Beautiful Assassin (17 page)

“I heard you received the Gold Star,” she offered.

“Yes.”

“Such an honor,” she said, squeezing my hand. “I am so proud of you.”

“You deserve it as much as I.”

“Nonsense. You did the shooting. I just served them up to you.”

We laughed at that.

“I still can’t believe my eyes,” I said. “I thought you were dead.”

“The last I saw of you I thought the same thing.”

“So it was
you
? Who saved me.”

Zoya nodded, smiling modestly.

“How? What happened?”

“When I returned with the girl, the Germans had already overrun our position. Our troops were retreating down to the harbor under heavy fire. There was no sense trying to help, especially since the girl was with me, so we stayed in the sewer. I headed back to see if I could help you. I found you lying there. The girl and I pulled you into the sewer. We dragged you until we heard friendly voices. The last I saw of you they were bringing you to a field hospital.”

I hugged her again. “Once more I have you to thank for my life, little mother.”

“Look,” Zoya said, pointing to her shoulder. I hadn’t noticed the three red stripes of an NCO. “For saving your neck, they promoted me to sergeant. How about that?”

“That’s wonderful,” I cried. “Tell me, how on earth did you find me?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I was in Sumgait. They’d flown some of us there from Sevastopol. A blue hat came up to me and said I was to get on a plane at once and come. So here I am.”

“What happened to our company?” I asked.

Zoya harrumphed in her usual fashion. “Only a few of us got out. Ivanchuk. Cheburko. The medic, what’s his name? Yuri. The rest were either killed or taken prisoner.”

“The captain?”

Zoya shook her head. “He stayed behind, fighting to the last.”

I was almost afraid to ask. “And the little girl?”

“Raisa was evacuated with us.”

“Thank God,” I said.

“Yes, thank God,” Zoya said, crossing herself. “They put her on a ship bound for Canada.”

“Canada?”

“Yes. With other orphans from the Crimea.”

I was pleased to learn not only that Raisa had survived but also that someone would take care of her, love her. She would become the woman my own Masha could not.

Just then the aid came in with my noon meal.

“Would you join me, Zoya?” I asked.

“No, you go ahead and eat. You need it. My goodness, you’re skin and bones.”

“Ach. They feed me so much I’ll be fat as a pig,” I said, puffing out my cheeks. Zoya laughed. “There’s enough for two. Come, we’ll share.”

As we ate, we talked about what had happened to each other over the past several weeks. We spoke of Zoya’s family, and she asked if I’d heard anything from my husband. I told her I hadn’t. I didn’t tell her the extent of my wounds, the fact that I would never have children. I guess I didn’t want to blunt our joy. Zoya looked different to me. In the short time we’d been apart she no longer had the features of a girl. Perhaps it had been happening all along and I had just now noticed it. But the soft fullness of her face had become angular. Her cheeks were more prominent, and her mouth had the cynical edge to it of one hardened by
experience. The change saddened me a little. When Zoya had first come to the unit she was hardly more than a fresh-faced girl.

She told me that her new unit was going to be shipped out soon.

“Do you know where?” I asked.

“Word has it we’re headed for Stalingrad. Let’s hope it doesn’t end like Odessa or Sevastopol.”

“I wish I were coming with you.”

“You’re crazy, you know that,” Zoya said, glancing around the room. “They should make sure your head wasn’t injured.”

We both laughed again. A sausage remained on the plate, and Zoya looked down at it, then at me.

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’m full.”

She picked it up and began eating it.

“Besides,” said Zoya, “you’re famous now. They can’t risk losing you.”

“How long can you stay?”

“Not long, I’m afraid. I have to be back on the plane tonight.”

“Remember your promise?” I told her.

“What promise?”

“You said you would come and visit me when this is over.”

“Of course,” she said, glancing away.

We both suspected, I think, that it would never happen. The war had brought us as close as sisters, had us sharing a foxhole and food and danger, had us killing men we didn’t know, and when it was over we would go back to our separate lives. It saddened me to think that I would never see Zoya again. We sat there, looking out the window toward the sea.

“Oh,” she said, fumbling in her pocket. “I have something that is yours.”

She took out a small leather case that I recognized immediately.

“Dear God!” I cried. It was the case that held my personal effects, my wedding band, the only picture I had of Kolya and Masha, the lock of her hair.

