“Karla… Karla is beautiful.” His expression was slightly misty-eyed. “She is small, but… fierce, determined. There’s a fire to her—”
“Thank you, Mister Kropp. Your poetic eloquence is very touching, but I’d prefer something a little more concrete. Do you have a picture of her?”
Maarten nodded. “On my phone,” he replied. He looked on the bedside table and then began to pat down his clothes. “Could you check my jacket?” he asked Lars pathetically.
Seeing the jacket crumpled in a heap on the floor, Lars picked it up and frisked the pockets. There was a wallet, containing cards and a few notes, as well as a passport—but no phone.
“It’s not here,” he said.
At this, Maarten’s face showed signs of panic. “It must be!” he moaned. “I need it. I had it on me. I knew she was at Schiphol, waiting for the plane and then—” Suddenly he clammed shut, looking at Lars guiltily.
“What is it, Maarten?” asked Lars softly. “What did you do?”
“I… I loaded something on her phone, so… I could track her.” Maarten hung his head guiltily.
This made Lars chuckle. “So, you didn’t trust Ms Pietersen after all,” he remarked. “Perhaps you’re a wiser man than you look.”
“No, it wasn’t like that,” Maarten began to protest defensively. “She didn’t lie to me! She wouldn’t!” It was clear to Lars now that the man facing him would be immune to reason, at least for the time being, so he decided to pursue a different route. It suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t threatened to torture Maarten even once. Oh well, he told himself, I can save that for later.
“What does Karla look like?” he asked, forcing his voice to resemble what he assumed was kindness. “I can help you find her—for her sake, as well as yours.”
“S-she has red, red hair, the most beautiful you can imagine.” Maarten’s lips looked as though he would begin blubbering. “Green eyes, like emeralds. She’s short, much shorter than you, and very beautiful. You would recognise her immediately if you saw her.”
Lars sighed. That was only mildly helpful. But this phone, if he could locate that then his task would be so much easier.
“Where’s your phone, Maarten? Try to remember.”
“I was downstairs, in the bar. I was… I was nervous, and drinking heavily. I… I remember talking to someone, a man. He was… he was listening and I was telling him all my problems. I was very drunk. We… we came back to my room, I think.” Sweating, Maarten passed a hand across his face. “I don’t really remember.”
Something occurred to the Norwegian. Reaching into his pocket, Lars retrieved a photograph. “Did he look anything like this?” The photograph was a blown up, slightly grainy picture of an engineer wearing a cap.
Maarten stared at it, trying to focus his eyes. “I don’t know. The hat gets in the way, so I can’t really…” He stopped speaking and then looked up at Lars sharply. “Who is this?” he asked.
“This is Frank Robeson. Your employers believe he was responsible for breaking into Boeckman’s and stealing the Wallenstein.”
“The engineer,” Maarten breathed, his face suddenly flushed and angry.
“You know this man?”
Maarten nodded. “I bumped into him yesterday morning. He was working at Boeckman’s.” He gave a hollow, bitter laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“I was too drunk and he had his hair different—his clothes.” Maarten shrugged. “This was the man I met in the bar. Find him, and you’ll find my phone and Karla.”
“Well, I’m sure that is true.” Lars was slightly confused for a moment, frowning as he attempted to piece together what had happened. “Now, about yesterday—”
“No!” Maarten’s voice made Lars lift his head and stare at the other man. The weak, frightened face was transfixed now, the eyes betraying a surprising steeliness. “No more questions,” he said. “We need to find Karla. Now.”
“We can do that in a while,” Lars said, attempting to hide his irritability and also making a show of waving his gun as he motioned in a calming gesture.
“No, now.” Maarten stared at the gun but he seemed suddenly implacable. Perhaps Lars was going to have to torture him after all. Then the next statement astonished him even more.
“If this man has found her, Karla’s in danger. I won’t say anything until we find her. When we do, you can have the Wallenstein, anything. I just want to know that she’s safe.”
