Tearing open a sterile pack, she takes out a monofilament suture line, and sets to work. The first entry of the needle makes FatPanda gasp, and as Nurse Wu wrenches the surgical knot tight, he shudders with barely containable pleasure. Frowning at this impertinence, Nurse Wu takes a chromium-plated probe from an ice-filled kidney dish, and inserts it forcibly into FatPanda’s rectum. His eyes are closed now. He’s in the zone, the place where terror and ecstasy meet in a dark, swirling tide.
And then suddenly, soundlessly, Nurse Wu is gone. FatPanda eyes drowsily revolve, scanning their limited field of vision, and another, different figure swims into view. Like Nurse Wu, she is dressed in surgical scrubs, cap, face-mask and gloves. But the eyes that are gazing at FatPanda are not amber brown like Nurse Wu’s. They are the icy grey of the Russian midwinter.
FatPanda regards her with hazy surprise. A new practitioner is a departure from the scenario that he hasn’t anticipated.
“I’m afraid things have got very serious,” she tells him, in English. “That’s why I’ve been called in.”
FatPanda’s eyes shine with fearful anticipation. A gweipo surgeon. The clinic have excelled themselves.
Villanelle can tell from his expression that he understands what she has said. Not that she doubts for a moment that a man who has spent the best part of a decade reading the confidential files of international corporations is fluent in English. From a bag at her feet she takes an aluminium cylinder, just nine inches long. Disconnecting the airflow from the oxygen tank to FatPanda’s rubber mask, she attaches it to the cylinder.
Pure carbon monoxide is odourless and tasteless. To the haemoglobin in the human body it is indistinguishable from oxygen. With the first cold rush of the gas into his nostrils, FatPanda feels the threads of reality drifting away. Twenty seconds later his breathing ceases.
When she’s sure that he’s dead, Villanelle reconnects the rubber mask to the oxygen. She has no doubt that someone with the specialist skills of Lieutenant Colonel Zhang Lei will receive a very thorough autopsy indeed, and that the true cause of his death will swiftly be revealed, but there’s no harm in sowing a few seeds of confusion.
Kneeling, she examines the prostrate form of Nurse Wu. When Villanelle clamped a latex-gloved hand over her mouth, punched a hypodermic needle into her neck and injected a carefully measured dose of etorphine, the young Shanghainese woman managed a faint mew of surprise before slumping backwards into Villanelle’s arms. Minutes later she still looks startled, but her breathing is steady; she will be conscious again in half an hour.
As an artistic touch, Villanelle slips off Nurse Wu’s knickers and places them over FatPanda’s head. Then, taking out a cheap mobile phone she has bought for cash that afternoon, she photographs him from a number of angles, none of them flattering. A final click emails the pictures, with a pre-written commentary, to half a dozen of China’s most influential bloggers and dissidents. This is one story the Beijing establishment is not going to be able to cover up.
If there is a house rule common to the world’s pleasure-houses, it is that the customer who is arriving must not meet the customer who is leaving. In the Dangfeng house a back stair leads to the exit, and it is this that Villanelle now takes, having changed from her surgical uniform. Outside, the streets are humid, and still teeming with tourists and strolling families, and no one takes any notice of a young Western woman wearing a baseball cap and carrying a small backpack. When pressed—and in the days and weeks to come there will be hard questions asked in the lanes and alleyways of the Old Town—one or two observers will recall that the woman’s cap carried the insignia of the New York Yankees, and that her dark-blonde hair was worn in a ponytail, and from these slender impressions will be born the rumour that the suspect is an American. Frustratingly for the intelligence services and the police, no one will recall her face.
Ten minutes’ walk is enough for Villanelle to dispose of the phone, battery and SIM card in separate restaurant garbage bins. The scrubs, gloves, mask and cap, together with the aluminium CO cylinder, sink to the murky bed of the Huangpu river in a string shopping bag weighted with stones.
Hours have passed, and Villanelle is lying in a claw-footed bathtub in a tenth floor apartment in Shanghai’s exclusive French Concession, meditating upon the murder that she has just committed. The water is scented with essence of stephanotis, the walls are jade-green, silk curtains billow in the faint breeze.
