I Was Waiting for You

COITUS INTERRUPTUS, A BALLAD

THE CUBAN GUY TAKING her from behind was puffing and panting, nearing the finishing line in his race to orgasm.

Cornelia felt nothing. Neither in her body or her soul, let alone her heart.

What was the point, she wondered?

It was always like this.

Meaningless words. Hydraulics. Sweat.

No emotions.

Then her cell phone rang. It was lodged at the bottom of her handbag, but they both could clearly hear its insistent nudge.

She had no fancy tone. No classic song or silly sounds. Just a strong vibration followed by an insistent buzz.

The man inside her slowed. His tides of lust receding fast.

Possibly her body tensed, but Cornelia said nothing.

The phone kept ringing, then the sound died and there was a discreet mechanical click as the message function took over. In silence.

“It’s OK,” she said. “I’ll check it later.”

The man grunted and focused again on fucking her.

But whatever magic they had ridden the waves of had by now dissipated and his ardour was no longer the same. He soon pulled out of her.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

The traffic noises outside his mid-range Broadway hotel room window somehow increased in volume.

“No problem,” Cornelia responded.

He rose awkwardly from the bed.

Cornelia rolled over on to her back and pulled the white, crumpled sheet back across her naked body. She felt empty, again.

She remained silent.

The phone call she had not taken now separated them and the man was visibly in a hurry to cut their encounter short and be on his way.

Which was fine with her.

Cornelia had picked him up at the Oyster Bar beneath Grand Central Station. She’d been bored and the man had initially seemed clean and not too bad-looking. So she’d thought, why not?

He glanced back at her, and his detumescing cock stirred a little. Cornelia just looked him in the eyes and kept on saying nothing.

Finally, he looked away and moved toward the bathroom, grabbing his shirt and trousers on the way.

Five minutes later he was stepping out of the room, after reminding her that she could stay another few hours if she wanted as the room had been booked until three in the afternoon.

She nodded. Blew him a desultory kiss, but his back was already to her, in his haste to abandon the landscape of this latest sexual fiasco.

Cornelia sighed, stretched her long, pale limbs under the thin white sheet.

She closed her eyes.

The message was short and sweet.

“Call me. Today, if you can.”

Ivan.

She took a cab back to her Washington Square Place apartment and rang him back from there, once she had showered and changed into a grey T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

“It’s me.”

“Good.”

“A job?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you wanted me off the scene for a few more months following last time’s small mess.”

“I did. But this is overseas, not on home patch. Have you got an up to date passport?”

“Of course.”

“Fine. It’s in Paris. You’ll find the dossier in the usual place.”

“Perfect.”

“When can you leave?”

“Will tomorrow do?”

“Absolutely.”

“Hardware?”

“Locally. A safe deposit box. It’ll all be in the dossier.”

“Fee?”

“Fifteen thousand.”

“That works for me.”

“And, naturally, we’ll supply the return ticket. Business class.”

“The least you can do at such short notice…”

“You’re the best, C. You deserve a touch of luxury.”

“Cheap and cheerful, that’s me.”

She could almost hear him smile on the other end of the line. He had been her contact for two years now. They had never met. She had no idea what he looked like, although she guessed he must be in his mid forties. The voice was accent-less and impersonal. Businesslike.

Well, Cornelia reckoned, killing was just a business like any other, wasn’t it?

And one she was good at.

At any rate, more interesting than sex.

A WALTZ OF LOVE AND LUST

JACK WAS ON THE rebound from yet another disastrous affair. Feeling distinctively sorrow for himself, drowning in a sea of regrets. Romantically inclined as he was, he would readily have stumbled into the abandon of alcoholism, but he didn’t even enjoy the taste of booze. And it’s an uphill task to get yourself dead drunk on fruit juices or Pepsi Cola. But he knew this small bar in a Paris side street, a stone’s throw from the river, parked between a kebab place and a cheap souvenir shop. So there he was, now sipping his first coffee of the evening, attempting to stay awake, killing time, hoping some form of inspiration or another would strike and he would find out what his next book should be about. It had been over three years since his last one had been published, and the untamed ideas inside his head just kept on circling round and round, never quite connecting with any form of sensible plot, let alone believable characters. Or maybe, for the first time in ages, he was becoming scared of the loneliness of long distance typing?

A few decades earlier, he’d been a student here. Maybe taking yesterday’s early morning business commuter Eurostar to Paris on a whim had been a further desultory attempt to reconnect with his past. The bar on the Rue St André des Arts hadn’t changed much, although another alongside it had since become a Turkish takeaway and the smell of slowly revolving skewered meat and dripping fat just a few steps away kept on drifting across Jack’s nose, unpleasantly reminding him that time had moved on. Anyway, genuine students seldom came to this part of Paris any longer since most university locales had been moved out of the Latin Quarter following the riots in 1968.

Once upon a time, he could spend endless evenings here with his friends during which they would unilaterally put the world to rights, arguing fiercely about politics and art, managing with practised talent to make their drinks last until closing time. Whatever would he have then thought about his present self: this grey-haired guy and his still unruly hair, this stranger who looked a lot like him but now had a wallet stuffed with cash, twenty-pound notes, euros and US dollars which he had no one to spend on.

Jack had switched to citron pressé and nursed it slowly, drowning the drink in sugar. He leafed through the current issue of a film magazine he’d picked up earlier at a kiosk. Most of the features were about new French actors and actresses he knew little about.

Many years ago, this place had been the very centre of his private universe, as he regularly missed lectures and sought comfort in the familiarity of these old-fashioned surroundings, the shiny metal counter, the sizzle and hiss of the coffee machine, his gaze invariably captured by the full-size glass window on the other side of which passers-by trooped by, many of them women, young, old and in between but all unapproachable and distant to him. With a quiet smile, he recalled the day Mary Ann Armshaw had walked in. Blonde and skinny, all-American and, then, his distinctive ideal of the perfect Yankee corn-fed beauty. She had not been alone, but her companion, also American, was on the curvy side and had dark hair to her shoulders. He had listened to their conversation as they sipped their coffees, unaware as they were that he was also English-speaking. They had arrived in Paris four days earlier, on a student exchange programme and both young women were still in awe of and scared of this new city which proved so different from their small Midwest town. None of his mates had been around that day so, on a whim, he had quickly decided to follow the girls when they left the café. For two hours, they navigated the small streets and corners of the Left Bank, with him never more than fifty metres or so away. They appeared quite aimless and fancy free, peering at shop windows, at buildings, walking along the busy streets as if they had all the time in the world. More than once he almost gave up the chase and returned to his flat. Had it begun raining that evening, he would certainly have done so, but the weather just about held. The day grew darker and one of the two young American girls finally noticed his presence in their wake and they quickly glanced at him observing them from a distance, quietly conferred and then made a beeline for the nearest bar. This was still the days when almost every other door led to a café in the Latin Quarter.

“You’ve been following us, Monsieur” the blonde girl said to him as he walked in and stood by the counter next to them.

He’d smiled. “Yes, I saw you in the other bar earlier.”

She looked him straight in the eye. He held her stare.

“I often sit there in the afternoons…” he continued.

The darker-haired girl squinted a little as she gave him a closer look and it dawned on her that he was actually speaking English. And with no French accent.

“You’re not… French?”

He sighed with relief. They were seemingly not going to prove rude or aggressive. They were now curious. The ice had somehow been broken.

“No, I’m a foreigner here myself… like you,” Jack added.

“Oh.”

He no longer recalled today what her friend’s name had been, and her participation in the ensuing conversation turned out patchy to say the least. Two weeks later, she returned to America, having proven unable to adapt to the distinct charms and perils of Paris. Mary Ann Armshaw had stayed behind, and remained the full nine months of the academic year.

In addition to Jack, two of his friends, that he knew of, actually slept with her during that period, although he was sorry to discover later he was not actually the first and sly Marcel had breached her uncertain defences long before he did. He’d always been the quiet one. When his time came, she allowed him to do almost anything to and with her except touch her breasts. He still remembered those small breasts now as they rapidly became the very focus of his desire and he would on every single encounter try to get her to change her mind. But he never did succeed. Whenever a finger, let alone a whole hand, ventured inches forward towards her tits, she would begin to squirm uncontrollably as if the contact could have proved capable of setting her nipples, her very skin, on fire. Had he actually touched her there, he knew for sure she would have screamed like a banshee and thrown him violently off her and stormed off at great velocity in any random direction.

Anything but her breasts. Today, sitting in that bar, that haunt of his younger days, he could remember no other body part of Mary Ann Armshaw. Don’t ask Jack what her features were like or whether she was tall or small, or how long her blonde hair was. Just her pale, small breasts and her name came to mind. He wondered where she was now and if she had married her high school boyfriend after her return home? And was now a mother, or even a grandmother?Or even alive?

This place was so full of strange memories. It had been ages since he had even thought of Mary Ann. Why now recall yet another woman he had failed to truly connect with? He pushed the magazine aside and drowned his glass. Should he stay or should he go? The weather outside appeared unsettled and it was too early to go eat, and if he stepped back to his hotel room, a ten-minute walk away from the Rue St André des Arts, he knew he would no doubt doze off trying to kill time and wake up way past midnight with an unquenchable appetite. He called out for a further espresso.

He watched all the women walk by outside through the bar’s windows. There were men too, of course, but they were almost invisible to him. They came in all shapes, sizes, ages and colours, a melting pot of movement and limbs and lust.

He smiled.

Was he turning in old age into some sort of pervert who found every single unreachable woman trooping past out there an object of desire?

He chuckled quietly.

And silently answered his own question: no, he was not. He had always been that way: a dangerous dreamer, a fantasist, an unrepentant lover of the female kind.

And some had loved Jack back too.

But all too often in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

Like now.

He peered at the empty cup of espresso. The sugar had congealed at its bottom, but the taste was no longer present in his mouth. All he could taste was a bitter tang of loneliness.

Jack sighed.

Which is when the man walked through the door.

Outside, a deeper night was falling, darkness surrounding the narrow Paris streets like a blanket floating solemnly to the ground. The evening regulars at the café were making place for the night owls, another species of drinkers altogether.

The middle-aged man who had entered the bar gave him a rapid glance and walked towards his table. For a brief moment he annoyingly obscured Jack’s view of the street and a sumptuous passing redhead with unending legs and a cinched leather jacket who had momentarily caught his attention.

The stranger had a broken nose and short, greying hair and was dressed in a long green woollen coat which reached all the way down below his knees. Under the coat, he was wearing dark brown slacks and a white button-down shirt open at the neck. He didn’t appear to have shaved for a few days and the stubble across his cheeks and lower jaw veered patchily between black and white.

With no hesitation whatsoever, the stranger faced him and sat himself down on a chair across from the table where Jack had spent the last few hours in deep thought and reflections.

“I know who you are,” he said. He spoke to him in French, but he had an accent Jack couldn’t immediately place.

“Do you?”

“Yes,” the man confirmed.

He wasn’t in the habit of being recognised in public, but it was nothing to worry about. He had done readings and participated in literary festivals in several countries. Maybe that was the explanation.

“Great,” he said. “What can I do for you?” he asked the stranger. There were deep, swollen red pockets under the man’s eyes as if he had recently been crying a lot.

“I want to hire you.”

“Hire me?”

“Yes.”

Absolutely the last thing he had expected the man to say…

“To do what?”

He looked deep into Jack’s eyes.

“To find my daughter.”

“Are you sure it’s me you want?”

“Yes, I read about you in the newspaper back at home. I also once heard you on the radio,” he added.

Jack could now place his accent: he was Italian. He let him continue speaking in French, as he had begun.

“Did you?”

The Italian man nodded and lowered his gaze, as if he were now ashamed of looking at him and begging for help. The silence lasted almost a whole minute. Jack broke it.

“Do you want a drink?” he asked the Italian.

“Yes…” the stranger hesitated, “a glass of red wine, I think.”

Jack called over to the bar and ordered the man’s wine and another coffee for himself, a double this time. He somehow guessed he was going to need it, even though another part of him also knew the caffeine overkill would keep him awake all night. But then, what’s new? It had recently been a frequent state of affairs, unaided by coffee.

The stranger grimaced as he drank his first small mouthful of wine.

Jack stirred too much sugar into his coffee cup. The embarrassed silence persisted.

“Tell me,” he suggested.

The Italian man looked up at him once again, nervously tugged on his collar and launched into his explanation.

“I am a doctor. I specialise in gastro-enterology. I am from Rome where I work in a big hospital. Maybe you know it, it’s San Filippo Neri, on the banks of the Tiber. I run the Digestive Endoscopy Department.”

Jack naturally knew nothing about gastro-enterology. But there was a flash of recognition down in the pit of his stomach. A doctor from Italy? Surely not. His face deliberately impassive, he nodded sympathetically as best he could. It was visibly not his turn to ask questions right now. The other man continued.

