The Diamond Eye

by Kate Quinn

Things must change.” “How?” “Work,” she said, flourishing her pen. “It isn’t enough to believe in equality and peace and human rights—one must work at it.” I grinned. “For an American millionairess you have a work ethic a Russian would approve of.” “And you have an ability to laugh that any American would approve of,”

“We have bad poetry in the Soviet Union, too,” I consoled, and she burst out laughing.

This was a soldiers’ gathering, a shooters’ gathering, and for the first time since coming to America I felt honestly at home.

“Why did you invite him to join?” “Because you were nervous,” my partner returned. “But once he stepped to the line there was no way this side of the Arctic Circle you’d let him win.” I laughed, tossing down a shot of American whiskey that tasted like a wood fire. “I gutted him, didn’t I?” “Like a fish.”

“Gentlemen,” I called sharp and loud, abandoning my planned speech. I waited until I had all the eyes that might have wandered, and then I planted my boots wide on the platform with a sound like a coffin knock, clasping my hands behind me in parade rest. “Gentlemen, I am twenty-six years old. At the front, I have already eliminated 309 fascist soldiers and officers. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding for too long behind my back?”

I looked at Kostia, and meeting his eyes through the flashbulbs, I could have sworn I saw Lyonya at his shoulder. He was smiling.

She rolled her eyes. It was unmistakable—she rolled her eyes. “Another one,” she said in Russian to the blocky minder at her shoulder, balling up the letter and tossing it at him, and then she was sweeping off toward the hotel elevator. Heading upstairs to her luxurious whore’s bed and a good night’s sleep, no doubt. Having herself a good chuckle.

“Maybe we should—laughter makes men small. But I’ve seen too many Hitlerites coming at me with rifles and tanks to find them funny.”

Lyonya, I knew we were both thinking. And then Kostia was looking at me through the dark, thinking I love you. He didn’t need to say it for me to hear it. I took a deep, unsteady breath, looking down at the tiled ledge where my hand had found his and linked finger to finger. “You’re my partner,” I said unsteadily. “You’re my shadow. My other half. I trust you like no one else in this world. No one can do what we’ve done and not be closer than two humans can ever be, in this world or the next.” My parents, my child, my friends, either of the men I’d called husband—none of them knew me like Kostia. No one would ever know Kostia like me. His trigger-calloused forefinger caressed my knuckles. “You could have just said I love you, Lyudmila Mikhailovna.” “I do,” I whispered. I loved Lyonya, too. Maybe I’d loved them both all along, my husband and my partner. Maybe it wasn’t moving too soon; maybe it was this has always been. The second kiss, slower and fiercer than the one by the canoe. “Why are we always in water when we do this?”

“I think,” Kostia said slowly, “he would be glad for us. He’d say no one should waste time if there’s a chance to be happy.” “I was thinking the same thing,” I whispered as Kostia’s lips touched my temple, my scarred ear. “I can hear him saying it.”

“I am the one saying no, Alexei.” The storm of roiling emotions in me was tipping rapidly in favor of rage. From the damp-handed Mr. Jonson’s blind insistence to Alexei’s smug persistence to Laurence Olivier’s hand returning over and over to my hip—why could I not seem to make anyone hear the word no?

“I would disagree,” Eleanor said when I translated for her. “I think I have come to know something about snipers by now. An eye like a diamond, yes. But a heart”—she led me toward her husband for my final photograph—“for friendship.”

And it slid into my memory with a click: William Jonson in the sharpshooters’ club in Chicago, laughing at himself for shooting so badly during the demonstration, lighting a Lucky Strike—which he held in a cupped, reversed hand, like a sniper.

I don’t know what your diamond eye saw, Lyudmila, but do not miss.

But it was All Hallows Eve, when dangerous things supposedly walked the night . . . and the most dangerous of them here was me. A woman who wore a lynx pelt like the predator she was, who strode under the waning moon not with a socialite’s bustle or a housewife’s scurry, but with a gunslinger’s glide, shoulders swaying easy, hips loose and rolling below, pistol swinging ready at her side. I pulled the diamonds from around my neck and wrists and stuffed them into my coat pocket so their sparkle wouldn’t give me away, and as I slid from the paved surface of Colorado Avenue into the dark choir of trees, the glossy propaganda poster-woman so at ease in the national spotlight disappeared. Breathing through her skin was Lady Midnight, Lady Death, the woman who had terrified Nazi invaders from Odesa to Sevastopol.

