Fascinated

  He wears a dark trench-coat and carries an old leather overnight bag stuffed with the basic armoury of a traveller abroad. The bag contains a small Nikon automatic with three rolls of film, clean shirts and underwear, a waterproof washbag and shaving kit, a Michelin guide, an English phrase book, a street map of the city, a map of the London Underground, a travel clock and a carton of cigarettes.

  The good tourist takes a cab from the airport to the city outskirts where he enters a small hotel, bleak as a lazaretto, in which special arrangements have already been made for him. He’s received in a gloomy entrance hall by a large Jamaican woman in a nylon duster coat and a pair of Reeboks with green knitted ankle socks. After a few words of introduction she guides him to a room on the second floor where she leaves him alone to inspect his surroundings.

  He sets down the overnight bag and paces the worn carpet, rattles the window and draws the miserable rags of curtain against the view of a drab backyard filled by an empty pigeon shed. He examines the furniture, fiddles with the lamp in the ceiling, checks beneath the mattress on the narrow bed. He searches the bathroom, inserts an inquisitive hand behind the pipes of the small wash basin, strokes the carcass of the water heater bolted into the wall.

  Satisfied that nothing has been ignored, he removes his trench-coat and jacket and arranges them neatly on the buckled wire hangers he finds in the plywood wardrobe. Then he sits down on a chair and waits for the bedroom door to open and admit the object of his desire.

  After a few minutes there is a scuffling in the corridor beyond the room followed by several whispered protests until the door is flung wide to reveal the Jamaican woman returned and leading a girl by the hand.

  The girl, a sulking strumpet of seventeen, looks nervously at Kadinsky and glances quickly around the room at the wardrobe, the bed, the curtains that sag on the dirty window. Her dark hair hangs in greasy curls. Her eyes look stung by her caked mascara. Despite all the efforts that might have been made to titivate her sullen features, she’s already licked the colour from her pouting mouth. She is wearing a floral cotton smock and old beach sandals that slide beneath her feet. She is short and pale and pregnant.

  Kadinsky leans forward in his chair and surveys the girl from head to toe with his bulging assassin’s eye. And then he raises one hand in approval and lets it fall like a flag.

  The Jamaican housekeeper grins and bids the girl undress, giving her some encouragement with a friendly cuff to the head. The girl flinches and reluctantly sets to work. The smock is raised to reveal a pair of heavy thighs and the rim of a greatly swollen belly pushing against her Underpants. The stretched skin marked like a curving silver tracery. Small tufts of hair beneath her arms. A plastic necklace at her throat. The straps of a stout maternity bra cutting into her shoulders. She struggles with her underwear, reaching around and beneath her belly in a clumsy attempt to pull down the pants. But now the older woman takes charge, yanking the pants down the girl’s legs and snapping open the bra to release a pair of blue-marbled breasts for the general admiration.

  The girl stands naked, hands clasped under her belly as if she were holding a boulder, watching Kadinsky watching her with his mad, unblinking stare. She feels herself hypnotised by those eyes, sinking beneath his influence, until she is rudely shaken awake and ordered to mount the bed with an urgent poke in the ribs from her keeper. She settles herself in the mattress, turned slightly towards the window to relieve the pressure on her spine while guarding her buttocks from assault by tilting them at the sheltering wall.

  Then Kadinsky walks to the bed and slowly stoops to look at the girl, lowers his face to her body and trawls his nostrils against her skin. She shivers and covers her breasts with her arms. He takes her hand and nuzzles her shoulder, snuffling in the damp, sour smell of her armpit, sniffing out the faint trace of lavender soap buried in the fold of her elbow, catching his breath at the fresh dab of rose and geranium scent evaporating on her wrist, inhaling the odour of dog and tobacco clinging to her fingertips.

  The frightened girl struggles and tries to pull away but her keeper threatens her with violence and kicks the bed until she surrenders herself again to Kadinsky’s examination.

  This time he takes her foot, sniffs at the rank smell of rubber sandal, pulls open her toes to release their rank and musty odour, shovels along the length of her legs, trailing vague and elusive flavours until he pauses to linger at last in the thick, ripe smell of her thighs. And here, at the roots of her pubic hair, he inhales her secret vinegars, stirring memories of childhood nightmares, death and estuary mud, fear of the dark, rotting fish, glues rendered down from animal bones.