“I have two children. A girl and a boy. My daughter is called Giulia. She is now 23. I know I shouldn’t be saying this but she was always my favourite. She was a wonderful baby, always happy and cheerful. Dark curly hair from an early age and bright, oh so bright. We have tried to bring our children up right. I am very liberal, but she was always the apple of my eye and of course she soon knew it all too well and quickly became an expert in manipulating me to obtain almost everything she wanted. I didn’t mind, of course.” He wiped a thin tear away from the corner of his left eye. “When she became older, a teenager, both my wife and I were scared she might become too wild and unmanageable. There were a few difficult years, but we scrambled our way through them. In her late teens, she would almost never spend any time at home, apart from sleeping, you know. She was like a gypsy, flitting from friend to friend, playing tennis, studying, seeing films, theatre plays and opera. So that she should not run risks like so many of her classmates riding on a Vespa, we even bought her a small car, even though we knew that some years later we would have to do the same for her younger brother when the time came; a major expense. She became so independent. Yes, we argued a lot. She was spoiled and selfish at times, but I know we were closer than most fathers and daughters usually are, even in Italy, you know.”

The doctor caught his breath, picked up his glass to take another sip, even though it was now empty. He called for another one.

“No, maybe white this time,” he said. “It wasn’t very nice, I must confess… Algerian, I think.” He smiled weakly.

“Blanc, cette fois, s’il vous plait,” Jack corrected the order.

“Thank you,” the Italian man said.

“Do you know why she left?” he ventured.

“If only,” he answered. “She wasn’t that much into boys, I know. She found most friends her age too superficial. Remember, she was… is terribly bright. Completed her degree at 21, spoke 5 languages, even began writing film reviews for a small magazine where my wife knew the editor.”

“The reason girls usually leave home is because of love or infatuation,” Jack suggested.

“I know,” the man facing him said. “She seemed to be happier going out with girlfriends or as part of larger groups. Really. But then I suppose all fathers prefer not to think of real life and forget the fact that young girls cannot help but be attracted to sex. It’s our modern society, isn’t it? My wife and I met at college when we were only eighteen and sixteen respectively and married ten years later when we both had jobs and some form of security. She and I have never known others. Newer generations are different, I realise… Anyway, from time to time after she was seventeen or was it eighteen, Giulia would sometimes spend nights away from home, but she would always inform us in advance and we knew where she was staying most times, at a friend’s or some other safe place. If she had a boyfriend, she would never tell us and we just hoped that, once it happened, it would be someone nice that she would bring home in her own time to meet us. But she never did bring a young man home. She was a creature of secrets. I tell you, she had all the opportunities, but she followed her own counsel. Once a year, we go on a camper van holiday somewhere in Europe, all together — Giulia would even help out with the driving — and then spend the rest of the summer in the country house we have an hour away from Rome. She never minded; never suggested she should vacation on her own, or even with friends.”

He took a deep breath, anticipating the next question.

“She never wanted for money. I would always give her enough for her needs, and then she earned a bursary for her studies and worked a few hours a week at the university library. Somehow money never meant a lot to her. She seldom asked for more, unless she had a serious reason for doing so. Later she did suggest she could find a flat for herself and we argued a little about it, but she soon realised that with Rome property prices these days, it was something neither of us could really afford. It’s then I think that she met this man. An older man. I knew nothing about it, of course. She would never tell me. But she did confide in her mother. Although, even to my wife she would not provide any details. Age, name, nationality, profession, all those sort of basic things. I have now learned it lasted over a year. I suspect he was the first proper man in her life, also. Before him, just cheap infatuations and clumsy fumblings but no close… relationship.” He blushed. “But then something went wrong. Neither of us knows exactly what.”

He fell silent, rehashing the events and memories in his mind.

“And?” Jack asked.

“It was visible something disturbing had happened to her. She was no longer the soul and life of the party. She began spending hours alone in her room. Became introverted and anxious, defensive whenever we would try to speak to her. Evidently, there was something wrong.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do?” he said. “She was doing a postgraduate course in journalism and publishing and had mentioned the possibility of an Erasmus exchange with a matching institution in Paris. I wasn’t too pleased with the option of her being on her own in a foreign city, but she had done so a few years earlier when she had spent six months on a language course in Barcelona where I had made sure she stayed in a Catholic hall of residence, supervised by nuns; at any rate, this time I was the one who encouraged her to go to Paris on this course. Maybe I reasoned a change of place would do her good and the Giulia I had always known and cherished would return to us. I was wrong. Within a few weeks of arriving in Paris, she moved out of the apartment of the friend’s family where we had agreed she should stay. Since then, we’ve been trying to reach her on her mobile phone number but she never answers. I still try four or five times a day. Maybe she’s lost it. Or refuses to answer, I don’t know what to think.”

A veil of shadow lowered across his eyes.

“And you want me to find her?” Jack confirmed.

“Yes,’ the Italian doctor said.

“You do know I’m not a private detective, Doctor, don’t you?” Jack said.

The other man briefly looked away, as if this was a subject he would rather not discuss. He took a deep breath, then turned to Jack again, a note of pleading in his voice.

“Please,” he asked. “If I went to the police, they would just tell me she is old enough to make her own decisions, and I have no evidence of anything criminal having happened. Just another young girl wanting to live her life. But, somewhere inside, I just know that’s not the case. Not Giulia.”

A curtain of silence swept across the two men, both sitting there in a bubble in the far corner of the Parisian bar.

“Why me?” Jack enquired.

Fearing the answer.

“She was always reading your books,” the Italian replied. “I was always asking her why. I’ve never understood her interest, or for that matter anyone’s interest in mystery stories. I used to read Agatha Christie and Giorgio Scerbanenco when I was still at the faculty, but never since. Normal people grow out of it, I thought.”

“I see.”

“And I read that short interview she did with you for her friend’s magazine. She admired you.”

“Did she?”

“Yes, it was always Jack Clive this and Jack Clive that.”

“So?”

“So, I thought you might have some idea where to look for her. I just couldn’t face employing a real private investigator. It’s stupid, I know. But, at the back of my heart, I thought that was what Giulia might have wanted me to do…”

Jack stayed silent. He had expected another explanation. A more personal one.

Before departing the bar, the Doctor left Jack a folder with photographs and a mass of other details concerning his missing daughter and made him promise to keep in touch. Inside the file, there was also a thick wad of euros. They hadn’t, of course, even discussed a fee.

He was missing a daughter and Jack was missing all the women from his past.

It was a sorry state of affairs.

Or, looking at it from a different perspective, could it be the way to begin a new book? He’d always liked the simplicity of Raymond Chandler’s books, when a client found Marlowe and launched him on his investigative ways. And didn’t Marlowe invariably come across a woman or two along the way? Some might even have called this a challenge. Only time would tell.

L’AMÉRICAINE

CORNELIA TOOK THE RER from Roissy-Charles De Gaulle. A taxi would have been easier and more relaxed after the seven-hour plane journey, but she knew she had to remain as anonymous as possible. Cab drivers have a bad habit of remembering tall, lanky blondes, particularly so those who did not wish to engage in needless conversation and reveal whether it was their first time in Paris or was she coming here on holiday?

Because she knew there were countless CCTV cameras sprinkled across the airport and the train terminal, she had quickly changed outfits in a somewhat insalubrious toilet shortly after picking her suitcase up from the luggage carrousel, and by the time she walked on to the RER train, she now had a grey scarf obscuring her blonde curls and wore a different outfit altogether from the flight. It was far from foolproof, but at least would serve its purpose in muddying the waters in the eventuality of a later, thorough investigation.

The commuters on the train to Paris looked grey and tired, wage slaves on their mindless journey to work or elsewhere. A couple of teenage Arab kids listening to rap or was it hip hop on their iPods glanced at her repeatedly, but her indifference soon got the better of them and she wasn’t bothered until they reached the Luxembourg Gardens stop where she got off.

She had booked herself on the Internet into a small hotel there the previous day. She checked in under the false name on her spare passport, a Canadian one she’d seldom used before. She took a shower and relaxed before taking the lift to the lobby around lunch hour, noticing someone new had taken over at the registration desk from the young woman who’d earlier checked her in. Cornelia then calmly walked back to her room and stuffed some clothes into a tote bag she had packed into her small suitcase and went down to the lobby again and left the hotel. Fifteen minutes later, she registered at another hotel, near the Place de L’Odéon, this time under her real name. This booking she’d openly made by phone from New York the day before. She was now the proud tenant of two separate hotel rooms under two separate names and nationalities. Both rooms were noisy and looked out onto busy streets, but that was Paris, and anyway she wasn’t here for a spot of tourism. This was work. She settled in the new room, took a nap, and just before the evening walked out and took a cab to the Place de L’Opéra. There was a thin jiffy bag waiting for her at the American Express Poste Restante. Here, she retrieved the key she had found back in Brooklyn at the Russian grocery Ivan occasionally used as a dropout. She then caught another taxi to the Gare du Nord, where she located the left luggage locker which the key opened. The package was anonymous and not too bulky. She picked up a copy of Libération and casually wrapped it around the bundle she had just retrieved from the locker and walked down the train station stairs to the Métro and took the Porte d’Orléans line back to Odéon. In the room, she unwrapped the package and weighed the Sig Sauer in her hand. Her favourite gun. Perfect.

The Italian girl had always preferred older men. Some of her friends and other fellow students at La Sapienza, Rome’s University, had always kidded her she had something of a father fixation, and indeed her relationship with her gastro-enterologist Dad was prickly to say the least, seesawing between devotion and simmering anger. At any rate, he also spoiled her badly.

But boys her age seemed so clumsy and uninteresting, coarse, superficial, so sadly predictable, and she found herself recoiling instinctively from their tentative touches all too often. Not that she knew exactly what she wanted herself.

Whenever asked about her plans for the future, she would answer in jest (or maybe not) that she planned to marry an ambassador and have lots of babies. When Peppino — the jokey name she would use in public circumstances for her much older, foreign lover so as to make him impossible to identify for her parents– queried her about this, she would add that the ambassador would also be a black man, a big man in both size and personality. He would smile silently in response, betraying his own personal fears and prejudices, only to point out that she’d be wasting so many opportunities by becoming merely a wife. After all, this was a young woman who by the age of 22 had a degree in comparative literature, spoke a handful of languages, and would surely make a hell of a journalist or foreign correspondent one day.

Her affair with the man she and her few friends aware of his secret existence had affectionately called Peppino had lasted just over a year and he had been the first man she had fucked. To her amazement, he had become not just a lover but her professor of sex; unimaginably tender, crudely transgressive, and the first time she had come across a guy who understood her so well their contact when apart became almost telepathic. However, he was also more than twice her age, lived in another country and happened to be married, which sharpened her longing and her jealousy to breaking point. The affair had proven both beautiful and traumatic, but eventually the enforced separation from Peppino could not be assuaged by telephone calls, frantic e-mails and mere words any longer. For her sanity, she was obliged to break up with him. Even though she also loved him. She had a life to live, adventures to experience; he had already lived his life, hadn’t he? Now was her time. The decision was a painful one and he naturally took it badly. Not that her state of mind was much better, wracked by doubts, heartache and regrets by the thousands as both she and Peppino could not help recalling the days and nights together, the shocking intimacy they had experienced, the pleasure and complicity, the joy and the darkness. Sleepless nights and silent unhappiness followed in her wake and she had agreed to stay with a girlfriend from her exchange months in Barcelona who lived in Paris — ironically, a city he had always wanted to take her to.

It was a wet spring and the thin rain peppered the Latin Quarter pavements with a coating of grey melancholy. Flora had departed for the countryside and her grandparents’ villa where a family reunion was taking place and left Giulia on her own in the apartment for a few days. Initially, she had looked forward to the prospect but now felt herself particularly lonely. When she was not busy and frantically exploring the city with other casual acquaintances, memories just kept on flooding back.

She was sitting reading a book at the terrace of Les Deux Magots, sipping a cappuccino, half-watching the world pass by, women who walked elegantly, young men who looked cute but would surely prove dull in real life, she thought, when she heard the seductive voice of the bad man across her shoulders.

“That’s a quite wonderful book, Mademoiselle,” he said. “I envy you the experience of reading it for the first time. Truly.”

Giulia looked up at him.

He looked older. How could he not be?

Cornelia much preferred ignorance. A job was a job and it was better not to have to know any of the often murky reasons she was given an assignment.

Had the target stolen from another party, swindled, lied, killed, betrayed? It was not important.

Cornelia was aware she had a cold heart. It made her work easier, not that she sought excuses. She would kill both innocent and guilty parties with the same set of mind. It was not hers to reason why.

She had been given a thin dossier on her Paris mark, a half dozen pages of random information about his haunts and habits and a couple of photographs. A manila folder she had slipped between her folded black cashmere sweaters in the travelling suitcase, to which she had added a few torn out pages from the financial pages of The New York Times and a section on international investment from The Wall Street Journalto muddy the waters in the event of an unlikely snap examination of her belongings by customs at either JFK or Roissy. He was a man in his late forties, good-looking in a rugged sort of way which appealed to some women, she knew. Tallish, hair greying at the temples in subdued and elegant manner. She studied one of the photographs, and noted the ice-green eyes, and a steely inner determination behind the crooked smile. A dangerous man. A bad man.

