Since she had been gifted a luxurious dacha by her new patron Vladimir—“Vova” was one diminutive of his name, a familiarity reserved for mothers, grandmothers, and mistresses—Dominika had followed Gorelikov’s suggestion to fly down for the weekend to see the dacha, and acknowledge the honor. The president earlier had told her about the gala event there in late fall, a time of glorious weather on the southern coast. “Friends and colleagues will gather there in early November for the Unity Day holiday on the fourth,” Putin had said. Unity Day was a traditional holiday reinstated in 2005, originally commemorating the Russian victory in 1612 over Polish invaders. An extra holiday and a few wreaths placed on the monuments kept the popular approval ratings up, and was cause for a two-day bacchanal at Putin’s Palace. “I expect you to come and enjoy the scenery,” said Putin, with a half smile first perfected in AD 41 by Caligula.
“Go down there now, and get the lay of the land,” Gorelikov had added confidentially, rubbing his hands, blue halo pulsing. “It will impress the jealous ones that he gave you a dacha. They’ll all assume the obvious, and will be afraid of you.” He’s grooming me to be Director, thought Dominika. I wonder when he will become my svodnik, my pimp.
The dacha—her dacha—was a modern-stark three-story cement villa decorated in sleek Scandinavian style, with swoopy chairs in white leather and stainless steel. The main floor consisted of a foyer, a living room with sliding glass doors that led to the balcony looking out over the cliff face and the sea, and a modern galley kitchen in white with stainless-steel highlights. The top floor was one broad master bedroom with a two-acre bed and its own picture window and balcony, while the bottom floor had two additional bedrooms and a small cedar-lined banya, a Russian steam room. Looking out over the balcony railing, Dominika could see a stony goat path beside the villa that hugged the cliff face and wound its way down to a boulder-strewn beach seventy meters below. The villa was perched on the side of the incline, and the balconies virtually soared over the cliff.
Bozhe, God, this was beautiful. Dominika opened all the sliding doors to smell the sea air and the fragrant pines, took off her shoes, opened cupboard doors, bounced on the bed, and took off her jacket and skirt and lay in her underwear on a chaise lounge on the upper balcony in the warm October sun. She found a bottle of Georgian champagne in the small refrigerator and poured herself a glass, and sat outside again looking at the distant sea and listening to the cicadas buzzing in the trees. There were no other houses visible, no man-made sounds at all. In Moscow it was almost freezing, and some frost dusted the rooftops. Here it was still summer.
This was luxury, this was privilege, this was a universe away from the pall of Moscow. The sea breeze tossed the gauzy white curtains as Dominika stepped into the gray-tiled walk-in shower, and she sniffed at the rose-scented soap, and let the hot water loosen her muscles, and she turned, trying to imagine Nate standing close, soaping her back, but Blokhin was there instead, grinning like Shaitan, water coursing off his face, his paws bloody, and Dominika shook the image away, suddenly cold despite the hot water, and closed her eyes.
She bitterly realized that this modern villa soaring above the sea was lipovyy, literally a lime blossom, but figuratively it meant something false, a fake, a forgery. Her grandmother from Saint Petersburg used to whisper to her stories from the bibliya, the Book, about temptation. This dacha was nothing more than Satan’s plate of silver in the desert that tempted Saint Anthony. Vladimir Putin would trade this house for her loyalty, the Directorship of the SVR for her conscience, and her induction as a silovik for her soul. She stood dripping wet in the shower, shivering. The villa now was gray and ugly, the sunlight harsh and revealing, the cicadas a painful buzzing in her ears. She had come this weekend out of curiosity, to see her dacha, to acknowledge Putin’s gift, to get away from the crenellated walls of the Kremlin. Now she knew there would be no rest in this cement lockbox. She would have to suffer a savorless night and return to Moscow tomorrow on the shuttle flight.
Dressed in a light sweaterdress and wearing flats, Dominika walked at dusk along the paved path toward the massive main house—through the trees she saw its lights ablaze on every floor; the staff would be preparing for the upcoming Unity Day gala. As she walked in the failing light, she saw the cherry glow of a cigarette in the woods, then another on the other side. The grounds were swarming with security. A bruiser sat in a cart where the path crossed another. He watched her walk past him without nodding or acknowledging her.
