Читать книгу The Huntress - Кейт Куинн - Страница 13

April 1950

Vienna

You have a wife?” Tony dragged Ian into the corner for a quick, hissed discussion. “Since when?”

Ian contemplated the woman now sitting at his desk, boots propped on the blotter, crunching down biscuits straight from the tin. “It’s complicated,” he said eventually.

“No, it isn’t. At some point you and this woman stood up together and said a lot of stuff about to have and to hold, and there was an I do. It’s pretty definitive. And why didn’t you tell me four days ago when I said she was coming here? Did you just forget?”

“Call it a sadly misplaced impulse to have a joke at your expense.”

Tony glowered. “Was the part about her being such a fragile flower a joke too?”

No, that turned out to be a joke on me. Ian remembered Nina stumbling over the foreign words of the marriage service, swaying on her feet from weakness. The entire wedding had taken less than ten minutes: Ian had rushed through his own vows, pushed his signet ring onto Nina’s fourth finger where it hung like a hoop, taken her back to her hospital bed, and promptly headed off to fill out paperwork and finish a column on the occupation of Poznań. Now, five years later, he watched Nina suck biscuit crumbs off her fingertip and saw she was still wearing the ring. It fit much better. “I came across Nina in Poznań after the German retreat,” Ian said, realizing his partner was waiting for answers. “The Polish Red Cross picked her up half dead from double pneumonia. She’d been living rough in the woods after her run-in with die Jägerin. She looked like a stiff breeze would kill her.”

It hadn’t just been her physical state either. Her eyes had been so haunted, she looked a step from shattering altogether. Logically, Ian understood she would have changed in five years, but he couldn’t stop trying to reconcile the woman in his office with the frail girl of his memory.

Tony still looked unbelieving. “You fell in love at first sight with our Nazi huntress’s only surviving victim?”

“I didn’t—” Ian raked a hand through his hair, wondering where to begin. “I’ve seen Nina exactly four times. The day I found her, the day I proposed, the day we married, and the day I put her on a train toward England. She had nothing to her name and she was desperate to get as far from the war zone as she could.” They’d hardly been able to communicate, but her desperation had needed no translator. It had tugged at Ian’s heart despite himself. “The region was an utter mess, she had no identification, there were only so many strings I could pull to get her out of the limbo she was in. So I married her.”

Tony eyed him. “Chivalrous of you.”

“I owed her a debt. Besides, we intended to divorce once her British citizenship came through.”

“So why didn’t you? And how is it we’ve worked together several years, yet this is the first I’m hearing about a wife?”

“I said it was complicated.”

“Whisper, whisper,” Nina interrupted. “You’re done?”

“Yes.” Ian threw himself down in the chair opposite and looked her over, his wife. Mrs. Ian Graham. Bloody hell. “I thought you were working in Manchester,” he said at last. Their last exchange of telegrams had been four months ago.

“Whoever do you work for?” Tony added, getting Nina a cup of tea. He still looked flummoxed, and Ian would have enjoyed that if he hadn’t shared the feeling.

“I work for English pilot. He comes out of RAF, starts a little airfield. I help.” Nina stirred her tea. “You have jam?” She wasn’t precisely rude, Ian decided, just abrupt. She had to be what, thirty-two now?

Her eyes flicked at him. The blue eyes, he thought—those hadn’t changed. Very, very watchful.

“Why are you here?” he asked quietly.

“The message.” She tilted her head at Tony. “He asks me to help find your huntress. I help.”

“You dropped everything and caught the nearest train across half Europe, all because you heard we might have a lead on die Jägerin?”

His wife looked at him as though he were an idiot. “Yes.”

Tony fetched the jam pot, then leaned back against the desk. “I hope you’ll tell me more about yourself, Mrs. Graham. Your devoted husband has not exactly been forthcoming.”

“Just Nina. Mrs. Graham is only for passport.”

“‘Nina,’ that’s a pretty name. You’re Polish?”

He switched languages, asking something. Nina answered, then switched back. “I do English now. Who are you again? I forget to write name down.”

“Anton Rodomovsky.” Tony took her hand that didn’t have a teacup in it and bowed, all his charm coming to the fore. “Formerly Sergeant Rodomovsky of the United States Army, but both me and the US of A thought that was a failed experiment. Now I’m just Tony: interpreter, paper pusher, all around dogsbody.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Interpreter?”

“Grow up in Queens with as many babushkas as I did, you pick up a few languages.” Lazily. “Polish, German, Hungarian, French. Some Czech, Russian, Romanian …”

Nina transferred her gaze to Ian. “Interpreter,” she said as if Tony wasn’t there. “Is useful. When do we leave?”

“Pardon?” Ian was transfixed by the way she was dropping heaping spoons of strawberry jam into her teacup. He’d never seen anyone do that to an innocent cup of tea in his life. Bloody hell, it was barbaric.

“I help look for the bitch,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “When do we leave, and where do we go?”

“There’s a witness in Altaussee who might have information on where die Jägerin went after the war,” Tony said.

Nina drank off her jam-clotted tea in three long gulps, then rose and stretched like an untidy little alley cat. Ian rose too, feeling enormous; she barely came up to his shoulder. “We leave tomorrow,” she said. “Where can I sleep?”