“I wanted to hold on to it for you,” she said. “I didn’t want it getting lost. And then we were separated.”

“Thank you, Zoya.”

I opened it, looked at the picture of my daughter and Kolya, and began to cry.

Zoya put her arm around me. “It’s all right, Tat’yana.”

We talked for a long while. When it was time for her to leave, we hugged once again, and she headed for the door. But she stopped and turned toward me.

“You take care of yourself, Tat’yana,” she said. “Allow yourself to be happy.”

“Yes, little mother. I will.”

“Good-bye.”

O
ne morning several weeks later, while I was lying in bed reading some of the get-well letters I received, two men showed up at my room. The first was an older man, tall and gaunt and pale as curdled milk, with bushy eyebrows and thick glasses that made the whites of his eyes appear exaggeratedly large and soggy-looking. He looked like death warmed over. The other was much younger, a red-haired man with dark eyes and pimples still on his chin. It was sweltering, and both were sweating profusely. NKVD, I thought as soon as I’d laid eyes on them.
Chekisty
. You could always tell their sort. They were dressed in those dark, standard-issue, badly tailored suits and wore the unmistakable air of self-importance of the secret police. They strode in and stared around my room, without even bothering to identify themselves.

“May I help you?” I asked.

“Are you Lieutenant Tat’yana Levchenko?” replied the older of the two. He seemed to be the one in charge. He had a brusque demeanor, someone used to giving orders.

“Yes,” I replied.

“You are to come with us.”

“What is this about?” I demanded.

“I am not at liberty to say. You are to get your things together.”

They stood in the room while I packed my soldier’s bag.

“Do you need help?” offered the younger one. He was nicer than the other one, trying to be pleasant.

Though the doctors had taken the cast off my arm, it was still in a sling and I wasn’t much good for anything. Still, I didn’t want these two touching my things.

“No, I can manage,” I replied.

“Here’s a new uniform,” the younger one said, handing me a paper sack.

Even as I dressed the two didn’t leave, so that I had to pull the curtain around my bed for privacy. I wondered what the secret police could want with me. I recalled how I’d spoken out with General Petrov, criticizing him for leaving his troops. Had that something to do with the presence of these two? I thought of all the stories of people who’d been taken away, never to be heard from again. Yet I was now a Hero of the Soviet Union. They wouldn’t dare try anything with me, would they?

“What do you want with me?” I asked through the curtain.

“Move it. We have to be going,” replied the older one impatiently.

The younger one carried my duffel bag as we walked outside into the blistering sunlight. They had me get in the backseat of an automobile. Another one of theirs drove. It was stifling in the car, and the two policemen sat silently on either side of me, pressed so close I couldn’t move. I could smell the sweat on them and the unmistakably sweet tang of gun oil. They drove me to an airbase on the outskirts of the city. They escorted me toward a plane on the runway, its propellers already spinning. As we were about to board, I stopped and turned to the older one. “I demand to know where you’re taking me.”

“It would be better if you just got on the plane, Lieutenant,” he replied.

I wasn’t going to be cowed by these two. After all, I’d fought against the German Eleventh Army.

“I refuse to go unless you tell me.”

“Just get on the plane,” said the older one, growing visibly annoyed.

“No!”

He drew his lips tight over his too-large teeth. I could see he was used to having people obey his orders without question. Finally he said, “We are taking you to Moscow.”

“Why?”

“That is not for us to say.”

“I won’t go unless you tell me,” I repeated.

The older NKVD agent glanced from me to the younger one and back to me again. I think he was considering just grabbing me by the hair and dragging me onto the plane. The Soviet secret police had never been known for their subtlety. Finally, though, he threw his hands in the air, mumbled something to his partner, and headed up into the plane, as if leaving this unpleasantness to his colleague.

“They wanted it to be a surprise,” said the red-haired man.

“What do you mean, ‘surprise’?”

“They want to honor your achievements. We were told to say nothing. Now please, Lieutenant,” he said, extending his hand toward the plane with a kind of elegant bow.

I still wasn’t sure I believed them, but finally I acquiesced and climbed aboard.

At sunset that evening as we approached from the south, I made out the colorful domes and spires of the Kremlin. I gazed out the plane’s window, searching for the massive Palace of the Soviets. I’d read about it and seen sketches of it in newspapers. It was to be the tallest structure in the world, the grand expression of Stalin’s vision for our new country. I thought it would have been finished by now.

