Tony looked from print to print. “You’ll sell it,” he said. “You do know that?”
“Maybe.” And she could even see this shot as the start of a new essay entirely focused on Anneliese, the progression of a demure bride to an ice-eyed murderess to a prisoner on trial. Shades of a Murderess. Portraits of a Huntress. Something like that might help Ruth understand the many faces of the woman who had stolen her and raised her and cared for her. But Jordan turned away from the worktable, rubbing her temples. “Ruth has to come first, now. I don’t know how much time I’ll have for this. I can’t work the way I was planning to.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m all Ruth has.” Once again Jordan felt the panic of that, the fear of failing her sister. “I’ll have to do it all, now.”
“As long as I’m in Boston, I’ll help. Not because of you and me, because the team owes you, Jordan. This hunt blew your world to bits.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” Jordan stated. “Dad was already gone before you even came here, and once you began tracking Anna, there were going to be other consequences no matter how she ended up caught. I’ll gladly take them, if it means she’s out of Ruth’s life.”
“That doesn’t mean it sits right with me to swan off and leave you picking up the pieces. It won’t sit right with Ian or Nina either.”
“You’d help us?” The fierce common bond between them all had been Anneliese—what was left when that was gone?
Could it be Ruth?
Tony wrapped his arms around her waist. “Count on it, J. Bryde.”
They stood for a long time, silent under the red light. Jordan’s thoughts were a jumble, exhaustion and relief and cautious hope. The thought of going on entirely alone, carrying Ruth into the coming storm of the breaking scandal, had felt like that hair-raising moment when Nina cut the engine and the plane began to drop. Now it felt like Tony and his partners had reached around, flicked the switch, turned the engine back on. The plane had leveled.
Jordan twisted her head, kissed Tony lightly. “Come upstairs and stay the night.”
“Are you sure? Nosy neighbors take note when gentlemen callers leave in the morning.”
“My family is about to become notorious all through Boston.” Jordan slung the Leica’s strap over one shoulder and tugged him up the darkroom steps, switching on the overhead light. “I don’t really care if the neighbors think I’m a hussy.”
“Jordan?”
She half turned. Click. Standing two steps below, Tony lowered the little Kodak he’d taken out of his pocket, smiling. “I want a picture of my girl.”
Sometimes you got great pictures with skill, Jordan later thought, and sometimes great pictures just happened. That cheap Kodak snap was the best picture of Jordan McBride ever taken, in its subject’s opinion. Blue jeans and a ponytail, caught in motion halfway up a staircase, slinging the Leica casually over one shoulder as she looked back at the camera. A woman on the move, with a gleam in her eye like a lens.
It was the photo most used by J. Bryde, in her byline.
Chapter 59
Ian
October 1950
Vienna
The story was a razor in print form.
Ian had thought he’d never write again, that war had used up all his words. Now, sitting in a deck chair outside the locked third-class cabin where Lorelei Vogt would wait out the Atlantic crossing, he wrote the story of the capture, the story begun in Boston on Jordan’s typewriter. Finishing it longhand on a notepad, he hammered it into shape: the article he was determined would make die Jägerin famous.
Lake Rusalka: a lake in Poland named for a creature of the night, and during the darkest years of the war, a woman lived on her shores far more fearful than any witch who crawled from a lake’s depths.
That was his lede, and in the paragraphs that followed Ian vivisected the woman born as Lorelei Vogt, reborn in murder as Anneliese Weber, rechristened in deception as Anna McBride, and identified by nature—primitive, primal nature red in tooth and claw—as a huntress. He knew every pulse point to push in those paragraphs, every emotional trigger to pull. Women would cry at this article; men would shake their heads; newspaper editors would see banknotes. Ian looked down at his final copy and thought, Dynamite in ink.
It felt good, not to be done with words, after all.
The ship stopped in New York before starting across the Atlantic. Ian took the chance to wire the story to Tony, told him to pitch it to every major newspaper in Boston, and promptly wrote a follow-up memorializing his brother and the Jewish children and poor Daniel McBride. Ian barely slept and neither did Nina, one or the other of them on continuous watch outside Lorelei Vogt’s door.
Not until the very end, after they’d left the ship behind in Cannes and boarded a series of trains that would take them to Vienna, did the huntress speak to him. Ian had been too tense for conversation or scribbling once they left the security of the ship, far too aware Lorelei Vogt could make a panicked run the moment his attention lapsed—but she passed through the train travel passive and silent as a wax doll. On the final train to Vienna, hearing the wheels slow beneath them, she looked at Ian suddenly as if realizing this limbo time of traveling was coming to an end. “I still don’t know who you are, Mr. Graham.”
Ian raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t know you, so why did you come looking for me?” She sounded so puzzled. “You crossed half a world to catch me. What did I do to you?”
How many times had he envisioned sitting down with this woman and telling her in biting words what she’d taken from him? Telling her about a little brother who dreamed of flight and did not know what distrust was. How he’d yearned to do that. Yearned for something else too—for any memories she might have of Seb, the way he looked bolting his stew when she took him inside her ocher-walled house, the things they had talked about in her warm kitchen. The last look on his face before she shot him . . .
But Nina had recounted with quiet poignancy what the last look on Seb’s face had been, had sketched him in the end as he stood in the moonlight warm and well fed, looking at the sky and never dreaming he was about to die. I won’t replace that memory with whatever poisoned image you might have, Ian thought, looking at die Jägerin’s puzzled blue eyes. I want to remember my brother through Nina’s eyes, not yours. The eyes of a woman who saw a friend, not a murderer who saw prey.
So Ian just gave a smile like his wife’s razor. “You’ll find out at the trial,” he said. “If I am called to testify.”
“You should have let me die,” the huntress answered, low voiced. “You should have let me shoot myself.”
“You don’t get to die,” Ian said. “I am not that merciful.”
Lorelei Vogt bowed her head. It stayed bowed through the commotion and paperwork that greeted their arrival in Austria. Fritz Bauer came from Braunschweig in a whirl of suits and uniforms to witness the arrest. Bauer’s greeting had been a fierce smile around his ever-present cigarette, but Ian hadn’t been surprised to see the blend of curiosity and resentment their colleagues aimed at them.
“Sour faces,” Nina commented, puzzled.