“Loud and clear. Last time I saw my ex she said much the same thing.”
“Lol. Anyway, the South Africa one, Kyla, was perfectly friendly but said that she was bound by law from discussing her ex-husband with anyone, which I took to mean that she’d signed a non-disclosure agreement as a condition of her divorce settlement. So not much help there. Anyway, back to Kent. He grew up in Lymington, Hampshire, and was educated at Eton College. As, it turns out, was Dennis Cradle.”
“They weren’t there together, were they?” Eve asks.
“Yes, Kent was Cradle’s fag. Which means, apparently, that he was like his personal servant, and had to clean his shoes and make him tea and warm his toilet seat in the winter.”
“Seriously?”
“Totally.”
“Bloody hell. I knew those places were weird, but…” She blinks. “How did you find all this out?”
“I asked Richard to run both names through the Security Services vetting records, and both were on file.”
“Cradle, obviously. But why Kent?”
“After Eton, Cradle goes to Oxford, takes the Civil Service exam, and is headhunted by MI5. Four years later Kent goes to Durham, and after graduating, tries to join Cradle at Thames House, but fails selection.”
“Any idea why?” Eve asks.
“Put it like this: one of the assessors ended his evaluation with the words ‘Sly, manipulative, untrustworthy.’”
“Sounds like the ideal candidate,” says Lance.
“The MI5 selection panel don’t think so. They bin him, and the following year he goes to Sandhurst, and is commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Logistics Corps. Serves two tours of duty in Iraq, leaves the army in his late twenties, and from that point onwards things get hazy. I found only two very brief press references to his activities over the next decade. One describes him as a London-based venture capitalist, one as an international security consultant.”
“Which can mean pretty much anything,” Eve says.
“Yeah, well. Turns out that Kent owns no residential or commercial property in London, and a search at Companies House reveals that he holds no directorships, executive or non-exec, of UK-registered companies. So given the Twelve connection, I start looking for Russian interests. I don’t speak Russian fluently, but a lot of the international registries are in English, including the database of the Federal State Service for Statistics. Anyway, I discover that Kent’s a partner in a private security company named Sverdlovsk-Futura Group or SFG, based in Moscow. He’s also a partner in an offshoot of the company, SF12, which is registered in the British Virgin Islands.”
“And do we know what these companies do?”
“Well, this is the point at which my lack of Russian becomes a problem. I’m learning the language via the MI6 online course, but I’m nowhere near fluent. So Richard puts me in touch with a Russian-speaking investigator from the City of London Economic Crime department, a guy called Sim Henderson. And what Sim tells me is that private security companies, known as Chastnye Voennie Companiy, or ChVKs, have become the go-to option for Russian military activities abroad. Official and deniable. Under the Russian constitution, any deployment of ChVK personnel must be approved by the upper house of parliament. But here’s where it gets interesting. If the company’s registered abroad, Russia and its parliament are not legally responsible.”
“And you say that the offshoot company, whatever it’s called, is registered in the BVI?” Eve says.
“Exactly.”
“So on the one hand you’ve got the official company, with a turnover of…”
“A hundred and seventy million dollars, give or take. SFG handle everything from security for hospitals, airports and gas pipelines to military adviser contracts.”
“All transparent and above board?”
“Basically, yeah. I mean, this is Russia we’re talking about, so they’re almost certainly paying a hefty percentage to the Kremlin for the privilege of staying in business, but… yeah.”
“And meanwhile the not-so-official, foreign-registered arm—”
“SF12.”
“SF12, yes, is going its own merry way, doing whatever…”
“Exactly. Whatever weird dark-side shit it feels like.”
Max Linder has specified that, for the duration of his private gathering, the female catering staff of the Felsnadel should wear the uniform of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth. Accordingly, Villanelle is wearing a blue skirt, a short-sleeved white blouse, and a black neckerchief secured by a leather woven knot. Her hair, still damp from her tepid shower, is in a short pigtail. She’s holding a circular tray of cocktails.
