He stands as she enters. A man of medium height in a dark, expensively-cut suit. A lethal stillness about him, and a smile that doesn’t begin to reach his eyes. ‘Excuse my presumption,’ he says. ‘But I couldn’t help observing your appreciation of the performance. As a fellow opera lover I was wondering if I might offer you a glass of frappato? It comes from one of my vineyards, so I can vouch for its quality.’
She thanks him. Takes an exploratory sip of the cold wine. Introduces herself as Sylviane Morel.
‘And I am Salvatore Greco.’ There is a questioning note in his voice but her gaze does not flicker. It is clear to him that she has no idea who he is. She compliments him on the wine and tells him that it is her first visit to the Teatro Massimo.
‘So what do you think of Farfaglia?’
‘Superb. A fine actress and a great soprano.’
‘I’m glad you like her. I was fortunate enough to assist, in a small way, with her training.’
‘How wonderful to see your belief in her confirmed.’
‘Il bacio di Tosca.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Questo é il bacio di Tosca. “This is Tosca’s kiss!” Her words when she stabs Scarpia.’
‘Of course! I’m sorry, my Italian…’
‘Is most accomplished, Signorina Morel.’ Again, that icy half-smile.
She inclines her head in denial. ‘I don’t think so, Signor Greco.’ Part of her is conducting the conversation, part of her is calculating ways and means, timing, evasion routes, exfiltration. She is face to face with her target, but she is alone. And this, as Konstantin has so often made clear, is how it will always be. No one else can be involved except in the most peripheral, disconnected roles. There can be no backup, no staged diversion, no official help. If she’s taken, it’s the end. There will be no discreet official leading her from the cell, no waiting vehicle to speed her to the airport.
They talk. For Villanelle, language is fluid. Most of the time she thinks in French, but every so often she awakes and knows that she’s been dreaming in Russian. At times, close to sleep, the blood roars in her ears, an unstoppable tide shot through with polyglot screams. On such occasions, alone in the Paris apartment, she anaesthetises herself with hours of web-surfing, usually in English. And now, she notes, she is mentally playing out scenarios in Sicilian-inflected Italian. She hasn’t sought out the language, but her head echoes with it. Is there any part of her that is still Oxana Vorontsova? Did she still exist, that little girl who lay night after night in urine-sodden sheets at the orphanage, planning her revenge? Or was there only Villanelle, evolution’s chosen instrument?
Greco wants her, she can tell. And the more she plays the well-born, impressionable young Parisienne with the halting Italian and the wide-eyed gaze, the greater his desire grows. He’s like a crocodile, watching from the shallows as a gazelle inches closer to the water’s edge. How would it play out, she wonders. Dinner somewhere they know him well, with the waiters deferential and the bodyguards lounging at a neighbouring table, followed by a chauffeured drive to some discreet, old town apartment?
The interval ends. She affects not to notice, and he smiles his hooded smile.
‘Every first night, this box is reserved for me,’ he tells her. ‘The Greci were aristocrats in Palermo before the time of the Habsburgs.’
‘In that case I consider myself fortunate to be here,’ she murmurs, as the orchestra strikes up for the third and final act. As the opera plays out, Villanelle once again gazes raptly at the stage, waiting for the moment that she has planned. This comes with the great love duet, Amaro sol per te. As the final note dies away, the audience roars its applause, with cries of ‘Bravi!’ and ‘Brava Franca!’ echoing from every corner of house. Villanelle applauds with the others, and eyes shining, turns to Greco. His eyes meet hers, and as if on impulse, he seizes her hand and kisses it. She holds his gaze for a moment, and raising her other hand to her hair, unfastens the long, curved clip, so that the dark tresses fall to her shoulders. And then her arm descends, a pale blur, and her clip is buried deep in his left eye.
His face blanks with shock and pain. Villanelle presses the tiny plunger, injecting a lethal dose of veterinary-strength etorphine into the frontal lobe of his brain and inducing immediate paralysis. She lowers him to the floor, and glances around. Her own box is empty, and in the box beyond, an elderly couple are dimly visible, peering at the stage through opera-glasses. All eyes are on Farfaglia and the tenor singing Cavaradossi, both standing motionless as wave after wave of applause breaks over them. Reaching around the partition, Villanelle recovers her bag, retires into the shadows, and takes out the Rüger. The double snap of the suppressed weapon is unremarkable, and the low-velocity .22 rounds leave barely a loose thread as they punch though Greco’s dark suit jacket.
