She probably lives on air and water, Aniela thought meanly.
No one had started to eat; they were waiting for their host to give them the signal to begin. Pushing back the oaken throne on which he was sitting, Grigor scrambled to his feet, hoisting himself off the pile of velvet cushions which gave him extra height at the table.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, holding up his cut-glass goblet of Romanée-Conti – it was much too heavy a red wine to be properly paired with turkey, but it was one of the most expensive wines in the world, which was all that Grigor really cared about – ‘Happy Christmas! It is a wonderful time of year for me, and especially this one, because I have with me my beautiful fiancée, Zhivana, who will make me the happiest man in the world when we marry in the New Year...’
A stir of excitement ran round the room at this information: everyone who didn’t already know this news strained to get a look at Grigor’s bride-to-be, and a tiny sigh of disappointment issued from their lips when they realised that the limp celery stick of a girl between Grigor and her beaming father was the chosen one. Zhivana’s pallid, drooping face did not change expression in any way as Grigor continued:
‘And my younger son, Dmitri, has also come to join us! My older son Alek has sent his best regards to all – he is skiing in Verbier with the Casiraghi children.’
He smiled complacently at this reference to the scions of the Monaco royal family. The guests, already half-tipsy with mulled wine and champagne and vodka, murmured in appreciation of the name-drop.
‘So let us all raise a toast to family and friends, present and absent,’ he continued, waving his glass with dangerous abandon, ‘and—’
If Dasha Khalovsky had been waiting in the wings, ready to make her entrance with the most perfect dramatic timing possible, she could not have done better. Everyone had raised their glasses and had their heads turned towards Grigor: as Dasha launched herself, screeching, into the great room, the guests snapped round as if they were watching a soap opera come to life.
‘You fucking bastard!’ she shrieked. ‘Merry fucking Christmas to you too, you pig! Sitting here and toasting with our friends and not giving a shit about me,alone, rotting, for all you care! After all those years together, all I gave you, you throw me aside like a used old jacket when something younger comes along! How fucking dare you!’
The first wives at the table shivered, almost imperceptibly, as if a cold wind had blown over their bare shoulders. The models looked even more confused than usual. And Grigor turned bright purple with fury. He had taken off his beard and hat to eat, so his whole face was visible, and his ability to switch instantly from genial host to livid husband was impressive and frightening in equal measure.
‘What the hell!’ he yelled back. ‘How the fuck did you get in here?’
Dasha was wearing her yellow fur coat, and her hair was loose, its tinsel extensions glinting among the almost equally yellow locks. Theatrically, she ripped the coat open and placed her hands on her black silk-clad hips, standing with her legs a little apart, tossing her hair back; she’s crazy, but she does look very powerful, Aniela thought, unwillingly impressed by Dasha’s sheer presence. I wouldn’t like to get on her bad side.
Jon eased his chair a little back from the table. It looked as if he were merely trying to get a better view of the unfolding confrontation, and no one but Aniela paid any attention to the small movement.
‘I still have a key to the lift, you idiot!’ Dasha yelled. ‘And you can’t stop me coming in here any time I want! I own this place too!’ One hand still on her hip, the other traced a sweeping, magnificent gesture in the air that encompassed the entire penthouse.
‘Not for long!’ Grigor shouted, pounding his fist on the table so hard that the glassware and cutlery rattled. ‘You’re not getting this in the settlement!’
‘I don’t bloody want it, the way it turned out!’ Dasha shrieked, more than equal to this. ‘Look at it! It’s a fucking mess! Nothing goes with anything else! I can’t believe you bought that stupid, six-foot glass bear! I told you it was ridiculous, and so did the decorator!’
‘You bitch!’ Grigor clutched his chest, wounded to the quick. He glanced quickly at the giant crystal bear, as if to confirm for his own benefit how nice and big and shiny it was.
‘What the hell do you want, Dasha?’ he demanded angrily. ‘Why are you ruining Christmas like this? You’re getting a huge settlement!’
‘I don’t want a fucking settlement!’ Dasha’s voice was as high as a castrato’s by now. ‘Fuck you! I want our life back the way it was! Now you’re marrying that little nothing— ’ She practically spat at Zhivana, who didn’t even react to this; it was her father who bellowed like a bull at the insult to his daughter, waving a fist at Dasha. ‘And you’ll have kids with her! Kids who’ll disinherit ours!’
