Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 4

It was largely empty, like a museum, and her boots clacked against the marble tiles, echoing against the eighteen-foot ceilings. They must have polished the marble floors every night and dusted the pictures and statues of long-vanished gods. It still spoke of tsars and dukes, not commissars. At last they led her to a conference room; she entered to find three high NKVD officers sitting in awkward obeisance next to a man in civilian clothes who had the diffident posture of a duke among dungsweepers.

“Krulov,” he said, rising and nodding, not extending a hand or any welcoming gesture.

Krulov’s name conveyed enough information on its own. He was called the boss’s right hand, in some circles the boss’s steel fist. Where trouble lurked, Krulov was dispatched, with his sharp eyes and handsome features, with his brutal charm and steel will, and he handled whatever that difficulty might be, whether it was a hang-up in machine gun deliveries or the recalcitrance of a certain general officer in the Baltics. He was a fellow known to get things done.

But she thought: Why would a big shot be so interested in a matter like Kursk?

“Comrade Sniper,” he said, “I see from reports that your leg has healed, I see that you have been serving dutifully in a staff intelligence position under General Zukov for a few months as you healed, and he says extremely encouraging things about your heroic duty in the Stalingrad shithole. And he requests again your commission to lieutenant.”

“The general has treated me well,” said Petrova.

“He should. After all, you have killed several dozen of his enemies for him. Do you have an exact number, Comrade Sniper?”

“No, sir. I never kept count.”

“The reports put your score well over a hundred. I would have thought a competitive athlete such as yourself”—she had been a tennis player, a champion, a thousand years ago—“would like to mark her place against the others.”

“It is death,” she said. “I don’t enjoy it. I do it because it helps the nation, it helps our leader, and most of all because when a German goes still through my sight, I know he won’t kill that boy I saw in the mess line this morning.”

“Yes, it’s true and well put. It’s that boy, after all, for whom we are fighting.”

The three officers nodded sagely. They had the blue NKVD piping on their tunics and appeared to be two colonels and a lieutenant-general. They had the uniform, they had the shoulder boards, on the table they had the hats, all lined with blue. You could not miss it. But if you did, they had something yet more powerful: they had NKVD faces — she’d seen them in the the blocking battalions NKVD placed behind troops about to assault — which were blunt, sealed, small to the eye, and prim to the mouth. You did not want to stare at them too hard, however; as career secret policemen, they did not like to be stared at. In this circumstance their only task was to express ardent admiration to Krulov. After all, he could have them disappeared at the blink of an eye. What was more, everyone in the room, from Krulov himself to the sniper sergeant, knew this to be the case.

Krulov lit a Maxopka cigarette from a red and yellow pack, taking his time as if to express the idea that the world waited for him, not he for it. When he had the cigarette lit and had exhaled a huge billow of smoke into the room, he stared at her directly. He wore a dark civilian suit on his beefy frame and a tie without color and too much design. Nothing fit because nothing had to fit.

“Ludmilla Petrova, a hard question. I put it to you directly out of respect for your considerable accomplishments.”

Here it came. Kursk at last.

But then it didn’t.

“In the matter of your father, I must ask if you have anger still, and if so, whether that might cloud your judgment.”

Petrova kept her eyes hooded and noncommittal. The first idiot was right, that was a true gift. Her eyes expressed only when she wished them to. Others leak their emotions into the world without care or caution. Petrova showed nothing.

“The state did what it thought was necessary,” she said, willing herself to suppress the memory of the arrival of the Black Maria in 1939 and the removal — forever, as it turned out — of her father, a professor of biology at the University of Leningrad. “I trust that it acted in good faith, in the interests of the people. Once the war came, I endeavored to serve the people totally. I allowed myself to fall in love for one week, and to get married. My husband went back to duty and died shortly thereafter. I will serve as long as I am physically able. My death means nothing. The survival of the people is what counts.”

“An excellent response,” said the commissar, and his acolytes nodded. “Entirely fictitious, I am sure, but delivered with heartfelt if fraudulent sincerity. You lie well, and I appreciate the effort it takes. It’s not so easy, as any commissar knows. I’m sure your father’s opinions on wheat yield had their own logic, and he believed them sincerely, and whatever they were, they did not warrant the fate that befell him. A warning in his file, a withheld promotion, perhaps, but death? Such a pity. The regime has made many mistakes, even the boss himself will be the first to admit. But he hopes, and I do, too, that after the war, when we get everything sorted out, rectification of some sort can be made. In the meantime, though I know the wound to be still bitter, your patriotism is without question. Do any of my colleagues from the intelligence section have questions for Comrade Sniper?”

Here it comes, she thought. Kursk at last. Then it’s off to Siberia for me.

But the questions were few and mild, and Petrova handled them easily enough. Born Leningrad, 1919, happy, athletic child of a professor, then his arrest, then the war, then Dimitri and her two brothers in the first two years, her poor mother gone early to a shell during Leningrad’s siege, and her own condition, now stronger, the two shrapnel wounds having healed.

Nothing about Kursk or her assignment to the Special Tasks Detachment.

She did not let her eyes betray her.

Finally Krulov seemed satisfied. Glancing at his watch, he signified that it was time to move on; he had his usual eighteen-hour day and dozens more duties before him.

“Comrade Sniper, please open the folder before you.”