The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  Nina smiled. “Thank you, Papa.”

  He shouldered his pack. “Don’t come back to the lake,” he said in farewell. “Next time I get a skinful of vodka I’ll drown you for good, little rusalka.”

  “Or I’ll cut your throat this time and not your hand.”

  “Either way.” He nodded at the razor’s edge, still showing between her fingers. “Kill a German for me with that.”

  She waited till he was out of sight, that tall shaggy form sliding into the crowd as noiselessly as he vanished into the taiga around the Old Man. Will I ever see you again? she wondered, and somehow thought not. There was some relief in the thought, some regret, some pleasure. No need to rank one over the other.

  She was sitting cross-legged on her bed that night, cutting carefully into the seal pelt to fashion herself a new cap, when Tania turned on the radio. “They’re broadcasting a women’s antifascist meeting in Moscow.” Nina barely listened, cutting away at the sealskin. A proper flying cap with flaps to tie down over the ears, just the thing for open-cockpit flights.

  “. . . The Soviet woman is the hundreds of drivers, tractor operators, and pilots who are ready at any moment to sit down in a combat machine and plunge into battle.”

  Nina paused. “Who’s that?”

  “Marina Raskova,” Tania said. Nina glanced at the cutout newspaper photograph on her mirror. The woman on the right, dark hair, sparkling eyed, very easy and capable in front of her Tupolev ANT-37. Nina had devoured every word about Raskova, but never heard her speak. Her voice came through the radio warmly intimate, clear as crystal. Nina would have followed that voice off a cliff.

  “Dear sisters!” Marina Raskova cried. “The hour has come for harsh retribution! Stand in the ranks of the warriors for freedom!”

  Tell me how, Nina thought.

  THE ANSWER CAME, not that night but in a matter of weeks, the day Soviet troops were driven back to the Mozhaisk Line only eighty kilometers from Moscow. The day another piece of news swept over the air club: Comrade Stalin had ordered the formation of three regiments to be trained for combat aviation under Marina Raskova, Hero of the Soviet Union.

  Three regiments of women.

  “The local Komsomols have been asked to screen and interview volunteers,” Nina heard a fellow pilot saying. “I’ve submitted all my paperwork already. Only the best recruits will be sent to Moscow—”

  How can I make them choose me? Nina thought. A little barbarian from the taiga with patched-together schooling and a record of individualism, when women everywhere would be clamoring to join—women with university backgrounds, impeccable records, Party connections.

  There’ll be a chance, Nina Borisovna, her father had said. Don’t ask, when you see it. Just fucking take it.

  She didn’t bother filling out paperwork. Instead she went home to collect her essentials—passport, Komsomol membership card, certificates for completing pilot training and glider training—then crammed a few clothes into a bag, stuffed her hair into her new sealskin cap, and went running under an iron October sky for the train station. She threw every ruble she had onto the counter and said, “One way. Moscow.”

  Chapter 10

  Jordan

  May 1946

  Boston

  The day after Jordan’s father escorted Anneliese off on their honeymoon, Jordan took Ruth to the Public Garden. Nothing like ice cream and a swan boat ride to get a little girl smiling . . . and talking.

  “Chocolate or strawberry?” Ruth chewed her lip in indecision. “Both,” Jordan decided. “You deserve it.” That got a shy smile from Ruth, who was still hanging on to Taro’s leash like a safety harness, but who seemed to be unfolding into something like trust.

  Which you’re taking advantage of, Jordan thought grimly, but pushed that aside. People aren’t obliged to drag out their old hurts or dirty laundry just because of your need to know, her father had told her not long ago, but he was off on his honeymoon with a woman who had carried a swastika down the aisle, and Jordan’s need to know was burning her up.

  Licking their ice creams, Jordan and Ruth wandered down to the duck pond, Taro wagging between them. The water reflected the summer tourists throwing bread down from the bridge, but for once Jordan had no impulse to capture the moment on film. “See that flicker, Ruth? That’s a dragonfly. Did you see dragonflies at the lake in Altaussee?” Ruth looked puzzled. “That was where you were, wasn’t it? Before you came here.”

  Nod.