But they all have weaknesses, and it appeared his was women. Younger women. It usually was. Cornelia sighed. Kept on perusing the information sheet she had been furnished with, made notes. Finally, she booted up her laptop and went online to hunt down the ‘clubs échangistes’ her prey was known to frequent on a regular basis. They appeared to be located all over the city, but the main ones appeared to be in the Marais and close to the Louvre. She wrote down the particulars of Au Pluriel, Le Chateau des Lys, Les Chandelles and Chris et Manu, and studied the respective websites. She’d been to a couple of similar ‘swing’ clubs back in the States, both privately and for work reasons. She’d found them somewhat sordid. Maybe the Parisian ones would prove classier, but she doubted it. Cornelia had no qualms about public sex, let alone exhibitionism — after all she had stripped for a living for years now and greatly enjoyed the sensation, but still found that sex was an essentially private communion however effectless it could be. But then she’d always had an uneasy relationship with and perception of sex, and at a push would readily confess to decidedly mixed feelings about it.

Would sex in Paris, sex and Paris prove any different she wondered?

She rose from the bed where she had spread out the pages and photographs, switched off the metal grey laptop and walked pensively to the hotel room’s small, pokey bathroom. She pulled off her T-shirt and slipped off her white cotton panties and looked at herself in the full-length mirror.

And shed a tear.

Sometimes, it just happened. For no reason.

The bad man had no problem seducing the young Italian woman. He had experience and a deceptive elegance. Anyway, she was on the rebound from her Peppino and a vulnerable prey. Had her first lover not warned her that no man would ever love her, touch her with as much tenderness as he? And had she not known in her heart that he was right? But falling into the arms of the Frenchman was easy, a way of moving on, she reckoned. She knew all he really wanted to do her was fuck her, use her and that was good enough for now for Giulia. She was lost and the excesses of sex were as good a way of burying the past and the hurt as any other course of action. This new man would not love her; he was just another adventure on the road. So why not? This was Paris, wasn’t it? And spring would soon turn into summer and she just couldn’t bear the thought of returning to Rome and resuming her Ph.D. studies and being subsidised by her father.

She rang home and informed her parents she would be staying on in Paris for a few more months. There were protests and fiery arguments, but she was used to manipulating them. She was old enough by now, she told them, to do what she wanted with her life.

“Respect me, and my needs,” she said. Not for the first time.

“Do you need money?” her father asked.

“No, I’ve found a job, helping out in a bookshop,” she lied. “But Flora’s parents say I can keep on living with them.”

The Frenchman — he said he was a businessman, something in export/import– ordered her to move in with him and Giulia accepted. She couldn’t stay on at Flora’s without revealing her new relationship.

At first, it was nice to sleep at night in bed with another person, a man. Feeling the warmth of the other’s body, waking up to another naked body next to her own. And to feel herself filled to the brim when he made love to her. To again experience a man’s cock growing inside her as it ploughed her, stretched her. To take a penis, savour its hardening inside her mouth, to hear a man moan above her as he came, shuddered, shouted out obscenities or religious adjectives and feel the heat waves coursing from cunt to heart to brain. Of course, it reminded her of Peppino. But then again, it was different. No fish face at the moment of climax with this new man, just a detached air of satisfaction, almost cruelty, as he often took her to the brink and retreated, playing with her senses, enjoying her like an object.

Day times, he would often leave her early in the morning and go about his work and Giulia would explore Paris, fancy free, absorbing the essence of the city in her long, lanky stride. For the first time in ages, she felt like a gypsy again, like the young teenager who would live on the streets of Rome and even enjoy sleepless nights wandering from alleys to coffee shops with a cohort of friends or even alone, drinking in life with no care in the world. In Belleville, she discovered a patisserie with sweet delicacies, near Censier-Daubenton she made the casual acquaintance of a young dope dealer who furnished her with cheap weed, which she would take care never to smoke at the man’s apartment off the Quai de Grenelle. As with Peppino, she knew older guys secretly disapproved of her getting high, as if pretending they had never been young themselves. Neither did they appreciate The Clash, she’d found out… He would leave her money when he left her behind but she was frugal and never used it all or asked for more.

And at night, after her aimless, carefree wanderings, he would treat her to fancy restaurants — she’d cooked for him a few times at the flat but he was not too keen on pasta or tomato sauce or seemingly of Italian food altogether — and then bring her back to the bedroom where he would fuck her. Harder and harder. As she offered no resistance and her passiveness increased, the bad man went further. One night, he tied her hands. Giulia allowed him.

Soon, he was encouraged to test her limits.

She knew it was all heading in the wrong direction and she should resist his growing attempts at domination. But the thought of leaving this strange new life in Paris and returning to Rome would feel like an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that she should not have broken up with Peppino, and broken his heart into a thousand pieces, as she clearly knew she had. Maybe this was a form of penance, a way of punishing herself? She just didn’t know any more. Had she ever known?

One dark evening, after he’d tied her hands to the bedpost and, somehow, her ankles, he’d taken her by surprise and despite her mild protests, had resolutely shaven away her thick thatch of wild, curling jet-black pubic hair and left her quite bald, like a child, which not only brought back bittersweet memories of her younger years but also a deep sense of shame. She’d always insisted Peppino should not even trim her.

The next day, the Frenchman used his belt on her arse cheeks and marked her badly.

Sitting watching a film that afternoon in a small art house by the Odéon was painful, as Giulia kept on fidgeting in her seat to find a position that did not remind her of the previous evening’s punishment. Her period pains had also begun, as bad as ever; she’d once been told they’d only start improving after she’d had her first child.

That night, the bad man wanted to fuck her, as usual and she pointed out that she was having her period. He became angry. He would have been quite furious had she actually revealed that she had once allowed Peppino to make love to her on such a day and the blood communion they had shared was still one of her most exquisitely shocking and treasured memories. He brutally stripped her, tied her hands behind her back and pushed her down on the floor, onto her stomach and sharply penetrated her arse hole, spitting onto his cock and her opening for necessary lubrication. She screamed in pain and he gagged her with her own panties and continued relentlessly to invest her. Giulia recalled how she had once assured Peppino as they spooned in bed one night how she would never agree to anal sex with him or anyone. Another promise betrayed, she knew. She grew familiar with the pain. She had never thought it would be so easy to break with her past.

Later, as she lie there motionless, the bad man said:

“Next week, I shall continue your education. I’m taking you to a club and I want to watch you being fucked by a stranger, or more, my sweet Italian girl. Time we tamed you.”

He asked her for her mobile phone and took it away with him. Giulia just felt numb. Before he left the apartment, he retrieved her spare set of keys from her handbag and locked her in. They were on the fifth floor and she had no other way out. Giulia sighed.

It was a night full of stars and the Seine quivered with a thousand lights.

The taxi had dropped Cornelia around the corner of Les Chandelles. She looked out for a decent-looking café and sat herself at a table overlooking the street, where she would be highly visible to all passers-by. She wore an opaque white silk shirt and was, as ever, bra-less. Her short black skirt highlighted her endless pale legs and this was one of the rare occasions when she had lipstick on, a scarlet stain across her thin lips. She’d ruffled her hair, blonde medusa curls like a forest, and slowly sipped a glass of Sancerre, a US paperback edition of John Irving’s A Widow for One Year sitting broken-spined on the ceramic top next to the wine carafe.

The bait was set:a lonesome American woman on a Friday night in Paris, just some steps away from a notorious ‘club échangiste’: L’ Américaine.She’d found out earlier, through judicious tipping and a hint of further largesse, from the club’s hatcheck girl who drank her pre-shift coffee here, that her target was planning to attend the club later this evening. The entrance fee for single women was advantageous but she felt she would attract less attraction if she were part of a couple. She’d gathered on the grapevine that lone men would often congregate here before moving on to the club, in search of a partner.

She’d been told right and within an hour, she’d been twice offered an escort into the premises. She hadn’t even needed to uncross her legs and reveal her lack of underwear. The first guy was too skanky for her liking, and altogether too condescending in the way he spoke to her in the slowly-enunciating manner some automatically do with foreigners. She quietly gave him the brush-off. He did not protest unduly. The second candidate was more suitable, a middle-aged businessman with a well-cut suit and half-decent after shave. Even sent her over a glass of champagne before actually accosting her. Much too old, of course, but then there was something about Paris and older men with younger women. The water, the air, whatever!

They agreed that once inside she would have no obligation to either stay with him or fuck him, at any rate initially. Maybe later, if neither came across someone more suitable. He readily acquiesced. Cornelia knew she was good arm candy, tall and distinctive, a beautiful woman with a style all her own, and an unnerving visible mix of brains and provocation. She’d worked hard on that aspect of her appearance.

Despite its upmarket reputation, Les Chandelles was much as she expected. Tasteful in a vulgar but chic way; too many muted lights, drapes and parquet flooring, dark corners or ‘coins calins’ as they were coyly described on the club’s website, semi-opulent staircases leading to private rooms and a strange overall smell of sex, cheap perfume and a touch of discreet disinfectant not unlike the cabins of erstwhile American sex shop cabins or the tawdry rooms set aside for private lap dances in the joints she had once merrily navigated through.

She spent some time at the bar with her escort and enjoyed further champagne, and allowed him to show her some of the nooks and crannies of the swing club, where he appeared to be a regular. Now she knew the lay of the land. She offered to dance with him.

“Not my scene,” he churlishly protested.

“It warms me up,” she pointed out. He nodded in appreciation.

“Just go ahead,” he said. “Maybe we can meet up later, if you want?”

“Yes,” Cornelia said.

From the dance floor, she would have a perfect vantage point to observe new arrivals as they trooped past on their way to more intimate areas of the club. She shuffled along to a Leonard Cohen tune and marked her area between a few embracing couples, embracing the melody with her languorous movements. She’d always enjoyed dancing, it had made the stripping bearable. Cornelia closed her eyes and navigated along to the soft music. Occasionally, one hand or another would gently tap her on the shoulder, an invitation to move on and join a man, a woman or more often a couple to a more private location, but each time she amiably turned the offer down with a smile. No one insisted, obeying the club’s basic protocols.

Amongst the French songs she had not previously known, Cornelia had already delicately shimmied to recognisable melodies by Luna, Strays Don’t Sleep and Nick Cave when she noticed the new couple settling down at the bar.

The girl couldn’t have been older than 25 with a jungle of thick dark curls falling to her shoulders and a gawky, slightly unfeminine walk. Her back was bare, pale skin on full display emerging from a thin knitted top, and she wore a white skirt that fell all the way to her ankles, through which one could spy on her long legs and a round arse just that little bit bigger than she would no doubt have wished to have, an imperfection that actually made her quite stunning, what with deep brown eyes and a gypsy-like, wild demeanour that reminded Cornelia of a child still to fully mature. She wore dark black shoes with heels, which she visibly didn’t need, as she was almost as tall as Cornelia. But there was also a sad sensuality that poured out from every inch of her as she followed her companion’s instructions and settled on a high stall at the bar. The man ordered, without asking the young girl what she actually wanted. Her eyes darted across the room, looking at the other patrons of the club, judging them, weighing them. It was evidently her first time here.

Cornelia adjusted her gaze.

The man squiring the exotic young woman was him, her target. The bad man. Her information had proven correct. As she watched the couple, Cornelia blanked out the music.

Less than an hour later, she had innocently made acquaintance with them and suggested to her new friends they could move on to a more private space. Throughout their conversation, the Italian girl had been mostly silent, leaving her older companion to ask all the questions and flirt quite openly and suggestively with the splendid American blonde seemingly in search of local thrills. At first, the man appeared hesitant, as if the visit to Les Chandelles had been planned differently.

“I’ve never been with a woman before,” the Italian girl complained to the man.

“Would you rather I looked for a negro to fuck you here and now with an audience watching?” he said to her.

“No,” she whispered.

“So, we all agree,” he concluded and pushed his stall back, and gallantly took Cornelia’s hand. “Anyway, you can do most of the watching as I intend to enjoy the company of our new American friend to its fullest extent. You can watch and learn; I do find you somewhat passive and unimaginative, my dear young Italian gypsy. See how a real woman fucks.”

Giulia lowered her eyes and stood up to follow them.

Once they had located an empty room on the next floor, Cornelia briefly excused herself and insisted she first had to walk back to the cloakroom to retrieve something from the handbag she had left there as well as picking up some clean towels, which their forthcoming activities would no doubt require.

“Ah, Americans, always keen on hygiene,” the bad man said and broadly smiled. “We’ll be waiting for you,” he added, indicating to his young companion to start undressing.

“I’ll leave my clothes too,” Cornelia said, turning round. “Don’t want to get them crumpled, do we?”

“Perfect,” the man said, turning his attention to Giulia’s slight, pale, uncovered breasts and sharply twisting her nipples while she was still in the process of slipping out of her billowing long white skirt. There were red marks on her butt cheeks.

When Cornelia returned a few minutes later, the bad man was stripped from the waist down and the Italian girl was sucking him off while his fingers held her hair tight and her head forcibly pressed against his groin, even though his thrusts were making her choke. He turned his own head towards Cornelia, a blonde apparition, now fully naked and holding a bunch of towels under her left arm.

“Most beautiful,” he remarked, and released his pressure on Giulia’s head. “Truly regal,” he observed, his eyes running up and down Cornelia’s body. “I like very much,” he added. His attention now centred on her groin. “A tattoo? There? Pretty? What is it?”

Cornelia approached the couple. The man withdrew his cock from the Italian girl’s mouth, allowing her to breathe better, and he put a proprietary hand on Cornelia’s left breast and then squinted, taking a closer look at her depilated pubic area and the small tattoo she sported there.

