Revenger

6

In Paris another eminent, middle-aged man was having a hard time persuading a determined woman to see his point of view. ‘I’m sorry, Madame Novak, but I really cannot have this discussion at the moment.’

Jean-Jacques Levistre rose from his family dinner table, holding his mobile phone in one hand and making exasperated gestures with the other which, along with the exaggerated look of annoyance on his face, were meant to indicate to his wife, sitting opposite him, just how much he did not want to take this call. ‘Look, I will go into my office so that we can talk confidentially, but I must insist: no more than five minutes, maximum.’

‘I fail to understand why you won’t see me,’ said Celina Novak. ‘I have money, lots of it. Are you seriously telling me you don’t want to be paid? I don’t believe it. No one turns their back on cash these days. No one!’

‘Of course I want to be paid. I have a family to feed. But I also have professional ethics that I must observe and a conscience that I must live with. What you are asking of me offends both those principles. I’m sorry, but I cannot do it.’

‘But you have to! Can’t you see that? I insist! You have to do this for me!’

‘No, really I don’t,’ Levistre insisted. He did his best to summon up the soothing, reassuring tones that were one of the major reasons for his success. ‘Honestly, Celina, you should be happy with what we have already achieved. You have been remarkable. Your courage, your fortitude, your ability to endure the un-endurable — they have inspired me. But we must all know our limits. And we have reached ours. I am very sorry, but there is nothing more to be done.’

Levistre turned off his phone, took a deep, calming breath and then walked back to rejoin his family.

A couple of kilometres away in her hotel room, Celina Novak looked at herself in the full-length wardrobe mirror, running her eyes up legs that possessed not the faintest scrap of cellulite; a waist as slender as a girl’s half her age; breasts that had been so perfectly enhanced that most men now had to make a conscious effort to look her in her cool, grey-blue eyes; and hair whose natural length and volume had been boosted by extensions applied by the most expensive stylist in Paris. A great deal had already been done. But Levistre was wrong. There was more she could still do. There had to be.

Two days had passed since the incident with the child in the park. She should have got over it by now. All her life she had lied, cheated, seduced and killed without the slightest backward glance. She possessed a sociopathic indifference to truth, morality, conscience, compassion, empathy or pity. And that included self-pity. As a young child she had learned to fake unhappiness or distress as a means of getting what she wanted from adults. But she did not really feel those emotions. So why was this memory still haunting her?

Even that question itself angered her, since she regarded reflection and introspection as pointless wastes of time. Far better, Novak decided, to work off some of the rage and frustration that was gnawing at her guts. She rode her hired BMW F650GS motorbike out of the heart of Paris to the eastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. The vast majority of its population were North African Muslims, who were now locked in a more or less permanent battle with paramilitary units of the resurgent Front National. The most combative of all the anti-fascists hung out at a mixed martial arts club that stayed open late. Novak turned up there and got in the ring, a head guard her only concession to personal protection. She started taunting the regulars, daring them to fight a white woman. It took a while before her first opponent stepped into the ring. But when the others saw the ferocity with which she fought, and the blows she was willing to take as well as deal out, Novak had no shortage of takers, and she did not leave that ring until the pain and exhaustion were enough to provide some relief, however temporary, from the furies raging inside her.