Dragonfly Girl

by Marti Leimbach

  A realization hits me all at once: The dress is my entrance ticket, my letter of recommendation. Wearing this, I can walk into any restaurant in the city and be treated with respect. And into any hotel. If I’m going to be arrested, I may as well have some fun first. So I stand up, put on my high heels, and set off across the street to the Ritz-Carlton.

  The Ritz-Carlton, Moscow, parks expensive cars out front to show how wealthy their guests are. It’s huge and glitzy and kind of terrifying. I stand at the entrance, about to go in, then change my mind. But it’s not because the hotel intimidates me. It’s because I see the Hotel National next door, an Art Nouveau building with more of an old-world feel, and there’s a family arriving at its doors. Two children and their parents, dressed as though they’ve been to the theater and laden with shopping bags. I head toward the Hotel National, arriving just in time to slip into line behind them. The parents don’t notice. The children regard me curiously, then glance away. I try to appear casual, as though I’m part of the family and I belong in a place like this.

  Nothing could be further from the truth, though I look the part.

  I pass through the lobby, which is enormous, with expensive furnishings, marble floors, and shrub-size flower arrangements. The family I’m following calls for an elevator, and I wait with them, then remain in the elevator when the family gets out on the third floor. I have a plan . . . sort of.

  I go searching for a cleaning cart outside an open hotel room door. This takes all of ten minutes to find. Standing in the lobby, I gather the courage to enter. Then, like a diver embarking on a complicated series of flips, I set my concentration and burst into the room, arriving in what I hope looks like a flurry of frustration. I see the cleaner right away. She’s my mother’s age. She even looks like her, but is wearing a stiff uniform and sturdy pumps.

  “My glasses?” I say, making circles with my thumbs and forefingers, holding them against my eyes.

  At first, the cleaner regards me suspiciously. I feel the dread of discovery. What if she knows that the person who occupies this room has already checked out? But she begins poking around, searching for the glasses I’ve pretended to lose, her low heels clicking against the parquet floor. Meanwhile, I stash my actual glasses behind the television and then make out that I’m hunting for them, too.

  In fact, I’m looking for the internet access code, which I find on a sheet of instructions on the desk. Then, a stroke of luck: a card key sleeve is sitting right there by the phone. Waving the card sleeve will likely get me past the doormen.

  But when I tuck the card sleeve into my palm, I discover it isn’t empty. I feel the stiff plastic of a card inside. This is like treasure. It must be that the occupants had been given an extra key or simply left it behind. I stuff it into my shopping bag just as the cleaner finds the “lost” glasses. She holds them up to me carefully and I make a show of looking genuinely relieved. “Spasibo!” I say. It’s what Dmitry always says by way of thanks.

  I retreat to the lobby and head down the hall, turning into a stairwell, where I have to pause, leaning against the wall, waiting for my heart to stop racing. I think of Stockholm and how, in those days, I’d been almost too afraid to enter a hotel in which I’d had an actual reservation. Now look at me.

  First things first. I need a shower. The hotel has a fitness center and a pool. All I have to do is wave my new card key at the attendant and I’m straight into the changing room. This room couldn’t be further from the cold shower in the abandoned laboratory. For one thing, the floor is heated. Also, the tiling is beautiful and might, in fact, be marble. Banks of mirrors and sinks occupy one side of the room, big shower stalls the other. I peek through the doors and see the pool area. A wall of glass shows the city in sparkling light. If I had a little more courage and a bathing suit, I’d swim in the glow of the sun that streams through.

  But for now it’s enough to take a shower, not lukewarm like in the abandoned laboratory, but a hot shower full of steam, with shampoo and scented shower gel, even hair conditioner. I stay in the shower so long my skin wrinkles. Then I wash my underwear, drying it under a hand dryer. I dress again in the steamy warmth, feeling clean and smelling good for the first time in a long while.

