The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  The last thing Jordan was going to do was make wild speculations about anyone’s past. “I’m sure it’s just his nerves, Dad. The war, you know.”

  “Does he bring people into the shop? Not customers, I mean bringing people into the back.”

  “Not that I’ve noticed. Why?” The afternoon sun was coming through the window strong and golden, highlighting her father beautifully. Jordan moved for her camera, stashed behind the door. “Stay right there—”

  “I came up here one day and Kolb had another German fellow in the back room. Older, a Berliner, didn’t speak a word of English. Kolb went off in a babble, I could just about get that it was a rare books expert he’d brought in to consult.”

  “He has experts in sometimes.” Jordan checked her film, lifted the Leica. “Anna gave him permission.” Click.

  “That’s what she said. I just wondered. You have to be careful in a business that attracts swindlers.” A shrug. “Well, Kolb does free me up, even if he makes me twitch sometimes. I want to tell him to relax before he frets himself into a heart attack.”

  “You’re the one who never relaxes!” Jordan lowered her camera. “You promised you’d take an afternoon’s fishing at the lake this spring, and you haven’t been once.”

  He laughed. “I’ll go soon, missy. I promise.”

  The backroom door opened then, and Anneliese’s dark head reappeared. “Does she like the earrings?”

  “She does.” Jordan grinned. “Did you help pick them?”

  “Not a bit.” Anneliese shut the door on Mr. Kolb in the back room, Ruth peering at the broken-spined book he was repairing. “I thought next Saturday we might shop for a wedding dress? I may be able to stitch up a chic sundress, but wedding gowns are beyond me. I saw one in the window at Priscilla of Boston, empire princess silhouette, seed pearls—”

  “I think I’ve picked which weekend I’m going to the lake,” Jordan’s father decided. “Suddenly I fancy tramping after some spring turkey.”

  “You hunt turkey.” Anneliese gave Jordan a woman-to-woman smile. “We ladies shall hunt French Chantilly and petal-drop caps. I for one know which hunt will be the more ruthless.”

  A week later, Jordan was standing in the lavish fitting room at Priscilla of Boston on Boylston Street when the news came. Swathed in ivory satin exploding into a huge bell of a skirt, turning her head to feel the Lalique pearls swinging as Anneliese waved away the salesgirl trying to suggest ruffles: “My stepdaughter is not a ruffles sort of bride.” Turning to tease Anneliese with some mother-of-the-bride joke, thinking how glad she was that the two of them could laugh and tease each other now. That was when Jordan saw Anneliese’s eyes go toward the door, where a man in a dark suit stepped forward.

  “Mrs. Daniel McBride?” Waiting for Anneliese’s nod. “The clerk at your shop said you could be found here. It’s about your husband.”

  Jordan stepped off the dressmaker’s dais, feeling ivory satin pool around her feet. Her eye was taking pictures in jerky little snaps. The man in the suit, looking uncomfortable—click. Anneliese frozen still, face draining of color, a Chantilly wedding veil dropping from her hands—click.

  The man cleared his throat. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”

  Chapter 23

  Ian

  May 1950

  Aboard the SS Conte Biancamano

  It was the first leisure Ian had known in years. Sitting in the cinema lounge of the great ocean liner, nothing to do but watch the parade of passengers in dinner jackets and sequined evening gowns, cigarette smoke and jazz swirling together in idle seduction, dark water of the Atlantic sliding past outside. Enjoy it, the ship seemed to whisper. A little lotus-eating time before the chase begins in Boston.

  “I’m so bloody bored I could jump over the rail,” he said to his companion.

  She grinned: a tall lanky woman in her fifties, loose trousers and boar-tusk ivory bracelets, a faint stammer, and mangled-looking hands that drew stares. “Another d-drink?”

  Ian inspected his tumbler. “No, thank you.”

  “What happened to the stories I heard about you drinking Hemingway under the table?”

  “It got rather old.”

  “So will you, and then w-what will you have to show for it?”

  “Fewer hangovers, Eve. Fewer hangovers.”

