Maestra (15 page)

‘Thank you for coming. Lovely to see you.’

‘Thank you for inviting me. What wonderful flowers.’

His eyes were already elsewhere. I stepped back to allow the next guests to be received. Behind Balensky, in the shadows of the stairwell, were two huge men, standard-issue American football physiques, with ill-fitting black suits (why are billionaires so stingy when it comes to their bodyguards’ suits – surely a proper tailor could accommodate the concealed guns?), folded arms and earpieces. At the sight of them, I felt a delicious icy caress of adrenalin sink into me like the first sip of a perfect martini.

I moved backwards into the group, pretending to wave at someone I knew, until I was out of their range, then I discreetly asked one of the waiters for the ladies’ room. He escorted me slowly down a flight of stairs and along a corridor decorated with a replica of the Villefranche Cocteau mural of St Peter and the fishes and opened a door to a bathroom. I shut myself inside and waited to hear the sound of his footsteps retreat. They didn’t. Rats. I counted to sixty, flushed and ran the tap, then allowed him to accompany me back to the party, counting the number of doors we passed on the way.

It had been pretty easy to obtain the layout of Balensky’s boat. An email from Steve’s office to the yacht-builder suggesting he was looking to upgrade and asking for a ‘similar’ plan to Balensky’s had produced a virtual blueprint from the slavering designers in a couple of hours. Since Balensky’s was obviously a unique custom build, we could be sure the layout would be fairly accurate. The stateroom was the third door after the guest bathroom on the right, the first corridor as you came down the stairs.

Back on deck, Carlotta was curled under Steve’s shoulder as he spoke to a heavy-set man with diamond studs in his starched shirt front, trailing a disdainful teenage blonde from his fingertips like an ornamental poodle. I managed to get a conversation going with one of the other girls, a South African swimwear model we’d met at Marina di Massa, the usual exchange of where we were going next and what parties we’d been to. I liked her earrings, she admired my shoes.

Bikini Babe and I soldiered on until we were ushered up to the next deck for dinner. It wasn’t that large a party; despite decorations worthy of the debutante ball at the Crillon we were only about twenty at table, and Balensky directed the seating himself, placing me three seats to his right with Steve and Carlotta opposite. I had diamond studs to my left, and next to him, in the seat of honour beside the host, was an Italian actress/model in a sequined gown slashed to her navel, whose face I recognised from the pages of
Gente
. She had a lingerie range and had once dated George Clooney. I assumed she was being paid to attend as she and Balensky ignored one another completely.

To my right was another girlfriend, and what conversation there was began in fits and starts between the men, as we were served with poached oysters stuffed with caviar, lacquered quail stuffed with foie gras and
vitello tonnato
with truffle cream. Pink pansies and shavings of gold leaf adorned every plate. Long silences endured while the waiters ponderously changed the dishes, interspersed with staccato bursts of talk from the men in response to a remark from Balensky. At least we had chairs to sit on, not like the poor French aristocrats at Versailles, forbidden to sit in the presence of the king. Pudding was a rose petal parfait in a violent cerise nitroglycerined gelee, sculpted into such a perfectly realistic flower that we might have been eating the arrangements. Perhaps we were. I was grateful that little was expected of me on the dazzling repartee front; the quiet scrape of my spoon on the plate was measuring out the moments before I would have to strike. I was savouring what I was about to do far more than the parfait.

As the waiters went round with coffee and pyramids of pink Ladurée
macarons
and the men began to light their cigars, I excused myself to go to the loo, carrying my heels as soon as I reached the staircase and tying a knot in the skirt of my gown so I could move more freely.

As I descended, my eyes were casting urgently for the bodyguards, whom I had left standing behind Balensky’s chair. They hadn’t followed me. I paused to listen, rising on my toes a few times like a high jumper preparing a run-up, lengthening out into a run, low, wolflike, down the next flight and along the corridor. Vision twitching neatly along the doors, one, two, three, I streamed towards the stateroom like a missile, loving the focused suppleness of my limbs, the predatory high. Heart drumming, I paused again at the correct door. Behind me, the corridor was still empty. I pushed gently at the doorhandle, and I was in.

The cabin was lined in white carpeting, with piles of white fox stoles on the bed. Certainly the old chap would need them; it was freezing in there. With the air conditioning turned up to maximum the place felt like a luxury morgue. One door at the side of the bed led to the bathroom, another to a dressing room, a row of tiny Rumpelstiltskin shoes neatly lined up, carefully moulded wedges slipped in the soles for extra lift. At the back of the dressing area was the second door I’d seen on the plans. Either an office or a private dungeon. Again, I pushed the handle gently, half expecting an ice pick to shoot out from the spy hole. A small study, just a plain built-in desk and a bank of screens like Steve’s on the
Mandarin
. The Nokia burner was ready, though my hands were sweating so much despite the cold I thought I might drop it. I moved the mouse and the screens came to life.