Putin’s personal bodyguard belonged to the SBP, the Presidential Security Service, which was an autonomous element of the FSO, Federalnaya Sluzhba Okhrany, the Federal Protective Service, a reorganized agency loyal only to Vladimir Putin and tasked exclusively with the protection of the Russian Federation, which meant anything the siloviki wanted it to mean. Dominika had heard the rumors about the president’s outwardly blasé but secret fear of assassination; about the plastic containers of prepared meals, sealed and signed by food tasters; and about the most-trusted men of his protective detail, uncouth new millionaires who had been given blocks of shares in the State-run petroleum, manufacturing, and railroad conglomerates as a reward for their loyalty. She wondered if the towering irony was lost on Vladimir Putin that the leader of a modern nation, with nuclear weapons and a space program, feared political murder as the tsars before him feared the silken strangler’s cord. Even Josef Stalin felt it. He was famously quoted as saying, “Do you remember the Tsar? Well, I’m like a tsar.”
The meticulously manicured inner courtyard of the palace was massive. A white marble fountain bubbled in the center, and ropes of white lights hung from poles and were strung along the second-floor windows of the mansion. Dominika was directed to a small private dining room where she was served in silence by a waitress with downcast eyes. The selection of dishes went on for pages, with ingredients that were not to be found in all of Russia, not even in the five-star restaurants of Moscow or Saint Petersburg. She chose a tuna carpaccio with grapefruit and fennel like she’d had in Rome, just to see what they would do with it. The tuna, sliced paper-thin, came on a large chilled plate dusted with fennel fronds and drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. It was delicious.
Dominika felt slightly ridiculous sitting alone in a little dining room, but the mansion and the entire compound—including outdoor amphitheater, spa club, screening room, indoor and outdoor pools, library, and massive barbecue deck—was deserted, the lull before the president and scores of guests arrived in November. She was resigned to walk back to her dacha through the dark, watched by eyes in the woods, and go to bed. She would think about Nate, as she always did at night, and wish he were there with her lying on the balcony chaise lounge, working on getting a moon burn. She got up from the table and walked down the hall toward the exit when she heard a voice behind her calling in accented Russian.
“Excuse me, Miss, but do you have the time?” A young man in his twenties with dark hair and blue eyes was standing in an open door. He wore a work shirt and jeans, was muscular but thin, with strong forearms holding up either side of the door frame. His face was ruddy and unshaven, and his mouth was more like a woman’s mouth, with full lips.
“You are wearing a watch on your left wrist,” said Dominika, intuitively replying in English. “An instrument often put to use determining what time it is.” This elicited a thousand-watt smile from the young man, which was, Dominika had to admit, somewhat charming.
“You speak English, good, my Russian’s terrible,” he said, smiling. “I was asking if you had the time . . . to join us for a drink.” Another incandescent smile, naughty, cherubic. “There’s no one around this place and we’ve been here for two weeks.” Intrigued, Dominika walked back toward him and peeked into the door. It was a cafeteria, a dining room for staff. Two other young men and two women were the only ones in the room sitting at a table littered with plates and glasses. Four empty wine bottles were clustered together. They were all smoking and an overflowing ashtray
was in the center of the table. The people around the table smiled—they were from Poland—and the young man held out a chair and poured her a glass of wine. Dominika introduced herself as a visiting event organizer, something vague.
The charming young man was Andreas. He was the leader of the team from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts Department of Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art. He introduced his colleagues, all art-restoration experts, attractive, attentive. Everyone spoke at once, all smart, new generation Poles who knew English well (in the generation since the Soviets withdrew, East European schoolchildren no longer willingly studied Russian). The academy in Warsaw had been hired by Rosimushchestvo, the Federal Agency for State Property Management, to do emergency restoration work in the mansion on a large number of ceiling and wall murals. Pipes in the walls had leaked or burst even as the palace was being completed, requiring restoration on a new building, which Dominika silently thought was a metaphor for the Russian Federation—broken before completed.
