by Peter James
When he had started his career, twenty-seven years earlier, most casinos had a smart dress code and he regretted the lack of elegance he saw today. But, in order to attract the punters, he understood the necessity of moving with the times. If the Rendezvous did not want these high-rollers, plenty of other casinos in the city would welcome them.
He took a brief walk through the busy, gleaming kitchen, nodding at the head chef and some of his underlings, watching a tray of prawn cocktail and smoked salmon platters heading out to the dining room, then went through into the main downstairs gambling room.
It was filling up. He cast his eye across the slots and it looked as if about two-thirds of them were busy. All the blackjack tables, the three-card poker tables, the roulette wheels and the craps table were in use. Good. There was often a lull in this pre-Christmas period, but business was building up nicely, with yesterday’s takings up almost 10 per cent on the previous week.
He walked across the room, passing all the tables in turn, making sure that each croupier and pit boss saw him, then took the escalator up to the high-value room. As he alighted at the top, he saw Clint straight away, standing like a sentinel at his regular table.
Clint was here at least three nights a week, arriving around ten and leaving somewhere between two and four in the morning. They had given him that sobriquet because Macaulay’s assistant, Jacqueline, once said he reminded her of the actor Clint Eastwood.
In the days before the smoking ban, like the actor in his early Westerns, Clint always had a slim cigar wedged between his lips. Now he chewed gum. Sometimes he came alone, sometimes he was accompanied by a woman – rarely the same woman, but they all seemed from the same mould. He was alone tonight. There had been one with him two nights ago, a tall, young, raven-haired beauty in a miniskirt and thigh-high leather boots, dripping with bling. She looked, as they all did, as if she was being rented by the hour.
Clint always drove himself here in a black Mercedes SL55 AMG sports car, gave the valet-parking attendant a £10 tip when he arrived and the same when he left, regardless of whether he had won or lost. And he gave the same amount to the coat-check girl on arrival and on departure.
He never uttered more than a grunt or a monosyllabic word to anyone, and he always turned up with exactly the same amount of money, in cash. He bought his chips at the table, then at the end of the night handed them in at the downstairs cashier.
Although he bought £10,000 worth of chips, he bet only with £2,000 worth of them – but that was still ten times the amount of the average punter here. He understood the game and always bet big, but cautiously, on permutations that would give him small gains, but, equally, only small losses. Some nights he walked away up, some nights down. According to the casino’s computer, he lost an average each month of 10 per cent of his initial stake. So, £600 a week, £30,000 a year.
Which made him a very good customer indeed.
But Campbell Macaulay was curious. When time permitted, he liked to watch Clint from the CCTV room. The man was up to something and he could not figure it out. He did not seem out to scam the casino – if that was his intention, Macaulay reckoned, he would have done it a long time ago. And most scamming tended to be at the blackjack tables, which, throughout his career, had been most vulnerable to fraud from card counters and bent croupiers. Money laundering was Macaulay’s best guess about Clint. And if that was his game, it was not Macaulay’s problem. Nor did he want to risk losing a good customer.
Traditionally, casinos had long been about cash. And casino operators did not like to grill their customers about the provenance of their money.
All the same, he did once, dutifully, mention his name to the head of the local police licensing team, Sergeant Wauchope. It was more to protect his own back, in case Clint was up to something illicit that he had failed to spot, than out of civic duty. His first loyalty was, and always had been, to the casino company, Harrahs, the Las Vegas giant, which had always looked after him.
The name that Clint used on the guest register here was Joe Baker, so it had come as a surprise when the Licensing Officer, returning the favour, had given him the privileged information that the Mercedes was registered to one Vlad Cosmescu.
That name meant nothing to Campbell Macaulay. But it had, for some considerable time, been on Interpol’s radar. There was no warrant out for his arrest at this stage. He was merely listed on the files of several police forces as a person of interest.
