by L. S. Hilton
We were both shaking; weakly I licked a salt trickle of sweat from the deep hollow between his pecs. Still holding me around him, he carried me to the sofa, knelt forwards and let me roll off him, trembling. He reached for one of the glasses, took a long mouthful of wine then put his lips to mine as I took it from his mouth.
‘You are well, Elisabeth?’ He sounded touchingly anxious.
‘I think so. I don’t know yet.’ My hand brushed his cock, retreating now into the thatch of his pubic hair. ‘That was . . . surprising.’
‘You don’t really think that.’
‘No, I don’t.’
*
He sat up and began pulling on his shirt and trousers. I followed suit, scouting among the cushions for my underwear, and when we were both approximately dressed, he refilled our glasses and turned to me.
‘So, now you are going to tell me why you came to find me with your rather terrible picture?’
‘You deal regularly through Ivan Kazbich?’
‘Yes. You know this.’
‘I think you sometimes sell him other things.’ I practically saw the ripple of tension run up his cotton-clad arm, a rip tide from elbow to shoulder.
‘Perhaps,’ he answered tightly.
‘I want you to give him a message for me. For one of his other employers. I’ve written it down, I’ll give you the paper before I leave. Kazbich knows I have the thing his employer is looking for, and I will give it to him in Switzerland in one week’s time. Assuming he will keep the meeting according to my conditions.’
‘And why should I do this?’
I could have said that I hoped I hadn’t just screwed him for nothing, but that would have been untrue, not to mention coarse.
‘Because Kazbich is flipping fakes and he is risking . . . complicating your other supply chain.’
‘You don’t know anything.’
‘Maybe.’ I didn’t actually, I just had to pray he’d buy the bluff. Happy ending notwithstanding, the whole point of this trip was to convince Yermolov and Balensky that I knew what they were up to. Only a message direct from Dejan Raznatovic would convince them that I had seen Guiche’s papers and made the connection. Assuming I got out of here alive, a communication from Dejan himself would suggest that I knew enough to bring them down. That’s why they would agree to the meeting, in just the way I planned to stage it. Of course, tipping them off that I knew about the art-for-arms connection might just inspire them to kill me, but they were planning on that anyway. A conviction of my knowledge could buy me the time I needed to confront them.
‘You’re very inquisitive.’ Dejan sounded disappointed. ‘Or possibly very stupid.’
‘That’s not polite.’
He was right. He wouldn’t need to summon help; those huge hands could snap my neck like a cocktail stick. This was the riskiest part of my scheme, which was what made it the sexiest. I stared him down, ventured a cold smile.
‘Surely you wouldn’t – not after we’ve just . . .?’ I purred.
He smiled back. ‘How does it go? You don’t think I would have done that before? You are . . . funny. As well as brave.’
‘Thank you. But as I say, your . . . private arrangements are not my business. I only want to get the message to Kazbich and return the missing object. That’s all. I assure you.’
He stood. ‘I will have someone drive you home now, Elisabeth.’
‘But will you do as I ask?’
‘Maybe. I think so.’ He handed me my bag. I retrieved the paper with the instructions. ‘I would perhaps like to have spent some more time with you, but you must forgive me. I am very busy.’
‘Of course.’ It stung a little, the sop to his pride, the renewed formality.
He pressed a bell by the door to the stairwell and I straightened myself up as we heard footsteps ascending. Dejan spoke swiftly in Serbian through the door.
‘Zvezdan will drive you wherever you wish to go. Goodbye, Elisabeth.’ He bent over my hand.
‘Goodbye, Dejan. Thank you so very much for your time.’
*
I followed the boy across the courtyard, passing another of them, who unlocked a barred gate and accompanied us down a ramp into an underground garage. The Aston was parked there, as well as a Porsche SUV and two Range Rovers, the dark one from earlier, which in the strip light I saw had white interiors, and a white one, with the leather in black. I held my breath. The boy clicked a key and my lungs erupted in relief. The black car, with the white inside. If he’d chosen the other one, it would have meant he was going to kill me. Can’t have blood on the motor.
