The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2. Adam Thirlwell

water. The pulsing headlamps of the Mercedes parked below the corniche road lit up the cove. Where the hell was Lydia? Somewhere along the beach a woman with a bloody breast would frighten the wits out of the Russian landing party.

       Cordobés

      The self-contained face of the bullfighter, part gamin, part Beatle, lay below Quimby as he set out the cards on the balcony table. Whatever else they said about the boy, he never moved his feet. By contrast Raissa was pacing around the bedroom like a tigress in rut. Quimby could hear her wide Slavic hips brushing against his Paisley dressing gown behind the escritoire. What these obsessives in Moscow and Washington failed to realize was that for once he might have no motive at all.

       Drinamyl

      Those bloody little capsules, Raissa thought. No wonder the West was dying. Every time she was ready to lure Quimby over to Sir Giles’s villa he took one of the tranquillizers, then went down to the sea and talked to the beachniks. At Benidorm he even had the nerve to bring one of the Swedish girls back to the apartment. Hair down to her knees, breasts like thimbles, the immense buttocks of a horse. Ugh.

       Embonpoint

      The Princess slid the remains of the eclair into her mouth. As she swallowed the pastry she pouted her cream-filled lips at Statler. He lowered his rolled-up copy of Time Atlantic, with its photo of Quimby before the House Committee. The dancers moved around the tea-terrace to the soft rhythm of the fox-trot. There was something sensuous, almost sexual, about Manon’s compulsive eating of eclairs. This magnificent Serbo-Croat cow, had she any idea what was going to happen to her?

       Fata Morgana

      Lydia felt his hand move along the plastic zipper of her dress. She lay on the candlewick bedspread, gazing at the sea and the white sand. Apart from the dotty English milord who had rented the villa to them the place was empty. As Kovarski hesitated the silence seemed to amplify all the uncertainties she had noticed since their arrival at San Juan. The meeting at the nudist colony on the Isle du Levant had not been entirely fortuitous. She reached up and loosened the zip. As her breasts came out she turned to face him. Kovarski was sitting up on one elbow, staring through his Zeiss binoculars at the apartment block three hundred yards along the beach.

       Guardia Civil

      Quimby watched the olive-uniformed policemen ambling along the shore, their quaint Napoleonic hats shielding their eyes as they scanned the girls on the beach. When it came to the crunch, on whose side would they see themselves – Stat’s, the Russians’, or his own? Quimby shuffled the Cordobés-backed cards. The platinum-haired call-girl who lived in the next apartment was setting off for Alicante in her pink Fiat. Quimby sipped his whisky. Five minutes earlier he had discovered the concealed aerial of Raissa’s transmitter.

       Heterodyne

      Kovarski was worried. The sight of Raissa’s body on the pony skin reminded him that Statler was still to be reckoned with. The piercing whistle from the portable radio confirmed that Raissa had been lying there since dusk. He knelt down, eyes lingering for a last moment on the silver clasps of her Gossard suspenders. He put his finger in her mouth and ran it around her gums, searching for the capsule. A cherry popped into his palm. With a grimace he dropped it into the vodkatini by the radio. He opened Raissa’s right hand and from the frozen clasp of her thumb and forefinger removed the capsule. As he read the message his brow furrowed. What the devil had the Princess to do with Quimby? Was this some insane CIA plot to restore the Romanoffs?

       Iguana

      The jade reptile shattered on the tiled floor at Sir Giles’s feet. With an effort he regained his balance. Pretending to straighten his Old Etonian tie, he touched the painful bruise under his breast-bone. He looked up at the tough, square-jawed face of the American girl. Would she hit him again? She glared at him contemptuously, bare feet planted wide on the pony skin. Ah well, he thought, there had been worse moments. At Dunkirk the bombs falling from the Stukas had made the beach drum like a dancing floor.

       Jasmine

      Statler gazed at the white salver-shaped flowers in the lobby. Their nacreous petals, bled of all colour, reminded him of Manon’s skin, and then of Quimby’s large pallid face, with its too-intelligent eyes watching over the sunken cheeks like a snide Buddha’s. Was the exchange a fair one, the Princess for the complex, moody cipher chief? He walked out through the revolving doors of the hotel into the bright Alicante sunlight, realizing with a pang that he would never see Manon again.

       Kleenex

      Raissa bent forwards over the bed. With the ring finger of her right hand she lifted her eyelid. For a moment the elegant mask of her face was contorted like an obscene paroquet’s. She tapped the lower lid and the micro-lens jumped on to the tissue. The minute R on its rim shone in the beam of the Anglepoise. She wiped the lenses and placed them in the polarimeter. As the door of the safe opened, revealing the dials of the transmitter, she listened to Quimby singing Arrivederci Roma in the bathroom. All that drinamyl and whisky would keep the pig drowsy for at least an hour.

       Limbo

      The bar had been a mere twelve inches from the floor, Kovarski recollected, as he felt the hard curve of Lydia’s iliac crest under the midnight blue stretch pants. For once the nightclub in Benidorm was hushed, everyone watching as this demented American girl with the incredible thighs had edged under the bar, hips jerking to the throb of the juke-box. Kovarski picked his nose, involuntarily thinking about Stat. The CIA man had a face like ice.

       Mercedes

      The brake servos had gone. Holding the hand-brake, Lydia groped behind Kovarski’s chest for the off-side door handle. The Russian lay against the sill, his handsome face beginning to sag like the first slide of an avalanche. As the door opened he fell backwards on to the gravel. Lydia released the hand-brake and let the car roll forward. When Kovarski had gone she wound up the window, elegantly starred by the bullet which had passed through the door. She flashed the headlamps for the last time and pressed the starter.

       Neapolitan

      Raissa finished off the remains of Quimby’s ice-cream with the eager lips of a child. In three hours they would be six fathoms under the Mediterranean, due to surface for the first time in the Baltic. She would miss the sunlight, and the small, dark Spaniards with their melancholy eyes following her down the dusty street to the bodega. In the end it would be worth it. Throw away the Man-Tan, as Kovarski often quoted to her in his mock-Yevtushenko, the sky will soon be full of suns.

       Oceanid

      For a moment Manon realized that Kovarski was undecided whether to rape or kill her. She backed into the bathroom, her left hand covering her powdered breasts. The trapped steam billowed into Kovaraski’s face. He goggled at her like an insane student in a Dostoevski novel. He stepped across the cork bathmat and took her elbow in a surprisingly tender gesture. Then the alabaster soap-dish caught her on the side of the head. A second later she was lying in a hot mess in the bath, Kovarski’s arms moving over her head like pistons.

       Poseidon

      Quimby handled the bottle of Black Label with a respect due their long acquaintance. The proto-Atlantic ocean had covered all North America and Europe except for Scotland, leaving intact a