There are perhaps twenty guests in the dining hall, which is set with a single long table. Apart from those she arrived with, Villanelle recognizes a number of prominent far-right figures from Scandinavia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Russia. Most have entered into the spirit of the occasion. There are polished boots, cross-straps, and daggers hanging from stable-belts. Magali Le Meur has a forage cap pinned to her blonde up-do, while Silas Orr-Hadow is sporting lederhosen and white knee socks.
“So what have we here, fräulein?”
Her smile tightens. It’s Roger Baggot, in a loud tweed suit.
“Cocktails, sir. This is a Zionist, this is a Snowflake, and this is an Angry Feminist.”
“What’s in this one?”
“Mostly crème de menthe and Fernet Branca.”
“So why’s it called an Angry Feminist?”
“Probably because it’s difficult to get it to go down, sir.”
He roars with laughter. “Well, you’re a sharp little piece of work, aren’t you? What’s your name?”
“Violette, sir.”
“I take it you’re not a feminist, Violette?”
“No, sir.”
“Glad to hear it. Now please point me to where I can get some decent beer. We’re in fucking Germany, after all.”
“Over there, sir. And for the record, sir, until the establishment of the Fourth Reich, we’re in fucking Austria.”
Baggot retreats, grinning bemusedly, and at that moment, to loud whoops and applause, Max Linder enters the dining hall. It’s Villanelle’s first sight of the man she has come to kill, and she takes a long hard look. Elegant in a high-buttoning Bavarian trachten jacket, his platinum-blond quiff shining in the spotlight, Linder looks less like a politician than a member of a fascistically inclined boy band. His smile reveals orthodontically perfect teeth, but there’s something avid about it too. A twist to the lips that suggests a hunger for the extreme.
They sit down to dinner, Linder taking the head of the table. As the courses come and go—lobster thermidor, roasted boar with juniper, crêpes Suzette flambés, Dachsteiner and Bergkäse cheese—Villanelle and the other serving women pour the accompanying wines and spirits. As she does so, Villanelle catches fragments of the diners’ conversations. Max Linder is sitting next to Inka Järvi, but spends much of the meal talking across her to Todd Stanton.
“Can you guarantee the result?” Linder asks Stanton.
The American, his face flushed, drains his etched crystal glass of Schloss Gobelsburg Riesling, and indicates to Villanelle that he wants it refilled. “Look, Max, the population of Austria is eight and three-quarter million. Four and three-quarters of those use the same social media platform. Mine that data, and you’ll know more about those dumb motherfuckers than they know about themselves.”
“And the cost?” Inka Järvi interjects, as Villanelle pours Stanton’s wine.
“Well now…” Stanton begins, but at that moment Villanelle sees Birgit beckoning to her from the other end of the room.
Birgit tells Villanelle that she is to take part in a ceremony in front of the hotel at the meal’s conclusion.
“So what does it involve?”
“Whom are you addressing, Violette?”
“I’m sorry. What does it involve, Birgit?”
“You’ll
see. Wait in the entrance hall after the meal.”
“No problem, Birgit. Where’s the staff toilet, by the way? I need to—”
“You should have gone earlier. Right now, you need to return to the guests.”
“Birgit, I’ve been standing up for an hour and a half.”
“I’m not interested. Exercise some self-control.”
Villanelle stares at her, then slowly turns and walks back to her place. Stanton, his face by now flushed a livid mauve, is still talking across Inka Järvi to Linder. “I said, dude, think about it. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a musical. Give me one motherfucking reason why not.”
On the bus going home, squashed into her seat by an obese man who smells of damp hair and beer, Eve attempts to organize her thoughts. Beyond the rain-streaked windows, Warren Street tube station and the Euston Road intersection pass in an illuminated blur, so familiar that she only half sees them. She’s left Billy with instructions to find out all he can about Rinat Yevtukh, and to search the darkest reaches of cyberspace for any mention of Villanelle. She feels a rush of exhilaration. It’s good to be back. Venice is already a dream, and now she’s going home to Niko. And the goats.
