Beria stroked his chin. ‘It is an idea.’
‘It is an idea, Lavrenty, which I want carried out and brought to a successful conclusion. We will, of course, require proof of her death.’
*
The woman behind the desk looked up, suspiciously. The only women who ever entered these doors worked on the premises; the House did have lesbian clients, but these always arranged a partner by telephone. And this woman . . . she took in not only the striking features and the tall, obviously good figure, but also the quality of the clothes concealing it, the patterned summer frock with the new-style, flaring Dior skirt, and the light cloth coat which had never been taken off any peg. Nor had her somewhat large shoulder bag come off a roadside stall. While her tiny bar earrings and her wristwatch were clearly gold; any rings she might have been wearing were concealed beneath her kid gloves. Her hair was also totally concealed beneath a slouch hat, and her eyes by an unusual pair of dark glasses, with flared hinges rather like miniature wings, which she did not take off despite the somewhat gloomy foyer, but the general impression was that she was fair.
‘You have business?’ The woman spoke Spanish.
‘I wish to see Senora Jaquetta.’ The voice matched the physical picture, low and husky; she also spoke Spanish, but with a foreign accent.
‘You have business?’ the woman asked again.
‘It is a personal matter.’
The woman continued to regard her for several seconds. ‘You have a name?’
‘Anna O’Brien. I spoke with Senora Jaquetta on the telephone.’
The woman pressed the intercom on her desk. ‘Senora?’ Again she looked at Anna’s gloves. ‘A Senorita O’Brien is here, wishing to see you. Of course, senora.’ She turned off the switch. ‘You are to go up.’ She sounded surprised.
‘Thank you.’ Anna turned to the double doors on her right, from behind which there was some sound, of laughter and clinking glasses.
‘Not there,’ the concierge said, and indicated the narrow flight of stairs behind her desk. ‘It is on the left.’
‘Thank you,’ Anna said again, and went up the stairs, while the concierge watched her flawless, silk clad calves and high-heeled shoes.
At the top of the stairs there was a landing, off which there branched two corridors. That on the right led past several doorways, and as Anna glanced along it, one of these doors opened, and a man came out, straightening his tie. He checked at the sight of her, mouth open. Anna smiled at him. ‘Your flies are still undone,’ she pointed out, and went down the left hand corridor. Here there was a single door, and on this she knocked.
‘It is open.’
Anna turned the knob and stepped into a spacious, high-ceilinged room, brilliantly lit by the huge chandelier, although the shutters over the large windows were closed to keep out the bright Mexican sunlight.
The woman behind this desk was heavy, in her early forties, Anna estimated, but from her general bone structure she could also estimate that she must once have been quite a beauty. She wore a somewhat shapeless dress and was laden with cheap jewellery; and her yellow hair was clearly dyed.
For her part, she was regarding Anna was less interest than awe. ‘You, are Senorita O’Brien?’
‘That is correct.’ Anna took off her glasses, sat in the chair before the desk, uninvited, and crossed her knees. Then she pulled off her gloves, and Jaquetta stared at the huge ruby solitaire on the forefinger of her right hand; that had clearly never come out of a cracker.
She licked her lips. ‘On the telephone you said—’
‘That I would like to work for you.’ Anna took off her hat and silky straight golden hair tumbled past her shoulders and down the back of the chair. ‘Do you think I would be acceptable to your clients?’
Jaquetta gulped, and almost visibly pulled herself together. ‘Senorita . . . you do understand . . .?’
‘That you operate a brothel?’
‘Ah . . .’
‘Or should I have said a house of ill repute?’
‘Mine,’ Jaquetta said proudly, ‘is a house of pleasure.’
‘Of course. I do apologize.’
‘There is no better known house of pleasure in all Mexico City. And you wish to work in it? You? Our business is providing a service for the gentlemen, any gentlemen and any service they desire, who come to see us?’
‘Of course.’
‘And yet you wish to work here?’
‘For one night.’
‘Senorita?’
‘Tonight.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘It is very simple, senora. There is a gentleman I wish to meet. But he is unapproachable, always surrounded by armed guards, never alone.’
‘Ah. And you think this gentleman will come here, tonight?’
‘No. He never comes here. But one of your women, goes to him, every night.’
Jaquetta drew a sharp breath. ‘You are speaking of Senor Capillano.’
‘You obviously know your principal clients, senora. Now, as I said, I understand that you supply Senor Capillano with company every night. I assume the arrangement for tonight has already been made, and the girl already selected and identified. I would like to take her place, just for tonight. This means that you will have to telephone Senor Capillano’s secretary and tell him that the original young lady has been taken ill, but that you are, of course, supplying a replacement. You will then describe me so they will know who to expect.’
‘All this is because you wish to meet him? Could you not just telephone him for an appointment? Or turn up at his hotel suite? I do not think any man the least interested in women would turn you away.’
‘You say the sweetest things. Unfortunately, my information indicates that without an introduction from someone Senor Capillano knows and trusts, I would be turned away. Is it not true that in view of his past he has a number of enemies?’
