“Everyone keeps bringing me pie,” Jordan heard herself say. “Ever since he died. Like lemon meringue fixes anything.”

He picked Mrs. Dunne’s pie up out of the birdbath, deposited it on the glass counter, then went to a display case where a set of thirteen apostle spoons had been laid out in a fan. He brought back two spoons, offering one to Jordan.

Jordan’s chest felt like it was about to burst. She dug a heaping spoonful out of the middle of the pie and jammed it into her mouth. It tasted like absolutely nothing. Ashes. Soap shavings. My father is dead. She ate another heaping spoonful.

Tony levered up a bite of his own. Chewed, swallowed. “This is—very good pie.”

“You don’t have to lie.” Jordan kept eating. “It’s terrible pie. Mrs. Dunne never uses enough sugar.”

“Where can you get good pie in Boston, then? I’m new in town.”

“Mike’s Pastries is pretty good. The North End.”

Tony jabbed the apostle spoon back into the meringue. “Looks like I’m going to Mike’s Pastries to get you something decent.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I can’t bring your father back. I can’t make you feel anything but sad. I can at least make sure you don’t have to eat lousy pie.”

“I don’t want any more goddamn pie,” Jordan said and burst into tears. She stood there crying into Mrs. Dunne’s crummy meringue, hiccuping and gulping. Tony Rodomovsky fished a handkerchief from his pocket and pushed it quietly across the counter, then went to turn the shop sign around from Open to Closed. Jordan wiped her streaming eyes, shoulders heaving. My father is dead.

“I’m very sorry to intrude, Miss McBride,” Tony said. “I’ll leave you alone now.”

“Thank you.” There was a fresh explosion of sobs building up in her chest, making its way through the chink in the bricks; all she wanted to do was cry it out. But she stamped it down for a moment, pushing her damp hair off her forehead and looking squarely at her Good Samaritan. “Come back Monday, Mr. Rodomovsky.”

“Sorry?”

“My stepmother will want a proper application and some references,” Jordan said, scrubbing at her eyes. “But as far as I’m concerned, you’ve got a job.”

Chapter 26

Ian

May 1950

Boston

Success!” Tony burst through the door of their newly rented apartment. “I have officially made contact.”

Ian grunted acknowledgment, stretched out on the floor between window and table, halfway through his daily set of one hundred press-ups. “How?” he pushed out between counting. Ninety-two, ninety-three . . . His shoulders were burning.

“What target?” Nina sat on the sill of the open window with her feet hanging out over a four-story drop, eating tinned sardines straight out of the tin.

“McBride’s Antiques.” Tony flung his jacket over a nail by the door, which was all they had for a hat rack. “Frau Vogt said the Boston shop dealing documents to war criminals under the counter was McCall Antiques, McBain Antiques, Mc-Something. The only remotely close match in the city is McBride’s Antiques. You are looking at their newest clerk.”

Ian started to get up, but Nina swung her legs back inside the windowsill, dropping her boots on his back. “Seven more.”

“Bugger off,” he said, but lowered himself down toward the floor again. Ninety-four . . . ninety-five . . .

Tony flung himself down at the table, moving a paperback of Nina’s called The Spanish Bride. “I’ll need to supply references. Write me something glowing, boss?”

Ian finished the last press-up, shoved his wife’s boots away, and flopped on his back on the floor. “What name?”

“Run ’em for my real name. Tony R, born and raised in Queens, enlisted right out of Grover Cleveland High 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 unfair.” Tony flung a wadded-up scrap of paper at Ian. Nina bounced the sardine tin off his chest. “Fine. I’ll keep an eye on the daughter.”

“Look at the mother too.” Ian’s notes on the McBride widow were brief, coming from the obituary and the short newspaper article about the deceased antiques dealer and his family, including one Mrs. Anna McBride, born and raised in Boston. “And the shop files—there could be records of the others helped under the table. We know there are more besides die J?gerin.”

“Would they be stupid enough to keep records for something illicit?” Tony kept scribbling.

“You always keep records,” Nina said firmly. “Is not stupid, is something to trade. Someone to throw out of the sleigh for the wolves, if the police come knocking.”