“I would be able to finish my dissertation.” I sighed. “Would you like to see? A study of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the Ukraine’s accession to Russia in 1654—”
I could have sworn Kostia gave a cough of warning on my other side, but the First Lady listened with every appearance of fascination, only interrupting me to point out the high sand dunes that had begun to appear on the landscape the farther south we drove.
“It is a beautiful country,” I admitted, leaning past her to look out. “You people here live in such peaceful conditions. I keep looking around and wondering where the bomb damage is . . . such a land of luxury.”
“But?” she said, hearing the note in my voice.
“A land of destitution, too.” I looked her in the eye. “I see enough of the poorer parts of your cities to know that American Negroes live very badly.”
“It’s true we have a long way to go,” she acknowledged calmly. “America fights prejudice abroad but tolerates it at home. Segregation warps and twists the lives of our Negro population; that is beyond doubt. Things must change.”
“How?”
“Work,” she said, flourishing her pen. “It isn’t enough to believe in equality and peace and human rights—one must work at it.”
I grinned. “For an American millionairess you have a work ethic a Russian would approve of.”
“And you have an ability to laugh that any American would approve of,” the First Lady replied. “Punch cartoons and Hollywood would have us all believing that Soviets have no sense of humor.”
“Life can be hard for us. We have to laugh at it.” I remembered a joke my darling Lena had told me. “What did one German soldier say to the other when they reached the Russian front?”
“What?”
“ ‘Look at that cute Russian girl eyeing me over there.’ His friend says, ‘Why not go say hello?’ His friend replies, ‘Because she’s eyeing me with her scope.’ ”
Eleanor laughed. More kilometers slipped by; conversation giving way to silence and then to drowsiness. At some point I dozed off, giving a great start when the limousine stopped. My eyelids were gummy, and I felt a weight against my shoulder—Kostia’s dark head.
“You dropped off at the same time,” Mrs. Roosevelt said, eyes crinkling down at me, and I realized I had fallen asleep with my head on her shoulder. “Wake up now, my darling,” she continued as I sat upright, pink with embarrassment, thinking Please let me not have drooled on the First Lady! “We are in Chicago. A famous American poet once called it ‘the city of the big shoulders,’ you know.”
“We have bad poetry in the Soviet Union, too,” I consoled, and she burst out laughing.
DON’T THEY LOOK fresh and rested, the marksman thought sourly, watching Lyudmila Pavlichenko and the First Lady take the bunting-draped stage, waving to the cheering crowds below. He’d spent five hours following the presidential entourage in a shoebox-sized Packard, cramped and irritable—he hadn’t arrived in Chicago bright-eyed and rested like the girl sniper.
A dazzle of flashbulbs went off, and the marksman noticed she no longer flinched as though grenades were exploding in her face. He’d thought she’d be more nervous, especially after he’d bribed a hotel maid to get another of his anonymous threats shoved under her door. In Washington, it had seemed to be working. She’d been visibly nervous at the opera, and at the conference reception she glanced repeatedly over her shoulder as though looking for her stalker. She’d looked off-balance, which was precisely his aim. But now she appeared poised and professional as she gave a short speech through her interpreter—and people were responding, damn it. The marksman had been convinced she’d never be the success the Soviets hoped for on this goodwill tour—asking an American audience to warm to a woman who had supposedly killed 309 men was absurd. But the audience here in Chicago was ecstatic.