It’s Giovanna. She’ll be there in ten minutes.
In her narrow room on the first floor of the Gasthof Lili in Innsbruck, Villanelle is sitting cross-legged on her bed in front of a laptop, scrolling through architectural blueprints of the Felsnadel. The hotel, a futuristic slice of glass and steel wrapped around a frozen Tyrolean crag, is Austria’s highest. It stands on a ledge, some two and a half thousand metres above sea level, on the eastern flank of the Teufelskamp mountain.
Villanelle has been prowling the building in her imagination for hours now, testing possible entry and exit points, memorising the layout of the guest quarters and the kitchens, noting the whereabouts of storerooms and service areas. For the last thirty minutes she’s been examining the fittings and locking mechanisms on the triple-glazed windows. Details like these, Konstantin impressed on her, can mean the difference between success and failure, between life and death. It saddens Villanelle to think that, somewhere along the line, Konstantin himself neglected a detail.
She yawns, baring her teeth like a cat. She always enjoys the preparatory phase of an operation, but there’s an overload point. A moment when the plans blur, and the words on the screen start to run together. In addition to researching the mission, she’s been teaching herself German, a language she’s never previously studied. She will not be required to pass herself off as German at the Hotel Felsnadel; her cover story is that she’s French. But she will be required to speak it, and it’s an operational necessity that she understands everything that she hears.
These and other preparations are mentally tiring. Villanelle is less susceptible to stress than most people, but when she’s faced with long periods of waiting, a familiar need tends to make itself felt. Locking down the laptop so that any attempt to log in will cause total data-erasure, she stands, and stretches. She’s wearing a cheap black tracksuit, she hasn’t showered for thirty-six hours, and her unwashed hair is raked back into a scrappy ponytail. She looks, and smells, feral.
Herzog-Friedrich-Strasse is pretty in the fading light, its illuminated buildings framing the distant mountains like a stage set. But it’s cold, with an insistent wind whistling through the narrow streets, and this cuts straight through Villanelle’s skimpy clothing as she hurries towards the Schlossergasse and the golden glow of the Brauhaus Adler. Inside, noise levels are high, and the air warm and beery. Edging round the throng, Villanelle notes a line of men with their backs to the bar, surveying the crowd with an amused, predatory air. At intervals, they exchange comments and knowing smiles.
Villanelle watches for a minute or two, and then, unhurriedly, walks up to the bar. Strolling along the line of men, taking casual repossession of the space they’ve annexed, she eyeballs them one by one before coming to a halt in front of a fit-looking guy in his early twenties. He’s handsome, he knows it, and he meets her stare with a confident grin.
Villanelle doesn’t return it. Instead, she takes his stein of beer, drains it, and walks away without looking back. An instant later he follows, pushing through the crowd after her. Wordlessly, she leads him out of the main entrance, then turns into a side street, and again into a narrow alley behind the bar. Halfway along the alley is a shadowed space between two overspilling refuse bins. Above the further of these, an extractor fan vents kitchen exhaust through a dirty grille.
Bracing her back against the brick wall, Villanelle orders the young man to kneel in front of her. When he hesitates she grabs a handful of blond hair and forces him down. Then she drags her tracksuit bottoms to her ankles with her free hand, parts her legs and pulls her knickers open to one side. ‘No fingers,’ she tells him. ‘Just your tongue. Get on with it.’
He glances up at her, his eyes uncertain, and she tightens her hold on his hair until he gasps with pain. ‘I said get on with it, dummkopf. Lick my pussy.’ She shuffles her feet wider apart, the wall cold against her buttocks. ‘Harder, it’s not a fucking ice cream. And higher. Yes, there.’
Sensation flickers through her, but it’s too irregular, and her new acquaintance too inexpert, to take her where she needs to go. Through half-closed eyes she sees a kitchen worker in a soiled apron and skullcap step from a doorway and stop, open-mouthed, at the sight of her. She ignores him, and the blond guy is much too busy searching for her clitoris to sense the presence of a spectator.
The kitchen worker stands there, hand on groin, for the best part of a minute, then a voice recalls him to the kitchen in profanity-laden Turkish. By now Villanelle is pretty sure that if she wants to come, she’s going to have to go back to her room and finish the job herself. Her thoughts wander, dissolving into refracted images which, quite suddenly, coalesce into the figure of Eve Polastri. Eve with her skuchniyy clothes, and that English decency that Villanelle wants, so badly, to disrupt. Imagine if she were to look down, right now, and see that face between her thighs. Eve’s eyes looking up at her. Eve’s tongue scouring her.
Villanelle cleaves to this image until, with a brief shuddering of her thighs, she comes. At which point the image of Eve dissolves into that of Anna Leonova. Anna, to whom all the blood-trails lead. Anna who, in another life, showed Oxana Vorontsova what love could be, and then denied it to her for ever. Opening her eyes Villanelle takes in her filthy surroundings. The wind touches her face and she realises that there are tears on her cheeks.
The blond guy is grinning. ‘That was good, ja?’ Standing, he fishes a pubic hair from his mouth with a
