“And you just picked it all up?”

“There are two ways to learn a language fast, and one of them is when you’re under ten and have a pliable young brain.”

“What’s the other?”

He grinned. “Over a pillow.”

Jordan slanted him a look. He doffed an imaginary hat in apology. “I apologize. Es tut mir leid. Je suis désolé. Sajnálom. Imi pare rau. Przepraszam—”

Jordan stopped, transfixed, assessing him.

He left off his multilingual flood of apologies. “Normally when a girl stares at my lips I think she wants a kiss. You’re mentally composing a camera shot, aren’t you?”

She raised her Leica. “An Interpreter at Work.” A close-up shot of that smiling mouth midspeech, with the gesturing hand to frame . . .

Tony groaned, tugging her along into the Public Garden, where trees threw dappled shade over crisscrossing paths. “You cruel dasher of hopes, shooting me instead of kissing me . . .”

“I need a motion shot, so talk!” Jordan picked a bench near the entrance, some distance from the swan boats, where the tourists would be crowded. “Tell me something about yourself. Anything.”

“I’d rather talk about you.” He rested an elbow on the back of the bench. “When did you first pick up a camera?”

“I was nine, transfixed by winter trees and a little Kodak.” He smiled, and she clicked three shots off, already knowing this would be a good roll. Tony Rodomovsky wasn’t handsome, but he had a face that photographed well: dark coloring, bold nose, the kind of ink-dark lashes that were absolutely wasted on men who never had to pick up a mascara brush. “When did you join the army?”

“The day after Pearl Harbor. A walking cliché at seventeen, winking at the recruiter. Yes, sir, I’m of age! Then I got to war and found out that it was just as boring as high school. It was if you got stuck with interpreter duty, anyway. What was your war?”

“Scrap metal drives and emergency drills about what to do if the Japs invaded, as if the Japs were going to invade Boston, for God’s sake.” A shot of Tony listening; click. He listened very intently, backs of his fingers brushing her arm now and then. “Mostly, my war was daydreaming. I devoured stories about the women journalists and photographers going overseas—Margaret Bourke-White got torpedoed and had to ship off in a lifeboat, and I nearly died of envy. I absolutely longed to get torpedoed.”

“As long as you got away with some good shots of it?”

“Which would then make the cover of LIFE, yes. That’s exactly how the fantasy went. Then maybe I’d marry Ernest Hemingway and live a life of action and glamour.” Jordan paused, as a connection drifted into place. The journalists and photographers she’d idolized, all dash and danger and war zones, the names she could rattle off like her friends rattled off movie stars. Capa and Taro, Martha Gellhorn and Slim Aarons and . . . “Graham. Is your English friend the Ian Graham?”

Tony looked amused. “In the flesh.”

“And he offered to teach my little sister her scales?” Jordan shook her head. “I used to read his column during the war, after it was syndicated!”

“I’m going to be jealous, if you keep gushing about my boss.”

“Why, can’t a girl get a crush on an older man?” Jordan teased. “Especially a tall good-looking one with a devastating accent, who’s been all the places she’s ever wanted to go?”

“He’s married, and besides, I’d rather you got a crush on me.”

“So charm me. Tell me about being an interpreter at a documentation center.” Lifting the Leica again.

“Not a life of action and glamour. A flood of refugees poured through Vienna—they told their stories to Ian, through me.”

“Was he writing articles, or—”

“No, he says he’s done with writing. Gave it up for practical refugee work and hasn’t penned an article since the Nuremberg Trials.”

“I can see it might wear your soul away,” Jordan said, thoughtful. “Year after year, seeing human suffering and turning it into newspaper fodder. Was it like that for you, translating? Hearing war stories day in and day out, when the rest of the world only wants to leave the war behind?”

