Below his cries of triumph was another sound: the moans of the Nassri sitting at his desk, in a hum of denial, shaking his head, as he watched himself come comprehensively over the abdomen of the patient on whom he had just operated.
‘I’m the king of tits!’ the onscreen Nassri howled happily, as he spunked over Dasha’s unconscious body, his entire body shaking in release. ‘The king of fucking tits!’
The moans stopped, and the Nassri behind his desk covered his face with his hands, unable to watch the sight of himself orgasming on the woman standing in front of him.
‘Thank you very much, Dr Nassri,’ Dasha said coolly. She dropped her cigarette into the water of the large Lalique vase, containing white winter roses, that stood on the desk: the butt sizzled momentarily, then fizzled out. ‘I’m sure that was exactly what the doctor ordered. Or should I call you the “king of tits” from now on?’
Hassan Nassri stabbed at the keyboard, managing first to freeze himself in the act of trickling some last drops onto Dasha’s stomach, and then, eventually, to fumble the disc out of the drive again. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely hold it: bending it savagely against the side of the desk, he broke it in two and threw the pieces across the room.
‘I have many more copies,’ Dasha said casually.
Nassri’s professional assurance had entirely deserted him: he stared up at Dasha, his face a ghastly mask of entreaty. ‘You must understand!’ he pleaded. ‘When I create something so beautiful – like what I did for you – when I work on a masterpiece of perfect symmetry – when I know how good it is, I become excited. An unbearable pressure. It builds up, I feel it so strongly, and then, when it is over, when I know that I have succeeded, triumphed – I celebrate. It is like an act of worship, a tribute to beauty—’
But he had to stop, because Dasha was laughing so hard she had doubled over and was holding onto the desk, her shoulders rising and falling, her cackle like a rook’s caw. When she eventually straightened up, she was red in the face; she took a tissue from the box on the desk and dabbed the tears carefully from her eyes, studying the tissue to make sure that her liner and mascara hadn’t run, before tossing it on the floor.
‘Oh, very good!’ she said, her body still shaking. ‘Very good, Hassan! You don’t mind that I call you Hassan, instead of the king of tits? I feel that we are close now. Intimate. After all, we just watched you jerk your dick and come all over my body.’
Her eyes narrowed, her skin hardened; she might have been looking through the eye slits of a helmet. Pulling her skirt up a little, she sat down in the chair facing the surgeon across the desk, crossing her legs, dangling a Kandee leopard-skin stiletto from her toes as if she were showing it off for an advertisement shoot.
‘I hope you enjoyed that, Hassan,’ she hissed. ‘I wonder how much my husband would enjoy to watch you worshipping the beauty that he paid for.’
Hassan’s lips were white now with fear.
‘P – please... ’ he managed to stutter.
‘You should have been more careful, Hassan,’ Dasha advised him, her tone almost friendly now; she could switch back and forth in an instant. She snapped open her gold Fabergé case and extracted another cigarette. ‘You should have confined yourself to wanking over women whose husbands won’t rip your balls off with pliers and then feed them to you before taking a blowtorch to what’s left.’
Hassan was trembling now from head to toe; by now, he was beyond speech.
‘Have you heard of a man called Arkady Chertkov?’ Dasha asked him, her eyebrows rising. ‘He was a business rival of Grigor’s, long ago. Long ago. And he had been given some natural gas concessions—’ She smiled, interrupting her story briefly. ‘Well, he had bought some natural gas concessions from people in the government, for a lot of money. But you see, Grigor had also paid the same people. He had the deal already arranged, and then Arkady stepped in at the last minute and paid them more. I think the word in English is gazumbing.’ She tilted her head to the side. ‘Gazumbing, gazumding – something funny like that. Anyway, Grigor was very cross, and he went to see Arkady, and he said: “You have not been behaving well, and you must give me the concessions that I paid for.” And Arkady said no.’
She stared at Hassan.
‘Would you like to know what happened next?’ she asked.
Hassan shook his head frantically.
‘Fine,’ Dasha said. ‘I will not tell you.’ She smiled. ‘I will show you.’
