“You’d keep us here all night, cricket, and Mr. Graham has other obligations. I’ll bring you back tomorrow to practice.”
Ruth sighed, watching the instrument go back behind glass. When her sister prompted, “What do you say to Mr. Graham now?,” she fixed Ian with a direct stare and said, “When can you teach me more?”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” Jordan protested.
“When can you teach me more, sir?” Ruth amended.
Ian laughed out loud.
“You don’t have to do this again,” Jordan told him. “I don’t wish to impose.”
Ian opened his mouth to take the way out she’d given him. “I don’t mind,” he heard himself saying instead, and looked at Ruth. “Will Thursday do, cricket?”
Both McBride sisters burst into smiles like small suns. Goddammit, Ian thought. He liked them, and it made him wish he hadn’t met them under slightly false pretenses.
“I hope I’m not too forward in asking.” It burst out of Jordan like a dam breaking. “You were in Spain with Gerda Taro, Mr. Graham—she’s such a hero of mine, you can’t imagine. What was she like?”
“Gerda?” Ian recalled. “They used to call her la paquena rubena—the little red fox. She had a good deal of swagger as well as nerve.” Jordan had stars in her eyes, and behind her Tony smiled. He’d warned Ian in advance that she’d recognized his name, and that surprised Ian as much as Ruth’s passion for scales. Didn’t young women gush over film stars, not journalists?
“You were at the liberation of Paris,” Jordan was saying now. “I remember one of your columns—”
“Yes, I got my first draft down in the bar of the Hôtel Scribe, jammed in between a woman writing a piece for the New Yorker—Janet Flanner, I think it was—and John, who looked like he had the worst hangover in France.”
“John who?” Jordan asked.
“Steinbeck.” Ian saw Jordan’s impressed expression, and hastened to add, “It wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds. A roomful of exhausted press corps nursing blisters and griping about their deadlines.”
She didn’t look like she believed that. “And afterward?”
Ian leaned on the counter, drawn into the past despite himself. “There was a poker game played in the bed of a truck as we headed out of Paris . . .” He ended up telling one story and then another, through a second cup of tea as Jordan pressed him with questions.
“You tell these stories, and I can see everything unfold like I was there,” she exclaimed. “But Tony says you’ve given up writing.”
Ian shrugged. “See enough horrors, the words run out.”
Jordan looked like she wanted to push a pen into his hands anyway, but Tony interjected. “Princess Ruth is getting restless.” He nodded at Ruth, who sat drumming her heels. “And we’ve got a date, McBride.”
That surprised Ian. “I thought you said she didn’t know anything else useful about Kolb,” he said when Jordan disappeared into the back room to put the teacups away.
“This isn’t for work.” Tony shrugged. “Nina has Kolb’s tail until dawn, and it’s too late to make more telephone calls. There’s absolutely nothing else chase related I can turn my hand to, so I’m going to take a pretty girl to the movies.”
“If you want a pretty girl to take out, wouldn’t it be less complicated to pick one who isn’t wrapped up in our chase?” Ian said mildly. “One you don’t have to keep fibbing to?”
“I like her, that’s all.” Tony hesitated, looking unusually thoughtful. “She wants things, big things. I like that. She makes me think about wanting bigger things too. Not just coasting along on your train.”
Ian tried to resist the gibe, but failed. “Has it entirely escaped you that you’re falling for a witness?” he said straight-faced.
Tony shot him a dirty look. “This is not like you getting moony over our resident Soviet assassin—”
“Which is an absurd idea, and you can drop it—”
“—Jordan makes me laugh, that’s all. I make her laugh. It’s a bit of fun on both sides. What’s the harm?”
“Is she going to laugh when she learns you had ulterior motives for asking her on a date to begin with?” Ian lifted an eyebrow. “I may not know everything there is to know about women, but I know they don’t like to be deceived.”
Jordan swept out of the back room. “I hope you don’t mind Ruth coming to the movies, Tony? My stepmother’s out of town.”
“I can cover three tickets.” Tony smiled at the tall blond girl in her yellow summer dress, she smiled at him, and Ian could see the heat there, plain as day.
Something about this chase, he thought. It’s throwing us all off-balance. He went back disquieted, to take over the dawn watch on Kolb from Nina, then attack their list of telephone calls. But by the following afternoon when Tony came home from his shift at the antiques shop, disquiet was forgotten.
“CHEERS,” IAN SAID to his team. “We’ve unraveled our first thread.”
The three of them stood around the table, looking down at the list.
“Seven of these addresses are fakes,” Ian said. “No pattern to it, they’re mixed in with the real ones. But Riley Antiques in Pittsburgh, Huth & Sons in Woonsocket, Rhode Island . . .” He rattled off the rest. “Not one of them is real.”
“What’s on the other end when you dialed those numbers?” Tony asked.
“All private residences.” Sometimes a woman had answered the telephone, sometimes a man, in one case a child’s treble. But not one person at the end of the line had been anything other than puzzled when Ian asked about the business named on the list. “I heard at least three German accents, as well. And when I asked the operator to find me the number of the business, she told me there was no Huth & Sons in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, or anywhere else in Rhode Island for that matter. Same with the others. Those businesses do not exist.” Ian could feel his heart clipping along in staccato pleasure, the thrill when tedious legwork finally produced a lead.
Tony gnawed a thumbnail. “Was anyone on the other end suspicious?”
“Some sounded flustered. One rang off on me. Mostly I pleaded a wrong number and rang off myself in a hurry.”
Nina hadn’t said anything at all. But her eyes glittered, and as Ian looked from her to Tony, he felt the same electric charge leaping between the three of them.
Seven addresses. Die Jägerin might be living at one of them.
“Car or train?” Ian asked. “We’ve got a few day-trips ahead of us.”
“BLOODY HELL . . .” Ian looked around a sea of unfamiliar street signs, pulling over with a squeal of some very dodgy brakes. Tony had taken the train to Queens to see a cousin and come back in a rusty Ford on loan. “Hand me that map, Nina.”
Nina rummaged for it, sharp white teeth crunching through the skin of a beet. She ate raw beets like apples, until her teeth were pink. Ian hoped they wouldn’t be pulled over by any policemen questioning his tendency to drift to the correct (i.e., English) side of the road, because the woman at Ian’s side looked like a small blond cannibal. “You’re holding the map upside-down, comrade. Some navigator you are.”