*
The squat was thumping when the bodyguard dropped me back about an hour later. He held the door for me and gravely handed me my bag before giving a little half-salute and heading back to the city. He wasn’t bad-looking, and I was feeling so gleeful that I might have asked him up, if it wasn’t for his boss. I removed my shoes again and reversed the schlep to the tenth floor, the cold and the climb burning off the haze of the wine. A kaleidoscope of sounds, mostly house and techno, bounced off the walls; the studios were all open, full of people dancing, drinking, kissing, smoking. A bearded giant rode past on a child’s tricycle, waving to me as his friend filmed him on his phone. Two gorgeous Serbian Amazons clomped past in Doc Martens and leather leggings, holding fistfuls of lighted sparklers. I hauled on up to the roof for a chance of quiet and took out my phone, that strange, exuberant city gleaming below me.
First I messaged Carlotta, to take her up on the kind invitation to visit St Moritz she had mentioned at her wedding. Blowing on my fingers, I tried the various numbers Elena had given me back in Venice. First a Russian mobile, which was switched off, then a 44 code – perhaps she was in London. It was after midnight there, if she was awake she’d be unlikely to be sober, but she answered muzzily on the second ring.
‘Elena, it’s Elisabeth, from Venice. That thing you asked me about? I can get you something better. Way better. Don’t say anything. I need you to call me back now, a new number, I’ll give it to you. But you need to do it from a different phone. Can you do that?’
‘Da.’ If she was surprised, or confused, she didn’t show it.
There were some junkshop picnic tables on the roof. I spent the twenty minutes Elena took to return the call shoving a couple of them together into a sort of windbreak, then I squatted inside it, shivering in my thin dress and bare feet. Dejan’s cum had frozen unpleasantly over the tops of my thighs. Then she did call, and we spoke for so long that my hand congealed around the phone and I had to unpeel it and massage it into life as I creaked downstairs to seek out Timothy.
Xaoc’s space was as crowded as a club, dense with sweating bodies. I pushed my way to the kitchen, where Jovana was stirring a huge frying pan of scrambled eggs and fag ash. She grinned at me dreamily, spangled. I had a sudden urge to kiss her mouth, but I remembered I was effectively her boss – it might have seemed like harassment.
‘How did it go?’ she shouted over her shoulder.
I gave her a thumbs down and she shrugged.
‘But we’re on for the other one!’ I yelled. ‘Can we go through it tomorrow?’
She nodded, adding Tabasco, tick-tocking her spatula to the mix.
Timothy was dancing in the studio, twirling a girl in an incongruous rock ’n’ roll routine. He’d made himself a one-shouldered blouse from one of Jovana’s folky fabrics, gypsyish against his dark hair. He had his shine back good and proper, he looked young again, and ingenuously happy. I had never seen him look that way, and it gave me pleasure. What I had in store for him was pretty nasty, but sex was business to him after all. Afterwards he’d be OK, I was sure of it.
I tapped his partner on the shoulder and took her place, letting him spin me as best he could through the snarl of bodies.
‘Having fun?’
‘I love this place!’ he shouted back in his heavy English.
‘Good. Enjoy yourself then. We’re leaving tomorrow
.’
‘Leaving?’
I gave him a hug.
‘Yes, darling. We’re going to Switzerland.’
PART THREE
DISPERSION
22
Although I’d spent most of my life broke, a few years of being flush had caused me to forget how magnificent flush feels. Acts of God aside, I was certain that after hearing my message through Dejan, Yermolov and I had a date in two days’ time, so there no longer seemed any need to heed the grey hat’s warning that he could track me through my bank card. I even travelled as Judith Rashleigh, for the hell of it. Timothy and I flew business for the short trip from Belgrade to Milan, and after the coach and the squat we thoroughly enjoyed both the hot meal and the selection of complimentary beverages, served by willowy Air Serbia hostesses in natty leather gloves. Timothy was all for stopping off for some shopping in the city, but I was eager to get up to the mountains, so we took a driver direct from Malpensa airport.
