The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  I’m not giving that up, Ian thought. If I can just figure out what will make you want to stay. How the hell did you woo a woman as impervious as a bullet?

  They ate hot dogs at a ramshackle beachside diner, and then Nina found a public washroom and disappeared with the package she’d bought from the five-and-dime. Ian waited outside, fanning himself with the straw panama he’d picked up to replace his old fedora, crumpling and bashing it until it sat on his head at the appropriately battered angle. At last Nina came out with her hair lying damp against her shoulders, smelling of peroxide. “Better,” she said contentedly, running fingers through her newly blond roots as they set off in the direction of the beach.

  “Why do you dye your hair?” Ian said curiously. “Not to be rude, I like it. But considering that your only other nod to personal adornment has been to tattoo your aviation record on the soles of your feet . . .”

  Nina shrugged. Another of those arbitrary questions she refused to answer—Ian let it be, and they strolled on down the long deserted beach, shoulders brushing. It was now full dark, just the faint glitter of stars overhead and the gritty slide of sand beneath Ian’s shoes. Nina stopped and pulled off her sandals as they came to the edge of the water. Her profile was bright against the darkness, and Ian thought of the night on the ship rail. “Nina,” he asked, “those five years you spent in England before this . . . was there anyone for you? I wouldn’t blame you if there were,” he added, not entirely truthfully. Falling for his wife had brought out a possessive streak, he was finding, but that didn’t mean he had to give in to it. “It wasn’t precisely a real marriage.”

  “There were a few,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “Was five years. You?”

  “A few,” Ian admitted. “No one lasting. Are any of your fellows waiting for you?” he made himself ask. If she said yes, he wouldn’t say another word.

  “No. Peter, he goes off to fly with aerobatic team. Simone, she’s married—”

  Ian stumbled in the sand. “Simone?”

  “My boss at Manchester airfield, he brings a French wife home from the war. But he’s in town every night with his mistress now, and Simone gets lonely. Bozhe moi, she could tire out a tiger. You ever need sleep,” Nina advised, “get a Frenchwoman, forty-five, who wears eau de violette and hasn’t had good roll in the hay in years.”

  Ian digested this. “Bloody hell, Nina—”

  She chuckled. “I shock you?”

  “A bit, yes.” It wasn’t as if he was unfamiliar with the idea of females who enjoyed female company. It was a little odd, however, to realize that his wife, like her razor, cut both ways.

  “You’re thinking now, this means I don’t like you?” Nina grinned, tugging his head down for one of her voracious kisses. “I do.”

  “I have fairly compelling evidence by now that you like me, comrade.” Ian returned the kiss, hand sliding through Nina’s damp hair, then shrugged out of his jacket, flung it over the sand, and tossed her down on it. She wasn’t wearing the willow for someone in Manchester, whether a British flyboy or a Frenchwoman who smelled of eau de violette, and that was enough to fill him with relief and hunger, setting his lips at Nina’s throat and slowly kissing his way down. Come on, comrade, he thought. There’s starlight and sand and the smell of the sea, and there’s me making love to you. Be moved by the goddamned romance of it all, would you? Be moved, Nina. Give me a chance.

  “Stay with me.” He said it simply, in the moments afterward where they still lay twined up and breathing hard among the scatter of clothes, before his wife could get brisk and pull away. “I don’t want to divorce you, Nina. Stay with me.”

  She stared at him, and he could feel her pulling away without moving a muscle.

  “Give it a year,” he said, drawing a thumb down her sharp cheekbone. “You like this work, you like the chase, you like me. Why not stay? Try it for a year, being my wife more than just in name. It wouldn’t be like most marriages, children and Sunday lunches and peace. That would bore you, and it would bore me. We’d have this instead, the road and the hunt and a bed at the end of it. Give it a year.” Ian put everything into the words. “Give it a year, and if you want to walk away at the end, we’ll divorce. But why not try?”

  Nina sat up, linking her arms around her knees, her face like a small obdurate shield. “I don’t love,” she said. “Is not what I do.”

  Go soft-eyed on her and she will bolt, Ian thought. “Love isn’t the word,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s a word in the world for what you are to me, Nina. Maybe comrade says it best. Comrades who are husband and wife—why isn’t that worth keeping?”

