The buzz that swept the table sounded skeptical; evidently the marksman wasn’t the only one with doubts. Eleanor Roosevelt, however, looked thoughtful, sitting with her chin resting in her hand. “Can you see their faces?” she asked.
Her interpreter, a young officer in lieutenant’s epaulets, murmured a translation as the girl sniper answered. “Their faces, Mrs. Roosevelt?”
“Of the men you shot. If you had a good view of the faces of your enemies through your sights, but still fired to kill . . . well, it will be hard for American women to understand you, Lyudmila dear.”
For a long moment, the girl sniper stared at the First Lady. Long enough for people to begin shifting in their seats, long enough to make the marksman’s blood prickle in his veins. He had the urge to reach into his jacket for a weapon, but of course he hadn’t brought so much as a pocket knife to the White House. Yet suddenly, here and now, he wished he had a gun.
“Mrs. Roosevelt,” Mila Pavlichenko began, and with a jolt the marksman realized she was speaking in English. Her accent was marked, and she was clearly struggling to express herself correctly, but every word came slow, clear—and furious. “We are glad to visit your beautiful country. It is prosperous—you all live far from the struggle. Nobody destroys your towns, cities, fields. Nobody kills your citizens, your sisters and mothers, your fathers and brothers. I come from a place where bombs pound villages into ash, where Russian blood oils the treads of German tanks, where innocent civilians die every day.”
She caught herself up, exhaled slowly as she marshaled her next words. No one moved, least of all the marksman.
“An accurate bullet fired by a sniper like me, Mrs. Roosevelt, is no more than a response to an enemy. My husband lost his life at Sevastopol before my eyes. He died in my arms. As far as I am concerned, any Hitlerite I see through my telescopic sights is the one who killed him.”
A frozen silence fell over the room. Only the marksman’s eyes moved as he looked around the table, cataloging responses. The Soviet delegation leader sat clutching his butter knife, looking like he wanted to saw off her head and bowl it through the window into the White House gardens. The smart Washington women in their frills and pearls looked appalled. The First Lady looked . . .
Embarrassed? the marksman wondered. Did that horsey presidential bitch look embarrassed?
“I’m sorry, Lyudmila dear,” she said quietly, laying down her napkin. “I had no wish to offend you. This conversation is important, and we will continue it in a more suitable setting. But now, unfortunately, it is time to disperse. My duties are calling, and I understand you have a photographer waiting at the embassy.”
She rose from the breakfast table, made some farewells, and was gone before the girl sniper could essay a response. “What did you say?” hissed the delegation leader. “We have orders not to offend them!”
“They offend me,” Lyudmila Pavlichenko whispered back in furious nearly inaudible Russian. The marksman, looking after the First Lady’s departure as though oblivious, strained to make out every word from two seats down. “I came here to help solicit aid for my comrades in arms, my friends at the front, men and women dying every day in their dugouts, and the President’s wife sits there worrying that her husband’s constituents won’t find me likable?”
“Lyudmila Mikhailovna, you will obey directives—”
The back-and-forth hiss of Russian got too rapid for the marksman to follow, and the Soviet delegation was rising to leave anyway. Chairs were pushed back, pleasantries were exchanged in both languages, an aide hovered: “Mrs. Roosevelt has instructed me to give you a brief tour of the White House before you depart for the embassy . . .” The marksman faded into the departing throng of guests, turning to give one last thoughtful glance over his shoulder at the girl sniper. Color burned high and angry in her cheeks as she turned to follow the aide, and her eyes were molten.
For just one instant, the marksman wondered: What if she actually is everything they say she is?