Beautiful Assassin

Beautiful Assassin - Michael C. White


PROLOGUE

Colorado, 1996

Elizabeth had driven several miles past the dirt road before it occurred to her that it might have been the one the old woman had told her to take. After glancing once more at the directions, she decided finally to turn the rental car around and head back along the same parched stretch of eastern Colorado road. The August afternoon was scorching, the blacktop ahead undulating like a snake trying to shed its skin. Her eyes ached from the glare off the pavement, and even with the air conditioner on full blast, her blouse clung damply to her back. On either side of the road, the brown, desiccated plains stretched out to the harsh blue of the sky. The sheer relentlessness of the landscape called to mind a train ride she’d once made to Kiev for a story. She’d been traveling from Moscow, where she was the bureau chief for an American newspaper, and was on her way to interview one of the leaders of the Rukh nationalist movement. This was back in the eighties when the idea of an independent Ukraine was still a pipe dream. She remembered seeing out her compartment window the Russian steppes unfurling endlessly, their vastness giving her vertigo. Now, halfway around the world, she was, ironically, going to see another Ukrainian, one who’d declared her own independence a long time ago.
There was no mailbox or marker, but she took the chance and turned down the narrow dirt road. She drove over a cattle guard, then up a bumpy incline. The washboard road kicked up stones against the car’s undercarriage, the pinging sounding eerily as if someone were shooting at her. When the road leveled off, it appeared headed straight for a windbreak of cottonwoods off in the wavy distance. In the shelter of the trees stood a weather-beaten barn and several outbuildings, a windmill listing precariously, a small white farmhouse. That had to be her place, Elizabeth thought.
She wondered if the old woman would look anything like the person in the newspaper photos. Every picture Elizabeth had come across, as well as everything she’d read about Tat’yana Levchenko, only confirmed that she had been a striking-looking woman. “A real knockout,” one reporter had called her in that hard-boiled journalistic slang of the times. Dark hair done in those pin curls of the forties, short enough to tuck beneath the forage cap she sometimes posed in. The strong features, the high, Slavic cheekbones and slightly aquiline nose, the smooth, porcelain complexion. A full mouth that, for the cameras at least, was always made up with lipstick and smiling as buoyantly as a Girl Scout, an image that her uniform, with its cluster of impressive medals, only enhanced. Yet it was the eyes that drew the viewer: a lucid dark, wide and serious, exuding the innocent gaze of an ingenue having just arrived in the big city. But that image, of course, belied the facts, what she’d accomplished in the war (one newspaper article had dubbed her “the doe-eyed executioner”). Elizabeth sensed something else lurking beneath those innocent eyes. She’d seen that look before, the masklike expression in the faces of the Muscovites she passed in the streets, the old babushkas cautiously avoiding eye contact with strangers, the young trained to be wary, as if their very thoughts were being monitored by the government. Elizabeth felt that if she could get beneath the public face of Tat’yana Levchenko, she would get a glimpse of the real woman who lay beneath and the story she’d been guarding for more than half a century.
The American press back then had had a field day with her. A Communist, war hero, scholar, poet, and on top of everything, movie star good-looking, a figure right out of central casting. They’d fawned over her, eager to introduce her to an American public largely ignorant of their newfound ally, that notorious Russian Bear, and of a European theater of war that, in 1942 at least, was still just a distant rumble. She would have appeared to many a kind of Rosie the Riveter but with a rifle instead of a rivet gun. Today, her story would have commanded a seven-figure book deal; she’d have been on the talk show circuit and had a flood of movie offers. But today, of course, the woman would be almost eighty, and, as she herself had obviously preferred it, a largely forgotten figure. As Elizabeth drove along she thought of that odd photo of Tat’yana Levchenko up in a tree, one the Soviet press had reenacted for propaganda purposes, just as they had the blowing up of the Nazi eagle over the Reichstag days after they’d already taken Berlin. An obviously staged publicity shot with her wearing a camouflage poncho and holding a rifle, her face quite clearly made up, staring prettily through the scope at an imaginary enemy—all the while perched in a tree! Elizabeth had read the accompanying article in the Saturday Evening Post, about her near-fatal duel with the German sniper. How much of it was true, though? How much simply Soviet propaganda? In fact, how much of the woman herself was to be believed, Elizabeth wondered, and how much was just an agitprop creation, that cold war tendency to distort reality for some desired political advantage?