  She shook her head sharply.

  “Why?” Ian sat up too, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “Tell me that. Tell me something. Don’t just glower and prickle.”

  Nina glowered, prickling. He stared her down through the dark. She looked away, out at the long slow rollers of the Atlantic crashing under the night sky, and finally tugged at a strand of her damp hair. “You know why I dye it?” she said, carving the words off like ice chunks. “Yelenushka liked it—my pilot. I keep for her. Yelena Vassilovna Vetsina, senior lieutenant in the Forty-Sixth. Almost three years with her, and I love her till I die.”

  Ian saw the gleam of tears in his wife’s eyes, even in the starlight. Not a hard heart, after all, he thought with a sinking feeling. A broken one. “Yelena,” he said, keeping his voice steady. “The Russian version of Helen, isn’t it? What was she like?”

  “Dark. Tall. Lashes to here. And tvoyu mat, she could fly. Nothing more beautiful in the air.”

  “What happened?”

  Nina told him, tersely. Hard to imagine his tough, swaggering Nina as a brokenhearted girl sobbing her eyes out in a cockpit. He would have hugged her, but she would hate that. “Do you know what became of her?” Ian asked over the sound of the waves. “Your Helen of Troy.”

  “Yes,” said Nina.

  Ian waited. His wife stared out over the black waves. “After the war, was a little time you still get letters to the Motherland. Before everything shuts down and the West is forbidden. Is still like floating messages in bottles, trying to find people. I don’t know where to find Yelenushka, but I find my old commander.”

  “Bershanska?”

  “Bershanskaia. Is a relief, knowing she lived. The regiment, they got all the way to Berlin!” A flash of fierce, momentary pride sounded in Nina’s voice. “Disbanded after, of course. No one wants little princesses in the air unless it’s war and you really need them.”

  “Whoever decided that,” Ian said, trying to lighten Nina’s stony face and his own leaden heart, “can fuck themselves through seven gates whistling.”

  Nina smiled briefly, but it faded. “I can’t write Bershanskaia as me, as Lieutenant N. B. Markova declared dead in Poland. I write as some cousin from Kiev now living in England, someone imaginary, and I put in details so Bershanskaia knows is me. I ask news of my sestry.” A long breath. “I get one letter back.”

  The slow crash of waves, one, two, three. Rustle of fragrant vegetation overhead. Mangroves, maybe, Ian thought, stomach heavy as a stone.

  “Bershanskaia lists the dead, ones who died after me.” Ian didn’t think that was a slip of the tongue; in a very real sense Lieutenant N. B. Markova had died in that funeral pyre she’d made of her plane in the wet woods of Poland. “My navigator, poor Galya, she makes it to the end of the war and dies in crash outside Berlin. Others too—many bad nights, at the end.”

  Ian steeled himself. “Did your Yelena . . . ?”

  “No. She lived.”

  That startled him. The grief in Nina’s voice, he was certain her lover must have died.

  “Hero of the Soviet Union, one of ten crews marching in Moscow Victory Parade on Air Force Day, June ’45. I imagine her marching through Red Square, flowers falling on her hair.” Another long silent moment; Nina seemed to have turned to ice. “Bershanskaia tells me she lives in Moscow, instructor pilot in civil aviation.
She shares an apartment with navigator she had after me, Zoya. I always wonder, does she fall in love with Zoya? That bucktoothed suka has red hair, she’s a widow, she has two babies. Always Yelena wanted babies. She falls in love with one navigator, maybe now two?” Sigh. “Or maybe she’s just sharing apartment.”

  “I imagine she thinks of you,” Ian said. “I can’t imagine anyone not thinking of you.” He had not one hope in the world now that his wife would stay with him. Astounding how much that hurt.

  “Bershanskaia writes once,” Nina finished. “Wishes me well, finishes Don’t write again. Too dangerous, I know that. And soon there are no more letters allowed west to east, so doesn’t matter.” Pause. “I think Yelenushka’s alive, teaching boys to fly, playing with Zoya’s babies. Happy. Maybe is true. I won’t know.”

  “What would you do,” Ian made himself ask, “if you saw her coming along this beach toward you?”

