Domina

by L. S. Hilton

  Thanks for helping me. I need to know if an offshore account can be hacked?

  They pinged back. Not unless you’re the CIA, lol!

  Really? Even by someone with serious money to pay for it?

  That stuff’s for movies.

  Even Russian?

  Russian? Old school.

  Meaning?

  Governments can mess with accounts. The systems don’t exist outside. That’s what people think, but private not advanced yet. They’ll just fuck with you.

  How?

  Usual. Physical.

  Nothing like understatement. I suppose I might have described a dead old woman as ‘old school’.

  What about surveillance?

  IMHO (what the hell did he mean? Why couldn’t these people just use actual words?) no worry, unless you’re running (:

  Jesus.

  Card sensors a problem, even if you don’t use them. Watch that.

  Thanks. Phone?

  Get new burner.

  Thank you. If I need you again?

  Will message a code.

  Thank you.

  No problem.

  *

  I messaged Dave. Grey hat v useful. Thanks a million. Where did you find?

  Nairobi. Take care, you x

  Kenya. Snazzy.

  *

  As I’d thought, I’d have to leave the cards. I felt insecure without them, but I’d managed a surprising amount of my life thus far without plastic. Returning for my bag, I thumbed them one by one into the water, a manoeuvre that greatly interested a group of passing Germans. At the last, I hesitated. A discreet black number with just a twirl of a handwritten name. The Klein Fenyves card, from my lovely bank in Panama. It would be impossibly dumb to use it, after what I’d just learned, but equally stupid to leave myself vulnerable in a real emergency. I returned it to my wallet, then wheeled the case to the tabaccaio for some fags and a single ticket for the station boat, walked smartly to the stop, my peripheral vision hyper-alert, though the case alone was a sort of disguise. Venice is full of bewildered women wheeling suitcases. The Caravaggio book was poking out of my handbag, I started reading as the vaporetto chugged its way between ugly boatyards and gargantuan cruise ships. On the station steps I refused a porter with his trolley and lugged my bag to the counter, where after a moment’s hesitation I bought a second-class ticket. Welcome back, Judith. I settled myself as comfortably as I could in a corner seat for the long ride: I had to change at Munich and again at Utrecht.

  *

  The altarpiece at Santa Irene in Lecce is by Guido Reni, its subject the Archangel Michael, namesake of Reni’s rival Caravaggio. In 1602, Reni left Rome to return to his home city of Bologna, a journey prompted by what he described to a friend as his ‘defeat’ by Caravaggio. Reni was a painter who believed that pictures should show only a beautiful version of the world, an eternally incorruptible ideal. Like many, he was confused by what he saw as the irreverence of Caravaggio’s work, the Lombard’s refusal of prettified politeness. It made him nervous. Early that year, Caravaggio had delivered a painting that appeared to show three men having supper in the kind of Roman tavern where artists gathered to drink and gossip; the linen tablecloth is clean enough, but the food is basic – chunky, hard-looking loaves, a bowl of fruit which has seen better days. The roast chicken has clearly lived an athletic life. The men are being served by a stern waiter, who is perhaps wondering whether they are good for the bill. And then, if you look again, you see that this is a painting of a miracle. The young man in the middle of the table is Christ, and this is the supper at Emmaus, when Jesus revealed himself to his disciples after he had risen from the tomb. There is no gold leaf, no crooning angels. The moment is announced in shadow, the waiter’s leaning form casts a halo on the wall behind Christ’s head, while the lemon and the grapes form an echo of a fish, the first symbol of Christianity, on the starched cloth. The divine hides within the mundane, only available to those who see.

  I watched the illustration as the train rolled over the hot Veneto plain, squeezing my fingernails into my palms. The deep shadow cast by the candlelight around the table recalled the dull sprawl of Masha’s dress. Again and again I traced the figures in the picture, the wide gaze, the stretching arms. I wanted to cry for her, but the tears wouldn’t come, even when I forced my memory into a slow fly-crawl over her corpse. It’s not your fault, Judith. None of this was, and all of it was, and as the raw-eyed hours moved past in the throb of the sun on the window blinds, the emptiness of the carriage felt like the only mercy I would ever know in the world.