It comes as a shock to see him on crutches, with one foot in an orthopedic boot. She’d forgotten that he’s broken his ankle. Forgotten about the boy stepping into the road, the accident, the entire phone conversation. The realization freezes her to the spot, and when she lunges forward to give Niko a hug she almost pushes him off balance. “I’m sorry,” she says, wrapping her arms around his chest. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Being a shit wife. Not being here. Everything.”
“You’re here now. Hungry?”
He’s made a stew. Ham hock, Polish sausage, porcini mushrooms and juniper berries. Two cold bottles of Baltika beer stand next to the casserole dish. It’s a lot better than anything she had in Venice. “I spent half a day in the main police station, and it only occurred to me afterward that that’s where I should have asked where to go to eat. Cops always know.”
“How was it with Lance?”
“How was it? You mean working with him?”
“Working with him, hanging out with him…”
“Better than I expected. Street-smart but socially dysfunctional, like a lot of older field agents.” She tells him the Noel Edmonds story.
“Smooth.”
“Yeah, I just wanted to…” She shakes her head. “Tell me about your foot.”
“Ankle.”
“I mean ankle. What did they say at the hospital?”
He shrugs. “That it’s fractured.”
“That’s all?”
He smiles faintly. “They did suggest some exercises I could do to make the bone mend faster.”
“So have you been doing them?”
“No, they involve you.”
“Ah, those exercises.” She touches his face. “Perhaps we could pencil something in for tomorrow night?”
“We could make a start now.”
“I’m pretty wiped out. And you look tired too. Why don’t we watch TV in bed? You choose something. I’ll clear up.”
“I suppose I could settle for that. Will you put the girls to bed?”
Thelma and Louise bleat and snicker as Eve orders them off the sofa and dispatches them to their quarters. Hearing the clump of Niko’s orthopedic boot in the bedroom, she remembers Claudio’s neat, tanned feet in the velvet loafers embroidered with the Forlani crest. Claudio, she reflects, would not see the point of the goats at all.
Taking her phone from her bag, she runs a search for “Villanelle, scent” and is directed to the website of Maison Joliot, in the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré in Paris. The perfumery has been owned by the same family for many generations, and its most expensive range is named Poésies. It comprises four fragrances: Kyrielle, Rondine, Triolet, and Villanelle. All come in identical vials, the first three with a white ribbon at the neck. The fourth, Villanelle, has a scarlet ribbon.
Gazing at the screen, Eve is possessed with a sudden and unexpected longing. She’s always thought of herself as a fundamentally cerebral person, contemptuous of extravagance. But gazing at the tiny image on the screen, she feels her certainties shifting. Recent events have taught her that she is not as immune to luxury and the purely sensual things of life as she once thought. Venice at nightfall, the weightless caress of the Laura Fracci dress, the touch of a six-thousand-euro bracelet on her wrist. All so seductive, and all in some essential sense so corrupt, so cruel. Villanelle, she reads, was the favorite scent of the Comtesse du Barry. The perfume house added the red ribbon after she was guillotined in 1793.
“Niko, sweetie,” Eve calls out. “You know you say you love me.”
“I may at some point have mentioned something to that effect, yes.”
“Because there’s something I’d really, really like. Some scent.”
At the Felsnadel Hotel, the meal is in its terminal stages, with bottles of Cognac, Sambuca, Jägermeister, and other spirits circulating. Leonardo Venturi, his tiny hands cradling a balloon glass of Bisquit Interlude Reserve brandy, is explaining his personal philosophy to Magali Le Meur. “We are the descendants of the grail knights,” he says, glaring at her breasts through his monocle. “New men, beyond good and evil.”
“And new women, perhaps?”
“When I say men, I mean women too, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
In the entrance hall, Birgit issues Villanelle and the other serving women with floor-length black cloaks and long-handled combustible torches. Villanelle has asked once again to be allowed to go to the toilet, and has once again been refused. Sympathetic glances from her fellow staff members suggest that they’ve been victims of the same obsessively controlling behavior. Ordering them outside onto the snow-covered plateau in front of the hotel, Birgit positions the serving women in lines of six on either side of the helicopter landing pad. This has now been swept of snow and converted into a music stage, with speaker-towers to left and right. At the front of the stage is a microphone stand, at the rear a drum-kit bearing the Panzerdämmerung logo.
