“Die J?gerin’s heart on a stick?”
“I’ve heard marriage meant the surrender of hearts, but I didn’t think quite so literally. And no,” Ian added.
Nina snorted. “Is Antochka coming to join us?”
“That Milanese divorcée he cozied up to two nights ago still hasn’t let him out of her cabin.” It had made for easier sleeping arrangements: Nina kept the tiny cabin assigned to Mr. and Mrs. Graham while Ian bunked with Tony. Ian had wondered at first if that would be awkward, given the quarrel they’d had in the Vienna office, but Tony made no reference to it and they’d fallen back into the old camaraderie. Ian was still grateful when Tony began staying with the Italian blonde with her mink and her scarlet fingernails. The cabin class reservations that were all they were able to afford on the May installment of Ian’s annuity were not roomy.
“Is your fault we waste time on this boat, you know,” Nina was complaining. “If not for your damned fear of heights, we fly this distance, much shorter time. I fear water, but you hear me complain about this boat?”
“Yes,” Ian said. “You’ve been complaining about this boat since Cannes.”
“I still go on it. You can’t get on a plane, you’re too sensitive? Western milksop. No one in Soviet Union is sensitive.”
“Clearly,” Ian answered, grinning.
“Mat tvoyu cherez sem’vorot s prisvistom.”
“What does that mean?”
“‘Fuck your mother through seven gates whistling.’”
“Bloody hell, woman. The mouth on you . . .”
They gave up their table and wandered out on deck. A cool night, faint light on the ocean from a waning quarter moon. Nina looked at it, glaring. “I hate quarter moon.”
“That’s rather random,” Ian observed.
Silence. Her face had grown taut.
“Did you see the ceiling frieze in the great hall on this ship?” he asked, watching her. “Jason and the Argonauts, setting off for the golden fleece. The original no-chance-we’ll-find-it hunt. But they found it. Perhaps we’ll find our golden fleece too.”
“I don’t want to talk,” Nina said abruptly.
“All right.” Ian lit a cigarette and leaned on the rail, looking over the water. Slowly the crowd thinned, trailing off to bed. Nina’s profile was bright against the darkness, rather lovely. She’s designed to be looked at by moonlight, the thought went through his head. Normally he’d have brushed that bit of whimsy aside, but now he stood at the rail of the vast ship thinking that he had never kissed his wife and realizing in a sudden visceral tug that he wanted to. She was a Russian whirlwind who stole his shirts and put her boots on his desk, but under the stars she looked like she was made of silver.
Goddammit, Ian thought, half angry, half amused. He had no wish to be attracted to a woman he would soon be divorcing. Yet here he was, flicking his cigarette into the water below and saying, “Would you slit my throat if I were to kiss you?”
Nina’s eyes came down from the quarter moon overhead, dark with some old remembered pain. It took her a moment to focus on Ian. “Never mind,” he said quietly, and began to turn away, but she reached up, yanked him down to eye level, and nailed her mouth against his. It wasn’t a kiss, it was a hurricane. Her strong fingers laced around the back of his neck, her ankle hooked his knee, and Ian found himself burying his hands in her hair and yanking her hard up against him. He felt her compact form almost climbing up his as her teeth scored his lip. He bit at her right back, drinking the taste of her like ice and salt and violence. His wife kissed like she was trying to drink his heart through his throat.
“Bloody hell, woman,” he managed to say, heart pounding. “The mouth on you . . .”
She regarded him coolly, as if they hadn’t just nearly ravaged each other against a deck railing. “I don’t want to talk.”
He could still taste her, like the icy burn of vodka electric in his throat. “I don’t either.”
They dragged each other back to the tiny cabin booked in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Graham, which Ian hadn’t set foot in. Is this a good idea? he thought.
No, he answered himself promptly. But I don’t give a damn. Banging the door shut, he picked up his wife and kissed her again.
“Chyort,” she muttered, wrenching at his shirt as they toppled onto the bed. “What are you doing?”
“Confiscating your weaponry.” Ian tugged the razor out of her boot top. “I know better than to take an armed woman to bed.”
“You have to fight me for it.” She gave a mock snarl like a wolverine, her strong limbs coiling and twisting through his. She was half laughing and half angry, at herself or at him he didn’t know, but she was nearly throwing off sparks of heat and fury as they kissed and struggled and clawed to get closer. There were enough buried sparks of his own anger to meet hers, the banked antagonism of the quarrel in his office flaring into a different kind of fire as he roped her hair around his hand and pulled it tight, and she left the marks of her teeth in his shoulder even as she wrapped her legs around his waist. The razor came partly unfolded and nicked Ian’s arm before he got it away from her.
“I know how to fight, you Red Menace.” Ian hurled the razor across the cabin and kissed her again, drinking down her bone-buckling taste of ice and arctic wind, blood and sweetness. Her nails raked his back, and he sank into her like he was sinking into a headwind, blown and tossed and dizzied by chaos.
The first thing she said afterward was, “We still get divorce.”
Ian burst out laughing. They were both still breathing hard, sweating, sheets and skin lightly dappled with blood from the cut on his arm, which he still didn’t feel even remotely. “I’d say this rules out nonconsummation as grounds.”
“This is—” Nina hunted for a word, muttered something in Russian. Squirming away from his side, she set her back against the foot of the bed facing him, scowling. Ian’s flare of anger had burned out, but she was still crackling and sparkling, all wary prickles in the dark. “We’re on the hunt. We search, we fight, the blood is up, we screw. Is all it is.”
Ian leaned forward to run a hand over the smooth curve of her leg still tangled with his, down the strong arch of her calf. She had a tattoo on the sole of her foot, he saw with fascination; some spiky Cyrillic lettering. Шестьсот шестнадцать. The visceral tug toward his wife that he’d felt at the deck railing hadn’t gone out, it had only gone deeper. He curved a hand around her ankle. “If that’s how you want it, comrade.”
“Is.” She looked fierce, and he wondered what she was remembering. What memory she’d pushed down when she dragged her eyes away from that quarter moon and dragged him down for a kiss instead.
“Who were you thinking of when you kissed me?” he asked, running his thumb over the Cyrillic on her small foot.
She looked him in the eye. “No one.”
Liar, Ian thought, even as he tugged her back toward him and kissed her scowling mouth. What’s going on in that head of yours, Nina? Who are you? He still had no idea, only that the answer was growing more complicated rather than less.
Chapter 24
Nina
January 1943
North Caucasus front
This makes thirteen,” Yelena called on ascent. By now they were accustomed to deciphering each other’s words through the tinny interphones. “Take the stick.”
Nina took over, shivering even in furred overalls and mole-fur flight mask. Nothing kept you warm in an open cockpit under a frozen moon. Better than the armorers, Nina told herself. They worked bare-handed even in the dead of winter; they couldn’t attach bomb fuses through bulky gloves. They were losing fingertips, laboring with blank, stoic faces and bandaged hands as blue as wild violets, but they weren’t slowing down. With more than six months’ practice under their belts, the regiment had turnaround down to an art: a U-2 could land, fuel, rearm, and take off again in less than ten minutes. “It’s counter to regulations,” Bershanskaia had admitted, “but it’s our way and it works.”
Nina saw Yelena’s head loll in sleep, up in the front cockpit. In these long winter shifts where eight runs per night stretched to twelve or more, all the pilots and navigators had started sleeping in shifts. Generally Yelena dozed on the way out, and Nina on the way back. Better that than risk us both dozing off at once. Sleep was the enemy on the long winter nights; sleep the seducer luring you to doze off and fall out of the sky.