“I want something twice the size. I want printing assistants, I want other photographers to share it with.” Jordan slipped out of her shoes. “There are so many things I want.”
“I’d tell you I’d give them to you, but you want to earn them.” Tony leaned against the wall. “Go ahead, get to work.”
“I start working, I lose track of time,” she warned.
“I’ve got time. Nina’s taking over a shift of work from Ian, and he’s hogging our only telephone. I’ve got nothing to do but watch you.” Tony linked his hands behind his head. “And you are an unbelievably tempting sight when you are lost in work.”
“Really, now.” Jordan turned for the scrap of yarn she used to keep her hair out of her face. Lifting her hair off her neck, she felt his eyes on her nape like a kiss and looked back over one shoulder with a smile. “It’s dull, watching film get developed. You’ll be bored to tears.”
“You nibble your lower lip when you’re concentrating,” Tony replied. “I can be happy for hours watching you do that.”
“You’re a charming liar, Tony Rodomovsky.”
His smile faded. “I try not to be.”
Part of Jordan wanted to cross the floor and drag his head down to hers on the spot. Part of her was enjoying the rising anticipation too much to hurry. “Well, let’s see how well I can work with someone watching and thinking impure thoughts.”
His grin returned. “Very impure thoughts.”
She switched on the red safelight, pulled out her film, and got started, happily conscious of his eyes. Lifting the prints out and clipping them to the line one by one, she stood back.
“Verdict?” Tony asked behind her.
“That one, maybe. Possibly that one.” Pointing. “I need to enlarge it, focus on just the hands against the propeller blade.”
He wrapped his arms around her waist from behind, looking at the prints over her shoulder. “How do you know?”
“How does anyone know how to do anything?” Jordan caught her breath as his jaw scraped the side of her neck. “Classes. Practice. Years of hard work.”
He nipped her earlobe. “Fair enough.”
She tilted her head back against his. “Tell me a secret.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re in the dark, and people trade secrets in the dark.”
“You first.”
“I sometimes call myself J. Bryde. It’s the name I want for my byline, but I talk to her like she’s real, sometimes. The famous J. Bryde who travels the world with a camera and a revolver, men and Pulitzer Prizes falling at her feet.”
“I’m no Pulitzer, but I’ll fall at your feet.”
He kissed the other side of her neck, and Jordan reached up to slide her hand through his soft hair.
“Your turn. What’s your secret?”
He was still for a while, chin resting on her shoulder, arms tight around her waist. “There’s one I want to tell you,” he said slowly, “and can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Not mine to tell. Not yet.”
“You have a wife and six children in Queens?”
“No wife. No girlfriends. No kids. That I promise.”
“Prison record? Warrant out for your arrest?”
“No.”
“All right, then.” Jordan might usually have been curious, but in the dizzying warmth of this red-lit room, she didn’t care. She wasn’t bringing Tony home for inspection as a future husband to trot out his credentials. He could keep as many secrets as he liked; she had a few of her own. “Just tell me a secret then. If not that one.”
“I’m Jewish,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yes. Want me to leave?”
Jordan reached behind her and swatted him. “No!”
His voice had a guarded wariness. “Some people don’t like hearing it.”
“Was there a girl who didn’t like hearing it?” Jordan guessed.
“A girl in England I thought was important for a while. She stopped returning my calls after I told her my mother’s mother was a Jew off the boat from Kraków.” A shrug. “I was raised Catholic, but one-fourth part Jewish is enough for plenty of people.”
Jordan leaned back against him, the warm arms around her waist. “You’re Tony Rodomovsky. I like all your parts . . . and don’t you dare make that into a smutty joke.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” They stood a moment, entwined and silent, then Tony kissed the slope of her shoulder and stood back. “You’ve got one more roll to develop.”
“Yes,” she managed to say.
The air had thickened. Jordan ran the second roll through, knowing she wasn’t doing her usual meticulous job, not caring. She clipped her prints up and cleaned away her chemicals, feeling his gaze redoubled.
