Maestra

by L. S. Hilton

  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 that 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

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  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 traveling 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, weakly studying French grammar after a two 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.

  I spent a week or so at the Holiday Inn on the Boulevard Haussmann while I organized everything, 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 wanted to live. Over the river in the fifth, above the Panthéon, 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’Épée, 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 crisscross 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.

  The first thing I bought was a hideous Ule Andresson from Paradise Galleries in New York, a dull green canvas with a fecal smear in one corner. I had it shipped to Steve’s office on Guernsey and sent a text with a smiley face that said Thanks for getting me started. I’d been following the results of my little research trip on Balensky’s boat in the FT: Steve had done well from it. He’d hidden the trade in the classic manner, building up his fund’s interest in general hospitality along with the Rivoli Group, then watching his shares catapult when the Man from the Stan acquired it. Neat, and entirely illegal. But Steve didn’t return my message, he was gone, to New York or Dubai or Sydney, but I was surprised to find I minded a bit. I wanted to send some money to Dave, my only non-Asperger’s male friend, but I couldn’t work out a way of doing it that wouldn’t seem conspicuous. Also, he was pissed at me.

  I couldn’t let that sit any longer. I texted him apprehensively, asking how he was doing. He pinged back the word Bonhams with an exclamation mark and a smiley face. No x, but what a relief. Bonhams wasn’t quite up there with the Big Two, but it was a decent house and Dave was working again. When I replied, asking discreetly if there was any way I could help him out, he returned the words Mercenary fees only. X. He’d used to joke that he would have ended up fighting as private security in somewhere like Somalia, as had many of his former army pals, and that it was only his missing leg that had spared him. I was delighted, but not entirely surprised that he had forgiven me. Dave was smart enough to recognize that grudges are not an efficient use of one’s time.

  And then, I went shopping. First to Hôtel Drouot for an eighteenth-century writing desk, a real bonheur du jour with a hidden compartment in the back and a chased strawberry leather lining, then to La Maison du Kilim in the Marais for a square Anatolian rug in bronze and emerald and turquoise, to Artemide for lamps and Thonet for a sofa, to the Marché aux Puces for a nineteenth-century rosewood credenza and an Art Deco dining table. Gentileschi forked out for a Lucio Fontana, a cool half million, but I could afford it. I would sell, in time, and my home would be my gallery. I found a “school of Orazio Gentileschi” Susanna and the Elders, nothing very special, apprentice work, but it pleased me, the tense silent space between the limbs of the terrified young gir
l, the evil mass of the two filthy old men whispering over her shoulder. I hung it on my white wall alongside the Fontana and a Cocteau sketch of a Negroid profile with a fish for the eye. I even insured them.

  I thought I would just keep my head down for a year, practice living as I had always dreamed I should. And then, if it seemed safe, I could start to buy seriously. True, London and Paris were very close, but pretty girls with rich, indulgent boyfriends play at being gallerists all the time. That would be my story if it got back to the House that Judith Rashleigh was in business. And I did mean to be in business. I intended to gather a few less expensive pieces to show with the Fontana, to visit the European art fairs to build up contacts, then start to deal. I knew how it was done, and if I could hold back on spending the money like a navvy, in time I could start to think about renting a real gallery space, to travel, to find artists of my own. But I needed to wait, give myself time to learn, to become as sure as I ever could be that the old men would stay safely enframed on the wall.

  I wasn’t remotely bored. For a start, I never stopped loving my flat. Sometimes I’d spend a creepy little ten minutes just . . stroking it, running my palms over the contours of the wood, tracing the line of the sunlight through my crisp linen blinds along the battlements of the kilim. I loved how it smelled, of beeswax and Trudon candles and tobacco; I loved opening a bottle of wine and pouring it into one of the heavy jade-colored Art Nouveau glasses I’d found in a junk stall near the flower market; I loved the heavy clunk of the closed door and the silence inside. Sometimes it made me so happy I’d pirouette naked along the wide hallway from the bathroom to the bedroom. Not that I entertained there. For that, there was what Parisians call la nuit.

  Real Paris is a small town, neat in its protective belt of autoroute. The suburbs, crammed with weary fonctionnaires and disaffected, violent Arab boys, don’t count. Like any city, it has its tribes, but they are tidily arranged like matryoshka dolls, one inside the other, with what the mags call “les happy few” at the center, but I wasn’t interested in fashion parties or the rich kids of Paris ouest, I was looking for something more particular. I ignored the neat ads in the back of the Pariscope too. I’d tried them a couple times on my gap year, the cellar bars thinly populated with middle-aged masturbators and tourists out for a thrill. I wasn’t opposed in principle to fucking ugly people, I’m democratic like that, but I could afford to raise my standards now. So I went to the obvious places first, Le Baron and La Maison Blanche, even poor old Queen on the Champs and le Cab in the Place du Palais-Royal, went diligently and often until the bouncers said “Salut, cherie” and undid the ropes as soon as they saw me. I sat and chatted and drank, and bought coke to give away and hundred-euro bottles of bad vodka to share with lesbian DJs and Italian playboys, concentrating on the women, always the women, until the inbox on my new phone was full of inane texts and kisses and somebody else might have thought she’d acquired some friends.

  I met Yvette at a private party at Castel, full of skinny boys in velvet jackets and models with ostentatiously bare faces. She was wearing a white Stetson, dancing on a banquette, because if you’re crazeee you can’t dance on the floor, swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, contemptuously twirling a lasso over a crowd of drooling Eurotwinks, platinum dreads bobbing to Daft Punk. I liked her style, the way I always like people who are their own invention. I offered her a line, and by four a.m., the white time, we were best friends. She introduced me to that night’s crowd: Stephane; a dealer who looked like a philosophy student; and a pair of six-foot Midwestern runway models who sure as hell weren’t in Kansas anymore; a random Vicomte in Harley leathers who claimed to be a film producer. Everyone was shiny, everyone was pretty.

