These and other preparations are mentally tiring. Villanelle is less susceptible to stress than most people, but when she’s faced with long periods of waiting, a familiar need tends to make itself felt. Locking down the laptop so that any attempt to log in will cause total data-erasure, she stands, and stretches. She’s wearing a cheap black tracksuit, she hasn’t showered for thirty-six hours, and her unwashed hair is raked back into a scrappy ponytail. She looks, and smells, feral.
Herzog-Friedrich-Strasse is pretty in the fading light, its illuminated buildings framing the distant mountains like a stage set. But it’s cold, with an insistent wind whistling through the narrow streets, and this cuts straight through Villanelle’s skimpy clothing as she hurries toward the Schlossergasse and the golden glow of the Brauhaus Adler. Inside, noise levels are high, and the air warm and beery. Edging round the throng, Villanelle notes a line of men with their backs to the bar, surveying the crowd with an amused, predatory air. At intervals, they exchange comments and knowing smiles.
Villanelle watches for a minute or two, and then, unhurriedly, walks up to the bar. Strolling along the line of men, taking casual repossession of the space they’ve annexed, she eyeballs them one by one before coming to a halt in front of a fit-looking guy in his early twenties. He’s handsome, he knows it, and he meets her stare with a confident grin.
Villanelle doesn’t return it. Instead, she takes his stein of beer, drains it, and walks away without looking back. An instant later he follows, pushing through the crowd after her. Wordlessly, she leads him out of the main entrance, then turns into a side street, and again into a narrow alley behind the bar. Halfway along the alley is a shadowed space between two overspilling refuse bins. Above the further of these, an extractor fan vents kitchen exhaust through a dirty grille.
Bracing her back against the brick wall, Villanelle orders the young man to kneel in front of her. When he hesitates she grabs a handful of blond hair and forces him down. Then she drags her tracksuit bottoms to her ankles with her free hand, parts her legs and pulls her knickers open to one side. “No fingers,” she tells him. “Just your tongue. Get on with it.”
He glances up at her, his eyes uncertain, and she tightens her hold on his hair until he gasps with pain. “I said get on with it, dummkopf. Lick my pussy.” She shuffles her feet wider apart, the wall cold against her buttocks. “Harder, it’s not a fucking ice cream. And higher. Yes, there.”
Sensation flickers through her, but it’s too irregular, and her new acquaintance too inexpert, to take her where she needs to go. Through half-closed eyes she sees a kitchen worker in a soiled apron and skullcap step from a doorway and stop, open-mouthed, at the sight of her. She ignores him, and the blond guy is much too busy searching for her clitoris to sense the presence of a spectator.
The kitchen worker stands there, hand on groin, for the best part of a minute, then a voice recalls him to the kitchen in profanity-laden Turkish. By now Villanelle is pretty sure that if she wants to come, she’s going to have to go back to her room and finish the job herself. Her thoughts wander, dissolving into refracted images which, quite suddenly, coalesce into the figure of Eve Polastri. Eve with her skuchniyy clothes, and that English decency that Villanelle wants, so badly, to disrupt. Imagine if she were to look down, right now, and see that face between her thighs. Eve’s eyes looking up at her. Eve’s tongue scouring her.
Villanelle cleaves to this image until, with a brief shuddering of her thighs, she comes. At which point the image of Eve dissolves into that of Anna Leonova. Anna, to whom all the blood-trails lead. Anna who, in another life, showed Oxana Vorontsova what love could be, and then denied it to her forever. Opening her eyes Villanelle takes in her filthy surroundings. The wind touches her face and she realizes that there are tears on her cheeks.
The blond guy is grinning. “That was good, ja?” Standing, he fishes a pubic hair from his mouth with a finger. “Now you suck my dick, OK?”
Rearranging her underwear, Villanelle pulls up her tracksuit bottoms. “Please,” she says. “Just go.”
“Hey, come on now, schatz…”
“You heard me. Fuck off.”
He meets her stare, and his grin fades. He starts to walk away, and then turns. “You want to know something?” he says. “You stink.”