“Your husband lives upstairs,” Tony said. “Shall I take up your things?” Ian shot him a withering look. “What, no passionate reunion?” he remarked, innocent.

“Very funny,” Ian said, unamused. It had been the hardest thing to communicate to Nina five years ago when he proposed marriage—that he expected nothing from her, that he was honoring a debt and not looking to collect payment in return. The mere idea of pressing physical attentions on an illness-weakened, war-ravaged woman made him feel like a debaucher out of a Dickens novel. Nina had spent her wedding night in a hospital cot, and he’d spent his filling out paperwork in the name of Nina Graham so she could get to England as soon as she was released.

“I doubt our landlady will be too keen on you staying under this roof,” Tony was saying. “I rent a room two blocks down from a nice little hausfrau. I’ll walk you over, see if I can get you into her spare room.”

Nina nodded, sauntering toward the door. For all her crumb scattering and sprawling limbs, she moved absolutely soundlessly—that too Ian remembered from five years ago; how his bride even while shaky with weakness had moved over a hospital floor silent as a winter fox.

Tony held the door for her, the speculative gleam back in his eye. “So tell me,” he began as the door closed.

Ian turned, contemplating his office. One short visit had turned it to chaos: muddy footprints, rings of drying tea on the files, a sticky spoon staining the blotter. Ian shook his head, half irritated and half amused. This is what you get for putting off the divorce paperwork, Graham. The entire marriage should have been over within a year of the vows—he and Nina had agreed, in a combination of English, Polish, and hand gestures on the way back from the registry office, on a divorce as soon as her British citizenship was finalized. But that had taken so long, and he’d been heading out with the war crime investigation units, and Nina had been struggling to get used to ration-locked postwar England, and time had passed. Every six months or so Ian telegrammed to ask if she needed anything—he might not know his wife, but he’d felt a certain responsibility to make sure the frail woman he’d got out of Poland wasn’t utterly lost in her new country. Yet she always refused help, and most of the time he forgot he was married at all. He certainly had no woman in his life with designs on Nina’s place.

He had cleaned up the mess and gone back to his files by the time Tony returned. “You have an interesting wife,” he said without preamble. “Please tell me you’re aware she’s not Polish.”

Ian blinked. “What?”

“She’s no native speaker. Her grammar’s terrible and her accent’s worse. Didn’t you notice she swapped back to English the minute she could?”

Ian leaned back, hooking an elbow around the back of his chair and reevaluating everything all over again. How many surprises was this day going to lob at him? “If she isn’t Polish, what is she?”

Tony looked ruminative. “You know how many grandmothers and great-aunts I had whacking me with wooden spoons when I was growing up? All these old ladies in shawls nagging their daughters and quarreling over goulash recipes?”

“Will you get to the point?”

“Hundreds, because the women in my family all live forever, and when you add in the godparents and in-laws—not just the Rodomovskys but the Rolskas and the Popas and the Nagys and all the rest—they came off the boat from everywhere east of the Rhine. There was one particularly mean old cow, my grandmother’s cousin by marriage, who talked about winter in Novosibirsk and put jam in her tea …” Tony shook his head. “I don’t know what else your wife is lying about, but if she’s from Poland, I’m a Red Sox fan. I know a Russian when I hear one.”

Ian felt his eyebrows shoot up. “Russian?”

“Da, tovarische.”

Silence fell. Ian turned a pen over slowly between two fingers. “Perhaps it doesn’t matter,” he said more to himself than his partner. “She was a refugee when I met her in Poznań, and refugees are rarely fleeing happy pasts. I doubt her story is any prettier for starting in the Soviet Union than in Poland.”

“Do you even know what her story is?”

“Not really.” The language barrier had made it so difficult to exchange more than basic information, and besides, Nina hadn’t been a source he’d been interrogating to get a story. She’d been a woman in trouble. “She was desperate, and I owed her a debt. It was that simple.”

“What debt?” Tony asked. “You’d never met her before; how could you owe her anything?”

Ian took a long breath. “When I came to the Polish Red Cross, I was looking for someone else. His name was Sebastian.” A boy in an ill-fitting uniform, seventeen the last time Ian had seen him. I told them I was twenty-one, I ship out next week! Even now, that memory made Ian catch his breath in pain. “Seb had been a prisoner of war since Dunkirk, held at the stalag near Poznań. I didn’t find him, but I found Nina—she had his tags, his jacket. She knew him. She was able to tell me how he died.”

“How do you know she told the truth about that?” Tony asked quietly. “She lied about being Soviet. She could have lied about anything else. Everything else.”

Ian turned the pen over again. “I think I need to have a chat with my wife,” he said at last.

Tony nodded. “After Altaussee?”

“Altaussee first.” The witness, the hunt, die Jägerin. Nothing came before that.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Tony said eventually. “What debt did you owe Nina that you married her without a second’s hesitation to get her to England?”

“Seb had promised to get her there. I kept his promise for him.” Ian looked at his partner. “He was my little brother. The only family I had left. And Nina watched die Jägerin murder him at Lake Rusalka.”

But the poisonous doubt had crept in. If she had lied about one thing, why not this? That night when Ian sat awake in his dark bedroom with his mind consumed by a woman, it wasn’t the huntress. He leaned on his windowsill with a half-smoked cigarette, looking out over moonlit Vienna and wondering, Who the hell did I marry?