“No.” Tony linked his hands between his knees, smile fading to something more pensive. “An interpreter tries to work a step removed. You’re not really there, in a way. You’re like a set of interphones; you make it possible for the two people on either side to hear each other. And that’s everything, when you come down to it. That’s it, in a nutshell: if people would just hear each other—”

Tony stopped. “They’d what?” Jordan asked quietly.

He gave a small, crooked smile. “Likely go right on killing each other in swaths.”

Click. That’s the shot, Jordan thought. Bitter cynicism from a mobile mouth, that same mouth curled in a smile that was still touched with hope even after all it had looked on. “It’s not so different being a photographer,” she found herself saying. “I’m no professional, not yet, but I’ve had a similar feeling to the one you’re describing. The lens removes me from the scene I’m recording, in a sense. I’m a witness to it, but I’m not part of it.”

“People think it makes you heartless. It doesn’t.” A boy walking a beagle on a leash went past; Tony stretched out a hand to the beagle, who lapped his fingers happily before moving on. “It makes you a better set of interphones.”

“Or a better lens.” Jordan tilted her head at Tony. Unexpected depths to her charming clerk—who would have guessed? “You were at war since Pearl Harbor, and then you stayed and did refugee work when everyone else went home. Why?”

“You know what my war was?” Tony smiled thinly. “Nothing. Four years of it. I never fired a shot in anger, never so much as got my boots wet. My entire war was spent in various tents and offices, translating acronyms between high brass of various armies who didn’t speak each other’s lingo.”

“So you stayed on for a chance to do more,” Jordan said. “Why come home this year? It doesn’t sound to me like you’re tired of it.”

He took a long time answering, as if parsing out what to say. “I’m not tired of it,” he said at last. “But I wouldn’t mind doing something—different. Ian’s an avenger, scales of justice in one hand and sword in the other. I want to do more.”

“Like what?” A group of shopping-laden housewives fussed past, but Jordan ignored them.

“I don’t know.” Tony ruffled a hand through his hair. “Make a repository for all those stories, maybe? So they aren’t forgotten and lost. No one likes to talk about their war, after it’s fought. They want to forget. And what happens when they die, and they’ve taken all their memories with them? We’ve lost it all. And we can’t.”

You should talk to my stepmother, Jordan almost said. Another refugee who only wants to forget. But it was Anneliese’s right, surely? Because her story wasn’t just pain and loss, it was shame—the shame of the SS connection, what her father had been. “I’m an American now,” she always said firmly if asked about her past.

“You know why I prefer pictures to words?” Jordan asked Tony instead. “People can’t ignore them. Most find it easier to forget the things they read than the things they see. What’s caught on film is there, it’s what is. That’s what makes pictures so wonderful, and so devastating. Catch someone or something at the right moment, you can learn everything about them. That’s why I want to record everything I see. The beautiful, the ugly. The horrors, the dreams. All of it, as much as I can get a lens in front of.”

“And how long have you known that’s what you wanted?” Tony asked. “I’m guessing when you heard that little Kodak go click for the first time.”

Jordan smiled. “How did you know?”

“Drive—you’ve got it in spades.” His eyes went over her. “I don’t have any, so I notice it when I see it.”

Jordan returned his gaze, letting her eyes go over him just as frankly. “You’re amusing when you flirt, Tony,” she said at last. “But when you’re being serious, you’re downright riveting.”

“That’s too bad. I can’t sustain serious for more than ten minutes.”

“Maybe you should practice. You might get up to fifteen.”

“My record is twelve. Who’s going to kiss who?” he asked.

“Who said there’s going to be kissing?”

“You’re thinking it. I’m thinking it.” His black eyes danced. “Who goes first? I’d hate to bump noses.”

“Why do I need to kiss you? I just took half a roll of film of your mouth as you talked. By the time I’m done cropping and filtering the image, I’ll know everything there is to know about it, without kissing you once.”

“But what a waste that would be.”

“Time in the darkroom is never wasted.”

“That depends entirely on what you’re doing down there.”