by Mark Burnell
'So it really is about oil, after all.'
'Yes. But at governmental level, not corporate level, as the conspiracy theorists would have you believe. The US wants – needs – a permanent foothold in the region. If a better alternative presented itself, the US would switch to it in a shot because they really don't give a fuck about anybody else.'
'You know, sometimes I find it hard to believe you're an American.'
'Why? Because I don't wave a little flag? Because I'm not a NASCAR dad? Don't patronize me, Stephanie.'
'Come on. You're hardly your average American.'
'I accept that. I've lived abroad almost half my life. I've travelled all over the world. I'm lucky I've never had to rely on Fox News for real news. But that doesn't invalidate me as an American.'
'Perhaps not.'
'Maybe I'm just not that mainstream. Maybe I'm just a little too … tangential.'
Just as she was. Was that it, then? Were they the same? Strip away the professional veneer – the business suit, the gun – and what was left? An evasive core.
'Tangential. That's a good word. Your relationship to Solaris – is that tangential too?'
'Now you mention it – yes, it is.'
'What is Solaris, exactly? You never really told me.'
'You never really asked.' He placed his mug on the side-table. 'Technically, it's an international law firm. Its head office is in Zurich and it has offices on five continents.'
'Technically?'
'Solaris is more than a law firm. Or less, if you're a purist. I'd say it was somewhere between a law firm and an investment house.'
'That trades in oil.'
'Not exclusively. Although in the United States, most Solaris work is concerned with oil. Around the world, it wears a lot of hats. It instigates and handles mergers and acquisitions. It's a lobbying organization. It's a firm of industry strategists. It's a firm of financiers. It's a law firm. Take your pick.'
'So what are you, then? A lawyer?'
'First patronizing, now aggressive. What next? No, I'm not a lawyer.'
She recalled that he hadn't answered the question at the Lancaster, either. At least he was consistent. 'A strategist?'
'No. And I'm not a financier, either. Not really. I'm just someone who puts people together.'
'That sounds amorphous.'
'I guess that's why I'm a consultant to Solaris and not an employee.'
'Yet you have a secretary.'
'Considering the amount of money I've generated for Solaris I'm probably entitled to a Gulfstream. But I'm happy to settle for Marie. She imposes order on a chaotic life.'
'I'd like to see her try now.'
'Good point,' Newman conceded.
'But your background's in oil, isn't it? That's what you said.'
'I worked for oil companies when I was younger. In the United States and the Middle East. And that's why Solaris approached me. Essentially, they wanted to exploit my contacts which were – and still are – pretty good.'
'And you didn't mind that? Being exploited?'
'Why would I? Contacts are currency, nothing more, nothing less. Trading them is like trading dollars for euros. It's a simple transaction where the exchange rate is determined by degrees of urgency.'
How true. Wasn't that how Stern had conducted himself? And if that principle remained true, where did that leave Natalya Ginzburg? She'd supplied information to Stephanie. Why? So that she could disappear, as Ginzburg had belatedly suggested?
Unlikely.
She took a pair of scissors and a newspaper to the bathroom. She closed the door and stripped, then ran a basin full of warm water. She ducked her head into it, making sure all her hair was immersed, then ran a comb through it. She looked at her dripping reflection and tried to decide where to make the cut. Shoulder or shorter?
Over the years, Petra had worn her hair shorter than Stephanie. Petra tried colours and styles including a total shave on one occasion – while Stephanie preferred the natural look; dark and thick with a few curls when she grew it long enough. In recent months, however, it had been Petra who'd had the long hair.
She cut it short and thought it hardened her features. That was good. She needed to be Petra now. Just for a day or two, until she was someone else. Then she could lay her to rest and contemplate the rest of her life.
She supposed it would feel peculiar to have only one life to lead. The last time she'd been in that position she'd been eighteen. Since then, she'd been partitioned. As an adult, she'd never lived any other way. She wondered how she'd adapt to reunification.
