Work Text:
So much to do today:
kill memory, kill pain,
turn heart into stone,
and yet prepare to live again.
—
Anna Akhmatova, “The Sentence.”
What the movies never showed was that, in order to indulge in cliché and successfully and inconspicuously exchange codes and documents and international secrets at the park, one sometimes simply had to spend one’s evening in said parks. It was near-thankless work. One sat quite still and pretended it was interesting, perhaps even soothing, to watch mothers shepherd their weeping children or teenagers fumble over football in the grass, collecting battle scars on their elbows and knees, purple-black bruises that would be compared like medals of valour, green stains on their shorts. Nowadays, there was a new and more unnatural cult of fully grown adults to watch during one’s well-maintained silence: those strange individuals who elected to thread brightly coloured elastic bands between tree trunks and attempt paltry high-wire acts. Carolyn was admiring the way one such tight-roper wobbled along her band when there was a sudden, warm rush of smoke. A new weight settled itself down on the bench next to Carolyn, presumptuously close and wearing one of Carolyn’s favourite coats.
“You did that once, didn’t you?” Carolyn did not turn her head to the side. She felt Dasha’s body rotate in a strange, slow motion to follow the subtle gesture of Carolyn’s chin. The tree-walkers were more like human pellets, gleefully loading themselves into slingshots, waiting to be snapped inelegantly to the grassy floor. It must be wonderfully freeing, to be so unself-conscious, so perpetually embarrassing. When the current amateur acrobat took a brutal tumble, Dasha snorted delightedly. It had been years, Carolyn thought, since she had heard that particular laugh.
In Carolyn’s peripheries, there was a dismissive wave of Dasha’s hands: “Yes. Serbian businessman, the nineties.” Another sharp snap of the rope. Above their heads, tree leaves shook in a sympathetic olive wind. “Baby gymnastics,” Dasha condemned, mimicking a pacifier, mocking. When Carolyn first met Dasha, first understood her pride, she thought she had discovered some lost treasure of Troy—some golden, scalding arrogance that belonged to a more mythic age, to heroes. Even now, cruelty made Dasha sound youthful, capable of anything: contortion, cartwheels, carnage, crime.
In Italy, they had met in orchards and vineyards, submerged themselves in the full intensity of summer. Dasha was newly exiled and all her motions had been sour, stinging. She laughed her way through the formal meeting, the perfunctions they carried out for MI6. She had been blithe and composed and imperial: offering riddles, promising nothing, spitting lemon seeds out into the field. Later, in the apartment, orange wallpaper peeling itself off the corners like jungle flowers moved by the heat, Carolyn kissed the acid from Dasha’s mouth and then the sweat from her neck. There was the application of constant pressure until Dasha yielded. “You work for me now, don’t you?” Carolyn whispered, her hand over Dasha’s pulse, looking down at the assassin, the insurmountable darkness of her eyes, the gentle pink of her tongue. She had been the most wonderful, compliant creature.
So it did not surprise Carolyn then, to see Dasha here, wearing a coat stolen from the spy’s own closet. All her impulses were sharpened in Carolyn’s direction. It was no different from any eel, returning along smooth, dark currents to the Bermuda; or the summer-seeking arctic tern, flitting reliably from pole to pole. Like any wild thing, it was inevitable that Dasha would return to her eventually.
What did surprise Carolyn was the bruising around Dasha’s eyes, the rusted lip, the effort of every breath, the pained movement. England turned Dasha damp, autumnal. Whatever gold she still possessed threatened to wither or else shake free.
“Whatever you want, don’t be circuitous about it,” Carolyn said. She felt a wave of weariness pass over her; Dasha’s demands were never small. And then, as if it explained why everything now vexed her: “I killed a man recently.”
Dasha snorted again, unimpressed and so unsympathetic. “Recently, I was killed.”
The tree-walker was back on the rope, taking more foolish steps. What did she think would happen when she reached the other tree? Who did she think would applaud? On the other end of the park, there was a burst of cheers; someone had scored a small, inconsequential goal. The two women watched the acrobat go, waiting politely for her to fall again before they turned to look at each other properly. Eye to eye. At the same time, in Russian: “So that’s why you look like shit.”
Carolyn smiled. Dasha laughed. Somewhere above, dark clouds ambled past, and children and mothers and footballers all began to disperse, fearing harmless rains.
“Very strange house.” Dasha lingered near the mirror, adjusting her wet hair and demonstrating her remarkable gift for sufficiently observing her surroundings while focusing primarily on herself. “All this wood. Suppose I lit a match—Do you still have neurotic little dog?” She bent down swiftly, as though she might catch the interloper unawares under the table.
