The Art of Deception

by The Art of Deception (retail) (epub)

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that It couldn’t have been.’

  Even as I resisted, the picture changed in front of my eyes. I remembered that this was one story that she had told in detail, reworking her own history. The facts were the same, but the interpretation was different. What had been authentic, Julian’s past told by herself, now appeared a forgery. It was not simply a question of my deliberate blindness in refusing to understand what she was. She had fabricated an image with the intent to deceive.

  ‘It certainly was. Then Anatoli met Sveta again in Paris. Sveta’s a very nice girl, good pianist, great singer and all that, but she’s not beautiful and she’s not clever like Julian. But that’s Anatoli for you. Somewhere he’s soft He had a conscience about those years she’d spent in Soviet madhouses and wanted to make it up to her. I’ve spent years in the camps, but he’s never felt the need to make it up to me. And he was fed up with Julian interfering in everything. He wanted a woman who was beautiful, sexy and fun, and that’s all. So he abandoned Julian and London and moved his base to Paris. But Julian had all the knowledge, contacts and papers. At the very least, the stupid bastard should have kept them both in play. It’s not as if it’s difficult to run two women in different cities. He’s had plenty of practice.’

  Anatoli had said she liked to take control, I recalled, and I had thought he meant emotionally, sexually.

  ‘The mugging,’ I repeated. ‘Who did it? Who was trying to kill Julian?’

  ‘That was Dyadya,’ Igor said. ‘Can I have another whisky?’

  I rose to pour him one. I put ice in his glass and tipped the liquid over it plentifully. He watched in silence, not speaking again until he had taken a deep drink.

  ‘I think he did mean to kill her. She was beyond his control, a completely unguided missile, Pershing plus. It’s odd that he didn’t get her, though. I’ve never heard of one of Dyadya’s hitmen failing before. I think what happened was that she swivelled round, and when the knife went in, it entered on her right side, not the left. Normally, they go straight for the spleen…’

  I did not want to hear about the assassination methods of Igor’s branch of the Russian Mafia. ‘And the flat?’

  ‘No, that wasn’t Dyadya. That was something else. He still had his guys watching her, but she’d signalled to him by then, to fix something.’

  ‘With Dyadya?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t all settled until she got to Moscow, but she’d already realised she’d have to make peace with him.’

  The night we first slept together, I remembered every detail of it. The textures of the ris de veau and the daube on our plates, the sound of the footsteps in the street, the scent of the lilies in her hall as we entered, the sight of Julian’s transparent skin. And her voice saying, It must be the effect of the mugging. I thought I’d settled everything. Then the nightmare evening in the Mafia club in Moscow; Julian and the Uzbek sitting together; the authority with which she had faced him. Why had I never questioned, never analysed? That must have been the moment when the deal was struck.

  ‘The business with the flat and the farce you were involved in, that was me,’ Igor was saying. ‘I wanted her to think it was Dyadya. I was trying to keep the pressure up and make her choose me. Once Anatoli was out of it, she had to chose between me and Dyadya.’ He was nursing the last mouthful of whisky in his glass. ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you there was something odd about those attacks? Violence without conviction. I never meant to hurt her.’

  ‘The wrecking of the flat was very convincing, I can assure you.’

  ‘Yeah, well, no one got killed.’

  ‘Let me understand what you’re telling me,’ I said pedantically. ‘You’re saying that Julian has been a fourth partner in all your activities, has been the cause of the break-up of your partnership, has had Anatoli arrested. I still don’t understand where the murder in Moscow comes into your story. Who killed the Uzbek?’

  Igor was lighting a cigarette and did not answer.

  ‘Let me guess. You’re going to tell me that the Uzbek was also Julian’s lover and she had him killed, because…’ I searched for the most implausible reason I could think of.

