A grave young man in a dark suit materializes at his elbow, and Rinat orders a malt whisky.
“Cancel that. Make the gentleman a Negroni Sbagliato. And bring me one too.”
Rinat turns, and meets the amused gaze of a woman in a black chiffon cocktail dress, who is standing behind him.
“You are, after all, in Venice.”
“I am,” he concurs, a little dazedly, and nods to the waiter, who silently withdraws.
She looks out over the lagoon, which shimmers like white gold in the dusk. “See Venice and die, is what they say.”
“I’m not planning to die yet. And I haven’t seen much of Venice, except the inside of the shops.”
“That’s a pity, because the shops here are either full of tourist trash, or the same as those in a hundred other cities, except maybe more expensive. Venice is not about the present, Venice is about the past.”
Rinat stares at her. She really is very beautiful. The amber gaze, the oblique smile, the whole artfully expensive look of her. Belatedly, it occurs to him to offer her a chair.
“Sei gentile. But I’m interrupting your evening.”
“Not at all. I’m looking forward to that drink. What was it again?”
She sits, and with a whisper of silk tights, which Rinat does not fail to appreciate, crosses her knees. “A Negroni Sbagliato. It’s a Negroni, but with sparkling wine instead of gin. And at the Danieli, naturalmente, they make it with champagne. For me, the perfect drink at sunset.”
“Better than a single malt whisky?”
A faint smile. “I think so.”
And so it proves. Rinat is not an obviously handsome man. His shaved head resembles a Crimean potato, and his handmade silk suit cannot disguise his brutal build. But wealth, however acquired, has a way of commanding attention, and Rinat is not unused to the company of desirable women. And Marina Falieri, as he learns her name to be, is nothing if not desirable.
He can’t take his eyes off her mouth. There’s a faint scar on the bow of her upper lip, and the resultant asymmetry lends her smile an equivocal quality. A vulnerability that speaks, quietly but insistently, to the predator in him. She is flatteringly interested in everything he has to say, and in response he finds himself holding forth freely. He tells her about Odessa, about the historic Cathedral of the Transfiguration, where he is a regular worshipper, and about the magnificent Opera and Ballet Theatre, to which, as an enthusiastic patron of the arts, he has contributed millions of rubles. This account of himself, if wholly fictional, is richly and convincingly detailed, and Marina’s eyes shine as she listens. She even persuades him to teach her a couple of phrases in Russian, which she repeats with endearing inaccuracy.
And then, all too soon, the evening is over. She has to attend an official dinner in Sant’Angelo, Marina explains apologetically. It will be dull, and she wishes she could stay, but she’s on the steering committee of the Venice Biennale, and…
“Per favore, Marina. Capisco,” Rinat says, discharging his entire stock of Italian with what he hopes is a gallant smile.
“Your accent, Rinat. Perfezione!” She pauses, and smiles at him conspiratorially. “It’s not possible, by any chance, that you’re free for lunch tomorrow?”
“Well, as it happens, I am.”
“Excellent. Let’s meet at eleven at the hotel’s river entrance. It will be my pleasure to show you something of… the real Venice.”
They rise, and she’s gone. Four empty cocktail glasses stand on the white linen tablecloth, three of his and one of hers. The sun is low in the sky, half obscured by oyster-pink cirrus clouds. Rinat turns to beckon for the waiter, but he’s already standing there, as patient and unobtrusive as an undertaker.
In the bus, moving at a snail’s pace up the Tottenham Court Road, the only person to give Eve a second glance is an obviously disturbed man who winks at her persistently. It’s a warm evening and the interior of the bus smells of damp hair and stale deodorant. Opening the Evening Standard, Eve flicks through the news pages and the descriptions of parties and serial adultery in Primrose Hill, and settles pleasurably into the property section.
There’s no question of her and Niko being able to afford any of the living spaces so seductively laid out there. All those Victorian warehouses and industrial units reimagined as fabulous, light-filled apartments. All those panoramic river-views framed in steel and plate glass. Nor, in any real sense, does Eve covet them. She’s entranced by them because they’re deserted, and not quite believable. Because they serve as the imagined backdrops to other lives that she might have led.
