The Third Woman. Mark Burnell
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a kettle. While the water heated she investigated Newman’s study. On a large oak desk beside the window were two slim Sony monitors and a cordless keyboard. She looked in the drawers; stationery, bills and receipts, correspondence, cash – euros, dollars, Swiss francs – an Air France first-class boarding card from Singapore to Paris, and two American passports.
The first passport belonged to Robert Ridley Newman, aged forty-eight. It had been issued two years before but there were already dozens of stamps in it, some recurring frequently; Damascus, Riyadh, Beijing and Shanghai, Tehran, Jakarta. The second passport was seven years older. She flicked through the pages. There were only twelve stamps in it, nine of them issued at Ben-Gurion airport, Tel Aviv.
In the bottom drawer on the right she found a Vacheron watch with a leather strap. On the back was an inscription and a date: Robert, with love, Carlotta, 10–11–2001. A birthday? She checked the passports. Not his.
Back in the kitchen, she switched on the TV suspended over the slate worktop. Bloomberg was playing. She flicked through the channels until she came to BBC World, which was showing archive footage of Anders Brand. He was shaking hands with Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton to one side, the three of them sharing a joke. At the bottom of the screen the caption read: Former Swedish diplomat named among Paris dead.
A résumé unfolded; posts in Manila, Baghdad, Rome and Washington, as a junior diplomat, followed by two forays into business with Deutsche Bank in New York and Shell in London. Later, Brand had returned to the Swedish diplomatic service, serving in the Philippines, then Spain. After that, he’d joined the United Nations in New York, filling a series of increasingly undefined roles as his star rose. Divorced for almost twenty years, Brand was survived by his ex-wife, the former actress Lena Meslin, and their two adult sons.
A little late but just as Stern had predicted.
Stern.
Painfully, Stephanie surrendered to the one thought she’d been resisting since the Lancaster.
You set me up.
Now, more than ever, she needed information. For years, he’d been her preferred source. Information from Stern was bought at a premium but was cheap at the price. She’d never had reason to question its quality. He’d never sold her out. On the contrary. There had been occasions where he’d volunteered information to protect her. Or rather, as he usually put it, to protect his investment.
Safe from one another, their relationship had evolved into a form of sterile, electronic friendship, neither of them interested in finding out too much about the other because they both understood that security lay in anonymity. But in the beginning it had been strictly business; request, negotiation, payment, delivery. Cold and clinical.
Stern traded information, not affection. The faux relationship that Stephanie had allowed to develop between them had come to obfuscate that uneasy fact. Stern owed her nothing, nor she him. At the end of every transaction they were equal. It was true that he’d made money out of her. Just as she’d made money out of the information he’d sold her. She’d come to assume that he’d never trade her because she was valuable to him. But why not, if the money was right? She’d never guaranteed him anything. Each transaction ran the risk of being the last. Stern existed in a transitory environment; the currency of information tended to devalue with time. In both their worlds, it paid to seize the moment.
Ultimately, Stern’s fidelity was always going to be a question of price.
At first, he thought he’d imagined it. The sound of running water. A shower. His shower. He tried to straighten himself. Had he fallen asleep? Perhaps, but not in the regenerative sense. Sleep was nothing more than a brief lapse between uncomfortable bouts of waking. He was slowly seizing; numb hands, stiff neck, sore spine, cramping muscles. His mouth felt dirty and dry.
He wondered how long he’d been alone. Not that it mattered. There was nothing he could do. He and the chair had become a single entity, she’d made sure of that. An entity isolated at the centre of a Bokhara carpet, a castaway in his own apartment.
He couldn’t reconcile the woman in his apartment with the woman who’d approached him at the bar in the Lancaster. Claudia Calderon had been confident, relaxed, playful. And sexy. He could admit that, even now. And then there was the creature with the gun. What had she done? What did she want?
He tried to convince himself that she wouldn’t harm him. That she’d float away, like a bout of bad weather, leaving him as she’d found him. But Leonid Golitsyn and another man were dead. Newman had seen that on TV. She’d admitted to being in their room. And she had the gun. He’d barely heard her denial. Stranger still, she’d seemed more preoccupied with coverage of the Sentier bomb than events at the Lancaster. Were the two connected? Was she the connection? And if she was, what would that mean for him?
Stephanie said, ‘I’m going to untie your hands. You need to get your blood moving.’
The purple scars around the wrists were shiny and ragged. There was no smoothness to them, nothing … uniform. The hands themselves were swollen. As they separated a shudder coursed through Newman. He brought his arms to the front of his body in a series of stiff jerks, catching his breath with each halt. Once his hands were in his lap he flexed his fingers. She saw the solid tension in his shoulders, knotted muscle crawling on itself.
‘Who’s Carlotta?’
He didn’t answer.
‘I usually like to know whose clothes I’m wearing.’
Still nothing.
‘Was the earring hers?’
She could see no fear, no anger, no emotion at all.
She left him and took Golitsyn’s attaché case to the sofa. Keys, pens, a leather-bound address book, lots of business documents. His letters were addressed to him at several locations: the head office of MosProm on ulitsa Tverskaya in central Moscow; Galerie Golitsyn on avenue Matignon, Paris; the Hotel Meurice, Paris; an apartment on East 62nd Street in New York City.
In a see-through foolscap plastic wallet was a set of architectural plans. Stephanie turned it over to see the address. Cork Street, London; another art gallery, she assumed. There was something inserted between the folds of the drawings. She unzipped the wallet and a sheet of paper slipped free.
It was an agreement with an immobilier named Guy Grangé on boulevard Magenta in the 10ème arrondissement. A one-month rental, a one-room apartment in the Stalingrad district, cash paid in advance. Not the sort of area Stephanie would have expected Golitsyn to frequent. Or the sort of property, for that matter. There was no address, just a reference number. The printed key code corresponded to the number on the red plastic disk attached to the keys.
Why had Stern pointed her in the direction of this seventy-seven-year-old Russian?
There were some credit-card receipts in the attaché case, including one from the fabled jeweller Ginzburg, on place Vendôme. A small card was stapled to the receipt. On the back, written by a shaking hand, was a brief message:
Leonid, mon cher,
merci pour tout,
N x.
Beneath that, in Russian, was an addition:
Diamonds or bread? Only we know which.
Stephanie looked at the first part of the message. N for Natalya? Aleksandr Ginzburg’s widow was Natalya. And alive, it seemed. Stephanie was a little surprised. Aleksandr Ginzburg had died a long time ago – a famous car crash outside Cannes sometime in the late Seventies or early Eighties – so Stephanie had just assumed that his wife had died since then. Apparently not. Which now made her a very old woman. Except that Aleksandr hadn’t been so old when he’d died. Perhaps she was as young as eighty. In other words, of the same vintage as Golitsyn.
Stephanie stared at the message and felt the pull of its undercurrent.
Diamonds or bread? Only we know which.