by L. S. Hilton
What slips, what stays? Guiche was a senior lawyer in the firm that had represented Balensky in France. Perhaps, since Yermolov had attended the service for Guiche’s unfortunate colleague, the firm had acted for him too? It wasn’t much, but it was the first real connection I had. Back at the till, Bruce got a sale. A hot chocolate along the street at Angelina’s, so thick you could stand your spoon in it, and a quick browse online, then I was on my way to the Place des Victoires at the edge of the first arrondissement, where the office of Saccard Rougon Busch occupied a Louis XIV townhouse overlooking the statue of the king. The firm was listed in a group of ‘magic circle’ French lawyers, specialising apparently in ‘High End Capability and Acquisitions’. It didn’t seem too intelligent to ring the bell and ask if Monsieur Guiche was available without a story, so I settled for lurking outside, interspersing window-shopping in the square’s smart boutiques with covert glances at the doorway, which occasionally opened to admit or release a series of more-or-less identical men in well-cut dark suits. After an hour I was rewarded with a glimpse of Guiche himself, speaking with a female colleague as they got into a waiting taxi and pulled away. The temptation to jump into a passing cab and ask the driver to follow was irresistible, but it’s impossible to hail a bloody cab in Paris, so I mooched back to the Hearse and continued digging.
After a few tries, I discovered a series of websites hosted by the French Bar Society, from which I learned that Edouard Guiche had been made partner after Ralewski’s demise, and that for the past decade his firm had been involved in property transactions through a Swiss company, involving residential buildings in Paris, Clermont-Ferrand and the Côte d’Azur. A bit more trawling and I found that the Swiss company listed Balensky as a director, and that work permits had been issued for its employees by various French municipalities. I tried a few Russian sites, but my vocabulary simply wasn’t up to it. It all seemed relatively trivial for an ‘oligarche’, though presumably someone of Balensky’s – or possibly Yermolov’s – wealth and interests would have armies of lawyers on call around the world. I didn’t imagine Guiche could lead me direct to the resolution of the scene in the Place de l’Odéon, but in my search for the mysterious witness of that night’s events I didn’t have much else to go on.
Which is why the following day and the day after that saw me back in the Place des Victoires. About 5 p.m. on the third day, Guiche left the office and set off towards the river, walking briskly with what looked like a serious briefcase. I didn’t know much about surveillance techniques except what I had learned from spy novels, but following him wasn’t that difficult, especially as his custom-made Aubercy wing-tips were fitted with brass heel taps which clattered on the paving stones like stilettos. It was quite fun really. Guiche made his way towards Hôtel de Ville, then crossed over the Pont Marie to the Île Saint-Louis, bearing left along the Quai d’Anjou. I’d crossed the island the first night I’d spoken to Renaud, and the last time too, when I’d released his head into the current of the Seine. Such a long goodbye.
Guiche paused and took out his phone, tapped, spoke, all the while scanning the street and the river as though he was looking for someone. Had he spotted me? He continued, more slowly now, replacing the phone and taking out a bunch of keys which glinted against the dark cloth of his jacket. So he was going home? He stopped outside a building at the end of the quai, towards the top eastern corner of the island, and then something else happened. Guiche put down the briefcase and went to open the plain black wooden street door, when a young man, approaching from the far corner by the Sully bridge, called out to him. Guiche whirled around, clearly recognised the man and waved him away. I drew closer, keeping my eyes on the river and taking out my own phone as though I was a tourist filming the passing boats. I tapped on the Mirror Contrast app and watched the pair over my shoulder.
