School the day after Pearl Harbor—what’s more trustworthy than that?” Tony struck a patriotic pose. “I can stake out the shop, and we can use the salary.”
“Yes, we can.” Between Ian’s annuity and Tony’s savings, they’d managed to rent a top-floor two-room apartment overlooking Scollay Square, which mostly seemed to be crammed with drunken university students pressing into Joe & Nemo’s for hot dogs, and drunken sailors on leave pressing into the Half Dollar Bar. The apartment smelled like grease and shoe polish, but it was cheaper than a hotel and worth putting up with the broken door lock and the three-legged table whose corner sat on a nonfunctional radiator. Any income would, Ian had to admit, be welcome.
“That twitchy German clerk I ran into last week at the McBride shop?” Tony grabbed a pad, began scribbling notes. “I’ve got a name now, Kolb. I hate to play the game of Let’s automatically blame the Kraut, but that Kraut was twitchy as hell. He does the shop’s restoration work—”
“How you find that out?” Nina swung her legs back outside the windowsill. It made Ian queasy, watching her swing her boots over a four-story drop. “You don’t start work yet.”
“The owner’s daughter told me, the one who offered the job. A man good at restoring antiques might mean one good with documents. This Kolb could have a sideline going under the table, hooking money out of war criminals. Lorelei Vogt’s mother told us people like her daughter could get papers there, identification, new names.”
“Why would they need new papers to begin with?” Ian rose, thinking aloud on something that had been nagging at him since this chase took its America-bound turn. “The United States is more obsessed with Communists than Nazis. There hasn’t been a single extradited war criminal, and they’ve welcomed war refugees from Europe since ’48—”
“As long as they aren’t Jewish war refugees,” Tony muttered. “Oh, no, we don’t want the Yids here, anyone but them—”
“—so anyone who came here under their own name wouldn’t need to bother with new papers.”
“Smart ones would.” Nina sounded matter-of-fact. “You keep your name, it’s on file. If someone wants, they look you up, including your war record. Today, no one cares about looking. Tomorrow, who knows? Next year, five years, ten years—is still there, if anyone looks.”
“My wife is a professional paranoid,” Ian observed.
“I’m Soviet.”
“Same thing, you teapot desecrator.”
“A name gets on a list, it stays there forever in a drawer. Maybe nobody ever looks at it. Or maybe someone decides list matters. Then the black van rolls up for you.” Nina shrugged. “If I leave my country with things to hide, I would change name, background, everything, to be safe.”
You did leave your country with things to hide, Ian thought. He and his wife had spent most of the Atlantic crossing rolling around the sheets, but that didn’t mean he knew much more about her. She wouldn’t sleep next to him, looked wary at any sign of affection outside a bed, and was not interested in answering most of the questions he wanted to ask. Like why she’d left her homeland . . .
“Well, whatever McBride’s Antiques might be dealing out of the back room to paranoid war criminals,” Tony said, “I’ll bet my next month’s salary Kolb’s the one dealing it.”
“See what you can find out.” Ian sat, tilting his chair back on two legs. “Check out the owners as well. They might be complicit, they might not.”
“A peaches-and-cream Boston co-ed helped the huntress get a new identity and disappear?” Tony linked his hands behind his head. “I’m doubtful.”
“You think girls of twenty-one can’t be dangerous?” Nina drank off the last of the oil in the sardine tin. “In war I know plenty; call most of them sestra. Don’t discount just because she’s pretty.”
“Who said she was pretty?” Tony countered. “I have no idea if she’s pretty. She was crying her eyes out over her dad—I was passing her handkerchiefs, not eyeing her up and down like some street-corner lothario.”
“But you already think she can’t be involved. Is what you want to think.” Nina looked at Ian. “Means she’s pretty, yes?”
“Definitely,” he said, pulling out the notes they’d made on the McBride family.
“I resent that,” Tony remarked. “I am not some slavering GI who turns to jelly at the first pair of shapely female legs that walks by. I am perfectly capable of objectivity here.”
“‘Shapely,’” Nina said.
“Telling,” Ian agreed.
“Now that you two are screwing, you gang up on me. Completely