“Well, your count’s off. This is already your fourth time injured.”
“The first two don’t count.” An impatient shake of my head. “A concussion, then a strained hip . . . those were little nothing wounds. The last one was the first, really. Now this. The next one—”
“But last week you were convinced you’d be dead on this one,” Kitsenko pointed out. “So it sounds to me like you’re changing your story. Are you so determined to be a martyr that you’ve forgotten how to count?”
I tried giving him a sour look, but it was hard with a mouth full of chocolate.
“You’re not dying,” he said. “What can I say to make you believe that?”
“I can’t—shake it.” My voice came out thready, uneven. “Maybe it’s not the number of wounds. Third, fourth . . . at some point, I’m done. My luck’s almost out.”
“I don’t think that’s how luck works, Pavlichenko.” He pushed his cap back on his rumpled fair hair. “You’re not issued a certain amount, like bread in the chow line.”
“Run the numbers,” I said brutally. “I can calculate wind shifts by the milliradian; you think I can’t run the odds on whether I’ll ever see my son again?”
“I think you have a good many more dead Nazis to go before that has any chance of happening.” Kitsenko pushed another square of chocolate into my hand. “Here. My mother always said when a woman is upset, give her chocolate and tell her she’s beautiful. In your case, I think I can amend that to give you chocolate and tell you you’re dangerous. You are beautiful,” he added, “but something tells me you’ll be more comforted by the thought that you’re still dangerous. And that the Hitlerites know it.”
Maybe the compliment shouldn’t have mattered at a moment like this, but it did. I hiccupped a laugh.
“We all have that feeling from time to time,” he added. “The feeling that we’re doomed. It comes and goes, like fever. I had it when I first came to the front—I thought the first battle would kill me, and I’m still here. Kostia had a bad patch in Odessa at the end, he told me, convinced he’d be cut down before the evacuation.”
“He didn’t tell me that.”
“He needs to be invincible for you, just as you are for him. And now you’re having a bad case of the forebodings, and that’s perfectly natural. You’ve dealt so much death, you feel it breathing at your shoulder.”
“You’re going to tell me it’s not breathing at my shoulder?”
“It’s breathing at all our shoulders. We could all die tomorrow. So eat your chocolate, Pavlichenko.” He gave me the last square. I rolled it around my mouth, savoring the last drop of sweetness, not sure what to feel. Except . . . lighter, a very little. For everyone else—my family, in my letters; my men, in my platoon; even Kostia, in our partnership—I had to be invincible. But before Kitsenko, I could be afraid. Be tired. Be human.
The relief of that stabbed so sweetly.
“Mila,” I said at last.
“What?” He linked his hands between his knees.
“We’ve fought together now.” I lay back in my hard cot. “Call me Mila.”
He smiled. “If you call me Lyonya.”
The Soviet Delegation:
Day 1
August 27, 1942
Washington, D.C.
Chapter 15
Say, Mrs. Pavlichenko, can we call you Lyudmila? Pavlichenko, that’s a mouthful!”
The marksman watched the hungry ripple of curiosity that rose up as the girl sniper entered the first-floor White House dining room. Another barrage of camera flashes—he hid his face behind his own borrowed camera—and through the lens he saw her flinch. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was not a tall woman, and she looked smaller now that she’d changed out of her olive-drab uniform into a blue-sprigged day dress that probably passed for stylish in Moscow. The marksman watched her eyes drift over the smart frocks of the sleek Washington women in the room, their pearl necklaces, their carefully set waves and curls; for an instant the Russian girl’s hand stole up to her bluntly chopped hair.