The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  They’d had this same conversation the first week they worked together, on the trail of a Gauleiter responsible for a number of atrocities in occupied France. After one particularly unproductive interview, Tony had murmured, “Let me drag him into the back alley, I’ll get him talking.”

  Ian had with great calm taken his new partner by the collar, applied a half twist that cut off the breath, and lifted him up onto his toes so they stood eye to eye. “Do I have your attention?” he said quietly and waited for Tony’s nod. “Good. Because we do not beat up witnesses. Not now. Not ever. And if you can’t wrap your mind around that, get out now. Am I in any way unclear?” He let Tony go, and the younger man shrugged, eyes wary. “Your call, boss.”

  Now, Tony looked at Ian with curiosity in those dark eyes. “I’m not saying we’d ever go at a man’s nails with pliers. There are degrees. When all it would take is a good shaking and a few slaps—”

  “Anyone who would spill that easily can be loosened up without violence.”

  “It doesn’t always work that way, and you know it. Don’t tell me you’ve never been tempted to make a witness cough up.”

  “Of course I’ve been tempted,” Ian said flatly. “I’ve been tempted to degrees you would not believe. But it isn’t just about catching war criminals. How we catch them—that matters.”

  “Does it?”

  Ian rested his elbows on his knees, looking down the train tracks. “I worked with an American team not long after the war ended,” he said at last. “Investigating cases where German civilians were suspected of murdering downed airmen. The Americans used to detain the local Burgermeister until he coughed up a list of witnesses, then stand the witnesses up against a wall and threaten to shoot them unless they talked. They always talked, we’d get our man, and no witness was ever shot. But I hated it.” Ian looked at his colleague. “There are more war criminals out there than we will ever be able to find. If I have to let go of the ones that won’t get found unless we turn into torturers, I’m at ease with that decision.”

  “Will you be at ease with it if you have to let go of die Jägerin?” Tony asked. “What if the woman who killed your brother and nearly killed your wife lies on the other side of beating the shit out of a witness?”

  Ian thought in stark honesty, I don’t know.

  He breathed away the instinctive flare of defensive anger, saw an approaching plume of smoke, and rose. “Train’s here.” It was a long, silent ride back to Vienna.

  “YOU ARE EVICTED,” Frau Hummel greeted them at the door, crimson with rage. “You and that barbarian Hure—”

  She continued to shout, but Ian pushed past and threw open the door to the center. “Bloody hell . . .”

  In one day, the office had gone from an orderly oasis to an utter disaster. Files were scattered everywhere in heaps, paper drifted like snow across the desk, and empty cups sat on every surface. The air smelled like scalded tea, and the jam pot was attracting flies. The author of all this anarchy sat in Ian’s chair, bare feet swinging, blond head bent over a file she was leafing with jam-sticky fingers.

  “No more biscuits,” Nina greeted them without looking up. “Or tea.”

  Ian gave his desecrated office another long stare. Tony surveyed the chaos too, eyes dancing. “Nina,” Ian said eventually, waiting until she looked up. “Why are we being evicted, and why are you wearing one of my shirts?”

  “Mine is hanging to dry.” She pushed Ian’s cuff up her arm, fanning the file in her hand. “This case, the Schleicher mudak—my reading isn’t so good, but it looks like the wife is lying. Why didn’t you threaten to cut her nose off?”

  “Is Frau Hummel really evicting us?”

  “She threatened.” Nina tossed the file down, picked up another. “I tell her I cut her nose off.”

  “Wonderful.” Ian suppressed the urge to throttle his wife where she sat. “Nina, you were only supposed to take care of the post, answer the telephone—”

  “Is boring.” Nina picked up her tea, looked around for a spoon, and stirred it with the end of Ian’s fountain pen instead. “I review your old chases, see how you work. Useful, for when we go after die Jägerin.”

  “Useful?” He folded his arms across his chest. “You unleashed chaos in my office, you little savage.”

  “Is my office too. Until target’s bombed flat, what’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is mine.” She gulped some tea, then rose and stretched, the hem of Ian’s shirt falling nearly to her knees. “What do you find in Altaussee? Where do we go next?”

