Kostia gave a soundless wolf’s snarl into my throat, and then we were breaking apart, splashing out of the pool as quietly as possible, wrestling back into our dry clothes. I gave him one last dark, drowning kiss, murmuring “Room 114” into his mouth even as I wrestled my damp limbs back into my uniform—thank goodness for sturdy gabardine that could withstand a Russian winter, much less a little Beverly Hills chlorine. A fast scoop of his own clothes and Kostia was limping back toward the house the long way, while I shoved my wet hair out of my face and shouted “I felt like a swim!” to the cross-looking Yuri as he tramped out of the shadows.
“It is not part of your directive to swim.”
A drunken, weaving drive out of Beverly Hills, every centimeter of my skin singing like I was crawling on my elbows through no-man’s-land again, feeling my partner in the seat in front of me like he was a missing limb, everyone around us drunk and oblivious in the crammed car . . . then I was in my hotel room in the dark, waiting, alive. I knew when he was there; he didn’t have to knock. He was moving into the room like an arrow before I even had the door fully open, tumbling me to the floor in a midnight blackness that felt as bright as day. Grappling and pulling at each other, sniper eyes flaring, rifle-roughened fingers teasing out cries of response the way we’d once teased out ballistic arcs through icy winds. Folding our bodies together into a nest, a foxhole, like we’d done so many times—only this was a foxhole of crisp sheets and fierce warm arms and a silence so complex it wiped away the world.
No one spoke until nearly dawn, and then it was me, arm curled around Kostia’s waist, his lips in my hair. “When I said I was still mourning my dead, I was really thinking, What would Lyonya say if he saw us?”
My partner’s voice in the darkness was quiet. “I’ve been thinking that, too.”
I knew he had. Our thoughts, in the few private moments to be found around the edges of this noisy, exhausting, exceedingly public goodwill tour, had probably been much the same. Thinking in somber reflection, in bitter grief, in tensile silence, imagining Lyonya’s smiling face, holding entire unspoken conversations with the man we’d both loved.
“I think,” Kostia said slowly, “he would be glad for us. He’d say no one should waste time if there’s a chance to be happy.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” I whispered as Kostia’s lips touched my temple, my scarred ear. “I can hear him saying it.”
Chapter 30
The headline: WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT AMERICA’S NEXT SWEETHEART COULD BE A SOVIET GIRL SNIPER WHOSE HAND （NOW KISSED BY HALF THE COUNTRY!） HAS ENDED THE LIVES OF 309 NAZIS? LYUDMILA PAVLICHENKO RETURNS TO WASHINGTON AFTER CONCLUDING HER TOUR OF THE WEST WITH CROWDED STOPS IN SAN FRANCISCO AND FRESNO . . .
The truth: I think San Francisco had a bridge. Fresno I don’t remember at all, but even the people who live in Fresno probably don’t care to remember it. The only thing that rose above my daze of quiet happiness at being with Kostia was the question the entire delegation asked the moment we returned to Washington: When can we go home?
“THE TOUR HAS been extended.” The Soviet ambassador beamed, looking at the three student delegates who had been reunited. We had traded stories of our respective tours, and the stories had been largely the same . . . except that my leg of it had gotten considerably more newspaper coverage. Krasavchenko was the only one who looked pleased to be continuing in the public eye; Pchelintsev scowled openly, and I couldn’t keep my face from falling. “My friends, this is good news,” the ambassador protested. “You have accomplished the near impossible: shifted public opinion in the USA in favor of the USSR. Opposition to a second front is subsiding. We would be foolish not to capitalize on—”
“Send Lyudmila on the tour,” Pchelintsev interrupted. “She’s the one they want to see. Have her trot round the spotlights and send me to Stalingrad.”
I looked at him. “If anyone’s going to Stalingrad, it should be the better sniper, and that would be me.”