Football. Bloody football. Steve was not going to be impressed. I photographed the screens anyway, then took a few shots of the bits and pieces lying on the desk – a pile of receipts, a cigar case half-covering a few scribbled notes, a copy of the
Spectator
with the page folded back at the wine column. Should I try the desk drawers? They could be alarmed, and Balensky probably had a personal tiger shark in a tank somewhere for nosy guests. Something crunched under my bare foot, a piece of A4 paper from a cheap jotting pad. Quickly I rolled it up and hooked it into the elastic of my Fifi Chachnil panties. As I was trying to haul my long dress into place, I heard a voice, a man’s voice, speaking Russian. Fuck. What was I doing? Hadn’t I learned anything from playing spies with the Stubbs?

A crazy squad of images tumbled across my mind, old footage of Balensky posing with a gold-plated machine gun, his malevolent leer as he accepted a charity award, humped roadside corpses in wars I’d half read about. Balensky wasn’t a comic-book joke, he was real. This was real. It would take a minute for his guys to snap my neck and dump me over the side, and if a fraction of the rumours I’d seen about their boss were true, they’d had the practice. Didn’t pissed holiday girls drown all the time? I froze, trying to hold my breath, but I was shaking, shuddering as though I’d been punched in the stomach. I hugged my arms around my body and squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, trying to force out the fear.

Think. There was nowhere to hide except the cubby hole beneath the desk. I looked frantically round for a security camera. The carpeting in the bedroom muffled any footsteps, but I heard the bathroom door open. Fuck fuck fuck. Better the wardrobe than the study. I chanced it, racing across into the dressing cubicle while the bodyguards peered down the plughole. They were going to be in here any second. I yanked down the knickers and shoved them in my bag, fumbling to get the paper into my half-empty fag packet.

When the first guard opened the dressing-room door, he found me naked except for the Valli sandals. ‘Darling!’ I gasped, rushing into the black expanse of his chest. ‘I thought you were never – oh! Oh my God! I’m so sorry.’

We looked at one another for a long moment. I forced myself to meet his gaze. If he was amused, I lived. If he wasn’t, I was more than prepared to beg. He said something and the second man joined him, both of them doing a combined bored-slash-deathly menace expression.

‘What are you doing in Mr Balensky’s bedroom?’

‘Waiting for Mr Balensky,’ I answered, as haughtily as I could, which wasn’t easy in six-inch stilettos and nothing else.

‘He tell you to come?’

‘Not exactly. I – um – I wanted to give him a surprise.’

The second man translated for the first. They both laughed. I breathed for the first time in what felt like hours.

‘Please, miss. Is not allow to be in Mr Balensky’s bedroom.’

Thank God, they were being polite. I’d assumed this kind of thing must happen all the time.

‘You have phone?’

I opened my Fendi bag and handed over my iPhone, all innocent.

‘Of course.’

Another exchange in Russian, then the second guard spoke again.

‘I check phone. You are staying here with him. Phone is OK, we are not saying anything to Mr Balensky. OK, miss? You open phone now.’

I tapped in my code and he closed the door. It was rather cramped in the dressing room, but we didn’t need much space for what was expected of me.

When I’d wiped my mouth on one of Balensky’s starched Turnbull & Asser cuffs I put my dress back on and we sat side by side on the bed. After a few minutes of listening to the air conditioner he managed, ‘You like party?’

‘Yes, thank you. Very nice party.’

Number two reappeared and threw my phone and bag at me. Another line in Russian, containing ‘shylukha’-sounds like ‘slut’, means ‘whore’.

‘Phone is OK.’

‘Good. OK!’ Why were we talking like we were in
The Sopranos
?

‘You go back to party now. Naughty girl!’ He wagged his finger at me.

Two minutes later I was back on the upper deck, hair smoothed, heart quiet. I asked a waiter for a Brandy Alexander to take the taste away. I took it to the rail and watched the waves for a moment. There’s a lot to be said for being bullied as a child. After all, as every misery memoir triumphantly confirms, you’re only being picked on because you’re special. You become isolated, but also adamantine. I had learned a particular set to my spine, a disregard for the whispered taunts, even a kind of pleasure in them, because I told myself that it made me different, and then I’d just carried on believing it. Perhaps a therapist would have confessed it out of me, but I’d never had either the money or the interest, because that knowledge of pain became, in time, a source of defiance, a source – though I was embarrassed to even think the word – of strength. I could take things that others couldn’t, and that meant I could do them, too. I had done this, and the relief was glorious.

