Beautiful Assassin (3 page)

“Eez up to you,” the woman replied.

Elizabeth pressed the Record button and placed the machine on the table.

“Where did you originally come from?”

“The Ukraine.”

“How did you meet my cousin?”

“I came to America after the war. Was refugee in German labor camp. A Ukrainian group here help me to get settled. They arranged for a job in Colorado Springs. It is there I met Walter. At a dance.” Then she added with a wistful smile, “He was only second man I ever danced with.”

“Who was the first?”

“You would not know him,” she replied, her eyes taking on a sudden pensive look.

Elizabeth nodded. “So you were a refugee?”

“Yes.”

“But I thought the Yalta agreement mandated that Soviet refugees had to be repatriated to their homeland. How did you end up in the States?”

The woman stared curiously across at her for a moment, but then, almost without missing a beat, she replied, “I had connections. Was able to get visa to come to America.”

“I see. Why didn’t you want to return home?”

Elizabeth watched as she picked at a loose thread on her dress. “That was no longer my home.”

“It must have been hard, though. Leaving your family, everything you knew.”

“It was not my home anymore,” she repeated. “And my family, they were all killed in the war.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It was long ago,” she said, with a shrug of her shoulders. Her brows furrowed as she looked out the window, squinting intently, as if trying to make out something at a great distance. Elizabeth pictured just such a look when the woman was aiming at an enemy soldier. After a while, she turned her gaze on Elizabeth. “I thought you wanted to find out about Walter. Not me.”

She decided the time had come, that there was no point in pretending any longer. She reached into her briefcase again and removed a folder. She opened it on her lap and took out a sheet of paper. It was a copy of an old newspaper article. The blurry headline read, “Girl Sniper Credited with 315 Kills.” Beneath it was a grainy black-and-white photo of a young, pretty woman in uniform, flanked by several men. She was smiling broadly for the camera, beaming like someone who’d just won a prize. Elizabeth placed it on the coffee table, facing the old woman, as if it were a piece of evidence in a court trial. The woman gave it a cursory glance, then stared across at Elizabeth.

“What eez this?” she asked coolly.

“Take a closer look,” Elizabeth insisted.

The woman put her glasses on and leaned forward, picked up the paper, stared at it carefully for several seconds. Elizabeth watched her closely. The woman’s expression hardly changed, save for a muscle in her jaw that knotted itself and released several times. Elizabeth had to hand it to her, she was a cool one. Finally, the old woman looked over her glasses at Elizabeth and dropped the paper onto the table.

“Do you recognize her?” Elizabeth asked.

Tat’yana Levchenko pursed her lips with something like scorn. “Why, should I?”

“What about this one?” Elizabeth handed her a second article. Similar to the first, the article’s heading read, “Soviet Hero Meets First Lady.” Below it was another photo showing the same uniformed woman, this time standing beside a grinning Eleanor Roosevelt. “Or this one?” Elizabeth said, passing her another picture of the woman soldier, this time speaking at a podium on an outdoor stage. The headline: “Red Hero Addresses Central Park Crowd.” Again the old woman looked at it, though this time she gave it no more than a cursory glance before
tossing it on the table with a disdainful flourish. By now her mouth had hardened into a thin, furrowed line.

Elizabeth tried to hand her another article: “Beautiful Assassin Wishes to Kill Even More Nazis” read the headline. The same young woman appeared below it. However, the old woman wouldn’t even accept this last sheet, pulled her hand back so that Elizabeth had to place it on the table with the others. The woman didn’t look at the photos in front of her but rather stared silently, steadily, across at Elizabeth for several seconds, her dark eyes narrowing. Then she leaned forward and picked up the tape recorder, fumbled with the buttons until she had turned the thing off. Elizabeth could see that she was angry now.

“You are not Walter’s cousin,” the woman hissed at her.

Elizabeth shook her head. “No, you’re right. I’m not.”

“What is your real purpose for coming here?”

“You
do
know who that is, though, don’t you?”

“You lied to me. Who are you?”

“The real question, Mrs. Bishop, is, who are you?”

As the woman stared at her, yet another change came over her features. Elizabeth could see the anger in her eyes slowly leach out, replaced by something Elizabeth thought at first was fear. But then she realized it wasn’t fear at all but a kind of weary resignation, as if the fate she had been waiting for all those years had finally arrived at her doorstep, was seated across from her. Her shoulders slumped with acquiescence, her body relaxing like a wild animal accepting its capture.

