“Staring at a door? Draw comparisons all you like between flying bombing runs and tracking Nazis, but this kind of hunt involves a great deal more paperwork and waiting. I’m surprised you aren’t bored stiff. Or”—an idea struck him—“is it that you like having a team again? Not like your regiment of sestry, of course. But you have Tony and me, and we all share a target. Is that what you—”
She jerked her hand away from his, something black bolting through her eyes too fast for him to follow. “Am not your team,” she flung at him, every word like an ice bullet. “Is one hunt. One, only because of die Jägerin. We find her and is all finished. We divorce, I go home, is done.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Ian heard himself say. “Even after we divorce, you can still stay on at the center, Nina. You work well with Tony and me; you enjoy it. I know you do. Why not stay on?” He realized how much he wanted that. Under her recklessness she had a navigator’s discipline and total dedication. And having a woman on the team, the places a woman could watch where a man couldn’t—“Stay with us after we catch Lorelei Vogt,” Ian urged, putting all the vehemence he could into the words. “Stay, Nina.”
“No team,” she repeated, eyes like stones, and stamped out of the diner.
Chapter 33
Jordan
June 1950
Boston
Garrett looked back and forth between the two prints lying on the darkroom table. “You’ve been working all week on two pictures?”
“I finally got them right.” A week’s worth of slaving in the darkroom: developing, enlarging, cropping, like as not scrapping and starting all over again. Two prints. But two prints to be proud of.
“Huh.” Garret looked back and forth between them. He’d come from the office, tall and pressed in a summer-weight suit. Jordan knew she looked like a complete wreck in comparison, hair tied up with a scrap of yarn, old shorts splashed with developer fluid. “They’re nice,” Garrett said, clearly hoping it was the right thing to say.
First a low-angle shot of her father in the workroom, holding up a silver card tray. She’d played with exposure and cropped the image till it showed just his hands, his forehead creased with concentration, the scrolled back of the tray, the outer edge of his smile. An Antiques Dealer at Work, she’d titled it with a quick pencil scrawl. “That’s the essence of Dad at work, but it’s also the essence of any antiques dealer at work. It’s why I cropped the image to show just a sliver of his face. It’s not just him; it’s anyone in that job.”
The second photograph was of Garrett at the airfield outside Boston, gesturing in front of the biplane. She’d cropped this image to its essence too; it wasn’t her fiancé looking handsome for the flash, but a pilot, any pilot, every pilot: a wedge of image that showed Garrett’s outward-stretching arm against the outward-stretching wing, Garrett’s grin as man and machine alike yearned for the air. A Pilot at Work.
“Very nice,” Garrett said again, looking lost.
Jordan looked at the two prints, for a moment wondering if she’d been wasting her time. You’re seeing things that aren’t there, the old critical voice scolded her, the one that told her not to dream wild things. But a cooler, more analytical voice said, They’re good.
“The photo-essay will be called Boston at Work. A series of fifteen or twenty portraits, all pared-down close-ups.” The idea had refined itself over the last week, since the evening on the balcony with Anneliese. What do you want? “I’m going to spend the entire summer on it.”
Garrett scratched his jaw. “What about the shop?”
“Dad’s old clerk Mrs. Weir offered after the funeral to come back to the shop if we needed help—Anneliese gave me leave to hire her full-time to replace me.” Jordan was already teeming with ideas. People doing their jobs all over Boston, just waiting to be photographed—the bakers at Mike’s Pastries in the North End, some pictorial slice of the flour and kneading fingers; Father Harris at Mass, the way his hands make a cradle as he elevates the host . . .
Garrett touched the biplane in the print of himself, looking wistful. “What’s it for?”
“My portfolio. I don’t have job experience yet, so I need solid work to show. I’m going to spend the summer photographing everything I can get my hands on.” Jordan took