  Ian frequently reflected that the greatest advantage from a life spent hopping all over the map trying to catch the next war was that he never knew where he’d meet an old friend last seen in a Spanish airdrome or a Tunisian bar or the deck of a French troopship. His last encounter with Eve Gardiner had been during the Blitz in London, seeing her shake glass slivers out of her hair in the middle of a bombed-out pub. Everyone else ran for an air-raid shelter when the alarm went off, but Eve kept right on reading the Dispatches from London column. “‘It’s their good humor that surprises me,’” she read aloud as Ian trailed back in after the raid. “‘How this city can paste a smile on its collective face and still get to work more or less on time—’ Miss Ruby Sutton writes a good column. You’ve got your work c-cut out for you, Graham. Try to live up to all this good press and trundle off to work with a smile, won’t you?”

  And now here they were drinking scotch in idle luxury, bound for the United States. Behind him was bleak, bombed Vienna with the temporarily closed-down center; ahead was the new chase. Here there was limbo, and an old friend met by chance.

  “It’s been good bumping into you, G-Graham.” Eve finished her drink, rising. “I’d stay, but I’ve got a tall colonel in my c-cabin who keeps me from getting b-bored on ocean crossings.”

  “Is that the secret of surviving shipboard travel?” Ian rose, gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I should have packed an army officer.”

  “You packed a Russian anarchist.” Eve nodded across the cinema lounge where Nina’s blond head was coming through the crowd. “Is she a p-pilot?”

  “I have no idea. Why?”

  “I saw her check the sk-sky the moment she went on deck. All fliers do that. How do you not know if your w-w—your wife is a pilot?”

  “It’s complicated. Would you like an escort back to your cabin? I’d hate to think of you running into a drunken passenger on a dark deck.”

  “I have a Luger P08 at the small of my b-b-b—my back, Graham. If a drunken passenger gives me any trouble on a dark deck, I’ll just sh-shoot him.”

  Eve disappeared into the throng. “Who is that?” Nina said, throwing herself into the chair Eve had vacated.

  “An old friend.” Ian looked at his wife, speculative. “She says you’re a pilot, Lieutenant Markova.”

  “Yes.” Nina’s brows rose. In her patched trousers and boots she stuck out from the sleekly dressed crowd like a barnacle, but she didn’t seem to care. “How does she know?”

  “She used to do something unbelievably vague in British intelligence, and people like that are rather good at observing things. Tell them good morning, and they know your occupation, your birthday, your favorite novel, and how you take your tea. What is your birthday?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know your occupation, Comrade Lieutenant Markova, and I know your vile predilection for jam in tea and historical romances, but I have no idea what your birthday is. On the marriage certificate, I believe I made something up.”

  “March 22. Born a year after the revolution.”

  She’d have turned thirty-two not long ago, then. “I owe you a birthday present, comrade.”

  “Die Jägerin’s heart on a stick?”

  “I’ve heard marriage meant the surrender of hearts, but I didn’t think quite so literally. And no,” Ian added.

  Nina snorted. “Is Antochka coming to join us?”

  “That Milanese divorcée he cozied up to two nights ago still hasn’t let him out of her cabin.” It had made for easier sleeping arrangements: Nina kept the tiny cabin assigned to Mr. and Mrs. Graham while Ian bunked with Tony. Ian had wondered at first if that would be awkward, g
iven the quarrel they’d had in the Vienna office, but Tony made no reference to it and they’d fallen back into the old camaraderie. Ian was still grateful when Tony began staying with the Italian blonde with her mink and her scarlet fingernails. The cabin class reservations that were all they were able to afford on the May installment of Ian’s annuity were not roomy.

  “Is your fault we waste time on this boat, you know,” Nina was complaining. “If not for your damned fear of heights, we fly this distance, much shorter time. I fear water, but you hear me complain about this boat?”

  “Yes,” Ian said. “You’ve been complaining about this boat since Cannes.”

  “I still go on it. You can’t get on a plane, you’re too sensitive? Western milksop. No one in Soviet Union is sensitive.”

  “Clearly,” Ian answered, grinning.

  “Mat tvoyu cherez sem’vorot s prisvistom.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “‘Fuck your mother through seven gates whistling.’”

