Of all those humiliations, it’s her rejection by the French teacher, Anna Ivanovna Leonova, that she still feels most keenly. A single woman in her late twenties, Leonova was more than a little awed by her troubled pupil’s precocious linguistic gifts, and ignoring Oxana’s rudeness and gracelessness, determined to open her eyes to a world beyond the grey confines of Perm. So there were weekend sessions in Anna’s tiny apartment, discussing Colette and Françoise Sagan, and on one memorable occasion a visit to the Tchaikovsky Theatre, to see a performance of the opera Manon Lescaut.
Oxana was bemused by the attention. No one had ever expended so much time on her. What Anna Ivanovna was giving her, she realised, was something selfless, something close to love. Intellectually, Oxana understood such an emotion, but she also knew herself incapable of feeling it. Physical desire, though, was another matter, and she lay awake, night after night, tortured by a raw longing for her teacher that she could find no way of expressing beyond a sullen blankness.
Not that the teenage Oxana was a novice when it came to sex. She had tried both men and women, and found no difficulty in manipulating both. But with Anna she dreamt of a realm of the senses that lay beyond the beery fumblings of bikers behind the Bar Molotov, or the rough tongue of the female security guard at the TsUM department store who had caught her stealing, marched her to the toilets, and buried her face between Oxana’s thighs as the price of silence.
She tried, just once, to take things further with Anna. It was the evening they went to Manon Lescaut. They were sitting in the balcony, in the back row of seats, and towards the end of the opera Oxana had inclined her head against the teacher’s shoulder. When Anna responded by putting an arm around her, Oxana was so overwhelmed she could hardly breathe.
As Puccini’s music swirled around them, Oxana reached out a hand and laid it over one of Anna’s breasts. Gently, but firmly, Anna removed the hand, and equally firmly, a moment later, Oxana replaced it. This was a game she had played many times in her mind.
“Stop it,” Anna said quietly.
“Don’t you like me?” Oxana whispered.
The teacher sighed. “Oxana, of course I do. But that doesn’t mean…”
“What?” She parted her lips, her eyes searching for Anna’s in the half dark.
“It doesn’t mean… that.”
“Then fuck you, and fuck your stupid opera,” Oxana hissed, rage rising uncontainably inside her. Standing, she stumbled towards the exit, and ran down the staircase to the street. Outside, the city was lit by the sulphurous glow of night, and flurries of snow whirled in the car headlights on Kommunisticheskaya Prospekt. It was freezing cold, and Oxana realised that she had left her jacket inside the theatre.
She was too furious to care. Why didn’t Anna Ivanovna want her? That culture stuff was all very well, but she needed more from Anna than that. She needed to see desire in her eyes. To see everything that gave her power over Oxana—her gentleness, her patience, her fucking virtue—dissolve into sexual surrender.
But Anna resisted this transformation. Even though, deep down she felt exactly the same way, and Oxana knew this to be true, because she had felt the flutter of the other woman’s heart beneath her hand. It was intolerable, unbearable. And there in the theatre doorway, one hand thrust down the front of her jeans, Oxana gasped out her frustration until she sank to her knees on the icy pavement.
Anna forgave her for her behaviour at the Tchaikovsky Theatre, but Oxana never quite forgave Anna, and her feelings for her teacher took on a morbid, angry cast.
When Anna was sexually assaulted, matters reached a head. Taking her father’s combat knife, Oxana lured Roman Nikonov into the woods, and put things right. Nikonov survived, which wasn’t part of her plan, but otherwise things went perfectly.
Oxana was never questioned, and if she’d have preferred her victim to die of shock and blood loss, at least she had the satisfaction of knowing that he’d be pissing through a tube for the rest of his life. She’d said as much to Anna Leonova, laying the story at her teacher’s feet like a cat bringing home a mutilated bird.
With Anna’s reaction, Oxana’s world collapsed. She’d hoped for gratitude, admiration, profuse thanks. Instead the teacher had stared at her in icy, horrified silence. Only her knowledge of the conditions that Oxana would face in a women’s penitentiary, Anna said, prevented her from contacting the police immediately. She would remain silent, but she never wished to see or speak to Oxana again.
The injustice of it, and the lacerating sense of loss, brought Oxana to the brink of suicide. She considered taking her father’s Makarov pistol, going round to Anna’s place, and shooting herself. Showering the little flat on Komsomolsky Prospekt with her blood and brains. Perhaps she’d have sex with Anna first; a 9mm automatic was a pretty persuasive seduction accessory.
In the end, though, Oxana did nothing. And the part of her that had yearned so desperately to make Anna her own simply froze.
Lying in the scented water in the Shanghai apartment, Villanelle feels her earlier elation displaced by an undertow of melancholy. She turns her head towards the window, a sweep of plate glass framing the glimmering dusk and the rooftops of the French Concession, and bites pensively at her upper lip. In front of the window is a Lalique bowl of white peonies, their petals soft and enfolding.
She knows that she should lie low. That to go out on the prowl for sex, tonight of all nights, would be reckless. But she also recognises the hunger inside herself. A hunger whose grip will only tighten. Stepping from the bath, wreathed in steam, she stands naked in front of the plate glass, and considers the infinity of possibilities before her.
It’s after midnight when she walks into the Aquarium. The club is in the basement of a former private bank on the North Bund, and entrance is by personal introduction only. Villanelle was told about the Aquarium by the wife of a Japanese property developer whom she met at the Peninsula Spa in Huangpu. A stylish, gossipy woman, Mrs. Nakamura explained to Villanelle that she usually went there on Friday nights. “And alone, rather than in the company of my husband,” she added, with a meaningful sideways glance.
Certainly the name Mikki Nakamura is one the doorman knows. He shows Villanelle through an interior door to a spiral staircase winding down to a spacious, dim-lit subterranean chamber. The place is crowded, and an animated buzz of conversation overlays the muted pulse of the music.
For a moment Villanelle stands at the foot of the stairs, looking around her. The most striking feature is a floor-to-ceiling wall of glass, perhaps ten metres long. A moving shadow darkens its luminous blue expanse, and then another, and Villanelle realises that she is looking into a shark tank. Hammerheads and reef sharks glide past, the underwater lights painting their skins with a satin sheen.
Mesmerised, Villanelle makes her way towards the tank. The smell of the club is that of wealth, a heady mix of frangipani blossom, incense and designer-scented bodies. In the tank a tiger shark drifts into view, and fixes Villanelle with its blank, indifferent gaze.
“Dead eyes,” says Mikki Nakamura, materialising beside her. “I know too many men who look like that.”
“We all do,” says Villanelle. “And women, too.”
Mikki smiles. “I’m glad you came,” she murmurs, running a finger down Villanelle’s black silk qipao dress. “This is Vivienne Tam, isn’t it? It’s lovely.”