Читать книгу: «The Huntress», страница 7

Chapter 10
JORDAN

May 1946

Boston

The day after Jordan’s father escorted Anneliese off on their honeymoon, Jordan took Ruth to the Public Garden. Nothing like ice cream and a swan boat ride to get a little girl smiling … and talking.

“Chocolate or strawberry?” Ruth chewed her lip in indecision. “Both,” Jordan decided. “You deserve it.” That got a shy smile from Ruth, who was still hanging on to Taro’s leash like a safety harness, but who seemed to be unfolding into something like trust.

Which you’re taking advantage of, Jordan thought grimly, but pushed that aside. People aren’t obliged to drag out their old hurts or dirty laundry just because of your need to know, her father had told her not long ago, but he was off on his honeymoon with a woman who had carried a swastika down the aisle, and Jordan’s need to know was burning her up.

Licking their ice creams, Jordan and Ruth wandered down to the duck pond, Taro wagging between them. The water reflected the summer tourists throwing bread down from the bridge, but for once Jordan had no impulse to capture the moment on film. “See that flicker, Ruth? That’s a dragonfly. Did you see dragonflies at the lake in Altaussee?” Ruth looked puzzled. “That was where you were, wasn’t it? Before you came here.”

Nod.

“What else do you remember, cricket? I’d like to know more about you, now that you’re my sister.” Squeezing Ruth’s hand. “What do you remember before coming to Boston?”

“The lake,” Ruth said in her soft voice. Her trace of a German accent was already fading. With her blond braids and blue jumper, she could have been any little American girl. “Seeing the lake every day through the window.”

“Every day?” Anneliese hadn’t said they were in Altaussee very long. “How many days?”

Ruth shrugged.

“Do you remember your father? How he died?”

“Mama said he went east.”

“Where east?”

Another shrug.

“What else do you remember?” Jordan asked as gently as she knew how.

“The violin,” Ruth said even more softly. “Mama playing.”

Jordan blinked. “But she doesn’t play the violin.”

“She did.” Ruth’s eyebrows pulled together, and she reached for Taro’s soft back. “She did!”

“I believe you, Ruthie—”

“She did,” Ruth said fiercely. “She played for me.”

Never had Anneliese said she could play an instrument. She never asked to turn on the radio to listen to music either. And she didn’t own any violin—Jordan had seen her things carried in to be unpacked after the honeymoon, and there was no instrument case. Maybe she had to sell it?

Jordan looked down at Ruth. “Your mama said there was an incident by the lake in Altaussee. A refugee woman who, um, wasn’t very nice to you both.”

“There was blood,” Ruth whispered. “My nose bled.”

Jordan paused, heart thumping. “Do you remember any more?”

Ruth dropped her melting ice cream, looking upset, and Jordan couldn’t keep pushing. She just couldn’t. She opened her arms and Ruth burrowed into them. “Never mind, cricket. You don’t have to remember if you don’t want to.”

“That’s what she said,” Ruth mumbled into Jordan’s middle.

“Who?”

A pause. Then, “Mama.”

But her voice lifted as though she wasn’t entirely certain, and her small shoulders hitched. Jordan bit her tongue on any further questions—what could she even ask?—and hugged her new sister tight. “Let’s go for a swan boat ride. You’ll love that.”

“But I dropped my ice cream.”

“You can have mine.”

Ruth calmed down by the time they got to the boats with their paddle-operated swans. Jordan still felt like a monster. Wasn’t that productive? she scolded herself. You upset your brand-new little sister, all to learn that maybe Anneliese played the violin, and that a refugee woman made Ruth’s nose bleed in Altaussee. That’s proof of nothing, J. Bryde.

Anneliese had brought very few belongings to the house, hardly suspicious for a woman fleeing the wreckage of a war. Jordan had already looked through her closet and drawers, guiltily, but there was nothing to be found. If the new Mrs. McBride had anything incriminating, it had gone on her honeymoon along with the Iron Cross.

Watch and wait. As much as she wanted to run to her father, Jordan knew she’d need more proof than two photographs, or he might just shake his head and say, Jordan and her wild stories.

By Monday the new Mr. and Mrs. McBride were back, laden with presents. Jordan couldn’t help a shiver of relief to see her dad hale and hearty, although what had she been fearing? That the dainty Anneliese would do him harm? That was the wildest idea yet, surely.

“I missed my girls!” He swooped Ruth up in a hug, and Anneliese’s smile for Jordan was so infectious Jordan couldn’t help smiling back.