“No. Pancreatic cancer, like my second husband. Ages ago now.” Carolyn came in from the kitchen and set down the tea. Poor Martin. The chihuahua had borne his fate more nobly than the late Doctor Stowton; in the end, Martin had a surprisingly Spartan attitude to pain. Or so Kenny had told her, anyway.
Dasha was only half-listening. She turned the plain teacups over in the wan, grey light. There had been a time in Carolyn’s life when she had a surfeit of opinion on houses and their contents, too. What was safe, what was attractive, what was proper. Now, they were all simply places in which work carried on, rooms to be furnished by the taste of others, walls to be lined with another person’s books.
“It’s just me.”
Kenny had liked this house, had wanted it, in that shy way of his; entering the hallway had left him speechless. He would never have admitted it to her, but Carolyn guessed it all stemmed from a daft childhood memory. When he was nine, he had campaigned for a treehouse. One’s fundamental wishes never changed much, at their core. One simply dressed them in different, more grown-up clothes.
Now Kenny’s room—where the sunlight came in dappled, filtered through the rounded shadows of the Judas Tree, the springtime silhouette of fuchsia blooms—still smelt of Geraldine’s sage. And Kenny’s things were still there, so many months later, in cardboard boxes. Geraldine had not unpacked them. Carolyn suspected her daughter had wanted to make some sort of bonding exercise of it all. The two them passing around items that had once been Kenny’s, sharing treasured memories, perhaps shedding a poignant tear. It had been yet another interaction to avoid: a needless game that would have only hurt Geraldine’s feelings. If Carolyn said nothing, she would be callous. If Carolyn documented memory after memory, eventually Geraldine would realize Carolyn did not have nearly as much to say about her, and would grow spiteful and jealous and cry, and her daughter was such an ugly crier. Her tantrums were always unbearable. It was best to avoid all of that entirely. Carolyn kept the room locked.
Poor Geraldine, Carolyn thought, but without any sentiment. It was simply a fact: Poor Geraldine. Someone, somewhere—God knows it wasn’t her—had taught her daughter that safety and transparency were synonymous. Kenny had never been so childish, even as a boy, dismantling circuit boards on her office floor or ferreting sweets from high cupboards. Kenny had understood safety was not a feeling but a strategy. He had never protested any of her idiosyncratic requests, never fussed. Geraldine would’ve been beside herself, pink up to her ears, watching Dasha run her fingers along the whorls in the dining table. If Kenny had any nerves about tea with one of the world’s most deadly assassins, he would’ve at least had the sense to excuse himself and quiver in private.
All things considered, however, Dasha was being notably well behaved. She poured tea for them both, watching Carolyn warily. Carolyn’s silence had been a long one—even for her—and Dasha did not like to be concerned until she knew she also had to be concerned for herself.
Refocusing, Carolyn took her tea. “Was it someone interesting, at least, whoever tried to kill you?”
“My star pupil —and then yours.”
“In the ballroom, then, with the candlestick?”
“Edinburgh. With a golf club.” Dasha threw her a daggered look: “Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“Not ‘ha ha,’ maybe. But you are inside. I can see it. I know you, Carolyn. But it is serious. They had to shock me in hospital, hm? Like Frankenstein. Three times.” Dasha was adding sugar into her cup with murderous precision: three indulgent spoonfuls, each punctuated by the sharp chime of metal against china.
Carolyn took her tea plain, and sipped it while contemplating this. Villanelle now sloppy, perhaps even sentimental. Eve dabbling once more in homicide. There was an excessive amount of feeling between the two of them, the promise of something entropic. A mess, then, for another day.
“I hope you haven’t sought me out to file an HR complaint. You could’ve stuck with Hélène for that.” The Hélènes and the Pauls of the world all adored bureaucracy over action. They wanted to run the world’s affairs like businessmen, whatever that meant. It was all rather absurd. For one thing, it was not as if an assassin could earn vacation pay, or that The Twelve had much of a use for doling out sick days. It was to their benefit, really, that they corralled so many megalomaniacs; their employees were too self-absorbed to ever dream of unionizing.
Eve would have reacted by now. She would be frustrated or impulsive or excited and come out with it, whatever she was after. Carolyn forgot, sometimes, how patient Dasha could be, how many years they had made her wait, and the athleticism the assassin brought to even the most inconsequential games. Whatever it was she wanted was now coiled up inside her, anticipating its perfect time to spring.
Dasha ran her finger along the table once again. She took her sweetened tea. “Who did you kill?”
“Konstantin’s handler.” So-called, anyway. Certainly someone like Hélène would’ve had an organizational chart in a briefcase somewhere, riddled with codenames and absent of photos. Another childish, futile exercise: the lines of power were never so clean. Nor was Carolyn ever included in any of their charts.
“Mm—why not the man himself?”
“I considered it.” And then, like it was a joke or a motive: “He said he loved me.”
Dasha’s laugh was polite and restrained, pitying. “And you believed him?”
