The thrumming of the ferryboat engines moderated, then the deck shook as the engines were put full astern to ease the nose of the ferry into the exit ramp at St. George Terminal on Staten Island. Time to go, time to turn on, time to go to work. Dominika slung her bag over her shoulder, and nodded vaguely to the young man. Moving quickly, she followed the signs to the adjacent rail platform to board the southbound train. Quick checks to either side did not pick up the loitering passenger, or the too-long look from the young woman on the sidewalk, or the ticket clerk diving for the phone. No coverage, she thought, as she stepped into a train car. As the doors closed, Dominika saw with annoyance that the young man had boarded the next car, and was staring at her through the window of the connecting door. She didn’t have time for this: a Romeo following her, thinking he might get lucky with a hot tourist from France.
The train rattled and swayed and stopped frequently at suburban stations. A different world was unraveling in front of Dominika’s eyes on each side of the tracks. Commercial areas had petrol stations on every corner; there were supermarkets with tomatoes stacked on display in front, and she counted restaurant after restaurant—most of them claiming they made the best pizza in New York. Was this even New York City? The train clanked past working-class neighborhoods of tidy two-story houses, shingled, with lean-to greenhouses and tiny fenced yards, some of which had curious aboveground swimming pools hardly big enough to hold a person. On every roof was a gray satellite TV dish, all pointed up in the same direction. The houses were nothing like the luxurious dachas of the siloviki; these were not rich people, but these houses looked comfortable. The cars parked along the street were big and relatively new. If this was not wealth, it was at least prosperity on a wide scale. In Russia, they would say blagopoluchiye, bread buttered on both sides, well-being. Not many people, not even in Moscow, were living lives with such possessions, with such abundant food. Her countrymen struggled to survive, they despaired of improving their lives, they dared not think grand thoughts or speak the truth. They could not choose.
Dominika had memorized the strange names of the train stations: Grasmere, Old Town, Dongan Hills, Jefferson Avenue, Grant City. People bustled on and off as the train doors opened and closed—no observable surveillance behavior, nothing amiss. She could see the young man in the next car watching her through the glass. The next station was her waypoint, New Dorp, where she had to get off. She stepped out to the platform and quickly walked in the middle of a crowd of passengers up the steep exit staircase to street level and onto a broad boulevard with light traffic. On the opposite corner stood an Italian bakery owned by someone named Dominick. Perhaps I will have a bakery someday named Dominika’s, she thought. Idiot you don’t know how to bake. She went inside, assaulted by the heavy aroma of fresh bread, noting there were no lines at the counter, was no one screaming for service, no churlish salesperson cursing at customers. She bought something called a calzone, which looked like an oversized chebureki, a Russian meat pie. This calzone was baked golden brown with a fluted edge, and was served with a small cup of tomato sauce.
Dominika sat at one of a few tables by the window and checked the street. The persistent Romeo was loitering on the opposite sidewalk, smoking. An American gopnik, but he didn’t look as tough as the Moscow species. Bozhe, God, she didn’t need this distraction right now. The mixture of sausage, peppers, and onions inside the calzone was delectable and oozed out, and she wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. Izobiliye, she thought, abundance. This was an American neighborhood bakery, not a state store, one of hundreds in this borough alone. Enough. Get moving.
Dominika walked up New Dorp Lane, the sidewalks broad and clean, people in storefront offices working. A corner food market, the “Convenient Mart,” whatever that meant, had cases of bottled water stacked high on either side of the door. The young man was still following her and she knew she had to shake him before she neared the cemetery. The illegal might be observing her approach and it would be a disaster if she couldn’t get rid of him. As she was entering the store in an effort to shake him off, Dominika heard footsteps and the young man called “Hey, Mam’sell!” and she turned to see Romeo take a picture of her with his cell phone at a distance of five feet, then hold it up to admire. Besides her official academy photo, and the ID pics Gable had taken of her in Helsinki, and ops alias passport photos, there was no extant photograph of SVR Colonel Dominika Egorova, especially not on the mobile phone of some durak, some idiot, in front of the Convenient Mart, on New Dorp Lane, on Staten Island, forty minutes before a clandestine contact with an illegals officer. She’d be on this boy’s Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts in three minutes.
Dominika made an instant calculation. “Since you seem so intent on following me,” said Dominika to him, “perhaps you can show me a good bottle of American wine in this store.”
The young man stepped up to her, exuding his snail-trail charm. “Show you a bottle of wine, or share it with you?” he cooed.
Dominika let a slight smile move her lips. “It depends how good the wine is,” she said.
The young man led her into the little market, down a food aisle where Dominika stopped in amazement to count no fewer than ten different types of breakfast cereals on the shelf, an impossible riot of color. She followed Romeo to the back of the store, and stood in front of a wine cooler with sliding glass doors, while Romeo pointed out the reds, then the whites. They had everything, anything she wanted. Almaden, Gallo, Carlo Rossi, Blue Nun, Lancers. He said the Franzia box wines were underrated. If she didn’t like any of the wines, they had pints behind the counter: gin, vodka, rye. Dominika chose a white and let Romeo pay, then followed him across the avenue to sit on a step that was part of a cement bridge that carried ribbed steam-heat pipes over the commuter train tracks and was screened from the main road. The cement bridge shook when a train passed beneath. Blokhin would have driven the tactical spike through Romeo’s eye and into his brain, but Dominika took a sip from the bottle—the wine was sweet and metallic—then handed it back. She turned and hit him on the side of his neck with a hammer fist that started down by her left hip and snapped around with torque provided by her hips. The strike overloaded the nerves in his mastoid process, and his head slumped forward as he pitched unconscious face-first onto the concrete. If he wasn’t dead, he would be out for several hours, and Dominika would be long rid of Staten Island. She fished Romeo’s phone out of his back pocket and used a broken, pointed chunk of concrete as a Paleolithic tool to pulverize the modern appliance into plastic crumbles, none remotely recognizable as a phone. She scattered the smithereens onto the tracks under the bridge, took a final vile sip from the bottle, and threw that too, to smash on the rail bed among all the detritus piled along the tracks.
“Zvezdá, big shot,” said Dominika, looking down at Romeo, knowing it would have been easier and more secure to have killed him. She wondered if she would eventually get to that point: the Blokhin/Stalin default solution—kill and erase the obstacle, regardless of circumstances.