  “Salzburg.” Ian glared. “Give me my shirt back.”

  “Nu, ladno.” She shrugged, began unbuttoning.

  “Bloody hell,” he growled again and yanked open the door to the tiny washroom. It smelled of peroxide; evidently she’d used the sink to touch up her hair. An improvised laundry line had been hung with a rinsed-out blouse and a set of silky blue knickers. “Your blouse is dry,” Ian said, ignoring the underwear.

  “You’re easy to shock, luchik. Is very funny.” She patted his arm, amused, and closed the washroom door. Ian turned to find Tony chortling.

  “She collectivized the office,” he said. “Definitely a Russki.”

  Ian bit back a snort. The urge to throttle his wife was now warring with the urge to laugh. “Well, help me clear up my Soviet bride’s mess.”

  “She was putting files away as she read. It’s not that bad.”

  “Without order lies madness.” Ian believed that in his bones. With order came peace and law; without it lay war and blood. He’d seen enough of both to know it was true.

  He locked that thought away as Tony sat back on his heels and asked, “When do we head for Salzburg, and are we taking your Soviet bride?”

  “I don’t know.” Ian paused. “What does luchik mean?”

  Tony grinned. “‘Little ray of sunshine.’”

  “Does it bother you that she’s a Soviet?” Ian knew how suspicious the Yanks were of the Reds these days. Five short years from the end of the war, and benevolent ally Uncle Joe had become everyone’s enemy, but the Americans seemed more paranoid about the Communist Menace than anyone.

  “She hasn’t gone around quoting Das Kapital. She hasn’t done anything except desecrate your tea and lie about her origins, and there are plenty of reasons for people to do the latter.” Tony slid a cabinet drawer shut. “We listen to lies day in and day out, not just from war criminals. Refugees and good guys lie too. About whether they’re Jewish or gentile, about their war record or their imprisonment record, about their health and their age and how they got their papers. Good reasons or bad, everybody lies.”

  “Maybe.” Ian rose. “It’s time I talked to Nina. Will you smooth Frau Hummel over, make sure we aren’t being evicted?”

  “Some glamour in this job,” Tony groused amiably, slouching out. “Become a Nazi hunter for the thrills, and it’s all paperwork and sweet-talking the landlady . . .”

  Nina padded out of the washroom, tossing Ian’s shirt at his desk and sending more papers to the floor in a shower. Ian ignored that, fixing his wife with a level stare.

  “You aren’t Polish. Let’s dispense with that lie first. You’re Russian.”

  Nina looked up at him, wariness falling across her face. Then she shrugged. “Yes.”

  Ian blinked, so braced for a denial that her acknowledgment caught him off guard. “You aren’t denying it?”

  “Why?”

  “You told me you were Polish. In the Red Cross hospital—”

  “No.” Her eyes were as opaque and bottomless as two blue lakes. “You assumed. I let you.”

  He tried to remember. Nineteen forty-five, the steely hospital scent of antiseptic over blood. Nina still half starved and woozy from pneumonia, Ian desperate for answers about his brother. The language barrier, the chaos all around. No, Ian thought, she hadn’t said she was Polish. A girl found near Poznań, with the name Nina, which was so common in Poland . . . everyone assumed. “Why did you let everyone
think you were Polish?”

  “Easier.” She flopped into his chair, propping her disreputable boots on the desk. “I wasn’t going home. I say I’m Soviet, is where they’d send me.”

  “Where is home, exactly?”

  “Go east through Siberia until you fall off the world edge into a lake as big as the sky. All taiga and water witches and ice eating railway stations whole; everything needs you dead and everybody wants to leave.” Amusement gleamed in her eyes. “Would you go back?”

  “If my family were there.” He’d cross Siberia barefoot if his brother were at the end of it.

  “My family isn’t.” If there was pain in her eyes, it flickered by too fast for Ian to catch. “I spend my whole life going as far west as I can from that lake. Poland? Is just the next stop.”

  “Dangerous. You were nearly dead when the Red Cross found you.”

  “I’m hard to kill.”

