Die for Me Read online

  “Please,” I said.

  “Please what?”

  “Please do what I say.”

  She jerked herself away from my side. “Fuck ‘please,’ suchka. You want to stay alive, you obey me.”

  “I see.”

  “Obviously you don’t see. This is my world, OK?”

  “It’s mine too, now. Whether I want it or not.”

  “You want to leave? Fine. See how long you last, yebanutaya.”

  I couldn’t see her. But I sensed her fury, radiating through the darkness.

  “Villanelle,” I began. “Oxana—”

  “Don’t ever call me that.”

  “OK, I’m sorry, but—”

  “But nothing, Polastri. I hope you freeze. I mean it, I hope you fucking die.”

  I undid my jacket, trousers and boots and placed them where I could find them in the dark. Beside me, I could hear Villanelle doing the same. Shivering, I settled myself into the bales, about a meter away from her. As the minutes crept by, and the cold wrapped more and more tightly around me, I listened to the calm rise and fall of her breathing. Hateful bitch.

  What was I doing? Why, knowing everything that I knew, had I trusted her? I clamped my teeth together, but was unable to prevent them chattering. I pressed my hand over my mouth, blinking away tears of hopeless, abject fury, and knew that I’d destroyed everything in my life that had value. That I’d ignored the inner voice that might have saved me, and thrown in my lot with an unfeeling monster who killed people without a second thought, and who would probably, sooner or later, kill me.

  I wiped my nose with my sleeve, and sniffed. A heartbeat later I felt Villanelle shift. She molded herself against me, her knees behind mine, her breasts against my back. Nudging my hair out of the way with her nose, she pressed her face against my neck. Then she folded her arm over mine and arranged her fingers around my wrist. I was still shivering, and she moved more closely against me.

  Finally, as the warmth of her body possessed me, I was still. Silence enclosed us, and I imagined the snow beating at the container’s walls and roof. My arm twitched, as it sometimes does at night, and Villanelle’s hand closed around mine, her thumb firm in my palm. Taking a tress of my hair between her teeth she gently tweaked it, then licked the nape of my neck as if she were a lioness. And bit me, hard.

  I arched away from her, gasping, but she grabbed my shoulders, swung me onto my back, and pulled herself on top of me so that we were face to face in the darkness, her breath beer-sour, her nose cold against my cheek. Then her tongue was in my mouth, snaking and probing. I twisted my head away. “Stop.”

  “Why?”

  “Just… talk to me.”

  She rolled onto her side. “What about?”

  “Have you ever really cared, really felt anything, for another person?”

  “You think I can’t feel?”

  “I don’t know. Can you?”

  “I feel like you feel, Eve. I’m not some freak.” She took my hand and pulled it into her panties. “Feel my pussy. Wet.”

  It was. I left my hand there for a single, dizzying heartbeat. “That’s not the same as caring about someone,” I heard myself say.

  “It’s a good start.”

  I steadied my breath. “So have you ever been in love?”

  “Mmm… Sort of. Once.”

  “And?”

  “She didn’t want me.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “I wanted to kill myself. To show her.”

  “So where am I, in all of this?”

  “You’re here, dumbass. With me.” Her fingers found my hair. “And if you don’t kiss me right now, I really am going to kill you.” She started to pull me toward her, but I was already there, searching for her mouth with mine.

  Then we were all over each other, bumping noses, smearing lips, and blindly, desperately kissing. I felt her fingers hook into the waistbands of my thermal leggings and panties and drag them over my ankles, and as she moved back up my body I tried to pull her sweater off, but the neck was so tight that she fell on top of me, laughing and whispering that I was choking her. Sitting astride me, she inched the sweater forwards over her head. It brushed my face—warm wool, stale sweat—and then it was gone, and her undershirt and bra after it. She pulled mine off and I shuddered as the cold seized me. “We need to toughen you up, pupsik,” she whispered, wriggling out of her own leggings and panties.

