Eighty Days Amber (30 page)

Summer drew her bow across the strings, producing a sound that was so pensive and beautiful that I could not help the tears that welled up and flowed gently down my cheeks. My emotions were getting the better of me as my fear about the latter part of evening grew. She had a spotlight trained on her also and every now and again when we spun in her direction I caught a glimpse of her standing with her instrument raised to her chin, her breasts and cunt on proud display. She was barefoot like I was, and looked as solid as an oak tree, implacable and rigid, as if there was no force in the world that could sway her. The imperious woman who played for this audience was a world away from the blushing girl that I had watched dancing in New Orleans.

Chey turned me away from him, my cue to slip out of my dress and reveal my nudity. This too had been Viggo’s emphatic suggestion. The sight of my naked body would distract the audience, if the sight of Summer’s hadn’t caused them to forget Chey altogether already. He also felt that
naked I would appear more vulnerable and therefore less likely to be involved in the deceit.

Honey traps were the oldest trick in the book, I reckoned, but according to Viggo, men have terribly short memories, particularly when confronted by the body of a naked woman.

Desire, he said, did much to overwhelm the senses, including overwhelming common sense altogether.

Removing Chey’s clothes had proven a trickier point. I refused to allow him to wear any kind of cheap Velcro ensemble that would make him seem no better than a stripper at a hen night. He could not merely half undo his toreador trousers and then continue to dance with them pooled around his feet. But we could not devise any way for him to step out of a pair of trousers and a buttoned shirt without appearing a fool.

And so I was left alone for a moment under the burning glow of the spotlight, whirling rhythmically as Chey stripped under cover of darkness, off to one side of the improvised stage. This was my opportunity to ensure that every eye in the audience was upon me and that Chey was forgotten and so I danced like I had never danced before, twisting my limbs into every darkly erotic position that I had been able to dream up.

Viggo, I was certain, must have planted members of his trusted stage crew into position which would explain why the lighting was unusually dull for a few moments, enabling me to see past the penumbra of the beam that surrounded me and into the auditorium.

Beyond the first few rows, I could barely make out any features on the blurred crowd but I was certain that I could see movement. Huddled forms drawing together to whisper
to one another. The electronic displays of mobile phones lighting up to make calls. The faint, quick steps of someone running in a corridor. The hostess rushing to and fro, her stilettos tapping a staccato rhythm on the stone flooring.

The Russians had discovered our plot. I was sure of it. Every faint sound or rustle of movement cut into me like a whip. I had begun to feel a little strange, as if my limbs wouldn’t move when I asked them to and water was flooding into my brain. The effects of shock, I thought, or adrenalin; and I forced myself to keep moving as the room tilted sideways. A scream rushed through my throat and threatened to burst from my mouth, but I swallowed it back and continued to shimmy as though my life depended on it, because tonight it did, and Chey’s life too.

Chey stepped back into the stage light, which had now been turned up a notch and lit us as brightly as the beam from a desert sun. He was utterly bare and beautiful. His abdomen muscles ran down in a V shape to meet his pelvis. His cock was hard and pointed up towards my sex like an arrow. His bush of pubic hair was untrimmed, black and lustrous, framing his penis in savage style. In that moment I forgot what it was that we were there for and I fell to my knees as if to worship him, wrapping my lips reverently around his organ as a nun might take communion.

This was not part of the programme. I had broken from Viggo’s tightly choreographed and rigorously detailed scheme to satisfy my own desire, because I had wanted nothing more than to feel the silky skin of his cock against the wet pillow of my tongue.

Chey crouched down and clasped my chin. He pressed his lips against mine.

I did not even notice when he lifted the gun to my forehead and fired.

‘I’m sorry, Luba. It had to be this way,’ he whispered tenderly, his voice quiet and meant only for me.

Summer screamed.

My world went black.

I slumped against the floor, barely aware of the babble of sound around me and the heavy
phut
of another shot. A loud
thump
! Another scream. A man’s voice from the crowd shouting; ‘I’m a doctor, I’m a doctor.’ I realised it was Dominik’s voice. Heels clattering. The voice of the hostess coming to me as if through a tunnel, ‘Luba, Luba, Luba.’ Then, ‘She’s dead. Oh my God, she’s really dead.’

