Maestra

by L. S. Hilton

  “Sounds grand.”

  Above us on the sundeck, I could sense Carlotta pricking up her ears, or maybe her tits. Her nipples probably had built-in oligarch radar. I flipped over and swam a couple side strokes to bring me next to him.

  “I could pick something up.”

  “Yeah, you need something smart. Get Tris to sort it.”

  Carlotta’s face popped over the rail. “I hate you,” she mouthed sulkily, condemned to a romantic supper for two with her beloved.

  “Get over it, Cinderella,” I called. “It’s your lucky day. We’re going shopping.”

  • • •

  LIKE ALL THE CHARMING fishing villages we’d passed on our way down the coast, the port at Ponza, the tiny strip of an island where the Romans go to play, no longer took the fishing part that literally. Most of the ramshackle ocher and yellow houses tumbling down to the sea contained million-euro pieds-à-terre, though a few still displayed washing at the windows and old ladies gazing placidly from their doorways. Maybe they were actresses sponsored by the government to give the place some color. And even the sleepiest village square would contain a boutique or two where the women of the floating tribe of Eurowealth could pop in to make an offering. I pulled Carlotta into the nearest shop, which featured a window display of thousand-euro La Perla bikinis.

  “You need a dress. You’re going to be Steve’s girlfriend tonight.”

  “You mean, like, a threesome?” I didn’t have the impression that this was a particularly novel request.

  It was a struggle not to roll my eyes. “Duh. No. Just for this party. You don’t have to do anything except look devoted. Now, how about this?”

  “What about Hermann? He won’t like it.”

  “Tris’ll square it. He’ll have a fine time, don’t worry.”

  Carlotta picked out a full-length white Marc Jacobs shift with the tiniest of spaghetti straps that made her breasts look more improbably gravity-defying than ever. Wearing simple jewelry and with her hair down, she would look like a Fellini goddess. I chose a vintage-style long-sleeved Lurex dress in gold, much more covered up at the front, but scooped out and draped down to the coccyx behind. We found nude python Giambattista Valli sandals for us both—I assumed that a black-tie evening would dispense with the no-shoe nonsense, and two Fendi python clutches, emerald-and-silver for Carlotta, pink-and-gold for me. Carlotta watched appraisingly as I peeled off just over seven thousand euros in five-hundred-euro bills.

  “He really likes you, Steve.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Still, whatever. You want to get good stuff you can keep.”

  Before we went back to the Mandarin we stopped at the café and snarfed down two pizzette and a gelato affogato, swimming in Baileys and espresso. Carlotta speculatively pinched a fold of skin above her elbow.

  “I’m always starving. Hermann hates me to eat, but two prawns and a piece of watermelon is not lunch, you know? When I’m old, I’m going to get, like, totally fucking fat.”

  • • •

  AS WE BOARDED the tender that evening. Carlotta was really getting into character, holding Steve’s arm and playing with his collar. He actually looked quite handsome in a dinner jacket, though at the last minute he’d defiantly left off the tie. I hissed at Carlotta to take off her engagement ring and she whipped it into the Fendi. She’d happily have chucked it into the sea, I thought, if there was a chance of her method acting becoming reality. Hermann had been diplomatically removed by Tristan for a scuba excursion, a night dive to some famously inaccessible caverns, from which Carlotta reluctantly had to be excluded, as she didn’t have her PADI scuba certificate. Maybe I’d better see about doing that.

  “So did you hear about that father and son last year in the caves at Capri? They got, like, stuck, and the father had to decide whether to save himself and leave the son or die with him, so, like—”

  “Jesus, Carlotta,” I said. “It’s like being on holiday with Edgar Allan Poe.”

  She looked blank.

  “Nothing. You look gorgeous. We’ll have a great time.”

  The trip in the Riva took a while, as Balensky’s boat was moored farther out, in deeper water. Five decks reared up at us; it seemed the size of a shopping mall, so huge that we drove inside it into an inner dock and were shown into a copper-lined lift to whiz us up to the deck. I’d had many moments since being on the Mandarin when I wanted to freeze-frame my surroundings, to look at myself and remember incredulously how it felt to be hauling my briefcase along the Piccadilly line. This was one of those moments.

