Justine Saracen - The Sniper’s Kiss

Her mouth twisted in an expression of irony. “And the goose got away, too.”

“You’re referring to Mr. Molotov, I presume. I got a cable from Mr. Harriman, in code, of course, explaining that Molotov was at the heart of the theft and that nothing could be done about him. He also mentioned that your life was endangered more than once, but I’ll leave you to tell the details.”

She let out a long breath and would have preferred not to talk about it at all, but clearly, reporting was her primary duty.

“Oh, where should I begin?” she said dully. “I uncovered major deficiencies at a factory where the foreign minister had assured me our deliveries had been received. I naïvely reported the discovery to Mr. Molotov, or attempted to, not realizing he was part of it. Within minutes, he had me detained. With the flimsy excuse that I should attend a Lend-Lease delivery, he put me on a plane with two thugs who were supposed to dispose of me in the air.”

“Oh, my Lord. It’s like a bad novel. How did you escape them?”

“The Luftwaffe shot us down. I survived the crash and was rescued by a Soviet unit on the front line. Unfortunately, their commander reported my presence to STAVKA and planned to return me to Moscow, where of course Molotov would trap me again. But an air attack on the ambulance convoy enabled me to escape and join the local infantry division.” She thought for a moment, then snorted. “Imagine that. Saved twice by the Luftwaffe.”

His eyebrows seemed to rise to their maximum height. “You joined the Red Army!? Just like that!?”

“Yes, as a sniper,” she said dully. The word had too many tragic associations for her to enjoy the shock value.

“A sniper. Well, this just gets better and better. And then?”

“Well, we fought all the way to Pskov, where I was wounded again, this time more severely.”

“In the shoulder.” He nodded toward the bandage.

“Yes, fractured clavicle and shoulder blade, and a collapsed lung. That meant I had to be carried with the other wounded back to Novgorod and eventually Moscow. I managed to get to the embassy, but then someone I had become close to was arrested for trying to save me, and when Molotov tracked me down, I… um… blackmailed him to have her released, with the threat of revealing his crime to Stalin.”

“You blackmailed the Russian foreign minister!?” Hopkins’s eyebrows had nowhere left to go, but his voice rose a note higher.

“I tried to. But he outmaneuvered me by telling Stalin that he and I together had uncovered the thief and that it was Nazarov, some lower-level guy in the group. At that point, my friend and I tried to leave Moscow with Mr. Churchill, but Molotov tracked us down and seized her from the plane. I was allowed, well, forced, actually, to go home.”

Hopkins sat in silence blinking, for a few moments, while his eyebrows finally relaxed.

“I think you need to tell that to the president.”

“So that’s what kept me away for so long.” Mia had concluded her story once again.

Roosevelt screwed a Chesterfield into the front of his cigarette holder. “My Lord. What a tale!” he exclaimed. “Though I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to help, my dear. I can’t even protest. At the moment, Molotov is number two at the Kremlin. Besides, the Russians have done far worse things than embezzle and threaten a diplomat, and we’ve had to overlook them.” He lit the cigarette and took the first puff, then shrugged. “With the fate of Europe resting on our agreements with them at the next conference, we can’t afford to antagonize them. No matter how horrendous the crime.”

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.

“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.”