A stranger’s hand wrapped around my throat.

‘I can’t feel a pulse,’ someone said.

‘There’s so much blood.’

No trapdoor had opened in the stage floor below us as I had been half-expecting. Viggo’s men were not assembled to whisk us away.

And where was Chey?

‘This one’s a goner.’

‘Shot himself straight in the head.’

‘And her too.’

Voices in Russian babbled in garbled voices. Their words floated around me like hummingbirds, quiet, quick, impossible to catch. I reached up an arm to snatch at them but my limbs would not move.

Lubov Shevshenko, Luba Shevshenko, my love, my life, my private dancer
.

There was a sound like wind rushing in my ears and a barrage of thoughts and images, so no matter how I tried to
concentrate on my surroundings in case we needed to flee, I could not decipher what was reality and what was dream.

Sirens rushed towards us with alarms like magpies screeching. The noise came to me as if I was standing at the mouth of a cave and listening to echoes. More heels clacking, enough pairs to shoe an army.

And then I was being lifted and carried away into the night.

The next sound I heard was laughter.

‘Christ, I think even
she
thinks she’s dead!’

My eyes fluttered open.

I blinked.

Lauralynn was staring straight down at me, an enormous grin on her face. She looked as unglamorous as I had ever seen her, with her hair pulled back into a loose ponytail and the rest of her encased in a baggy yellow high-visibility jacket and a pair of thick dark-green trousers. I craned my neck for a better look. Even her shoes were ugly thick-soled black clompers. Besides when she was getting in and out of the shower, it was the first time I had ever seen her outside of her trademark stiletto heels. She wasn’t even wearing a scrap of make-up and her eyes looked tired and wan.

‘Thank God for that,’ she said when I lifted my head. ‘I was beginning to think I was actually going to have to use this.’

She was holding a defibrillator.

‘Where am I? Where’s Chey?’

Memories of the evening had turned into a scrambled mess in my mind and I couldn’t piece any of it together.

‘Calm down, Lulu, he’s right here. He should be awake in a minute or two.’

I pushed myself up into a sitting position and shrieked when I saw Chey’s face covered with blood. Lauralynn was carefully wiping it off with a wet cloth.

‘Don’t worry, it’s fake. Fake gun, fake bullets, fake blood.’ She spoke as though she was explaining something to a very slow child.

My head thumped and everything was spinning, as though I’d just gotten off a merry-go-round. I had a vague feeling that something important had just happened and I’d slept through it, but if I just thought hard enough, it might come back to me.

‘Here,’ said Viggo, leaning over from the front seat. ‘This might help.’ He passed me a bottle of water.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Where are we?’

We were lying on stretchers in the back of an ambulance. The windows were small and high up so I could not make out our surroundings, but we were driving through the night and the street outside was quiet, the New Year’s festivities audible but some distance away.

‘You went straight down the K-hole,’ Lauralynn said, chuckling to herself.

‘What?’

When I tried to speak, my mouth refused to form the words, as if a wall had been erected between my brain and my body functions.

‘We didn’t trust either of you to play dead well enough,’ Viggo added. ‘So we knocked you out. Spiked your tequila with ketamine. Just enough to get you to lie still for a while. We had to tell Chey, to check you didn’t have a heart condition or anything . . . I didn’t want to be responsible for actually killing you.’

‘Can you move?’ Lauralynn interrupted. ‘As educational as this is, we need to get you two out of Dublin.’

She passed me a rucksack and with a great effort of concentration I was able to pull on the pair of cheap, stone-washed jeans and the oversized Metallica T-shirt inside it. A pair of Converse trainers, a baseball cap and a puffer jacket finished the look. I tucked my hair under a cap and down the back of my T-shirt and wrapped a heavy green scarf around my neck, the sort that tourists buy in tacky souvenir shops.

‘You’ve never been more beautiful,’ Viggo said, glancing at me quickly as he crawled across to check on Chey.

He looked like a matchstick draped in a tent, in his paramedic’s costume that was loose cut and about three sizes to big for him.

‘Those baggy trousers suit you,’ I replied. ‘You should try wearing them on stage. The women will go wild.’

