Archive of Our Own

You will live without misfortune,
You will govern, you will judge.
With your quiet partner
You will raise your sons.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And for us, descending into the vale,
The altars burn,
And our voices soar
To God’s very throne.

Anna Akhmatova, “You will live without misfortune,” 1990.

Vladimir’s apartment was not conducive towards sleep. Carolyn suspected the floors were uneven. In her teenage years, she had spent a summer in a house with similar floors. She had hardly slept then, too. All her dreams had been tilted, filled with the same uneasy sound of a marble sliding across varnished wood. Eventually, some years later, the whole thing had collapsed into a sinkhole, and was now a sad little field that someone, one day, would probably try to turn into a water park or a condominium. Such was the way of the world.

Despite knowing the floors would be uneven, Carolyn had spent the night, and now she rose before Vladimir did. She was competitive about being the first to wake; she always had been. There was a quiet, thrilling victory in being the first to open one’s eyes, to look over at another and see their face slack and unguarded. Vladimir looked lovely when he slept, like a well-fed ferret with his long, fine lashes. (Konstantin was an ugly sleeper; he went about it brutally, like something far more feral, something moved by the inevitability of its own musculature. She imagined all of his dreams revolved around some hunger or another.) In the morning light, his face was perfectly smooth and unbothered, without any of his waking ambition. Stretching, Carolyn wondered if this was how mothers ended up falling in love with their infants. But that required you to find docility endearing.

The other advantage to waking first was one could look through a friend’s possessions unobserved. When Vladimir was awake, she had to keep her gaze perfectly even, with no particular interest in any of his objects except the ones to which he gestured, the aspects of himself he wanted her to find remarkable. But while he slept, Carolyn could turn over the translations of Austen or childhood photographs, the shelves and shelves of novelty rubber ducks that, otherwise, went entirely unacknowledged. Vladimir was not like Konstantin, whose apartment kept little more than air, and the sort of books everyone read —  Bibles, innocuous travel guides, and, wryly, Bond novels —  the kinds of books one bought to suggest one had a tepid interior life. She allowed herself the liberty of touching one of Vladimir’s ducks as she passed. He had a strangely serious personality (Carolyn feared he might even be noble), a handsome if unremarkable face, and a baffling obsession with mallards. Freud would be delighted.

Carolyn opened the window. Vladimir had, to put it mildly, an abysmal view. His apartment looked out over the back of one of Moscow’s bars, the sort that catered to foreigners. And while it sounded like apt positioning for a KGB agent, in reality it was more of a nuisance than an asset. At all hours there was chatter from the patrons who stumbled out of the doorway like they were exiting Babel’s ruins: garbled junctions between languages, slurring from one to the next and never saying anything in particular. It was one of the innumerable reasons Vlad was so keen for a promotion.

The sound and the wind came in all at once, and she heard Vladimir stir. Something about the Russian air made Carolyn a romantic. Maybe it was all the ice it in, and the way it forced your heart alive to keep you warm. And the necessity for fictions, when blood was not enough. Or perhaps that pervasive edge of death. No British winter, after all, could have culled Napoleon. Everything seemed much more fatal in the shadow of Moscow’s spires, and that always made things seem more important, especially one’s affections.

It was a hazard of the career, really. Everything about espionage became touched with romance eventually. Their days were laced with intimacy: coercing their way into hearts and minds, learning how to see others clearly, how to move about in their worlds, and to do it so tenderly, so compassionately, so as not to be detected. To know one's colleagues and targets so well, they never noticed you were different, separate. It was an act of devotion, more than anything.

The window jammed partway. Carolyn slid her hand along its edge, trying to feel where it was stuck. It was the same motion she had seen fishmongers use in Billingsgate, to gut their catches. Spikes had been carved along the stone window ledge, to ward off pigeons and other mild nuisances. Despite this, the previous evening, Carolyn had watched one particularly nihilistic bird try again and again to perch. She had not pointed it out to Vladimir, who had been preoccupied with the buttons of her dress shirt, and would not have appreciated it anyway. Konstantin would find it amusing; this sad, determined death drive, an eerily human movement for a bird to know. If she remembered, she would tell him. She would, perhaps, also write about it to the two men back home in England who would both, in time, propose to her. She would compare the bird Sisyphus in one letter and Hamlet in the other. They loved receiving these small, mundane observations. It made them feel like they knew her deeply, and distracted from the fact that she never told them anything of substance about her work, which took her so far away from them for such long stretches of time.

She turned, then, to watch Vladimir wake. He always did so in the same way, raising a hand to his heart as though to check that it, of all things, was still intact.  Idly, Carolyn wondered where in their bodies animals sensed death.

They went down to a café for breakfast. Carolyn wore a ushanka, made of black fish fur, mostly because she found the phrase delightful. Fish fur. It was a wonderfully contrarian phrase. There was something delightful, too, about doing all the things one would find tedious in one’s home country: the unfussy breakfasts; the nationalistic accessories; the way one indulged cartoonish habits, mixing vodka with coffee and so on. And while her expression was placid, marked with the same unwavering ease with which she approached everything, Carolyn thought she took to breakfast rather cheerily. For instance, she took great pleasure in how smooth her knife sounded as it cut through her egg, scything against the cheap ceramic plate.

Certainly, someone had to play at optimism. Vladimir smoked moodily, and flipped through the newspaper pages as if each one bore some catastrophic prophecy, some vindictive doom for him and him alone. He was thinking about his promotion. Carolyn used the possessive pronoun generously. The promotion was his only because Vladimir wanted it to be his, and believed it deserved to be his. He was more competent than Dimitri Yesenin and far more skilled. He just needed Director Evgeny Tarasov to notice, and reward him with Yesenin’s coveted desk. 

Once again, Carolyn thought of Napoleon, exiled, with his ankles in the deep blue of the Tyrrhenian, waiting for the Inconstant to come to shore.

She had no imaginary friends as a girl, no ordinary ones anyway. For a time, though, she had imagined Napoleon, puffed up as a teddy-bear and of equivalent height. Instead of anthropomorphic elephants or chattering cats or whatever strange creatures whirled about in the minds of her peers, Carolyn had poured invisible tea for him and Einstein and Marx. Even then, she believed that if you read enough books, and learned enough facts about someone, you could carry them around in your mind, and know exactly what they were like at tea. Eventually she grew up and stopped inviting dictators and revolutionaries and mass murderers for imaginary tea, and they started inviting her over for real lunches and dinners, sometimes even coffee. 

Vladimir, at breakfasts like these, wore an expression that had been fashionable at her tea parties: the look of some would-be despot, though Carolyn knew he would never be that. All men wanted to be kings or emperors or deities, whatever title was currently en vogue. She stifled a sympathetic sigh. It would be an awfully dull burden to be God. It would require you to know entirely too much about all the boring people, and not nearly enough about the interesting ones.

Which, again, was why Vladimir needed his promotion. Because Carolyn was not God; she was a promising spy with a very interesting set of secrets. If Vladimir was promoted, he would be able to access Morosov’s files, and if he could access those files, then Carolyn would exchange that information for something particularly useful on The Bluejay Operation, which would be quite a coup for Vladimir’s career. So really, it was not one promotion but many that loomed so heavily over his shoulders, and caused all the loosely pent-up irritation. It was the kind of frustration that was productive for their sleepovers, but not for the obligations she owed MI6. Though she usually adored him, Carolyn increasingly wished Vladimir would just get on with it.

“You have a remarkably symmetrical face,” Carolyn said. “Like looking at a coin. We always assume those faces are symmetrical, don’t we? And not some ghoulish Edward Hyde, obscured?”

Vladimir hummed a polite but distant note, and turned the page. Like her far-away suitors, Vladimir enjoyed English literature. He liked anything that used the phrase “lake district”; it evoked an overwhelming feeling of calm. Konstantin hated England, and likely hated lakes, but he would’ve indulged this offer of levity. He would’ve told her whatever the closest approximation to Dr. Jekyll the Soviets had. It would’ve been a fascinating bit of nonsense to know off-hand.

Gently, Carolyn reached over and pressed the newsprint down against the table. A trite, scandalous sort of image: a woman wearing a deputy minister as casually as a cheap bracelet. The woman looked directly into the camera, striking in harsh inks, an unmistakable sense of pride. Carolyn thought her rather reminiscent of Wright Barker's "Circe," caught in her own, divine wind, destined to be haloed by lions and other beasts. Nikolai Mikhaylov, new to the Ministry of Justice, looked spellbound at her side, small.

“Who is she?” Carolyn said. She took the cigarette from Vladimir’s hands; their softness always struck her. “I see her everywhere.”

At Carolyn’s touch, Vladimir returned to her. “Dasha?” He referred to the woman mononymously, as though she were a Roman emperor, or perhaps a dictator. Someone of equivalent gravity.

