Beautiful Assassin (44 page)

I
woke to the rhythmic swaying of the train, the remnants of a dream snaring me like barbed wire. In the dream a mustachioed man with soulless black eyes asked if he could trust me. I couldn’t utter a word. My mouth seemed frozen. Finally he said, “If I can’t trust you, you are worthless to me.” Only when I woke did I realize who it was. Stalin.

We were headed for Chicago, hurtling through the night. For the past several days, Mrs. Roosevelt and I had been giving whistle-stop talks along the way, in small towns and villages where people came to hear us. Sometimes, as we had in Pittsburgh, we spoke in a large auditorium, followed by a dinner with local dignitaries. Often I would be interviewed by the press. At each event, they would sell war bonds and ask for donations for the Eastern Front. At a stadium in Cleveland before a baseball game, I gave a short address, for which I was given a rousing ovation. Afterward, Mrs. Roosevelt turned to me and, through Captain Taylor, said, “I think we just bought you another tank.”

I lay in my berth in the dark, thinking even darker thoughts, the rails beneath me clicking away the miles. I almost had the feeling that each mile was bringing me closer and closer to some uncertain but equally unavoidable destiny. I thought about what they were asking me to do—to spy on Mrs. Roosevelt, to use Jack Taylor to get information, to be a courier of secret documents.

Ironically, they had so little faith in me they were spying on me at
the same time they were the Americans. Otherwise what was the significance of the pictures of me and Captain Taylor? Why had they followed us around? What were they hoping to learn? Were they going to blackmail me too? Or did they think I was betraying them to the Americans and planning on using the photos as evidence against me once I was home (though, of course, I knew if they wanted to arrest me, they didn’t need
any
evidence). Since the meeting with Semyonov and Zarubin, I’d found myself looking over my shoulder, wondering if someone was watching me. Snapping my picture. And now that I suspected I was a target of their interest, I had taken care to keep my distance from the captain. I didn’t want to draw him into this morass any further than I already had. I was polite but formal with him. Once or twice when we chanced to be alone for a moment, I would excuse myself, thereby avoiding any sort of contact of a personal nature. I think he sensed my coolness toward him, and several times over the preceeding days, he would glance at me with an expression both confused and hurt. If only I could have told him all that was going on behind the scenes. I pondered my options. I could go along with them and betray Mrs. Roosevelt and Captain Taylor. Or I could disobey them and risk everything—my reputation, my freedom, perhaps even, as Vasilyev had put it, my own neck.

A couple of nights earlier on the train, I had gone into the club car for a drink. It was crowded with people, White House staff and reporters covering the First Lady. I saw Viktor seated at a table playing solitaire and drinking vodka.

“Can I sit down, Viktor?” I asked.

“Suit yourself,” he said, without looking up.

“I need to talk to you.”

“So talk.”

“Someplace private.”

Finally he glanced up at me. He stood, and I followed him outside between cars.

“So what’s going on?” he asked.

I explained to him in general terms what Semyonov had wanted me to do. I didn’t tell him, however, about Enormous. I felt the less he knew, the better. For both of us.

Viktor humphed. “Those fucking
chekist
whores,” he said. “So what are you going to do, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come with me.”

“Defect?” I said. “How can I do that? That’s madness, Viktor. You know it as well as I do.”

“What’s madness is staying with them and doing their bidding.”

“Where would I go?”

“I have some friends here in America who would take us in for a while.”

“You know what they’ll do to you if they catch you,” I said.

“First they will have to catch me,” he said, smiling. He grasped my hand and added, “Don’t let them do this to you. Come with me.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I must think on it.”

“Don’t think too long on it.”

That was two days earlier. Since then, I’d found myself contemplating his offer. I knew it would be unimaginably difficult trying to break free from the iron grip of the Soviet secret police. I knew they would come after anyone who tried it, hunting them down, even if it took decades. But I also considered something else, something I hadn’t really thought of before—what I felt for Jack Taylor. I could no longer deny that I felt something for him, something very powerful. And I was pretty certain he felt the same way for me. However, I hadn’t seen Viktor the previous night at dinner. The day before we’d made a stop near Toledo, Ohio, and now I was worried that he’d already made his move without me.

