“Was thinner when I saw her than here,” Nina agreed, tapping the picture. “Darker hair too.”
“So how much help will this photograph be, identifying the real thing if we run across her? This girl could grow up to look like anyone.”
“I know her,” Nina stated. “I know that face till I die, however old it gets. Is the eyes.”
Ian stared at Lorelei Vogt’s eyes. Just eyes. It was pointless trying to find evil in a face. So often, evil sat invisible behind perfectly ordinary features. But still . . .
“Hunter eyes.” Nina summed it up, giving the sweet serious face of their target a tap. “Calm and cold.”
Chapter 15
Nina
October 1941
Moscow
The cold slapped Nina like an open hand. It was well below zero, the air so frozen in the dark night that it felt like winter lake water, but the women of Aviation Group 122 were bright-eyed with excitement as they made their way down the tracks. There might be panic all through Moscow that the Germans would be spilling into the city at any moment—but Nina and her sisters were on their way at last.
“Where are they sending us to train?” Yelena wondered, tripping over her oversize boots.
“Who knows?” Nina gave a hop, trying to see over the girls ahead. The railcars stood open; the first ranks were climbing in.
“It had better be warmer than it is in Moscow.” Yelena’s dark lashes glittered with ice; her eyes were watering and the tears had frosted to her eyelashes. “How can it be this cold in October?”
“This isn’t cold,” Nina lied, trying not to shiver. No Siberian was ever going to admit to a Muscovite that she was cold.
“Liar.” Yelena’s eyes laughed. “Your lips are blue.”
“Well, it’s still nothing compared to winter on the Old Man. The cold there comes rolling out over the lake and there’s nothing to stop her, the icy bitch.” Yelena wrinkled her nose. “What?”
“You’ll think I’m a terrible prude.”
“What?”
“I can’t hear anyone swear.” Yelena blushed. “My father wouldn’t let anyone curse—he’d flick you on the nose hard enough to make your eyes water. Not just the one who said it, but any of us in earshot. So whenever I hear a bad word, I cringe and wait to get hit on the nose.”
Nina laughed, as they pushed their way along to the next railcar. “Fuck your mother, Yelena Vassilovna!” Just to see that nose wrinkle again.
“Laugh away.” Yelena sighed. “I’m a little Moscow goody, and I know it.”
Nina grabbed the handle beside the railcar’s open door, swinging herself up. “Little Moscow goodies don’t have as many flying hours as you. Here, jump up!”
Yelena took Nina’s outstretched hand. A freight car, not a passenger car, and so cold inside their breath came in white clouds. Nina tugged her sealskin hat farther over her ears as more girls piled in. “I won’t swear,” she heard herself saying to Yelena, “if you don’t like it.” It had never occurred to her to care what her fellow pilots thought of her, because she’d always flown alone. But she’d be navigator to one of these girls in the pilot class, responsible for keeping her safe and on course. They had to trust her; she had to trust them. Trust may have been simple for Yelena with her warm, easy ways, but for Nina it felt like flexing a muscle she had never used.
“Swear all you want, Ninochka!” Yelena laughed. “I have to toughen up. If I’m going to kill fascists, I can’t wrinkle my nose at bad words.”
Nina grinned, feeling that muscle flex a little easier. “So say, it’s fucking cold in here.”
“It’s—” Yelena screwed up her face.
“Say it, say it!” Little Lilia Litvyak laughed from Nina’s other side, overhearing.
“It really is exceptionally cold in here,” Yelena said primly, red as a beet, and they nearly fell over laughing as the railcar shuddered into motion. Then the news passed back like a ripple over a field of grain: “Engels, we’re going to Engels—”
“—the training airdrome on the Volga—”
“—Engels!”
NINE DAYS TO ENGELS. Nine slow, cold days: braced and swaying with the movement of the cars, gnawing on rations of bread and herring and swallowing bitter sugarless tea, standing on railway sidings stamping their feet to keep warm as the track was cleared for more urgent supply trains to push through. Talking, always talking, and it was Nina’s turn to be astonished. They know so much more than me. A tall brunette from Leningrad had work calluses from digging tank traps and hauling sandbags, but she had a university degree and spoke four languages. A pink-cheeked girl two years younger than Nina studied children’s education—“Very important to give children a system of structured play that will develop their cooperative instincts.” Marina Raskova herself spent a morning traveling in their railcar, and when they begged her to talk of her record-setting flight on the Rodina, she said that was old news and told them instead how she had wanted to be an opera singer growing up, singing a bit of the chorus from Eugene Onegin. Voices joined in throughout the railcar, and Nina stared uncomprehendingly. She couldn’t hum a note of Tchaikovsky; spoke no language but her native Russian; had never been herded along in structured play or honed a cooperative instinct in her life.
She’d felt a similar disconnect when she first came to Irkutsk at nineteen, but then she had been so focused on learning to fly that she had adopted Komsomol meetings and the other trappings of civilized life without ever giving them the slightest thought. Now she sat surrounded by hundreds of women for whom such things weren’t trappings to be shrugged into as a grown woman, but truths they’d imbibed with their mothers’ milk. They talked of Marxist lectures and hikes with the Young Pioneers, of trying to find shoes during the famine years that didn’t fall apart after one wearing. They even talked in whispers of the black vans that might take you away if you were denounced. Yelena had a neighbor in Moscow who had been taken: “He’d been allotted a bigger room than his apartment mates, and they wanted it, so they reported him as a wrecker,” she said matter-of-factly. “When he was taken, his parents denounced him too so they wouldn’t be sent with him.” No one asked where. They knew not to ask, just as they knew about shoe shortages and lectures, Tchaikovsky and Party songs. It was more than the difference between the country girls and the city girls, Nina thought, because there were both kinds here. This was the difference between growing up civilized, and growing up wild.
“You don’t talk much, Ninochka,” Yelena said at some point, stitching away at her uniform. They’d been passing needles and thread back and forth for days, cuffing up hems as they talked. “How did you grow up, out there on Baikal?”
“Not like you,” honesty compelled Nina to say.
“How?”
“Living on the Old Man in a collection of huts too small to call a village . . .” Nina shrugged. “It’s the end of nowhere. No one sends you away to the wilds, because you already live in the wilds. No one queues for shoes; if it’s winter you go into the forest with a snare and you kill something and make shoes from the hide, and if it’s summer you make sandals out of birchbark. There’s no one to denounce your neighbors to if they have a bigger apartment. No one has an apartment. We barely have neighbors.” There was no one to hear if your father regularly informed the world that Comrade Stalin was a swindling Georgian bastard, but Nina knew better than to confess that. “Maybe once in a lifetime someone might get to a Marxist lecture,” she went on, “if they can get to the next town a hundred kilometers away, and then they talk about it until they’re a hundred. There are old women half convinced the tsar is still alive.” She looked at the curious eyes around her and flushed.