  The biggest of the decks was decorated with garlands of pink orchids twined round the rails and the staircases. Globes of heavily sherbet-scented pink roses formed an aisle along which waiters stood with magnums of pink Krug. Carlotta and I refused grilled tartines with caviar of truffle and tomato confit and tiny dishes of pink lobster Bolognese. Balensky was waiting at the top of the aisle, in a midnight-blue silk jacket with padded shoulders that was working overtime to disguise the fact that he was practically a dwarf. His sallow skin hung in wattles from his Botoxed forehead, which sported a few strands of carefully woven-in, weirdly henna-colored hair. Maybe this was the one thing money couldn’t buy, I thought. No matter how much wedge you threw at it, a restored scalp still looked like a nuclear disaster. I thought Balensky must be in his eighties, but his face was timelessly malicious. He supposedly had a wife and children stashed away somewhere, although braver Web gossips also claimed that he gave boys-only parties at his restored Roman villa outside Tangier. Balensky shook Steve’s hand with a politician’s enthusiastic pump, then bowed over Carlotta’s wrist as Steve introduced her. I hovered behind, the spare friend, but made sure I turned my hip so he could glimpse my naked back as he greeted me.

  “Thank you for coming, lovely to see you.”

  “Thank you for inviting me. What wonderful flowers.”

  His eyes were already elsewhere. I stepped back to allow the next guests to be received. Behind Balensky, in the shadows of the stairwell, were two huge men, standard-issue American football physiques, with ill-fitting black suits (why are billionaires so stingy when it comes to their bodyguards’ suits—surely a proper tailor could accommodate the concealed guns?), folded arms, and earpieces. At the sight of them, I felt a delicious icy caress of adrenaline sink into me like the first sip of a perfect martini.

  I moved backward into the group, pretending to wave at someone I knew, until I was out of their range, then I discreetly asked one of the waiters, in Italian, for the ladies’ room. He escorted me slowly down a flight of stairs and along a corridor decorated with a replica of the Cocteau mural of St. Peter and the fishes at Villefranche and opened a door to a bathroom. I shut myself inside and waited to hear the sound of his footsteps retreat. They didn’t. Rats. I counted to sixty, flushed, and ran the tap, then allowed him to accompany me back to the party, counting the number of doors we passed on the way.

  It had been pretty easy to obtain the layout of Balensky’s boat. An e-mail from Steve’s office to the yacht builder suggesting he was looking to upgrade and asking for a “similar” plan to Balensky’s had produced a virtual blueprint from the slavering designers in a couple hours. Since Balensky’s was obviously a unique custom-build, we could be sure the layout would be fairly accurate. The stateroom was the third door after the guest bathroom on the right, the first corridor as you came down the stairs.

  Back on deck, Carlotta was curled under Steve’s shoulder as he spoke to a heavyset man with diamond studs in his starched shirt front, trailing a disdainful teenage blonde from his fingertips like an ornamental poodle. I managed to get a conversation going with one of the other girls, a South African swimwear model we’d met at Marina di Massa, the usual exchange of where we were going next and what parties we’d been to. I liked her earrings; she admired my shoes.

  Bikini Babe and I soldiered on until we
were ushered up to the next deck for dinner. It wasn’t that large a party; despite decorations worthy of the debutante ball at the Crillon, we were only about twenty at the table, and Balensky directed the seating himself, placing me two seats to his right, with Steve and Carlotta opposite. I had diamond studs to my left, and next to him, in the seat of honor beside the host, was an Italian actress/model in a sequined gown slashed to her navel, whose face I recognized from the pages of Gente. She had a lingerie range and had once dated George Clooney. I assumed she was being paid to attend, as she and Balensky ignored each other completely.