She swivelled on her heel and pointed at Dmitri like a murder suspect trying to cast suspicion on another one in an amateur dramatic production of an Agatha Christie play. Her rings flashed.
‘I am here for you, Dima!’ she said poignantly, switching gears like a skilled soap-opera actress, using the diminutive of his name. ‘I was not going to come, to make a scene! But when you texted to say you were having lunch here and would come to me later – when I realised you would be here, with him and her, when all she’s waiting for is to marry your father and have children with him to take your inheritance away, I could not control myself !’
Zhivana was huddling back in her chair now, her eyes wide, looking like a terrified little girl: whether she was more frightened of Dasha’s wrath or the prospect of giving birth to Grigor’s babies it was impossible to tell.
‘Mama, I really don’t care about the money,’ Dmitri said timidly. ‘I’d give most of it away to charity anyway.’
‘You’d what?’ his father yelled, turning to look down at his son.
‘Don’t pick on Dmitri! He’s a good boy! A moral boy!’ his mother screamed. ‘Things you don’t know anything about!’
Jon’s chair slid back another foot. Aniela stared at him curiously.
‘Dasha, there’s enough for everyone!’ Grigor turned back to her in frustration. ‘More than enough! You’ll be fine, Alek and Dmitri will be fine, I could have twenty kids with Zhivana and they’d be fine—’
Zhivana let out a tiny wail of protest at the mere idea of having twenty kids: and the number also tipped Dasha right over the edge. Her black-lined eyes bulging in fury, lips bared, she let out a banshee wail and dashed full tilt at Grigor, hands up like claws.
Every single bodyguard stationed around the room pulled out his gun automatically at this threat, even Fyodorov’s; their employer was a mere two seats away from Grigor. But it was pointless. They couldn’t fire. Dasha was Grigor’s wife. Without a direct command, they couldn’t possibly have shot her. And even if she had been a total stranger, it was much too dangerous with so many dignitaries in the line of fire.
So while they hesitated, it was Jon who sprang into action. Even Aniela, sitting opposite him, was blindsided by the speed with which he moved. Later on, she would try to reconstruct everything he had done, replay what she had seen: everyone else’s eyes had been entirely fixed on Dasha, but Aniela had been half-watching Jon, and the moment he jumped from his chair, she knew it.
After that, though, it was partially blurred, because he had moved so very fast. Unbelievably, she realised that he had vaulted right over the table, like a gymnast on a pommel horse, both hands smacking down onto the table, sending glasses flying, his legs tucking up into a tight ball, his waist twisting to send his legs driving together like a piston over the far side of the table, his feet shooting between her and Mr Dale, landing square on the ground. But he must – how, she couldn’t imagine – have grabbed something from the table en route, because the second he landed his right hand flashed out and sent something flying towards Dasha, a narrow missile, silver and sharp and deadly-looking. A knife.
Women screamed. The bodyguards
dashed forward. But no one could have prevented the knife from taking Dasha square between the shoulder blades: she went down as if poleaxed, the wind hit out of her, the knife itself clattering to the ground. Jon had spun the knife in the air, reversed it, so that it was the handle, not the sharp blade, that had struck her. She fell to her knees, gasping, hitting the marble floor with her hands in the next moment for balance, and Jon shot past her, reaching an amazed Grigor in two strides, grabbing him and pushing him down into the chair, shielding him with his own body.
A round of terrifying clicks sounded through the room, the noise reverberating off the marble pillars; every single armed man in the room was cocking his gun. Jon was surrounded by them, all aiming their lethal armoury directly at him. Bodyguards of Russian oligarchs didn’t do subtle. The Glocks were, frankly, unnecessarily large and overblown for the job they had to do. But they certainly had their effect. The Russian guests and their wives didn’t bat an eye at the sight of all the wide blued-steel barrels pointing at Jon’s head, but the models screamed, as did Melody, Mrs Takahashi and Mrs Dale: the men gasped.
