Kitabı oku: «The Huntress»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for The Huntress

Dedication

Prologue

Part I

Chapter 1: Jordan

Chapter 2: Ian

Chapter 3: Nina

Chapter 4: Jordan

Chapter 5: Ian

Chapter 6: Nina

Chapter 7: Jordan

Chapter 8: Ian

Chapter 9: Nina

Chapter 10: Jordan

Chapter 11: Ian

Chapter 12: Nina

Chapter 13: Jordan

Chapter 14: Ian

Chapter 15: Nina

Chapter 16: Jordan

Chapter 17: Ian

Chapter 18: Nina

Chapter 19: Jordan

Chapter 20: Ian

Part II

Chapter 21: Nina

Chapter 22: Jordan

Chapter 23: Ian

Chapter 24: Nina

Chapter 25: Jordan

Chapter 26: Ian

Chapter 27: Nina

Chapter 28: Jordan

Chapter 29: Ian

Chapter 30: Nina

Chapter 31: Jordan

Chapter 32: Ian

Chapter 33: Jordan

Chapter 34: Nina

Chapter 35: Ian

Chapter 36: Jordan

Chapter 37: Ian

Chapter 38: Nina

Chapter 39: Jordan

Chapter 40: Ian

Chapter 41: Nina

Chapter 42: Jordan

Chapter 43: Ian

Chapter 44: Nina

Chapter 45: Jordan

Chapter 46: Ian

Chapter 47: Jordan

Chapter 48: Ian

Part III

Chapter 49: Jordan

Chapter 50: Ian

Chapter 51: Jordan

Chapter 52: Ian

Chapter 53: Nina

Chapter 54: Ian

Chapter 55: Jordan

Chapter 56: Nina

Chapter 57: Ian

Chapter 58: Jordan

Chapter 59: Ian

Epilogue: Nina

Author’s Note

Reading Group Questions

Further Reading

About the Author

Also by Kate Quinn

About the Publisher

Prologue

Autumn 1945

Altaussee, Austria

She was not used to being hunted.

The lake stretched slate blue, glittering. The woman gazed over it, hands lying loose in her lap. A folded newspaper sat beside her on the bench. The headlines all trumpeted arrests, deaths, forthcoming trials. The trials would be held in Nuremberg, it seemed. She had never been to Nuremberg, but she knew the men who would be tried there. Some she knew by name only, others had touched champagne flutes to hers in friendship. They were all doomed. Crimes against peace. Crimes against humanity. War crimes.

By what law? she wanted to scream, beating her fists against the injustice of it. By what right? But the war was over, and the victors had won the right to decide what was a crime and what was not. What was humanity, and what was not.

It was humanity, she thought, what I did. It was mercy. But the victors would never accept that. They would pass judgment at Nuremberg and forever after, decreeing what acts committed in a lawful past would put a man’s head in a noose.

Or a woman’s.

She touched her own throat.

Run, she thought. If they find you, if they realize what you’ve done, they will lay a rope around your neck.

But where was there to go in this world that had taken everything she loved? This world of hunting wolves. She used to be the hunter, and now she was the prey.

So hide, she thought. Hide in the shadows until they pass you by.

She rose, walking aimlessly along the lake. It reminded her painfully of Lake Rusalka, her haven in Poland, now ruined and lost to her. She made herself keep moving, putting one foot after the other. She did not know where she was going, only that she refused to huddle here paralyzed by fear until she was scooped onto the scales of their false justice. Step by step the resolve hardened inside her.

Run.

Hide.

Or die.

THE HUNTRESS

BY IAN GRAHAM

APRIL 1946

SIX SHOTS.

She fired six times on the shore of Lake Rusalka, not attempting to hide what she did. Why would she? Hitler’s dream of empire had yet to crumble and send her fleeing for the shadows. That night under a Polish moon, she could do whatever she wanted—and she murdered six souls in cold blood.

Six shots, six bullets, six bodies falling into the dark water of the lake.

They had been hiding by the water, shivering, eyes huge with fear—escapees from one of the eastbound trains, perhaps, or survivors fleeing one of the region’s periodic purges. The dark-haired woman found them, comforted them, told them they were safe. She took them into her house by the lake and fed them a meal, smiling.

Then she led them back outside—and killed them.

Perhaps she lingered there, admiring the moon on the water, smelling gun smoke.

That nighttime slaughter of six at the height of the war was only one of her crimes. There were others. The hunting of Polish laborers through dense woods as a party game. The murder, near the war’s end, of a young English prisoner of war escaped from his stalag. Who knows what other crimes lie on her conscience?

They called her die Jägerin—the Huntress. She was the young mistress of an SS officer in German-occupied Poland, the hostess of grand parties on the lake, a keen shot. Perhaps she was the rusalka the lake was named for—a lethal, malevolent water spirit.

I think of her as I sit among the ranks of journalists in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, watching the war crimes trials grind on. The wheel of justice turns; the gray-faced men in the defendants’ box will fall beneath it. But what about the smaller fish, who escape into the shadows as we aim our brilliant lights on this courtroom? What about the Huntress? She vanished at the war’s end. She was not worth pursuing—a woman with the blood of only a dozen or so on her hands, when there were the murderers of millions to be found. There were many like her—small fish, not worth catching.

Where will they go?

Where did she go?

And will anyone take up the hunt?

PART I

Chapter 1
JORDAN

April 1946

Selkie Lake, three hours west of Boston

Who is she, Dad?”

Jordan McBride had timed the question perfectly: her father jerked in surprise midcast, sending his fishing line flying not into the lake, but into the branch of the overhanging maple. Jordan’s camera went click as his face settled into comic dismay. She laughed as her father said three or four words he then told her to forget.

“Yes, sir.” She’d heard all his curse words before, of course. You did, when you were the only daughter of a widowed father who took you fishing on fine spring weekends instead of the son he didn’t have. Jordan’s father rose from the end of the little dock and tugged his fishing line free. Jordan raised the Leica for another shot of his dark silhouette, framed against the feathery movement of trees and water. She’d play with the image in the darkroom later, see if she could get a blurred effect on the leaves so they seemed like they were still moving in the photograph …

“Come on, Dad,” she prompted. “Let’s hear about the mystery woman.”

He adjusted his faded Red Sox cap. “What mystery woman?”

“The one your clerk tells me you’ve been taking out to dinner, those nights you said you were working late.” Jordan held her breath, hoping. She couldn’t remember the last time her father had been on a date. Ladies were always fluttering their gloved fingers at him after Mass on the rare occasions he and Jordan went to church, but to Jordan’s disappointment he never seemed interested.

“It’s nothing, really …” He hemmed and hawed, but Jordan wasn’t fooled for a minute. She and her father looked alike; she’d taken enough photographs to see the resemblance: straight noses, level brows, dark blond hair cut close under her father’s cap and spilling out under Jordan’s in a careless ponytail. They were even the same height now that she was nearly eighteen; medium for him and tall for a girl—but far beyond physical resemblance, Jordan knew her father. It had just been the two of them since she was seven years old and her mother died, and she knew when Dan McBride was working up to tell her something important.

“Dad,” she broke in sternly. “Spill.”

“She’s a widow,” her father said at last. To Jordan’s delight, he was blushing. “Mrs. Weber first came to the shop three months ago.” During the week her father stood three-piece-suited and knowledgeable behind the counter of McBride’s Antiques off Newbury Street. “She’d just come to Boston, selling her jewelry to get by. A few gold chains and lockets, nothing unusual, but she had a string of gray pearls, a beautiful piece. She held herself together until then, but she started crying when it came time to part with the pearls.”

“Let me guess. You gave them back, very gallantly, then padded your price on her other pieces so she still walked out with the same amount.”

He reeled in his fishing line. “She also walked out with an invitation for dinner.”

“Look at you, Errol Flynn! Go on—”

“She’s Austrian, but studied English at school so she speaks it almost perfectly. Her husband died in ’43, fighting—”

“Which side?”

“That kind of thing shouldn’t matter anymore, Jordan. The war’s over.” He fixed a new lure. “She got papers to come to Boston, but times have been hard. She has a little girl—”

“She does?”

“Ruth. Four years old, hardly says a word. Sweet little thing.” Giving a tweak of Jordan’s cap. “You’ll love her.”

