It was the same city he remembered from a couple of years back: capitalism, dust, a throbbing rhythm, construction everywhere, Porsches and Beemers everywhere construction wasn’t, new skylines poking up all over the place, people in a hurry. He checked in to the Metropole, because he knew it, and had a nice room not far from the restored and gilded dining room and the ornate cage of the elevator.
A shower, a nap, then another shower, and he met Reilly at a restaurant that specialized in meat, where they had meat appetizers, meat entrees, and — no, not meat desserts but some kind of cherry tart whose red custard looked like glistening protein.
Same old Reilly. Smart, tart, and funny, she listened fully and considered an answer without any urgency to fill the air with noise, then came up, always, with the best one. She had an interrogator’s clear blue eyes that compelled confession, and a kind of secretly dry delight in the follies of the day. She saw through anything and everything.
No hooch for a dry old coot, and finally, after chatter of children and possibilities, jokes about politics, newspapers, the insanity of the North Koreans, they got to business.
“Why are you here?”
“It’s complicated.”
“It always is, isn’t it?”
“I saw something in her face I liked.”
“She was beautiful, no doubt about it.”
“Yeah, sure. But something else. Reilly, I want to know more about this girl. I really do.”
“I used to think heroes were always an illusion, a PR stunt. But you proved me wrong, so maybe she’s not an illusion. Wouldn’t that be nice? Let’s go after her hard. Let’s find out what was done to her and why.”
And by who? Swagger thought, though he didn’t say it.
“Here’s today’s news. I’ve found a woman sniper,” said Reilly. “Very old, as you might imagine. She talks to me, but she’s in and out. I have trouble staying with her. And I really don’t know enough to engage her. Maybe if you came along, I could introduce you as a famous sniper, a comrade in arms, and if you asked her technical things, it would get her focused. What do you think?”
“I can’t think of no better idea,” he said.
At ten the next morning, in the shadow of a vast building of no identifiable architectural style except to communicate mass — it was built by engineers, not architects, like so much of the Stalinist legacy — Swagger found himself with Reilly and Katrina Slusskya. Slusskya, in her mid-nineties, lived in a ward in this veterans’ home in a far Moscow suburb. She sat in a wheelchair under a birch tree, shielded from the sun, while the two Americans sat across from her, all of them drinking tea.
Slusskya had a photo in her hands. When she was told that the Great Swagger was a sniper hero of America, she proudly passed it to him.
He looked. It was clearly her, in some war year, beaming in pride. It was black and white, so the color was unknowable, but she wore a high collar similar to that of the Marine Corps dress-blue tunic, with a row of brass buttons down the front.
“Look at her medals,” Reilly said. “She’s very proud of them.”
An array of decorations hung on her left breast in the photo, under her square, earnest, duty-to-death face.
“She should be,” said Swagger.
“This man has medals, too,” said Reilly in Russian.
Guessing the content, Swagger asked Reilly to add, “But not as many. You must be a true hero. I was just a lucky fellow. Can you ask her what the medals are?”
Reilly narrated: “Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner, the Caucasus Defense Medal, two orders of the Red Star, and the Order of the Patriotic War.”
“That’s a lot of combat she saw,” he said.
“She says she’d do it again, not for Stalin, whom she loathed and is finally seen as the monster he was, but for Russia and its millions of good and decent people.”
“I salute her.”
The old lady smiled and reached out and touched his hand.
“Okay, we’ll try shop talk. Tell her in Vietnam I worked with a spotter mostly. But the ranges were longer and finding targets more difficult. I’m wondering if, in the city battles, a spotter was necessary.”
Slusskaya considered, then answered.
“She says not only not necessary but not practical. We girls, she says, we were scrawny little rats and could squeeze into odd spots where no man could, and bend ourselves into positions no man could. In those circumstances a spotter would have been a hindrance. She also believes women have naturally more patient temperaments. She said she once waited three and a half days for a shot on a German colonel.”
“She made the shot, I take it?”
Slusskya tapped herself on her forehead to mark where she hit him.
“The Mosin 91, did she find it an adequate rifle?”
“She loved her 91. Later in the war, they tried to take it away. She was given a rifle of an automatic nature called an SVT-40, with a telescope. She didn’t like it as much. It squirted bullets, but of what use is that to a sniper?”
“I agree,” he said. “I used a bolt-action.”
“She said she had fifty-nine targets eliminated. How many did you have?”
“Fifty-eight,” said Swagger.
The old lady laughed.
“She says that is a very good answer even if she bets you’re lying to be polite.”
“Tell her I’d never lie to a lady as sharp-eyed as she is. And I wouldn’t gamble against her, neither. She’d get everything but my undershorts.”
Again she laughed.
“She says you remind her of her first commanding officer. He was a wonderful man, very funny, very brave. Dead in Bagration. A great loss.”
Swagger knew Bagration was the Russian offensive against Army Group Center in mid-1944, north of the Pripet Marshes, that drove the Germans out of Belarus.
“I’ve lost many, too,” he said. “If you haven’t lost, it’s hard to understand how far the pain goes and how long it lasts.”
She nodded, touched his hand.
“In that war,” he said, “women were very brave.”
“We were fighting to survive. Everybody had to fight. Even beautiful girls, who might normally marry a commissar or a doctor, they had to fight.”
“I’m sure all the woman snipers were beautiful.”
“That’s the story, at any rate. Myself, I was always a plain girl. I had no expectations and so no disappointments. I married a plain man and had plain children. All turned out well. Beauty, it can be a curse. Too much light is on the beautiful, too many are watching. Belayavedma was cursed that way.”
She began to chatter on about this Belayavedma and Reilly lost the thread.
“Bob, go to Petrova,” she said in English.
“Ma’am, we want to remember all those valiant girls, especially one of them. My friend here wants to write her story. We believe she was killed. Beautiful girl, according to the picture. Ludmilla ‘Mili’ Petrova. Does that mean anything?”
The old woman stirred, shook her head. She was clearly disturbed.
“The names, they come and go. No, no Mili, no Petrova. I do remember a Ludmilla,” and from there she launched into a long story of the other Ludmilla, the not-Mili Ludmilla, and Reilly struggled to stay with her and couldn’t and soon was saying to Bob in quiet English, “I’m completely lost now. I thought we were in Belarus, but suddenly it’s the Baltics.”
And on it went for another couple of hours, with Reilly and Swagger feeding her eager eye-cues and judging when to laugh by the tone and timing in her voice. Names came and went, stories mingled, battles were transposed. Reilly tried to keep up but couldn’t stay with it. But she heard more and more about this Belayavedma, who seemed to have come from nowhere.