“More Stalinist paranoia . . .”
Despite all the banter, Ian could feel the crackle of energy whipping through the room now that the chase was underway. It was a new office here, a new feeling in the air. In Vienna there had been a separation between work and leisure: in the evening Tony went home to his rented rooms, and Ian retired upstairs to his cot and violin. Here in Boston, there was no separation; they were all underfoot from dawn to dusk. Once they’d exhausted the topic of Herr Kolb and how to proceed, they elbowed the scribbled notes aside and made room for bowls of soup heated up from tins and ate with elbows knocking—and even then, the fierce concentration in the air still hummed. Lorelei Vogt belonged equally to all three of them, and now there was no ocean in the way.
We are going to find her, Ian thought. She is no match for the three of us.
IT WAS NEARLY DAWN, and Nina was up on the roof.
Ian and Tony shared the one bedroom, which had two cots against opposite walls; Nina insisted on the couch under the skylight in the sitting room. “I don’t sleep next to anyone,” she told Ian when he offered her the other bedroom cot, rather hoping they could push them together. Now it was four in the morning, the sitting room was empty, and the skylight was open. Ian climbed onto the arm of the couch. It would be a jump for Nina, but he grabbed the lip of the skylight and levered himself skyward.
The rooftop was a flat barren square with a raised ledge running around at knee height. The sky was still dark overhead, a creeping edge of pink starting to outline the city horizon. Nina lay on her back on the ledge, gazing up at the fading stars. Wearing, Ian saw with amusement, her own patched trousers, one of Tony’s old sweaters, and a pair of Ian’s socks.
“Will you stop collectivizing the laundry?” he demanded, not moving toward her. He wasn’t getting anywhere near the edge; his stomach was already churning at the drop on Nina’s other side.
“You have nicer socks than me.”
“Harrods,” Ian said. “The key to surviving most of the things life throws at you is taking care of your feet. Something I learned tramping around in Spanish mud in the thirties. You’re going to fall off,” he added as she stretched her feet up into the air. Her toes flexed and arched like a bird’s tail fanning.
“No, I won’t.” Nina extended her arms out on either side, moving them dreamily up and down as if on air currents. Ian averted his eyes from the edge. The sounds of morning traffic drifted up: tires on pavement, the occasional shout from a drunk heading home, shouts back from respectable people heading for work. This was a young city, brash and confident, and Ian liked it.
Nina’s eyes were still on the stars above. “Tvoyu mat.” She sighed. “I miss the night sky.”
“From your pilot days?” Getting information out of Nina was like interviewing a porcupine, all prickles and defensively lashing tail, but he couldn’t help probing anyway. The journalist’s urge to ask questions, which hadn’t died along with his urge to write articles. “You haven’t said much about your flying days in the war.”
“Was a navigator. I fly bombing runs in the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. Later known as Forty-Sixth Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment.” She sat up, slanting an eyebrow. “You look surprised.”
“I am,” he said honestly.
“What, you think girls don’t fly?”
“I know perfectly well that women fly. I am surprised you were a navigator, because it’s a job that relies on obedience, teamwork, and precision. Not exactly qualities that spring to mind when I look at you, you little anarchist.”
“I was good navigator!” Nettled into reacting, as he hoped, she peeled off his socks, showing the tattoos on the soles of her feet—a red star across the arch of one, spiky lettering across the arch of the other. Ian had asked about them before, but received only a shrug. Now, she stretched out her left foot, placing it in his hands as he came closer, and translating the letters: шестьсот шестнадцать. “‘Six hundred sixteen,’” Nina said. “Is how many bombing runs I flew in the war.”
“You cannot be serious.” English bomber pilots were considered lucky if they survived twenty runs.
“Six hundred sixteen.” Nina smirked. “Us little Soviet girls worked harder than your English flyboys.” Ian meditated a cutting retort—he’d devoted much newsprint ink to those English flyboys—but Nina pulled her foot out of his hands, replacing it with the foot that had the red star. “Order of the Red Star, awarded January ’43.”
Ian looked from his wife’s tattooed foot up to her amused, knowing eyes. “I’m . . . impressed, comrade.”
“The Hitlerites said a squadron of U-2s at night sounded like witches on broomsticks.” Her sharp teeth showed in a smile as she pulled her foot out of his hands. “So they called us the Nachthexen.”
“Night Witches? That sounds rather grandiose to have come from pragmatic German imaginations.”
“We scared the piss out of them.” She pretzeled her feet under her on the rooftop ledge, propping her elbows on her knees. She had a scar on her forearm, a knot of old scar tissue, like something had pierced all the way through her arm. Ian knew how to make her back arch if he ran his lips along that scar, but nothing else about it. “What about that?” he asked. “Since we’re telling stories.”
“Are we?”
“I certainly hope so, Scheherazade.”
“Who’s that?”
“The fascinating tale-telling wife of another fellow who didn’t know what he was getting into when he married her.”
Nina snorted, but inspected the scar. “Just a flying accident. Two weeks I wasn’t allowed to fly. Also,” she added, “the reason I met Comrade Stalin.”
Chapter 27
Nina
January 1943
Moscow
They had all cried, weeping into one another’s shoulders at the airdrome on the North Caucasus front. From Major Bershanskaia to the newest little mechanic, they wept.
“To Marina Mikhailovna Raskova,” Bershanskaia said at last.
Wrung with grief, the regiment she had founded echoed the toast. “Marina Mikhailovna Raskova.”
Dead at thirty-three, her Pe-2 crashing on its way to an airfield near Stalingrad. Surviving so much, only to die in a common aviation accident on the banks of the Volga.
“She will be buried in two days’ time,” Bershanskaia said later. “Full military honors in Red Square. The first state funeral of the war to be held in Moscow, awarded to our commander.”
Three fierce nods answered her. Nina and two other regiment pilots grounded by injury had been summoned to Bershanskaia’s office, and she was scribbling a set of passes. The Night Witches had flown off for tonight’s target; a mission couldn’t be put off just because their founder was dead. Raskova herself would have been outraged at the thought. Bershanskaia had no tears in her eyes now when she addressed Nina and the other two.
“An honor guard will stand watch over her remains during the vigil,” Bershanskaia went on. “It is unthinkable that her regiments will not be represented. I will not pull active fliers from their duty, but the three injured officers with the best records are to be sent from each regiment. You three will depart tomorrow.”
A new dress uniform landed on Nina’s bed by dawn. She unfolded it and stared in horror. “Fuck your mother . . .” She was struggling into it, yanking at the stiff buttons, when the Night Witches trailed in exhausted and frost rimed. “What’s this?” Yelena walked around Nina. “Are they finally giving us uniforms designed for women?” Smiles came out over tear-smudged faces as a dozen women in bulky overalls contemplated Nina in her dress uniform, complete with skirt and heels. Nina stared back at them in utter panic.
“I’ve never owned a pair of heels in my life,” she wailed. “I’m going to fall on my face in the middle of Red Square!”
It brought the laugh they all needed so sorely. A watery laugh, but still a laugh. “Ninochka needs us, rabbits,” Yelena announced, rummaging for her sewing needles. “It’s time for the Night Witches to work some magic.”