Palace of Treason

6

Gable later said he had never heard of such an operational gambit: DIVA, a recruited Russian agent, proposing that Nate, her CIA handler, impersonate a Russian nuclear analyst from KR and together meet DIVA’s unilateral Iranian source. If they could pull it off, CIA would essentially get a secret drop copy of all the intelligence generated by the case that was being sent to the Center in Moscow, a priceless look inside the Iranian program.

“Jesus H. Christ, it’s the damnedest false flag op I ever heard of,” said Gable, throwing clothes into his suitcase. He had passed Vienna Station a summary of Dominika’s proposal for forwarding to Langley, and was immediately returning to Athens to talk to Forsyth. What the CIA officers did not tell their captivating Russian agent was that they would begin examining covert action possibilities with the supersecret Headquarters component called the Proliferation Division (PROD) whose virtuoso officers conceived, developed, and executed operations to combat weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs around the globe. It was an eclectic division, populated by quirky officers — physicists, operators, engineers — a number of whom were relatively normal: The extroverts in PROD were the ones who looked at your shoes when they spoke to you. On his way out, Gable stopped at the door and turned toward Nate.

“I have no authority to do it, but I’m green-lighting this without Headquarters’ approval. No risk aversion, no politics, no lawyers. Forsyth and COS Vienna will back me up. But that means no fuckups tomorrow.”

He stuck his ruddy face into Nate’s. “Listen up. Nash, you have to be as smooth as you ever dreamed of being. Tomorrow night. No rehearsals. When you walk into that apartment with Dominika, that Persian dickwad has to believe you’re a fu… a Russian. Any mistake and he’s going to squawk to his people about the third man — the analyst — in the room, it’ll get to the Center in five minutes, and Domi’s in the wringer. Remember what I told you in Athens? Tight as a Laotian bar hostess? Do you not understand any part of what I just told you?”

Dominika looked back and forth at the two men. “Does he always speak like this?” she said. “What is this about Laos?”

Gable turned to her. “I already told you how glad I am to see you. Right off the bat, you bring us this once-in-a-decade lead. You’ve outdone yourself, but I don’t want you to get careless. I want to eat room service with you for the next five years.”

“Thank you, Bratok. For my organization, this is not so much, a simple maskirovka, a deception. We Russians are good at it.”

Gable looked at Nate and Dominika, shook his head, and went out into the corridor, the door closing behind him.

Dominika and Nate stood in the middle of the ruined suite, which looked like Sunday morning after Saturday night, plates stacked everywhere, napkins on the floor, wine bottles upside down in sloshy ice buckets.

“What did Bratok mean about Laos?” Dominika asked casually, stacking plates.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Nate. “Give them time to clean up.”

Dominika looked at him calmly. “Laos?”

“It’s not Laos,” said Nate. “It’s about an operation being run carefully, everything thought out, no mistakes.”

“With bar girls?” said Dominika, putting the dirty plates on the wheeled trolley.

“No, it’s an expression describing close coordination, like hugging a girl. Jesus, Domi, I can’t explain it now.”

“You’re quite the muzhlan,” said Dominika dryly. “How do you say this in English?”

“Sorry, I don’t know that word,” said Nate. Who’s she calling a bumpkin? he thought.

“A pity to leave this, but we need to plan for tomorrow night,” she said. “I want to show you Line X requirements. I will be speaking to the Persian in French, but you must speak only Russian. He probably speaks English — most scientists do.”

“How many pages of requirements are there?” said Nate. “Did you bring them yourself?”

“There are forty pages, some with diagrams. Of course I brought them myself, we are not going to transmit them through the rezidentura in Vienna, this case is razdelenie, strictly compartmented.”

Nate shook his head. “You carried intel requirements with you on the plane? That’s not very professional. What if you lost them?”

Nate hadn’t meant to criticize Dominika, but he worried about flaps. One accident and Langley’s covert action possibilities would be lost. But he saw her eyes flare: Gable once had told Nate that there is not an intelligence officer in the world who does not bristle at being accused of shoddy tradecraft. Tell him there’s a nickel parking meter beside his sister’s bed, but don’t impugn his tradecraft.

Dominika’s voice crackled like hoarfrost on a window pane. “I do not lose documents,” she said. “And do not lecture me, Mr. Neyt, on techniques. Your agency’s professionalism is no better than ours.”

Nate swallowed the “So who recruited who?” because he knew it wasn’t fair, and also because he’d very likely get a slap across the face. Agent handling, Mr. Case Officer, he thought, leave it alone.