20
Outside Bucharest’s Gara de Nord, the chauffeur closed the door of the Mercedes with a solid thud. And for a moment, cocooned in the sudden silence of the interior of the car, on the big, soft seat, breathing in the rich smells of leather, Simona felt safe. The man who had rescued her entered on the far side and closed his door with the same thud.
Her heart thudded too.
The chauffeur climbed in the front and started the engine. The interior lights dimmed, then went off completely. As the car rolled forward, there was a sharp clunk beside her, like a door lock clicking, and she wondered what it was. Then she felt a sudden panic. Who was this man?
Seated on the other side of the big armrest, he smiled at her and, in a gentle, reassuring voice, asked, ‘Are you OK?’
She nodded, bewildered by the events of the past few minutes.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.
She was still a little wary of him, and there was that smug expression she continued to dislike, but he did not look a bad person. There were strangers, rich strangers, who occasionally came up to you and gave you money or food. Not often, but it happened, the way it seemed to be happening now. She nodded.
‘What is your name?’
‘Simona,’ she replied.
‘What is your favourite food?’
She shrugged. She didn’t know what her favourite food was. No one had ever asked her before.
‘Do you like meat? Pork?’
She hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘Potatoes?’
She nodded.
‘Fried sausage?’
Again she nodded.
The man leaned forward, took a glass from a cabinet in front of him, poured whisky into it and gave it to her. She cupped the glass in her hand and took a long gulp. She stiffened in surprise at the deep, fiery sensation as it went down her throat. Then, moments later, she felt a pleasant, warm feeling ripple inside her. Stretching her legs out in front of her, she swallowed some more, draining the glass.
She had only drunk whisky once before, a bottle Romeo had stolen from a shop, but this tasted much better, much smoother.
The man’s mobile phone rang. He answered it, at the same time pouring more whisky into her glass, then began talking business to someone in America. She knew it was America because he asked how the weather was in New York. He was negotiating some kind of a deal and it sounded important. But occasionally he turned and smiled at her, and each time, with each gulp of whisky she took, she trusted him more.
The driver, who had said nothing, piloted the car in silence. His hair was cropped to a light fuzz and she suddenly saw, in the flare of oncoming headlights, the top of a tattoo. It was a snake, its tongue forked as if striking, rising out of the right side of his shirt collar, curling around his neck and up towards his chin. Outside, the lights of Bucharest glided past and rain pattered softly on the windows.
Simona had never been in a plane, but she wondered if this was what it felt like to fly. Music came from a speaker somewhere behind her head, a man singing. It sounded English or American, she could not tell which, a soft, rich voice. ‘I’ve got you under my skin’ was playing but she did not speak enough English to understand the meaning.
She looked out of the window, trying to get her bearings. They were passing the big place that Romeo told her the former president had built. He said it was called the People’s Palace, but she had never been inside it. It belonged to another world, another kind of people, just the way this car, the man in the back seat and the music all belon
ged to another world that was beyond her reach, and beyond her comprehension.
But the whisky made it all fine. She liked the man more and more, liked this car, liked the city that she had traipsed through, cold and hungry, just a short while ago, that was now gliding past. Maybe, just maybe, this man could help her to change her life.
After a short while, the car turned down a street she did not recognize, then slowed. In front of her, electric gates slid open and they drove through them, stopping in front of a tall house with a floodlit entrance.
The driver opened Simona’s door and took the empty glass from her hand. Feeling drunk and unsteady, she tottered out into the wind and rain. The man stepped out too, put an arm around her shoulder and gently encouraged her up stone steps to a front door, which was opened by a middle-aged woman dressed in a uniform, a maid, perhaps.
The house smelled of polish, like a museum.
‘Her name is Simona,’ the man said. ‘She needs food and then a hot bath.’
The woman smiled at her. A kind smile. ‘Follow me,’ she said. ‘Are you very hungry?’
Simona nodded.
