by L. S. Hilton
I ordered a glass of Chenin blanc and scanned the room. A couple of Arab guys at the next table, giving me the glad eye, an ancient exiled-dictator type with an implausible blonde, a group of German women with laptops scowling at her, two youngish men in jeans and IWC watches drinking vodka tonics. No good. Hedgies wear jeans. I needed someone dressed like me; I needed a banker. So I took myself and my copy of the Economist to Quirinale for dinner and ordered fresh foie gras for the hell of it, and scanned an article on North Korea while I waited for the music in the adjoining bar to start up, the aggressive house that Eurotrash need to know they’re having a good time. I ordered a mousse au chocolat with jasmine syrup for the hell of that, then slid over to the bar and abandoned the pretence of reading. The place was filling up. Two women in black suits occupied the next stools, standard blonde and brunette combo, though by the look of the brunette’s over-large hands and the slightly taut set to her jawline I thought whoever she ended up with might be getting a surprise extra. Within minutes they had annexed a couple of suits, and were soon halfway down a bottle of champagne, laughing and tossing their highlights and generally acting like they were absolutely thrilled to be in precisely that stuffy bar with its lame DJ and lamer floating candles in ice troughs, with precisely those fascinatingly witty men, while their luckier colleagues were doing bad Russian coke on the Riviera. I gave it ten minutes and then I asked the doorman to get me a cab to the Leopard Lounge.
There, I ordered bourbon. No one was bothering to pretend that this was anything other than a meat market. A gaggle of D-list teenage models, lingerie catalogue level, with a gay fixer in white Dolce jeans and a couple of ageing-player types whose hair looked like it had crawled off the seating of their doubtless slightly crappy boat. More blondes with varying degrees of tit job, more four-inch starched collars, more Rolexes, more lasered teeth and undead eyes. The two hedgies I’d seen at the Bergues getting loud and brawly on vodka, a girl in leather-look skinnies on either arm. Girls everywhere, Grazia’d up and ready to do anything. Girls alight with the hope that tonight might be the chance, the springboard, the moment that would make the dawn horrors and the bad blow-jobs worthwhile. Girls like me, once.
Geneva is a small town, full of young single men with money, and two and a half per cent of its population is engaged in the sex trade. I wasn’t overly concerned with competition, but by eleven thirty I was beginning to feel a bit desperate. I couldn’t risk another bourbon. The list I had made back in Como was spinning like a juke box behind my eyes: Rupert, Cameron, Leanne, Moncada. How long did I have? If I couldn’t swing this I’d have to get what I could from the bank and make a run for it. How much cash could I legally get away with carrying? It could only be a couple of days, and at this rate I’d be lucky to get any money out of Osprey and myself out of Europe before one of da Silva’s colleagues came looking for me.
And then, because sometimes, just sometimes, if you close your eyes and wish really hard, life can be just like a movie, he walked in. Fiftyish, greying, not too handsome but sheeny with money, wedding band, Savile Row, Bulgari cufflinks (excellent – not aristocratic and a bit insecure), shoes and watch impeccable. Especially the shoes. If there was one thing I wanted never to see again if this little European tour came off it was another fucking tasselled loafer. He was alone, which meant things had gone badly and he was having a drink, or that things had gone well and he was having a drink. Either way, he was having it with me.
20
It wasn’t until we were back in my hotel room and I’d poured him the drink and not asked for the money up front, that it began to dawn on Jean-Christophe that I wasn’t a hooker. And even after he’d spent fifteen minutes with his face in my cunt, and about three banging me from behind with suitably orchestral encouragement, and I’d fluttered and shivered a bit in his surprisingly hairy arms, he still couldn’t quite believe it.
‘So, I wasn’t exactly expecting that.’ He spoke French.
‘Is this the part where I tell you I’m not usually this forward, it’s just that I really couldn’t help myself?’ I wriggled free and got up from the bed naked to fetch a glass of water, ensuring he could get his first proper look.
‘Well, I do really like you,’ I went on, ‘but I’m a grown-up and games bore me.’
‘I see.’
‘But I’m not the clingy type. You can stay if you want.’ I got back into bed and arranged the duvet around myself. ‘Or not.’
He slid his arms back around me from behind, holding my breasts and biting the nape of my neck. This might not have to be such a chore.