When she'd finished cutting, she wrapped the damp hair in newspaper and dropped it in the bin, then took a long shower, washing away the remainder of the cut.
In the bedroom she put on the clothes she'd laid out; a pair of Anna's olive combats, a black T-shirt, a turquoise cotton shirt, a pair of trainers, tennis socks and black underwear. Next to the clothes was the small Tumi bag containing Scheherazade Zahani's cash. In the hall was a thick jersey and a coat. And that was it. She didn't intend taking anything of Golitsyn's, apart from his cash. There was no point. Not any more. Best to travel as light as possible.
Newman was still on the sofa in the sitting room when she returned. He'd finished The Economist and was flicking through a copy of The New Yorker.
When he saw her he said, 'That's radical.'
She ran a hand through the damp cut. 'I'm supposed to be radical.'
'Then it suits you.'
'And if you met me in a bar? At the Lancaster, say?'
'It would still suit you. But not Claudia Calderon. She was a different kind of woman.'
'True. She was classy, sophisticated and elegant.'
'She was see-through.'
'In my line of work, see-through can be good.'
He smiled at her. 'Since you're leaving, I can say this: despite everything, I'm going to miss you, Stephanie.'
'No you're not. You're going to miss a version of me that exists only in your imagination. You don't know me.'
'I know what you're not. You're not the woman who got into my car.'
'Don't get misty, Robert. I'm not worth it.'
Quarter-past-nine. Stephanie entered the kitchen. Newman was standing by the island. Bloomberg was playing on the TV suspended over the slate top, stock prices scrolling across the bottom of the screen. He poured Glenlivet into a tumbler then offered her the bottle.
She shook her head. 'I don't drink and drive.'
'Drive?'
She smiled sweetly for him. 'I need your car, Robert.'
'Sure. Why not? Have I ever denied you anything?'
'I'm sure your insurance company will take pity on you.'
She put a pan of water on a dancing blue gas ring and opened a pack of spaghetti. Food for fuel. No point in leaving the sanctuary of Newman's apartment on anything less than a full tank. She took a bottle of virgin olive oil from the shelf to the right of the sink, laid it next to the thick board and began to chop an onion with a Sabatier carving knife.
He sat on one of the stools. 'Where will you go?'
'Tonight? Holland. I have contacts there. After that – who knows?'
She didn't want to lie to him. Not now. But it was a necessary piece of chicanery for both of them.
'I need a few hours, Robert.'
He was still watching the wafer-thin Loewe screen. 'How many?'
'As many as you can give me.'
'You want me to wait until morning?'
'Would you?'
He nodded, then peered into his glass. 'If you're about to leave, I might make some calls.'
Stephanie stiffened, then felt ashamed, anxious and confused in quick succession.
'Business calls,' Newman assured her. 'I mean, I could wait half an hour if you want. But I'd like to catch New York before four.'
'You've had all day to make the calls but you waited until now?'
'I said I wouldn't when you asked me not to.'
'You know wh
at I mean.'
'When I give my word, I keep it.'
'An honest man.'
'When I have to be.'
'And you felt you had to be even under duress?'
He looked at her. 'What duress?'
'Go ahead. It's your place again.'
She watched him leave the kitchen. For some reason, she expected him to turn round. To say something else. But he didn't.
She scraped the chopped onion into a pan with a little oil, then pushed a garlic clove through a pristine crusher, turning the pulp to paste. She added that to the onion, which began to sizzle. The water started to splutter. She salted it and put the spaghetti in.
Having ended so many other lives, now she was ending one of her own. She was already in limbo, stranded between Petra's world and a post-Petra world. When she left the apartment, Petra would begin to disintegrate. With every mile she put between her and Paris the greater that disintegration.
The future, huge and empty, was simultaneously seductive and alarming. She saw herself softer. She pictured herself alone. Or with friends she hadn't yet made. But she knew there would be parts of Petra that she'd never purge.
Which was why instinct cut in a moment before the sound.