“So it’s already serious, then,” Jordan said, startled. Her father wouldn’t have met this woman’s child if he wasn’t serious. But how serious …?

“Mrs. Weber’s a fine woman.” He cast his line out. “I want her to come to supper at the house next week, her and Ruth. All four of us.”

He gave her a wary look, as if waiting for her to bristle. And part of her did just a tiny bit, Jordan admitted. Ten years of having it be just her and her dad, being pals with him the way so few of her girlfriends were with their fathers … But against that reflexive twinge of possessiveness was relief. He needed a woman in his life; Jordan had known that for years. Someone to talk to; someone to scold him into eating his spinach. Someone else to lean on.

If he has someone else in his life, maybe he won’t be so stubborn about not letting you go to college, the thought whispered, but Jordan shoved it back. This was the moment to be happy for her father, not hoping things might change for her own benefit. Besides, she was happy for him. She’d been taking photographs of him for years, and no matter how wide he smiled at the lens, the lines of his face when they came up ghostlike out of the developing fluid said lonely, lonely, lonely.

“I can’t wait to meet her,” Jordan said sincerely.

“She’ll bring Ruth next Wednesday, six o’clock.” He looked innocent. “Invite Garrett, if you want. He’s family too, or he could be—”

“Subtle as a train wreck, Dad.”

“He’s a fine boy. And his parents adore you.”

“He’s looking ahead toward college now. He might not have much time for high school girlfriends. Though you could send me to BU with him,” Jordan began. “Their photography courses—”

“Nice try, missy.” Her father looked out over the lake. “The fish aren’t biting.” And neither was he.

Taro, Jordan’s black Labrador, raised her muzzle from where she’d been sunning on the dock as Jordan and her dad walked back to shore. Jordan snapped a shot of their side-by-side silhouettes thrown across the water-warped wood, wondering what four silhouettes would look like. Please, Jordan prayed, thinking of the unknown Mrs. Weber, please let me like you.

A SLIM HAND extended as blue eyes smiled. “How lovely to meet you at last.”

Jordan shook hands with the woman her father had just ushered into the sitting room. Anneliese Weber was small and slender, dark hair swept into a glossy knot at her nape, a string of gray pearls her only jewelry. A dark floral dress, darned but spotless gloves, quiet elegance with touches of wear and tear. Her face was young—she was twenty-eight, according to Jordan’s dad—but her eyes looked older. Of course they did; she was a war widow with a young child, starting over in a new country.

“Very pleased to meet you,” Jordan said sincerely. “This must be Ruth!” The child at Anneliese Weber’s side was darling; blond pigtails and a blue coat and a grave expression. Jordan extended a hand, but Ruth shrank back.

“She’s shy,” Anneliese apologized. Her voice was clear and low, almost no trace of a German accent. Just a little softness on the V’s. “Ruth’s world has been very unsettled.”

“I didn’t like strangers at your age either,” Jordan told Ruth. Not true, really, but something about Ruth’s wary little face made Jordan long to put her at ease. She also longed to take Ruth’s picture—those round cheeks and blond braids would just eat up the lens. Jordan’s father took the coats, and Jordan dashed into the kitchen to check the meatloaf. By the time she came out, whipping off the towel she’d tucked around her waist to protect her green Sunday taffeta, her father had poured drinks. Ruth sat on the couch with a glass of milk, as Anneliese Weber sipped sherry and surveyed the room. “A lovely home. You’re young to keep house for your father, Jordan, but you do it very well.”

Nice of her to lie, Jordan approved. The McBride house always looked mussed: a narrow brownstone three stories up and down on the lace-curtain side of South Boston; the stairs steep, the couches worn and comfortable, the rugs always skidding askew. Anneliese Weber did not seem like the type who approved of anything being askew, with her spine ramrod straight and every hair in place, but she looked around the room with approval. “Did you take this?” She gestured to a photograph of the Boston Common, mist wrapped and tilted at an angle that made everything look otherworldly, a dream landscape. “Your father tells me you are quite a … What is the word? A snapper?”

“Yes.” Jordan grinned. “Can I take your picture later?”

“Don’t encourage her.” Jordan’s dad guided Anneliese to the couch with a reverent touch to the small of her back, smiling. “Jordan already spends too much time staring through a lens.”

“Better than staring at a mirror or at a film screen,” Anneliese replied unexpectedly. “Young girls should have more on their minds than lipstick and giggling, or they will grow from silly girls to sillier women. You take classes for it—picture-taking?”

“Wherever I can.” Since Jordan was fourteen she’d been signing up for whatever photography classes she could pay for out of her allowance, and sneaking into college courses wherever she could find a professor willing to wink at the presence of a knock-kneed junior high schooler lurking in the back row. “I take classes, I study on my own, I practice—”

“One has to be serious about something in order to be good at it,” Anneliese said, approving. A warm glow started in Jordan’s chest. Serious. Good. Her father never saw Jordan’s photography that way. “Messing about with a camera,” he’d say, shaking his head. “Well, you’ll grow out of it.” I’m not going to grow out of it, Jordan had replied at fifteen. I’m going to be the next Margaret Bourke-White.

Margaret who? he’d responded, laughing. He laughed nicely, indulgently—but he’d still laughed.

Anneliese didn’t laugh. She looked at Jordan’s photograph and nodded approval. For the first time Jordan allowed herself to think the word: Stepmother …?

At the dining room table Jordan had set with the Sunday china, Anneliese asked questions about the antiques shop as Jordan’s father heaped her plate with the choicest cuts of everything. “I know an excellent treatment to make colored glass shine,” she said as he talked about a set of Tiffany lamps acquired at an estate sale. She quietly corrected Ruth’s grip on her fork as she listened to Jordan talk about her school’s forthcoming dance. “Surely you have a date, a pretty girl like you.”

“Garrett Byrne,” Jordan’s father said, forestalling her. “A nice young man, joined up to be a pilot at the end of the war. He never saw combat, though. Got a medical discharge when he broke his leg during training. You’ll meet him Sunday, if you’d care to accompany us to Mass.”

“I would like that. I’ve been trying so hard to make friends in Boston. You go every week?”

“Of course.”

Jordan coughed into her napkin. She and her father hardly went to Mass more than twice a year, Easter and Christmas, but now he sat there at the head of the table positively radiating piety. Anneliese smiled, also radiating piety, and Jordan mused about courting couples on their best behavior. She saw it every day in the halls at school, and apparently the older generation was no different. Maybe there was a photo-essay in that: a series of comparison photographs, courting couples of all ages, highlighting the similarities that transcended age. With the right titles and captions, it might make a piece strong enough to submit to a magazine or newspaper …

Plates were cleared, coffee brought out. Jordan cut the Boston cream pie Anneliese had brought. “Though I don’t know why you call it pie,” she said, blue eyes sparkling. “It’s cake, and don’t tell an Austrian any differently. We know cake, in Austria.”

“You speak such good English,” Jordan ventured. She couldn’t tell yet about Ruth, who hadn’t spoken a word.

“I studied it at school. And my husband spoke it for business, so I practiced with him.”

Jordan wanted to ask how Anneliese had lost her husband, but her father shot her a warning glance. He’d already given clear instructions: “You’re not to ask Mrs. Weber about the war, or her husband. She’s made it quite clear it was a painful time.”

“But don’t we want to know everything about her?” Much as Jordan wanted her father to have someone special in his life, it still had to be the right someone. “Why is that wrong?”

“Because people aren’t obliged to drag out their old hurts or dirty laundry just because of your need to know,” he answered. “No one wants to talk about a war after they’ve lived through it, Jordan McBride. So don’t go prying where you’ll be hurting feelings, and no wild stories either.”

Jordan had flushed then. Wild stories—that was a bad habit going back ten years. When her barely remembered mother had gone into the hospital, seven-year-old Jordan had been packed off to stay with some well-meaning dimwit of an aunt who told her, Your mother’s gone away, and then wouldn’t say where. So Jordan made up a different story every day: She’s gone to get milk. She’s gone to get her hair done. Then when her mother still didn’t come back, more fanciful stories: She’s gone to a ball like Cinderella. She’s gone to California to be a movie star. Until her father came home weeping to say, Your mother’s gone to the angels, and Jordan didn’t understand why his story got to be the real one, so she kept making up her own. “Jordan and her wild stories,” her teacher had joked. “Why does she do it?”

