It was after midnight when they left the restaurant. Pol, his rosy face smeared and streaked with sweat, held them both tightly by the arm and wobbled between them on his slippered feet. He mounted the stairs with some difficulty, pausing every few steps, and once swayed perilously backwards as they neared the top. Packer felt gloomily sober.
They reached Pol’s door first. He stopped and beamed. ‘My children, I must offer you a last drink!’ He winked at Packer. ‘A glass of Vichy perhaps, Monsieur Packer?’
‘Thank you,’ said Packer, ‘we’re going to bed.’ He released himself from Pol’s grip and took Sarah’s arm, which she instantly removed.
‘Good night, Charles. Thank you for a marvellous evening!’ She gave Pol her most devastating smile, and Pol smiled back, bright and benign, but without excitement.
‘Bonne nuit!’ he whispered loudly, and stumbled against his door as he opened it.
In their room Sarah began to undress at once, quickly and dispassionately, wearing only a pair of tight blue pants as she bent over the mirror, her back fully displayed to Packer. She began peeling off her eyelashes.
He tried to avoid looking at her, lay down on the bed and stared moodily at the ceiling. He knew the routine too well by now; it was less of an instinct than an animal scent, like a dog sniffing fear. Only with her it was resistance, truculence — worst of all, indifference. He caught a glimpse of her pale-nippled breasts in the mirror and saw them quiver slightly as she pulled two jade necklaces over her head, and heard her voice, limp and sulky, talking to her reflection: ‘God, I’m tired.’
Packer looked away and fought the familiar temptation to coax her with soft lulling endearments, imagining it as it had been in the early months, with him standing behind her with one hand cupping her breast, slowly pinching the nipple, while the fingertips of his other gently prodded her pubic mound, feeling her thighs parting as he leaned down and began kissing the fluffy black hair at the nape of her neck. Now, with the passing of that year, the task of seduction had become inversely more difficult, more challenging, while his own approach had become clumsier and more artless, to the point when it was no more than a coarse and ineffectual grope.
He heard her rings clatter on to the table top, then felt the bed heave as she sank down on to it, curling up with her back towards him, pulling the sheet and blanket close up round her neck and shoulders. ‘I’m so tired,’ she said again; then, with a little sigh: ‘Goodnight.’
He got up and began to undress, leaving on his boxer shorts, and wondered, in a flash of desperation, whether this might be the moment to offer her a share of half a million pounds. Every girl has her price, he thought. There had been times, increasingly during recent months, when he’d caught himself imagining luscious, fearful, unspeakable things he could do to her — or watch have done to her — wondering how much she would accept before submitting, each subtle and ghastly perversion calculated to within a few pounds.
He could feel her steady breathing, feigning sleep, as he climbed carefully in beside her, rigidly restraining himself from touching her, even with his knees or toes, until he felt that cold dead lump in his gut and a tiny pulse beating fast in his left temple. He reached up and turned out the light.
CHAPTER 6
The peacock-blue diplomatic passport was cleared through a special gate, and the man walked out of Zürich’s Kloten Airport eight minutes after his Boeing 727 had landed. It was 10.20 p.m. and snowing lightly. Outside, a black Peugeot stood with its engine idling. A plain-clothes chauffeur waited on the kerb, and whipped the rear door open as soon as the man emerged.
Even inside the car the man kept on his dark glasses and ankle-length vicuna coat, removing only his black astrakhan hat. An attaché case with four gold-plated locks was secured by a chain to his thin wrist, just below his Patek Philippe watch. The chauffeur drove fast but carefully, accelerating only when they joined the autoroute to Chur, where the Peugeot reached the ‘advised’ speed limit of 120 kmh. An hour later the chauffeur turned off at the intersection to Landquart.
At exactly two minutes to midnight they passed the sign marked Klosters, six miles below Davos. The Peugeot drove between the scattered chalets on the outskirts of the resort. The car then took a sharp left turn, passed a red and white No Entry sign, and began to climb a steep single track between pine trees, its surface freshly cleared of snow. A hundred yards further on, a couple of men stood on either side of the track, half hidden by the pines. As the Peugeot’s headlights swept up between them, one of them flashed a pocket torch twice, and the chauffeur slowed down long enough for the man to read the Peugeot’s number plate. After another quarter of a mile they came in sight of the dark heavy-roofed shape of the chalet.
The Ruler received his visitor ten minutes later in the sauna lined with oozing pine logs. He was sitting on the centre step, naked except for a white towelling sarong. Despite the fierce heat, he sweated little. His body was well preserved, betraying its age only by a slightly hollow chest and small paunch.
As soon as the door closed, his visitor suppressed a gasp, bowed low three times, and began to breathe carefully. He was wearing
