Richard stares through the office’s single, long-uncleaned window. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Eve. And the answer is no.’
‘What am I thinking?’
‘Wring Cradle out, then use him as bait. See what swims up out of the deep.’
‘It’s not a wholly bad idea.’
‘Murder’s always a bad idea, trust me, and murder’s what it would amount to.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll stick to the plan. Dennis will be back in the arms of the lovely Gabi before you can say full-blown mid-life crisis.’
Rinat Yevtukh, leader of Odessa’s Golden Brotherhood crime network, is frustrated. Venice, he’s been assured, is more than a city. It’s one of the high citadels of Western culture, and perhaps the ultimate luxury destination. But somehow, standing at the window of his suite at the Danieli Hotel in his complimentary dressing gown and slippers, he can’t quite engage with the place.
Partly, it’s stress. Kidnapping the Russian in Odessa was a mistake, he sees that now. He’d assumed, quite reasonably, that the thing would play out in the usual way. A flurry of back-channel negotiations, a cash sum agreed on, and no hard feelings on either side. In the event, some lunatic chose to take the whole thing personally, leaving Rinat with six men and the hostage dead, and his house in Fontanka shot to pieces. He has other houses, obviously, and men are easily enough replaced. But it’s all extra work and, at a given point in your life, these things begin to take their toll.
The Doge’s Suite at the Danieli is reassuringly luxurious. Winged cherubs disport among candy-floss clouds in the ceiling fresco, portraits of Venetian aristocrats hang from walls shining with gold damask, antique carpets cover the floors. On a side table stands a metre-high, multicoloured glass statuette of a weeping clown, bought in a Murano factory that morning and destined for Rinat’s Kiev apartment.
Katya Goraya, Rinat’s twenty-five-year-old lingerie model girlfriend, is sprawled barefoot across a rococo chaise longue. Dressed in a Dior crop top and Dussault thrashed jeans, Katya is gazing at her phone, chewing gum, and nodding her head to a Lady Gaga song. At intervals she sings along, insofar as the chewing gum and her limited English permit. There was a time when Rinat found this endearing, now he just finds it annoying.
‘Bad Romance,’ he says.
Unhurriedly, her expensively augmented breasts straining against the lacy fabric of her top, Katya removes her ear-buds.
‘Bad Romance,’ Rinat repeats. ‘Not Bedroom Ants.’
She looks at him blankly, then frowns. ‘I want to go back to Gucci. I’ve changed my mind about that bag. The pink snakeskin one.’
There’s nothing Rinat wants to do less. Those superior San Marco shop assistants. All smiles until they’ve got your money, and then you might as well be dogshit.
‘We need to go now, Rinat. Before they close.’
‘You go. Take Slava with you.’
She pouts. Rinat knows that she wants him to come because if he does, he will pay for the bag. If the bodyguard takes her it will come out of her allowance. Which he also pays for.
‘You want to make love?’ Katya’s gaze softens. ‘When we get back from the shop I’ll fuck you up the ass with the strap-on.’
Rinat shows no sign of having heard her. What he really wants is to be somewhere else. To lose himself in the world beyond the gold silk curtains, where afternoon is shading into evening, and gondolas and water taxis are drawing pale lines across the lagoon.
‘Rinat?’
He closes the bedroom door behind him. It takes him ten minutes to shower and dress. When he returns to the reception room, Katya hasn’t moved.
‘You’re just leaving me here?’ she asks, incredulous.
Frowning, Rinat checks his reflection in a silvered octagonal mirror. As he closes the door of the suite behind him, he hears the sound, not unimpressive in its way, of a twenty-kilo Murano glass clown shattering on an antique terrazzo floor.
In the hotel’s top-floor bar, it’s blessedly quiet. Later it will be thronged with guests, but for now there are just two couples, both sitting in silence. Installing himself on the terrace, Rinat leans back in his chair, and through half-closed eyes watches the soft rise and fall of the gondolas at their moorings. Soon, he muses, it will be time to leave Odessa. To get his money out of Ukraine and into a less volatile jurisdiction. For the last decade sex, drugs and human trafficking have proved themselves the ultimate gilt-edged trifecta, but with new players like the Turkish gangs moving in, and the Russians cracking down hard, the game is changing. The wise man, Rinat tells himself, knows when to move on.
Katya has her gaze set on Miami’s Golden Beach, where for less than $12 million, including bribes to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, you can get a luxury waterfront home with a private dock. Rinat, however, is increasingly of the opinion that life might be less stressful without Katya and her incessant demands, and the last few days have got him thinking about Western Europe. About Italy in particular, which appears to take a relaxed view of crimes of moral turpitude. The place is classy – the sports cars, the clothes, the fucked-up old buildings – and Italian women are unbelievable. Even the shop-girls look like movie stars.
A grave young man in a dark suit materialises at his elbow, and Rinat orders a malt whisky.
‘Cancel that. Make the gentleman a Negroni Sbagliato. And bring me one too.’
Rinat turns, and meets the amused gaze of a woman in a black chiffon cocktail dress, who is standing behind him.
‘You are, after all, in Venice.’
‘I am,’ he concurs, a little dazedly, and nods to the waiter, who silently withdraws.
She looks out over the lagoon, which shimmers like white gold in the dusk. ‘See Venice and die, is what they