That morning at breakfast, I met with Vasilyev. He was already eating, stuffing his face with food, washing it down with gulps of coffee.

“Do you want something to eat?” he asked.

“Just coffee,” I said.

A black waiter happened to be passing by, so Vasilyev got his attention and said, “
Kofe,
” and pointed to me. When his cup was refilled he took out his flask and spiked it liberally with whiskey. Between forkfuls of food, he said to me, “They want you to bring up a name the next time you speak to Mrs. Roosevelt.”

“What name?”

“Fermi.”

I shrugged.

“He’s actually quite famous. Won the Nobel Prize.”

Since the meeting with Semyonov, I had been passing along notes of my conversations with the First Lady to Vasilyev. Mostly I tried to steer Vasilyev toward topics that might on the surface appear of interest to Semyonov but in actuality were really quite benign—what Mrs. Roosevelt felt toward the labor unions, whether she thought her husband was going to run for office again, some sudden issue regarding the president’s health. I once told him that Mrs. Roosevelt had said in passing that her husband had recently called in his entire cabinet for an urgent midnight meeting. With this, Vasilyev’s ears perked up. It was, of course, a complete falsehood. I fabricated what I could, evaded where I was able, anything I could do to protect my friend the First Lady. Whether he suspected this or not—my guess was on some level he did—I could only imagine on his end that he also elaborated and falsified enough to keep Semyonov and Zarubin thinking that we were making progress. My attitude toward Vasilyev had changed a little. I still didn’t trust him, but I looked upon him no longer as the evil architect of all this but as someone who also had to follow orders, who was being pressured to do what he was told. I even felt a bit sorry for him. He seemed to perform his job now with a perfunctory indifference, as if he were just going through the motions. I wasn’t sure if it was the fact that he disagreed with Semyonov and his plans, or if he had been so devastated by the death of his son that his mind was preoccupied. He had also taken to drinking more than he had. Before he had always managed to carry it off. Now he sometimes got quite drunk. Once in the dining car, he was slurring his words so badly that Gavrilov and Dmitri had to help him back to his berth and put him to bed. He would take down what I told him without seeming to have the slightest interest, his thoughts drifting elsewhere. And now it was an amorphous “they” who wanted to know this.

“This Fermi is an Italian national,” he continued. “Up to this point Italian nationals couldn’t move about the country. However, the presi
dent just gave the order declaring them no longer enemy aliens. We know too that this Fermi has recently moved to Chicago, and we believe he is conducting experiments there with other scientists, which might be connected to Enormous. See if you can work his name into the conversation.”

“And just how would I go about doing that?”

“Use your head. You can say something to the effect that you read about him in the newspaper. See if she bites at it.”

I told him I would try.

“I see you’ve been rather aloof with Captain Taylor,” he said.

I shrugged.

“What is it they say?” he offered with a smile. “Honey catches more flies than vinegar?”

“I am not your damn whore,” I cursed.

“Ssh,” he said, glancing around the dining car. “I’m simply trying to protect you. You don’t want to end up like Viktor.”

“What do you mean? What happened to him?”

“Ah,” he said. “Your friend was called home suddenly.”

“‘Called home’?” I said, startled at the implication.

“He returned yesterday, accompanied by Comrade Shabanov.” That was the one we called the Corpse.

“What’s going to happen to him?”

“He was warned. It’s out of my hands now. If you don’t want to share his fate, you had better be more cooperative.”

That evening in the dining car, I was invited to join Mrs. Roosevelt, Miss Hickok, her assistant Miss Thompson, as well as two other women I had not previously met, and, of course, Captain Taylor. Mrs. Roosevelt and one of the two women, a Mrs. Smythe from England, spoke of refugees streaming into the West from Eastern Europe.

“We have to do something about these poor people,” Mrs. Roosevelt said. “Especially the orphans. Why, it just breaks your heart.”

