“I’m a tourist, and my fee for hauling your bag and buttering up that old dame who claimed she was a White Russian countess who fled the Bolsheviks is a swan boat ride.”
Jordan took his arm, turning toward the Public Garden a few blocks away. “White Russian countess?”
“Her accent was Ukrainian, but I was too much of a gentleman to call her a fibber.”
“So you spoke Russian just now to Madame Tamara, and French to those Parisian tourists who came into the shop three weeks ago.” Jordan tilted her head. “And I’m sure I’ve heard you speak German to Mr. Kolb . . .”
“He didn’t like that much. Odd duck, that one. How did your father come across him?”
“He was coming overseas and needed a sponsor. He’s twitchy,” Jordan admitted, “but he had a bad war, or so Anna said.”
“Is she a wicked stepmother, your Mrs. Anna? Poison apples, makes you sleep in the cinders?”
Jordan smiled. “No, she’s wonderful.”
“Too bad, I always liked stories about wicked stepmothers. My Hungarian grandmother told me ghoulish tales growing up, the kind where the wicked stepmother wins in the end, not Cinderella. The farther east from the Rhine, the darker the fairy tales.”
“Hungarian now—really, how many languages do you speak?”
“Six or seven. Eight?” Tony shrugged. “My mother’s parents were a Hungarian and a Pole, and my father’s parents were a Romanian and a Kraut, and everybody came to Queens for a grab at the American dream. That’s a lot of languages going back and forth over a dinner table when you’re growing up.”
“And you just picked it all up?”
“There are two ways to learn a language fast, and one of them is when you’re under ten and have a pliable young brain.”
“What’s the other?”
He grinned. “Over a pillow.”
Jordan slanted him a look. He doffed an imaginary hat in apology. “I apologize. Es tut mir leid. Je suis désolé. Sajnálom. Imi pare rau. Przepraszam—”
Jordan stopped, transfixed, assessing him.
He left off his multilingual flood of apologies. “Normally when a girl stares at my lips I think she wants a kiss. You’re mentally composing a camera shot, aren’t you?”
She raised her Leica. “An Interpreter at Work.” A close-up shot of that smiling mouth midspeech, with the gesturing hand to frame . . .
Tony groaned, tugging her along into the Public Garden, where trees threw dappled shade over crisscrossing paths. “You cruel dasher of hopes, shooting me instead of kissing me . . .”
“I need a motion shot, so talk!” Jordan picked a bench near the entrance, some distance from the swan boats, where the tourists would be crowded. “Tell me something about yourself. Anything.”
“I’d rather talk about you.” He rested an elbow on the back of the bench. “When did you first pick up a camera?”
“I was nine, transfixed by winter trees and a little Kodak.” He smiled, and she clicked three shots off, already knowing this would be a good roll. Tony Rodomovsky wasn’t handsome, but he had a face that photographed well: dark coloring, bold nose, the kind of ink-dark lashes that were absolutely wasted on men who never had to pick up a mascara brush. “When did you join the army?”
“The day after Pearl Harbor. A walking cliché at seventeen, winking at the recruiter. Yes, sir, I’m of age! Then I got to war and found out that it was just as boring as high school. It was if you got stuck with interpreter duty, anyway. What was your war?”
“Scrap metal drives and emergency drills about what to do if the Japs invaded, as if the Japs were going to invade Boston, for God’s sake.” A shot of Tony listening; click. He listened very intently, backs of his fingers brushing her arm now and then. “Mostly, my war was daydreaming. I devoured stories about the women journalists and photographers going overseas—Margaret Bourke-White got torpedoed and had to ship off in a lifeboat, and I nearly died of envy. I absolutely longed to get torpedoed.”
“As long as you got away with some good shots of it?”
“Which would then make the cover of LIFE, yes. That’s exactly how the fantasy went. Then maybe I’d marry Ernest Hemingway and live a life of action and glamour.” Jordan paused, as a connection drifted into place. The journalists and photographers she’d idolized, all dash and danger and war zones, the names she could rattle off like her friends rattled off movie stars. Capa and Taro, Martha Gellhorn and Slim Aarons and . . . “Graham. Is your English friend the Ian Graham?”
Tony looked amused. “In the flesh.”
“And he offered to teach my little sister her scales?” Jordan shook her head. “I used to read his column during the war, after it was syndicated!”
“I’m going to be jealous, if you keep gushing about my boss.”
“Why, can’t a girl get a crush on an older man?” Jordan teased. “Especially a tall good-looking one with a devastating accent, who’s been all the places she’s ever wanted to go?”
“He’s married, and besides, I’d rather you got a crush on me.”
“So charm me. Tell me about being an interpreter at a documentation center.” Lifting the Leica again.
“Not a life of action and glamour. A flood of refugees poured through Vienna—they told their stories to Ian, through me.”
“Was he writing articles, or—”
“No, he says he’s done with writing. Gave it up for practical refugee work and hasn’t penned an article since the Nuremberg Trials.”
“I can see it might wear your soul away,” Jordan said, thoughtful. “Year after year, seeing human suffering and turning it into newspaper fodder. Was it like that for you, translating? Hearing war stories day in and day out, when the rest of the world only wants to leave the war behind?”
“No.” Tony linked his hands between his knees, smile fading to something more pensive. “An interpreter tries to work a step removed. You’re not really there, in a way. You’re like a set of interphones; you make it possible for the two people on either side to hear each other. And that’s everything, when you come down to it. That’s it, in a nutshell: if people would just hear each other—”
Tony stopped. “They’d what?” Jordan asked quietly.
He gave a small, crooked smile. “Likely go right on killing each other in swaths.”
Click. That’s the shot, Jordan thought. Bitter cynicism from a mobile mouth, that same mouth curled in a smile that was still touched with hope even after all it had looked on. “It’s not so different being a photographer,” she found herself saying. “I’m no professional, not yet, but I’ve had a similar feeling to the one you’re describing. The lens removes me from the scene I’m recording, in a sense. I’m a witness to it, but I’m not part of it.”
“People think it makes you heartless. It doesn’t.” A boy walking a beagle on a leash went past; Tony stretched out a hand to the beagle, who lapped his fingers happily before moving on. “It makes you a better set of interphones.”
“Or a better lens.” Jordan tilted her head at Tony. Unexpected depths to her charming clerk—who would have guessed? “You were at war since Pearl Harbor, and then you stayed and did refugee work when everyone else went home. Why?”