  *

  And then it was too dark to see and my legs had gone to sleep long ago. Hopping with pins and needles, I inched through the almost-empty carriages to the buffet car. I couldn’t eat, but buying a banana and a bottle of Tropicana was something to do. My watch read 11.20, still the whole night to sit through. As I was paying for the juice, a young guy opened the door that led to first class. Jeans, white shirt, heavy navy cashmere sweater. Not bad. He nodded politely at the waitress, including me in his glance.

  ‘Buonasera.’

  ‘Buonasera.’

  He caught my eye again as he paid for a macchiato. Travelling alone, miss? His skin would be warm and satiny, still the colour of the foam on his coffee from a long season of Italian sun.

  ‘Sei da sola?’ Are you alone?

  The plastic table rocked a little with the rhythm of the train as I considered his question.

  *

  Bossun was a small-time dealer who hung around my school gates, handing out tiny wraps of weed and speed in return for pilfered fivers. He drove an old white BMW, which counted as glamorous on our estate, and he was good-looking, if Nigerian giants are your thing. I never wanted any of his crap gear, but he would sometimes give me a Lambert & Butler and we’d have a chat. Once, during one of Mum’s bad times, when the electricity had been cut off again and there was nothing in the kitchen except a scraped-out tub of Utterly Butterly!, he asked if I wanted to do a drop for him. Fifteen quid. He drove me right into town in that lovely warm car, to a big terraced house on Hope Street, near the cathedral, and gave me a battered textbook to put in the plastic carrier I used as a school bag. The stuff was taped inside, over an introduction to the essays of Walter Benjamin.

  ‘Students,’ Bossun explained contemptuously as he pulled away. ‘Make sure you bring it back.’

  The wind pinned my school skirt to my body as I waited for the door, but I didn’t feel the cold. I was hopping on adrenalin, could feel it taut in my muscles, fireworking through me. I had never broken the law before. I was convinced that the slightest error would see me hauled to the police station and I was lit with the thrill of it. I held the book close to my coat, trying for a calm, studious expression in case anyone was watching. The guy who eventually opened the door was obviously buying something a lot stronger than weed. He was young, not that much older than me, but his eyes behind matted mousy hair were yellow and as he reached for the book I saw the track marks on his greyed forearms beneath their raggedy jumper. In the hallway I stood between two oozing bin liners while he detached the gaffer-taped package, replacing it with a few crumpled notes and closing the cover carefully. ‘Cheers. Um – see you.’ I was surprised to hear that his voice was deep, educated.

  Bossun seemed quite pleased with me; he gave me an extra five quid. So after that I started delivering for him fairly regularly. The school uniform helped, he explained solemnly: ‘Diverts suspicion.’ He was always getting hassled by the police; just because he was black they assumed he was a dealer. ‘Maybe it’s actually because you’re a dealer?’ I suggested flatly, and for a minute I thought he’d give me a clip round the ear, but he just laughed and told me I was too sharp for my own good. Bossun had his own flat in Toxteth, two manky rooms that smelled of feet and joss sticks, but there was a gas fire and bright-patterned African throws on the crappy furniture, and with the curtains drawn and the music on it felt all right. After a while Bossun said I
could kip over if I needed, if I gave him a nice blow job before I went to sleep. And because when you’re fifteen and nothing has ever happened to you, when you’ve been nowhere and seen nothing and the slightest bit of attention or interest can make the world radiant if only you pretend hard enough, I did. I called him my boyfriend, at least in my head, and for a while I was even proud when he razzed up to the school gates in the Beemer. He didn’t bother me for anything except the blow jobs, which was just as well as he had a cock like a collapsible umbrella, but once I turned up at his place to find a skinny blond guy in a grubby shell suit next to him on the sofa, with an Indian and a half-drunk pack of beers.

  ‘All right, girl? This is Kyle. Old mate. This is Judy.’

  ‘Hiya.’ Kyle didn’t look up. He was throwing down chicken tikka with a plastic spoon like he’d never seen food before.

  ‘Why don’t you sit here, eh? I’ve got to nip out.’