“Our shining star. Olympian, in every sense. Gymnastics. She is responsible for half the gold in the Union,” Vlad said, and at last the corners of his mouth tugged upward, his forehead smoothed. Warmth returned between them; there was a secret, here, they could share.

“But that must have been some time ago?” The woman in the photograph was likely approaching her thirties. She had all the severe angles of that age, but her expression was playful. It made Carolyn pause, linger. She had never met a gymnast. “She’s political now.”

“Everything is political,” Vladimir shrugged. He reached over the photograph indifferently, to sip from Carolyn’s coffee cup. “Success most of all. And she is successful. All that love? It would be a hard thing to lose.”

“You don’t care much for her, then?” A pause, and then: “Are you jealous?”

Vladimir smiled at her, admonishing. This was something he would not say outright. Instead, as though it were a consolation: “You would hate her. She is — ah, she is not like you, Carolyn.”

“And what is that — to be like me?”

Some people came to their lovers wanting mirrors, to see themselves more clearly through another’s eyes. Carolyn was not adverse to the notion, though she found it rather futile.

“Subtle,” Vladimir said, setting down her cup. “Shrewd.” He pressed his curiously soft hand over hers. “Torturous —” Vladimir kissed her, and she supposed that made up for his juvenile attempts at flattery. Below them, with her unsubtle political attachments and allegedly crude judgment, Dasha watched them with wide, proud eyes.

Carolyn held Vladimir’s face in her hand. His eyes were so pale; there was no room for reflection. “If you don’t hurry, you’ll be late,” she said pleasantly, resting her free arm over the newsprint. And then she looked down, as though she had just remembered the paper’s existence. “Do you mind if I keep this? The crossword is good for my vocabulary.”

Vlad was smoothing out his tie, smiling and perhaps even oblivious. He laughed, mainly to himself, and shook his head. “You are more fluent than my mother, Carolyn.”

Vladimir’s mother was an uneducated peasant who had survived entirely off her beauty. It was not much of a compliment. Carolyn smiled mildly, and let Vladimir kiss her once more before he left. Delicately, she rolled up the paper, careful not to crease the photograph. It was so cold out, the ink was frozen on the page; Dasha’s stare would not smudge, or leave a mark.

She couldn’t remember where she put the scissors, so Carolyn cut out the photograph with a knife, measuring twice before every incision to keep her lines straight. She pinned it where, at that age, she kept all her half-formed hunches: on the ceiling above her bed, so she could stare at it before she slept, dream on it. It was curious, really, the way people never seemed to look up when they entered rooms.

She called Mulligan at headquarters, and inquired after the deputy minister, and his connections, and oh, if he had the time, was there anything on Dasha—?

“Dyuzhenkova?” Mulligan was exceptionally bright, but his voice shared a genus with the common vacuum cleaner. Even in person, he sounded like a man trapped within a machine. “Have you seen her double back-flip? Gosh, I didn’t even know bodies could do that—”

Through the usual, roundabout means Mulligan sent what they knew about the minister. He parceled it out, and each installment was more mundane than the last. It was almost an accomplishment. On the telephone, Carolyn caught herself on the precipice of badgering for information on Dasha Dyuzhenkova for the third time. She pressed her tongue sternly against her palate. It was never wise to draw too much attention to one’s intuition. For one thing, that was how an individual became predictable. Furthermore, it was unseemly to display more than a passing interest in anything or, indeed, anyone. Carolyn considered herself, both by inclination and by necessity, to be above such indiscretions.

Still, every night Dasha smiled down at her. When Carolyn closed her eyes, she felt submerged in that endless stare. She memorized the exact angle of Dasha’s mouth, the smug expression. And though Carolyn knew better, at times she would’ve believed Dasha was in the room with her, taunting. She bit down on her tongue. She slept. She said nothing. 

On the ice, Dasha was showing off, cutting across the rink in broad, hunting strokes. She was almost entirely obscured in her thick jaguar coat. It was a large, obscene thing, even by the most revolutionary fashion tastes: a blur of yellowed fur and dizzying rosettes. She reminded Konstantin of those ancient, expensive falcons the old Tsars used to keep: cages and cages of silky-winged birds, each hungry for sudden, brutal deaths. Only unlike an imperial bird, Dasha was unruly. She did not always come back when called. Now, for example, she was busy pirouetting ahead, slicing through all the other skaters ambling up and down Gorky Park — jumps and axels and spins and then jump-spins or spin-jumps — leaving Konstantin to trudge along feebly in her shadow. There was something wrong with his skates, he argued whenever Dasha came back. They didn’t work. Dasha cooed, her voice full of fake pity. Whenever she returned, she kicked rink-ice all over his legs and under his wool coat. Like all things with Dasha, it was intentional. She laughed with a child’s unguarded cruelty, looping round him in circles.

“You skate worse than little girl,” Dasha sneered, amused, in English. The first time he had seen Dasha, she had been smaller than Konstantin’s face, a tiny black and white girl on the shitty television, wearing that same harsh expression. Konstantin did not mind it so much: her attitude, her flashiness, her mocking. She was familiar to him; she had been from the moment she flickered on the screen.

“As I am telling you, it is not me. These are broken.” Konstantin gestured emphatically at his skates, feeling like he was twelve again and explaining that his brother should've stayed quiet if he did not want to be punched. These days, Konstantin thought about his siblings exclusively in the past tense, to put more distance between them. He had not liked his brother very much, but had also felt intrinsically connected to him. It was not loyalty, but some other potent, stubborn feeling. An understanding. He felt that for Dasha too; their hearts had thawed from the same ice.

“Stop being afraid of looking like idiot,” she was going on. “You will. It is your nature, yes? But you will look less like idiot on ice if you stop caring and just move — like this —” And then she was off again, forcing the crowd to part in curtains of gasps and applause. Dasha could have had one sibling or ten; she could have had loving parents or none at all — it did not matter. Moscow had raised her: in tan and cavernous gymnasiums, with drill sergeants and their dry, chalked hands. If she had a family, it would be easy for Konstantin to find out; it would also be a waste of time, revealing nothing. In Dasha’s mind, there was only Dasha. Singular and vaulting. The motherland’s golden daughter. She left little room for anyone else.

The other skaters had formed a little ring around her, watching her impromptu performance in the way Moscow watched anything Dasha did: with reverence. Moving in stilted, chopping motions, Konstantin attempted to push through, but his left blade gave in and his ankle twisted and followed. All at once, he collided with a red-nosed bureaucrat. Konstantin fell on his back with a spectacular crash.

“No idea how to hold your weight.” Ten Dashas scolded him from above, kicking ice all over his face. Now he was the show. The crowd looked on pityingly. When she pulled him up, he was sure they thought she was generous and sweet. Dasha dusted the ice off Konstantin’s lapels as he scowled. “No sense of balance — maybe this is why you always have problems and problems.”

“I have no problems,” but it was an unconvincing protest. Dasha took his hands and began to pull him along. She was in a good mood now, because she had seen him fall. Dasha was kindest when she believed herself to be invulnerable; plenty of her victims knew this. She often gave them false hope, before she set about her butchering. “This is just a terrible place to do work,” Konstantin muttered. “It is a recreation park. Recreation. The opposite of work space. The key is to compartmentalize, then you are balance—” He looked down then, watching Dasha’s skates flash. “Would you stop that —”

“What?”

“This.” Konstantin released a hand to wave it inarticulately, glowering at the way she skated backwards, swaying side to side with some unfathomable awareness of all the bodies crowded around them and speeding by. “It’s unnatural.”

“Unnatural?” Dasha scoffed, and though Konstantin heard the note of melodrama in her voice and braced himself, he still yelped as she released him, suddenly and with great force, out into the rink — only to catch him just as quickly, just as he thought his heart would burst. Dasha linked their arms, guiding them to a safer, less life-threatening speed. “Very funny,” Konstantin said, in the manner of someone who was pointedly not entertained. “But you are supposed to be killing Kuznetsov, not me.”

“You cannot rush these things —”

“—The whole point is to be fast—”

“—You would not understand. This is art, I need inspiration—”

“Ha! And Mister Minister Nikolai Mikhaylov is inspiring?”

Dasha elbowed him in the ribs. “He has good taste. He bought me this.” She gestured to her coat, “And —” Now grinning, she thrust her wrist in front of Konstantin’s face, nearly smacking him across the brow with a heavy, golden watch.

“A fake,” he said, looking at the gilded numbers accusingly. “Ow!” Dasha elbowed him again, harder.

“Is not.”

“Is.”

“Is not.” Dasha sniffed indignantly. “Between the two of us, I would know real gold, hm?”

“How would Mikhaylov get this? What connections? It’s impossible. He is not clever enough.”