‘I know nothing of Senor Capillano’s immediate past, senorita, nor do I wish to. He comes to Mexico City from his hacienda in the mountains, perhaps twice a year. This is for business, and to . . . indulge himself. I knew him years ago, before he became wealthy, and so he turned to me to supply the company he wishes when on these visits. However, as Roberto is both a friend and a valued client, I think I am entitled to know just what is your interest in him. As you say, he does have enemies. Fortunately, he also has friends.’
‘And a great deal of money.’
‘Money is very helpful in these circumstances.’ Jaquetta waited.
Anna gazed at her with enormous, innocent blue eyes. She placed her shoulder bag on her lap, opened it, and took out her passport. ‘My name is Anna O’Brien, and I am a citizen of Eire.’ She held out the passport.
Jaquetta opened it, looked from the photograph to Anna’s face and then back again. ‘Born 21 May 1920,’ she remarked. ‘You are not yet twenty-nine years old.’
‘Is there something wrong with that?’
‘I was thinking how nice it must be to be not yet twenty-nine. And you do not even look that.’
‘If it is any comfort to you, as you can see, I will be twenty-nine in a week’s time. You have not told me if you will help me to meet Senor Capillano.’
‘You have not told me why you are so anxious to meet him.’
‘It is confidential.’
‘I have realized that. But if you do not confide in me, I cannot help you.’
‘Well . . .’ Anna appeared to consider while she came to a decision. ‘I am gathering material for a book.’
‘On Senor Capillano? Then I cannot help you.’
‘I am no more interested in his business activities than are you, senora. This book is about the great lovers of history, and it has been suggested to me that Senor Capillano is one of the greatest.’
‘Lovers?’ Jaquetta was scornful. ‘I do not think Roberto has ever loved anyone in his life. Save himself, of course. He is a great, what shall I say, sexual athlete, certainly.’ She gazed at Anna from beh
ind arched eyebrows.
‘Is not being a great sexual athlete merely an aspect of being a great lover?’
Jaquetta continued to gaze at her for some seconds, then gave a snort which could just have been a short laugh. ‘You have obviously lived a sheltered life, senorita. I do not think you know a great deal about love, and sex, and the forms it can take. Love suggests something soft, and beautiful.’
‘Cannot sex be soft and beautiful?’
‘Of course it can. But it can also be vicious. Roberto makes “love” as if he hates all womankind. As you have apparently discovered, when he is in Mexico City, he requires me to send him a girl every night. He has been here ten days, this time, and so far I have had to send one girl to hospital, and lay off another because the very suggestion of sex makes her scream.’
‘But you continue to supply him.’
‘Well,’ Jaquetta said, defensively, ‘He pays very well. And these girls are experienced sexual playthings. You . . . I would say that you come from a well-to-do background. You are obviously well educated, refined, and, I would say, looking into your eyes, quite innocent of what the real world, Roberto Capillano’s world, is like. He would take that lilywhite flesh of yours and turn it inside out. He would make you ashamed to be a woman. As for ever again touching yourself . . .’
‘Well,’ Anna said bravely. ‘It would make a great passage for my book, wouldn’t it?’
‘I cannot believe you would risk that much, for a book.’
Anna opened her bag again. ‘You say he pays well. How much, per girl, per night?’
‘One thousand American dollars. And her expenses, if she has to receive hospital treatment afterwards.’
‘Of which you take?’
‘Well, half. That is the agreed percentage.’
‘You are in a very profitable business.’ Anna took out a wad of notes, secured by a rubber band, and laid it on the desk. ‘Those are ten hundred dollar bills. That is to say, one thousand dollars.’ She took out, one after the other, four more wads and laid them beside the first. ‘I will pay you these five thousand dollars if you will send me to see Senor Capillano tonight. You may keep all of it, as well as the thousand he will pay you. And then I will disappear from your life, forever. But,’ she added, ‘I will send you a copy of my book, when it is published.’
Jaquetta gazed at the five packets of money lying on the desk, then at the bag, clearly wondering what else it might contain. ‘You wish to pay me five thousand dollars so that you may be bullied, beaten, and very probably buggered?’
‘Well,’ Anna said, more bravely yet. ‘An author must have experience, if she is going to write about life.’
Another long stare, then Jaquetta picked up the money.
INCIDENT IN MEXICO
Naked, Anna lay on her back on her bed, spreadeagled, arms and legs stretched to their widest extent, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. The hotel bedroom was air-conditioned, and her body was deliciously cool, after the heat of the street; at several thousand feet above sea level, the sun seemed to redouble its strength in the middle of the day.
It would not be hot outside tonight, once the sun had set. And inside? She was going to kill, for the ninety-eighth time. And then more, if all she had heard of Capillano being surrounded by bodyguards was true. Because she was a monster? Or because Fate, Destiny, perhaps even the Almighty, had set her feet upon a path, when she had been only seventeen years old?