As she neared the house, Elizabeth grew excited at the prospect she was finally going to meet the woman she’d been hunting for years. She felt the sort of nervous anticipation she always did when covering a story that had consumed her so completely. But then she wondered if she should continue the subterfuge she’d started when she first called, that of being a distant relative of the woman’s dead husband. She didn’t like having to lie, felt her job as a journalist was to find the truth and tell it. But sometimes a small falsehood was the only way to get your foot in the door to a greater truth. She knew the woman would never have agreed to meet her if she’d confessed her real intentions up front.
“Who are you?” Tat’yana Levchenko had asked over the phone. Her English was fairly good but heavily accented, her labored breathing punctuated by raspy coughs.
“Elizabeth Meade. I’m related to your husband, Mrs. Bishop.” Elizabeth used the woman’s married name, not Andreeva, the alias she’d assumed more than fifty years before.
“He never spoke of…,” the woman began, but then paused for an intake of breath. “Any Meades.”
“My mother was a Bishop. May I call you Irina?”
“How did you find me?”
“Through some old letters of my grandmother’s,” Elizabeth lied.
“What do you want?”
Elizabeth could hear the wariness in the old woman’s voice, the caution of one who’d spent years in hiding, first as a sniper and later a lifetime looking over her shoulder, waiting for someone to come for her. Just as they had for Trotsky. Or Walter Krivitsky, who was murdered by KGB agents in a Washington hotel room. Or like Juliet Stuart Poyntz, a Barnard professor and high-ranking American Communist Party member, as well as a Soviet agent. Poyntz had been invited to Moscow in the thirties, but after seeing the brutality of Stalin’s purges firsthand, she’d turned on the Communist Party. Fearing she might betray important information, Soviet agents were rumored to have kidnapped her in Central Park, and she was never heard from again. In those days, no one was safe from the long reach and even longer memory of Stalin, or his brutal enforcer Beria.
“I’m a writer,” Elizabeth explained. “I’m writing a family history. I’d like to find out about your husband’s side of the family.”
“What’s to tell?” the woman said. “My husband was not very close to them.”
“I’d just like to talk to you. It would mean a great deal to me.”
The woman fell stone silent on the other end for several seconds, so that Elizabeth thought she’d hung up. But to her surprise, the woman finally conceded. “It is a long way to come for nothing. But if you insist.”
The next day, Elizabeth left New York on the first available flight for Denver. And here she was, about to meet Tat’yana Levchenko, a figure whose sudden disappearance a half century ago had caused headlines.
She pulled up in front of a white two-story house whose paint was badly blistered. As she cut the engine, the dust that had been trailing behind her finally had a chance to catch up. It swirled around her in an ochre cloud, and even inside the car she could taste something like chalk dust. When the air cleared, Elizabeth made out a squat figure standing behind the screen door gazing out at her. As she got out of the car she was immediately confronted by the yapping of a dog.
“Fu!” the old woman called sharply to the animal. The dog, a border collie with a grizzled muzzle, gave off a few halfhearted growls before slinking off toward the shade of a cottonwood.
“Irina?” Elizabeth called to her.
The woman nodded. “And you are Elizabeth, no?” She pronounced her name E-leezabet.
“Yes. Sorry I’m late.”
Elizabeth reached back into the car for her briefcase, then headed up toward the house. As she approached, the woman opened the screen door and Elizabeth offered her hand in greeting. She was surprised that the old woman’s grip was so vigorous, the palm callused, the fingers cracked and hooked like talons. Her hair was short and puffy-white, accentuating a ruddy complexion. She wore a shapeless flowered dress that hung on her, and she was thick through the body, with a large bosom that Elizabeth had not noticed in the old pictures, no doubt camouflaged by the bulky military jacket and Sam Browne belt. Hanging from around her neck was a pair of reading glasses. She was shorter than Elizabeth had assumed, not much more than five feet. Perhaps she had shrunk with age. Still, in all the photos she had projected an image of height, of substance. Her skin was badly wrinkled, her once pretty mouth hard and sunken. She looked nothing like the woman in the photos, just like some old lady who had lived a difficult life. Nothing about her suggested she’d had such a remarkable past. In fact, for a moment Elizabeth wondered if it could be a mistake, if she had the wrong person. But then the old woman’s gaze met Elizabeth’s. From this close, her eyes bore an unmistakable resemblance to those of the young woman in the photos. They were still clear and wide, darkly intent as a hawk’s searching for prey. Elizabeth could imagine those same eyes fixing a target in her crosshairs. She remembered reading something about how the woman had said that the trick was to silence one’s breathing, to kiss the trigger. That killing was simply a matter of controlling one’s breath.
