Craig Russell - The Carnival Master

‘Am I what you were looking for?’ she asked. ‘Do I please you?’

‘You, my dear,’ said Oliver with a broad, handsome grin, ‘are sheer perfection.’

Having travelled down to Cologne from Hamburg by train, Maria didn’t have her own car with her. It was part of her strategy: her car was an older Jaguar XJS – in an uncharacteristic moment of flamboyance she had bought it deliberately to turn heads. And that made the XJS far too conspicuous for the type of surveillance work that she intended to carry out. Maria had therefore spent much of her first morning in the city looking for a rental car. Even the small economy models were too obviously new and shiny. Cologne had been sulking under a leaden sky that refused to unburden the snow it had been threatening all day. Maria’s mood matched the weather and her feet hurt. She could simply have phoned around from her hotel room but she knew she needed to see the car that she would use.

It was about three in the afternoon and the sky was already dimming from dull to dark when she left the last rental place. It wasn’t one of the main national or international rental companies and was attached to a servicing garage and second-hand car showroom. The girl behind the rental counter was confused when Maria asked her if she could rent the dark blue Citroen Saxo parked on the lot. A phone call brought to the office a salesman who looked to Maria as if he should still have been at school. He explained that the car could not be rented; it was for sale. Perhaps it was because Maria glanced out at the car through the rental office window that he decided to launch into his pitch, promising Maria that it was an exceptional car for its age. When Maria asked him the price he began his prepared build-up.

‘Never mind the crap. How much is the car?’ Maria fixed him with a withering gaze. The salesman blushed behind his freckles. After she had taken the Saxo for a test drive, she told him he’d take seven hundred Euros less than he’d asked. An hour and a half later, with all the documentation sorted out, Maria drove in the Saxo back to her hotel. She parked in the car park around the corner. The car was perfect: completely anonymous and ideal for surveillance. The paintwork was dark blue but had dulled and there were no dents or trims that would mark it out and Maria removed a colourful sticker from the rear window.

She left the Saxo in the car park and walked to the Karstadt store in Breite Strasse, where she sought out the clothing equivalent of the Citroen: grungy tops and jeans, a knitted hat and a couple of heavier jackets, one with a hood. All the clothes were in muted dark colours. As she ran the cheap clothes through the scanner the assistant at the till cast a surreptitious eye over Maria’s expensive lambswool coat and designer handbag.

‘A present for my niece.’ Maria smiled emptily.

It was as good a hotel as Oliver could pay for in cash without arousing suspicion or undue attention. He had booked in before meeting the amply bottomed escort girl in the nightclub and had used a false identity, as he always did. So when the escort agency telephoned the hotel and asked to speak to Herr Meierhoff, to make sure that he was genuinely a guest there, they were put through to his room. It also meant that there was no embarrassing or conspicuous fumbling with wads of Euros when he brought the escort back. While still in the nightclub, he had passed her an envelope containing cash to the pre-agreed amount. All done calmly, with Oliver’s easy smile never faltering.

Oliver had been his usual chatty, charming self all evening and he could see that his professional companion was a little confused about why a man as attractive and urbane as he was would need to pay for sex. But, there again, he had been quite specific about his requirements. In the taxi, however, Oliver fell silent and watched Cologne slide by, occasionally glancing at his companion and smiling. She had explained that her name was Anastasia, and he had commented on what a beautiful name it was, while thinking to himself that it was probably as genuine as Meierhoff. Oliver’s comparative quiet came from his need to anticipate the fulfilment of his desire. He considered these moments to be the most delectable of all, almost better than the fulfilment itself. It was the perfect combination of a growing, hardening lust and the mouth-watering anticipation of a fine meal, whose aromas had already reached him. He became intensely aware of the pressure of Anastasia’s wonderfully full and firm thigh against his.

He gave the taxi driver a reasonable but not lavish tip. Oliver was doing his best not to be remembered by anyone too clearly. He and Anastasia walked straight past reception and to the lifts, again as inconspicuously as he could manage.

‘We’ll have a little nightcap in the room,’ Oliver explained in the elevator. ‘Anastasia’ smiled at him with contrived mischievousness and placed her hand on his groin.

‘Maybe that should wait for after.’ She closed her fingers around him a little. ‘By the way, if you really like what you get tonight, it’s quite in order for you to give me an extra tip.’

The curtains were still open in his hotel room and the main railway station and the massive profile of the cathedral loomed dark against the night sky. Oliver returned Anastasia’s smile as he closed the hotel room door behind him.

I hope, he thought to himself as he dropped the door’s night-bolt lever, that she doesn’t scream. Like the last one did.

Everybody needs to be someone else sometimes, even if it is only for a couple of hours becoming lost in the flesh of another in an anonymous hotel room. Andrea always held that thought at the front of her mind during the first few moments of meeting a client. She didn’t see herself as a prostitute: she would never allow herself to be sold as just so much meat. She was not, after all, what was normally considered feminine. But not everybody had the same ideal of femininity: the work she got through the agency was for a niche market. After all, she was no ordinary woman and the men who paid to be with her were not looking for ordinary sex. Andrea was well aware that the agency she worked for specialised in the more unusual end of the sex industry and she didn’t like to think about what other tastes they probably catered for. She had always suspected that A la Carte was run by gangsters, but her contact with them was confined to the calls they made to her cellphone and the envelopes she mailed them with their percentage of her fees. She knew they had come looking for her, or someone like her.

The first contact had been in the gym where she had been preparing with a few of the other girls for a local competition. It had been a sleazy-looking man called Nielsen who had made the approach. Nielsen had been dressed like a businessman but had had the thick, thuggish build and face of a gangster. He had spoken to Andrea and another three girls. Andrea had noticed that the girls Nielsen spoke to were the only others with the same amount of muscle mass as Andrea had. Nielsen had at first said the work was photographic modelling. He had been quite specific about the type of modelling and it had not bothered Andrea. She was used to parading in a bikini that strained to contain her heavily muscled body: being gawked at without it didn’t unduly bother her. It was after the second photo session that Nielsen had mentioned that A la Carte ’s main business was providing escorts. Escorts for an especially discerning clientele.

Cologne had been the first German city to levy a tax on prostitutes’ incomes, but A la Carte was less than assiduous when it came to record-keeping. This had meant that Andrea had successfully managed to avoid being registered as a part-time sex worker and therefore was not taxed on her ‘extra’ earnings. The money from the escort work was more than useful, supplementing the income she made from running her cafe; but Andrea knew that she didn’t do it just for the money.