Beautiful Assassin (2 page)

The idea for the story had come to Elizabeth quite by chance. The late eighties and early nineties had been heady times for a journalist covering the Soviet Union. It was the place to be for a reporter trying to make a name for herself, and Elizabeth had wanted to be at the epicenter of it. History was unfolding right before her eyes. Reagan’s evil empire was imploding, everything in a dangerous state of flux. Each day brought something new, a threat or rumor, the end of the cold war or nuclear apocalypse. Yeltsin standing on a tank, defying the military. Nuclear missiles for sale on the black market. Old women waiting in long lines to pawn silverware so they could buy a little food. Some story hidden since the war just coming to light—like the one about Hitler’s skull suddenly turning up in Moscow. Revelations and scandals and long-buried secrets unearthed. In short, a journalist’s dream.

At a cocktail party Elizabeth had attended at the American ambassador’s residence, the buzz was all about whether Gorbachev would resign peacefully in favor of Yeltsin or if there would be actual civil war. She happened to run into an acquaintance named Reynolds, a retired British diplomat. He’d worked with the Reds, as he called them, ever since the war, and still did something of a vaguely clandestine nature that he would allude to only with a self-important wink. He liked to give the impression that he was well connected. She found him vaguely annoying, a boozy blowhard with that patronizing manner that Brits often assumed with Americans. But for some reason he liked her, and while mostly he was just a big talker, occasionally he’d toss some newsworthy item her way. It was he who’d tipped her off that the Reds were about to allow Sakharov to return to Moscow. She was the first to break the story.

Reynolds was holding court with a small group of men when Elizabeth came up. The subject was Vasily Zaitsev, a famous sniper at Stalingrad whose recent death had been largely overshadowed by all the political upheaval in the country. Reynolds, however, claimed that the most famous Soviet sniper wasn’t Zaitsev at all, but a woman.

“She killed hundreds of krauts,” he said.

“What was her name?” Elizabeth ventured.

“Tat’yana Levchenko.”

Elizabeth shrugged, used as she was to Reynolds’s big talk.

“Now there’s a story for you, my dear,” he said. He went on to lecture in that supercilious manner of his that this Levchenko had fought during the siege of Sevastopol, had recorded the most kills of any Red soldier up until that point in the war.

“It just so happens that I met her personally. Right in this very room, in fact. Quite the looker,” he said, winking at the other men. “But cold as ice.”

“Are you making all this up?” she chided him.

“The God’s truth,” he said. “She was as well known over here as your own Audie Murphy in the States. Quite the darling of the big shots at the Kremlim, too.” Reynolds went on to say she’d become so famous that Eleanor Roosevelt heard about her and invited her to visit America. “She toured the States with Mrs. Roosevelt, speaking on behalf of the war effort. Made a pretty big splash on your side of the pond.”

“How come I never heard of her?” she asked.

“You ought to read your history, my dear,” replied Reynolds.

“What happened to her?”

“Let’s get another drink, shall we, and I’ll tell you all about her,” he said, slipping his arm into hers and leading her over to the bar.

Later, when they were alone, he said, “Some say she worked for the NKVD.”

“She was a spy?” Elizabeth exclaimed.

“That was the word on her. Supposedly, she passed along information she got through her relationship with Mrs. Roosevelt.”

He smiled at her evasively and sipped his drink.

Elizabeth wondered how much of this she could believe. Still, she
had to admit the story intrigued her. A female war hero who spied on Mrs. Roosevelt. “Where did you hear all this?”

“Around,” Reynolds replied, twirling his glass in the air so that some of his drink sloshed onto the bar.

“You still haven’t told me what happened to her.”

“Disappeared,” he said, hooking his fingers as quotes around the word.

“What does that mean?”

“There was a big brouhaha for a time when she vanished. Some say the Yanks sent her into hiding. Others that they eventually caught up with her.”

“What do you mean, ‘caught up with her’? Who?”

“For a smart girl you can be bloody naïve, Elizabeth. The KGB. You know how these thugs used to operate. Still do, for that matter,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, as if someone might overhear him.

“What did they do with her?”

Reynolds put his index finger to his temple and went, “
Tfff
.”