She reaches the one-bedroom flat that she and Niko rent shortly after eight forty-five, and pushing past the accretion of footwear, bicycle accessories, Amazon packaging, and fallen coats, follows the smell of cooking to the kitchen. The table, which holds an unstable pile of math textbooks and a bottle of supermarket Rioja, is laid for two. A hissing sound and a tuneless whistling from the bathroom tell her that Niko is in the shower.
“Sorry I’m late,” she calls out. “Smells delicious. What is it?”
“Goulash. Can you open the wine?”
Eve has just taken the corkscrew from the drawer when she hears a frantic clicking sound on the floor behind her, and turns to see two substantial animal forms hurtling through the air and landing on the table, sending the textbooks flying. For a moment she’s too shocked to move. The Rioja rolls from the table and smashes on the tiled floor. Two pairs of sage-green eyes watch her quizzically.
“Niko.”
He saunters damply out of the bathroom, a towel round his waist, slippers on his feet. “My love. I see you’ve met Thelma and Louise.”
She stares at him. When he steps over the widening lake of Rioja and kisses her, she doesn’t move.
“Louise is the clumsy one. I expect it was her that—”
“Niko. Before I fucking kill you…”
“They’re Nigerian dwarf goats. And you and I are never buying milk, cream, cheese, or soap again.”
“Niko, listen to me. I’m going to the off-license, because I’ve had a bitch of a day, and every drop of alcohol we have is there on the floor. When I get back I want to sit down to your goulash, and a nice bottle of red wine, possibly two, and relax. We won’t even mention those two animals on the table, because by then they will have vanished as if they’d never existed, OK?”
“Er… OK.”
“Excellent. See you in ten minutes.”
When Eve returns with another two bottles of Rioja, the kitchen has had a superficial but adequate makeover, there are no goats in sight, and Niko is fully dressed. With a simultaneous lifting and plummeting of her heart Eve notes that he smells of Acqua di Parma, and is wearing his Diesel jeans. Neither of them has ever put it into words, but Eve knows that when Niko wears these particular jeans and that cologne after 6 p.m., it’s to signal that he’s romantically inclined, and would like the evening to end with them making love.
Eve has no equivalent of Niko’s sex jeans, as she calls them. No fuck-me shoes or flirty dresses, no lace and satin lingerie. Her work wardrobe is anonymous and utilitarian, and she feels silly and self-conscious wearing anything else. Niko regularly tells her that she’s beautiful, but she doesn’t really believe him. She accepts that he loves her—he says so too often for it not to be true—but why he should do so is wholly mysterious to her.
They talk about his work. Niko teaches at the local school, and has a theory that less well-off teenagers, who do all their shopping with cash, are much better at mental arithmetic than richer kids who have been given credit cards.
“They call me Borat,” he says. “Do you think that’s a compliment?”
“Tall, eastern European accent, mustache… Kind of inevitable. But you’re wonderful with them, you know that.”
“They’re good kids. I like them. How was your day?”
“Weird. I phoned someone using a voice-changer.”
“Actually to disguise your voice, or for fun?”
“To disguise it. I didn’t want the guy to know I was a woman. I wanted to sound like Darth Vader.”
“I’m not even going to begin to imagine that…” He looks at her. “I think you’d like the girls. Truly.”
“Which girls?”
“Thelma and Louise. The goats. They’re very sweet.”
She closes her eyes. “Where are they now?”
“In their house. Outside.”
“They have a house?”
“It came with them.”
“So you’ve actually bought them. They’re permanent?”
“I’ve done the math, my love. Nigerian dwarfs give the richest milk of all breeds, and they only weigh about seventy-five pounds fully grown, so they eat the least hay. We’ll be completely self-sufficient for dairy products.”
“Niko, this is the arse end of the Finchley Road, not the fucking Cotswolds.”
