For a crazy moment he wondered if she had heard another, darker rumour, but decided it was impossible. The buyout had only been discussed with a handful of board members. It would not be made public until after it was successful.
‘I guess you’re going on to St Petersburg,’ she said. ‘Where are you staying?’
‘The Grand Sovetskaya. How about you?’
‘Oh, nothing so fancy. That was one of Sean’s personal favourites, wasn’t it?’
‘Well, it’s part of the chain.’
‘I slept with him, you know. Our flights were cancelled and we were stuck at the Espacio Rojo Hotel in Barcelona. I was really sorry to hear he died. Or was it the Severine in Paris? They have this fabulous spa treatment where they wrap you in oil-soaked gauze and place hot stones down your spine.’
He listened without hearing. The image of the old man pumping away on top of poor bony Amanda while whispering sales figures in her ears was best left behind in the departure lounge.
The Grand Sovetskaya was an unashamedly old-world hotel in the French style, with green copper gables and crouching gargoyles. In the domed reception area hung a crystal chandelier the size of a skip. The rooms were filled with dark wooden dressers, sideboards and wardrobes, and were locked with huge brass keys. There were twenty-one floors of corridors that smelled of furniture polish and boiled cabbage, all identical and gently curved, like those of an ocean liner. Thick floral carpets and heavily lined drapes deadened all sound.
Best of all was the bar, a paradise for the serious drinker. The shelves were stacked with dozens of flavoured vodkas and an immense range of mysterious liquors, vaguely medicinal in appearance. Court suspected that the elderly hatchet-faced bar staff had arrived with the first guests. Heavy marble ashtrays lined the counter. This was clearly no place for lightweights.
Court was there to conclude the discreet negotiations with Lassiter’s board, but if anyone asked, he was attending a forum staged by the Opportunities in New Business Development Commission. Discretion was second nature to him. He spent most of his life in hotels as quiet as libraries where the patrons were defined by the depth of their expense accounts. Lighting a cigar, he thought about Lassiter turning over and over in the warm night air, a tiny flailing puppet whose existence had been erased almost before he hit the concrete. How many Indian workers had been employed to scrub the blood from the stones before another harsh dawn flooded the hotel with sunlight? Had the manager posted Lassiter’s luggage back to his grieving wife? Had Elizabeth pored over the spreadsheets, graphs and overlays, hopelessly looking for answers?
He felt no guilt. Lassiter’s downward spiral had begun before Dubai. Court had saved him the incremental degradation a man feels when he realises the company he has founded no longer needs or desires his advice. He waved aside the blue haze of cigar smoke and studied Vienna. She was seated in a red leather horseshoe between two short bald oligarchs. When she saw him looking, she momentarily forgot what she was saying. Her eyes lingered a moment too long.
Clearly, she was good at her job if she was travelling to international clients. For a second it crossed his mind that they might make an interesting team, but he knew that the best call-girls stayed at the peak of their trade by giving nothing of themselves to others. Even so…
It would have been unprofessional to send her any kind of message while she was working, so he smoked and waited, and treated himself to a golden Comte de Lauvia 1982 Armagnac. The Russians here were loud and unsophisticated, but Vienna never appeared bored. After an hour they were clearly drunk. Court had no idea what she said to them, but they suddenly fell into a sombre mood and rose together, bidding her good night.
She came to him with her shoes in one hand, and he realised how much they added to her height. ‘However long your evening has been,’ she told him, taking a sip of his brandy, ‘I promise you mine was longer.’ She licked her lips appreciatively and allowed her head to fall back against the red leather seat. ‘Mm. Can I get one of those?’
The waiter appeared without asking, delivered and departed. She seemed content to drink and drift without making small talk. She wore another low-cut black dress, and a single strand of pearls. Her perfume had faded enough to allow a natural womanly odour, faint but arousing, to rise from her peach-coloured skin.
He relit his cigar and watched her, wondering how much she remembered of their last meeting. The bar was almost empty. It was a quarter past two in the morning. ‘How long are you staying here?’ he asked.
‘Two nights. I’m entertaining those guys.’
‘They must be important.’
‘To someone. Not to me. It’s a job.’
‘They left without you.’
‘I sent them away.’ She took the cigar from his fingers and smoked it for a minute.
‘I’m here for—’
‘I don’t want to know why you’re here.’ She studied the glowing tip of the cigar. ‘I’m sure you get tired of talking shop. I do.’
‘So, Vienna, what would you rather do?’
She turned her eyes to his. Her pupils were violet, the lashes long and black. ‘Shall I tell you what I would really like to do?’
He gave no response, but waited with a small catch in his breath.
‘I would like to fall asleep in a great big soft bed with my head on your chest.’
‘We can do that.’ Then he remembered. ‘Wait, they screwed up my reservation. I have two singles. We can push them together.’
‘Thanks, but no thanks.’
‘Well, where are you staying?’
She held up the key. It was the first time he had seen a genuine smile on her lips. ‘I have the royal suite.’
Now he was impressed. ‘How did you get that?’
‘How do you think?’
