The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

It started as a little buzz in her stomach—the whisper hints of a real orgasm, not faked—that radiated to her crotch, then grew, and hovered like an antique vase on the edge of the mantelpiece after an earthquake, waiting for the next trembler that would set it wobbling over the edge to the floor below. This cannot be happening, she thought. Not with this lizard cleaning her chimney. The sensation grew; her orgasm was going to happen if she let it, and it would be a big one, it had been too long without Nate, a time of prolonged stress, and she had built up a lot of, well, kilowatts, that were ready to arc and burn someone’s eyebrows off. She no longer used her grandmother’s long-handled hairbrush, for she assumed her official residences—here and in Moscow—were filled with audio and video. Bogu moy, my God, the vase on the mantelpiece started chittering, vibrating closer to the edge.

This cannot happen. This will not happen, she thought. Even as she began the Sparrow School routine for Putin’s benefit (No. 44, “A single snowflake will start the avalanche”), Dominika shut down her real climax, chased it away by thinking about Bratok, banished it back to her spleen, or her liver, or wherever it resided. It was easy enough to do, considering the dibbuk, the ogre who was hunched over her, nose-whistling as he plowed in and out.

Putin was himself laboring; it was catching up to him too: the image of this unattainable Venus, head back, throat offered to him, eyes white in their sockets, was having its effect, not to mention the quite remarkable sensation of her pubococcygeus muscle actually milking his organ with the result that he felt the telltale gathering in his groin, the insidious thickening of his member, and finally the leaden palsy that sweeps over the limbs at the moment of spuskat, of ejaculation. He said nothing, blinked once—his expression did not change—and disengaged the moment he was done, wiping his face, sliding off the bed, and collecting his tracksuit pants off the floor. The tsar was not one for kissy endearments, or stroking of hair, or tender embraces in the soft après-sex twilight. It was sufficient that he had deposited on his bedewed Director of Foreign Intelligence, an SVR general, the imperial spoor that marked one of the boundaries of his predatory range.

She was outwardly languid, but breathing hard and sweaty between the breasts. Dominika’s thoughts raced madly in the postcoital asylum that was her brain. She had to get rid of the president. Agnes in the closet probably had to pee. Would the freshening land breeze prevent Benford’s USV—due in fifty minutes—from landing on the beach below? Ugh, her thighs were sticky. As a trained Sparrow, Dominika knew that a healthy man ejaculates approximately 5 milliliters (a teaspoon) of semen, which contains approximately one hundred million sperm. That meant one hundred million melon-headed Putin spermatozoa with whippy tails were all on the move inside her, intent on annexing her cervix like the Crimean peninsula. (Thank God for the Agency-issued IUD, a copper coil PARAGARD device developed [purely by coincidence] by Lockheed in 1962 during the design phase of the SR-71 Blackbird supersonic reconnaissance aircraft.) The president was saying something, and Dominika stilled the cascade of her disjointed thoughts.

“I would like you to have this,” said Putin, sliding a long velvet box onto the end table. “Wear it tomorrow at the concert.” Tomorrow’s entertainment was to be a live performance by a hugely famous American music artist, also well-known as a vocal and committed progressive activist who, despite the absence of demonstrable human rights in Russia, found he could accept $5 million from the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation to appear at Cape Idokopas to entertain the siloviki. Dominika opened the case. Nestled inside was a priceless strand of multicolored South Sea and Tahitian pearls, each one 114 millimeters, as big as marbles, sea green, gold, ivory, and mocha, a sublime strand.

“Mr. President, these pearls are magnificent. I couldn’t possibly . . .”

Putin put up his hand to quiet her, took the strand from the box, and fastened it around her neck, where a separate pearl nestled heavily in the hollow of her neck. Personal gifts exchanged between governmental colleagues—Dominika’s pizda in exchange for the pearls—did not pose the slightest conflict of interest in this tsar’s Russia. “I would like you to accept them,” he said.

Dominika fingered the pearls. “Thank you, Mr. President,” she said. “And thank you for a wonderful evening.” His blue halo glowed.