Jordan could have said, Because no one told me the truth. Because no one told me “She’s sick and you can’t see her because you might catch it” so I made up something better to fill the gap.

Maybe that was why she’d latched so eagerly onto her first Kodak at age nine. There weren’t gaps in photographs; there wasn’t any need to fill them up with stories. If she had a camera, she didn’t need to tell stories; she could tell the truth.

Taro lolloped into the dining room, breaking Jordan’s thoughts. For the first time, she saw little Ruth grow animated. “Hund!”

“English, Ruth,” her mother said, but Ruth was already on the floor holding out shy hands.

“Hund,” she whispered, stroking Taro’s ears. Jordan’s heart melted completely. “I’m getting a picture,” she said, slipping out of her own chair and going for the Leica on the hall table. When she came back in and started clicking, Ruth had Taro piled over her lap as Anneliese spoke softly. “If Ruth seems very quiet to you, or flinches, or acts odd—well, you should know that in Altaussee before we left Austria, we had a very upsetting encounter by the lake. A refugee woman who tried to rob us … It’s made Ruth wary and strange around new people.” That seemed to be all Anneliese was going to say. Jordan stamped down her questions before her dad could shoot her another glance. He was perfectly correct, after all, when he pointed out that Anneliese Weber wasn’t the only person who didn’t care to discuss the war—no one did now. First everyone had celebrated, and now all anyone wanted to do was forget. Jordan found it hard to believe that at this time last year there had still been wartime news and stars hanging in windows; victory gardens and boys at school talking about whether it would all be over before they got old enough to join up.

Anneliese smiled down at her daughter. “The dog likes you, Ruth.”

“Her name is Taro,” said Jordan, clicking away: the little girl with her small freckled nose against the dog’s damp one.

“Taro.” Anneliese tasted the word. “What kind of name is that?”

“After Gerda Taro—the first female photographer to cover the front lines of a war.”

“And she died doing it, so that’s enough about women taking pictures in war zones,” Jordan’s father said.

“Let me get a few shots of you two—”

“Please don’t.” Anneliese turned her face away with a camerashy frown. “I hate having my picture taken.”

“Just family snaps,” Jordan reassured. She liked close-camera candids over formal shots. Tripods and lighting equipment made camera-shy people even more self-conscious; they put a mask on and then the photograph wasn’t real. She preferred to hover unobtrusively until people forgot she was there, until they forgot the mask and relaxed into who they really were. There was no hiding the real you from a camera.

Anneliese rose to clear the table, Jordan’s father assisting with the heavy dishes as Jordan quietly moved and snapped. Ruth was coaxed away from Taro to carry the butter dish, and Dad was soon describing their hunting cabin. “It’s a lovely spot; my father built it. Jordan likes to snap the lake; I go for the fishing and the odd bit of shooting.”

Anneliese half turned away from the sink. “You hunt?”

Jordan’s father looked anxious. “Some women hate the noise and the mess—”

“Not at all …”

Jordan put down her camera and went to help with the washing up. Anneliese offered to dry, but Jordan turned her down so she’d have the chance to admire Daniel McBride’s deftness with a dish towel. No woman could possibly fail to be charmed by a man who could properly dry Spode.

Anneliese said good-bye soon after. Jordan’s father gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek, but his arm stole around her waist for just an instant, making Jordan smile. Anneliese then squeezed Jordan’s hand warmly, and Ruth offered her fingers this time, well slimed by Taro’s affectionate tongue. They descended the steep brownstone steps to the cool spring night, and Jordan’s father shut the door. Before he could ask, Jordan came and kissed his cheek. “I like her, Dad. I really do.”

BUT SHE COULDN’T SLEEP.

The tall narrow brownstone had a small basement with its own private entrance to the street. Jordan had to walk outside the house and then down the very steep outer stairs to the tiny door set below ground level under the stoop, but the privacy and the lack of light made it perfect for her purposes. When she was fourteen and learning to print her own negatives, her dad had allowed her to sweep out the rubbish and make herself a proper darkroom.

Jordan paused on the threshold, inhaling the familiar scents of chemicals and equipment. This was her room, much more than the cozy bedroom upstairs with its narrow bed and the desk for homework. This room was where she ceased being Jordan McBride with her messy ponytail and bag of schoolbooks, and became J. Bryde, professional photographer. J. Bryde was going to be her byline someday, when she became a professional like her idols whose faces looked down from the darkroom wall: Margaret Bourke-White kneeling with her camera on a massive decorative eagle’s head sixty-one floors up on the Chrysler Building, impervious to the height; Gerda Taro crouched behind a Spanish soldier against a heap of rubble, peering for the best angle.

Normally Jordan would have taken a moment to salute her heroines, but something was gnawing at her. She wasn’t sure what, so she just started laying out trays and chemicals with the speed of long practice.

She loaded the negatives for the pictures she’d taken at dinner, running the images onto the paper one at a time. Sliding them through the developer under the red glow of the safelight, Jordan watched the images come up through the fluid one by one, like ghosts. Ruth playing with the dog; Anneliese Weber turning away from the camera; Anneliese from behind, doing dishes … Jordan rotated the sheets through the stop bath, the fixer bath, gently agitating the liquids in their trays, transferring the prints to the little sink for washing, then clipping them up on the clothesline to dry. She walked down the line one by one.

“What are you looking for?” Jordan wondered aloud. She had a habit of talking to herself down here all alone; she wished she had a fellow photographer to share darkroom conversation with, ideally some smoldering Hungarian war correspondent. She walked the line of prints again. “What caught your eye, J. Bryde?” It wasn’t the first time she’d had this niggling feeling about a shot before it had even been printed. It was like the camera saw something she didn’t, nagging her until she saw it with her own eyes and not just through the lens.

Half the time, of course, that feeling was completely off base.

“That one,” Jordan heard herself saying. The one of Anneliese Weber by the sink, half turned toward the lens. Jordan squinted, but the image was too small. She ran it again, enlarging it. Midnight. She didn’t care, working away until the enlarged print hung on the line.

Jordan stood back, hands on hips, staring at it. “Objectively,” she said aloud, “that is one of the best shots you’ve ever taken.” The click of the Leica had captured Anneliese as she stood framed by the arch of the kitchen window, half turned toward the camera for once rather than away from it, the contrast between her dark hair and pale face beautifully rendered. But …

“Subjectively,” Jordan continued, “that shot is goddamn spooky.” She didn’t often swear—her father didn’t tolerate bad language—but if there was ever an occasion for a goddamn, this was it.

It was the expression on the Austrian woman’s face. Jordan had sat across from that face all evening, and she’d seen nothing but pleasant interest and calm dignity, but in the photograph a different woman emerged. She wore a smile, but not a pleasant one. The eyes were narrowed, and her hands around the dish towel suddenly clenched in some reflexive death grip. All evening Anneliese had looked gentle and frail and ladylike, but she didn’t look like that here. Here, she looked lovely and unsettling and—

“Cruel.” The word popped out of Jordan’s mouth before she knew she was thinking it, and she shook her head. Because anyone could take an unflattering photo: unlucky timing or lighting caught you midblink and you looked sly, caught you with your mouth open and you looked half-witted. Shoot Hedy Lamarr the wrong way, and she turned from Snow White to the Wicked Queen. Cameras didn’t lie, but they could certainly mislead.

Jordan reached for the clothespins clipping the print, meeting that razor-edged gaze. “What were you saying, right at this minute?” Her father had been talking about the cabin …

You hunt?

Some women hate the noise and the mess—

Not at all …

Jordan shook her head again, moving to throw the print away. Her dad wouldn’t like it; he’d think she was twisting the image to see something that wasn’t there. Jordan and her wild stories.

But I didn’t twist it, Jordan thought. That’s how she looked.

She hesitated, then slipped the photograph into a drawer. Even if it was misleading, it was still one of the best pictures she’d ever taken. She couldn’t quite bring herself to throw it away.

Chapter 2
IAN

April 1950

Cologne, Germany

About half the time, they tried to run.