  “Kiss her till she can’t breathe, ask her to stay. But she wouldn’t.”

  “No?”

  “She loves the Motherland, just enough more than me. Is all there is to say.” Nina looked at Ian. “I love her, I lose her. I don’t love anyone else. Is better.”

  For who? Ian wanted to lash back. But he stamped the anger down, and under it the pain. There was a dark-eyed Moscow rose in a training cockpit somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and against her he stood no chance.

  “I wouldn’t have asked if I’d known,” he said at last. “I’m sorry.”

  Nina nodded acknowledgment.

  “I’ll begin divorce proceedings,” Ian went on, stripping his voice to a matter-of-fact flatness. “No sense waiting until this chase is over; it could drag on for months.”

  Another nod. “Is best.”

  Ian rose, shrugging into his clothes. Nina slid into her own. They didn’t say another word.

  Chapter 47

  Jordan

  September 1950

  Boston

  Jordan hadn’t intended to go to the Scollay Square apartment at all. She’d been mindlessly walking the pathways on the Common all morning, forgetting her hat on a bench somewhere, gripping the Leica like a lifeline. Gripping her pocketbook too, where she’d hidden those long-ago photographs of Anneliese in the kitchen, Anneliese’s bouquet with its swastika, Anneliese with the man she said was her father, because Jordan didn’t dare leave them in the darkroom. Anneliese never came down to the darkroom, or she said she didn’t, but Jordan wasn’t sure of anything anymore. What did Anneliese really do all day? Jordan was appalled at the speculations that now prowled through her mind.

  She’d managed to avoid facing her stepmother over the supper table the last few nights, claiming work. “If I’m going to New York so soon, I need to have everything ready—” and Anneliese was so warmly encouraging of anything that advanced that plan. “I’ll make you some cocoa to take down.” Jordan couldn’t work after that, just stare into the mug that Anneliese always topped with a dash of cinnamon, because she knew that was how Jordan liked it, and try to make sense of it all.

  “Look at this logically, J. Bryde,” she had muttered aloud to the darkroom’s silence. “Step by step. And get it right this time.” She’d already gone down the path of suspicion before, after all, and it had blown up in her face. I am not doing that again.

  So. An unexplained absence, not to Concord or New York but somewhere unknown. Maybe Anna went to meet a man, Jordan thought. If she has her eye on someone new, so soon after Dad, she would hide that from me. But a new suitor in her life didn’t account for that strange scene with Kolb. Some kind of fraud at the shop? There were all kinds of swindles that could take place in the antiques business; perhaps Kolb had dragged her into something unsavory. But I saw the look on his face; he’s terrified of her. He wouldn’t dare try to drag her into anything she didn’t want. Could Anneliese be the one who had initiated some shop swindle, and dragged Kolb along? What financial trouble could she have that would make her risk everything for a little extra cash? Risk the shop’s reputation, risk legal charges, risk Jordan’s father finding out?

  Dad suspected, the cold thought whispered. He told you he had his doubts about Kolb, and right afterward—

  But that thought stopped in its tracks, driving her out of the darkroom to walk the Common for the rest of the morning. Anneliese was with me when Dad left for that hunting trip, Jordan thought, aimlessly drifting toward the Common bandstand. She was with me all morning as I tried on wedding dresses.

  That didn’t silence the cold voice. What a terrible thing suspicion was, once you let it have full rein. Jordan didn’t think she would ever be able to get this beast on a leash again, and she couldn’t avoid Anneliese forever, ducking supper and hiding in the morning behind a newspaper. Sooner or later, Anneliese was going to realize something was wrong.

  And what are you going to do, J. Bryde? You can’t run to your father with your suspicions this time. Who are you going to tell? There’s no one but you.

  Jordan realized she’d stopped by the pillared marble bandstand. Tony had kissed her here on their third date. She ran her hand along the marble, wishing for him viscerally—not to kiss, not to cling to, but to listen. No one listened like him; under all the grins and jokes he missed nothing.

  Tell Tony.

  She felt a reflexive cringe at the thought of unpacking this unsavory family business with an outsider—even a lover she trusted. But Jordan hesitated only a moment before letting her feet take her toward his apartment.

