Beautiful Assassin Read Free Page A

into hiding. Others that they eventually caught up with her.”
    “What do you mean, ‘caught up with her’? Who?”
    “For a smart girl you can be bloody naïve, Elizabeth. The KGB. You know how these thugs used to operate. Still do, for that matter,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, as if someone might overhear him.
    “What did they do with her?”
    Reynolds put his index finger to his temple and went, “ Tfff .”
    “I think you’ve been reading too many James Bond novels,” she joked.
    Nonetheless, her curiosity piqued, Elizabeth decided to do some digging on this Tat’yana Levchenko. Right away she learned virtually nothing was to be found regarding the woman in the Soviet records. As with that of so many other personae non gratae Soviets, her existence had been purged, wiped clean, like those ghostly blanks of individuals who’d been painted out of the group portraits with Stalin. So Elizabeth turned to American records, and there she found that the famous female sniper had, indeed, existed. She uncovered dozens of references to her, articles and photographs of the Soviet soldier in newspapers and magazines from her wartime visit to the States. And the more she learned about the woman, the more fascinated she became. Before the war Tat’yana Levchenko had been a scholar and a budding poet; a skilled marksman with a youth shooting club; a young wife and new mother; then with the German invasion, a sniper extraordinaire and sudden international war hero, someone who toured the States giving speeches with Eleanor Roosevelt, and with whom she’d become closefriends. And all the while perhaps acting as a Soviet spy, passing secrets along to Red agents, though none of that was alluded to in the press. Elizabeth thought it would make a great story, maybe even that book she’d always been meaning to write. But she kept running into a dead end. She could find nothing about what became of the woman, beyond several sketchy newspaper reports of her “disappearance.” “Soviet Hero Defects to U.S.” read one front-page headline. Another article, a smaller one on page two of the New York Times, reported that the Soviets had lodged a formal complaint with the United States, insisting that their famous citizen be returned to them. Yet another article said simply: “Female Sniper Disappears.” And then slowly the news about her faded, and Tat’yana Levchenko simply vanished, a footnote to history.
    Over the next several years Elizabeth ran into more dead ends, and her research added little to what she already knew of the woman. But then, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were suddenly plenty of people who were, for a price, willing to talk. Reynolds arranged for Elizabeth to meet with a purported former KGB agent who apparently had direct knowledge of the woman. They met in a seedy strip bar on Prospekt Mira. The man, who must have been seventy, wore mirrored sunglasses and a threadbare coat that stank of cigar smoke and fried fish. As she spoke to him, he kept looking over her shoulder at the girls dancing on the stage behind the bar. Elizabeth could see their snow-pale, writhing forms reflected in his glasses. He asked for the agreed-upon payment—a thousand dollars; he wouldn’t accept rubles. Elizabeth had withdrawn money from her own savings—she wanted this to be her story alone. Only then did the man remove a piece of paper from his coat pocket and slide it across the table. When Elizabeth looked at it, she saw a name scrawled in Cyrillic: Irina Andreeva. She asked him what this had to do with the woman she was looking for.
    “That,” he replied in broken English, a long, dirty fingernail tapping the name, “is same woman. Tat’yana Levchenko.”
    “That’s the name she assumed?”
    He nodded.
    “What happened to her?” Elizabeth asked.
    The man shrugged. “She defect to America.”
    “Did the KGB get to her?”
    “ Tsh, ” he scoffed. “Those fools couldn’t find a turd in a