Daniel Silva - The Kill Artist

She crossed into the Luxembourg Quarter. How quickly it had come to this, she thought-Michel Duval, trying to threaten her into a quickie between takes. A few years ago he wouldn’t have considered it. But not now. Now she was vulnerable, and Marcel had decided to test her.

Sometimes she was sorry she ever got into this business. She had planned to be a ballet dancer-had studied at the most prestigious academy in Marseilles-but at sixteen she was spotted by a talent scout from a Paris modeling agency, who gave her name to Marcel Lambert. Marcel scheduled a test shoot, let her move into his flat, taught her how to move and act like a model instead of a ballerina. The photographs from the test shoot were stunning. She had dominated the camera, radiated a playful sexuality. Marcel quietly put the pictures into circulation around Paris: no name, nothing about the girl, just the pictures and his card. The reaction was instantaneous. His telephone didn’t stop ringing for a week. Photographers were clamoring to work with her. Designers wanted to sign her up for their fall shows. Word of the photographs leaked from Paris to Milan and from Milan to New York. The entire fashion world wanted to know the name of this mysterious raven-haired French beauty.

Jacqueline Delacroix.

How different things were now. The quality work had started to slow down when she turned twenty-six, but now that she was thirty-three the good jobs had dried up. She still got some runway work in Paris and Milan in the fall, but only with lower-level designers. She still landed the occasional lingerie ad-“There’s nothing wrong with your tits, darling,” Marcel liked to say-but he had been forced to hire her out for different types of shoots. She had just finished a shoot for a German brewery in which she posed as the attractive wife of a successful middle-aged man.

Marcel had warned it would happen this way. He had told her to save her money, to prepare herself for a life after modeling. Jacqueline had never bothered-she’d assumed the money would pour in forever. Sometimes she tried to remember where all of it had gone. The clothes. The crash pads in Paris and New York. The extravagant vacations with the other girls in the Caribbean or the South Pacific. The ton of cocaine she had sucked up her nose before getting straight.

Michel Duval had been right about one thing: she had slept with a man to get a job, an editor from French Vogue named Robert Leboucher. It was a high-profile job that she needed desperately-a swimsuit and summer-wear shoot in Mustique. It could change everything for her-give her enough money to get back on stable ground financially, show everyone in the industry that she still had what it took for the hot jobs. At least for one more year, two at the most. Then what?

She walked into Marcel’s building, entered the lift, rode up to his flat. When she knocked on the door, it flew back. Marcel stood there, wide-eyed, mouth open. “Jacqueline, my pet! Please tell me it’s not true. Tell me you didn’t kick Michel Duval in the balls! Tell me he made up the entire thing!”

“Actually, Marcel, I kicked him in the cock.”

He threw back his head and laughed loudly. “I’m certain you’re the first woman who’s ever done that. Serves the bastard right. He almost ruined Claudette. You remember what he did to her? Poor little thing. So beautiful, so much talent.”

He pulled his lips downward, emitted a Gallic snort of disapproval, took her by the hand, and pulled her inside. A moment later they were drinking wine on the couch in his sitting room, the hum of evening traffic drifting through the open windows. Marcel lit her cigarette and deftly waved out the match. He wore tight-fitting faded blue jeans, black loafers, and a gray turtleneck sweater. His thinning gray hair was cropped very short. He’d had another face-lift recently; his blue eyes seemed unnaturally large and bulging, as if he were constantly surprised. She thought about those days so long ago, when Marcel had brought her to this flat and prepared her for her life ahead. She’d always felt safe in this place.

“So what kind of stunt did Michel pull now?”

Jacqueline described the shoot, holding nothing back. There were few secrets between them. When she finished Marcel said, “You probably shouldn’t have kicked him. He’s threatening to sue.”

“Let him try. Every girl he’s coerced into having sex will testify at his trial. It’ll destroy him.”

“Robert Leboucher called me a few minutes before you arrived. He’s trying to back out of Mustique. He says he can’t work with a woman who kicks photographers.”

“Word travels fast in this business.”

“It always has. I think I can talk some sense into Robert.” Marcel hesitated, then added, “That is, if you want me to.”

“Of course I want you to.”

“Are you sure, Jacqueline? Are you sure you still have what it takes for this kind of work?”

She took a long drink of the wine, leaned her head against Marcel’s shoulder. “Actually, I’m not quite sure I do.”

“Do me a favor, sweetheart. Go to your house in the south for a few days. Or take one of those long trips like you used to take. You know-the ones you were always so mysterious about. Get some rest. Clear your head. Do some serious thinking. I’ll try to talk some sense into Robert. But you have to decide whether this is really what you want.”

She closed her eyes. Perhaps it was time to get out while she still had some shred of dignity. “You’re right,” she said. “I could use a few days in the countryside. But I want you to call that fucking Robert Leboucher right now and tell him that you expect him to keep his word about the shoot in Mustique.”

“And what if I can’t make him change his mind?”

“Tell him I’ll kick him in the cock too.”

Marcel smiled. “Jacqueline, darling, I’ve always liked your style.”

Bayswater, London

Fiona Barrows looked a great deal like the block of flats she managed in Sussex Gardens: broad and squat with a bright coat of paint that could not conceal the fact she was aging and not terribly gracefully. The short walk from the lift to the entrance of the vacant flat left her slightly out of breath. She shoved the key into the lock with her plump hand, pushed open the door with a little grunt. “Here we are,” she sang.

She led him on a brief tour: a sitting room furnished with well-worn couches and chairs, two identical bedrooms with double beds and matching bedside tables, a small dining room with a modern table of tinted gray glass, a cramped galley kitchen with a two-burner stove and a microwave oven.

He walked back into the sitting room, stood in the window, opened the blinds. Across the road was another block of flats.

“If you want my opinion, you couldn’t ask for a better location in London for the price,” Fiona Barrows said. “ Oxford Street is very close, and of course Hyde Park is just around the corner. Do you have children?”

“No, I don’t,” Gabriel said absently, still looking at the block of flats across the street.

“What kind of work do you do, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I’m an art restorer.”

“You mean you spruce up old paintings?”

“Something like that.”

“You do the frames as well? I have an old frame in my flat that needs patching up.”

“Just the paintings, I’m afraid.”

She looked at him as he stood in the window, gazing into space. A handsome man, she thought. Nice hands. Good hands were sexy in a man. Imagine, an art restorer, right here in the building. It would be nice to have a touch of class around for a change. Oh, that she was still single-single, twenty years younger, twenty pounds lighter. He was a cautious fellow; she could see that. A man who never made a move without thinking through every angle. He would probably want to see a dozen more flats before making up his mind. “So, what do you think?”