  My plan for dinner is whatever is left on trays outside room doors. Eating room service leftovers isn’t exactly stealing, and anyway, my stomach is roaring with hunger. The first tray offers cold coffee and an after-dinner mint. The next is nothing but an empty wine bottle and two stemmy glasses. But then I discover a true gift: half a deli sandwich, totally untouched, that a guest has left behind. I eat it in a laundry closet that will be my bedroom for the night. Of course, the door was locked, but I waited for someone from housekeeping to leave with a load of towels in her arms, then caught the door just before it closed. I’ve never been so grateful for a meal.

  The business center is just a few computers and a printer in a small yellow room, but it’s all I need this morning. I wish I could email Dmitry, but as far as I know the only time he hacks out of the closed system at Mellin is to play online chess. I’m desperate to contact Lauren but am almost certain that all Lauren’s social media will now be under surveillance, and I don’t want the FBI knocking on her door. However, there is one person I must communicate with whatever the consequences. I open up a fresh message and type in her email address. Dear Mom, I begin.

  But then I have to stop and pull myself together. This is so hard.

  I try again, typing, You’re going to hear a lot of misinformation about me, but this is the truth, as hard as it is to believe . . .

  She may not get the email—she hardly ever checks her inbox. But it may be my last opportunity to contact her for a while, and I have to try. I want to reassure her, but also warn her that what is said about me on the news will probably get much worse before the media grow tired of the story. I tell her the truth, at least what is safe for her to know, which isn’t much. Specifically, I don’t tell her anyone’s name. I don’t mention Munn. If I did, she’d be at Mellin, threatening his life if he doesn’t get me out of Russia. But he can’t get me out of Russia.

  Moscow has over a hundred sixty thousand CCTV cameras. Its facial recognition software is among the most sophisticated in the world. I know this from Dmitry. And I also know from Dmitry that the Russian government keeps a bank of images so vast that if you are on the Russian social media site, VKontakte, you are in the system. If you have a passport or any photo ID, you are in the system. Certainly if you have a criminal record or are understood to be a fugitive from justice, as I am now, you are in the system.

  So, once I leave the hotel and am out on the street again, I know I’m being clocked. I better do something about that. I see an old lady at a kiosk selling straw hats. While she’s sorting out change for a customer, I do something awful, grabbing a navy-and-white bonnet with a flouncy pink ribbon. It will help me fool the cameras. I move quickly away, hiding in the crowds, the hat pulled low across my brow. Then I duck into one of the nicer cafés to perform another act I’d never do in regular life: steal a tip off a table. Stealing a tip takes stealth and true thievery. It’s also just mean. When my mother waitressed, her tips made up most of her pay.

  The waitress shows me a table and offers me a menu. I hold the menu, pretending to read the complicated script. I consider leaving, trying another restaurant with a waitress who is rude or lazy, and not the lovely girl who brings me ice water and this basket of black bread that I’m scarfing down fast.

  But I really don’t have a choice.

  Deeper in the restaurant, I see a group get up noisily, readying to leave. It appears a guy is looking for the waitress, a few bills in his hand, but she’s in the kitchen, so he drops them on the table. If I’m quick I can get there in time. I make my way toward the table as though looking for a bathroom, pocketing the money as the guys reach the door. I wait until they are out of sight entirely, then turn on my heel and walk swiftly out of there.

  The money is for the metro.
There’s a shop I saw from the bus on the way in yesterday that looked like it sold secondhand clothes. I’ve been in enough secondhand places to have a nose for such things. If I’m lucky, I can sell the dragonfly dress and buy some jeans and a pair of shoes I can walk in.

  I enter the metro, still thrilled to be traveling on my own. No locked rooms. No men with guns. The metro turns out to be incredibly fancy: wide, tiled floors, marbled walls, all beautifully lit by brass wall lamps. It’s a surprise, just as in Stockholm when Rik showed me the world’s longest art museum, underground.

  Above me is a surveillance camera. Along the platform are more. It seems the whole of Moscow is one big observation tower. I pull my hat deeper onto my head and angle my gaze down, waiting for a train to Novokuznetskaya. It’s not long before I emerge back into daylight, searching now for the shop front I was sure I saw. I get lost, of course, and Lauren’s shoes are unforgiving. By the time I find the secondhand clothing shop my feet are sore with blisters. But the windows are stocked with nice clothes, and a cheerful set of jingle bells announce my arrival.

