Prince Hunter

by Garrett Russell

  ‘There,’ Grivas said eventually. ‘Coming down the steps with some others now. The green dress.’

  Linda looked around, she hoped naturally and casually, and her heart jumped.

  ‘Oh shit,’ she thought to herself. ‘This is going to be harder than I ever imagined.’

  Olga Tsenyenko looked not only normal, she looked downright conservative. Her light woollen dress was heavily tailored, with buttons to the neck and long sleeves. She wore a single string of cultured pearls and a wristwatch. Her shoes were the mid heel style favoured by airline stewardesses, both pretty and practical. She had a fine nose and high Slavic cheek bones. Her jaw was fine, too, finishing in a delicately pointed chin. Her hair was blonde, cut to hang straight to her shoulders and parted to a fringe that just brushed over her left eyebrow. She was slim, a fraction taller than Linda and about the same weight, and Linda guessed her age to be on the right side of 30. She moved with a grace that was nothing but feminine, head high and proud as she scanned the room for familiar faces.

  ‘She’s not exactly what you’d call butch,’ Linda said as she turned back to Grivas and took a gulp of her drink.

  ‘Shush. She’s seen me. She’s coming over.’ He waved a greeting across Linda’s shoulder as he spoke.

  ‘Raoul, darling,’ said Olga Tsenyenko in English, her voice a husky growl, thick with accent. Like Dietrich, thought Linda.

  ‘I saw you come in.’ Grivas smiled. ‘I took the liberty of ordering you a drink. Vodka, as always.’

  ‘So, we can still be friends,’ she smiled back. ‘Now that we understand each other’s point of view.’

  ‘And your friends?’ Grivas moved on smoothly. He gestured to the two women Olga had arrived with and who had found a table not far away by the edge of the dance floor. Linda could feel their bitchy stares boring holes into the back of her neck.

  ‘Muchas gracias, mi amigo. They will take whisky and soda. It will keep them happy over there while you introduce me to your charming companion.’

  It happened just the way Grivas had said it would.

  Linda forced a coquettish smile as Olga’s eyes wandered over her figure. Grivas spun the story of difficulties with her husband, her yearning for affection, mixed up sexual feelings, all convincingly delivered and eagerly received over another couple of drinks.

  He did it so well that all Linda had to do was to look shy. And that was easy. The accompanying bashfulness involved no acting at all.

  She drank some more, now sipping slowly. Her nerves were sufficiently anaesthetised by alcohol for her not to jump when Olga first touched her waist. By this time the other two women were totally forgotten. Linda saw them across Olga’s shoulder, dancing close together.

  The touching was subtle at first, a gentle pat of empathy as Grivas wove his story. Then it became little cuddles of encouragement, like footballers after a goal. Then probing, becoming more sensual, fingers lingering on Linda’s bare skin. Once she panicked when she felt goose bumps crawl over her back. ‘You can’t blow it now,’ she sternly thought to herself, but Olga seemed only to be excited by the tension.

  Grivas recognised the signals. He threw Linda a cue by suggesting that she and Olga could have more of a talk. Girl to girl, somewhere quieter. Linda asked Olga to share coffee with her back at her apartment.

  The two of them came out of the Zulu Club into the chill air of midnight and Linda instantly shivered.

  ‘You’re frozen,’ said Olga as they slid thigh to thigh into the back seat of a cab. ‘Give the driver your address and I’ll give you a little hug to warm you up.’

  Linda’s heart jumped a beat. Her mind snapped to a sudden, chilling awareness from the faintly boozy fog she had been in. She couldn’t tell the driver where to go. She didn’t know the address.

  It was the one detail they had forgotten. No one had told her the name of the building nor its street number nor even the name of the street. There had been no need to know, she had always been driven there by Grivas or one of his men.

  Her mind raced furiously. ‘Olivos,’ she slurred, exaggerating the genuine effect in her voice that she had been aware of since the drink before last. ‘I’ll show you where when we get there.’

  As the driver racked his meter flag down and crunched into first gear, she carried the boozy swoon act further. She fell back on the seat against Olga’s shoulder, desperately trying to visualise the approaches to Hawker’s home. Then she saw her way out.