‘I have to be at the office in the morning.’
‘What’s your collar size?’
‘Why?’
‘I’ll call the concierge and see about a clean shirt. He’ll like a challenge.’
*
Jean-Christophe did stay, that night and the next. Then he asked me if I would join him in Courchevel for the weekend. The season was on my side, I thought. Not only were the wives safely tucked away en vacances (I wondered whether Madame Jean-Christophe was amusing herself with the tennis coach at Cap d’Antibes or assiduously starving in Biarritz?), but also, for all my many gifts, I didn’t actually know how to ski, which could have proved awkward for Lauren the nice English art dealer to explain had it been winter. Lauren was the kind of girl to be childishly delighted, but not excessively impressed, when Jean-Christophe’s Jaguar turned into the General Aviation sector at Geneva airport. Obviously I’d never flown private before, but now I could see Carlotta’s point. Twenty minutes in the Sikorsky helicopter, exclaiming over the sublime views of the Alps gleaming below us, and we were touching down in 1850. The kind of thing that could corrupt a person for life, really.
We were to stay in a chalet borrowed from Jean-Christophe’s old schoolfriend. His own place was in Verbier; I imagined that this was a longstanding arrangement which suited the pair of them. I had a poke around while he finished off his Friday-evening calls to the office. It wasn’t one of the gazillion-euro glass-walled palaces that the Russians were constructing on what in winter were the pistes, more a solid family home, three bedrooms, everything in wood, decorated in a mixture of shabby Alpine chic with a few mediocre but pretty pieces of Oriental art. The beds were made up with colourful striped Basque linens. The only glamorous touch was a cedar hot tub built out on a wooden deck, with views right down the valley. There were tatty paperbacks and family photos, the friend with his highlighted wife and his three wholesome blond children on the slopes or what looked like tropical beaches. The daughter looked about ten years younger than me. I wondered what her life was like, about her boarding school and her clothes and her holidays, about what it would be like to grow up that secure, that safe. No doubt she probably spent her days smoking fags and bitching to her friends on Facebook about how crap her existence was.
Jean-Christophe apologised that he couldn’t take me to La Mangeoire, the restaurant which turned into Courchevel’s most expensive night club at ten thirty, but I assured him prettily that I’d much rather do something simple. We changed into jeans and cashmere sweaters and walked hand in hand through the town, stopping at a small bistro where the owner obviously recognised Monsieur. Jean-Christophe asked politely if I thought raclette was too heavy, and I answered politely that it was just cold enough, up here, to make it a delight. So we carved oozing cheese from what looked like a medieval torture instrument onto thin shards of cured ham and venison and drank a bottle of Burgundy. I quite liked Jean-Christophe, though obviously not as passionately as I pretended to. Unlike James, he had nice manners, and an easy store of chat which mostly revolved around travel. He didn’t ask many questions, but I made a point of telling him briefly that I had plans to start my own gallery. Towards the end of the bottle he reached for my hand across the table and kissed it.
‘Mais, que tu es belle.’
I wanted to giggle. In another life this might have been all that I dreamed of. Distinguished older man, exclusive loca
tion. Jesus. As it was, I was counting the minutes until I could get him safely settled in the hot tub. So we strolled back, and I did a bit of exclaiming at the beauty of the stars, which really were extraordinary, touchably luminescent, and I ran ahead of him indoors to fetch a bottle of champagne and two glasses and fiddle with the buttons, so that when he came out onto the terrace I was already naked under the deliciously steaming water with my hair trailing sleek along my back. Jean-Christophe joined me, lit a cigar and let his head fall back and we were silent for a few minutes, sipping and staring at the night. His fingers swam towards me, reaching idly for my nipple, but I sat up a little straighter.
‘Darling, I want to ask you something.’
Immediately, he was tense. If this was the hard sell he would be ready, and no doubt perfectly courteous, but furiously disappointed, perhaps even a little sad. I could let him stew a moment.
‘You see, there’s something I need help with.’
‘Oui.’
His tone was flat and discouraging. What was it going to be, I could see him wondering suspiciously – the intractable landlord, the exorbitant college fee? The sick mother? Surely not the sick mother?
‘I would pay, of course. A fee. Maybe a hundred thousand euro?’
‘You would pay?’
