The Third Woman

by Mark Burnell

  He looked up at her, full of resignation and rage, the two emotions blending to form a third: defiance. 'Fuck you.'

  Day Five

  She stood on the balcony overlooking Pont Louis-Philippe and the Seine. Three o'clock in the morning, the drizzle drifting. She lifted her face to it, closed her eyes and tried to ignore the persistent ache of her bruises.

  A pepper grinder!

  How depressingly amateur. She'd removed the knife-block and the bottle but not the large chrome pepper grinder standing next to them. There were reasons, naturally – exhaustion, the Stalingrad shock – but no excuses. Petra didn't believe in excuses. They were for other people. Weak people. Like Stephanie.

  She'd moved just before the first blow which had probably saved her. With hindsight there was something vaguely comical about the idea of the great Petra Reuter being killed by a blow from a pepper grinder. Like Finnish sniper Juha Suomalainen dying in a bizarre gardening accident. Assassins were meant to be gunned down in a blaze of bloody glory. Not killed by condiments.

  Why her? And why use Jacob Furst to lure her to Paris? She hadn't been brought here to take a contract. She'd been brought here to die. In Passage du Caire with Anders Brand, a famous man she'd never met. So what of Leonid Golitsyn? An afterthought, clearly, but whose? Stern's? Or someone else's? Someone who used Stern the way Stephanie used him, perhaps. At the moment, that made little difference since it failed to answer the only question that truly mattered: why?

  In his office, there were shelves the length of one wall; books, mostly, a mix of fact and fiction in hardback and paperback. Most of the fiction was twentieth-century American; F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Stone.

  Inside an oak cupboard she found crowded CD racks and boxes of old dog-eared vinyl albums, which she flicked through. Stephanie would have marked Newman as a jazz fan so his taste surprised her. Talking Heads, Patti Smith, lots of Rolling Stones, no Beatles. Pink Floyd was less surprising but twelve David Bowie albums? That made him more than a casual fan but was still less of a surprise than learning that an assassin like John Peltor made marmalade in his spare time. An admirer of Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Beethoven, she noticed, but not of Mozart.

  On one wall were three framed drawings, pencil sketches on plain paper – a hand holding a tea cup, a solitary petrol pump, a nude woman sitting on the edge of a bed – all signed by the artist: Edward Hopper. Yet in the entrance hall the gilt-framed canvases were sixteenth-century Flemish.

  A cultural scavenger, Stephanie decided. A man who enjoyed Mahler and the Thin White Duke, literature and pulp fiction, pop art and fine art. A man at home in tailored suits and threadbare T-shirts. A man who was comfortable with different versions of himself.

  Just as she was.

  Shortly before seven, she took him breakfast. When she untied his hands he thanked her. He didn't look at the raw scars. Stephanie gave him fruit and bread, and a cup of milky coffee.

  She switched on the TV. The headlines were still dominated by the Sentier bomb and its repercussions. Overnight a mosque in the town of Annecy had been fire-bombed. Some saw it as the first sign of a backlash. Meanwhile the French President had declared that 'an attack on a Jew is an attack against France'. Which was not enough of an assurance for Benabdallah Bentaleb, president of the Muslim Association of Greater Annecy.

  In the TV studio, Patrick Roth, a Paris correspondent for The Washington Post, was airing his own opinion: 'In the United States these days there's a feeling that it's not safe to be a Jew in Europe any more. It's the old European disease and it's been around for a thousand years. The current situation in Israel is making it very easy for modern Europeans to resurrect old hatreds. What happened in Sentier is a tragedy. But seen from another perspective, it's nothing new. It's history repeating itself. It's Jewish businesses being destroyed. It's Jews being murdered.'

  Beside Roth sat Alain Vega, the Swiss writer and intellectual. 'This is absurd, of course. To try and make a comparison with the persecution of European Jews in the nineteen-thirties is a gross distortion of the reality. If I may be blunt: there is a far closer comparison to be drawn and that is with the way the Israelis are treating the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. That is the real comparison. An entire people geographically imprisoned and marked out for persecution. An entire people who – were it not for the inconvenience of satellite television – would be likely candidates for total eradication.'

