“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 grapefruit 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.
When Nate called Agnes to tell her he’d be in Los Angeles for the day, and to invite her to lunch, she told him to stop talking nonsense. She would pick him up at the airport, she would give him lunch at her house, where he would stay the night, and she would bring him back to the airport the next morning in time for his onward flight. That was the plan, no arguments. Ever the pro, she didn’t ask where he was going or why.