It wasn't loud – she barely heard it over the kitchen TV – and it wasn't startling. A thud of some sort. Something knocked over. A common household noise.
But she knew.
It wasn't taught. Boyd had told her that much. It developed after all the teaching had finished. It developed with experience. There was no short cut.
The temptation was to call out, to locate Newman, but she resisted it. Nor did she quieten the TV. Where was the gun? In the sitting-room, which was the approximate source of the sound. She listened for further noise. Nothing.
She picked up the carving knife, then examined the other Sabatier blades in the block, selecting a paring knife as a second weapon.
The kitchen had two doors. The main door led into the hall. The other led to the utility room, which was an effective dead end. She couldn't cross the hall or go down it. Not if there was a gun out there.
She heard movement. A squeak. Rubber soles on stone, perhaps?
She grabbed the bottle of olive oil and poured it over the tiled floor. When the bottle was empty she retreated to the far corner of the kitchen. She took a look beneath the sink for disinfectant. None.
She tried the utility room and found a plastic bottle of bleach. And the fuse-box, mounted in a beige case over the ironing-board hook. She abandoned the bleach and turned off the power.
Eyes open, shapes forming, the Bloomberg commentators cut off in their prime. She edged out of the utility room. The only light in the kitchen came from the two blue gas rings. They whispered to her. She crouched by the island, her head just below the lip, the carving knife in one hand, the paring blade in the other.
In the new silence, the city outside was suddenly inside; cars cruising along quai d'Orléans, sirens in the distance, muffled music from a passing boat. And a trace of movement entering the kitchen.
The slip sounded like a squelch. A male voice grunted. The body hit the ground, the gun discharged. A flash, a muted percussive thump – there's a silencer attached – and the slap of a bullet biting into the wall.
She was moving. And so was the intruder. Unbelievably quick, already up on one knee, the gun coming round towards her. The second shot flew so close to her she could feel it part the air beside her left shoulder. She lashed out with a foot, knocking the weapon from his grip. Then she hurled herself towards him, both blades forward. And missed.
He moved like a spirit, vanishing in a moment, reforming in another place an instant later. In the blue darkness, she caught a glint of light on steel. A dagger, longer than her carving knife, twice as broad, both edges serrated.
He was a big man. Six-three, six-four, trim, all in black, including the balaclava. He jabbed the dagger at her, trying to suck her into a strike. She held back, holding the carving knife to the fore, keeping the paring knife to the rear for close work.
When his right heel hit olive oil again, he skidded, losing his balance. Stephanie surged forward and he moved inside, lashing at her. She twisted to avoid the knife, losing her footing in the process. Her momentum carried her into him.
They both lost a blade in the fall, leaving Stephanie with the paring knife. She thrust it at him but he parried with his forearm, then grabbed her left wrist, crushing it in his hand. His free fist landed a series of staccato punches to her body, each blow powerful enough to send a shudder right through her.
She leaned over and bit the hand gripping her wrist as violently as she could, her teeth sawing through glove, skin and sinew. His grip loosened for a moment. Which was all it took to throw herself – her whole body behind the movement – and head-butt him in the face.
Beneath the black balaclava, his nose buckled. It sounded like footfall on gravel. Momentarily stunned, he allowed Stephanie a little space. She lashed backwards with her elbow, catching him full in the mouth. She crawled clear and gathered the carving knife. He rolled over, retrieved his dagger and sprang to his feet. He plunged, she swivelled. The tip of his blade smacked against slate and squealed across the worktop.
In the flickering blue gas-light, she noticed a circular wet patch forming just beneath the balaclava's eye-slits. He came at her again, one knife being no disadvantage to her two. There was a dazzle of steel in front of her. She deflected, metal biting metal, then tried a jab of her own with the paring knife. He swatted it away with his left arm. It skittered across the floor.
The force of the backhand unbalanced her again. He pitched forwards once more. She tried to spin away but was too clumsy and slow. She felt the contact ripple through her left side, the knife so sharp it cut through material and flesh without significant protest.
A sticky wet heat gripped her left side.