After a while Tat’yana Levchenko asked, “Are you with them?”

“Who would that be?”

“Don’t play games. You know. The NKVD. The
chekisty
. Or whatever those swine call themselves now.”

Elizabeth shook her head. She was surprised that the woman would actually think the KGB had come for her after all these years, as if what she’d done a half century before mattered anymore to them. But then again, she knew the fear the old regime had instilled in people, the insidious, all-encompassing terror of the Soviet state, its seemingly endless desire for, as well as the means to exact, revenge. “No, I’m just a journalist.”

“You’re lying.”

“No, it’s the truth. I doubt they even know you exist anymore.”

“But you found me. They could too.”

“Even if they could, they no longer care about you. There
is
no Soviet Union anymore.”

The woman gave out a dry, sardonic chuckle that quickly segued into a cough. The cough grew worse, and soon she had worked herself into a paroxysm of hacking, her face turning bright red, her eyes straining with each breath. A terrible rasping sound echoed from within her chest.

“Can I get you anything?” Elizabeth asked.

With her free hand the woman made a drinking motion. Elizabeth hurried off toward the kitchen. In a cabinet she found a glass and filled it with water.

“Here,” Elizabeth said, squatting in front of the woman and holding out the glass to her. After a while, the woman’s coughing slowed, and she finally was able to take a breath. As she did so, Elizabeth gently rubbed her arm.

“Are you all right?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” the woman said with a resigned wave of her hand. She looked up and held Elizabeth’s gaze for several seconds. In Tat’yana Levchenko’s eyes, Elizabeth saw that young woman again, the one from the newspaper photos, a look both innocent and yet filled with a terrible knowledge, as if she’d had a glimpse of hell. “So why
are
you here then?” she asked Elizabeth.

“I want to tell your story.”

“What story is that?”

“Tat’yana Levchenko’s story.”

“
Ona umerla davnym davno
.”

“But she didn’t die.”

Tat’yana Levchenko shook her head. “You are wrong. That woman perished in the war.”

“No.
You
are that woman. People need to know your story.”

“You should go, Miss Meade. Or whatever your name is.”

Elizabeth paused for a moment. Then she asked, “Is it true that you spied for the Soviets?”

“That’s a lie,” the woman scoffed.

“The FBI had you under surveillance. They said—”

“I don’t care what they said. I was…
soldat,
” she replied, pointing a crooked finger at Elizabeth. “Soldier. I fought for my country. Can you understand that?”

“Are you denying you passed on information to the Soviets?”

“You know nothing,” the woman exclaimed, her eyes suddenly flaring up.

“If you didn’t spy for them, what did you do?”

“I told you. I was soldier. I did my duty. I was ordered to go to America and I went. That is all.”

“Then people should know that. They should know the truth.”

“The truth—
huh!
What do you know of the truth?”

“People should know who you are, what you did. You were a hero.”

“Hero,” she scoffed. “It is not a world of heroes anymore, Miss Meade.”

“I think you’re wrong. No woman has ever done what you did. People would want to know about you.”

The old woman pursed her lips, then once more fell to staring out over the dry plains. Elizabeth could see her chest rising and falling, a dry rattling sound faintly reverberating from her lungs.

“It was different then,” the woman said.

“What was?”

“Everything. The world. Your country and mine. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Make me understand then.”

“Ach,” Tat’yana Levchenko said. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

Elizabeth turned and reached for the folder again, took out another picture. This one showed the same pretty woman, though now she was up in the branches of a tree, holding a gun and aiming it off to the left.

“What about there?”

The old woman looked at the photo and shook her head, a scornful smile playing about her lips. “That was a lie, too.”

“Then tell me the real story.”

She could see the old woman debating, wondering if she wanted to
do this, if she had the stamina, the courage to dredge up those times. Finally, she glanced down at the tape recorder. “All right. But leave that thing off,” she said. “I shall tell you what really happened. And you can believe it or not, makes no difference to me.”

