The Kill Artist

  She stepped out of a taxi and entered the apartment building on the rue St-Jacques where Michel kept his studio. Upstairs a small crowd was waiting: makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, a representative from Givenchy. Michel stood atop a ladder, adjusting lights: good looking, shoulder-length blond hair, feline features. He wore black leather trousers, low-slung around narrow hips, and a loose pullover. He winked at Jacqueline as she came in. She smiled and said, “Nice to see you, Michel.”

  “We’ll have a good shoot today, yes? I can feel it.”

  “I hope so.”

  She entered a changing room, undressed, and studied her appearance in the mirror with professional dispassion. Physically she was a stunning woman: tall, graceful arms and legs, elegant waist, pale olive skin. Her breasts were aesthetically perfect: firm, rounded, neither too small nor abnormally large. The photographers had always loved her breasts. Most models detested lingerie work, but it never bothered Jacqueline. She’d always had more offers for work than she could fit into her schedule.

  Her gaze moved from her body to her face. She had curly raven hair that fell about her shoulders, dark eyes, a long, slender nose. Her cheekbones were wide and even, her jawline angular, her lips full. She was proud of the fact that her face had never been altered by a surgeon’s scalpel. She leaned forward, probed at the skin around her eyes. She didn’t like what she saw. It wasn’t a line, really—something more subtle and insidious. The intangible sign of aging. She no longer had the eyes of a child. She had the eyes of a thirty-three-year-old woman.

  You’re still beautiful, but face facts, Jacqueline. You’re getting old.

  She pulled on a white robe, went into the next room, and sat down. The makeup artist began applying a base to her cheek. Jacqueline watched in the mirror as her face was slowly transformed into that of someone she didn’t quite recognize. She wondered what her grandfather would think if could see this.

  He’d probably be ashamed…

  When the makeup artist and hairstylist finished, Jacqueline looked at herself in the mirror. Had it not been for the courage of those three remarkable people—her grandparents and Anne-Marie Delacroix—she would not be here today.

  And look at what you’ve become—an exquisite clothes hanger.

  She stood up, walked back to the changing room. The dress, a black strapless evening gown, waited for her. She removed her robe, stepped into the gown, and pulled it up over her bare breasts. Then she glanced at herself in the mirror. Devastating.

  A knock at the door. “Michel is ready for you, Miss Delacroix.”

  “Tell Michel I’ll be out in a moment.”

  Miss Delacroix…

  Even after all these years she was still not used to it: Jacqueline Delacroix. Her agent, Marcel Lambert, was the one who had changed her name—“Sarah Halévy sounds too… well… you know what I mean, mon chou. Don’t make me say it out loud. So vulgar, but such is the way of the world.” Sometimes the sound of her French name made her skin crawl. When she learned what had happened to her grandparents in the war, she had burned with hatred and suspicion of all French people. Whenever she saw an old man, she would wonder what he had done during the war. Had he been a guard at Gurs or Les Milles or one of the other detention camps? Had he been a gendarme who helped the Germans round up her family? Had he been a bureaucrat who stamped and processed the paperwork of death? Or had he simply stood by in silence and done nothing? Secretly it gave her intense delight that she was deceiving the fashion world. Imagine their reaction if they found out the lanky, raven-haired beauty from Marseilles was in fact a Provençale Jew whose grandparents had been gassed at Sobibor. In a way being a model, the very image of French beauty, was her revenge.

  She took one last look at herself, lowering her chin toward her chest, parting her lips slightly, bringing fire to her coal-black eyes.

  Now she was ready.

  They worked for thirty minutes without stopping. Jacqueline adopted several poses. She sprawled across a simple wooden chair. She sat on the floor, leaning back on her hands, with her head tilted upward and her eyes closed. She stood with her hands on her hips and her eyes boring through the lens of Michel’s camera. Michel seemed to like what he was seeing. They were in sync. Every few minutes he would pause for a few seconds to change his film, then quickly resume shooting. Jacqueline had been in the business long enough to know when a shoot was working.

  So she was surprised when he suddenly stepped from behind the camera and ran a hand through his hair. He was frowning. “Clear the studio, please. I need some privacy.”

  Jacqueline thought: Oh, Christ. Here we go.

  Michel said, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me!”

  “Nothing? You’re flat, Jacqueline. The pictures are flat. I might as well be taking pictures of a mannequin wearing the dress. I can’t afford to give Givenchy a set of flat prints. And from what I hear on the street, you can’t afford it either.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you’re getting old, darling. It means that no one’s quite sure whether you have what it takes anymore.”