As always on these occasions, the current of Villanelle’s emotions ebbs and flows. There’s satisfaction at a job well done. Detailed research, imaginative planning, and a clean, silent kill. Could anyone else have taken out FatPanda with such style, such frictionless ease? In her mind she replays his last moments. The surprise as their eyes met. Then that curious acceptance as he began the drift into the depths.
There’s satisfaction, too, in the importance of her role. It’s exhilarating to stand at the still centre of the turning world, and to know yourself an instrument of destiny. It makes up for the savage humiliations of her years as Oxana Vorontsova to know that she is not cursed, but blessed with a terrible strength.
Of all those humiliations, it’s her rejection by the French teacher, Anna Ivanovna Leonova, that she still feels most keenly. A single woman in her late twenties, Leonova was more than a little awed by her troubled pupil’s precocious linguistic gifts, and ignoring Oxana’s rudeness and gracelessness, determined to open her eyes to a world beyond the grey confines of Perm. So there were weekend sessions in Anna’s tiny apartment, discussing Colette and Françoise Sagan, and on one memorable occasion a visit to the Tchaikovsky Theatre, to see a performance of the opera Manon Lescaut.
Oxana was bemused by the attention. No one had ever expended so much time on her. What Anna Ivanovna was giving her, she realised, was something selfless, something close to love. Intellectually, Oxana understood such an emotion, but she also knew herself incapable of feeling it. Physical desire, though, was another matter, and she lay awake, night after night, tortured by a raw longing for her teacher that she could find no way of expressing beyond a sullen blankness.
Not that the teenage Oxana was a novice when it came to sex. She had tried both men and women, and found no difficulty in manipulating both. But with Anna she dreamt of a realm of the senses that lay beyond the beery fumblings of bikers behind the Bar Molotov, or the rough tongue of the female security guard at the TsUM department store who had caught her stealing, marched her to the toilets, and buried her face between Oxana’s thighs as the price of silence.
She tried, just once, to take things further with Anna. It was the evening they went to Manon Lescaut. They were sitting in the balcony, in the back row of seats, and towards the end of the opera Oxana had inclined her head against the teacher’s shoulder. When Anna responded by putting an arm around her, Oxana was so overwhelmed she could hardly breathe.
As Puccini’s music swirled around them, Oxana reached out a hand and laid it over one of Anna’s breasts. Gently, but firmly, Anna removed the hand, and equally firmly, a moment later, Oxana replaced it. This was a game she had played many times in her mind.
“Stop it,” Anna said quietly.
“Don’t you like me?” Oxana whispered.
The teacher sighed. “Oxana, of course I do. But that doesn’t mean…”
“What?” She parted her lips, her eyes searching for Anna’s in the half dark.
“It doesn’t mean… that.”
“Then fuck you, and fuck your stupid opera,” Oxana hissed, rage rising uncontainably inside her. Standing, she stumbled towards the exit, and ran down the staircase to the street. Outside, the city was lit by the sulphurous glow of night, and flurries of snow whirled in the car headlights on Kommunisticheskaya Prospekt. It was freezing cold, and Oxana realised that she had left her jacket inside the theatre.
She was too furious to care. Why didn’t Anna Ivanovna want her? That culture stuff was all very well, but she needed more from Anna than that. She needed to see desir
e in her eyes. To see everything that gave her power over Oxana—her gentleness, her patience, her fucking virtue—dissolve into sexual surrender.
But Anna resisted this transformation. Even though, deep down she felt exactly the same way, and Oxana knew this to be true, because she had felt the flutter of the other woman’s heart beneath her hand. It was intolerable, unbearable. And there in the theatre doorway, one hand thrust down the front of her jeans, Oxana gasped out her frustration until she sank to her knees on the icy pavement.
Anna forgave her for her behaviour at the Tchaikovsky Theatre, but Oxana never quite forgave Anna, and her feelings for her teacher took on a morbid, angry cast.
When Anna was sexually assaulted, matters reached a head. Taking her father’s combat knife, Oxana lured Roman Nikonov into the woods, and put things right. Nikonov survived, which wasn’t part of her plan, but otherwise things went perfectly.