“Come help me unpack, Jordan. I’ll show you the scarf I found in Concord, just your color.” She was so warm and open, Jordan couldn’t help but wonder if she’d imagined the Iron Cross altogether.

“I wondered,” Jordan asked casually as they unpacked upstairs, shawls and lace handkerchiefs piled around the bed, “did you ever play the violin?”

“No, why?”

“No reason. Oh, that scarf is pretty, Anneliese—” She let her stepmother loop the fringed blue-sequined ends around her neck.

“Anna,” corrected Anneliese, arranging the scarf across Jordan’s shoulder. “Now that I’m a proper American housewife, I’d like a proper American name!”

Yes, let’s just erase your past, Jordan thought, even as Anneliese tugged her to look in the mirror. Because there’s something there you don’t want us to know.

“WE HAVE A SUITE at the Copley Plaza Hotel,” Ginny Reilly was saying. “My sister had her honeymoon there, it’s gorgeous. So when I have my wedding night there, Sean will carry me across the threshold—”

“You should carry him across the threshold,” Jordan observed, keeping one ear on the kitchen where Anneliese was clattering dishes. “Sean’s a string bean.”

“Shut up, it’s my fantasy.” Stifled laughter from the girls sitting around the parlor floor with a stack of magazines. “He opens the champagne while I change into a negligee. Bias-cut ivory satin—”

More suppressed laughter, up until Ginny finished with a whispered, “When the light goes out he just rips my negligee off …” They all exploded, Jordan laughing too.

She lifted the Leica and snapped her friends, mentally titling it June 1946: A Study in Feminine Frustration. Graduation had come and gone just after Jordan’s eighteenth birthday, and now that school was done, she found herself sitting around with a good many friends who wanted to plan their fantasy weddings—and wedding nights. They were all good girls with lace-curtain-and-Sunday-lunch parents, so nobody here had Done It, but they talked about Doing It. What else was there to fantasize about now that school was done? Ginny worked at Filene’s, and Susan was going to Boston College in the fall but had already said she’d only stay till she got engaged. And Jordan, who had yearned for high school to be done, now found herself wondering what the point was. Her father still wouldn’t budge about the question of college, when she brought it up last week. “Let me talk to him later,” Anneliese had whispered afterward, with a smile of friendly complicity that gave Jordan a guilty twinge.

“Your turn, Jor,” Ginny laughed. “How does your first time go?”

Jordan gave up fretting for the moment. “All right, here it goes.” This was all very silly, but it was their time to be silly, wasn’t it? “We’re at war with the Soviets, and I’m filming the bombing of Moscow. I meet a glamorous Frenchman working for Reuters, and after the bombing he drags me off to an abandoned tank—”

“You want to Do It in a tank?”

“There are bullets flying. It’s very romantic. Then my photo of the bombing makes the cover of TIME—”

“If I had Garrett, I wouldn’t be daydreaming about Frenchmen,” Susan said. “Is he going to give you his college ring?”

“He won’t have one until he starts this fall,” Jordan evaded. But Garrett probably would offer it to her, and if she took it, everyone would expect her to wear it around her neck on a chain, because that was the next step. The trouble with steps was that the more you took in a certain direction, the more people assumed that you would continue on, which Jordan wasn’t sure she wanted to do. She was barely eighteen; how was she supposed to know if Garrett Byrne was the One and Only? Jordan wasn’t even sure she believed in the entire idea of the One and Only.

Anneliese glided in with a tray. “Would you girls like some cake?”

“Please, Mrs. McBride!” Jordan’s friends chimed, and then when she had retreated: “Your stepmother is the best.”

“So elegant—never a hair out of place. My mother always looks so frazzled.”

“She’s wonderful,” Jordan said. If I could be certain she wasn’t a Nazi, she’d be absolutely perfect.

“Just because she has an Iron Cross,” Jordan argued to herself, down in the darkroom after her friends had left, “doesn’t mean she’s a Nazi.” Trying to be fair, unbiased, like the level-headed J. Bryde who could always find truth in the middle of sensationalism. “Maybe Anneliese’s husband was a Nazi, and the medal was his. She said he was in the war, but she’s avoided saying if he followed Hitler or not. That’s the kind of thing you would keep to yourself, if you moved to America.”

Perfectly reasonable. Entirely possible.

“Even if he was a Nazi, it doesn’t mean she was. She could have carried his old medal because it was a reminder of him, not because she’s a fascist.”

Also entirely possible.