The man who had accosted Guiche was a boy really, about twenty-one. Dark-haired, viciously lovely face atop a ballerino’s body, its taut lines shown off when his jacket (last year’s navy Valentino, aggressive studs on the collar) swung away as he tried to turn the reluctant lawyer to face him. In the corruption that played around his overripe mouth there was something that reminded me of Caravaggio’s beautiful, taunting Cupid. A gold watch flashed on the boy’s wrist, but his trousers and shoes were cheap. Interesting. Guiche turned to speak to him – it didn’t seem as though the two were arguing, more that the boy was asking him for something, his expression halfway between wheedling and pleading. Guiche shook his head, opened the door, relented and turned back to say something else. The boy nodded, and walked back the way I had come, on the opposite side of the pavement. The door closed. I turned, put the phone away and crossed towards the apartment building, freezing when the door clicked open. But Guiche had no eyes for anyone but the boy. He hovered in the doorway, watching him leave until he turned left towards the Rue Saint-Louis en l’Île and vanished from sight. As soon as I heard the door shut again, I jogged down the way the boy had gone, turning onto the main street of the island, busy now it was getting dark with homecoming shoppers and early tourists heading for the restaurants, scanning the pavements for the twinkle on the boy’s sleeve. He was already halfway across the bridge, heading towards Notre Dame. I sped up, relieved to see he had stopped to light a cigarette, scowling self-consciously down at the Seine. He knows he’s pretty.
While he smoked, I took out a cheap bright orange pashmina I had picked up earlier from one of the stalls which line the river. I’d planned to use it as a disguise for trailing Guiche. Now if the boy saw me his eyes would register it and I’d be invisible again when I removed it. At least that’s what John le Carré says. He finished the cigarette and tossed the butt into the river, checked his phone reflexively and moved off. This stalking business was fun, I had to admit. ‘To be at the centre of the world and yet to remain hidden from the world . . . The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.’ Maybe this was the feeling I liked best, the total isolation of utter anonymity, when no one at all knows who or where you are.
*
I followed the boy easily to the Saint-Michel fountain, then into the narrow streets of the Quartier Latin, lurid with kebab-shop signs. It was cold now and I was grateful when he turned into one of the stores and I could follow him into the fatty warmth. I pretended to study the menu board as he shook hands across the counter with young guy busy with the chip fryer, who was saying something in Arabic. I waited in the queue as they chatted, oblivious to the increasingly impatient customers, until the server shrugged and made up a chicken kebab with a huge portion of salad and frites stuffed into the pita bread, handing it over with an obvious nod and a wink. As the boy reached for it eagerly, I saw the watch was a Rolex. It looked pretty genuine – so why was a man with a watch like that scrounging shawarma? He took it outside to eat, standing at one of a pair of small high tables, and I watched him pick the kebab apart and place pieces fastidiously in his mouth, clearly trying to keep his clothes and hands clean, while I drank the small coffee I’d ordered. Then we were off again, first to a McDonald’s down the road, where he ducked in to use the bathroom, then back over the river, east towards the Centre Pompidou and east again. He was an easy mark, pausing to check his phone every few blocks, but it was a long walk and though my mouth was unpleasantly dry from the espresso I didn’t want to lose him by stopping for water. He wandered for about an hour – it was after 8 p.m. when he finally took a chair outside a café in Belleville. It was a part of town I once wouldn’t have dreamed of knowing: even the café tables had a look of drawing in their skirts in disdain at what had become of the neighbourhood. Reluctantly, I unwound the pashmina and took my own seat at the far end of the terrace. The waiter was in no hurry to take anyone’s order – eventually I was supplied with a horrible Beaujolais and the boy with a Ricard. Good for the breath. I spun out my drink as long as he did, which felt like about a year. He noodled aimlessly on his phone, I read the latest Houellebecq between covert glan
ces and wincing sips.
I was sure he had paid me no attention so far, but there were only two other occupied tables on the terrace and I felt his eyes on me as I turned a page. Looking up, I briefly met his glance – a studied lack of attention might have seemed unnatural. His own thick black lashes dipped and fluttered flirtatiously. I looked down at my book again. A little while later he got up. I had already put the coins for my drink in the waiting saucer, ready to move when he did, but now I paused and gathered my hair into a ponytail, watching him walk purposefully to the street corner. He had been killing time; now he had somewhere to be. I stayed about thirty metres behind him, keeping him in sight, dodging a woman in bright African prints with a churning pushchair, a freezer truck unloading outside a halal butcher’s. He turned into a cul-de-sac lined with grey apartment buildings, a brutal modern block forming a perpendicular impasse, skanky even by the standards of the twentieth arrondissement. An ancient Arab guy in a dun-coloured djellaba sat at a table in the doorway under a flickering neon strip light, engrossed in a hand of patience. There was an alarming flare of gold teeth as he greeted the boy, who passed into the lobby and descended a flight of stairs to the right beneath an exit sign. Maybe this was where he lived.