Lars lowered his gun, letting it rest on his knee while he stroked his chin with the other hand. This Maarten Kropp was a mass of contradictions, but it was also becoming clear that he believed himself to be genuinely in love with this Karla Pietersen, whoever she was. Attempting to piece things together, Lars was confused but one thing was clear: the man pretending to be Frank Robeson had been here recently. Lars suspected that he and this Pietersen woman were probably involved in an elaborate scam, but there were too many loose ends. However, Maarten was right about one thing: Robeson almost certainly had Maarten’s phone and the trail would grow cold if he left it too long. He needed to find Robeson, and quickly.
Standing, he pointed his gun at Maarten in an almost perfunctory manner. A glimmer of fear crossed the gem cutter’s face.
“Get up,” Lars told him.
“W-where are we going?”
“Somewhere safe. I’ll need to talk to you again, and I want to be sure I can find you. After I’ve dealt with you, then I’ll find your precious Ms Pietersen and this Frank Robeson.”
Chapter Nine: Karla
Two days had passed since Karla had woken up in the hotel just outside Heathrow. Her tears and self pity had lasted less than twenty minutes, quickly being replaced by a fierce determination.
No-one—no-one—had ever gotten the better of her before. That bastard had taken something that was hers, something that she had planned and schemed and worked for months to own. First and foremost she wanted revenge.
Which was why she was now standing in a casino just off Mayfair, dressed in, for her, a fairly conservative black dress that displayed her as not much more than the typical eye candy for such a place. The bra she was wearing—a heavy-duty sports number—flattened her figure somewhat, and her hair was dyed the same colour as her dress. The blue contact lenses were slightly irritating, but she had spent a great deal of time preparing this disguise. Despite the seriousness of it all, she couldn’t resist adding a slight Marlon Brando touch, cotton wool padding out her cheeks a little. I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t fucking refuse.
Not that her days had been spent playing dressing up games. After she’d woken up in that despicable hotel room, she’d gone straight to Maarten’s room. This time there could be no doubt that someone had been there: the lock to the door was broken and the bed showed signs of having been slept in, while she had located Maarten’s suitcase in the wardrobe, most of his clothes hung up neatly above it. What the hell had that slimeball done to Maarten? If anyone was going to push the little Dutch guy around, it was going to be her.
She’d called in a lot of favours that day, not resting as she made contact with people who knew people who knew people. In the end, her best lead had been the Madame of a brothel in Kensington. When she described the man who had tricked her, the woman—who called herself Jasmine LaCroix (though Karla knew that her real name was Monica Prendergast)—raised her eyes and whistled.
“So he got to you as well, did he, chéri?” Jasmine liked to affect a French demeanour which she thought classy, but she could never quite disguise a faint trace of her original Croydon accent. “I never thought you’d be the type to fall for his charms, though he is hard to resist.”
It turned out his name was Hayden Carter, though of course he went under a long list of other pseudonyms. Karla did wonder from time to time if she’d ever live the kind of life where people stayed with the name they’d been born with, but that didn’t matter much now. Apparently he’d had a privileged upbringing, and was not th
e kind she’d have usually expected to turn to a life of crime other than the safe, white-collar type for which people didn’t normally go to prison. As Jasmine told it, however, this Hayden Carter was something of an adrenaline junkie: supremely charismatic, devastatingly charming, incredibly handsome, thoroughly unscrupulous and infinitely manipulative, under other circumstances he would have been Karla’s type. For now, however, she wanted his blood—as well as various other parts of his anatomy sliced up and sealed in a range of airtight jars.
In addition to a series of crimes (a couple of which even Karla had to admit were quite impressive), none of which could ever be pinned on him, he was well known as a gambler, making—and sometimes losing—a fortune at the tables. Which was why she was here now. She’d had a tip off that Hayden was enjoying himself as a high roller, celebrating something which already had a number of people whispering. It seemed that he’d never placed much stock in the notion that discretion was the better part of valour.
