The Diamond Eye
Kate Quinn
Dedication
To all the writers who managed to produce a book during the COVID-19 lockdown—to all the creators who managed to make art in the middle of a pandemic.
It was really tough, wasn’t it?
Epigraph
In the summer of 1942,
as the world was locked in war against Hitler, a woman crossed the sea from the Soviet Union to the United States.
She was a single mother, a graduate student, a library researcher.
She was a soldier, a war hero,
a sniper with 309 kills to her name.
She was Russia’s envoy, America’s sweetheart,
and Eleanor Roosevelt’s dear friend.
Her story is incredible. Her story is true.
Meet Lady Death.
Prologue
August 27, 1942
Washington, D.C.
He stood with a pocketful of diamonds and a heart full of death, watching a Russian sniper shake hands with the First Lady of the United States.
“Whoever heard of a girl sniper?” the marksman heard a photographer behind him grumble, craning for a look at the young woman who had just disembarked from the embassy limousine. She’d seemed to flinch at the barrage of camera flashes like muzzle fire, averting her gaze and walking in a phalanx of Soviet minders up the steps of the White House. The photographer snorted, scoffing, “I say she’s a fake.”
Yet we couldn’t resist coming here for a look at her, thought the marksman, idly flipping his falsified press badge. A delegation from the Soviet Union arriving for the international student conference that was Eleanor Roosevelt’s latest goodwill project—it wouldn’t have merited more than a few lines of newsprint, much less rousted a lot of hungover journalists and photographers out of their beds before dawn and sent them scurrying, pens in hand, to the White House gates, if not for that girl in her crisp olive-green uniform.
“Did they say she had seventy-five kills on the Russian front?” a Washington Post journalist wondered, rummaging through his notes.
“I thought it was over a hundred . . .”
“Higher,” said the marksman in the Tidewater Virginia drawl he’d grown up with. He’d long since ironed his soft southern vowels out into a flat mid-Atlantic cadence that could belong anywhere and nowhere, but he often let Virginia creep back into his tone, depending on who he was talking to. People trusted a southern accent, and they found themselves trusting the marksman: a loose-jointed man of medium height, medium hair between brown and blond, a bony face, and mud-colored eyes, usually jingling a clutter of uncut diamonds in his trouser pocket. He didn’t like banks; anyone who hired him paid in cash, which he then promptly converted to jewels. Lighter than cash, easy to hide—just like bullets. He was thirty-eight years old and had been operating for nineteen years and more than thirty marks. It added up to a lot of diamonds, and a lot of bullets.
“How does a girl like that kill over a hundred Nazis?” a columnist at his side was speculating, still watching the Russian woman on the front steps of the White House, standing to one side in a cluster of dark-suited embassy men as the First Lady welcomed the rest of the Soviet delegation. “Wasn’t she a librarian or a schoolteacher or something?”
“Russkies let women in their army, apparently . . .”
Their medical battalions, maybe, the marksman thought. But even the Reds don’t make women into snipers.
Yet he was here to see for himself, wasn’t he? Wanting a look at the woman whose sparse biography he had already committed to memory: Lyudmila Pavlichenko; twenty-six years old; fourth-year history student at the Kiev State University and senior research assistant at the Odessa public library—before the war. After the war, thirteen months of continuous fighting against Hitler’s forces on the Russian front.