Aniela screamed too. But she was so terrified that nothing came out. She had pushed back her chair too and jumped to her feet, though she had no idea why – she couldn’t possibly have helped Jon in any way. It had just been a confused, frantic impulse not to be trapped at the table when the man she cared about was putting his life in danger. And now she stared hopelessly at the scene, something from an action film, as every single terrifying-looking gun targeted Jon’s back as he pushed Grigor down into the chair, and there was nothing she could do if someone’s finger trembled on the trigger...
Desperately, she watched as one of Grigor’s hands appeared, spatulate and hairy, grabbing onto Jon’s forearm. And then the other hand, on the other forearm, Jon stepping back as Grigor hauled himself to his feet once more and pushed his rescuer aside, flapping his hand impatiently at the semicircle of bodyguards surrounding him.
‘Put those things away!’ he barked angrily. ‘You’re frightening the ladies! And what the hell are you going to do with them?’ He clapped Jon on the shoulder. ‘This is the only guy who did anything – the one who’s just had surgery, for fuck’s sake! Look at him! And I don’t even pay him!’
Fyodorov let off a stream of Russian at his own guards; they all backed away, holstering their weapons, heads ducked in shame. The guests, released from fear of their lives, turned to each other and babbled their relief. Grigor had been generous in his assessment of who had been petrified by being surrounded by armed oligarchs’ bodyguards; it hadn’t just been the women. Mr Dale and Mr Takahashi were both still trembling, and the former, uninhibited by Japanese reserve, had grabbed his wife, clinging to her in delayed shock. Wayne Burns downed his entire glass of Romanée-Conti in one go and shook his head violently afterwards, as if in denial of what had just happened. Ashley Dale and Haruki Takahashi, however, had finally bonded and were chattering to each other furiously about exactly what kind of guns the bodyguards had pulled, how Jon had vaulted over the table, and which Tony Jaa Thai action film was their favourite.
‘What the fuck did you just do?’ Grigor said to Jon, his hand still resting familiarly on his shoulder. ‘I never saw anyone move so fast in my life!’
‘I’m a stuntman, Mr Khalovksy,’ Jon said smoothly, as Aniela held her breath waiting for his answer. ‘That’s how I got injured – staging a car crash. Hope I didn’t freak you out, slamming you into your chair like that. I wasn’t sure if the lady was carrying or not.’
Grigor snorted.
‘You did the right thing. That bitch is crazy,’ he hissed malevolently at his wife.
Dasha, who was being helped up, one bodyguard on each side of her holding her elbows while a third frisked her expertly for concealed weapons, hissed back:
‘You make me crazy, you fucker! And I don’t need a fucking gun to take you out! I could strangle you with my bare hands!’
‘Yeah? Yeah?’ Grigor thrust his burly head at her, his hands rising to pull the fur-trimmed collar of his Santa costume from his neck. ‘Try it, you mad bitch! Try it and I’ll kill you first!’
‘Papa! Mama!’ Dmitri Khalovsky pushed back his own chair with a visible effort – he was thin and it was very heavy – and stood up. His tenor voice was high and strained, but his sincerity and decency were painfully obvious, and everyone in the room fell silent, including his warring parents.
‘Stop it!’ he yelled passionately, his accent without a hint of Russian inflection. ‘What’s wrong with both of you? You’re supposed to be adults and you’re behaving like a pair of kids! No wonder I want to stay in the States and never come back!’
‘Dima—’ His mother started towards him, shaking off the bodyguards impatiently, her eyes flashing. ‘Darling – it’s all your father’s fault, he’s trying to turn you against me—’
‘Mama, ne nado! Stop! It’s both of you! You’re just as bad as each other! I can’t take this any more!’ Dmitri pushed back his curtains of hair with both hands. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of work on myself in the States. I’ve joined an encounter group, and I’m realising that my upbringing has been fundamentally toxic on almost every level. I doubt that either of you is evolved enough to even understand what I mean by that. But it must be obvious that this is a totally unhealthy situation, and it can’t go on. I wish you two would consider some sort of relationship therapy, conflict resolution, to help you mediate your differences and—’
‘I’ll show him therapy!’ Dasha screamed at Grigor, lunging at him again: Jon grabbed her around the waist, ducking her swinging arms, spinning her round and throwing her into the grip of the nearest bodyguard, who lumbered back under the impact.