Elizabeth went over and sat on the couch, got her pen and pad ready. The old woman closed her eyes again, leaned her head against the back of the chair. She remained like that for a long time. It was as if she had to reach down deep inside herself, to a place that was dark and had been sealed shut for ages, a place of war and of death, of intrigue, of memories she had to pick up and dust off. After a while, with her eyes still closed, she began to talk, softly, slowly at first, but then, as if her voice was a pump that needed only a little priming, in a swift torrent, the words spilled from her. She started in English, but after a short time, she lapsed into Russian, and her native tongue seemed to carry her along faster and faster. Elizabeth could almost sense that the story had been sitting there inside her, just waiting for this moment.

Sevastopol, 1942

I
magine a woman in a tree, a silly, foolish young woman holding a gun and preparing to kill a man she does not even know. There she sits, waiting, hopeful of the smallest of lapses that will spell death for her opponent. She is fearless. She has on her side the vanity of youth, the blindness that comes from a righteous sense of revenge. She believes herself on a sacred mission, that each death she inflicts on the enemy brings her a little closer to peace. She doesn’t yet know that she could kill every single German in the Third Reich, and she would not find peace. She has yet to learn this. But she will.

That time in the tree was mere luck. Nothing more than that. In war, you cannot count on luck. You can only avoid making mistakes. If you make one mistake in battle, you pay for it, usually with your life. That day I had made not one, but two mistakes. The first was hiding in the tree. The second was that I had let myself daydream. It was so unlike me to let my thoughts drift when I was in position, rifle at the ready, all of my senses heightened like those of a wolf stalking its prey. Such an indiscretion often ends badly, let me tell you. But there I was, recalling a summer morning before the war, remembering a way of life that seemed unreal, as gossamer as a fairy tale. In the memory I lay
in bed alone. Kolya, my husband, was already off to his job working for the city of Kiev. I recalled that the bedroom window was open, the yellow curtains I’d made the first year of our marriage ballooning like a bellows. The cool air from the Dnieper was wafting into the room, and from the apartment below ours drifted the wistful cello notes of the music student who lived there. Mostly, though, what I remembered of that morning was the feeling, that strange and altogether wondrous sensation somewhere deep down inside a woman when she feels—no, when she
knows
—she is carrying life within her. I lay very still, feeling that life beginning in me, taking hold, filling me, knowing already that I loved the tiny creature that was sharing my body, loved it with all my heart and soul, loved it so much that the tears welled up in my eyes as I listened to something hauntingly beautiful by Rachmaninoff. I thought to myself, This is love. This feeling. This moment. I had never felt it before, not even with my husband, but I knew right then what it was.

At that moment, the war had faded far, far away.

But sentimentality is a luxury a soldier cannot afford. That’s when the first bullet murmured softly behind my left ear. Its passage was no more than a feather over my skin, a warm breath along my neck, yet it was enough to yank me back to the present. I knew that breath all too well: it carried the foul stench of death itself. Its wake caused the hairs on my scalp to stand at attention, and the leaves surrounding me to jingle like a wind chime. I noticed a single leaf, prematurely aged, detach itself and spiral lazily toward the gravestones below. The ground was already littered with its comrades. Though only late spring, the leaves had begun to turn color and drop. Perhaps it was due to the general disruption in things—the gritty ash that rained constantly from the skies, the pounding of the big siege guns the Germans had brought up by train, the fearsome shuddering from the nightly air raids, the intense heat and smoke of the fires that had scorched the earth all the way to the hazy mountains west of Yalta. Whatever it was, it seemed even nature itself was in full-scale retreat, like the people in the city who’d taken to the sewers, trying to get to a place of safety, a place that no longer existed. And certainly not to be found in a lone apple tree in the middle of a cemetery.

Dura,
I cursed to myself. For I was a fool, an arrogant fool. You see,
I didn’t fear death, that was my biggest mistake of all. My life had long ago stopped mattering to me. It was but an instrument of my revenge. I was like Hamlet. For me the readiness was all, ready to spill my blood at the drop of a hat. Yet I didn’t want to squander my life by a foolish mistake, didn’t want that German
sobaka
across the way to beat me.

