Beautiful Assassin Read Free

dangerous state of flux. Each day brought something new, a threat or rumor, the end of the cold war or nuclear apocalypse. Yeltsin standing on a tank, defying the military. Nuclear missiles for sale on the black market. Old women waiting in long lines to pawn silverware so they could buy a little food. Some story hidden since the war just coming to light—like the one about Hitler’s skull suddenly turning up in Moscow. Revelations and scandals and long-buried secrets unearthed. In short, a journalist’s dream.
    At a cocktail party Elizabeth had attended at the American ambassador’s residence, the buzz was all about whether Gorbachev would resign peacefully in favor of Yeltsin or if there would be actual civil war. She happened to run into an acquaintance named Reynolds, a retired British diplomat. He’d worked with the Reds, as he called them, ever since the war, and still did something of a vaguely clandestine nature that he would allude to only with a self-important wink. He liked to give the impression that he was well connected. She found him vaguely annoying, a boozy blowhard with that patronizing manner that Brits often assumed with Americans. But for some reason he liked her, and while mostly he was just a big talker, occasionally he’d toss some newsworthy item her way. It was he who’d tipped her off that the Reds were about to allow Sakharov to return to Moscow. She was the first to break the story.
    Reynolds was holding court with a small group of men when Elizabeth came up. The subject was Vasily Zaitsev, a famous sniper at Stalingrad whose recent death had been largely overshadowed by all the political upheaval in the country. Reynolds, however, claimed that the most famous Soviet sniper wasn’t Zaitsev at all, but a woman.
    “She killed hundreds of krauts,” he said.
    “What was her name?” Elizabeth ventured.
    “Tat’yana Levchenko.”
    Elizabeth shrugged, used as she was to Reynolds’s big talk.
    “Now there’s a story for you, my dear,” he said. He went on to lecture in that supercilious manner of his that this Levchenko had fought during the siege of Sevastopol, had recorded the most kills of any Red soldier up until that point in the war.
    “It just so happens that I met her personally. Right in this very room, in fact. Quite the looker,” he said, winking at the other men. “But cold as ice.”
    “Are you making all this up?” she chided him.
    “The God’s truth,” he said. “She was as well known over here as your own Audie Murphy in the States. Quite the darling of the big shots at the Kremlim, too.” Reynolds went on to say she’d become so famous that Eleanor Roosevelt heard about her and invited her to visit America. “She toured the States with Mrs. Roosevelt, speaking on behalf of the war effort. Made a pretty big splash on your side of the pond.”
    “How come I never heard of her?” she asked.
    “You ought to read your history, my dear,” replied Reynolds.
    “What happened to her?”
    “Let’s get another drink, shall we, and I’ll tell you all about her,” he said, slipping his arm into hers and leading her over to the bar.
    Later, when they were alone, he said, “Some say she worked for the NKVD.”
    “She was a spy?” Elizabeth exclaimed.
    “That was the word on her. Supposedly, she passed along information she got through her relationship with Mrs. Roosevelt.”
    He smiled at her evasively and sipped his drink.
    Elizabeth wondered how much of this she could believe. Still, shehad to admit the story intrigued her. A female war hero who spied on Mrs. Roosevelt. “Where did you hear all this?”
    “Around,” Reynolds replied, twirling his glass in the air so that some of his drink sloshed onto the bar.
    “You still haven’t told me what happened to her.”
    “Disappeared,” he said, hooking his fingers as quotes around the word.
    “What does that mean?”
    “There was a big brouhaha for a time when she vanished. Some say the Yanks sent her