“A gun? Interesting” he said.

“Sig Sauer,” Cornelia said.

There was a brief look of concern on his face, but then he relaxed briefly and nodded towards the American woman, indicating she should replace Giulia and service his still-jutting cock. Cornelia quietly asked Giulia to move away from the man so that she might take over her kneeling position. The Italian girl, in a daze, stumbled backwards towards the bed. Cornelia lowered herself. As her mouth approached the man’s groin, she pulled out the gun she had kept hidden under the white towels, placed it upwards against his chin and pressed the trigger.

The silencer muffled most of the sound and Giulia’s sharp cry of surprise proved louder than the actual shot which blew the lid of his head off, the lethal bullet moving through his mouth and into his brain in a portion of a second. He fell to the ground, Cornelia cushioning his collapse with her outstretched arm.

“Jesus!” Giulia exclaimed.

She looked questioningly at Cornelia who now stood with her legs firmly apart, the weapon still in her hand, a naked angel of death.

“He was a bad man,” Cornelia said.

“I know,” the Italian girl said. “But…”

“It was just a job, nothing personal,” Cornelia said.

“So…”

“Shhhh….” Corneliasaid. “Get your clothes.”

The young Italian girl just stood there, as if nailed to the floor, every inch of her body revealed. Cornelia couldn’t avoid examining her.

“You’re very pretty,” she said.

“You too,” the other replied.

Cornelia folded the gun back inside the towels. “Normally, I would have killed you too,” she said. “As a rule, I must leave no witnesses. But I’m not big on killing women. Just dress, go and forget him. And me. You’ve never seen me. I don’t know how well you knew him and suspect it wasn’t long. Find yourself a younger man. Live. Be happy. And…”

“What?”

“Forget me, forget what I look like. You don’t know me, you’ve never known me.”

Giulia, still shaking from the shock of the summary execution, nodded her agreement as she pulled the knitted top she had worn earlier over her head, disturbing her thousand thick dark curls. The other woman was in no rush to dress, comfortable in her white nudity. Her body was also pale, but a different sort of pallor, Giulia couldn’t quite work out the nature of the difference.

Cornelia watched her hurriedly dress.

“Go back to Italy. This never happened. It’s just Paris, Giulia. Another place. A bad dream. OK?”

Back in the street, Giulia initially felt disorientated. It had all happened so quickly. She was surprised to see that she wasn’t as traumatised now as she should have been. It was just something that had happened. An adventure. Her first adventure since Peppino. Under her breath, she whispered his real name to herself. “Jack”. It all felt unreal. The Paris night did not answer.

She checked her handbag; she had enough money for a small hotel room for the night. Tomorrow, she would take the train back to Rome.

The Louvre was lit up and she walked towards the Seine, and towards the darkness. At her fourth attempt, she found a cheap hotel on the Rue Monsieur le Prince. The room was on the fourth floor and she could barely fit into the lift. Later, she went out and had a crêpe with sugar and Grand Marnier from an all-night kiosk near the junction between the Rue de l’Odéon and the Boulevard Saint Germain. People were queuing outside the nearby cinemas, people mostly her own age, no older men here. She walked towards Notre-Dame and wasted time in a late-opening bookshop, idly leafing through the new books on display. She would have dearly liked to have a coffee, but none of the Latin Quarter bookshops also served coffee, unlike her favourite haunt, Feltrinelli’s in Rome, where she had almost spent a majority of her teenage years. But she knew that if she walked into a café and took a table alone, someone would eventually try a pick up line and disturb her, and tonight she felt no need for further conversation.

Giulia then remembered that she had left her laptop computer and, more importantly, her passport at the bad man’s place. And her clothes, although she was less concerned about losing them. She had never been that much a creature of fashion. More jeans and T-shirts and trainers, despite the nice things her new Paris lover had bought for her and ordered her to dress in. Back in Italy, she had always been swapping clothes with friends and acquaintances, finding a warm sense of comfort in second-hand clothes, which her aunt would often then adjust for her size. As they were leaving tonight, he had returned the keys to his apartment to her and she had dropped them in her handbag. She remembered the crime and mystery books she used to read. Surely, the police would not be investigating the man’s death yet? She took a calculated risk and hailed a cab. She could be there in under ten minutes.

There were no cars with flashing lights outside the building. She slipped in, ran breathlessly up the stairs, put her ears to the door. There were no sounds coming from inside. In all likelihood he had not been properly identified yet. Just a naked man with a bullet through his skull. She unlocked the door and quickly ran through the flat. Picking up her few belongings, the computer, her toiletries. She couldn’t see where he had put her mobile phone. Maybe he’d thrown it away. Damn! Looked at the bathroom mirror. Realised her prints were everywhere over the flat. But then reassured herself that the crime had not occurred here, so it was unlikely they would lift the prints. Anyway, she knew there had been other women here before he had taken her in, seduced her into staying as his pet.

She was about to run out the apartment, after barely four minutes flat — she had timed herself — when she noticed that the drawer under his desk in the study was still open. Just as they’d left for the club, he had considered ordering her to wear a heavy gold chain around her neck. All part of his sexual rituals, she knew. But the clasp had been too loose and he’d decided against it. They were already running late, and he’d neglected to push the drawer closed and lock it.

She peered inside. The necklace shone darkly. And beneath it a half dozen or so manila folders and a tidy bunch of bank notes tied together with a red elastic band. The money would prove useful, she reckoned. She hurriedly grabbed the drawer’s contents and scooped it all into her deep and floppy handbag. Then pulled the necklace out and put it back in the drawer. It would evoke too many bad memories, she knew. And rushed out of the man’s flat. Locked up behind her. Walked quietly down the stairs to the street. No one had seen her inside the building and the pavements outside were empty. She walked to the Place de la Bastille, where she caught a taxi to her hotel.

Back in the small room, Giulia slept soundly. A night without nightmares or memories.

The man in the Police du Territoire uniform handed her passport back to Cornelia.

“I hope you enjoyed your stay, Mademoiselle?”

L’Américaine candidly smiled back at him as she made her way into the departure lounge at the airport.

“Absolutely,” she said.

FOLLOW ME AN ANGEL

THAT NIGHT, JACK DREAMED of Giulia. Of the warmth of her body in the bed at night, the scent of her hair. But every time Giulia woke up inside the dream and his hand tenderly advanced towards her in the darkness, she would draw back with a look of horror over her face and say, “Don’t ever touch my breasts, ever…” just like Mary Ann Armshaw. And he would wake up drenched in cold sweat.

Realising that maybe he and Giulia were now actually in the same city. In Paris.

Not that he could appreciate the irony in this. That he had impulsively taken the first train to Paris to bury her memories. A place he had always promised to take her to, but then somehow circumstance and life had conspired against them and time had finally run out. Was this why she had come here, according to her father? Coincidence? Fate?

But then how had her father known where to find him?

Or was it all a bad joke being played at his expense?

He emptied the folder. Photos of Giulia. As a child, more recent ones he had never seen. Smiling at the camera, pensive, cooking pasta in the family kitchen wearing a white T-shirt that adhered to her skin and highlighted her jutting nipples, standing in front of Warsaw’s Old Square, driving the camper on some unrecognisable road.

Printed-out pages, with the addresses and telephone numbers, where known, of her friends. Some of whom he was aware of, from past conversations. Others unknown to him. Many of them Spanish. He idly wondered which were the two Barcelona University students she had gone to Mallorca with. One of them had made a pass at her, and she had been tempted, he knew. Had even allowed the young man to see her naked on the beach, sprawled across the golden, wet sand.

Jack swallowed the bile rising up through his throat.

He looked at every printed sheet of paper and every photograph again and again. Seeking clues, answers, a direction to follow until it all became a blur in front of his teary eyes.

Damn, he was no detective; he didn’t even know where to begin this foolish investigation. He remembered that book he’d once written where the private eye was asked by a distraught husband to discover what had happened to his missing wife. Jack had tried to conceal from the reader that the detective in question had actually known the woman in question, and had in fact killed her, thus being recruited to investigate himself. He’d never been that good at plotting; had always been much better at characterisation.

He walked out to a nearby patisserie on the Rue Saint Sulpice, bought himself a couple of petits pains au chocolat and, on the short way back to his hotel room, a bottle of mineral water from an all-hours épicerie and settled at the desk in the narrow, fourth-floor room. He spread out the contents of the doctor’s envelope and, across a few sheets of paper, attempted to list most of the things he still clearly remembered about Giulia: the friends she had mentioned, things she had said, places she had talked about, anything that could help him now find where she had taken off for. Was she even still in Paris?

Two hours later, his mind was still scrambled and despairing and he had a bad headache.

He needed to go online. Maybe he should find another hotel, one with a broadband connection.

Jack glanced at his watch. London was one hour behind but by now people would be out of bed there, he reckoned. He called up the contacts page on his mobile phone, and selected a number. The phone at the other end took ages before it was finally picked up.

A morose South London voice, emerging from the fogs of sleep, answered.

“Hallo…”

Timbers was a small-time hustler he had once been introduced to when he needed some inside information for a book he was working on. He wanted to know how one could get hold of an illegal gun south of the river. And Jack knew all too well that he was not the sort of guy who could venture into a pub in Brixton or Herne Hill enquiring about such matters, without running the risk of being beaten up at the back or wherever his curiosity would have led him to. He had the wrong look and the wrong accent, to begin with. Someone at the Groucho Club had once mentioned Timbers, another writer maybe and once he had made contact with the petty crook, they had improbably bonded and he’d become a mine of information. They hadn’t seen each other for well over two years now, but had kept in touch with the occasional conversation over the phone every few months. Timbers loved reading mystery novels, and particularly enjoyed picking holes in plots and details, invariably pointing out that he could certainly do better should he ever find the time to actually write.

“It’s Jack Clive.”

“Wow, man, you’ve woken me up.”

“I feared I would, sorry Timbs. But I’m abroad, in Europe, and wasn’t sure what the time was back home,” Jack lied.

“It’s OK,” Timbers said, stirring his mind, dragging it laboriously towards the shores of morning consciousness.

“I need some help. And couldn’t think of anyone else to call, you see.”

Jack could almost see the sly smile spreading across the other man’s lips.

“Guns again?”

“No,” Jack said. On the occasion of that initial encounter, he’d been treated to an hour-long treatise on models, calibres and a parallel history of South London establishments of ill-repute and villains. All that for something that warranted only a line or so in the novel. But Timbers visibly was thrilled to become the professor and showing off his knowledge of the darker side of life.

“Tell me, Jack, I’m all ears.”

“I’m in Paris and need some information…”

“Mate, I haven’t been there for ages, twenty years I think, know nothing about the place. You know me, it’s a week of Sundays if I ever even cross the river here…”

“I realise that, Timbers, knew that already. What I need is some contact here who could maybe give me some assistance. Someone like you, see, but with local knowledge of things. Does that make sense?”

On the other end of the line, the gawky South Londoner chuckled.

“Ah, a French Timbster…”

“Exactly,” Jack said. “Or should I say exactement?”

“For a moment there, I thought you wanted me to come over, had me worried, just not my scene… hmmm… tell me… legal or illegal sort of stuff?”

“Just information, really,” Jack answered. “Lay of the land, suggestions and all that.”

There was a brief silence.

“Can probably do, man.”

“That would be just great…”

“I’ll need a few hours. A couple of calls, check the guy is still around, see if he’s willing to see you. Vouch for you.”

“I understand,” Jack nodded.

“I’ll ring you back. This number?” Timbers asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s a deal mate. The moment I know, I’ll be on the blower.”

“Great, really great.”

“I suppose a guy like you speaks French? Not sure how much my guy can communicate in English.”

“I do,” Jack confirmed. “Enough to make myself understood.”

“So,” Timbers queried, “your next story is going to be set in Paris?”

“No,” Jack said. “Nothing to do with a book.”

“Personal?” Timbers said.

“You could call it that, I suppose.”

The call from London didn’t come until the following day. Jack was given just a name and a number. Timbers had spoken to the man and vouched for Jack. “You owe me one,” he’d said. “I know.” “Good luck then; hope it works out for you.”

It took him another couple of days to contact the guy in question. His number just kept ringing and took no messages. In the meantime, Jack kept on wrestling with his memories of Giulia in search of possible clues, evoking too many bittersweet memories of their past encounters and embraces. How they had met, the first night, the first touch, the kiss, the scent of her skin. He rang her father twice, in need of further information to clarify matters. He was back in Rome. Every time he spoke to the surgeon, he felt like a total fraud, but the snippets he garnered didn’t help him make any progress. He knew why Giulia had come to Paris in the first place, but little of what she had done here for the past three months or so of her stay, outside of perfunctory university lectures and prudent evenings out with the friend with whom she had been staying until she had out of the blue moved out on some flimsy pretext. The friend, Flora, whom he’d questioned on the telephone, as she was initially reluctant to meet, had no explanations to offer; she was as puzzled as they all were.

Timbers’ French connection asked to meet up with him in a bar off the Place Pigalle. In another life, he would have been fascinated to find out everything there was to know about the man, a stocky guy from Marseille with a lived-in face and piercing grey eyes, in his mid-fifties, who listened impassively to Jack’s questions like a minor character in a Jean-Pierre Melville film, indifferent but attentive and secreting menace by the bucket load. But a small, sad voice inside him told Jack all of this was unlikely to ever make it into a book.