  Inside, a woman in a handcrafted dress is marking price tags on earrings spread across a glass counter. She looks up when I come in and I feel her eyes sweep the dress, then rest on Lauren’s watch.

  “Do you speak English?” I say.

  “Little,” she says, pinching her thumb and forefinger together. She has dark eyes, heavy features. She moves slowly as though she’s just woken from a nap.

  “Do you think you can sell this dress?” I wonder what Lauren would say at the idea of selling the dress to a shop like this. But then, Lauren is a practical girl. She’d sell it and not look back.

  The woman eyes the dragonfly dress freshly. Coming around the counter to where I stand, she touches the fabric, then pulls back the neck to check the label. “I can sell,” she says finally. She offers a price, but of course I can’t understand. I ask her to write it down, which she does.

  “How about this?” I say, countering with a larger number, “but I take it mostly in clothes?” The negotiation goes on for a few minutes, with me desperate to get the best deal I can and the woman looking spectacularly bored with it all.

  At last, we settle. I begin searching through the store. I want jeans, at least two shirts, and a pair of comfortable shoes. Also, another dress. I may need to keep freeloading off the hotel and have to look respectable.

  “Do you have raincoats?” I say.

  She doesn’t understand. “Plashch?” she says, pointing to a rack of jackets.

  For shoes I take a thin pair of pink sneakers because they are the only shoe in the place without heels. I try to get the rest in cash, but the woman balks.

  “No money,” she says, pushing a large velvet box of rings and necklaces my way. “Jewelry.”

  “I really need money,” I say apologetically. Walking around penniless isn’t going to work for much longer. And I’m hungry again.

  “The watch,” the woman says, eyeing my wrist again. “I give cash.”

  I need cash. But Lauren’s watch is the only thing I’ve got left from my old life, and I won’t give it up.

  She purses her lips in disapproval, but she tallies up the totals on a pad and hands me a copy along with some old bills that are perhaps too dirty to give to paying customers. She also throws in a tote bag for free.

  “I want to sell my hair,” I say.

  The woman looks only mildly surprised. “Not Moscow,” she says. “Kyiv.”

  Kiev, Ukraine. “Nowhere in Moscow?”

  I can see the woman thinks it’s a bad idea. “You keep long hair. Men like,” she says. But she gives me an address.

  The address takes me farther out of the city to an apartment in a building that looks like the half dozen buildings next to it on a nondescript residential street. A heavy woman wearing black answers the door, glaring at me crossly as though I’m intruding. I don’t have the language to describe why I’m here, so I grab my hair, holding it up like a rope. “Sell?”

  At first, the woman says nothing. But then she steps forward, inspecting my hair as though for lice. I can hear her breathing, smell her perfume. Finally, she nods and ushers me inside.

  I sit in a chair in the middle of a living room lined in fake wooden paneling with windows that look as though they would fall apart if anyone tried to open them. The woman brushes out my hair and speaks slowly in Russian as though I will understand if she takes the time to sound out each word. The steam from a stew is thick in the air, along with the smell of onions.

  It turns out the woman makes sheitels, wigs worn for religious reasons. The place is set up with sewing machines and Styrofoam heads, stained by dye. Two beautiful finished wigs, one blond, one brunette, perch gracefully on a tabletop like floral displays. Nearer are boxes of hair marked by color, blond in one box, brown in another, black in a third. Freshly washed clothes drape the radiators, above which the white paint peels due to years of rising moisture.

  I sit quietly as over a foot of my hair is lopped off, feeling the scissors flutter around my head like birds. The woman is careful with the hair, not losing a strand to the floor. She then divides it into three bunches and wraps each with a band before putting them into plastic bags like specimens.

  The dress shop owner was right—you don’t get much for hair in Russia. You also don’t get much of a haircut from it. I can feel the woman working away, the whisper of scissors close to my scalp. She’s giving me the pixie haircut that I drew onto a page of notebook paper before we began. She frowns with disapproval, as though being forced to make me ugly. Girls should have long hair, she seems to say.

