“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.”
She nodded, matter-of-fact. “Has been long enough. You want your ring back?”
“Keep it.” His father’s signet, gold and ornate like something an earl would wear. His father always liked to imply there were lords in the family line, but there weren’t, just defunct English gentlemen who bankrupted themselves to mix with the right people and marry the right girls from other defunct English families. The ring somehow suited Nina’s sun-browned workmanlike hand, and Ian smothered a moment’s dark humor thinking how apoplectic his father would have been to see it on the finger of a Communist blonde from the wastes of Siberia.
“Tell me one more thing. Just one.” Ian put his musing aside, looking at the puzzle that was his temporary wife. She stared back, blue eyes giving away nothing. “What happened with you and Seb and die J?gerin? How did you come across her? What—”
“Nyet,” Nina said sharply.
“What?”
“No. Not for you. Is mine. And Seb’s.”
“Until the target is down, what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.” Ian shot her own words back at her. “I have a right to know what happened at Lake Rusalka.”
“No. I lived it; I don’t have to tell it all. Seb fights her, he cuts her, he saves me, she kills him. It happens fast. He dies a hero. That’s enough.”
“It is not enough.” Ian heard his voice sinking toward a whisper. “This isn’t just a man’s right to hear how his brother died. You are helping us hunt down the woman who killed him. Anything you know about her could be essential.”
“And I tell you already—what she looks like, how she moves, how she speaks English, all of it. I tell you anything about her. Not the rest. That’s mine,” Nina repeated.
“If you jeopardize this hunt by holding back something important—”
“I’m not. What you want from me is knowing her if I see her, yes? To bring me out when you have her in your sight, so I can say if we have the right one?” Ian gave a reluctant nod. “That I can do. I saw her. I know her face anywhere. I remember her till I die.”
Ian looked at Nina, feeling anger flare. She stared back with a gaze like flint.
Seb saved you? he thought. His life was worth twice yours. How dare you live and not him? But he stamped that terrible thought down as hard as he could. It was not Nina’s fault Sebastian had died; it was die J?gerin’s fault. Only hers.
“You find something in Altaussee,” Nina said, dispensing with the duel of eyes. “What?”
Ian could have been as cagey with her as she’d been with him, but he suppressed the urge to be spiteful. “Die J?gerin’s mother lives in Salzburg, and we know where.”
“We go to Salzburg, then. I go this time,” Nina added. “I want the huntress dead.”
“We don’t do that.” Ian thought of the train station conversation with Tony—that there were lines not to be crossed. How close to those lines is this chase going to lead you? the thought whispered. Because you’re already skirting a very high cliff.
“If not dead, caught.” Nina shrugged. “I come to Salzburg with you.”
“All right. We’ll settle on an approach, and you’ll do things our way.”
“Why?”
“Because we’ve been doing this for years, and that’s how it goes. And if what’s yours is mine, just as what’s mine is now apparently yours, you get my rules as well as my tea.”
Nina’s eyes suddenly twinkled. She looked impish and young all of a sudden, cheeks creasing in an infectious smile. “‘My rules, my tea.’ Marina said something like that once.”
“Who?”
Chapter 12
Nina
October 1941
Moscow
Marina Mikhailovna Raskova, Hero of the Soviet Union and most famous aviatrix of the Motherland, had dark hair and rosy cheeks and a gleaming white smile. Her blue eyes were like lakes, and Nina fell into them like she was drowning.
“So—” Raskova looked Nina up and down, visibly amused. “You’re the girl who’s been making Comrade Colonel Moriakin’s life hell the past few days?”
Nina nodded, suddenly speechless. They stood in a borrowed office in Moscow’s aviation headquarters, an ugly box of a room with the usual desk heaped with folders and the usual portrait of Comrade Stalin on the wall. Raskova had sauntered in with a tossed comment over her shoulder to someone unseen—“You don’t mind if I take ten minutes, Seryosha?”—her voice as warm and crystalline as it had sounded over the radio. Nina followed that voice into the office every bit as blindly as she had followed it to Moscow in the first place, and now stood twisting her sealskin hat between her hands, desperately trying to summon the speech she had practiced all those long, monotonous hours on the train from Siberia to Moscow.
“You come from Irkutsk?” Raskova prompted when it became clear Nina wasn’t going to speak first.
“Yes. No,” Nina blushed. “Baikal. Then Irkutsk.”
Raised eyebrows. “You’ve come a long way to see me.”
More than four thousand kilometers. From train windows Nina had seen vast gold sunsets over stretches of taiga, followed by endless kilometers of towering dark trees where it was all too easy to imagine Baba Yaga’s witch house moving along on stalky chicken legs. Country stations where women in flowered shawls herded goats off the tracks were followed by city stations where railway officials rushed about in brass-buttoned coats. Farmland and pastureland, factories and tenement blocks, horse carts and cars, all whisking past Nina’s wide eyes.
“Your first time in Moscow?”
“Yes.” Her first glimpse of the city had been so terrifying—the vast spread of boxlike buildings, the peaks of distant spires and domes from old imperialist palaces and cathedrals, the spread of Three Stations Square where trains fed their passengers into the city—that her overwhelming urge had been to leap back onto the railcar. You do not belong here, the panicky thought pounded, looking at the overwhelming crush of uniformed soldiers, kerchiefed women, and slab-booted men. It wasn’t just the size and scale of it all, it was the pulsation of fear at being so much closer to the advancing enemy. Houses were draped with camouflage; flak guns crowned rooftops like long-legged cranes; streets were lined with barricades of welded railway girders. There was nothing like it in Irkutsk. You don’t belong here, go back east—
But she wasn’t going east again, not ever. You don’t belong here, Nina Borisovna, she had told herself, pushing through the crowd. You belong up there, in the sky. And if going through here is the only way there, then through here is where you’ll go. So she tunneled her vision, shut out Moscow, and stamped out into the sour-breathed cold-hunched press of humanity to find the aviation headquarters. “I didn’t pay much attention to Moscow,” she managed to tell Raskova. “I won’t be here long enough to make it worthwhile.”
“You won’t?”
“I’ll either join your new regiment, or go home.” Though Nina had barely a ruble left in her pocket, so how she was going to manage fare back to Irkutsk if she was rejected, she had no idea.
Raskova laughed, the sound warm and easy. “Why didn’t you apply through your Komsomol or your air club?”
“They would have said no. They were picking university girls, educated girls.” Nina heard her voice coming stronger, but her hands still had a death grip around the sealskin hat. “So I came direct to you.”
Raskova leaned against the edge of the desk, peeling off her gloves. She looked like she’d come right in from the airfield, still wearing boots and overalls. Her hands were fine and white, but she had oil smudges across her knuckles just like any pilot. “Colonel Moriakin says you camped in the chair outside his office for four days until he agreed to see you.”
“It was the fastest way to get an appointment.” Nina was surprised when Raskova burst out laughing. “He said I was crazy, but that I should talk to you, Comrade Raskova.”