Red Sparrow

3

Dominika Egorova was sitting at a private corner banquette in the crystal-and-marble opulence of Baccara, the most elegant of the new restaurants in Moscow, located a few steps from Lubyanka Square. The forest of crystal and silver on a dazzling white tablecloth was unlike anything she had experienced before. She was enjoying herself and, despite the operational nature of the evening, was determined to enjoy the sinfully expensive dinner.

Dimitri Ustinov sat across from her, humming with horny. Tall, heavily built, with a shock of black hair and a lantern jaw, Ustinov was a leading member of the fraternity of gangster Russian oil and mining oligarchs who had amassed billion-dollar empires in the boom years after the Cold War. He had started as a local enforcer in organized crime, but he had come up in the world.

Ustinov was dressed in a flawless shawl-collar tuxedo over a ribbed white dress shirt with blue diamond studs and cuff links. He wore a Tourbillon watch by Corum, one of only ten produced each year. His bear-paw hands rested easily over a blue-enameled Fabergé cigarette case, made in 1908 for the czar. He took a cigarette out of the case and lit it with a solid-gold Ligne Deux, snapping it shut with the distinctive musical note of all Dupont lighters.

Ustinov was the third-wealthiest man in Russia, but for all his wealth he was not the smartest. He had feuded publicly with the government, most notably with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and had refused to acknowledge or accept government regulation of his enterprises. Three months ago, at the height of the feud, Ustinov airily made obscenely disparaging remarks about Putin on a Moscow TV interview show. People in the know were amazed that Ustinov was still alive.

Ustinov wasn’t thinking about anything that evening except Dominika. He had seen her at the television station a month after his interview. Her beauty and elemental sexuality took his breath away. He had been prepared to buy the television station on the spot just to meet her again, but it wasn’t necessary. She immediately and delightedly had accepted his invitation for dinner. As he looked at her across the table, Ustinov wanted his thumbprints all over her.

Dominika was twenty-five years old, with dark chestnut hair worn up and tied with a black ribbon. Her cobalt-blue eyes matched his cigarette case and he said so, then compulsively slid the priceless bauble across the table to her. “This is for you.” She had full lips and slim, elegant arms that tonight were bare. She wore a simple black dress with a plunging neckline that revealed a spectacular cleavage. The diffused candlelight barely illuminated one fine blue vein on her breast beneath flawless skin. She reached out and fingered the magnificent case with long, elegant hands. Her nails were short and square-cut, without any polish. She looked at him with wide eyes and he felt a string being plucked somewhere between his gut and groin.

She knew enough to follow her instincts, to swallow the bile in her throat. She smiled at this elemental lizard. “Dimitri, this is magnificent, I cannot possibly accept such a gift,” she said. “It’s too generous.”

“Of course you can,” Ustinov said, struggling to be charming. “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever met, and you being here is the most wonderful gift I could ever receive.” He took a sip of champagne and imagined that little black dress in a discarded heap in the corner of his bedroom. “I am very fond of you already,” said Ustinov.

Dominika willed herself not to laugh at him, even as she felt a delicious iciness run up her back and down her arms. This derevenshchina, this rube, had as much sophistication as a provincial bully-boy enforcer, which was exactly what he had been years before. But Lord, he was wealthy now. During the week of preparation, Dominika had been told a few facts about Ustinov: Yachts. Villas. Penthouse apartments. Oil and mineral holdings around the world. A private security army made up of well-paid mercenaries. Three private jets.

Dominika was the only child of Nina and Vassily Egorov. Nina had been concertmaster in the Moscow State Symphony, a rising virtuoso who had studied with Klimov and had such massive potential that she was allocated Guarneri’s magnificent 1741 Kochanski del Gesù by the Glinka State Central Museum of Music and Culture. Fifteen years ago her anticipated promotion to the Russian National Symphony Orchestra was denied her when Prokhor Belenko, a toad-eating violinist of inferior talent—but married to the daughter of a Politburo member—demanded that he be promoted, and was given the position. Everyone knew what had happened, but no one said a thing.

