“No one wants to arrest Nazis anymore,” Bauer said, not caring a jot for the glares. “Sweep it all under the rug, live and let live. Your girl may not get more than a few years in prison,” he warned Ian. “Maybe even the case thrown out. Judges don’t like locking up pretty young widows.”
“I’ll make her so famous they won’t have a choice.” Tony had said on Ian’s last telephone call that the first story had exploded in Boston like a V-2 rocket. Ian already had the stories to follow it up, paced to land like a sequence of punches in a boxing ring. Once the nationals picked up the story, even the hidebound Austrians with their distaste for scandal wouldn’t be able to slide away from their duty.
Ian watched die Jägerin walk away, disappearing into a cloud of homburgs and Polizei caps as she was finally taken off his hands. He supposed the next time he saw her it would be her trial. Jordan McBride, he guessed, would be at his side, the lens of her eye poised behind the lens of her camera. She needs answers more than I. Or if she didn’t, Ruth would someday, when she was old enough to ask the difficult questions about the woman who had raised her.
“I have a question for you, comrade.” Ian looked down at Nina, strolling along at his side. They were staying at a hotel on the Graben, but he wasn’t eager to return yet. They hadn’t really talked, he and his wife, since the night on the beach in Florida. After that the chase had swamped them, and the tense need to watch their prey. “You could have killed Lorelei Vogt, out there on Selkie Lake. She had a pistol, she was moving to use it. You disarmed her rather than cutting her down. Why?” Nina’s restraint had surprised him. Since when had she ever been restrained, in the matter of capture over vengeance?
“Dying, that is easier for her. She wants it, because justice is harder. So I don’t cut her down. Is difficult,” Nina conceded, a glint of fury in her blue eyes. “I think for a moment, when I dive into the lake and the shot goes off, that she’s killed you.”
Ian stopped. “And you wanted to cut her to ribbons to avenge me?” From Nina that was practically a valentine.
“But I don’t,” Nina said, virtuous. “I just disarm her. I think maybe you are right, luchik. Justice over vengeance.”
“Bloody hell, woman, have I actually made a dent in you?”
She jabbed him in the ribs. “I make a few in you too.”
Yes, you have, Ian thought. And not just the fact that I am now addicted to your paperback Regency tosh. He tugged her arm through his, and Nina let him. The beginning of autumn nipped the air, and a few chestnut sellers were out, but the city looked tired and gray. Ian missed the hum of energy from Boston, the brashness, even the accents.
“You go back to Boston soon?” Nina asked as if reading his mind.
“Yes.” Not forever, perhaps, but there was no doubt his reception in Vienna was going to be cool for some time. He’d burned every favor he’d ever stored up ensuring Lorelei Vogt’s arrest—it would be no bad thing to absent himself and pursue war criminals in America for a few years. Jordan had said on his last telephone call that he could have the workroom over the antiques shop rent-free, if he would just go on giving Ruth the occasional lesson. With a thrum of quiet delight Ian envisioned it: a bright space with a window over Newbury Street, the smells of beeswax and silver polish drifting from the workshop where Mr. Kolb no longer worked. Taking half an hour every day to stretch his back and teach Ruth a new tune when she was let out of school, drinking tea afterward with Tony and Jordan as they talked above the sound of scales, then back to work. Building a case, maybe, against Vernon Waggoner of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who looked like he might have buried a few corpses in shallow graves back in his day. “Yes, I’m going back.” Ian looked at Nina. “Are you?”
“Is nice place, the decadent West.” Nina sounded noncommittal. “I like decadent.”
“Come back, Nina. Stay with the team.” Ian held up a hand before she could bristle. “I’m not asking you to stay married to me. I’m asking you to stay with the center. You belong with this team. You know you do.”
“You want me?” She looked suddenly vulnerable, Nina who normally faced the world behind shields of serenity or prickliness, with the occasional switch to barbarism. “I think how I left Seb behind, think maybe you wouldn’t want me to stay. Once huntress is caught.”
That memory hurt, Ian couldn’t deny it, but casting all the blame on Nina would be unjust. “My brother was a grown man. He made a decision, and you couldn’t dissuade him from it. There it is.”
She nodded. There was guilt there, and probably always would be, but overlaid by that Russian fatalism of hers. Battered souls like ours, Ian thought, tramping out of the wreckage of wars, always have guilt. Ghosts. Lakes and parachutes. They could both bear that weight, going on. “I want you on this team, Nina. On the hunt, wherever it leads. With me or not, but always on the hunt.”
She considered that. “Then I come back to Boston.”
Ian couldn’t hide the grin that broke over his face. Nina almost grinned back, but scowled instead. “We still divorce,” she warned.
“All right.”
“Because after Yelena I don’t—”
“Who asked you to love me?” Ian said lightly. “That’s not what I’m saying at all, you Red Menace.”
“What do you say?”
He had searched for what to tell her on the beach in Florida and got it wrong. But something tense and jealous had unspooled in him since die Jägerin’s capture, and there had been many hours to reflect on the Atlantic crossing, staring at the waves.
“I am only saying that I will find you mad wolves to hunt,” Ian told his wife, “and that I will never break your heart.” If part of that heart was always out of reach, that seemed entirely fair to Ian. You did not get a whole heart when you pinned yours to a splendid, battered, high-flying hawk like a Night Witch. Nina’s soul would always in some deep place yearn to be soaring under a bomber’s moon with her dark-eyed Moscow rose, and that was fine. Ian thought there was a chance, despite her prickles, that a bit of that remaining heart might thaw enough for him.
Or maybe I’m wrong, he thought. Maybe they’d divorce, after all. But he would still have a Night Witch on his team, and there wouldn’t be a war criminal in the world out of their reach.
He was happy to wait as Nina decided what she wanted.
His wife was peering upward, smiling. He followed her gaze and saw she was looking at the silhouette of the great Prater wheel above the amusement park. “You want to go?” she challenged.
Sixty-five meters up. Ian had nearly come to pieces the last time he rode it. But he’d gone flying since then with a Hero of the Soviet Union, far higher than sixty-five meters. With the bloody engine turned off. Smiling, he shook his head.
“Why not?” Nina asked. “Kill the fear, luchik.”
He slipped his trigger finger through hers and tugged her back in the direction of their hotel. “Already done, comrade.”
Epilogue
Nina
April 1951
Fenway Park, Boston
Nina didn’t understand baseball. “Why are they arguing?”