Ian inspected his tumbler. “No, thank you.”
“What happened to the stories I heard about you drinking Hemingway under the table?”
“It got rather old.”
“So will you, and then w-what will you have to show for it?”
“Fewer hangovers, Eve. Fewer hangovers.”
Ian frequently reflected that the greatest advantage from a life spent hopping all over the map trying to catch the next war was that he never knew where he’d meet an old friend last seen in a Spanish airdrome or a Tunisian bar or the deck of a French troopship. His last encounter with Eve Gardiner had been during the Blitz in London, seeing her shake glass slivers out of her hair in the middle of a bombed-out pub. Everyone else ran for an air-raid shelter when the alarm went off, but Eve kept right on reading the Dispatches from London column. “‘It’s their good humor that surprises me,’” she read aloud as Ian trailed back in after the raid. “‘How this city can paste a smile on its collective face and still get to work more or less on time—’ Miss Ruby Sutton writes a good column. You’ve got your work c-cut out for you, Graham. Try to live up to all this good press and trundle off to work with a smile, won’t you?”
And now here they were drinking scotch in idle luxury, bound for the United States. Behind him was bleak, bombed Vienna with the temporarily closed-down center; ahead was the new chase. Here there was limbo, and an old friend met by chance.
“It’s been good bumping into you, G-Graham.” Eve finished her drink, rising. “I’d stay, but I’ve got a tall colonel in my c-cabin who keeps me from getting b-bored on ocean crossings.”
“Is that the secret of surviving shipboard travel?” Ian rose, gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I should have packed an army officer.”
“You packed a Russian anarchist.” Eve nodded across the cinema lounge where Nina’s blond head was coming through the crowd. “Is she a p-pilot?”
“I have no idea. Why?”
“I saw her check the sk-sky the moment she went on deck. All fliers do that. How do you not know if your w-w—your wife is a pilot?”
“It’s complicated. Would you like an escort back to your cabin? I’d hate to think of you running into a drunken passenger on a dark deck.”
“I have a Luger P08 at the small of my b-b-b—my back, Graham. If a drunken passenger gives me any trouble on a dark deck, I’ll just sh-shoot him.”
Eve disappeared into the throng. “Who is that?” Nina said, throwing herself into the chair Eve had vacated.
“An old friend.” Ian looked at his wife, speculative. “She says you’re a pilot, Lieutenant Markova.”
“Yes.” Nina’s brows rose. In her patched trousers and boots she stuck out from the sleekly dressed crowd like a barnacle, but she didn’t seem to care. “How does she know?”
“She used to do something unbelievably vague in British intelligence, and people like that are rather good at observing things. Tell them good morning, and they know your occupation, your birthday, your favorite novel, and how you take your tea. What is your birthday?”
“Why?”
“Because I know your occupation, Comrade Lieutenant Markova, and I know your vile predilection for jam in tea and historical romances, but I have no idea what your birthday is. On the marriage certificate, I believe I made something up.”
“March 22. Born a year after the revolution.”
She’d have turned thirty-two not long ago, then. “I owe you a birthday present, comrade.”
“Die Jägerin’s heart on a stick?”
“I’ve heard marriage meant the surrender of hearts, but I didn’t think quite so literally. And no,” Ian added.
Nina snorted. “Is Antochka coming to join us?”
“That Milanese divorcée he cozied up to two nights ago still hasn’t let him out of her cabin.” It had made for easier sleeping arrangements: Nina kept the tiny cabin assigned to Mr. and Mrs. Graham while Ian bunked with Tony. Ian had wondered at first if that would be awkward, given the quarrel they’d had in the Vienna office, but Tony made no reference to it and they’d fallen back into the old camaraderie. Ian was still grateful when Tony began staying with the Italian blonde with her mink and her scarlet fingernails. The cabin class reservations that were all they were able to afford on the May installment of Ian’s annuity were not roomy.
“Is your fault we waste time on this boat, you know,” Nina was complaining. “If not for your damned fear of heights, we fly this distance, much shorter time. I fear water, but you hear me complain about this boat?”
“Yes,” Ian said. “You’ve been complaining about this boat since Cannes.”
“I still go on it. You can’t get on a plane, you’re too sensitive? Western milksop. No one in Soviet Union is sensitive.”
“Clearly,” Ian answered, grinning.
“Mat tvoyu cherez sem’vorot s prisvistom.”
“What does that mean?”
“‘Fuck your mother through seven gates whistling.’”
“Bloody hell, woman. The mouth on you . . .”
They gave up their table and wandered out on deck. A cool night, faint light on the ocean from a waning quarter moon. Nina looked at it, glaring. “I hate quarter moon.”
“That’s rather random,” Ian observed.
Silence. Her face had grown taut.
“Did you see the ceiling frieze in the great hall on this ship?” he asked, watching her. “Jason and the Argonauts, setting off for the golden fleece. The original no-chance-we’ll-find-it hunt. But they found it. Perhaps we’ll find our golden fleece too.”
“I don’t want to talk,” Nina said abruptly.
“All right.” Ian lit a cigarette and leaned on the rail, looking over the water. Slowly the crowd thinned, trailing off to bed. Nina’s profile was bright against the darkness, rather lovely. She’s designed to be looked at by moonlight, the thought went through his head. Normally he’d have brushed that bit of whimsy aside, but now he stood at the rail of the vast ship thinking that he had never kissed his wife and realizing in a sudden visceral tug that he wanted to. She was a Russian whirlwind who stole his shirts and put her boots on his desk, but under the stars she looked like she was made of silver.
Goddammit, Ian thought, half angry, half amused. He had no wish to be attracted to a woman he would soon be divorcing. Yet here he was, flicking his cigarette into the water below and saying, “Would you slit my throat if I were to kiss you?”
Nina’s eyes came down from the quarter moon overhead, dark with some old remembered pain. It took her a moment to focus on Ian. “Never mind,” he said quietly, and began to turn away, but she reached up, yanked him down to eye level, and nailed her mouth against his. It wasn’t a kiss, it was a hurricane. Her strong fingers laced around the back of his neck, her ankle hooked his knee, and Ian found himself burying his hands in her hair and yanking her hard up against him. He felt her compact form almost climbing up his as her teeth scored his lip. He bit at her right back, drinking the taste of her like ice and salt and violence. His wife kissed like she was trying to drink his heart through his throat.