I pressed against the tree’s slender trunk and froze. I waited five, ten, thirty minutes or more, not allowing so much as the twitch of a muscle to give away my position, though obviously that was a question already in doubt. When I thought enough time had elapsed, I slowly grasped the field glasses hanging from my neck, brought them up, and cautiously scanned the valley to the northwest. Once it had been rolling farmland, green and fertile and verdant, but now it resembled more a lunar landscape than any place on earth. An apple orchard, most of whose trees were broken and splintered as if by a giant’s angry fist. Grazing land pockmarked by the Germans’ 88s. The blackened remains of a farmhouse, in the yard of which lay the rotting corpse of a cow, its belly bloated obscenely in the heat. To the right of the house was the barn, curiously still intact. I inspected the upper and lower doors closely, then the stone wall that ran behind it, but instinct told me the shot had not come from there. About a hundred meters to the north was a stand of alder trees and dense undergrowth that lined the banks of a stream. Is that where he is? The
gitlerovets
. My fascist adversary. The one I’d been stalking and who, in turn, had been stalking me for the past several days. That strange dance we’d been engaged in, that terrible act of intimacy which is at the heart of killing. Yesterday he’d hidden in the loft of the barn. Knowing him as I’d come to, it should have been obvious, but then again, in my attempt to get inside his head and outwit him, I’d thought the barn would have been
too
obvious,
too
pedestrian for someone as clever as he, and so I’d ignored it. And because of my oversight, he’d managed to pick off three of my comrades and seriously wound a fourth before I was able to locate his position. By then, of course, he’d moved on, slithered away in that reptilian fashion of his to blend in somewhere else and kill again—two more times. A good day for him, a bad one for me. From the vantage point of the tree, I felt I’d have the upper hand. It looked right down the valley, on the German lines below.
Wherever he would take up today, as soon as he fired, I would have him in my grasp. I would kill him. But I should’ve known he’d counter my move, and now
he
was the one with the advantage. Wherever he was.

It was early, but already the sun exploded into my hiding spot. What had seemed before dawn to be the perfect position, now appeared for what it was: a trap. Too many leaves had fallen, making the upper branches of the tree resemble the head of an old man going bald. Sunlight from the east streamed into my sniper’s nest through a hundred gaping holes. I felt suddenly naked and vulnerable. I should have listened to Zoya, the young corporal who was my spotter. We worked in teams, a sniper and a spotter. Zoya, always the cautious one, had warned me against taking up a position in the tree, especially one off by itself. The first thing we’d been taught in sniper training was that you must always have an escape route. You must move often, so that your position couldn’t be discovered. Shoot and move, that was how we were taught. But now it was too late to move. I’d been discovered, my position known by my foe. So I did the only thing I could—I adjusted my feet on the branch below me, shifted my weight a bit, and accepted whatever slight protection the tree’s narrow trunk offered.

Save for the raspy cawing of a lone crow somewhere in the distance, it was quiet for a long while. Then I heard Zoya calling me.

“Sergeant,” she whispered hoarsely. Zoya had hidden in the foxhole over at the cemetery’s edge, behind a hedgerow. Where I should have been. “Jump and run for it.”

Yet I remained silent, unmoving.

I mulled over my options. It was four or five meters to the ground, which was a small cemetery. Beneath the tree, the earth was flat and clear, save for a few gravestones, most of which were small or composed of wooden crosses, and they offered little cover. It was a tiny village cemetery on the outskirts of the city. The closest cover was behind the small hill at the western edge of the cemetery where Zoya was dug in, some thirty meters off. If I landed cleanly, I could make a run for it. I was swift of foot, had won medals in track back in school. I figured with my pack and rifle I could cover that distance in five, perhaps six, seconds. Maybe I could make it. But that, I told myself, was
wishful thinking. Before I reached safety I would have to surmount the small hill, then make it through the hedgerow. At this distance, in broad daylight, I would present an easy target. I wouldn’t make it two steps up that hill before a bullet tore into my back. Then he’d have won, he’d have beaten me. In some ways that thought was more bitter than death itself. To lose to the fascist dog, to have him put me down in his kill log as another notch. No, I thought. Better just to stay put and hope that something else presented itself. Maybe I would get lucky.