The applause is subsiding as Villanelle opens the door of the box, her weapon concealed behind her back, and beckons concernedly to the bodyguards. As they genuflect beside their employer she drops them to the carpeted floor with a round each through the nape of the neck. Blood jets briefly from the entry wounds but both men are already dead, their brain-stems shot through. For several long seconds, Villanelle is overwhelmed by the intensity of the killings, and by a satisfaction so piercing that it’s close to pain. It’s the feeling that sex always promises but never quite delivers, and for a moment she clutches herself, gasping, through the Valentino dress. Then slipping the Rüger into her bag and squaring her shoulders, she exits the box.
‘Don’t tell me you’re leaving, Signorina Morel?’
Her heart slams in her chest. Walking towards her down the narrow corridor, with the sinister grace of a panther, is Leoluca Messina.
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
‘That’s too bad. But how do you know my uncle?’
She stares at him.
‘Don Salvatore. You’ve just come out of his box.’
‘We met earlier. And now, if you’ll excuse me, Signor Messina…’
He looks at Villanelle for a moment, then steps firmly past her and opens the door of Greco’s box. When he comes out, a moment later, he is carrying a gun. A Beretta Storm 9mm, part of her registers, as she levels the Rüger at his head.
For a moment they stand there unmoving, then he nods, his eyes narrowing, and lowers the Beretta. ‘Put that away,’ he orders.
She doesn’t move. Aligns the fibre-optic foresight with the base of his nose. Prepares to sever a third Sicilian brain-stem.
‘I mean it. I’m glad that evil bastard’s dead. Now if you want to get out of here alive, put that gun away and follow me.’
Some instinct tells her to obey. They hurry through the doors at the end of the corridor, down a short flight of stairs, and into a crimson-upholstered passageway encircling the stalls. ‘Take my hand,’ he orders, and Villanelle does so. Coming towards them is a uniformed usher. Messina greets him cheerily, and the usher grins. ‘Making a quick getaway, Signor?’
‘Something like that.’
At the end of the passageway, directly below Greco’s box, is a door faced in the same crimson brocade as the walls. Opening it, Messina pulls Villanelle into a small vestibule. He parts a blanket-like curtain and suddenly they are backstage, in the heavy half-dark of the wings, with the music, relayed by tannoy from the orchestra pit, blaring about them. Men and women in 19th-century costume swim out of the shadows; stage-hands move with regimented purpose. Placing an arm round Villanelle’s shoulder, Messina hurries her past racks of costumes and tables set with props, then directs her into the narrow space between the cyclorama and the brick back-wall. As they cross the stage they pass the baritone who portrayed Scarpia. From the stage comes a volley of musket-fire. Cavaradossi’s execution.
More corridors, discoloured walls hung with red fire-extinguishers and instructions for emergency evacuation of the house, and finally they are stepping from the stage door onto the Piazza Verdi, with the sound of traffic in their ears and the livid purple sky overhead. Fif
ty metres away, a silver and black MV Agusta motorcycle is standing at a bollard on the Via Volturno. Villanelle climbs up behind Messina, and with a low growl of exhaust they glide into the night.
It’s several minutes before they hear the first police sirens. They are heading eastwards, winding through side streets, the Agusta nervily responsive to the sharp twists and turns. At intervals, to her left, Villanelle catches a glimpse of the lights of the port and the inky shimmer of the sea. People glance at them as they pass – the man with the wolfish features, the woman in the scarlet dress – but this is Palermo; no one looks too closely. The streets narrow, with washing suspended above and the sounds and smells of family meals issuing through open windows. And then a dark square, a derelict cinema and the baroque façade of a church.
Rocking the bike onto its stand, Messina leads her down an alley beside the church, and unlocks a gate. They are in a walled cemetery, a city of the dead, with family tombs and mausoleums extending in dim rows into the night. ‘This is where they’ll bury Salvatore when they’ve dug your bullets out of him,’ says Messina. ‘And sooner or later, where they’ll bury me.’