“Also, Nigerian dwarfs are—”
“Please stop calling them that. They’re goats, period. And if you think I’m getting up every morning—or any morning, for that matter—to milk a pair of goats, you’re insane.”
In answer, Niko gets up from the table, and goes out onto the tiny paved area that they call the garden. A moment later Thelma and Louise come bounding joyfully into the kitchen.
“Oh God.” Eve sighs, and reaches for the wine.
After the meal Niko does the washing-up, then takes himself to the bathroom to freshen up the Acqua di Parma, wash his hands, and run his wet fingers through his hair. When he returns he finds Eve fast asleep on the sofa, a spoon in one hand and an ice-cream tub trailing from the other. Thelma is lying contentedly at her side, and Louise is standing with her forelegs on the sofa, scouring the tub for the last of the melting chocolate chip with a long, pink tongue.
Rinat Yevtukh has dressed carefully for his morning rendezvous, and after some thought has selected a Versace polo shirt, raw silk slacks, and Santoni ostrich-skin loafers. A solid-gold Rolex Submariner completes the impression of a man who espouses quiet good taste, but is by no imaginable means to be fucked with.
Marina Falieri keeps him waiting underneath the ironwork canopy of the Danieli’s river entrance for half an hour. Two bodyguards in tightly fitting suits lounge behind him, surveying the narrow canal with bored eyes. Katya’s vindictive mood has not abated, but has been tempered by the promise of a photo spread in Russian Playboy, and perhaps even the cover. Such a thing is by no means within Rinat’s gift, but he will cross that bridge when he comes to it. Meanwhile, Katya is safely ensconced in the hotel’s hairdressing salon, undergoing a revitalizing treatment involving white truffle essence and pulverized diamonds.
Shortly after eleven thirty, an elegant white motoscafo launch swings beneath the low, balustraded bridge and draws up at the hotel jetty. Marina is at the wheel in a striped T-shirt and jeans, her dark hair swinging around her shoulders. She’s also wearing—and this Rinat finds unaccountably sexy—soft leather driving gloves.
“So.” She raises her sunglasses. “Ready to see la vera Venezia?”
“Very much so.” Stepping onto the varnished mahogany afterdeck in his new loafers, Rinat teeters for a moment. As the bodyguards move reflexively forward, he lurches into the cockpit beside Marina, placing a heavy hand on her shoulder for balance.
“Excuse me.”
“No problem. Those your boys?”
“They’re on my security staff, yes.”
“Well, you should be quite safe with me.” She smiles. “But you’re welcome to ask them along if you’d like to.”
“Of course not.” Rinat addresses the two men in fast idiomatic Russian, ordering them to keep an eye on Katya, and to tell her that he is lunching with a business associate. A man, obviously. Not this devushka.
The men smirk and withdraw.
“I’m definitely going to learn Russian,” Marina says, maneuvering the launch beneath the road bridge. “It sounds such an expressive language.”
Skillfully, she threads a path between the gondolas and the other river traffic, and steers an unhurried southern course past the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and the eastern curve of the Giudecca. As the motoscafo noses through the unruffled surface of the lagoon, its 150-horsepower engine carving a pale wake behind them, she tells Rinat about the palaces and churches that they pass.
“So where exactly do you live?” Rinat asks her.
“My family has an apartment next to the Palazzo Cicogna,” she says. “The Falieri were originally from Venice, but our principal residence is now in Milan.”
He glances at her gloved left hand, curled lightly round the wheel. “And you’re not married?”
“I was close to someone, but he died.”
“I’m sorry. My condolences.”
She opens up the throttle. “It was very sad. I was there when he passed away. I was devastated. But life goes on.”
“Indeed it does.”
She turns to him and pushes up her sunglasses so that, for a moment, he’s caught in her amber gaze. “If you look behind you, in that cold-box, you’ll find a shaker and some glasses. Why don’t you pour yourself a drink?”
He retrieves the ice-frosted shaker and a tall glass. “Can I give you one?”
“I’ll wait until we get to the island. You go ahead.”
He pours, drinks, and nods appreciatively. “This is… very good.”
