by Kate Quinn
“Dying, that is easier for her. She wants it, because justice is harder. So I don’t cut her down. Is difficult,” Nina conceded, a glint of fury in her blue eyes. “I think for a moment, when I dive into the lake and the shot goes off, that she’s killed you.”
Ian stopped. “And you wanted to cut her to ribbons to avenge me?” From Nina that was practically a valentine.
“But I don’t,” Nina said, virtuous. “I just disarm her. I think maybe you are right, luchik. Justice over vengeance.”
“Bloody hell, woman, have I actually made a dent in you?”
She jabbed him in the ribs. “I make a few in you too.”
Yes, you have, Ian thought. And not just the fact that I am now addicted to your paperback Regency tosh. He tugged her arm through his, and Nina let him. The beginning of autumn nipped the air, and a few chestnut sellers were out, but the city looked tired and gray. Ian missed the hum of energy from Boston, the brashness, even the accents.
“You go back to Boston soon?” Nina asked as if reading his mind.
“Yes.” Not forever, perhaps, but there was no doubt his reception in Vienna was going to be cool for some time. He’d burned every favor he’d ever stored up ensuring Lorelei Vogt’s arrest—it would be no bad thing to absent himself and pursue war criminals in America for a few years. Jordan had said on his last telephone call that he could have the workroom over the antiques shop rent-free, if he would just go on giving Ruth the occasional lesson. With a thrum of quiet delight Ian envisioned it: a bright space with a window over Newbury Street, the smells of beeswax and silver polish drifting from the workshop where Mr. Kolb no longer worked. Taking half an hour every day to stretch his back and teach Ruth a new tune when she was let out of school, drinking tea afterward with Tony and Jordan as they talked above the sound of scales, then back to work. Building a case, maybe, against Vernon Waggoner of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who looked like he might have buried a few corpses in shallow graves back in his day. “Yes, I’m going back.” Ian looked at Nina. “Are you?”
“Is nice place, the decadent West.” Nina sounded noncommittal. “I like decadent.”
“Come back, Nina. Stay with the team.” Ian held up a hand before she could bristle. “I’m not asking you to stay married to me. I’m asking you to stay with the center. You belong with this team. You know you do.”
“You want me?” She looked suddenly vulnerable, Nina who normally faced the world behind shields of serenity or prickliness, with the occasional switch to barbarism. “I think how I left Seb behind, think maybe you wouldn’t want me to stay. Once huntress is caught.”
That memory hurt, Ian couldn’t deny it, but casting all the blame on Nina would be unjust. “My brother was a grown man. He made a decision, and you couldn’t dissuade him from it. There it is.”
She nodded. There was guilt there, and probably always would be, but overlaid by that Russian fatalism of hers. Battered souls like ours, Ian thought, tramping out of the wreckage of wars, always have guilt. Ghosts. Lakes and parachutes. They could both bear that weight, going on. “I want you on this team, Nina. On the hunt, wherever it leads. With me or not, but always on the hunt.”
She considered that. “Then I come back to Boston.”
Ian couldn’t hide the grin that broke over his face. Nina almost grinned back, but scowled instead. “We still divorce,” she warned.
“All right.”
“Because after Yelena I don’t—”
“Who asked you to love me?” Ian said lightly. “That’s not what I’m saying at all, you Red Menace.”
“What do you say?”
He had searched for what to tell her on the beach in Florida and got it wrong. But something tense and jealous had unspooled in him since die Jägerin’s capture, and there had been many hours to reflect on the Atlantic crossing, staring at the waves.
“I am only saying that I will find you mad wolves to hunt,” Ian told his wife, “and that I will never break your heart.” If part of that heart was always out of reach, that seemed entirely fair to Ian. You did not get a whole heart when you pinned yours to a splendid, battered, high-flying hawk like a Night Witch. Nina’s soul would always in some deep place yearn to be soaring under a bomber’s moon with her dark-eyed Moscow rose, and that was fine. Ian thought there was a chance, despite her prickles, that a bit of that remaining heart might thaw enough for him.