  She squeezed past a pair of gangly young men sitting on the grimy stairwell passing a bottle back and forth, edging up the last set of steps to knock on the door. No one answered. She rattled the door handle again, and it came open; Tony had said it was flimsy. She hesitated. Normally she’d never have invited herself inside, but Tony had said Mr. Graham and his wife were out of town—and Jordan didn’t like the look of those men on the stairwell, talking too loudly as they passed their bottle. She went in and shut the door behind her. Tony wouldn’t mind.

  The room was hot, the broken table heaped with papers and tea mugs. Jordan reached for the nearest piece of paper and fanned herself with it. Come home, she thought to Tony, looking at the clock. She very badly wanted to talk to him.

  The piece of paper in her hand slipped between sweaty fingertips, fluttered to the floor. Jordan picked it up again. Tony’s writing, bold and spiky, some kind of list—the words Chadwick & Black jumped out. She’d telephoned that number just days ago. This was a list of antiques dealers, written in Tony’s hand.

  Puzzled, she looked at the papers piled on the table. More lists in Tony’s handwriting. Maps, both American and European. Lists, all in Tony’s hand, looking like they’d been hastily copied—list after list of names and businesses, many of which Jordan knew, on shop stationery. Copied out at the shop.

  A slip of newsprint fluttered out of the bottom layer as she sifted, and Jordan bent to pick it up. Dan McBride’s obituary, circled.

  Jordan sat down, heart pounding, and began to sift through the layers. Scribbled notes in what looked like German and Polish. Maps jotted all over with an upright script she recognized as Ian Graham’s, having seen him write pieces of music down for Ruth to listen to. A thick file labeled Die Jägerin/Lorelei Vogt.

  Jordan opened it. Clipped inside was a photograph of a family on church steps, the figure at one end circled in red.

  Jordan looked closer. A young woman, gloved and folded hands, composed eyes over smiling lips. Jordan knew those eyes. Her ears roared, and she squeezed her eyes shut. Opened them again, brought the photograph closer.

  Anneliese. Younger than Jordan was now, almost unrecognizable in her chubby, unformed youth, but not to Jordan, who knew her so well. It was Anneliese.

  Jordan looked around the table with its heaped evidence of a long stakeout. “What is this?” she whispered aloud into the stale, silent air. Tony Rodomovsky turning up at the shop inquiring about a job. Ian Graham never quite saying what he was doing in Bo
ston, except that he had all the time in the world to teach Ruth scales. His strange Soviet wife with her unmistakable edge of danger. Anneliese’s picture in a file with another woman’s name . . .

  Jordan pushed the photograph aside with shaking fingers and began to read.

  Chapter 48

  Ian

  September 1950

  Boston

  You two look like death warmed over,” Tony yawned, picking Ian and Nina up at the bus station in the rattling Ford. “I’m the one running on about three hours of sleep, trailing Kolb all by myself.”

  “Poshol nakhui,” Nina growled. “I spend two years straight on three hours of sleep, you can shut up.”

  “You can’t trump a Russian when it comes to suffering,” Tony grumbled, peeling into the Boston traffic. “They have always suffered more, and in minus-twenty-degree weather, and in a gulag to boot. You just can’t win.” He looked at both his passengers, Ian staring out one window, Nina the other. “Anything happen that I should—”

  “No,” Ian said around the stone in his throat, and the silence held as they trudged upstairs to the apartment. Normally Nina skipped backward up the steps just ahead of him until he told her to get out of his bloody way. Now she took the steps two at a time without looking back, uncharacteristically silent. Better this way, Ian thought, already eager to sink back into the grind of cross-checking and telephoning and diner stakeouts. Better the drudgery of a stalled chase than this tangle of pain and anger with which he had no time to deal.

  At the top landing, Ian saw their door ajar. He reached out, twitched it open all the way, and every thought of Nina and her Moscow lover and the end of his hopes on a shadowy Florida beach disappeared.

  Their worktable lay bare, papers and maps and pencils lying in a jumble across the floor as though someone had swept everything off in one violent heave. A woman’s dusty footprint showed clearly on the back of a map, pointing out the door. On the empty table lay a torn sheet of paper and two photographs.