  The girl cringes into the mattress, twisting her legs and pulling away from his flaring nostrils. The beads on the plastic necklace bury themselves in the folds of her neck.

  Kadinsky blinks and his eyes darken. His fingers flutter over her body. He grows more demanding, snuffling for the scent of milk curdling in her bulbous nipples, the traces of sweated salt in the knobbles along her spine, hunting for the smell of entrails in the socket between her jerking buttocks, dipping his nose into all her cracks and crevices until she can endure it no longer and lets out a long cry of misery, fighting him away and rolling from the bed to hobble weeping from the room, still chased by her angry gaoler.

  Kadinsky, thus satisfied, retires to scrub his hands with a plastic nail brush, cleans his teeth with an index finger, combs his hair, retrieves his jacket and coat and, having suitably rewarded the girl with enough money for a christening mug, quietly leaves the house to present himself without further delay, at Conrad’s security gates.

  Conrad receives his visitor in a corner of the jungle hothouse. He’s dressed for the occasion in a full-length black silk ballgown with a diamond necklace and matching earrings. He’s standing beneath an ornamental palm that shoots like a fountain from a mighty Chinese bowl embossed with ceremonial dragons. Kadinsky, the trench-coat folded over his arm, sweats softly and opens an envelope containing the photographs of his targets taken by the security cameras hidden around the house. He leans against the edge of the bowl and studies the eyes of his victims.

  ‘They’ll be together,’ says Conrad. ‘The old one is crafty. He knows enough to look after himself. The young one is a noodle-brain but he’s quick on his feet and he’s plucky.’

  ‘Are they running or hiding?’ asks Kadinsky. His voice is so soft that Conrad must strain his ears to catch it. The words seem to float from his mouth like a whispering through a keyhole.

  ‘They’ll have taken cover,’ growls Conrad, slapping the wall of the great bowl as if testing for the hollow ring of a priest hole among the roots.

  ‘Do they know they’ll be hit?’

  ‘I gave them a friendly warning,’ Conrad confesses, ‘so they’ll probably try to leave the country. Spain. Morocco. Florida. The old one is soft. He’s going to chase the sun.’

  ‘Are they clean?’

  ‘No. They’ll need passports and papers.’

  ‘It’s easy to find a passport in London.’

  ‘That’s true,’ agrees Conrad, teasing the bunches of ribbons that decorate his waist. ‘But they’ll want to search out a man called Picasso. He’s an artist. His passports are perfect. They won’t be making any cheap mistakes. When you’ve found Picasso you’ll find your targets.’

  ‘Where does this man work?’

  ‘Soho. Somewhere. You’ll have to make contact with Ronnie the Scrubber. You’ll find him at the Peekaboo Club along the back of Berwick Street. Threaten to break his fingers and he’ll take you straight to Picasso. He’s very obliging in that direction.’

  ‘It shouldn’t be difficult,’ says Kadinsky. He returns the envelope to Conrad while he searches for a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from the back of his neck. Parakeets mock him from the treetops. Behind them, deep in the undergrowth, a tiger moans in its sleep.

  ‘Make it fast. And make it nasty. I don’t want them buried in pine boxes. I want them hosed from the wall
s and ceiling. What have you brought with you?’

  ‘A camera. A Michelin guide. Three hundred Lucky Strike,’ says Kadinsky mildly. He knows how to pack a suitcase bomb. He knows how to pack an overnight bag.

  ‘What do you want?’ says Conrad.

  ‘What can you give me?’

  ‘If you want to make a mess I can give you a shotgun. A Remington 870 packed with birdshot. That’s enough to mincemeat a horse.’

  ‘You’re talking close-range work if you want that sort of penetration,’ says Kadinsky, after a moment’s reflection.

  He doesn’t look impressed. He wipes his hands in the handkerchief, polishes his fingernails.

  ‘You want something heavier?’ says Conrad, pulling nervously on his nose.

  ‘I’d settle for an HK MP5 with 30-round mags. High impact. Deep saturation.’