  “Bloody hell, woman. The mouth on you . . .”

  They gave up their table and wandered out on deck. A cool night, faint light on the ocean from a waning quarter moon. Nina looked at it, glaring. “I hate quarter moon.”

  “That’s rather random,” Ian observed.

  Silence. Her face had grown taut.

  “Did you see the ceiling frieze in the great hall on this ship?” he asked, watching her. “Jason and the Argonauts, setting off for the golden fleece. The original no-chance-we’ll-find-it hunt. But they found it. Perhaps we’ll find our golden fleece too.”

  “I don’t want to talk,” Nina said abruptly.

  “All right.” Ian lit a cigarette and leaned on the rail, looking over the water. Slowly the crowd thinned, trailing off to bed. Nina’s profile was bright against the darkness, rather lovely. She’s designed to be looked at by moonlight, the thought went through his head. Normally he’d have brushed that bit of whimsy aside, but now he stood at the rail of the vast ship thinking that he had never kissed his wife and realizing in a sudden visceral tug that he wanted to. She was a Russian whirlwind who stole his shirts and put her boots on his desk, but under the stars she looked like she was made of silver.

  Goddammit, Ian thought, half angry, half amused. He had no wish to be attracted to a woman he would soon be divorcing. Yet here he was, flicking his cigarette into the water below and saying, “Would you slit my throat if I were to kiss you?”

  Nina’s eyes came down from the quarter moon overhead, dark with some old remembered pain. It took her a moment to focus on Ian. “Never mind,” he said quietly, and began to turn away, but she reached up, yanked him down to eye level, and nailed her mouth against his. It wasn’t a kiss, it was a hurricane. Her strong fingers laced around the back of his neck, her ankle hooked his knee, and Ian found himself burying his hands in her hair and yanking her hard up against him. He felt her compact form almost climbing up his as her teeth scored his lip. He bit at her right back, drinking the taste of her like ice and salt and violence. His wife kissed like she was trying to drink his heart through his throat.

  “Bloody hell, woman,” he managed to say, heart pounding. “The mouth on you . . .”

  She regarded him coolly, as if they hadn’t just nearly ravaged each other against a deck railing. “I don’t want to talk.”

  He could still taste her, like the icy burn of vodka electric in his throat. “I don’t either.”

  They dragged each other back to the tiny cabin booked in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Graham, which Ian hadn’t set foot in. Is this a good idea? he thought.

  No, he answered himself promptly. But I don’t give a damn. Banging the door shut, he picked up his wife and kissed her again.

  “Chyort,” she muttered, wrenching at his shirt as they toppled onto the bed. “What are you doing?”

  “Confiscating your weaponry.” Ian tugged the razor out of her boot top. “I know better than to take an armed woman to bed.”

  “You have to fight me for it.” She gave a mock snarl like a wolverine, her strong limbs coiling and twisting through his. She was half laughing and half angry, at herself or at him he didn’t know, but she was nearly throwing off sparks of heat and fury as they kissed and struggled and clawed to get closer. There were enough buried sparks of his own anger to meet hers, the banked antagonism of the quarrel in his office flaring into a different kind of fire as he roped her hair around his hand and pulled it tight, and she left the marks of her teeth in his shoulder even as she wrapped her legs around his waist. The razor came partly unfolded and nicked Ian’s arm before he got it away from her.

  “I know how to fight, you Red Menace.” Ian hurled the razor across the cabin and kissed her again, drinking down her bone-buckling taste of ice and arctic wind, blood and sweetness. Her nails raked his back, and he sank into her like he was sinking into a headwind, blown and tossed and dizzied by chaos.

  The first thing she said afterward was, “We still get divorce.”

  Ian burst out laughing. They were both still breathing hard, sweating, sheets and skin lightly dappled with blood from the cut on his arm, which he still didn’t feel even remotely. “I’d say this rules out nonconsummation as grounds.”

  “This is—” Nina hunted for a word, muttered something in Russian. Squirming away from his side, she set her back against the foot of the bed facing him, scowling. Ian’s flare of anger had burned out, but she was still crackling and sparkling, all wary prickles in the dark. “We’re on the hunt. We search, we fight, the blood is up, we screw. Is all it is.”