  Ian pulled up a chair, gazing at Nina across the desk. She gazed back, unblinking. “Where were you trying to go after Poland?”

  “As far west as I can without falling off that edge of the world. You help me get to England, I look around and think not bad. It’s ugly, there’s rationing, but the ice in winter doesn’t eat you alive.”

  “How does a Soviet girl end up in Poland in the first place?”

  “Assigned to the front. Surprised? Soviets, they use women in their wars, not just for factory jobs or behind desks.”

  Ian knew something about that. One of his fellow war correspondents, a motherly-looking American woman with nerves of gunmetal, had written a pointed article for her paper about how Soviet women were employed as tank drivers and machine gunners, whereas the great and enlightened United States of America just told their women to plant Victory gardens, and be thrifty with their bacon grease. Ian looked at his wife from the Siberian wastes and wasn’t terribly surprised to discover she had been assigned to the front. No wonder we won the war.

  “So,” he said at last, “you defected.”

  “Not so official as that, luchik.” She grinned. “You think I go to an embassy, ask for asylum? I see chance in chaos, I take it.”

  “Not very patriotic,” he couldn’t help observing. “Walking away from your countrymen in the middle of a war.”

  Her smile disappeared. “My countrymen, they want to stand me against a wall and shoot me.”

  “Why?”

  “Is Stalin’s world, Stalin’s rule. Who needs a why?”

  “I do.”

  “Not your business.”

  “Yes, it is.” He linked his hands behind his head, not backing down from their stare. “You’re my wife. I gave you my name, you got your citizenship through me. You and your past and anything else I helped you bring to my country are very much my business.”

  Her lips remained sealed.

  “Did my brother know?” Ian asked, changing tack. “When he promised he’d get you safe to England if you both lived, did he know you were a Soviet?”

  “Yes.” No hesitation there.

  “Why would he make such a promise? Was it an affair? Love in a time of war?” Ian held his breath, waiting. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard of desperate women escaping war zones by finding a dead soldier’s belongings and making up a tragic wartime romance when his grieving family came around. Only Ian knew that for his little brother, that was unlikely. He waited for Nina to step into the lie . . . hoping, he realized, that she wouldn’t. So far she’d only misdirected him. Now, he realized just how badly he wanted his wife not to be a liar.

  “Lovers, Seb and me?” Nina laughed outright, shaking her head. “No. He liked the boys.”

  Ian let out his breath. “Yes, he did.” Seb had told him that the night their father died, so drunk he could hardly stand. It hadn’t shocked Ian particularly. You didn’t spend years in an English public school without knowing exactly what two males could do together if they had the inclination. You don’t look surprised, Seb had slurred, not only drunk but in tears by then.

  I’m not, Ian had answered. Chagrined, maybe—he knew full well how this would complicate and endanger his little brother’s life—but not surprised. I’ve never seen you even look at a girl, Seb.

  I don’t know anything about girls. A hazy wave indicating the all-male household where they’d grown up, the all-boys’ schools. Maybe I’ll grow out of it?

  Maybe you will. If you don’t, well, you’ll have to keep your head down and be careful, but it’s more common than you think.

  It is?

  Ian had poured them both another measure of whiskey and delivered a blunt, mildly drunken lecture on all the various combinations of the sexes he had seen tearing at belt buckles in Spanish hospital supply closets or going at it under Hyde Park bushes during blackouts—any prudishness Ian had carried out of school had died as soon as he went to war. Seb had passed out from whiskey and relief not five minutes later.

  I was the first one he told, Ian thought now, painfully. And Nina, if she spoke truly, was the last. “He really told you?”

  Nod.

  “Tell me how you two met, what happened.” Ian’s voice sounded rough to his own ears; he cleared his throat. “I didn’t get much detail when we spoke of it five years ago. Difficult to get a lot of nuance from a conversation that’s half pantomime.”

  “I’m in Poland, getting clear of Soviet lines.” No hint how or why she’d done that, and from her barbed smile, Ian thought it was a sticking point she wouldn’t give way on. For now he let it go. “I head into Polish forest, aim west. Avoid towns, people. Not far from Poznań, I run into Sebastian. He’s just made a break out of POW camp.” She shook her head. “City boy, stumbling around the trees. I take him on.”

