“This way.” Ian motioned her toward his door, keeping a wary eye on the razor. Rarely did visitors enter quite this dramatically. “You have business with the Refugee Documentation Center, Fr?ulein?”
The woman folded up that lethally sharp razor and tucked it back into her boot. “Arrived an hour less ago,” she said in hodgepodge English as Ian closed the office door. Her accent was strange, somewhere between English and something farther east than Vienna. It wasn’t until she straightened and brushed her tangled hair from a pair of bright blue eyes that Ian’s heart started to pound.
“Still don’t know me from Tom, Dick, or Ivan?” she asked.
Bloody hell, Ian thought, frozen. She’s changed.
Five years ago she’d lain half starved in a Red Cross hospital bed, all brittle silence and big blue eyes. Now she looked capable and compact in scuffed trousers and knee boots, swinging a disreputable-looking sealskin cap in one hand. The hair he remembered as dull brown was bright blond with dark roots, and her eyes had a cheery, wicked glitter.
Ian forced the words through numb lips. “Hello, Nina.”
Tony came banging back in. “The gn?dige Frau’s feathers are duly smoothed down.” He gave Nina a rather appreciative glance. “Who’s our visitor?”
She looked annoyed. “I sent a letter. You didn’t get?” Her English has improved, Ian thought. Five years ago they’d barely been able to converse; she spoke almost no English and he almost no Polish. Their communication in between then and now had been strictly by telegram. His heart was still thudding. This was Nina . . . ?
“So you’re—” Tony looked puzzled, doubtless thinking of Ian’s description of a woman who needed gentle handling. “You aren’t quite what I was expecting, Miss Markova.”
“Not Miss Markova.” Ian raked a hand through his hair, wishing he’d explained it all four days ago, wishing he hadn’t had the impulse to turn the tables on his partner. Because if anyone in this room had had the tables turned on them, it was Ian. Bloody hell. “The file still lists her birth name. Tony Rodomovsky, allow me to introduce Nina Graham.” The woman in the hospital bed, the woman who had seen die J?gerin face-to-face and lived, the woman now standing in the same room with him for the first time in five years, a razor in her boot and a cool smile on her lips. “My wife.”
Chapter 3
Nina
Before the war
Lake Baikal, Siberia
She was born of lake water and madness.
To have the lake in her blood, that was to be expected. They all did, anyone born on the shore of Baikal, the vast rift lake at the eastern edge of the world. Any baby who came into the world beside that huge lake lying like a second sky across the taiga knew the iron tang of lake water before they ever knew the taste of mother’s milk. But Nina Borisovna Markova’s blood was banded with madness, like the deep striations of winter lake ice. Because the Markovs were all madmen, everyone knew that—every one of them swaggering and wild-eyed and savage as wolverines.
“I breed lunatics,” Nina’s father said when he was deep into the vodka he brewed in his hunting shack behind the house. “My sons are all criminals and my daughters are all whores—” and he’d lay about him with huge grimed fists, and his children hissed and darted out of the way like sharp-clawed little animals, and Nina might get an extra clout because she was the only tiny blue-eyed one in a litter of tall dark-eyed sisters and taller dark-eyed brothers. Her father’s gaze narrowed whenever he looked at her. “Your mother was a rusalka,” he’d growl, huddled in his shirt half covered by a clotted black beard.
“What’s a rusalka?” Nina finally asked at ten.
“A lake witch who comes to shore trailing her long green hair, luring men to their deaths,” her father replied, dealing a blow Nina ducked with liquid speed. It was the first thing a Markov child learned, to duck. Then you learned to steal, scrabbling for your own portion of watery borscht and hard bread, because no one shared, not ever. Then you learned to fight—when the other village boys were learning to net fish and hunt seals, and the girls were learning to cook and mend fishing nets, the Markov boys learned to fight and drink, and the Markova girls learned to fight and screw. That led to the last thing they learned, which was to leave.
