Beautiful Assassin

21

Over the next week, before everything was to collapse like a house of cards, I gave myself over completely to being in love with Jack Taylor. I say “gave,” as if I had some actual choice over the matter. The fact is, I fell in love so fully, so wholly and unconditionally, I couldn’t have stopped myself if I’d wanted to. And I didn’t want to. Despite still not trusting him completely, I surrendered to my feelings. I was inexperienced in the ways of love, a novice when it came to the intricacies of passion and touch, of the way the gaze of a lover seemed to ignite one’s soul. Whereas with Kolya, my choice had seemed a surrender, with Jack it felt like liberation, the way a prisoner must feel whose cell door was suddenly thrown open after years of confinement. I loved his hazel eyes, the soft fullness of his lips, his earlobes, the boyish cowlick at the top of his head, the hard plane of his stomach. I loved the way his missing arm made him appear so vulnerable, so delicate and fragile. I loved the way he would whimper when he entered me, and the way afterward he would run his long fingers through my hair. We made love with the lights on, savoring the other’s naked body. Jack touched me in ways I had never been touched.
We pursued our passion with a recklessness that both startled and yet made me feel, for the first time ever, alive, vibrant, like the woman I was always meant to be. We behaved rashly. We threw caution to the wind. We ran to each other’s embrace every moment we could, this despite being always in the reflected glow of the First Lady, as well as the fact that Jack and I were both conscious of being spied upon by Soviet agents. (Besides Dmitri, there were now two other chekisty who suddenly appeared, sinister-looking men we first took notice of in Chicago and later on the train. The two lurked at the periphery, pretending to read an American newspaper but eyeing us clumsily from a distance.) But knowing they were there, we were usually able to elude them. We conspired to find moments alone and capitalized on those. Late at night on the train Jack would slip into my berth. Or if we were staying somewhere, he would come to my room after everyone was asleep, take me in his arms, and make love to me. Once, after giving a speech at the University of Chicago, I excused myself to use the bathroom. Jack followed me and we slipped into an empty science classroom for our tryst. Giggling like children, aroused by the fear of being caught, we tore at each other’s clothing and made frenzied love behind a table filled with beakers and Bunsen burners. Afterward, I had to appear at a press conference. Vasilyev leaned toward me and indicated that one of the buttons was missing on my tunic: “You’re getting rather careless, Lieutenant,” he said, but more a caution rather than an admonishment.
In restaurants we held hands beneath the table. With my boot, I would rub his leg, and over dinner our gazes would meet as I found myself counting the seconds before we could be together again. Whenever we were standing in an elevator his hand would brush my leg, and I’d feel a tremor of desire ripple through me. We sent each other missives declaring our love for each other. In one letter he wrote, “To my precious beloved, always and forever, J.” In bed we would talk about our “future,” as if we actually had one. The things we would do, the places we would go, conjuring a distant, faraway place on the horizon in which we were together. Though, of course, I think we sensed on some level that we didn’t have a future. We had only now, these few stolen moments to share, but this fact seemed only to kindle our passion.
For her part, Mrs. Roosevelt seemed to know about the captain and me, and implicitly gave us her blessing, with a wink or nod of understanding. Occasionally she even arranged for us to be together, like some matchmaking aunt. She would send us off under the pretense of Captain Taylor continuing my tutelage of English. “You need to work on those irregular verbs, young lady,” she’d say, giving Miss Hickok a knowing look. Or sometimes she would glance at me and smile that crooked, adorable smile of hers. Once at a dinner for a veterans group in Des Moines, she leaned toward me, squeezed my hand, and said, “Ya rada za vas” (“I’m so happy for you”).
And I was never more happy in all my life, and yet, never more afraid. Yes, I was afraid. I had not been afraid in the war, not of German bullets or bombs, but I was afraid now. Before, you see, I had nothing to lose. Now I had everything to lose. I was happy. I was in love, and love makes a person very vulnerable. It made me want to cling to life with a fierce determination. I didn’t want to lose this feeling, one I had been waiting for all my life. I worried constantly. I felt every moment, most especially during those glorious ones in which I was in his embrace, that something bad would befall us, felt this looming sense of impending disaster. That Vasilyev or Semyonov would find out that I had been lying to them, that they would realize I was no longer their pawn to be manipulated as they saw fit, and have me sent back home. I feared they would view me no longer as a Hero of the Soviet Union, but as an Enemy of the People.
Several times, Jack tried to convince me I should defect, that it was my only choice.