*
The Maloja Pass to the Engadin Valley climbed in a series of switchback bends, through which the driver gyrated the cab with practised aplomb, occasionally pulling aside to allow a creaking bus full of blank-faced Filipinos or alarmed-looking tourists to pass. The snow began about halfway up, stacked two metres high in thick wedges either side of the road. We passed Christmas-card stone farms with swords of ice dangling from their eaves and thick groves of gnarled pine, bent horizontal under their burdens of snow and years of Alpine winds. On the lip of the valley we drove past a long black lake, stiffly adorned with cross-country skiers in neon hats and Lycra, moving ponderously across its frozen waves, then several villages with musical names, Sils Maria, Silvaplana, until the ornate blue-and-white façade of the Kempinski Hotel announced St Moritz proper. I hadn’t expected the town to be so modern; its many glass-and-steel buildings looked ugly against the white grandeur of the mountains, but as we crawled through bottlenecks of Porsche and Audi SUVs I had plenty of time to see that rustic simplicity wasn’t really St Moritz’s thing. Furred up like Pomeranians, tubby women slithered along the pavements in crystal-spangled wedge-heeled trainers, mink ski-bands holding their hijabs in place, peering into watch shops, jewellers’ shops, sunglasses shops. Anything that wasn’t covered in brand logos was covered in diamonds. One boutique displayed a white fox-fur sleeping bag, another window was hung with padded black satin ski jackets with ‘Sexy’ in diamanté crawling over the lapels. Perfect for a chilly January in Riad.
We deposited Timothy in the Eiderhof, a hostel-style concrete block by the station. After paying for three nights the two of us went up to his room, single with shower, number 9, and I took a look at the building’s layout while Timothy checked the corridors for CCTV. This was Switzerland, and it was clean. Downstairs, I gave him some money. He accepted it with an uncharacteristically dubious look.
‘I’ll see you later,’ I tried to reassure him. ‘You should go shopping now. Get yourself some proper gear. There’s a Moncler shop over there.’
That perked him up a bit, though he looked very young and alone standing on the snow-blown steps among a group of hearty Swiss ski instructors in red jackets.
I reminded him of what time to be ready that evening, and that I’d be watching. Then I wriggled through the snarled traffic to the waiting cab and embarked on a shopping excursion of my own. First a sex shop I’d noticed at the entrance to the town, conveniently attached to a petrol station and buffet restaurant. So efficient, the Swiss. I picked out a black PVC jerkin and matching hotpants from the men’s aisle. The other props for my crime scene included fishing line from a camping stockist, a good old Swiss Army knife, a heavy trilobite fossil from a souvenir shop and a bottle of whisky. Finally the impassive cabbie and I set off in search of Carlotta.
*
It took a while to find Franz’s place above the town centre, mainly because Norman Foster had disguised it as a bit of hill. The house might have been in Architectural Digest, but from the outside it resembled Bilbo Baggins’s dream bachelor pad, less a building than a hummock. Still, once I’d paid the astronomical fare and lugged my bag gingerly down a narrow path cushioned with black sphagnum, I had to admit that the interior view was pretty spectacular. Carlotta was waiting for me in the NASA-grade kitchen, whose glass wall gave onto a perfect vista of the peaks across the valley. I was surprised to find her dressed in jeans and a Tyrolean jerkin over a navy cashmere polo-neck, but then her chameleon quality was one of the few things we had in common. After we’d squawked-and-kissed she offered me a cup of tea, though producing a mug and a tea bag from the banks of brushed-steel cupboards left her at a loss.
‘Our Filipino’s broken,’ she explained.
‘Oh – um – dear.’
‘Yah, I’d sent him to Hanselmann’s to get this rye bread that Franz likes and he, like, slipped over on the ice and snapped his leg.’
‘How awful.’
‘Yah, Franz is really, like, pissed, because we were going to give a dinner tonight, but never mind – we can go to Cecconi’s.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘Yah, Franz loves Cecconi’s.’
‘OK. Great.’
I settled for a glass of the best tap water I have ever tasted and we sat side by side on a reindeer-hide-covered bench, contemplating the view. It was quite difficult to balance, because the artfully arranged skins kept threatening to slide to the floor.