  ‘An interesting idea.’ I should have realised that Russians have no sense of irony and an endless capacity for speculation, taking up any absurdity if they can weave some debate from it. ‘I don’t think he was ever her lover. She was quite fond of him, though. With her, it’s all acting. She was Dyadya’s little girl, she was my best friend, she was Anatoli’s devoted little wife, with you, well you know about that. I’d have said there was only one person she really cared for out of all of us…’

  He paused, but I did not ask the question he was waiting for. Instead, I repeated, ‘So who killed the Uzbek?’

  ‘That was me.’ Silence again.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘I want you to see Julian, to know what she is and what she’s been doing before… before we go any further.’ He lifted his glass to receive the whisky I was pouring into it. I didn’t bother with ice this time. ‘I knew her before you. I know her for what she is. You can’t see what’s in front of your eyes. You put her on a pedestal, a wronged woman, devoted, betrayed, a sort of female counterpart for you. You think what Emily has done to you, Anatoli did to her.’

  Igor’s knowledge of my life, which could only have come from Julian, was the most convincing evidence of how close they had been.

  She used to tell me about Victor, Igor about Anatoli. Why had I not guessed she was telling someone, Igor, about me?

  ‘You created a new person to hang your ideas on and for a while she liked it,’ he went on, then paused to watch my reaction. ‘She told me, you see, all about you.’

  So my rival all those months had not been Anatoli, but Igor and his drunken, intimate conversations. He must have been coming to London, every few weeks throughout the winter with his briefcase full of dollars. Julian had spent her mysterious days with him in quiet hotels in Bayswater. I could imagine them at restaurant tables, eating and drinking, while she described the food we ate; lying together on the bed in some dingy room, while she described our love-making, every private gesture exposed. I shut my eyes and groaned.

  ‘And you’re still refusing to see,’ Igor was saying. He was helping himself to whisky now. ‘I’m going to open your eyes. I’m here tonight to tell Julian her plans haven’t worked. Dyadya’s dead and I’m not. She made a deal with Dyadya when she was in Moscow and the deal was that she would fix Anatoli and Dyadya would get rid of me and they would share things between them.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ I must have been a bit drunk. I had eaten nothing all day except a sandwich consumed in haste in the department at lunchtime and the whisky, even though I had only had two glasses to Igor’s four, had gone to my head. My voice sounded too loud, and less than convincing in its repetitions.

  ‘I offered her the same deal and she turned me down for Dyadya. The stupid bitch. She preferred Dyadya for business and you for pleasure. Well, I’ve dealt with him.’

  ‘She’s a fiend, a fiend,’ I said. ‘A demon’, Anatoli had called her. How had I reached this point, enslaved by such a woman? Even Emily looked innocent beside her. I got out of my chair and stumbled furiously towards the door.

  ‘I’m not having anything more to do with this. You and Julian can sort it out together.’

  I had not so lost touch with reality that I had forgotten Minna.

  Only my work was important. I must pass Igor and his farrago over to Julian to deal with, so I could see Minna in a sober and authoritative state. I led the way across the landing. The door to Julian’s apartment was open and we went in. The lights in the hall and drawing room shone in the gaping emptiness. The windows were sinister black rectangles. There was no heating and the air was frigid.

  ‘Julian,’ I called sharply.

  This part was the hardest to describe; the hardest to live through.

  We heard her footsteps above us in the gallery.
She reached the top of the stairs, when she must have seen Igor draw out from behind me. She stopped, one hand holding the newel post. She was wearing her coat against the cold in the flat; it hung loosely open to show her red dress beneath. She said nothing, paused, waiting.

  ‘Julian, I’m back.’ Igor overtook me and ran up the stairs towards her.

  I saw the joyous reunion that had not taken place at the airport was happening now and in the same moment I realised where I had seen Igor before: lying naked, face-down on Julian’s bed.

  They met in an embrace that held for a second and then split open the world. They whirled apart. I saw Julian stagger. Igor turned and ran downstairs. She had her hand inside her coat, holding her side, as she followed him.

  ‘Igor,’ she said. He did not respond. As he passed me, without speaking, I heard a skittering on the floor. Julian lurched forward and crashed down the last half dozen steps, lying at my feet, face down, her hair thrown forward over her head, exposing the nape of her neck, like Cordelia’s battered doll.

