waitress plodded out of earshot. “New city, new name. He’s a forger, maybe he make himself new papers.”
Ian nodded, remembering various failed tail operations of the past. It wasn’t easy for a tiny team to mount a comprehensive watch.
“Is only three of us,” Nina said, reading his mind. “We can’t sit on him every breath.”
“We can try. I’ll take him from dawn until he arrives at work.” Ian hadn’t been sleeping much anyway; he might as well come here at four in the morning and sit watching a door. “Tony will watch him at work. And you—”
“I take nights.”
“Agreed, Night Witch.” Ian felt the anger draining out of him, being replaced by shame. You lost your temper. You threw a witness up against a wall and choked him. He’d never done that before, no matter how much he was tempted.
Bloody hell, it had felt good.
Ian looked at his wife. “I believe I owe you an apology.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I threw you out of my office in Vienna because you said you’d take violence over legality. Yet I’m the one who just threw a man up against a wall simply because he made me angry. There’s an analogy about pots and kettles that isn’t making me particularly happy at the moment.”
“Kettles? Kolb didn’t have kettles.”
“Never mind.”
Nina’s hamburger arrived. Ian watched her tear into it. The door of Kolb’s building stayed closed. It was always even odds what a guilty man did after being accused: about half bolted in the first hour, and half decided to stay put and pretend they had nothing to hide. He would have bet Kolb for a bolter . . .
Ian sighed. It was going to be a long night, he could tell. One of the sleepless ones, where the parachute drifted at his shoulder.
“Is lake I dream about,” Nina said.
Ian blinked. “What?”
“Lake. Drowning in it. Sometimes is my father holding me under, sometimes is die Jägerin. Always lake.” She shrugged. “Your lake—what is it?”
“There’s no lake. Like there’s no kettle. Your English is very peculiar, comrade.”
Nina took another huge bite of hamburger. “Is parachute?” she asked thickly.
His blood went ice-cold.
“Antochka says you mutter in your sleep. Something about parachute.”
“It’s nothing.” That came out sharper than Ian intended.
“Is something,” she replied. “Or else why is it your lake?”
He said nothing. Nina said nothing either, just looked at him.
“His name was Donald Luncey,” Ian said, wondering why he was telling her. He hadn’t told anyone. “GI from San Francisco, eighteen years old. He called me Gramps. I probably looked ancient to him. He looked about twelve to me.”
“Sounds like my navigator after I was promoted to pilot.” Nina smiled. “Little Galya looked like she should have been on Young Pioneer hikes, not flying runs over the Black Sea.”
“What happened to her?” Ian asked.
Nina’s smile vanished. “Dead.”
“Donald Luncey too. March ’45, American troops parachuting out into Germany. I begged permission to hitch a ride on the jump.”
“Why?”
“It’s what you do, if you want to be any good as a war correspondent.” Ian tried to explain. “At the front, no one likes journalists. The brass worry you’ll see something you shouldn’t, make them look like idiots. The poor bastards in the ranks think you’re a ghoul, sticking your notepad in their faces looking for a story as they’re trying to stay alive. The only way they don’t hate you is if you’re in the thick of it too. Bunk with them, drink with them, jump out of planes with them, run into fire with them—you share the danger, they’ll share their stories. It’s the only way to do the job right.”
Ian had chatted up Private Luncey when they lined up to jump. One of those narrow beaky faces, ears that stuck out like jug handles, a big smile. “We jumped,” Ian went on. “The rest came down safely and went on to their mission, but Donald Luncey and I splatted off course. Hooked our rigs up in some German wood.”
Another woman would have taken his hand. Ian’s wife just looked at him steadily.
He’d snagged badly about twelve meters off the ground in the branches of a massive oak, hanging breathless and tangled under his lines. He’d had a knife, but the overhead angle was so awkward the blade slipped, spinning to the ground below before he could cut a single line. His straps were too badly knotted to slip out of without cutting. But he was lucky compared to Private Luncey, who had hit every branch on the way down