‘It’s so kind of you to have me!’ I enthused. ‘And what a fabulous place.’
‘We like it. At least, Franz was all for getting some, like, old stable conversion along the valley in Zuoz, and I was, like, no way, I’m not being stuck in the sticks with a load of old Germans, so we kept this. Fuck!’
‘What’s the matter? Are you all right, Carlotta?’
Carlotta was squinting at the gold ingot strapped round her left wrist. ‘Just a second.’
She disappeared and returned a few moments later brandishing a syringe.
‘Bit early for that, isn’t it?’ I asked rather nervously.
‘It’s my IVF,’ she explained. ‘I have to do the injection. Here, you can get it ready for me.’
She handed me two glass ampoules and told me to snap the tops off and mix the contents in the syringe while she hiked up her sweater, displaying a smooth plane of tanned stomach. She stretched the skin between two fingers. I looked away as she depressed the plunger.
‘I need some cotton wool. Stick that in the trash, would you?’
I looked round helplessly for the bin.
‘I’m trying to get pregnant,’ she announced, in case I was wondering.
‘Has it been difficult?’ I asked sympathetically.
‘No. I’m, like, totally able to do it naturally, but this way you can get twins and you only have to be fat once. Insurance policy.’ She nodded confidentially. ‘He’ll, like, totally have to redo the prenup.’
‘Right. Well, I hope it goes really well for you both.’
‘Yah, except sometimes they have to remove the extra ones, the, like, unviable foetuses, and there was this woman I knew in London, and they took the wrong one out and her kid had, like, one arm.’
‘Jesus, Carlotta.’
‘I know. It was, like, back to front or something. Gross. Anyway, this woman –’
‘Please shut up! Why not just do it normally?’
‘I wouldn’t mind that much, actually, but that would mean I’d have to get Franz to, like, fuck me, you know?’
‘I thought you said he was no bother?’
‘Well, no. But he’s still a pig. Like he wants me to pee into a glass and then he drinks it while he has a wank. Less hassle but no good for babies,’ she concluded ruefully.
‘What happened to Hermann, by the way?’
‘Ten years. Gross fraud. Bullet dodged.’ That newsflash seemed to cheer her up.
‘Come on, we should get changed. Franz is at the Cresta but we’re meeting him at seven.’
*
Carlotta’s go
at Gotha-chic did not extend to eveningwear. She reappeared in a black leather Balmain cocktail dress set off with a rope of emeralds which vanished into her prodigious cleavage and snakeskin Louboutin ankle-boots with a line of spikes around the ten-centimetre heel. My travelling wardrobe didn’t extend quite so far, but I managed to convert the somewhat crushed Lanvin into a mini with some strips of tit-tape from Carlotta’s bathroom, reluctantly adding black stack-heeled patent thigh boots borrowed from my hostess. Contemplating my reflection, I recalled that this had been my idea of elegance, in more innocent times. I remembered my first trip to the Riviera, how excited I’d been to get all dollied up in a minidress and heels. Had it been yellow, that dress I’d worn to go out with Leanne? I’d been so naive, in so many ways . . . thrilled by a Chanel handbag even.
‘Come on, darling!’ Carlotta interrupted. She was wrapping herself in something that might once have been a jaguar. I still didn’t have a properly warm coat – ‘Great, we’ll go shopping tomorrow!’, Carlotta squealed, so she generously lent me a dark mink jacket from a large collection hanging in the hallway. At least she knew where that wardrobe was; got to have your priorities right in the event of a fire. Franz’s driver texted and we teetered over the moss to the ubiquitous blacked-out SUV, grateful for its warmth after the sudden dash through the sub-zero night air.
‘So, Franz is bringing a friend for you,’ announced Carlotta idly as we wound back into town. Her lip gloss gleamed plummily in the screen-light from her phone.
‘Anyone nice?’
‘No, Tomas is a total snore, but he owns, like, half of Frankfurt. You should really think about your future, you know. I mean, you have your gallery thing, and that’s great, but –’
‘I’m not really in the market for a husband.’ I’d always known that wasn’t for me; I’d never cared for the idea of being owned.