For a moment Ian Graham’s partner kept up with him, but though Tony was more than a decade younger than Ian he was half a head shorter, and Ian’s longer stride pulled him ahead toward their quarry: a middle-aged man in a gray suit dodging desperately around a German family heading away from the swimming beach with wet towels. Ian put on a burst of speed, feeling his hat blow away, not bothering to shout at the man to stop. They never stopped. They’d sprint to the end of the earth to get away from the things they’d done.

The puzzled German family had halted, staring. The mother had an armful of beach toys—a shovel, a red bucket brimming with wet sand. Veering, Ian snatched the bucket out of her hand with a shouted “Pardon me—,” slowed enough to aim, and slung it straight and hard at the running man’s feet. The man stumbled, staggered, lurched back into motion, and by then Tony blew past Ian and took the man down in a flying tackle. Ian skidded to a halt as the two men rolled over, feeling his own chest heave like a bellows. He retrieved the bucket and handed it back to the astonished German mother with a bow and a half smile. “Your servant, ma’am.” Turning back toward the prey, he saw the man curled on the path whimpering as Tony leaned over him.

“You’d better not have put a fist on him,” Ian warned his partner.

“The weight of his sins caught up to him, not my fist.” Tony Rodomovsky straightened: twenty-six years old with the olive-skinned, dark-eyed intensity of a European, and the untidy swagger of a Yank. Ian had first come across him after the war, a young sergeant with Polish-Hungarian blood and a Queens upbringing wearing the most carelessly ironed uniform Ian had ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on.

“Nice curveball with that bucket,” Tony went on cheerfully. “Don’t tell me you pitched for the Yankees.”

“Bowled against Eton in the house match in ’29.” Ian retrieved his battered fedora, cramming it down over dark hair that had been salted with gray since Omaha Beach. “You have it from here?”

Tony looked at the man on the ground. “What do you say, sir? Shall we continue the conversation we were having before I brought up a certain forest in Estonia and your various activities there, and you decided to practice your fifty-yard dash?”

The man began to cry, and Ian looked at the blue sparkle of the lake, fighting his usual sense of anticlimax. The man dissolving in tears on the ground had been an SS Sturmbannführer in Einsatzgruppe D, who had ordered the shooting of a hundred and fifty men in Estonia in 1941. More than that, Ian thought. Those eastern death squads had put hundreds of thousands in the ground in shallow trenches. But one hundred and fifty was what he had the documentation for in his office back in Vienna: testimony from a shaky-handed, gray-faced pair of survivors who had managed to flee. One hundred and fifty was enough to bring the man to trial, perhaps put a rope around a monster’s neck.

Moments like this should have been glorious, and they never were. The monsters always looked so ordinary and pathetic, in the flesh.

“I didn’t do it,” the man gulped through his tears. “Those things you said I did.”

Ian just looked at him.

“I only did what the others did. What I was ordered to do. It was legal—”

Ian took a knee beside the man, raising his chin with one finger. Waited until those red-rimmed eyes met his own. “I have no interest in your orders,” he said quietly. “I have no interest if it was legal at the time. I have no interest in your excuses. You’re a cringing soulless trigger-pulling lackey, and I will see you face a judge.”

The man flinched. Ian rose and turned away, swallowing the rage red and raw before it burst out of him and he beat the man to a pulp. It was always the damned line about orders that made him want to tear throats open. They all say it, don’t they? That was when he wanted to sink his hands around their throats and stare into their bewildered eyes as they died choking on their excuses.

Judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason … Ian let out a slow, controlled breath. But not me. Control was what separated men from beasts, and they were the beasts.

“Sit on him until the arrest,” he told Tony tersely, and he went back to their hotel to make a telephone call.

“Bauer,” a voice rasped.

Ian crooked the receiver to his right ear, the one that wasn’t faintly hearing-damaged from an unlucky air raid in Spain in ’37, and switched to German, which he knew still had a wintry British tang despite all his years abroad. “We got him.”

“Heh. I’ll start putting pressure on the state prosecutor in Bonn, push to put the Hurensohn on trial.”

“Put that prosecutor’s feet to the fire, Fritz. I want this son of a bitch in front of the hardest judge in Bonn.”

Fritz Bauer grunted. Ian envisioned his friend, sitting behind his desk in Braunschweig, puffs of gray hair around his balding head, smoking his perpetual cigarettes. He’d run from Germany to Denmark to Sweden during the war, steps ahead of having a yellow star slapped on his arm and being shipped east. He and Ian had met after the first of the Nuremberg trials—and a few years ago, when the official war crimes investigation teams were being shut down for lack of funding, and Ian had started his own operation with Tony, he’d turned to Bauer. “We find the guilty,” Ian proposed over a tumbler of scotch and half a pack of cigarettes, “and you see them prosecuted.”

“We won’t make friends,” Bauer had warned with a mirthless smile, and he was right. The man they’d caught today might see a prison cell for his crimes, he might get off with a slap, or he might never be tried at all. It was five years after the end of the war, and the world had moved on. Who cared anymore about punishing the guilty? “Let them alone,” a judge had advised Ian not long ago. “The Nazis are beaten and done. Worry about the Russkies now, not the Germans.”

“You worry about the next war,” Ian had replied evenly. “Someone has to sweep up the muck of the last one.”

“Who’s next on your list?” Bauer asked now over the telephone.

Die Jägerin, Ian thought. The huntress. But there were no leads to her whereabouts, not for years. “There’s a Sobibór guard I’m tracing. I’ll update his file when I get back to Vienna.”

“Your center is getting a reputation. Third arrest this year—”

“None of them big fish.” Eichmann, Mengele, Stangl—the bigger names were far beyond Ian’s limited reach, but that didn’t bother him much. He couldn’t put pressure on foreign governments, couldn’t fight massive deportation battles, but what he could do was search for the lesser war criminals gone to ground in Europe. And there were so many of them, clerks and camp guards and functionaries who had played their part in the great machine of death during the war. They couldn’t all be tried at Nuremberg; there hadn’t been the manpower, the money, or even the interest in anything so huge in scale. So a few were put on trial—however many would fit on the bench, in some cases, which Ian found starkly, darkly ironic—and the rest just went home. Returned to their families after the war, hung up their uniforms, perhaps took a new name or moved to a new town if they were cautious … but still just went back to Germany and pretended it had all never happened.

People asked Ian sometimes why he’d left the gritty glamour of a war correspondent’s work for this dogged, tedious slog after war criminals. A life spent chasing the next battle and the next story wherever it led, from Franco’s rise in Spain to the fall of the Maginot Line to everything that followed—hammering out a column on deadline while hunched under a tarp that barely kept off the beating desert sun, playing poker in a bombed-out hotel waiting for transport to arrive, sitting up to his shins in seawater and vomit as a landing craft crammed with green-faced soldiers neared a stretch of beach … Terror to tedium, tedium to terror, forever vibrating between both for the sake of a byline.

He’d traded all that for a tiny office in Vienna piled with lists; for endless interviews with cagey witnesses and grieving refugees; for no byline at all. “Why?” Tony had asked soon after they began working together, gesturing around the four walls of their grim office. “Why go to this, from that?”

Ian had given a brief, slanted smile. “Because it’s the same work, really. Telling the world that terrible things happened. But when I was hammering out columns during the war, what did all those words accomplish? Nothing.”

“Hey, I knew plenty of boys in the ranks who lived for your column. Said it was the only one out there besides Ernie Pyle’s that wrote for the dogface with boots on the ground and not the generals in tents.”

Ian shrugged. “If I’d bought it on a bombing run over Berlin when I went out with a Lancaster crew, or got torpedoed on the way back from Egypt, there’d have been a hundred other scribblers to fill my place. People want to read about war. But there’s no war now, and no one wants to hear about war criminals walking free.” Ian made the same gesture at the four walls of the office. “We don’t write headlines now, we make them, one arrest at a time. One grudging drop of newspaper ink at a time. And unlike all those columns I wrote about war, there aren’t too many people queuing up behind us to do this work. What we do here? We accomplish something a good deal more important than anything I ever managed to say with a byline. Because no one wants to hear what we have to say, and someone has to make them listen.”

“So why won’t you write up any of our catches?” Tony had shot back. “More people might listen if they see your byline front and center.”