  ‘It’s a problem finding the ammo,’ says Conrad cautiously. This man is talking army-issue 9 mm sub-machineguns! He’s talking burgled military stores. He’s talking Irish cabbage fields.

  ‘I’ll take a box of grenades if you’ve got a shotgun that fires them,’ Kadinsky bargains with him. ‘A Mossberg would be enough.’

  ‘Grenades?’

  ‘I’d prefer mortars.’

  Conrad grins and grinds his teeth. Windows melt like sugar. Bricks turn to biscuit. Smoke. Flames. Bones burn. Blood boils like gravy. He’ll teach them a lesson. He’ll make them regret they abandoned him.

  He retrieves his handbag from a clump of lilies and scratches inside for a few moments, spilling several lace handkerchiefs, a Swiss army knife and a large security whistle.

  ‘Take a look in the gun room,’ he says, offering Kadinsky a black key on a length of string. ‘Whatever you need for the job.’

  There is a crackling in the undergrowth and a maid appears with a tray of savoury morsels and glasses of chilled champagne. She approaches Kadinsky, attempts a curtsey, and holds out the tray before him.

  He trades the trench-coat for a champagne flute and as the maid struggles to fold the coat on her shoulder he leans forward to sniff her skin, his nostrils flared, his eyes turning cloudy with desire.

  ‘Good health!’ barks Conrad, jerking his glass of champagne to his mouth and splashing his fingers and chin.

  ‘You’re wearing Dawn’s diamonds,’ says Kadinsky, accepting a fancy tidbit. A wafer of toast trimmed with a curl of raw ham as pink and tight as a rosebud. He sniffs it lovingly, inhaling its ripe and naked odour, before slowly inserting it into his mouth.

  Conrad looks startled, touches the necklace at his throat and is soon so befuddled with misery that he fails to enquire how Kadinsky should know the name of his wife.

  ‘Twenty years,’ he grieves. ‘Twenty wretched miserable years. Twenty years of solitude.’ He slumps against the Chinese bowl, wagging his head and staring forlornly into the jungle.

  ‘I thought it was thirty,’ says Kadinsky, staring at Conrad suspiciously.

  ‘Twenty,’ Conrad corrects him. ‘She was young and she was beautiful and God Almighty snuffed out her life. She demised in the Caribbean. Stolen away. Swept out to sea with the mermaids and porpoises.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘It’s true,’ growls Conrad. ‘Swept out to sea with the porpoises.’

  ‘I came to your wedding,’ says Kadinsky.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ frowns Conrad. He stares at Kadinsky, casting back into his crowded memory, licking the edge of his champagne flute.

  ‘It was 1962. I was fresh out of the army and working as a sniper in Algeria. I thought I’d found my vocation. But the shooting stopped in March and I never got paid so I came to London. I wanted to raise enough money to take me to the Sudan. I needed the price of a ticket. They said you could find me work.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You invited me to your wedding.’

  Conrad nods in approval making the diamonds flash on the fat truffles of ears. ‘It was a huge affair. We had the best of everything. Harry Goldberg did the catering. The Beverley Sisters did a cabaret. They treated us like royalty.’

  ‘I’ve never forgotten it.’

  Conrad beams, puffed out with pleasure, and rinses his mouth with another glass of champagne. ‘You’ll join us for dinner,’ he belches. ‘You can meet my daughter. You’ll enjoy that. You’re going to be killing her boyfriend.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  ‘Yes!’ says Conrad in surprise. ‘We don’t have any secrets in this family!’ And he instructs the maid to show the assassin to his room.

  But Valentine fails to join them at the dinner table and when Conrad sends someone to search her out he’s told that she’s retired for the night and has barricaded her door.

  ‘Sulking!’ he grumbles. ‘They don’t like it when you punish them. She’s lucky I didn’t give her a spanking.’

  ‘Plucky girl,’ says Kadinsky, cutting into a ripe cheese and watching it leak across the plate. ‘Pugnacious like her mother.’ He leans forward and draws up its dank odours of urine and rotting straw.

  ‘Ah!’ Conrad sighs and slips back into a reverie. ‘Dawn was a glutton for punishment. Did you ever see her spanked in Bullwhip Beauties?’