“Just because you work for big, secret intelligence does not mean you are big intelligent — Anyway, stop worrying. I am best killer, yes? So he will be dead. I’m just, mm, 'storming in the brain.' It is important part of the process.”

“No, murder is important part of the process. Stabbing is important part of the process. Doing your job is important part of the process.”

Dasha rolled her eyes. “Do you ever kill? Anyone? Not even person, maybe annoying neighbour’s dog?”

“What kind of question is that? Of course I kill people.”

“Not ‘have people killed,’” Dasha slowed them to a stop by the snowbanks. She turned sharply on the ice to face him. “Actually kill people. Put your big, ugly hands around their neck and squeeze and squeeze and —” Konstantin swatted her hands away as she reached for his neck.

“Stop that—”

“Maybe you should kill more. You would be more interesting. You are clumsy—”

“— I am not clumsy —”

“You’d probably get a scar on your face, but that might be good, too. Less of your face. More handsome.”

“If I buy you a fake watch, will you please kill Kuznetsov?”

Dasha pretended not to hear him. She knelt down and began to pack the dirty snow between her hands.

“If you do not kill him, we will both be in trouble. You more than me.”

Dasha laughed. The rosettes shook around her shoulders. “Ha! No one important would die in this country without me. It would all be factory deaths, yes? Automatic. Boring.”

Konstantin imagined it: bureaucrats and industry men on a great, steel assembly line. Perhaps a single, well-oiled lever he could pull this way and that. Stopping them on the conveyor belt for someone to torture them here, plunge a knife through them there, before cleanly disposing of the body in some humming incinerator. It would be boring, yes, and beautiful. All the best parts of their country were like that: the metal fence beyond Dasha, which stretched out in even intervals around the park; the benches laid about them, also equidistant, where old men sat in companionable pairings, smoking benign little clouds or tending to chessboards wedged into icy drifts. It was better, Konstantin thought, when things were organized, cleanly done. It made it easier for someone like him to move through the cracks.

Dasha held two snowballs in her hands. She tossed them in the air experimentally.

“Don’t,” Konstantin warned.

“Shush. Not everything is about you.” Dasha threw snowball to him with uncharacteristic gentleness. Despite this, Konstantin was aware they both held their snowballs like weapons, fingers flexing around the spheres, searching for a hard edge. A habit, perhaps, and nothing more.

“What do you think?” Dasha pointed towards the nearby bench, to a pair of old men balancing a chessboard between their frostbitten knees. “If you hit their board, I will gift you the watch.”

She looked wicked then, warmed by her own mischief: her cheeks flushed from the cold and her malice and all that fur around her face. He could complain all he liked, but being with Dasha made you feel warm too.

“Say real goodbye to your fake watch.” Konstantin looked up at the white winter sky. The old men would not see them coming. They wound up their arms, and Dasha counted down from three, and they released their snowballs with that precise, hateful feeling they knew lived inside them both, and bound them to their work. They hit their targets cleanly: Konstantin’s snowball landed with perfect brutality on the board, spilling out all the pieces; Dasha’s crashed into one man’s face. They let out a roar of laughter, watching one old fool sputter and the other scramble for the chess board, both of them swearing —

“Go, go, go,” Dasha urged. She tugged on Konstantin’s woolen sleeve with a forceful, joyous insistence, pulling him away before the men thought to turn and search for someone to blame.

From the street kiosk, Konstantin pulled out two bottles of vodka. He held them out to Dasha expectantly. “Which one of these says romance and which says —” There was an empathetic motion of his brows. “You know?”

“They both say vodka.” Dasha was readjusting her leather gloves around her bare wrists. She did so in an exaggerated manner, as though it took a great deal of effort to move the fabric, to show Konstantin that she was bored. He chose to ignore this.

“Yes but to a woman — which says You should marry me and which says We should sleep together.”

 “Sleep with you?” She crinkled her nose, now elaborate in her disgust. “Both. But very quickly. She’d have to drink one right after another.”

“Dasha.”

“Vodka is vodka. Who wants to sleep with you, anyway?”

“Plenty of people.” Konstantin pulled a face of his own. “Lots of people. I am very popular, and very well-liked. By this time Sunday, I will be engaged.”

“And so the 'fucking' bottle is for what? A bribe, for the wedding night?”

“My —” Konstantin paused. He was not sure, exactly, how to describe Carolyn, or what they were to each other. “She is a friend. She is special.”

“You? You do not have special friends.”

“Don’t be jealous.”

“What kind of woman would want you, for fun? What is wrong with her? You hit her over the head first, yes? Keep her in dungeon for a few weeks?”

Leisurely, Konstantin checked the time. He liked Dasha’s watch much better now that it was his. “She’s very perceptive actually. Clever. Funny. You would like her.”

This, more than anything, seemed to strike Dasha between the ribs. “I would not,” she huffed, gathering up her furs. “What does she look like? What animal? Frog? Pig? Ugly snout?”

“More like bird, I think.” Konstantin picked out a third bottle and paid the merchant as she sulked. The glass had a faint, reddish tint and a long, firm neck. If you smashed it against a wall or table, you would still have decent reach in a fight. He twisted it open, tucking the remaining two bottles beneath his arm, and took a swig.

“You can come and meet her, you know.” Konstantin offered Dasha a sip, feeling conciliatory to her moods. Dasha took the bottle suspiciously, eyeing Konstantin in the same way the squirrels did when he offered them nuts in the park. Like he was going to trick them, and take the food away. In fairness, he did do that sometimes. But only to the squirrels. He knew better with Dasha.

“There’s a party. Next Friday. Fancy bullshit, hm?” Konstantin patted at his pockets, searching for his cigarette case. “You can come with me — but only if you kill Osip Kuznetsov first.”

“Why? Will I have to kill someone there, too?”

“Of course. I said it was a party — Aha!” Konstantin held the silver tin up in the air triumphantly. He offered a cigarette to Dasha, who rolled her eyes again.

“Give me the good cigarettes and I will come to your party and kill Kuznetsov tonight.”

Konstantin huffed. He considered whether it was worth it, and then gestured towards his right-hand pocket, where he kept a slim blue and white carton. Dasha withdrew the belomorkanals and produced a lighter from some hidden compartment in her cat furs and lit them both. For a moment, in the harsh winter light, they looked ordinary. Like lovers or friends. Like people without secrets or second lives.

“I’m here to interview with Doctor Verenich?” Carolyn had only two Russian voices in which she felt sufficiently confident. One was her natural voice, however the language set in her mouth; some would say it carried all the ice of her English. The other register, which she used now, was almost the same, but a half-step or so higher — a bit more earnest, a bit less assured, the voice of a woman who, for instance, might sincerely interview for a secretary position just as the afternoon was softening into evening. The kind of unnotable, foolish woman any member of staff would know they needn’t remember. Who they could tell, barely raising a glance, to go up, yes, to the sixth floor, just that way, knowing and yet keeping to themselves that a woman with this high, sweetened voice would not secure any position within these walls. 

Ascending the steps, then, Carolyn took note of the other stairwells, the long rows of offices, and the staff who, like her, passed through the cavernous university hallways with the delicacy of shadows. Carolyn had a great-aunt who had been a secretary and then, later, a spinster. These facts were always presented together, as though there was causality between them. Her great-aunt drifted, habitually, to the corners of rooms, looking at home with all the other undusted heirlooms — vases and candlesticks that belonged to another time, and were kept politely, with some dwindling hope that they might one day become interesting or valuable. When she thought of her great-aunt, she always saw the woman’s face as it was reflected in those chachkies and baubles: golden and ugly, the nose hideously compressed, the garish, sad gleam of her eyes.

Carolyn wondered how her great-aunt had ever endured it: walking in these ruddy shoes and always having to hold her body, her own mind at some distance. Bending, each day, to translate someone else’s thoughts, someone else’s goals. It was a personal death — and so it was no wonder, really, why so many of her great-aunt’s kind could be convinced to watch, to document, to spy. Carolyn enlisted a great number of secretaries who, once recruited, were always thorough, meticulously detailed, almost spitefully so. Suddenly, all their tedious minutia had purpose. Suddenly, finally, someone was listening to them.

And though it compromised the bulk of her work these days, Carolyn was not here, explicitly, to recruit. This was a matter of charity, rather than business. Doctor Verenich’s office bordered Osip Kuznetsov’s, who taught physics and had gone to school with Yesenin. They took lunches together often, and walks in the grounds between their offices, under the clocktower’s stately shadows. It was all very quaint.