The doorman didn’t look up from his game.
‘You a friend of Olivier?’ He used the familiar tu.
‘Er, yes.’ Whoever Olivier was.
‘Twenty.’
I handed him a note and followed the boy inside.
*
In the time when Caravaggio was painting, when all kinds of new worlds were up for grabs, there was one whose currents hummed beneath the surface of everyday life all across Europe, from the Slavic steppes to the tiny brokewalled fields of England. Those who knew called it ‘spiery’, the shadow-land of espionage, whose methods were often no more elaborate than lemon-juice ink and Latinate codes, their pace merely the speed of a galloping horse, yet whose power could redraw the borders of kingdoms, massacre whole towns, elect a pope or besmirch a queen. We would have made good in that world, I thought later, those of us who sought out la nuit. We recognised our own kind, and we kept our own secrets, at least until the morning. I had sought out that world when I first lived in Paris, then Renaud had found me there, and now, here, at the bottom of a piss-stained concrete stairwell behind an abandoned launderette, I was back home once more.
It was a far cry from the flashy clubs where I used to hang out with Yvette, though the place would have been a hipsters’ gold-mine in London or Manhattan. Once I’d got past the twin tubs and the unspeakable lavatory, the crappy cellar felt much like anywhere, except that the red flock wallpaper was unironic. I liked the crowd immediately, a mixture of saucer-eyed swingers up from the banlieue, slumming bobos from Paris proper and gentle, bewildered transvestites dressed like a gaggle of lost librarians, stubble valiantly concealed beneath old-school panstick, size-eleven courts bravely polished, drowning in a culture that suddenly required you to slice your dick off to prove your commitment. Altogether depressing, but I quite liked that too.
The place was obviously more of a knocking shop than a real partouze club: a few nervous-looking middle managers in cheap suits and denial were picking their trade from a goggle of writhing twinks pouting and bitching at the bar. I wasn’t altogether surprised when my quarry joined them. He had the look on him. After a while he excused himself from his chums to slip off to what had to be the dark-room with a youngish guy who twisted his wedding ring as he followed the boy through the velvet drapes. They reappeared no more than ten minutes later, by which time I’d discovered that good old ‘Olivier’ stocked Maker’s Mark. The john scuttled off immediately, ready to spark up the Renault for the guilty commute back to the burbs. My boy left soon after. I didn’t bother following him; I’d given myself enough to think about. Besides, I fancied another drink. Maybe too many drinks. I thought I could get quite into that role: I’d never considered I had the discipline for alcoholism, but by anyone’s standards I had a whole lot of shit to forget.
As I sipped, I considered Guiche and the boy, what their relationship could be. Guiche worked for Balensky and presumably Yermolov, he was clearly doing pretty well out of it if he lived on the Île Saint-Louis, and I didn’t imagine that rent boys were part of his usual social circle. When I’d first encountered Balensky, during the summer I’d spent on Steve’s boat, I had been aware of rumours about his private life – gossip about parties with boys at the oligarch’s home in Morocco. Maybe Guiche was gay, but so what? Russia was notoriously intolerant of homosexuality, but this was France. I ordered another, neat again.
I had to know who it was who had betrayed my past to Yermolov. Kazbich would presumably have told him by now that I had the picture, but I wasn’t about to give up my only bargaining chip until I found out. Trying to return it could easily get me killed, and if not, arrested. The boy’s link to Guiche seemed to be the only other connection I might leverage. It was a long time since I had felt so powerless, and it was Yermolov who had done it, Yermolov who had thought me too inadequate for his pictures. But I had it now, didn’t I, the one he really craved? The third piece to complement the Botticellis in his gallery. The thought of his frustration that I had eluded him so far afforded me a certain pathetic glee. Who was Yermolov to underestimate me? He wasn’t the only one who could be ruthless. I raised a wobbly toast to Alvin and knocked back the last of the drink, but there seemed to be something furious in my grip on the glass, which slid out of my hand and shattered on the bar. A drop of amber liquid dribbled into my lap.