They walked across a marble floor, along a hallway lined with fine paintings, statues and grand furniture, and into a huge, modern kitchen. A widescreen television on the wall was switched off. Simona stared around in wonder. She had never in her life been in a place so grand. It was like pictures she had seen in magazines and on the television in the homes she had once been in.
The woman told her to sit at a table, then moments later produced the finest plate of food Simona had ever seen. It was piled with roast pork, sausage, lard, cheese, pickled watermelon, tomatoes and potatoes, and accompanied by another plate with large, crusty bread rolls and a tumbler of Coca-Cola.
Simona ate with both hands, cramming the food into her mouth as fast as she could, scared that it would be taken away again before she had finished. The woman sat opposite her, watching her in silence, nodding encouragement occasionally.
‘You live on the streets?’ the woman asked at one point.
Simona nodded.
‘How is it?’
Speaking while chewing, she said, ‘We have a place under the heating pipe. It’s OK.’
‘But not enough food?’
Simona shook her head.
‘When did you last have a bath?’
Simona shrugged, chewing a thick piece of crackling. A bath? She could not remember. Not since the last time she had run away from the hostel. Not for years. She washed from bottles of water from the street pipes, when it was not too cold.
‘I have a beautiful bath waiting for you,’ the woman said.
When Simona finished the plateful, the woman brought her another, this time a huge bowl-shaped doughnut covered in melting vanilla ice cream. Simona gulped it down, ignoring the spoon on the dish beside it. She tore it apart with her fingers and crammed it into her mouth, eating it faster and faster, then scooped every last drop of the ice cream from the plate with her hand and licked it off. Her stomach ached, she was so full, and her head was swimming with the whisky. She started to feel a little queasy.
The woman stood up and beckoned. Wiping her hands on her jogging suit, Simona followed her up a grand, curved marble staircase, then along a wide corridor, lined with more fine paintings, and into a bathroom that simply stopped her in her tracks. She stared around in awe.
It was almost impossibly beautiful and magnificent – and vast. And equally almost impossible to believe she was here, standing in it.
On the ceiling were paintings of clouds and angels. The walls and the floor were all in black and white marble tiling, and in the centre was a huge, sunken tub, big enough for several people, overflowing with bubbles, and surrounded by nude male and female marble statues on plinths.
‘So beautiful,’ she whispered.
The woman smiled. ‘You are a lucky girl,’ she said. ‘Mr Lazarovici is a good man. He likes to help people. He is a very good man.’
She began helping Simona out of her clothes, until she was naked. Then she took her hand, steadying her as she stepped into the hot – deliciously hot, almost too hot – water and sank down. The woman eased her head back, until her hair was under the water, then up a little and rubbed in a deliciously scented shampoo. She rinsed it off, then put more shampoo on and rinsed that off too.
Simona lay there, luxuriating in it, staring at the angels above her, wondering if this was what it was like to be an angel, the whisky and the food making her relaxed and drowsy despite her queasiness. She was close to drifting away as the woman soaped her, every inch of her body, then rinsed her off. Then she helped her out of the bath, wrapping her in a vast soft white towel, drying her carefully and thoroughly, before leading her through into an en-suite bedroom that was even more magnificent.
The centrepiece was a huge, canopied two-poster bed. Simona stared at erotic paintings of nudes in gilt frames all around the walls. Some were single females or males, some were couples. She took in a man and a woman making love. Two women entwined in oral sex. A man sodomizing another. There were tall windows, up to the ceiling, with rich, swagged drapes. A chaise longue and other fine furnishings.
‘The room is OK for you?’ the woman asked.
Simona smiled and nodded.
The woman removed the towel and helped Simona, who was becoming increasingly sleepy, into the silky white sheets of the bed. Then she left the room.
Simona lay there, bathed in soft light from two huge table lamps, and began drifting into sleep. After some minutes, she was not sure how long, the door opened. She opened her eyes instantly.