Before she had come, Carolyn had studied herself in the mirror and thought, again, of dark, hungry eyes. A look Vladimir had pronounced crude, unsubtle. A look he thought Carolyn could never give. But Vladimir was a gentleman. He was a sly and capable bureaucrat, but his ambitions had insufficient muscle behind them. And so Carolyn was not impatient, merely struck by a generous feeling. A subtle one. She agreed with poor Vladimir, really. He deserved his promotion, and soon. And so it was for his benefit entirely that she paused outside Doctor Kuznetsov’s office to meekly adjust the fit of her horrible heel, and then, when the hallway was empty, it was for Vladimir's benefit that she slid open the lock with well-practiced ease.

There was a letter in her handbag, addressed to Osip from the American Consulate. A standard note, nothing intrinsically suspicious, she had replicated it from the innumerable ordinary correspondences exchanged between their embassies. Only, she had signed it in Christopher Buckley’s name. There had been no personal grudge behind nominating him to take this utterly philanthropic fall. Buckley’s only crime was being dull — too dull, Carolyn suspected, for anything approaching spycraft, but also just dull enough to make one comfortable — which was simply a synonym for careless — in his presence. With that trying temperament, Christopher Buckley could all too easily stumble into something important, and not have the brains to deal with such a discovery appropriately. He would be someone the consulate would be willing to relocate if, by chance, he was found to have a rather personal correspondence with a well-connected and politically volatile scholar. The evidence would not even have to be particularly incriminating in nature; fear and paranoia held Moscow as thickly as morning fog. Carolyn needed only to fabricate a small handful of persuasive evidence, and then Vladimir — or, were he feeling more discrete, some office friend — could latch onto it with some teeth, create a bit of doubt in Doctor Kuznetsov’s loyalties and, by extension, doubt in his much more important confidante Yesenin, custodian of so many of Moscow’s cruel secrets.

Carolyn had been to enough tepid cocktails parties to know Buckley’s limited internal life. She had watched him pick lint from his suit when he believed no one was watching. In conversation, he was intimately acquainted with the weather, and little else. He always picked at peppers, of all things, when presented with a vegetable platter. He never described objects or individuals with colours, but with tedious comparisons; he was, predictably, particularly fixated on size.

In both her personal and professional life, Carolyn believed in being thorough; both sides of any planted conversation needed to be convincing. She stepped inside. Osip’s office was cluttered; there were clusters of debris. She noted the books on the desk, gathered in the left-hand corner around an old bronze lamp; the photographs — a wife, a son, a hunting dog; the crumbles from hastily eaten half-meals. She took one of his pens, the less expensive one which would not be missed, and a stray half-note, with his signature. She sat in his chair. It was essential, whenever possible, to know how a man sat; his perspective always followed.

When she heard a woman’s footsteps in the hallway, Carolyn stood and withdrew her letter.  She opened it with Osip’s silver letter opener and took three steps backward to stand, a little dumbly, on the threshold. There was the sound of the door pushed open and Carolyn impelled her body to jump, guilelessly. She turned —

In the doorway: a reflection, as if risen out of a dark pool of water. The woman had the same unattractive skirt; the functional low heels; the ordinary, unfussed hair, though a premature grey. Another unnotable — Carolyn smiled at her, feigning some clumsy earnestness. She modeled this, too, on her great-aunt, and a woman at the London office who always made cloying offers at friendship, as though she thought she worked at Debenhams rather than an intelligence agency.

“Oh — are you Doctor Kuznetsov’s secretary? I assist Doctor Verenich — this letter fell with ours. I opened it — my mistake — before I realized, and came to return it — I’ll just leave it here?” She spoke in her high, thin Russian, but with a fool’s cheerful insistence, laying the open letter down on the desk.

Her reflection’s smile was tighter. She struck Carolyn as haughty, the kind of woman who likely derived a great deal of pride in her simple work, who was strict and efficient, and who began and ended each day reliably, always at the same hour. She was not the kind of woman Carolyn could easily recruit. Carolyn knew this instantly, and still allowed herself to admire the secretary as she neared. Even obscured by over-large spectacles, the woman’s features had a straightforward cohesion: strong, dark, angular. Magnified by the lens, there was something familiar and fearsome to her stare. She did not step aside as Carolyn moved to pass her. Instead she reached out and seized Carolyn’s wrist, trapping them both in the threshold.

“Next time, make an appointment,” the woman said with severity. Her smile was condescending. The kind of woman Carolyn was pretending to be would not be able to meet this woman’s gaze. She focused instead on the mouth, which was so close to hers, and unadorned. Kuznetsov’s secretary smelt of strong, Soviet cigarettes and winter ice. Perhaps she had just come from the outdoors. Carolyn could imagine it: the sharp angles of the woman’s face caught in some mellow light, a lamp left on in an empty office; her plain, pretty mouth blowing smoke rings into the evening blue.

It was better, in these situations, to simply nod and skitter along; tyrants did not remember the ones who ran. She stumbled towards the staircase, and down the first flight, only resuming a placid, unremarkable pace when she was out of the woman’s view.

Carolyn touched her wrist, briefly, where Kuznetsov’s secretary had held her, before she pushed open the main doors. A bitter wind received her, and Carolyn shed all her meek affects, becoming someone else entirely.

One of her women had left her a note, slipped in between a Spanish-English dictionary, next to the entry for oveja (feminine, singular), sheep. As a schoolgirl, dissecting sheep eyeballs had left Carolyn with a fondness for formaldehyde, its strong, utilitarian smell wafting out of glass jars. She had held her hand steady, and peeled the rind of preserved skin from the soft, black cornea. Pried apart, the eye had looked like a mushroom cap, the same dark gills exposed and sensitive in the classroom light. It was a pleasant memory, and Carolyn was filled with nostalgia whenever she was allowed in a morgue. With the same delicacy as she had parted sclera from lens, Carolyn slipped the paper into some Ovid (generic, inconspicuous), which she tucked underneath her arm, my book of changes.

It was a quarter past noon. He was late. Carolyn wandered ambivalently through the shelves, touching books indiscriminately. From a high shelf, she retrieved a photography book: pictures from past Olympics in clean greys, of bodies, twisted and mobile and expended. Not so different from Ovid. As she was alone, Carolyn lingered on the photographs of the gymnasts — just out of girlhood, muscles pressurized, tense. Solemn faces and firm hands upon which one could balance one’s entire weight. She wondered what it would be like if a hand like that grabbed you.

There were familiar footsteps, undisguised, rounding on her. Carolyn leaned back against the shelf and, with careful carelessness, flicked the page just as Konstantin’s shadow crossed her.

“I’m thinking of taking up a new hobby,” she said evenly, when she felt him hovering over her shoulder. “What do you think?”

Konstantin looked at the page. He made a great show of contemplation. “Archery would be too obvious,” he decided, reaching to take the book and return it to its place.

“Hmm.” Carolyn neither agreed nor disagreed. “I’m a terrible shot.” A lie, easily given. She had excelled at archery in the summers, just as everyone expected. “You’re rather eager — what do you have?”

“Something better than sport.” From a pocket — it was impossible to discern how many he hid in those thick jackets of his — Konstantin produced an envelope. “Come, look.”

With all the drama of a street magician, he fanned out a series of photos. The contents were ordinary: an office, a mess of books and papers, an academic, but their arrangement was fatal. The man’s body was slumped backwards; there was some great, dark spot in his throat. An inky film was all over his desk, his papers. Carolyn swallowed a sour taste. In the left-hand corner, there was a familiar, rectangular lamp. Beneath it, an envelope, unstained. While it was a hasty, irrational feeling, for a moment she felt as though all her selfless work had been quite unfairly sabotaged.

“The man?” She showed none of this in her face, as was expected of her. Murder was rote to them by now.

“Doctor Osip Kuznetsov.” There was a bulge along Konstantin’s left ribs, another secret. Konstantin patted it, as though he were concerned something that solid and obvious could slip through his fingers. Carolyn suspected it was all a show, and that he was teasing her somehow. “A physics professor.”

“Slanderous or just unlucky?”

“Is a heel through a neck unlucky?”

“If it wasn’t designer, unquestionably.” She almost felt sympathetic; she would have been kinder. “That’s certainly inventive. What did he do to deserve such an — unconventional death?”

“It’s never really a matter of deserve, is it?” Konstantin shrugged, affable, and Carolyn slipped the photographs back into the envelope. It returned into the vast, impenetrable wool.

Briefly, the tone of amusement passed; Carolyn looked at Konstantin coolly: “Are you bemoaning a loss or are you bragging?”

“I simply thought you would enjoy it. It is — your word — unconventional. They don’t kill like that in London, do they?”

“No, we usually use the toe, rather than the heel.”

Konstantin offered her his arm, and she took it. Outside, Carolyn tucked the Ovid into a plain bag. All over the steps and walkways, the snow was bright and filled with sunlight, looking directly at it was blinding.

“Are you in a good mood because of the murder, or is there something else?”

“It cannot be your company?”

