Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

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. They 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.

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.

They left therestaurant 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.