The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  Nina smiled modestly. “I fly a little.”

  “Well, let me show you a few things while Jordan and Timmy here look around . . .”

  “Holy hell,” Tony whispered in Jordan’s ear as Garrett sauntered off with Nina at his elbow, looking up earnestly as he expounded. “He’s flirting with her.”

  “He’s trying to make me jealous.” Jordan smiled as she dug in her bag for film, relieved to realize she didn’t feel jealous. The last bit of proof, if she’d needed it, that it had been right to call off the wedding.

  Garrett’s voice floated over. “. . . this Travel Air here, her name’s Olive. Pilots like to name their planes, did you know that? I could take you up for a quick spin, go easy on you—”

  Tony spluttered laughter. “She’s going to eat him alive.”

  “Enjoy the show,” Jordan said, laughing too. “I’m going to get my shots.”

  Tony carried her bag into the hangar, looked around for the mechanics, backed her unhurriedly into the shadow of a decrepit crop duster, and gave her a long kiss. “For later,” he murmured, “when we lose the third wheel, after she’s eaten Gary boots, bones, and coveralls.”

  Another kiss, even longer. Jordan pulled back eventually, trying to remember why she was here. A Mechanic at Work. Right.

  She found the mechanics and introduced herself, chatted lightly, flattered them, and got them laughing—she’d picked up a few things from Tony, the way he got subjects to relax. She waved the mechanics back to work, asking admiring questions, scolding when they tried to meet the camera’s eye, clicking away once they got absorbed. Two rolls of film, no fuss. I’m getting better at this, she thought, thanking her subjects. Her photo-essay was taking wonderful shape, the centerpiece of the work she’d have to show when she began job hunting in New York. Soon she’d have to begin thinking about an apartment, job interviews . . .

  And breaking the news to Ruth that yes, her sister really was going away, but she’d be back every month to visit. Jordan grimaced. Ruth knew about the New York plan, but wouldn’t acknowledge it—and lately, she was so obsessed with music that she barely noticed anything that wasn’t violin shaped. Every evening, without Anneliese here to sneak around, Jordan took Ruth to practice at the closed shop; she’d play clear through supper if Jordan didn’t drag her home. “Ruth’s doing very well,” Jordan said carefully over the telephone when Anneliese called from Concord.

  “No nightmares?”

  “Not lately, no.” With practice every day and a lesson every time Mr. Graham could squeeze one in, Ruth was blossoming. “You’ll want a proper teacher for her soon,” Mr. Graham had said after the last lesson, just after he’d come back from his driving trip. “I can give her scales and simple melodies, but she’s soaking it in like a little sponge. She’s even trying to piece her way through tunes she’s heard me play, or remembered from the radio.”

  If Ruth has music, Jordan thought, she’ll adjust just fine when I leave in the fall. Which meant Anneliese had to be told. Soon. Not yet.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” Jordan had asked her stepmother over the telephone, hearing strain in Anneliese’s voice.

  “Making plans.” Anneliese sighed. “It’s been quite a summer for plans, hasn’t it?”

  And the summer was going so fast, Jordan thought, coming out onto the airfield. Soon fall would be in the air; she’d be packing for New York. No more evenings in the shop, watching a famous war correspondent teach her sister to play a simple, haunting lullaby from Siberia where Nina Graham had grown up. No more informal chats afterward as Mr. Graham made tea and told a story in his deadpan English baritone about how Maggie Bourke-White was so focused during her camera work that once her halter-neck shirt fell down around her waist and she didn’t even notice. No more Tony . . .

  He looked over his shoulder with a grin, pointing at the blue-and-cream biplane named Olive now rising from the runway into a slow loop around the field. Jordan couldn’t stop her stomach from flipping at that grin, and she didn’t try. Enjoy it now, enjoy it all. Before summer ends.

  “Gary took Nina up for a spin.” Tony was laughing. “He said she could take a turn on the student controls. This is going to be good.”