Or maybe I’m wrong, he thought. Maybe they’d divorce, after all. But he would still have a Night Witch on his team, and there wouldn’t be a war criminal in the world out of their reach.
He was happy to wait as Nina decided what she wanted.
His wife was peering upward, smiling. He followed her gaze and saw she was looking at the silhouette of the great Prater wheel above the amusement park. “You want to go?” she challenged.
Sixty-five meters up. Ian had nearly come to pieces the last time he rode it. But he’d gone flying since then with a Hero of the Soviet Union, far higher than sixty-five meters. With the bloody engine turned off. Smiling, he shook his head.
“Why not?” Nina asked. “Kill the fear, luchik.”
He slipped his trigger finger through hers and tugged her back in the direction of their hotel. “Already done, comrade.”
Epilogue
Nina
April 1951
Fenway Park, Boston
Nina didn’t understand baseball. “Why are they arguing?”
“The batter doesn’t like the umpire’s call,” Jordan explained, ponytail swinging. “It’s been a very generous strike zone.”
“Strike zone? He hits him now?” This was a boring game, Nina had decided. Hitting people would liven it up.
“No, no. He’s just arguing to make a point.”
“Should hit him with the bat,” Nina grumbled. “Why have a bat if you don’t hit people?”
“I’ll hit Kinder with a bat if he doesn’t stop coming inside on the fastball. He nearly winged Rizzuto.” On Jordan’s other side, Tony glared down at the Red Sox pitcher. In between putting in hours for Ian and filling in behind the shop counter when Jordan needed it, Tony was signed up for classes at Boston University. The center has always needed a legal expert, and I just happen to have the G.I. Bill on my side, he’d said last Christmas with a gleam in his eye. We can’t keep burning up the telephone lines to Bauer for advice by the time it comes time to try our first extradition case.
You, a lawyer? Nina had snorted.
I can sell ice to Alaskans and charm birds out of trees. It’s either be a lawyer or a shoe salesman.
“Keep whining.” Jordan laughed now, as Tony continued to grumble about the strike zone. “Your precious Yankees are down five runs.”
“Not for long, J. Bryde . . .”
“This game is stupid,” Nina told her husband.
“Agreed.” Ian was stretched out long limbed and relaxed in his seat, hat cocked back, collar unbuttoned. The smell of mown grass and chalk rose from the field, and the crowd hummed with cheers and groans, cracking peanut shells, and scratching pencils on scorecards. It was a rare day off for all of them: the team was preparing a file on one Vernon Waggoner of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, cross-checking his identity against that of a clerk who had worked at Belsen, and Jordan (when she wasn’t handling the team’s photography) had been taking pictures for a tourism bureau. “Easy work, decent money,” she said, snapping classic horizon shots all around Boston. “Brochure shots will buy the Sunday roasts until I sell Boston at Work.” There was interest; her photographs accompanying Ian’s articles on the capture of Lorelei Vogt/Anna McBride had received a certain degree of attention.
The ball went flying, which, to Nina’s eye, made all the men in uniform run around in inexplicable ways and made Ruth bounce up and down in excitement. Nina squinted at the field. “You understand this, malyshka?”
Ruth had been chattering to Tony in mixed English and Yiddish, which he’d begun informally teaching her this winter. Her real mother was Je
wish—Ruth will never know her, but she can know something about her mother’s people. Ruth lapsed entirely back to English, telling Nina, “This is the infield fly rule,” and going into far more detail than Nina wanted. Children could be very boring, Nina thought, even if you liked them. Ruth looked rosy in the sunshine, much less like the kind of scrawny chick a housewife wouldn’t even bother to put in a pot. She’d had bad nightmares in the fall, something about a woman hiding in her closet at night to steal her away, and Jordan had fussed very unnecessarily. Nina had taken her razor, gone into the closet and banged around uttering some Baba Yaga screeches, nicked the pad of her finger so there would be blood on the razor, then walked out holding it up for Ruth’s inspection, announcing, “Is dead now.” Nightmares had been better ever since.
