“One more gift arrived for you,” she said with a mischievous smile, lightening the moment of farewell and passing me a flat silk box. Pchelintsev was now having his photograph taken with Roosevelt; I’d be next. “From a certain brokenhearted American suitor, once it was made clear to him that you would never accept his proposal!”
I eyed the case like it was a snake. What surprises had the damp-handed Mr. Jonson left for me now? When I lifted the lid, my gasp made the Soviet ambassador drift closer.
A collar necklace of tiny diamonds. Twin bracelets like bands of diamond lace. A brooch with hanging diamond tremblers to catch the light. A diamond ring like a drop of cold fire.
To Lyudmila with great love from W. P. Jonson, my businessman suitor had written on the accompanying card. We will meet again.
“I cannot take this,” I began to say, but Eleanor shook her head.
“The man’s covering note stated that he refused to take anything back.”
“A fitting tribute to a heroine of the USSR,” the Soviet ambassador said, looking envious. I made a mental note to offer the brooch to him for his wife or his mistress. That was the way things were done in the Soviet Union, and I was fairly sure it was the way things were done in Washington as well.
Alexei’s voice sounded, sharp-edged and mocking on the ambassador’s other side. “Try them on, Mila.”
“Yes, do,” Eleanor enthused. “For your final photograph.” She looked innocently pleased, and for her I clasped the necklace around my neck, fastened a bracelet around each wrist, pinned the brooch to my yellow satin bodice, and tried on the ring. It ended up fitting my trigger finger, perfectly.
I looked at the handwritten card. We will meet again . . .
“Your American suitor picked well, Mila,” Alexei said, still mocking. “Diamonds for a girl with a heart like a diamond.”
“I would disagree,” Eleanor said when I translated for her. “I think I have come to know something about snipers by now. An eye like a diamond, yes. But a heart”—she led me toward her husband for my final photograph—“for friendship.”
“Agreed,” President Roosevelt boomed, grinning around his cigarette holder, and for the last time I felt the clasp of that strong, sinewy hand. We turned toward the bank of journalists, smiling as flashbulbs went off, and before he released my hand, he gave it a final squeeze along with a low-voiced promise: “Go home, keep fighting, and tell your friends that America is coming.”
THE MARKSMAN, METHODICALLY setting up behind a thicket of shrubs on the edge of the South Lawn, wondered why he’d given her the diamonds.
He’d get them back, of course, but why do it in the first place? He was finished with the William Jonson persona, at least as far as this job was concerned; there wasn’t any need to extend the facade of the mooncalf suitor. Yet when he made his preparations for this evening, packing up his disassembled rifle into the case specially modified to look like a carrier for camera equipment, he’d gone on a whim to his private safe, pushed aside the uncut gems into which he routinely converted most of his cash payments, and reached for a jewelry case at the very back. Payment for a job back in 1927; some stockbroker’s inconvenient wife. The marksman had made it look like an interrupted robbery; the grateful husband had paid him with the now-dead wife’s diamonds, then gone on to collect the insurance and a dewy-fresh fiancée; everyone had gone home happy. Well, except the wife. The marksman remembered how her eyes had widened, the moment she realized he was going to kill her . . . Would Lady Death’s eyes widen in the same way, when she faced his gun muzzle? On impulse, he took out the jewelry case, scribbled out an accompanying card, and sent it all off in the name of that booby William Jonson. A whim.
Maybe he hadn’t been able to resist telling her We will meet again.
Or maybe he was old-fashioned. You gave a woman a present, after all, when you took her on a date. And wasn’t this a date, in a way?