  Overhead, Olive came out of her sedate loop with a sudden swoop downward, took a screaming turn around the airfield, then flipped inverted and clawed up steep and fast. The plane nearly disappeared into the blue, then came roaring back a matter of feet over the hangar roof, painted belly flashing overhead seemingly close enough to touch. A final hammerhead turn, then Nina brought Olive down using about half the runway Garrett had used taking off.

  Jordan looked at Tony. They both burst out laughing. She barely managed to get control of herself by the time Garrett climbed out of the instructor’s cockpit, looking a little green around the gills. Nina hopped out in one lithe movement like a cat jumping from a roof, stripping off her flying cap. “. . . a little heavy on the controls,” she was saying as Tony and Jordan approached. “But good little plane. Nice.” Patting the wing, business-like. “You have anything faster?”

  “Um. Well, not yet, we’re a small operation—” Garrett pulled himself together, expression warring between chagrin and admiration. Admiration won out as he asked, “Could you show me a few things, Mrs. Graham?”

  “SHE WAS A PILOT with the Red Air Force?” Tony had discreetly filled Jordan in on a few things after dropping Nina off at the Scollay Square apartment.

  “Sure. We don’t spread it around, not as Commie crazy as people are here.” Tony pulled up in front of Jordan’s house, hopped out of the car. “Here you go. I take it you’re disappearing into the darkroom for a few hours to develop all that film?”

  “How’d you guess?” But Jordan paused. Ruth was playing at a neighbor’s house; it would be hours before she’d have to be picked up. Hours, Jordan thought, eyeing Tony.

  He handed her out of the car, quirking an eyebrow at her considering gaze. “What’s on your mind?”

  Nothing at all proper, Jordan thought. But the hell with proper. She was tired of the stepping-stone path of dates and doorstep kisses and white-gloved visits to meet the parents; the sedate junior-league progression of approved stages that had made her feel so caged in with Garrett. She wanted something private and wicked and just for her, something absolutely, gloriously improper. She took a breath. “Would you like to see my darkroom?”

  He gave his slow, eye-crinkling smile. “I’d be honored.”

  It was the first time Jordan had taken him—taken anyone outside the family, really—down these steep, separate steps under the front stoop to her private enclave. She threw the switch, pointing out Gerda and Margaret looking down from the wall, her equipment. Tony wandered around, looking at everything. “So this is where you spend all your best hours.”

  “Some bad hours too. Whenever I cry about Dad, it’s always here.” Not quite as often, now—grief was beginning to be overlaid by the first layer of skin and time. Jordan supposed that layer would get thicker and thicker, and in a way she was sorry. Grief cut, but it also made you remember. “Whether good or bad, everything that’s important happens here,” she said, inhaling the familiar smells.

  Tony touched the long table, looked up at the lights. “I like it.”

  “I want something twice the size. I want printing assistants, I want other photographers to share it with.” Jordan slipped out of her shoes. “There are so many things I want.”

  “I’d tell you I’d give them to you, but you want to earn them.” Tony leaned against the wall. “Go ahead, get to work.”

  “I start working, I lose track of time,” she warned.

  “I’ve got time. Nina’s taking over a shift of work from Ian, and he’s hogging our only telephone. I’ve got nothing to do but watch you.” Tony linked his hands behind his head. “And you are an unbelievably tempting sight when you are lost in work.”

  “Really, now.” Jordan turned for the scrap of yarn she used to keep her hair out of her face. L
ifting her hair off her neck, she felt his eyes on her nape like a kiss and looked back over one shoulder with a smile. “It’s dull, watching film get developed. You’ll be bored to tears.”

  “You nibble your lower lip when you’re concentrating,” Tony replied. “I can be happy for hours watching you do that.”

  “You’re a charming liar, Tony Rodomovsky.”

  His smile faded. “I try not to be.”

  Part of Jordan wanted to cross the floor and drag his head down to hers on the spot. Part of her was enjoying the rising anticipation too much to hurry. “Well, let’s see how well I can work with someone watching and thinking impure thoughts.”

  His grin returned. “Very impure thoughts.”