The man who had brought her here, Mr Lazarovici, came in. He was naked beneath a black silk dressing gown that was open at the front and he had a massive erection below a large paunch.
As he walked towards the bed he said, ‘How are you, my beautiful angel of the Gara de Nord?’
She felt a prickle of anxiety through her haze of wooziness.
‘I’m great,’ she murmured. ‘Thank you so much for everything. I’m so tired.’
Then his erection was touching her left cheek. ‘Suck him,’ he said. His voice was cold and hard.
She looked at him, suddenly more awake and alert. There were dark rings around his eyes and menace in the inky blackness of his pupils.
‘Suck him,’ he repeated. ‘Aren’t you grateful to me? Don’t you want to show me your gratitude?’
He climbed on to the bed and manoeuvred himself so that his erection and his balls were right over her face. Afraid, she put up her right hand and held the shaft, then took him in her mouth tentatively. It tasted of stale sweat.
Then she felt a stinging blow on her cheek. ‘Suck him, bitch!’
She took him in deeper, closing her mouth around it, moving up and down the shaft.
‘Owww! You fucking stupid woman, you want me to take your teeth out or something?’
She stared at him, wild-eyed, sobering fast.
Suddenly he pushed her chin away, pulling himself free. ‘God, you ungrateful bitch!’ Then, wrenching her shoulders harshly, causing her to cry out in pain, he turned her over, right over, until her face was buried in the pillow, and for a moment she thought he intended to suffocate her.
Then she felt his fingers probing her vagina and thought she was going to throw up. She struggled to swallow the bile that rose in her throat. Then they moved from her vagina to her anus. Moments later she felt his erection trying to enter it.
Then, shrieking with pain, she felt him entering her. Further. Further.
‘No! Gogu!’ she screamed, almost choking on more bile.
Further.
She felt as if she was splitting in two.
Further.
She shook her head, her whole body, in desperation, trying to break free. He grabbed a clump of her wet hair and banged her face hard into the pillow, so hard she could not breathe. Then entered her further. Further still.
She was whimpering. Crying. Calling, ‘Gogu, G
ogu, Gogu!’ Struggling. Struggling against the pain. Struggling for breath.
‘Fuck you, ungrateful little bitch,’ he whispered into her ear.
She turned her face sideways, gulping down air, crying in agony.
‘Fuck you, bitch!’ he hissed.
His erection was getting even bigger. Busting her in half.
‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, bitch!’ He smashed his fist into the side of her face. ‘Fuck you, ungrateful little bitch from the gutters!’
He pushed even deeper inside her.
She screamed out again and he rammed her face hard against the pillow, holding her there, jamming her airways. She struggled, tried to lift her head, but he kept it down, hard. Panic seized her, through the pain. She shook, trying to move, but she was pinned, as if a spike had been rammed through her. She began shaking in the final throes of suffocation, her chest hurting so much she thought it would collapse. Then he jerked her head back and kissed her deeply on the lips, as she gulped in air, his air, from his lungs.
Then he broke his mouth away. ‘Tell me you like this. Tell me you are grateful to me.’ He held his face hard against her cheek. ‘Tell me you are grateful to me for saving you. Say it. Say you are grateful! Say thank you!’
‘I hate you!’ she gasped.
He slammed the ball of his thumb against her cheek. Then he smashed his fist into her eye socket. He paused for a second before gripping her hair with both hands, so hard she was sure he was going to rip it from her scalp. He continued holding her hair as she felt him ejaculating inside her. Then she vomited.
*
Some time later, Simona did not know when – she had lost all track of time – she was in the back of the big black car once more. The same music she recognized from before was playing, that same rich voice singing those words of a song that had no meaning for her: ‘I’ve got you under my skin’.
The same Bucharest night was gliding past the window. She hurt all over. The most terrible pains. Her face felt puffy. Her head hurt. When she had arrived at the Gara de Nord she had felt dirty all over. Now she felt clean all over, but dirty inside. Filthy.