Dominika wasn’t through. “Russians invented spying,” she said, waving a fork at him. “Do you know konspiratsiya? Operating secretly, not being detected, what you Americans call tradecraft, we invented it.”

Invented spying? How about the Chinese in the sixth century BC? Nate raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, I just want us to be careful.”

Dominika looked at him sideways, reading his purple halo, steady and bright, and decided that (a.) he wasn’t disparaging her and (b.) she really did love him. “So you want to study the notes?”

“Yeah, I’ll have to memorize the Line X stuff. Gable won’t have time to send our requirements before tomorrow night,” Nate said. The Center’s nuclear requirements alone will be golden intel to analysts in Langley, he thought.

“We have a lot of work,” said Dominika. A pause.

“And we can’t be seen on the street together,” said Nate. More silence.

“We could use my safe apartment,” said Dominika. “To continue the operational planning.”

“More discreet than this hotel room,” said Nate. “You go ahead, I’ll come over in a half hour. What’s the address?”

“Stuwerstrasse thirty-five, apartment six. Come in an hour.”

“I’ll see you soon,” said Nate, his throat closing.

“Ring two short, one long. I will buzz you in,” said Dominika, who could not feel her lips.

“Roger,” said Nate idiotically, sounding like a test pilot.

Dominika looked at him as she opened the door. “And Neyt,” she said, “I think it is all right for you to be a bumpkin.”

When she was five, Dominika began seeing the colors. Words in books were tinted red and blue, the music from her mother’s violin was accompanied by rolling, airborne bars of maroon and purple, her professor father’s stories in Russian, French, and English at bedtime flew on wings of blue and gold. At age six, she was — secretly — diagnosed as a synesthete by a psychologist colleague of her father’s, who also observed the rare additional ability in Dominika to read people’s emotions and moods by the colored auras that surround them.

Her synesthesia made her one with music and dance, and she catapulted through the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, destined for the Bolshoi. A rival broke the small bones of her right foot, finishing her ballet career in an afternoon. Vulnerable and drifting, she was recruited into the SVR by her scheming uncle, then deputy director of the Service. He had pitched her to join the Service during the funeral wake for her beloved father.

That was about the time when the other began, the buistvo, the anger, the rage, the temper that would surge through her in reaction to deceit and betrayal at the hands of her Service and against the swollen bureaucrats that appropriated and encumbered her life. Dominika long ago had lost the patriotic idealism of her youth. The anger was overlaid by sadness and grief, as only a Russian could mourn, broadly and dark as the steppes, as she saw how the successors to the sclerotic Soviet Politburo — the cashiered KGB hustlers, and the thirsty oligarchs, and the crime lords, and the poker-faced president with his trademark sidelong glance — spindled Russia’s potential, sold the future, and squandered the magnificent patrimony of Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Pushkin, and Ulanova, the greatest ballerina ever — Dominika’s childhood idol. It was all done behind multiple curtains, masquerading as a government, a sovereign state, all behind Kremlin curtains.

Her parents had embodied Russian soul — her father a professor of literature, her mother a concert violinist — but they had been ground down between the Soviet mortar and Stalin’s pestle, confiding only in each other, out of young Dominika’s earshot, walking gingerly through life, like citizens now walk on Moscow streets, different but the same, wearily paying bribes and boiling their brown tap water and, outside Moscow, dreaming of milk, and waiting for meat, and hoarding the dear little tin of caviar for Maslenitsa, the end-of-winter holiday — a celebration as old as Russia is old — which brings the springtime promise of sun, and warmth, and food, and change, which never comes. It never comes.

As she sailed through SVR Academy, then inhaled the disinfectant-stench of Sparrow School, then was assigned the delirious first overseas posting to Helsinki, Dominika’s synesthesia became an operational asset. She could read the deceptions and suspicions in her own rezidentura. When she met the unflappable CIA officers who handled her after her recruitment she read the haloes of constancy — the same royal purple as her father’s — and in the case of Nathaniel Nash, the luminous purple of passion. Passion for CIA, for his country, and perhaps for her.

They had fallen into their affair, pushed together by the strain of Dominika’s spying, by Nate’s dread for her safety. They made love against the rules, against good sense, flaunting every tenet of security. Dominika rationalized that she was already committing espionage — the second bullet behind the ear for sleeping with the Main Enemy wouldn’t much matter. When Nate hesitated, retreating behind his regulations, worried about career dislocations, Dominika’s anger and pride would not forgive him.