‘Well, of course. You see, I was thinking . . . remember I told you at dinner about the gallery?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was in Geneva because I have an investor. He’s a serious buyer and he’s prepared to back me. I was seeing to the practicalities. The funds are with Osprey at present.’
He was interested now, beginning to think like a money man, not a john.
‘Osprey? Yes, I know someone there.’
‘But I want to move them. My client is very . . . exacting. He wants to gather an important collection and I’m very conscious that he’s taking a chance on me. But he also needs to be very discreet – you understand? He doesn’t necessarily want the world to know what he’s buying. And I don’t think Switzerland is as quiet as it could be. Not after all that UBS stuff last year.’
‘Alors?’
‘So I want to move it. I want to move the money. But I need to do it quickly, because I think my client has a fairly short attention span and if I’m not picking up pieces for him soon he might lose patience. Shanghai Contemporary starts in early September and I need to be ready. And there’s some artists showing at Art Basel Hong Kong in the spring – I just can’t afford bureaucracy. So I thought you could help me,’ I finished simply, looking him as clearly in the eye as the tea lights and the swirling steam would allow.
‘What did you have in mind?’
‘Jean-Christophe, I don’t know you very well. But I feel I can trust you. It’s a fair amount of money – about six million euro. I want you to move it to a corporate account in Panama for me, as quickly as you can. I want to arrange to draw funds and my own salary as a corporate employee from the account. I will pay you a hundred thousand euro, wherever you want the money sent. Nothing more.’
‘Six million?’
‘A cheap Rothko. Not that much, really.’
‘You are quite a surprising young woman.’
‘Yes,’ I answered, before I slid under the water. ‘Quite surprising.’ I was glad I’d got my life-saving certificate. It was true, what the instructor had said: those skills always do come in handy.
So I had a rather strenuous weekend and Jean-Christophe had a very relaxing one, then we took the heli back to Geneva on the Monday morning and a taxi straight to the Osprey building. I told Jean-Christophe I didn’t want to go in, but he said I had to accompany him or they wouldn’t agree to close the account. But it seemed that the benediction of Steve’s billions still hovered over me like a fairy godmother. The contact was if anything more sycophantic and obliging than the manager had been. I handed over the codes and decided in the end to leave the original 10K where it was – you never knew. I planned to send Steve something in about that price range as soon as I was settled and then we’d be quits. If Jean-Christophe’s connection at Osprey was surprised, he didn’t show it, but then that’s the point of Switzerland. If you have the money, you can hide anything there. So when we walked out Jean-Christophe was 100K richer and I was the proud and solitary employee of Gentileschi Ltd, registered with Klein Fenyves, Panama, on a salary of a hundred thousand euro a year with discretionary release options for purchases, funds to be released into the account of my choice. All taxable, all open, all safe, all in my own name. No more connections to the Moncada transfer or to that meagre account in the Cook Islands. It was too early for a celebratory drink, so we shook hands awkwardly on the steps of the bank and I made a few noises about getting in touch next time I was in town, though we both knew I wouldn’t. His driver brought the car round and he disappeared, though I was sort of touched that he bothered to look back out of the window until they turned the corner before reaching for his phone. I wondered if he felt he’d been played for a mug and decided he probably did, though not many mugs are that well paid, in every sense.
I walked back to the Bergues through a surly drizzle. I seemed to have acquired a surprising amount of stuff, looking at the mismatched pile in the luggage room. I could treat myself to a better set now. Matching luggage, dead posh. Somehow that didn’t lift my heart quite the way I thought it would. Wearily, I went to the lounge and ordered a coffee, logged on to the Corriere della Sera site. There it was: ‘Brutal killing of British businessman’. I forced myself to read it through slowly, three times. No mention of my name. Just ‘Police have interviewed a colleague of the victim, who confirmed he was meeting an unknown client.’ If it was out in Italy today it would definitely be in the English press tomorrow, especially as August was the slow season. But I was clear, wasn’t I? Rupert would have been frantic, seeing the money had gone to the Swiss account, but now it had simply vanished. Osprey wouldn’t hand out the details of where it had been sent, no matter what strings that fat fuck pulled. I had worked out a story now. Even if he knew I had met Moncada, even if he found me, I could say I had guessed the Stubbs stunt and talked Cameron into letting me in on it for ten grand. The kind of pathetic amount of money someone like Judith Rashleigh would be in need of. And then he didn’t show, and I went alone and saw that the money was transferred to where Cameron had directed me, and that’s all I knew. Rupert could blame Moncada, he could blame Cameron, he could blame whoever he liked, but they had nothing on me. And why had I kept quiet about Rupert’s involvement to the Italian police? Residual loyalty, playing the game, not letting the school down. Again, the kind of doglike fidelity to their values which I had once thought might impress them.
