Red Sparrow: A Novel

by Jason Matthews

  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. Th
ey 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.

  BLINIS SERVED AT VASSILY EGOROV’S WAKE

  Season one cup flour with baking powder and kosher salt. Add milk, egg, and clarified butter, and blend into a smooth batter. Cook a tablespoon of the batter at a time over medium low heat until blini are golden on both sides. Serve topped with red caviar, salmon, crème fraîche, sour cream, and fresh dill.

  4

  They left the restaurant in Ustinov’s sleek BMW, the windows of which were heavily armored. Ustinov’s apartment sprawled on the top floor of a massive neoclassical building in the “Golden Mile” section of the Arbat. It was a superb penthouse made up of two contiguous apartments with marble floors, massive white leather furniture, and gilt fixtures on the walls. City rooftops and the lights of Moscow were visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of the apartment.

  The air was scented with incense. Enormous Chinese lamps cast warm light in pools throughout the room, and in one corner hung an abstract reclining nude, fingers and eyes and toes pointing in all directions, a Picasso, Dominika guessed. That will be me in fifteen minutes, she thought wryly.

  Ustinov dismissed his security detail with a wave, and the door clicked closed. On an ebony sideboard, among a forest of bottles, Dominika saw a squat bottle of cognac, presumably the three-hundred-year stuff. Ustinov poured into seventeenth-century Bohemian crystal and made her sip. From another tray, she sampled an earthy pâté with a sublime hint of lemon on a delicate toast point.

  Ustinov took Dominika’s hand and led her down a broad hall hung with lighted paintings and up three wide steps to the darkened bedroom. He did not notice the hint of a limp from her mended foot, more a hitch in her stride than anything. He was too busy looking at her hair, her neck, the softness of her bosom.

  Their motion into the room triggered recessed lighting and Dominika stared in amazement from the doorway. The bedroom was a cavernous space, the size of a throne room, decorated in white and black contrasts. An enormous circular bed on a platform in the middle of the room was covered with plush fur throws. The walls were lined with scores of full-length mirrors. Ustinov picked up a remote and pressed a button. Fabric shades on the ceiling mechanically drew back to reveal a star-filled black sky through a cantilevered glass roof. “I can follow the moon and stars as they move across the sky,” he said. “Will you watch the sunrise with me tomorrow?”

  Dominika forced herself to smile. The svin’ya in his sty. But how could such a man amass such wealth while others still stood in lines for bread? The atmosphere in the bedroom was heavy, with a fragrance of sandalwood. The ivory carpet beneath her feet was soft and thick. A collection of silver dishes on a white ash sideboard winked in the revolving lights. A separate spot illuminated a framed Ebru panel with spidery calligraphy. Ustinov saw her look at it. “Sixteenth century,” he said, as if he were prepared to take it off the wall and give it to her.

  Now that they were standing in his bedroom, the game was a little more serious, the sexuality she had thrown around during dinner suddenly not so clever. The physical act was easy enough, she was not a prude. But she wondered what she would lose if she seduced this man. Nothing, she told herself. Ustinov couldn’t take anything away from her, neither could the leering briefers from the Service, nor lavender-scented Uncle Vanya with his mouthed condolences. “Serious work for the Service,” Vanya had said. Nonsense, Dominika thought. It was a political game to unseat a rival, but anyway this blyad, this gilded bastard, deserved to lose what he had, to go to prison. She would gut him, and Uncle Vanya would wonder what sort of person he had recruited for this task.

  Dominika turned to Ustinov and let her wrap fall from her shoulders. She kissed him once lightly on the mouth and ran her hand across his cheek. He pulled her close and kissed her back roughly. Their two figures were reflected in a hundred mirror images.

  Ustinov pulled away and looked at Dominika through tunnel-visioned eyes. His body was an exposed nerve; his brain was detaching itself from the anchor points inside his skull. He shrugged his dinner jacket to the floor and pawed at his silk bow tie. The oligarch who had made a fortune by outplaying other dangerous men, by cheating and hammering and, even, by eliminating his competition, saw only the blue eyes, the tendril of brown hair falling to the slender white throat, the lips still wet from their kiss. Dominika put her hands on his chest and whispered, “Dushka, wait for me on the bed. I will be two minutes.”

  In the gilt-bedecked bathroom, Dominika looked at herself in the mirror. You said yes, she thought, first to Vanya and now to this medved, this drooling bear, so important to prove yourself, now get on with it. She reached behind her, unzipped, and stepped out of her dress. You use this, she thought, looking at her body in the mirror, and you get the thing done, captivate him, find out what they want to know. They had told her Ustinov was dangerous, he was a brute who had killed men. Fine. Tomorrow morning she would be spooning iced consommé into his upturned mouth like a baby bird, and he would be chirping his secrets to her, and then the brute would be looking at the world through bars. Then she remembered something from the briefing and quickly reached into her clutch and popped a Benzedrine tablet they had given her, for the physical lift, they had told her.

  Ustinov was lying on the bed on his back, propped up on his elbows, naked except for a pair of black silk shorts. Dominika walked slowly up to the foot of the bed, wondering how to start. She remembered how good it felt when trainers had rubbed their inflamed feet at the ballet academy, so she knelt and rubbed her thumbs hard across the arch of his foot. Ustinov looked at her blankly. Idiotka, she thought, some courtesan you are, and with desperate intuition put her mouth over the big t
oe of Ustinov’s right foot and swirled her tongue around the length of it. He groaned and fell back on the bed. Better. His trembling hand reached into a recess on the frame of the bed and instantly the room was bathed in deep red light, coloring the bed, their faces, their skin. It was augmented by smaller dots of pink, swirling around the room, off the mirrors and over Dominika’s crimson body. With a low hum, the bed began revolving. God preserve us from gangsters, thought Dominika.

  Ustinov grunted something at her and reached out his hand. The revolving pink lights against the all-red background of the room turned into double pink dots, then triple dots, revolving around one another in their respective paths across the room. Dominika was overloading on the lights and the colors, and Ustinov continued beckoning for her. His guttural obscenities came out as slashes of dark orange, elemental, brutal; they somehow slid beneath, not over, the pink dots.

  Dominika looked at him from under half-closed lids and wondered whether she should lick her lips for effect. As he revolved like a Bundt cake in a microwave, Ustinov’s eyes never left her. Dominika knew she had to simultaneously obliterate his body as well as his head, he had to want her to stay with him. A week, two weeks, two months. Any amount of time would satisfy the requirements, the longer the better, they said. They had told her the sidewalk outside Ustinov’s apartment was stained with the tears of his one-night stands.

  Ustinov was slowly revolving toward her. When he came even with where Dominika was kneeling, he put his arms around her waist, threw her on her back—she registered the tug of tearing panties—hunched over her like a gargoyle and began making passionate, if feral, love to her.

  In the red light, Ustinov’s clenched teeth—normally white and even—appeared blue and black-rimmed. Dominika threw her head back and closed her eyes. She felt Ustinov’s hot breath on her breasts. The pink sparks of light flowed over her quivering legs, their bodies, and the mirrors. She lifted her buttocks and rocked her pelvis to meet each of his lupine thrusts, clapped her hands around his arms and concentrated on making him lose his sanity. Ustinov pulled his head back in a paroxysm of impending meltdown. Dominika involuntarily huffed as he began moving harder and faster. Apart from the red light, and his blue teeth, and his grunting, Dominika was surprised to feel her own body—her secret self—responding; the bitter-tongue lift from the Benzedrine had arrived. She looked past his chin at the glass ceiling but she could not see any celestial bodies. Where were the stars?