The Sniper's Kiss

Chapter Twenty-five

The trip to London, with a refueling stop in Stockholm, took place largely in daylight, but for Mia, it was the darkest night of her life. She sat the entire time with her head pressed against the bulkhead, bereft and crushed with guilt. She welcomed the constant ache in her still-bandaged shoulder because it distracted from the shame and regret that ate away at her.

Once or twice, a member of the British delegation ventured back to engage her, but she was monosyllabic, and each one, realizing she was a lost cause, retreated and left her in her misery.

Every image of every second of the arrest replayed itself in her memory in slow motion, like the still frames rotating inside a primitive zoetrope, recording the capture of the most precious thing in her life. And for the second time, she was responsible. Worse, only one outcome of this second arrest was likely. Alexia was a deserter, this time a genuine one, and would be executed.

The London arrival offered an end to the physical exhaustion of travel but not to the strain on her mind. She hadn’t felt such bereavement since the death of her mother, but even then, she’d suffered no guilt. Now she could barely make herself walk.

As a courtesy to Harry Hopkins, she presumed, the prime minister provided overnight accommodations for her at the Clairidge Hotel, and someone from his office booked her on a commercial flight the next morning back to Washington. She stumbled through every step, damaged, uncommunicative.

Three days after her departure from Moscow, she arrived in Washington with much the same luggage as she had departed with, her Lend-Lease documentation, now with an addendum in the form of the Molotov Report. She wore the clothing she’d left at the embassy—a wool skirt, cotton blouse, and blue sweater, with her bandaged arm folded inside—but now everything hung on her frame, which the battlefield and three days of not eating had rendered gaunt.

She took a taxi to the White House and forced herself along the path to the staff entrance. The security staff greeted her with genuine warmth, and that was comforting. Grateful, she nodded her thanks, though it took all her effort to climb the stairs to her tiny top-floor room. After almost seven months, it seemed to have shrunk in size and grown in dreariness. She washed at the corner sink and changed into the clothes she had left behind in the closet. Then she gathered the last of her forces and trudged down the stairs to report to Harry Hopkins.

“Oh, Miss Kramer, do come in,” he said, opening the door to her. “Security called me to say you’d arrived.” He gestured toward a chair. “We’re so glad you’re alive and safe. After you disappeared, we thought you’d become a fatality of war.”

“Not a fatality, but nearly, though I was in the war. It’s all in the report.”

“Of course I want to know the whole story, and so do several others here. I suppose the first thing I should tell you is that the disagreeable woman who was blackmailing you last March hasn’t been heard from again. Our plan, for you to temporarily leave the White House, was the right solution, though it was never intended to last so many months or to leave you injured. We may have protected the president, but your investigation, it seems, ended up being a wild-goose chase.”

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.”

“I wouldn’t hold out much hope for her if she’s in the Gulag system. It’s only a few notches above a suicide battalion,” he said, coughing smoke into his fist.

“I know. You die from overwork after a year instead of immediately from a grenade. And she won’t be released while Molotov is in power.”

Hopkins shrugged. “I’m sorry about your friend. We all lose people we care for.” He crushed out the last inch of cigarette in his ashtray, and a tiny part of her mind registered it as a waste of tobacco. But the rest of her was depressed by his cavalier attitude toward Alexia.

“Will you at least show the president the cable?” she asked. “Just so that he’s aware. She saved my life and… well… that’s all…”

“Of course. He needs to know about every communiqué that comes in from the Soviets. Anyhow, thank you for your report. I’ll show him that as well. In the meantime, I’ve laid another assignment on your desk. Can you work on it first thing today?”

She was being dismissed, obviously, so she stood up. “Certainly. I’ll start right away.” With a faint wave of the hand that felt a bit like a civilian salute, she left his room for her cubicle.

Diligence was one of her strengths, and it served her well in this case, too. Manipulating numbers, categorizing objects by various criteria, calculating depreciations all required a mechanical part of her brain that allowed her to shut off her emotions.

She worked steadily until lunch, grabbed a fried baloney sandwich, and went back to work until five. With no desire to make small talk in the cafeteria and even less in retelling the story of her Russian adventure, she fetched another sandwich and a 7 Up for supper in her room. Then she moped. Still travel weary and lethargic, she dozed for a while, then woke later in the evening with her bedside reading lamp shining in her face. A knock at the door made her realize that was what had roused her in the first place.

Rubbing her face, she stood up and opened the door. Lorena Hickok stood in the corridor holding two bottles of Rheingold beer. “I heard this morning that you’d reappeared and was hoping to run into you in the cafeteria. You never showed, so I thought I’d celebrate your arrival personally. I hope you don’t mind.”

