He said nothing, just looked me over. I folded my arms over my yellow satin bodice, suddenly self-conscious. Strange to feel all this naked skin: bare arms; hair curling against bare neck; satin clinging to stockinged legs—my partner hadn’t ever really seen me in anything but uniforms. I’d had an evening dress for the formal events in Cairo, but Moscow’s idea of an evening dress and America’s were very different. Kostia’s face was carefully blank.
“I bought this without trying it on,” I burst out, filling the silence. “The salesgirl assured me it would fit . . . I didn’t think about the back.”
I turned around. The back of the yellow satin dress plunged in a deep V, and as much as I twisted, I couldn’t see how much of my back it revealed. “Does it show?”
The splinter wound that landed me in a hospital cot in Sevastopol had healed into a long, reddish, forked scar that snaked from my right shoulder blade to my spine. Lena had angled a pair of mirrors so I could see it. “Looks like a firebird clawed you,” she’d said cheerfully. I’d never had cause before to feel self-conscious about it. Why would I? The only one to see it besides Lena had been Lyonya; he used to trace it when I fell asleep at night with my naked spine curled against his chest. Otherwise, my uniform covered the scar. All my clothes covered it—except this foolish dress I’d bought on impulse, because Lady Death wanted to look pretty.
No one would think pretty, looking at my scars framed between the panels of yellow satin. I could cover the scars in my hair, the scars on my ear, but not this. “Let them get to know you,” the First Lady had counseled me in dealing with Americans—but they wouldn’t want to get to know me if my battle wounds made them recoil.
“It shows, doesn’t it?” I asked as the silence stretched.
My partner’s voice came quietly, right behind me, close enough to prickle my skin. “Yes.”
“I’ll change. Tell Krasavchenko—”
Kostia’s hands came down on either side of my waist. He bent his head, setting his mouth against the puckered skin of the scar, and stood there for a long year of a moment. “Wear it,” he murmured into my skin. The kiss started at the blade of my shoulder and finished over my spine at the scar’s tailing end. “Wear it with pride.”
I stood utterly still, pinned in place, until I heard the quiet click of the door signaling he was gone.
THE MARKSMAN SLID onto the stool beside the tall fair-haired Russian silently nursing a vodka alone at the hotel bar. “Mind if I join you?” he asked in his bad Russian, flashing his falsified press ID. “You’re Dr. Pavlichenko, right? The delegation physician.” He’d plucked the name off the list Pocket Square had provided of the delegation’s little people.
“The same,” said Alexei Pavlichenko, clearly pleased to be recognized. “Sit, sit. It’s always a pleasure to converse in my native language.”
“Even as badly as I speak it, eh? I had the beat covering the American Communist Party a few years . . .” The marksman trotted out some pleasantries, letting the conversation eddy around the drinks. He didn’t normally make contact with target-adjacent people like this—usually he operated by the rule that the fewer points of contact there were, the better—but he’d done enough research to talk like a newsman all night if necessary, and some careful changes in outward presentation （wig, shoe lifts, voice） meant Alexei Pavlichenko was very unlikely to recognize the marksman again once he’d reverted to his own accent and hair color.
“So, doc,” he said after calling for another round of drinks, “I hear you’re something of a war hero yourself. So why aren’t you at the National Theatre with the others?”
The doctor’s smile wavered. “One gets tired of these public events. All the press, the attention . . .”
You weren’t invited. The marksman had already sat through the first act of Madama Butterfly tonight, keeping an eye on the Soviet delegation, which attracted more attention than the singers. At intermission they were urged onstage by the audience to take a bow. Lyudmila Pavlichenko, looking visibly nervous in yellow satin, had given a pretty speech through the interpreters about how pleased they all were to be in Washington, how dire the Russian need was for American aid . . . when the theater audience began passing the hat for donations to the Red Army, the marksman had risen in his seat and ambled back to the hotel where the delegation had been put up. Not just the delegation but their flunkies and minders.