Vodka and Bordeaux
He was snoring before he could rip off her clothes. DREADFUL PENNY Ep. 5
From Episode 4: Penny and Timur check out his suite at the Burj al Arab while Kasym finds new ways to foil her.
Timur was downstairs in the office, where a bodyguard was setting up KazPetro’s own computer terminals. Timur was murmuring into a cell phone that was practically lost inside his big hand. This was a working holiday. The chairman of a thirty-two-billion-dollar oil company didn’t have holidays of any other kind.
“Honey, why don’t you work upstairs,” she said. “It would be so much more comfortable.”
He waved her off, but she draped herself around his back. “You could mix business with pleasure,” she whispered.
Timur paused his flow of Kazakh into the phone.
“Set up your laptop in the bedroom,” she purred. “Maybe you don’t need to go out. We’ll get one of those butlers to fill the Jacuzzi and then…”
“Later,” he grunted.
Veronique accepted this with delight and smothered his thick neck with kisses.
Kaysm entered. “The chairman is busy now,” he snapped.
She retreated upstairs, her playful smile reverting to a studied frown. She locked herself in the suite’s bathroom and opened her toiletry bag. She took out her contact-lens case to reassure herself that the poisonous gel was still there. The hand lotion, too—a salve unlike any other.
Penny caught her reflection and saw how her body was angled over the counter and a memory surprised her, for she imagined she saw the man named Viktor standing behind her.
After what he had done to her in London, she had exorcised him from her mind. She’d taken her revenge and was determined to never feel the way he had made her feel, ever again. But Viktor had popped up several times in the past few days, usually the night when she lay beneath Timur, as if to mock her attempts to convince the chairman of her pleasure.
“You don’t scare me.” Saying it like she really meant it.
She brushed up her lipstick, her mind still foisting images of Viktor behind her in the mirror. Stack knows… Full-bore self-gazing in the mirror. Penny Lee, you’ve got this.
The door latch jiggled. An impatient knock.
“It’s occupied,” she called.
“Do not lock.” It was one of the bodyguards.
“I’m using the bathroom,” she protested, moving to the toilet and lowering the seat.
“Open or I break.”
She flushed the toilet and crossed the long bathroom to open the door. “Satisfied?”
The bodyguard smirked. “You know rules. Next time I break.”
“I’m a woman. I need some privacy.”
The broad-shouldered man turned away and continued his scouting. The two bodyguards were trained to be constantly sweeping, and the confines of the hotel made them restless. Cooped up in the suite, they burned calories by double, triple-checking anything within their reach.
She wandered back downstairs. She could hear Timur speaking in Kazakh. The briefcase with the laptop lay open on the table in the main living room. He was on a secure videoconference. Timur saw her but turned his back on her.
“Why don’t you go out,” Kasym suggested. “There’s pool, gym, anything you want.”
She changed into a bathing suit. It was a chocolate Roberto Cavalli monokini, held together by a ring around her neck and the connecting fabric that covered her bellybutton down to the spaghetti ties on either hip. The suggestive design made a string bikini seem frankly dull. Timur and his men were listening as another man’s video image on the laptop screen droned over a flowchart. They all fell silent as she paraded past.
She pirouetted toward Timur, making a scene of interrupting his work. The other men indulged in the break by ogling her. Timur let her twirl into his embrace.
“Go play,” he told her.
“It’s more fun with you.” She checked the laptop screen. “Besides, if that guy thinks oil prices will climb above seventy dollars, fire him.”
“You’re right.” Timur turned to the screen. “Gregor, you’re fired.”
The figure in the video image cringed.
Timur smacked her on the bottom, sending her toward the exit. “You are smarter than clowns I have here, but now you go.”
The men laughed nervously and she repaid them with a wagging finger, oh you naughty boys. Timur began shouting at the man on the laptop screen. He sounded like he really was firing the guy. Good, Gregor probably deserved it.
Penny covered herself in a long gauzy wrap and slipped into flip-flops. She exited the suite with the happy knowledge that she could have done that jock’s stupid analyst job ten times better, except she didn’t want to trade her freedom just to become some brown-nosing executive vice president slaving over other people’s emails.
At least that’s what she had always told herself. It seemed true when she was released from duty, hopscotching from one playboy’s yacht to another.
Penny took the elevator down to the outdoor pool and did laps beneath the greedy eyes of fat men smoking shisha.
Timur took her to dinner that evening at a restaurant up top and opposite the helipad. They had a table by the long window to themselves, but the view, facing the Gulf, was monochrome black. The bodyguards kept an eye nearby. Kasym had chosen, or had been told, to eat elsewhere.
She wore a dark, low-cut evening dress with a sapphire suspended just above the crevasse of her breasts. Timur had given it a cursory glance and buried his nose in the menu. The staff crawled around them like cockroaches. Would the Chairman like a suggestion regarding the wine?
He ordered a 1973 Pomerol to go with his steak and her lamb, but then also a bottle of vodka to go with his Bordeaux. Veronique tried conversation and she tried holding his fingers and smiling at him. He grew animated when he started complaining about KazPetro’s business.
She tried dropping something she had picked up from her research. “I heard from our CEO that the Arab Gas Pipeline’s going to close again.” The war in Syria was disrupting the regional industry, and outside oil giants like KazPetro were always scrambling to secure supply.
“Will stay open,” he said.
“How do you know?”
Timur grunted and poured another slosh of vodka.
“C’mon, Timur. How do you know?”
“Never mind,” he said, taking a long draft. His eyes had dulled. “Oristar,” he sneered, and she picked out the Kazakh word for Russians, followed by something that sounded impolite.
Then he clammed up. Penny knew she could press him when he fell into one of his moods, but delicately. She shifted to inconsequential banter, laying the pathway back to serious talk. Timur refilled his heavy glass to the brim.
Later he collapsed in the vastness of the bed, snoring before he could rip off her clothes. Penny lay gazing at their reflections, Timur on his belly, a meaty sprawl, and herself, a slender slice of dessert trapped beneath his arm. In the dark she could make out only the faintest outline of her face in the mirror above the bed. The mirror was big and solid enough to kill them if it fell.
Would that be such a tragedy? Viktor asked.