Before dawn that morning, Zoya and I had crawled to the cemetery’s edge, a half kilometer forward of our front lines. As always we had scouted out the position the day before and had planned on digging in, getting concealed and set up before first light. A sniper’s life is one of careful planning, of concealment, of surprise, of infinite patience, and of course, of much luck. Behind that little hill at the edge of the cemetery was a good position, one that commanded much of the valley to the north where the German lines were. Yet as Zoya removed her entrenching tool and began to dig our foxhole, I happened to notice, in the middle of the cemetery, the darker, jagged outline of the tree set against the lighter blue of the predawn sky. I’d seen it the previous day, a single apple tree set off by itself amid the graves. Long ago, somebody visiting a loved one must have tossed an apple core, and the thing took root and sprouted there among the dead. I imagined its roots reaching down, entwining with the bones of those who lay sleeping. From its branches, it offered a tantalizing view of the valley, one even better than where we were now. A perfect sniper cell, one which
he
would never think to look in, exactly because it was too risky.

“What of that tree?” I whispered in the darkness. The spot where Zoya was digging offered shelter from the German lines, so we felt free to talk, at least in measured whispers.

“What about it?” Zoya asked.

“What if I took up position there?”

Zoya gave her usual humph when she felt something undeserving of comment, and kept digging.

“It looks right down at the barn,” I explained. “From there you can see the entire valley. It’s a good position.”

“
This
is a good position,” she said.

“But that is a better one.”

“
Vot cholera,
” she said, one of her odd, Ossetian curses. “Sergeant, you and I both know that would be foolishness.”

“I would have a clear shot at him.”

“And he of you,” said the young woman in her heavy accent, one that sounded as if she had smooth tiny pebbles in her mouth.

I felt her hesitation was partly owing to the fact that she didn’t like the idea of crawling through the cemetery in the dark. Zoya Kovshova was very superstitious. A mere girl of eighteen, she’d come from some tiny village way up in the Caucasus where the women were married off at thirteen and wore black for a year when their husbands died, and where a hare hopping across your path was considered an ill omen. She was forever crossing herself and uttering some oath against bad luck. Facing the Germans she was as fearless as any soldier in the entire Chapayev Division. During the evacuation of Odessa, for instance, when we were savagely fighting the German advance street by street, Zoya had remained behind in what was left of Birzhevaya Square, firing her machine gun until she’d run out of ammo. And only then did she leave her post when Captain Petrenko ordered her to do so. But if a crow lighted in a tree and squawked three times, she would mumble something in her strange mountain tongue and throw a handful of dirt over her shoulder; otherwise, she worried she would never be able to bear children after the war. And what man would want a bride whose womb had been dried up by a crow? But she was, I knew, also just watching out for me. Zoya was as protective as a mother hen. In fact, as a joke I sometimes called her “
malen’kaya
”—little mother. Now and then when I would shoot an enemy soldier and I’d lie in wait to claim a second one I could sense was nearby, she would touch my arm. “Don’t get greedy, Tat’yana. It’s not safe here,” she would caution me. “Yes, little mother,” I would reply.

“The sun will be in his eyes,” I had said this morning.

“But if you’re spotted, you cannot get out of it.”

“I won’t be spotted. He’s a clever one, this German, and I have to outfox him.”

Zoya straightened and turned to face me. I could feel her gray eyes fixing me even in the darkness.

“This is madness. You take too many risks, Tat’yana Levchenko.” When it was just the two of us, she still called me by name, though I had by now been promoted to sergeant. I didn’t mind. We were good friends as well as comrades. The fighting had brought us close in ways that only danger and the letting of blood can. During brutally cold winter nights, when we were in a foxhole, we sometimes used to sleep in each other’s arms for warmth. Other times, when I would make a difficult shot she would throw her arms around me and kiss me on the cheek. So I usually permitted such familiarity, especially when we were alone.

“We are at war,” I said. “Everything we do is a risk.”

“But you take too many.”

“Wait here then,” I told her, picking up my rifle to leave.

“Has all the talk gone to your head?” she said.

I turned on her and said sharply, “That will be enough, Corporal.” I had only recently been promoted to sergeant and wasn’t used to pulling rank on her. For months as corporals, we’d worked well as a sniper team, sharing the demands and discomforts and dangers of our profession—sweating under the hot summer sun, freezing in the snow and cold of winter, shivering in the rain, many times coming within a hairs-breadth of catching a sniper bullet. And always taking equal credit for the kills. Sometimes, however, friendship had to take a backseat to duty, to the necessity of command. Besides, I knew the potential danger I was courting, and yet I wanted so very much to get this German, and I was willing to do almost anything, risk anything. But I couldn’t permit Zoya to sacrifice her life for my prideful need for vengeance.