“Bloody hell, Nina, you ate all my peanuts.” Ian rattled the empty bag.
“What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine.”
“We’re divorcing,” he said. “So that’s not true.”
“I get more.” She climbed out of her seat, up the park steps toward where the vendors hawked snacks, still marveling at the abundance of all the food on display.
Succumbing to capitalist greed, her father sneered, but Nina ignored him. She could buy a second bag of peanuts if she wanted them; she had sandals that weren’t made out of birchbark or cheap factory-glued leather; she had a dress that had never been worn by someone else first: polished cotton as scarlet as the star on the Rusalka. The dress Ian had bought for her in Filene’s last year, a dress that would have made Yelena’s eyes dance with wicked intentions. If this was capitalist greed, Nina would take it.
Western whore, Papa grumbled, but his voice came more faintly now than it used to. Perhaps because she couldn’t imagine him here in his wolfskins, eating peanuts and enjoying a lovely April day. Nina looked at the grassy outfield lapping up to the tall green wall in left field, and imagined April on the Old Man. The lake would still be frozen, the rusalka sleeping green haired and still below the ice, but the air would be freshening, looking ahead toward June when the ice would break into rainbow needles, turquoise blocks, shards sharp enough to cut a throat. Nina remembered standing on that frozen shore in seal-fur boots, hating it, asking furious questions of the world that had seemed so cold and closed in.
What is the opposite of a lake? What is the opposite of drowning? What lies all the way west?
Among Yelena and the Night Witches, she’d found the first two answers. But the third had tormented Nina in the bad years between Seb’s death and Tony’s call to hunt the huntress. Scrabbling to make a living in ruined, exhausted England, missing Yelena, telling herself never to get so close to anyone again. Thinking, as she trudged through rainy days on the ramshackle airfield, that this was all she deserved for failing first her regiment and then Seb. It was better to be alone; it didn’t matter if the all the way west she had yearned for turned out to be a world not as cold but just as closed in as the one she’d fled.
No, Nina thought now, looking at the park, at the green grass and the men running in pointless squares. This is all the way west. She looked down the rows of seats and found Tony saying something to Ruth; Ruth listening as she unwrapped a piece of gum; Jordan snapping a picture of the field . . . and Ian lazily fanning himself with his battered panama.
“This is our year,” the vendor who sold Nina her peanuts predicted. “We go all the way this year, I can feel it. This is our team.”
“Yes,” Nina agreed, smiling at the two blond heads below, the black head, and the dark with its salting of gray. Maybe they weren’t Night Witches, they weren’t a regiment, but—“Is our team.”
She tore into the peanuts, wandering back down. Men on the field were running around again, people were on their feet shouting, who knew why. “Hit him with the bat!” Nina shouted, just to join in. Slid into her seat beside Ian, who had dropped his hat and pulled a paperback out from Nina’s bag: The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer. “You stole my book again, Vanya,” Nina complained.
“Sophia Stanton-Lacy is being vexed by the spiteful Miss Wraxton, but I am confident she will prevail.” Ian removed a bookmark. “And since when am I Vanya? We’ve moved on from little ray of sunshine?”
“Ian—in Russian, would be Ivan. Proper nickname for Ivan is Vanya.”
“Nicknames are to shorten. You don’t shorten a three-letter name to a four-letter name to a five-letter name.”
“You do in Russian,” she said serenely.
He raised an eyebrow, studying her. “What are you thinking, comrade?”
“I think maybe we put off divorce for a year.” She’d been turning those words over for a while, not sure about them. She followed them up with a glare. “Only a year. Then maybe . . .”