“Where is the great palace?” I asked.

“What palace?” replied the younger of the two policemen.

“Why, the Palace of the Soviets, of course.”

The younger one laughed. “See that big ditch down there,” he said, pointing through the window at an excavated area that resembled a massive bomb crater. “That’s what’s left of it. They used the steel for making tank defenses.”

We landed at Kuybyshev military airport and drove into the now-darkened city, where they brought me to a hotel on a narrow out-of-the-way street. I noticed that some of the hotel’s windows had wood covering them, and here and there the bricks were pockmarked, no doubt from the German guns during the previous year’s assault. I’d heard that the
krauts had come within a few kilometers of Moscow before being driven back. My room on the third story was cramped and musty-smelling. They dropped my bag on the bed and turned to leave.

“Wait,” I said. “What now?”

“Someone will be by for you in the morning,” instructed the older one. “I hope everything is to your liking,” he added, flatly, without the least sarcasm.

I listened with my ear to the door as they walked away, and when they were gone I turned the lock. In bed that night, I had an odd feeling. I felt naked without my rifle, vulnerable and defenseless. I’d not had it in the hospital, but that was different. For a year in the war I’d kept it with me constantly, when I ate and when I slept, even when I went to the latrines. It had always been within arm’s reach. It had given me a feeling of security. Without my realizing it, my rifle had become a part of me, like an arm or a leg. That’s what war does to one. I lay on the bed, still in my uniform. That night, I slept irregularly, tossing and turning in the strange room. The pipes clanged, and outside in the hall I thought I heard footsteps, though maybe it was just one of several strange dreams I had.

In the morning, a knock on the door woke me. I got up and answered it. There in the hallway stood a heavyset man with ruddy cheeks, his thick neck overflowing his collar. He was wheezing from the climb up to my room. He wore a dark, smartly tailored suit, and sweat beaded on his upper lip. In his hand he held a fedora hat by the brim.

“I am Vasilyev,” he said, and without asking permission strode into my room. He stood there, looking disapprovingly about. “You’d think they could have done a little better than this for someone who has just won the Gold Star.” Then, turning back to me he said, “Your picture doesn’t do you justice, Lieutenant.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

He smiled at me and gave an exaggerated bow, sweeping the fedora in front of him. He had a meaty face, with a dark shadow of a beard, and he was thick through the middle. About the only thing that wasn’t abundant was his mouth, which was thin and severe, a sharp line separating his thick nose from his double chin. Despite his bulk he had a certain grace to him, a delicacy that was almost feminine.

“I told you, I am Vasilyev. I fear it is going to be unbearably hot
again,” he said, dabbing his forehead with an embroidered handkerchief. His movements seemed almost theatrical, those exaggerated gestures of a second-rate actor. “Oh, pardon me. Let me welcome you to Moscow,” he said, extending his hand. When I offered my hand, instead of shaking it, he bent and kissed it, as if he were a figure out of some nineteenth-century novel. As he spoke, I caught a faint whiff of alcohol on his breath. “Vasily Vasilyev. At your service, madam.”

“I don’t need your service.”

“Then think of me as your escort.”

“To what?”

“To certain events they have planned for you.” Then turning toward me, he said with disdain, “That uniform looks as if you slept in it, Lieutenant.”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

He smiled and walked over to the window, pushed the curtains aside and looked out. “Your wounds,” he asked, “have you recovered fully from them?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I’m fine.”

“I am pleased to hear that.”

“So when can I return to the front?”

At this he smiled, his hands folded beneath his prominent belly, as if it were a basket of clothes he was carrying.

“Have you had breakfast yet, Lieutenant?”

“No.”

“Neither have I. Come,” he said.

We headed down and got into the backseat of a black Citroën and were chauffeured by a man with a sharp, narrow face like a wood chisel. We drove east along the Moscow River, with the walls of the Kremlin to our left. The day was warm and bright, with a light breeze coming off the water. We wound our way through the city, stopping eventually in front of a small café in an old neighborhood on Tverskaya. “The only good French restaurant left in all of Moscow,” Vasilyev said as the two of us headed in. When the waiter came up, he said, “
Ah, bonjour, Monsieur Vasilyev
.
Comment allez-vous
?” The two spoke rapidly and fluently in French. My escort ordered a prodigious breakfast of eggs and sausages,
blini cakes and
grenki
and porridge. Though he ate heartily, his manners were the refined sort of someone who’d come from a cultured background. Now and then he’d daintily wipe the corners of his mouth with his napkin, and once he removed from his coat pocket an expensive-looking silver flask. He offered it to me, but I shook my head.