“I’m done writing instead of doing.” Ian hadn’t written a word since the Nuremberg trials, even though he’d been a journalist since he was nineteen, a lanky boy storming out of his father’s house shouting he was going to damned well work for a living and not spend his life sipping scotch at the club and droning about how the country was going to the dogs. More than fifteen years spent over a typewriter, honing and stropping his prose until it could cut like a razor’s edge, and now Ian didn’t think he’d ever put his name on an article again.

He blinked, realizing how long he’d been woolgathering with the telephone pressed to his ear. “What was that, Fritz?”

“I said, three arrests in a year is something to celebrate,” Fritz Bauer repeated. “Get a drink and a good night’s sleep.”

“I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since the Blitz,” Ian joked, and rang off.

The nightmares that night were particularly bad. Ian dreamed of twisting parachutes tangled in black trees, waking with a muffled shout in the hotel room’s anonymous darkness. “No parachute,” he said, hardly hearing himself over the hammering of his own heart. “No parachute. No parachute.” He walked naked to the window, threw open the shutters to the night air, and lit a cigarette that tasted like a petrol can. He exhaled smoke, leaning against the sill to look out over a dark city. He was thirty-eight, he had chased two wars across half the globe, and he stood till dawn thinking in boundless rage-filled hunger of a woman standing on the shore of Lake Rusalka.

“YOU NEED TO get laid,” Tony advised.

Ian ignored him, typing up a quick report for Bauer on the typewriter he’d carried since running around the desert after Patton’s boys. They were back in Vienna, gray and bleak with its burned-out shell of the state opera house still bearing witness to the war’s passing, but a vast improvement on Cologne, which had been bombed to rubble and was still little more than a building site around a chain of lakes.

Tony balled up a sheet of foolscap and threw it at Ian. “Are you listening to me?”

“No.” Ian flung the ball back. “Chuck that in the bin, we haven’t got a secretary to pick up after you.” The Vienna Refugee Documentation Center on the Mariahilferstrasse didn’t have a lot of things. The war crimes investigation teams Ian had worked with just after the war had called for officers, drivers, interrogators, linguists, pathologists, photographers, typists, legal experts—a team of at least twenty, well appointed, well budgeted. (Not that the teams ever got all those things, but at least they tried.) The center here had only Tony, who acted as driver, interrogator, and linguist, and Ian, who took the mantle of typist, clerk, and very poor photographer. Ian’s annuity from his long-dead father barely covered rent and living expenses. Two men and two desks, and we expect to move mountains, Ian thought wryly.

“You’re brooding again. You always do when we make an arrest. You go off in a Blue Period like a goddamn Picasso.” Tony sorted through a stack of newspapers in German, French, English, and something Cyrillic Ian couldn’t read. “Take a night off. I’ve got a redhead in Ottakring, and she has a knockout roommate. Take her out, tell her a few stories about throwing back shots with Hemingway and Steinbeck after Paris was liberated—”

“It wasn’t nearly as picturesque as you make it sound.”

“So? Talk it up! You’ve got glamour, boss. Women love ’em tall, dark, and tragic. You’re six long-lean-and-mean feet of heroic war stories and unhappy past—”

“Oh, for God’s sake—”

“—all buttoned up behind English starch and a thousand-yard stare of you can’t possibly understand the things that haunt me. That’s absolute catnip for the ladies, believe me—”

“Are you finished?” Ian drew the sheet out of the typewriter, tipping his chair back on two legs. “Go through the mail, then pull the file on the Bormann assistant.”

“Fine, die a monk.”

“Why do I put up with you?” Ian wondered. “Feckless cretinous Yank …”

“Joyless Limey bastard,” Tony shot back, rummaging in the file cabinet. Ian hid a grin, knowing perfectly well why he put up with Tony. Ranging across three fronts of the war with a typewriter and notepad, Ian had met a thousand Tonys: achingly young men in rumpled uniforms, heading off into the mouth of the guns. American boys jammed on troopships and green with seasickness, English boys flying off in Hurricanes with a one in four chance of making it back … after a while Ian couldn’t bear to look at any of them too closely, knowing better than they did what their chances were of getting out alive. It had been just after the war ended that he met Tony, slouching along as an interpreter in the entourage of an American general who clearly wanted him court-martialed and shot for insubordination and slovenliness. Ian sympathized with the feeling now that Sergeant A. Rodomovsky worked for him and not the United States Army, but Tony was the first young soldier Ian had been able to befriend. He was brash, a practical joker, and a complete nuisance, but when Ian shook his hand for the first time, he’d been able to think, This one won’t die.

Unless I kill him, Ian thought now, next time he gets on my nerves. A distinct possibility.

He finished the report for Bauer and rose, stretching. “Get your earplugs,” he advised, reaching for his violin case.

“You’re aware you don’t have a future as a concert violinist?” Tony leafed through the stack of mail that had accumulated in their absence.

“I play poorly yet with great lack of feeling.” Ian brought the violin to his chin, starting a movement of Brahms. Playing helped him think, kept his hands busy as his brain sorted through the questions that rose with every new chase. Who are you, what did you do, and where would you go to get away from it? He was drawing out the last note as Tony let out a whistle.

“Boss,” he called over his shoulder, “I’ve got news.”

Ian lowered his bow. “New lead?”

“Yes.” Tony’s eyes sparked triumph. “Die Jägerin.”

A trapdoor opened in Ian’s stomach, a long drop over the bottomless pit of rage. He put the violin back in its case, slow controlled movements. “I didn’t give you that file.”

“It’s the one at the back of the drawer you look at when you think I’m not paying attention,” Tony said. “Believe me, I’ve read it.”

“Then you know it’s a cold trail. We know she was in Poznań as late as November ’44, but that’s all.” Ian felt excitement starting to war with caution. “So what did you find?”

Tony grinned. “A witness who saw her later than November ’44. After the war, in fact.”

“What?” Ian had been pulling out his file on the woman who was his personal obsession; he nearly dropped it. “Who? Someone from the Poznań region, or Frank’s staff?” It had been during the first Nuremberg trial that Ian caught die Jägerin’s scent, hearing a witness testify against Hans Frank—the governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, whom Ian would later (as one of the few journalists admitted to the execution room) watch swing from a rope for war crimes. In the middle of the information about the Jews Frank was shipping east, the clerk had testified about a certain visit to Poznań. One of the high-ranking SS officers had thrown a party for Frank out by Lake Rusalka, at a big ocher-colored house …

Ian, at that point, had already had a very good reason to be searching for the woman who had lived in that house. And the clerk on the witness stand had been a guest at that party, where the SS officer’s young mistress had played hostess.

“Who did you find?” Ian rapped out at Tony, mouth dry with sudden hope. “Someone who remembers her? A name, a bloody photograph—” It was the most frustrating dead end of this file: the clerk at Nuremberg had met the woman only once, and he’d been drunk through most of the party. He didn’t remember her name, and all he could describe was a young woman, dark haired, blue eyed. Difficult to track a woman without knowing anything more than her nickname and her coloring. “What did you find?”

“Stop cutting me off, dammit, and I’ll tell you.” Tony tapped the file. “Die Jägerin’s lover fled to Altaussee in ’45. No sign he took his mistress with him from Poznań—but now, it’s looking like he did. Because I’ve located a girl in Altaussee whose sister worked a few doors down from the same house where our huntress’s lover had holed up with the Eichmanns and the rest of that crowd in May ’45. I haven’t met the sister yet, but she apparently remembers a woman who looked like die Jägerin.”

“That’s all?” Ian’s burst of hope ebbed as he recalled the pretty little spa town on a blue-green lake below the Alps, a bolt-hole for any number of high-ranking Nazis as the war ended. By May ’45 it had been crawling with Americans making arrests. Some fugitives submitted to handcuffs, some managed to escape. Die Jägerin’s SS officer had died in a hail of bullets rather than be taken—and there had been no sign of his mistress. “I’ve already combed Altaussee looking for leads. Once I knew her lover had died there, I went looking—if she’d been there too, I would have found her trail.”

“Look, you probably came on like some Hound of Hell from the Spanish Inquisition, and everyone clammed up in terror. Subtlety is not your strong suit. You come on like a wrecking ball that went to Eton.”

