Map

  Dedication

  To all the writers who managed to produce a book during the COVID-19 lockdown—to all the creators who managed to make art in the middle of a pandemic.

  It was really tough, wasn’t it?

  Epigraph

  In the summer of 1942,

  as the world was locked in war against Hitler,

  a woman crossed the sea from the Soviet Union to the United States.

  She was a single mother, a graduate student, a library researcher.

  She was a soldier, a war hero,

  a sniper with 309 kills to her name.

  She was Russia’s envoy, America’s sweetheart,

  and Eleanor Roosevelt’s dear friend.

  Her story is incredible. Her story is true.

  Meet Lady Death.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Five Years Ago

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  The Soviet Delegation: Day 1

  Chapter 5

  Fourteen Months Ago

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  The Soviet Delegation: Day 1

  Chapter 10

  Eleven Months Ago

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  The Soviet Delegation: Day 1

  Chapter 15

  Nine Months Ago

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  The Soviet Delegation: Day 1

  Chapter 20

  Five Months Ago

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  The Soviet Delegation: Day 1

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Further Reading and Entertainment

  Historic Photographs

  About the Author

  Praise for The Diamond Eye

  Also by Kate Quinn

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  August 27, 1942

  Washington, D.C.

  He stood with a pocketful of diamonds and a heart full of death, watching a Russian sniper shake hands with the First Lady of the United States.

  “Whoever heard of a girl sniper?” the marksman heard a photographer behind him grumble, craning for a look at the young woman who had just disembarked from the embassy limousine. She’d seemed to flinch at the barrage of camera flashes like muzzle fire, averting her gaze and walking in a phalanx of Soviet minders up the steps of the White House. The photographer snorted, scoffing, “I say she’s a fake.”

  Yet we couldn’t resist coming here for a look at her, thought the marksman, idly flipping his falsified press badge. A delegation from the Soviet Union arriving for the international student conference that was Eleanor Roosevelt’s latest goodwill project—it wouldn’t have merited more than a few lines of newsprint, much less rousted a lot of hungover journalists and photographers out of their beds before dawn and sent them scurrying, pens in hand, to the White House gates, if not for that girl in her crisp olive-green uniform.

  “Did they say she had seventy-five kills on the Russian front?” a Washington Post journalist wondered, rummaging through his notes.

  “I thought it was over a hundred . . .”

  “Higher,” said the marksman in the Tidewater Virginia drawl he’d grown up with. He’d long since ironed his soft southern vowels out into a flat mid-Atlantic cadence that could belong anywhere and nowhere, but he often let Virginia creep back into his tone, depending on who he was talking to. People trusted a southern accent, and they found themselves trusting the marksman: a loose-jointed man of medium height, medium hair between brown and blond, a bony face, and mud-colored eyes, usually jingling a clutter of uncut diamonds in his trouser pocket. He didn’t like banks; anyone who hired him paid in cash, which he then promptly converted to jewels. Lighter than cash, easy to hide—just like bullets. He was thirty-eight years old and had been operating for nineteen years and more than thirty marks. It added up to a lot of diamonds, and a lot of bullets.

  “How does a girl like that kill over a hundred Nazis?” a columnist at his side was speculating, still watching the Russian woman on the front steps of the White House, standing to one side in a cluster of dark-suited embassy men as the First Lady welcomed the rest of the Soviet delegation. “Wasn’t she a librarian or a schoolteacher or something?”

  “Russkies let women in their army, apparently . . .”

  Their medical battalions, maybe, the marksman thought. But even the Reds don’t make women into snipers.

  Yet he was here to see for himself, wasn’t he? Wanting a look at the woman whose sparse biography he had already committed to memory: Lyudmila Pavlichenko; twenty-six years old; fourth-year history student at the Kiev State University and senior research assistant at the Odessa public library—before the war. After the war, thirteen months of continuous fighting against Hitler’s forces on the Russian front.

  Nickname: Lady Death.

  “Dammit, how many kills was it on her tally?” The Washington Post journalist was still searching his notes. “Was it more than two hundred?”

  Three hundred and nine, the marksman thought, but he didn’t believe a word of it. This little junior librarian/schoolteacher was no trained killer. She was a trick pony stuffed with Soviet propaganda, handpicked for the student delegation, and the marksman could see why. A pretty brunette with lively dark eyes and a neat, photogenic face above her bemedaled uniform, nothing like the sort of mannish freak Americans would expect of a Russian female soldier. The Soviets needed American aid; they needed good press coverage on this delegation to American shores, so they’d selected the most winsome candidates they could find. Front and center, this girl sniper who looked so small and appealing beside that tall bony bitch Eleanor Roosevelt.

  “Congratulations on your safe arrival in America.” The press corps clustered close enough to hear the First Lady’s cultured, silver-spoon voice easily as she addressed the Soviet delegation, see the flash of her horsey teeth. “On behalf of my husband the President, welcome to the White House. He looks forward to meeting you all at a later time and invites you to spend your first days in America’s capital under our roof. You are some of the first Soviet guests to be hosted in the White House, a historic moment in the friendship between our nations.”