  To my right was another girlfriend, and what conversation there was began in fits and starts between the men, as we were served poached oysters stuffed with caviar, lacquered quail stuffed with foie gras, and vitello tonnato with truffle cream. Pink pansies and shavings of gold leaf adorned every plate. Long silences endured while the waiters ponderously changed the dishes, interspersed with staccato bursts of talk from the men in response to a remark from Balensky. At least we had chairs to sit on, not like the poor French aristocrats at Versailles, forbidden to sit in the presence of the king. Dessert was a rose-petal parfait in a violent cerise nitroglycerined gelée, sculpted into such a perfectly realistic flower that we might have been eating the arrangements. Perhaps we were. I was grateful that little was expected of me on the dazzling repartee front; the quiet scrape of my spoon on the plate was measuring out the moments before I would have to strike. I was savoring what I was about to do far more than I was the parfait.

  As the waiters went round with coffee and pyramids of pink Ladurée macarons and the men began to light their cigars, I discreetly excused myself to go to the loo, carrying my heels as soon as I reached the staircase and tying a knot in the skirt of my gown so I could move more freely.

  As I descended, my eyes were casting urgently for the bodyguards, whom I had left standing behind Balensky’s chair. They hadn’t followed me. I paused to listen, rising on my toes a few times like a high jumper preparing a run-up, adrenaline lengthening my strides as I began to run, low, wolflike, down the next flight and along the corridor. Vision twitching neatly along the doors, one, two, three, I streamed toward the stateroom like a missile, loving the focused suppleness of my limbs, the predatory high. Heart drumming, I paused again at the correct door. Behind me, the corridor was still empty. I pushed gently at the door handle, and I was in.

  • • •

  THE CABIN WAS LINED in white carpeting, with piles of white fox stoles on the bed. Certainly the old chap would need them, it was freezing in there; with the air-conditioning turned up to maximum, the place felt like a luxury morgue. One door at the side of the bed led to the bathroom, another to a dressing room, a row of tiny Rumpelstiltskin shoes neatly lined up, carefully molded wedges slipped in the soles for extra lift. At the back of the dressing area was the second door I’d seen on the plans. Either an office or a private dungeon. Again, I pressed the handle gently, half expecting an ice pick to shoot out from the spy hole. A small study, just a plain built-in desk and a bank of screens like Steve’s on the Mandarin. The Nokia burner was ready, though my hands were sweating so much despite the cold I thought I might drop it. I moved the mouse and the screens came to life.

  Soccer. Bloody soccer. Steve was not going to be impressed. I photographed the screens anyway, then took a few shots of the bits and pieces lying on the desk—a pile of receipts, a cigar case half covering a few scribbled notes, a copy of The Spectator with the page folded back at the wine column. Should I try the desk drawers? They could be alarmed, and Balensky probably had a personal tiger shark in a tank somewhere for nosy guests. Something crunched under my bare foot, a piece of A4 paper from a cheap jotting pad. Quickly I rolled it up and hooked it into the elastic of my Fifi Chachnil panties. As I was trying to haul my long dress into place, I heard a voice, a man’s voice, speaking Russian. Fuck. What was I doing? Hadn’t I learned anything from playing spies with the Stubbs?

  A crazy squad of images tumbled across my mind, old footage of Balensky posing with a gold-plated machine gun, his malevolent leer as he accepted a charity award, humped roadside corpses in wars I’d half read about. Balensky wasn’t a comic-book joke, he was real. This was real. It would take a minute for his guys to snap my neck and dump me over the side, and if a fraction of the rumors I’d seen about their boss were true, they’d had the practice. Didn’t pissed holiday girls drown all the time? I froze, trying to hold my breath, but I was shaking, shuddering as though I’d been punched in the stomach. I hugged my arms around my body and squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, trying to force out the fear.

  Think. There was nowhere to hide except the cubbyhole beneath the desk. I looked frantically round for a security camera. The carpeting in the bedroom muffled any footsteps, but I heard the bathroom door open. Fuck fuck fuck. Better the wardrobe than the study. I chanced it, scuttled across into the dressing cubicle while the bodyguards peered down the plughole. They were going to be in here any second. I yanked down the knickers and shoved them in my bag, fumbling to get the paper into my half-empty fag packet.

  When the first guard opened the dressing-room door, he found me naked except for the Valli sandals. “Darling!” I gasped, rushing into the black expanse of his chest, “I thought you were never—oh! Oh my God! I’m so sorry.”

