Chapter 12 #2
“Let’s say I did.” Estella shifted her weight, resting back against Ellie’s car again, looking far too comfortable for Ellie’s liking.
“You and I could help each other quite a lot, couldn’t we?
We could spend a little time together so you don’t have to stalk me at yoga class.
Ask me questions, understand my motivations. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
Ellie struggled for breath. What Estella was offering her was a dream come true from an artistic point of view. Ellie wasn’t born yesterday though.
“And what do you get out of it? You know I’m not a scriptwriter or a producer. I’m not directing any of it. I’ll be playing whatever version of you I’m given.”
“To a point,” Estella said. “But if that were wholly true, why would you have bothered to follow me around town in the first place? Why even care about what kind of person I am?”
Ellie opened her mouth and closed it again. She had no good answer for that.
Estella pushed off the car and got right up close to her again.
Ellie wanted to take a step back, but she was scared it would look too much like running.
Instead she stood her ground, toe-to-toe and eye-to-eye with the scariest woman she’d ever met.
“Here’s the thing you don’t know,” Estella said. “I’ve seen you on stage before.”
“What?” Ellie was truly thrown now. “When?”
“Last year. That play. Whatsisname… Chekhov.” Estella told her.
“After the last season of that fucking terrible TV show came out, I wanted to figure you out: the woman with the balls to think she could play me. And god knows there’s not much I can find to see of you on screen outside of you sensuously spooning ice-cream into your mouth. ”
“Was that really necessary?” Ellie was really running out of patience for Estella’s little digs.
“I mean most people just eat it.” Estella shrugged a single shoulder.
“But I’m afraid that particular role didn’t really satisfy my curiosity, no matter how many times I watched you lick your lips, so I decided I’d go see you in a play.
And there you were, playing…” she clicked her fingers as she remembered.
“Yelena. Which, if you want my opinion, is not that much of a role, really, is it? She’s just the young wife, when you see her written down on paper.
A supporting character, there just to be beautiful and for everyone to fall in love with for no real reason.
A fucking decorative housewife, Ellie. I was pissed, if I’m honest, that my opportunity to see you from the front row was going to give me so little to go on. ”
“Wait. I’m sorry. You… read the play?”
“Yes, Eloise, shockingly, just because I’m a criminal doesn’t mean I can’t read.”
“That’s not what I meant! I’m just surprised you cared that much.” Ellie was truly baffled by the image of Estella Grant, propped up in bed, Chekhov in hand, purely to get a handle on her. “Go on. You were saying how much my performance disappointed you.”
“The performance? Oh no. That’s what I’m telling you.
You made Yelena fascinating. Here she is, nothing but pretty on paper, living a wasted existence.
But you made her a whole entire human being, this woman who ached with life.
I couldn’t figure it out. What was it you were doing on that stage?
Was it your eyes? The way you moved your body?
The little spaces, in the way you delivered dialogue?
Fuck me, Eloise Silver, I still don’t know what witchcraft you used, but I know sure as hell you were doing more than just playing what they gave you. ”
Ellie was gobsmacked. It was the most words Estella had ever said in her presence.
She couldn’t figure out whether to take the woman seriously, because up until now she’d never heard her say a word that wasn’t sarcastic, threatening or both.
Any second now, Estella was going to laugh and mock her, she was sure.
And yet the look in those blue eyes, was, for one moment in time, quite steady.
“What do you want from me?” Her voice came out low. They were still standing inches apart, and as the words slipped out she wanted to curse herself. Somehow, with her voice this soft, the conversation felt startlingly intimate.
“Nothing,” Estella said. Ellie recognised a lie when she heard one.
“Just you, doing your job. Nothing you wouldn’t do for any other role, even a fucking ice-cream commercial.
You licked that spoon like you really meant it.
” Ellie didn’t even dignify that with a response, even as Estella’s eyes danced, making Ellie grit her teeth against an urge to laugh.
The mob queen sobered up, raising her chin.
“I want you to play me like you actually know me. I’m offering you access, that’s all. ”
“Out of the goodness of your heart?” Ellie narrowed her eyes. “Give me a break. For sure I’m going to walk out the other side of this finding I’ve accidentally smuggled drugs across the border.”
“Just for starters, you should know that on a personal note, I hate the drug trade. Heroin took my mother’s life. And, in a way, my father’s.”
Estella delivered the words so lightly, that Ellie instantly recognised them as the truth.
It was the same way Zara sounded, when she talked about the very worst things she’d gone through.
A slightly checked out trauma voice that came out when someone was recounting a truth so horrible, that in that moment they literally couldn’t feel it.
“I’m sorry,” she heard herself say. Which felt, oddly, like the most bizarre sentence she’d ever spoken in her life.
I’m sorry to a possible murderess. I’m sorry to the most dangerous woman in the city.
Estella considered her for a moment, neither one of them breaking eye contact.
Finally, she stepped back and gave Ellie just a fraction of personal space.
Ellie felt the relief instantly, like her lungs could finally expand again.
“Don’t be sorry,” Estella said. She smiled, slowly, with what Ellie belatedly realised was seduction in her gaze.
The way she probably looked at men she wanted to manipulate.
“Consider it a taste.” She lowered her lashes and tucked back her hair.
Then she straightened. “Thursday, 2PM. You’ll get a text of the location that morning. Be good, Ellie.”
She turned and walked all of three paces before a black car parked a few hundred metres away pulled out from the curb and stopped beside her. She slipped into the back seat and the car peeled away, Ellie staring wide-eyed after it.