Nickname: Lady Death.
“Dammit, how many kills was it on her tally?” The Washington Post journalist was still searching his notes. “Was it more than two hundred?”
Three hundred and nine, the marksman thought, but he didn’t believe a word of it. This little junior librarian/schoolteacher was no trained killer. She was a trick pony stuffed with Soviet propaganda, handpicked for the student delegation, and the marksman could see why. A pretty brunette with lively dark eyes and a neat, photogenic face above her bemedaled uniform, nothing like the sort of mannish freak Americans would expect of a Russian female soldier. The Soviets needed American aid; they needed good press coverage on this delegation to American shores, so they’d selected the most winsome candidates they could find. Front and center, this girl sniper who looked so small and appealing beside that tall bony bitch Eleanor Roosevelt.
“Congratulations on your safe arrival in America.” The press corps clustered close enough to hear the First Lady’s cultured, silver-spoon voice easily as she addressed the Soviet delegation, see the flash of her horsey teeth. “On behalf of my husband the President, welcome to the White House. He looks forward to meeting you all at a later time and invites you to spend your first days in America’s capital under our roof. You are some of the first Soviet guests to be hosted in the White House, a historic moment in the friendship between our nations.”
She began ushering the Russians inside, and that was that. It wasn’t even six-thirty yet, the skies above the capital barely flushed with sunlight as the pack of journalists, photographers, and one lone innocuous assassin began to disperse. “Never thought I’d see the day a Russian sniper got welcomed to the White House,” a grizzled columnist grumbled. “FDR will rue the day.”
He won’t be alive to do it, the marksman thought, eyes still on Mila Pavlichenko’s neat dark head as she followed the First Lady toward the doors of the White House. In nine days—the last day of the international conference—President Roosevelt will be dead.
“I can see the headlines now,” the Washington Post reporter muttered, scribbling in his pad. “ ‘Russian Female Sniper Receives Warm White House Welcome.’ ”
The marksman smiled, jingling his pocketful of diamonds again. Ten days from now, all the headlines would scream RUSSIAN FEMALE SNIPER MURDERS FDR!
Notes by the First Lady
The President was intending to greet the Soviet delegation with me as they arrived, but he had a fall this morning. I’d just entered with a knock, carrying a packet of memoranda and reports for him to read, and I saw the valet lose his grip as he transferred my husband from his bed. Franklin fell hard on the carpet of his bedroom. Had it happened in public he would have roared with laughter as though it were all a prank, a Charlie Chaplin pratfall, and set about regaining his feet with some hearty, bracing joke. Since he was in the privacy of his bedroom, he allowed his face to twist in agony. I always feel I should look away in such moments—watching the proud facade of President Franklin D. Roosevelt crack with frustration in response to his body’s failings feels like a violation.
I reassure Franklin when he is sitting upright again, tell him to take his breakfast at leisure, and offer to greet the Soviet delegation alone. The President already has a packed schedule; I can at least take on this first task. I see the gratitude, even as he makes a joke about his fall. “Better in here than out where all the jackals can see.”
“They wouldn’t dare cheer,” I say lightly.
“But they’d pray I never got up.”
Something about his tone bothers me, but he’s already reaching for his morning newspapers, girding himself for the day ahead. To the world he appears invincible: a voice full of golden confidence trickling honey-thick from the radio, a profile like a ship’s prow cleaving the world, with a jutted cigarette holder rather than a bowsprit. Only a few see the iron will that keeps his facade in place, keeps his body moving ever forward, keeps his enemies at bay.