“I think you’ve been reading too many James Bond novels,” she joked.

Nonetheless, her curiosity piqued, Elizabeth decided to do some digging on this Tat’yana Levchenko. Right away she learned virtually nothing was to be found regarding the woman in the Soviet records. As with that of so many other personae non gratae Soviets, her existence had been purged, wiped clean, like those ghostly blanks of individuals who’d been painted out of the group portraits with Stalin. So Elizabeth turned to American records, and there she found that the famous female sniper had, indeed, existed. She uncovered dozens of references to her, articles and photographs of the Soviet soldier in newspapers and magazines from her wartime visit to the States. And the more she learned about the woman, the more fascinated she became. Before the war Tat’yana Levchenko had been a scholar and a budding poet; a skilled marksman with a youth shooting club; a young wife and new mother; then with the German invasion, a sniper extraordinaire and sudden international war hero, someone who toured the States giving speeches with Eleanor Roosevelt, and with whom she’d become close
friends. And all the while perhaps acting as a Soviet spy, passing secrets along to Red agents, though none of that was alluded to in the press. Elizabeth thought it would make a great story, maybe even that book she’d always been meaning to write. But she kept running into a dead end. She could find nothing about what became of the woman, beyond several sketchy newspaper reports of her “disappearance.” “Soviet Hero Defects to U.S.” read one front-page headline. Another article, a smaller one on page two of the
New York Times,
reported that the Soviets had lodged a formal complaint with the United States, insisting that their famous citizen be returned to them. Yet another article said simply: “Female Sniper Disappears.” And then slowly the news about her faded, and Tat’yana Levchenko simply vanished, a footnote to history.

Over the next several years Elizabeth ran into more dead ends, and her research added little to what she already knew of the woman. But then, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were suddenly plenty of people who were, for a price, willing to talk. Reynolds arranged for Elizabeth to meet with a purported former KGB agent who apparently had direct knowledge of the woman. They met in a seedy strip bar on Prospekt Mira. The man, who must have been seventy, wore mirrored sunglasses and a threadbare coat that stank of cigar smoke and fried fish. As she spoke to him, he kept looking over her shoulder at the girls dancing on the stage behind the bar. Elizabeth could see their snow-pale, writhing forms reflected in his glasses. He asked for the agreed-upon payment—a thousand dollars; he wouldn’t accept rubles. Elizabeth had withdrawn money from her own savings—she wanted this to be her story alone. Only then did the man remove a piece of paper from his coat pocket and slide it across the table. When Elizabeth looked at it, she saw a name scrawled in Cyrillic: Irina Andreeva. She asked him what this had to do with the woman she was looking for.

“That,” he replied in broken English, a long, dirty fingernail tapping the name, “is same woman. Tat’yana Levchenko.”

“That’s the name she assumed?”

He nodded.

“What happened to her?” Elizabeth asked.

The man shrugged. “She defect to America.”

“Did the KGB get to her?”

“
Tsh,
” he scoffed. “Those fools couldn’t find a turd in a toilet bowl.”

“Is she still alive?”

He lifted his hands inconclusively in the air. At which point he started to get up.

“Wait,” Elizabeth said. “If they didn’t kill her, what happened to her?”

Rubbing his thumb over his first two fingers, he said, “Cost more.”

“How much?”

“Thousand.”

Used to the Soviet ways of bargaining for information, Elizabeth withdrew from her purse three hundred-dollar bills.

“Three hundred,” she said, waving the bills at him.

As if he was going to strike her, he shoved five fingers at her face. “
Piat
.”

“Forget it.”

Now Elizabeth made as if to get up to leave.

“All right. Deal,” the man said.

He swiped at the bills, but she pulled her hand back. “First tell me what happened to her.”

“I told you, she defect.”

“Is she still alive?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no. Who can say?”

“You’re lying.”

“Is truth, I swear. People die. Now pay me.”

“One more question. Was she a spy?”

He smiled mockingly at her. “If you find her, you can ask her yourself.”

Holding out the money toward him, she said, “You had better not be lying.”

