“You didn’t,” Jordan said, even though it wasn’t what girls were supposed to say. Boys pushed, and girls scolded them. “I’m the one who pushed,” she added, though girls weren’t supposed to say that either, much less do it. But she didn’t feel guilty, sitting here doing up her brassiere in the front seat of Garrett’s Chevrolet. She wished it were warm enough to just move to the backseat and keep going, keep kissing, keep putting off the moment where she’d have to go home. She looked out at the moonlight on the Charles and pushed away a surge of dread. “I should get back now.”
“Yeah,” said Garrett, and he dropped his head for another long kiss. He took Jordan’s hand and guided it, not under his sweater this time, but to his other hand, where she could feel the hard, cool lump of his college ring. “I wish you’d wear it,” he whispered. “You know I’m serious about you.”
“Okay,” Jordan heard herself say. Because why not? It was the next step. She’d wear his college ring for the next few years, a placeholder for the step after that: the real ring that would come at some point during his senior year, after which the next step was a June wedding. His parents would be delighted. Her dad would be delighted. I was hoping so much that you’d want to take the shop over from me, he had said. You and Garrett both, maybe. A real future.
“Okay,” she said again, and it felt fine.
Chapter 20
Ian
May 1950
Vienna
On the first of May, Ian jogged down the stairs from his tiny apartment to the center office below, only to find his wife already sitting in his chair.
He stopped, still doing up the buttons on his shirt. “I locked the door.”
Nina made jimmying motions, lowering the paperback she was reading. Something lurid called Regency Buck. Ian looked at the open door, handle now dangling loose. She reads romance novels and breaks locks, he thought. Just what every man wants in a wife. “What are you doing here?” he asked, turning back his cuffs and going to work on the door. It had been a few weeks since she and Tony stormed out, and Ian hadn’t heard from either.
“Tony is sorry,” Nina said. “He wants to apologize, the things he said.”
“So why are you here and not him?”
“He says you are Achilles in your tent and he waits till you come out. I tell him he’s a stupid mudak and I will come instead, and he says Agamemnon sends Briseis and maybe that does it. I don’t know any of these people.”
“He’s off his bloody head. I’m not Achilles, he’s not Agamemnon, and you’re nobody’s prize getting sent anywhere.” Ian jiggled the door handle back into place. “If Homer gave Briseis a razor, Achilles would have died a good deal sooner.”
“Who is this Homer?”
“He didn’t write Regency Buck. Why do you read that tosh?” Ian wondered, diverted. Razors didn’t seem to go with romances.
“I come to library my first month in Manchester—need books to learn about England, practice my reading. The librarian, she says, ‘Georgette Heyer is England.’ Is not much like the England I see, but maybe is the war?” Nina tucked Regency Buck back into her jacket. “Anyway, I come because Tony is sorry.”
“We both said things I imagine we regretted.” Ian wasn’t surprised at the relief that loosened his chest. He and Tony had worked together for years, after all; had been friends as well as partners. Perhaps we still are. “I notice you aren’t offering any apologies,” Ian couldn’t help but observe.
Nina merely gave a long blink. I kill her, his wife had said of Lorelei Vogt, so matter-of-factly. She meant it, she wasn’t sorry, and he’d be damned if he apologized either for throwing her out of his office because of it.
Her eyes glinted as if she was reading his mind, and the hostility of their last encounter sparked the air for a moment. It wouldn’t take much to get it going again.
But Nina changed the subject. “Tony and I, we went to Heidelberg for a week. We look for die J?gerin’s old university friends, student records.” A shake of the head. “Dead ends.”
Ian had managed to put die J?gerin out of his head, mostly by working twenty-hour days. He was the only one in the office now; he had to take up Tony’s share of the load. “Do you believe me now, that pursuing her is hopeless?”
“We go to Boston anyway,” Nina said. “Tony and me. Come with us.”
“I meant what I said.” Ian leaned against the desk, looking down at her. “I won’t work with a vengeance squad. I won’t work beside you as you plan to kill her.”
