cut hair just behind us. Kostia’s 1903 and mine thundered in unison, and I knew that was a pair of bull’s-eyes. Our hands flew in tandem, our rifles barked in tandem, and it was just like old times. No, better—cleaner, the smell of gunpowder unmarred by the smell of blood.
I didn’t need ten minutes to make my ten shots. I didn’t even need five.
Everyone rose as the last shots from the stragglers tailed in and crowded around the paper targets. Whoops went up as the hits were tallied. “Lady Death takes it!” I grinned, dusting off the front of my dress and wondering what my scarred firearms instructor would say if he could see his pupil now. Wondering if he was still training snipers in Kiev, if he still lived . . .
“Goddamn, I ain’t lost a contest that bad since aught nine.” The American with the gray brush-cut hair hair offered me a hand like oak. He’d come third, right after Kostia, and I could hardly understand his odd drawl. “I reckon your Siberian boy here could shoot the eye out of a muskrat at three miles if the wind was right, Miz Pavlichenko—and you could probably do it at five. I’d ask you to marry me, if I didn’t have a missus at home already who wouldn’t care for no Russki sniper gal bunking in her spare room. Care to raise a glass with me instead?”
“And me,” gushed William Jonson, who hadn’t even managed to hit the target most of the time. He lit up a Lucky Strike, waving it enthusiastically. “A wonderful demonstration, Mrs. Pavlichenko!”
Bottles of brandy and whiskey began appearing; up in the gallery with Colonel Douglas, the First Lady looked faintly disapproving. I waved up to her, unrepentant. This was a soldiers’ gathering, a shooters’ gathering, and for the first time since coming to America I felt honestly at home. One of the delegation flunkies bleated a reminder at me to let Kostia interpret rather than use my English, but I ignored him. I didn’t want a filter between me and these men; I was done with filters. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alexei toss his 1903 aside with a curt gesture, and grinned. He’d come in fifth out of ten.
“Good try,” I called to him in Russian. He glared and I fluttered my fingers, murmuring to Kostia, “Why did you invite him to join?”
“Because you were nervous,” my partner returned. “But once he stepped to the line there was no way this side of the Arctic Circle you’d let him win.”
I laughed, tossing down a shot of American whiskey that tasted like a wood fire. “I gutted him, didn’t I?”
“Like a fish.”
“Will you be able to give your usual speech tonight?” the First Lady asked as we settled back into the limousine, giving a disapproving shake of her head.
“It was not very much whiskey. Americans, they don’t know how to drink. Forty milliliters is not enough for a proper toast.” Just enough to warm my cheeks, which were still smiling from a half hour with the American shooters. The chatter over the glasses had all been war stories—they asked for mine from this year; I asked for theirs from the Great War—and then they had presented me with the mahogany box now sitting in my lap. “Have you ever seen anything so pretty?” I burst out, lifting the lid on my gift again: a pair of Colt M1911A1 pistols, brand new and gleaming, and two magazines with cartridges.
“In New York you were given a full-length lynx coat.” The First Lady looked amused as I gleefully took one of the Colts out and began examining it right there in the passenger seat. “In Detroit, you were given six dozen roses. Yet you turn starry-eyed over a pair of pistols?”
“This is much better than the last time I got a pistol.” That had been in Sevastopol, when General Petrov told me to keep the last bullet for myself rather than be taken alive and suffer what the Germans did to women snipers. I blinked that memory away, examining the various mechanism parts of my new Colt. “Ah, .45 caliber! Made by Browning, you know that? Adopted by your army in 1911, then by ours in the last war . . .”
Mrs. Roosevelt laughed. “Play with your new toy later, my dear. We’re almost at Grant Park.”