“Good. And a word of advice. Next time you find yourself in a girl’s pants, bring a map.”
The Palazzo Forlani is at the eastern end of Dorsoduro. The street entrance, through which Eve arrives, is nondescript. There’s a poorly lit cloakroom staffed by dark-suited attendants and supervised by an unsmiling figure who looks as if he might have once earned his living as a boxer. Beyond them, two young women in identical black moiré cocktail dresses sit at an antique desk, checking the names of new arrivals on a printed list.
Eve approaches them. “Sono con Giovanna Bianchi.”
They smile. “OK, no problem,” one of them says. “But my friend needs to fix your hair.”
Eve raises a hand and encounters a hairclip swinging from an errant tress. “Oh my goodness, could you really?”
“Come,” says the friend and, beckoning Eve to a chair, swiftly and expertly reworks her coiffure. As she’s inserting the final pin Giovanna arrives.
“Eve. You look stunning… Ciao, ragazze.”
“Ciao, Giovanna. Just fixing a little hair emergency here.”
“My French twist came adrift,” Eve explains.
Giovanna smiles. “That’s why you should always go Italian.”
A curtain parts, and they move from the twilit foyer into a warm blaze of illumination. The street entrance to the palazzo, Eve realizes, is in fact the back entrance, like a stage door. They’re in a wide, stone-floored atrium, thronged with guests, at whose center is a rectangular space concealed by hanging drapes imprinted with the Umberto Zeni logo. Opposite Eve and Giovanna is the much grander and more ornate canal entrance, dominated by an arched portal through which the gleam of water is visible. As Eve watches, a motor launch draws up, and two guests step out onto a jetty, and are ushered inside by a doorman.
Around her, the crowd ebbs and flows. She can smell scent, face-powder, candle wax, and the faint, muddy tang of the canal. It’s an intoxicatingly strange scene, a collision of the antique and the dazzlingly fashionable. Eve feels poised, soignée even, but she can’t imagine actually talking to anyone here. There’s a nucleus of ageless men in dark suits and heavy silk ties, and women whose lacquered hair and ornate designer gowns are clearly chosen to intimidate rather than to attract. Circling around these figures, like pilot fish around sharks, is a retinue of socialites and hangers- on. Lizard-like designers with implausible tans, gym-toned young men in ripped jeans, willowy models with wide, vacant eyes.
“And that’s Umberto,” says Giovanna, swiping two glasses of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray, and nodding toward a tiny figure dressed from head to foot in leather fetish-wear. “An interesting crowd, don’t you think?”
“Amazing. And so not my world.”
“So what is your world, Eve? Forgive me for asking, but you come into my shop with this man who shows me identification from Interpol and then pretends to be un cretino while he eavesdrops on my assistants’ conversations—oh, don’t worry, I saw him—and then you ask me about a bracelet that was bought by a woman who came into the shop with her girlfriend, but which you are now wearing? Per favore, what is going on?”
Eve takes a deep swallow of her champagne, and turns her wrist so that the diamonds glitter. “It’s a long story.”
“Tell it to me.”
“We want this woman for a series of crimes. She knows I’m after her, and she sent me this bracelet to insult and intimidate me.”
“How so?”
“Because this is the kind of luxurious thing I could never afford, and could never imagine myself wearing.”
“Nevertheless, Eve, you are wearing it.”
Their conversation is interrupted by a dimming of the lights. Then,
to a deafening burst of industrial metal music, and whoops and applause from the onlookers, the curtains at the center of the atrium rise, and spotlights illuminate the tableau within. Rising from the floor is a massive concrete column, into which a white Alfa Romeo sports car appears to have crashed at speed. The car, wrapped around the column, is a total wreck. Two passengers, one male, one female, have been thrown through the windscreen, and are sprawled on the car’s crumpled bonnet.
At first Eve thinks that these are horribly life-like, or perhaps death-like, dummies. Then she sees that they are breathing, and real. Belatedly, she recognizes the famous boy-band singer and his supermodel girlfriend. Shane Rafique, dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, is lying face down. Jasmin Vane-Partington is on her back, one arm outflung, her breasts exposed by her ripped blouse.
