by L. S. Hilton
‘Yes. But better now. When your wife gets back, lock up properly. If anyone comes, anyone at all, if anyone asks, tell them you’ve seen me. Tell them you gave me this –’ I jerked my head at the zipped black nylon case on the seat beside me – ‘and that I left immediately. Got into a cab that I’d kept waiting. You haven’t opened it, you don’t know what’s inside. And – could you get away for a few days?’
He looked at me, reflecting, then nodded. ‘Probably could, yeah.’
I had never been more grateful that the substance of my friendship with Dave was silence.
‘Well then. I’ll leave first thing. I’m so sorry.’
‘I’ll be going then. But – are you all right? You know, for money?’
‘I love you.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘I meant that. But I’m fine, thank you.’
‘I’ve got something else.’ He handed me a fat brown A4 envelope, I could feel pages inside.
‘I thought maybe you could have a look,’ he proffered shyly. ‘I’ve been writing a book.’
‘Seriously? What is it?’
‘About me, I suppose. I’d been helping at this centre, you know, for lads who were in the services?’
Dave had left his leg in the Gulf. It was typical of him that he should volunteer to help others who had lost even more.
‘And one of the – well, therapists, I should call her – she suggested I try to write something. About pictures really. About how they can help.’ Oh, couldn’t they just.
‘Good for you, Dave! That’s brilliant. I’d love to read it, if you allow me? Thank you. Although – it’s probably best if I don’t get in touch, for a bit. But I promise I’ll read it. And I’ve got something for you.’
I held out the book I had bought at Paddington station. Dave had a passion for lurid true crime.
‘The Shade by My Side. New life of Ted Bundy. Old times’ sake.’
As Dave was leaving, the TV screen erupted in a roar. I followed him to the door and called after him down the street and he turned towards me in the glow of the lamp-post.
‘Man City. They’ve just won two–nil.’
He gave me a hint of a salute. I watched him go, then carefully carried the case upstairs. Surveying my possessions in the chintzy pub bedroom I felt pathetically badly equipped. I had about fourteen thousand euros left in cash, the case, and fuck all else that might come in useful. My watch, I supposed, my beautiful Vacheron. Looking at it now I could see that it was almost eleven – no point in trying to make it back to Bath and up to London at this hour. In my wallet was the tag for the luggage locker at Lille station, where I’d left the Caracal after disassembling it in a stall in the women’s bathroom and stuffing the parts in a plastic Hello Kitty vanity case I’d bought at the Relais H. Which meant that I’d have to go back through Lille. Quelle massive shag, but there’d been no way I was going to try to get through international security at a French station with three IDs and a weapon.
Below my room, the pub was quiet; Sky turned off, the faint churning of the dishwasher behind the bar the only sound. I jumped again when I heard a car slowing outside, only too audible in the thick country dark, and moved instinctively behind the door, holding my breath, waiting for the slam of the door, the heavy footsteps on the stairs, but the driver shifted up a gear and moved off again, into the night. I hadn’t switched on the main light. I inched across the small room on my knees and twitched the yellowed net curtain. Nothing but the village street, glowing in the orbs from the lamp-posts, the odd window glowing with bluish television haze. I stretched, tried to relax, but kept repeating the wording of those emails. I was missing something. Why would Yermolov have done this? It was too . . . inefficient. If he wanted to threaten Dave, he would just do it. As he had with my flat, the gallery, with poor Masha. The emails seemed like the work of someone with fewer resources, someone trying to elicit information, not someone who could command a small private army. I was glad I had told Dave to take precautions, but something didn’t fit. Why hadn’t he sent someone to burgle Dave’s place? Maybe he thought Dave, if he had the picture, would be intimidated and try to contact me – from what the grey hat had told me, that might allow him to intercept me. What if the emails were a decoy? Meant to throw me off? Maybe even now a car was sliding north up the motorway, towards Liverpool, towards my mother . . .
Zersetzung. He was confusing me, trying to trap me, to funnel me towards him. I couldn’t let him. I had the picture now, which meant I had significantly altered the odds. I just had to stay calm, which was about the most irritating advice I could give myself. What did I have to be fucking calm about? I forced myself to take the shower I’d been waiting for since that morning. Binding my hair in a towel, I pulled on a T-shirt and knickers and dried my hands carefully, no cream, before approaching the case again.
