She disappeared after being sent to Moscow, the story went, and it was a third- or fourth-hand story, as Slusskya had never seen Belayavedma herself.
“If she was as beautiful as I hear,” the old lady said, “a plain girl like me, I would have remembered it the rest of my life. But no, she was gone before I even became active.”
“Do you have a year?” asked Reilly.
“It’s all run together. My memory, it’s like I got hit in head by the bullet, not the German colonel. I can’t even—” She paused as some old thought poked her. “I don’t know why. Somewhere I heard someone say they sent Belayavedma to Ukraine and she never came back.”
“When you say ‘they’—”
“Bosses. The bosses ruin everything. We would have won the war fine without the bosses.”
She told a long story about hiding in the trees while thousands of young infantrymen walked across a field into German fire and were cut down like hay. The boss kept sending them, row after row after row. At the end of the day, the field was strewn with bodies, all those fine young men wasted by this boss who wanted to impress his boss.
She shook her head. “I am very tired now, my friends. Slusskya must sleep. It is not your fault, but I had forgotten all those young men, and now I remember them. I need to sleep again.”
A nurse had been standing by and intervened to wheel Slusskya out, but not before she kissed each of them and grasped their hands with her firm old talons.
They watched as she was pushed up the ramp and disappeared behind the doors of the bleak institution.
It didn’t happen right away. These things can’t be scheduled. But somewhere in Reilly’s mind the fog lifted and a shaft of light revealed that which was clear but not yet clear. They were in The Washington Post’s Chevy, driving back from their chat with the old sniper, trying not to get hit by moguls in Ferraris, when it broke through.
“Belayavedma! Ah! No, no, I’m such an idiot, I forgot that there are no articles in Russian so there wouldn’t have been an equivalent to Die, as in Die weisse Hexe, the German nickname, remember, for Mili. But Belayavedma, it’s really belaya vedma, two words. The two words in English: white witch. That’s who she was talking about at the end.”
“Not bad,” said Swagger, which was as close as he got to admitting admiration.
“It was before Slusskya’s time,” Reilly continued, riding her insight to the end, “but it was part of the collective memory of female sniper culture, USSR, 1944 to ’45. The women would talk and tell stories that weren’t in the official record, pass them along, one to the other. There’s always a real history that never gets into the books or the newspapers.”
“Okay, we have some testimony on where they sent her. Fragile, from memory, otherwise unvalidated, but nevertheless, a place to look at.”
“Sure, we’ll check out Ukraine. But first let’s think about who would have the power to pull her from duty wherever she was in Russia, give her a special mission, and send her on it with the whole apparatus making it happen. Who would have that much power?”
CHAPTER 4
It was largely empty, like a museum, and her boots clacked against the marble tiles, echoing against the eighteen-foot ceilings. They must have polished the marble floors every night and dusted the pictures and statues of long-vanished gods. It still spoke of tsars and dukes, not commissars. At last they led her to a conference room; she entered to find three high NKVD officers sitting in awkward obeisance next to a man in civilian clothes who had the diffident posture of a duke among dungsweepers.
“Krulov,” he said, rising and nodding, not extending a hand or any welcoming gesture.
Krulov’s name conveyed enough information on its own. He was called the boss’s right hand, in some circles the boss’s steel fist. Where trouble lurked, Krulov was dispatched, with his sharp eyes and handsome features, with his brutal charm and steel will, and he handled whatever that difficulty might be, whether it was a hang-up in machine gun deliveries or the recalcitrance of a certain general officer in the Baltics. He was a fellow known to get things done.
But she thought: Why would a big shot be so interested in a matter like Kursk?
“Comrade Sniper,” he said, “I see from reports that your leg has healed, I see that you have been serving dutifully in a staff intelligence position under General Zukov for a few months as you healed, and he says extremely encouraging things about your heroic duty in the Stalingrad shithole. And he requests again your commission to lieutenant.”
“The general has treated me well,” said Petrova.
“He should. After all, you have killed several dozen of his enemies for him. Do you have an exact number, Comrade Sniper?”
“No, sir. I never kept count.”
“The reports put your score well over a hundred. I would have thought a competitive athlete such as yourself”—she had been a tennis player, a champion, a thousand years ago—“would like to mark her place against the others.”
“It is death,” she said. “I don’t enjoy it. I do it because it helps the nation, it helps our leader, and most of all because when a German goes still through my sight, I know he won’t kill that boy I saw in the mess line this morning.”
“Yes, it’s true and well put. It’s that boy, after all, for whom we are fighting.”
The three officers nodded sagely. They had the blue NKVD piping on their tunics and appeared to be two colonels and a lieutenant-general. They had the uniform, they had the shoulder boards, on the table they had the hats, all lined with blue. You could not miss it. But if you did, they had something yet more powerfuclass="underline" they had NKVD faces — she’d seen them in the the blocking battalions NKVD placed behind troops about to assault — which were blunt, sealed, small to the eye, and prim to the mouth. You did not want to stare at them too hard, however; as career secret policemen, they did not like to be stared at. In this circumstance their only task was to express ardent admiration to Krulov. After all, he could have them disappeared at the blink of an eye. What was more, everyone in the room, from Krulov himself to the sniper sergeant, knew this to be the case.
Krulov lit a Maxopka cigarette from a red and yellow pack, taking his time as if to express the idea that the world waited for him, not he for it. When he had the cigarette lit and had exhaled a huge billow of smoke into the room, he stared at her directly. He wore a dark civilian suit on his beefy frame and a tie without color and too much design. Nothing fit because nothing had to fit.
“Ludmilla Petrova, a hard question. I put it to you directly out of respect for your considerable accomplishments.”
Here it came. Kursk at last.
But then it didn’t.
“In the matter of your father, I must ask if you have anger still, and if so, whether that might cloud your judgment.”
Petrova kept her eyes hooded and noncommittal. The first idiot was right, that was a true gift. Her eyes expressed only when she wished them to. Others leak their emotions into the world without care or caution. Petrova showed nothing.
“The state did what it thought was necessary,” she said, willing herself to suppress the memory of the arrival of the Black Maria in 1939 and the removal — forever, as it turned out — of her father, a professor of biology at the University of Leningrad. “I trust that it acted in good faith, in the interests of the people. Once the war came, I endeavored to serve the people totally. I allowed myself to fall in love for one week, and to get married. My husband went back to duty and died shortly thereafter. I will serve as long as I am physically able. My death means nothing. The survival of the people is what counts.”