“Will you get to the point?”
“Hundreds, because the women in my family all live forever, and when you add in the godparents and in-laws—not just the Rodomovskys but the Rolskas and the Popas and the Nagys and all the rest—they came off the boat from everywhere east of the Rhine. There was one particularly mean old cow, my grandmother’s cousin by marriage, who talked about winter in Novosibirsk and put jam in her tea . . .” Tony shook his head. “I don’t know what else your wife is lying about, but if she’s from Poland, I’m a Red Sox fan. I know a Russian when I hear one.”
Ian felt his eyebrows shoot up. “Russian?”
“Da, tovarische.”
Silence fell. Ian turned a pen over slowly between two fingers. “Perhaps it doesn’t matter,” he said more to himself than his partner. “She was a refugee when I met her in Poznań, and refugees are rarely fleeing happy pasts. I doubt her story is any prettier for starting in the Soviet Union than in Poland.”
“Do you even know what her story is?”
“Not really.” The language barrier had made it so difficult to exchange more than basic information, and besides, Nina hadn’t been a source he’d been interrogating to get a story. She’d been a woman in trouble. “She was desperate, and I owed her a debt. It was that simple.”
“What debt?” Tony asked. “You’d never met her before; how could you owe her anything?”
Ian took a long breath. “When I came to the Polish Red Cross, I was looking for someone else. His name was Sebastian.” A boy in an ill-fitting uniform, seventeen the last time Ian had seen him. I told them I was twenty-one, I ship out next week! Even now, that memory made Ian catch his breath in pain. “Seb had been a prisoner of war since Dunkirk, held at the stalag near Poznań. I didn’t find him, but I found Nina—she had his tags, his jacket. She knew him. She was able to tell me how he died.”
“How do you know she told the truth about that?” Tony asked quietly. “She lied about being Soviet. She could have lied about anything else. Everything else.”
Ian turned the pen over again. “I think I need to have a chat with my wife,” he said at last.
Tony nodded. “After Altaussee?”
“Altaussee first.” The witness, the hunt, die Jägerin. Nothing came before that.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Tony said eventually. “What debt did you owe Nina that you married her without a second’s hesitation to get her to England?”
“Seb had promised to get her there. I kept his promise for him.” Ian looked at his partner. “He was my little brother. The only family I had left. And Nina watched die Jägerin murder him at Lake Rusalka.”
But the poisonous doubt had crept in. If she had lied about one thing, why not this? That night when Ian sat awake in his dark bedroom with his mind consumed by a woman, it wasn’t the huntress. He leaned on his windowsill with a half-smoked cigarette, looking out over moonlit Vienna and wondering, Who the hell did I marry?
Chapter 6
Nina
May 1937
Lake Baikal, Siberia
Nina broke the rabbit’s neck with a fast twist, feeling the last tremor of its heart under her fingertips. Spring had come to the lake, the air alive with the squeal and groan of ice as the lake’s surface broke apart into rainbow shards. Icicles dripped and water lapped on the shore as the air warmed, but ice floes still drifted in the farther depths. The Old Man had control of the seasons here, and he kept a long grip on winter.
Nina reset the rabbit snare under the trees. She was nineteen now, her blue eyes wary under a shapeless rabbit-fur cap, razor never far from her hand. Her father was too drunk much of the time now to set snares or to stalk game, so Nina did it. The rabbit in her hand would go into the stewpot, and the pelt could line a pair of gloves or be traded. Hunting let her make a living without a man, but Nina still glowered restlessly across the lake. It had been three years since she lay gasping on the ice with her eyelashes freezing together, looking up into the vast sky thinking Get out of here. Three years of waking up with the choking feeling of cold water closing over her head, the terrible drowning sensation. But where was there for a girl like her to go, little and wolverine-mad and knowing nothing except how to stalk and kill and move without a sound?
She didn’t know, but she had to find it, or else she would die here. Stay, and Nina knew the lake would take her in the end.
She stood swinging the dead rabbit by the ears and pondering her useless questions as she’d done for so many mornings, and the day might have ended as so many did: with her stamping back to the house, and skirting her father as he lay snoring. But today, Nina heard a rumble from the sky.
The gornaya? she wondered—but it was too early in the year for the mountain-bred wind that could whirl out of the northwest from a warm sky, whipping the lake into a frenzy and hurling waves three times the height of a man across the shores. Besides, this was a droning mechanical sound that seemed to rise from everywhere. Nina shaded her eyes, hunting for the strange buzz, and her jaw dropped as a shape rose sleek and dark from the horizon and glided down over the trees. An airplane? she thought. The village traders who had been to Irkutsk claimed to have seen them, but she never had. It might as well have been a firebird rising from myth.
She thought it would streak across the sky and be gone, but there was a skipping sound in the drone of its engines. Nina had a moment’s terror the machine would crash into the lake. But it banked stiffly, descending below the tree line, and Nina began to run. For once she didn’t bother to move quietly, just crashed through underbrush and squelching mud. At some point she realized she had lost the rabbit, but she didn’t care.
The plane had touched down in a long clearing in the taiga. The pilot was standing by the cockpit with a toolbox, cursing, and Nina stared at him, mesmerized. He looked as tall as a god in his overalls and flying cap. She didn’t dare come closer, just sank to her heels in a stand of brush and watched him work on the engine. She couldn’t stop looking at the plane, its long lines, its proud wings.
It took her a long time to work up the courage to approach. But she moved out from the brush, slowly came forward. The pilot turned and found Nina under his nose.
He jumped back, boots slipping in icy mud. “Fuck your mother, you scared me.” His Russian was clipped, strangely accented. “Who are you?”
“Nina Borisovna,” she said, dry mouthed. She raised a hand in greeting, and saw his eyes dance over the dried rabbit blood showing under her nails. “I live here.”
“Who lives in a mud splat like this?” The pilot looked at her a little longer. “A real little savage, aren’t you?” he said, turning back to his toolbox.
Nina shrugged.
“This isn’t even Listvyanka, is it?”
“No.” Even Listvyanka was bigger than her village.
The pilot swore some more. “Hours off course from Irkutsk . . .”
“Planes don’t land here,” Nina managed to say. “Where are you from?”
“Moscow,” he grunted, slinging tools. “I fly the mail route, Moscow to Irkutsk. Longest route in the Motherland,” he added, unbending. “Detoured past Irkutsk in the fog, had some engine trouble. Nothing serious. I could fly this girl home on one wing if I had to.”