“Moreover,” Jordan went on, pacing the length of the darkroom, “maybe she’s not even keeping this background of hers a secret. Just because she didn’t tell me doesn’t mean she hasn’t told Dad. He might already know. A little secret between husband and wife.”

So ask him, Jordan thought. But something gut-deep held her back. Anneliese made Jordan’s father happy; she had seen that very clearly over the past weeks of watching and waiting. The cheery way he whistled when he shaved in the morning, the bounce in his step when he came home from work. And though Jordan had no urge to imagine what happened behind her father’s bedroom door, that side of things was clearly going very well too. Last week Jordan had knocked on their bedroom door in the afternoon and come in to see Anneliese straightening the bedclothes as her husband fastened his cuffs—Jordan had seen the private smile that passed between them. Maybe she was just an eighteen-year-old high school graduate who had never gone further than taking off her blouse in her boyfriend’s car, but it was perfectly clear that elegant Anneliese with her impeccable housekeeping and starched handkerchiefs had a less impeccable, less starched side, one that Jordan’s father was very happy with after so many years of sleeping alone. And everyone had multiple sides, really, so should she really worry like this about the various sides of Anneliese?

Jordan frowned, fighting the dread that she really was just making up wild stories again—that same part of her that had to fantasize about war-zone men and whistling bullets rather than honeymoon suites and bias-cut ivory satin.

“There you are.” Anneliese looked up from her sewing machine as Jordan came into the upstairs sunroom, now a sewing room. “What do you think?” Shaking out a half-stitched lilac cotton dress for Ruth.

“More ruffles. Ruth always wants more ruffles.” Anneliese had made Jordan’s graduation dress in this room: green silk molded tight to the waist, a wide neckline, elbow sleeves; the most stunning dress in the graduating class. Jordan’s father had mopped his eyes, and Anneliese had given her an armload of cream roses to carry. Jordan felt that squirm of guilt again and flopped down at the sewing table with a sigh.

“Restless?” Anneliese smiled. “It’s a hard time in a girl’s life, out of school but not moved to the next stage yet.”

“Are you going to tell me to stop moping around and get engaged?” Because Jordan’s father was thinking it, she could tell.

“No, because the last thing a girl your age needs is to be—what’s the word? Bossed.” Anneliese pronounced it with precision; her quest to conquer American slang was unceasing. “My mother lectured me day and night when I was your age, and it just made me stubborn and resentful.”

“You’re so nice to me,” Jordan couldn’t help saying. Strategy, or because you really are as good as you seem?

Anneliese bit off a thread, eyes sparkling. “I have no wish to be a wicked stepmother.”

I keep watching you, Jordan thought desperately, and you don’t give me anything to see. Nothing but reasons to like you.

Until the afternoon months later, on Selkie Lake.

Chapter 11
IAN

April 1950

Vienna

That bitch,” Tony fumed, kicking the legs of their bench on the railway station. “That goddamn Nazi bitch. I know she knew something.”

“Agreed,” Ian said, scanning his newspaper. “I’d be willing to wager she knew quite a lot.”

The morning expedition to 8 Fischerndorf had not gone well. No combination of plausible half-lies, Tony’s charm, or money had pried anything useful from Vera Eichmann née Liebl. She didn’t know any woman with dark hair and a scar on the neck. No such woman had stayed with her after the war. If the neighbors said so, she couldn’t be responsible for what they thought. They were only too eager to make up evil things about a widow struggling to make ends meet. Yes, she considered herself a widow. She had not laid eyes on her husband in five years. She wished to be left alone. The door had then banged in their faces.

Ian hadn’t expected it to go much better, so he remained sanguine, reading while his partner raged. At last Tony stopped pacing and dropped onto the bench. “What I’d have given to drag that woman into her own cellar and beat the truth out of her.”

“You wouldn’t do that, and you know it.”

“Wouldn’t I?” Tony raised an eyebrow. “I don’t have a lot of chivalric feeling for a woman like that. It’s not like trying to understand the compromises little people like the Ziegler sisters might have made to get through the war—Adolf Eichmann’s wife was at the top level. She had to know something about how her husband was shipping Jews east by the million. Believe me, I could bounce her off a wall or two and still sleep well at night if it got us the information we needed.”

“What if it didn’t? Would you start to break bones? Threaten her children? Where does it stop?” Ian folded his newspaper, feeling the spring breeze ruffle his hair. “That’s why we don’t operate that way.”

They’d had this same conversation the first week they worked together, on the trail of a Gauleiter responsible for a number of atrocities in occupied France. After one particularly unproductive interview, Tony had murmured, “Let me drag him into the back alley, I’ll get him talking.”

