The Sniper's Kiss

Chapter Twenty-six

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reelection in November 1944 was probably the least celebrated presidential victory in American history. Though it was for an unprecedented fourth term, most appreciated that victory came primarily from the understanding that a nation at war could not change its commander in chief.

The Allies were winning the war, but after the euphoria of taking Paris and marching along the Champs-Élysées in August, they met with an iron-hard Wehrmacht and had to wring every town and village from them.

The president and his advisors, including Hopkins, spent a great deal of time in the Map Room tracing the slow advance of their troops, and when Mia asked Hopkins about the Eastern Front, she was disappointed by the paucity of new information.

It was mid-December. Where was the Red Army? Newspaper reports showed it was poised to cross the Vistula and enter Germany itself. In the south, it was sweeping across Bulgaria and Hungary, edging toward Budapest. Where was the 109th Rifle Division, or the 62nd Armored Division that had absorbed them? Were Kalya and Klavdia still alive? And Galina, the medic?

Hopkins’s voice broke her reverie. “Our men are held up here in the Ardennes,” he said, punching the map on his desk. “The Jerries are mounting a terrific offensive, and it doesn’t help that it’s the worst winter in years. Our guys aren’t used to that much snow.”

Snow, she thought. Did the Americans use snipers in white camouflage? She didn’t think so. Maybe that was part of their problem. They didn’t really understand winter, and now it was killing them.

Victory seemed both inevitable and distant. And there was more ominous talk, just a word or two, that something big was going on. Some great weapon that scientists were developing in the deserts of southwestern United States. Something more terrible than the flamethrower and mustard gas.

She excused herself and returned to work, for the Lend-Lease shipments continued, though she wondered with each list and manifest how much was still being stolen.

Christmas came and went, leaving no impression on her. No pastor came to read Dostoyevsky to them, and while she herself gained back her weight, both the president and his closest advisor looked ever more gaunt.

And scarcely had Roosevelt been sworn in on January 20 when, a few days later, news came from the Eastern Front that the Soviets had come upon a horror near the town of Oświęcim. A few days later she heard the name in German: Auschwitz. Were Kalya and Klavdia among the liberators?

All the while she wondered if Alexia was still alive. She willed her to be alive, however cruel the labor. Against all reason, she yearned to return to Russia to be closer to her, perhaps to find a way to contact her.

And so her heart leapt when Hopkins called her into his office and said the word “Yalta.”

Yalta, resort city on the south coast of the Crimean peninsula that had been liberated from the Germans the previous year. Yalta was once again Russian.

“So, do you feel up to going back? It’s only a week away. February 4 to 11. I know you had some bad experiences in Russia, but I do need a Russian-speaking assistant, and no one else in the White House is qualified.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, perhaps a bit too quickly, then added, “So, Molotov will be there.”

“As the foreign minister, yes, of course. But we won’t let him kidnap you this time. Given what you’ve told me, I think he’ll be more afraid of you. He has to always worry about your exposing him.”

Mia shook her head. “No. He knows I won’t do that. He has a hostage. My sniper friend. You saw the cable, so you know what he holds over me.”

“I see. Something of a Mexican standoff, isn’t it? I wish we could do something, but we can’t.”

“The president has already made that clear,” she said somberly.

“All right, then. Start packing. We’re going back to Russia.”

February 1944

Mia hadn’t seen so much military brass since Tehran. The British delegation arrived on the same day as the Americans at Saki airport, and she lost count of the officers with stripes along their forearms and “salad” on their caps. Churchill was accompanied by an army field marshal, an admiral, and an RAF marshal, but she didn’t know any of their names. In addition to his civilian advisors, most notably Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt was supported by an army chief of staff and a fleet admiral. All the military jackets were heavy with medals, though in the competition of who had more decorations, badges, and ribbons, the Russians won by a landslide.

A convoy of vehicles carried them into Yalta, where the main street was lined with Soviet soldiers standing in the melting snow. Lacking military rank or political status, Mia rode in a sort of bus near the end of the convoy. She sat behind the driver, and when he discovered she spoke Russian, he cheerfully provided some of the history of the Livadia Palace, where the Americans would be housed.

“The summer vacation house of the tsar, you know. Nicolas and Aleksandra and all the children. They went to Italy, you see, and liked what they saw, and when they came back, they said, ‘We have too much of that Russian architecture. Let’s make a Renaissance palace.’ So they hired the architect Krasnov, and he made one for them in 1911.”

“Very interesting,” Mia said politely, but he wasn’t finished.

He rattled off a series of names of tsarinas, tsarevnas, tsarevitches, grand dukes, and duchesses who had resided there, but they all seemed to be variations of Nicolas or Aleksandr, so she lost interest. Mercifully, the bus pulled up at the entrance of the palace, terminating the narration.

