Chapter Two
Queens Take Pawn
I did, indeed, think about what I’d done.
Exactly how did I plummet from the lap of luxury in Washington, DC, in February 2007, to the scrapheap of Countess Natasha Vronsky’s seduced-and-abandoned Slaves in Russleder in November 2007? Superficially, the two locales contrast sharply with each other: the Capital of the United States, climatically though not sociologically a Southern city, and Russleder, which roughly translates to ‘Russian Leather,’ staked out in the harsh terrain of Siberia.
Yet these two sites share significant comparative attributes. In fact, aside from their physical contrasts, they resemble each other in their essence: one, a fake dominion in Siberia; the other, sixty-eight square miles, surrounded by reality. A government official once
