But when she did turn to him, cigarette dangling between her lips and long fingers wound around the short, thick glass of amber liquid, she looked nothing so trite as “pretty.”
Emerald-green eyes fixed him from under deep lids, fringed with the longest dark lashes he had ever seen. Her skin was flawless, the color of the whiskey in her glass, radiating that same intoxicating glow.
For a second he was taken back to a room in Edinburgh a long time ago. An art student’s room, full of draped scarves and fake Tiffany lamps and a picture on the wall of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. This woman looked strangely like Marlene. Marlene with an afro. Black Angel.
She took the cigarette from between her red lips and asked: “Could you give me a light?” Her glittering eyes held his brown ones in a steady gaze, a smile flickered over her perfect lips.
Dougie fumbled in the sleeve of his jacket for his Zippo and fired it up with shaking fingers. Black Angel inhaled deeply, closing her bronze-colored eyelids as she sucked that good smoke down, blowing it out again in a steady stream.
Her long lashes raised and she lifted her glass to him simultaneously.
“Cheers!” she said, and he caught that heavy inflection again. Was he going mad, or did she even sound like Marlene too? “Ach,” she tossed back her mane of curls, “it’s so good to be off vork!”
“I’ll drink to that,” Dougie said, feeling like his tongue was too big for his head, his fingers too big for his hands, that he was entirely too big and clumsy. He slugged down half his pint of Becks to try and get some kind of equilibrium, stop this weird teenage feeling that threatened to paralyze him under the spell of those green eyes.
She looked amused.
“What kind of work do you do?” she asked.
Dougie gave his standard reply. “Och, you know. This an’ that.”
It pleased her, this answer, so she continued to talk. Told him in that smoky, laconic drawl all about the place she worked. One of the clip joints off Old Compton Street, the ones specifically geared up to rip off the day-trippers.
“It izz called Venus in Furs,” she told him. “Is fucking tacky shit, yeah?”
He started to wonder if she was Croatian, or Serbian. Most of the girls pouring into Soho now were supposed to be ones kidnapped from the former Yugoslavia. Slavic was a word that suited the contours of her cheeks, the curve of her green eyes. But how could that be? Dougie didn’t think there was much of a black population in Eastern Europe. And he couldn’t imagine anyone having the balls to kidnap this one. Maybe she was here for a different reason. Images raced through his mind. Spy films, Checkpoint Charlie, the Cold War. High on her accent, he didn’t really take the actual words in.
Until at some point close to dawn, she lifted a finger and delicately traced the outline of his jaw. “I like you, Dougie.” She smiled. “I vill see you here again, yes?”
Dougie wasn’t really one for hanging out in drinking clubs. He was only in this one because earlier that evening he’d had to have a meet in Soho and he couldn’t stand any of the pubs round there. Too full, too noisy, too obvious. This was one of the better places. Discreet, old-fashioned, not really the sort of place your younger generation would go for, it was mainly populated by decaying actors skulking in a dimly lit world of memory. It was an old luvvie who’d first shown him the place. An old luvvie friend of a friend who’d been ripped off for all his Queen Anne silver and a collection of Penny Blacks by the mercenary young man he’d been silly enough to invite back for a nightcap. Dougie had at least got the silver back, while the guy was sleeping off what he’d spent the proceeds of the stamps on. He really didn’t come here often, but as he watched the woman slip off her stool and shrug on her furry jacket, he felt a sudden pang and asked, “Wait a minute — what’s your name?”
She smiled and said: “It’s Lola. See you again, honey.” And then she was gone.
Dougie found himself drifting back to the club the next evening.
It was weird, because he’d kept to himself for so long he felt like his heart was a hard, cold stone that no one could melt. It was best, he had long ago told himself, not to form attachments in his line of work. Attachments could trip you up. Attachments could bring you down. It was better that no one knew him outside his small circle of professional contacts and the clients they brought. Safer that way. He’d done six months time as a teenager, when he was stupid and reckless, and had vowed he’d never be caught that way again.
He was mulling over all these facts as he found himself sitting at the bar. He didn’t quite know what he thought he was doing there, just that he felt his heart go each time the buzzer went and a new group of people clattered down the steps. Lola had come into the place alone. He supposed he could ask the guvnor what he knew about her, but that didn’t seem very gentlemanly. After all, he wasn’t a regular himself, who knew how long she’d been making her way down here after the grind of an evening “huzzling the schmucks” under Venus’s neon underskirts?
At half past 1:00 she had wound her way down the stairs toward him. A smile already twitching at the corners of her mouth, she was pleased to see him. One look up her long, bare, perfect legs to her leather miniskirt and that same leopardskin jacket and he felt the same.
“He-looo, Dougie,” she said.
Dougie felt drunk, as he had ever since.
Gradually, over whiskey and sodas with the ice crinkling in the glass, she’d told him her story. It was all very intriguing. Her father was Russian, she said, ex-KGB, who since the fall of Communism had managed to create an empire for himself in electronic goods. He was a thug, but a charming one — he had named her after a character in a Raymond Chandler book that he’d read, contraband, as a teenager.
They had a lot of money, but he was very strict. Made her study hard and never go out. There was not a lot of emotion between him and her mother.
Her mother was an oddity, a Somalian. Lola didn’t know how they met, but she suspected. Back in the old days, it was quite possible her father had bought her out of semi-slavery in a Moscow brothel. Her mother always claimed she was a princess, but she was also a drunk, so what was Lola to believe? She was beautiful, that was for sure. Beautiful and superstitious, always playing with a deck of strange cards and consulting patterns in tea leaves. She might have mastered dark arts, but never managed to speak Russian — probably she never wanted to. So Lola grew up speaking two languages, in one big, empty apartment in Moscow.
Right now, she was supposed to be in Switzerland. She looked embarrassed when she told Dougie this. “At finishing school. Can you believe? Vot a cliché.” Lola had done a bunk six months ago. She’d crossed Europe, taking cash-in-hand work as she did, determined to get to London. She wanted to escape while she was in the “free West” rather than go back to what she knew would be expected of her in Russia. Marriage to some thick bastard son of one of her father’s ex-comrades. A life of looking nice and shutting up, just like her mother.
But she feared her father’s arm was long. There were too many Russians in London already. Someone was bound to rat her out, the reward money would be considerable. So she had to get together a “traveling fund” and find somewhere else to go. Somewhere safe.