“Zdravstvuyte. Bol’shoye spasibo zato, chto soglasilis’ vstretit’sya so mnoy,” offered Elizabeth by way of greeting.
“Rada poznakimitsya,” replied the woman. “Where you learn Russian?”
“I studied it in school. And I worked as a newspaper correspondent in Moscow.”
“How come you no say you work in Moscow?”
“I used to,” replied Elizabeth, catching the hesitant note in the woman’s voice. Suspicion that someone from the old country had finally tracked her down? Or merely nostalgia for her homeland, for her past? Hoping to dispel the woman’s fears, she quickly changed subjects. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”
“It is hot out here. Come,” the woman said, inviting her inside.
As she held the door for Elizabeth, the dog slipped by them, into the house, its nails clicking on the wood floors. The place had an old-person smell to it, a stale and leathery odor like a pair of old shoes. There was also a vague smell of vegetables boiled and meats fried over a lifetime, the sort of earthy stench Elizabeth associated with Russian households. The woman walked with a cane, her other hand out to the side, touching the wall for balance, moving gingerly like a blind person. She led Elizabeth toward a small screened porch off to the right. A fan coaxed tepid air into the room, bringing with it, too, the same chalky smell Elizabeth had experienced before. Somewhere a fly buzzed noisily, stubbornly crashing into the screen. The room was plainly furnished—in the corner a bureau upon which sat a small portable TV, in the opposite corner a metal card table with two folding chairs. In the middle of the room was a well-worn recliner, in front of it a wicker coffee table with a Plexiglas top, and against the outside wall a metal glider for a couch.
The dog lumbered over to the couch, jumped up onto it, and was about to curl up.
“Get down!” the woman commanded. When the animal didn’t budge, she whacked it firmly with the end of her cane. With a desultory slowness, the creature slid off the couch, walked a few feet, and collapsed on the floor with a loud exhalation of air.
“Please, sit,” she instructed Elizabeth, indicating the couch.
The woman was nearly out of breath from the short walk from the front door. “May I…offer you something to drink?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
The woman turned and shuffled out of the room. The momentary break was just what Elizabeth needed—a chance to clear her head, to plan out how she would approach the interview. She glanced around the room, trying to get a feel for what she thought of as her “subject.” She had interviewed many subjects in their elements, in their homes and offices and places of work. One time it had been in a prison cell where she’d interviewed a noted Soviet dissident writer. Another time it was in a T-62 tank with soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. Most of the time, Soviet citizens were wary of opening up to her, fearful of the repercussions, and Elizabeth had found that the objects they surrounded themselves with sometimes told her more than they themselves did. She’d once interviewed Yuri Andropov. The leader of the Soviet Union and former KGB head was a reticent subject. Both awkward and aloof, he kept fidgeting during the interview, checking his wristwatch. Elizabeth happened to notice a framed photograph of a tabby cat on his desk. She steered the conversation toward cats, and suddenly this hard-line old Communist who’d ordered the arrests of thousands became as chatty as a schoolgirl gossiping among friends.
Yet as Elizabeth glanced around the house, she saw little that hinted at the life of its occupant. The room had that frugal midwestern efficiency, neat and plain and anonymous as a budget motel room. A few insipid landscape pictures on the walls, some plastic flowers in a vase on the coffee table. On a bookshelf to the right of the recliner sat some knickknacks, as well as an assortment of books, a number, she noticed, in Russian. Elizabeth leaned forward to read their titles. There were several by Akhmatova and Esesin. From her research, Elizabeth recalled how Tat’yana Levchenko had written poetry (she wondered if she still did or was that another part of her that she’d had to leave behind). Sitting on the bookshelf were two framed photos. Both were black and white, one a picture of a tall, lean man wearing a straw cowboy hat. He had a long, angular face, and his expression was one of bemused annoyance. The husband, Elizabeth concluded. Her research had turned up little more than his name—Walter Bishop. The other was of a young blond woman in her twenties, though the hairstyle—bangs, with a large bouffant—suggested the picture had been taken back in the fifties. She was thin, sharp-featured, pretty in an austere sort of way. A daughter, Elizabeth wondered.


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 na?ve, 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?”
“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.