“Bozhe moi, don’t be dramatic.” Nina glared. “I want her caught, punished, dead, I don’t care which. Tony, he says you are good at finding them. Tony and I try alone, maybe we fail—I don’t know America, I hunt seals and deer, not Nazis. If you come, I promise now: we find her, I don’t try to kill her.”
“How do I know I can trust you?” Ian asked quietly.
“Poshol nakhui, govno.” Nina seized Ian by the collar and yanked him down to eye level, her blue eyes all but spitting knives. “Am not just a savage from the taiga,” she hissed. “I am Lieutenant N. B. Markova of the Red Air Force. I make a promise and I keep it. Blyadt,” she spat for good measure, shoving him back so hard he staggered. “Fuck you.”
She reads romance novels, she breaks locks, and she’s a lieutenant in the Red Air Force, Ian thought. Just what every man wants in a wife! He felt the strangest urge to laugh, not because he thought she was lying, but because . . . “Bloody hell, Nina. When are you going to stop turning my world on its ear?”
She planted hands on hips, glaring. “You come with us, I promise I do things like you want. Carrot, stick, no razor.” How boring, her eyes said.
Ian didn’t bother quoting the odds against their succeeding. Nina clearly didn’t care what the odds of extraditing Lorelei Vogt were, and neither did Tony. “I know how much this chase pulls at you,” he said instead. “It does me too. Tony said Lorelei Vogt was my white whale, and he’s not wrong. But in Moby-Dick, everyone who hunts the white whale dies.”
“I’m hard to kill. So are you—Tony tells me about the places you go in the war. Come to Boston.”
“I have other cases. They are just as important as—”
“Ian,” his wife said, his name in her voice bringing him up short. “You want the huntress. For Seb and for the children, you want her. I want her for Seb and for the children and for me. Is not just vengeance, is also justice. Can be both. Is not wrong if it’s both.”
She put out her hand, and the burning chill of recklessness raced across Ian’s nerves again. Throw everything down because the bombs were coming closer and who knew what the odds were? Throw it all on the line. You bring this out in me, he thought, looking at his wife. The reckless side that had made him go to war with a typewriter instead of a gun, that risked everything for the right story, the right column. The right hunt.
This hunt goes on whether you join it or not, the voice of reason said. The one that refused to beat suspects, or be party to vigilante justice. One way or another, she’ll follow die J?gerin. If you don’t go with her, who knows how the chase could end? Nina certainly wasn’t going to be held by any promise of clean dealing if he wasn’t there.
He couldn’t tell what this hungry swoop in his stomach was, if he was talking himself onto the right path or onto the wrong one. But with a coppery hunger, it was whispering, Call me Ishmael.
“Boston.” Nina’s small hand was still extended. “In? Or out?”
Part II
Chapter 21
Nina
September 1942
North Caucasus front
Night had fallen, and with it, the chase.
Ahead of Nina, Yelena was sprinting. Arms pumping, legs flashing, head lowered as she poured every last drop of strength into getting ahead of the crowd behind. One boot hit the Rusalka’s lower wing, and Nina’s pilot vaulted straight up to the side of the cockpit, fist punching up toward the sliver of moon. “Too slow, rabbits! Rusalka claims first place on the runway!”
She was utter magnificence, crouched atop their plane on boot toes and fingertips like a cat. Nina’s heart squeezed, even as a chorus of groans rose up from the other pilots running to their own U-2s in Yelena’s wake. “God rot you, Yelena Vassilovna,” Dusia Nosal gasped, reaching her own plane. “Long-legged cow—”
“I love you too, Dushenka,” Yelena cooed, blowing a kiss as she dropped into the Rusalka’s cockpit, and Nina grinned, jogging behind with the navigators. First pilot to her plane every night earned the right of first takeoff, and Yelena had the longest legs in the regiment. Unless someone tripped her off the line (Dusia wasn’t above sticking a boot out), the Rusalka had first takeoff five nights out of seven.
By the time Nina threw herself down into the rear cockpit, Yelena was already belted in and running checks. “Start up!” the call came from the ground.
“Starting up!”
“Swing prop!”