The next thrust missed but he was close enough to kick her in the knee. Down she went, her wrist smacking the corner of the worktop, the carving knife spiralling into the dark.
He lunged at her. She scrambled backwards, ignoring the pain in the joint, the soles of her shoes repelling two knife strikes. He was stepping through the blood she was leaving on the floor, closing in on his target, the arc of his blade swinging ever closer, his confidence on the rise.
Just too much.
She stopped retreating. He stepped forward. She kicked up with all her force, catching him in the testicles with enough power to lift him off the ground.
She didn't wait for the reaction but heard the wheeze. She dragged herself to standing. The knives were out of reach. He over-rode his pain and advanced. Which was when she heaved the pan of boiling water at him.
He howled. Stephanie reached for the knife block on the other side of the island and grabbed the first handle she could. A meat cleaver.
Slower now, less nimble, he was coming at her again. She stepped to one side, wrapped both hands around the handle and swung it into him, catching him on his right flank, just below the ribs, the force of her blow barging him into the sink. She let go, leaving the blade embedded. He staggered, slipped on her blood, and fell.
She saw his gun under the island beside the swing-bin. When she bent down to retrieve it she felt the full protest of the tear in her own side.
A Heckler & Koch USP with a sound suppressor. The anti-corrosion finish over the synthetic polymer frame gave the gun a silvery gloss in the half-light. She pointed it at the back of his head and squeezed the trigger.
But only a little. She needed him alive. For a while, anyway.
Stephanie kicked his dagger away, stepped over his prostrate body, grabbed a fistful of balaclava and yanked it off.
A large square head emerged. Ruddy skin, short blonde hair, not entirely unattractive at first glance, if one discounted the rhubarb crumble nose. And not unfamiliar, either.
'Grotius,' she whispered. 'Lance Grotius.'
I flip the switch on the fuse-box. Th
e lights come on, the Bloomberg broadcast resumes. Grotius is a mess but his attitude remains intact. Somehow he manages a smile through a parade of broken teeth and steaming spaghetti.
'Hey, Petra,' he gurgles. 'Long time, no see. We could still have that drink, if you want.'
'Drink? That wasn't what you promised me, Lance.'
A former soldier with the South African Army, Grotius was born to fight. He served in Namibia and Angola before leaving South Africa for a life of freelance violence; Sierra Leone, the DRC, Somalia, the Balkans.
We met at a bar in Cyprus – the Mistral – more than a year ago now, not long after my reincarnation. Cheap drinks, cheap lighting, the rotor-blades doing nothing to stir the humid heat. I was there to meet three Russian human-traffickers.
The second thing Grotius said to me was: 'My name's Lance.' The first thing he said to me was: 'My God, man, you're beautiful.'
It's hard to imagine how those words could sound so ugly. But even now, the memory of them repulses me. Which makes the task ahead a little easier. His guttural, machine-gun accent, the waft of body odour beneath cheap aftershave, the hand he pressed on to one thigh, then the other, then between – I've forgotten none of it.
The third thing he said to me was: 'Can you guess why they call me Lance?'
I tried to head him off at the pass. 'Because you work for free?'
Confused, he frowned, his brow casting his eyes into shadow.
Over-excited, lacking any hint of social restraint, he pawed me continually. At first, he was merely persistent. Later, his bloodstream infected with alcohol, he became insistent. At one point, he pulled me close to him, kissed my neck, then tongued my ear before whispering to me, 'One more drink then I'm going to take you back to my place. I want you now. Let me show you.' Beneath the table, he took my hand and guided it to his stiffening crotch.
'You'll cry,' he promised me.
I couldn't react violently, not with the Russians at the table. But when Grotius staggered away from us in search of the urinals, I left. Back in my hotel I scrubbed my skin raw in the shower; a narrow escape and I still felt contaminated. Later, I realized why. It wasn't me. It was the thought of those anonymous others. The ones who must have been in the same position. The ones who hadn't got away. The ones who'd had no choice.