“It’s a limoncello cocktail. Perfect, I always think, for a morning like this.”
“Delicious. So tell me about this island we’re going to.”
“It’s called the Ottagone Falieri. It was once a fortification, built to protect Venice from invaders. One of my ancestors bought it in the nineteenth century. We still own it, even though no one goes there any more, and it’s pretty much a ruin.”
“It sounds very romantic.”
She gives him a veiled smile. “Let’s see. It’s certainly an interesting place.”
They’re holding a steady course now. The Giudecca is far behind them; ahead Rinat can see only gray-green water. The limoncello is creeping through his veins with glacial slowness. He feels, for the first time in as long as he can remember, at peace.
The fortification looms, quite suddenly, out of the haze. Walls of cut stone, and above them a few sparse treetops. Soon, a jetty becomes visible. Tied up to it is another, smaller motor launch, with a black-painted hull.
“We have company.”
“I asked someone to come ahead with the lunch,” Marina says, as if this is the most natural thing in the world.
Rinat nods. Of course. Everything about this woman charms and impresses him. Her unusual beauty, which over the last couple of hours he has had considerable opportunity to examine at close range. Her easy familiarity with wealth. Old-money wealth, of the kind that doesn’t need to proclaim itself, but nevertheless makes its presence felt with unambiguous force. It’s not enough to be rich, Rinat knows. You have to be connected, to know the secret signs by which real insiders recognize each other. Insiders like Marina Falieri.
Katya, it’s increasingly clear, has to go.
Marina ties up the motoscafo, and as they make their way along the sun-bleached planking of the jetty, Rinat hears a faint clinking sound. There are steps built into the wall, and at the top is an octagonal compound, perhaps a hundred meters from end to end. At one extremity are the ruins of a brick and tile building, shadowed by stunted pines. Elsewhere the ground is rough scrub, quartered by a pathway. At the end of the compound furthest from the steps, a strongly built young woman with cropped hair is wielding a pickaxe, swinging it steadily at the stony ground. In her bikini top, military shorts and combat boots, she cuts an unusual figure. As Rinat watches, the woman turns, briefly meets his gaze, drops the pick, and saunters toward the ruined building.
Ignoring her, Marina leads Rinat to a table covered by a white cloth at the center of the compound. At either side of the table is an ironwork garden chair. “Shall we?” she asks.
They sit. Beyond the stone wall there is no land in sight, just the vast stillness of the lagoon. Behind him, Rinat hears the rattle of a tray. It’s the pickaxe woman, with chilled wine and mineral water, antipasti and tiny, exquisite pastries. A faint sheen of sweat covers her muscled body, and her calves and combat boots are dusty.
Marina ignores her, and smiles at Rinat. “Please. Buon appetito.”
Rinat tries to swallow a forkful of mortadella, but for some reason his appetite has deserted him, and he feels mildly nauseated. He forces himself to chew and swallow. Soon the steady clinking of the pickaxe resumes.
“What’s she doing, exactly?” His voice sounds distant, disembodied.
“Oh, just some gardening. I like to keep her busy. But let me pour you some of this wine. It’s a local Bianco di Custoza, I’m sure you’ll like it.”
Wine, local or otherwise, is the last thing that Rinat feels like, but politeness compels him to tender his glass. He can hardly hold it steady as she pours. Sweat is running down his face and back; the horizon shimmers and sways. Some still-observant part of him notes that the clinking of the pickaxe has been replaced by the steady, rhythmic thudding of a spade. He tries to drink some mineral water but gags, and regurgitates the wine and mortadella onto the tablecloth. “I’m…” he begins, and slumps back heavily in his chair. His heart is racing, and his arms and chest have started to prickle and burn as if fire-ants were creeping beneath his skin. He claws at himself, panic rising in his chest.
“That sensation’s called paraesthesia,” Marina explains in Russian, sipping her wine. “It’s a symptom of aconitine poisoning.”
Rinat stares at her, his eyes widening.
Killing Eve--No Tomorrow Page 2