Eleven years ago, she had been a serious-minded, devout schoolgirl, proud of the position she had achieved in her small circle, that she was the youngest ever head girl in her convent, that she was top of her form in most subjects, captain of the athletics team, daughter of loving and caring parents, and aware that her striking looks attracted attention wherever she went. She had attended confession every week, with only her pride for which to beg forgiveness. As she had no brothers, she had never known a boy, even as a casual acquaintance, and as her life had been so full, she had not even had any sinful thoughts to whisper to the priest.
And only six months later, having watched her parents and her sister marched off to gaol like common criminals, having expected the worst for herself without any idea of what that worst could be, she had found herself being subjected to the sexual humiliation of an SS training camp, of forced relationships with men who were nothing more than guinea pigs, for the benefit of her instructors, and finally, the never-to-be-forgotten day when she had been handed a pistol and told to kill.
Whatever had gone before, that day had been the watershed that had turned her from a bewildered schoolgirl, uncertain whether or not she was merely having a long nightmare, into what she now was, a woman who knew instantly what needed to be done, and who did it, without conscience or hesitation.
That day had not abated the nightmare, much less ended it. It had made her part of it, the creator of nightmares rather than their frightened victim. She could still ask herself why she had obeyed that first command. She had known, she had been told, within days of her own arrest, that if she would serve the Reich faithfully and well, she would survive, and so would her family, in close but not brutal confinement, hostages for her loyalty. At the age of just eighteen there had not seemed any alternative to acquiescence. There would have been none in similar circumstances today. But she had assumed, from her initial training, that her service would consist of seducing men to learn their secrets. Until the gun had actually been pressed into her hand, it had never occurred to her that she might also be required to kill them, if considered necessary by the Reich.
Perhaps she had been fortunate, that first day. Even the knowledge that refusal could involve the execution of her parents might not have been sufficient to overcome her moral and religious background. But she had been the second girl to be called forward. The first, the red-headed Karen – Anna had never learned her last name – had been unable to do it, had deliberately missed with all six of her shots. Karen had been stripped naked, there and then, and publicly flogged until she bled before a hundred jeering, leering men, and then sent to an SS brothel.
That fate was worse than to become a murderess. If Fate had condemned her to hell, from which there could be no escape, it was surely preferable to be one of the devils!
*
Thus she had begun the career that had made her name a whispered terror throughout Germany, and, she now knew, most of the world, as she had operated in Moscow and Washington and a variety of other places, dealing in deadliness. Because her amazing speed of thought and reaction, her phenomenal skill, based on her immense powers of concentration, with a pistol, not less than with a knife or with the edge of her hand, all concealed beneath her outward appearance of blue-eyed, yellow-haired, long-legged innocence, had made her the most lethal woman in the world, and she had never yet encountered a man to match her.
But there had, after all, been a loophole of escape. It had appeared, quite fortuitously, when in a mood of angry outrage after being humiliatingly ‘disciplined’ by her then master, Reinhard Heydrich, for a breach of his rules, she had seduced the MI6 agent Clive Bartley, not because of any orders from above, but simply to restore her own battered ego. And found a man she could not only trust, but love. As she could not abandon Germany, and thus condemn her family to an unthinkable fate, she had done the next best thing, and agreed to work for him. From a double agent, spying and if necessary killing for the British as well as the Nazis, she had then become a triple agent with the entry of the Americans into the war, when they had discovered that this most wanted of Nazi operatives was actually employed by their British allies and thus that her enormous and terrifying skills were also available to them.
Superficially, the end had seemed to make it all worthwhile. Working for the Allies in the very heart of the Reich as both Hitler and Himmler, fascinated by her combination of innocent femininity and lethal ability had grown to trust her, she had been able to play her part in bringing down the Nazi regime, then with British help she had been able to get her
parents out of Germany at the end of the war, and with American help she had been able to escape herself with a fortune in Nazi gold bullion. Thus, it had seemed, freedom at last. But that aid had come with a caveat, that she would continue to work for the CIA, in areas where even they could not reach, and in circumstances with which they, or the United States, could not afford to be involved or even associated. In these circumstances, MI6 had faded into the background, controlled as it now was by a government that was not only bent on shedding as many of the responsibilities, both moral and financial, of empire as they could as rapidly as possible, but also of the amoral requirements of exercising power.
Actually, it had not been so bad. She had been allowed to live wherever she chose, and had only been called upon twice in the past three years, before tonight, and those two missions had only involved three deaths. Only! It amused her to regard herself as America’s secret weapon, to be used sparingly and only when absolutely necessary – a human atomic bomb, a uniquely destructive force, as Dr Goebbels had once described her. And in that regard she could at least be honest with herself, and reflect that after so many years she actually sought the excitement and the dangers of the chase and the execution, like the fighter pilot to whom she often compared herself, always with the confidence that his skill and superior equipment would prevail; she knew that during the recent war several German fighter aces had scored more than a hundred kills, mainly on the Russian front. If she was up there with the stars, she also knew that not one of those men had survived the war. But their records were immortal.
Thus that this promised to be as dangerous an assignment as she had ever undertaken, was merely stimulating, not frightening. She looked at her watch. Six o’clock. It was time to move.
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