  ‘Stop!’ she screamed. ‘There’s Raoul. I must see him. I didn’t say thanks to him for being so kind to me.’

  Grivas had just appeared around the corner from the alley of the Zulu Club. He had with him a young stud who had fashionably slicked black hair and wore a black flying jacket over his jeans. Linda sprawled across Olga’s lap, reached for the door handle and pulled herself untidily out into the street.

  ‘Raoul, my friend!’ she yelled drunkenly and staggered across the sidewalk towards the two men. Grivas stepped fast towards her, alarmed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he hissed under his breath as she let her head loll towards his shoulder.

  ‘The address,’ she breathed. ‘Quickly, tell me the apartment address.’ And smothered his face in sloppy kisses.

  ‘Mendoza 98.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you again!’ she called aloud and skipped back to the door of the cab, which Olga held open with startled amusement.

  Twenty minutes later they were in bed together.

  Linda had poured them each a stiff vodka and let Olga lead her into the bedroom, glasses in hand. She sifted past Ravel’s Bolero which Sullivan had managed to leave at the top of a small pile of albums on the shelf, trying hard to avoid a sharp sideways glance in the direction of the wardrobe, and selected a Deutsche Grammophon recording of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. As the music began, she fell down on the bed to accept Olga’s gestured invitation to massage her back.

  Olga was a good masseuse. Linda was surprised to feel the tension leaving her muscles, and then it all started to happen very fast.

  Olga slipped Linda’s dress up over her shoulders and unclipped the back of her bra. She kissed the back of Linda’s neck, still working gently and smoothly with her hands.

  Linda rolled over and slipped the bra and dress off over her head with a small moan of what she hoped would sound like pleasure. All she could think of was Sullivan’s eye peering down the viewfinder of a camera at her bare nipples. Olga kissed her again on the neck, her hands now caressing her breasts, but not demanding in the way a man would be. She toyed with Linda’s nipple, bringing it to plump hardness, but without insistence. She seemed to be backing off, too gentle, anxious to go at Linda’s pace rather than her own.

  ‘Let’s get it over with,’ thought Linda. She reached up and unzipped Olga’s dress.

  In the dark closeness of the closet, Hawker heard Sullivan’s sharp intake of breath when Olga slipped out of her dress and unclipped her own bra. Her breasts were revealed like two small, firm ripe fruit. Her body was athletic, lean and strangely hard. When she moved, it was with a masculine hint of muscle under the skin, though the movement itself was lithe and feline. She could have been a gymnast, the way her muscularity emphasised the femininity of her form. Hawker felt Sullivan’s elbow nudge him as Olga kissed and fondled Linda’s breasts. The bastard was enjoying it!

  Hawker could imagine Sullivan’s face, lost in the darkness not two feet away from his own. It would be fixed in a gaping leer, the leer he had seen a hundred times before in strip clubs from Reconquista to Soho. And he felt the same revulsion he had felt so often before. Not at the women, but at the blank faces of the voyeurs. And at himself for being part of it. The scene had always been sordid enough when he was young and drunk and surrounded by back slapping buddies. Now he was cold sober and watching a woman whose younger body he once knew as well as his own. His impulse when the music announced the start of this action had been to tear through the clothes on their racks and stop the whole thing. But he knew
he could not. He now only wished that he could close his eyes to it all and close his ears to Sullivan’s low grunts of approval every time the women moved on the bed. But Hawker knew he could not do that either. Sullivan had given him the second camera to use, the one mounted with a 40mm wide angle lens that gave a view of the whole scene on and around the bed. He had to keep looking and keep shooting and, worst of all, he felt himself growing hard at the sight of the women in spite of his better instincts.

  The women embraced heavily now, wriggling out of their briefs and stockings with their bellies pressed close together. Linda could feel Olga’s breathing becoming shorter. Her petting became faster, more insistent, and Linda forced herself to drop any resistance.

  Olga’s hand ran across her right breast, down her stomach and brushed lightly, teasingly, for a long moment on the small patch of ginger hair. Then it slid down to seek the softness between her legs.

