The Third Woman. Mark Burnell

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СКАЧАТЬ From her mail-box she retrieved an electricity bill and a mail-shot printed in Arabic. The aroma of frying onions clung to the staircase’s peeling wallpaper.

      Stephanie’s apartment was on the third floor; a cramped bedroom and bathroom at the back with a large room at the front, one quarter partitioned to form a basic kitchenette. There were hints of original elegance – tall ceilings, plaster mouldings, wall panels – but they were damaged, mostly through neglect.

      Her leather bag was where she’d left it late yesterday afternoon, at the centre of a threadbare rug laid over uneven stained floorboards. The luggage tag was still wrapped around a handle. So often it was the smallest detail that betrayed you. In the past she’d been supported by an infrastructure that ensured there were no oversights, no matter how trivial. These days, as an independent, there was no one.

      On the floor by the fireplace a cheap stereo stood next to a wicker basket containing the few CDs she’d collected over ten months. They were the only personal items in the apartment. She slipped one into the machine. Foreign Affairs by Tom Waits; more than any photograph album could, it mainlined into the memory.

      The first albums she’d listened to were the ones she’d borrowed from her brother: Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home; David Bowie, Heroes; The Smiths, The World Won’t Listen. She remembered being given something by Van Morrison by a boy who wanted to date her. Not a good choice. She’d disliked Van Morrison then and still did.

      Elton John’s ‘Saturday Night’ had been the song playing on the radio the first time she sold herself in the back seat of a stranger’s car. Every time she heard the song now, that same meaty hand grasped her neck, jamming her face against the car door. The same fingernails drew bloody scratches across her buttocks. Later, she’d been routinely brutalized and humiliated but nothing had ever matched the emotional impact of that initiation. She felt she’d been hung, drawn and quartered. And that the music coming from the tinny radio in the front had somehow been an accomplice.

      Sometimes mainlining into the memory was as risky as mainlining into a vein; you didn’t necessarily get the rush you were depending on. So she changed the CD to Absolute Torch & Twang, a k.d.lang album she’d discovered as Petra.

      Petra meant no bad memories. In fact, no memories at all.

      She emptied the leather bag. Dirty clothes, a roll of dollars, a wash-bag containing strengthened catgut in a plastic dental-floss dispenser, an Australian passport in the name of Michelle Davis, a ragged copy of Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost and a guide to Turkmenistan featuring out-of-date maps of Ashgabat and Turkmenbashi.

      In the bathroom, beneath the basin, she kept a battered aluminium wash-bowl. She shredded the passport, luggage tag, receipts and ticket-stubs, then dropped them into the bowl, which she placed on the crumbling balcony. She squirted lighter fuel over the remains and set light to them. A small funeral pyre for another version of her.

      There were four messages on the answer-phone including one from Tourisme Albert on boulevard Anspach. Your tickets are ready for collection. Shall we courier them to you or would you like to collect them from our office? She looked at her watch. In thirty-six hours, she would be gone; a fortnight in Mauritius, intended as a buffer between Turkmenistan and the next place. Yet again, a woman in transit.

      In her bedroom, she shunted the single bed to one side, rolled back the reed mat and lifted two loose floorboards. From the space below she recovered a small Sony Vaio laptop in a sealed plastic pouch.

      Back in the living-room, she switched on the computer and accessed Petra’s e-mails. Spread over six addresses, split between AOL and Hotmail, Petra hid behind four men and two women. She checked Marianne Bernard’s mail at AOL; one new message. Roland, predictably. Gratitude for the best night of the year. Not the greatest compliment, Stephanie felt, in early January.

      She sent one new message. To Stern, the information broker who also acted as her agent and confidant. It had to be significant that almost the only person she truly trusted was someone she had never met. She didn’t even know whether Stern was a man or a woman, even though she called him Oscar.

      > Back from the Soviet past. With love, P.

      She left the laptop connected, then took her dirty clothes to Wash Club on place Saint-Géry. She bought milk and a carton of apple juice from the LIDL supermarket on the other side of the square, then returned home to find two messages waiting for her. One was from Stern. He directed her to somewhere electronically discreet and asked:

      > How was it?

      > Turkmenistan? Or Sullivan?

      > Both.

      > Depressing, dirty and backward. But Turkmenistan was fine.

      Eddie Sullivan was a former Green Jacket who’d established a company named ProActive Solutions. An arms-dealer with a flourishing reputation, he’d been in Turkmenistan to negotiate the sale of a consignment of weapons to the IMU, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The hardware, stolen from the British Army during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, was already in Azerbaijan, awaiting transport across the Caspian Sea from Baku to the coastal city of Turkmenbashi.

      Petra’s contract had been paid for by Vyukneft, a Russian oil company with business in Azerbaijan. But Stern had told her that the decision to use her had been political. Made in Moscow, he’d said. Hiring Petra meant no awkward fingerprints. It wasn’t the first time she’d worked by proxy for the Russian government.

      The final negotiation between Sullivan and the IMU had been scheduled for the Hotel Turkmenbashi, a monstrous hangover from the Soviet era. Hideous on the outside, no better on the inside, she’d eliminated Sullivan in his room, while the Uzbek end-users gathered two floors below. She’d masqueraded as a member of hotel staff, delivering a message with as much surliness as she could muster.

      Distracted by the imminent deal, Sullivan had been sloppy. He’d never looked at her, even as she loitered in the doorway waiting for a tip. When he’d turned his back to look for loose change, she’d pulled out a Ruger with a silencer and had kicked the door shut with her heel. The gun-shot and the slam had merged to form one hearty thump. Two minutes later she was heading away from the hotel on the long drive back to Ashgabat and the Lufthansa flight for Frankfurt.

      > Are you available?

      > Not until further notice.

      > Taking a vacation?

      > Something like that. Anything on the radar?

      > Only from clients who can’t afford you.

      > Then your commission must be fatter than I thought.

      > Petra! Please. Don’t be cruel.

      The second message, at one of the Hotmail addresses, was a real surprise. No names, just a single sentence.

      > I see you chose not to take the advice I gave you in Munich.

      Petra Reuter was sipping a cappuccino at a table close to the entrance of Café Roma on Maximilianstrasse. It was late September but winter had already made its presence felt; two days earlier there had been snow flurries in Munich.

      The man rising from the opposite side of the table was Otto Heilmann. A short man, no more than five-foot-six, with narrow sloping shoulders, he wore a loden hunting jacket with onyx buttons over a fawn polo-neck.

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