Luke Jennings: Codename Villanelle

“You’ll take his place?”

Messina shrugs. “Someone will.”

“Business as usual?”

“Something like that. But you? Who do you work for?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters if you’re going to come after me next.” He draws the squat little Beretta from his shoulder holster. “Perhaps I should kill you now.”

“You’re welcome to try,” she says, drawing the Ruger.

They stare at each other for a moment. Then, without lowering the weapon, she steps towards him, and reaches for his belt. “Truce?”

The sex is brief and savage. She holds the Ruger throughout. Afterwards, placing her gun hand on his shoulder for balance, she wipes herself with the tail of his shirt.

“And now?” he says, watching her with awed repulsion, and noting how, in the half-light, the asymmetrical tilt of her upper lip makes her look not sensual, as he’d previously imagined, but coldly rapacious.

“Now you go.”

“Will I see you again?”

“Pray that you don’t.”

He glances at her for a moment and walks away. The MV Agusta kicks into life with a snarl and fades into the night. Picking her way downhill between the tombs, Villanelle finds a small clearing in front of a pillared mausoleum. From the Fendi shoulder bag she takes a Briquet lighter, a crumpled blue cotton frock, a pair of wafer-thin sandals and a lingerie-fabric money belt. The money belt holds 500 in cash, an airline ticket, and a passport and credit card identifying her as Irina Skoryk, a French national born in Ukraine.

Quickly changing her clothes, Villanelle makes a pyre of the Valentino dress, all documents relating to Sylviane Morel, and the green contact lenses and brunette wig that she has been wearing. The fire burns briefly but intensely, and when there is nothing left she sweeps the ashes into the undergrowth with a cypress branch.

Continuing downhill, Villanelle finds a rusty exit gate, and a path leading down steps to a narrow lane. This gives onto a broader, busier road, which she follows westwards towards the city centre. After twenty minutes she finds what she has been looking for: a large wheeled garbage bin behind a restaurant, overflowing with kitchen waste. Pulling on the opera gloves she looks around her, and makes sure that she’s unobserved. Then she plunges both hands into the bin, and pulls out half a dozen bags. Unknotting one, she thrusts the Fendi shoulder bag and the Ruger into the stinking mess of clam shells, fish heads and coffee grounds. Returning the bag to the bin, she piles the others on top. Last to disappear are the gloves. The whole operation has taken less than thirty seconds. Unhurriedly, she continues walking westwards.

At 11 a.m. the following morning, agent Paolo Vella of the Polizia di Stato is standing at the bar of a cafe in the Piazza Olivella, taking coffee with a colleague. It has been a long morning; since dawn Vella has been manning the cordon at the main entrance to the Teatro Massimo, now a crime scene. The crowds, by and large, have been respectful, keeping their distance. Nothing has been officially announced, but all Palermo seems to know that Don Salvatore Greco has been assassinated. Theories abound, but the general assumption is that this is family business. There’s a rumour that the hit was carried out by a woman. But there are always rumours.

“Will you look at that,” breathes Vella, all thoughts of the Greco murder temporarily banished. His colleague follows his gaze out of the cafe into the busy street, where a young woman in a blue sundress—a tourist, evidently—has paused to watch the sudden ascent of a flight of pigeons. Her lips are parted, her grey eyes shine, the morning light illuminates her close-cropped hair.

“Madonna or whore?” asks Vella’s colleague.

“Madonna, without question.”

“In that case, Paolo, too good for you.”

He smiles. For a moment, in the sun-dazed street, time stands still. Then as the pigeons circle the square, the young woman continues on her way, long limbs swinging, and is lost in the throng.

Villanelle sits in a window seat in the south wing of the Louvre art gallery in Paris. She is wearing a black cashmere sweater, leather skirt, and low-heeled boots. Winter sunshine pours through the vaulted window, illuminating the white marble statue in front of her. Life-sized, and entitled Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss , it was carved by the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova in the final years of the eighteenth century.

It’s a beautiful thing. Psyche, awakening, reaches upwards to her winged lover, her arms framing her face. Cupid, meanwhile, tenderly supports her head and breast. Every gesture speaks of love. But to Villanelle, who has been watching the visitors come and go for an hour now, Canova’s creation suggests darker possibilities. Is Cupid luring Psyche into a sense of false security so that he can rape her? Or is it Psyche that’s sexually manipulating him, by pretending to be passive and feminine?

Unaccountably, passers-by seem to take the sculpture at its romantic face value. A young couple imitate the pose, laughing. Villanelle watches closely, notes how the girl’s gaze softens, how the flutter of her eyelashes slows, how her smile turns to a shy parting of the lips. Turning the sequence over in her mind like a phrase in a foreign language, Villanelle files it away for future use. Over the course of her twenty-six-year lifespan she has acquired a vast repertoire of such expressions. Tenderness, sympathy, distress, guilt, shock, sadness… Villanelle has never actually experienced any such emotions, but she can simulate them all.

“Darling! There you are.”

Villanelle looks up. It’s Anne-Laure Mercier. Late as usual, with wide apologetic grin. Villanelle smiles, they air-kiss, and stroll towards the Café Mollien on the gallery’s first-floor landing. “I’ve got a secret to tell you,” Anne-Laure confides. “And you mustn’t tell a soul .”

Anne-Laure is the closest thing that Villanelle has to a friend. They met, rather absurdly, at the hairdresser. Anne-Laure is pretty, extroverted and more than a little lonely, having exchanged life at a busy public relations firm for marriage to a wealthy man sixteen years her senior. Gilles Mercier is a senior functionary at the Treasury. He works inordinately long hours, and his greatest passions are his wine cellar and his small but important collection of nineteenth-century ormolu clocks.

But Anne-Laure wants to have fun, a commodity sadly lacking in the life she shares with Gilles and his clocks. Right now, before they’ve even reached the curving stone staircase up to the restaurant, she’s pouring out the details of her latest affair, with a nineteen-year-old Brazilian dancer at the Paradis Latin cabaret.

“Just be careful,” Villanelle warns her. “You have a lot to lose. And most of your so-called friends would go straight to Gilles if they thought you were playing around.”

“You’re right, they would.” Anne-Laure sighs, and links her arm through Villanelle’s. “You’re so sweet, you know that? You never judge me, and you’re always so concerned.”

Villanelle squeezes the other woman’s arm. “I care about you. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

In truth, it suits Villanelle’s purposes to spend time with Anne-Laure. She’s well-connected, with an insider’s access to the finer things of life. Haute couture shows, tables at the best restaurants, membership of the best clubs. Besides which she’s undemanding company, and two women together attract far less attention than a woman on her own. On the negative side Anne-Laure is sexually reckless, and it can only be a matter of time before some indiscretion is brought to Gilles’s attention. When that happens, Villanelle doesn’t want to give the impression that she’s complicit in his wife’s infidelity. The last thing she needs is the hostile attention of a senior public servant.