  “Out of the goodness of your heart?” Ian didn’t exactly see Nina swooning with pity for an English stranger.

  “Two get by better than one. I know how to survive. He knows German, Polish—Russian too, is how we talk.”

  “How did he know Russian?”

  “Some Soviets at his camp. Prisoners have long hours to fill; they talk.” Nina’s smile lost its edge, the affection unmistakable. “Trying to teach me English, Seb talks about birds. I only know how to kill birds, and he’s asking if the lake where I grow up has puffins.” She linked her thumbs together and flapped her fingers each in sequence. “Puffins! Is even a real bird?”

  Ian nodded, throat suddenly thick at the memory of Seb at nine, fingers linked in exactly that gesture as he described a robin in midair. All children flapped their hands to mimic flight, but not quite like that. You know he liked boys rather than girls, and you know his gestures, Ian thought. Yes, you must have known my brother. What’s more, he must have trusted you.

  “Puffins.” Nina sighed, and both affection and sadness were clear in that sigh. “Thought he was joking me. Tvoyu mat, that boy was a joker.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” Ian asked. “It’s been five years, Nina.”

  “When do I have chance? We marry, you put me on a train to England and say you’ll be there in six months to start divorce. I think, ‘I tell you then.’ But you stay in Europe, I stay in England, we talk by telegram. When am I supposed to start this talk, over last five years?”

  “Fair point,” Ian admitted. “We should start up divorce proceedings, now that we’re finally at the same table to discuss them.”

  She nodded, matter-of-fact. “Has been long enough. You want your ring back?”

  “Keep it.” His father’s signet, gold and ornate like something an earl would wear. His father always liked to imply there were lords in the family line, but there weren’t, just defunct English gentlemen who bankrupted themselves to mix with the right people and marry the right girls from other defunct English families. The ring somehow suited Nina’s sun-browned workmanlike hand, and Ian smothered a moment’s dark humor thinking how apoplectic his father would have been to see it on the finger of a Communist blonde from the wastes of Siberia.

  “T
ell me one more thing. Just one.” Ian put his musing aside, looking at the puzzle that was his temporary wife. She stared back, blue eyes giving away nothing. “What happened with you and Seb and die Jägerin? How did you come across her? What—”

  “Nyet,” Nina said sharply.

  “What?”

  “No. Not for you. Is mine. And Seb’s.”

  “Until the target is down, what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.” Ian shot her own words back at her. “I have a right to know what happened at Lake Rusalka.”

  “No. I lived it; I don’t have to tell it all. Seb fights her, he cuts her, he saves me, she kills him. It happens fast. He dies a hero. That’s enough.”

  “It is not enough.” Ian heard his voice sinking toward a whisper. “This isn’t just a man’s right to hear how his brother died. You are helping us hunt down the woman who killed him. Anything you know about her could be essential.”

  “And I tell you already—what she looks like, how she moves, how she speaks English, all of it. I tell you anything about her. Not the rest. That’s mine,” Nina repeated.

  “If you jeopardize this hunt by holding back something important—”

  “I’m not. What you want from me is knowing her if I see her, yes? To bring me out when you have her in your sight, so I can say if we have the right one?” Ian gave a reluctant nod. “That I can do. I saw her. I know her face anywhere. I remember her till I die.”

  Ian looked at Nina, feeling anger flare. She stared back with a gaze like flint.

  Seb saved you? he thought. His life was worth twice yours. How dare you live and not him? But he stamped that terrible thought down as hard as he could. It was not Nina’s fault Sebastian had died; it was die Jägerin’s fault. Only hers.

  “You find something in Altaussee,” Nina said, dispensing with the duel of eyes. “What?”

  Ian could have been as cagey with her as she’d been with him, but he suppressed the urge to be spiteful. “Die Jägerin’s mother lives in Salzburg, and we know where.”

  “We go to Salzburg, then. I go this time,” Nina added. “I want the huntress dead.”