Кейт Куинн – The Huntress (страница 15)

More glasses being drained, more laughter. Jordan’s father set Ruth down, hearing himself called over by a colleague. Ruth looked around, chewing her lip, and Jordan captured her hand. “What do you need, Ruthie? Oh—” As Ruth made a certain clamped-knees gesture. “Let me take you to the powder room.” Ruth protested as Jordan took the bridal bouquet from her hands. “Mama said don’t let go of it—”

“You can hardly take it into the toilet!” Ruth disappeared into the stall, and Jordan laid the roses down before the powder room mirror, snapping a close-up of the flowers. The pale blue satin ribbon was coming undone around the bouquet; Jordan started to rewrap it, but there was a hard little lump in among the stems. Some wedding charm for good luck? Jordan fished down into the roses and drew out the wedged object. The little piece of metal lay in her hand, glittering in the soft powder room light, and Jordan stood as if turned to ice.

A war medal. Not an American medal, but Jordan still recognized it. All through the war, Hollywood actors wore them if they were cast as the Nazi villain. An Iron Cross, black swastika gleaming.

She dropped it as though it were red hot. It lay among the bridal roses and loops of pale blue ribbon like a drop of poison. Something old, something new, Jordan thought, waves of bewildered horror crawling down her spine, something Nazi, something blue.

The toilet flushed; Ruth would be coming out. Anneliese could walk in at any moment. Hardly aware of what she was doing, Jordan raised the Leica. Click—the swastika lurking among the wedding flowers. What kind of woman walked down the aisle carrying a swastika? Why would she risk that? Swiftly, Jordan bundled the roses back together, burying the Iron Cross exactly where it had been before, then she rewrapped the ribbon. Her hands trembled.

Ruth came out, trotting to the sink to wash her hands. Who is your mother? Jordan thought, staring at the little girl. She put the roses back in Ruth’s hands, looked at herself in the mirror, and saw the spots of color flushing in her cheeks. Smile, she told herself, smile—and went back outside.

“There you are!” Anneliese exclaimed, swiftly reclaiming her bouquet. “Ruth takes my flowers and just disappears. Mäuschen, I told you—”

Jordan gripped her father’s sleeve, drawing him aside. “Dad—”

“Cab’s here,” he said, reaching for Anneliese’s traveling case. “You have the telephone number of our hotel in Concord if there’s any trouble. Though I don’t see how much trouble my girls could get into in just two nights!”

I think we may be in a lot of trouble. “Dad,” Jordan said, gripping his sleeve harder.

The crowd was already carrying them outside. He pulled Jordan along. “What is it?”

Jordan’s tongue dried up. What on earth was she going to do, rip Anneliese’s bouquet to bits on the church steps? What would that prove?

Anneliese’s laughing voice exclaimed behind her: “Jordan, catch!”

Jordan turned at the top of the church steps, and the bridal bouquet came flying into her hands.

“For my maid of honor,” Anneliese twinkled as guests clapped. “The train, Dan, we’ll be late—” There was a whirl of luggage and flying skirts as he loaded the cab and Anneliese slid her pocketbook over her arm, and Jordan stood feeling frozen all over again. Because she could feel quite clearly that there was no hard little lump among the stems now. Anneliese must have slid the Iron Cross out before throwing the bouquet.

It must be something very precious, Jordan thought, if she’d risk carrying it today, and only take it out at the last minute.

Or it was never there at all, another thought whispered, and for one horrible moment Jordan thought she was going crazy. Jordan and her wild stories. She’d concocted the wildest theory imaginable out of thin air and jealousy, and this time her mind was furnishing evidence.

But the strap of the Leica reassured her. The Iron Cross had been there; she’d snapped a shot of it. She’d go down to the darkroom the minute she got home and look at the film. Already she was shivering, imagining the black arms of the swastika emerging skull-like through the developing fluid. Proof.

Of what? Jordan thought, staring at Anneliese as her father opened the cab door. By itself, it’s not proof of anything.

Except that this woman was hiding something.

Ruth opened her bag of rice, flinging grains everywhere. A final flurry of hugs, and Jordan’s father and his new wife slid into their taxi. Guests cheered as they rolled away, as confusion and horror swept over Jordan.