  She began ushering the Russians inside, and that was that. It wasn’t even six-thirty yet, the skies above the capital barely flushed with sunlight as the pack of journalists, photographers, and one lone innocuous assassin began to disperse. “Never thought I’d see the day a Russian sniper got welcomed to the White House,” a grizzled columnist grumbled. “FDR will rue the day.”

  He won’t be alive to do it, the marksman thought, eyes still on Mila Pavlichenko’s neat dark head as she followed the First Lady toward the doors of the White House. In nine days—the last day of the international conference—President Roosevelt will be dead.

  “I can see the headlines now,” the Washington Post reporter muttered, scribbling in his pad. “ ‘Russian Female Sniper Receives Warm White House Welcome.’ ”

  The marksman smiled, jingling his pocketful of diamonds again. Ten days from now, all the headlines would scream RUSSIAN FEMALE SNIPER MURDERS FDR!

  Notes by the First Lady

  The President was intending to greet the Soviet delegation with me as they arrived, but he had a fall this morning. I’d just entered with a knock, carrying a packet of memoranda and reports for him to read, and I saw the valet lose his grip as he transferred my husband from his bed. Franklin fell hard on the carpet of his bedroom. Had it happened in public he would have roared with laughter as though it were all a prank, a Charlie Chaplin pratfall, and set about regaining his feet with some hearty, bracing joke. Since he was in the privacy of his bedroom, he allowed his face to twist in agony. I always feel I should look away in such moments—watching the proud facade of President Franklin D. Roosevelt crack with frustration in response to his body’s failings feels like a violation.

  I reassure Franklin when he is sitting upright again, tell him to take his breakfast at leisure, and offer to greet the Soviet delegation alone. The President already has a packed schedule; I can at least take on this first task. I see the gratitude, even as he makes a joke about his fall. “Better in here than out where all the jackals can see.”

  “They wouldn’t dare cheer,” I say lightly.

  “But they’d pray I never got up.”

  Something about his tone bothers me, but he’s already reaching for his morning newspapers, girding himself for the day ahead. To the world he appears invincible: a voice full of golden confidence trickling honey-thick from the radio, a profile like a ship’s prow cleaving the world, with a jutted cigarette holder rather than a bowsprit. Only a few see the iron will that keeps his facade in place, keeps his body moving ever forward, keeps his enemie
s at bay.

  I hope, moving into the morning light to greet the Soviet delegation—a block of dark-suited inscrutable men, and one unexpected serious-eyed young woman (they say she is a sniper?)—that it will be enough.

  Five Years Ago

  November 1937

  Kiev, Soviet Union

  Mila

  Chapter 1

  I was not a soldier yet. We were not at war yet. I could not conceive of taking a life yet. I was just a mother, twenty-one and terrified. When you’re a mother, panic can engulf you in the blink of an eyelash. All it takes is that instant when your eye sweeps a room for your child and doesn’t find him.

  “Now, Mila,” my mother began. “Don’t be angry—”

  “Where’s Slavka?” I hadn’t even pulled off my patched gloves and snow-dusted coat yet, but my heart was already thudding. There was my son’s half-constructed block factory on the floor of the apartment, there was the small worn pile of his books, but no sturdy dark-haired five-year-old.

  “His father dropped in. He knew he had missed the appointment—”

  “Nice of Alexei to acknowledge that,” I gritted. The second appointment I had set up to have our divorce finalized; the second appointment my husband had missed. Each time it had taken me months to scrape up the required fifty-ruble fee; weeks to get an appointment with the backlogged office; then hours waiting in a cold, stuffy corridor craning my eyes for a glimpse of my husband’s golden head . . . all to lead to nothing. Anger smoldered in the pit of my stomach. Any Soviet citizen already spent entirely too much time waiting in lines as it was!

  My mother wiped her hands on her apron, her big dark eyes pleading. “He was very sorry, malyshka. He wanted to take Slavka out for a treat. He’s hardly seen the boy these past few years, his own son—”

  Whose fault is that? I wanted to retort. I wasn’t the one keeping our son out of Alexei’s life. My husband was the one who decided only a month or two after giving our son the name of Rostislav Pavlichenko that marriage and fatherhood weren’t really to his liking. But my mother’s kind, pretty face looked hopeful, and I bit back my hot words.

  Mama’s voice was soft. “Maybe there’s a reason he keeps missing these appointments.”

  “Yes, there is,” I stated. “To make me dance on his string.”

  “Maybe what he’s really hoping for is to reconcile.”

  “Mama, not again—”

  “A doctor, Mila. The best surgeon in Ukraine, you said—”

  “He is, but—”

  “A man on his way up. Rooms of his own rather than a communal apartment, a good salary, a Party member. Not things to throw away.” My mother launched into the old argument. She hadn’t approved of how Alexei and I had come together; she’d said it happened too fast and he was too old for me and she was right—but she also wanted me safe and warm and fed. “You always said he’s no drunk and never once hit you,” she went on now. “Maybe he’s not the man you dreamed of, but a surgeon’s wife won’t ever stand in a bread queue, and neither will his children. You don’t remember the hungry years, you were just a little thing . . . but there’s nothing a woman won’t put up with to keep her babies fed.”