  Eventually, she holds up a mirror for me to see, and I understand why she hates it. My hair is so short now it doesn’t really curl, but neither will it lie down flat, sticking out in little ledges and peaks. A long section in the front obscures one eye and a bit of my cheek and there’s a flat bang straight across the eyebrows. I nod my approval.

  “Okay?” she says.

  “Okay,” I mutter.

  “Vsio budet horosho,” she says in an encouraging tone.

  I have no idea what this means. Perhaps that it will grow.

  Back on the street, I hold my palms against my choppy hair, thinking how strange it feels. It looks terrible—and creates a silhouette that I don’t recognize as my own. But that is the point. It’s exactly the right hair to trick the facial recognition cameras.

  Anyway, my hair isn’t important right now. I’ve got to stay focused. I try to imagine what Dmitry would say. He was the one who cheered me up when I burned myself, the one who always saw the good in any situation. He’d say, This is great! The cameras won’t pick you up now. He’d say, Hair is just protein that sprouts from your head.

  I concentrate on the positives. It feels great to be in jeans, to have pockets and shoes I can walk in, to have a little cash. I find the hat lady and carefully place the hat I stole earlier back onto a hook in her kiosk. I return to the restaurant on Arbat Street and give the waitress I stiffed her tip. Her eyes grow large; she doesn’t understand and it’s frustrating not to be able to explain.

  “Just take it,” I say, closing her fingers gently over the bills.

  At a big department store I find a makeup counter and try on dark lip liner, tracing a slightly different design to my natural lip line, then I walk outside to the market and purchase a pair of cheap sunglasses.

  You’d never recognize me, sitting at a bar wearing Russian clothes, drinking ginger ale and eating salted nuts, and watching a television that plays soundlessly in the corner. There’s more coverage about post-death recovery, but this is Russian television, not American, so I can’t understand what’s being said.

  I think of Munn’s glassware arranged so delicately in Volkov’s cabinet. And Volkov’s enormous house replete with scientific antiquities. I’m missing a piece here, but I don’t know what it is.

  I have no choice but to return to the hotel. Dinner is an uneaten roll left outside a ro
om on the second floor. A large bowl of green apples in a picture window on the landing is also a welcome find. I search out the laundry closet that will again be my bedroom for the night. I spend a few hours asleep in an enormous hamper, hiding beneath a stack of freshly washed towels.

  Morning comes too fast, but at least nobody finds me. I’m able to sneak out of the closet, heading to the fitness room for another luxurious shower. An unexpected perk of choosing the laundry closet is the abundance of linen and towels stored here. With my own clothes rolled into a clean towel, I walk the corridors in a hotel bathrobe and slippers taken from a cart, appearing like any other guest. One of the staff even opens the door as I pass.

  If there is a weirder way to live, I don’t know of it.

  In the business center I read the news from America. The story is being rehashed in different ways, but at least I’m no longer trending on Twitter. Will certainly is. He’s being touted as some kind of boy genius. I can imagine what Dmitry thinks of that.

  I can’t stop myself remembering the days and nights we spent comforting each other through that awful train journey, playing checkers with cookies, telling stories. I’m so alone without him now. But he’d wanted to be a big shot. He’d wanted to be rich. I guess he got both in the end. His new thick-framed glasses lend him a distinguished air that suits his new position as the scientific director of a laboratory in Maryland. I try not to remember how he said he wouldn’t leave me behind. How he promised.

  I miss him and hate him in equal measure.

  Everyone else I just miss. I will never have a better friend than Lauren. I will never know anyone as smart and kind as Dmitry. I try not to think about my mother. It just brings tears.

  I type in search after search on Munn. Like Will, he was born in Cambridge, England, where his father was a professor. He’s a member of the Athenaeum Club and the Royal Society. There’s a list of his prizes and papers. I see he is affiliated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, same as Einstein. I look for every possible association with Russia or Volkov but I find nothing.