He snatched the bills from her hand and stood. “
Shlyukha
,” he said under his breath, then turned and hurried out into the streets of Moscow. In her gut she feared she’d just thrown away thirteen hundred dollars. But it would, in fact, prove to be her most important lead.

She decided to take a leave of absence from her newspaper duties
and fly back to Washington, where she started to do research. By this time, countless wartime documents had been declassified, and Elizabeth was able to find out more about Tat’yana Levchenko. She spent months, which turned into an obsession of years, pouring through dusty government boxes filled with papers, old documents and files, newspaper articles, photos of the woman in Washington and New York and Chicago. Her next big break came when they released the Venona papers, part of Senator Moynihan’s Commission on Government Secrecy. They included more than fifty years’ worth of Soviet encrypted cables that America had been secretly collecting and decoding from as far back as 1941. At the NSA library, Elizabeth came across several telegrams, sent in early September 1942, from New York and Washington to Moscow, alluding to the “Captain’s Wife” (the known code name for Eleanor Roosevelt, the Captain being Roosevelt himself ). Mentioned with Mrs. Roosevelt was someone whose code name was simply “Assassin.” Elizabeth wondered if that could be the Soviet sniper she was looking for.

Some months later, quite by chance, she stumbled upon a slender FBI file labeled simply
ASSASSIN
.
Much of the information within it had been deleted, blacked out, with the words
CLASSIFIED MATERIAL
stamped in the margins. But from the photos it became readily apparent that this “Assassin” was actually the same woman Elizabeth had seen in the American newspaper photos—Tat’yana Levchenko. From what Elizabeth could piece together, it seemed that Hoover’s Feds had had Levchenko under surveillance. In addition to the old newspaper photos, there were pictures of Tat’yana Levchenko giving speeches at large rallies, getting into and out of limousines, leaving a hotel lobby, talking with various people, candid photos taken from a distance, like those a private detective might snap of an unfaithful wife. There were several of her conversing with a heavyset man in a dark suit. There were also a number of Levchenko and a young man in uniform, an American soldier. In one photo this soldier and Levchenko were captured embracing in a doorway. And there were several of her and an older woman, a tall, gangly person with saggy jowls and buck teeth. It took Elizabeth a moment to recognize Eleanor Roosevelt. As Elizabeth perused the contents of the file, which seemed to stop in the late forties, she came
across the name Irina Andreeva, the same one the KGB agent had given her back in Moscow. Even with all of this information in hand, it took Elizabeth another year before she was able to track down Irina Bishop, née Andreeva. Whose real name was Tat’yana Levchenko. Code-named Assassin.

The old woman shuffled into the room carrying a glass filled with iced tea. Unsteadily, she placed the glass on the table between them, then seemed to collapse into the recliner opposite Elizabeth. The woman’s face was flushed, and she was obviously having difficulty breathing. Her shoulders heaved with the effort, and in her eyes there was the panicked look of one trapped under water.

“Are you all right, Irina?” Elizabeth asked.

The woman casually held up one finger, as if she were used to this routine. She was a tough old bird, Elizabeth thought. In some ways she reminded Elizabeth a little of her own grandmother, a feisty woman in her eighties.

“Emphysema,” was all she said by way of explanation.

Elizabeth sipped her iced tea and waited for the woman to catch her breath. Finally, pointing at the picture of the man in the cowboy hat, Elizabeth asked, “Is that your husband?”

“That is Walter, yes,” the old woman replied. Then she added, “He passed away six years ago. How is it you are related to him again?”

“His mother and my grandmother were cousins. Do you still farm?”

The woman put her hand to her ear. “You will have to speak up. I am hard of hearing.”

“Do you still farm?” Elizabeth said, glancing out at the land surrounding the house.

The woman shook her head. “After Walter died, I sell everything but the house and barn. I keep a few chickens for eggs.”

“You’re pretty isolated out here.”

She stared out the window, at the isolation. “One gets used to it.”

“Do you have someone to look in on you?”

“My daughter checks in on me.”

“Is that her?” asked Elizabeth, pointing at the photo on the wall.

The woman nodded.

From her briefcase on the floor, Elizabeth removed a pad and pen, as well as a small tape Recorder. “Do you mind if I tape our conversation?”