Red Sparrow

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.