  She switched on the red safelight, pulled out her film, and got started, happily conscious of his eyes. Lifting the prints out and clipping them to the line one by one, she stood back.

  “Verdict?” Tony asked behind her.

  “That one, maybe. Possibly that one.” Pointing. “I need to enlarge it, focus on just the hands against the propeller blade.”

  He wrapped his arms around her waist from behind, looking at the prints over her shoulder. “How do you know?”

  “How does anyone know how to do anything?” Jordan caught her breath as his jaw scraped the side of her neck. “Classes. Practice. Years of hard work.”

  He nipped her earlobe. “Fair enough.”

  She tilted her head back against his. “Tell me a secret.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re in the dark, and people trade secrets in the dark.”

  “You first.”

  “I sometimes call myself J. Bryde. It’s the name I want for my byline, but I talk to her like she’s real, sometimes. The famous J. Bryde who travels the world with a camera and a revolver, men and Pulitzer Prizes falling at her feet.”

  “I’m no Pulitzer, but I’ll fall at your feet.”

  He kissed the other side of her neck, and Jordan reached up to slide her hand through his soft hair.

  “Your turn. What’s your secret?”

  He was still for a while, chin resting on her shoulder, arms tight around her waist. “There’s one I want to tell you,” he said slowly, “and can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not mine to tell. Not yet.”

  “You have a wife and six children in Queens?”

  “No wife. No girlfriends. No kids. That I promise.”

  “Prison record? Warrant out for your arrest?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then.” Jordan might usually have been curious, but in the dizzying warmth of this red-lit room, she didn’t care. She wasn’t bringing Tony home for inspection as a future husband to trot out his credentials. He could keep as many secrets as he liked; she had a few of her own. “Just tell me a secret then. If not that one.”

  “I’m Jewish,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Want me to leave?”

  Jordan reached behind her and swatted him. “No!”

  His voice had a guarded wariness. “Some people don’t like hearing it.”

  “Was there a girl who didn’t like hearing it?” Jordan guessed.

  “A girl in England I thought was important for a while. She stopped returning my calls after I told her my mother’s mother was a Jew off the boat from Kraków.” A shrug. “I was raised Catholic, but one-fourth part Jewish is enough for plenty of people.”

  Jordan leaned back against him, the warm arms around her waist. “You’re Tony Rodomovsky. I like all your parts . . . and don’t you dare make that into a smutty joke.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.” They stood a moment, entwined and silent, then Tony kissed the slope of her shoulder and stood back. “You’ve got one more roll to develop.”

  “Yes,” she managed to say.

  The air had thickened. Jordan ran the second roll through, knowing she wasn’t doing her usual meticulous job, not caring. She clipped her prints up and cleaned away her chemicals, feeling his gaze redoubled.

  “Finished?” came Tony’s voice behind her.

  She shoved the last of the trays aside, turned around to meet his gaze, and felt the tilting sensation of utterly giving in. Not to stop and ask Is this wise? but to think I don’t care and seize it. “Come here, you.”

  “Thank God. Another roll would have killed me.” He came toward her in the red light, catching the end of the yarn tying back her hair and tugging it slowly free. She’d abandoned the Rita Hayworth pin curls long ago; Jordan felt her loosened hair slip straight and easy through his fingers.

  “I’m going to New York in the fall,” she said, getting it out before the talking stopped altogether. “Until then, I’m going to be working like a dog in this darkroom and looking after my sister—and hopefully, having a mad, passionate fling with you.” Winding her arms around Tony’s neck, she looked him in the eye. He had eyes to drown in. “How does that sound?”

  His voice was rough. “Sounds like heaven.”

  Their mouths crashed together in the red glow of the safelight, hands pulling at buttons, shirttails tugging out of waistbands. Jordan reached behind, hoisted herself up to sit on the worktable, pulling him with her. Tony’s shirt landed on the floor, then Jordan’s blouse. “I always meant to put a cot in here for the nights I work late and get tired . . .” Jordan murmured between kisses. “I never got around to it.”

