Luke Jennings - Codename Villanelle

The second floor is altogether more specialist. FatPanda is met by an unsmiling young woman dressed in a crisp green and white skirted uniform. She wears a starched cap pinned to her upswept hair, a surgical mask, and a transparent plastic apron which rustles as she moves. She smells of some austere disinfectant. A name tag pinned to her chest identifies her as Nurse Wu.

“You’re late,” she says icily.

“I’m sorry,” FatPanda whispers. He’s already so excited that he’s trembling.

Frowning, Nurse Wu leads him into a room dominated by a gurney, several monitors, and a ventilator. Beneath the ceiling light, an array of scalpels, retractors and other surgical instruments gleam dimly on aluminium trays.

“Remove your clothes and lie down,” she orders, indicating a pink hospital gown. The gown barely reaches FatPanda’s fleshy hips, and as he takes his place on the gurney with his genitals exposed, he feels profoundly, thrillingly vulnerable.

Beginning with his arms, Nurse Wu begins to fasten a series of canvas and Velcro restraints, pulling the cuffs so tightly around FatPanda’s chest, thighs and ankles that he is completely immobilised. The final restraint encircles his throat, and with the strap secured, she places a black rubber oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. His breathing is now audible as a shallow, urgent hissing.

“You understand that all this is for your own good?” says Nurse Wu. “Some of the procedures you require are highly intrusive, and may be painful.”

FatPanda manages a faint groan from inside the mask. His panicked eyes skid around. For an instant, inches in front of his face, Nurse Wu’s plastic apron falls forward and her gown parts to reveal a plump crotch in a pair of utilitarian, possibly military-issue, knickers.

“Now!” she says, and he hears the snap of latex gloves. “You need a full bladder-flush. So I’m going to have to shave and catheterise you.”

FatPanda hears water running, feels the blood-temperature warmth as she lathers his pubic area and begins to scrape away with a surgical razor. Soon, his penis is rearing and twitching like a marionette. Laying down the razor, her eyes thoughtful above the three-ply surgical mask, Nurse Wu reaches for a pair of locking forceps from the tray. Holding them briefly in front of his face, she clamps the sharp teeth of the forceps onto the base of his scrotum. FatPanda looks up at her adoringly, tears of pain running down his cheeks. Once again, as if by the sheerest accident, he is permitted a glimpse of Nurse Wu’s pillowy pudenda. He hears the clink of metal, feels the forceps lifted, and a moment later feels a fiery sensation tearing across his perineum.

“Now look at what you’ve made me do,” Nurse Wu murmurs exasperatedly, holding up a scalpel with a red-tinged blade. “I’m going to have to stitch that.”

Tearing open a sterile pack, she takes out a monofilament suture line, and sets to work. The first entry of the needle makes FatPanda gasp, and as Nurse Wu wrenches the surgical knot tight, he shudders with barely containable pleasure. Frowning at this impertinence, Nurse Wu takes a chromium-plated probe from an ice-filled kidney dish, and inserts it forcibly into FatPanda’s rectum. His eyes are closed now. He’s in the zone, the place where terror and ecstasy meet in a dark, swirling tide.

And then suddenly, soundlessly, Nurse Wu is gone. FatPanda eyes drowsily revolve, scanning their limited field of vision, and another, different figure swims into view. Like Nurse Wu, she is dressed in surgical scrubs, cap, face-mask and gloves. But the eyes that are gazing at FatPanda are not amber brown like Nurse Wu’s. They are the icy grey of the Russian midwinter.

FatPanda regards her with hazy surprise. A new practitioner is a departure from the scenario that he hasn’t anticipated.

“I’m afraid things have got very serious,” she tells him, in English. “That’s why I’ve been called in.”

FatPanda’s eyes shine with fearful anticipation. A gweipo surgeon. The clinic have excelled themselves.

Villanelle can tell from his expression that he understands what she has said. Not that she doubts for a moment that a man who has spent the best part of a decade reading the confidential files of international corporations is fluent in English. From a bag at her feet she takes an aluminium cylinder, just nine inches long. Disconnecting the airflow from the oxygen tank to FatPanda’s rubber mask, she attaches it to the cylinder.

Pure carbon monoxide is odourless and tasteless. To the haemoglobin in the human body it is indistinguishable from oxygen. With the first cold rush of the gas into his nostrils, FatPanda feels the threads of reality drifting away. Twenty seconds later his breathing ceases.

When she’s sure that he’s dead, Villanelle reconnects the rubber mask to the oxygen. She has no doubt that someone with the specialist skills of Lieutenant Colonel Zhang Lei will receive a very thorough autopsy indeed, and that the true cause of his death will swiftly be revealed, but there’s no harm in sowing a few seeds of confusion.

Kneeling, she examines the prostrate form of Nurse Wu. When Villanelle clamped a latex-gloved hand over her mouth, punched a hypodermic needle into her neck and injected a carefully measured dose of etorphine, the young Shanghainese woman managed a faint mew of surprise before slumping backwards into Villanelle’s arms. Minutes later she still looks startled, but her breathing is steady; she will be conscious again in half an hour.

As an artistic touch, Villanelle slips off Nurse Wu’s knickers and places them over FatPanda’s head. Then, taking out a cheap mobile phone she has bought for cash that afternoon, she photographs him from a number of angles, none of them flattering. A final click emails the pictures, with a pre-written commentary, to half a dozen of China’s most influential bloggers and dissidents. This is one story the Beijing establishment is not going to be able to cover up.

If there is a house rule common to the world’s pleasure-houses, it is that the customer who is arriving must not meet the customer who is leaving. In the Dangfeng house a back stair leads to the exit, and it is this that Villanelle now takes, having changed from her surgical uniform. Outside, the streets are humid, and still teeming with tourists and strolling families, and no one takes any notice of a young Western woman wearing a baseball cap and carrying a small backpack. When pressed—and in the days and weeks to come there will be hard questions asked in the lanes and alleyways of the Old Town—one or two observers will recall that the woman’s cap carried the insignia of the New York Yankees, and that her dark-blonde hair was worn in a ponytail, and from these slender impressions will be born the rumour that the suspect is an American. Frustratingly for the intelligence services and the police, no one will recall her face.

Ten minutes’ walk is enough for Villanelle to dispose of the phone, battery and SIM card in separate restaurant garbage bins. The scrubs, gloves, mask and cap, together with the aluminium CO cylinder, sink to the murky bed of the Huangpu river in a string shopping bag weighted with stones.

Hours have passed, and Villanelle is lying in a claw-footed bathtub in a tenth floor apartment in Shanghai’s exclusive French Concession, meditating upon the murder that she has just committed. The water is scented with essence of stephanotis, the walls are jade-green, silk curtains billow in the faint breeze.

As always on these occasions, the current of Villanelle’s emotions ebbs and flows. There’s satisfaction at a job well done. Detailed research, imaginative planning, and a clean, silent kill. Could anyone else have taken out FatPanda with such style, such frictionless ease? In her mind she replays his last moments. The surprise as their eyes met. Then that curious acceptance as he began the drift into the depths.