It had taken me a while to work out what must have happened, but I knew that the case in front of me was not the one I had taken to the Place de l’Odéon. I had laid the original on the bed in Moncada’s hotel room, and he had stooped over it to remove the picture just as Renaud burst in on us. Their struggle had distracted me from seeing that Moncada had moved the picture into the similar case he had brought, the one containing the Caravaggio. I remembered Renaud’s stertorous instructions – ‘Quickly, all of it . . . Take the picture, too.’ I had grabbed the case without noticing the switch. To be fair, what with the corpse and the approaching cops, I’d been a bit distracted.
As I expected, the main section, which Moncada had intended for the Richter, was empty. Using the stubby blade of my eyelash tweezers, I carefully pierced a small hole in the nylon, then tore the case, millimetre by millimetre, along its length, until I was able to withdraw the thin waxed-card package from the lining. The card was gaffer-taped along the join, I boiled the in-room tea-service kettle and wincingly held the tape six inches above the spout of steam to loosen it, then gradually peeled back the plastic. And when I saw what was inside, in spite of the hideous absurdity of my situation, I laughed.
*
As soon as I woke, I ran. Four, five quick miles under the freezing drizzle, along the arterial road to Bath, in the lorry fumes and the disdainful glares of school bus drivers, pounding the tarmac until my lungs burned and my head cleared. When I dripped back into the pub, the landlord was wrangling a hoover and listening to Radio 2. I ordered a full English – sausages, bacon, grilled tomatoes, syrupy baked beans, mushrooms, fried eggs and fried bread, and used the landline again to book a cab to Bath. An hour later, the Caravaggio and I were back on the move. Near the station, I took myself to Costa Coffee and sat down at a corner table with a burner phone and a horrible caramel frappuccino thing. Cleaning the sugar-dusted table with my sleeve, I set down the notebook in which I had recorded all my numbers before leaving Venice and dialled Kazbich. I didn’t expect an answer, and indeed the line buzzed in the long, slow bursts of a European ring tone before switching to automated voicemail. I had rehearsed the message in the cab:
‘Dr Kazbich, you know who this is. I have the item your employer needs. I’ll be in touch. Don’t look in England. If you do, I’ll destroy it. I’ve seen it, so you know I know how.’
Across the street, bored country teenagers wandering in their best imitations of London trends, a party of nice American ladies on a tour, clutching copies of Northanger Abbey. I texted Dave, whose number I knew by heart:
Let me know if all is well. I’ll call in a few days. Thank you, for everything, as ever xxx
I waited, flipping the little phone over like a playing card until Dave texted back.
All clear so far. Take care. xxx
Then I let myself into the loo, with its conveniently low disabled-access handle, wadded the phone in lavatory paper and stuffed it into the sanitary-towel bin. Good luck finding that, Yury.
The night Moncada had died, who had known of his presence in the hotel on the Place de l’Odéon? Me. Moncada and Renaud Cleret, and neither of them was talking. Romero da Silva, Renaud�
��s colleague in the Italian police. And whoever was supposed to collect the picture. Who was that person, and who had sent them? Balensky or Yermolov, it had to be. But Yermolov also knew about me, about Gentileschi. Logically that person had to be the link. The witness who had – somehow – made the connection, who had told Yermolov about me. Was it Kazbich then, or someone else? Until I knew, I would never be safe. Returning the picture wouldn’t be enough. So I had to go to Paris. Via sodding Lille.
16
Crossing the Tuileries towards Concorde two days later, I remembered the first time I had spoken to Renaud Cleret, on a freezing bench outside the gardens. It’s strange, memory, what slips and what stays. Renaud had played me for a mug, and I had paid him out properly, but as my boots crunched over the neat gravelled paths, all I could think of was the good times we had shared – shopping in the market at my old flat near the Pantheon, him lumbering after me on the wet grass of the Luxembourg, reading the papers quietly with the sun carving patterns on the floorboards of my flat. Though since the nearest thing I’d ever had to a relationship ended in decapitation, a therapist might suggest I had commitment issues. I passed the seat where he had wrapped me in his jacket and blackmailed me into helping him. For a moment I stood there in the traffic fumes and let my hand trail slowly across its green wooden back.