  Linda let out a low moan and started to writhe under Olga’s probing touch. This was the critical moment. She arched her back and, putting her hands up to Olga’s face, gently pulled her head away from her own breasts and down past her stomach. Olga understood the invitation well. She moved down and began to work her tongue, so knowingly, so expertly that Linda could feel the first wave of pleasure in spite of herself.

  Olga swung herself around, brought her knees up and put them on the bed either side of Linda’s waist. She dropped onto her haunches, thrusting her own pink moistness towards Linda’s face.

  ‘No, I’m not ready for that. Not yet,’ Linda moaned, and she writhed away, rolling away from under Olga until her back arched over the foot of the bed. This was the position she had choreographed in her mind, with Olga’s face clearly visible from the foot of the bed. It was precisely the shot Sullivan wanted.

  Neither Sullivan nor Hawker took his eye away from the viewfinder. They were both totally absorbed now, their fingers pressing the shutter button and winding the film forward in a rhythm that matched Olga and Linda’s.

  ‘Oh my God!’ called Linda. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’ And her face flushed with pleasure as her mind screamed its indignance.

  Olga brought Linda to climax twice more, then climaxed herself, caressing and cuddling Linda all the while. She wanted more, but Linda shrank away, cool and remote. She said she was confused, she needed desperately to be alone, and Olga appeared to believe her. And why not? This time it was the truth.

  They finished their glasses of vodka naked together on the bed, the ice in Linda’s glass tinkling rapidly in her shaking hand.

  They dressed separately, Olga into her plain white underwear and dress, Linda in a light silk kimono she used as an excuse not to go down to the street while Olga waited for a taxi.

  Linda sat at the window in the living room looking down to the street. Olga stood in the pool of light from the apartment entrance, looking back up at her. When the cab came, she blew a kiss up to the window before disappearing into the darkness of the back seat.

  Linda watched the cab’s yellow roof light flick off as it started down the street. She watched it go past a dark blue Falcon parked where Hawker had pointed out a different Falcon earlier that same day and watched the red glow of its taillights fade away around the corner and into the next street. Only when the cab had gone from her sight for a full five minutes did she turn back to the room and call out towards the bedroom door.

  ‘It’s all clear. You can come out now.’

  Sullivan burst out of the wardrobe with a wild Irish whoop. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, his face fixed in a smutty leer.

  ‘Magnificent. Bloody magnificent,’ he whooped as he came out to the living room, poured himself a large whisky and, holding the glass up in a toast to Linda. ‘If you didn’t say otherwise, lass, I’d have bet you’ve done it with a woman before. Mag-fucking-nificent!’

  Linda pulled the kimono closer around herself. She could feel the skin at the base of her neck prickling against the silk.

  Hawker came out of the bedroom, slowly, as if he were walking on eggs. He carried both Pentax cameras and put them down on the sideboard very carefully, studiously avoiding Linda’s eyes. He poured himself a rum and another vodka, straight, for her.

  ‘Well done,’ he said softly. ‘We could not have expected better.’

  When she took the proffered glass, her hand was still shaking so much that she spilled some of the vodka. She looked down at the damp patch on the kimono where the spilled liquor made the silk cling to the shape of her breast. When she looked up, her bottom lip was quivering.

  She burst into tears and threw herself, her body racked with long heaving sobs, into the refuge of Hawker’s arms.

  Saturday 15 May 1982

  Linda Kelly looked out from the restaurant, across the sweeping lawns of the park at Palermo towards the stands of the Hipodromo in the distance. Crowds were beginning to gather at the gates for the afternoon’s horse racing. There were thousands of people, like ants around the huge walls of the imposing stadium, despite the leaden clouds that rolled overhead.

  Winter was approaching fast. The temperature today was several degrees down from the day before. The whole city was huddled under the grey cloak of the sky and icy winds that blew directly out of the darkness of the Antarctic.