“That’s not much to go on,” he finally commented, taking a slow slip from his glass of pastis, and giving the photographs of Giulia Jack had brought along a somewhat perfunctory glance.

“I know,” Jack said apologetically.

“Women go missing all the time in Paris,” the man from Marseille said.

“She’s bright,” Jack added. “I don’t think she would have gotten involved in anything dangerous. Really. Let’s not be over-dramatic here,” he concluded. This was not a book and a damsel in distress to be rescued from the heartless clutch of traffickers in white flesh. Surely those days were over.

His interlocutor made no further comment.

“The family are happy to pay a reward, I would add,” Jack said.

“Money’s not the problem,” the Marseillais said. “At any rate at this stage. I’m happy to do this as favour to our mutual friend in London. We go back a long time.”

“That’s generous of you.”

“I’ll ask around,” he concluded.

They exchanged telephone numbers. Jack desperately wanted to ask the man how long his enquiries would take, but refrained from doing so. He had done a deal with the owner of his small hotel to stay for another week, at a slightly reduced rate. He had to be patient.

Later that day, he arranged to meet up with Flora, who had in all likelihood been the last known person to have seen Giulia before her disappearing act.

The young woman wore her hair cropped and short and preferred to just sit on the Boulevard bench than join him for a coffee. She was visibly nervous. She’d already told Giulia’s father everything she knew, she said. She gave Jack a weary glance. As if she could see right through him. Had Giulia told her about him, their now defunct relationship, or was she just guessing?

“She just told me she had to… get away,” Flora said.

“Was she running away from something, from somebody?” Jack asked, terrible visions of other men, tall, dark, swarthy pursuing Giulia.

“No,” the young French woman replied. “That was in the past. She told me after she arrived that she’d come to Paris to forget the past, begin a new life, adventures maybe. She felt life owed her that…”

“Was she happy?”

“I think so. Those first weeks, we laughed a lot, went out dancing, she met a lot of my friends, she was cheerful.”

“Do you think she might have met someone?” Jack enquired.

“Maybe, Flora said. “But if she did, she never mentioned it to me. Giulia enjoyed going out during the day, while I was at classes. Just walking about, you know. She always said she was something of an urban gypsy. She was also very secretive, kept to herself,” she added.

“Oh, I know…” he said. Didn’t he know it!

“She just told me she wanted to move out, that it was nothing personal, but she wished to be on her own, wanted to think and all that. But she was lying, I’m sure of that…”

“And she just packed all her stuff?”

“Yes. The last I saw of her was through the window — I was watching– as she began her walk towards the Métro station down the street, pulling her case behind her and that big rucksack of hers strapped across her shoulders.”

“And she never phoned you again or got in touch?”

“No. I assumed she’d gone back to Italy soon after, so it was a surprise when her father came here to question me and my parents.”

A thought occurred to Jack.

“Did she bring her computer with her when she came to stay in Paris with you?”

“Yes, she had a small Apple white PowerBook. But she couldn’t use it much at our apartment. We haven’t got a broadband connection, just a dial-up connected to the telephone. My parents are a touch old-fashioned. Giulia would sometimes go out to cafés or places where they had a free connection when she wanted to check or send mails.”

Flora stole another furtive glance at him as he sat there deep in thought, adding every word, every snippet to his mental search engine. There was nothing to take notes about, he knew. He’d have no problem remembering all this. What little there was. Jack looked up, and his eyes intersected with hers. Her fingers were playing with a stray strand of wool defying the tidy alignment of her knitted scarf’s thread. She avoided his gaze. As if she had been about to ask him something. “Who are you really?” “Are you the older man Giulia knew?” But whatever thoughts she was formulating did not translate into words.

“I’m sorry about all these questions,” Jack said. “But her father does want me to find her, you see,”

Flora nodded.

They looked at each other in silence, too many unsaid thoughts swirling inside their heads. The conversation had come to an end. They formally exchanged telephone numbers — just in case — and shook hands and parted.

For a couple of days, Jack installed himself in the nearest Starbucks and sipped too many coffees while his laptop roamed the net for clues. There was no response from Giulia’s old Skype moniker. Her profile there still listed her as living in Barcelona, which she had left almost eighteen months ago, and still listed only the fifteen contacts she’d had originally. No one had been added. Evidently the account was dormant. Although Jack could not believe she would come to Paris without her computer. She’d never go anywhere without it, he was convinced. And it could be his only way of finding her.

She had no MySpace account, whether under her name or under the half dozen or so handles he knew she was likely to use. There were two other women there with the same name, but one was in San Francisco and the other in Reggio Emilia, and the photos on their main pages were quite unlike her and he did not believe she’d load a bogus photograph. In addition, the contacts for the two women showed no evidence of having any connection with the Giulia he knew, in addition to the fact their musical tastes would have literally made her scream.

There was a Facebook page though. And the black and white photo of a tall young woman dancing with her arms outstretched and her face in shadows was most definitely her. A new photograph he had never seen. He recalled her mentioning that a friend of hers had offered to shoot some pictures of her, and the shiver he had felt in his heart at the time. Not nude ones, surely. Jealousy already. She was wearing a short skirt, seemingly denim and a tight dark top which emphasised the flatness of her breasts. Her hair cascaded like a stream across her pale shoulders. Jack felt his stomach tighten.

The friends listed made sense. He recognised a few names, other girls she had sometimes mentioned in passing, from her film club and university, her brother, strangers he was unaware of, another writer she had also once interviewed at the film festival where they had first met. He made a request to become her friend, but she did not respond. Jack then blanketed her friends list. Only one reacted, a old school friend who hadn’t seen her for two years and had no clue where she might now be. None of the others reacted, but the word must have gone out to Giulia that he was trying to track her down, and on the second morning he settled at the Starbucks table with a pastry and a coffee and connected to the web on an open wi-fi link, her Facebook account had disappeared. Although repeated Google searches still revealed, like ghosts, thin electronic traces of Giulia, synapses that ran across the screen that weren’t quite there, like evidence left behind in the wake of her retreat. That photo, her name listed as part of a litany of names amongst her friends’ accounts. Already the trail had grown cold. She was there somewhere but evidently did not wish to have any further contact with him again. As it was before her disappearance, he realised. Why would the circumstances have changed? How could she know that Jack was now helping out her family, rather than following his own agenda. Well, there was that too, he couldn’t deny it, could he? Damn, he missed her so much.

He checked whether she was listed on Linked-In, but she wasn’t. Another Internet social networking group, but one mostly business people used. Bebo was no help either. Or Twitter. This appeared to be a dead alley.

He closed the laptop and sat there silently. There was an old Simon and Garfunkel song playing in the bar. On the Boulevard outside, passers-by promenaded by in blissful oblivion, hurrying businessmen in suits and winter coats, beautiful women, all angles and curves under their finery, booted, lithe, each one another world of secrets he could never know. Sure, it could never have worked with Giulia. Jack knew that. It had been a war between his heart and the cold logic of the situation. Eventually, she would have grown bored with him, or he would have become incapable of pleasing her sexually or socially, the words would have run out, the silences would have taken hold and dug the grave of that ever so fragile love that still held them together in New York and all those other clandestine places he had taken her to. But never New Orleans, he sadly knew. Yet another promise he had never kept.

He felt like crying. A grown man at a corner table in a Paris Starbucks lost in his sorry thoughts. Not quite classy enough for Edward Hopper. A fool. A tear was brewing in the corner of one eye. He wiped it away with a single finger.

His phone rang.

“A man from Marseille tells me you are looking for information,” the voice at the other end said in French.

“I am.”

“Let’s meet, then.”

Antoine Franck had once worked for the French security services. He’d been recruited covertly whilst at university. He was bright and he was ambitious, but had no ambition to later move on to one of the Grandes Ecoles where the country’s business elite were groomed. He underwent intensive training in intelligence matters and was later posted to the backwaters of Lagos in Nigeria where he managed to make the best out of an impossible place, and was later promoted to a small unit based in New York, which had been created to run discreet surveillance on United Nations delegations and identify possible sources of useful information. He was an apolitical man, but for him this was just a job, and patriotism was not a virtue that ever crossed his mind. In America, he flourished and discovered his forte was not as a man of action or a plotter in the darkness but as an analyst and gatherer of random facts with the uncanny ability to see through the murk of jungles of data and see the trees, the nuggets that would pay off. However, his insight into the clandestine financial dealings of others also provided him with a profound knowledge of the system and how it could so easily be subverted. He became greedy. Siphoned small, and then larger amounts of cash from offshore accounts held by friends and foes. Eventually, his transgressions were discovered and he returned to Paris in disgrace and jobless. He was philosophical about it, anything but angry and set himself up locally as a consultant in matters financial and discreet, offering his services to anyone who wished to manipulate the arcane loopholes of the financial underground: money laundering, setting up networks and connections which efficiently erased the trail of fraudulence. He quickly thrived. He had retained many of his contacts within the Intelligence community who were happy to use him for below the line activities, but also made him invaluable to those who lived on the other side of the divide between honesty and crime. A most useful man, with a foot in both camps.

He met Jack in the basement bar of the opulent Hotel du Palais Royal.

“So, you’re the writer? Jack Clive? I looked up a few of your books. Interesting. But I don’t read much.”

“Yes,” Jack replied, ordering a citron pressé. He just couldn’t take more coffee, after his Starbucks residency of the past couple of days.

“I’ve never met a writer before,” Franck said.

“Well, we look quite normal, don’t we, no different from anyone else with a real job?”

Franck smiled. “Absolutely.”

A waiter with a white regulation jacket served their drinks. Franck had ordered a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. Jack diluted his lemon juice from the water jug and tore open all three of the sugar sachets he had been provided with and emptied them into his glass and stirred the whole lot in.

“Sweet tooth?”

“Indeed.”

Franck quickly got down to business. “Why are you looking for the Italian girl?”

“A favour to her family,” Jack said.

“I see.” Franck weighed the information. There was visibly something on his mind.

“Did you find anything out, then?” Jack asked.

“Yes.”

“So?”

“So I think there is a problem. A bad problem,” the Frenchman said.

“Tell me.”

“There is this man. You don’t need to know his name, I think. A rather bad man, a dangerous man…” he briefly fell silent.

“And?” Jack’s stomach was fast embarking on the agonising process of tying itself into knots.

“She was seen with him. Someone answering her description.”

“Who is he? In Paris?”

“Yes, in Paris. He grooms young women…”

“Grooms?” A terrible spectre of obscene possibilities swished across his mind. The pain in Jack’s midriff sharpened.

“A predator. A very accomplished one. He somehow manages to meet all these young women, has a talent for recognising those who offer the right potential. Initially, he seduces them. Then, gradually, he takes hold of them, mentally, not just physically and soon he convinces them it’s right they be shared with others, trains them.”

“Trafficking?” The images rushing across the back of his eyes were too much to bear.

“No. There is nothing non-consensual about it all. They become willing. That’s the cleverness of it all. It never becomes illegal.”

“I don’t understand…”

“It’s a whole other world,” Franck added. “BDSM circles. Limited to a small elite but they always need new, fresh meat, so to speak. And he is one of the main suppliers. He’s no pimp, doesn’t sell them, just passes them on to others, to groups, once he has tired of them, sucked the will out of them, I am told. Ironically, there is nothing the authorities can do about the whole farrago. Various people are aware of his activities but he is beyond the law. Nothing can be done.”

“And Giulia was seen with him?”

“Just recently. A young women corresponding to her description and the photograph I was provided with was seen entering a notorious club échangiste, a swingers club as you call them, on his arm.”

“Jesus…”

“It gets worse…”

“How?” Jack felt breathless as the revelations continued.

“On the same night, this man was killed.”

“How?”

“Shot. Looked like a professional hit. But she was with him when it happened. She was later seen leaving the club without him, though.There are no witnesses to what could have taken place inside the club. In those sort of establishments people cleverly always look the other way.”

“It couldn’t be her,” Jack said.

“Of course not, from what you have told me she is not the type. But people change, you know; life intervenes.”

“Certainly not,” Jack vehemently added.

“But a lot of people might be seeking her out now. Not necessarily the police, who are possibly rather glad to be rid of him, but possibly his associates. And, I am told, others.”

“When did this happen?” Jack asked.

“Two nights ago.”

“So she might still be in Paris?”

“You know as much as I do,” Franck concluded.

Jack was struck dumb.

“A nest of vipers, Mr Clive. I wouldn’t like to be in your young woman’s shoes right now.”

“And you’re positive she is the one who was seen with the man that night?”

“Yes, the doorman was positive. It’s his job to remember faces. He’s an invaluable source of information. I trust him.”

Jack fell silent.

They promised to stay in touch.

That night Jack had nightmares of large, calloused hands roaming across Giulia’s white skin, of her body stretched and tied to a cross, of whips and men in fierce boots and all the paraphernalia of BDSM he could summon from reading Story of Odecades back. And every single cliché he could mentally summon hurt like hell. When it came to matters sexual, it took very little for his imagination to unleash.

Why did life sometimes turn into a novel, he wondered? Always the wrong sort of novel, of course.