When the twelve women are in place, Birgit walks to each of them in turn and lights the wicks of their torches with an electronic gas lighter. “When the guests come out, lift the torches up in front of you, as high as you can,” she orders them. “And on pain of dismissal, do not move.”
It’s piercingly cold, and Villanelle pulls her cloak around her. The burning oil in the torches sputters faintly in the frozen air. Ice particles swirl on the wind. Finally the guests saunter out of the hotel, warmly wrapped in coats and furs, and Villanelle raises her flaming torch in front of her. The guests arrange themselves on either side of the stage and then Linder appears, picked out by a spotlight, and marches to the microphone.
“Friends,” he begins, raising his hands to silence the applause. “Welcome to Felsnadel. I can’t tell you how inspiring it is to see you all here. In a minute the band are going to start playing, but before they do, I just want to say this. As a movement, we’re gathering speed. The dark European soul is awakening. We’re creating a new reality. And that’s in great part due to all of you. We’re winning supporters every day, and why? Because we’re fucking sexy.”
Pausing, Linder acknowledges the cheers of his guests.
“What woman, and what sensible man, doesn’t fancy a bad-boy nationalist? Everyone wants to be us, but most people just don’t dare. And to all those sad liberal snowflakes out there, I say this. Watch out, bitches. If you’re not at the high table with us, tasting the glory, you’re on the menu.”
This time the whoops and cheers are deafening. As they finally die away Linder steps to one side of the stage and the three members of Panzerdämmerung enter from the other. As Klaus Lorenz slips his arm through the strap of a bass guitar, and Peter Lorenz takes his place behind the drums, Petra Voss walks to the microphone. She’s dressed in a white blouse,
calf-length skirt, and boots, and carrying a blood-red Fender Stratocaster guitar slung like an assault rifle.
She starts to sing, her fingers picking softly at the strings. The song is about loss, about forgotten rituals, extinguished flames and the death of tradition. Her voice hardens and her guitar-playing, underlined now by Klaus Lorenz’s bass, takes on a steely resonance. She doesn’t move or sway but just stands there, motionless except for the dance of her fingers. For a long moment she stares straight at Villanelle, expressionless.
Villanelle stares back, and then turns her attention to the guests, who stand rapt in the flickering torchlight. Max Linder is watching them too. His gaze scans the group dispassionately, noting their reactions to the spectacle that he has created for them.
On the drums, Peter Lorenz has been maintaining a ticking backbeat, but now he ramps up the pace. A recorded track of a political speech, ranting and incoherent, counterpoints Petra Voss’s edgy, insinuating guitar. The drums continue to build until all other sound is annihilated. It’s the sound of battalions marching through the night, of lands laid waste, and as it reaches a climax and stops dead, a starburst of spotlights pierces the darkness, illuminating the surrounding mountain peaks. It’s an awesome sight, ghostly and desolate in the ringing silence. The guests break into applause, and Villanelle, taking advantage of the diversion, lengthily and copiously pisses herself.
Eve and Niko doze through most of the TV show they’re watching in bed. Opening her eyes to discover the end-titles rolling, Eve reaches for the remote control. For several minutes she lies there in near-darkness, her thoughts vague, as Niko shifts beside her. Every time he moves he’s twitched into wakefulness by his fractured ankle, but eventually fatigue and codeine prevail, and he sleeps.
Claudio. Suppose she’d let him kiss her. How would it have gone from there?
The kiss itself would have been brief and efficient. A formal statement of his intention and of her acquiescence. He would have taken her somewhere in the palazzo, into some suggestively appointed chamber for which he always carried the key. There would be few words and no wasted time. He would be a serial womanizer with a well-worn routine, refined by scores or perhaps hundreds of such encounters. The choreography would be fluent and the narrative arc conventional, proceeding to a showy money-shot for which she would be expected to display gasping and incredulous gratitude. He would be back in his clothes within minutes, his handmade loafers barely cooler than when he kicked them off. She would be left with a crumpled dress, the musky taint of his cologne, and sticky breasts.
Killing Eve--No Tomorrow Page 12