“Harrow.”

“Same thing.” Tony fished for his cigarettes. “I’ve been doing some lighter digging. All that driving around Austria we did last December, looking for the Belsen guard who turned out to have gone to Argentina? I took weekends, went to Altaussee, asked questions. I’m good at that.”

He was. Tony could talk to anyone, usually in their native language. It was what made him good at this job, which so often hinged on information eased lightly out of the suspicious and the wary. “Why did you put in all this effort on your own time?” Ian asked. “A cold case—”

“Because it’s the case you want. She’s your white whale. All these bastards”—Tony waved a hand at the filing cabinets crammed with documentation on war criminals—“you want to nab them all, but the one you really want is her.”

He wasn’t wrong. Ian felt his fingers tighten on the edge of the desk. “White whale,” he managed to say, wryly. “Don’t tell me you’ve read Melville?”

“Of course not. Nobody’s read Moby-Dick; it just gets assigned by overzealous teachers. I went to a recruiter’s office the day after Pearl Harbor; that’s how I got out of reading Moby-Dick.” Tony shook out a cigarette, black eyes unblinking. “What I want to know is, why die Jägerin?”

“You’ve read her file,” Ian parried.

“Oh, she’s a nasty piece of work, I’m not arguing that. That business about the six refugees she killed after feeding them a meal—”

“Children,” Ian said quietly. “Six Polish children, somewhere between the ages of four and nine.”

Tony stopped in the act of lighting his cigarette, visibly sickened. “Your clipping just said refugees.”

“My editor considered the detail too gruesome to include in the article. But they were children, Tony.” That had been one of the harder articles Ian had ever forced himself to write. “The clerk at Frank’s trial said that, at the party where he met her, someone told the story about how she’d dispatched six children who had probably escaped being shipped east. An amusing little anecdote over hors d’oeuvres. They toasted her with champagne, calling her the huntress.”

“Goddamn,” Tony said, very softly.

Ian nodded, thinking not only of the six unknown children who had been her victims, but of two others. A fragile young woman in a hospital bed, all starved eyes and grief. A boy just seventeen years old, saying eagerly I told them I was twenty-one, I ship out next week! The woman and the boy, one gone now, the other dead. You did that, Ian thought to the nameless huntress who filled up his sleepless nights. You did that, you Nazi bitch.

Tony didn’t know about them, the girl and the young soldier. Even now, years later, Ian found it difficult. He started marshaling the words, but Tony was already scribbling an address, moving from discussion to action. For now, Ian let it go, fingers easing their death grip on the desk’s edge.

“That’s where the girl in Altaussee lives, the one whose sister might have seen die Jägerin,” Tony was saying. “I say it’s worth going to talk in person.”

Ian nodded. Any lead was worth running down. “When did you get her name?”

“A week ago.”

“Bloody hell, a week?”

“We had the Cologne chase to wrap up. Besides, I was waiting for one more confirmation. I wanted to give you more good news, and now I can.” Tony tapped the letter from their mail stack, scattering ash from his cigarette. “It arrived while we were in Cologne.”

Ian scanned the letter, not recognizing the black scrawl. “Who’s this woman and why is she coming to Vienna …” He got to the signature at the bottom, and the world stopped in its tracks.

“Our one witness who actually met die Jägerin face-to-face and lived,” Tony said. “The Polish woman—I pulled her statement and details from the file.”

“She emigrated to England, why did you—”

“The telephone number was noted. I left a message. Now she’s coming to Vienna.”

“You really shouldn’t have contacted Nina,” Ian said quietly.

“Why not? Besides this potential Altaussee lead, she’s the only eyewitness we’ve got. Where’d you find her, anyway?”

“In Poznań after the German retreat in ’45. She was in hospital when she gave me her statement, with all the details she could remember.” Vividly Ian recalled the frail girl in the ward cot, limbs showing sticklike from a smock borrowed from the Polish Red Cross. “You shouldn’t have dragged her halfway across Europe.”

“It was her idea. I only wanted to talk by telephone, see if I could get any more detail about our mark. But if she’s willing to come here, let’s make use of her.”

“She also happens to be—”

“What?”

Ian paused. His surprise and disquiet were fading, replaced by an unexpected flash of devilry. He so rarely got to see his partner nonplussed. You spring a surprise like this on me, Ian thought, you deserve to have one sprung on you. Ian wouldn’t have chosen to yank the broken flower that was Nina Markova halfway across the continent, but she was already on the way, and there was no denying her presence would be useful for any number of reasons … including turning the tables on Tony, which Ian wasn’t too proud to admit he enjoyed doing. Especially when his partner started messing about with cases behind Ian’s back. Especially this case.

“She’s what?” Tony asked.

“Nothing,” Ian answered. Aside from pulling the ground out from under Tony, it might be good to see Nina. They did have matters to discuss that had nothing to do with the case, after all. “Just handle her carefully when she arrives,” he added, that part nothing but truthful. “She had a bad war.”

“I’ll be gentle as a lamb.”

FOUR DAYS PASSED, and a flood of refugee testimony came in that needed categorizing. Ian forgot all about their coming visitor, until an unholy screeching sounded in the corridor.

Tony looked up from the statement he was translating from Yiddish. “Our landlady getting her feathers ruffled again?” he said as Ian went to the office door.

His view down the corridor was blocked by Frau Hummel’s impressive bulk in her flowered housedress, as she pointed to some muddy footprints on her floor. Ian got a bare impression of a considerably smaller woman beyond his landlady, and then Frau Hummel seized the mud-shod newcomer by the arm. Her bellows turned to shrieks as the smaller woman yanked a straight razor out of her boot and whipped it up in unmistakable warning. The newcomer’s face was obscured by a tangle of bright blond hair; all Ian could really take in was the razor held in an appallingly determined fist.

“Ladies, please!” Tony tumbled into the hall.

“Kraut suka said she’d call police on me—” The newcomer was snarling.

“Big misunderstanding,” Tony said brightly, backing Frau Hummel away and waving the strange woman toward Ian. “If you’ll direct your concerns to my partner here, Fräulein—”

“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, Fräulein?”

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 gnädige 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 Jägerin 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.

Until the day she turned sixteen, when her father tried to drown her in the lake.

Nina was standing on the shore in a pure, cold twilight. The lake was frozen in a sheet of dark green glass, so clear you could see the bottom far below. When the surface ice warmed during the day, crevasses would open, crackling and booming as if the lake’s rusalki were fighting a war in the depths. Close to shore, hummocks of turquoise-colored ice heaved up over each other in blocks taller than Nina, shoved onto the bank by the winter wind. A few years ago, those frozen waves had crawled so far ashore that Tankhoy Station had been entirely swallowed in wind-flung blue ice. Nina stood in her shabby winter coat, hands thrust into her pockets, wondering if she would still be here to see the lake freeze next year. She was sixteen years old; all her sisters had left home before they reached that age, mostly with swelling bellies. All the same, Markov’s daughters, came the whisper in the village. They all go bad.

“I don’t care if I go bad,” Nina said aloud. “I just don’t want a big belly.” But there didn’t seem to be anything else her father’s daughters did, except grow up, start breeding, and run away. Nina kicked restlessly at the shore, and her father came lurching out of the hut, naked to the waist, oblivious to the cold. Clumsy inked dragons and serpents writhed over his arms, and his body steamed. He’d been on one of his binges, guzzling vodka and muttering mad things for days, but now he seemed lucid again. He gazed at her, seeing her for the first time all day, and his eyes had an odd gleam. “The Old Man wants you back,” he said conversationally.

And he was after her like a wolf, though Nina got three sprinting strides toward the trees before the huge hand snatched at her hair and yanked her off her feet. She hit the ground so hard the world slipped sideways, and when it came to rights she was on her back, boots scrabbling on the ground as her father dragged her onto the glass-smooth lake.

The ice this time of year was thicker than a man was tall, but there were gaps where the ice thinned. The village schoolmaster, less ignorant about the lake than about most of the things he taught, said something about warmer water channels winding upward from the deeper rift, enough to make holes in the surface—and now, her father dragged her across the ice to one of the spring holes, dropped to his knees, broke the thin crust, and thrust her head under the freezing water.