Nearly a year later, things had changed. Her disgust with the zveri, the animals in Moscow, was renewed. She knew that Zyuganov would as soon liquidate her as look at her, but she knew that Putin’s wet-lipped patronage of her would keep him at bay, at least for a time. She wondered quite seriously whether she would have to kill Zyuganov before he killed her. And her fury at the thought of Korchnoi, gunned down a few meters from freedom, swirled unchecked and unabated in her breast. She supposed it was inevitable that she would gravitate to her CIA handlers — and she suspected that those smiling professionals always knew it. She was satisfied with the recontact with CIA and Gable — he was right, she missed the game. And she had done a lot of thinking about Nate — the last thing he had told her before she went back inside Russia had been that he cared about her. Fine, but she would not offer herself to him again.

She combed her hair in the little bathroom with the long-handled, antique tortoiseshell brush that once belonged to her prababushka, her great-grandmother, in Saint Petersburg. She had brought it with her to the Academy, then to Sparrow School, and on her first tour in Helsinki. It was one of the only mementos from her family. She looked at the brush in her hand. The elegant, curved handle had helped her unlock — unleash — her nighttime adolescent urges, without shame. As she entered young womanhood, she noted the emergence of her “secret self,” another part of her, sexual and edgy and questing, that lived quietly in the deeply barricaded hurricane room inside her — that is, until she opened the door. She set the brush down and asked herself what she expected — from a life of espionage on the brink, from Udranka, holding on by her fingernails, from earnest and conflicted Nate, from herself.

The street door intercom buzzed dit-dit-dah.

They worked until nightfall, then quit. The table was covered in paper. Two water glasses had made rings on the pages of SVR Line X requirements concerning temperatures of the thermal gradient in the gas rotors of Iran’s centrifuges at Natanz. Dominika got up from the table, brushed the hair out of her eyes, sprawled out on the little couch in the corner of the room, and kicked off her shoes.

“We have an excellent chance of success tomorrow,” she said.

“If Jamshidi hasn’t changed his mind,” said Nate from the table.

“He will not change. He cannot afford the scandal. And he cannot resist Udranka. His lust is stronger than his fear.”

“If he refuses to cooperate, would you make good on your threat?” asked Nate. “Would you feed him to the mullahs?”

“Of course. I could not be seen to bluff.” She lifted her chin and pointed it at Nate. “You would not? What would you do if he refused to cooperate?”

“I don’t know. Try to persuade him, appeal to his reason as a scientist.”

“And if he still refused?”

“Then we’d try to get him kicked out of IAEA over some minor charge.”

“To let him return in good standing to his country to continue his destructive work?” Dominika wiggled her toes and stretched her legs.

“Dominika, in CIA we don’t eliminate a recruitment target when the pitch is refused,” said Nate. “We wait and watch, and come back in a month, or a year, or five years. Besides, we don’t pitch someone until we’re nearly sure of the outcome.” The wiggling stopped.

“Were you sure about me? Did you know my response before you asked?”

“I wasn’t sure; I held my breath when I started talking to you about working together. I thought I knew — hoped I knew — what your response would be.” Nate started shuffling the papers on the table. “Then things became complicated…” Time to shut up. Jesus. Her toes started wiggling again.

“And the other,” said Dominika, “was that part of the operation, my recruitment?” Nate’s upper lip was a little wet, the papers were sticking to his hands.

“What do you mean ‘the other’?” said Nate.

“What do suppose I mean?” said Dominika. “When we made love.”

“What do you think, Domi?” said Nate. “Do you remember what I said to you in Estonia before you crossed the bridge back to Russia? I said—”

“You said we didn’t have time for you to tell me you are sorry for what you said to me, no time to tell me what I meant to you as a woman, as a lover, as a partner, no time to tell me how much you will miss me.” Silence and the sound of a car horn on the street below. Dominika looked down at her hands in her lap.

“Have I remembered correctly?” she said softly.

“How lucky for us, on the eve of our meeting with Jamshidi, that your well-known memory hasn’t failed you,” said Nate. He stopped gathering the papers and looked into her eyes. “I meant what I said.”

Her mouth twitched, suppressing a smile, or perhaps some other emotion. “Well, it is good to be working together again,” she said quickly. The bubble popped; they both knew it. It was the only way.

“Are you hungry?” she said. “Do you want to go out for one of their beastly sausages and kraut?”

“What’s wrong with sausages? I like that stuff,” said Nate.

“Protivno, disgusting,” said Dominika.

