“Good.” Ian rested an elbow against the door of the telephone box, looking across the street where Nina was disappearing into a beachside five-and-dime. The sun was falling fast. “Because our Florida lead was a fifty-two-year-old man who might have been a camp clerk or a Nazi Party functionary but was definitely not Lorelei Vogt.” Tony swore, but Ian was fatalistic. “They were leads; we had to run them out.”

He and Nina had bitten the bullet and taken a bus down to the tiny town outside Cocoa Beach, Florida, that was their final lead, since bus tickets proved marginally cheaper and quicker than driving the rackety Ford, but the suspicion had already been growing in Ian that with six addresses already scratched off the list, the last name would be no more fruitful. “Who knows, maybe I’ll be back through here someday to help arrest that middle-aged fellow with the Berlin vowels and the nervous look who opened his door to us an hour ago,” he said when his partner ran out of curses.

A pause on the other end, and then Tony’s voice, more thoughtful. “Do you ever want to do more with the center than focus on arrests, boss?”

“Like what?”

“Making a repository. A museum, even, or maybe that isn’t the right word. I don’t know, but I’ve got ideas.”

“Did Jordan McBride put them there?” Ian asked wryly.

“She makes me think. Makes me think a lot, actually.” Tony took a breath. “What if we brought her into the chase?”

“What?”

“We have nothing to hide; we aren’t doing anything shameful. She might even be able to help. She knows Kolb and the shop, after all. She might have some angle we don’t know.”

“Or maybe she’d fire you for lying to her, and there goes our access to Kolb’s workplace,” Ian pointed out.

Tony’s voice was taut. “I hate lying to her.”

“We’ll talk about it.” Ian ruffled a hand through his hair. “First item for discussion when Nina and I get back tomorrow.” This Florida town was such a hamlet, there wouldn’t be another bus until the morning.

Ian rang off as Nina came strolling out of the five-and-dime with a small package. The sun was down, night falling fast. “I suppose we should try to find a hotel, if they even have hotels.” There wasn’t much to this tiny hamlet except sticky heat and the sound of waves.

“Why bother with hotel?” Nina looked at the darkening sky. “Is nice night.”

For any other woman, Ian thought, that would have meant there was a lovely sunset and a full moon, a night for romance. For Nina, it meant no clouds and only a sliver of moon—in other words, perfect weather to blow things up. “You want to pitch out on the sand all night?”

“Would save money, and we don’t sleep anyway after a hunt. Too fizzed.”

“True enough.” Ian didn’t know if there were two insomniacs alive worse than Nina and himself. On the road, economy dictated sharing a room, and Ian was surprised how much better sleeplessness was when shared. He’d wake at one in the morning with a parachute dream, steady his racheting heart by turning on the light and reading (surreptitiously) one of his wife’s Georgette Heyer paperbacks balanced on Nina’s bare shoulder as she slumbered. Eventually he curled up around her and dropped back to sleep, vaguely feeling her come awake an hour later and prowl out of bed to sit at the hotel window and drink in the night air. When she came back, she slid under the covers and started nipping his ear—“I’m not sleepy, luchik, tire me out”—and after he’d obliged her, they both usually managed to drowse past dawn, legs entangled, Nina’s arm thrown across Ian’s ribs, his face buried in her hair.

I’m not giving that up, Ian thought. If I can just figure out what will make you want to stay. How the hell did you woo a woman as impervious as a bullet?

They ate hot dogs at a ramshackle beachside diner, and then Nina found a public washroom and disappeared with the package she’d bought from the five-and-dime. Ian waited outside, fanning himself with the straw panama he’d picked up to replace his old fedora, crumpling and bashing it until it sat on his head at the appropriately battered angle. At last Nina came out with her hair lying damp against her shoulders, smelling of peroxide. “Better,” she said contentedly, running fingers through her newly blond roots as they set off in the direction of the beach.

“Why do you dye your hair?” Ian said curiously. “Not to be rude, I like it. But considering that your only other nod to personal adornment has been to tattoo your aviation record on the soles of your feet . . .”