*
As soon as I arrived in Paris, I had provided myself with a new phone and laptop, paying, obviously, from my dwindling stock of cash. I had been familiar with the newspaper reports of Moncada’s death well before Elena Yermolov had produced her souvenir file, but I went through them once more. Following the story, it transpired that the police seemed curiously uninterested in the case. The French press merely reported an investigation into the death of an unnamed man in a Paris hotel, followed by reports that he was of Italian nationality. And then, nothing more. The Italian press made no mention of it at all. I had searched coroners’ inquests around the date with no success. The cross-border bureaucracy of two nations with a passion for documents was weepingly dull. As far as I could make out from a handy guideline to expatriating the corpses of non-French citizens, it appeared likely that a coroner’s inquest could have taken place in Italy, though not necessarily with access to a French judicial file. The paperwork required for tracing bodies was relentless and apparently circular – if your granny died on a coach tour of the Dordogne it was truly alarming how easily she could be mislaid. I had surmised at the time that Renaud’s colleague da Silva would succeed in hushing the matter up to protect his friend, and it seemed I had been right.
I hadn’t got any further with Ivan Kazbich. Beyond one minimal website featuring the latter’s gallery in Belgrade, which dealt in a mixture of orthodox icons and unchallenging contemporary pieces, Kazbich’s web presence was a black hole. No images, no information. I was curious that a man who had been an active and significant dealer for so long – big enough to work for the likes of Yermolov – could leave so little trail, but even after wasting hours cross-referencing ever more unlikely terms, I produced nothing. I had returned several times to the Place de l’Odéon, hoping that the sight of the hotel would provoke some memory, some sequence of logic, but if there were any peripheral clues, they were locked up somewhere in my head.
So now I found myself aimlessly wandering around Paris’s tourist attractions, with no real idea where to look next. It didn’t help that Paris and I were practically no longer speaking. The city I had once loved so much had betrayed me with ghosts. Maybe if you live anywhere for a while it becomes a palimpsest, reinscribed with the shadows of former selves. Dusty, cramped, traffic-gorged, Paris taunted me with older incarnations, all of whom I preferred to my present one. I had lived there briefly as a student, returned to start my gallery there, spent a few intense, intimate weeks with Renaud, my lover and would-be nemesis. However I tried to avoid my old haunts, they still came back to haunt me.
One afternoon, on Rue de Turenne in the Marais, I was idly riffling through a stack of madly priced marl sweatshirts in a boutique when I glimpsed Yvette’s reflection in a mirror behind me. Yvette was a stylist who for a time had been a sort-of friend – at least she’d been useful, and she was still alive. She had also been with me at our regular haunt, a swingers’ club called La Lumière, the night I’d unfortunately had to shoot the owner. The shop was small and she was between me and the door, languidly trying to persuade the assistant that she was picking up some clothes for a ‘shoot’. Yvette’s hair was woven into a ziggurat of cobalt-blue dreads now, which matched the tone of the thigh-high Vetements cowboy boots she’d no doubt nicked from a set. It made me smile to think that she was still in business, but I buried my head in the sweatshirts, praying for her to leave without seeing me, which obviously meant she saw me immediately.
‘Lauren?’
Like Steve, she had known me by my real second name. I kept my face blank, tugging my coat sleeve down over my wristwatch, the only thing I was wearing that she could just have recognised from those days.
‘I’m sorry?’ I said in English.
‘Mais, c’est toi, non?’
‘Sorry. I don’t speak French.’ I smiled pleasantly, the helpless Anglo monoglot.
‘Ah. Excuse me,’ she answered in her heavily accented English, and turned back to her negotiation. I crossed to the door and nodded to the assistant. ‘Thank you!’ I trilled gaily, but Yvette gave me a long, calculating stare as I passed her, and I felt her eyes in my back all the way down the street. At least that made a change from all the other eyes I was convinced were on me. My walks around my lost city were twitchingly accompanied by the imagined presence of Yermolov’s goons.