Along with her brilliance in playing the red-varnished skripka, Nina Egorova was known for her fiery disposition, including a simmering temper that exploded whenever she had seen enough. Before the amused eyes of eighty fellow orchestra members, Nina had walloped Belenko above the right ear with his own music stand during his last rehearsal with the State Symphony. Nina was unrepentant. She was also a woman in the then–Soviet Union. They took away the Guarneri. She refused to play a lesser instrument. They moved her from the first to the third seat in strings. She sent them to hell. Administrative leave morphed into dismissal when the Ministry of Culture called the symphony director and her career was over. Now, years later, the elegant neck had bent, the strong hands had curled, the dark hair was gray and in a bun.

Dominika’s father was the famous academician Professor Vassily Egorov, Senior Professor of History at Moscow University. He was one of the most respected and influential figures in Russian letters, with the rank of Meritorious Professor. His gold-and-blue Order of St. Andrew hung framed on the wall; the claret bowknot he wore every day on his lapel was the Medal Pushkina, the Pushkin Medal for achievement in literature and education. Ironically, Vasya Egorov didn’t look distinguished or influential. He was short and slight, with thinning hair combed carefully across his head.

Unlike his wife, Vassily Egorov had survived the Soviet years by avoiding politics, allegiances, and controversy. Cocooned in the university, he succeeded chiefly by carefully cultivating a persona of studious fair-mindedness, discretion, and loyalty. What no one knew was that Meritorious Comrade Professor Vassily Egorov maintained a secret, separate soul, the conscience of a totally different being, in which he harbored a moral thinker’s revulsion for the Soviet. Like all Russians, he had lost family in the 1930s and 1940s to Stalin, resisting the Germans, the purges, the katorga. But more than that. He rejected the imbalance and illogic of the Soviet system, he despised the top-heavy favoritism of the cheloveki, the insiders’ sloth and self-indulgence that crushed the human spirit and had robbed Russians of their lives, their country, their patrimony. It was an apostasy shared only with Nina.

All Russians harbor secret thoughts, they are accustomed to it. So it was with Vassily and Nina, who hid their revulsion at how modern Russia had not changed. Even as Dominika grew older and could begin to understand, Vassily dared not speak to her of their feelings. Both parents yearned to give her a clear vision of the world, to let her see the truth for herself. If they could not expose Russia’s hellish evolution—from Bolshevik rage to Soviet rot and now, even after glasnost, into the Federation’s parasitic greed—Vassily at least resolved to instill in Dominika the real majesty of Russia.

The spacious three-room apartment (after Nina’s dismissal they were permitted to keep it, thanks only to the continued position and prestige of Vassily) was filled with books, music, art, and conversation in three different languages. Her parents noticed, when Dominika turned five, that the little girl had a prodigious memory. She could recite lines from Pushkin, identify the concertos of Tchaikovsky. And when music was played, Dominika would dance barefoot around the Oriental carpet in the living room, perfectly in time with the notes, twirling and jumping, perfectly in balance, her eyes gleaming, her hands flashing. Vassily and Nina looked at each other, and her mother asked Dominika how she had learned all this. “I follow the colors,” said the little girl.

“What do you mean, ‘the colors’?” asked her mother. Dominika gravely explained that when the music played, or when her father read aloud to her, colors would fill the room. Different colors, some bright, some dark, sometimes they “jumped in the air” and all Dominika had to do was follow them. It was how she could remember so much. When she danced, she leapt over bars of bright blue, followed shimmering spots of red on the floor. The parents looked at each other again.

“I like red and blue and purple,” said Dominika. “When Batushka reads, or when Mamulya plays, they are beautiful.”

“And when Mama is cross with you?” asked Vassily.

“Yellow, I don’t like the yellow,” said the little girl, turning the pages of a book. “And the black cloud. I do not like that.”

Vassily asked a colleague from the Faculty of Psychology about the colors. “I have read about a similar condition,” said the colleague. “Sensing letters as colors. It’s quite interesting. Why don’t you bring her by one afternoon?”

Vassily waited in his office while his professor friend sat with Dominika in a nearby classroom. One hour stretched to three. They came back, little Dominika happy and distracted, the professor pensive. “What?” asked Vassily, looking sideways at his daughter.