She reached into her bag again, and came out with an A4 envelope: holding it open over Hassan’s desk, she scattered its contents onto the leather blotter, Polaroid photos with wide white borders. Hassan stared down at them, his expression first incredulous; then, as he slowly took in the reality of what he was seeing – Arkady Chertkov tied to a chair, undergoing exactly the torture that Dasha had described earlier – he went from ashy pale to livid green. Pushing back his chair, he stumbled over to the sink behind the screen in the corner; the noises he made, heaving up his guts, were prolonged and accompanied by a nauseating smell.
Dasha pulled a bottle of Paloma perfume from her bag and spritzed it in a wide arc around her.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I see you are aware of how serious this is.’
Hassan, having rinsed out his mouth and wiped it dry, eventually began to stagger back to his desk. All his confident professional assurance had deserted him; he moved as if he were crippled by a savage series of blows, propping himself against the edge of the sink, manoeuvring from there to the back of his chair and thence to a stumbling collapse into his chair again.
‘Please... ’ He reached out a trembling arm and pushed the Polaroids away; they tumbled off the edge of the desk, landing on the carpet with a series of soft thuds. ‘Tell me what you want from me,’ he muttered, unable to meet her eyes.
Dasha leaned forward, propping both her elbows on the desk, all the power and authority in the room now hers. It might have been her office, and Hassan a lowly, grovelling employee.
‘I want a hitman,’ she said. ‘You need to find me a hitman.’
December 23rd
Melody
‘Darling! Oh my God, just look at you! Your poor face!’ Felicity Bell, Melody’s best girlfriend from their RADA days, flitted into Melody’s temporary home on a wave of perfume. Belted tightly around her tiny waist was a tweed coat whose ruffled neckline framed her pretty little face with fluttering layers.
‘It must be incredibly sore!’ Felicity continued with great relish, gawking unashamedly at Melody. ‘And my God, so swollen! Is it going to be like that for absolutely ages?’
‘No, the swelling’s going down fast...’ Melody said feebly, already wondering whether this visit had been such a good idea after all. Meeting Aniela yesterday, chatting to her, showing her the Wonder Woman clip, had done Melody the world of good – at first. But when the buzz had worn off,
Melody had been left feeling lonelier than ever. She’d even toyed with the idea of ringing Aniela, asking her to come back and watch a film that evening, and then told herself she was being utterly pathetic. Poor Aniela would feel obliged to keep her patient company, and the last thing Melody wanted was to force her into a fake friendship.
So her thoughts had turned to real friends, girls she’d been close to since drama school: girls who would understand the pressure young actresses were under, who would empathise with the decision she had made to have plastic surgery, not judge her.
And girls who know James, who hang out in the same social group, who can tell me how he’s doing...
Melody was determined not to see James until her face was fully recovered. But the temptation to talk about him, once it entered her mind, was impossible to resist. She’d rung Felicity, who’d been very excited to hear from her; Melody had made her promise that she wouldn’t tell a soul where Melody was holed up, and Felicity had sworn, with proper dramatic emphasis, that she absolutely wouldn’t, on her life, for anything; but Kathy had been asking about Melody c
onstantly, and what if Felicity brought Kathy over too, she knew that Kathy would love to see how Melody was doing too...
‘Mel! Oh, it’s so great to see you! We brought you coffee,’ said Kathy enthusiastically, following Felicity into the apartment. She was carrying a moulded cardboard tray into which three Caffè Nero paper cups were wedged. While Felicity unfastened her coat and threw it dramatically onto one of the dining-room chairs, walking over to ooh and aah at the view from the huge windows, Kathy placed the coffee tray on the table, took off her own bulky padded coat, hung up both hers and Felicity’s in the entrance hall cupboard, and, consulting the marker pen scrawl on each cup, duly distributed them among the three girls.
‘Skim-milk cappuccino, no chocolate,’ she said, handing Melody hers with a big smile. ‘Just like you said.’
‘Thanks, Kathy,’ Melody said gratefully, taking the coffee. ‘I’m really missing these while I’m holed up here.’
