“Lalique, 1932. Rose gold settings, freshwater pearls.” He shuffled a bit. “Your birthstone. A good smart girl like you, who picked yourself out a good smart man and a good smart future—a daughter like that deserves pearls.”

Jordan hugged him, throat thick as she inhaled his aftershave. “Thank you.”

He squeezed her back. “All this wedding talk, flowers and dresses—we haven’t talked about afterward, the important things. If you want to keep house for Garrett, or if you want to keep your hand in here at the shop.”

Thinking about after the wedding was almost impossible, like the crest of a hill she couldn’t see beyond. She knew Garrett’s father had spoken to Garrett about helping them with an apartment and then a house; she knew her father had probably been part of that discussion too, though no one had talked to her. But exactly how life alongside Garrett was going to continue after the honeymoon was still in many ways a question mark. “I know I want to work,” she said firmly.

“Well, take some time after the honeymoon. I’ll put up a Help Wanted sign this week, look for another clerk. Some suave fellow or pretty girl to work the counter; Mr. Kolb hasn’t got the English for that.” Jordan’s father hesitated, fingering his suit’s lapel. “Anything ever strike you about Kolb, missy?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. He always looks furtive anytime I come in to check on the restoration work. And with his English so patchy, I can’t ask him anything but the simplest questions. Of course Anna translates anything tricky.” A pause, looking toward the backroom door where Anneliese and Ruth and Mr. Kolb had vanished. “I just wondered what you thought, working around him more than I do.”

The last thing Jordan was going to do was make wild speculations about anyone’s past. “I’m sure it’s just his nerves, Dad. The war, you know.”

“Does he bring people into the shop? Not customers, I mean bringing people into the back.”

“Not that I’ve noticed. Why?” The afternoon sun was coming through the window strong and golden, highlighting her father beautifully. Jordan moved for her camera, stashed behind the door. “Stay right there—”

“I came up here one day and Kolb had another German fellow in the back room. Older, a Berliner, didn’t speak a word of English. Kolb went off in a babble, I could just about get that it was a rare books expert he’d brought in to consult.”

“He has experts in sometimes.” Jordan checked her film, lifted the Leica. “Anna gave him permission.” Click.

“That’s what she said. I just wondered. You have to be careful in a business that attracts swindlers.” A shrug. “Well, Kolb does free me up, even if he makes me twitch sometimes. I want to tell him to relax before he frets himself into a heart attack.”

“You’re the one who never relaxes!” Jordan lowered her camera. “You promised you’d take an afternoon’s fishing at the lake this spring, and you haven’t been once.”

He laughed. “I’ll go soon, missy. I promise.”

The backroom door opened then, and Anneliese’s dark head reappeared. “Does she like the earrings?”

“She does.” Jordan grinned. “Did you help pick them?”

“Not a bit.” Anneliese shut the door on Mr. Kolb in the back room, Ruth peering at the broken-spined book he was repairing. “I thought next Saturday we might shop for a wedding dress? I may be able to stitch up a chic sundress, but wedding gowns are beyond me. I saw one in the window at Priscilla of Boston, empire princess silhouette, seed pearls—”

“I think I’ve picked which weekend I’m going to the lake,” Jordan’s father decided. “Suddenly I fancy tramping after some spring turkey.”

“You hunt turkey.” Anneliese gave Jordan a woman-to-woman smile. “We ladies shall hunt French Chantilly and petal-drop caps. I for one know which hunt will be the more ruthless.”

A week later, Jordan was standing in the lavish fitting room at Priscilla of Boston on Boylston Street when the news came. Swathed in ivory satin exploding into a huge bell of a skirt, turning her head to feel the Lalique pearls swinging as Anneliese waved away the salesgirl trying to suggest ruffles: “My stepdaughter is not a ruffles sort of bride.” Turning to tease Anneliese with some mother-of-the-bride joke, thinking how glad she was that the two of them could laugh and tease each other now. That was when Jordan saw Anneliese’s eyes go toward the door, where a man in a dark suit stepped forward.

“Mrs. Daniel McBride?” Waiting for Anneliese’s nod. “The clerk at your shop said you could be found here. It’s about your husband.”

