The men around the table regard the grisly tableau for a moment, then return their gaze to the speaker.
“Gentlemen, I think we need to take an executive decision concerning Salvatore Greco. He is a dangerously uncontrollable force, and beyond the reach of the law. His criminal activities, and the social havoc they entail, threaten the stability of the Mediterranean sector. I propose that we remove him from the game, permanently.”
Rising from his chair, the speaker makes his way to a side-table, returning with an antique lacquered box. Taking out a black velvet drawstring bag, he pours its contents on the table in front of him. Twenty-four small ivory fish, twelve of them aged to a smooth yellow, twelve of them stained a dark blood-red. Each man receives a contrasting pair of fish.
The velvet bag makes its way around the table counter-clockwise. When it has made a full revolution, it is passed to the man who proposed the vote. Once again, the contents of the bag are poured onto the dimly gleaming surface of the table. Twelve red fish. A unanimous sentence of death.
It’s evening, a fortnight later, and Villanelle is sitting at an outside table at Le Jasmin, a private members club in Paris’s Sixteenth Arrondissement. From the east comes the murmur of traffic on the Boulevard Suchet, to the west is the Bois de Boulogne and the Auteuil racecourse. The club’s garden is bordered by a trellis hung with blossoming jasmine whose scent infuses the warm air. Most of the other tables are occupied, but conversation is muted. The light fades, the night awaits.
Villanelle takes a long sip of her Grey Goose vodka Martini, and discreetly surveys the surroundings, particularly noting the couple at the next table. Both are in their mid-twenties: he elegantly dishevelled, she cat-like and exquisite. Are they brother and sister? Professional colleagues? Lovers?
Definitely not brother and sister, Villanelle decides. There’s a tension between them—a complicity—that’s anything but familial. They’re certainly rich, though. Her silk sweater, for example, its dark gold matching her eyes. Not new, but definitely Chanel. And they’re drinking vintage Taittinger, which doesn’t come cheap at Le Jasmin.
Catching Villanelle’s eye, the man raises his champagne flute a centimetre or two. He murmurs to his companion, who fixes her with a cool, assessing stare.
“Would you like to join us?” she asks. It’s a challenge, as much as an invitation.
Villanelle stares back, unblinking. A breeze shivers the scented air.
“It’s not compulsory,” says the man, his wry smile at odds with the calm of his gaze.
Villanelle stands, lifts her glass. “I’d love to join you. I was expecting a friend, but she must have been held up.”
“In that case…” The man rises to his feet. “I’m Olivier. And this is Nica.”
“Villanelle.”
The conversation unfolds conventionally enough. Olivier, she learns, has recently launched a career as an art dealer. Nica intermittently works as an actress. They are not related, nor on closer inspection do they give the impression of being lovers. Even so, there is something subtly erotic in their complicity, and the way they’ve drawn her into their orbit.
“I’m a day-trader,” Villanelle tells them. “Currencies, interest-rate futures, all that.” With satisfaction, she notes the immediate dimming of interest in their eyes. She can, if necessary, talk for hours about day-trading, but they don’t want to know. Instead, Villanelle describes the sunlit first-floor flat in Versailles from which she works. It doesn’t exist, but she can picture it down to the ironwork scrolls on the balcony and the faded Persian rug on the floor. Her cover story is perfect now, and deception, as always, affords her a rush of pleasure.
“We love your name, and your eyes, and your hair, and most of all we love your shoes,” says Nica.
Villanelle laughs, and flexes her feet in her strappy satin Louboutins. Catching Olivier’s eye, she deliberately mirrors his languid posture. She imagines his hands moving knowledgeably and possessively over her. He would see her, she guesses, as a beautiful, collectible object. He would think himself in control.
“What’s funny?” asks Nica, tilting her head and lighting a cigarette.
“You are,” says Villanelle. How would it be, she wonders, to lose herself in that golden gaze? To feel that smoky mouth on hers. She’s enjoying herself now; she knows that both Olivier and Nica want her. They think that they’re playing her, and Villanelle will go on letting them think so. It will be amusing to manipulate them, to see how far they will go.
“I have a suggestion,” says Olivier, and at that moment the phone in Villanelle’s bag begins to blink. A one-word text: DEFLECT. She stands, her expression blank. She glances at Nica and Olivier, but in her mind they no longer exist. She’s out of there without a word, and in less than a minute is swinging into a northbound stream of traffic on her Vespa.
It’s three years now since she first met the man who sent her the text. The man who, to this day, she knows only as Konstantin. Her circumstances, then, were very different. Her name was Oxana Vorontsova, and she was officially registered as a student of French and Linguistics at the University of Perm, in central Russia. In six months’ time she was due to sit her finals. It was unlikely, however, that she would ever walk into the university’s examination hall as, since the previous autumn, she’d been unavoidably detained elsewhere. Specifically, in the Dobryanka women’s remand centre in the Ural Mountains. Accused of murder.
It’s a short drive, perhaps five minutes, from Le Jasmin to Villanelle’s apartment near