DANCE ME

SHELTERING BEHIND DARK CLOUDS, a distant moon haltingly threw a light across the Washington Square arch. Cornelia paid the cab driver the fare from JFK and made her way up the steps to her building, swinging her tote bag behind her.

Inside her apartment, the message light on her phone was flashing. She ignored it. Slipped out of her coat. Glanced at her watch. Walked to her bedroom where she upended the contents of her bag onto the bed. She’d travelled light. She’d acquired essential toiletries in Paris at a corner pharmacieand left them behind at her first hotel. There was just a change of underwear and a couple of skirts, a spare T-shirt and the outfit she’d worn at the club. She had briefly thought of jettisoning the latter back in France, but since she’d actually not been seen wearing it that much, it would have been a bit of a waste, she reckoned.

For a brief moment, her mind wandered back to the moment of execution yesterday evening, the lightning flash of recognition on the man’s face as he looked up from the small tattoo in her crotch to the weapon in her hand. The muffled sound of the shot and the eyes of the young Italian woman as she uncomprehendingly watched the scene unfold. Cornelia shuddered. She felt dirty. She hurriedly tore off the clothes she had worn for the flight.

It was the same after every kill. This delayed reaction. Not disgust at having killed another human being. Just emptiness. The adrenaline had now retreated from her system, and left her void, with a sense that her whole existence was meaningless. She didn’t mind the killing. It was a job like any other, and in some cases she managed to pump herself up enough to actually dislike the targets she had been assigned. It was not even a question of morality. She sighed and made a beeline to the shower.

The water dripped, a Niagara of heat streaming across her wide shoulders. Her eyes were closed as she stood motionless, allowing the insistent warmth to surge through her body, cleansing her, waltzing her every thought away, when a phone in the other room rang. The cell phone she’d transferred from her bag to the bed cover. Barely a handful of people knew the number. Cornelia didn’t move. The phone drifted into silence. A few minutes went by. Then it rang again. It could wait, she knew. It WOULD wait. The anonymous ring tone ceased again and the quiet returned, punctuated only by the water hiccupping down across her skin to the bathtub floor.

She dried herself briskly, dropped the white towel to the wooden floor, grabbed an old pair of jeans folded over the back of a chair and fumbled her way into them. Searched for a clean T-shirt and settled on a light V-necked beige Walkabouts on Tour one. Her leather jacket hung on its usual hook on the back of the apartment’s door. It was old and battered, an imitation WW2 aviator’s jacket, from which she had carefully detached all the irrelevant and pretentious sewn-on badges and insignias after she’d found it in a thrift store in San Diego a few years ago while on a job there.

It was approaching ten at night. As she locked the door behind her, the cell phone which she’d left behind, still on the bed, amongst her discarded clothes, rang again. She made her way towards the Bowery.

The club was half empty, even at this time of night. The recession was biting, and Wall Street types visibly had less cash to spend these days. Nor was it anywhere as opulent, or pretentious as the swing joint in Paris, Cornelia knew. Functional was the right word for it.

She’d checked on the way over whether she could work a shift, and Stangaler had agreed. Although he’d warned there weren’t many big tippers around. Cornelia wasn’t bothered. She just wanted something that could take her mind off the last job. Something she could do with her brain switched off. As she had walked down Lafayette, the thought that the Paris job was somehow far from over niggled her. Loose ends were always unwelcome and she suspected the Italian girl was one. Why in hell had she spared her? It had been a mistake, she realised. Hopefully, one that would have no lasting consequences. The girl had dark brown eyes and, following the surprise of witnessing Cornelia pull the gun from below the towel and her execution of the man who had dragged her there, there had been a shadow flying across those eyes that spoke of resignation, not of pleading as would normally be expected.

Maybe that acceptance of her fate, that sadness was what had momentarily touched Cornelia, interrupted her in murderous flight.

There were only three other dancers on tonight’s bill. No wonder that her proposal to come and do an impromptu shift had been so cheerily welcomed.

It had been a couple of weeks since Cornelia had worked last, but she kept a locker here with a couple of spare outfits and a bunch of discs pre-recorded with numbers she could dance to.

She changed into a black leather two-piece bustier and bikini bottom, each item garlanded with a plethora of zips, most of which only served a decorative purpose, then sat and pulled on a pair of matching thigh-high leather boots with pencil-thin five-inch heels. She’d always resisted wearing stockings for her act, unless specifically required to by the locale’s management. There were already so many clichés in the stripping arsenal, and stockings had never pleased her. Fortunately, her dancing was sufficiently sexy (she preferred to call it erotic) for her to be forgiven her idiosyncrasies and there were at least half a dozen small clubs dotted across Manhattan who were happy to provide her with a stage on the occasions she made herself available. Cornelia never agreed to long-term residencies. She was strictly a freelance stripper. And, for convenience sake, she only worked in Manhattan, although word was reaching her that Brooklyn was fast becoming the in place. A better class of audience, it appeared. But, deep down, Cornelia only danced for herself, not for an audience. Take it or leave it.

From a hook on the far wall of the changing room, floating full of static across the make-up lamp, she grabbed hold of a thin wrap, all gauze and transparency.

She glanced at her discs and selected one. It had to be the right mood for today. On the other side of the curtain where the stage and its central pole stood, the sounds of a Beyoncé song were nearing their climax. Cornelia walked over to the sound and lighting technician’s pokey cabin and handed him her music.

“Welcome back, gal,” he said. “Been a long time.”

“You know me, Pete,” she said. “I have another life on the side.” Little did he know.

“Good to see you again. This joint always needs a touch of extra class,” he said. Pete studied sound engineering at Columbia and was in his final year. His job here paid the bills.

“It’s good to be back,” Cornelia said. “It’s about time I exercised again. Been travelling. Too much food…” She’d almost mentioned she’d been to Paris before she caught herself. Too much information.

“Oh, by the way, you know that guy who’s hung up on you. The Hedge Funder? He slipped me a few bills to let him know when you’d be in again. Should I?”

Cornelia smiled. One of her harmless regulars.

“Sure. Earn your money…”

“Any good books I should read?” Pete continued. He’d noticed early in her sessions here that she spent her spare time backstage reading, and was always happy to talk about the books. He’d thoroughly enjoyed her recommendations.

Cornelia was about to reel off a list of good reads she thought he would enjoy when the dancer who’d been occupying the stage stormed past them on her way to the dressing room. Her tape came to an end. Pete quickly pressed a button, and the muted sounds of a big band tune hit the speakers, the customary transitional music the club played between acts.

“Later,” Cornelia said. “My turn.”

She moved away from the cabin and crossed behind the curtain to the other side of the small stage where she would be making her entrance.

The music began.

A melancholy piano.

Darkness. Then a lone spotlight exploded, harshly revealing her standing motionless on centre stage. Pale skin. Black leather. Blonde hair. Muted red lipstick.

Cornelia drew her breath, lazily extended her arms, reaching, stretching, her hands fluttered to the sound of the bass now underpinning the melody. The rest of her body remained frozen. The tinkling of glasses at the bar or at the scattered tables stopped; isolated conversations ceased.

A distant keyboard, organ or harmonium — the P.A. system was muddy and did the music no justice- quivered in the melody’s background and Cornelia’s head began to sway gently from one side to the other as the wall of sound began to grow in size and emotion. As if a statue was awakening from a thousand-year slumber. One hand grazed the translucent wrap that barely covered the top half of her body, and the thin material caught the light and shimmered. Her long, unending legs began undulating like a vertical tide from the stage upwards, ripples of movement moving towards her midriff.

Cornelia bends her knees, her body rotates on the high heels and her regal arse tightly constrained by the leather bottom is now facing the onlookers. She bends, offering the spectators a full view of her rump’s curve. A steel guitar pierces the serenity of the dance and she straightens and pivots several times on her axis, her whole body now coming to life, tremors rippling between the white skin, the tautness of her stomach, the hard hills of her breasts laced within the black leather bustier.

She knows every eye in the room is on her. She closes her own eyes and accelerates her swaying, her dancing, her seduction.

One hand on the metal pole, she skips a figure of eight around it, head falling backwards, medusa hair swinging down between her shoulder bones, brushing against the small of her back, leg extended in front of her, a perfect horizontal line criss-crossing the metal pole. The rest of the music fades as she floats along on its melody and once again just the piano can be heard, dragging the tune onwards, lonely, sad, languorous, towards its inevitable lingering conclusion.

Her movements around the pole slow down until once again she stands motionless and someone in the audience rudely yelps. Within seconds, the music resumes, a new tune with heaving rhythms and relentless percussion unleashed. Cornelia nervously pulls the transparent, gauzy wrap away from her body, revealing the full domino visual effect of black and white, skin and leather, in all its glory, scattering the thin piece of material in her wake as she kicks a leg up and races across the stage and the abandoned wrap floats down towards the dusty dance floor.

Her body, all sinews now electrified and in the right gear, shakes and sways and glides like a whirlpool of movement, graceful, enticing, provocative. Cornelia opens her eyes again. Recalls her waltzing hand and without missing a step or a single planned tremor begins to pull the cord lacing the bustier across her front. The thin, black leather string effortlessly slithers back in her finger and soon the bustier gapes open, barely held up by her small, firm breasts. A skip, a jump and hey presto the bustier falls to the ground, but she is now with her back to the sparse audience, cupping her breasts in her hand as she bends again and offers them a final view of her arse in its black leather sheath, flesh far from invisible, perceived but still shielded from their hungry gaze, straining against the material.

One brief moment, the melody all but drowned in dissonance and reverb before the next bridge in the music intervenes and it flows, launches again in full flight, Cornelia’s wandering mind alights on a fleeting memory: Paris. The swing club and its ornate chandeliers, the young Italian girl and the line of imperceptible hair fluff descending like an arrow between her belly button and her genitalia, the look in Giulia’s eyes, but it’s all a confused blur of movement and she returns to the present, and, now on automatic pilot, goes through the rest of her routine through a veil of indifference, exposing her pale breasts in full view now and, after a final change of tune, dives into her finale, with the right amount of flexing, bending, teasing and outright exposure, until all that is left of the leather two-piece is on the stage floor and she is fully visible, cunt unveiled, bare, as one final time she reverts to being a statue, motionless, legs apart, stance proud and upright, eyes piercing the darkness of the room, daring the punters to comment or even applaud, her jungle of blonde curls bathed in the sunlight of the lone spotlight like a basket of snakes, smoking, fierce, untamed. And then the light holding her captive at the very centre of the stage is switched off and it is dark night again. She keeps on standing there a while, a few shy claps in the audience, the sound of glasses clinking, being refilled, and that awful music they always put on in the intervals between the dancers.

Unseen, she moved off the stage and made her way towards the changing room, brushing against a Latina girl in a slutty outfit making her way towards the stage in their relay race of stripping and teasing.

She badly needed a shower again.

She’d been sweating more than usual. Maybe it was the jet lag? Couldn’t really wait until she got back to Washington Square. She couldn’t stand the feel of it much longer, had to wash it off right now.

Dried off a quarter of an hour later, she was about to dress into her civilian clothes again, when the crimson lights above the changing room door lit up. She was the only dancer there right then, so it must be for her. A lap dance request. Not her favourite game.

She set her jeans back on the chair and grabbed her work outfit again.

It was her hedge funder. Her current greatest fan. They came, they went. Never meant too much to Cornelia. He’d certainly made good time getting here after being advised of her presence, she reckoned.

“Hi,” he greeted her, with a large smile on his face.

“Hello,” Cornelia walked into the small private cubicle. He was already sitting on the settee, his legs apart, jacket off. He was wearing totally uncreased black corduroy trousers which had probably never been worn before and his customary starched white shirt. His idea, no doubt, of leisure attire in the rush to reach the gentleman’s club from his downtown condo.

A fifty-dollar bill had been placed on the worn green settee’s corner. He knew the routine. He’d been visiting her over six months already; had probably spent most of a thousand bucks on lap dances with her in that space of time.

“How are you? Been on vacation? Anywhere nice?” he asked.

“Nowhere special,” Cornelia replied, stepping towards him and positioning herself above his knees, ready to straddle him.

She unhooked her top. Leaned in towards the middle-aged guy, catching a whiff of his deodorant, or was it after shave, observing with detachment how his sandy hair was perfectly sculpted and trimmed.

“Music?”

“No need,” he said. Strains of the music playing onstage a few curtains away were leaking through all the way to the cubicle anyway.

“A silent lap dance, eh?” Cornelia said.

“The best,” he remarked. His eyes alighting on her pink nipples now almost grazing the crisp material of his shirt as she leaned forward, barely making actual contact with him. He took a deep breath. Cornelia was now sitting on his knees and to an unheard rhythm began grinding her arse against his thighs, shifting her weight from one thigh to the other with metronomic regularity, balancing, slipping and sliding. In an instant he was visibly hard. Her head fell towards him, and her jungle curls fell across his forehead, caressing him, whipping him gently. The hedge funder threw his head back and his chest heaved, the white shirt momentarily wiping against her jutting nipples.

Three minutes can sometimes feel like a wilderness of eternity.

Cornelia never offered any extras. Just a basic lap dance. No frottage. No unzipping the punter’s trousers and helping him manually to climax. No lips or mouth on his cock, let alone his face or any other part of the man’s anatomy. She had explained the rules the first time he’d called for her after her show. Naturally, on the initial occasions, he had suggested more, offered more cash, but she was not prepared to change her rules. For him or anyone else. She had made that clear.