  “What else do you remember, cricket? I’d like to know more about you, now that you’re my sister.” Squeezing Ruth’s hand. “What do you remember before coming to Boston?”

  “The lake,” Ruth said in her soft voice. Her trace of a German accent was already fading. With her blond braids and blue jumper, she could have been any little American girl. “Seeing the lake every day through the window.”

  “Every day?” Anneliese hadn’t said they were in Altaussee very long. “How many days?”

  Ruth shrugged.

  “Do you remember your father? How he died?”

  “Mama said he went east.”

  “Where east?”

  Another shrug.

  “What else do you remember?” Jordan asked as gently as she knew how.

  “The violin,” Ruth said even more softly. “Mama playing.”

  Jordan blinked. “But she doesn’t play the violin.”

  “She did.” Ruth’s eyebrows pulled together, and she reached for Taro’s soft back. “She did!”

  “I believe you, Ruthie—”

  “She did,” Ruth said fiercely. “She played for me.”

  Never had Anneliese said she could play an instrument. She never asked to turn on the radio to listen to music either. And she didn’t own any violin—Jordan had seen her things carried in to be unpacked after the honeymoon, and there was no instrument case. Maybe she had to sell it?

  Jordan looked down at Ruth. “Your mama said there was an incident by the lake in Altaussee. A refugee woman who, um, wasn’t very nice to you both.”

  “There was blood,” Ruth whispered. “My nose bled.”

  Jordan paused, heart thumping. “Do you remember any more?”

  Ruth dropped her melting ice cream, looking upset, and Jordan couldn’t keep pushing. She just couldn’t. She opened her arms and Ruth burrowed into them. “Never mind, cricket. You don’t have to remember if you don’t want to.”

  “That’s what she said,” Ruth mumbled into Jordan’s middle.

  “Who?”

  A pause. Then, “Mama.”

  But her voice lifted as though she wasn’t entirely certain, and her small shoulders hitched. Jordan bit her tongue on any further questions—what could she even ask?—and hugged her new sister tight. “Let’s go for a swan boat ride. You’ll love that.”

  “But I dropped my ice cream.”

  “You can have mine.”

  Ruth calmed down by the time they got to the boats with their paddle-operated swans. Jordan still felt like a monster. Wasn’t that productive? she scolded herself. You upset your brand-new little sister, all to learn that maybe Anneliese played the violin, and that a refugee woman made Ruth’s nose bleed in Altaussee. That’s proof of nothing, J. Bryde.

  Anneliese had brought very few belongings to the house, hardly suspicious for a woman fleeing the wreckage of a war. Jordan had already looked through her closet and drawers, guiltily, but there was nothing to be found. If the new Mrs. McBride had anything incriminating, it had gone on her honeymoon along with the Iron Cross.

  Watch and wait. As much as she wanted to run to her father, Jordan knew she’d need more proof than two photographs, or he might just shake his head and say, Jordan and her wild stories.

  By Monday the new Mr. and Mrs. McBride were back, laden with presents. Jordan couldn’t help a shiver of relief to see her dad hale and hearty, although what had she been fearing? That the dainty Anneliese would do him harm? That was the wildest idea yet, surely.

  “I
missed my girls!” He swooped Ruth up in a hug, and Anneliese’s smile for Jordan was so infectious Jordan couldn’t help smiling back.

  “Come help me unpack, Jordan. I’ll show you the scarf I found in Concord, just your color.” She was so warm and open, Jordan couldn’t help but wonder if she’d imagined the Iron Cross altogether.

  “I wondered,” Jordan asked casually as they unpacked upstairs, shawls and lace handkerchiefs piled around the bed, “did you ever play the violin?”

  “No, why?”

  “No reason. Oh, that scarf is pretty, Anneliese—” She let her stepmother loop the fringed blue-sequined ends around her neck.

  “Anna,” corrected Anneliese, arranging the scarf across Jordan’s shoulder. “Now that I’m a proper American housewife, I’d like a proper American name!”

  Yes, let’s just erase your past, Jordan thought, even as Anneliese tugged her to look in the mirror. Because there’s something there you don’t want us to know.