  All was rapt discovery. Her skin and my skin, her smell and my smell, her mouth and my mouth. Villanelle took charge, as I needed her to, and I felt her hand reach confidently between my thighs. She’d killed a man with a knife-thrust through the femoral artery. A strike so delicate, so surgically precise, that her victim was probably not immediately aware that he’d been stabbed. Could she feel the throbbing of my femoral artery? When she slid those fingers inside me, was she remembering other, bloodier penetrations? Did the warm explorations of her tongue recall more lethal partings of flesh?

  Afterward we pulled our sweaters and jackets on top of us, and I folded into her back, spoonwise. For several minutes I lay there in the dark, overwhelmed, my lips touching the soft hair on her neck, which stirred as I breathed.

  “It’s weird,” she said. “I can’t remember what you look like.”

  “Not at all?”

  “No. You could be anyone.”

  I raised myself on one elbow. “Why do you like me? Truthfully?”

  “Who says I like you?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Maybe. Maybe I just wanted to get into your pants. Which, by the way, are not pretty.”

  “Ah.”

  She wriggled her bottom against me. “Truthfully, I have a thing for dorky women. Especially in glasses.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “Pozhaluysta. I need to pee.”

  She did so, noisily, into the bucket, which she’d lodged in the clothing bales in one corner. I followed her there and did the same, not easy in the dark, then we dressed ourselves—it was just too cold not to—and I curled up behind her again, with the sharp smell of her hair in my face. “Admit it, pupsik,” she murmured, barely audible, “this is a much more romantic honeymoon than your first one.”

  We woke the next morning as the truck shuddered into life and began its journey to the docks. We lay motionless, the only sound the slopping of the urine in the bucket. Twenty minutes later we came to a halt, and I felt Villanelle’s body relax and her breathing become slow and calm. This was the moment of maximum danger. If there was to be an inspection of the container and its cargo, it would be now. I tried to imitate Villanelle’s zen state, but started to tremble uncontrollably. My heart was pounding so wildly I thought I was going to pass out.

  A dull clang reverberated throughout the container. I burrowed desperately into the bales, ignoring a brief explosion of pain as my nose struck Villanelle’s forehead or shoulder. The truck began to move again, but I stayed submerged, inhaling the thick smell of unaired cotton. This time the journey was shorter, our stop–start progress indicating that we were in a line of vehicles approaching the loading bay. With the final halt, the truck’s engine fell silent. There was a harsh scraping of metal on metal, a heavy thump, and we started to ascend. I’d dreaded the moment the container was hoisted from shore to ship, picturing it swinging sickeningly beneath the cranes. Nothing of the sort happened, of course. The process was smooth and deft, with only a brief kiss of steel to indicate the moment we were locked in place, and a faint knocking as our temporary home was fixed to those beneath it.

  Hours passed, during which the smell of urine grew stronger, and Villanelle maintained an unapproachable, trance-like silence. Was she telling herself that she’d made a fatal miscalculation in bringing me with her? Had the previous night meant nothing to her at all? I lay there, staring into the cold darkness. Finally I slept.

  I woke to the steady thrum of the Kirovo-Chepetsk’s engines and the faint creak of the containers around us. As I regained
my bearings, Villanelle’s hand reached through the darkness and found mine.

  “Are you OK?” she whispered.

  I nodded, still not quite there.

  “Hey. We’re alive. We got away.”

  “For now.”

  “Now’s all there is, pupsik.” She pressed my palm to her icy cheek. “Now’s all there ever is.”

  2

  I’m beginning to learn Villanelle’s ways.

  She withdraws. She locks herself into the secret citadel of her mind. I’m sitting there next to her, her leg warm against mine, our breath mingling, but she could be a thousand miles away, so arctic is her solitude. Sometimes it happens when we lie down to sleep and she burrows into me for warmth. Part of her is just not there. I long to tell her that she’s not alone, but the truth is that she’s utterly alone.