  ‘I believe the pleasure escaped me.’

  ‘It’s hell for leather in the old barn when the Grinning Gaucho gives Dawn and Dolores a taste of his tackle!’ shouts Conrad, reciting the plot from memory.

  ‘It doesn’t ring any bells,’ says Kadinsky.

  ‘You must have seen Bullwhip Beauties!’ says Conrad, hiding his disappointment in another glass of brandy. ‘It’s a classic. Dawn wears a special corset with stainless-steel wrist and ankle restrainers. Handmade. Natural leather.’ He draws an hourglass with an undulating sweep of his hands and then smacks the hands together, locking the fingers, shaking them in the candlelight, describing a pair of invisible handcuffs. His face is flushed. His wattle quivers with excitement.

  ‘Perhaps I was working abroad,’ says Kadinsky, hoping to pacify him. He fills his mouth with cheese and sets it melting through his teeth.

  ‘We’ll watch it downstairs!’ cries Conrad, banging his chest with his shackled fists. ‘We’ll watch it together. Bring the bottle.’ And he guides his guest from the pleasures of the table to the secrets of the basement.

  Kadinsky escapes in the small hours of the morning with Conrad asleep and the Grinning Gaucho still flogging Dawn and Dolores with bullwhack and pizzle.

  He steals through the silent house in search of his room along unfamiliar corridors. The brandy hurts his head and he finds himself tormented again by the smell of the pregnant halfwit unwrapped for him on his way from the airport. He tries to rekindle the memory of her pungent body, the rancid odours of skin and hair, when a bright breeze of perfume shocks his nose and throws him from the scent. He pauses, turns and locates the source of the intrusion lurking in the shadows of an antique cupboard.

  ‘You’re Valentine,’ he whispers. The maids smell of nothing but soap and cologne buried in a broth of kitchen odours. Conrad smells like a pickle barrel fashioned from oak staves and iron rings. This must be Valentine or the living ghost of her mother.

  A young woman steps into the light. She’s wearing crimson silk pyjamas and a pair of brocade slippers. ‘So you’re the hired help,’ she says softly, gazing at him with her beautiful Bedouin eyes. He’s older than she imagined him but he’s lean and hard and dangerous. She remembers the stories of his killings in Southern Angola. The torture camps. The burial pits. The murder of women and children. ‘How does it feel to do another man’s dirty work?’ she demands, trying to balance her trembling voice.

  ‘It feels good!’ he whispers. And when he smiles she feels her mouth and throat turn dry.

  ‘What are you going to do to them?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Don’t play games with me!’

  ‘I’m here to follow your father’s instructions,’ he says simply, watching her with his pale
eyes.

  ‘He’s a sick old man. He lives in a fantasy world.’

  ‘I’m here to make his dreams come true.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave us alone? We’re nothing to you.’

  ‘I never break a contract.’

  ‘How much is he paying you?’

  ‘He’s paying the price,’ says Kadinsky and wonders if she’s planning to raise a ransom. He doubts it. She’d have to pick her father’s pockets and, besides, if she pays him ransom money he’ll have to forfeit a good day’s sport.

  ‘You won’t find them. You’re too late,’ she says defiantly, flicking her head to throw a gleaming curtain of hair swinging against her neck.

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘They’re heading for Glasgow.’

  ‘It’s cold in the north at this time of the year,’ whispers Kadinsky.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘The frost gets into an old man’s bones. Burns in the blood. I heard they’ll be going south.’

  ‘I don’t care if they fry or freeze to death!’ snaps Valentine, glaring back at him. ‘They’re nothing to me.’ Her heart is pounding. He knows everything! He knows the direction of their escape. He’ll track them down like runaway slaves and dig them out of hiding.

  ‘You’re not telling the truth,’ says Kadinsky. He purses his lips like a coquetting corpse. ‘I think you care about one of them. I heard you were a naughty girl …’

  ‘That’s none of your business!’ Her courage breaks down as she struggles to smother her tears. She curls her fingers into fists. She won’t cry. She won’t give him the satisfaction.

  Kadinsky smiles. ‘I heard he gave you a royal shagging.’ He likes that. Royal shagging. It makes him laugh. It’s something he heard in Amsterdam.