‘She’s the one who needs therapy!’ Grigor yelled at Dmitri. ‘At the end of a Kalashnikov!’
His wine had spilled down the front of his Santa suit when Jon had tackled him into his chair, but there was some left, and Grigor polished it off defiantly and slammed his glass onto the table.
‘Coward!’ Dasha retorted, wrestling in the grasp of the bodyguard. ‘Typical! A real man would do it with a knife – with his bare hands!’
Grigor opened his mouth to reply, turned blue, clutched his chest, and collapsed to the ground.
‘Oh my God, he’s having a heart attack!’ Mrs Dale shrieked. ‘RICE! RICE! No, that’s for when you strain something! Phil, what is it? We did this in the Red Cross course at the WI!’
‘Stayin’ Alive!’ Mr Dale said. ‘No, that’s to get the right speed for CPR—’
‘FAST!’ Ashley yelled. ‘Face! Arms! Speech! Time!’
‘But that’s for a stroke!’ his mother said. ‘He’s fallen over – that’s not a stroke, is it?’
Jon, kneeling by Grigor’s prone body, called:
‘Aniela!’
But she was already there, pushing her way through the massed bodyguards, dropping to her knees, loosening Grigor’s costume even further at the neck, pressing her fingers into the big vein there to check his pulse.
‘Back off!’ Jon snapped. ‘Give the lady some room to do her job.’
The bodyguards, clustered tightly around Grigor, obeyed Jon’s air of authority instinctively, though a couple of them, the more intelligent ones, exchanged glances of surprise that they had automatically followed his orders. They remained circling him, apart from a couple who split off to flank Fyodorov’s chair.
Dmitri ran over to his father’s side, throwing himself down next to Jon, tears in his soft brown eyes. Dasha, however, took advantage of the bodyguards’ momentary distraction to twist free and dash away, fleeing the great room in the direction of the lift; they hadn’t been instructed to detain her, and though the two who had been holding her started to go after her, they hesitated, unsure of whether grabbing the boss’s wife and dragging her back would be overstepping their bounds. Unused to acting on their own authority, they shrugged and let Dasha go.
‘Dad!’ Dmitri said frantically. ‘Dad! Is he all righ
t? What’s happening?’
Gently, Jon put a hand on Dmitri’s chest, easing him back till Aniela had finished. Grigor was unconscious; she lifted one eyelid to check, ducked her head to listen to his breathing, and eventually looked up again.
‘He’s okay,’ she said, and the entire room sagged with relief. ‘It’s just a syncope. A faint,’ she clarified, seeing everyone’s faces remain blank. ‘His heart rate is absolutely fine. It was probably stress,’ she said to Dmitri, ‘but you should advise your father to tell his doctor what happened and have a thorough check-up. It can be caused by a reaction to medication, for instance.’
‘Thank you!’ Dmitri wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve, Fyodorov snorting at this sign of male weakness. ‘I was so scared!’
‘Let’s pick him up and take him into his bedroom,’ Aniela suggested.
Fyodorov barked some commands, and the bodyguards jumped forward to pick up Grigor. Halfway across the room, however, his recumbent form started to jerk in their arms.
‘Whaa...’ Grigor said faintly. ‘Aaaah...’
His legs thrashed, kicking out, catching one of the men a glancing blow in his face; to his credit, he took it, barely flinching, and didn’t drop his employer.
‘Postav’te menya! Put me down!’ Grigor mumbled.
Fyodorov strode across the room, his heavy body loud on the marble floor, and slipped an arm under his friend’s shoulder as he was lowered to the ground.
‘Come on,’ he said gruffly. ‘Back to the table. We’re celebrating, old friend.’
‘He should really—’ Aniela began, but Jon’s hand closed on her shoulder and she took the hint, falling silent as one oligarch helped the other back to his seat in pride of place at the table.
Fyodorov settled Grigor in; the latter was a little grey around the gills, but his breathing was steady, and he smiled at his assembled guests as one of the bigger bodyguards heaved the chair up to the table again.
Bad Angels Page 26