And scarcely had Roosevelt been sworn in on January 20 when, a few days later, news came from the Eastern Front that the Soviets had come upon a horror near the town of Oświęcim. A few days later she heard the name in German: Auschwitz. Were Kalya and Klavdia among the liberators?
All the while she wondered if Alexia was still alive. She willed her to be alive, however cruel the labor. Against all reason, she yearned to return to Russia to be closer to her, perhaps to find a way to contact her.
And so her heart leapt when Hopkins called her into his office and said the word “Yalta.”
Yalta, resort city on the south coast of the Crimean peninsula that had been liberated from the Germans the previous year. Yalta was once again Russian.
“So, do you feel up to going back? It’s only a week away. February 4 to 11. I know you had some bad experiences in Russia, but I do need a Russian-speaking assistant, and no one else in the White House is qualified.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, perhaps a bit too quickly, then added, “So, Molotov will be there.”
“As the foreign minister, yes, of course. But we won’t let him kidnap you this time. Given what you’ve told me, I think he’ll be more afraid of you. He has to always worry about your exposing him.”
Mia shook her head. “No. He knows I won’t do that. He has a hostage. My sniper friend. You saw the cable, so you know what he holds over me.”
“I see. Something of a Mexican standoff, isn’t it? I wish we could do something, but we can’t.”
“The president has already made that clear,” she said somberly.
“All right, then. Start packing. We’re going back to Russia.”
February 1944
Mia hadn’t seen so much military brass since Tehran. The British delegation arrived on the same day as the Americans at Saki airport, and she lost count of the officers with stripes along their forearms and “salad” on their caps. Churchill was accompanied by an army field marshal, an admiral, and an RAF marshal, but she didn’t know any of their names. In addition to his civilian advisors, most notably Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt was supported by an army chief of staff and a fleet admiral. All the military jackets were heavy with medals, though in the competition of who had more decorations, badges, and ribbons, the Russians won by a landslide.
A convoy of vehicles carried them into Yalta, where the main street was lined with Soviet soldiers standing in the melting snow. Lacking military rank or political status, Mia rode in a sort of bus near the end of the convoy. She sat behind the driver, and when he discovered she spoke Russian, he cheerfully provided some of the history of the Livadia Palace, where the Americans would be housed.
“The summer vacation house of the tsar, you know. Nicolas and Aleksandra and all the children. They went to Italy, you see, and liked what they saw, and when they came back, they said, ‘We have too much of that Russian architecture. Let’s make a Renaissance palace.’ So they hired the architect Krasnov, and he made one for them in 1911.”
“Very interesting,” Mia said politely, but he wasn’t finished.
He rattled off a series of names of tsarinas, tsarevnas, tsarevitches, grand dukes, and duchesses who had resided there, but they all seemed to be variations of Nicolas or Aleksandr, so she lost interest. Mercifully, the bus pulled up at the entrance of the palace, terminating the narration.
It was an impressive façade, she had to admit, and thoroughly un-Russian. Snow-white granite, with an arched portico of marble and a Florentine tower, it could have been an Italian villa inhabited by some Renaissance prince.
Arriving toward the end of the convoy, she had to wait until the primary guests were escorted to their rooms. Then a butler of some sort invited her and the other lesser luminaries to follow him. Her room, she learned, was on the same floor but some distance away from Hopkins’s room.
She asked where the Soviets were housed and was told they hadn’t arrived yet. But some time that afternoon, Stalin and his bodyguards, traveling by armored train, would be received at the Yusupov Palace. So many palaces, built in the face of vast nineteenth-century Russian poverty. She shook her head.
The first morning was taken up by the plenary session, involving hundreds of participants from the British and American delegations alone.
Mia glanced around and noticed, as she had in Tehran, a paucity of women, only a few secretaries and briefcase holders like herself. Among the Russians, a few women stood as palace guards, without any say in the conference, though hundreds of thousands of them had died and were dying on the front lines.
She sat directly behind Hopkins, taking notes. Numerous note-takers were evident, but Hopkins liked that she didn’t depend on the official interpreter for what the Russians said. She could draw her own nuances and discuss them with him later when she had transcribed her notes.
The first session addressed in general terms the locations of the allied armies and their expected victory within the next month, or two months at the outside. No one made any mention of the frightening new American weapon that was being whispered about. Just as ominous, both Stalin and the foreign minister, Molotov, were taking a hard line regarding the expected sphere of Soviet influence after the war, and she recalled Churchill’s remark about losing Eastern Europe.
On the second day, the sessions addressed the final assault on Germany, clarified the Soviet commitment to fight Japan and organize the UN, and identified lesser postwar issues.
The morning of the last day, Hopkins met her at breakfast, and it was clear he was disturbed. “The Soviets aren’t letting anyone in to the meetings today. The talks are apparently ‘sensitive’ and only between the heads of state. The president has insisted on having me there, but no one else is allowed.”
“And the issues of the previous three days were not sensitive?”
“Ridiculous, isn’t it? But the Soviets get to make the rules here. Please stay in the palace. I’ll look for you as soon as I come out and dictate everything I remember while it’s still fresh in my mind.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll walk around for an hour and then wait in my room.”
Churchill arrived, striding alongside Roosevelt, wheeled by his doctor. But at the door, the doctor was turned away, and Hopkins replaced him pushing the wheelchair.
Relieved at having a free morning, she wandered through the palace like a common sightseer. It was as lavish as she expected a tsarist palace to be, but after strolling through three or four staterooms, all differently decorated, she became disgusted with the opulence. The excess of grandeur and ornament had no doubt contributed to the downfall of the Romanovs in the first place.
She traced her way back to her room and opened the novel she had brought along. Crime and Punishment hadn’t been a good choice, and just as she was growing bored, a knock sounded at the door.
One of the palace guards stood there, a handsome lad in a spotless uniform. “Miss Kramer, you have visitor,” he said in bad English, and she replied in Russian.
“Visitor? That’s impossible.”
In Russian he said, “It is very possible. She asked for you by name. I think it’s the famous sniper.”
“Sniper?” She was stunned. “Where is she?”
“In the entry hall. You can follow me there.”
Tossing her tedious book aside, she hurried after him, her heart racing. As she paced alongside the guard, a dialogue ran though her head.
Could it be Alexia? Impossible. She’s in a labor camp. But maybe Molotov changed his mind. Why would he do that? The war is almost over, and he has nothing to worry about. The Molotov I met does not do favors. But miracles happen. No, they don’t.