“I contacted my friend at the State Department,” he told me once as we were having coffee in the dining car. Outside the window, the overcast day lay suspended over the bare, ocher-colored plains unfurling to the hazy gray of the autumnal horizon. At the other end of the dining car I spotted those two men, the new chekisty who had begun to watch us. One was squat and powerfully built, with a broad face; the other thin and wiry, with a small, sharp nose like a chicken’s beak. “I told him about your case.”
“What did he say?”
“He spoke to some people in the OSS.”
“What’s that?”
“They deal with this sort of thing,” was how he explained it. “There’s a chance my government could offer you political asylum.”
“But I’m not sure yet.”
“What are you not sure about? It’s not as if you have a lot of options, Tat’yana,” he said, his hazel eyes fixing me in their stare.
“It’s just that I’ll be leaving everything I know—my home, my country.”
“You’re tired of doing their dirty work, right?”
“You know that I am.”
“And you don’t want to end up like Viktor.”
“But if I choose this path, there’s no turning back.” I looked outside at the landscape rushing by. With a wave of my hand toward the window, I said, “Could you leave all of this, Jack? Your home. Everything you loved.”
“I know it’s hard. But we’re running out of time. Besides, I can’t just stand by and pretend I don’t know what I know. What Vasilyev and the others are trying to do. And you can’t play it both ways.”
“I’m not playing it both ways.”
“No?” he said. “Sometimes I almost think you’re playing me too.”
“How can you think that!” I cried, a little too loudly. The two chekist officers at the other end of the dining car looked up.
“Ssh,” he warned me.
“Why would you say that?” I whispered to him.
“You lied to me about all of this at first,” he said. “How can I trust that you’re not still working for them and just using me?”
“I’m telling you the truth, Jack. You know I love you.”
“Do you?”
“Of course I do. How can you doubt that?”
“Then prove it. Leave them.”
I closed my eyes, my head spinning at how fast things were moving.
“What about us?” he pleaded.
“Us?”
“If we’re going to have a chance to be together, you have to defect. It’s the only way.”
“Jack, even if I decided to stay in America, do you think they,” I said, rolling my eyes toward the two chekisty, “will just let me go?”
“We can protect you.”
“We?”
“The American government.”
“You don’t know these people. They won’t give up. They will hunt me down and find me. Whether it takes a year or ten years.”
“I’m willing to do anything to be with you. To risk everything. Are you willing to do the same?”
“You know I’d do anything to be with you, Jack.” I paused to sort out my thoughts. “Just give me a little more time to think about it.”
“All right, I’ll give you until we reach San Francisco. And then I’ll have to act.”
In the meantime we agreed I would continue to provide false information to Vasilyev. I decided I had to trust Jack Taylor, so I removed the letter from my coat pocket, the one I’d gotten back in Chicago. I glanced at the two chekisty before I handed it under the table to Jack.
“What’s this?”
“A man back in Chicago gave it to me. I’m to give it to someone in San Francisco.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it sooner?”
I pursed my lips. “I wasn’t ready to yet.”
“This man in San Francisco, his code name wouldn’t be Kharon, would it?” Jack said.
I stared at him in surprise.
“Yes. How did you know that?”
“My friend who works in the State Department. He told me.”
He slid the letter into his pocket. Before he got up, he squeezed my hand under the table, then stood and left. One of the two chekisty got up and followed him.
Over the next few days, things began to escalate, to spin out of control. My own side, I got the feeling, had stopped trusting me. When we stayed in a hotel, sometimes I would notice one or another of the chekisty outside my hotel room. I sensed the desperation of Vasilyev too. For example, one time he had me come to his hotel room.
“They are worried that you have become too emotionally involved with the captain.”
“I thought they wanted me to get close to him.”
“Close, yes. But not to the point that you’ve lost your loyalties.”
“I haven’t lost my loyalties.”
“Let’s hope not, for your sake.”
“Is that why you’ve begun posting someone outside my room?”
He ignored my question.
“Do you get the sense the captain knows more than he’s letting on?”
“He’s just a translator. That’s all he is.”
“When you are with him, try to feel him out about Enormous.”
“You’re wasting your time, I tell you.”
“That’s an order. And not from me but from higher up.” He ran a hand across his face. “Lieutenant, I would warn you not to think all your medals or status will protect you. Because if you try anything, you’ll find just how unimportant they are. One more thing. Inquire of the captain if he was ever in Moscow.”
“I already did. I told you he wasn’t.”
“Ask him again.”


Shortly after this last conversation with Vasilyev, our train pulled into Denver, where we were going to stay for a few days. We were to attend a rally, give a few speeches. In the evening after one such event, Jack Taylor slipped into my hotel room.
