Rearranging her underwear, Villanelle pulls up her tracksuit bottoms. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Just go.’
‘Hey, come on now, schatz . . .’
‘You heard me. Fuck off.’
He meets her stare, and his grin fades. He starts to walk away, and then turns. ‘You want to know something?’ he says. ‘You stink.’
‘Good. And a word of advice. Next time you find yourself in a girl’s pants, bring a map.’
The Palazzo Forlani is at the eastern end of Dorsoduro. The street entrance, through which Eve arrives, is nondescript. There’s a poorly lit cloakroom staffed by dark-suited attendants and supervised by an unsmiling figure who looks as if he might have once earned his living as a boxer. Beyond them, two young women in identical black moiré cocktail dresses sit at an antique desk, checking the names of new arrivals on a printed list.
Eve approaches them. ‘Sono con Giovanna Bianchi.’
They smile. ‘OK, no problem,’ one of them says. ‘But my friend needs to fix your hair.’
Eve raises a hand and encounters a hairclip swinging from an errant tress. ‘Oh my goodness, could you really?’
‘Come,’ says the friend and, beckoning Eve to a chair, swiftly and expertly reworks her coiffure. As she’s inserting the final pin Giovanna arrives.
‘Eve. You look stunning . . . Ciao, ragazze.’
‘Ciao, Giovanna. Just fixing a little hair emergency here.’
‘My French twist came adrift,’ Eve explains.
Giovanna smiles. ‘That’s why you should always go Italian.’
A curtain parts, and they move from the twilit foyer into a warm blaze of illumination. The street entrance to the palazzo, Eve realises, is in fact the back entrance, like a stage door. They’re in a wide, stone-floored atrium, thronged with guests, at whose centre is a rectangular space concealed by hanging drapes imprinted with the Umberto Zeni logo. Opposite Eve and Giovanna is the much grander and more ornate canal entrance, dominated by an arched portal through which the gleam of water is visible. As Eve watches, a motor launch draws up, and two guests step out onto a jetty, and are ushered inside by a doorman.
Around her, the crowd ebbs and flows. She can smell scent, face-powder, candle wax, and the faint, muddy tang of the canal. It’s an intoxicatingly strange scene, a collision of the antique and the dazzlingly fashionable. Eve feels poised, soignée even, but she can’t imagine actually talking to anyone here. There’s a nucleus of ageless men in dark suits and heavy silk ties, and women whose lacquered hair and ornate designer gowns are clearly chosen to intimidate rather than to attract. Circling around these figures, like pilot fish around sharks, is a retinue of socialites and hangers-on. Lizard-like designers with implausible tans, gym-toned young men in ripped jeans, willowy models with wide, vacant eyes.
‘And that’s Umberto,’ says Giovanna, swiping two glasses of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray, and nodding towards a tiny figure dressed from head to foot in leather fetish-wear. ‘An interesting crowd, don’t you think?’
‘Amazing. And so not my world.’
‘So what is your world, Eve? Forgive me for asking, but you come into my shop with this man who shows me identification from Interpol and then pretends to be un cretino while he eavesdrops on my assistants’ conversations – oh, don’t worry, I saw him – and then you ask me about a bracelet that was bought by a woman who came into the shop with her girlfriend, but which you are now wearing? Per favore, what is going on?’
Eve takes a deep swallow of her champagne, and turns her wrist so that the diamonds glitter. ‘It’s a long story.’
‘Tell it to me.’
‘We want this woman for a series of crimes. She knows I’m after her, and she sent me this bracelet to insult and intimidate me.’
‘How so?’
‘Because this is the kind of luxurious thing I could never afford, and could never imagine myself wearing.’
‘Nevertheless, Eve, you are wearing it.’
Their conversation is interrupted by a dimming of the lights. Then, to a deafening burst of industrial metal music, and whoops and applause from the onlookers, the curtains at the centre of the atrium rise, and spotlights illuminate the tableau within. Rising from the floor is a massive concrete column, into which a white Alfa Romeo sports car appears to have crashed at speed. The car, wrapped around the column, is a total wreck. Two passengers, one male, one female, have been thrown through the windscreen, and are sprawled on the car’s crumpled bonnet.
At first Eve thinks that these are horribly life-like, or perhaps death-like, dummies. Then she sees that they are breathing, and real. Belatedly, she recognises the famous boy-band singer and his supermodel girlfriend. Shane Rafique, dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, is lying face down. Jasmin Vane-Partington is on her back, one arm outflung, her breasts exposed by her ripped blouse.
Where there might have been blood and torn flesh, however, there are jewels. Jasmin’s forehead is not studded with fragments of windscreen glass, but enclosed in a tiara of diamonds and blood-red garnets. A string of Burmese rubies snakes down her belly like a fatal gash. Tourmalines glitter in Shane’s hair and a topaz necklace cascades from his mouth. Vermilion gemstones spatter the car’s bodywork.
As cameras flash, the music plays, and the applause rises and falls, Eve stares open-mouthed at this glittering tableau mort.
Giovanna smiles. ‘So what do you think?’
‘It’s quite an extreme way of selling jewellery.’
‘People want extremes here, they get bored very easily. And the fashion press will adore it. Especially with Jasmin and Shane.’
After ten minutes, when the photo flashes have subsided, and Umberto Zeni has made a short speech of which Eve understands not a single word, the curtain descends on the crashed Alfa Romeo and the celebrity corpses. Unhurriedly, the guests begin to make their way up a worn stone staircase, past faded tapestries, to the first floor. Eve and Giovanna join them, collecting fresh glasses of champagne en route.
‘Having fun?’ asks Giovanna.
‘So much fun. I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘Finish your story.’
Eve laughs. ‘I will, one day.’ For
