Sniper's Honor(114)

“Another long story, along the lines of old newspaper friend who married the national editor of The Washington Post, who becomes an executive at the Holocaust Museum. Small world, no? But absolutely true. So I called him. That is, my friend’s husband, a few weeks ago, to see if the museum had anything in its archives about Groedl. That was finally the response.”

“Okay,” said Bob. “I copy.”

“So this interviewer, remember, recorded a gulag survivor who’d been in Siberia. In the barracks was a man known to have fought with the partisans. The two became friends. Maybe both were Jews, though that’s not said anywhere. So our man passed on to the interviewer what the ex-partisan had told him about being in the forest with a woman Russian sniper, who had killed a big Nazi criminal.”

“Any verification?”

“He said Ukraine, July 1944. I didn’t tell that to Michael, that’s independently from the interviewee, circa 1976, recounting what he’d been told in 1954. Because someone guessed it was Groedl, a copy of this part of the interview went into the Groedl file, which is why Michael’s people found it.”

“That’s the first outside verification that Mili wasted Groedl.”

“There’s more to the story.”

“You better hurry and tell me.”

“He knew what happened to Mili.”





CHAPTER 54


The Carpathians


Ginger’s Womb


JULY 1944


Von Drehle walked over and examined the captives. They were scrawny, filthy, exhausted, shiny with sweat.

The two men were uninteresting. A fellow in glasses, mid-thirties, with perhaps too much intelligence in his eyes that he tried to mask. A Jew, possibly. The other, big, one of those hearty Ukrainian peasant types.

“Karl, the skinny one had this,” Deneker said, handing over a small Hungarian pistol.

Karl dumped the magazine, which was full, then pulled back the slide, so the chambered cartridge popped out. “Sir,” he said in Russian, “this could get you into a lot of trouble.” He tossed the magazine one way, the pistol the other, into the trees. “Okay, I want to talk to the legendary White Witch now,” he said.

The men led the two males off to the trenches for some food. Karl gestured the woman to the grass margin by the road and indicated for her to sit. Yes, goddammit, she was a beauty. From somewhere in his forgotten education—Flaubert: “Beauty can cut like a knife.”

She had cheekbones like doorknobs, which pulled her cheeks taut, almost concave. The lips, however, were full, if grim. The nose had an aquiline perfection, but nothing matched her eyes, which were as blue as summer lakes and as big as winter oceans. They, too, were grim, but somehow calm and capable of holding a stare without revealing a thing. But one knew that the irises could dilate into expressiveness, even warmth, in split seconds. Her eyebrows were dark in contrast to her tanned but still-soft skin; the tawny-dark tendrils of hair hanging down across her forehead achieved not messiness but perfection. Whatever happened to this woman’s hair, it would always seem perfect.

“Cigarette?” he said, holding out a Merkur for her.

She took it, watching him carefully. Beauties were usually calm, because they understood bad things would not happen to them. That extended to the White Witch in German captivity. Even though she understood, at least abstractly, that very bad things were about to happen to her.

He lit her cigarette and one for himself.

A new barrage opened up, preceded by the howl of the Katyushas.

“As you can see, your people are on their way,” he said in Russian. “I would advise you against false hopes. They’re not going to get to this position until nightfall, several hours away. Our business will be concluded by that time, and you will be on your way.”

Her eyes settled on far distance, focusing on nothing. Then she said, “My name is Ludmilla Petrova. I am a Sergeant, Sixty-fourth Guards Army, currently on detached duty. I forgot my serial number. That is all I am going to tell you.”

“I’m not asking anything, Sergeant Petrova. The SS is on the way, and they’ll have plenty of questions. They want you very badly. I’ll see that you’re fed. I’ll give you some cigarettes. Nobody will rape or molest you. We’re not that kind of German. My advice is, give the SS what they demand. What does it matter, this late in the war, which you’ve basically already won? They get very unpleasant when they are defied. Maybe that will earn you a swift execution, which is all you can reasonably expect from them. After all, you killed one of their heroes.”

“I would do it all over again, knowing that it would turn out this way. My death means nothing.”