Beautiful Assassin by Michael C. White

commissars and the NKVD officers warning against fraternization between the sexes, how such things could cause problems and would therefore be dealt with harshly, that still didn’t stop some from having affairs. In the loneliness of war, relationships inevitably formed between men and women. You could not stop it with government decrees. But there were some men like the Wild Boar who used their influence to pressure or lure women into doing their bidding. He wouldespecially befriend the new recruits, who arrived weekly to replace those that had been killed, with small favors—a piece of cheese, a cup of vodka, a pair of silk stockings many liked to keep in their pockets to remind them what silk felt like against their skin. A few of the women in my unit would respond to his advances, out of fear of how hard he could make things for them or from simple hunger, or even out of the gnawing loneliness the war had brought into our lives, a loneliness that made even the Wild Boar’s company seem appealing.
    When I’d first arrived with the Second Company, he used to come sniffing around me, too. He would tell me how pretty I was, offering me things, chocolates and tins of sardines, bragging how he could get anything I wanted, anything at all. It didn’t matter to him that I was married. When I told him, he laughed. He said we were at war and could die at any moment. I’d managed to keep him at bay, sometimes using cleverness, other times with not-so-veiled threats of going to Captain Petrenko, or even to the NKVD officer, Major Roskov. Then when my work as a sniper during the siege of Odessa got me promoted to sergeant and I was, at least technically, his equal in rank, he left me alone. Though, of course, I knew he was jealous of me. He didn’t like the fact that I was educated, that I spent my free time writing in my journal, that I read. That I wasn’t intimidated by him. And he certainly didn’t like all the attention I’d gotten of late. “What courage does it take to sit in a little hole and kill at three hundred meters?” I’d overheard him say once to another soldier. Lately, I had begun to notice how the Wild Boar had become friendly with Zoya, talking with her, offering her food and small treats. She was young and naïve, and perhaps he thought he could take advantage of her some night out behind the latrines. I had cautioned her about him.
     
    The Wild Boar wasn’t a man to have his authority questioned. He got up and came over toward me. He squatted on his haunches and waved the thick sausage in front of my nose tauntingly. To be honest, its smoky flavor set my mouth watering. When one is hungry, one will do almost anything for food.
    “Go ahead, Sergeant,” he said. “Think of it as a reward for getting that kraut.”
    “I am not hungry,” I lied, this time without bothering to look up.
    “It is a simple compliment I am paying you, Comrade Levchenko. Surely such bravery as yours deserves recognition,” he said, his tone edged with sarcasm.
    “I said ‘I’m not hungry.’”
    “I am only being generous.”
    “I know all about your generosity, Gasdanov.”
    At this he snorted. “And what the hell does that mean?”
    “I think you know what it means.”
    “What is it with you, Levchenko?” he said, dropping any pretense of being cordial. “Has all the big talk gone to your pretty little head?”
    “I just don’t want your sausage.”
    “Is my meat not good enough for the likes of you?” he replied, dangling the sausage obscenely between his thick legs. Smiling, he glanced over his shoulder at Drubich and the others, to see if they thought his joke funny. Drubich, his lapdog, sniggered nervously, but the others were reluctant to openly choose sides. Both of us were, after all, sergeants. The Wild Boar, a decorated veteran who’d fought in the Winter War against Finland in ’39, was known as someone you crossed at your own peril; and while I was a woman and only newly promoted, they’d