‘You said you were happy to see him dead.’
‘You’ve saved me the trouble of killing him myself. He was un animale. Out of control.’
‘You’ll take his place?’
Messina shrugs. ‘Someone will.’
‘Business as usual?’
‘Something like that. But you? Who do you work for?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It matters if you’re going to come after me next.’ He draws the squat little Beretta from his shoulder-holster. ‘Perhaps I should kill you now.’
‘You’re welcome to try,’ she says, drawing the Rüger.
They stare at each other for a moment. Then, without lowering the weapon, she steps towards him, and reaches for his belt. ‘Truce?’
The sex is brief and savage. She holds the Rüger throughout. Afterwards, placing her gun hand on his shoulder for balance, she wipes herself with the tail of his shirt.
‘And now?’ he says, glancing at her with a mixture of awe and repulsion.
‘Now you go.’
‘Will I see you again?’
‘Pray that you don’t.’
He stares at her for a moment and walks away. The MV Agusta kicks into life with a panther snarl and fades into the night. Picking her way downhill between the tombs, Villanelle finds a small clearing in front of a pillared mausoleum. From the Fendi shoulder bag she takes a briquet lighter, a crumpled blue cotton frock, a pair of wafer-thin sandals and a lingerie-fabric money belt. The money belt holds five hundred euros in cash, an airline-ticket, and a passport and credit card identifying her as Irina Skoryk, a French national born in Ukraine.
Quickly changing her clothes, Villanelle makes a pyre of the Valentino dress, all documents relating to Sylviane Morel, and the green contact-lenses and brunette wig that she has been wearing. It burns briefly but intensely, and when there is nothing left she sweeps the ashes into the undergrowth with a cypress branch.
Continuing downhill, Villanelle finds a rusty exit gate, and a path leading down steps to a narrow lane. This gives onto a broader, busier road which she follows westwards towards the city centre. After twenty minutes she finds what she has been looking for: a large wheeled garbage bin behind a restaurant, overflowing with kitchen waste. Pulling on the opera gloves she looks around her, and makes sure that she’s unobserved. Then she plunges both hands into the bin, and pulls out half a dozen bags. Unknotting one, she thrusts the Fendi shoulder bag and the Ruger into the stinking mess of clam-shells, fish-heads and coffee grounds. Returning the bag to the bin, she piles the others on top. Last to disappear are the gloves. The whole operation has taken less than thirty seconds. Unhurriedly, she continues walking westwards.
*
At 11am the following morning, agent Paolo Vella of the Polizia di Stato is standing at the bar of a café in the Piazza Olivella, taking coffee with a colleague. It has been a long morning; since dawn he has been manning the cordon at the main entrance to the Teatro Massimo, now a crime scene. The crowds, by and large, have been respectful, keeping their distance. Nothing has been officially announced, but all Palermo seems to know that Don Salvatore Greco has been assassinated. Theories abound, but the general assumption is that this is family business. There’s a rumour, according to Vella’s colleague, that the hit was carried out by a woman. But there are always rumours.
‘Will you look at that,’ breathes Vella, all thoughts of the Greco murder temporarily banished. His colleague follows his gaze out of the café into the busy street, where a young woman in a blue sun-dress – a tourist, evidently – has paused to watch the sudden ascent of a flight of pigeons. Her lips are parted, her grey eyes shine, the morning light illuminates her close-cropped hair.
‘Madonna or whore?’ asks Vella’s colleague.
‘Madonna, without question.’
‘In that case, Paulo, too good for you.’
He smiles. For a moment, in the sun-dazed street, time stands still. Then as the pigeons circle the square, the young woman continues on her way, long limbs swinging, and is lost in the throng.
I hope you've enjoyed Codename Villanelle, the first in a series of episode-length Kindle Single thrillers.
The story continues with Villanelle: Hollowpoint. Our heroine's latest target is a firebrand Russian leader whose extreme politics threaten to unleash global conflict. To eliminate him will take every ounce of Villanelle's lethal inventiveness.
But lying in wait is intelligence officer Eve Polastri, ready to pursue Villanelle wherever the search leads her. And so starts a deadly game between two brilliant and determined adversariesz
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Codename Villanelle (Kindle Singles) Page 4