by Kate Quinn
Nina’s hamburger arrived. Ian watched her tear into it. The door of Kolb’s building stayed closed. It was always even odds what a guilty man did after being accused: about half bolted in the first hour, and half decided to stay put and pretend they had nothing to hide. He would have bet Kolb for a bolter . . .
Ian sighed. It was going to be a long night, he could tell. One of the sleepless ones, where the parachute drifted at his shoulder.
“Is lake I dream about,” Nina said.
Ian blinked. “What?”
“Lake. Drowning in it. Sometimes is my father holding me under, sometimes is die Jägerin. Always lake.” She shrugged. “Your lake—what is it?”
“There’s no lake. Like there’s no kettle. Your English is very peculiar, comrade.”
Nina took another huge bite of hamburger. “Is parachute?” she asked thickly.
His blood went ice-cold.
“Antochka says you mutter in your sleep. Something about parachute.”
“It’s nothing.” That came out sharper than Ian intended.
“Is something,” she replied. “Or else why is it your lake?”
He said nothing. Nina said nothing either, just looked at him.
“His name was Donald Luncey,” Ian said, wondering why he was telling her. He hadn’t told anyone. “GI from San Francisco, eighteen years old. He called me Gramps. I probably looked ancient to him. He looked about twelve to me.”
“Sounds like my navigator after I was promoted to pilot.” Nina smiled. “Little Galya looked like she should have been on Young Pioneer hikes, not flying runs over the Black Sea.”
“What happened to her?” Ian asked.
Nina’s smile vanished. “Dead.”
“Donald Luncey too. March ’45, American troops parachuting out into Germany. I begged permission to hitch a ride on the jump.”
“Why?”
“It’s what you do, if you want to be any good as a war correspondent.” Ian tried to explain. “At the front, no one likes journalists. The brass worry you’ll see something you shouldn’t, make them look like idiots. The poor bastards in the ranks think you’re a ghoul, sticking your notepad in their faces looking for a story as they’re trying to stay alive. The only way they don’t hate you is if you’re in the thick of it too. Bunk with them, drink with them, jump out of planes with them, run into fire with them—you share the danger, they’ll share their stories. It’s the only way to do the job right.”
Ian had chatted up Private Luncey when they lined up to jump. One of those narrow beaky faces, ears that stuck out like jug handles, a big smile. “We jumped,” Ian went on. “The rest came down safely and went on to their mission, but Donald Luncey and I splatted off course. Hooked our rigs up in some German wood.”
Another woman would have taken his hand. Ian’s wife just looked at him steadily.
He’d snagged badly about twelve meters off the ground in the branches of a massive oak, hanging breathless and tangled under his lines. He’d had a knife, but the overhead angle was so awkward the blade slipped, spinning to the ground below before he could cut a single line. His straps were too badly knotted to slip out of without cutting. But he was lucky compared to Private Luncey, who had hit every branch on the way down through the tree that eventually snagged him up short. A shattered rib had pierced his lung, or at least Ian guessed that was what had happened. It killed him slowly over the course of seven hours, shredding his lung as he hung there screaming. Ian remembered every moment of those hours: first telling him to be still, not exacerbate the injury; then trying and failing to pendulum-swing close enough to help; finally just hanging there listening as the boy’s voice ran out, from screams to the occasional monotone mutter of Gramps . . .
“By the time he died I was hallucinating,” Ian managed to say. “Dehydration and shock—it turned Donald Luncey into my brother—into Seb. I knew it wasn’t him, I knew Seb was sitting in a stalag in Poland, but it was still him, down to the last freckle. My little brother was hanging dead in the tree next to me.” Hanging there for most of a day as Ian, mouth leather dry, shivering in the cold sweat of horror, stared at his corpse. Ian had tried to focus on the ground below instead, and that twelve meters under his swaying boots seemed to double, an impossibly long fall into darkness.
“Ah,” Nina said. “Is why you have your thing, the thing about heights.”
