Pocket Square now looked positively ashen. “You can’t possibly know who they are. The greatest care was—”
“They’re suits,” the marksman said calmly. “Men in expensive suits who want the world to run in their favor. That’s always who hires me—some shadowy compact of powerful discontented suits. And they know I can get the job done.”
He rose, giving a mental tip of his hat to the distant marble figure of President Lincoln inside the monument. A theater performance spattered with presidential blood and brains; now that had been an assassination with style. “If you’ll excuse me,” the marksman told his employer’s flunky, “I have a breakfast to attend.”
Notes by the First Lady I have very little time before the welcome breakfast for our Soviet guests, but I look through an invitation to address the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children, examine the minutes of a meeting of the advisory committee of the American Federation of Negro College Students, review the schedule for the commissioning of a new battleship in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, read over a report from the Civil Aeronautics Administration concerning the use of women in their CAA pilot training, and check on Franklin. He’s sitting up in bed where he always takes his breakfast, old blue cape thrown over his pajamas, breakfast tray set to one side with its scatter of toast crumbs and coffee dregs. Newspapers litter the bed—he always takes the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, the Washington Times-Herald, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Times with his breakfast—and on the floor by his bedside table is the Eleanor basket, where I leave reports and communications earmarked for his attention. He groans sometimes—“More homework, Eleanor?”—but he knows he cannot see everything and counts on me to fill the gaps. He’s already gone through the notes I left earlier, and he must be about to get dressed, because I hear the valet rustling in the wardrobe. Franklin is sitting with his eyes closed, face set in exhausted, determined lines.
I know what he’s doing. He’s imagining himself as a boy back on the family estate in Hyde Park, standing with his sled at the top of a snowy hill overlooking the Hudson far below. In his mind he tips over the brow of the hill and careens down, wind rushing past his face, steering every curve in a shower of diamond-bright snow crystals. At the bottom he brakes to a halt, throws the rope of his sled over one arm, and strides back up on strong young legs. He relives that hill, that exhilaration, that climb, until it is real and the vigor of it flows through him.
Normally he saves this memory for restless nights, using it to calm his mind and bring sleep. This morning he has taken it out to banish weakness before he faces the day ahead. This morning he has need of it. His lean strong hands brace his weight on the bed—it is like he is braced for a bullet.
What is it you fear? I want to ask. What—or who? But the gong sounds below, and I tiptoe away to welcome our Soviet guests.
Eleven Months Ago
September 1941
The Sevastopol front, USSR
Mila
Chapter 11
My memoir, the official version: I hadn’t seen Alexei Pavlichenko for at least three years before enlisting in the Red Army. I’d write it that way not because I wanted to lie, but because then I could dispense with him in one line, and not waste the page space that real life had allotted him.
Because in my memoir, the unofficial version? That rot-gut, oily-tongued bastard turned up in the middle of the war like what the Americans would call a bad penny. The most unwelcome penny in the world.
I STOOD GAZING at him, large as life and three times as unpleasant on the deck of the ship bound for Sevastopol, my stomach suddenly roiling. “Look at you,” he said, and noted the rank on my collar. “Sergeant? I hope you didn’t steal your boyfriend’s tunic just to keep warm, kroshka. There are penalties for impersonating rank!”
I’d forgot how tall he was. Most of the soldiers on the Zhan Zhores looked disheveled and weary from the retreat, but Alexei’s uniform was crisp, his cap perched on his fair hair at a rakish angle. “This is my uniform,” I said as coolly as I could manage. “I am a sergeant.”