  We looked at each other for a long moment. I forced myself to meet his gaze. If he was amused, I lived. If he wasn’t, I was more than prepared to beg. He said something and the second man joined him, both of them doing a combined bored-slash-deathly menace expression.

  “What are you doing in Mr. Balensky’s bedroom?”

  “Waiting for Mr. Balensky,” I answered as haughtily as I could, which wasn’t easy in six-inch stilettos and nothing else.

  “He tell you to come?”

  “Not exactly. I—um—I wanted to give him a surprise.”

  The second man translated for the first. They both laughed.

  “Please, miss. Is not allow to be in Mr. Balensky’s bedroom.”

  Thank God, they were being polite. I’d assumed this kind of thing must happen all the time.

  “You have phone?”

  I opened my Fendi bag and handed over my iPhone, all innocent.

  “Of course.”

  Another exchange in Russian, then the second guard spoke again.

  “I check phone. You are staying here with him. Phone is okay, we are not saying anything to Mr. Balensky. Okay, miss? You open phone now.”

  I tapped in my code and he closed the door. It was rather cramped in the dressing room, but we didn’t need much space for what was expected of me.

  When I’d wiped my mouth on one of Balensky’s starched Turnbull & Asser cuffs I put my dress back on and we sat side by side on the bed. After a few minutes of listening to the air conditioner he managed, “You like party?”

  “Yes, thank you. Very nice party.”

  Number two reappeared and threw my phone and bag at me. Another line in Russian, containing shylukha—sounds like slut, means “whore.”

  “Phone is okay.”

  “Good. Okay!” Why were we talking like we were in The Sopranos?

  “You go back to party now. Naughty girl!” He wagged his finger at me.

  Two minutes later I was back on the upper deck, hair smoothed, heart quiet. I asked a waiter for a Brandy Alexander to take the taste away. I took it to the rail and watched the waves for a moment. There’s a lot to be said for being bullied as a child. After all, as every misery memoir triumphantly confirms, you’re being picked on only because you’re special. You become isolated, but also adamantine. I had learned a particular set to my spine, a disregard for the whispered taunts, even a kind of pleasure in them, because I told myself that it made me different, and then I’d just carried on believing it. Perhaps a therapist would have confessed it out of me, but I’d never had either the money or the interes
t, because that knowledge of pain became, in time, a source of defiance, a source—though I was embarrassed to even think the word—of strength. I could take things that others couldn’t, and that meant I could do them too.

  Anyway, it could have been worse. The goon could have wanted a fuck. And even if his cock was as tiny as I imagined his boss’s was, it might have been a bit cozy, what with the second mobile already jammed up there.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  LIKE EMOTION, humor wasn’t Steve’s thing, but even he saw the funny side. I couldn’t tell him, of course, until Carlotta, rock reluctantly back in place, had been reunited with Hermann, then we curled up in Steve’s bed and laughed until I thought I might pee.

  “Let it be noted for the record,” I said with a gasp, “that I cannot be accused of not taking one for the team.”

  “Did you wash it?”

  “Eeeew. Of course!” I chucked it over. “You so owe me.”

  “You’re good, you know. Thinking of the two phones. He didn’t notice a thing.”

  “If they’d found that phone I can’t think what Balensky would have done, to all of us. They don’t mess about, those people.”

  “Believe me, I’m grateful.” He wasn’t, he was just impatient.

  I went to take a shower while Steve hooked up the phone. When I came back he had a screen up, the picture of the notes I’d seen under the cigar case, spinning it, zooming in and out.

  “Anything?”

  “Nope.” He sounded irritated, which worried me.

  “I got everything, I’m sure I did. All that was up on his computer was Premier League summer transfers.”

  “There’s nothing.”

  “You weren’t the one risking a broken neck from Lenny back there.”

  “Who?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Whatever, Lauren. Fuck.” He reached for his phone. “I need to make some calls now.”

  There was a hardness to his tone I had not heard before. In fact, I had never seen Steve so expressive. Those abstract trails of money may have represented a game, but it was one he was fearsomely committed to winning.