“Belayavedma! Ah! No, no, I’m such an idiot, I forgot that there are no articles in Russian so there wouldn’t have been an equivalent to Die, as in Die weisse Hexe, the German nickname, remember, for Mili. But Belayavedma, it’s really belaya vedma, two words. The two words in English: white witch. That’s who she was talking about at the end.”
“Not bad,” said Swagger, which was as close as he got to admitting admiration.
“It was before Slusskya’s time,” Reilly continued, riding her insight to the end, “but it was part of the collective memory of female sniper culture, USSR, 1944 to ’45. The women would talk and tell stories that weren’t in the official record, pass them along, one to the other. There’s always a real history that never gets into the books or the newspapers.”
“Okay, we have some testimony on where they sent her. Fragile, from memory, otherwise unvalidated, but nevertheless, a place to look at.”
“Sure, we’ll check out Ukraine. But first let’s think about who would have the power to pull her from duty wherever she was in Russia, give her a special mission, and send her on it with the whole apparatus making it happen. Who would have that much power?”
CHAPTER 4
Moscow
The Kremlin
EARLY JULY 1944
It was largely empty, like a museum, and her boots clacked against the marble tiles, echoing against the eighteen-foot ceilings. They must have polished the marble floors every night and dusted the pictures and statues of long-vanished gods. It still spoke of tsars and dukes, not commissars. At last they led her to a conference room; she entered to find three high NKVD officers sitting in awkward obeisance next to a man in civilian clothes who had the diffident posture of a duke among dungsweepers.
“Krulov,” he said, rising and nodding, not extending a hand or any welcoming gesture.
Krulov’s name conveyed enough information on its own. He was called the boss’s right hand, in some circles the boss’s steel fist. Where trouble lurked, Krulov was dispatched, with his sharp eyes and handsome features, with his brutal charm and steel will, and he handled whatever that difficulty might be, whether it was a hang-up in machine gun deliveries or the recalcitrance of a certain general officer in the Baltics. He was a fellow known to get things done.
But she thought: Why would a big shot be so interested in a matter like Kursk?
“Comrade Sniper,” he said, “I see from reports that your leg has healed, I see that you have been serving dutifully in a staff intelligence position under General Zukov for a few months as you healed, and he says extremely encouraging things about your heroic duty in the Stalingrad shithole. And he requests again your commission to lieutenant.”
“The general has treated me well,” said Petrova.
“He should. After all, you have killed several dozen of his enemies for him. Do you have an exact number, Comrade Sniper?”
“No, sir. I never kept count.”
“The reports put your score well over a hundred. I would have thought a competitive athlete such as yourself”—she had been a tennis player, a champion, a thousand years ago—“would like to mark her place against the others.”
“It is death,” she said. “I don’t enjoy it. I do it because it helps the nation, it helps our leader, and most of all because when a German goes still through my sight, I know he won’t kill that boy I saw in the mess line this morning.”
“Yes, it’s true and well put. It’s that boy, after all, for whom we are fighting.”
The three officers nodded sagely. They had the blue NKVD piping on their tunics and appeared to be two colonels and a lieutenant-general. They had the uniform, they had the shoulder boards, on the table they had the hats, all lined with blue. You could not miss it. But if you did, they had something yet more powerful: they had NKVD faces—she’d seen them in the the blocking battalions NKVD placed behind troops about to assault—which were blunt, sealed, small to the eye, and prim to the mouth. You did not want to stare at them too hard, however; as career secret policemen, they did not like to be stared at. In this circumstance their only task was to express ardent admiration to Krulov. After all, he could have them disappeared at the blink of an eye. What was more, everyone in the room, from Krulov himself to the sniper sergeant, knew this to be the case.
Krulov lit a Maxopka cigarette from a red and yellow pack, taking his time as if to express the idea that the world waited for him, not he for it. When he had the cigarette lit and had exhaled a huge billow of smoke into the room, he stared at her directly. He wore a dark civilian suit on his beefy frame and a tie without color and too much design. Nothing fit because nothing had to fit.