It was an impressive façade, she had to admit, and thoroughly un-Russian. Snow-white granite, with an arched portico of marble and a Florentine tower, it could have been an Italian villa inhabited by some Renaissance prince.

Arriving toward the end of the convoy, she had to wait until the primary guests were escorted to their rooms. Then a butler of some sort invited her and the other lesser luminaries to follow him. Her room, she learned, was on the same floor but some distance away from Hopkins’s room.

She asked where the Soviets were housed and was told they hadn’t arrived yet. But some time that afternoon, Stalin and his bodyguards, traveling by armored train, would be received at the Yusupov Palace. So many palaces, built in the face of vast nineteenth-century Russian poverty. She shook her head.

The first morning was taken up by the plenary session, involving hundreds of participants from the British and American delegations alone.

Mia glanced around and noticed, as she had in Tehran, a paucity of women, only a few secretaries and briefcase holders like herself. Among the Russians, a few women stood as palace guards, without any say in the conference, though hundreds of thousands of them had died and were dying on the front lines.

She sat directly behind Hopkins, taking notes. Numerous note-takers were evident, but Hopkins liked that she didn’t depend on the official interpreter for what the Russians said. She could draw her own nuances and discuss them with him later when she had transcribed her notes.

The first session addressed in general terms the locations of the allied armies and their expected victory within the next month, or two months at the outside. No one made any mention of the frightening new American weapon that was being whispered about. Just as ominous, both Stalin and the foreign minister, Molotov, were taking a hard line regarding the expected sphere of Soviet influence after the war, and she recalled Churchill’s remark about losing Eastern Europe.

On the second day, the sessions addressed the final assault on Germany, clarified the Soviet commitment to fight Japan and organize the UN, and identified lesser postwar issues.

The morning of the last day, Hopkins met her at breakfast, and it was clear he was disturbed. “The Soviets aren’t letting anyone in to the meetings today. The talks are apparently ‘sensitive’ and only between the heads of state. The president has insisted on having me there, but no one else is allowed.”

“And the issues of the previous three days were not sensitive?”

“Ridiculous, isn’t it? But the Soviets get to make the rules here. Please stay in the palace. I’ll look for you as soon as I come out and dictate everything I remember while it’s still fresh in my mind.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll walk around for an hour and then wait in my room.”

Churchill arrived, striding alongside Roosevelt, wheeled by his doctor. But at the door, the doctor was turned away, and Hopkins replaced him pushing the wheelchair.

Relieved at having a free morning, she wandered through the palace like a common sightseer. It was as lavish as she expected a tsarist palace to be, but after strolling through three or four staterooms, all differently decorated, she became disgusted with the opulence. The excess of grandeur and ornament had no doubt contributed to the downfall of the Romanovs in the first place.

She traced her way back to her room and opened the novel she had brought along. Crime and Punishment hadn’t been a good choice, and just as she was growing bored, a knock sounded at the door.

One of the palace guards stood there, a handsome lad in a spotless uniform. “Miss Kramer, you have visitor,” he said in bad English, and she replied in Russian.

“Visitor? That’s impossible.”

In Russian he said, “It is very possible. She asked for you by name. I think it’s the famous sniper.”

“Sniper?” She was stunned. “Where is she?”

“In the entry hall. You can follow me there.”

Tossing her tedious book aside, she hurried after him, her heart racing. As she paced alongside the guard, a dialogue ran though her head.

Could it be Alexia? Impossible. She’s in a labor camp. But maybe Molotov changed his mind. Why would he do that? The war is almost over, and he has nothing to worry about. The Molotov I met does not do favors. But miracles happen. No, they don’t.

When they passed through the wide double doors to the entry hall, the sniper stood up, and it was not a miracle.

Swallowing her disappointment, Mia met her with a warm handshake. “Major Pavlichenko, how nice to see you again. Um… what brings you to Yalta?”

“A little vacation. I’ve been training snipers without rest for six months at Saratov but developed some back problems, so my commander has granted me a few days’ rest in a warm place.” She smiled. “I know the Crimea. I was one of those who liberated Sebastopol.” She tilted her head westward in the general direction of that city.

“So, you went out for a short walk and ended up here in Yalta. And how did you manage to get past security? The hotel is supposed to be blocked off.”

Pavlichenko chuckled. “I assure you, it is. It so happens that I am a friend of one of the generals accompanying Marshal Stalin. He invited me to visit him, but then I learned that Mr. Hopkins was here and remembered you were his assistant.” She held out her hand. “Glad to see you made it back home.”

“Thanks to you. I would have expressed my gratitude for your motorcycle intervention sooner but assumed any message to you would have been compromising.”