They made their way to the twenty-first floor. As they followed the curve of the passage, Vienna entwined her fingers in his. I don’t have to tell this woman anything, he thought, she and I are the same kind.
When she unlocked the door at the end of the corridor and turned on the lights, he was disappointed to see that except for an extra pair of curtains covering the end wall, the room was almost identical to his. It was unbearably hot. He removed his suit jacket, threw it on the couch and loosened his tie.
‘Make me a drink,’ she told him, ‘I’ll be back.’ She headed for the bathroom. Something made him uncomfortable. He heard the bathroom door shut, then silence. He poured two whiskies at the wet bar and thought for a moment. It was exactly what she had done in Dubai.
No, it wasn’t.
She had waited until she had seen her own drink poured. Call girls always did that, just to be careful.
She wasn’t going to drink anything. Then why had she asked him to make her a drink?
‘Vienna?’ He knocked on the bathroom door, but there was silence beyond. He placed his ear against the wood and listened. Nothing.
The room was spectacularly hot. Vienna was obviously missing Dubai. There didn’t seem to be a thermostat anywhere. Then he remembered; his was in the bathroom. ‘Vienna,’ he called, ‘turn the heat down, will you?’
The floor tipped, just a little, but enough for him to realise what had happened. He headed back to the bar and examined his drained whisky tumbler. There was some kind of white residue in the bottom of it. Sweat was starting to pour between his shoulder blades. The front of his shirt was darkening around his armpits and in the middle of his chest.
The carpet seemed to be pulling away beneath his feet. He needed cold air, fast. He reached the end window and pulled back the curtains, but there was just more wall behind them.
The big French windows were in the same place as the ones in his room. He lurched across to them and tried the right handle. It turned easily. He pulled the glass door toward him and a blast of subzero air filled the room. It was snowing hard. Almost instantly he began to sober up. He tried to think.
Stepping onto the balcony, he breathed in the stinging winter air, fil
ling his lungs with ice. Fat white flakes settled on his eyelids, in his ears. His head was clearing fast but his reactions were still slow.
Too slow to stop the door from being shut behind him. Vienna was standing beyond the glass. She studied him blankly, as if watching an animal at the zoo. Her right arm was raised, her hand against the wall. She was pressing something. She wiggled the fingers of her left hand slightly, waving goodbye.
The steel shutter that fitted tightly over the windows was swiftly closing. He tried to seize its edge with his fingers, to push it back up, but it was so cold that the flesh of his fingertips, still wet from his whisky glass, stuck to the metal, pulling him down.
And then it was shut. He tore his fingers free, leaving behind four small scarlet patches of skin. The sweat on his back was already turning to ice. He hammered on the steel shutter, but was shocked by its thickness. It barely rattled. Old French-style hotels always sported European shutters. He moved around the edges of the metre-wide balcony. A sheer drop down, no lights on anywhere. The rooms on either side had bricked-up windows.
The bitter wind had risen to a howl. He was in his shirtsleeves, and knew he had but a short time to live. He had been drinking all evening; his blood was thin. He fell to the floor of the balcony and pushed himself into the wall, but the ice and snow still blew through the balustrade, settling over him.
His first instinct was to assume he had been subjected to a woman’s revenge. Then he remembered she was merely an employee.
He tried to laugh when he understood what had happened, but the saliva was freezing in his mouth. Even his eyes were becoming hard to move. He fancied he could hear the ice forming beneath his skin. Tiny crackles like rustling cellophane filled his ears.
Looking out into the night beyond the balcony, the darkness was sprinkled with swirling white flakes that looked like stars. He could have been anywhere in the world.
They’ll leave the shutters down for twenty-four hours, he thought, just to be absolutely sure. Vienna will be back on a Dubai beach by then.
His mind was growing numb. He remembered something from a history book he had once read. When the Persian matriarchs wanted to rid themselves of the most treacherous family members, they locked them away in sumptuous apartments and left them to die. From a business point of view, it made perfect sense to do so. He should have put forward the idea as part of his new business model, but, just as Lassiter had warned, someone else had thought of it first.
He found himself laughing as the freezing snow-laden winds whirled about him, and then he could no longer close his mouth.
The Boy Thug
Giddens had been riding with the two grain merchants for four days before he cut their throats. It never took less time than this. The pair had come out of Bismarck with fat saddlebags, but Giddens could not be sure what was in them. The tall one, name of Sweeney, had arranged to visit a bank before they set off, that much was certain, and his horse was heavier when he left. There was a story that the merchants were quietly moving gold across the state, travelling without protection so as not to draw attention to themselves. They weren’t too smart; Giddens liked that.
His method was a tried and tested one.
At first he rode silently behind them, waiting for an opportunity to be useful. He did not have long to wait. The track was bad, and Sweeney’s pot-bellied horse soon threw a shoe. Giddens palmed a thick briar thorn and appeared to extract it from the nag’s hoof. The merchants were grateful, but wary of strangers. He rode beside them for three hours, jawing about the weather, the troublesome tribes further south, anything he thought might interest them, but they gave nothing away.
Soon he left, knowing they would get suspicious if he befriended them too quickly. Same thing next day, three hours of riding, then gone. Finally it got so they were expecting him, and then he knew he had won their trust. That was when they were as good as dead.
