The Goddess of Warsaw

Bina, now Lena Browning and “Tinseltown’s leading lady” (224), sleeps with a bartender at a hotel. While he is thrilled, she is only doing so as an alibi. The next morning, Lena’s assistant, Connie, discusses a homicide that took place nearby. Lena feigns surprise while privately reflecting on how she killed the man.

Ralph Winters, whose real name is Rolf Wagner, served alongside Jürgen Stroop during the war. He masterminded the bombing of the Żegota headquarters, as well as the bombing of the Grand Synagogue after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was finally quashed. Instead of being tried for his war crimes, he was saved through Operation Paperclip, “a top secret intelligence program in which sixteen hundred high-ranking Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians were rescued from Nazi Germany, their criminal pasts wiped clean, and given U.S. government employment after the war” (227).

After learning about the program, Lena seduced a Pentagon official during an event at the White House and obtained a list of names from him. Rolf is the fourth person she has killed so far as “payback”—she knows that she cannot kill all 1,600, so she targets the ones she knew personally. For a short moment, she feels at peace.