It was ironic that Kathy was bustling around, looking after the other girls; it was life imitating art. Melody and Felicity were part of what the papers had nicknamed the ‘Corset Crew’, a whole group of attractive young actors who were riding the wave of success on the raft of historical TV series that were currently so popular. Melody had, of course, hit big with Wuthering Heights; Felicity had just wrapped a TV series called The Making of a Marchioness, and both girls had had bit parts in an adaptation of The Pallisers straight out of drama school. Slim, pale-skinned and elegant, both Melody and Felicity exemplified the image of upper-class, aristocratic girls whose figures looked slender even in constricting corsets. Kathy, on the other hand, at size 12, was too large, by the harsh standards of film, to play a heroine. Her skin was too sallow, her hips and bosoms too generously curved. She was, however, a very talented actress – much more so than Felicity, and maybe even more than Melody – and was carving out a good career playing best friends, second leads, and servants; casting considered her figure more suitable for the lower classes. She was currently making a name for herself as Betty, the plucky, working-class kitchen maid with a secret dream of starting up her own bakery, in the BBC Victorian drama series Howerby Hall. Felicity took the coffee cup from Kathy without a word of thanks, just a swift question.
‘It is soy, isn’t it? I’m so off dairy.’ She curled her tiny little body up in the curve of one of the Ligne Roset leather sofas as confidently as if she were the hostess. ‘And gluten. I feel absolutely wonderful. My digestion’s just ripping along.’ ‘Lovely,’ Melody said, exchanging a glance of amusement with Kathy, who was perching decorously on the sofa in the small amount of space Felicity’s legs were leaving her. ‘This place is fabulous!’ Felicity went on, looking around her appreciatively. ‘It’s like fantasy living, up in the clouds! I bet you don’t miss Shoreditch one little bit, do you?’ Melody winced. In her impulse for company, for talk about her old London life, she’d forgotten that Felicity had the knack of finding your sore spot and pressing her finger down on it firmly. ‘So the surgery’s gone all right, then?’ Kathy said, seeing Melody’s reaction and quickly steering the conversation away from anything to with James.
Melody nodded, peeling off the plastic lid to her cup and blowing on the frothy cappuccino.
‘Apparently it went without a hitch,’ she said. ‘It should have done,’ she added dryly. ‘It’s costing me a fortune.’ ‘You should have gone to Brazil! It’s much cheaper, apparently!’ Felicity trilled. ‘I read this amazing book recently about Princess Diana not being dead after all – she goes to Brazil to get her face done and then hides out in America – it was really fascinating! I’m auditioning for the film, actually.’
‘How long do you have to stay in here?’ Kathy asked, ignoring Felicity.
‘I don’t,’ Melody admitted. ‘I’m just hiding out from the paps. I don’t want photos of me looking like this on the front page of the Express.’
‘Oh no, so you’re going to be stuck in here over Christmas? That’s a shame!’ Kathy said sympathetically, wrinkling up the cute, freckled snub nose that was one of the features which disqualified her from ever being cast as an aristocrat. ‘She’s lucky,’ Felicity drawled, sipping her soy latte. ‘Christmas is so bloody fattening. She gets to stay in here and eat lovely little healthy meals – and isn’t there a spa here as well?’ ‘There’s a Six Senses spa,’ Melody said. ‘And a wave pool.’ ‘Oh, I should have brought my cossie!’ Felicity exclaimed; she was one of those girls who loved nothing better than to strip off to a tiny bikini while complaining about how fat she was, so that everyone else would tell her she was being ridiculous. She squinted at Melody’s body, swathed in her cashmere wrap.
‘You got those boob implants taken out as well, didn’t you?’ she continued. ‘They were really big in that film of yours.’ This was disingenuous; everyone knew the name of ‘Melody’s film’ perfectly well. ‘Good thing you got them deflated again. They’d have been much too big for anything period. Especially Regency. Unless you were playing a wench, of course.’ She giggled.
Remind me again why I rang her up? Melody asked herself, taking in the maliciously amused expression on Felicity’s sharp-boned little face. She’s always been a self-obsessed bitch
– what was I thinking, having her round to gloat over me when I’m looking like I fell face-first down a mine shaft?
Because she’s fuck buddies with Piers, James’s best friend, she reminded herself. And she’s a terrible gossip – she’ll know exactly what’s going on with James. If he’s seeing anyone... if it’s serious...