Nina shrugged. Another of those arbitrary questions she refused to answer—Ian let it be, and they strolled on down the long deserted beach, shoulders brushing. It was now full dark, just the faint glitter of stars overhead and the gritty slide of sand beneath Ian’s shoes. Nina stopped and pulled off her sandals as they came to the edge of the water. Her profile was bright against the darkness, and Ian thought of the night on the ship rail. “Nina,” he asked, “those five years you spent in England before this . . . was there anyone for you? I wouldn’t blame you if there were,” he added, not entirely truthfully. Falling for his wife had brought out a possessive streak, he was finding, but that didn’t mean he had to give in to it. “It wasn’t precisely a real marriage.”

“There were a few,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “Was five years. You?”

“A few,” Ian admitted. “No one lasting. Are any of your fellows waiting for you?” he made himself ask. If she said yes, he wouldn’t say another word.

“No. Peter, he goes off to fly with aerobatic team. Simone, she’s married—”

Ian stumbled in the sand. “Simone?”

“My boss at Manchester airfield, he brings a French wife home from the war. But he’s in town every night with his mistress now, and Simone gets lonely. Bozhe moi, she could tire out a tiger. You ever need sleep,” Nina advised, “get a Frenchwoman, forty-five, who wears eau de violette and hasn’t had good roll in the hay in years.”

Ian digested this. “Bloody hell, Nina—”

She chuckled. “I shock you?”

“A bit, yes.” It wasn’t as if he was unfamiliar with the idea of females who enjoyed female company. It was a little odd, however, to realize that his wife, like her razor, cut both ways.

“You’re thinking now, this means I don’t like you?” Nina grinned, tugging his head down for one of her voracious kisses. “I do.”

“I have fairly compelling evidence by now that you like me, comrade.” Ian returned the kiss, hand sliding through Nina’s damp hair, then shrugged out of his jacket, flung it over the sand, and tossed her down on it. She wasn’t wearing the willow for someone in Manchester, whether a British flyboy or a Frenchwoman who smelled of eau de violette, and that was enough to fill him with relief and hunger, setting his lips at Nina’s throat and slowly kissing his way down. Come on, comrade, he thought. There’s starlight and sand and the smell of the sea, and there’s me making love to you. Be moved by the goddamned romance of it all, would you? Be moved, Nina. Give me a chance.

“Stay with me.” He said it simply, in the moments afterward where they still lay twined up and breathing hard among the scatter of clothes, before his wife could get brisk and pull away. “I don’t want to divorce you, Nina. Stay with me.”

She stared at him, and he could feel her pulling away without moving a muscle.

“Give it a year,” he said, drawing a thumb down her sharp cheekbone. “You like this work, you like the chase, you like me. Why not stay? Try it for a year, being my wife more than just in name. It wouldn’t be like most marriages, children and Sunday lunches and peace. That would bore you, and it would bore me. We’d have this instead, the road and the hunt and a bed at the end of it. Give it a year.” Ian put everything into the words. “Give it a year, and if you want to walk away at the end, we’ll divorce. But why not try?”

Nina sat up, linking her arms around her knees, her face like a small obdurate shield. “I don’t love,” she said. “Is not what I do.”

Go soft-eyed on her and she will bolt, Ian thought. “Love isn’t the word,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s a word in the world for what you are to me, Nina. Maybe comrade says it best. Comrades who are husband and wife—why isn’t that worth keeping?”

She shook her head sharply.

“Why?” Ian sat up too, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “Tell me that. Tell me something. Don’t just glower and prickle.”

Nina glowered, prickling. He stared her down through the dark. She looked away, out at the long slow rollers of the Atlantic crashing under the night sky, and finally tugged at a strand of her damp hair. “You know why I dye it?” she said, carving the words off like ice chunks. “Yelenushka liked it—my pilot. I keep for her. Yelena Vassilovna Vetsina, senior lieutenant in the Forty-Sixth. Almost three years with her, and I love her till I die.”

Ian saw the gleam of tears in his wife’s eyes, even in the starlight. Not a hard heart, after all, he thought with a sinking feeling. A broken one. “Yelena,” he said, keeping his voice steady. “The Russian version of Helen, isn’t it? What was she like?”

“Dark. Tall. Lashes to here. And tvoyu mat, she could fly. Nothing more beautiful in the air.”