“Foolish, really. I didn’t even fall. I was found soon after; they rigged me down safe. Quite lucky.” Lucky, but maybe not entirely sane, Ian sometimes thought. It was five years after the war was done, yet still he had the dream and in the dream it was always Seb, right from the beginning. Donald Luncey wasn’t even there; start to finish it was his brother he couldn’t save.
“Don’t brood, luchik.” Nina upended ketchup over her hamburger like she was drowning it in blood. “Brooding is no good.”
“You never brood, do you?” For all that she moved in such a cloud of anarchy, Nina was very even-keeled—rather remarkable, Ian thought, considering what she’d lived through. He wondered if flying in combat had drilled that into her, or if it had already been there—in her, and in her fellow Night Witches. “Most assume women have no place at the front lines, but after hearing about your friends in the regiment—”
“Women are good in combat,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “We don’t compete like the men do. Is all mission, no proving who is better with stupid stunts.”
“You told me you once climbed out on a plane wing at eight hundred meters, you little Cossack. If you want to talk about stunts.”
“Was necessary!” She smiled, but there was a shadow behind it. “My pilot yelled at me for that.”
“Good for her.” Ian studied Nina’s lively face, suddenly gone still. “I can see how much you miss them. Your friends.”
“Sestry,” she said softly.
He could guess the word meant sisters. “Were they all like you?” She shrugged, and he imagined hundreds of Ninas, handed planes and set loose on the Führer’s eastern front. Bloody hell. No wonder Hitler lost the war.
“No one ever did what we did before.” Nina picked up her hamburger, dripping ketchup. “We pay for it, what we do. Dreams, twitches, headaches . . .”
“I know what you mean.” Ian tapped his left ear. “It’s never been quite right after that bombing run in Spain nearly did it for me.”
“My ears too, not so good as they were. U-2 cockpit is noisy. And those years being awake all night every night—I still never sleep all night through.”
“Don’t be ashamed of it. You were a soldier.” Not like me with my pointless nightmares, Ian thought, wry.
She seemed to catch his unspoken thought. “You went to war too, luchik. You go to war, you have a lake or a parachute after. Everyone does.”
“Soldiers do. They’ve earned it. I wasn’t a soldier. Nightmares are for those who fight, not those who scribble. Maybe I was at the front, but I could leave any time I wanted. They couldn’t.”
“So?” Nina asked. “Same risk for either soldier or hunter.”
“Hunter?”
“Hunters,” Nina said. “You. And me—well, I was soldier and hunter, but important part is hunter. Very different from soldier.”
“I don’t quite follow.”
“Soldiers fight wars. It gives them nightmare—a lake, a parachute. It makes them want to stop, go home.” The hamburger was gone; she sat spooning up ketchup by itself, like soup. “Hunters in war face same risks, same fight, so they get a lake or a parachute too. But we don’t have the thing soldiers do, other people do—the thing that says stop. We have a nightmare, we hate it, but if war ends, soldiers go home while we need a new hunt.”
Ian looked at her. “That does not make sense.”
“Does.” Calmly. “Soldiers get made. Hunters get born. You either need to track danger, or you don’t.”
“I don’t need to track danger, Nina. Not all Englishmen go pounding over fields blasting shotguns.”
&nb
sp; Nina sighed, impatient. “Those boys you wrote about, GIs, airmen—what did they want?”
“They talked about home, like all soldiers. Films, backyard barbecues, going out for girls—”
“Then the war ends and they go back to that, yes?”
“The lucky ones.” The unlucky ones ended up like Private Luncey. Like Seb.
“But some don’t. Like Tony; he doesn’t go home to get married, find work. He stays, finds a hunt. You don’t go home either. Your war ends, you start tracking Hitlerites.” Nina licked ketchup off her thumb. “The girls I fly with, they’re mostly like your GIs. They dream of peace, babies, all the borscht they can eat. Their war ends, they get peace, they’re happy. But me?” A grimace. “During the war, I have my bad nights, I dream the lake, but it never makes me want borscht and babies. My war finishes, you get me to England, I end up at the airfield in Manchester. Loops on old biplanes, no target, going crazy. Until I get the message about die Jägerin. Is good then; because I have target again.” Nina pointed at Ian, then at Kolb’s door. “You—in war you hunt stories, in peace you hunt men like him.” Pointing at herself, then at Kolb’s door. “Me—in war I hunt Nazis to bomb, in peace I hunt Nazis to make pay.”