The allotted time ran out. Cornelia began to rise.

“No. Stay,” he asked, his hand extending to the jacket draped across the other side of the settee and pulling out a further bank note.

“It’s your money,” Cornelia remarked and began to grind into him again.

“No need for that,” he said. “Just talk…”

Again. He always wanted to talk. But Cornelia was not into conversation. This was a job, that was all. She felt no need for bonding or extraneous manifestations of friendship. Just keep it professional.

“Fine,” she agreed. Still sitting on his knees, his bones now pressing hard into her flesh. Tiredness rushed across her body. Maybe it had been a bad idea to come and work so quickly after the transatlantic flight.

“You never say much, do you?”

“That’s not what I’m here for, is it?” Cornelia replied.

“I realise that, but… it would be nice to know something about you, wouldn’t it? After all, you seem intelligent… and with all due respect, not like your average sort of lap dancer…”

“So, I’m articulate and I can spell and I don’t have a Bronx accent… Does it make me any sexier?” Cornelia asked her customer.

“Absolutely,” the hedge funder said, with a soft chuckle. “And you have a sense of humour, to boot…”

“Thank you, kind sir.”

His tone changed. His eyes looking darkly into hers.

“Listen, you’re fucking beautiful but I just don’t understand why you do this… as much as I enjoy seeing you strip and these private sessions, you could do so much better for yourself… really… I don’t know what brought you here but if I can help you…”

Cornelia sharply interrupted his hurried flow.

“YOU listen. This is what I do. This is want I want to do. I won’t give you a sob story about my journey to get here. There was no journey. I didn’t grow up disadvantaged, I wasn’t abused or abandoned on some sidewalk bereft of everything following a wounding affair of the heart. I have no bad luck story to bore you with or gain your sympathy or your pity at that…”

Her head drew back and Cornelia straightened. On the P.A. across the room, on the stage where another girl was now performing, they could recognise the strains of Springsteen’s Born in the USA.

The man opened his mouth wide, as if to protest against her tirade.

Cornelia continued.

“Look, I don’t wish to be saved. I’m not drowning, just dancing. Because I like it, because it’s what my body is good at and if the pleasure I provide is worth a few bucks all the better.

Why is it so many of you men always want to invent some complicated story full of sound and fury to explain why we shake our butts on a badly-lit stage exposing our bodies to all and sundry. I’m not on drugs, I’m not a single mother and I know what my personal vices are and can happily live with them, thank you. And the very last thing I’m seeking is some Wall Street prince to ride in and save me from the gutter. There is no story to tell and no cry for help in my darkness. I don’t need the questions, or the pity. Just try and understand that and we’ll get on fine and I’ll keep on showing you my tits or spreading my legs for your delectation and private fantasies. It doesn’t come free of course, but you know that already, and beyond that I’m not for sale.”

Her punter was now fully silenced.

Cornelia glanced at the man-sized watch on her wrist.

“So, you still want to know the reason I’m a stripper?” she asked him provocatively.

Puzzled, he said “Yes.”

“I do this because I collect books,” Cornelia said. “And now your time is up. I have to leave now. See you.”

She rose from the couch and still proudly topless swiftly stormed out of the narrow lap dancing area and made her way back to the artists’ changing room. She was laughing inside from the dazed look on the man’s face, his lips pursed like a fish’s mouth. Because for once she had actually told him the truth. Well, maybe a half truth: the dancing and stripping paid for the basic bills, but her freelance contract killing did actually pay for the rare books she liked to collect. As vices went, she could think of much worse.

The weather was still mild for the time of year and Cornelia decided to walk home, rather than take a cab. She needed the fresh air to clear the fog of her jet lag. She meandered up Broadway, made a detour through Chinatown and then reached Houston. There was a midnight movie playing at the Angelika, but she decided against it. Somehow she was not in the mood right now for an indie with an emo soundtrack. There was a fifty/fifty chance she would fall asleep halfway through anyway. She noted the film would still be playing for the next few days. There was no rush.

A nagging feeling of unease had settled on her mind.

The Greenwich Village comedy clubs and bars disgorged their hordes onto the quietly lit streets as she made her way North. Bleecker Street. Thompson. Sullivan and finally the shores of the darkened park.

The cell phone she had abandoned still sat on the table. It vibrated, then buzzed. Cornelia first ignored its insistent sound and moved over to the kitchen, took a sip of apple juice from the half empty carton in the fridge and then finally picked the phone up. There were six messages waiting. She held it to her ear.

“Hello.”

“Where the fuck have you been?”

“Here and there,” she said.

It was Ivan. She didn’t think she’d ever heard him swear at her before.

“Don’t you pick up your messages?” he asked.

“I’d left the phone at home and gone for a walk.”

“Damn, woman, you should have been in touch with me the moment you landed at Kennedy. Reported back.”

“Sorry. I was tired. Didn’t think. I would have called you in the morning.”

“Very unlike you.”

“So, sue me…”

“Cornelia, you’ve fucked up.”

“Have I?”

He snorted on the other end of the line.

“How?” But Cornelia knew. She’d broken one of the basic rules. Leave no witnesses.

“You know very well what you’ve done, girl. I’m disappointed with you, really.”

It had been barely 24 hours since the hit. How could they have known? Was there someone else at the Paris club, observing, checking matters out?

“Why did you spare the other woman?” Ivan continued. “You know it’s not on. And don’t go telling me you took pity on her. There’s no place for sentiment in this business. You of all people know that.”

“It just happened, Ivan.”

“Well, the shit has hit the fan, my dear.”

“Let me guess: the doorman reported back?”

“No matter how it happened, Cornelia. I’m having bad pressure applied. The customers are furious…”

“Even if the girl talks, to the French police or whoever,” Cornelia protested. “Worst possible case, all she can do is describe me. There is no open connection to you or your principals.”

“That’s not the way they see it, I’m afraid,” Ivan said.

“I’m sorry, Ivan. I’ve let you down. I’ll forego the payment and reimburse the expenses. And the cost of the Sig Sauer, which right now is at the bottom of the Seine. It was disposed of soon after the job, I threw it from a bridge. It won’t be found.”

“That’s just not good enough.”

“So?”

“Not only did you let the girl go, but she is thought to have then taken some documents from the hit’s apartment. She has to be found.”

“Me?”

“You’re the only one who really knows what she looks like. She hadn’t been introduced yet to the man’s associates, so apart from the doorman at the club who only caught a quick glimpse of her, no one else can now recognise her.”

“Oh, Ivan…” she began to plead.

“Go back. Eliminate her.”

“A tall order…” Cornelia said.

“You’ve always been resourceful. Anyway, you have no choice. You messed it up and I’ve been instructed to the effect that if the young girl is not found and those documents retrieved within ten days at most, it’s you who might have to pay the price. I’m sorry.”

“Who are these principals of yours?”

“You know I can’t tell you that, even more so in the present circumstances.”

“It would help to know a little. Might explain who she is and where I should be looking out for her…”

“I don’t even know that, Cornelia, you realise. And there is no way I can ask. You know how it works: every link in the chain must remain just a voice on the phone …”

“And right now I’m the link that sticks out like a sore thumb…”

“Yes.”

“Damn.”

“I’d hate to lose you, Cornelia. I’ve always liked you and you’re good at the job. Quirky but efficient. I’m still surprised you could have made such an elementary mistake, what with all the experience you have.”

“No one’s perfect.”

“There’s a flight out of Newark tomorrow at three in the afternoon. Be on it. Usual arrangements at the other end. You know the drill. Get it right this time, please.”

“I will.”

“Clean things up once and for all. That’s all you have to do. They wanted you scratched, you know. Asked me to assign your case to another operative, but I pleaded for you. Got you this second chance. It would have been too much of a waste.”

“I understand.”

The phone in her hand went dead.

Cornelia felt ever so tired right now. She stripped and dropped onto the bed. Pulled the covers around herself and sleep finally caught up with her.

LIKE A LILY TO THE HEAT

GIULIA LOOKED AT THE cash she had retrieved from the bad man’s drawer. There was more there than she had initially thought. Sitting up in the narrow bed of the small hotel room on the Rue Monsieur le Prince, she pulled the red elastic band from the bundle and began counting the euro notes.

She could survive on this for several months, she reckoned. Easily.

She realised she had no wish to return to Rome and bury herself in the deadly, familiar routine of studies and family. It would be an admission of defeat. There surely had to be something more to life. Paris had begun on the wrong foot. She had been too weak, goal-less. A mistake she was determined not to make again.

Having wrapped the elastic band around the cash again and transferred it to her rucksack, she looked at the half dozen manila envelopes she had picked up from the drawer in her haste to leave the dead man’s apartment behind. Surely not more money? She pulled them towards her across the grey sheet that reached to her waist.

She opened one, and then the others. Just files. Dossiers with names and random information. Some of them had photos attached. Of young women. Images of their faces looking sadly into the camera. Others of their naked bodies shot against a dark photographic studio background, impersonal, stark, like a series of pieces of meat put up for sale. Giulia shivered. Leafed rapidly through the mass of files that had been divided between the envelopes. No, there was no file on her. She didn’t recall the man having taken any pictures of her. Yet. Was he planning to set up a file about her, had the fatal incident at the club échangistenot happened? Another woman in a catalogue. She had no wish, right now, to read the text that accompanied each woman’s photograph. In French, anyway, which would take her ages to decipher. There was something creepy about all the documents. She stuffed the envelopes into the rucksack, rose from her bed and quickly showered, She needed a walk. Some fresh air. Time to think.

She was wandering through the bird market just to the north of Notre-Dame when the helplessness of her situation struck her. She was alone in a foreign city, she had severed all her ties to the few friends she had here and had no wish to return and attend the courses she had been following. It had only been an excuse to leave Italy again, and allow her father to subsidise her. She already had her degree; what was the point of further qualifications when the job market in Rome was worse than it had ever been and over two-thirds of graduates could only get macjobs and still lived with their parents late into their twenties? And she had been the witness to a murder. Was it even safe to stay here?

Maybe she could go to Barcelona. She still held bittersweet memories of the city, its friendly campus, the Ramblas on Sant Jordi’s day, the beaches. The man who had joined her there. Just two years ago now; how time had flown. Or should she take a flight to America, any flight, go as far as she could from Europe? San Francisco maybe? She realised she had enough funds to do so. But what then? A question she still couldn’t find the right answer to.

The grey waters of the Seine lapped against the stone walls of the quays and Giulia shivered. Warmer weather, that’s what she needed.

She stopped. Her nose was dripping. She hadn’t brought warm clothes with her to Paris. And made her mind up right there and then. Rapidly retraced her steps back to the small hotel. Repacked her few possessions, settled her bill and walked down to the nearest Métro station on the Boulevard St Germain, the entrance opposite the banks of art cinemas and took the first train towards the Porte d’Orléans. Half an hour later she was standing in the vast and noisy departure hall of the Gare d’Austerlitz. The vast station momentarily felt like a film set, a ghost town littered with lingering extras waiting for the invisible director to call the shots and set them in motion.

Jack was stuck in a rut. Philip Marlowe by now would have called up his cronies in the police force, followed half a dozen red herrings, possibly come across murderous but beautiful twins or little sisters and been bashed over the head several times and woken up dazed and dishevelled by a lake or in some derelict industrial warehouse, but at least he would have made progress in his quest for the missing person or object he had in a fit of romantic generosity agreed to look for. Alongside consuming endless sips of whiskey. Jack didn’t even have a clue where to venture to even get beaten up properly. Damn, it was easy on the page. Marlowe would never give up on a case.

It was evening. Autumn was slip-sliding into winter and he was sitting at his usual table in the small café in the Rue St André des Arts, with a notepad open at an empty page on the table next to his glass. Clueless. His phone rang.

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice, soft, shy.

“Mr Clive, can I call you Jack, it’s Eleonora Acanfora. I knew Giulia. Her father, il Dottore, told me that you are looking for her. I also want to find her. I would like to help. I am in Paris. Arrived this afternoon by train. Maybe we can finally meet for first time?”

Jack had heard of Eleonora when he and Giulia were still seeing each other. She was a photographer in Salerno, south of Naples, who had accompanied her to take snaps on the occasions Giulia had been asked to interview movie directors or actors for the small semi-professional film magazine she sometimes freelanced for. Which was how Jack and Giulia had originally met.

He remembered Giulia mentioning how much she liked Eleonora. They had even, she had once confessed to him, swapped skirts.

“Hello, Eleonora,” he replied. “It’s been a long time. I was worried that you’d grown offended with my e-mails … Anything you can do to help would be gratefully appreciated.”

“Good.”

He gave her the address of the café. She joined him there an hour later.

Out of curiosity, the year before, Jack had once visited Eleonora’s website. Initially, to see whether she had ever taken shots of Giulia he might not have seen before. It was in fact more of a blog illustrated with frequent photographs and with a hyperlink to a flickr account where the rest of her images were archived under an assortment of categories. Often reading other people’s blogs was like peeking into the lives of strangers with total impunity, a compelling variation on voyeurism and one a writer found it difficult to avoid. More so as Jack always could find time to waste on the Internet; like all writers he held the art of procrastination in high regard and online research was always a perfect excuse not to write quite yet. He had begun to scroll through the previous six months of Eleonora’s entries. More short sentences or zen-like thoughts possibly lifted from books she had read. She didn’t post every single day, and the journey hadn’t taken that long.