  Even later, Yvette took me on to an “after” in a penthouse in the seventh, trompe l’oeil corrugated copper walls and blackout blinds pulled against the dawn, a huddle of bodies crowded round a table covered with art books, jaws working, noses running, chasing their high off a Marc Quinn retrospective, the joyless air dense with nicotine and bullshit. A girl reared to her feet and began an impressionistic striptease, clutching vaguely at an imaginary pole, tugging at a ruined scrap of peach-colored Chloé chiffon. A few hands, equally lackadaisical, fastened themselves over her flat breasts, tweaking the tan nipples like knobs on an old-school stereo.

  “I’m leaving,” I hissed to Yvette.

  “What’s the matter, baby? Not your scene?”

  “I like that”—I jerked my head to where the lost girl was jabbing her dry mouth at the crotch of the nearest guy, helpless as a baby vampire—“but not like this. You see?”

  Yvette nodded knowingly.

  “Sure, baby. No amateurs, right?”

  “No amateurs, got it.”

  “Call me tomorrow. I’ll take you somewhere better.”

  • • •

  SOMEWHERE BETTER WAS an evening hosted by Julien, who I got to know later at his club, La Lumière. I met Yvette in the bar at the Lutetia. She was sober, if a little twitchy. The dreads, it turned out, were clip-ons, her own hair was a severe white-blond crop, dramatic against her perse skin and this season’s orange Lanvin shift, which she had accessorized with python Louboutins. No jewelry. I looked closer.

  “Nice dress.”

  “Mango. Don’t tell.”

  “I won’t. You okay?”

  “I will be in a minute. Want one of these? Just a little beta-blocker. Slows you down, takes the edge off.”

  “Sure.” I mouthed the little tan pill into my kir framboise.

  I asked about her day, in a desultory way. She was a stylist, she said. I told her I worked with pictures. We were neither of us really interested, now that the coke had worn off, but it felt important to go through the motions.

  “So, where are we heading?”

  “I told you about Julien? He has a club in the center, but he also organizes parties—something a bit more special.”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  At ten, we took a cab up to Montmartre. I could see her watching the meter.

  “My friend Julien,” she whispered anxiously, “his nights aren’t that cheap, you know.”

  “No worries. I’m inviting you.” Her face relaxed visibly. Freeloader.

  Julien greeted us at the street door of a somber nineteenth-century town house. A slight man who compensated for his lack of looks with a slim-cut Italian suit and mirror-polished Aubercy wing tips, too dapper to be anything but sleazy. Yvette introduced us, and I reached into my bag, but he waved us casually through to the courtyard: “Later, darling, later.” Inside, colored glass lanterns and discreet electric heaters made the air feel cozy despite the April chill. My heels snagged; I looked down and saw that I was walking over a Persian rug. Heavy mahogany chaise longues and armchairs, brass plant stands and ormolu side tables had been dragged in to make an outdoor drawing room. A stolid-looking young woman in a long black dress played a harp. It looked like the setting for a bourgeois Victorian novel, were it not for the fact that the waitresses handing round trays of iced Sauternes and oozing morsels of foie gras were naked except for black button boots, long black satin gloves, and straw boaters with thick black grosgrain ribbon bands. Maybe thirty people were smoking and chatting in the warm glow of elaborate Fortuny lanterns, the women in simple, elegant cocktail dresses, the men in dark suits.

  “Wow,” I said to Yvette, and I meant it. She smiled, a genuine smile.

  “You like?”

  “A lot. Thanks for bringing me.”

  “So . . . in a while we’ll have dinner, and then . . .”

  “And then.” I smiled back.

  Yvette greeted a few people she knew and introduced me. The women used the formal vous; the men stooped punctiliously to kiss our hands. None of the anxious status confrontations of Balensky’s boat here—if Yvette’s “career” was not quite what she pretended, and I suspected it wasn’t, it didn’t matt
er. Beauty was enough, and were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty. We might have been at an old-fashioned society wedding, juggling canapés and small talk, were it not for the confident, measured glances passing among the guests, the humming radar of sex. One of the waitresses beat a small dinner gong and we trooped obediently indoors, through an anteroom to a staircase. Julien bobbed up again. “Ladies upstairs, please, gentleman to the right, just here. Voilà, comme ça. Dinner is served in fifteen minutes.” I followed Yvette’s heels upward to a large room with dressing tables and bright lights, presided over by another woman in black, compact and serious, her mouth full of pins. “She’s a hand at Chanel,” whispered Yvette—les mains, the artisans who hand-stitch the beading and feathers for the couture. Around us, the women were undressing, folding their clothes to reveal expensive lingerie in coffee lace or fuchsia silk, slipping on heavy, delicately embroidered kimonos. The air was thick with our mingled perfumes. As each woman fastened her robe, the little “hand” bustled up with a basket. The women looked elongated and alien, towering over her squat shoulders in their high shoes, like creatures of a different species, which I suppose was how we were meant to feel. With considerable muttering and comparing, the woman pinned a favor on a kimono, fastened a flower into a chignon or on a choker, wound a jeweled and plumed chain around a wrist. After looking at me for a long time, she rootled in the basket and brought out an exquisite white silk gardenia, so perfect that I wanted to smell it.

  “Bend down.”

  I inclined my head and felt her fingers unpinning and refastening my simple updo.

  “Nothing fussy for you, mademoiselle. Très simple. Yes, like that.”

  She stepped back, speculatively inserted another pin, withdrew it.