‘So! Are you going to catch up with James at all?’ Felicity asked, reading Melody’s mind with frightening ease. ‘Probably not while you’re still looking like this, eh?’ She giggled. ‘Don’t want to frighten the horses, do you?’
‘Felicity, give it a rest!’ Kathy said crossly. ‘We’re supposed to be cheering Mel up!’ She smiled at Melody. ‘I’m sure you’ll be back to normal soon,’ she said in the soothing voice that was making Betty the kitchen maid the nation’s sweetheart.
‘I hope so,’ Melody said with gratitude.
‘Are you going to stay on here, Mel, or head back to LA?’ Felicity asked, so casually that Melody was immediately on full alert.
‘Definitely here,’ Melody answered firmly. ‘I want to get back to doing stage work.’
‘Probably better for a while, because of the close-ups,’ Felicity cooed. ‘You must be worried about all that scarring.’ She looked visibly relieved. ‘I’m going over to audition for that Princess Di film in a couple of weeks – you’re not up for that too, are you?’
Melody shook her head, carefully, because of the splint on her nose. Felicity’s smile was catlike with satisfaction as she propped a cushion behind her shoulders and leaned back on the sofa, handing without a word her discarded waxed-paper coffee cup to Kathy to put on the glass coffee table; Kathy, always nice and helpful, obeyed as dutifully as the maid she played on TV.
‘I hear you’re doing really well,’ Melody said to Kathy, who beamed.
‘There’s definitely going to be a second series of Howerby Hall,’ she said happily. ‘And they’re even talking of giving Betty her own series after that – send her to Leeds to open up a bakery. I dunno, though. I’m a bit worried about being typecast. So I’m doing a new play by Shelley Silas at the Bush – it’s really good, very modern, nothing period about it, brilliant part for me – and then I’m looking at something else at the Royal Court. I want to balance things out so casting directors don’t just see me as Betty for ever.’
‘That’s a really good idea,’ Melody murmured appreciatively.
Kathy’s doing such a good job of managing her career, she thought enviously. I know she’s always wanted to be the next Judi Dench, and she’s nicely on her way. Whereas me – well, what am I on track to be? Right now, I’d be lucky to be the next Catherine Zeta Jones! More like Megan Fox, to be honest...
‘So—’ Felicity interrupted, never happy when the conversation wasn’t about, or
directed by, her. ‘You’ve heard about James and Priya, right? I heard she’s going to be doing Much Ado opposite him at the RSC, after those amazing reviews they got for Romeo and Juliet.’
Every muscle in Melody’s body stiffened. She had known that the Royal Shakespeare Company had approached James, asking him if he wanted to play the iconic part of Benedick in its upcoming production of Much Ado About Nothing next September; but her UK agent had sworn to her just a couple of days ago that the role of Beatrice, who feuded and sparred wittily with Benedick until they were tricked into admitting their love for each other, had not been cast, and Melody was desperate to snag it. Every serious Shakespearean actress dreamed of playing Beatrice. She was a wonderful character, sharp, funny, hiding her feelings behind her rapier tongue, gradually letting down her guard to show the passion she had been concealing, bursting out in a magnificent show of anger against the man who had injured her beloved cousin.
‘O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace!’ she quoted to herself. They were the strongest lines in the whole play, in her opinion, pouring out Beatrice’s frustration at not being able to pick up a sword herself and avenge her cousin’s honour, her fury that her lover wasn’t doing it in her stead: complex, powerful, moving. A world away from having to say ‘Suck it and see!’ as Wonder Woman, while she seductively ground the heel of her boot into some prone guy’s mouth.
She shuddered, pushing away the memory as fast as it had come to her. But to play Beatrice opposite James as Benedick... it would be the perfect, triumphant return to the British stage for Melody. It would demonstrate that Hollywood hadn’t spoiled her irrevocably, that she had her own face and body back, that she was still as good an actress as she had ever been. And all those weeks of rehearsals, flirting with James onstage, acting the parts of lovers slowly coming together, confessing their feelings in the most beautiful language ever written – that’s the best way to seduce back an ex-boyfriend I could ever imagine! Surely he couldn’t resist me?
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