  Ian leaned forward to run a hand over the smooth curve of her leg still tangled with his, down the strong arch of her calf. She had a tattoo on the sole of her foot, he saw with fascination; some spiky Cyrillic lettering. Шестьсот шестнадцать. The visceral tug toward his wife that he’d felt at the deck railing hadn’t gone out, it had only gone deeper. He curved a hand around her ankle. “If that’s how you want it, comrade.”

  “Is.” She looked fierce, and he wondered what she was remembering. What memory she’d pushed down when she dragged her eyes away from that quarter moon and dragged him down for a kiss instead.

  “Who were you thinking of when you kissed me?” he asked, running his thumb over the Cyrillic on her small foot.

  She looked him in the eye. “No one.”

  Liar, Ian thought, even as he tugged her back toward him and kissed her scowling mouth. What’s going on in that head of yours, Nina? Who are you? He still had no idea, only that the answer was growing more complicated rather than less.

  Chapter 24

  Nina

  January 1943

  North Caucasus front

  This makes thirteen,” Yelena called on ascent. By now they were accustomed to deciphering each other’s words through the tinny interphones. “Take the stick.”

  Nina took over, shivering even in furred overalls and mole-fur flight mask. Nothing kept you warm in an open cockpit under a frozen moon. Better than the armorers, Nina told herself. They worked bare-handed even in the dead of winter; they couldn’t attach bomb fuses through bulky gloves. They were losing fingertips, laboring with blank, stoic faces and bandaged hands as blue as wild violets, but they weren’t slowing down. With more than six months’ practice under their belts, the regiment had turnaround down to an art: a U-2 could land, fuel, rearm, and take off again in less than ten minutes. “It’s counter to regulations,” Bershanskaia had admitted, “but it’s our way and it works.”

  Nina saw Yelena’s head loll in sleep, up in the front cockpit. In these long winter shifts where eight runs per night stretched to twelve or more, all the pilots and navigators had started sleeping in shifts. Generally Yelena dozed on the way out, and Nina on the way back. Better that than risk us both dozing off at once. Sleep was the enemy on the long winter nights; sleep the seducer luring you to doze off and fall out of the sky.

  Nina battled yawns until the target showed below. “Wake up, rabbit,” sh
e called to Yelena, rapping gloved knuckles on her pilot’s head. “Dusia’s lining up.” Bombing headquarter-designated buildings was always hell; the searchlights and the ground fire were twice as fierce.

  “I’m awake.” Yelena shook her head to clear the cobwebs, then took control again and dropped them neatly down behind Dusia’s U-2. Nights like tonight they flew in pairs: Dusia would blaze through first, flinging herself sideways as shells ribboned into the sky in pursuit . . . and the Rusalka came floating silently behind while searchlights and guns were busy. Yelena slid the Rusalka neatly under the one questing searchlight that didn’t dive after Dusia’s U-2, lining them up in perfect darkness. Nina triggered the bombs, and Yelena looped around.

  “Nod off, Ninochka,” she called through the interphones. “I’ll wake you on the descent—”

  But she broke off as the plane rolled left, fighting her efforts to level out. Nina swore, leaning out over her cockpit and suddenly very, very awake. “Bring us around! There’s still a twenty-five kilo on the rack.”

  All traces of weariness bottomed out of Yelena’s voice. “Can you see it?”

  “Yes. Last bomb didn’t drop.”

  Yelena was already taking them back out wide, past the target into the darkness. Nina caught a flash glimpse of the next U-2 lining up to descend, pilot probably wondering if they’d lost their bearings. No time to worry about that. Nina toggled the bomb’s release, but nothing dropped. “Stuck fast. Level out on the straight, and throttle back.”

  “Why?” Yelena called even as she fought the plane’s left-leaning roll, applying opposite aileron and stick to take them flat and steady. Nina unclipped her safety harness. “Ninochka, what are you doing?”

  “Giving it a push,” Nina said reasonably and stood up.