  ‘Julian, Julian.’ I rushed forward. Frantically I was trying to help her up. This time there was no will to rise. I put my hands inside her coat and felt the warmth and dampness soaking into her dress and had no need to look at my hand to see what had caused it. I tipped an object with the toe of my shoe and bent down to retrieve it: a knife.

  ‘Nicholas.’ In the door of the apartment stood Minna. ‘Nicholas,’ she said again. ‘What on earth have you done?’

  39

  I was arrested the following day.

  Absorbed by grief, by all that had happened in the previous twenty-four hours, I did not understand my own danger and not until I was cautioned did I realise that I was the obvious suspect.

  Although Minna’s first words to me amounted to an accusation, in the atmosphere of crisis our mutual hostility seemed to have been forgotten. Even though I knew Julian was dead, I behaved as if she were still alive and there was still a chance of saving her. I put the knife down on the stairs and pulled up her clothing, to reveal the wound in her side. The visible loss of blood was not great, but I knew that her body cavity was filling up with the flow from her ruptured spleen. Minna bent down beside me. She had no medical background, but she knew death when she saw it.

  ‘It’s no good, Nicholas. We must call the police.’

  ‘An ambulance, if we could get her to hospital…’

  ‘All right, an ambulance. Where’s the phone?’

  We went next door to my flat. I picked up the phone, hesitating for a moment, wondering where to find the number of the hospital. Minna took the receiver from my hand impatiently and dialled 999. ‘Police,’ she said.

  ‘Ambulance, ambulance. The address is…’

  I watched her with the sensation that one gets talking on the telephone to Moscow when you can hear the gap, the time taken by speech to reach its destination a thousand miles away. Everything reached me with a perceptible delay; my own words echoed in my head and Minna’s actions were taking place on the other side of a double-glazed window. I had registered Julian’s death, but my mind had not even begun to work out its meaning and consequences. I was still trying to comprehend the past, what she had done to Anatoli, what she had done to me.

  The police filled both apartments with their voices and activity. They carried bags of equipment which they dumped on the floor, opening them with clumsy speed. I did not go back to Julian’s apartment, but sank into a chair in my mother’s drawing room, occupied with my own thoughts. Minna picked out and cornered the senior officer with the skill of a champion sheepdog bitch and I allowed her to take charge. I could see her standing on the landing in a position that commanded a view of both flats. As she spoke, though I could not hear her words, I could see her occasionally glancing at me.

  She must be telling him about Igor, I thought. It was only then that I remembered him. Minna had arrived so soon after his swift, yet unhurried departure that she must have seen him, either up here or below. I should have done something at once; I should have followed him and caught him. Why had I not chased after him, or at least phoned to Victor to call the police, to stop him, forcibly, from leaving the building? Julian had been my priority and I had not given him a thought. Now I leapt up. I looked at my watch and saw with astonishment that it was only just after nine. So much had happened that I felt it must already be the early hours of the morning. There was still time.

  But the delay was enough to catch me.

  I interrupted Minna’s conversation to insist that someone tried to find Igor. Minna ignored what I was saying and introduced the police officer, whose name I immediately forgot.

  ‘A tall blond Russian,’ I was saying. ‘He’s very thin, early thirties, very pale grey eyes, height one metre ninety, about the same as me.’

  Misunderstanding followed. This was the first they’d heard of Igor.

  ‘Minna, you must have seen him as you arrived,’ I said.

  ‘Seen whom?’

  ‘Who are we talking about, sir?’

  ‘The man who… He killed, knifed Julian. Then he just walked out. It’s already more than an hour ago.’

  I was trying to think of where he might have gone. Would there have been a BMW, parked in the square with its engine running, waiting to pick him up, as for the jogger on the first night? Or would Igor make a more democratic getaway, eschewing the flashy chauffeur-driven cars beloved of the Uzbek? I imagined him dissolving into the darkness of the streets, walking anonymously among the crowds at the tube station, stepping off the Circle Line, unremarked, at Queensway or Notting Hill.