Fear slapped Nina then, alien and spiky as new-forming frost. Even being dragged across the lake by the hair she had not been afraid; it had all happened too fast. But as the dark water swallowed her, terror descended like an avalanche. The water’s cold gripped her; she could see the depths of the lake stretching away below, blue green and fathomless, and she opened her mouth to scream but the lake’s iron fist punched into her mouth with another paralyzing burst of cold.

On the surface, her body thrashed against her father’s grip in her hair. His stone-hard hand thrust her head down deeper, deeper, but she flailed a leg free and slammed one boot into his ribs. He brought her up with a curse, and Nina got one sobbing gasp of air that stabbed her lungs like hot knives. Her father cursed blurrily; he released Nina’s sodden hair and flipped her onto her back, seizing her by the throat instead. “Go back to the lake,” he whispered, “go home.” Again her head went down under the water. This time she could see up through the ripples, up past her father to the twilight sky. Get there, she thought incoherently through another wash of fear, just get up there—and her hand stretched blindly … But it wasn’t the sky her fingers brushed. It was the unfolded razor swinging at her father’s belt.

She couldn’t feel her fingers wrapping around the handle. The cold had her in its jaws, clamping down. But she watched herself move through the ripples of the lake that was drowning her, watched her hand jerk the razor free and bring it around in a savage swipe across her father’s hand. Then he was gone, and Nina came roaring up out of the water, a shard of broken ice on the edge slicing along her throat, but she had the razor in her fist and she was free.

They lay gasping on opposite sides of the ice hole. Her father clutched his hand, which Nina had sliced nearly to the bone, sending curling ribbons of scarlet across the frozen lake. Nina huddled on her side, racked by bone-deep shudders of cold and terror, ice crystals already forming on her lashes and through her hair, a similar ribbon of blood winding down the side of her throat from the ice cut. She still held the razor extended toward her father.

“If you touch me again,” she said through chattering teeth, “I’ll kill you.”

“You’re a rusalka,” he mumbled, looking bewildered at her fury. “The lake won’t hurt you.”

A violent shudder racked her. I am no rusalka, she wanted to scream. I’ll die before I ever let water close over my head again. But all she said was, “I’ll kill you, Papa. Believe it.” And she managed to stumble back to the hut, where she bolted the door, peeled away her ice-crusted clothes, built up the fire, and crawled naked and shuddering under a pile of silver-gray seal pelts. Had it been deep winter the shock of the cold would have killed her, she realized later, but winter’s bite was easing toward spring, and she managed not to die. Her father slept it off in the hunting shack while Nina lay shivering under her furs, still gripping the razor, breaking into hiccuping little sobs whenever she thought of the water lapping over her face, filling her mouth and nose with its iron tang.

I have my one fear, she thought. From that day forward, as far as Nina Markova was concerned, if it wasn’t death by drowning it wasn’t worth being afraid of. Get away from here, she thought, unpeeling from the furs long enough to find her father’s vodka and take several enormous gulps of the oily, peppery stuff. Get out. The thought pounded. Go where? What is the opposite of a lake? What is the opposite of drowning? What lies all the way west? Nonsensical questions. Nina realized she was half drunk. She crawled under the furs again, slept like the dead, and woke with a crust of blood on her throat where the lake’s icy fingers had tried to kill her, and that one clear, cold thought.

Get out.

Chapter 4
JORDAN

April 1946

Boston

Aaaaand it gets away! Line drive past the diving Johnny Pesky—”

“Garrett,” Jordan told her boyfriend as groans rose around them across the stands of Fenway Park, “I know the line drive got past Johnny Pesky. I’m right here, watching the line drive get past Johnny Pesky. You don’t need to give me the play-by-play.”

It was a perfect spring day: the smell of outfield grass, the murmur and rush of the crowd, the scratch of pencils on scorecards. Garrett grinned. “Admit it, you missed our baseball dates when I was in training. Even my play-by-play.” Jordan couldn’t resist raising the Leica for a snap. With his dimples, his broad shoulders, and his Red Sox cap tipped down over short brown hair, Garrett looked about as all-American cute as a Coca-Cola ad. Or a recruitment poster: he’d enlisted at the end of his senior year, giving Jordan his class ring, but a badly broken leg during pilot training and the abrupt end of the war with Japan not long afterward had cut his stint in the army air force very short. She knew Garrett regretted that—he’d been dreaming of dogfights over the Pacific when he signed up, not of being cut loose on a medical discharge before even making it overseas.

“Sure, I missed our baseball dates,” Jordan said playfully. “Maybe not as much as I missed having Ted Williams batting in the three-spot during the war, but—”

Garrett flicked a peanut shell into her ponytail. “Bet I looked better in an army air force uniform than Ted Williams.”

“I’m sure you did, because Ted Williams was a marine.”

“The marines were only invented so the army has someone to take to the prom.”

“I wouldn’t tell any marines that.”

“Too dumb to get the joke.”

The next Yankee came to bat, and Jordan raised the Leica. Only in the darkroom would she know if she missed the high point of the bat’s swing. Flawless timing; every great photographer needed it.

“Come to lunch this Sunday?” Garrett rooted through his bag of peanuts. “My parents are dying to see you.”

“Aren’t they hoping you’ll start dating some Boston University sorority girl in the fall?”

“Come on, you know they love you.”

They did, and so did Garrett, which surprised Jordan. They’d been together since she was a junior, and from the start she’d been determined not to get her heart broken once he moved on. High school seniors went off to college or war, but either way they moved on. And that was just fine, because this business of getting married right after graduation to your high school sweetheart was ridiculous as far as Jordan was concerned (no matter what her dad said about it working perfectly well for him). No, Garrett Byrne would move on to a new girl at some point, and Jordan’s heart was going to be a little bit broken but then she’d toss her head back, sling her Leica around her neck, and go work in European war zones and have affairs with Frenchmen.

But Garrett hadn’t moved on. He’d come back from his medical discharge, still on crutches, and picked up their afternoon baseball dates and Sunday lunches with his parents, who beamed at Jordan as much as her dad beamed at Garrett. The knee-buckling weight of all that parental expectation made everything seem so firm, so settled, that a trip around European war zones taking pictures for LIFE seemed about as likely as a trip to the moon.

“C’mon.” Garrett sneaked an arm around her waist, nuzzled her ear in that way that also made her knees buckle. “Sunday lunch. We can go for a drive afterward, park somewhere …”

“I can’t,” Jordan said, regretful. “Mass with Dad and Mrs. Weber.”

“It must be serious.” Garrett grinned again. “So, how is this Fräulein of your father’s?”

“She’s very nice.” There had been another dinner, this time at Anneliese Weber’s tiny spotless apartment; she had been warm and welcoming, and made crisp fried schnitzel and some kind of pink-iced Austrian cake soaked in rum. Jordan’s father had gone all soft around the edges as Anneliese served him, and Jordan already adored little Ruth, who had asked in a whispery voice how der Hund was. It had all been fine, absolutely fine.

Jordan didn’t know why, but she kept thinking back to that picture. Anneliese Weber looking by a strange twist of light and lens to be about as soft and welcoming as a straight razor.

“She’s very nice,” Jordan said again. The Sox went down 4–2, and soon Jordan and Garrett were streaming out of Fenway with the rest of the fans, crunching peanut shells and discarded scorecards underfoot. “It’s our year,” Jordan proclaimed. “This year we win it all, I can feel it. Walk me to the shop? I promised Dad I’d swing by.”

Hand in hand, they made their way through the game crowd and finally turned onto Commonwealth, Jordan stretching her steps to match Garrett’s, who still walked with a slight limp. It was that day, she thought, the sudden spring day coming at the end of a too-long winter. As they turned down the central mall on Commonwealth, it seemed like all Boston had tossed their heavy coats and come outside, winter-pale faces blissfully skyward as they stumbled along absolutely drunk on the warmth. It was why Jordan loved Boston—there was something about its citizens that was curiously welded together, more like a small town than a big city. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, their heartaches and their secrets … And that brought a frown to Jordan’s face.

“I wish I knew more about her,” she heard herself say.

“Who?” Garrett had been talking about the classes he’d take in the fall.