  Stephanie was aware of Newman looking at her and could feel his question: where do you fit into all of this?

  He chose the indirect way to ask it. 'Are they even close?'

  'I don't know.'

  'This means nothing to you?'

  'Nothing.'

  'Well I wouldn't sweat it. These guys are paid for.'

  Provocation dressed in the designer clothes of the casual aside.

  'What do you mean?'

  'I don't know who greases Vega but I can tell you that Patrick Roth is in the pocket of AIPAC.'

  'AIPAC?'

  'The American Israel Public Affairs Committee. A lobbying organization.'

  'I haven't heard of them.'

  'The American Association of Retired Persons is considered the most influential interest group in Washington. They've got thirty-three million members. AIPAC is considered the next most influential. They've got fifty thousand members.'

  'How do they manage that?'

  'They've got a lot of money and they're not afraid to use it. They spread it around. Directly, or indirectly, through astro-turf organizations …'

  'Astro-turf?'

  'Fake grass-roots groups. Like the Californian Retired People's Association for Better Government. Or the Texan Institute for Moral Conduct in Public Life. Anything, as long as it doesn't sound too Jewish. In Washington AIPAC lines up with many of the think-tanks that have helped shape the foreign policy of the current administration. Outfits like the Potomac Institute and the American Partnership Foundation.'

  'The fabled neo-cons?'

  Newman nodded. 'For lack of a better term. AIPAC can easily influence the appointment of hardliners to key posts in the administration.'

  'Like?'

  'Richard Rhinehart, for one. A senior figure in the American Partnership Foundation but also a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board.'

  'That sounds convenient.'

  'That's the way it works. Because that's the way they make it work. But it's an imperfect situation, having organizations like AIPAC running parallel to the Potomac Institute or the APF. They're staunchly right-wing. That's not the natural territory for Jewish interests in American politics.'

  'What's your interest?'

  'Easy. Oil.'

  'Oil?'

  'Well, the US's Middle-East policy is a blend of three things, above all: oil, Israel and Islam. And whichever way you cut it, you can't separate them. That's how I know about AIPAC. And that's how I know that Patrick Roth takes money from them. It's in my interest to know. I'll guarantee you this: if you gave me a telephone and an hour I'd be able to tell you who's paying for Alain Vega's retirement.'

  At eight-thirty Stephanie made Newman call Marie, his secretary at Solaris. He told her he had influenza. Exhausted, he sounded convincing to Stephanie. But evidently not to his secretary: 'No, Marie. It's not a cold. Not even a heavy cold. It's influenza, okay? And that means I'm in bed. Which is where I'm going to stay … no, I don't need anything. Except sleep. I'll call you when I feel human again.'

  They watched some more news. Later, Stephanie made him another cup of coffee and watched him drink half of it while he focused on the screen. She tried to remember how she'd first seen him; at the bar, a glass at his elbow, on the phone.

  What were you really doing there?

  They'd been together for thirty-six hours. Stephanie felt he'd adapted to their situation better than she had; the competent hostage and incompetent captor. Did the familiar surroundings of his own apartment make a difference? Did
gender make a difference? Or had he detected in her something to ease his own anxiety? Whatever it was, she found his composure unnerving.

  Eventually, she said, 'Your cramp yesterday – that was real?'

  'You thought I was acting?'

  'If you were, you should move to LA and get an agent. But I thought it might be a ploy to get you out of the chair.'

  'I wish I'd thought of that.'

  'The pepper grinder – you didn't plan that?'

  He shook his head. 'It just happened.'

  'You never worried it might go wrong?'

  'There wasn't time. Besides, I figured you were going to kill me anyway so …'

  'Wait a minute. Why would you think that?'

  'Why wouldn't I? The fact that you're here. The fact that you were there. At the hotel. And the fact that I know who you are.'

  Stephanie scoffed. 'I don't even know who I am.'

  'I've seen your face. You're on the run. You can't afford loose ends.'

  'Listen to me. I'm not going to kill you.'