  Bossun left us in the sound of chewing. After a bit I asked Kyle if he wanted the telly on, but he just carried on eating. I wondered where Bossun had found him, if maybe he was a bit simple. When the last lurid grease was scraped out of the foil, I took the heap of trays to the filthy bin next to the long-retired cooker and cracked him another beer like a proper little hostess. I wondered if it was rude to get a book out.

  ‘Bossun said –’ he piped up suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said you’d –’

  ‘That I’d what?’

  ‘See, I just got out. Today, like.’ He took a long swig, as though that explained everything.

  ‘Got out?’

  ‘Yeah. Prison.’

  ‘Oh. Well, congratulations.’ Obviously I wanted to know what he’d done, but that seemed like bad manners. I thought of something. ‘So you’re staying here?’

  ‘Yeah. For a bit. Till I sort meself out, like.’

  ‘Well, I’d best get going then.’

  ‘But he said.’

  And then I saw what he meant, and why Bossun had left, and somewhere in Kyle’s pinched face a hope that I recognised. I looked at him and saw how desperately he wanted to touch me, and that the gnaw-nailed hand holding the beer can was ever so slightly shaking, and that what I had under my pleated skirt and my ugly school sweatshirt was power.

  *

  That’s how they tame us. Because when you’re fifteen and you’ve seen nothing and been nowhere, even the faintest hint of that power will push you over, convince you that all the pop songs are true, that this is love, never mind that it’s coercion, or worse. So you do it, and ten years later you wake up with three kids and some overweight no-mark in the bed next to you and you wonder where it went and why you did so little with it. Why you pissed all that strength away on sentiment and need and cheap attention. But I wasn’t like that. Even then, I was never like that. Love wasn’t for me. I was going to know about what I could make men do, and one day I was going to use it. This was – necessary.

  *

  I reached out and touched my fingertips to his mouth. Then I got up and went to the cold bedroom, pulled down the broken blind as far as it would reach and took off everything except my knickers. I got under the familiar Everton duvet and lay still, on my back. When he kissed me, he tasted of curry and hops. He told me I was gorgeous. When he lay on top of me in the damp fug of our thin bodies I wished I’d had a joint, but seconds after his cock stabbed into me he gasped, ‘Ah, fuck! Fuck, girl!’ and lay still, holding me so tight I could barely breathe, his face jammed between my breasts. He fell asleep like that, and I didn’t want to move him, so we were still stuck there when Bossun came back and slid into bed beside us. ‘All right, lovebirds?’

  I opened my arms and both bodies, dark and pale, turned towards me, two arms twined across my body. We lay like that all night, tumbled like puppies in the orange lumen of the street lamp under that awful blind. I listened to them breathe, their snuffles and moans, and it hurt me how young they were, how clean we could be for a while. The filthy sheet beneath my naked arse was damp, with Kyle’s cum and what I knew was my blood. It hadn’t seemed the moment to mention that I was a virgin. For a while, before I too fell asleep, I could see us lying there, how innocent, how ugly.

  *

  The guy had raised an eyebrow, confused, expectant, confident. The offer was there in his face and all I had to do was say yes. He could fuck it all out of me while the Alps trailed their snowy tendrils of fog around like bandages around my heart. Easy.

  ‘No,’ I replied, indicating the passage back to second class. ‘C’e . . . C’e qualcuno.’ There’s someone.

  He finished his coffee with a smile.

  ‘Allora, buonasera, signorina.’

  ‘Buonasera.’

  I went back to my seat alone, and sat out the night as the train rolled on towards the North Sea.

  13

  Four thousand euro is a lot to pay for a slip of paper, but I couldn’t afford to buy cheap. I had considered a US passport, which ranks equally with the UK on the passport index of the most useful documents in the world, but since I didn’t trust myself to fake the accent, I’d have to settle for staying British. I had reached Amsterdam mid-morning, creaky and grubby from the train, then taken the underground to Nieuwmarkt, where the coffee-shops on the border of the red-light district were already doing business. I wove through red-eyed clusters of gurning stags, trying several of the cheap hotels until I found a dull, efficient room for cash. After a luxuriously hot shower I allowed myself three hours’ sleep, then set off for Alex’s place near the Vondelpark.