  The day matched Linda’s mood perfectly. She still nursed a headache from last night’s drinking. She was tired and strained by the tension that had not let up enough to let her sleep more than a few fitful descents into darkness. And Olga Tsenyenko was over a quarter of an hour late.

  They had arranged this lunch meeting before Olga left the apartment last night. Rather, Linda had arranged it exactly to Grivas’ briefing. Palermo is a neighbouring suburb to Olivos, a place where a restaurant would be an easy and natural choice for Linda. More importantly, this restaurant had high-backed booth seating, where intimate matters could be discussed in privacy.

  Linda was sitting in a booth that gave her a view of the front door, and through the plate glass of the façade, the park outside.

  Grivas was alone in the booth behind her, hidden from view and waiting impatiently for Olga’s arrival. On the banquette seat beside him sat an A4 size brown envelope packed with a small wad of black and white photographic prints. Linda had not seen the prints. She had no desire to ever see them. She had, however, a good idea of how explicitly good they were from the excited looks on Sullivan’s and Hawker’s faces when they came out of the darkroom earlier this morning.

  The rest of the morning waiting for the time to leave for Palermo had been hell. Apart from Linda’s headache and Sullivan’s leery glances at her, there had been Kreuzer and O’Hara to contend with. They were peeved that something was going on without them. They had been left completely out of it by immediate agreement between Grivas and Hawker on Thursday morning, and they were now dangerously restless. A man management problem for Hawker, but a sideshow for Linda that she was emotionally unprepared to handle.

  She was about to order a second mineral water when Olga Tsenyenko breezed through the front door.

  Linda stood up and waved, the signal she had arranged with Grivas. Olga waved brightly back and came over at an eager trot. She kissed Linda on both cheeks in the friendly way that is quite habitual and acceptable in any Latin country. What no one else in the restaurant saw, however, was the way her hand squeezed Linda’s waist as she brushed past, putting her handbag down.

  Fortunately, a waiter bustled over with menus as soon as they sat down facing each other across the table, so Linda was not forced to maintain any intimate chit chat before Grivas appeared around the corner of the booth. He slid onto the seat beside Olga, effectively blocking her path of escape, and beamed his oily smile.

  Olga was at first surprised, then suspicious.

  ‘Raoul! This is a pleasing coincidence, is it not?’ she said, and when Linda abruptly stood up, ‘Or is it?’

  ‘Adios, Miss Tsenyenko,’ Linda had already turned away before she finished pronouncing the name
and was on her way to the door.

  ‘I have a small gift for you,’ she heard Grivas say as she walked away. ‘It’s something to get us back to the matter you refused to talk about with me the other day.’

  Linda found the Falcon with Grivas’ driver and a second goon in it parked by the kerb almost directly outside the restaurant. She climbed in the back and waited.

  After a quarter of an hour Olga Tsenyenko stormed out through the door. She looked pale and terrified. Her cheeks were smeared with tears and she clutched the brown envelope inside her jacket.

  She saw Linda in the car and her face turned ugly with hatred. She strode over, grabbing for the rear door handle. But the thug in the front seat was too quick for her. He reached back and slammed the lock button down in one lightning stroke. Olga slammed her knee into the locked door with a force that rocked the car on its springs, recoiled, and bent back to spit on the window. She screamed in Russian loud enough for Linda to hear through the glass, although the only word she understood was “Americanski.” It was enough to set Linda shivering as Olga stormed away down the street towards the Bartolome Mitre subway station. The smear of her spit ran down the window and onto the Falcon’s door.

  The heavy plate glass door of the restaurant was still swinging in Olga’s wake when Grivas came out and slid into the car beside Linda.

  ‘Mission accomplished,’ he said with a grim smile. ‘We will have the information by this time tomorrow.’

  Sunday 16 May 1982

  It was two in the morning. Paul Hawker could not sleep.

  He was in his bunk at the Naval School of Engineering trying to recreate in his mind the flight deck of HMS Invincible and coming up only with visions of Anne and Elizabeth. He saw them more now because he had nothing else to do. He was a soldier waiting for action and he knew how destructive this dead time can be. It was beginning to tell on them all, which worried him greatly in a force of such low discipline to begin with.