  'Not unless you have to. Right?'

  She didn't want to argue with him. She took his empty cup from him and said, 'For what it's worth, I'm sorry.'

  'For what?'

  'For getting into your car. I'm sorry it turned out to be you.'

  Sutherland, north coast of Scotland, 09:25

  The helicopter dropped out of the cloud, rain slithering over the glass bubble. They flew between stark mountains and over black lochs and rivers. Beneath them a single-track road meandered through the bleak rusted landscape and Rosie Chaudhuri realized the pilot was using it to navigate.

  'Are we nearly there?'

  He leaned over and prodded a finger at a winding line on the map, the B801 to Kinlochbervie. 'We're here. Oldshoremore's just a couple of miles on.'

  He circled the beach twice at two hundred feet. Halfway along it, a rocky spit protruded into the sea, rising to its furthest point, from where it dropped vertically into the rioting swell. During the second pass, she saw people on the spit, black spots running over green grass towards the tip. There were three people on the stretch of beach from where the spit departed.

  The pilot began to drop the helicopter, struggling to keep it steady in the wind. Before they'd even landed, Rosie saw one of the three coming towards them.

  Iain Boyd. More than any other individual, he was the man who'd turned Stephanie Patrick into Petra Reuter. Rosie had heard plenty about Boyd but had never met him. Not as tall as she'd anticipated but broader, he looked five ten from top to toe, and from shoulder to shoulder. A product of the land that had nurtured him, his features and temperament had been weathered by climate.

  They hit the beach with a bump. The pilot killed the engine. It died with a sad wail. Then he leaned across Rosie and opened the door, ushering in a blast of freezing ocean air. She stepped on to wet sand and her heels sank. She tottered forward a few steps before kicking off her shoes despite the cold and wet.

  Iain Boyd watched her, unimpressed. She looked over his shoulder at the black specks nearing the rocky point. 'Friends of yours?' she asked.

  He stared at her, not blinking in the horizontal rain.

  'Sorry about this. We tried to get hold of you earlier. My name's Rosie Chaudhuri. We don't know each other but …'

  'I know who you are.'

  'You do?'

  'Who else would land a piece of shit like that on a beach like this? I don't work for you people any longer.'

  Rosie tried to keep the hair from blowing into her eyes. 'It's Stephanie.'

  He shook his head. 'She's gone. Vanished.'

  'She should be gone. But she's back.'

  'Seen her yourself, have you?'

  'No.'

  'Then you've made a mistake.'

  'Have you seen the news today?'

  'I know we're a long way from Islington, or wherever it is you people come from, but we do get newspapers up here. Some of us can even read them.'

  'The bomb in Paris …'

  'Not her work.'

  'How can you be so sure?'

  'You know how. I made her.'

  'There's been a lot of water under the bridge since you last saw her.'

  'Then what the hell are you doing here?'

  'I'm sorry?'

  'Isn't that why you've come? For my opinion?'

  'Partly.'

  'Well, that is my opinion. It's not her.'

  'But she was there. That's a fact. And it's not the only thing. Two nights ago there was a double strike in central Paris. Again, she was there. In both places.'

  'She retired.'

  'I know. But people come out of retirement. For all sorts of reasons. Anyway, she's the one the French authorities are looking for.'

  'What do you want?'

  Rosie looked out to sea where pewter waves rose and collapsed, their rumble drifting ash ore between gusts of icy wind. 'Somebody has to talk to her.'

  'Don't you have people to do that?'

  She looked back at him. 'My people don't talk, Mr Boyd. You of all people should know that. Besides, you're the one she trusts.'

  'I thought that was you.'

  'It used to be. Maybe it still could be. I don't know. In any event, you're the only one who stands a chance of finding her before somebody else does.'

  'If she's half the woman she used to be she'll evade the French authorities.'

  'Maybe.'

  'Definitely.'

  Her fingers and toes were already numb. Boyd was wearing a worn sweatshirt – once dark blue, now pale grey – over a T-shirt. She could see the temperature was making no impact on him.

