“When do I leave?” said Petrova.
The commissar looked at his watch. “In about ten minutes,” he said.
CHAPTER 7
Moscow
THE PRESENT
He was dully metallic and about eighteen feet tall. His tommy gun was nine feet long and must have weighed a couple of tons, at least. He had on a worker’s hat, size 358, and his handsome face was unlined by doubt or fear, set with heroic stubbornness as he gestured his imaginary squad of giants onward, his hand raised with a three-ton Tokarev pistol in it. THE PARTISAN, proclaimed the stature’s brass plaque, and like statues everywhere, it had attracted indifferent birds who left their marks of conquest where the Wehrmacht had failed, and sat utterly unnoticed by the busy millions of Moscow except for Swagger and Reilly, who had placed themselves on a bench before it.
“Okay, I think I have something,” she said, summing up her day in the Red Army archives.
“I’m listening.”
“Ukraine, 1944. Well, it had to be before July twenty-sixth, because that was the date the Germans pulled out of Stanislav when the Russians started their big offensive. There’s no record of Groedl being killed.”
“So Groedl gets away. The good die young, the evil just go on and on.”
“Sightings in Rio, Athens, São Paulo, Shanghai after the war. The Israelis wanted him bad and put a major effort into it. They caught Eichmann in the same net, but Groedl was a lot smarter. He was an econ professor, remember? He also seems to have more people who believed in him and would want to help him. Eichmann was just a drab little clerk. Banality of evil, all that stuff. Anyway, thoughts on Petrova versus Groedl, West Ukraine, 1944?”
“She clearly failed, and maybe Stalin had her ‘eliminated’ as punishment. He had two hundred thirty-eight generals executed during the war. He was a guy you didn’t want to disappoint.” Bob had spent the day familiarizing himself with the military situation in Ukraine in that period of 1944. “By July, the Germans had been squeezed out of most of Ukraine. They’re clinging to a little piece that included Stanislav and the Carpathian Mountains. But they know the Reds will get around to them and drive them out. On the twenty-sixth, the Russians open fire and the Germans take off. The Russians actually occupy Stanislav on the twenty-seventh.”
“Here’s where it gets interesting,” Reilly said. “There’s a last surge of German atrocities in and around the twenty-sixth as the Germans are pulling out. A mountain village called Yaremche was burned, a hundred-odd people were executed.”
“I see what you’re saying,” Bob said, turning it over in his mind. “The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming, and still, in the middle of it, the Germans are committing atrocities. You’d think they’d be busy enough retreating.”
“Yes, you would.”
“So what’s got ’em pissed off so much?”
“That’s the question.”
“Well, I’m just remembering that when Heydrich was killed by Czech intelligence in ’42, they went all berserk. Lidice, the town where the killers hid, that was wiped out in retaliation. There were a lot of executions, a lot of terrible interrogations. So one of their operating policies is to go all crazy when there’s an assassination. Or an attempt.” He tumbled on, seeing something new in the old information. “So maybe she took a crack at him. Maybe she missed. But still they went all nuts. Maybe, like in Prague, someone ratted her out. So she was caught and killed. That would save Stalin the trouble.”
“It can’t be coincidence that it was in August 1944 that Mili ceased to exist. I spent my time looking up all accounts of female snipers and she disappears after July ’44. So if Slusskaya’s right, you have Mili in Ukraine, an unusual atrocity in Yaremche, and Mili’s disappearance, all in July 1944, in exactly the same small area.”
“God, I hate to think of that young girl dying. Sure, she’s a beauty, a movie star, a princess. But if she looked like a handle of a plow, she’s still a goddamned sniper, all out on her lonesome, where beauty don’t count a lick, and she maybe comes real close to nailing this bastard, which is all anyone can ask of the sniper, and she catches a German eight-millimeter in the throat and dies hard and alone. As I said, the good die young, and the motherfuckers go on forever, pardon my French.”
“It’s okay,” Reilly said. “It’s okay to feel something for a hero.”
“We have to go to this Yaremche. To South Ukraine,” Swagger said. “If I see the land and read the geometry of it, maybe I can understand what happened.”