Free Transgressions by Sarah Dunant Page A

torso would be in better condition, depending, of course, on how long it took them to find it.
    Jake swallowed the saliva that had gathered in the bottom of his mouth. Ten years a cop and he thought he’d seen everything. But there was always something more, always another one worse than the one before. Still, no point in throwing up. This early on in the job he had his reputation to think of.
    “ ‘If you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs,’ eh?” he said, half under his breath.
    “What?”
    “Nothin’. Just an English poem.”
    “ ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever,’ ” the officer said, his accent curling the words in on themselves. “Though in this case, I think not.”
    Christ, these European cops. They certainly had themselves an education. Some of them even knew American movies better than he did. Had studied them like some kind of lifestyle correspondence course. “So, Jake, who do you think she is?”
    He shook his head. But the fact was, he already knew. The hair had given her away.
    She had left the apartment at 4:15 the previous afternoon, the same short black skirt, the same leather jacket, only this time she was wearing sunglasses—sunglasses and no sun. At first he thought it was affectation, until she had crossed the street and shimmied straight past him into the café. Then he had seen the bruise, a great fat strawberry of a thing, puffing up under the right lens. She wore it well though, head up, a kind of fuck-you quality to the walk. Good body, he noted, lean, well kept, curved in all the right places, her breasts small and high like ripe apples. A little like Mirka’s. Jesus, how long would it take before he could look at a woman and not compare? Longer than the six months it had been.
    Anyway, this woman wasn’t worth the comparison. Within the scheme of things she was just blond trash, a carrier of other people’s messages and possessions, a gift to be used—or abused—as part of a larger seduction plan. What she would have brought him would have been the sample, a token of goodwill to show the purity and the quality: quality that could be guaranteed if he and his bosses decided to move their order. And if the Americans were going to sew up the old Soviet market they needed to get those orders.
    They. He knew them so well he could taste the salt in their sweat. Not that the big guys sweat much. They pay others to do that for them. Theirs was the brain work, the strategy, the boardroom tangos. Except it didn’t take a genius to sort this one out. With the Western market at saturation point, this was where the action was now. Their nineties business plan had them carving up the post-Soviet bloc within the next three to four years, bribing the small guys, buying out the big, and neutralizing those who couldn’t be bought. Then they slam down the price, create the appetite, and, hey presto, new markets, big profits. Proof that capitalism works.
    Czechoslovakia was the perfect place to do it all from. Germany to the left, Russia to the right, Hungary and Poland on either side, an economy moving fast enough to have money, and the kind of foreign investment that meant they could launder the profits without anybody asking. All this in a cute little city that was fast gaining the comforts of home but where American law couldn’t touch them.
    But the same didn’t go for American law-enforcement officers. This job had had Jake’s name on it from the beginning. He’d already run a couple of successful operations against these guys in the States, so when the Czech government decided to come clean and admit they had a problem, Jake’s name was high on the files. Everyone in the department knew he needed a reason to get the fuck out for a while, and what other American narcotics cop could negotiate his way through the Prague old town without a tourist map to help him? That’s what eighteen months married to a Czech beauty did for you. Visiting the family. They’d come