Timid, the marksman filed away, still fiddling behind the camera to hide his face. They’ll eat her alive.
“I hope you have all rested.” The First Lady stepped forward with a gesture of welcome for the whole Soviet delegation as the dark-suited men filed in behind their girl sniper, trying not to gawk at their surroundings. The room was big despite its being called the small dining room, with a glittering chandelier, gracious molded ceilings, and tall windows draped in elegantly tied-back curtains. Interpreters on both sides murmured introductions, and the marksman paid close attention to the murmurs of Russian. He didn’t speak the language well, but he could understand it. Useful for when he had to sit through American Communist Party meetings, waiting for a chance to pick off the latest Red agitator who had sufficiently alarmed someone in Washington or New York. Arranging fatal accidents for American Marxists had paid the bills nicely in its day—not so much now that the Soviets were allies . . .
Although the people he worked for weren’t at all convinced they should remain allies, a prospect which the marksman thought might mean a great deal of future employment.
The First Lady continued, gesturing everyone toward the long table with its forest of china, crystal, and silver. “I thought you might begin your acquaintance with the American way of life by trying a traditional American breakfast.”
“Is there always this much food at an American breakfast?” the marksman heard the head of the Soviet delegation mutter in Russian as everyone took their places. The dishes had already been laid out: fried eggs, grilled bacon and sausage, marinated mushrooms, jugs of cold orange juice, and carafes of hot coffee. “What are those, oladi?”
“Pancakes,” Mila Pavlichenko murmured back, also in Russian. The marksman had angled himself into a seat two down from her, where he could hear her clearly but she’d have no view of his face at all. “Americans call oladi pancakes. Don’t stare, or they’ll think we’re yokels.”
“The one they’re staring at is you. Maybe they think you’re the yokel.” The head of the Soviet delegation sounded peevish, and the marksman hid a smile as chatter erupted across the table. The Soviets had sent two other Russian students turned soldiers to attend the international conference, both of whom sat at this table, along with a phalanx of minders and embassy staff—but they were all blocky charmless men in dark suits, and no one was interested in them. All the eyes were on the girl sniper, who had started to empty the marmalade pot into her cup of tea, then stopped with a deprecating little shrug as she realized her neighbors were staring.
“I wish they’d stop calling me the girl sniper,” the marksman heard her mutter in Russian as she took a slug of tea laced with marmalade. “Only in America can you be a soldier and twenty-six, and still be a girl.”
Thin-skinned, the marksman noted, crunching bacon, increasingly glad that he was here to make his own evaluation of Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Normally he’d have obtained any information he needed about her from some well-bribed third party; kept a careful layer of distance between himself and a patsy being set up for a fall. But with a top-shelf cover identity in place thanks to powerful backers, not to mention a throng of avid newsmen and glittering Washington functionaries to keep the girl from focusing on one more innocuous face at a table of loud strangers . . . well, he’d thought it merited the slight risk. He could already feel his internal sketch forming of this pretty Soviet propaganda pony: who she was, what made her tick, how to pull her strings. He didn’t think it would be much of a challenge.
“A woman at the front lines, serving as a soldier!” A slim blonde leaned across the table toward the Russian side, eyes avid. “You can’t imagine how strange that is to American women. I suppose the measure was only passed to defeat Hitler, desperate measures for desperate times and all that?”
“On the contrary,” the girl sniper replied in Russian once the question was translated. “Our women were on a basis of equality long before Hitler rose. Our full rights were granted from the first day of the revolution—that is what makes us as independent as our men, not the war.”