Mia stepped back, admitting the visitor. “Uh, have a seat.” She pointed to the only chair in the room and sat down on the edge of her bed. “I had a lot of work to catch up on,” she said dully. “After all those months, you can imagine how it piled up.”

Lorena handed her one of the bottles. “Eleanor, I mean, Mrs. Roosevelt and I feared you were missing in action.” She sipped from the bottle, and Mia followed her example, odd as it felt. The beer tasted surprisingly good.

“I almost was. But that’s another story. How are you?”

“I’m fine, thanks. Working hard for the Democratic Party in the election campaign, of course. We both are, even though his reelection seems a pretty sure thing. It’s obvious how sick the president is, but who would be crazy enough to change administrations so close to the end of the war?”

“After all the negotiations, he’s the only one who can bring it to a close. But I can see how all of that is wearing him down.”

“It is, but my dear, you don’t look so good either. What happened over there? I know you’ve told the story to Hopkins and to the president. Maybe you can summarize for me.”

Mia took another swallow of the beer. She’d eaten so little in the last week, she feared it might make her sick. “Summary, eh? Let’s see. Stalwart civil servant sent to Russia to uncover source of major diversion of Lend-Lease supplies into black market. Civil servant is successful but gets into trouble for it, arrested, escapes, joins Red Army, is saved from death by young woman sniper. Sniper arrested while I escape. She’s sent to a penal battalion and later to the Gulag.”

Her throat tightened and her voice rose in pitch. “And it’s all my fault.”

Lorena stared at her for a long moment, but it was a kind stare. “Is that all?” She tilted her head back and took a long drink from her bottle. “Well, I always thought you were the kind of woman who took control of events. But the loss of your friend explains that new stoop you have, like you’re carrying a great weight.”

Mia imitated her, feeling a slight light-headedness after the third swallow. “Well, I also had a broken clavicle and scapula, and just today took off the bandage. It stoops all by itself.”

“Even so. Something in your face looks like bereavement.”

“You’re very discerning. I made several good friends among the women snipers, and most of them were lost. Except the most important one, and she’s in the Gulag. Because of me.”

“You loved her, didn’t you?”

“Don’t talk about her in the past.” Mia felt tears welling up and pressed her lips together to keep them from trembling. She took a breath. “I told Mr. Hopkins about her, but he only offered some platitude like ‘we all lose people we care for.’ I might have been talking to a wall.”

“You mustn’t be so hard on him. He just lost one of his sons. In the Pacific. He never talks about it, though.”

“Oh, I didn’t know. Then he’s stronger than I am.” The beer was making her reckless, but she didn’t care. “I’m choking with guilt, and I can’t bear it. If she hadn’t become involved with me, she’d still be with her friends at the front.” The pooling tears flowed over onto her cheeks, and she sniffed noisily.

Lorena bent forward across the small space between them and laid a plump hand on her good shoulder. “I understand more than you know. I mean about loving someone.”

“Do you?” Mia was certain Lorena was hinting at Eleanor Roosevelt, but she dared not ask.

Lorena nodded somberly. “Loving someone doesn’t do anything to change the world, but it changes you. Being a person who loves, that makes you somehow a superior being. I don’t believe in God, but if there is a divinity in us, that has something to do with our capacity to love. I’m sure that’s not much comfort to you.”

She finished her beer and added, “Do you have any idea where she is?”

“Somewhere in Vyatlag. I don’t even know what that means. Only that bastard Molotov knows exactly where she is. He’s the one who sent her there.”

“Molotov? The one with the gun and the sausage in his suitcase?”

“Yeah. I caught him stealing Lend-Lease supplies, presumably to sell for profit on the black market. His revenge, since he can’t kill me, is to arrest the woman I love.”

“But she’s alive? You’re sure she’s alive?”

“At least so far. Mr. Hopkins showed me a cable from Ambassador Harriman today that said so. He’s going to pass it on to the president. That’s all I know.”

Lorena glanced down at her bottle that was now empty. “I’m sorry, deeply sorry for your bereavement.” She stood up and stepped toward the door.

As Mia stood up as well, Lorena turned and embraced her. Mia found it awkward being pressed against Lorena’s plump breasts but appreciated the sincerity.

Lorena let go and stepped through the doorway. “If you don’t mind, I’ll tell your story to Eleanor,” she said over her shoulder.

“Thank you, for the beer and the sentiment,” Mia said, gently closing the door behind her. Then she let go and had another good, long cry.