“I could sit with her for days,” said the professor, packing his pipe. “Your little girl shows the attributes of a synesthete. Someone who perceives sounds, or letters, or numbers as colors. Fascinating.” Vassily looked at Dominika again. She was now happily coloring at her father’s desk.

“My God,” said Vassily. “Is it an illness, is it insanity?”

“Illness, burden, curse, who can say?” He stuffed his pipe. “On the other hand, Vasya, perhaps she is odarennyi, gifted.” Vassily, the brilliant man of letters, was at a loss. “There’s something else,” said the professor, looking over at Dominika, her head bent over her drawing. “Her synesthesia appears to extend to human reactions. Not only words or sounds, she also sees emotional content as colors. She spoke to me about what sounds like halos of color around people’s heads and shoulders.” Vassily stared at his friend. “Perhaps she will develop into something of a savant in matters of human intentions.

“Of course, there is the prodigious memory. She flawlessly repeated twenty-five digits back to me several times. It is not uncommon in these cases,” continued the professor. “But you already have seen that.” Vassily nodded. “And another thing, not so common. Your little girl is prone to buistvo, define it as you like, temper, mischief, a short fuse. She swept my papers to the floor when she could not solve a puzzle. Something she will have to control later in life, I would imagine.”

“Bozhe,” said Vassily, and hurried home to tell his wife.

“This comes from your family,” said Vassily dryly to Nina, as red-faced Dominika would glower when the music was turned off, gravely displeased, eyes ablaze. If she was this way at age five, what would she be like later on?

When at the age of ten Dominika auditioned at the Moscow State Academy of Choreography at second Frunzenskaya 5 she impressed the admissions panel. She had no technique, no formal discipline, but even at that young age they saw in her the intensity, the natural skill, the instincts of a great dancer. They had asked her why she wanted to dance, and had laughed at her answer, “Because I can see the music,” and the room grew still as her already strikingly beautiful face darkened and she regarded the panel through narrowed eyes as if contemplating doing them all physical harm.

Dominika made her saucy, triumphant way through the academy, the great feeder school for the Bolshoi. She flourished despite the rigors of the classical Vaganova method. She had by then become accustomed to living with the colors. Her ability to see them, whether while listening to music, or dancing, or simply talking to people, now felt more refined, somehow more under her control. And she began deciphering the colors, associating them with moods and emotions. It was not a burden. To her it was simply something she lived with.

Dominika continued to excel, but not only in dancing. She achieved highest marks in the academy’s middle and upper schools, where her ability to remember everything she had been taught served her well. This was something new, something different. Dominika listened to the political lectures, the ideological lessons, the history of communism, the rise and fall of the socialist state, the history of Soviet ballet. Of course, there had been excesses, and there had been corrections. And now modern Russia would continue to grow, a sum greater than its parts. Her young mind made the leap, accepted the cant.

By age eighteen, Dominika was promoted to the first student troupe at school and led her study class in political achievement. Each night she would return home to tell her secretly horrified father what she had learned. He tried to counterbalance her growing enthusiasms with the lessons of literature and history. But Dominika was in the full flight of her adolescence, in the grip of her young career. If she sensed the nature of his desperate message, if she read the colors above his head, she gave no sign. Vassily could not be more clear. He dared not speak out openly against the system.

Of course, Nina was pleased that her daughter was progressing so rapidly in the junior ballet company. It was fine, a secure future was assured. But she too watched in dismay as her little girl became a model Modern Russian Woman, an ultranationalist, a tall, chestnut-haired beauty who walked with the elegance of a ballerina, and who behaved like the apparatchiki of the old days.

Dominika lay on the carpet in the living room, her mother combing her dark hair softly, rhythmically, with the long-handled brush that belonged to her great-grandmother. The tortoiseshell brush with gently curved handle that, along with a framed photograph and a silver samovar, was the only family belonging rescued from the elegant house in pre-Bolshevik Petersburg. The hog’s-hair bristles made a quiet stirring sound, crimson in the air. Her hair was radiant. Dominika, stretching after a long day of ballet, interrupted her father’s soft-spoken narrative by relating what she had heard at school. “Father, do you realize that outside influences are threatening the country? Are you aware of the growing number of dissidents advocating chaos? Have you read V. V. Putin’s article concerning Zionists working against the state?”