  This frozen state can last for hours, and then, like dawn breaking, she’ll wake to my presence. At these times I’ve learned to wait and see which way the cat jumps, because she’s so unpredictable. Sometimes she’s pensive, just wanting to be held, sometimes she’s as sullen and spiteful as a child. When she wants sex, she reaches for me. After four days and nights at sea, this has become a raw, feral business. We need the water that we have for drinking, washing is impossible, and our bodies are rank. Not that either of us cares. Villanelle knows what she wants and goes straight for it, and with the last of my inhibitions dispelled by the darkness and the desperate uncertainty of our situation, I’m soon giving as good as I get. Villanelle likes this. She’s much stronger than me, and could easily throw me off when I pin her down and roll on top of her, but she lets it happen, and lies there as I stroke her breast, and my tongue and my teeth probe for the scar tissue on her lip. And then she grabs my hand and pulls it downwards, cramming my fingers inside her, and grinds against the heel of my palm until she’s gasping, and sometimes laughing, and I can feel the muscles of her thighs twitching and shuddering.

  “You’ve never been with another woman?” she says. “I’m really your first?”

  This is a conversation we’ve had before. “You know I am,” I tell her.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sweetie, take my word for it. You’re the first.”

  “Mmm.”

  “I thought about it a lot. What it would be like with you. What we might do.”

  “That’s what you were doing in that shitty office all day? Thinking of having sex with me?”

  “I was mostly trying to catch you, if you remember. An entire MI6 team was trying to catch you.”

  “You never got close, pupsik. What were they called, those losers you worked with?”

  “Billy and Lance.”

  “That’s right. Billy and Lance. Did you think about having sex with them?”

  “Literally never. Billy was a computer wonk who lived with his mum, and Lance was a bit like a rat. A super-cunning, well-trained rat, but still, you know…”

  “A rat?”

  “Exactly.”

  She considers this for a moment. “You know that when I was bored, in Paris, I used to hack your computer.”

  “You did tell me that, yes.”

  “It wasn’t interesting. Ever. I hoped to find emails from a lover or whatever. But it was just orders for bin liners and moth traps and awful, ugly clothes.”

  “Sorry. That’s called life.”

  “Life doesn’t have to be so sad. You don’t have to buy acrylic sweaters, for example. Even moths think they’re disgusting.”

  “You kill people for a living and you’re criticizing my knitwear?”

  “It’s not the same thing, Eve. Clothes matter. And what’s Rinse-Aid? Is it for your hair? Some kind of charitable organization?”

  “Sweetie, have you never used a dishwasher?”

  “No. Why?”

  I kiss her nose. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “And now you’re laughing at me. Again.”

  “I’m not. Really I’m not.”

  Her breathing slows. “I could have killed you, Eve. So easily. But I didn’t. I saved your life, and I risked my own, which to be very honest with you was a fucking stupid thing to do. But because I care for you, I got you away from London, and the Twelve, and that asshole husband you never loved, and I’m taking you to my country. So what do you do? You laugh at me because I don’t know what fucking Rinse-Aid is.”

  “Sweetie, I’m—”

  “Don’t call me ‘Sweetie.’ I’m not your sweetie and you’re not mine. You know my girlfriend is in a Moscow prison because of you?”

  “If you mean Larissa Farmanyants, she’s hardly there because of me. She tried to shoot me in a crowded Metro station, missed, killed a harmless old man and got herself arrested.”

  “And now she’s locked up in Butyrka. Well, you know what? I wish you were there and Lara was here. She used to lick my pussy for hours on end. She had the most powerful jaws of any woman I ever met, like a pit bull.”

  “She sounds adorable.”

  “She is.”

  “I’m thrilled. Have you finished?”

  “Finished what?”

  “Being such a spoiled, manipulative little bitch.”

  “I’ll be any kind of bitch I want. I created you, Polastri. Show some fucking gratitude.”