Carolyn smiled with mild disbelief. She allowed herself to be flattered, anyway. “Well, don’t make me take off my heels and force you. I’m not wearing the right pair for assault and battery, nevermind murder.”

Konstantin would not be forced. Not so easily. “I have a gift for you,” he said, instead. And he withdrew the protrusion from his side with the same flourish of a soldier unsheathing his sword. Vodka, the cheap kind. Carolyn held the bottle up to the light; sunbeams passed through it cleanly.  

“Will you tell me the occasion for this?”

“Always so suspicious,” he laughed, and now was complimentary. “I thought of you.” Another shrug. “And to get you in spirit —” Carolyn raised a single brow. “There is a party, Friday. Fancy types. Bureaus. You should come. I can introduce you to new people. Friends.”

“I’ll check my calendar.”

“You will want to come. There will be music. Violins.” She did like violins. “Here — So you won’t be late.” The Soviet agent removed his watch and fastened it around Carolyn’s wrist. It was plated entirely in gold, uncharacteristically showy for either of them. 

“Ask Vladimir to take you, he’ll be there too,” Konstantin tried to continue on in the same generous tones, but his sentence tapered off toward the end. The pause was slight but tender. It was like pressing against a bruise.

“You can’t?”

Konstantin put his hands in his pockets. He pretended as if there was something interesting there. Perhaps there was, but Carolyn doubted it was relevant to the conversation at hand.

“I already have a date.”

There was no reason he shouldn’t. Carolyn made an approving, non-committal sound.

“In fact — I am engaged.”

“Oh,” said Carolyn, breathless. She thought she ought to savour the feeling that passed through her now, like an electric shock, however unpleasant. It was so rare. “Oh,” she repeated the sound once more, forcing it to sound delighted. The best way to guard one’s heart was to not be precious with it. “Oh, why didn’t you say so? Konstantin — congratulations.”

He looked shy, then. Boyish and innocent, a face that had not yet learned to carry confidence. With her free hand, Carolyn cupped his face and Konstantin obliged. It was a kind face, gently formed, especially for a man of his work. Then again, many men who oversaw murder had a rounded sort of quality, a physical kindness they all hid behind. If he wanted, Konstantin could surely strangle any young gymnast. Carolyn leaned forward, and Konstantin obliged. She kissed him, and he kissed her back.

“Congratulations. This is — Wonderful. We should celebrate. We should share this.” Carolyn offered the bottle and Konstantin took it back jovially and with, perhaps, the slightest hint of relief.

“And you? Have you decided between your suitors?”

Carolyn almost laughed. “No, no not yet. I won’t, I don’t think, until I go back. It’s all a matter of pigeons, really…” Once she would’ve elaborated, explained. Now she simply pressed on: “Are we going to yours or to mine?”

“Ah, mine, mine. Maybe I have a picture lying around. I can show you —” And Carolyn knew he wouldn’t. Konstantin kept nothing so personal in the rooms he shared with her, but he lied so blithely and so easily, she remembered why, exactly, she thought so dearly of him. She knew him, and rather thoroughly, not through his objects but through his obfuscations; they understood that uneasy, unspeakable part of each other: the part that deceived and deceived and felt no guilt or sadness or shame. It would be good for Konstantin to love another. If Carolyn loved him any more, she would find herself responsible for him, a premise she found entirely unappealing. This, she told herself, was better. 

Konstantin held the bottle and Carolyn held his hand. She looked out into the sun, and thought about whether the bronze of Kuznetsov’s blood would’ve matched his lamp; and what sort of features Konstantin’s fiancée would have; and how she would arrange, now, for Vladimir’s promotion. Konstantin was telling her a memory, the first time he had come to Moscow, and as Carolyn listened, she slipped her hand into one of Konstantin’s pockets: warm and soft as sheepskin, and empty — just as she suspected.

“They sound a bit dreary, don’t they?” Carolyn was saying over the small, whining murmur in the hotel ballroom. Alongside the idle chatter of bureaucrats in suits and ironed dresses, the orchestra music sounded caught in a seashell: distant, ambient, contained. “You did promise violins. I suppose when we want them to be cheery, we call them fiddles —” Carolyn paused. Her wine glass was empty and she couldn’t remember the Russian for violin. Vladimir was listening to her, but only partially; primarily, he stared at Yesenin and Tarasov, standing a few groups over. Carolyn thought it was embarrassing to wear any emotion — nevermind envy, nevermind desire — so plainly on one’s face. She looked away, scanning the crowd for Konstantin.

Somehow, as was his nature, he was already behind her. Carolyn felt his touch, briefly, near the base of her spine, and so stayed still as she heard Konstantin seize upon Vladimir. It was Vladimir’s gasp, slight and immediately suppressed, which suggested the sound was a mistake and not a simple embellishment of character that made her turn. But there was Konstantin, looking as he always did: jovial, wolfish, and wearing one more layer than either necessary or expected. 

He was not the reason Vladimir gasped.

“Carolyn, you remember my friend Konstantin Vasiliev…?” In Russian, Vladimir made to smooth his quiet misstep. His motions became as velvety as an ermine’s, exuding charm with the same sleek aggression as stoats did sulfurs. “And this — it can’t be — is this your…?” Even his stumbles were lovely, intentional now, an exaggerated and complimentary speechlessness. Carolyn could not have done better.

Their attentions shifted, and a feeling of surprise pierced her. For a moment, Carolyn felt all her languages escape her. It was an inexplicable and rather juvenile sensation. She supposed, later, she may have been starstruck.

Dasha Dyuzhenkova, in flesh and blood and colour. Dasha, in sensational leopard print, looking entirely unlike all this room of forgettable shadows: the politicians and ambassadors and spies, all wearing their most ordinary faces, making their most ordinary sounds. Dasha, arrogant, familiar, stunning. She was statuesque in person. Her stare was not one Carolyn could ever incise; it was too hard, too bright.

“Devoted bride-to-be?” Offered Dasha, beaming, her hand tight, comfortable, on Konstantin's arm. She gave no introduction; it was assumed. Konstantin seemed content to be held by her, even as he choked slightly at her words, as though he, too, was surprised life had linked him to the Dasha Dyuzhenkova. “I took pity on him —”

“— She means, I swept her off her feet —”

“I thought he would cry if I said ‘no.’”

Konstantin laughed a little too loudly. “Her humour, ah? They say to marry the one who makes you laugh —”

“And your face makes me laugh every day, doesn’t it, my little sun?”

“You should have said,” Vladimir moved to kiss Dasha on either cheek, a gentle attempt to curtail them. “I would have worn a much nicer suit for such a renowned athlete.” 

“I wanted to,” Konstantin said. “I thought of sending a note, but then I thought — ah, Vladimir will not still be at his old desk, hm? He must be somewhere else, by now, our Great Vladimir —” He met Carolyn’s gaze. They both watched Vladimir’s smile tighten, and Dasha watched them.

“Did you have a name?” Dasha untangled herself gracefully from Konstantin, turning her gravity upon Carolyn. She offered a hand, and Carolyn watched as Dasha’s eyes focused on Carolyn’s wrist, on the way Konstantin’s obscene gold watch shimmered under the crystal lights. 

“Carolyn Martens.” She did not offer her hand. She did not give the slightest suggestion she cared to touch the Motherland’s most excellent daughter. Dasha bristled wonderfully; she did not even hide her insult.

“And how, exactly, do you know our Vladimir?”

“Through work. The embassy —”

“British? Yes. I thought so — you have that look, hm? We should be speaking English, then, for you —”

“— I’m perfectly fluent, you needn’t —”

“Non-sense,” In English, Dasha pronounced it like two words instead of one. She turned to Konstantin: “Darling,” this she pronounced in an incredible impression of Carolyn’s own posh voice, scathing in its accuracy, “Go get us some drink, mm?” Konstantin mumbled some assenting endearment, and allowed Dasha to kiss him. Carolyn wondered whether this was meant to rile herself or Vladimir. In any event, it worked on them both, and Vadimir made his own hasty exit: exercising a modicum of chivalry and slipping into the crowd at Konstantin’s side, promising to return with something Carolyn would enjoy.

“So—” Dasha began, and were she, indeed, a leopard, Carolyn imagined this was the moment she’d flex her claws. Her words suggested some kind of muscular force; she was readying herself for a fatal leap. Carolyn had the distinct feeling that other women, in the same situation, would feel a shot of fear. She did not feel it; instead, she watched the way Dasha’s eyes focused just to the right of Carolyn’s head. “What makes you so special?”

“If I indulged this line of inquiry, we could hardly say my humility.”

Dasha gestured behind her. “They’re both fucking you.”

Carolyn didn’t flinch: “A semantic matter, but one might say that I am fucking them.” She offered the clarification willingly. This was hardly her most important secret, and it was more interesting, anyway, to confess. She wondered where Dasha would lead her. “Though, if we’re speaking of semantics, you’re not really the future Missus Vasiliev.”

