guide wore the traditional white djellaba with a pointed hood. Inside the Mellah, the Jewish Quarter, they entered a covered market. In the still heat, smells competed for supremacy: fish, body odour, chickens, rubbish and, in particular, a meat counter with oesophagi hanging from hooks. The hum of flies was close. Beyond the market the guide led her through a maze of crooked streets, some so narrow she could press her palms against both walls. There were no signs and no straight lines. They passed doors set into walls, snatching occasional glimpses: a staircase rising into darkness, a moving foot, a sleeping dog. Lanes were pockmarked with tiny retail outlets: a man selling watch straps from a booth the size of a cupboard, a shop trading in solitary bicycle wheels, Sprite and Coke sold from a coolbox in the shallow shade of a doorway.
They came to an arch. Beneath it a merchant was arranging sacks of spices. Behind the sacks, on a wooden table, were baskets of lemons and limes. Garlands of garlic hung from a wooden beam. They passed through the arch into a courtyard. Beneath a reed canopy two women were weaving baskets.
They headed for a door on the far side of the courtyard, took the stairs to the upper floor, turned left and arrived at a large, rectangular room. It was carpeted, quite literally: carpets covering the floor and three walls. Other carpets were piled waist high, some exquisitely intricate, with silk thread shimmering beneath the harsh overhead lighting, others a cruder style of kilim, in vivid turquoise, egg-yolk yellow and blood red. The fourth wall contained the only window, which looked out onto the courtyard.
Maxim Mostovoi was at the far end of the room, sprawled across a tan leather sofa as plushly padded as he was. He wore Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses and a full moustache. His gut stretched a pale green polo-shirt that bore dark sweat stains in the pinch of both armpits. Fat thighs made his chinos fit as snugly as a second skin.
Jarni, the whippet-faced man from the villa at Palmeraie, stood to Petra’s right. Beside him was a taller man, a body-builder perhaps, massive shoulders tapering to a trim waist, black hair oiled to the scalp, his skin the colour and texture of chocolate mousse. He had a gold ring through his right eyebrow.
‘I feel I know you,’ Mostovoi murmured.
‘A common mistake.’
‘I’m sure.’ He nodded at the body-builder. ‘Alexei …’
Petra said, ‘I’m not armed.’
‘Then you won’t mind.’
Petra had been frisked many times. There were two elements to the process that almost never varied, in her experience: the procedure was carried out by men, and they took pleasure in their work. More than once she’d had eager fingers inside her clothes, even inside her underwear and, on one occasion, inside her. The man who’d done that had gorged himself on her discomfort. Later, when she crushed both his hands in a car door, she took some reciprocal pleasure from the act.
‘You should be more careful where you put your fingers,’ she’d told him, as he surveyed what remained of them.
Petra had dressed deliberately. Black cotton trousers, a black T-shirt beneath a turquoise shirt tied at the waist and a pair of lightweight walking boots. Suspended from the leather cord around her neck was a fisherman’s cross made of burnished mahogany, the wood so smooth that the fracture line at the base of the loop was almost invisible. She wore her long dark hair in a pony-tail.
Among friskers she’d known, Alexei the bodybuilder was about average. In other words, tiresomely predictable. Petra knew that behind his sunglasses Mostovoi wasn’t blinking. His face was shiny with sweat. As he took in the show, she took in the room. Apart from his mobile phone, the table was bare. A lamp without a shade stood on an upturned crate at the far end of the sofa. By the door she’d noticed a box containing a wooden paddle for beating the dust from carpets. Next to the box there was a portable black-and-white security monitor on a creaking table, a bin, a ball of used bubble-wrap and an electric fan, unplugged. She’d been in rooms that offered less. And in situations that threatened more. Until now she hadn’t known whether Mostovoi would be viable.
Alexei reached between her legs, but Petra snatched his wrist away. ‘Take my word for it, you won’t find an Uzi down there.’
He glanced at Mostovoi, who shook his head, then continued, skipping over her stomach and ribs before slowing as he reached her breasts. His fingers found something solid in the breast pocket of her shirt. Petra took it out before he had the chance to retrieve it himself.
‘What’s that?’ Mostovoi asked.
‘An inhaler,’ Petra said. ‘With a Salbutamol cartridge. I’m asthmatic’
He was surprised, then amused. ‘You?’ It was the third version of the inhaler Petra had been given. She’d never used any of them. Mostovoi’s amusement began to turn to suspicion. ‘Show me.’
‘You put this end in your mouth, squeeze the cartridge and inhale.’
‘I said, show me.’
So she did, taking care not to break the second seal by pushing the cartridge too vigorously. There was a squirt of Salbutamol from the mouthpiece, which she inhaled, a cold powder against the back of her throat.
The frisk resumed, until Alexei stepped away from Petra and shook his head. Mostovoi seemed genuinely amazed. ‘You don’t have a gun?’
‘I didn’t think I’d need one. Besides, I didn’t want your friend to feel something hard in my trousers and get over-excited.’
A barefoot boy entered the room, carrying a tray with two tall glasses of mint tea and a silver sugar bowl. Fresh mint leaves had been crushed into the bottom of each glass. He passed one to Petra and the other to Mostovoi, before leaving.
Petra said, ‘That was a neat idea, using Claesen as an intermediary yesterday.’
‘It was a matter of some … reassurance.’
‘I know.’ She caught his eye. ‘Your reassurance, though. Not mine.’
Mostovoi inclined his head a little, a bow of concession. ‘Your reputation may precede you, but nobody ever knows what follows it. Within our community you’re a contradiction: the anonymous celebrity.’
‘Unlike you.’
‘I’m a salesman. Nothing more.’
‘Don’t sell yourself short.’
Mostovoi smiled. ‘I never do.’ He lit a Marlboro with a gold Dunhill lighter. ‘This is a change of career for you, no?’
‘Not so much a change, more of an expansion.’
‘I know you met Klim in Lille last month. And again in Bratislava three weeks ago.’
‘Small world.’
‘The smallest you can imagine. You discussed Sukhoi-25s for five million US an aircraft. For fifty-five million dollars, he said he could get you twelve; buy eleven, get one free.’
‘What can I say? We live in a supermarket culture.’
‘Or for one hundred million, twenty-five. Which is not bad. But you weren’t interested.’
‘Because?’
‘Because