“Ninety-proof bourbon from America,” he explained. “Munitions can’t get through the German U-boats, but booze can. It is a strange war, no?”

As he took a long draft, I noticed that he had a wedding band that creased the flesh on one fat finger and that his nails were perfectly manicured. His dark brown hair was thinning and combed straight back. His eyes were also dark, and beneath them the flesh was discolored and loose.

“When can I return to the front?” I asked again.

“Ah, the front,” he said, taking a sip from the flask. “Where is it today? I have not read the paper. It keeps changing so fast.”

“I want to get back to fighting.”

“That is a very admirable sentiment, Comrade. But right now we have more important things planned for you. You really ought to try the blini. It is delicious,” he said, eating heartily.

“What sorts of things do you have planned?” I asked.

“A little this and that,” he said, waving his fork about in the air. Now and then he’d take the handkerchief from his coat pocket and wipe his flushed brow. On the one hand, he gave the appearance of a rough-hewn peasant who enjoyed his earthy pleasures. But he was, I would come to know, a complex man of many sides, many contradictions too—erudite, sophisticated, worldly, someone equally well read in Pushkin or Goethe, or in the subtleties of Soviet propaganda, but also someone who could be fiercely cruel. “We want to give a human side to the war,” he explained.

“There is no human side to it,” I snapped. “It’s all brutish and vicious.”

“Then let’s say we wish to show you off.”

“Show me off?”

“Yes. The capitalists call it marketing. We intend to market you as they do one of their motion picture stars.”

He obviously thought this funny, for he smiled broadly. He reached
into his pocket and brought out a silver case and offered me a cigarette. I took one, and he lit it for me and laid the case on the table. I noticed it had words engraved on the side:
with all my love, o.
His wife? I wondered.

Through the café window, I saw a second black sedan across the street from where our car was parked. Two men sat in it. The one behind the steering wheel wore glasses and had bushy eyebrows. I recognized him as one of the two
chekisty
that had brought me to Moscow.

After breakfast we got back in the car.

“I’m to show you about the city,” Vasilyev said. “Have you ever been to Moscow?”

“No.”

“Good. I shall be your tour guide.”

We visited the Novodevichy convent and its famous cemetery, where we saw the graves of Chekhov and Gogol. Next we went to the Pushkin museum. After a leisurely lunch, where Vasilyev drank an entire bottle of Italian Barbera all by himself, we headed to St. Basil’s Cathedral. After that we proceeded to Lenin’s tomb. As we stood there, staring at the grayish figure of Lenin apparently asleep beneath the glass, Vasilyev leaned toward me and whispered conspiratorially, “Wax.”

“What?” I asked.

“The real thing is in Siberia,” he explained. “When they thought the Germans would take the city, they removed Lenin’s body and replaced it with a wax figure. The NKVD sent an entire lab to keep his body preserved.”

Even now everywhere I saw artillery batteries with Katyushas and howitzers and antiflak weapons, soldiers manning machine guns behind heavily fortified emplacements. Tanks nearly collided with trolley cars and horse-drawn carts.

“It still looks like a city under siege,” I observed.

“They are not taking any chances,” Vasilyev replied. “If that crazy fool in Berlin changes his mind, they’ll be back.”

Vasilyev seemed thoroughly to enjoy his role as tour guide, gesturing at places we passed, pointing out landmarks, laughing heartily at his own jokes. He was chatty, gregarious, making witty comments. He
seemed at times even a little flirtatious, though I would come to learn that this was an affectation, him just plying his trade. He had no interest in me in that way. There was, nonetheless, something about Vasilyev that made me wary. Was he, like the other two, NKVD? Everywhere we went we were followed by the black sedan. When we went inside some museum or palace, the two secret police would follow at a distance, never really trying to hide themselves but never coming too close either. Several times, the younger red-headed man made eye contact with me, and once I thought he actually nodded and smiled.