With a dull ache, the parents looked down at their daughter. Gospodi pomiluj! God forbid! The state. V. V. Putin. Dissidents. On the floor, Dominika stretched deeply, her long legs and lithe figure already Their instrument, her good mind slowly being brought into Their service. Nina looked at Vassily. She wanted to tell her daughter the truth, to warn her about the pitfalls of the system that had killed her career, of a system that had forced Vassily to blank his exceptional mind and stay silent for his entire life. Vassily shook his head. “Not now, not ever,” he said.

At twenty, Dominika was selected prima ballerina of the First Troupe. Her evaluations uniformly were outstanding and her athletic ability prompted her ballet master to compare her to “a young Galina Ulanova” the prima ballerina assoluta of the Bolshoi after the war. Now, when she danced, the colors she saw no longer were elemental shapes and hues, but sophisticated waves of variegated lights, rolling and pulsing and carrying her aloft. The sepia tones surrounding her dancing partners let her more perfectly combine with them. She was hot to the touch, precise, strong in back and leg, exquisite and tall on her toes. The ballet master insisted it was time she began preparing for the yearly audition to join the Bolshoi troupe.

As she grew stronger and more supple, there was something else coming alive within Dominika’s body, an extension of the rigors of dance, an awareness of her own body. It was not lasciviousness, for she carried her sexuality within her. It was a private awakening, and she tested her corporeal boundaries without a thought of shame. As far as she could determine, neither of her parents was this way, so perhaps a long-forgotten relative had been a libertine.

In her darkened bedroom, when her body called her, she explored her sensations, explored them as intently as she practiced at the barre, her breathing deep red behind her eyelids, and she shuddered as she discovered how she was wired. It was not a fetish, nor an addiction, but rather a secret self that grew more aware as she grew older. She enjoyed her secret self. It was not all nature-child innocence, however. She occasionally felt the need for something edgy, forbidden, and she closed her eyes tight, on a night of a colossal thunderstorm outside her window, amazed at herself, as she held the swan-necked handle of Prababushka’s brush in her long fingers, timing the lightning flashes to match her own rhythms. Wanting more and more, amazed still, she trailed the humid point lower and held her breath and felt the even sweeter surge of the handle suddenly pinning her like a beetle in a display case. Thank God she had now taken to combing her own hair in the evenings after ballet school.

Though she had casual friends, Dominika was not friendly with her classmates. For all that, she was class leader, concerned and consumed with nothing but the troupe’s progress, its record of excellence, the triumphs in competitions with other schools, especially those from Saint Petersburg, the spiritual center of Russian ballet of the imperial style. Dominika lectured her weary fellow dancers about the Moscow School’s purity, its essential Russian nature. They all called her klikusha, the demoniac, behind her back, the New Russian Woman, the gladiator, the star, the devoted, the true believer. Oh, shut up, they thought.

At twenty-two, Sonya Moroyeva probably had one final year to move up from the academy to the Bolshoi, but with Egorova in the running that year, her chances were not good. She had been dancing all her life, was the daughter of a full member of the Duma, and was at the core a spoiled and vain young woman. She was, frankly, desperate. She had been recklessly sleeping with a boy in the troupe, blond, lynx-eyed Konstantin, an incredibly risky activity that if discovered by the instructors would have guaranteed their instant dismissal from the school. But after fifteen years in the academy she knew the quiet times, and when the sauna room was deserted, and how long they had for their sweaty sessions, with her supple legs bent over her head, and she whispered in Konstantin’s ear for a week, and told him she loved him, and ground her hips up at him, licking the sweat from his face, and begged him to save her career, her life.