  Rosie said, 'You're assuming they're the only ones looking for her.'

  'There's someone else?'

  'There could be.'

  He looked annoyed. 'If I find her, and if I manage to talk to her, then what?'

  'Bring her in.'

  'To Magenta House?'

  'It's not the same organization it used to be.'

  His smile was one of the chilliest Rosie had ever seen. 'I heard that. Quite a coup the two of you staged. She put the bullet in Alexander, you took his position, and she got what the old man wouldn't give her: freedom. Very neat. For you, for her. But not for him.'

  'It wasn't a coup.'

  'Whatever you say.'

  'It was neat for the organization, too. Alexander had become a serious liability.'

  'I'm not disputing that.'

  'Just find her and talk to her.'

  'And if she won't cooperate, then what?'

  'I don't have the luxury of a sentimental option, Mr Boyd. One way or another, she needs to be disengaged. If you won't do it, I'll send someone else. Someone who doesn't know her. Someone who'll do it the clinical way. Then you can go back and join your friends over there on the rock. It's up to you.'

  I look at the scrap of paper from the pair of Levi's in the apartment at Stalingrad. Rudi, Gare du Nord, 19:30. At the bottom there's a seven-digit phone number. The Thalys service I took from Brussels to Paris terminated at Gare du Nord. I dial the number using the Brussels prefix but there's no answer.

  Who is Rudi? What is he to me, since this message was in my jeans, in my apartment? And what was Leonid Golitsyn to me? He paid for the place and I lived there. Was I the taste of the gutter for the man who has everything?

  There have always been versions of Petra and most of them have been me. But now I've been stolen from myself I have no control over the Petra I discovered in Stalingrad. I feel peculiarly violated by her existence. I don't know what she's done but one thing is certain: like every other version of Petra, she will have a purpose.

  I'm in the office going through Golitsyn's attaché case again; two packs of Philip Morris cigarettes, a Mont Blanc pen, a leather pocket diary from Smythson's. I flick through it. Since we're in January, there's not much to look at. His entries are a mix of Russian and English, with no apparent logic to either. There are several appointments in New York before his departure f
ive days ago.

  Four days ago: 10.30 a.m., arrive CDG; lunch, av. Foch, 1 p.m.; AB – the Meurice, 8.15 p.m.

  AB – Anders Brand. Stern told me that Golitsyn and Brand dined together at the Hotel Meurice the night before the bomb in Passage du Caire.

  Three days ago: blank.

  Two days ago: blank.

  No mention of the Emile Wolf suite at the Lancaster. Or of an appointment with Claudia Calderon at eight.

  Yesterday: 7.30 a.m., EL; Moscow, Air France; MosProm dinner, Café Pushkin, 8.30 p.m.

  I know Café Pushkin in Moscow. A wonderful place to eat unless you're paying. Next to EL, which was written in black ink, the original time – 11 a.m. – has been crossed out in the same red ink that has provided the new time: 7.30 a.m. The unused Air France ticket is in a travel wallet with a black American Express card and a wad of roubles. There's a small plastic pouch containing three bottles of prescription medication; Golitsyn suffered from high blood pressure, inflamed joints and lack of sleep.

  I look through some of his business correspondence; banks, security houses, lawyers. Much of it relates to the proposed Golitsyn Gallery on Cork Street in London. Then there's a plastic folder marked PETROTECH XIX. Inside, the top sheet is a letter from Agence Sirius on avenue de Wagram:

  Sir,

  We are pleased to confirm the following arrangements: a private aircraft, Moscow – Vienna – Moscow; a penthouse suite at the Hotel Bristol on Kärntner Ring for three nights; a private car and driver for the duration of your visit. Further details to follow.

  There are five slim brochures beneath the letter. Four are American; two engineering firms, one aviation leasing company, one Florida-based deep-sea diving company. The fifth brochure is from a Russo-French industrial design company called Mirasia. The product is Mir-3, a brand new service drone for oil pipelines.

  Stern hinted at interests that ran beyond the world of fine art. First politics, now oil. Although perhaps it's naïve to consider them apart.