“The batter doesn’t like the umpire’s call,” Jordan explained, ponytail swinging. “It’s been a very generous strike zone.”
“Strike zone? He hits him now?” This was a boring game, Nina had decided. Hitting people would liven it up.
“No, no. He’s just arguing to make a point.”
“Should hit him with the bat,” Nina grumbled. “Why have a bat if you don’t hit people?”
“I’ll hit Kinder with a bat if he doesn’t stop coming inside on the fastball. He nearly winged Rizzuto.” On Jordan’s other side, Tony glared down at the Red Sox pitcher. In between putting in hours for Ian and filling in behind the shop counter when Jordan needed it, Tony was signed up for classes at Boston University. The center has always needed a legal expert, and I just happen to have the G.I. Bill on my side, he’d said last Christmas with a gleam in his eye. We can’t keep burning up the telephone lines to Bauer for advice by the time it comes time to try our first extradition case.
You, a lawyer? Nina had snorted.
I can sell ice to Alaskans and charm birds out of trees. It’s either be a lawyer or a shoe salesman.
“Keep whining.” Jordan laughed now, as Tony continued to grumble about the strike zone. “Your precious Yankees are down five runs.”
“Not for long, J. Bryde . . .”
“This game is stupid,” Nina told her husband.
“Agreed.” Ian was stretched out long limbed and relaxed in his seat, hat cocked back, collar unbuttoned. The smell of mown grass and chalk rose from the field, and the crowd hummed with cheers and groans, cracking peanut shells, and scratching pencils on scorecards. It was a rare day off for all of them: the team was preparing a file on one Vernon Waggoner of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, cross-checking his identity against that of a clerk who had worked at Belsen, and Jordan (when she wasn’t handling the team’s photography) had been taking pictures for a tourism bureau. “Easy work, decent money,” she said, snapping classic horizon shots all around Boston. “Brochure shots will buy the Sunday roasts until I sell Boston at Work.” There was interest; her photographs accompanying Ian’s articles on the capture of Lorelei Vogt/Anna McBride had received a certain degree of attention.
The ball went flying, which, to Nina’s eye, made all the men in uniform run around in inexplicable ways and made Ruth bounce up and down in excitement. Nina squinted at the field. “You understand this, malyshka?”
Ruth had been chattering to Tony in mixed English and Yiddish, which he’d begun informally teaching her this winter. Her real mother was Jewish—Ruth will never know her, but she can know something about her mother’s people. Ruth lapsed entirely back to English, telling Nina, “This is the infield fly rule,” and going into far more detail than Nina wanted. Children could be very boring, Nina thought, even if you liked them. Ruth looked rosy in the sunshine, much less like the kind of scrawny chick a housewife wouldn’t even bother to put in a pot. She’d had bad nightmares in the fall, something about a woman hiding in her closet at night to steal her away, and Jordan had fussed very unnecessarily. Nina had taken her razor, gone into the closet and banged around uttering some Baba Yaga screeches, nicked the pad of her finger so there would be blood on the razor, then walked out holding it up for Ruth’s inspection, announcing, “Is dead now.” Nightmares had been better ever since.
“Bloody hell, Nina, you ate all my peanuts.” Ian rattled the empty bag.
“What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine.”
“We’re divorcing,” he said. “So that’s not true.”
“I get more.” She climbed out of her seat, up the park steps toward where the vendors hawked snacks, still marveling at the abundance of all the food on display.
Succumbing to capitalist greed, her father sneered, but Nina ignored him. She could buy a second bag of peanuts if she wanted them; she had sandals that weren’t made out of birchbark or cheap factory-glued leather; she had a dress that had never been worn by someone else first: polished cotton as scarlet as the star on the Rusalka. The dress Ian had bought for her in Filene’s last year, a dress that would have made Yelena’s eyes dance with wicked intentions. If this was capitalist greed, Nina would take it.
Western whore, Papa grumbled, but his voice came more faintly now than it used to. Perhaps because she couldn’t imagine him here in his wolfskins, eating peanuts and enjoying a lovely April day. Nina looked at the grassy outfield lapping up to the tall green wall in left field, and imagined April on the Old Man. The lake would still be frozen, the rusalka sleeping green haired and still below the ice, but the air would be freshening, looking ahead toward June when the ice would break into rainbow needles, turquoise blocks, shards sharp enough to cut a throat. Nina remembered standing on that frozen shore in seal-fur boots, hating it, asking furious questions of the world that had seemed so cold and closed in.
What is the opposite of a lake? What is the opposite of drowning? What lies all the way west?
Among Yelena and the Night Witches, she’d found the first two answers. But the third had tormented Nina in the bad years between Seb’s death and Tony’s call to hunt the huntress. Scrabbling to make a living in ruined, exhausted England, missing Yelena, telling herself never to get so close to anyone again. Thinking, as she trudged through rainy days on the ramshackle airfield, that this was all she deserved for failing first her regiment and then Seb. It was better to be alone; it didn’t matter if the all the way west she had yearned for turned out to be a world not as cold but just as closed in as the one she’d fled.
No, Nina thought now, looking at the park, at the green grass and the men running in pointless squares. This is all the way west. She looked down the rows of seats and found Tony saying something to Ruth; Ruth listening as she unwrapped a piece of gum; Jordan snapping a picture of the field . . . and Ian lazily fanning himself with his battered panama.
“This is our year,” the vendor who sold Nina her peanuts predicted. “We go all the way this year, I can feel it. This is our team.”
“Yes,” Nina agreed, smiling at the two blond heads below, the black head, and the dark with its salting of gray. Maybe they weren’t Night Witches, they weren’t a regiment, but—“Is our team.”
She tore into the peanuts, wandering back down. Men on the field were running around again, people were on their feet shouting, who knew why. “Hit him with the bat!” Nina shouted, just to join in. Slid into her seat beside Ian, who had dropped his hat and pulled a paperback out from Nina’s bag: The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer. “You stole my book again, Vanya,” Nina complained.
“Sophia Stanton-Lacy is being vexed by the spiteful Miss Wraxton, but I am confident she will prevail.” Ian removed a bookmark. “And since when am I Vanya? We’ve moved on from little ray of sunshine?”
“Ian—in Russian, would be Ivan. Proper nickname for Ivan is Vanya.”
“Nicknames are to shorten. You don’t shorten a three-letter name to a four-letter name to a five-letter name.”
“You do in Russian,” she said serenely.
He raised an eyebrow, studying her. “What are you thinking, comrade?”