Sniper's Honor(5)

A shower, a nap, then another shower, and he met Reilly at a restaurant that specialized in meat, where they had meat appetizers, meat entrees, and—no, not meat desserts but some kind of cherry tart whose red custard looked like glistening protein.

Same old Reilly. Smart, tart, and funny, she listened fully and considered an answer without any urgency to fill the air with noise, then came up, always, with the best one. She had an interrogator’s clear blue eyes that compelled confession, and a kind of secretly dry delight in the follies of the day. She saw through anything and everything.

No hooch for a dry old coot, and finally, after chatter of children and possibilities, jokes about politics, newspapers, the insanity of the North Koreans, they got to business.

“Why are you here?”

“It’s complicated.”

“It always is, isn’t it?”

“I saw something in her face I liked.”

“She was beautiful, no doubt about it.”

“Yeah, sure. But something else. Reilly, I want to know more about this girl. I really do.”

“I used to think heroes were always an illusion, a PR stunt. But you proved me wrong, so maybe she’s not an illusion. Wouldn’t that be nice? Let’s go after her hard. Let’s find out what was done to her and why.”

And by who? Swagger thought, though he didn’t say it.

“Here’s today’s news. I’ve found a woman sniper,” said Reilly. “Very old, as you might imagine. She talks to me, but she’s in and out. I have trouble staying with her. And I really don’t know enough to engage her. Maybe if you came along, I could introduce you as a famous sniper, a comrade in arms, and if you asked her technical things, it would get her focused. What do you think?”

“I can’t think of no better idea,” he said.



* * *



At ten the next morning, in the shadow of a vast building of no identifiable architectural style except to communicate mass—it was built by engineers, not architects, like so much of the Stalinist legacy—Swagger found himself with Reilly and Katrina Slusskya. Slusskya, in her mid-nineties, lived in a ward in this veterans’ home in a far Moscow suburb. She sat in a wheelchair under a birch tree, shielded from the sun, while the two Americans sat across from her, all of them drinking tea.

Slusskya had a photo in her hands. When she was told that the Great Swagger was a sniper hero of America, she proudly passed it to him.

He looked. It was clearly her, in some war year, beaming in pride. It was black and white, so the color was unknowable, but she wore a high collar similar to that of the Marine Corps dress-blue tunic, with a row of brass buttons down the front.

“Look at her medals,” Reilly said. “She’s very proud of them.”

An array of decorations hung on her left breast in the photo, under her square, earnest, duty-to-death face.

“She should be,” said Swagger.

“This man has medals, too,” said Reilly in Russian.

Guessing the content, Swagger asked Reilly to add, “But not as many. You must be a true hero. I was just a lucky fellow. Can you ask her what the medals are?”

Reilly narrated: “Hero of the Soviet union  , the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner, the Caucasus Defense Medal, two orders of the Red Star, and the Order of the Patriotic War.”

“That’s a lot of combat she saw,” he said.

“She says she’d do it again, not for Stalin, whom she loathed and is finally seen as the monster he was, but for Russia and its millions of good and decent people.”

“I salute her.”

The old lady smiled and reached out and touched his hand.

“Okay, we’ll try shop talk. Tell her in Vietnam I worked with a spotter mostly. But the ranges were longer and finding targets more difficult. I’m wondering if, in the city battles, a spotter was necessary.”

Slusskaya considered, then answered.

“She says not only not necessary but not practical. We girls, she says, we were scrawny little rats and could squeeze into odd spots where no man could, and bend ourselves into positions no man could. In those circumstances a spotter would have been a hindrance. She also believes women have naturally more patient temperaments. She said she once waited three and a half days for a shot on a German colonel.”

“She made the shot, I take it?”

Slusskya tapped herself on her forehead to mark where she hit him.

“The Mosin 91, did she find it an adequate rifle?”

“She loved her 91. Later in the war, they tried to take it away. She was given a rifle of an automatic nature called an SVT-40, with a telescope. She didn’t like it as much. It squirted bullets, but of what use is that to a sniper?”