“I’ve missed you,” he said, kissing me urgently on the neck. We hadn’t been able to be together for two whole days, and our hunger cut us like a well-honed blade.
“Did anybody see you come in?” I asked. As I spoke I was already fumbling with the buttons on his jacket, as he was tugging at my Sam Browne belt, trying to get it off my shoulder. Our need was so strong we were willing to take any risk.
“No,” he replied. “I love you.”
“And I, you, my dear.”
Afterward, we lay in each other’s embrace. I ran my fingers over the scars of his missing arm, then placed my lips against his skin and kissed him.
“I have the letter you gave me,” he said. “No one can tell it was opened.”
“What was it?”
“A list of names. But they were all in code. They’re connected to something called Enormous. That’s code for our weapons project, isn’t it?”
I looked away from him momentarily and actually considered lying to him. I knew that I had reached a point of no return. That if I told him what I knew and my side found out, they wouldn’t bother with sending me home to go through the fa?ade of a trial. They would just take me out in the woods outside the Kremlin and put a gun to the back of my head.
“Yes,” I conceded. “That’s the term they use for your project.”
Jack stared at me in amazement. “My God,” he exclaimed. “This is unbelievable. They have the names of a couple of dozen scientists working on it. Do you think you could try to find out from Vasilyev more about this Kharon fellow?”
“Vasilyev might get suspicious. Why do you want to know about him?”
“If our government knows who this Kharon is, they might be able to crack the entire Soviet rezidentura in the United States.”
Rezidentura? I thought. There was the word I’d first heard Vasilyev mention on the voyage over.
“What is rezidentura?” I asked.
“A Soviet spy network here in the States.”
“And how would you know of such a thing?”
He stared at me. Behind his eyes I could almost see his darker thoughts. I considered the prospect that he was, as Vasilyev had warned me, someone other than whom I thought.
“My friend told me,” he explained.
“The one in the State Department?” I said.
“Yes. My friend also said if you’re going to defect, the government will expect something in return.”
“In return?”
“That’s the way these things work. You do something for them, they do something for you.”
I was soon to learn all about the quid pro quo of espionage.
Jack traced his long fingers down my belly, where it stopped at the scar. As he kissed my ear, he said, “And you’ll need to give Vasilyev something too. So he thinks you’re still working for him. The next time you meet with him, I want you to say that Mrs. Roosevelt spoke of a man named Oppenheimer visiting with her husband.”
“Oppenheimer?” I said.
“Yes. He’s a scientist. He’s very important to the work on that bomb project. That should keep your bosses happy for a while.”
“But if this scientist is so important, why would you want to give away such a secret?”
“It’s not really a secret anymore. Your people already know about it. But it’ll convince them that you’re still playing along.”
“And just how do you know all of this?” I asked. Before he could answer, I said, “From this friend of yours in the State Department?”
He stared at me, probably suspecting that I knew he was lying.
Instead of replying, he began to kiss me, my mouth and neck and breasts. As I lay there, letting him make love to me, staring at the ceiling, I felt something in the back of my mind, not the kindling of passion but a kind of low droning noise, like a Messerschmitt coming in from a long ways off. I kept trying to bat it away, but it kept returning. Why would he be in possession of such important information?
He must have sensed that my mind was not on our lovemaking.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“When you were in the Soviet Union, did you ever get a chance to visit Moscow?”
“I told you already. No,” he replied, attempting once more to arouse me. “Why? What’s all this about?”
I wondered if I should continue or just drop the entire thing and savor his body against mine.
“Vasilyev said the only Captain John Taylor in the army was in San Diego. That he was married and had a family.”
Jack smiled. “Now how would he know that?”
“I don’t know. That’s just what he told me.”
“And you believed him?”
“No, I didn’t say I believed him.”
“Well, obviously he’s wrong.”
Jack got up then and walked over to where his trousers lay on the floor and picked them up. I watched his naked body—tall and slender, the muscles taut, the tight curve of his buttocks—a body I had come so quickly to know and to love as I had never known and loved a man’s body. He removed his wallet and brought it over to the bed. He began taking out pictures of himself, his family, his sister, throwing them on the bed for me to peruse. He even had one of him standing before the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
“There,” he said. “What more proof do you want?”
“I don’t need any proof.”
“It seemed like you did.”
He lay back on the bed. He took up my hand, brought it to his mouth, and kissed it.
“You have a choice, Tat’yana. You can believe me. Or you can believe him.”