“I suppose you think salo is better?” Dominika sat up and squared her shoulders.

“Salo is a delicacy,” she said.

“It’s fatback bacon, and you Russians eat it cold and raw, the more fat the better.”

Dominika sighed and shook her head. “Nevinnyi,” she said, “how little you know, almost childlike.”

“Maybe we should stay off the street,” said Nate.

“I know a restaurant with a covered garden, the Good Old Whale, it’s in the park, we can stay away from downtown,” said Dominika, seeing him hesitate. “Come on dushka, I will watch for trouble and protect you.” Dominika knew she was good, but she also knew that Nate was twice the street operator she was.

Nate pushed open the door to the apartment building and they stepped onto the sidewalk. Neither of them consciously registered that they simultaneously looked across the street and scanned both wings as they turned to walk toward the Prater, crossing busy Ausstellungsstrasse, using the double-lane boulevard to look both ways and check for trailing coverage again. They left the traffic behind and walked down pedestrian, tree-lined Zufahrtsstrasse, now inside the park, past the booths, the funhouses, the fairie lights, and the big Prater Ferris wheel always visible above the tree line, its bread-box cars picked out in white bulbs. Dominika took Nate’s arm as they strolled through the smells of the confections and cakes and roasted meats, and they mentally cataloged the faces and the jackets and the shoes, to be able to recognize repeats later on.

The summer evening was cool and pleasant. Dominika’s bare arm was relaxed and warm and Nate felt the familiar constriction — desire, tenderness, lust — in his throat, and he looked over at her classic profile, reflected in a hundred spinning lights, and she caught him looking at her and yanked his arm to behave, and pulled him toward the tables of the restaurant under the linden trees, Der Gute Alte Walfisch — the Good Old Whale — and they ordered sauerkraut balls with mustard, sauerbraten and red cabbage for Dominika, and Nürnberger Rostbratwurst with horseradish cream for Nate, and a bottle of Grauburgunder, but Dominika shook her head and refused to toast when Nate held up his glass.

Nate put down his glass without taking a sip. “What’s up?”

Dominika made a sweeping gesture at the plates on the table. “This. In Russia the only people who eat like this are the siloviki, the fat cats licking their paws and purring when our dear president scratches them behind the ears,” she said. “They are in their dachas, and villas and seaside resorts — do you know about Putin’s palace in Praskoveevka on the Black Sea? He stole hospital funds to build it.”

Nate picked up his wineglass again. “Well, then, confusion to the siloviki,” he said. “Dominika Egorova will keep them awake at night, like the Russian household demons — what do you call them? — that live under the floor and knock all night.”

Dominika raised her glass and touched the rim to Nate’s glass. “Barabashki, the pounders, the bad demons, the domovye.”

Nate sipped. “That’s you, the domovoi in Putin’s palace, under the floorboards. He just doesn’t know it’s you.”

“Thank you very much,” said Dominika. “Domovye are smelly and ill-behaved.”

“You’re certainly not smelly,” said Nate.

“Funny,” Dominika said. “Are all the men in your family as charming?”

Nate held up his hand. “Let’s not go there. Talk about pounders and knockers.”

“What?” Dominika said.

“Forget it,” said Nate.

Dominika leaned forward. “No, you cannot refuse. Now I am curious.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” said Nate. He poured both of them some more wine.

Dominika kept looking at him, even as he avoided her eyes. “You’re supposed to keep your agent happy and motivated. Tell me.”

Nate took a deep breath. “Not so dramatic. Two brothers, both older. Partners in the family law firm. My father is a lawyer, my grandfather a judge. Great-grandfather started the firm. In Virginia, Dinwiddie County, near the capital of Richmond. The Old South, you know what that is?”

Dominika nodded her head. “Your Civil War. Abraham Lincoln. The film Blown with the Wind, yes I know.”

“That’s right, good movie.” Nate patted Dominika’s hand. “It was pretty competitive growing up, in school, sports, my brothers especially, we were always fighting. They like to win, like my father and grandfather; the whole family likes to argue, all lawyers. The only thing I did better than them was swim, and one summer I pulled my oldest brother to shore after his sailboat flipped. I guess I saved his life, but when we got to shore he started wrestling me — I was smaller than him — and he threw me back into the lake and walked up to the house. I guess thanking me was out of the question. He had to win.