Ian shook his head. “If you and I are hunters, if we have the urge to chase down prey and we give in to it, that makes us no better than die Jägerin. And if that is the truth, then I will go home and put a bullet in my own brain.”
“Nyet.” Nina was very certain. “Die Jägerin, she’s different kind of hunter. A killer who hunts things because she likes it. Maybe she has excuses—is orders from her Reich, is because her mudak of a lover tells her to—but is just excuses. She kills because she likes it, and she hunts what she thinks are easy targets—children, people on the run, those who can’t fight her. Would you do that?”
“Bloody hell, Nina, no!”
“I don’t either. We don’t hunt the helpless, luchik. We hunt the killers. Is like villagers going after a wolf gone mad. Only when the wolf is dead, villagers go home and we find the next mad wolf. Because we can keep on. Others, they try keeping on, they just—” She mimed an explosion. “Is too much for them; they come to pieces. Not us. Hunters, they are different. We can’t stop, not for bad sleep or parachute dreams or people who say we should want peace and babies instead. Is a world full of mad wolves, and we hunt them till we die.”
It was the most thoughtful thing he’d ever heard her say. Ian sat back, looking her over. “I had no idea my wife was a philosopher.”
“Is a Russian thing. Sit around, drink too much, talk about death.” She pushed her empty plate away. “It makes us cheerful.”
“Hunters chasing a huntress . . .” Ian rotated his cup of now-cold coffee. “This is your first chase, Nina—normally, our targets aren’t terribly impressive. They may have done terrible things, but in the flesh they are pathetic men full of excuses, not unlike Kolb in there. Die Jägerin isn’t. She had the nerve to hide in plain sight in Altaussee, even while it was being combed for Nazis. She managed to come to America on a new identity. She covered her tracks.”
“And now she is target,” Nina said.
“She’s a very clever target,” Ian stated bluntly. “It will not be easy to catch her.”
“Hunters tracking a huntress?” Nina reached across the table, hooking what would be her trigger finger through his trigger finger. “I like our odds.”
It was the first time she’d ever touched him outside a bedroom—normally Nina was prickly as a thornbush when it came to giving or receiving any sign of affection. Ian smiled. Fingers still linked, he fell into silence, watching Herr Kolb’s unmoving doors. The moon was higher up the sky; they’d been sitting a long time in this diner.
“I think Kolb stays where he is tonight,” Nina said, also watching the doors.
Ian agreed. “Go home. No sense for us both to be bored here.”
“Isn’t boring.”
“Staring at a door? Draw comparisons all you like between flying bombing runs and tracking Nazis, but this kind of hunt involves a great deal more paperwork and waiting. I’m surprised you aren’t bored stiff. Or”—an idea struck him—“is it that you like having a team again? Not like your regiment of sestry, of course. But you have Tony and me, and we all share a target. Is that what you—”
She jerked her hand away from his, something black bolting through her eyes too fast for him to follow. “Am not your team,” she flung at him, every word like an ice bullet. “Is one hunt. One, only because of die Jägerin. We find her and is all finished. We divorce, I go home, is done.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Ian heard himself say. “Even after we divorce, you can still stay on at the center, Nina. You work well with Tony and me; you enjoy it. I know you do. Why not stay on?” He realized how much he wanted that. Under her recklessness she had a navigator’s discipline and total dedication. And having a woman on the team, the places a woman could watch where a man couldn’t—“Stay with us after we catch Lorelei Vogt,” Ian urged, putting all the vehemence he could into the words. “Stay, Nina.”
“No team,” she repeated, eyes like stones, and stamped out of the diner.
Chapter 33
Jordan
June 1950
Boston
Garrett looked back and forth between the two prints lying on the darkroom table. “You’ve been working all week on two pictures?”
“I finally got them right.” A week’s worth of slaving in the darkroom: developing, enlarging, cropping, like as not scrapping and starting all over again. Two prints. But two prints to be proud of.
