Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 53

They could see the helicopter orbiting the crossroad before the narrow passageway that had to be Natasha’s Womb. All the housekeeping had been taken care of, the Stens ditched—“Damn good piece when it counted” was Swagger’s verdict — the phone call to Jerry’s backup team, via Jerry’s own phone, which was then quickly abandoned. Swagger took care of the Enfield No. 4 (T), meaning somehow to get it to the partisan museum.

So now it was a matter of a few minutes. And then Reilly’s phone buzzed. She fished it out of the bag, read the number, and said, “D.C.”

“No rush,” said Bob. “The chopper ain’t going nowhere without us.”

“Hello,” she said, and then, “Hi, Michael. Oh, actually very well. Long story, when I see you, I’ll tell you. I do, yes. Very interesting, and it seems to me you’d want to be involved. Oh, really? Oh, great, yes, yes, let’s hear what you have.”

She listened intently for several minutes, nodding. The smile on her face did not change at all, but at the same time it changed totally. The smile ceased to be a reflection of mood and became some kind of external edifice, supporting the face, which, three layers beneath the skin, in the deep subcutaneous tissue, went taut and hurt. She went from a smiling woman to a woman with a smiling mask on.

“Yes, yes, well, we knew it all along, and it’s the best ending under the circumstances. Yes, we’ll be back in Moscow in eight hours, I’ll call you, we’ll set something up. I agree, very good news, oh no, I had help, believe me, I had help. It wasn’t all me, not by a long shot. Okay, talk soon.”

She turned to Swagger and issued a total blaze of a smile, radiantly insincere. “Okay, all set. Let’s go.”

They walked to the Womb, where at last the chopper could put down.

Swagger said, “I’d say you seen a ghost, but not even a ghost would smack you as hard as whatever just did.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Not bad news, not really. Good news, you’d say.”

“You don’t believe that any more than you’ve made me believe it.”

“I had held out hope. And so had you. It was a one-in-a-million chance. But now it’s gone.”

“Okay, tell me.”

“Long boring background: in 1976, someone was interviewing Jewish survivors of the war. He never got around to writing the book. All of the transcripts went to the Holocaust Museum archives in D.C., where they were read and indexed. One of them was a recording of a guy who’d survived not only the concentration-camp system but then the gulags.”

“The Holocaust Museum in D.C.? How does that come into it?”

“Another long story, along the lines of old newspaper friend who married the national editor of The Washington Post, who becomes an executive at the Holocaust Museum. Small world, no? But absolutely true. So I called him. That is, my friend’s husband, a few weeks ago, to see if the museum had anything in its archives about Groedl. That was finally the response.”

“Okay,” said Bob. “I copy.”

“So this interviewer, remember, recorded a gulag survivor who’d been in Siberia. In the barracks was a man known to have fought with the partisans. The two became friends. Maybe both were Jews, though that’s not said anywhere. So our man passed on to the interviewer what the ex-partisan had told him about being in the forest with a woman Russian sniper, who had killed a big Nazi criminal.”

“Any verification?”

“He said Ukraine, July 1944. I didn’t tell that to Michael, that’s independently from the interviewee, circa 1976, recounting what he’d been told in 1954. Because someone guessed it was Groedl, a copy of this part of the interview went into the Groedl file, which is why Michael’s people found it.”

“That’s the first outside verification that Mili wasted Groedl.”

“There’s more to the story.”

“You better hurry and tell me.”

“He knew what happened to Mili.”