Anyway it could have been worse. The goon could have wanted a fuck. And even if his cock was as tiny as I imagined his boss’s was, it might have been a bit cosy, what with the second mobile already jammed up there.

13

Like emotion, humour wasn’t Steve’s thing, but even he saw the funny side. I couldn’t tell him, of course, until Carlotta, rock reluctantly back in place, had been reunited with Hermann, then we curled up in Steve’s bed and laughed until I thought I might pee.

‘Let it be noted for the record,’ I gasped, ‘that I cannot be accused of not taking one for the team.’

‘Did you wash it?’

‘Eeeew. Of course!’ I chucked it over. ‘You so owe me.’

‘You’re good, you know. Thinking of the two phones. He didn’t notice a thing.’

‘If they’d found that phone I can’t think what Balensky would have done, to all of us. They don’t mess about, those people.’

‘Believe me, I’m grateful.’ He wasn’t, he was just impatient.

I went to take a shower while Steve hooked up the phone. When I came back he had a screen up, the picture of the notes I’d seen under the cigar case, spinning it, zooming in and out.

‘Anything?’

‘Nope.’ He sounded irritated, which worried me.

‘I got everything, I’m sure I did. All that was up on his computer was Premier League summer transfers.’

‘There’s nothing.’

‘You weren’t the one risking a broken neck from Lenny back there.’

‘Who?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Whatever, Lauren. Fuck.’ He reached for his phone. ‘I need to make some calls now.’

There was a hardness to his tone I had not heard before; in fact I had never seen Steve so expressive. Those abstract trails of money may have represented a game, but it was one he was fearsomely committed to winning.

‘Wait, there was something else, a bit of paper. I’ll get it.’

I dumped the contents of the tiny Fendi bag on the duvet. Fags, lighter, lip gloss, comb, mints, one pair black silk chiffon knickers and the crumpled sheet of paper I had hastily stuffed in the cigarette packet.

‘This. Here.’

Steve scanned it slowly, and as he did the tension was ironed out of his face.

‘Lauren, you are a fucking genius. Where did you get this?’

‘It was on the floor by the desk. I didn’t think he’d miss it – the maid could have picked it up easily. What is it?’

Of course, I’d already read it. A name, a date two days from now and a question mark, scribbled in Biro.

‘Rivoli. Hotel group. He’s bidding for it. I really do need to make some calls now. Thanks, doll.’ Steve wandered out, yelling for Tris.

All that cloak-and-dagger nonsense for a bit of insider share dealing. If I hadn’t read up on the penalties for that kind of thing, I wouldn’t have been able to see what Steve was so excited about. But if he wasn’t going to prison, he stood to make some serious money, and whilst I supposed I could ask him for a cut, there was something else that he could do for me now. And it was useful to know that even the financial masters of the universe were so unsophisticated when it came to dirty little secrets.

*

Something else I discovered while the
Mandarin
was off Ponza was James’s obituary notice. It was in
The
Times
online, no photograph, presumably out of respect for the family, but it mentioned James’s wife, Veronica. Rhodes, like Cecil. I’d never registered his surname. JR, like me. I could have read that as a sign. It mentioned various charities he had contributed to, the bank he worked for, the fact that he’d once played for Harrow at Lord’s which I couldn’t really picture, that he left one daughter, Flora, that a memorial service was to be held in a month. He was sixty-three, not a bad innings, considering. The piece only mentioned that he’d died of a heart attack whilst travelling on business, but it still made me antsy. I locked myself in the bathroom and took out the seamed Loro Piana carrier where I kept my personal stuff. My money was crammed into a paper sandwich bag. There was still about 8,000 euro of James’s cash left, plus what I’d creamed off from my shopping trips, a good few thousand. I’d made a few withdrawals from my own English account, small sums, just to keep up the idea that I was on holiday, but it wasn’t as though I could stay on the boat forever. Steve was obviously getting a bit over the whole idea of leisure pursuits, dying to get back to moving some serious money. I could keep the bank off my back for a few months, until I had some work, but the cash wouldn’t stretch much further, not in London. I also had to consider that it might not be so easy to find a job in the art world, given that I’d called one of London’s major experts a ‘bent cunt’.