Beautiful Assassin Read Free Page B

toilet bowl.”
    “Is she still alive?”
    He lifted his hands inconclusively in the air. At which point he started to get up.
    “Wait,” Elizabeth said. “If they didn’t kill her, what happened to her?”
    Rubbing his thumb over his first two fingers, he said, “Cost more.”
    “How much?”
    “Thousand.”
    Used to the Soviet ways of bargaining for information, Elizabeth withdrew from her purse three hundred-dollar bills.
    “Three hundred,” she said, waving the bills at him.
    As if he was going to strike her, he shoved five fingers at her face. “ Piat .”
    “Forget it.”
    Now Elizabeth made as if to get up to leave.
    “All right. Deal,” the man said.
    He swiped at the bills, but she pulled her hand back. “First tell me what happened to her.”
    “I told you, she defect.”
    “Is she still alive?”
    “Maybe yes, maybe no. Who can say?”
    “You’re lying.”
    “Is truth, I swear. People die. Now pay me.”
    “One more question. Was she a spy?”
    He smiled mockingly at her. “If you find her, you can ask her yourself.”
    Holding out the money toward him, she said, “You had better not be lying.”
    He snatched the bills from her hand and stood. “ Shlyukha ,” he said under his breath, then turned and hurried out into the streets of Moscow. In her gut she feared she’d just thrown away thirteen hundred dollars. But it would, in fact, prove to be her most important lead.
    She decided to take a leave of absence from her newspaper dutiesand fly back to Washington, where she started to do research. By this time, countless wartime documents had been declassified, and Elizabeth was able to find out more about Tat’yana Levchenko. She spent months, which turned into an obsession of years, pouring through dusty government boxes filled with papers, old documents and files, newspaper articles, photos of the woman in Washington and New York and Chicago. Her next big break came when they released the Venona papers, part of Senator Moynihan’s Commission on Government Secrecy. They included more than fifty years’ worth of Soviet encrypted cables that America had been secretly collecting and decoding from as far back as 1941. At the NSA library, Elizabeth came across several telegrams, sent in early September 1942, from New York and Washington to Moscow, alluding to the “Captain’s Wife” (the known code name for Eleanor Roosevelt, the Captain being Roosevelt himself ). Mentioned with Mrs. Roosevelt was someone whose code name was simply “Assassin.” Elizabeth wondered if that could be the Soviet sniper she was looking for.
    Some months later, quite by chance, she stumbled upon a slender FBI file labeled simply ASSASSIN . Much of the information within it had been deleted, blacked out, with the words CLASSIFIED MATERIAL stamped in the margins. But from the photos it became readily apparent that this “Assassin” was actually the same woman Elizabeth had seen in the American newspaper photos—Tat’yana Levchenko. From what Elizabeth could piece together, it seemed that Hoover’s Feds had had Levchenko under surveillance. In addition to the old newspaper photos, there were pictures of Tat’yana Levchenko giving speeches at large rallies, getting into and out of limousines, leaving a hotel lobby, talking with various people, candid photos taken from a distance, like those a private detective might snap of an unfaithful wife. There were several of her conversing with a heavyset man in a dark suit. There were also a number of Levchenko and a young man in uniform, an American soldier. In one photo this soldier and Levchenko were captured embracing in a doorway. And there were several of her and an older woman, a tall, gangly person with saggy jowls and buck teeth. It took Elizabeth a moment to recognize Eleanor Roosevelt. As Elizabeth perused the contents of the file, which seemed to stop in the late forties, she cameacross the name Irina Andreeva, the same one the KGB agent had given her back