‘May I get you another?’
I turned. A young guy, about my own age, bearded. His breath was cabbagy. The last thing I felt like was a turn in the dark-room.
‘No, thanks.’ I tried to curve my lips, but my smile had long since run screaming from the building, so I settled for sliding arse first off the stool instead, which may not have been my best look. The guy kindly held my bag while I sorted myself out, but I was as bored of him as I was of myself.
‘I’m juss . . . goin’ ferra cigarette,’ I managed, as I lurched towards the door, choking down a throatful of whisky vomit. I held it until I got up to the street, where it streamed out into the gutter under the impassive eye of the old Arab doorman.
17
I was becoming quite the detective. At least, I had a hangover. I’d rejected the idea of simply calling Guiche’s firm and asking to speak to him – even if I got through, he was hardly likely to discuss his clients with some random stranger, and if I told him I had the Caravaggio he would go straight to Yermolov. I had to find the boy; I had to make use of him, see if there was some way of getting close enough to Guiche without arousing suspicion so that I could learn what, if anything, he knew of the night of Moncada’s death. If it turned out to be nothing, I’d have to come up with a plan B. I stuck to water when I returned to Olivier’s the next night at 11 p.m.
The junior hustlers were clustered once more round the bar. My boy was not among them, but I did recognise one of the group to whom he had been speaking the previous evening: whip-thin in tight white jeans and a natty leather-collared T-shirt, artfully gelled bouffant atop a sulky, smudgy-featured face. I’d picked the lowest-cut top from my meagre travelling wardrobe and worn a push-up bra, trying to look as though I was genuinely there for a bit of action, and I gave him the glad-eye until he joined me at the bar, with only the slightest moue of weary distaste at his chums. He looked about nineteen, and there was no getting around it – in his eyes I was basically a cougar.
‘Bonsoir, mademoiselle.’ At least he hadn’t said madame.
‘Bonsoir. I saw you here last night.’ He smiled modestly, obviously convinced that I had been drawn back for a taste of what he had to offer in the backroom. ‘I hoped you might be able to introduce me to your friend,’ I continued simply. ‘You were talking with him yesterday.’ I quickly described the boy as best I could, mentioning the gold Rolex, which provoked a look of recognition.
‘What do you want with him?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘The same thing you thought I wanted from you, of course.’
He made to back away. ‘Sorry – I think you’ve made a mistake,’ he replied dismissively.
I set a note on the bar between us. It was more than I could afford really, but I didn’t have time to haggle.
‘I’d be glad to speak to him – if you could maybe try . . . ?’
He cocked his potato of a nose at me as the fifty shimmied its way into his back pocket. ‘I could . . . ask around.’
‘Thank you. You’re very kind.’
He made his way out of the club, presumably to place a call as there was no reception down in the basement. He was back about ten minutes later; the fresh air had given his face some colour and he briefly looked young and enthusiastic. ‘My friend says he can join you in a short while, mademoiselle. Perhaps half an hour?’ His eyes were on my bag. I reluctantly extracted a twenty from my wallet and handed it over. He nodded and wished me a good evening. I wondered what kind of message he had sent to my mystery date.
I drank my water and watched the crowd and listened to Jacques Dutronc sing ‘J’aime les filles’ and in a while a hand touched my shoulder. There he was.
‘My friend said I would find you here. You were looking for me?’
In the cocksure tilt of his head, the smile on those twisted plum lips, I read his swift estimation of my age, my loneliness, the degree of my desperation, and I found myself liking him for the pro he so evidently was, so I offered him a drink. His name was Timothy, he pronounced it ‘Timotee’, like the shampoo, which seemed terribly funny. He was wearing the same clothes as the night before, with a thin-inadequate T-shirt under the flashy jacket and the watch carefully in evidence. So his lover, or lovers, were rich, but he was not. Excellent. He gallantly offered a second round; I toasted instead with my half-full Perrier.