Where there might have been blood and torn flesh, however, there are jewels. Jasmin’s forehead is not studded with fragments of windscreen glass, but enclosed in a tiara of diamonds and blood-red garnets. A string of Burmese rubies snakes down her belly like a fatal gash. Tourmalines glitter in Shane’s hair and a topaz necklace cascades from his mouth. Vermilion gemstones spatter the car’s bodywork.
As cameras flash, the music plays, and the applause rises and falls, Eve stares open-mouthed at this glittering tableau mort.
Giovanna smiles. “So what do you think?”
“It’s quite an extreme way of selling jewelry.”
“People want extremes here, they get bored very easily. And the fashion press will adore it. Especially with Jasmin and Shane.”
After ten minutes, when the photo flashes have subsided, and Umberto Zeni has made a short speech of which Eve understands not a single word, the curtain descends on the crashed Alfa Romeo and the celebrity corpses. Unhurriedly, the guests begin to make their way up a worn stone staircase, past faded tapestries, to the first floor. Eve and Giovanna join them, collecting fresh glasses of champagne en route.
“Having fun?” asks Giovanna.
“So much fun. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Finish your story.”
Eve laughs. “I will, one day.” For the first time in months, perhaps years, she is having a fabulous time that she won’t have to account for. She feels an airy rush of elation, and floats up the staircase, weightless.
The galleries set around the stairwell swiftly fill with noise and people. Everyone seems to know Giovanna and she’s soon surrounded by an excitable clique, exchanging observations in rapid-fire Italian. Fluttering her fingers in a vague, see-you-in-a-minute gesture, Eve drifts away. Taking a third glass of champagne, she winds purposefully through the crowd, smile in place, as if she’s just caught sight of an acquaintance. She’s always felt like an outsider at parties, torn between the desire to be swept along on a tide of conversation and laughter, and to be left alone. The essential thing, she’s found, is to keep moving. To stand still, even for a moment, is to present a vulnerable profile. To announce yourself a target for every cruising shark.
Adopting a connoisseurial attitude, she examines the art on the paneled walls. Allegorical scenes from Greek mythology hang next to vast contemporary paintings of skulls; eighteenth-century Venetian aristocrats cast a jaundiced eye over explicit life-size photographs of a couple having sex. Eve supposes she should know the names of the artists in question, but isn’t quite interested enough to find out. What strikes her forcibly is the sheer, bludgeoning force of the wealth on display. These art objects are not here because they are beautiful, or even thought-provoking, but because they cost millions of euros. They’re currency, pure and simple.
Moving on, she finds herself in front of a gilded porcelain sculpture, again life-size, of the late Michael Jackson fondling a monkey. One push, Eve muses. One good, strong shove. She imagines the crash, the gasps, the shocked silence.
“La condizione umana,” says a voice beside her.
She glances at him. Registers dark hair and aquiline features. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re English. You don’t look English.”
“Really? In what way?”
“Your clothes, your hair, your sprezzatura.”
“My what?”
“Your… attitude.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Turning to face him she meets amused brown eyes. Notes the broken nose and the sensual, deeply incised mouth. “You, on the other hand, could be nothing but Italian.”
He grins. “I’ll take that as a compliment. My name is Claudio.”
“And I’m Eve. You were saying?”
“I was saying that this sculpture represents the human condition.”
“Seriously?”
“Of course seriously. Look at it. What do you see?”
“A pop singer and a monkey. A giant version of the china ornaments my grandmother used to buy.”
“OK, Eve, now I believe you’re English. You want to know what I see?”
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“Dio mio. You look at me with those beautiful eyes and you bust my balls.”
“The same pretty eyes. The same sad smile…”
“I apologize,” he says. “I’ve offended you.”
“No, not at all.” She touches his shirt sleeve, feels his arm warm beneath. “Truly. I just… thought of someone.”
“Someone special?”