  *

  Back when I’d lived in Paris, when I was still dumb enough to think I could get away with stuff, I had started Gentileschi with the profits from a stolen painting. That the painting – a Stubbs – was forged made me feel quite righteous, but the appearance of an Italian cop posing as a bounty hunter named Renaud Cleret saw off any notions of security. We had been lovers, and in a sense friends, at least until I’d worked out that he planned to sell me out to his colleague in the anti-Mafia squad, Romero da Silva. In the interests of fair play, I’d had to take care of that, but Renaud had left me a number of parting gifts, including Alex, his ‘cobbler’ in Amsterdam.

  *

  Renaud had boasted to me of his connection with the expert passport forger, but Alex had been rather a disappointment the first time we met. In Paris, after my friend Leanne disappeared, Renaud, my undercover lover, had sent her passport to Alex and had the original photo replaced with mine. That document wasn’t meant to send me anywhere but prison, yet Alex had shown no surprise when I turned up asking for another a short while later. His professionalism was impeccable and imperturbable, it was his premises that were a bit of a let-down. On that first night journey from France, I’d conjured a workshop lit by La Tour, in a cellar perhaps, or reached through a Fagin-esque warren of attics, where crookbacked clerks laboured with tweezers and diamond loops. Alex, a youngish bearded father in slightly tragic skinny jeans and high-tops, in fact lived with his family in a pretty nineteenth-century house in one of Amsterdam’s smartest suburbs and conducted his business from the spare bedroom.

  Small talk in these situations is an absurd social fault-line, where manners creak at the seams, but Alex and I observed the form of a cup of milkless tea in his Farrow & Ball-ed kitchen and a few remarks about where we had spent our summer holidays, a conversation so innocuous I might have been having it with my coke dealer. We went upstairs and I positioned myself before the mounted tubular camera, but before he took the shots he asked ‘How many of these have we done?’

  ‘Two. Well, three now.’

  He paused in his adjustment of the lens. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Right. OK, don’t say cheese!’ He’d made the same joke last time.

  Alex’s equipment was housed in three square grey steel cabinets, I had no idea what went on in there, but they hummed reassuringly as he copied down the details I gave him.

  Cobbl
ers usually assemble fake passports from stolen ones. The market is huge, for those who are skilled enough to get it right. The zone information, the text at the bottom of the passport which is read electronically, needs to match the printed data, spacing is essential to a fraction of a millimetre, the thickness of the pages has to be consistent, no raised edges, not a speck of excess glue. Alex had come good last time: with the thought of Yermolov on my back I prayed this one would be impeccable.

  ‘All done then. You can collect it – oh, say about 8 p.m.? Same place as last time?’

  ‘Sure. Have you got the code for the door?’

  ‘212B.’

  ‘And it’s good?’

  He gave me a pained professional smile.

  ‘Well, you’re screwed if it’s not, right?’

  I gave him the cash folded in paper tissues and he saw me to the front door, handing me a small key as we said goodbye. Originally I had wondered what his cover was – looked for a fake doctor’s plaque or the headquarters of a minor religion – but of course the only premises that pretend to be something else now are lame hipster speakeasies. If you have a laptop, you’re a freelance, end of. The key was for a registered letter box on the other side of the city. At 8 p.m. I would retrieve the envelope with the new passport and leave it inside. Until then there was Caravaggio.

  *

  The window of my dreary hotel room was hiked as wide as it would go, and as night fell the air smelled of grass and hot asphalt and hormones. An early autumn evening in Amsterdam ought to have been replete with potential – not that the prurient delights of the red-light district offered any particular thrill – but I found I didn’t even have the energy to go looking, though surely company wouldn’t have been a problem. The Rijksmuseum was already shut. A joint, to take the edge off? Yeah, right. Face it, Judith. You’re a raddled old whore who’ll be alone forever. Glad we got that cleared up. I settled for an early, stodgy Malaysian dinner with my book, but even greasing my arteries with peanut sauce and palm oil disgusted me. I abandoned my plate and set off on foot to follow the canals round to Lauriergracht.