They spoke of ways of helping the displaced people, how to involve the Red Cross more, sending packages of food, getting their two countries to allow more refugees to immigrate. While they spoke and the captain
translated, I felt his eyes on me. At one point during a lull in the conversation, he whispered to me, “Is something the matter, Tat’yana?”

“No, why do you ask?” I said, pretending not to know what he was getting at.

“I just had the feeling that something was wrong.”

Mrs. Smythe turned to me and said, “You must have seen your share of refugees, Lieutenant Levchenko.”

“Indeed,” I replied. I suddenly recalled Raisa, the young girl Zoya and I had rescued in the sewers of Sevastopol. I remembered that Zoya had said that some orphans from the Crimea were sent to Canada to live.

“Mrs. Roosevelt,” I said, “how would one go about finding a Ukrainian girl who entered Canada?”

I briefly told her about Raisa, how we had found her living in the sewers, how she had been evacuated with other orphans.

“What a touching story,” added Miss Hickok. “You must let me tell it for you. People would love to hear it.”

“I would like to find out if she is all right,” I said.

“That would be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack,” replied Mrs. Roosevelt. “But I’ll have Tommy look into it.”

Miss Thompson, her secretary, made a note of it.

After a while, I thought about what Vasilyev had wanted me to do. I felt awkward doing this, using my friendship with Mrs. Roosevelt in this manner, but I considered gleaning information regarding some scientists to be less intrusive and far less of a betrayal than ferreting out details about her personal life.

“Speaking of refugees, Mrs. Roosevelt,” I said. “I recently read an article about a man from Italy. A scientist by the name of Fermi…”

Late that evening, I was having a cigarette between cars. The night was calm, the midwestern sky ablaze with a million stars. As we passed through small villages and hamlets, I’d see a light on in a window, occasionally the figure of a woman standing at a sink. In some ways, I envied these women, their quiet lives so far removed from all the chaos
in the rest of the world. I imagined children asleep, a husband sitting at the table reading the newspaper. They would retire into the warm certainty of each other’s embrace. Had my own life ever been so peaceful, so reassuring?

At that moment, the door clanged behind me and I turned to see Captain Taylor step out into the night.

“Hi,” he said.

“Good evening, Captain.”

“Back to being so formal, I see,” he offered with an ironic smile.

“I think it’s preferable that we maintain a certain professional distance.”

“Is it because I got out of line with you the other night? I already apologized.”

As I looked up at him, I thought of our kiss, that wonderful, blissful kiss that had so confused and yet so thrilled me. “It’s just that I’ve had a lot on my mind lately.”

“Because of your husband?”

“No. Well, perhaps that too.”

“May I ask you a question? If you didn’t love him, why did you marry him then?”

“It’s a long story.”

“It’s a long war,” Jack Taylor said. He gave me a mock-serious look, which softened into a smile. He took out his pack of cigarettes, offered me one. As I inhaled, I glanced out at the passing countryside.

“I guess in part I married him because it was what everyone expected of me. My parents. Kolya. I guess even I did.”

“But you don’t seem to me someone who is easily talked into something she doesn’t think is right.”

He looked at me with an expression that suggested he was referring to more than just my marriage.

“I was young. I let myself be convinved it was the right thing to do. When the war came, I saw my husband off at the train station. It sickens me to confess this, but the truth is I felt a certain relief at his going. I even secretly hoped he wouldn’t return. Then I would be free. I know you must think I am a terrible person for such a thought.”

He shook his head. “No. Just honest.”

“When I got the letter saying he was missing, I felt somehow I owed it to him to wait and find out if he was alive or dead. Out of guilt or loyalty, I cannot say.”

We both fell silent for a while. I considered heading inside then, but I remained there, staring out over the darkened landscape.

“Jack?” I began. “What were you going to tell me the other day? You said you had something to confess.”

“Oh,” he said. He turned and stared at me, his eyes searching mine. Then he reached out and touched my cheek. “I was going to tell you that…well, that I love you.”

I pulled back from his touch. “You mustn’t say that.”

“But why? It’s the truth.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s the truth or not. There are other things to consider.”