Dasha feigned indignation before she laughed. It was a luxurious sound. Carolyn suspected that if Dasha had ever sounded any less polished, reedy or girlish or silly, it had been trained out of her, and ruthlessly so. “And thank goodness, no?”

Fiancée. What a curious pretense. A strangely ornate lie, distracting in its oddity, its flashy shine. Carolyn stared at Dasha’s eyes. She said nothing, trying to place a feeling of her own.

Dasha did not do well with silence. The gymnast pressed on, more aggressively this time: “You’re not even that pretty. So — why? You are not nice either, I can tell.”

“No,” Carolyn conceded. She wondered how Dasha could tell. Perhaps she felt it too; the sharp edge they both carried. “No, I’m often told I’m the opposite. Menacing, on occasion.”

“By the British? What do you do — use the wrong fork at dinner?”

“Sometimes I even misappropriate the spoon.”

“To take out the eyeballs,” Dasha nodded, and although Carolyn suspected the woman was entirely sincere, she laughed. Maybe she laughed because of the sincerity. Maybe she laughed because, all at once, she saw Dasha with perfect clarity and it was obvious — wasn’t it? — and she should have realized sooner.

“You killed Osip Kuznetsov.”

“If you were admirer, you could just say.”

“You’re going to kill someone again tonight, aren’t you?”

Dasha seemed radiant, now. She turned differently under the chandelier’s brilliant light. Everyone looked differently when you saw them truly. The assassin could not hide her pleasure, not even as she continued on condescendingly: “So smart. You went to fancy, fancy schools, yes?”

“I did. Sometimes they even gave me medals,” Carolyn said, feeling rather pleased with herself when Dasha grimaced.

“All that education, and you aren’t afraid?”

It was such a cliché intimidation, Carolyn almost found it endearing: the nakedness of Dasha's threat, her conceit. Once again, Carolyn felt their temperaments brush up against each other. A spy is not showy, a murderer is; these facts were inherent, ingrained. However much creativity Dasha had exercised against Kuznetsov, assassins lived for cliché; they were constantly creating predictable fictions, delineating the boundaries of expected behaviour with brutal force. Their professions allowed them to view moral quandaries with great simplicity, or to simply not think at all. Besides, Dasha was hardly here to kill her; Carolyn was nowhere near that important and so, she reasoned, had nothing to fear.   

“Who is it? Shall I guess?” And when Dasha motioned for her to go ahead: “Tarasov?”

The Olympian raised an eyebrow. Carolyn wasn’t sure, yet, if it was an admission, but it was certainly his table at which Dasha kept stealing glances.

“Go on, you can tell me. You needn’t worry about my constitution. My moral indiscretions started young.” Carolyn watched Dasha’s face carefully, her eyes, the movement of her hands. She wanted to know what the gymnast’s body looked like when it was interested, when it was shocked, when it lied.

“Oh yes. I see it now. You are six and you what? Do not look both ways before crossing street? You take candy from uncle’s pockets without asking? I am terrified.” 

“They were banknotes, not lollies, and I believe would’ve been five. At which point you were doing tumbles and backwards somersaults…?”

“Handsprings and bars. A bit of ballet, then. By thirteen, I am better than Keleti, easy, but not yet allowed to compete. Then, well, it is as they say — history.”

“At thirteen I was off to boarding school. Do you know what barely supervised girls on the brink of puberty get up to? A verifiable Gordian knot. Quite literally, every now and again.”

Dasha scoffed. “You are not that flexible.”

“Are you sure? That might be what's special about me, after all.”

“It is not that special,” Dasha said, but with irritation. It was clear Carolyn’s relations still vexed her. “Two men? What is that? It is feeble. You would know this, if you knew real love.” She did not wait to be prompted: “To hold an entire nation breathless? To be adored by every citizen? Their cheers? This is love. To give yourself entirely, this is love. But I see you, a bit of your time with one, a bit of your time with the second, always testing the springboard and never jumping. It is a coward’s approach.”

Carolyn lifted a brow. It was quite an accusation, delivered with a martyr’s conviction. It seemed to require a response of equivalent force.

“Have you considered Occam’s Razor? The simplest answer —” Carolyn leaned forward, close. She touched lightly at a soft juncture beneath Dasha’s chin. Carolyn inhaled. Dasha smelt exactly how she knew she would: of smoldered wood, harsh Soviet tobacco. “— If I offer them neither romance nor acrobatics, I may just be, to borrow your term, an incredibly good fuck.”

When she pulled away, Dasha was no longer watching the other table. She regarded the British agent with the same fearsome hunger Carolyn had seen in her photographs. Carolyn pressed against Dasha’s wrist, a challenge, an invitation. To Dasha, she suspected they were one and the same.

They ascended the stairs in long, purposeful strides. Along the balcony, the chatter thinned and became its own, pleasant drone, and Carolyn could focus on the violins, which gave the whole scene an air of melodrama. Carolyn did her best to ignore it. As a general rule, she cared for melodrama as much as she cared for coffee froth or the sound of silverware against wine glasses, which was to say not at all. She preferred to watch Dasha’s neck, the muscles of her back underneath her dress. Eventually the music would recede, and Dasha would bring her to a door and then open that door and there would — she hoped — be a bed or some other kind of accommodation, and one of them would end up pinned against it — and it occurred to Carolyn that they’d both like to be the one pinning, rather than pinned, and also that, if it came down to something as gauche as wrestling, Carolyn didn’t stand much of a chance against a gold medalist who murdered for fun and profit. She would have to exercise her influence in other ways.

That assumed, of course, this was not just a schoolgirl’s dare. Perhaps Dasha would not touch her at all. Perhaps she wanted nothing more than to lead Carolyn up and away from the party. Perhaps she only wished to exert some punishing sense of control, simply to show Carolyn that she could.

Dasha found the door she wanted. As she opened it, Carolyn realized she did not have a plan if she was walking into the latter scenario, rather than the former. 

The room was large and only partially furnished, which was typical of a Soviet hotel, but some benevolent architect had been kind enough to leave a bed, a nightstand, and a single crimson cushion — the promise of a sofa, perhaps, or one newly escaped. “Thank God—” Carolyn began, and then Dasha pushed her against the wall and kissed her with urgency, a sense of dire need. Carolyn let her. Carolyn let Dasha palm at her waist, her thigh, under her dress. “Thank God,” she repeated, under her breath, and hoped Dasha would not hear. 

They kissed again, ungraceful and unceasing, while Dasha groped high along her thigh, where everything was sensitive and smooth. Carolyn twisted the fabric at Dasha’s hip into knots, insistent. They moved like they were teenagers or sociopaths — it hardly needed to be noted that the two groups were markedly similar — like they had just discovered the existence of a taboo, any taboo, and believed only great excursion, passion, could break it.

Eventually they paused, and Carolyn refused to pant because Dasha wasn’t panting either. Her hair was mussed, her face flushed, but the Olympian retained her control. She lifted her fingers to Carolyn’s mouth, which Carolyn opened for her, obliging: “Suck.”

Carolyn stilled. Dasha’s fingers warmed on her tongue. She considered complying once more, but it seemed an acquiescence too far. She found the idea fundamentally repellent. Besides, there was little use in wanting anything easy; she had a suspicion Dasha agreed with her.

She bit down on Dasha’s hand, pressing firmly along the assassin’s waist, a reprimand. “Manners.” She pronounced the word with as much dignity as anyone could, given the circumstances.

“Please-oh-please,” Dasha said, in her mocking British accent. It would do. Magnanimously, Carolyn sucked.

Dasha slipped that hand beneath the waistband of Carolyn’s briefs. She touched her cunt, which was what they were obsessed with, really: the places where they were each shameless and vulnerable, hot and wet and weak. “So soon? Are you like this for them, too?”

“If you’re good for me”— Carolyn held back her gasps as Dasha moved her hand, still lovely, still aggressive —“I’ll show you exactly how I am for them.” And Dasha exhaled there, which meant Carolyn had her, and had found something that delighted her, and that Dasha would be good for her. Which she was, sliding her fingers along her folds, pressing her tongue and her teeth against Carolyn’s collarbone, her neck, before Carolyn’s hands forced her higher, and they resumed their kisses with unyielding intent.

Carolyn’s dress was discarded on the floor with her briefs and Konstantin’s watch and any remaining inhibitions. She reclined on the bed, watching Dasha slide off her knickers — “I don’t have time for an additional costume change, hm? Use your imagination.” — and then rounded on Carolyn with a sort of forceful thoughtlessness, full of lust and need. Dasha straddled Carolyn about the hips with her thighs, with a pressure that reminded the British agent of any number of dangerous things: drawn bowstrings or lion’s jaws or steel traps. Machines and mammals that moved with cruel precision, and relished in leaving a mark. She let Dasha pin her to the bed, mouth along Carolyn’s neck and then her ribs, and Carolyn ran her hand along the sharp indents of Dasha’s spine, along her thighs, touching her like one would any wild thing: with adoration, control.