  She’s such a jagged cluster of contradictions. I had no idea that anyone could be so ferociously self-sufficient, and at the same time so emotionally unstable. One moment she’s flirtatious and tender, covering my face with kisses, the next she’s spitting the most wounding things at me that she can think of. I know her cruelty is just a front, a way of protecting her fragile sense of self, but it pierces me like a knife every time. Because right now, if I don’t have her I don’t have anything. And she knows it.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised at Villanelle’s behavior, because although it’s crazy to get upset about Rinse-Aid, it makes me realize just how utterly solitary her existence has been. She’s never used a dishwasher because she’s never needed one: she’s always lived and eaten alone. In choosing to save my life, and in doing so risking her own, she went against her own nature.

  Why is she doing it? The staging of my death and our escape from London was so bold, so meticulously executed. Why is Villanelle going to so much trouble on my behalf? Does she really care for me, or am I just a fixation, an itch that she has to scratch? And what about me? What do I feel, beyond the fact that I want her, desperately, and live for the moments when we reach for each other in the darkness?

  We talk. In fits and starts to begin with, but soon for hours on end. Talking distracts me from the painful stomach contractions I’ve started experiencing. When they started, like a snake coiling tighter and tighter in my guts, I was afraid I had gastroenteritis or a knotted intestine. I told Villanelle and she laughed, prodded my stomach with a hard finger, and told me I was hungry. “I had this often when I was a child. It will be bad for a day or two then it will go.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then your internal organs start to dissolve.”

  “Great.”

  “I’m kidding. You’ll be fine. I knew a fashion model in Paris whose daily diet was a single Ladurée macaroon.”

  “Wow. What flavor?”

  “Pistache.”

  “Oh my God. I’d sell my soul for a pistachio macaroon right now.”

  “Too late.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your soul’s mine now. It’s not for sale. You have to starve.”

  “Shit. OK, just keep talking.”

  “What about?”

  “Tell me about Paris.”

  “I loved it. I was une femme mystérieuse. No one knew who I was, but I’d see people staring at me, and I’d think, fuck, if you only knew. But of course they didn’t know. And that felt so good. There was this one guy, very rich…”

  She always starts by boasting. She loves to describe the revenge that she’s visited on those who have underestimated her (a long list), and the eas
e with which she’s outwitted those trying to apprehend her.

  Her tendency to fictionalize her life makes it hard to establish a definitive story, but I already know the basic facts, and gradually I fit the pieces together. She was born Oxana Borisovna Vorontsova in Perm, a second-tier industrial city near the Urals. Her mother died of cancer when she was young, her father was a soldier, often absent. Diagnosed with an antisocial personality disorder, Oxana endured a lonely and friendless childhood. She excelled at her studies but was often in trouble for violent and disruptive behavior. While at secondary school she formed a close attachment to her French teacher, a woman named Anna Leonova. One night, after school, Anna was sexually assaulted at a bus stop. A local youth was suspected of carrying out the attack, and shortly afterward he was discovered incoherent and suffering from massive blood loss. “I castrated him,” Villanelle tells me with a touch of smugness. “I pretended I was going to give him a blow job, then cut off his balls with a knife. No one guessed it was me.”

  In fact, the local police had a pretty good idea who was responsible. They already had a juvenile file on Oxana Vorontsova, but abandoned the investigation for lack of evidence. They would be more tenacious when Oxana, by now at university, was arrested for murder. The victims were three local gangsters who, she claimed, had killed her father. This accords with what I was told by Vadim Tikhomirov of the FSB, although Villanelle’s version of events differs substantially from the official report. According to her, her father was working undercover for the security services, and had infiltrated the gang. According to the police, he was a low-grade enforcer for the gang and had been caught stealing from his bosses.

  While she awaited trial, Oxana’s release from prison was engineered by a man named Konstantin. She never knew his full name, but it’s probable that this was Konstantin Orlov, a former intelligence officer of considerable distinction and reputation. Orlov had for some years run the FSB’s Directorate S, a secretive bureau whose operational remit included the elimination of foreign enemies of the Russian state. By the time that Oxana encountered Orlov, it appears that he was performing a similar service for an organization called the Twelve. “He knew everything about me, right back to my childhood,” Villanelle remembers with pride. “He told me that I had been born to change history.”