Oxana was never questioned, and if she’d have preferred her victim to die of shock and blood loss, at least she had the satisfaction of knowing that he’d be pissing through a tube for the rest of his life. She’d said as much to Anna Leonova, laying the story at her teacher’s feet like a cat bringing home a mutilated bird.
With Anna’s reaction, Oxana’s world collapsed. She’d hoped for gratitude, admiration, profuse thanks. Instead the teacher had stared at her in icy, horrified silence. Only her knowledge of the conditions that Oxana would face in a women’s penitentiary, Anna said, prevented her from contacting the police immediately. She would remain silent, but she never wished to see or speak to Oxana again.
The injustice of it, and the lacerating sense of loss, brought Oxana to the brink of suicide. She considered taking her father’s Makarov pistol, going round to Anna’s place, and shooting herself. Showering the little flat on Komsomolsky Prospekt with her blood and brains. Perhaps she’d have sex with Anna first; a 9mm automatic was a pretty persuasive seduction accessory.
In the end, though, Oxana did nothing. And the part of her that had yearned so desperately to make Anna her own simply froze.
Lying in the scented water in the Shanghai apartment, Villanelle feels her earlier elation displaced by an undertow of melancholy. She turns her head towards the window, a sweep of plate glass framing the glimmering dusk and the rooftops of the French Concession, and bites pensively at her upper lip. In front of the window is a Lalique bowl of white peonies, their petals soft and enfolding.
She knows that she should lie low. That to go out on the prowl for sex, tonight of all nights, would be reckless. But she also recognises the hunger inside herself. A hunger whose grip will only tighten. Stepping from the bath, wreathed in steam, she stands naked in front of the plate glass, and considers the infinity of possibilities before her.
It’s after midnight when she walks into the Aquarium. The club is in the basement of a former private bank on the North Bund, and entrance is by personal introduction only. Villanelle was told about the Aquarium by the wife of a Japanese property developer whom she met at the Peninsula Spa in Huangpu. A stylish, gossipy woman, Mrs. Nakamura explained to Villanelle that she usually went there on Friday nights. “And alone, rather than in the company of my husband,” she added, with a meaningful sideways glance.
Certainly the name Mikki Nakamura is one the doorman knows. He shows Villanelle through an interior door to a spiral staircase winding down to a spacious, dim-lit subterranean chamber. The place is crowded, and an animated buzz of conversation overlays the muted pulse of the music.
For a moment Villanelle stands at the foot of the stairs, looking around her. The most striking feature is a floor-to-ceiling wall of glass, perhaps ten metres long. A moving shadow darkens its luminous blue expanse, and then another, and Villanelle realises that she is looking into a shark tank. Hammerheads and reef sharks glide past, the underwater lights painting their skins with a satin sheen.
Mesmerised, Villanelle makes her way towards the tank. The smell of the club is that of wealth, a heady mix of frangipani blossom, incense and designer-scented bodies. In the tank a tiger shark drifts into view, and fixes Villanelle with its blank, indifferent gaze.
“Dead eyes,” says Mikki Nakamura, materialising beside her. “I know too many men who look like that.”
“We all do,” says Villanelle. “And women, too.”
Mikki smiles. “I’m glad you came,” she murmurs, running a finger down Villanelle’s black silk qipao dress. “This is Vivienne Tam, isn’t it? It’s lovely.”
Villanelle mirrors Mikki’s smile and compliments her on her own outfit. At the same time, she’s running a security check, scanning the club for anything or anyone out of place. For the nondescript figure in the shadows. The eyes that look away too quickly. The face that doesn’t fit.
Her attention is snagged by a willowy figure in a white halter-top and miniskirt. Mikki follows Villanelle’s gaze and sighs. “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Who let the dogs out?”
“Pretty girl,” says Villanelle.
“Girl? Up to a point. That’s Janie Chou, one of Alice Mao’s ladyboys.”
“Who’s Alice Mao?”
“She owns this club. In fact she owns this building. She’s one of the richest women in Shanghai, thanks to the sex-trade.”
“Obviously quite a businesswoman.”
“That’s one way of putting it. She’s certainly not the sort of person you want to get on the wrong side of. But let me get you a drink. The watermelon Martinis are fabulous.”
“And fabulously strong, I bet.”
“Relax, sweetie,” says Mikki. “Have fun.”