“Are you always this quiet?” Dasha sat up again, looking down with a mixture of amusement and disbelief. She rucked up her skirt so Carolyn could see the tense muscles of her thighs, a flash of her cunt. “Never say anything you don’t want to?”

“Never.” Carolyn elongated the word into three syllables, pacing her breaths as Dasha nudged Carolyn’s thighs further apart. She found Carolyn’s clit, and the gentleness with which she touched her, at first, threatened to disarm Carolyn entirely: “And where did you learn all this self-control?”

There was no concise answer, and none that would be of interest to the assassin, either. Carolyn was the product of repression, the dying stars of aristocracy, all that wan light; this was not Dasha. She wondered if Dasha was like this in other aspects of her life, hedonistic and without restraint. She wondered what her life would be like, if she allowed herself to live this too. If she undid all the careful, controlled neuroticisms and joined Dasha in her leopard spots and tiger skins. Carolyn imagined she would be something destitute, perhaps an actress instead of a spy — the veil between the two was thin — perhaps the kind of woman who begged. She frowned, and said nothing, but reached for Dasha anyway — it would have been impossible not to — and kissed her.

Dasha was beautiful in her motions, Carolyn could admit that privately if nowhere else, the way the gymnast settled herself between Carolyn’s thighs, pressed their cunts together and rocked with athleticism and grace. Carolyn bit down against her tongue, both to hold back some scandalous, needy moan and so Dasha would not see her biting. But evidence persisted: the erratic buck of Carolyn’s hips, the way her hands now twisted into the sheets. Dasha was as vocal as she pleased, growling and moaning and whispering filthy bits of Russian that Carolyn tried to memorize, press into permanence, so she might return to them, fondly, later, but her mind was swimming away from her with little regard for Russian or even English or any sound but the most desperate, primordial ones a woman could make —

She kicked at Dasha then, used her knee to break some space between them. And Dasha indulged this twice more — moving fiercely against Carolyn until the agent felt she was on the precipice of self-control, retreating until Carolyn’s breathing soothed, only to gasp when Dasha pressed her mouth in new places, on Carolyn’s breasts or inner thigh. And Carolyn finally arched towards her — only for Dasha to withdraw, scolding, unbearable: “If you’re trying to delay me…”

The absence of Dasha’s touch bothered Carolyn more than it should have. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Good. Because I do have a schedule to keep to…” And the assassin pushed the hair away from her eyes before sliding her hands along the backs of Carolyn’s thighs, fingers biting into her hips to hold her still as she lowered her mouth, pressed her tongue against Carolyn’s cunt. “So be good now, yes?” And the severity in her tone, something Carolyn had heard in her own voice often, was enough to make the agent’s hips buck once more.

Carolyn bit her hand when she came. Dasha rose, her mouth was slick and shining, and crawled over Carolyn’s body, prying the hand from Carolyn’s mouth. She sucked on Carolyn’s index finger, and then the back of her hand, and then bit down over the teeth marks still red against Carolyn’s skin. It was a strange, incomprehensible gesture. It meant nothing, and yet Carolyn felt, deliriously, as though it bound them together somehow. Pleasure always made her sentimental, and perhaps it was the same for Dasha, who kissed her again. “Yesenin,” she whispered, before rising and retrieving her knickers. She cleaned her mouth with the inside of Carolyn’s dress. Dasha picked up the golden watch and slipped it over her hand. “He has, oh, fifteen more minutes? You should get back down. It will be better than little fiddles, hm?”

Alone and unscrutinised, Carolyn allowed herself ten deep breaths. From her handbag, she retrieved her compact and a plain silk scarf. She tied the latter around her neck in a manner a classmate had assured her, years ago, was quite fashionable. More importantly: it provided one with sufficient coverage for most public engagements. That was the real reason all the girls had adopted the style.

Coming down the staircase, she saw Yesenin begin to mount the steps. He looked fragile, and Carolyn remembered, vaguely, the carcasses of her brother’s toy soldiers, which he’d launch from windows or set on fire in the garden. He was coming towards her and she to him and she reached out then, impulsively, and touched at his arm.

Carolyn could barely hear the violins over the shock in Yesenin’s eyes, which were set ridiculously far apart on his face, and gave him the look of some saltwater fish, flopping out on a sunny shore. She felt a surge of pity for him. He would go to Dasha unthinkingly, and there was nothing to be gained in stopping either of them.

“I apologize,” she said softly, in her higher Russian voice, the one full of kind insincerities. “There was lint on your sleeve,” and then, quick as she had caught him, she released Yesenin, stopping for just a moment longer to watch as he went off to greet his own small oblivion.

In the ballroom, Konstantin and Vladimir were building an Eiffel Tower of their empty glasses. Its accuracy was impressive, given the materials at hand.

“Carolyn! Where did you disappear to?” There was a faint pink glow to Vladimir’s face when he smiled. Carolyn took the fresh shot glass from his hand and downed it, burning away the memory of Dasha’s tongue before she let Vladimir kiss her. All his moodiness left him when he was drunk, as did his restraint. Carolyn held him about his waist to contain him, and to remind him of his shape.  

“Helpless between two trade ministers, I’m afraid —” She leaned in to kiss him again. Then, lowly, while their faces were still near, “Go find Tarasov, and stay by him. You’ll want to be the first name that comes to mind, momentarily —”

“Of course,” Vladimir said as she pulled away. He spoke lightly, as though he could have been submitting any inconsequential request between lovers, but his eyes were understanding. “Anything you like.”

Konstantin passed her a wine glass, half-full, as they watched Vladimir slink off into the crowd. “You’re very friendly with him.”

“You know our arrangement. Don’t be jealous.”

“No?” Konstantin’s hand was on her back again. Carolyn sipped her wine and regarded him with indifference. “But I think that is exactly what you want from me, Carolyn.”

“You consider me terribly petty, then. Perhaps you confuse me with your fiancée?”

A shadow passed over Konstantin’s face, a rather heavy-handed omen when one considered it, and Carolyn looked up warily to search for the source. It was an impulse shared, evidently, by most of the ballroom, because the chatter and the strings all stilled and, instead, there was a great and spineless silence, and then everyone began screaming.

It was a remarkable bit of rigging. Carolyn wondered how on earth she had managed it: Yesenin’s body swung above them like a second, limp chandelier, a rope pulled tightly around his neck. His fishy eyes had popped out even further from his lids, looking like strange, soft pearls. Carolyn could not make out how he was suspended, but some part of it snapped. The sound echoed. “Oh dear,” she said mildly, setting down the wine glass. Intelligence officers and diplomats and musicians all began to scatter, fleeing Yesenin’s shadow.

Another sound pierced the room, reminiscent of cracking a bone. It harmonized, in its own horrible way, with the wailing. Through the crowd, Dasha came towards them, glamorous and distraught. She seized on Carolyn immediately, performing a series of sobs that made her indistinguishable from the maelstrom around them, and Carolyn felt herself pull Dasha towards her: a new and thoughtless impulse. The rope thinned. “Are you going to finish that?” Konstantin asked, ignoring Dasha and the pandemonium and the hanged man as he reached over for Carolyn’s glass.

Dasha gave another wail as the body fell. She buried her face in Carolyn’s neck and Carolyn touched her hair sympathetically, watching as Yesenin splintered into horrible, contorted angles. She did not look away from it, and it was only when, under the cover of so many other screams, Dasha covertly undid the scarf and sunk her teeth into Carolyn’s neck that the spy made a small, uninhibited sound. If one listened closely enough, it might have sounded like a gasp.

The librarians must have considered her insufferably predictable, if they ever considered her at all. In even intervals, she set her books down on her kitchen table, next to the scissors and the translucent rectangular vase, filled with the tall, pink roses Vladimir had sent her. In the Pushkin, there were notes from her women folded gently against the verses, an anxious request from Mulligan tucked towards the end. The Suetonius filled her with a feeling of nostalgia for the trite and simple problems of her university days, the crystalline characters, and so she had fit dear Vladimir’s letters there, near where Tiberius’ life came to a close. They would go for dinner in a month, when he was settled into his position and there would be less eyes on him, less suspicion; in the meantime, his letters were sweet, perhaps even florid with gratitude. More importantly, he had also slipped her the first portion of Morosov’s files. Carolyn slipped that under the Suetonius, where it would not draw attention. She touched the rose petals gently, before recentring the vase, so everything was aligned. Satisfied, Carolyn lifted the scissors to return them to the kitchen — 

Carolyn paused. Quietly, she returned the shears to their drawer. They hadn’t been there or, indeed, anywhere Carolyn could recall for the past weeks. She went to the bathroom and opened the cabinet. She took out her creams and, from behind a trick panel, withdrew the handgun, grimacing as she familiarized herself with its weight. It was the most desperate cliché, wasn’t it, to be a spy brandishing a little gun? It was such an unsubtle weapon; Carolyn would have been mortified to be seen with it. She consoled herself that she was probably alone, and there was no one to judge her but her nerves. Or if there was an intruder, well, then, she would simply have to shoot them, wouldn’t she?

