It all made terrible sense to Mia, who added morosely, “The prime minister’s last words to me were “We’ve lost Eastern Europe.”
Roosevelt nodded somberly. “Yes, it appears we have.” He moved on to other subjects. “That reminds me, Harry. Bring your Lend-Lease summaries with you to the meeting on Thursday. I’ve asked Cordell Hull to come, and we’ll be talking primarily about the United Nations charter, but I want him to know what you’ve been doing.”
“Yes, sir. It’s on my calendar. I’ll have the statistics ready.”
Mia fell silent. It was obvious that the discussion of the creation of a United Nations far surpassed her personal tragedy in importance. It was a loss she would have to endure, as millions of people were enduring all over the war-torn world. The interview over, she and Hopkins withdrew.
As they strode along the corridor together, Mia tried to focus on foreign policy. “What did Mr. Roosevelt mean when he said ‘far worse things than embezzlement’? Was he referring to Stalin’s purges?”
They arrived at Hopkins’s office and both sat down automatically, he at his desk and she in front of it. He lit a cigarette. “I’m not really at liberty to say. Not specifically, at least. It’s something we don’t want to fall into the hands of the newspapers, for just the reason the president said. We need the Kremlin’s goodwill.”
“Well, can you give me a general idea?”
He took a long drag on his cigarette, exhaled through his nose, and cleared his throat. “Something to do with opening a mass grave. In a forest in Poland. The Russians blame the Nazis, and the Nazis blame the Russians. Unfortunately, evidence suggests it was the Russians. But it’s one of those things that history must bring to light. It won’t be Mr. Roosevelt. He has a lot on his mind. Don’t forget, over and above his negotiations with Stalin, he has an election coming up in ten days.”
“That’s right. All that time I was at the front, he was campaigning. Hmm. I’m beginning to see what Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Stalin have in common. Of course one is a tyrant while the other’s a good man and a pragmatist, but still, both look over the heads of the suffering masses at some future ideal. Machiavellian, come to think of it.”
“It was ever thus.” Hopkins tapped the ash off his cigarette. “Your time in Russia has made you philosophical.”
“I was always philosophical. My time in Russia made me ruthless. Do you know I killed a man? Dozens, in fact, though I looked into the eyes of this one before I shot him in the face. The women I was with call that ‘the sniper’s kiss.’”
“I don’t think that makes you ruthless. We in government don’t pull triggers, but we kill thousands, millions, I suppose, by our actions or our agreements. It’s a sobering thought. I wonder sometimes how we can call ourselves Christians.”
“I don’t. I scarcely did before, but now religion doesn’t touch me at all. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go finish my report.” Without waiting for him to reply, she stood up and strode from the room.
The work was a therapy of sorts, and she was able to keep despair at a distance by composing, formulating, typing, until she had some ten pages of report. The numbers would follow the next day, and he cared less about those anyhow. At this late date, Hopkins no longer needed to justify the expenditures with Congress.
At six o’clock, she trudged up to her chilly room. It was a depressing kind of cold, not like the cold of the battlefield she’d shared with comrades. That she could endure, like the hunger and the pain.
“Oh, Alexia,” she moaned out loud. In shame, perhaps, or from some strange urge for self-punishment, she unwrapped her bandage and let her arm fall to her side. The sudden tug on her fragile shoulder caused a sharp pain. Then she dropped onto the bed and fell asleep without supper.
The next morning she rose early and went down to the White House dining room. She forced down toast and coffee without tasting it, then trudged up to her cubicle to work. Mechanically, she collated the pages of her report, inserted the schedules, lists, and columns of numbers into their respective places, and took them to Hopkins’s office.
She knocked and entered at his response and laid the report on his desk. Instead of acknowledging it, he picked up a yellow envelope at the side of his desk and handed it to her. “It’s for you, from Ambassador Harriman. It arrived in code, so of course we had to read it in order to transcribe it for you. Interesting. Perhaps you will explain it to me.”
Perplexed, Mia drew the paper from the envelope and unfolded it. Between the coded lines, which were gibberish, someone had glued in strips with the decoded message.
Contacted Ustinov who claimed innocent and proved it by saving A from execution stop sent to labor camp Vyatlag where he assures me she is alive stop.
“You could start by telling me who A is, why she is in a labor camp, and how this is of interest to you.”
She sat down, a flutter of emotions making it hard to order her thoughts. “In the embezzlement, at the bottom of the chain of authority was a man called Leonid Nazarov, who had oversight over a string of factories. Above him was the commissar of armaments, Dmitriy Ustinov, whom you know, and above him was Molotov. I had assumed all three were guilty, along with a pack of Nazarov’s men who fenced the goods on the black market.” She waved the cable. “This tells me I was partly wrong. I’m glad. Ustinov did seem like a decent man when we met him.”
“Who is A, and what does she have to do with the diversion?”
“That’s my friend Alexia, who was really an innocent bystander. In fact, she and her sniper friends saved my life on two occasions. She was put on a suicide battalion for leaving her post to carry me to the medical station. I thought I was saving her, but I’m afraid I condemned her by blackmailing Molotov into freeing her. In the end, when he couldn’t get to me, he took her, and I was sure he would execute her. But apparently Ustinov intervened. Now I need to find out where Vyatlag is.”
“I wouldn’t hold out much hope for her if she’s in the Gulag system. It’s only a few notches above a suicide battalion,” he said, coughing smoke into his fist.
“I know. You die from overwork after a year instead of immediately from a grenade. And she won’t be released while Molotov is in power.”
Hopkins shrugged. “I’m sorry about your friend. We all lose people we care for.” He crushed out the last inch of cigarette in his ashtray, and a tiny part of her mind registered it as a waste of tobacco. But the rest of her was depressed by his cavalier attitude toward Alexia.
“Will you at least show the president the cable?” she asked. “Just so that he’s aware. She saved my life and… well… that’s all…”
“Of course. He needs to know about every communiqué that comes in from the Soviets. Anyhow, thank you for your report. I’ll show him that as well. In the meantime, I’ve laid another assignment on your desk. Can you work on it first thing today?”
She was being dismissed, obviously, so she stood up. “Certainly. I’ll start right away.” With a faint wave of the hand that felt a bit like a civilian salute, she left his room for her cubicle.
Diligence was one of her strengths, and it served her well in this case, too. Manipulating numbers, categorizing objects by various criteria, calculating depreciations all required a mechanical part of her brain that allowed her to shut off her emotions.
She worked steadily until lunch, grabbed a fried baloney sandwich, and went back to work until five. With no desire to make small talk in the cafeteria and even less in retelling the story of her Russian adventure, she fetched another sandwich and a 7 Up for supper in her room. Then she moped. Still travel weary and lethargic, she dozed for a while, then woke later in the evening with her bedside reading lamp shining in her face. A knock at the door made her realize that was what had roused her in the first place.