“My brothers married respectable girls from old Southern families. Obedient and genteel. Everything the way it had been for four generations. Always winning. My exhausted sisters-in-law got by on pills and bourbon. I found out that my oldest brother’s wife was getting back at him by sleeping around fraternity row in Richmond. I could have thrown it in his face, payback for all the thumping, but that would be losing — for the whole family — so I skipped it, and went off to school.

“My father wanted me to be a lawyer too. When I studied Russian instead, and then picked another career, it was a serious crisis. They bet that I’d fail and be back home in two years.”

Dominika took a sip of wine. “Instead you are here, and you have me, and we are daring and desperate and dangerous operatives, saving the world and planning the destruction of evil.”

“Imenno, exactly,” said Nate. “Do you want this last sauerkraut ball? I’m tired of talking about me.”

“Go ahead,” said Dominika. “But tell me, Neyt, you don’t hate your family, do you? You must never forget your family. They will always be there to help you. Like my mother is always there when I need her.”

“I thought your mother passed away a few years ago,” said Nate.

“She did. But she is always close by.”

“You mean her memory? Of course you remember your parents, we all do,” said Nate.

“Yes, but more than a memory. I can sometimes see her, she talks to me.”

Nate sat back in his chair. “Like a ghost?” Would he have to draft a cable to Headquarters documenting DIVA’s episodic schizophrenia?

“Stop looking at me that way,” said Dominika. “I am not sumasshedshiy, crazy. All Russians feel a closeness to their ancestors and friends. We’re spiritual.”

“Uh-huh. Comes from the bottle of vodka a day,” said Nate. “Do you see other ghosts?” He kept his tone neutral.

“There was a girl at Sparrow School who died, and my friend in Finland, the one who disappeared.” Dominika looked down at her hands.

“She was the former Sparrow?” said Nate.

Dominika nodded. “I know the Center eliminated her.”

“And they talk to you?”

Dominika leaned forward, chin in her hand. “Do not worry, Dr. Freud, I am not raving. I just remember my friends. They are with me in spirit, they help me survive the days when you are not here. For me, they are like our Rusalki, the mermaids who sit by the river and sing.”

“I read about the Rusalki, Slavic folklore,” said Nate. “But don’t they sing to men to lure them to the water and drown them?”

“They sound dangerous, don’t they?” said Dominika, a trace of a smile on her lips. “But they are not here tonight, because you are here.” She reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze.

A blond waitress in a dirndl, a traditional peasant skirt, came to clear the table, bending to gather plates and silverware, taking her time, looking at Nate as she reached for the mustard pot. The traditional bodice was low cut and her blouse was strained tight. One arm balancing plates, she managed to fluff her hair and ask Nate in German if he wanted anything else. Nate smiled and simply made the universal signing gesture for the check. His smiled faded as he turned back to Dominika. Annoyed. Cossack displeased. White sparks from an arc welder.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “I thought we were dangerous operatives saving the world.”

“Do you love me?” asked Dominika, switching to Russian.

“What? What’s that got to do with this? She’s just a cute waitress.”

“You know the Danube is not that far away,” said Dominika. “I know Rusalki. They will drag you—” She stopped talking and looked over Nate’s shoulder.

Nate knew not to look, ingrained training, but watched her face, waiting.

“Two men, short sleeves, one tall, one fat,” Dominika said in a low voice.

“Stupid Tyrolean hat on the short one?” said Nate.

Dominika’s eyes searched his face, impressed. “Very good. They were ahead of us when we walked through the park.”

“Then they stopped at a food booth to let us go by,” said Nate.

“And they walked past us as we sat down here,” said Dominika.

“What are they doing now?”

Dominika shrugged. “Walking back up the lane, eating ice cream.”

“Three hits. Time for a loop out of the park,” said Nate.

They paid and unhurriedly walked in the opposite direction, onto looping Messestrasse, stopping at the Hotel Messe bar for a drink, exiting through the hotel garden, crossing over into Messezentrum arcade just before closing, moving counterclockwise around the hall until they came to the exit onto Ausstellungsstrasse, then sprinted across the road against the lights and stair-stepped into Dominika’s neighborhood. They had seen no extraordinary movement in response to their provocatively aggressive movements, no scurrying or obvious parallel coverage, either foot or vehicular. And no Mutt and Jeff with the hat. They stopped again at a schnapsbar on Arnezhoferstrasse, sat, and looked out the plate glass, tired and a little winded, but stoked with the pulse of the street, with the aphrodisiac of sound, movement, and car exhaust. The adrenaline high of possible unseen opposition in the shadows faded: There was no feel of coverage, no nibbles from the street. Dominika wondered whether he was as agitated as she was, and whether he would try to take her to bed. She ached for him, but she would not suggest it first.