It had been simplicity itself to sweet-talk her way into the casino. Actually, once inside she realised that she didn’t even need to make the effort. Although she’d not dressed too ostentatiously, it seemed that the main function of women in this place—other than a few, determined female gamblers—was to serve as a pussy-reward for the winners. She’d assumed it would be men only who took such a view, but after being goosed by a leering woman in her mid-fifties she decided to try a slightly different tactic.
To try and avoid too much attention, Karla grabbed a tray and pretended to be one of the waitresses serving drinks to the seething multitude at the tables. She wasn’t really in the right provocative get-up, but it didn’t matter. Even in disguise there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that a woman so beautiful had any other role other than to serve men. Occasionally, living and working among sexist pigs had its uses.
It was easy to tell the serious gamblers. They barely flickered an eye at her when she went by, their gaze fixed firmly on the cards or roulette wheels before them. In its own way, that interested Karla: what kind of existence was it where something like this was so all-consuming that even sex played second fiddle? Then she remembered the Wallenstein and, her blood rising inside her, she kind of understood.
“Hey, sexy, why don’t you come and sit on my lap for a while?”
She glanced sideways. Some city type in his early forties, his tie askew and his suit looking nearly as worse for wear as his face. Beside him a couple of his friends were laughing and ogling her. She went to move on but he grabbed her skirt.
“Come on, baby,” he slurred. “Sit on this. You won’t regret it. I got money!”
She sighed. Uncle Coilin had taught her a few useful tricks back in the day and she wasn’t in the slightest bit scared. Hell, even without the tray in her hand she could have taken this loser down. But that would have drawn too much attention. Instead she leaned over, a sweet smile on her face.
“The only way I’m going to sit on that is if you turn your chair over and ram it so far up your arse it comes through your crotch.” She made no attempt to hide her Irish accent. “I mean, let’s face it, it’s the only way I’m going to get any pleasure out of anything you’ve got between your legs.”
His friends began to laugh at this but city boy’s face turned into an even uglier snarl, something Karla had not considered possible. “You fucking bitch!” he hissed. “When I tell you to do something, you better fucking do it.”
He went to grab her but she deftly whipped up her hand and, with a subtle twist of the wrist too quick for him to see, grabbed hold of his little finger and yanked it back almost to breaking point. He yelped in pain, his drunken eyes suddenly focussing on her.
“Of course, I could be wrong,” she told him, her other hand weighing up the tray and preparing to smash him across the face if necessary. “It could be you’re hung like a donkey as well as having the face of one. But you know what? I’m a little bit busy right now.”
“Hey!” One of city boy’s friends had drunkenly started to realise that Karla was following a different script. “Let go of him.”
“Of course, sir!” Karla smiled sweetly and released her captive’s pinky, which he immediately shot down protectively into his lap, cradling it with his other hand and looking up at her fearfully. “Well, gentlemen, I must say it’s been a pleasure. Now, if you’d like a drink, I’d kindly suggest you fuck off to the bar and get yourselves one.”
“This isn’t on, not at all!” city boy began to grumble. “I’m going to complain to the management!”
“You do that.” Karla’s smile was fixed to her face. “In the meantime please don’t mistake me for someone who gives a fuck.” As she began to walk away, she glanced back over her shoulder. “It must be such a shame to come to a place like this and find out that it’s the Arabs and Russians who have all the real dough.”
Her distraction over, Karla tried to lose herself among the tables and keep a low profile for a while. She was, she reminded herself, looking for someone rather than being the centre of attention. She’d not had much sleep for a while and her nerves were stretching into long threads of cheese wire. Too many false moves and she’d end up slicing herself into a million pieces.
At last she saw him. Hayden Carter. She was glad she knew his real name. If she ever had to repeat the foul, disgusting, loathsome word “Simon” to herself ever again she would shrivel up into a knot of cantankerous venom. He was laughing loudly, seated at a table with two women who couldn’t have looked more like high-class hookers if they’d had their rates displayed in large, blinking neon lights above their heads.