The rest of the gang had been running a parallel trail, and now moved in so swiftly that they were able to take the merchants’ guns before they so much as looked up. Giddens took care of the killing. He buried the merchants side by side in the creek at the end of the red clay ravine, then emptied out their saddlebags.
He found a brick of bills thick enough to keep them all warm through the winter. He allowed his best men to send small amounts of money home. There was also a cloth filled with gemstones, blood-red crystals the size of coat buttons, but they had no way of fencing such rarities, so Parson emptied fist after glittering fist into the river.
That was four years ago, when things were still good. A lot had changed since then.
The gang led by Parson and Giddens was made up of men who had lived with them in the Dakota Territories, and loyalties ran strong. They were uncles, cousins, brothers, and they had joined because they needed money, or needed to stay on the move, and preferred the nomadic life to breaking their backs on the hardscrabble dirt of their homelands.
Some of them had been soldiers who had left the military in bad circumstances. Others would not be drawn to their reasons for joining; they had stolen, or killed, or abandoned their families. Anything was better than slowly starving to death in townships that had failed to take root.
As the frontier moved westward the military followed it in, so the gang was forced to live between two shifting barriers of settlers and lawmen. There were too many people around now. The garrisons served as troop bases, from where attacks could be launched on Indians, and once they were in place it was time to get out. The settlers caused almost as much trouble. They kept a cold eye on strangers, and winning them over took a great deal of effort and patience.
In 1873, there were three memorable events that were to have repercussions for the gang. The territorial officials decided to harvest Black Hills timber and float it downriver to Missouri for new settlements. The first Colt Peacemakers got sold out of Connecticut by mail order for $17 apiece. And Sam Henry Ezekiel Franks joined the gang at the age of eight, making him its youngest-ever member.
The gang never took women or children as a rule. A few years earlier at the end of a bad winter, they had stopped a party of five men, four women and two little girls, tracking them through an overgrown route to the Cheyenne River. It had taken Heck Giddens six days to convince the party of his good nature and honest intentions, but at last he had persuaded them to let him travel with them as a scout. Parson was waiting with the others down near the shoreline, and when the first two travellers appeared on the path he shot them both dead. The third he blinded, but the other two got back in time to warn their families. It turned into an unholy mess; Giddens cut the throats of the two little girls and stuck the most beautiful of the women with his knife because she kept screaming, although she took a long time to die and made a hell of a fuss.
It took another two days and nights to round up the remaining survivors. The men were rabbity little things and gave in easily when cornered, but their wives were hard, and had thin brittle bodies like boys. Parson and Giddens built them a shack in the woods, and kept them there for sexual purposes—the women could not leave because they had no horses or supplies—but the arrangement was to no-one’s satisfaction, and at the end of the summer they were killed and buried in the woods.
As a consequence, the ban on women and children stayed in force as the gang went about its business. It was a strange time to be surviving as they did. It was hard to tell who to trust anymore; the prospectors, the railroad officials and the land developers were all arriving to stake their claims. The Sioux were being pushed into reservations, the remaining buffalo hunting grounds were under threat, tribes and militiamen were fighting among themselves, and nobody except a few men in the East knew what the government was planning to do next.
The gang—it had no name—had been working in a loose figure-eight for several years, cutting down from the grey shale below the treeline to hit the old expedition routes and settlers’ paths. The winter of ’72 had been harsh, and the numbers of travelling parties we
re down. The longest it had ever taken to win the trust of a party was almost three weeks. Each time it grew a little harder.
They were careful in their choice of victims. The risk was always weighed against the prize. They paid off their members in installments, usually when they were far from any town, to prevent them from heading for the nearest bar and whorehouse, where they might talk to the wrong people. It was, Parson said, like a family, although here he was only guessing at the idea because his folks had thrown him into the forest at the age of two, and he had been raised by a fat little Yapa Comanche who had lost his own parents.
‘We got to get a good haul in before spring ends,’ said Parson one night, as the gang settled back into their old camp at Twelvetree Point. Only Giddens and his sidekick, a young half-breed Arikara named Blue Star, were still awake.
‘There’s talk of a party coming down from Fort Gray end of the month,’ said Giddens. ‘You know what that means.’
Parson did not need to be reminded. The fort held military gold reserves, and in the past had sent out interest payments with settling parties in the form of reshaped bullion. According to the prison warden, a gurning halfwit the Arikara had befriended, the bars were melted and pressed into leaves that were stitched into the floors of the ladies’ saratogas, but nobody knew for certain if this was true.
‘Gives us three weeks to prepare,’ said Giddens. ‘Should be enough.’ He was eight years younger than Parson, and took care of the planning. Over the past decade, he had perfected the art of inveigling himself into companies of suspicious strangers, but it never got any easier. The uncertainty of the times meant that men who were by inclination friendly now studied new companions with cold distance in their eyes.
‘Get your Indian back up to that fort,’ said Parson, ‘and get that stupid old drunk jailer talking. We need to know how many they gone be.’
Red Gloves, Volumes I & II Page 31