“Get a man who will take you away,” Nina’s next-oldest sister told her. Olga was gathering her clothes: fifteen, her body rounding, eyes already trained west in the direction of Irkutsk, the nearest city, hours away beyond the Siberian horizon. Nina couldn’t imagine what a city looked like. All she’d ever seen was the collection of ramshackle huts that could barely be called a village; fishing boats silvery and pungent with fish scales; the endless spread of the lake. “Get a man,” Olga repeated, “because that’s the only way you’ll get out.”
“I’ll find a different way,” Nina said. Olga gave her a spiteful scratch in farewell and was gone. None of Nina’s siblings ever came back; it was everyone for themselves, and she didn’t miss them until the last brother left, and it was just her and her father. “Little rusalka bitch”—he slung Nina around the hut as she hissed and scratched at the huge hand tangled in her wild hair—“I should give you back to the lake.” He didn’t frighten Nina much. Weren’t all fathers like hers? He loomed as large in her world as the lake. In a way, he was the lake. The villagers sometimes called the lake “the Old Man.” One Old Man stretched blue and rippling on the doorstep, and the other old man banged her around the hut.
He wasn’t always wild. In mellow moods he sang old songs of Father Frost and Baba Yaga, stropping the straight razor that always swung at his belt. In those moods he’d show Nina how to tan a pelt from the seals he shot with the ancient rifle over the door; took her hunting with him and taught her how to move over the snow in perfect silence. Then he didn’t call her a rusalka; he tugged her ear and called her a little huntress. “If I teach you anything,” he whispered, “let it be how to move through the world without making a sound, Nina Borisovna. If they can’t hear you coming, they’ll never lay hands on you. They haven’t caught me yet.”
“Who, Papa?”
“Stalin’s men,” he spat. “The ones who stand you against a wall and shoot you for saying the truth—that Comrade Stalin is a lying, murdering pig who shits on the common man. They kill you for saying things like that, but only if they can find you. So keep silent feet and they’ll never hunt you down. You’ll hunt them down instead.”
He’d go on like that for hours, until Nina dozed off. Comrade Stalin is a Georgian swine, Comrade Stalin is a murdering sack of shit. “Stop him saying those things,” the old women who bartered clothes whispered to Nina when she came to trade. “We’re not so far out on the edge of the world that the wrong ears can’t hear us. That father of yours will get himself shot, and his neighbors.”
“He says the tsar was a murdering sack of shit too,” Nina pointed out. “And Jews, and the natives, and any seal hunters who leave carcasses on our section of shore. He thinks everything and everyone is shit.”
“It’s different to say it about Comrade Stalin!”
Nina shrugged. She wasn’t afraid of anything. It was another curse in the Markov family; none of them feared blood or darkness or even the legend of Baba Yaga hiding in the trees. “Baba Yaga is afraid of me,” Nina said to another village child when they were scrapping ferociously over a broken doll. “You’d better be afraid of me too.” She got the doll, thrust at her by the child’s mother who crossed herself in the old way, the way the people did before they learned that religion was the opiate of the masses.
“Fearlessness, heh,” Nina’s father said when he heard. “It’s why my children will all die before me. You fear nothing, you get stupid. It’s better to fear one thing, Nina Borisovna. Put all the terror into that, and it leaves you just careful enough.”
Nina looked at her father wonderingly. He was so enormous, wild as a wolf; she could not imagine him afraid of anything. “What’s your fear, Papa?”
He put his lips to her ear. “Comrade Stalin. Why else live on a lake the size of the sea, as far east in the world as you can go before falling off?”
“What’s as far west as you can go before falling off?” The sun went west to die, and most of the world was west of here, but beyond that Nina hardly knew. There was only one schoolmaster in the village, and he was almost as ignorant as the children he taught. “What’s all the way west?”
“America?” Nina’s father shrugged. “Godless devils. Worse than Stalin. Stay clear of Americans.”
“They’ll never catch me.” Tapping her toes. “Silent feet.”
He toasted that with a swallow of vodka and one of his rare knife-edged smiles. A good day. His good days always came back to bad ones, but that never bothered her because she was fast and silent and feared nothing, and she could always keep out of reach.