That disappointed Karla, just as the sight of him made her heart leap up into her throat, her chest constricting momentarily. That handsome, charming, manipulative son of a bitch was just like all men in the end. Karla had made a very good career for herself taking advantage of precisely that fact, that in the end all men couldn’t think much further than the ends of their dicks, but for a while she had secretly hoped that Hayden Carter would be someone different.
After all, if Hayden Carter only thought with his dick, what did that mean for her? After all, he was the one who’d beaten her.
She studied him for a while, like a lioness watching her prey. There was that same almost black hair, his eyes glittering blue as he pushed chips into the centre of the table. The atmosphere around him was carnival—if this guy was as good a card sharp as people said, he really needed to work at his poker face. Unless, of course, this was all some elaborate double bluff. Certainly the pile of chips in front of him was no measly collection.
The woman to his left was a busty blonde, her hair colour as natural as her tits which presumably required some kind of underlying structural support to prevent them falling to her waist or exploding in some freak accident. The woman on the right at least looked as though she’d kept some kind of tabs on how her body was meant to evolve, but Karla took a grim pleasure in noting how her eyes strayed to the chips in front of Hayden more often than her hands dallied on his firm, robust chest.
Karla felt a twitch in her belly. Jesus! Was she jealous? Of a couple of call-girls? What the hell was wrong with her?
Setting her face into what she hoped was a look of bored indifference, she crossed towards the table. She didn’t really know what she was going to do: for all her sense of injustice, she’d not thought much further than finding Hayden Carter.
“Can I get you a drink, sir?” she asked, her voice as neutral and English as she could make it, her heart beating slightly as he looked up at her. There was a slight flicker of a frown on his face. Oh, shit! she thought. He recognises me. She considered the possibility of beating him around the head with the tray until he submitted to telling her where he’d stashed the Wallenstein.
“Yeah, sure, why not,” he said, flashing her a smile that made her tremble. Oh, bloody hell! she reprimanded herself with a silent wail. Get a fucking grip, girl! This man has humiliated you, and you get an ovary explosion because he fuc
king smiles at you? He lifted a chip and dropped it onto her tray. “Get one for yourself as well.”
The brunette glared up at her with a silent accusation that Karla recognised all too well. This one had clocked her as a potential rival. Oh, honey, thought Karla. If only you knew what I’ve done to your trick, and what I’d do next time if I could just get my hands around his fucking throat. Blondie, by contrast, didn’t seem too bright and simply smirked as though to say there was no way this guy could ever consider going with anyone else.
Walking away quickly from the table, she overheard Carter say: “Don’t be mean, she can’t help sounding like that. She’s probably got problems with her glands or something. I mean, did you see how her cheeks were bloated?”
Cursing, Karla reached into her mouth and yanked out the cotton pads. Oh, great, her disguise had worked perfectly. Two nights earlier he had been giving her the time of her life, and now he thought she was a poor little girl with glandular fever. She scooped up the chip he’d tossed onto her tray. Five hundred pounds. No doubt most of the girls working in here would have more than appreciated such a sign of generosity, but that bastard had stolen a multi-million Euro diamond from her, and it was going to take much more than five hundred pounds to make amends. Much more. She flung the chip down to the floor. One of the cleaners would have a very pleasant surprise in the morning.
She was fuming, wondering what to do and also, she began to realise, feeling even more humiliated that he hadn’t recognised her at all. That had never happened to Karla before. She’d always been the heartbreaker, and now… bloody hell! Was that feeling in her chest her own heart beginning to strain?
Gritting her teeth, she began to ponder her possible revenge. Very well, if it wasn’t enough for Hayden Carter to steal the Wallenstein—if he had to trample her heart to fragments beneath his feet—then she’d pick the splinters up, bind them around with barbed wire, and find a way to make him suffer.
That made her feel momentarily better, but she was still none the closer to working out what she was actually going to do. Her miserable self-reflection was interrupted by the sight of the blonde with the oversize frontage standing up and making her way to the bathroom. Karla ditched the tray and followed the woman discreetly.
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