“Are you nervous about tomorrow?” she said. Their shoulders were nearly touching, she could feel his body heat through her shirt.

“No, I think we’ll be fine. You?” said Nate. The purple halo around his head pulsated.

“I expect the Persian will try to dance around a bit, but there’s no way he can refuse us. I will have my Sparrow at the apartment,” said Dominika. “She will make an appearance, as a reminder of what a shalun, what a naughty boy, scientist Jamshidi has been.”

“Have you considered,” said Nate, “that if our little operation hits a bump, if Jamshidi starts squawking, the Center’s eventually going to want to know if your Sparrow was part of this false flag op, how much she knew. If this goes badly, they’ll chop her into little pieces.”

Dominika wondered how many pieces they would get out of Udranka’s 1.85 leggy meters. “She’s got nowhere to go,” said Dominika. “She has nobody.”

“I think we should include her in a contingency exfiltration plan if we have to bug out,” said Nate.

Dominika looked at him in the dark bar. “You would do that?”

“She’s part of the operation now,” said Nate. Concern for the benighted girl was not the whole story, thought Nate. If they had to withdraw, getting the Sparrow to safety would cauterize any flap. Still, Dominika was visibly touched. She smiled at him.

They looked at each other across the little plastic table, half of their faces faintly illuminated by the light behind the bar. They didn’t touch, they didn’t speak. Dominika could feel the electrons jumping the gap between them, could feel them in her heightened heartbeat. Her eyes darted over his face — his mouth, his eyes, the lock of hair on his forehead. He was looking at her, and she imagined the feel of his skin against her. She told herself she would not start anything — she would not — even though she needed him. She needed him to ease the burden that came with her new life as a mole, a betrayer of her country, living one step from the execution chambers. But she would not.

Nate looked at her, saw her lips trembling. In Helsinki he would have gathered her up and taken her to bed. Not now. She had reemerged from Moscow, was willing to resume work as their — his — penetration agent. Nate would not jeopardize it, would not disrespect MARBLE’s memory. As he looked at Dominika’s back-lighted hair, Nate thought of what had to be done.

His purple aura, normally steady, always constant, suddenly wavered in the night air. In a flash Dominika’s remarkable intuition told her that he still struggled with his professional discipline, even as he fought the passion she could see in his eyes. She knew she could not again bear to see the light fade from his eyes as they lay beside each other in bed.

“We will talk about taking care of my Sparrow later,” said Dominika. “Right now, we both need some sleep.”

“Do you want me to stay with you tonight?” said Nate, thinking operationally. Dominika knew what he meant. The fizz had gone out of the evening.

“I think not, Neyt,” said Dominika.

They paid the bill and walked down quiet streets to Dominika’s front door. Nate looked at her and the case officer in him knew what she had decided and precisely why. Correct. Prudent. Secure. Dominika gave him a light kiss on the cheek, turned, and went inside without looking back at him.

In her apartment, her eyes closed, Dominika stood with her back against the bedroom door, her arms wrapped around herself. She listened for some sound from the street below, the sound of him buzzing to be let in, so she could throw open the door and wait for him to come bounding up to the landing, into her arms.

She kicked off her shoes, pulled her dress over her head, and flopped onto the single bed, sinking into the plush comforter, trying not to think about Nate, or the bastards in the Center, or tomorrow’s operation with Jamshidi, so very risky, or her itchy scalp and the wet between her legs that wouldn’t go away. Dominika rolled over with a groan, hesitated, then reached for prababushka’s brush on the nightstand beside the bed. Great-grandmother’s brush. She held it in her hand, familiar yet forbidden. She knew in three minutes she could be shuddering, eyes rolled back white behind fluttering lids, and then asleep two minutes after that. She looked for one of her friends in the dark corners of the room, but there were no mermaids tonight. Only the memory of Nate, and of his earnest, pained expression when talking about himself, and his darting eyes when they were walking along dark streets, and his expression when he looked at her.

With another groan she tossed the hairbrush clattering into the corner of the room, turned over on her stomach, and contemplated a restless night.

Sauté onions and minced garlic in butter, stir in minced ham and flour, and cook till browned. In a bowl, mix drained sauerkraut, egg, parsley, and beef stock, then add to the skillet and cook into a stiff paste. Cool. Roll into balls, dip in flour, then egg wash, then bread crumbs, and fry till golden brown.