“Huh.” Garret looked back and forth between them. He’d come from the office, tall and pressed in a summer-weight suit. Jordan knew she looked like a complete wreck in comparison, hair tied up with a scrap of yarn, old shorts splashed with developer fluid. “They’re nice,” Garrett said, clearly hoping it was the right thing to say.
First a low-angle shot of her father in the workroom, holding up a silver card tray. She’d played with exposure and cropped the image till it showed just his hands, his forehead creased with concentration, the scrolled back of the tray, the outer edge of his smile. An Antiques Dealer at Work, she’d titled it with a quick pencil scrawl. “That’s the essence of Dad at work, but it’s also the essence of any antiques dealer at work. It’s why I cropped the image to show just a sliver of his face. It’s not just him; it’s anyone in that job.”
The second photograph was of Garrett at the airfield outside Boston, gesturing in front of the biplane. She’d cropped this image to its essence too; it wasn’t her fiancé looking handsome for the flash, but a pilot, any pilot, every pilot: a wedge of image that showed Garrett’s outward-stretching arm against the outward-stretching wing, Garrett’s grin as man and machine alike yearned for the air. A Pilot at Work.
“Very nice,” Garrett said again, looking lost.
Jordan looked at the two prints, for a moment wondering if she’d been wasting her time. You’re seeing things that aren’t there, the old critical voice scolded her, the one that told her not to dream wild things. But a cooler, more analytical voice said, They’re good.
“The photo-essay will be called Boston at Work. A series of fifteen or twenty portraits, all pared-down close-ups.” The idea had refined itself over the last week, since the evening on the balcony with Anneliese. What do you want? “I’m going to spend the entire summer on it.”
Garrett scratched his jaw. “What about the shop?”
“Dad’s old clerk Mrs. Weir offered after the funeral to come back to the shop if we needed help—Anneliese gave me leave to hire her full-time to replace me.” Jordan was already teeming with ideas. People doing their jobs all over Boston, just waiting to be photographed—the bakers at Mike’s Pastries in the North End, some pictorial slice of the flour and kneading fingers; Father Harris at Mass, the way his hands make a cradle as he elevates the host . . .
Garrett touched the biplane in the print of himself, l
ooking wistful. “What’s it for?”
“My portfolio. I don’t have job experience yet, so I need solid work to show. I’m going to spend the summer photographing everything I can get my hands on.” Jordan took a deep breath. “This fall I’m going to New York, to try to get work as a photographer.”
“This fall?” Garrett looked puzzled. “But the wedding’s next spring.”
Jordan made herself look up, meet his eyes squarely. “I’d like to put the wedding off for a while.”
She braced herself, but his face cleared. “It’s just nerves,” he reassured her. “My mother says bridal nerves are completely natural. She wants you to come over soon and choose flowers. She said something about petunias, or maybe it was phlox—”
“I’m not ready for phlox, Garrett. I’m not ready to set a date. I’m not ready.” What a relief to say the words, not be forever squashing them down out of sight and out of mind. “I don’t want to be married yet. I want to work. I want to be a photographer. I want to find out if I’m any good at all—”
Jordan ran out of breath before she ran out of all the things she had only realized this week that she wanted so badly. To go to France and snap the Eiffel Tower even if it was the most clichéd photograph in the world. To learn what it was like to work on a deadline over burning eyes and cold coffee, because some yet-to-be-found editor wanted something done by eight sharp. She wanted colleagues to bump around a darkroom with, sharing cigarettes and ideas. She wanted to see her name on a byline: J. Bryde.
Garrett was looking lost now. “We have so many plans . . .”
“Plans can change. Come with me,” she said, linking her fingers through his. “Come to New York, have an adventure. Work for TWA instead of—”
“Come on, quit kidding.”
“I’m not. Do you even want to work with your dad at the office? You’re bored stiff there.”
Garrett tugged his hand free, crossing his arms over his chest. “Are you calling this engagement off?”
“No. I am saying we should postpone—”
“We’ve been together five years. Mom’s going to be heartbroken if we postpone again.”