“Then maybe,” he agreed, nonchalant. Englishmen, they couldn’t do nonchalant. Or maybe just her Englishman. He was fighting the grin that tugged at his lips, the grin she’d liked from the start even when she couldn’t understand a thing he was saying. It wasn’t much like the grin that had scrunched Yelena’s nose so sweetly, but there must have been something about it that was the same, because it had a similar effect on Nina’s stomach.
“A year,” he said again, as if he liked the sound of it. Nina liked it too. Not too confining, a year. It didn’t make her want to bristle and retreat. It wouldn’t stop her looking at a waning quarter moon and wanting Yelena back, missing her more than life—Nina didn’t think that would ever leave her. But she could bear it.
Nina took Ian’s panama and clapped it over her own head, tilting her face up to the sun, warmed through. “Tvoyu mat,” she said, blinking at the blue sky above. “Good flying weather.”
NAZI MURDERESS SENTENCED
BY IAN GRAHAM
OCTOBER 9, 1959
THE TRIAL OF Nazi war criminal Lorelei Vogt has played to its last act, as the woman known as die Jägerin stood yesterday in an Austrian courtroom to receive her sentence. Although she was first arrested in 1950, her trial would not commence until 1953 and proceeded to drag out for a further six years. Crowds gathered outside the courthouse to see the arrival of the defendant, made notorious by the award-winning photographic essay “Portraits in Evil” (J. Bryde) run in the October issue of LIFE magazine in 1956. Lorelei Vogt showed no emotion as her sentence was read: life imprisonment. So the wheel of justice turns.
Those hoping to read answers in her face were surely disappointed. The face of evil remains unknowable, and the questions remain: Who is she? What is she? How could she? Her victims are memorialized at the Rodomovsky Documentation Center in Boston, Massachusetts (director Anton Rodomovsky, human rights attorney), where the words over the center’s doors read “The Living Forget. The Dead Remember.”
The dead lie beyond any struggle, so we living must struggle for them. We must remember, because there are other wheels that turn besides the wheel of justice. Time is a wheel, vast and indifferent, and when time rolls on and men forget, we face the risk of circling back. We slouch yawning to a new horizon and find ourselves gazing at old hatreds seeded and watered by forgetfulness and flowering into new wars. New massacres. New monsters like die Jägerin.
Let this wheel stop.
Let us not forget this time.
Let us remember.
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Meet Kate Quinn
About the Book
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Author’s Note
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Further Reading
About the Author
Meet Kate Quinn
KATE QUINN is a New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction. A lifelong history buff, she has written seven historical novels, including the bestselling The Alice Network, the Empress of Rome Saga, and the Borgia Chronicles. All have been translated into multiple languages. Kate and her husband now live in San Diego with two black dogs nam
ed Caesar and Calpurnia.
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About the Book
Author’s Note
“Does INS know of any Nazi war criminals living in the United States at this time?”
“Yes. Fifty-three.”
That question was posed in 1973 by Democratic Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman in a routine subcommittee hearing, and the answer surprised her as much as it did me during my research for this novel. Had there really been known war criminals living in America since the end of the Second World War?
Yes. There just wasn’t any funding or organization to investigate them. Holtzman later pushed for the creation of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, but before the OSI, any Nazi war criminal who made it to the United States had a good chance of living in peace . . . including one woman upon whom I partly based die Jägerin.
Hermine Braunsteiner was a brutal female camp guard at Ravensbrück and Majdanek, who served a brief postwar prison sentence in Europe, then married an American and became a US citizen living in Queens, New York. Her neighbors were dumbfounded when she was tracked down in 1964 and accused of war crimes, and her astonished husband protested, “My wife wouldn’t hurt a fly!” Anneliese Weber/Lorelei Vogt is a fictional composite of Hermine Braunsteiner and another woman, Erna Petri, an SS officer’s wife who during the war found six escaped Jewish children near her home in Ukraine, brought them home to feed them a meal, then shot them. Petri was tried in 1962 and given a life sentence, and Braunsteiner became the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States.