Jordan stepped off the dressmaker’s dais, feeling ivory satin pool around her feet. Her eye was taking pictures in jerky little snaps. The man in the suit, looking uncomfortable—click. Anneliese frozen still, face draining of color, a Chantilly wedding veil dropping from her hands—click.

The man cleared his throat. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”

Chapter 23

Ian

May 1950

Aboard the SS Conte Biancamano

It was the first leisure Ian had known in years. Sitting in the cinema lounge of the great ocean liner, nothing to do but watch the parade of passengers in dinner jackets and sequined evening gowns, cigarette smoke and jazz swirling together in idle seduction, dark water of the Atlantic sliding past outside. Enjoy it, the ship seemed to whisper. A little lotus-eating time before the chase begins in Boston.

“I’m so bloody bored I could jump over the rail,” he said to his companion.

She grinned: a tall lanky woman in her fifties, loose trousers and boar-tusk ivory bracelets, a faint stammer, and mangled-looking hands that drew stares. “Another d-drink?”

Ian inspected his tumbler. “No, thank you.”

“What happened to the stories I heard about you drinking Hemingway under the table?”

“It got rather old.”

“So will you, and then w-what will you have to show for it?”

“Fewer hangovers, Eve. Fewer hangovers.”

Ian frequently reflected that the greatest advantage from a life spent hopping all over the map trying to catch the next war was that he never knew where he’d meet an old friend last seen in a Spanish airdrome or a Tunisian bar or the deck of a French troopship. His last encounter with Eve Gardiner had been during the Blitz in London, seeing her shake glass slivers out of her hair in the middle of a bombed-out pub. Everyone else ran for an air-raid shelter when the alarm went off, but Eve kept right on reading the Dispatches from London column. “‘It’s their good humor that surprises me,’” she read aloud as Ian trailed back in after the raid. “‘How this city can paste a smile on its collective face and still get to work more or less on time—’ Miss Ruby Sutton writes a good column. You’ve got your work c-cut out for you, Graham. Try to live up to all this good press and trundle off to work with a smile, won’t you?”

And now here they were drinking scotch in idle luxury, bound for the United States. Behind him was bleak, bombed Vienna with the temporarily closed-down center; ahead was the new chase. Here there was limbo, and an old friend met by chance.

“It’s been good bumping into you, G-Graham.” Eve finished her drink, rising. “I’d stay, but I’ve got a tall colonel in my c-cabin who keeps me from getting b-bored on ocean crossings.”

“Is that the secret of surviving shipboard travel?” Ian rose, gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I should have packed an army officer.”

“You packed a Russian anarchist.” Eve nodded across the cinema lounge where Nina’s blond head was coming through the crowd. “Is she a p-pilot?”

“I have no idea. Why?”

“I saw her check the sk-sky the moment she went on deck. All fliers do that. How do you not know if your w-w—your wife is a pilot?”

“It’s complicated. Would you like an escort back to your cabin? I’d hate to think of you running into a drunken passenger on a dark deck.”

“I have a Luger P08 at the small of my b-b-b—my back, Graham. If a drunken passenger gives me any trouble on a dark deck, I’ll just sh-shoot him.”

Eve disappeared into the throng. “Who is that?” Nina said, throwing herself into the chair Eve had vacated.

“An old friend.” Ian looked at his wife, speculative. “She says you’re a pilot, Lieutenant Markova.”

“Yes.” Nina’s brows rose. In her patched trousers and boots she stuck out from the sleekly dressed crowd like a barnacle, but she didn’t seem to care. “How does she know?”

“She used to do something unbelievably vague in British intelligence, and people like that are rather good at observing things. Tell them good morning, and they know your occupation, your birthday, your favorite novel, and how you take your tea. What is your birthday?”

“Why?”

“Because I know your occupation, Comrade Lieutenant Markova, and I know your vile predilection for jam in tea and historical romances, but I have no idea what your birthday is. On the marriage certificate, I believe I made something up.”

“March 22. Born a year after the revolution.”

She’d have turned thirty-two not long ago, then. “I owe you a birthday present, comrade.”