  “WE HAVE A SUITE at the Copley Plaza Hotel,” Ginny Reilly was saying. “My sister had her honeymoon there, it’s gorgeous. So when I have my wedding night there, Sean will carry me across the threshold—”

  “You should carry him across the threshold,” Jordan observed, keeping one ear on the kitchen where Anneliese was clattering dishes. “Sean’s a string bean.”

  “Shut up, it’s my fantasy.” Stifled laughter from the girls sitting around the parlor floor with a stack of magazines. “He opens the champagne while I change into a negligee. Bias-cut ivory satin—”

  More suppressed laughter, up until Ginny finished with a whispered, “When the light goes out he just rips my negligee off . . .” They all exploded, Jordan laughing too.

  She lifted the Leica and snapped her friends, mentally titling it June 1946: A Study in Feminine Frustration. Graduation had come and gone just after Jordan’s eighteenth birthday, and now that school was done, she found herself sitting around with a good many friends who wanted to plan their fantasy weddings—and wedding nights. They were all good girls with lace-curtain-and-Sunday-lunch parents, so nobody here had Done It, but they talked about Doing It. What else was there to fantasize about now that school was done? Ginny worked at Filene’s, and Susan was going to Boston College in the fall but had already said she’d only stay till she got engaged. And Jordan, who had yearned for high school to be done, now found herself wondering what the point was. Her father still wouldn’t budge about the question of college, when she brought it up last week. “Let me talk to him later,” Anneliese had whispered afterward, with a smile of friendly complicity that gave Jordan a guilty twinge.

  “Your turn, Jor,” Ginny laughed. “How does your first time go?”

  Jordan gave up fretting for the moment. “All right, here it goes.” This was all very silly, but it was their time to be silly, wasn’t it? “We’re at war with the Soviets, and I’m filming the bombing of Moscow. I meet a glamorous Frenchman working for Reuters, and after the bombing he drags me off to an abandoned tank—”

  “You want to Do It in a tank?”

  “There are bullets flying. It’s very romantic. Then my photo of the bombing makes the cover of TIME—”

  “If I had Garrett, I wouldn’t be daydreaming about Frenchmen,” Susan said. “Is he going to give you his college ring?”

  “He won’t have one until he starts this fall,” Jordan evaded. But Garrett probably would offer it to her, and if she took it, everyone would expect her to wear it around her neck on a chain, because that was the next step. The trouble with steps was that the more you took in a certain direction, the more people assumed that you would continue on, which Jordan wasn’t sure she wanted to do. She was barely eighteen; how was she supposed to know if Garrett Byrne was the One and Only? Jordan wasn’t even sure she believed in the entire idea of the One and Only.

  Anneliese glided in with a tray. “Would you girls like some cake?”

  “Please, Mrs. McBride!” Jordan’s friends chimed, and then when she had retreated: “Your stepmother is the best.”

  “So elegant—never a hair out of place. My mother always looks so frazzled.”

  “She’s wonderful,” Jordan said. If I could be certain she wasn’t a Nazi, she’d be absolutely perfect.

  “Just because she has an Iron Cross,” Jordan argued to herself, down in the darkroom after her friends had left, “doesn’t mean she’s a Nazi.” Trying to be fair, unbiased, like the level-headed J. Bryde who could always find truth in the middle of sensationalism. “Maybe Anneliese’s husband was a Nazi, and the medal was his. She said he was in the war, but she’s avoided saying if he followed Hitler or not. That’s the kind of thing you would keep to yourself, if you moved to America.”

  Perfectly reasonable. Entirely possible.

  “Even if he was a Nazi, it doesn’t mean she was. She could have carried his old medal because it was a reminder of him, not because she’s a fascist.”

  Also entirely possible.

  “Moreover,” Jordan went on, pacing the length of the darkroom, “maybe she’s not even keeping this background of hers a secret. Just because she didn’t tell me doesn’t mean she hasn’t told Dad. He might already know. A little secret between husband and wife.”