Experienced ballet students know as much about anatomy and joints and injuries as a doctor. Konstantin, rabbit-mad in his gluttony for Sonya’s pizda, waited until he was paired with Dominika. Practicing a pas de deux on a crowded floor, he stepped hard on her heel when she was en pointe, forcing her foot forward, and the colors bled and her world went swirling black, and she buckled to searing pain and total collapse. They carried her to the infirmary, her classmates frozen and pale along the barre, Sonya palest of all. Dominika had looked at her then, had seen her guilty expression, the gray miasma swirling unseen around her head, and knew. On the infirmary table her foot was turning black and eggplant-purple, the worst, and the pain radiated up her leg. The doctor muttered, “Lisfranc fracture of the midfoot,” and after a series of orthopedic examinations and surgery, and a cast on her foot to the ankle, Dominika was dropped from the academy; her dancing career, her life for ten years, was over. It was that fast, that final. All the honeyed phrases about her being the next Ulanova evaporated. The masters, the coaches, the trainers wouldn’t look at her.

In young adulthood she had learned to cope with the buistvo, the mounting rage, but now she let it grow, tasted it in her throat. She hysterically considered denouncing Konstantin and Sonya for having sabotaged her. They too would be expelled if their assignation was revealed, but in the end she knew she could not. She was still numbly contemplating her future when the call came from her mother.

Her father had suffered a massive stroke and had died on the way to Kremlyovka Clinic in Kuntsevo, reserved for citizens of privilege and wealth. He had been the most important person in her life, her guide, her protector, and now he was gone. She would have held his hand to her cheek, told him of her release from the ballet academy, of the treachery of her classmates. She would have asked him for advice, for him to tell her what she should do. She could not know it, but Vassily would have whispered to his idealistic daughter that one may fall in love with the State, but the State does not reciprocate, ever.

Two days later, Dominika sat in the formal parlor of their apartment, her right foot extended in the cast, her eyes dry, her elegant neck and head held high. Her mother sat beside her, in black, quiet and calm. The house was full of guests, scores of people who came to pay their respects, academics, artists, government officials, and politicians. The sound of their voices filled the air with elemental shades of green, the color she associated with sorrow and grief, and which seemed to push the air out of the room. Dominika struggled to breathe. There was food from the kitchen, traditional blini with red caviar, smoked sturgeon and trout. On the sideboard, carafes of mineral water, a steaming silver samovar, fruit juice, whiskey, and iced vodka.

Then, looming in front of the couch was Uncle Vanya, leaning over her mother, mouthing words of condolence. The brothers had never been close, their personalities and temperaments nearly polar opposites. Dominika was not sure what he did, but one hardly uttered the letters KGB or SVR. Then he came close, sitting beside her, his beefy features inches from her face, intruding on her grief. She saw him appraise her, dressed in black, hair back, in mourning. Her throat constricted in the familiar way, and her mother reached over to squeeze her hand. Control yourself.

“Dominika, my deepest condolences,” said Vanya. “I know how close you were to your father.”

He reached out and gave her a paternal embrace, brushing his cheek against hers. His cologne (Houbigant from Paris) was lavender-scented and strong. “Let me also say that I regret your injury, how it affects your career.” He nodded at her cast. “I know what a good student you had become, both with the dancing and in school as well. Your father was always very proud of you.” He sat back in the couch as another family friend passed by, shaking hands.

Up till now, Dominika had only looked at Vanya, she had not spoken. “What are your plans now?” he asked. “Perhaps the university?”

Dominika shrugged. “I am not sure what comes next. Dancing was my life, I have to find something else.” She felt him staring at her.

He smoothed his tie and stood, looking down at her. “Dominushka, I have a favor to ask. I need your assistance.” Dominika looked up at him, startled. Uncle Vanya shrugged. “It’s not so mysterious. I need you to do something for me, quite unofficial, a small little thing, but important.”

“For the Secret Service?” Dominika asked, astonished.

Vanya put a finger to his lips. He led her limping to the side of the living room. The day of her father’s funeral. He had chosen this time purposely, hadn’t he? They always did.

“I need your talent, dorogaya moya, my dear, and your beauty,” Uncle Vanya had said. “Someone I can trust, someone with your well-known discretion.” He moved closer, and Dominika felt the flattery wrapped in his body heat.

“It is a simple task, almost a game, to meet a man, to get to know him. I can provide the details later.” Zmeya, serpent.