“I believe you,” I replied, though that droning sensation in the back of my head continued unabated.
“Good,” he said. “I want to ask you something.”
“Yes?”
“What do you want to call our first child?”
“Our first what!” I asked, shocked at his question. And yet I found myself smiling. “Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?”
“I like to plan ahead.”
I thought of telling him I couldn’t have children, that I was an empty shell of a woman. But I didn’t want to spoil the moment—for him or for me. Right then, I even let myself pretend that there was such a possibility. I imagined our child walking between us in a park, holding each of our hands.
“If it’s a boy,” I said, “I suppose we ought to call him Jack.”
He smiled and kissed me gently.


From Denver we headed north to the small town of Laramie, Wyoming, a place whose streets were filled with bowlegged men wearing cowboy hats. I had seen cowboys only in the rare silent picture shows they played back home. I had thought they were just more of the American myth. The First Lady and her guests had been invited to a rodeo. We watched men with leather pants ride horses that tried to throw them off or rope cattle and tie the helpless creatures’ hooves together.
“Have you ever seen anything quite like this, Tat’yana?” Mrs. Roosevelt asked me. I was seated on the other side of her from the captain, and she had leaned forward to say this. She smiled at me, but there was something about her smile, a kind of reserve, a certain diffidence I had never encountered with her before. I wondered if Jack Taylor had told her about what I had been doing for the past several weeks now. And I felt the shame of my betrayal spread over my face like a hot draft from a fire.
That night we stayed at a lodge that had a large Indian tepee out front and the heads of animals in the dining room, their glossy gray eyes staring woefully at us while we ate. Later I was in my room, waiting for Jack, when I heard someone knock. I rushed over and threw open the door only to find Vasilyev slouching against the door frame. The disappointment must have shown on my face.
“Were you expecting someone else?” he asked coyly. He let himself in and walked over and sat in the chair near the window.
“What do you want?” I asked.
He stared at me, giving me a look whose precise meaning I couldn’t interpret, though it was, I knew, in the general nature of a warning.
“Here,” he said, dropping an envelope on the table in front of him. “You are to deliver this to Mrs. Roosevelt.”
I walked over and picked up the envelope. On it were words in English.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“Private and confidential.”
“What is this about?”
“A message. For her eyes only,” he said. “So give it to her when you are alone with her. And be sure to wait for her response.”
“Her response?”
“Yes, she is to give you a reply.” He then got to his feet and headed toward the door. Before he left, he said, “They are getting very impatient. I don’t know how long I can keep them at bay.”
For a long time I debated about what to do, wondering if I should open it or not. Finally I decided to call Jack’s room, see what he thought.
“I have to see you,” I said. He told me to come right up. I checked the hall, and after seeing no one lurking anywhere, I sneaked off to his room.
As soon as I entered he embraced me and started to kiss me.
“No, wait,” I said.
“What’s wrong?”
“I have to show you something first.” I handed him the envelope and explained what Vasilyev had instructed me to do.
“Do you know what’s in it?” Jack asked.
“No. But he said I was to await her response. What do you think we should do?”
“I think we should open it.”
I hesitated, then finally agreed. The letter was brief, just a few sentences, which he translated for me.
We know about your relationship with a certain female reporter. We have incontrovertible evidence of your “activities,” and if you don’t cooperate with us, we are prepared to expose you. Indicate your willingness to discuss the matter by giving your assent to the bearer of this letter.
It wasn’t, of course, signed.
“Those bastards,” Jack cursed. I snatched the letter back from him, and in my anger I was about to tear it up, when he stopped me.
“Don’t. We might need this as proof.”
“Of what?”
“Of your government’s attempt to blackmail the wife of the president. It might help strengthen your case for being granted asylum.”
“But I would not wish her to know of this…of my part in it.”
“She’s going to have to know,” he said. “I can’t let this go on any longer, Tat’yana. You have to make a choice. Right here, right now.”
I looked at him and nodded. “I have already made my decision. I wish to defect.”
He approached, threw his arms around me, and hugged me. Then he leaned back, stared down into my eyes. “I’m going to have to consult with Mrs. Roosevelt about this.”
“Are you going to tell her of my role in it?”
“I don’t see how I can’t. But I’ll only tell her what I absolutely have to. Then we’ll have to see how she wants to handle it.”
I cringed at the thought that Mrs. Roosevelt, a woman who had been so kind to me, who had befriended me, would now know of my deception and duplicity.
“She will be very disappointed.”
He nodded, pursing his lips. “She’s also going to be your most important ally.”