Ian had with great calm taken his new partner by the collar, applied a half twist that cut off the breath, and lifted him up onto his toes so they stood eye to eye. “Do I have your attention?” he said quietly and waited for Tony’s nod. “Good. Because we do not beat up witnesses. Not now. Not ever. And if you can’t wrap your mind around that, get out now. Am I in any way unclear?” He let Tony go, and the younger man shrugged, eyes wary. “Your call, boss.”

Now, Tony looked at Ian with curiosity in those dark eyes. “I’m not saying we’d ever go at a man’s nails with pliers. There are degrees. When all it would take is a good shaking and a few slaps—”

“Anyone who would spill that easily can be loosened up without violence.”

“It doesn’t always work that way, and you know it. Don’t tell me you’ve never been tempted to make a witness cough up.”

“Of course I’ve been tempted,” Ian said flatly. “I’ve been tempted to degrees you would not believe. But it isn’t just about catching war criminals. How we catch them—that matters.”

“Does it?”

Ian rested his elbows on his knees, looking down the train tracks. “I worked with an American team not long after the war ended,” he said at last. “Investigating cases where German civilians were suspected of murdering downed airmen. The Americans used to detain the local Burgermeister until he coughed up a list of witnesses, then stand the witnesses up against a wall and threaten to shoot them unless they talked. They always talked, we’d get our man, and no witness was ever shot. But I hated it.” Ian looked at his colleague. “There are more war criminals out there than we will ever be able to find. If I have to let go of the ones that won’t get found unless we turn into torturers, I’m at ease with that decision.”

“Will you be at ease with it if you have to let go of die Jägerin?” Tony asked. “What if the woman who killed your brother and nearly killed your wife lies on the other side of beating the shit out of a witness?”

Ian thought in stark honesty, I don’t know.

He breathed away the instinctive flare of defensive anger, saw an approaching plume of smoke, and rose. “Train’s here.” It was a long, silent ride back to Vienna.

“YOU ARE EVICTED,” Frau Hummel greeted them at the door, crimson with rage. “You and that barbarian Hure—”

She continued to shout, but Ian pushed past and threw open the door to the center. “Bloody hell …”

In one day, the office had gone from an orderly oasis to an utter disaster. Files were scattered everywhere in heaps, paper drifted like snow across the desk, and empty cups sat on every surface. The air smelled like scalded tea, and the jam pot was attracting flies. The author of all this anarchy sat in Ian’s chair, bare feet swinging, blond head bent over a file she was leafing with jamsticky fingers.

“No more biscuits,” Nina greeted them without looking up. “Or tea.”

Ian gave his desecrated office another long stare. Tony surveyed the chaos too, eyes dancing. “Nina,” Ian said eventually, waiting until she looked up. “Why are we being evicted, and why are you wearing one of my shirts?”

“Mine is hanging to dry.” She pushed Ian’s cuff up her arm, fanning the file in her hand. “This case, the Schleicher mudak—my reading isn’t so good, but it looks like the wife is lying. Why didn’t you threaten to cut her nose off?”

“Is Frau Hummel really evicting us?”

“She threatened.” Nina tossed the file down, picked up another. “I tell her I cut her nose off.”

“Wonderful.” Ian suppressed the urge to throttle his wife where she sat. “Nina, you were only supposed to take care of the post, answer the telephone—”

“Is boring.” Nina picked up her tea, looked around for a spoon, and stirred it with the end of Ian’s fountain pen instead. “I review your old chases, see how you work. Useful, for when we go after die Jägerin.”

“Useful?” He folded his arms across his chest. “You unleashed chaos in my office, you little savage.”

“Is my office too. Until target’s bombed flat, what’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is mine.” She gulped some tea, then rose and stretched, the hem of Ian’s shirt falling nearly to her knees. “What do you find in Altaussee? Where do we go next?”

“Salzburg.” Ian glared. “Give me my shirt back.”

“Nu, ladno.” She shrugged, began unbuttoning.

“Bloody hell,” he growled again and yanked open the door to the tiny washroom. It smelled of peroxide; evidently she’d used the sink to touch up her hair. An improvised laundry line had been hung with a rinsed-out blouse and a set of silky blue knickers. “Your blouse is dry,” Ian said, ignoring the underwear.

“You’re easy to shock, luchik. Is very funny.” She patted his arm, amused, and closed the washroom door. Ian turned to find Tony chortling.