  “That is a serious oversight,” he agreed, disposing of her brassiere and tossing her on her back.

  “Do you—” Jordan stopped, gasped. He was kissing his way very slowly down the line of her ribs, and it was impeding her ability to speak. She’d had no idea the skin over her ribs was that sensitive. Then again, she’d never dated any male in her life, Garrett included, who had bothered paying attention to it. “Do you have any—”

  “In my pocket.” She felt Tony smile against her navel. “I’ve got no desire to be a daddy just yet.”

  “Good. Hurry up—” Reaching up to tug him closer.

  “Nope.” He pinned her wrists flat, giving that grin that made her stomach flip. “You had hours to work, J. Bryde. My turn.”

  Chapter 43

  Ian

  August 1950

  Boston

  Five addresses, and nothing?” Fritz Bauer’s cigarette rasp growled in Ian’s ear across the telephone line.

  “Not die Jägerin, anyway.” Ian would have bet good money all five of the men who had answered his knock and listened to his “moving to the neighborhood” story had a war record worth hiding. “Nina managed to get snaps with a little Kodak, pretending to take pictures of the neighborhood, getting our fellows at the edge of the frame. Relatively clear shots—can you do some matching work with your files, see if we can find names to go with the faces? If they’re identifiable war criminals—”

  “What did I tell you about fighting an extradition battle in the United States, Graham?”

  “Someone has to fight it,” Ian said with a grim smile. “I’ll send you the packet. I’m for Pennsylvania tomorrow.”

  Sixth address on the list, and the longest drive so far; more than six hours. If die Jägerin wasn’t there, their last chance was the address in Florida. Let her be in Pennsylvania, Ian prayed. He wasn’t sure the overstretched budget could take any more road trips. The reason they were now into August—August!—with still two addresses left to check was because between the telephone, the rent, and the drives to the first five addresses, they had to wait for the next month of Ian’s annuity to come in. A search for a murderess halts dead in its tracks for the want of ten more dollars in the bank account.

  “Is it my imagination,” he mused to Nina as they crossed the Pennsylvania state line, “or did Tony seem a trifle keen to see us on the road today?”

  “He’s getting laid,” Nina said, matter-of-fact.

  “Bloody hell,” Ian said, thinking of his partner and Jordan McBride.

  “You’re shocked?” His wife sounded amused
. “You think he should marry her first?”

  “No, I’m no pot to go calling kettles black.” He’d spent years in war zones where every day you survived meant a night seeing what you could drink and who you could take to bed, no one giving any thought to propriety or marriage. “But Tony had better not break that girl’s heart,” he added ominously.

  “You like her.”

  “I like both the McBride girls.” It surprised Ian just how much he’d been enjoying the half hour or so at the antiques shop after Ruth’s lessons, when he made tea and Jordan begged for war stories and Tony told jokes. It had been a way to pass the time, waiting until he and Nina had the money to drive out and investigate the last addresses on their list, but it was more than that.

  “I still don’t imagine you teaching children, luchik,” Nina observed, curling her legs under her catlike. She was never there for Ruth’s lessons; evenings were always her shift following Kolb. “Is very—word? Tame? Domestic?”

  “Ruth’s a nice child. Children like her make me think about the future.” Nina tilted her head, inquiring. Ian tried to elaborate, steering the Ford through a dilapidated suburb. “She was born during this last war, and thank God she had far better luck than those poor children Lorelei Vogt shot by the lake. She’s alive to play music, grow up whole and healthy. Other children born when Ruth was will grow up to start more wars; that’s the way of the human race, but Ruth won’t be one of them. She’ll bring music into the world instead. She’s at least one thing that’s right, going forward. Building a generation is like building a wall—one good well-made brick at a time, one good well-made child at a time. Enough good bricks, you have a good wall. Enough good children, you have a generation that won’t start a world-enveloping war.”

  “A lot to think about a child who can play a few scales.” Nina slanted him a look. “Is something you want? Children?”

  “Good God, no. I find most children bloody annoying.” A thought struck him. “You aren’t trying to tell me something, are you?”