Luke Jennings: Codename Villanelle

They talk. For Villanelle, language is fluid. Most of the time she thinks in French, but every so often she awakes and knows that she’s been dreaming in Russian. At times, close to sleep, the blood roars in her ears, an unstoppable tide shot through with polyglot screams. On such occasions, alone in the Paris apartment, she anaesthetises herself with hours of web-surfing, usually in English. And now, she notes, she is mentally playing out scenarios in Sicilian-inflected Italian. She hasn’t sought out the language, but her head echoes with it. Is there any part of her that is still Oxana Vorontsova? Does she still exist, that little girl who lay night after night in urine-sodden sheets at the orphanage, planning her revenge? Or was there only ever Villanelle, evolution’s chosen instrument?

Greco wants her, she can tell. And the more she plays the well-born, impressionable young Parisienne with the wide-eyed gaze, the greater his desire grows. He’s like a crocodile, watching from the shallows as a gazelle inches closer to the water’s edge. How does it usually play out? she wonders. Dinner somewhere they know him well, with the waiters deferential and the bodyguards lounging at a neighbouring table, followed by a chauffeured drive to some discreet, old town apartment?

“Every first night, this box is reserved for me,” he tells her. “The Greci were aristocrats in Palermo before the time of the Habsburgs.”

“In that case I consider myself fortunate to be here.”

“Will you stay for the final act?”

“With pleasure,” she murmurs, as the orchestra strikes up.

As the opera continues, Villanelle once again gazes raptly at the stage, waiting for the moment that she has planned. This comes with the great love duet, “ Amaro sol per te .” As the final note dies away, the audience roars its applause, with cries of “ Bravi! ” and “ Brava Franca! ” echoing from every corner of the house. Villanelle applauds with the others, and eyes shining, turns to Greco. His eyes meet hers, and as if on impulse, he seizes her hand and kisses it. She holds his gaze for a moment, and raising her other hand to her hair, unfastens the long, curved clip, so that the dark tresses fall to her shoulders. And then her arm descends, a pale blur, and her clip is buried deep in his left eye.

His face blanks with shock and pain. Villanelle presses the tiny plunger, injecting a lethal dose of veterinary-strength etorphine into the frontal lobe of his brain and inducing immediate paralysis. She lowers him to the floor, and glances around. Her own box is empty, and in the box beyond, an elderly couple are dimly visible, peering at the stage through opera glasses. All eyes are on Farfaglia and the tenor singing Cavaradossi, both standing motionless as wave after wave of applause breaks over them. Reaching over the partition, Villanelle recovers her bag, retires into the shadows, and takes out the Ruger. The double snap of the suppressed weapon is unremarkable, and the low-velocity .22 rounds leave barely a loose thread as they punch though Greco’s linen jacket.

The applause is subsiding as Villanelle opens the door of the box, her weapon concealed behind her back, and beckons concernedly to the bodyguards, who enter and genuflect beside their employer. She fires twice, less than a second separating the silenced shots, and both men drop to the carpeted floor. Blood jets briefly from the entry wounds in the back of their necks, but the men are already dead, their brainstems shot through. For several long seconds, Villanelle is overwhelmed by the intensity of the killings, and by a satisfaction so piercing that it’s close to pain. It’s the feeling that sex always promises but never quite delivers, and for a moment she clutches herself, gasping, through the Valentino dress. Then slipping the Ruger into her bag and squaring her shoulders, she exits the box.

“Don’t tell me you’re leaving, Signorina Morel?”

Her heart slams in her chest. Walking towards her down the narrow corridor, with the sinister grace of a panther, is Leoluca Messina.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“That’s too bad. But how do you know my uncle?”

She stares at him.

“Don Salvatore. You’ve just come out of his box.”

“We met earlier. And now, if you’ll excuse me, Signor Messina…”

He looks at Villanelle for a moment, then steps firmly past her and opens the door of Greco’s box. When he comes out, a moment later, he is carrying a gun. A Beretta Storm 9mm, part of her registers as she levels the Ruger at his head.

For a moment they stand there unmoving, then he nods, his eyes narrowing, and lowers the Beretta. “Put that away,” he orders.

She doesn’t move. Aligns the fibre-optic foresight with the base of his nose. Prepares to sever a third Sicilian brainstem.

“Look, I’m glad the bastard’s dead, OK? And any minute now, the curtain’s going to come down and this whole place is going to be crowded with people. If you want to get out of here, put that gun away and follow me.”

Some instinct tells her to obey. They hurry through the doors at the end of the corridor, down a short flight of stairs, and into a crimson-upholstered passageway encircling the stalls. “Take my hand,” he orders, and Villanelle does so. Coming towards them is a uniformed usher. Messina greets him cheerily, and the usher grins. “Making a quick getaway, Signor?”

“Something like that.”

At the end of the passageway, directly below Greco’s box, is a door faced in the same crimson brocade as the walls. Opening it, Messina pulls Villanelle into a small vestibule. He parts a blanket-like curtain and suddenly they are backstage, in the heavy half-dark of the wings, with the music, relayed by tannoy from the orchestra pit, blaring about them. Men and women in nineteenth-century costume swim out of the shadows; stagehands move with regimented purpose. Placing an arm round Villanelle’s shoulder, Messina hurries her past racks of costumes and tables set with props, then directs her into the narrow space between the cyclorama and the brick back wall. As they cross the stage they hear a volley of musket-fire. Cavaradossi’s execution.

Then more corridors, discoloured walls hung with fire extinguishers and instructions for emergency evacuation of the house, and finally they are stepping from the stage door onto the Piazza Verdi, with the sound of traffic in their ears and the livid purple sky overhead. Fifty metres away, a silver and black MV Agusta motorcycle is standing at a bollard on the Via Volturno. Villanelle climbs up behind Messina, and with a low growl of exhaust they glide into the night.

It’s several minutes before they hear the first police sirens. Leoluca is heading eastwards, winding through side streets, the MV Agusta nervily responsive to the sharp twists and turns. At intervals, to her left, Villanelle catches a glimpse of the lights of the port and the inky shimmer of the sea. People glance at them as they pass—the man with the wolfish features, the woman in the scarlet dress—but this is Palermo; no one looks too closely. The streets narrow, with washing suspended above and the sounds and smells of family meals issuing through open windows. And then a dark square, a derelict cinema and the baroque facade of a church.

Rocking the bike onto its stand, Messina leads her down an alley beside the church, and unlocks a gate. They are in a walled cemetery, a city of the dead, with family tombs and mausoleums extending in dim rows into the night. “This is where they’ll bury Salvatore when they’ve dug your bullets out of him,” says Messina. “And sooner or later, where they’ll bury me.”

“You said you were happy to see him dead.”

“You’ve saved me the trouble of killing him myself. He was un animale . Out of control.”