Dad, she thought, oh, Dad, what have you brought into our family?

Chapter 8

IAN

April 1950

Altaussee

Nina was not happy to be left behind in Vienna. “No. I go with you.”

“I have to sweet-talk a girl in Altaussee,” Tony said with his most persuasive smile. “How’s it going to look if I’ve got another girl with me already?”

Nina shrugged. She had been filled in on most aspects of the chase ahead and was clearly eager to begin. Ian put his oar in the water. “We need someone to look after the office.”

“You get to chase the huntress and I get to answer phone?” Nina said ominously. “Is horseshit.”

“Yes,” Ian stated. “But I am having a blunt conversation with you before I bring you along on the most important chase of my life, Nina, and since we don’t have time for that conversation right now, you’re staying in the bloody office.”

Her blue eyes narrowed. He stared back unblinking, impatience pulsing through him. The train left in an hour.

“Okay,” Nina finally said, still glowering. “I stay this time. Next time, you take me.”

“Try not to burn down the building while we’re gone.” Ian seized his battered fedora, ignoring Nina’s dirty look, and a moment later he and Tony were speeding down the Mariahilferstrasse in a cab. Vienna slid past outside, war raked but still lovely. A beautiful city, Ian thought, but not home. He hadn’t really had a home since Sebastian died. Home wasn’t merely an address.

“Well,” Tony said, speaking English so the driver wouldn’t understand. “Another day, another hunt.”

“This one is different,” Ian said, still thinking of his little brother. Scabby-kneed, earnest, eleven years younger—with such an age difference they shouldn’t have been close, yet they had been. Perhaps because their mother had died so soon after Seb was born, and the house had become such a mausoleum, their father interested in nothing but long lunches at the club and acting as if the Graham family still had money. “You’re the only thing good about coming home for hols,” the thirteen-year-old Seb had said frankly, back from school one summer. “You’re the only reason I bother coming home for hols,” Ian had replied, twenty-four himself, long moved out from under his father’s roof. “Let’s get out for some fishing before the old man starts going on about how I’d better not go to Spain and muck around with Reds and Dagos.”

Ian had headed to Barcelona not long after that, packing a notebook and a typewriter to cover Franco’s uprising, but even when he came back, sunburned and half a stone lighter, there had been time for his little brother. Teaching Seb to skip stones on a pond, Seb showing him bird calls. The two of them talking about the rumblings in Germany …

Sebastian dead in Poland, never to see the end of the war.

“This chase is different,” Ian said again, and his yearning to catch die Jägerin was a hunger so vast it could have swallowed the world.

Tony flipped through the file on their target as the cab rumbled along. “You’re lucky, you know.”

“Lucky?” Ian looked at him. “My brother would be about your age now if he’d lived, but he didn’t. I don’t have a brother, Tony. That Nazi bitch took him away.”

“You have a single person to blame. One.” Tony looked Ian in the eye, meeting the flare of anger he could probably see there. “Lots of us don’t have that.”

“Us?”

“My mother had family in Kraków, whole flotillas of Jewish cousins and aunts and uncles who didn’t emigrate when her parents did,” Tony said. “I’d never met them in my life, but I promised my mother I’d look them up if I was ever in Poland. When I was demobbed, I went looking …” He blew out a long breath. “Gone. All of them.”

Ian’s flash of anger faded. “I see.” He already knew Tony’s background, of course; his partner had flung that at him the day they started working together. I may be a born-and-raised Catholic boy from Queens, but my mother’s side is Polish Jew. Is that going to be a problem, Graham? “No,” Ian had replied, and that was that. He’d always wondered if Tony lost family in the horror of the camps, but he had never asked. You didn’t ask for information like that. You just listened, if someone decided to tell you. “I’m sorry,” he said simply.

“The maw took them—the machine. There’s no one person to find and accuse. All I can do is go after all of them, the thousands who staffed the machine, and there’s no such thing as catching all the bastards.” Tony smiled faintly. “But you, you’re lucky. You know exactly who killed your brother. One person. And we have a lead where she is.”