“Will you agree to help your old uncle?” Vanya asked, his hands on her shoulders. A serpent, flicking its tongue, tasting the air. For him to ask her now was monstrous, typical, beastly. Dominika could feel her heartbeat in her throbbing foot.

A halo of yellow bloomed behind Vanya’s head as if he were a Byzantine saint. Then her breath came back, and with it a hollow calm. Precisely because he expected her to refuse, Dominika accepted. She looked back evenly, seeing the narrowing of his eyes, seeing him calculate. She saw him searching her face, but she gave him nothing, and his face had reacted to that.

“Excellent,” said Vanya. “You know that your father would be extremely proud. There was no bigger patriot than your father. And he raised his daughter to be a patriot too. A Russian patriot.”

Continue speaking of my father and I shall lean forward and bite your lower lip off, she thought. Instead, Dominika gave him a smile that only recently she had come to recognize had an effect on people. “Now that my ballet career is over,” she said, “I may as well do secret chores for you.” Vanya’s face moved, then he recovered. He took his hands from her shoulders.

“Come to see me next week,” he said, looking down at her cast. “If you are able. I will send a car for you.” Vanya buttoned his light woolen suit. He took her hand in his big paw, his face inches from hers. “Come give your uncle a proper good-bye.” Dominika put her hands on his shoulders and pecked him lightly on either cheek, looking for a moment at his wet liver lips. Lavender scent and a yellow halo.

He whispered in her ear. “I do not ask you to help me for nothing in return,” he said. “I believe I can intervene in the matter of this apartment.” Dominika pulled back. “Your mother would not lose it, even after your father’s death. It would be a great comfort to her.” Vanya let go of her hand, straightened, and walked out of the room. Astonished, she watched him close the door behind him. A first taste of the yoke, thought Dominika.

On the street, Vanya motioned his driver to get going and settled into the backseat of his Mercedes. There, he thought with a sigh, I’ve paid my respects. Brother Vassily was a fuzzy-headed academic, living in the past. And that sister-in-law. She’s already lost her mind, a sumashedshij, a lunatic. But that niece—she’s a real Greek statue—is perfect for this matter, I’m glad I thought of her. Now that she’s ruined her foot she has no options. She can learn other things. That apartment would sell for millions, Vanya thought. Yes, after all, this is family and it’s the least I can do.

That evening after the guests had left she sat with her mother in the darkened living room. Bach was playing softly, accompanied by the nearly empty samovar that sighed occasionally with the last of its steam. Dominika didn’t need lights in the room. Great waves of deep red pulsed past her from the music. Holding both her hands in her lap, Nina looked at her daughter and knew she was “looking at the colors.” She squeezed Dominika’s hands to get her to concentrate, and began talking in a low, slow voice. She whispered to her, leaning close to her daughter, and spoke about her father and his life. She spoke about ballet school and Russia and what had happened to her. And then Nina spoke of darker things, of promise and betrayal and revenge. Two figures in a darkened room filled with vermilion Bach, two klikushy in a forest glen, planning mayhem.

Two days later, Dominika returned to the academy, ostensibly to talk with the doctors and to collect her belongings. She was already an outsider, it was as if they were waiting for her to leave. She lingered unobtrusively, sitting in a chair near the exit, watching Sonya Moroyeva and Konstantin dancing, Sonya’s right leg impossibly high, impossibly straight en penché, Konstantin turning her in a slow promenade. His eyes were on the slash of black leotard stretched across her crotch. At the evening break, with shadows lengthening in the nearly empty practice hall, Dominika watched Sonya and Konstantin slip down the hall toward the sauna room. There had been rumors about the two, of course, but now Dominika knew. She waited and watched the light on the practice hall’s parquet floor fade, feeling the familiar tightening, controlling it, bringing the ice.

The building had grown silent, the various offices dark. The ballet master and two matrons were still in their offices farther down; dim lights shone at the far end of the otherwise darkened hallway. Dominika hobbled silently to the door of the anteroom of the large wood-paneled sauna used by students and pushed through it, silently walked to the door of the steam chamber and peered through the smoked-glass port in the cedar door. They were both naked on the wooden slats of the top bench, barely illuminated by the single bulb in the ceiling. Konstantin had just raised his face from between Sonya’s wide-spread legs and was poised over her like a great beast. Sonya clasped her hands behind Konstantin’s neck and swung her legs over his shoulders. Through the glass, Dominika saw the calluses on the pads of Sonya’s feet and the splay of battered ballerina toes.