He snorted.

‘Shut it, or next time you get yourself in a fix I’ll let the Russians kill you.’

‘Shit,’ I said, as it all rushed back. ‘Where are the Russians? Are we safe here?’

‘Sure,’ Viggo replied, his lopsided smile growing wider by the minute. ‘We created a little diversion and they forgot about you and your man here quicker than you can say Picasso.’

‘He never learns, this one.’ Lauralynn sighed. ‘He’s got some of his boys out raiding the oligarch’s mansion. Millions of pounds’ worth of stuff in there, apparently.’

‘You know me better than that. It’s not the money, honey, it’s the art. And all of it wasted on a thug like that
anyway. I’m not stealing, I’m liberating. Taking it to a better place.’

‘You have very loose morals, my dear. No wonder I love you so much.’ Lauralynn leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.

Chey began to stir.

‘Luba?’ he whispered. His lips were barely moving, as if he had been cast in marble and was slowly coming to life.

‘I’m here.’ I moved towards him, taking his hand and holding it to my face.

‘This is very sweet,’ Lauralynn announced, ‘but we really need to get you two out of here.’

She unscrewed the cap from the bottle of water that she was holding and threw it over Chey’s face.

‘Fuck!’ he gasped like a fish stuck out of water and sucking for air.

‘Sorry about that.’ Lauralynn threw him another rucksack. ‘You’ll have to get dressed while we’re moving.’

She climbed over into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

‘Stay down,’ she hissed behind her as I lifted my head to peer out of the windows. Instead of drifting quietly down side streets, Lauralynn threw on the siren and raced through the centre of town.

‘We’re less obvious this way,’ Viggo said, noticing the look of fright that spread across my face. ‘An ambulance crawling slowly through dark streets is memorable. One racing through a busy city on New Year’s Eve when Dublin is full of sirens is not even worth a second glance.’

New Year’s Eve. I wasn’t even sure if we’d missed the countdown.

I stared at Chey, drinking in every last molecule of him in
case we should ever be parted again. He was struggling with his buttons, his co-ordination still suffering from the effects of the drug. Viggo had packed him a pair of jeans, a loose cotton shirt and a ribbed wool jumper with a casual jacket to go overtop, a woollen hat and scarf. We looked entirely unremarkable, like any two poor backpackers visiting Dublin to ring in the New Year.

‘Where are Summer and Dominik?’ I asked, as the night’s activities slowly pieced together in my mind.

‘Both safe, and on their way home,’ he replied. ‘We messed up all the CCTV cameras too so none of it’s been caught on film. They’ll find a tape to match our adventures but it’s all faked. And this isn’t a real ambulance. Just a panel van with a perfect paint job.’ Viggo slapped his thigh in self-congratulation and chortled. He’d pulled the whole gig off with aplomb and had obviously enjoyed himself.

‘Dominik sure made a hot doctor,’ Lauralynn called from the front seat. ‘He has a career on
House
waiting for him if the writing doesn’t work out. And at least we’ve given him plenty to write about.’

‘Not that anyone would ever believe it,’ I replied, staring wondrously at Chey and thinking of the bizarre history that we had shared together. ‘Truth is so much stranger than fiction.’

The clock at the front of the van read 01:55 as we pulled into the station. The next train was fifteen minutes later.

‘Well, lovebirds, this is it,’ Viggo announced. ‘Don’t stay in touch. Looks like we’re in the clear for now but you’ll need to lay low for a while.’

‘Viggo . . .’ I reached out and squeezed his hand to thank him. The words that I was trying to express were lodged in my throat and all I could manage was a weak smile.

‘And this is for you.’

He passed me an envelope brimming with banknotes, together with the brown jiffy envelope that Summer had trusted to him with our fee for the evening and, most importantly, the false papers that we had picked up earlier.

‘I can’t accept this,’ I said to him, pointing at the additional cash. ‘You’ve done too much already.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘call it a bonus. Your commission on my newly acquired pieces of artwork. As far as I’m concerned, your little episode was the perfect diversion for the art heist of the century. You should look at some of the stuff we snaffled. It’s going straight to the vault. And there’s not a thing your Russian friends can do about it because they stole it all in the first place.’