The Poles had been working in the empty palace overseen by scowling security thugs and a cavillous Russian foreman, and had cabin fever. They were apparently unconcerned about speaking freely.
“The murals are ghastly,” giggled Anka, a blonde.
“A Sardinian artist painted them when the place was built,” said Stefan, with a serious face. “Russians are the only ones who would think they were elegant.” Anka shushed him with a slap on the arm. Dominika smiled to show she was not offended.
“It turns out that Russian plumbers connect pipes as well as Sardinians paint,” said Andreas. “They’ve had burst water pipes everywhere, a lot of panels were damaged, and we’re here to repair the plaster and restore the paintings.” Dominika sipped her wine, interested.
Sitting at the table with these fresh-faced Poles, their country once a satellite state but now eagerly facing the challenges of a future where many things were possible, Dominika thought of her mother in her tiny State-provided Moscow apartment with the sooty heat-curdled wallpaper over the radiators that were always lukewarm, never hot, and her late father’s university photo on the mantelpiece alongside the photo of her mother standing in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, serenely receiving applause, her violin under her arm, and the little wooden box on the outside windowsill to keep food colder than any freezer, and the tiny table with an opened tin of sardinka, sardines in oil flecked with blood, a day-old heel of black bread spread with white lard instead of butter. This is what the munificence of Vladimir Putin had given the people of Russia, while water cascaded down the frescoes of his Black Sea palace.
“How much longer will you be here?” she asked. “They’re getting ready for a big gathering in November.” The Poles rolled their eyes.
“We know. That smelly foreman is always telling us to work faster,” said Stefan. “But there’s too much damage. We’ll probably need more people to come from Warsaw. The Russians don’t care, and they pay what we ask. We’ve heard this is the president’s house.”
“It’s best not to speculate,” said Dominika, with a wink. The Poles all laughed. It was a merry party. A glass of wine later, Andreas asked Dominika if she would like to see some of the murals they were working on. They walked up a magnificent double spiral staircase into a series of long corridors with vaulted painted ceilings. Every light seemed to be on, but the place was deserted. Where was security? Aluminum scaffolding ran along one water-stained wall. Plastic sheets were taped everywhere. Andreas stood close to one panel, his long fingers tracing a line, his face intent.
“This is just mechanical restoration, a matter of renewing new pigment that has been damaged. It is nothing like restoring an altar screen painted by Giotto in 1305. Nothing.” Dominika saw the fire in his eyes. He turned and caught her looking at him, and colored slightly.
“You should see how special it can be. Following the master’s brushstrokes, cleaning the dirt and varnish of the ages, seeing the blue he mixed with his own hand come back to the light, it’s magical.” He bashfully avoided looking at her.
They walked from one grand room to the next, gold leaf glimmering in the bright light, chandeliers hanging heavy, one after the other, along the endless length of the rooms. Exquisite ceramic bowls filled glass-fronted armoires and silk drapes were tied back with satin ropes. Farther down the corridor, Andreas put his hand lightly on Dominika’s shoulder, cocked his head, and opened a massive double door. They entered an enormous bedroom with a gilded ceiling, intricate parquet floors, and a massive canopy bed draped with brocaded curtains. Antique furniture filled the room, the boudoir of the Sun King.
“We had to repair the medallions on the ceiling,” Andreas said, looking up. “This is the president’s bedroom; what do you think?”
“It’s grand, isn’t it?” said Dominika, noncommittally. There was a possibility that these rooms were monitored somehow. Andreas bent toward her and whispered in her ear.
“I think it’s obscene,” he said. “No one should live like this, not with how people in your country struggle.” He straightened, looked at her, and smiled. “But I’m just an art technician, what do I know?”
An hour later, Andreas’s slim body glowed in the moonlight slanting through the sliding doors of her dacha. Dominika lay on top of him, her back bathed in sweat, her toes cramping, and her hair pointing in all directions. “For an art technician, you know quite a lot,” she said.