Her mouth was open and her head was back on the bench, but the heavy door of the sauna muffled Sonya’s moans. Dominika stepped back and willed the ice to take over the rage. A twist of the steam dial and a broomstick through the outer door handles would poach them both in twenty minutes. No. Something elegant, undetectable, poisonous, final. The two had ended Dominika’s career, now it was time to end theirs, but without a trace, without a hint of revenge.

Dominika propped open the hallway door to the anteroom and turned on the overhead light, which shone into the darkened corridor. In the long hallway she swung one of the exterior windows open. The cool night air rushed in and Dominika followed the cold air, pinpricks of ice-blue light like fireflies swirling down the hallway toward the matrons’ offices. She slipped into a darkened office two doors down and leaned against the wall and listened.

In three minutes the matron—which one was it? Dominika wondered—felt the cold air and went down the hallway to investigate. The light in the sauna anteroom and the open door opposite the window had her muttering to herself. It sounded like Madame Butyrskaya, the most strict, the most ferocious of the academy watchdogs. Dominika waited in the silence, counting the seconds, then heard the hiss of the sauna door and then Madame’s bellows and what sounded like a strangled sob. Sounds of feet on the linoleum and continued bellowing and now mewling, whimpering, receded down the hallway. Not even her daddy in the Duma could save her, she thought.

Dominika put her hand up in front of her face in the nearly dark office. It was steady and luminous and she felt air coursing back into her lungs, as if someone had opened the valve to an oxygen bottle, and she realized, with a little huff of surprise, that she felt no emotion over having destroyed those two, and she reveled in the elegance and simplicity of what she had done, and then thought about her father and was a little ashamed.

The cast came off her foot. SVR planners intended to dangle Dominika in front of Ustinov at the television station. They wanted him to invite her to spend time with him. They didn’t tell her to sleep with him, it wasn’t necessary, they had said, but she knew it was implied. Their deceit lay on the table. She surprised herself by not caring about that. The briefers looked at her cautiously, unsettled by her level gaze and slight smile, not sure what they had on their hands.

All right, all right, they said, they needed to know more about his business, his international travel schedule, his contacts. They said he was being investigated for fraud and misappropriation of State funds. The colors of their words were pale, washed out, as if they were not fully formed. Yes, what they needed was clear, she said, she could do it. The men in the room looked at one another and back to her, and she read them like a hymnal. This was an exceedingly interesting discovery, this SVR, this Russian Secret Service, she thought. Gusi, a gaggle of geese.

As she read the reports, themselves a riot of color, she resolved to silence the smug counterintelligence planners who sat looking at her through smoke-filled eyes, to wipe the smile off the face of her dear Uncle Vanya. She remembered the lavender smell of him. His poor little niece, the broken ballerina, his dead brother’s beautiful daughter. Care to help me in a delicate matter? Perhaps we can keep your mother in the apartment after all. Ochen horosho. Very good.

Now the candlelight flickered and the crystal clinked, and as Ustinov shoveled food into his mouth, Dominika felt an even, slow contempt for him that infused her with an icy detachment. She was prepared to do whatever was necessary to complete the assignment, and she knew precisely what to do and how to do it.

So she did. Dominika was captivating at dinner. Educated, attentive, distracting. She trailed a fingertip across the hollow of her throat, watching the parabolas of orange around his shoulders. Interesting, thought Dominika, the yellow of deceit mixed with the red of passion. Zhivotnoe. Animal.

He could barely sit still through dinner—she saw him gulping his champagne with the thirst that comes from building lust. His shirt studs vibrated. At the end of dinner, he told her he had a bottle of three-hundred-year-old cognac in his apartment, better than anything the restaurant could offer. Would she come home with him? Dominika looked at him and conspiratorially leaned forward. Her breasts swelled together in the candlelight. “I’ve never tried cognac,” she said. Ustinov could feel his heartbeat in his mouth.