“Don’t think I’m trying to drive you away.” Anneliese smiled. “This is your home. But you don’t have to be tied here because of the shop and your father’s wishes. I want you to be happy. Would it make you happy to go abroad? Find work as a photographer?”
“I don’t know if I’m good enough for that,” Jordan heard herself say.
“You won’t know unless you try.” Anneliese rested a black-sleeved arm next to the ashtray. “Take that camera of yours and find things to snap in Europe. It’s another way to learn besides university courses.”
“I can’t leave.” Jordan said it reflexively.
“Leave what? The shop?” Anneliese waved a hand. “You don’t really want it to begin with, and it will run just fine without you. Leave Garrett? If he loves you, he’ll wait. Leave Ruth? If you get married in the spring, she’ll have to adjust to your being gone, anyway.”
“But I’d still be in Boston, able to see her. Not a state away.” Or an ocean away. “Ruth’s already lost too many people.”
“Ruth will adjust. Children do. She’s your sister, not your daughter—you don’t have to build your life around her.” Pause. “And you don’t have to feel disloyal for wanting something different than your father wanted for you.”
I do, Jordan wanted to say. I changed everything I wanted because of what he said. But her imagination was already running far, far ahead of her. She thought of slinging the Leica over her shoulder and grabbing a bus for New York; walking into the big offices of LIFE and applying for a job as errand girl, darkroom assistant, anything at all to get her foot in those doors. She thought of trekking through Spain to see where Robert Capa had snapped his famous Falling Soldier. She thought of the project that had leaped into her mind just that afternoon after Tony’s casual comment seeing the print of her father, the second idea for which she’d thanked him—the project drumming away inside her head in its urgency to be started. Taking the time to do it, not just tell herself she didn’t have time because doing a big ambitious photo-essay was silly when the camera was just a hobby.
To never think the words just a hobby again.
“What I’m saying is that I can help you.” Anneliese’s voice went on warmly. “This is your inheritance, Jordan; you’re entitled to it. Do you want to travel? I can give you an allowance. Do you want to take an apartment in New York, work as a photographer? I can help with expenses until you start earning a proper wage. It’s not an offer I’d make to any twenty-two-year-old girl, but you’re of age, and you have a good head on your shoulders. Leave the shop to me, leave Ruth to me, leave Boston to me—it’s too small for you.” Her stepmother faced her, smiling. “What do you want?”
Jordan opened her mouth to answer and instead burst into tears. She heard Anneliese stub out her cigarette and then move closer, slim arms folding around Jordan. She cried into that small shoulder as the sky darkened from twilight to night, a half-moon beginning to rise, and there was one final stab of resentment. That Anneliese, whom she had met at seventeen, knew her so well, and not her father who had known her her whole life.
What do you want?
For the first time in a long while, Jordan thought, I want the world.
Chapter 32
Ian
June 1950
Boston
How did it go with Kolb?” Tony’s voice crackled through the pay phone.
“Nothing,” Ian said flatly, watching the rising half-moon. In the time he and Nina had been inside Kolb’s apartment, late afternoon had become full dark. “You finally met the McBride widow; anything of note?” They hadn’t technically ruled out that the shop owners might be involved with Kolb’s activities.
“Pleasant woman, blue eyes, dark hair, classic Boston clip on her R’s. No scar on the neck—hey, no harm checking. She was in and out with a few questions; no attempt to talk to the employees or customers. I’ll keep an eye, see if Kolb makes any effort to speak with her or give her anything, but she seems to be hands-off with the shop, and my first guess is that she wouldn’t know if he’s got a racket going.”
“He does,” Ian said shortly. “We just can’t prove it yet.”
He hung up, returning to the diner on the corner where Nina already sat with a Coca-Cola, keeping watch through the window. Not much of a diner, empty except for an ancient waitress whose cigarette ash nearly fell into Ian’s five-cent coffee. But the corner table by the window had an unobtrusive view of Kolb’s building, and that same building didn’t have a rear entrance besides an illegally defunct fire escape. Ian didn’t see the aging forger swinging down from a fire escape by his hands, so the diner was where they settled to keep watch.
“You should go home,” Ian told Nina. There was a part of him that was sorry—very sorry—that he hadn’t beaten Kolb into a mass of blood and bone splinters: he wanted to sit here and drink bad coffee until that part was thoroughly strangled. “You did well tonight,” he added. He’d worried her flair for chaos would spill into the work, but she’d cleaved to the plan, watched for cues, been useful.
“Spasibo.” Nina began taking out hairpins, shaking her hair out of its grim knot. “What if Kolb runs?”
“I’ll follow, see who he meets. Watch him until he leads us to something or someone new.”
Nina picked up the menu. “If he doesn’t?”
“In cases past, we’d make the decision at some point to move on.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Not here.”
“No.” There was an ocean in the way, not to mention an obsession. Ian took a sip of coffee, grimacing. “There are probably going to be a lot of hours spent in this booth.”
“They have hamburgers. Is something, at least.” Nina flagged the waitress. Ian knew she found hamburgers a miracle of American life far more compelling than freedom of speech. “Kolb runs, he maybe gets away for good,” Nina said when the waitress plodded out of earshot. “New city, new name. He’s a forger, maybe he make himself new papers.”
Ian nodded, remembering various failed tail operations of the past. It wasn’t easy for a tiny team to mount a comprehensive watch.
“Is only three of us,” Nina said, reading his mind. “We can’t sit on him every breath.”
“We can try. I’ll take him from dawn until he arrives at work.” Ian hadn’t been sleeping much anyway; he might as well come here at four in the morning and sit watching a door. “Tony will watch him at work. And you—”
“I take nights.”
“Agreed, Night Witch.” Ian felt the anger draining out of him, being replaced by shame. You lost your temper. You threw a witness up against a wall and choked him. He’d never done that before, no matter how much he was tempted.
Bloody hell, it had felt good.
Ian looked at his wife. “I believe I owe you an apology.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I threw you out of my office in Vienna because you said you’d take violence over legality. Yet I’m the one who just threw a man up against a wall simply because he made me angry. There’s an analogy about pots and kettles that isn’t making me particularly happy at the moment.”