“YOU ARE EVICTED,” Frau Hummel greeted them at the door, crimson with rage. “You and that barbarian Hure—”
She continued to shout, but Ian pushed past and threw open the door to the center. “Bloody hell . . .”
In one day, the office had gone from an orderly oasis to an utter disaster. Files were scattered everywhere in heaps, paper drifted like snow across the desk, and empty cups sat on every surface. The air smelled like scalded tea, and the jam pot was attracting flies. The author of all this anarchy sat in Ian’s chair, bare feet swinging, blond head bent over a file she was leafing with jam-sticky fingers.
“No more biscuits,” Nina greeted them without looking up. “Or tea.”
Ian gave his desecrated office another long stare. Tony surveyed the chaos too, eyes dancing. “Nina,” Ian said eventually, waiting until she looked up. “Why are we being evicted, and why are you wearing one of my shirts?”
“Mine is hanging to dry.” She pushed Ian’s cuff up her arm, fanning the file in her hand. “This case, the Schleicher mudak—my reading isn’t so good, but it looks like the wife is lying. Why didn’t you threaten to cut her nose off?”
“Is Frau Hummel really evicting us?”
“She threatened.” Nina tossed the file down, picked up another. “I tell her I cut her nose off.”
“Wonderful.” Ian suppressed the urge to throttle his wife where she sat. “Nina, you were only supposed to take care of the post, answer the telephone—”
“Is boring.” Nina picked up her tea, looked around for a spoon, and stirred it with the end of Ian’s fountain pen instead. “I review your old chases, see how you work. Useful, for when we go after die Jägerin.”
“Useful?” He folded his arms across his chest. “You unleashed chaos in my office, you little savage.”
“Is my office too. Until target’s bombed flat, what’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is mine.” She gulped some tea, then rose and stretched, the hem of Ian’s shirt falling nearly to her knees. “What do you find in Altaussee? Where do we go next?”
“Salzburg.” Ian glared. “Give me my shirt back.”
“Nu, ladno.” She shrugged, began unbuttoning.
“Bloody hell,” he growled again and yanked open the door to the tiny washroom. It smelled of peroxide; evidently she’d used the sink to touch up her hair. An improvised laundry line had been hung with a rinsed-out blouse and a set of silky blue knickers. “Your blouse is dry,” Ian said, ignoring the underwear.
“You’re easy to shock, luchik. Is very funny.” She patted his arm, amused, and closed the washroom door. Ian turned to find Tony chortling.
“She collectivized the office,” he said. “Definitely a Russki.”
Ian bit back a snort. The urge to throttle his wife was now warring with the urge to laugh. “Well, help me clear up my Soviet bride’s mess.”
“She was putting files away as she read. It’s not that bad.”
“Without order lies madness.” Ian believed that in his bones. With order came peace and law; without it lay war and blood. He’d seen enough of both to know it was true.
He locked that thought away as Tony sat back on his heels and asked, “When do we head for Salzburg, and are we taking your Soviet bride?”
“I don’t know.” Ian paused. “What does luchik mean?”
Tony grinned. “‘Little ray of sunshine.’”
“Does it bother you that she’s a Soviet?” Ian knew how suspicious the Yanks were of the Reds these days. Five short years from the end of the war, and benevolent ally Uncle Joe had become everyone’s enemy, but the Americans seemed more paranoid about the Communist Menace than anyone.
“She hasn’t gone around quoting Das Kapital. She hasn’t done anything except desecrate your tea and lie about her origins, and there are plenty of reasons for people to do the latter.” Tony slid a cabinet drawer shut. “We listen to lies day in and day out, not just from war criminals. Refugees and good guys lie too. About whether they’re Jewish or gentile, about their war record or their imprisonment record, about their health and their age and how they got their papers. Good reasons or bad, everybody lies.”
“Maybe.” Ian rose. “It’s time I talked to Nina. Will you smooth Frau Hummel over, make sure we aren’t being evicted?”
“Some glamour in this job,” Tony groused amiably, slouching out. “Become a Nazi hunter for the thrills, and it’s all paperwork and sweet-talking the landlady . . .”
Nina padded out of the washroom, tossing Ian’s shirt at his desk and sending more papers to the floor in a shower. Ian ignored that, fixing his wife with a level stare.
“You aren’t Polish. Let’s dispense with that lie first. You’re Russian.”
Nina looked up at him, wariness falling across her face. Then she shrugged. “Yes.”
Ian blinked, so braced for a denial that her acknowledgment caught him off guard. “You aren’t denying it?”
“Why?”
“You told me you were Polish. In the Red Cross hospital—”
“No.” Her eyes were as opaque and bottomless as two blue lakes. “You assumed. I let you.”
He tried to remember. Nineteen forty-five, the steely hospital scent of antiseptic over blood. Nina still half starved and woozy from pneumonia, Ian desperate for answers about his brother. The language barrier, the chaos all around. No, Ian thought, she hadn’t said she was Polish. A girl found near Poznań, with the name Nina, which was so common in Poland . . . everyone assumed. “Why did you let everyone think you were Polish?”
“Easier.” She flopped into his chair, propping her disreputable boots on the desk. “I wasn’t going home. I say I’m Soviet, is where they’d send me.”
“Where is home, exactly?”
“Go east through Siberia until you fall off the world edge into a lake as big as the sky. All taiga and water witches and ice eating railway stations whole; everything needs you dead and everybody wants to leave.” Amusement gleamed in her eyes. “Would you go back?”
“If my family were there.” He’d cross Siberia barefoot if his brother were at the end of it.
“My family isn’t.” If there was pain in her eyes, it flickered by too fast for Ian to catch. “I spend my whole life going as far west as I can from that lake. Poland? Is just the next stop.”
“Dangerous. You were nearly dead when the Red Cross found you.”
“I’m hard to kill.”
Ian pulled up a chair, gazing at Nina across the desk. She gazed back, unblinking. “Where were you trying to go after Poland?”
“As far west as I can without falling off that edge of the world. You help me get to England, I look around and think not bad. It’s ugly, there’s rationing, but the ice in winter doesn’t eat you alive.”
“How does a Soviet girl end up in Poland in the first place?”
“Assigned to the front. Surprised? Soviets, they use women in their wars, not just for factory jobs or behind desks.”
Ian knew something about that. One of his fellow war correspondents, a motherly-looking American woman with nerves of gunmetal, had written a pointed article for her paper about how Soviet women were employed as tank drivers and machine gunners, whereas the great and enlightened United States of America just told their women to plant Victory gardens, and be thrifty with their bacon grease. Ian looked at his wife from the Siberian wastes and wasn’t terribly surprised to discover she had been assigned to the front. No wonder we won the war.