She felt a reflexive cringe at the thought of unpacking this unsavory family business with an outsider—even a lover she trusted. But Jordan hesitated only a moment before letting her feet take her toward his apartment.
She squeezed past a pair of gangly young men sitting on the grimy stairwell passing a bottle back and forth, edging up the last set of steps to knock on the door. No one answered. She rattled the door handle again, and it came open; Tony had said it was flimsy. She hesitated. Normally she’d never have invited herself inside, but Tony had said Mr. Graham and his wife were out of town—and Jordan didn’t like the look of those men on the stairwell, talking too loudly as they passed their bottle. She went in and shut the door behind her. Tony wouldn’t mind.
The room was hot, the broken table heaped with papers and tea mugs. Jordan reached for the nearest piece of paper and fanned herself with it. Come home, she thought to Tony, looking at the clock. She very badly wanted to talk to him.
The piece of paper in her hand slipped between sweaty fingertips, fluttered to the floor. Jordan picked it up again. Tony’s writing, bold and spiky, some kind of list—the words Chadwick & Black jumped out. She’d telephoned that number just days ago. This was a list of antiques dealers, written in Tony’s hand.
Puzzled, she looked at the papers piled on the table. More lists in Tony’s handwriting. Maps, both American and European. Lists, all in Tony’s hand, looking like they’d been hastily copied—list after list of names and businesses, many of which Jordan knew, on shop stationery. Copied out at the shop.
A slip of newsprint fluttered out of the bottom layer as she sifted, and Jordan bent to pick it up. Dan McBride’s obituary, circled.
Jordan sat down, heart pounding, and began to sift through the layers. Scribbled notes in what looked like German and Polish. Maps jotted all over with an upright script she recognized as Ian Graham’s, having seen him write pieces of music down for Ruth to listen to. A thick file labeled Die Jägerin/Lorelei Vogt.
Jordan opened it. Clipped inside was a photograph of a family on church steps, the figure at one end circled in red.
Jordan looked closer. A young woman, gloved and folded hands, composed eyes over smiling lips. Jordan knew those eyes. Her ears roared, and she squeezed her eyes shut. Opened them again, brought the photograph closer.
Anneliese. Younger than Jordan was now, almost unrecognizable in her chubby, unformed youth, but not to Jordan, who knew her so well. It was Anneliese.
Jordan looked around the table with its heaped evidence of a long stakeout. “What is this?” she whispered aloud into the stale, silent air. Tony Rodomovsky turning up at the shop inquiring about a job. Ian Graham never quite saying what he was doing in Boston, except that he had all the time in the world to teach Ruth scales. His strange Soviet wife with her unmistakable edge of danger. Anneliese’s picture in a file with another woman’s name . . .
Jordan pushed the photograph aside with shaking fingers and began to read.
Chapter 48
Ian
September 1950
Boston
You two look like death warmed over,” Tony yawned, picking Ian and Nina up at the bus station in the rattling Ford. “I’m the one running on about three hours of sleep, trailing Kolb all by myself.”
“Poshol nakhui,” Nina growled. “I spend two years straight on three hours of sleep, you can shut up.”
“You can’t trump a Russian when it comes to suffering,” Tony grumbled, peeling into the Boston traffic. “They have always suffered more, and in minus-twenty-degree weather, and in a gulag to boot. You just can’t win.” He looked at both his passengers, Ian staring out one window, Nina the other. “Anything happen that I should—”
“No,” Ian said around the stone in his throat, and the silence held as they trudged upstairs to the apartment. Normally Nina skipped backward up the steps just ahead of him until he told her to get out of his bloody way. Now she took the steps two at a time without looking back, uncharacteristically silent. Better this way, Ian thought, already eager to sink back into the grind of cross-checking and telephoning and diner stakeouts. Better the drudgery of a stalled chase than this tangle of pain and anger with which he had no time to deal.
At the top landing, Ian saw their door ajar. He reached out, twitched