“Of course not.” She spoke too quickly, too sharply. Her finger curled, remembering how it trembled over the trigger. When he wrote letters to her in the 70’s, the 80’s, when the world was only beginning to spin according to their whims, Konstantin would promise poetry. Sometimes, this was a trite little code word, standing in for any number of things. Poetry, a synonym for a plot or a political scandal, the placement of plutonium. But sometimes it was real poetry. Terribly written, and recited with unbearable sincerity, full of childish, plodding rhymes that guaranteed one would remember every crass verse for the rest of one’s life. True, there was a spirit to them that, if Carolyn felt generous, one could trace back to Donne. And The Bard himself might have applauded Konstantin’s ingenuity of language, the way he concocted so many new words to rhyme with ‘breast.’ Carolyn could offer no further praise for their merits as literature.
Still, it was one of his poems she thought of, when he was on his knees, the black muzzle of the gun between his watering eyes. (He could cry on command; she had seen him do it plenty of times before.) Her head had been full of his horrible, thumping rhymes, and her hand had tensed according to their stilted rhythms. She would freeze again, if he were here before her, prostrate and defenseless. Murdering Konstantin Vasiliev was an activity analogous to eating Geraldine’s holiday tofurky, or attending a yoga class. It was something she simply could not do.
“Do you know where he is now?” Carolyn did not so much as blink; it was not a question she cared to answer. Darkly, almost gleeful, Dasha continued, unbothered. She leaned forward with the malice of a child who knows they will get a classmate in trouble, “He wants out.”
Carolyn could imagine it: Konstantin rustling through a labyrinth of buried spaces, safety deposit boxes, trapdoors, trailing a knotted thread of passports and fake IDs—and moving, always moving, in a furious circle. There was no out . Konstantin should have known better by now.
“He won’t get very far,” Carolyn said. She had over-steeped the tea by a minute and it turned bitter in her throat. “We have Irina, and he loves her . He won’t let her go. There’s no point to all of this if—” The rest of the sentence flashed sharply in her mind. She was being careless. Emotional. If she spoke it aloud, she would puncture something, and have to live with that tear. Carolyn gave a tight smile, instead. “He loves her. He’ll come home.”
“Will you kill him then? When you see him?”
“I always thought you wanted that honour.”
Dasha laughed again, and the moment softened. “He has very punchable face, yes. Good neck for knifing. And he abandons me, but…”
“But?”
“But,” Dasha shrugged, and the preposition was all, both explanation and prophecy, and Carolyn understood. Maybe even perfectly.
They finished their tea, and Carolyn wished only to go to bed. Dasha, for whatever reason, was still biding her time. She had found a stray receipt—flowers, for Mo's funeral—and was attempting to fold it into a frog or a pinwheel, something trite and absurdly entertaining to all the Italian girls she taught handstands and flips.
“Do you mean to bore me to death?” Carolyn said at last. Dasha looked up, holding the incomprehensible paper animal innocently in her palm.
“Always suspicious,” she chided insincerely. She reached out across the table, to brush Carolyn’s chin with her free hand. “We are having perfectly nice afternoon, Carolyn.”
“Because if you are part of this little coup—" What else to call it? To take Kenny, and then Mo? “—I'd rather you make it quick.”
She wondered how Dasha might kill her. Perhaps with her nicest cutlery, like she was an especially good takeaway. Perhaps Dasha would try to impale her with the edge of the tea cup, or the point of her umbrella. Or perhaps Dasha would strangle Carolyn inside her turtleneck, like she so often promised, whenever their paths crossed. Although historically that was more of a strange, sideways seduction than a threat, a mistranslated invitation to undress. Carolyn's mind carouselled through Dasha's more notable murders: the surprisingly inefficient pitchfork; the ministers hung from diamond chandeliers; the bodies in chalk and plaster, remnants of some volcanic passion. Did she love them more, the ones she treated most painfully? How much would she have to promise, to remind Dasha that she was far more useful to her alive, rather than mummified in her latest murderous arts and crafts? Whatever anyone else had promised Dasha, Carolyn had more.
When she had been promoted—all of her promotions, to the head of the Russian desk, to The Twelve, had been eerily similar, down to the same congratulatory Tesco cake—they had warned her the job was a great deal more paperwork than people. “And we do know, of course, how clever you are with people, Carolyn…” This had never proved true; behind every report, every last footnote, after all, was a whole collection of people—informants, victims, agents, murderers—all of whom needed to be catalogued, understood. But even if it had, Carolyn would not have been shaken. She had been ambitious, then. Arrogant. She thought she could understand the entire world, and approached these offers in the same manner one agrees to a sporting bet, or to another round of cards. It had merely been the most challenging game to play.