“In a sense, yes. But go on. Tell me what you see.”
“Well, I see a man so lonely, so detached from his fellow humans, that his only companion is this monkey, Bubbles. And eventually, even Bubbles moves on. He can’t live in this fantasy.”
“I see.” Eve lifts her champagne flute to her mouth but it’s empty. She realizes that she is quite drunk, and that this doesn’t matter. Perhaps it’s even a good thing.
“This sculpture is Michael Jackson’s dream. A golden forever. But it takes us back to the reality of his life, which is grotesque and sad.”
They stand there for a moment in silence.
“Perhaps your grandmother was right, with her china ornaments. Perhaps she understood that the things we really long for, we cannot buy.”
A wave of melancholy sweeps over Eve, she teeters dizzily on her heels, and a single tear runs down her nose. “Now you’ve made me cry,” she says. “Really, you’re impossible.”
“And your glass is empty.”
“It should probably stay that way.”
“As you wish. Come and see the view from the balcony.” He takes her hand, which makes Eve’s heart lurch, and leads her through the gallery to a marble-floored expanse hung with baroque mirrors. A projection screen is mounted on one wall, showing, on repeat, a video prequel to the Umberto Zeni installation, in which Shane Rafique and Jasmin Vane-Partington are shown running from a bank vault, laden with stolen jewelry, leaping into the white Alfa Romeo, and roaring away.
Like Giovanna, Claudio seems to know everyone, so their progress is stately, with much waving and greeting and air-kissing. An animated group is gathered round Umberto Zeni, who is explaining, in English this time, that dying in an automobile crash is the contemporary equivalent of Catholic martyrdom. As if to illustrate his point, a waiter is offering round a tray of petits fours shaped like sacramental objects. There are frosted pink sacred hearts, spun-sugar crowns of thorns, candied angelica crucifixion nails. Most exquisite of all are the tiny marzipan hands with red jelly stigmata.
“Divine, no?” says Umberto.
“Totally,” says Eve, biting off a mouthful of marzipan fingers.
Finally they reach the balcony, which is grand and spacious, and fronted by a carved balustrade, against which several guests are already leaning, smoking. Normally Eve hates cigarette smoke but at this moment, with the night darkening the Grand Canal and Claudio’s arm around her shoulder—how did that get there?—she couldn’t care less.
“I’m married,” she says.
“I would be very surprised if you weren’t. Look upward.”
She turns, and l
eans back against the balustrade. Above them, weathered by age and affixed to the building’s facade, is a crest carved from stone.
“The coat of arms of the Forlani family. Six stars on a shield, surmounted by a doge’s crown. The palace dates from 1770.”
“That’s amazing. Do the family still live here?”
“Yes,” he says, turning back to face the canal. “We do.”
She stares at him. “You? You… own this?”
“My father does.”
She shakes her head. “That must be… extraordinary.”
Half turning to her, he runs a finger down her cheek. “It is what it is.”
She looks back at him. The sculpted features, their perfection at once marred and confirmed by the broken nose. The crisp whiteness of the linen shirt against his skin, with the cuffs rolled just so high up his tanned forearms. The elegant musculature displayed by jeans that look ordinary enough, but undoubtedly cost many hundreds of euros. The nonchalant absence of socks, and the black velvet loafers embroidered with what, on inspection, turns out to be the Forlani family crest.
She smiles. “You’re just that tiny bit too good to be true, aren’t you? And you’re not quite as young as you’d have me believe, either.” She mirrors his gesture, running a finger across his cheekbone. “How many other women have you brought out here? Quite a few, I’m sure.”
“You’re a scary woman, Eve. I haven’t even kissed you yet.”
Desire ripples through her with unexpected force. “That sounds lovely, but it’s not going to happen.”
“Seriously?”
She shakes her head.
“That’s a pity, Eve. For you and for me.”
“I expect we’ll both survive, one way and another. And now I have to find my friend.”
Looking into the interior, she sees Giovanna moving toward them. “And here she is. Claudio, this is—”
Killing Eve--No Tomorrow Page 10