“Mrs. Weber.” Jordan fiddled with the Leica’s strap.

“What do you want to know?” Garrett asked reasonably. They were passing the Hotel Vendome, and Jordan nearly stepped in front of a Chevrolet coupe. Garrett pulled her back. “Careful—”

“That,” Jordan said. “She’s careful. She doesn’t say much about herself. And I caught the strangest expression on her face when I took her picture …”

Garrett laughed. “You don’t take a dislike to someone just because of a funny expression.”

“Girls do it all the time. Sometimes you catch a boy looking at you in the hall at school, when he thinks you can’t see him. I don’t mean looking at girls the way all boys do,” Jordan clarified. “I mean looking at you in a way that gives you the shivers. He doesn’t mean for you to see, and maybe that expression only lasts a second, but it’s enough to make you think, I don’t want to be alone with you.”

“Girls think that?” Garrett sounded mystified.

“I don’t know a single girl who hasn’t had that thought,” Jordan stated. “I’m just saying, sometimes you catch the wrong look on someone’s face and it puts you off. It makes you not want to take chances, getting to know them.”

“But this isn’t a boy leering around the locker door at school. It’s a woman your father is inviting home to dinner. You have to give her a chance.”

“I know.”

“Your dad’s really serious about her.” Garrett tweaked Jordan’s ponytail. “Maybe that’s the whole problem.”

“I am not jealous,” Jordan flashed. Then amended, “All right, maybe I am. A tiny, tiny bit. But I want Dad happy, I do. And Mrs. Weber is good for him. I can see that. But before I trust her with my father, I want to know more about her.”

“So just ask her.”

McBride’s Antiques sat on the corner of Newbury and Clarendon—not the best shopping district in Boston, but distinguished enough. Every morning, as long as Jordan could remember, her father had walked the three miles from their home to the shop that had been his father’s, mounting those worn stone steps toward the door with its ancient bronze knocker, unlocking the shutters to unveil the big giltlettered window. Jordan frowned at the window display as it came into view today, seeing that the tasseled lamps and Victorian hatstand from yesterday had been swapped for a tailor’s dummy in a wedding dress of antique lace, and a display of cabochon rings sparkling on a velvet tray. Jordan mounted the steps ahead of Garrett, hearing the sweet tinkle of the bell as she pushed the door open. She wasn’t really surprised to see her father beside the long counter, holding Anneliese Weber’s hand with a proprietary air. “I’ve got wonderful news, missy!”

Jordan couldn’t describe the mix of emotions that rose in her—why her heart squeezed in honest pleasure, seeing the happiness on her father’s face as he looked down at the Austrian widow’s left hand with its cluster of antique garnets and pearls … and why at the same time her stomach tightened as she came to give her soon-to-be stepmother a hug.

JUST ASK HER, Garrett had said. Jordan got her chance two days later, when Mrs. Weber invited her to go shopping for wedding clothes after she came home from school. As they sallied down Boylston Street, Jordan was still trying to find a casual segue into the questions she wanted to ask when Mrs. Weber took the initiative.

“Jordan, I hope you don’t feel you must call me—well, not Mutti, I suppose for you it would be Mother or Mama.” A smile at Jordan’s expression. “At your age that seems silly.”

“A little.”

“Well, you certainly don’t have to call me either. I don’t mean to take the place of your mother. Your father has told me about her, and she sounds like a lovely woman.”

“I don’t remember her very well.” Just her absence once she got sick, really. And all the reasons why, which they wouldn’t tell me, so I made them up for myself. Jordan wished she remembered more than that. She looked sideways at Anneliese, gliding along in her blue spring coat, pocketbook in gloved hands, heels hardly clicking on the sidewalk. Jordan felt large and clumping beside her, naked without her camera.

“I thought we’d go to Priscilla of Boston,” Anneliese suggested. “Usually I make up my own clothes, but for a wedding one needs something special. I don’t know if your father discussed the plans with you, men can be so vague about wedding details. We thought a quiet day wedding three weeks from now, just the four of us at the chapel and a few of your father’s friends.”

“And on your side?”

“No one. I haven’t been in Boston long enough to make friends.”

“Really?” For a woman who’d said she was trying so hard to make friends in a new country—and whose English was so good—it seemed odd. “Not even a next-door neighbor, or someone at the beauty shop, or another mother at the park?”

“I find it hard, talking with strangers.” A tentative smile. “I hoped you would be my maid of honor?”

“Of course.” Though Jordan couldn’t stop wondering. Months in Boston, and you don’t have one single acquaintance?

“Your father and I planned for a honeymoon weekend in Concord,” Anneliese continued, “if you could watch Ruth.”

“Of course.” Jordan’s smile was unforced this time. “Ruth’s a darling. I love her already.”

“She has that effect on people,” Anneliese agreed.

Jordan took a silent breath. “Does she get that beautiful fair hair from her father?”

A pause. “Yes, she does.”

“What did you say his name was—Kurt?”

“Yes. What color do you fancy wearing for the wedding?” Anneliese turned through the doors of the boutique, moving through the ivory bridal gowns and floral bridesmaid dresses, waving away salesgirls. “This blue? So lovely with your skin.”

She took off her gloves to test the fabric between her fingertips, and Jordan eyed her hands, naked of rings except for the engagement cluster of garnets. She tried to remember if she’d ever seen Anneliese wearing a wedding ring and was certain she had not. “You could wear your old ring, you know,” she threw out, trying a new tack.

Anneliese looked startled. “What?”

“Dad would never mind if you kept wearing your husband’s ring. He was a part of your life—I hope you don’t feel we expect you to forget him.”

“Kurt never gave me a wedding ring.”

“Is it not customary in Austria?”

“No, it was, he—” Anneliese sounded almost flustered for a moment. “We were rather poor, that’s all.”

Or maybe you lied about being married, Jordan couldn’t stop herself thinking. Maybe it’s not the only thing you’ve lied about either …

Her father’s voice, scolding: Wild stories.

“I think you’re right about this dress.” Jordan looked at the pale blue frock, full skirted and simple. “Ruth would look pretty in blue too, with her dark eyes. Most blondes have blue eyes like yours. She must have gotten her eyes from her father too.”

“Yes.” Anneliese fingered the sleeve of a pale pink suit, face smooth again.

“Well, it’s very striking.” Jordan tried to think where to tug the discussion next. It wasn’t just Ruth or Anneliese’s first husband she was interested in, it was everything—but something about the wedding ring had jarred Anneliese’s poise. “Did Ruth ever know her father, or—”

“No, she doesn’t remember him. He was very handsome, though. So is your young man. Would you like to bring Garrett to the wedding?”

“He’ll be working if it’s a day wedding—he’s putting in hours for his father’s boss until he starts at Boston University in the fall. His parents want him to join the business, though all he wants to do now is fly planes. Garrett never saw combat; he broke his leg too badly during training, and the war ended before he was anywhere near healed, so he was discharged early. Was your husband in the war?”

“Yes.” Anneliese picked up a cream straw hat, examining its blue ribbon. Jordan tried a question about Anneliese’s family next, but she didn’t seem to hear it. “Do you plan to follow Garrett to Boston University this fall?” she asked instead.

“Well—” Jordan blinked, sidetracked. “I’d like to, but Dad isn’t keen. With a business in the family, he doesn’t think college is necessary.” Especially for a girl. “He never went, and always says he didn’t regret it.”

“I’m sure he didn’t. But you have your own path, like any young person. Perhaps we might try to change his mind, you and I. Even the best men sometimes require steering.” Anneliese gave a conspiratorial smile, perching the hat on Jordan’s head. “That’s lovely. Why don’t you try on the dress? For myself, I think this pink suit …”

Jordan slipped into a changing cubicle, diverted despite herself. She’d first thought of a stepmother as something wonderful for her father and his loneliness—then, given all she didn’t know about this woman and her life even as she moved into theirs, as something to be uneasy about. It had never occurred to Jordan to think a stepmother could be … well, an ally. Perhaps we might try to change his mind, you and I. That made Jordan smile as she fastened up the blue dress with its snug waist and swirl of skirt, hearing the rustle of clothing as Anneliese changed on the other side of the wall. Did you mean it? Jordan wondered. Or were you trying to derail me from asking about you?