“Very perceptive. So, how’s the shoulder?” They strolled slowly along the ornate corridor but paid little attention to it.

“Much better, thank you, though I don’t think I could aim a rifle again.”

“Aim a…? Oh, yes, I forgot. You were with a sniper unit for a while. You are quite an amazing woman.”

“Not as amazing as you, Major. Or the women I fought with in the 109th.”

“I understand. One develops real loyalties to one’s comrades. It’s wrenching to the soul when they fall in battle.”

“I lost much of my unit, though one of them…” She hesitated, not knowing if she dared to ask yet another lifesaving favor.

Pavlichenko waited, eyebrows raised. “One of them…?”

“Alexia Vassilievna Mazarova,” she blurted. “She saved my life. I was shot, and she left her post to carry me to a medical station. For that they arrested her. First she was in a penal battalion, and then she was transferred to a camp in Vyatlag for attempted desertion.”

Pavlichenko frowned. “I believe I met her somewhere on the front. But a labor camp is an unusual punishment for a desertion.”

“Well, it’s a long and complicated story. I was wondering, could you help me get a letter to her? Just a brief message so she knows someone cares about her?”

Pavlichenko shook her head. “Some camps allow letters and parcels, and some do not. Unfortunately, if the authorities say no communication, I have no more ability to penetrate that wall than you do. All I can do is advise you to take heart. The war will be over soon. Our troops are already in Germany. Afterward, your government can make an appeal through the Central Committee to contact her, maybe even to shorten her sentence.” Pavlichenko offered simultaneously a smile of encouragement and a shrug.

They continued down the corridor for a few minutes without speaking. “Do you remember our conversation about Dostoyevsky when we first met?” Mia asked.

Pavlichenko clasped her hands behind her back as they paced. “Yes, though I still can’t fathom why he interests you.”

“Well, one of his characters makes a virtue of submission, of insisting that a person should offer love, a kiss, as it were, to the world no matter what evil is visited upon him.”

The major laughed in a sudden burst of derision. “Well, with 309 dead Germans behind me, you can imagine my opinion of submission.”

“But what about submission to the state? How is that different?”

“Submission to the state is done in the belief that the state is the collective will of the people. Dostoyevsky’s submission involves only the individual, a privilege of the comfortable intellectual who cares about his personal salvation more than for the suffering masses.”

She glanced down at her watch. “Oh, it’s twelve o’clock. I promised General Kruglov to meet him for lunch. It has been a pleasure to talk with you again, Miss Kramer, and I hope you find your friend, Alexia Vassilievna.”

They embraced lightly, and Mia hurried back to her room, arriving only a few minutes before Hopkins knocked at her door.

“Good that you’re in. Can you take some dictation right now? I want to set it all down before I forget.” He was already inside and seated on the one chair in the room.

“Of course.” She readied her fountain pen and notebook.

“The long delay of the Western allies in entering Europe has allowed the Soviets…” So he recounted for some fifteen minutes, but soon his voice grew hoarse. His almost-transparent skin and blue lips revealed how much the talks had taken out of him, and he seemed to be at the end of his strength.

“Please type that up as soon as you can, with carbon copies,” he said, coughing into his handkerchief. “I’m going to have a rest now. The president will have a private conversation with Stalin at two o’clock this afternoon in the blue suite, before the final press photos. I’d like you to be there, as a standby, in case the president needs another interpreter or messenger.”

“Yes, of course,” she said anxiously as he slouched toward the door and let himself out.

Mia arrived at the Blue Suite just before four, but as she feared, Hopkins had not made it. President Roosevelt greeted her as his assistant brought him down the corridor, but reaching the suite, he dismissed the man and rolled himself inside. Stalin was already inside with the single interpreter who was allowed.

What was so critical, she wondered, that excluded Churchill and all the president’s military staff and advisors? Could it have something to do with the mysterious Great Weapon the US was developing and everyone was whispering about?

Whatever the subject, the president emerged after an hour, and the leaders and their entourages collected before the main portal of the palace.

The three heads of state sat together much the same as they had done at Tehran, only this time they wore winter clothing. As the press snapped away and their flashbulbs popped, various officers wandered in and out of the frame behind them.

Mia knew most of the names of those in the American and British entourages, fewer in the Russian group, but had no trouble recognizing Molotov. He studiously avoided looking in her direction, but it no longer mattered; the power they once had over each other was gone.

What concerned her was that Stalin, in his military greatcoat, seemed gleeful, while Churchill glowered, and President Roosevelt huddled haggard and frail inside his cape.

All the while she watched the three leaders posing for the press, the thought of Alexia haunted her. What was life like in a Russian labor camp in the dead of winter?