HE HAD A Russian rifle; I had an American pistol. The irony was not lost on me.

One . . . the first cool, measuring glance at the target, the moment the soul falls silent and the eye takes over. Two . . . measuring the horizontal sight line; I didn’t have telescopic sights tonight, but I could imagine the lines framing the marksman’s shoulders as he stepped out of the trees. Three . . . using that benchmark to calculate distance. Hardly any distance at all here, but still not close enough. My heavy .45-caliber bullet would drop fast as soon as it left the barrel, but I hadn’t put in thousands of rounds of practice with this weapon to learn how fast. Four . . . checking the bullet in the chamber. Five . . . nestling the barrel forward a hair through the foliage as he stepped onto the bridge with his rifle leveled. Six . . . watch him stop, watch him catch the flash of the diamonds just barely visible beneath the far arch of the bridge. Seven . . . become stone, become ice, become so still frost could gather on me—all as I watched the President’s would-be killer raise his weapon, satisfaction in every line of his body because he thought he had me dead in his sights. Eight . . . final adjustment for wind, normally. No need here. Nine . . . take aim. Ten . . . breathe in. Eleven . . . breathe out.

TWELVE. My shot took him clean through the right eye.

But Alexei wasn’t any enemy; he was the first enemy. The one I’d outgrown, the one I’d stopped being afraid of a long time ago when larger monsters entered my sights . . . but still the first. The one whose gaze had prickled me as I pulled a five-year-old Slavka away from him at the shooting range, the one who made me think perhaps it would be just as well if I learned to shoot. Not only so I had a father’s skills to teach my son someday, but if the moment came to defend us. Well. Here it was. Die here, and Alexei would try his best to swan home a hero and claim my son.

sagged against the door, shaking with exhaustion, wondering if I could curl up and go to sleep right here on the threshold—and then I nearly collapsed in a heap as the door opened inward and I fell right into Kostia’s arms.

It occurred to me that when I pulled the trigger tonight—first on the marksman, then on Alexei—I had not once intoned my desperate prayer of Don’t miss. Perhaps Eleanor’s lesson had finally sunk home: the knowledge that even if I’d missed, I’d have gotten up, fired again, kept going until I succeeded. Until I saved the American president; until I saved myself.

“Thank you,” I whispered, smoothing my hand over the pages. The marksman had given me diamonds. My husband had utterly ignored anything I told him I wanted, because he always knew better. My sniper partner had retyped my dissertation with two fingers on a borrowed machine.

“When we get back to Moscow,” I whispered softly, preparing to go meet with the rest of the delegation and pass on my full account, “marry me.”

My hand tore from Kostia’s as I broke into a run. I shed Lady Death behind me, I shed the famous sniper of a thousand photographs, I shed my proud hopes of seeing Allied soldiers in Europe soon to buoy our eastern front—I shed everything but the sight of the child running toward me, ten years old, lanky with growth, his face alight. I flung my arms around him and then my legs buckled underneath me and I crashed to my knees in the snow, holding my son in a hug like steel, weeping unashamedly into his hair. Mila Pavlichenko was finally home.

But I could feel my face cracking in a huge smile, a smile that mirrored in her face under the white hair. “Darling Lyudmila,” she said, coming forward. “Eleanor,” I breathed, leaning into the embrace, and there was a ripple of applause as the two of us beamed at each other.

“He might not have lived to see victory, but he lived long enough to ensure it.” And Eleanor raised her cup to me, in silent thanks.

The invisible wounds can hurt just as much—if not more.

Because people love war heroes . . . but even in my own beloved homeland, war heroes are supposed to be clean and uncomplicated. Those urging me to write my memoir will want a patriotic young woman who fought to defend her country, a heroine to root for with a story clean and simple as a full moon—and I was that young woman, but I was more. My moon had a midnight side.

To the world, Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s tally officially stands at 309, a list achieved without bloodthirstiness, every shot fired in simple defense of hearth and home. Only a few know that there was another duel fought under a waning moon on the other side of the world, a duel fought in rage and desperation and savage self-preservation against two very different men . . . and that my true tally stands at 311. But that is my secret, a sniper’s secret, and it dies with me.