I had paid cash in advance for a two-week stay at the Herse d’Or, not far from the Bastille Métro station and the lovely garden at Place des Vosges. The gag on ‘hearse’ amused me, and it was relatively cheap, around 100 euro a night. My stack of bills was shrinking at an alarming rate and I didn’t know how much longer they would need to sustain me. The door of my room had a lock and a chain, but I didn’t think they’d be much good to me in the event of a visit from Yury, and the thin walls meant I spent every night in a paranoid sweat, waking every time I heard movement on the landing. Whenever I arrived or left I checked with the Chinese concierge to see if there had been any visits or messages – I imagined perhaps that he saw me romantically, as a hopeless lover waiting for a tryst – while knowing that I was nothing more to him than an irritating interruption to his perpetual games of online poker. My conversation with Dave’s guy in Kenya had reassured me, in that I knew logically that the probability of Yermolov locating me was low, but logic is a poor defence against insomnia. There were so many loose ends, so much I still couldn’t know. Even Yvette felt like a threat at four in the morning. I tried to assemble some sort of routine – running on the river, walking to the Rue Vivienne behind the Palais Royal to use the computers in the library there, a depressing picnic from the local Franprix minimarket for dinner – but after a few days I was arthritic with angst.
*
Hence the nice brisk walk through the Louvre, which had ended in me gawping on a bench like the village idiot. I’d come from the library on the Rue Vivienne, where I’d been going through microfiche files of articles featuring the word ‘oligarches’ in the French press. It would have been so much easier to sign up for online access, but that was impossible in my present cash-only incarnation. I was trying to get some sense – any sense – of what anyone connected with Yermolov or Balensky might have been doing in Paris when I was last there. I didn’t have much hope of finding anything, but one piece in Le Figaro – the paper Renaud had been so fond of – mentioned Balensky’s name. The Man from the Stan had been photographed last year at a memorial service for Oskar Ralewski, a Polish–Parisian lawyer who had died when his small private plane had crashed on a journey to Switzerland, killing its pilot and Ralewski himself. Also in attendance at the memorial, held at the Orthodox Nevsky Cathedral on the Rue Daru, was a certain Pavel
Yermolov. The two men had studiously not been photographed together, but the story made a gleeful point of the fact that Ralewski’s firm had represented a number of Russia’s new rich. The article quoted a book by a British journalist, a sensational analysis of the penetration of Russian money into the highest echelons of European politics, whose author suggested that Ralewski’s death might have been No Accident. For want of much else to do, I decided to stop by the English bookshop on the Rue de Rivoli to see if they had a copy. I stood and stretched, brushing the remembered scent of Renaud’s jacket from my neck like a cobweb.
*
Bruce Eakin’s biography described him as a ‘freelance web crusader’, no less. His book’s neon-pink cover promised insider revelations on the ‘cult’ of the oligarchs, beneath a smoking gun and a tottering heap of euros, in case anyone had missed the point. Flipping through the pages, it didn’t seem that Bruce’s research had taken him much further than his parents’ attic, as most of the ‘revelations’ were predictable skim ’n’ splice confections freely available on the Web. There was an index at least, and I looked up Ralewski to read the relevant passage. The lawyer had been professionally close to both Balensky and Yermolov, as well as to a number of their compatriots, and Bruce eagerly went over the details of the accident. He did his best to make the circumstances sound sinister, but given that the plane had crashed into an Alp in a sudden thunderstorm with zero visibility, I thought poor old Ralewski might just have been unlucky. The photo of Balensky was reproduced; I studied that ligneous face once again. Next to Balensky, shaking hands, stood a taller, grey-haired man. The caption read: ‘Balensky with Saccard Rougon Busch partner Edouard Guiche at the Ralewski memorial’. I flipped back to the index, but Guiche was not listed. I replaced the book under the pointed stare of the girl at the cash till and had a wander in the art section. I had used to come here sometimes when I was a student in the city, before the sounds of French around me resolved into sense, gulping as much as I could from the unaffordable books until the glare of a similar girl would drive me away.