It had come in a rush, beyond her control, no, she had not wanted to control it. Andreas had walked her back to the dacha, and had accepted a glass of champagne. Dominika was in a state; the opulence of Putin’s Palace had sickened her, and all the gold leaf had stuck in her throat. Her life was chaos. She was surrounded by Gorelikov’s poisonous charm, and by Putin’s covetousness, and by the unrelenting pressure of being a spy, and by Benford’s misanthropy, and by the tear in her heart over Bratok, and by the uncertain ache for Nate and, Chyort, goddamn it, by being alone, always alone, beset with requirements and assignments, each one more critical, or more urgent, or more deadly than the last. The Kremlin was still the hoggish preserve of larcenous usurpers who with each year, with each stolen ruble, doomed her Russia to future deprivations as vast as the Siberian tundra. These hogs, and this Hog Palace. They belonged in a skotoboynya, an abattoir.
Her head swam as she had walked up to Andreas, put her hand behind his neck, and mashed her mouth on his—there was no thought of being a Sparrow, and no thought about her genuine love for Nate—and she didn’t care what Andreas thought, and she paid no heed to the conventions, she just wanted passion, and juddering haunches, and the taste and smell of him, and she locked her heels behind his back and kissed him until the pipes broke and melted the murals and set her legs to shaking. Later she hoped she hadn’t bitten his lower lip too badly.
Andreas didn’t know who she was, or what exactly had happened, but the jungle survival instinct in his forebrain told him he probably shouldn’t spend the night. Dominika didn’t care when he tiptoed out. What Bratok Gable had once called “to horizontalize” was what she had needed. Thinking about Gable reminded her of how much she missed him.
Then thinking about Bratok made her think of the faceless mole in Washington who, if Benford didn’t catch him, would soon be reading her name on a list of CIA’s Russian clandestine assets, and the FSB arrest teams in their black Skoda vans would fan out through Moscow, and men with faces like canines would ring doorbells and pull suspects down the stairwells and into the vans for the drive to Lefortovo, where their guilt would soon be established. Dominika wondered if she shouldn’t start sleeping in her clothes so she wouldn’t be in a nightgown when they dragged her into the street.
TUNA CARPACCIO
Chill a ten-inch plate. Slice raw Bluefin tuna very thinly, then pound paper-thin under a layer of plastic wrap, and layer plate with slices. Keep chilled. Slice fennel bulb paper-thin, and mix with grapefruit supremes and salt. Finely grate ginger. Sprinkle ginger on tuna slices, then heap fennel and gra
pefruit in the center of the plate, and sprinkle chopped shallots and chopped fennel fronds on top. Drizzle with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and sprinkle with sea salt. Serve immediately.
24
Feel Mint for You
Nate’s flight to Hong Kong required an overnight stay in Los Angeles. Since the advent of commercial air, all US government employees assigned overseas were required by regulation to “fly American” to better support domestic airline companies, unfortunately at the cost of US taxpayers. This invariably resulted in not only more expensive tickets, but also inconvenient schedules, routes, and connections. But the rule was ironclad. Nate’s morning flight from Washington, DC, would arrive in Los Angeles before noon, and he would have the entire day rattling around the city. Then he thought of Agnes Krawcyk, and the white streak in her hair.
Since the mission to Sevastopol, they had stayed in touch via email and two or three uncomfortable phone calls. Agnes had wanted to visit Nate in Washington, but ops meetings with Dominika were imminent, so Nate put her off. They had spoken more frequently recently, and they’d made vague plans to see each other. Then the Hong Kong clambake came up.
Agnes had settled in coastal Palos Verdes south of Los Angeles, a semirural suburb of undulating hills and craggy oceanside bluffs covered with eucalyptus, cinnamon, and pepper trees, and populated by artists, aging flower children from the sixties, and one thousand feral India Blue peacocks. She lived in a comfortable two-bedroom Craftsman-style house, with fieldstone columns supporting a front porch and flowerpots in the windows. With art-restoration experience from her native Poland, Agnes had been hired by the Getty Museum in Brentwood as a conservator—her specialty was sixteenth-century Italian altar panels.
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