Only her bedroom door was closed. Feeling rather weary by what seemed all but inevitable, Carolyn twisted the doorknob, raising the barrel to the middle distance.

“Please not a gun. I deserve a more interesting death.”

Predators are always self-possessed, Carolyn thought, not without admiration. Sitting up on her bed, Dasha spoke flippantly. And though Carolyn was certain Dasha would profess no love for monarchs or emperors of any stripe, the defiant jut of her chin and smug smile all conjured a heady sort of confidence, the likes of which Suetonius would’ve reveled in recording. It was all the more impressive given that Dasha wore nothing but what Carolyn was rather certain was one of her blouses, and one of her more beloved ones at that.

“You found my scissors.” Carolyn set the gun to the side. She took off her winter coat.

“They were under the bookshelf. Why do you keep them there? I needed them to open the crackers.”

“You ate my crackers?”

“You took very long. I needed a snack.”

She went to her wardrobe, where, as she suspected, her clothes were in loose disarray, slipping from the hangers, collecting in puddles of silk and cashmere on the dresser floor. “You also played dress-up,” she said, rather unimpressed, as she put away her jacket. The least she could’ve done was clean up after herself. But Dasha only hummed ambivalently; this was hardly a trespass by her standards. “And you stayed to play what exactly…?”

“A gift.” Dasha beckoned her forward and Carolyn obliged. “I have been thinking since I met you…” The assassin reached for the zipper of Carolyn’s skirt, unclasping the teeth and letting the fabric fall. “All your time with ugly men — a great pity. You deserve a nice thing.”

Carolyn looked down at Dasha archly, watching as her hands began to undo the buttons of Carolyn’s dress shirt. She started from the middle, which Carolyn found curious, and lingered a moment, resting a warm hand on Carolyn’s stomach, her ribs, places she had kissed only a week ago.

“And you’re my nice thing?”

“In all the Union, there is nothing nicer than me.”

Carolyn undid the remaining buttons of her shirt, and then removed her nylons. Though Carolyn moved pragmatically, Dasha's eyes followed her as though her brisk undressing was a seduction unto itself. Finally, Carolyn undid the scarf around her neck. She moved forward onto the bed, her knees resting between Dasha’s spread thighs: “What kind of knot did you use — on Yesenin?”

Dasha took the fine material from Carolyn’s hands. She shrugged, as indifferent as if Carolyn had inquired into the day’s weather. “In gymnasium, we called it a Tsar-Killer.” Carolyn watched as Dasha looped it around her wrist and pulled it fast. Against her pulse, it looked as harmless as a child’s bow. “And I thought you were the gift,” Carolyn murmured, leaning down to kiss the assassin. She reached between Dasha’s legs, to touch the other woman where she was already wet and exposed.

When they parted, Carolyn studied Dasha: the penetrating darkness of her eyes, the feline grin. Her whole face betrayed a proud, uncompromising flame of desire, and Carolyn decided she was not embarrassed by it; instead, it filled her with her own thrilling heat, and she pressed her palm more forcefully against Dasha’s cunt, moved her hand until Dasha moaned and bucked and bit against Carolyn’s shoulder through the fabric of her shirt.

“Oh no,” said Carolyn, withdrawing her fingers from Dasha’s clit as she rebuked. “We’re going to do this properly, aren’t we?” She slid the shirt off from her shoulders, and then slipped her hands underneath Dasha’s blouse, pulling it upwards. She kissed Dasha, the sculpted lines of her abdomen, the smooth skin of her breasts.

“Now, then —” Carolyn’s hands cupped Dasha’s face, as though she could hold all of that hot desire, as though she was not burning herself. With a last gasp of control, before she surrendered herself entirely: “Don’t be too nice, hm?”

Afterwards, Carolyn lay back on her mattress and Dasha rested her head on Carolyn’s stomach, her body stretched out along Carolyn’s legs. Dasha asked if Carolyn had any smokes, and Carolyn said they were in the living room by the books, and they both considered this, taking slow, languid breaths. The exhaustion, a lovely and totalizing feeling of being quite entirely spent — one Carolyn had not felt in quite some time — outweighed the compulsion. They stayed as they were, sharing the same heat, breathing in the same heavy patterns. There was something freeing, too, to exist in the way they wanted one another, without any foolish, romantic expectations, not requesting love or life, but perhaps the obliteration of it, some perfect rhythm where nothing existed but uncomplicated desire.

In the dark, Carolyn stroked Dasha’s hair, tracing behind her ear to the beginning of her jaw. Dasha went very still, almost tense, in what Carolyn suspected was surprise. It was an intimate motion, and Carolyn imagined no one had touched Dasha in this manner before, or not in a very long time. The hand on Carolyn’s hip tightened. Carolyn wondered how many hours Dasha would stay before she fled back into the night to which she belonged.

“Is he really engaged?” Carolyn asked, finally, because her mind would not rest, even now.

“Yes,” Dasha turned her mouth away from Carolyn’s hip. Lazily, she brushed her nails up and down Carolyn’s thigh. “But he gets engaged once, twice every year. It does not mean anything — not to him. It is just something to do. And this one will not stick. I have seen her — she is too nervous, too suspicious. It will not work.” Carolyn felt Dasha’s smile press against her skin. She suspected it was mocking. “Don’t you worry, darling.”

“I suppose it can’t be helped. I’ve always suspected we’re all romantics, in our own way,” Carolyn cast a glance to the window, where the night was cobalt and impenetrable. She felt Dasha’s nose wrinkle, displeasure perhaps, disgust. “In fact, I think you may be right —”

“I am always right.”

“— I may be a stranger to what you boldly call 'real love.'” Her hand moved along Dasha’s jaw. “It’s not that I don’t love people,” She spoke to Dasha in the same way women spoke to their cats, with the kind of honesty you offer any creature that is bound to you, one that listens and does not care, or cares but does not know how to listen. “I find many people very interesting, really. And I want to know them, and deeply, but not at the expense of efficiency. It would be so much easier to love people — continuously, I mean — if one didn’t have to bother with all the tiresome, unnecessary details. All the peculiarities, the mundane idiosyncrasies — I imagine, to anyone else —”

“To normal people,” Dasha nodded, pronouncing the words with straightforward loathing.

“Normal people, yes. I imagine, for them, these small details are endearments. To me, they are weapons. They get in the way of everything else, and yet, I suspect love cannot live without them…”

Dasha rolled over, to look up at Carolyn. Her smile was unmistakably sardonic. Already, Carolyn felt there was a part of Dasha she knew intuitively, a knowledge that would eventually sharpen and, one day, wound someone — perhaps Dasha, perhaps herself.

“You make things very complicated,” Dasha scolded. “It is not this way. You either are, or you are not. You land or you fall. You win or you lose. You love or you hate. You feel something or nothing.”

“Perhaps,” said Carolyn. She was not interested in arguing with Dasha. She had a feeling such interactions did not end pleasantly for either party. What it must be, to live as she did: so simply, so many clean strokes. So much of life reduced to hunger and instinct. Carolyn was consumed, for a moment, with both envy and pity. Dasha would live richly, but always on someone else’s terms. It was almost a shame; Carolyn could not even imagine a Dasha who operated with refinement, a general’s prescience. She had an emperor’s cruelty, his gravity and gilded trappings, and none of his stratagems. It was better, she decided, not to worry and, while Dasha was still here, to focus instead, as Dasha would, on one’s immediate needs: “Shall we go again, then, while you still feel everything for me?”

When she woke next, the sky had thinned, pale with sunlight, and there was only her weight, her heat, in the bed. Leisurely, Carolyn considered her day ahead, the innumerable tasks; she was not the sort to procrastinate. She stretched, then. Her body was sore, full of bittersweet sensations, and Carolyn threw her head back — only to laugh.

Above her, Dasha’s impervious, inky stare, now flamboyantly autographed. Dasha’s large, looping signature slashed across the black and white furs. Carolyn rose to peel the photograph, gently, from her ceiling. It wouldn’t do, to be careless with something so priceless. It could be worth quite a lot of money one day. As with all her best stories, Carolyn would keep it somewhere safe.