  So ask him, Jordan thought. But something gut-deep held her back. Anneliese made Jordan’s father happy; she had seen that very clearly over the past weeks of watching and waiting. The cheery way he whistled when he shaved in the morning, the bounce in his step when he came home from work. And though Jordan had no urge to imagine what happened behind her father’s bedroom door, that side of things was clearly going very well too. Last week Jordan had knocked on their bedroom door in the afternoon and come in to see Anneliese straightening the bedclothes as her husband fastened his cuffs—Jordan had seen the private smile that passed between them. Maybe she was just an eighteen-year-old high school graduate who had never gone further than taking off her blouse in her boyfriend’s car, but it was perfectly clear that elegant Anneliese with her impeccable housekeeping and starched handkerchiefs had a less impeccable, less starched side, one that Jordan’s father was very happy with after so many years of sleeping alone. And everyone had multiple sides, really, so should she really worry like this about the various sides of Anneliese?

  Jordan frowned, fighting the dread that she really was just making up wild stories again—that same part of her that had to fantasize about war-zone men and whistling bullets rather than honeymoon suites and bias-cut ivory satin.

  “There you are.” Anneliese looked up from her sewing machine as Jordan came into the upstairs sunroom, now a sewing room. “What do you think?” Shaking out a half-stitched lilac cotton dress for Ruth.

  “More ruffles. Ruth always wants more ruffles.” Anneliese had made Jordan’s graduation dress in this room: green silk molded tight to the waist, a wide neckline, elbow sleeves; the most stunning dress in the graduating class. Jordan’s father had mopped his eyes, and Anneliese had given her an armload of cream roses to carry. Jordan felt that squirm of guilt again and flopped down at the sewing table with a sigh.

  “Restless?” Anneliese smiled. “It’s a hard time in a girl’s life, out of school but not moved to the next stage yet.”

  “Are you going to tell me to stop moping around and get engaged?” Because Jordan’s father was thinking it, she could tell.

  “No, because the last thing a girl your age needs is to be—what’s the word? Bossed.” Anneliese pronounced it with precision; her quest to conquer American slang was unceasing. “My mother lectured me day and night when I was your age, and it just made me stubborn and resentful.”

  “You’re so nice to me,” Jordan couldn’t help saying. Strategy, or because you really are as good as you seem?

  Anneliese bit off a thread, eyes sparkling. “I have no wish to be a wicked stepmother.”

  I keep watching you, Jordan thought desperately, and you don’t give me anything to see. Nothing but reasons to like you.

 
Until the afternoon months later, on Selkie Lake.

  Chapter 11

  Ian

  April 1950

  Vienna

  That bitch,” Tony fumed, kicking the legs of their bench on the railway station. “That goddamn Nazi bitch. I know she knew something.”

  “Agreed,” Ian said, scanning his newspaper. “I’d be willing to wager she knew quite a lot.”

  The morning expedition to 8 Fischerndorf had not gone well. No combination of plausible half-lies, Tony’s charm, or money had pried anything useful from Vera Eichmann née Liebl. She didn’t know any woman with dark hair and a scar on the neck. No such woman had stayed with her after the war. If the neighbors said so, she couldn’t be responsible for what they thought. They were only too eager to make up evil things about a widow struggling to make ends meet. Yes, she considered herself a widow. She had not laid eyes on her husband in five years. She wished to be left alone. The door had then banged in their faces.

  Ian hadn’t expected it to go much better, so he remained sanguine, reading while his partner raged. At last Tony stopped pacing and dropped onto the bench. “What I’d have given to drag that woman into her own cellar and beat the truth out of her.”

  “You wouldn’t do that, and you know it.”

  “Wouldn’t I?” Tony raised an eyebrow. “I don’t have a lot of chivalric feeling for a woman like that. It’s not like trying to understand the compromises little people like the Ziegler sisters might have made to get through the war—Adolf Eichmann’s wife was at the top level. She had to know something about how her husband was shipping Jews east by the million. Believe me, I could bounce her off a wall or two and still sleep well at night if it got us the information we needed.”

  “What if it didn’t? Would you start to break bones? Threaten her children? Where does it stop?” Ian folded his newspaper, feeling the spring breeze ruffle his hair. “That’s why we don’t operate that way.”