“She collectivized the office,” he said. “Definitely a Russki.”

Ian bit back a snort. The urge to throttle his wife was now warring with the urge to laugh. “Well, help me clear up my Soviet bride’s mess.”

“She was putting files away as she read. It’s not that bad.”

“Without order lies madness.” Ian believed that in his bones.

With order came peace and law; without it lay war and blood. He’d seen enough of both to know it was true.

He locked that thought away as Tony sat back on his heels and asked, “When do we head for Salzburg, and are we taking your Soviet bride?”

“I don’t know.” Ian paused. “What does luchik mean?”

Tony grinned. “‘Little ray of sunshine.’”

“Does it bother you that she’s a Soviet?” Ian knew how suspicious the Yanks were of the Reds these days. Five short years from the end of the war, and benevolent ally Uncle Joe had become everyone’s enemy, but the Americans seemed more paranoid about the Communist Menace than anyone.

“She hasn’t gone around quoting Das Kapital. She hasn’t done anything except desecrate your tea and lie about her origins, and there are plenty of reasons for people to do the latter.” Tony slid a cabinet drawer shut. “We listen to lies day in and day out, not just from war criminals. Refugees and good guys lie too. About whether they’re Jewish or gentile, about their war record or their imprisonment record, about their health and their age and how they got their papers. Good reasons or bad, everybody lies.”

“Maybe.” Ian rose. “It’s time I talked to Nina. Will you smooth Frau Hummel over, make sure we aren’t being evicted?”

“Some glamour in this job,” Tony groused amiably, slouching out. “Become a Nazi hunter for the thrills, and it’s all paperwork and sweet-talking the landlady …”

Nina padded out of the washroom, tossing Ian’s shirt at his desk and sending more papers to the floor in a shower. Ian ignored that, fixing his wife with a level stare.

“You aren’t Polish. Let’s dispense with that lie first. You’re Russian.”

Nina looked up at him, wariness falling across her face. Then she shrugged. “Yes.”

Ian blinked, so braced for a denial that her acknowledgment caught him off guard. “You aren’t denying it?”

“Why?”

“You told me you were Polish. In the Red Cross hospital—”

“No.” Her eyes were as opaque and bottomless as two blue lakes. “You assumed. I let you.”

He tried to remember. Nineteen forty-five, the steely hospital scent of antiseptic over blood. Nina still half starved and woozy from pneumonia, Ian desperate for answers about his brother. The language barrier, the chaos all around. No, Ian thought, she hadn’t said she was Polish. A girl found near Poznań, with the name Nina, which was so common in Poland … everyone assumed. “Why did you let everyone think you were Polish?”

“Easier.” She flopped into his chair, propping her disreputable boots on the desk. “I wasn’t going home. I say I’m Soviet, is where they’d send me.”

“Where is home, exactly?”

“Go east through Siberia until you fall off the world edge into a lake as big as the sky. All taiga and water witches and ice eating railway stations whole; everything needs you dead and everybody wants to leave.” Amusement gleamed in her eyes. “Would you go back?”

“If my family were there.” He’d cross Siberia barefoot if his brother were at the end of it.

“My family isn’t.” If there was pain in her eyes, it flickered by too fast for Ian to catch. “I spend my whole life going as far west as I can from that lake. Poland? Is just the next stop.”

“Dangerous. You were nearly dead when the Red Cross found you.”

“I’m hard to kill.”

Ian pulled up a chair, gazing at Nina across the desk. She gazed back, unblinking. “Where were you trying to go after Poland?”

“As far west as I can without falling off that edge of the world. You help me get to England, I look around and think not bad. It’s ugly, there’s rationing, but the ice in winter doesn’t eat you alive.”

“How does a Soviet girl end up in Poland in the first place?”

“Assigned to the front. Surprised? Soviets, they use women in their wars, not just for factory jobs or behind desks.”

Ian knew something about that. One of his fellow war correspondents, a motherly-looking American woman with nerves of gunmetal, had written a pointed article for her paper about how Soviet women were employed as tank drivers and machine gunners, whereas the great and enlightened United States of America just told their women to plant Victory gardens, and be thrifty with their bacon grease. Ian looked at his wife from the Siberian wastes and wasn’t terribly surprised to discover she had been assigned to the front. No wonder we won the war.

“So,” he said at last, “you defected.”

“Not so official as that, luchik.” She grinned. “You think I go to an embassy, ask for asylum? I see chance in chaos, I take it.”

“Not very patriotic,” he couldn’t help observing. “Walking away from your countrymen in the middle of a war.”