So now here she was: in an empty room, her face in one of her finest asset’s hands. She would live, as she had lived these past fifty-some years. But there was a small part of her that would not have protested terribly, if Dasha now drew her hand down from Carolyn’s jaw to caress the soft veins of her neck, squeeze. There were fewer and fewer reasons to keep playing, that was the problem. Or perhaps fewer and fewer people to play with. No one to inherit all the information she had carefully accrued, no noble motivation to unseat this billionaire or unsettle that small, seaside country. No one for her to, one day, hand it all off too. No Kenny and no Eve (or any of her other Eves). She continued on, she supposed, because it was a matter of aesthetics. If she must continue to live in this world, Carolyn preferred that it be arranged according to her order. And she was a better custodian than others; it may as well still be her, holding all the cards, placing all the clever bets.
But Dasha was holding her face gently, and her eyes were the ones filled with a sudden, pleading pain. Carefully, Carolyn covered her the assassin’s hands with hers.
“Let me go home, Carolyn,” Dasha said, softly and with a shine to her eyes. Her tears may even have been real. “Let me be with him.”
Carolyn removed Dasha’s hand from her cheek, and chided herself for her bout of self-indulgent fatalism. It was for lesser, sloppier individuals to think only of their own woes. She patted Dasha’s hands with a maternal sort of condescension.
“You know I can’t,” said Carolyn, when, in fact, she was the only person Dasha knew with such authority. But it was for Dasha’s own good, really. It was practically generosity on Carolyn’s part, why she kept Dasha away. Perhaps even affection.
For how could she tell her? Your Russia no longer exists; there is nothing there that loves you, and nothing that you will love either. And your son? He does not exist. Not the one you see in your head, your imaginary boy: strong and noble and doting. You are a stranger to him, unrecognizable. He could not pick you out from any other old, fading woman. And you will not impress him, and he will not be loyal. He’s gone already. Irrecoverable. You lost him the moment you let him slip from your sight.
It was a kindness then, to let him exist as he did: a dream in Dasha’s merciless heart. It had been cruel of her to separate them, but it would be crueler, now, to stage any reunion. At least this way, he was immortal to her; this way, he would never die.
“Is that all you came to ask?” Carolyn placed two fingers to her left temple, lightly. She felt stricken by a sudden, subtle headache. “You might have written, after all. It would’ve saved us the cost of a hotel—"
And then Dasha was beside her, and her mouth nearer. She still smelt faintly of metal. She rested her hand loosely around Carolyn's throat. Perhaps she did have it out for Carolyn's turtleneck, after all. “I am not like Konstantin. I have only been good to you. I have never hurt your heart.”
“We can go upstairs if you like.” Carolyn relaxed into Dasha’s grip. “But I’m afraid that’s as far north as I’ll take you.”
If she would not murder and could not seduce, there was one tool left at Dasha’s disposal, but the assassin would not beg. She was too proud, and knew it was futile anyway. She withdrew her touch: “I am not leaving, Carolyn, until you let me go home.”
He did look like her, Dasha’s son. When Carolyn had seen him last, he had seethed in the same way. Shown all his anger in his jaw. Perhaps it was only to be expected—it was some well-worn adage, wasn’t it? Sons took after their mothers.
“The sofa isn’t uncomfortable,” Carolyn said at last, rising. “I’m sure you can find a blanket somewhere.”
She left Dasha to inspect all the knives in the kitchen drawer, or snoop about until she discovered wherever Geraldine had unpacked the spare duvets. Calmly, Carolyn slipped into her pajamas and then into bed. She closed her eyes, though these days she never dreamed, merely lulled herself into some suspended boredom. Lately, she had taken to counting meaningless sums until her body gave in and slept.
She stirred at ten thousand and eleven, feeling a faint pressure at her side. Dasha was indistinguishable from the rest of the dark. She made herself known only by the slightly pained sound of her breathing, the docile way she lifted Carolyn’s hand and let her mouth follow old, well-worn patterns: Dasha kissed Carolyn’s palm, bit at her fingers.
Carolyn obliged and made room for Dasha in her bed. She feigned more weariness than she felt, as she remembered how to accommodate another body. She lifted a hand to Dasha’s forehead, where the assassin had been bruised. She touched the shadow of Dasha’s chest, where they had shocked her back into being. Dasha’s Frankensteined heart purred furiously, as Carolyn stroked her along her waist, her hips. And who could say, in the darkness, if some part of Carolyn was impressed by Dasha still, all her well-trained instincts and impulses, or by her brutal, miraculous body, which insisted on living and dreaming and wanting, despite it all. When the spy’s eyes adjusted to the dark, she made out a faint, smug smile. Carolyn’s own face remained impassive, but her fingers curled into Dasha’s bruised skin.
Tomorrow, Carolyn told herself, she would get rid of her. There was always tomorrow.