  I can’t pretend that the police ignored my story, though there was no rush to follow a trail which was cooling by the minute. The senior officer abandoned Minna and led me into the dining room. He allowed me to begin at the end of the story, to describe the meeting between Julian and Igor, their violent embrace, Igor’s calmly precipitate departure.

  ‘He was a visitor for Miss Bennet,’ he repeated. “You took him over the landing to meet her. He stabbed her as you watched and left.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t try to stop him?’

  ‘I was dealing with Julian. I was trying to stop the bleeding. Then Minna came. She must have seen him. And Victor, the porter on duty. He must have seen him coming in as well as leaving. Perhaps he saw which way he went. He’ll know what time he left.’

  His pouchy face, made of pockets of flesh hanging from points of purchase around his eyes and nose and jaw, showed no sign of what he made of this. He had been noting what I said; then he nodded to someone standing behind me, out of my view, who left the room. He began to question me in earnest.

  I remember the last time the police came, after the break-in, Igor’s fake burglary, Julian had answered their questions without giving any explanations. At the time I had noted how minimal were her replies; I now understood why. It was all too complicated. Impossible to convey the motives, only half-understood at the time, that had drawn along the train of events. So, like her, I made no effort to interpret my story.

  I answered his questions and watched him write down Julian’s name, age, address; my own name, age, address, relationship to the deceased; Igor’s name, age, address: not much that I could help with there. My account was interrupted from time to time by people knocking on the dining room door. During those intermissions I sat looking at the flowers, placed there by Julian earlier in the day, reflected in the high polish of the table. I felt as if I was dead too. Without her, I didn’t care what happened. I didn’t care whether they found Igor or not. I was without feeling and, even stranger, without thought, emptied out, so that I had become a shell. In the last twenty-four hours, I had been given fragments of information, about Julian, about Anatoli and Igor, about the Bank, but I no longer had any interest in fitting them together. They only had significance in relation to Julian; without her, it did not matter who had allied with whom, or who had won in their bloody power struggle.

  I overhear
d an interchange which took place in the hall, behind my back, the briefing of a new arrival.

  ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘Some guy has knifed his girlfriend.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Yup. The doc’s been. They’re taking the photos now.’

  How had they come to the conclusion that Julian was Igor’s girlfriend? I had said nothing about his motivation or his relations with her. I had simply described the events of the evening as they had happened. I had not mentioned that suddenly revived memory of the naked figure on Julian’s bed. Perhaps, for the police, all violence between the sexes was automatically seen as sexually motivated. And the casual interpretation was not so far wrong, I thought. If they wanted to see it like that, well and good. It would save me from stories that strained credibility about rivalry within the Russian Mafia, money-laundering, drugs trading. I did not fully understand what lay between Igor and Julian (I would have time to work that out later), but I had seen all along, in Julian’s account, his obsession with and desire for her.

  I could hear voices and movement next door. A photographer emerged and stood by the lift, closing the flap of his bag over the bulk of his lenses, the last images of Julian’s impassive, supremely photogenic face, rolled onto his films. Some time later I heard her body being removed, the characteristic shuffle of men manoeuvring a stretcher. I caught a glimpse of a bagged form before the doors to the stairs closed. Eventually they all left, sealing Julian’s flat. Still in my clothes, I lay down on our bed and fell at once into a dreamless sleep.

  The next day I woke suddenly and completely and for a few seconds everything that had happened was cancelled. Julian was still alive in my mind. Then the physical discomfort of my clothes, my aching head, recalled me to the nightmare of reality. I got up and undressed; I showered, but could not be bothered to shave. As I made myself some coffee, I worked out what would happen next. The police had their job to do of finding Igor. They would enquire at hotels in the area where he usually stayed. They would have been visiting them, street by street, during the night. Perhaps they had already found him, were questioning him at the police station. When they arrested him, I would have a chance of learning the truth about what Julian had been doing. In the meantime, I began the complex task of deciding what, how much, to believe of his story, of fitting his account of her activities with hers, and with my own observations.