Gone Tomorrow

You’ve probably still got them, as souvenirs.”
    There was no surprise. No denial. Sansom just said, “No, actually those tags were locked up with the after-action reports, and everything else.”
    I said nothing.
    Sansom said, “His name was Grigori Hoth. He was about my age at the time. He seemed competent. His spotter, not so much. He should have heard us coming.”
    I didn’t reply. There was a long silence. Then the situation seemed to hit home and Sansom’s shoulders fell and he sighed and he said, “What a way to get found out, right? Medals are supposed to be rewards, not penalties. They’re not supposed to screw you up. They’re not supposed to follow you around the rest of your life like a damn ball and chain.”
    I said nothing.
    He asked, “What are you going to do?”
    I said, “Nothing.”
    “Really?”
    “I don’t care what happened in 1983. And they lied to me. First about Berlin, and they’re still lying to me now. They claim to be mother and daughter. But I don’t believe them. The alleged daughter is the cutest thing you ever saw. The alleged mother fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch. I first met them with a cop from the NYPD. She said thirty years from now the daughter will look just like the mother. But she was wrong. The younger one will never look like the older one. Not in a million years.”
    “So who are they?”
    “I’m prepared to accept that the older one is for real. She was a Red Army political commissar who lost her husband and her brother in Afghanistan.”
    “Her brother?”
    “The spotter.”
    “But the younger woman is posing?”
    I nodded. “As a billionaire expatriate widow from London. She says her husband was an entrepreneur who didn’t make the cut.”
    “And she’s not convincing?”
    “She dresses the part. She acts it well. Maybe she lost a husband somewhere along the line.”
    “But? What is she really?”
    “I think she’s a journalist.”
    “Why?”
    “She knows things. She’s got the right kind of inquiring mind. She’s analytical. She monitors the Herald Tribune . She’s a hell of a storyteller. But she talks too much. She’s in love with words and she embroiders details. She can’t help herself.”
    “For example?”
    “She went for some extra pathos. She made out that the political commissars were in the trenches along with the grunts. She claims she was conceived on a rock floor under a Red Army greatcoat. Which is bullshit. Commissars were big-time rear-echelon pussies. They stayed well away from the action. They clustered together back at HQ, writing pamphlets. Occasionally they would visit up the line, but never if there was any danger involved.”
    “And you know this how?”
    “You know how I know it. We expected to fight a land war with them in Europe. We expected to win. We expected to take millions of them prisoner. MPs were trained to handle them all. The 110th was going to direct operations. Delusional, maybe, but the Pentagon took it very seriously. We were taught more about the Red Army than we were about the U.S. Army. Certainly we were told exactly where to find the commissars. We were under orders to execute them all immediately.”
    “What kind of journalist?”
    “Television, probably. The local crew she hired was tied to the television business. And have you ever seen Eastern European television? All the anchors are women, and they all look sensational.”
    “What country?”
    “Ukraine.”
    “What angle?”
    “Investigative, historical, with a little human interest mixed in. The younger one probably heard the older one’s story and decided to run with it.”
    “Like the History Channel in Russian?”
    “In Ukrainian,” I said.
    “Why? What’s the message? They want to embarrass us now? After more than twenty-five years?”
    “No, I think they want to embarrass the Russians. There’s a lot of tension right now between Russia and the Ukraine. I think they’re taking America’s evil for granted, and saying that big bad Moscow shouldn’t have put poor helpless Ukrainians in harm’s way.”
    “So why haven’t we seen the story already?”
    “Because they’re way behind the times,” I said. “They’re looking for confirmation. They still seem to have some kind of journalistic scruples over there.”
    “Are they going to get confirmation?”
    “Not from you, presumably. And no one else knows anything for sure. Susan Mark didn’t live long enough to say yea or nay. So the