As the other woman joins the crush at the small art deco bar, behind which an elegant young person is shaking cocktails, Villanelle allows herself to be swept along by a gesticulating crowd of young Chinese men, all designer-dressed to within an inch of their lives.
“I don’t think you have what they want,” says a soft voice at her side. “But I might have what you want.”
Villanelle looks into the pretty, upturned eyes of Janie Chou. “And what’s that?”
“Full girlfriend experience? Kissing on the mouth, lots of nice sucking and fucking, then afterwards I cook for you?”
“Perhaps not tonight. I’ve had a killing day.”
Janie leans in close, so that Villanelle can smell the jasmine flowers in her hair. “I got crabs,” she whispers.
Villanelle raises an eyebrow.
“No, silly! In my fridge, not my lady-garden! Hairy crabs. Very expensive.”
Mikki approaches with two brimming Martini glasses and hands one to Villanelle, pointedly ignoring Janie. “Someone I want you to meet,” she says, taking Villanelle’s arm and steering her away.
“What are hairy crabs?”
“A local delicacy,” says Mikki. “Unlike that little prostitute.”
She introduces Villanelle to a handsome young Malaysian man in a seersucker suit. “This is Howard,” she says, clearly anxious for Villanelle’s approval. “Howard, meet Astrid.”
They shake hands, and Villanelle summons the details of her cover story. Astrid Fécamp, twenty-seven-year-old columnist for Bilan21, a French-language investment newsletter. Like all her legends, this one has been very carefully constructed. Should anyone care to investigate Mademoiselle Fécamp online, they will discover that she has been a contributing editor of Bilan21 for two years, and specialises in petrochemical futures.
But Howard is too busy lavishing compliments on Mikki to concern himself with such minutiae. “Fuchsia!” he breathes, standing back to admire her Hervé Léger cocktail dress. “The perfect colour for you.”
Privately, Villanelle thinks the colour a disaster. Against her pale ivory complexion it makes Mikki look like Howard’s mother. But perhaps that’s what Howard likes.
“So what do you do?” Villanelle asks. “Are you in the fashion business?”
“Not as such. I have a concept spa in Xintiandi.”
“It’s heaven,” Mikki breathes. “There’s
a rock garden and an Evian ice fountain and Buddhist monks to align your chakras and do your hair.”
“Sounds fabulous. I’m sure my chakras are all shot to fuck.”
“Well then.” Howard smiles. “You must come visit.”
As soon as she can decently extract herself, Villanelle leaves them alone. Circulating, Martini glass in hand, she soon finds herself face to face with the sharks again. And, moments later, with Janie Chou.
“Come with me,” Janie says, her features soft in the lunar glow of the tank. “Someone wanna meet you.”
“Who?”
“Come.” Her slim hand takes Villanelle’s.
In a dim-lit alcove, a woman is sitting alone, scrolling through the messages on her phone. She’s Eurasian, and when she looks up to dismiss Janie with a casual sweep of one hand, Villanelle sees that she has eyes of the palest glass-green.
“Janie’s right,” says the woman. “You’re beautiful. Won’t you sit down?”
Villanelle inclines her head in acceptance. From the woman’s proprietorial manner she guesses that this is Alice Mao.
“So. Do you like my club?”
“It’s… fun. Things could happen here.”
“Trust me, things do.” Amusement touches the glass-green eyes. “Will you have some tea? One of those Martinis is quite enough, in my experience.”
“That would be nice. My name is Astrid, by the way.”
“It suits you. Mine, as you know, is Alice. What is your occupation, Astrid?”
“Financial forecasting. I write for an investors’ newsletter.”
Alice Mao frowns. “Do you now?”
“Yes.” Villanelle holds her gaze. “I do.”
“I’ve met a lot of finance people in my time, Astrid, and none of them is remotely like you.”
“So what am I like?”
“On the basis of our brief acquaintance, I’d say you’re rather like me.”
Villanelle smiles, allowing Alice’s cool regard to flood her veins. Something in the other woman’s features, the way the taut line of her cheekbone softens into the curve of her chin, stirs her. She knows that such feelings are dangerous, but there are times when the secrecy and the almost feral caution with which she has to conduct her life become unbearable.
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