  “Just get back behind the camera, and I’ll show you I have what it takes.”

  “I’ve seen enough. It’s just not there today.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “You want me to get you a drink? Maybe a glass of wine will help loosen you up.”

  “I don’t need a drink.”

  “How about some coke?”

  “You know I don’t do that anymore.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “Some things never change.”

  Michel produced a small bag of cocaine from his shirt pocket. Jacqueline sat down in the prop chair while he prepared two lines on a glass-topped table. He snorted one, then offered her the rolled-up hundred-franc note. “Feel like being a bad girl today?”

  “All yours, Michel. Not interested.”

  He leaned over and snorted the second line. Then he wiped the glass with his finger and spread the residue over his gums. “If you’re not going to have a drink or do a line, maybe we need to think of some other way to light a fire in you.”

  “Like what?” she said, but she knew what Michel had on his mind.

  He stood behind her, placed his hands lightly on her bare shoulders. “Maybe you need to be thinking about getting fucked.” His hands moved from her shoulders, and he stroked the skin just above her breasts. “Maybe we can do something to make the idea a little more realistic in your imagination.”

  He pressed his pelvis against her back, so that she could feel his erection beneath his leather trousers.

  She drew away.

  “I’m just trying to help, Jacqueline. I want to make sure these pictures come out well. I don’t want to see your career crash and burn. My motives are purely selfless.”

  “I never knew you were such a philanthropist, Michel.”

  He laughed. “Come with me. I want to show you something.” He took her by the hand and pulled her off the set. They walked down a hallway and entered a room furnished with nothing but a large bed. Michel pulled off his shirt and began unbuttoning his trousers.

  Jacqueline said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “You want good pictures, I want good pictures. Let’s get in the right frame of mind. Take off the dress so it doesn’t get ruined.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Michel. I’m leaving.”

  “Come on, Jacqueline. Stop fooling around and get into bed.”

  “No!”

  “What’s the big deal? You slept with Robert Leboucher, so he would give you that swimwear shoot in Mustique.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Because he told me.”

  “You’re a bastard, and so is he! I’m not some seventeen-year-old who’s going to spread her legs for you because she wants good pictures from the great Michel Duval.”

  “If you walk out of here, your career is over.”
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  “I don’t give a shit.”

  He pointed at his erection. “What am I supposed to do about this?”

  Marcel Lambert lived a short distance away, on the rue de Tournon, in the Luxembourg Quarter. Jacqueline needed time to herself, so she walked, taking her time in the narrow side streets of the Latin Quarter. Darkness falling, lights coming on in the bistros and the cafés, the smell of cigarettes and frying garlic on the chill air.

  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.”

  TWELVE

  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?”

  “It’s perfect,” he said to the window.

  “When would you like it?”

  Gabriel closed the blind. “Right now.”

  For two days Gabriel watched him.

  On the first day he saw him just once—when he rose shortly after noon and appeared briefly in the window wearing only a pair of black underpants. He had dark, curly hair, angular cheekbones, and full lips. His body was lean and lightly muscled. Gabriel pulled open Shamron’s file and compared the face in the window with the photograph clipped to the manila cover.

  Same man.

  Gabriel could feel an operational coldness spreading over him as he studied the figure in the window. Suddenly everything seemed brighter and sharper in contrast. Noises seemed louder and more distinct—a car door closing, lovers quarreling in the next flat, a telephone ringing unanswered, his teakettle screaming in the kitchen. One by one he tuned out these intrusions and focused all his attention on the man in the window across the street.

  Yusef al-Tawfiki, part-time Palestinian nationalist poet, part-time student at University College London, part-time waiter at a Lebanese restaurant called the Kebab Factory on the Edgware Road, full-time action agent for Tariq’s secret army.

  A hand appeared on Yusef’s abdomen: pale skin, luminous against his dark complexion. A woman’s hand. Gabriel saw a flash of short blond hair. Then Yusef vanished behind the curtains.

  The girl left an hour later. Before climbing into the taxi, she looked up toward the flat to see if her lover was watching. The window was empty and the curtains drawn. She closed the door, a little harder than necessary, and the taxi drove away.

  Gabriel made his first operational assessment: Yusef didn’t treat his women well.

  The next day Gabriel decided to mount a loose physical surveillance.