Jordan paused on the threshold, inhaling the familiar scents of chemicals and equipment. This was her room, much more than the cozy bedroom upstairs with its narrow bed and the desk for homework. This room was where she ceased being Jordan McBride with her messy ponytail and bag of schoolbooks, and became J. Bryde, professional photographer. J. Bryde was going to be her byline someday, when she became a professional like her idols whose faces looked down from the darkroom wall: Margaret Bourke-White kneeling with her camera on a massive decorative eagle’s head sixty-one floors up on the Chrysler Building, impervious to the height; Gerda Taro crouched behind a Spanish soldier against a heap of rubble, peering for the best angle.
Normally Jordan would have taken a moment to salute her heroines, but something was gnawing at her. She wasn’t sure what, so she just started laying out trays and chemicals with the speed of long practice.
She loaded the negatives for the pictures she’d taken at dinner, running the images onto the paper one at a time. Sliding them through the developer under the red glow of the safelight, Jordan watched the images come up through the fluid one by one, like ghosts. Ruth playing with the dog; Anneliese Weber turning away from the camera; Anneliese from behind, doing dishes . . . Jordan rotated the sheets through the stop bath, the fixer bath, gently agitating the liquids in their trays, transferring the prints to the little sink for washing, then clipping them up on the clothesline to dry. She walked down the line one by one.
“What are you looking for?” Jordan wondered aloud. She had a habit of talking to herself down here all alone; she wished she had a fellow photographer to share darkroom conversation with, ideally some smoldering Hungarian war correspondent. She walked the line of prints again. “What caught your eye, J. Bryde?” It wasn’t the first time she’d had this niggling feeling about a shot before it had even been printed. It was like the camera saw something she didn’t, nagging her until she saw it with her own eyes and not just through the lens.
Half the time, of course, that feeling was completely off base.
“That one,” Jordan heard herself saying. The one of Anneliese Weber by the sink, half turned toward the lens. Jordan squinted, but the image was too small. She ran it again, enlarging it. Midnight. She didn’t care, working away until the enlarged print hung on the line.
Jordan stood back, hands on hips, staring at it. “Objectively,” she said aloud, “that is one of the best shots you’ve ever taken.” The click of the Leica had captured Anneliese as she stood framed by the arch of the kitchen window, half turned toward the camera for once rather than away from it, the contrast between her dark hair and pale face beautifully rendered. But . . .
“Subjectively,” Jordan continued, “that shot is goddamn spooky.” She didn’t often swear—her father didn’t tolerate bad language—but if there was ever an occasion for a goddamn, this was it.
It was the expression on the Austrian woman’s face. Jordan had sat across from that face all evening, and she’d seen nothing but pleasant interest and calm dignity, but in the photograph a different woman emerged. She wore a smile, but not a pleasant one. The eyes were narrowed, and her hands around the dish towel suddenly clenched in some reflexive death grip. All evening Anneliese had looked gentle and frail and ladylike, but she didn’t look like that here. Here, she looked lovely and unsettling and—
“Cruel.” The word popped out of Jordan’s mouth before she knew she was thinking it, and she shook her head. Because anyone could take an unflattering photo: unlucky timing or lighting caught you midblink and you looked sly, caught you with your mouth open and you looked half-witted. Shoot Hedy Lamarr the wrong way, and she turned from Snow White to the Wicked Queen. Cameras didn’t lie, but they could certainly mislead.
Jordan reached for the clothespins clipping the print, meeting that razor-edged gaze. “What were you saying, right at this minute?” Her father had been talking about the cabin . . .
You hunt?
Some women hate the noise and the mess—
Not at all . . .
Jordan shook her head again, moving to throw the print away. Her dad wouldn’t like it; he’d think she was twisting the image to see something that wasn’t there. Jordan and her wild stories.
But I didn’t twist it, Jordan thought. That’s how she looked.
She hesitated, then slipped the photograph into a drawer. Even if it was misleading, it was still one of the best pictures she’d ever taken. She couldn’t quite bring herself to throw it away.
Chapter 2
Ian
April 1950
Cologne, Germany
About half the time, they tried to run.
For a moment Ian Graham’s partner kept up with him, but though Tony was more than a decade younger than Ian he was half a head shorter, and Ian’s longer stride pulled him ahead toward their quarry: a middle-aged man in a gray suit dodging desperately around a German family heading away from the swimming beach with wet towels. Ian put on a burst of speed, feeling his hat blow away, not bothering to shout at the man to stop. They never stopped. They’d sprint to the end of the earth to get away from the things they’d done.
The puzzled German family had halted, staring. The mother had an armful of beach toys—a shovel, a red bucket brimming with wet sand. Veering, Ian snatched the bucket out of her hand with a shouted “Pardon me—,” slowed enough to aim, and slung it straight and hard at the running man’s feet. The man stumbled, staggered, lurched back into motion, and by then Tony blew past Ian and took the man down in a flying tackle. Ian skidded to a halt as the two men rolled over, feeling his own chest heave like a bellows. He retrieved the bucket and handed it back to the astonished German mother with a bow and a half smile. “Your servant, ma’am.” Turning back toward the prey, he saw the man curled on the path whimpering as Tony leaned over him.
“You’d better not have put a fist on him,” Ian warned his partner.
“The weight of his sins caught up to him, not my fist.” Tony Rodomovsky straightened: twenty-six years old with the olive-skinned, dark-eyed intensity of a European, and the untidy swagger of a Yank. Ian had first come across him after the war, a young sergeant with Polish-Hungarian blood and a Queens upbringing wearing the most carelessly ironed uniform Ian had ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on.
“Nice curveball with that bucket,” Tony went on cheerfully. “Don’t tell me you pitched for the Yankees.”
“Bowled against Eton in the house match in ’29.” Ian retrieved his battered fedora, cramming it down over dark hair that had been salted with gray since Omaha Beach. “You have it from here?”
Tony looked at the man on the ground. “What do you say, sir? Shall we continue the conversation we were having before I brought up a certain forest in Estonia and your various activities there, and you decided to practice your fifty-yard dash?”
The man began to cry, and Ian looked at the blue sparkle of the lake, fighting his usual sense of anticlimax. The man dissolving in tears on the ground had been an SS Sturmbannführer in Einsatzgruppe D, who had ordered the shooting of a hundred and fifty men in Estonia in 1941. More than that, Ian thought. Those eastern death squads had put hundreds of thousands in the ground in shallow trenches. But one hundred and fifty was what he had the documentation for in his office back in Vienna: testimony from a shaky-handed, gray-faced pair of survivors who had managed to flee. One hundred and fifty was enough to bring the man to trial, perhaps put a rope around a monster’s neck.