Her smile disappeared. “My countrymen, they want to stand me against a wall and shoot me.”

“Why?”

“Is Stalin’s world, Stalin’s rule. Who needs a why?”

“I do.”

“Not your business.”

“Yes, it is.” He linked his hands behind his head, not backing down from their stare. “You’re my wife. I gave you my name, you got your citizenship through me. You and your past and anything else I helped you bring to my country are very much my business.”

Her lips remained sealed.

“Did my brother know?” Ian asked, changing tack. “When he promised he’d get you safe to England if you both lived, did he know you were a Soviet?”

“Yes.” No hesitation there.

“Why would he make such a promise? Was it an affair? Love in a time of war?” Ian held his breath, waiting. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard of desperate women escaping war zones by finding a dead soldier’s belongings and making up a tragic wartime romance when his grieving family came around. Only Ian knew that for his little brother, that was unlikely. He waited for Nina to step into the lie … hoping, he realized, that she wouldn’t. So far she’d only misdirected him. Now, he realized just how badly he wanted his wife not to be a liar.

“Lovers, Seb and me?” Nina laughed outright, shaking her head. “No. He liked the boys.”

Ian let out his breath. “Yes, he did.” Seb had told him that the night their father died, so drunk he could hardly stand. It hadn’t shocked Ian particularly. You didn’t spend years in an English public school without knowing exactly what two males could do together if they had the inclination. You don’t look surprised, Seb had slurred, not only drunk but in tears by then.

I’m not, Ian had answered. Chagrined, maybe—he knew full well how this would complicate and endanger his little brother’s life—but not surprised. I’ve never seen you even look at a girl, Seb.

I don’t know anything about girls. A hazy wave indicating the all-male household where they’d grown up, the all-boys’ schools. Maybe I’ll grow out of it?

Maybe you will. If you don’t, well, you’ll have to keep your head down and be careful, but it’s more common than you think.

It is?

Ian had poured them both another measure of whiskey and delivered a blunt, mildly drunken lecture on all the various combinations of the sexes he had seen tearing at belt buckles in Spanish hospital supply closets or going at it under Hyde Park bushes during blackouts—any prudishness Ian had carried out of school had died as soon as he went to war. Seb had passed out from whiskey and relief not five minutes later.

I was the first one he told, Ian thought now, painfully. And Nina, if she spoke truly, was the last. “He really told you?”

Nod.

“Tell me how you two met, what happened.” Ian’s voice sounded rough to his own ears; he cleared his throat. “I didn’t get much detail when we spoke of it five years ago. Difficult to get a lot of nuance from a conversation that’s half pantomime.”

“I’m in Poland, getting clear of Soviet lines.” No hint how or why she’d done that, and from her barbed smile, Ian thought it was a sticking point she wouldn’t give way on. For now he let it go. “I head into Polish forest, aim west. Avoid towns, people. Not far from Poznań, I run into Sebastian. He’s just made a break out of POW camp.” She shook her head. “City boy, stumbling around the trees. I take him on.”

“Out of the goodness of your heart?” Ian didn’t exactly see Nina swooning with pity for an English stranger.

“Two get by better than one. I know how to survive. He knows German, Polish—Russian too, is how we talk.”

“How did he know Russian?”

“Some Soviets at his camp. Prisoners have long hours to fill; they talk.” Nina’s smile lost its edge, the affection unmistakable. “Trying to teach me English, Seb talks about birds. I only know how to kill birds, and he’s asking if the lake where I grow up has puffins.” She linked her thumbs together and flapped her fingers each in sequence. “Puffins! Is even a real bird?”

Ian nodded, throat suddenly thick at the memory of Seb at nine, fingers linked in exactly that gesture as he described a robin in midair. All children flapped their hands to mimic flight, but not quite like that. You know he liked boys rather than girls, and you know his gestures, Ian thought. Yes, you must have known my brother. What’s more, he must have trusted you.

“Puffins.” Nina sighed, and both affection and sadness were clear in that sigh. “Thought he was joking me. Tvoyu mat, that boy was a joker.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” Ian asked. “It’s been five years, Nina.”

“When do I have chance? We marry, you put me on a train to England and say you’ll be there in six months to start divorce. I think, ‘I tell you then.’ But you stay in Europe, I stay in England, we talk by telegram. When am I supposed to start this talk, over last five years?”

“Fair point,” Ian admitted. “We should start up divorce proceedings, now that we’re finally at the same table to discuss them.”