“Finished?” came Tony’s voice behind her.
She shoved the last of the trays aside, turned around to meet his gaze, and felt the tilting sensation of utterly giving in. Not to stop and ask Is this wise? but to think I don’t care and seize it. “Come here, you.”
“Thank God. Another roll would have killed me.” He came toward her in the red light, catching the end of the yarn tying back her hair and tugging it slowly free. She’d abandoned the Rita Hayworth pin curls long ago; Jordan felt her loosened hair slip straight and easy through his fingers.
“I’m going to New York in the fall,” she said, getting it out before the talking stopped altogether. “Until then, I’m going to be working like a dog in this darkroom and looking after my sister—and hopefully, having a mad, passionate fling with you.” Winding her arms around Tony’s neck, she looked him in the eye. He had eyes to drown in. “How does that sound?”
His voice was rough. “Sounds like heaven.”
Their mouths crashed together in the red glow of the safelight, hands pulling at buttons, shirttails tugging out of waistbands. Jordan reached behind, hoisted herself up to sit on the worktable, pulling him with her. Tony’s shirt landed on the floor, then Jordan’s blouse. “I always meant to put a cot in here for the nights I work late and get tired . . .” Jordan murmured between kisses. “I never got around to it.”
“That is a serious oversight,” he agreed, disposing of her brassiere and tossing her on her back.
“Do you—” Jordan stopped, gasped. He was kissing his way very slowly down the line of her ribs, and it was impeding her ability to speak. She’d had no idea the skin over her ribs was that sensitive. Then again, she’d never dated any male in her life, Garrett included, who had bothered paying attention to it. “Do you have any—”
“In my pocket.” She felt Tony smile against her navel. “I’ve got no desire to be a daddy just yet.”
“Good. Hurry up—” Reaching up to tug him closer.
“Nope.” He pinned her wrists flat, giving that grin that made her stomach flip. “You had hours to work, J. Bryde. My turn.”
Chapter 43
Ian
August 1950
Boston
Five addresses, and nothing?” Fritz Bauer’s cigarette rasp growled in Ian’s ear across the telephone line.
“Not die J?gerin, anyway.” Ian would have bet good money all five of the men who had answered his knock and listened to his “moving to the neighborhood” story had a war record worth hiding. “Nina managed to get snaps with a little Kodak, pretending to take pictures of the neighborhood, getting our fellows at the edge of the frame. Relatively clear shots—can you do some matching work with your files, see if we can find names to go with the faces? If they’re identifiable war criminals—”
“What did I tell you about fighting an extradition battle in the United States, Graham?”
“Someone has to fight it,” Ian said with a grim smile. “I’ll send you the packet. I’m for Pennsylvania tomorrow.”
Sixth address on the list, and the longest drive so far; more than six hours. If die J?gerin wasn’t there, their last chance was the address in Florida. Let her be in Pennsylvania, Ian prayed. He wasn’t sure the overstretched budget could take any more road trips. The reason they were now into August—August!—with still two addresses left to check was because between the telephone, the rent, and the drives to the first five addresses, they had to wait for the next month of Ian’s annuity to come in. A search for a murderess halts dead in its tracks for the want of ten more dollars in the bank account.
“Is it my imagination,” he mused to Nina as they crossed the Pennsylvania state line, “or did Tony seem a trifle keen to see us on the road today?”
“He’s getting laid,” Nina said, matter-of-fact.
“Bloody hell,” Ian said, thinking of his partner and Jordan McBride.
“You’re shocked?” His wife sounded amused. “You think he should marry her first?”
“No, I’m no pot to go calling kettles black.” He’d spent years in war zones where every day you survived meant a night seeing what you could drink and who you could take to bed, no one giving any thought to propriety or marriage. “But Tony had better not break that girl’s heart,” he added ominously.
“You like her.”