let them fuss,” Yelena advised. “They need some way to help, even if it’s only hair.” Nina surrendered, and by the time it came to depart she stood resplendent and steady in her heels, newly blond hair pinned in a swoop, lips reddened with a navigation pencil. Her two companions also assigned to the honor guard were just as splendid; the girls in their dormitory had been hard at work too.

  “You three will do us proud,” everyone said. “You’ll do her proud.” They loaded Nina and the others with dried flowers to lay with the wreaths a grateful Motherland would already be heaping up in Marina Raskova’s memory.

  “Bring me something from Moscow,” Yelena said. “Anything, even a pebble. I miss it.”

  “Why?” Nina thought back to her haphazard glimpse of Moscow when she first came from Irkutsk. “It’s ugly.”

  “You have to see it as what it will be, not what it is. It’s a city on its way to glory. Our future home, after the war!”

  Nina’s stom
ach flipped. She couldn’t look ahead past the next bombing run, and here Yelena was making plans for after the war. Nina tried out the words, experimentally. “After the war we’re going to live in Moscow?”

  “Where would anyone live but Moscow if they had the chance?”

  “Somewhere that isn’t a pit?”

  Yelena swatted her. The train whistle was blowing. “You’ll see Moscow in its full glory this time, all for Raskova. Promise me you’ll love it.” Nina opened her mouth to promise, but it was time to leave. A squeeze of the hand and Yelena was gone.

  Nina intended to get a look at the countryside in between here and the city, but the exhaustion caught up with her and she slept almost the entire journey. All three of them did, cheeks pressed against glass compartment windows and slatted wooden partitions. Stumbling bleary-eyed into Three Stations Square in Moscow, Nina had the sensation that time was doubling back. She was getting off the train from Siberia, not the Caucasus front . . . the 588th had not even been formed yet, only Aviation Group 122 . . . Marina Raskova was up ahead somewhere, alive and well, waiting to give Nina her chance.

  But Marina Raskova was nothing but a ceremonial urn filled with ashes, sitting in state in the great domed hall of the Civil Aviation Club. And to Nina’s eyes, Moscow still looked like a gray wreck.

  “The doctor gave me these.” One of her companions took out a bottle of tablets, seeing Nina yawn. “They’ll keep us alert during the vigil. Coca-Cola pills—” Rolling the American slang.

  Nina swallowed two and after that the world was both sparky and hazy, the events of the funeral jumbled like confetti tossed in the air. They made their way to some office only to be greeted by a flurry of gray-faced functionaries barking orders. Nina’s arm throbbed in its sling as they were shepherded into the domed hall of the Civil Aviation Club, past the urn where Raskova’s honor guard would stand watch, breathing in the stifling smell of roses from the massive bank of funeral wreaths. No time to exchange more than a fast murmur with the other women of the honor guard, women Nina hadn’t seen since Engels. “Marina,” they whispered to each other, a greeting and a toast all together.