I closed my eyes. How long had it been since I could breathe properly? I should be moving, gathering that bloody luggage, taking a cab to the station, doing the next thing, and the next. But I didn’t. I just sat there, watching the rain.
PART FOUR
OUTSIDE
21
The Stubbs came up at auction that winter. Ten million pounds through a Beijing dealer bidding for a private client. Five million profit to Moncada’s invisible seller and the whole dairy department of Fortnum’s on Rupert’s face. Mr and Mrs Tiger obviously didn’t read the trades, or if they did they were happy to keep their mouths shut. I did try and follow it, just to discover if there was anyone I’d need to avoid, but it vanished from sight. Stashed in a safe somewhere with a few Nazi Chagalls, maybe, ready to emerge in a few decades.
Here are some things that happen when you have murdered someone. You jump at the sound of the radio. You never walk into an empty room. The white noise of your knowledge will never silence, and sometimes there are monsters in your dreams. Yet with the disappearance of the Stubbs, the last link with my own life had gently snapped. Until Rome, I saw that I had been reacting, harried by circumstance; I had believed I had a plan, but it hadn’t really consisted of much except getting the hell out of Dodge, howsoever I could. I wasn’t like that
anymore. The incident with Cameron had been regrettable, certainly, and da Silva was something of a fly in the La Prairie face cream, but as time passed, I found that I barely gave either of them a moment’s thought. A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof, after all. I had a new life now.
By the time the picture was sold, I had everything arranged. When I left Switzerland, I had no real doubt as to where I would go. Since I didn’t believe that Sex and the City was a documentary, I’d never seen much point to New York, and, besides, America meant paperwork and hassles with green cards. I’d considered the South American classic, Buenos Aires, but my Spanish was schoolgirl; Asia just seemed too distant. I don’t see my mother much, but somehow I still didn’t like the thought of being so far away. I’d posted a card before I left Como, saying I was going travelling for a while. It made me a bit sad that she probably didn’t expect much more. Since I was legitimate, Europe made much more sense, and there was only one city I wanted to live in – Paris. I’d had my gap year there, though it didn’t much resemble the gap years I heard about at college. Endless shitty jobs to make the rent on a horrible studio outside the Périphérique, studying French grammar weakly after a 2 a.m. shift, Sunday trips to the Louvre when I’d rather have been sleeping. Poor little me. But the city had got under my skin in a way that nowhere else ever had, and as soon as I could please myself, for the first time in my life, that’s where I went.
While I organised everything, I spent a week or so at the Holiday Inn on the Boulevard Haussmann, in the part of the city I liked least. Those wide streets that always seem dusty, dull with office buildings and windblown, disappointed tourists. I opened two bank accounts, personal and business, and applied for a carte de séjour – the long-term residency permit – all correct. I didn’t need a map of the city to know where I did want to live. Over the river in the fifth, above the Pantheon, in the streets running down to the Luxembourg. I used to go there, after those dutiful gallery trawls, to watch the rich men playing tennis in Marie de Medici’s garden, or sit by the fountain where Sartre and de Beauvoir first met. I had loved the quarter then, and it still danced with spells for me, spun on the familiar scents of roast chestnuts and plane trees. The flat I found was in an eighteenth-century building on the Rue de l’Abbé de l’Epée, off the Rue Saint-Jacques, second floor, overlooking a paved courtyard with a proper concierge, squat and waddling in a pussy-bow blouse and leisure slacks, a stiff bright yellow perm and a martyred air. I think I chose it for the concierge, really, but the flat had golden parquet floors, the old kind, laid criss-cross like the famous Caillebotte painting, a huge bathroom, white walls and painted roof beams above the bed, crudely done rinceaux in crimson and turquoise. Rilke had lived on that street, I saw in my guidebook.