“You’re paying me for results, not details.” The marksman had already fleshed out his plan for September 5, the last day of the conference. That horsey bitch of a First Lady was intending to invite all the international students to a farewell reception on the White House lawn. The President would be in attendance, as would a full cadre of press . . . including the marksman, thanks to the strings Pocket Square’s employers had already pulled behind the scenes. “Everything’s in place on my end.” Almost, anyway.
“What have you learned about the Red girl?” Pocket Square kept glancing around him, drawing glances from a pair of middle-aged women hurrying past with their shopping. “You can guarantee she’ll take the fall?”
“No guarantees in this business.” The marksman fed a little more Virginia drawl into his voice, soothing. “But your people were right to have me look into her. We couldn’t ask for a better patsy.”
Pocket Square peered up at the stony bulk of the embassy, now looming overhead. Journalists and photographers were already hurrying inside, showing their press badges to embassy security. “Is she really a sniper?”
“No.” The marksman had had a moment’s doubt at the end of breakfast, looking at Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s furious face as she said An accurate bullet fired by a sniper like me, Mrs. Roosevelt, is no more than a response to an enemy . . . but on reflection he’d dismissed it. An angry woman didn’t make a sniper. “She’s a propaganda poster girl who gets flustered easily and loses her temper at idiotic questions, and God knows the press can be counted on to ask plenty of those. The Russkies made a mistake, cooking up the sniper cover story. They think it will make her admired, a war hero.” In the Soviet Union maybe, but not in America, where pretty brunettes were supposed to bake cookies, not kill fascists. “Mrs. Pavlichenko won’t be the sensation here that they’re hoping for. Everywhere she goes, she’ll be viewed as a freak and a monster.”
In fact, he was counting on it.
“MRS. PAVLICHENKO—”
“Mrs. Pavlichenko—”
“Mrs. Pavlichenko—”
I tried not to flinch. Flashbulbs were going off in my face like grenades—had none of these journalists ever questioned soldiers before? Setting anything to explode with a flash of light in a battle veteran’s face was just asking to get stabbed.
“Smile,” the delegation head murmured. Three of us had been chosen for this delegation, all of us students, all of us soldiers, but he was in charge: Nikolai Krasavchenko, twenty-six and square and earnest. He’d fought well at Smolensk, but that wasn’t why he’d been chosen to lead the delegation. He’d been chosen because he was a pompous young bore who could be counted on not to have a single original thought on this entire trip. No surprises here, I imagined them saying as they stamped approval on his folder. Backbone of the Party!
Maybe Krasavchenko was delighted to have been chosen, but not me. I’d stood （dumbfounded, incredulous, increasingly angry） through a great deal of droning about Eleanor Roosevelt’s international student conference, that first night I heard about it in Moscow. How it provided Comrade Stalin with an opportunity to send students as the most progressive element of the population to speak out against fascism to the Americans . . . How we had been chosen among hundreds of candidates in the Moscow military district, not only as former students and current soldiers but as Young Communist League personnel . . . How we would advocate for our country, our party, and for the dire need of American aid . . .
“Smile,” Krasavchenko repeated now, glaring at me. He wasn’t happy about my angry outburst at the White House breakfast this morning, and his were the orders I was supposed to follow, so I faced the cameras and obediently pulled back my lips. The conference wouldn’t begin for a few days; tonight’s address to the American press would broadcast live over radio, from the embassy to the whole of America. I swallowed my nerves, looking out over a sea of cameras and chatter. This whole scene seemed as foreign to me as the moon. All I’d wanted was to find Kostia and go back to the fight, and instead I’d been packed off to a continent full of oblivious capitalists on a propaganda mission? Americans didn’t like Russians. They called themselves our allies, but so far they were leaving us to die in the hundreds of thousands. How was anything I said at this press conference supposed to change that?