  I looked down at my worn gloves. None of what she said was wrong, I knew that.

  I also knew that a part of me was afraid to let my little boy be alone with his father.

  “Mama. Where are they?”

  THE SHOOTING RANGE wasn’t much, just a converted storage space: bars on the windows, a small armory, a line of wooden shields with targets, men on a firing line standing with braced feet and pistols raised or lying on their bellies to fire rifles . . . and in the middle, a tall blond man with a small boy: Alexei Pavlichenko and little Rostislav Alexeivich. My stomach flipped in relief.

  “Every man should know how to shoot,” I could hear Alexei telling our son as I came closer. He was showing Slavka how to hold a rifle far too large for him, and his voice had that expansive cadence I remembered so well. There was nothing my husband liked better than explaining things to people who knew less than him. “Though inborn abilities are required to be a true expert, of course.”

  “What kind of abilities, Papa?” Slavka was round-eyed, looking up at this golden stranger he hardly knew. A man who had walked out of his life without a backward glance when he was just six weeks old.

  “Patience. A good eye. A steady hand, and a precise feel for the tool in your grip. That’s why your papa’s such a good shot—he has a surgeon’s touch.” Alexei flashed a smile downward, and Slavka’s eyes got even rounder. “Now you try—”

  “Slavka,” I called, striding down the firing line, careful to keep behind the shooters. “Give that rifle back. You’re too young to be handling weapons that large.”

  Slavka started guiltily, but Alexei didn’t look surprised to see me or my thunderous face. “Hello there,” he said easily, brushing a lock of fair hair off his tall forehead. He loomed a head above me: thirty-six, lean and golden, his teeth showing white in his easy smile. “You’re looking lovely, kroshka.”

  I didn’t bother asking him not to call me that—he already knew it made my hackles rise. For about one week during our marriage I had found it adorable when he called me his bread crumb—“Because you’re such a little bit of a thing, Mila!”—but it hadn’t taken me long to realize a crumb was something that could be flicked away into a dustbin. A piece of trash.

  “You shouldn’t have taken Slavka out without me,” I said instead, as evenly as possible. The pulse of fear was still beating through me, even at the sight of my boy safe and sound. I didn’t really think Alexei would try to steal our son away from me, but such things weren’t unheard of. At the factory where I’d worked when Slavka was a baby, one of the lathe operators had wept and raged when her former husband swooped their daughter out of school and took her off to Leningrad without any warning. She never got the girl back; her husband had too many Party friends in his pocket. These things happened.

  “Relax, Mila.” Alexei’s smile broadened, and that was when the fear in my stomach started curling into anger. He knew I’d been afraid; he knew, and he rather enjoyed it. “Who’s going to teach a boy to shoot if his father doesn’t do it?”

  “I know how to shoot, I can—”

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter.” Another amused glance. “You’re here now. Here to spoil the fun!”

  I saw him throw a wink over my head to some friend behind me. Women! that wink said. Always spoiling a man’s fun, am I right? I busied myself pulling off my gloves and disentangling myself from my winter coat, aware I was the only woman standing on the firing line. Females stood at the back, applauding when their brothers or boyfriends or husbands sank a shot. From Lenin on down, Soviet men have always talked a good game about women standing shoulder to shoulder with their men in every field society had to offer, but when it came to children being tended, dishes being scrubbed, or applause being given, I had always observed that it was still female hands doing most of the tending, scrubbing, and clapping. Not that I questioned such a thing overly much: it was simply the way of the world, and always had been.

  “Mamochka?” Slavka looked up at me anxiously.

  “Give that weapon back, please,” I said quietly, brushing a hand over his hair to make it plain I wasn’t angry at him. “You’re too little for a rifle that size.”

  “No, he’s not,” Alexei scoffed, taking the weapon. “Baby him like that and you’ll never make a man of him. Watch me load, Slavka . . .”

  Alexei’s hands moved swiftly, loading the TOZ-8. It was his hands I’d noticed first, when I saw him at that dance—a surgeon’s hands, long-fingered and precise, working with absolute skill and focus. What, you can’t say no when a tall blond man smiles at you? my mother scolded when she learned I was pregnant—but it wasn’t Alexei Pavlichenko’s height or his charm or even his hands that had drawn me into his arms. It was his skill, his focus, his drive—so different from the boys my age, all horseplay and careless talk. Alexei hadn’t been a boy, he’d been a man over thirty who knew what he wanted—and what he wanted, he trained for; aimed for; got. I’d seen that in him that first night, young and laughing as I was in my flimsy violet dress. Barely fifteen years old.

  A mother nine months later.

  I sent Slavka to hang up my coat at the back of the room, then turned back to Alexei. “You missed the appointment.” Fighting to keep my voice even. I was not going to sound shrill; it would just amuse him. “I waited nearly three hours.”