The initial sojourn inside Eleonora’s life had touched him more than he thought it possibly could, in addition to the fact she represented a final link to Giulia after their break-up. She didn’t use her blog as a diary, like so many other bloggers he had come across did, but in a strange way it was even more intimate. The respective entries were merely evocative, if puzzling titles “darkness’, “red room”, “blue room”, “ hold me”, “street with no name”, “raindrops on wire”, “take my soul”, “the surface of water” and so on, some accompanied by a photograph, others by a short poem or an excerpt from something she had recently read, a book or a haiku. Reading through the actual lines and sensing how apposite each photograph was to the words or the enigmatic title, he sensed the weight of a monumental sadness. This was visibly a woman in pain. And she moved him. There was also music embedded in the website which could be heard at the click of a link once he turned the sound back up on his computer. Some of the music he knew, some he did not recognise and was eager to identify as it also spoke of inner desolation, yearning and desire, all tropes that also anchored his own soul. And in strange ways her connection with Giulia made this surreal in a bittersweet way.

Had Jack not been in mourning for Giulia, he would have mailed Eleonora right there and then, with a myriad questions and an unhealthy curiosity for deciphering the story behind the story.

He recalled the conversations they had had about her friends. Was Eleonora the one who loved opera, or was that another, Simone maybe?

Slowly the memories coalesced. Eleonora was the friend from early schooldays who wanted to be an artist and had discovered she had a born talent for photography (and liked modern jazz, not opera…) but was not yet at a stage where she could make a living from it. She had not gone to university but the two young women had nevertheless kept in regular contact. Eleonora worked in her brother’s computer store in Salerno, but spent most of her leisure time in Naples and was always miserable in love, embroiled in an on-off-on relationship with a local musician — a piano player Jack thought he remembered — who treated her badly but that she couldn’t quite jettison. This was enough information for Jack’s unbridled imagination to pen whole stories in the gaps between her blog entries and illustrations, and think he understood Eleonora a little better.

There had been a loop of hypnotic guitar music on her website one week which had caught his imagination. He had e-mailed her, asking her to reveal its provenance. It was from the soundtrack of a movie he had already seen, but at the time it had not struck him as so compelling that it was now, accompanying her words and her images. They had then begun an intermittent correspondence, in which Giulia’s name or existence was deliberately never alluded to. A week or so later, she had posted a short sentence from one his books that had been translated into Italian — in fact some lines he could not even recall writing. Something to the effect that the bodies of women so quickly erased all evidence, traces of previous lustful excesses. Was it a signal to him or just something intimate that she recognised in herself?

A few days later, Eleonora began posting a whole series of new photographs, self-portraits, and Jack learned in an otherwise distant mail that she had broken up with her man. Again.

Every new photograph that appeared on the website — and by now, Jack was hunting them down almost obsessively at regular intervals, like a story developing, a page-turning plot, revealed another part of her, like a chameleon shedding layers of skin or pretending to be someone else. Her face, dark as night eyes, an aquiline, proud nose, wild dark, unkempt hair. And always, a sadness, a beauty made in darkness.

Some of the photographs revealed her in various states of undress, unveiling long legs, a pale shoulder, acres of white skin, her stomach, the swanlike line of her neck, the timid birth of breasts (none of the images were ever truly explicit), the shadow of her bones beneath the skin, the long-lasting pain in her eyes of coal, her strong waist (above black panties). He sometimes felt like printing up each and every image and trying impossibly to assemble them into a whole jigsaw portrait of her, but there would always be parts missing, as if yahoo or whichever server hosted her site did not allow sexual parts to be posted to a flickr account. So, Jack being Jack, he would wildly fantasise, imagining her on a bed, walking out of a shower in an anonymous hotel room. Jack had always had a perverse talent for dreaming.

Eleonora never offered him any encouragement and the little correspondence they exchanged was cryptic and mostly one-way traffic as she seldom clearly answered any of Jack’s questions. Which became highly frustrating as she usually took a week at least to answer Jack’s invariably longer e-mails. But every new photograph she posted online felt to him like a veiled, personal message.

He thought of her a lot. Maybe because of the connection with Giulia. The fact they both happened to be Italian. And attractive.

But he didn’t even know the sound of her voice.

Or the smell of her skin.

Let alone the taste of her lips. Or the texture of her hair slipping through his fingers.

From all those images on his computer screen, he knew intimately the shape of her back, the curve of her knee, the black shiny boots she once wore, a dress, a top, the ring that circled one of her fingers, the coat that buttoned at her neck, the deep sense of yearning in the deep pool of her eyes. He wondered unendingly what it might feel to sleep with her in the same bed, to feel the warmth of her body as they unconsciously switched positions at night in a bed too small for two, what her eyes would look like in the morning as she woke by his side. Harmless dreams.

One day, Eleonora had written to him, asking if he thought it would be easy for her to find a job if she ever came to London. She felt she had to get away from southern Italy and her present, confining surroundings. Just to get away from things. As Giulia so often did. Jack knew that she had seldom travelled outside Italy, except for two trips to Germany when her boyfriend’s band had toured there. It felt to him like a cry for help.

He cautiously answered that in all honesty it might prove difficult as he was aware that her spoken English was halting (they both wrote to each other in their own, respective language) but he was happy to do all he could to help.

It took Eleonora another fortnight to answer. Just a few words. Not really an answer. Telling him she was trying to sort herself out. Then their patchy correspondence had just petered out.

Out of gallantry, he had sent her flowers for Valentine’s Day months later. Roses, of course. As he used to do for Giulia when they were an item. She took a photograph of the flowers and placed it on her website as a blog heading. Enigmatically titled “Thanks, J.”

One week later, a new stream of photographs began to appear on Eleonora’s website. A plate of sushi on a restaurant table, the boyfriend (Henry Miller to her Anais Nin) sitting across from her in the same restaurant.

Then, as the days went by, a succession of photographs of Eleonora with her boyfriend, both topless, in unchaste embrace, sitting on a bed, against a wall, holding hands, fighting almost, touching, littering the horizon of her blog. One followed by another, relentlessly. Like an unfolding newsreel. Forever witnesses of afternoons and nights there were spending together — or, it once occurred to Jack, maybe they were earlier images of when the couple had been together and this was just a final visual requiem. To Jack, the other man almost looked like a Neanderthal. Rough, unfeeling, not the sort of guy he could ever understand Eleonora being attracted to. Every single time he logged on, Jack began to fear that the next image he would uncover might actually see them actually fucking.

For several days in a row, the images continued. Never had Eleonora appeared more beautiful and lost. There were now daily photographs of Eleonora and the other man, no text, no titles, no haikus. Then one day it just stopped and the blog stopped being active.

Maybe it was best this way, Jack had decided. What was he thinking of, falling for a woman he had never even met? And a friend of Giulia’s. It would have been like treading on thin ice, surely?

He sent Giulia yet another e-mail; asking her where she now was, and why she still refused to communicate with him, assuring her that he still missed her abominably and shackled himself to his keyboard to finally write another book. Yet again, Giulia refused to answer his pleas.

Six months later, Jack deleted everything he’d written. It just didn’t feel right. Once upon a time, the longing he felt inside was capable of generating stories, feelings. Now it was just a parade of words full of emptiness.

He’d packed lightly and taken the next morning early train to Paris.

He recognised her the moment she walked into the café. She was so much shorter than he had expected. All those photographs he had seen of her had not prepared him for this. Jack smiled.

“Sit down,” he invited her.

They both looked at each other.

“Is nice to finally meet,” Eleonora finally said.

“It is. Really,” Jack answered. “It’s so good to see you. Have you taken time off from your brother’s store?”

Eleonora’s smile broadened. She wore all black from head to booted toe.

“Oh no,” she said. “I not work there any more. For four months now I just do official photography at Naples clubs and music places. Tomorrow, if you want, I will show you my new portfolio. Is all pictures of musicians. I manage to become official photographer for many Naples venues where they have music. Is six months contract. Not pay too much but is still good. Better than my brother’s shop, for sure.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“But then, il Dottore, Giulia’s father, he come to see me and ask if I hear from her this year.”

“Have you?”

“No. I not even know she had come to Paris. She stops communicating totally after she finish with you. I not know if sadness or not. But she was always such good friend when she was happy, I decide I must do something. But now I not sure what.”

“Welcome to the club,” Jack said.

“But then I think that maybe together we know enough about Giulia. We have ideas. We talk and know where to look, no?”

“Maybe.”

“Il Dottore, he give me a bit of money and I have some of my own. I just I feel I owe it to Giulia. She help me when I was sad with Henry, you know.”

Jack knew. She would call him Henry after Henry Miller, and she thought herself as Anais, an Italian incarnation of Anais Nin. He’d seen the photographs. The images of their bodies together in the stark black and white photographs.

Eleonora read his thoughts.

“Is over with Henry,” she told Jack. “Finally. I make break. Is better. For good.”

“Eleonora, it’s none of my business. You don’t have to tell me, you know,” Jack pointed out.

“Is better to be honest, Jack.”

She leaned towards him over the table and Jack caught a whiff of her perfume and smiled.

“Why you laugh?” Eleonora asked.

“Just smiling, Eleonora. Just smiling,” he said. “Your perfume?”

“Yes?” she said quizzically.

“I recognise it. It’s Anaïs Anaïs, isn’t it? By Cacharel?”

They both laughed.

“So, you and me, together, we find Giulia? OK?”

“Yes, Eleonora, we find Giulia. That’s a deal.”

But at the back of Jack’s mind, there was another nagging question worming its way through to the surface. What would happen when they found her? Or if they didn’t?

Just four Latin Quarter blocks away, unknown to them, Giulia had earlier finished paying her latest hotel bill. For two weeks now, she had been flitting from place to place, eking her funds out, having graduated down to low-grade two star hotels in a bid to make the money last. Time to move on, she had decided.

Giulia had transferred all her meagre belongings into a large, newly-acquired rucksack she had slung over her shoulders for now, after having been defeated by the complexity of its straps and appendages. In her right hand she had her customary deep-bottomed canvas bag with her laptop and other essentials.

She’d taken the Métro to the train station.

The departure hall reverberated with a cacophony of noise. Light shone through on this grey day through the station’s cantilevered glass roof. She spotted random clusters of policemen examining papers at the entrance to various platforms and she nervously moved back into the main concourse. Her heart skipped a beat.

Surely this was routine; didn’t concern her.

She noticed a sign for the public toilets and zigzagged towards them between the ever-shifting crowds of travellers.

She washed her face with cold water and then, impulsively, disposed of the stack of envelopes and their shady dossiers into the nearest waste bin and quickly buried them under a mass of crumpled paper napkins. Why was she even carrying the stuff? It was the past and she was severing her ties once and for all. Yesterday, Rome, her studies, Jack, Barcelona, that week in New York, the bad man, the murder and now Paris.

Giulia walked back into the bustling railway station and looked up at the ever-shifting jumble of destinations, times and platform numbers on the large, high electronic indicator board.

All she really knew was that she wanted to go south. She grabbed a slice of lukewarm and tasteless pizza at the station’s central cafeteria.

Anywhere south.

Giulia knew her heart sought sun and warmth.

The louder sound of cheerful, laughing voices reached her ears, catching her attention. A group of young men and girls burdened with heavy backpacks were making their way to the platform where the TGV to Madrid was parked. Giulia glanced at the indicator. The train was scheduled to leave in a quarter of an hour. She looked down and saw the group being waved through by the bored cops. Three young women in jeans and tees, and four tall boys with untidy long hair, some with basketball caps, most wearing sweat shirts bearing logos of various American universities. Which didn’t mean they were necessarily Yanks, Giulia knew. It was just the sort of thing that was fashionable with European students, she had discovered.

It occurred to her that if she hadn’t taken different roads in her past life when alternatives had presented themselves and she had made the wrong choice, she might well have been part of that group, carefree, laughing her head off at bad jokes, slightly tipsy even. She looked down at her legs, her scuffed trainers. After all, didn’t she dress just like them? Wasn’t she even in all likelihood more or less the same age?

Giulia made up her mind.

She swivelled round and rushed to the ticket counter and bought a one-way student rate ticket for the train to Madrid and ran to the platform. The cops had moved on to another part of the railway station by now and she wasn’t delayed at the gate.

She stepped on to the train. She had no reserved seat. She was still catching her breath when the doors closed with a soft electric hush. There was a deafening moment of silence then the wheels shifted into gear, slowly at first, then exponentially faster as the whole train shuddered and followed and moved out smoothly, the now empty platform unrolling like a movie through the windows.

Giulia began her journey through the train, until she came across the earlier group of young men and women all sitting together in a compartment towards the front of the train. They were quieter now. One of the girls also had dark corkscrew curled hair, just like Giulia. And one the boys, who was growing a beard which was still a faint wisp on his chin, wore the same trainers, she noted, although his were still quite new and cleaner.

“Can I join you?” she asked.

Gentle, smiling eyes looked up at her.

Someone said “Yes” and two of the young men shifted apart to create a space between them where she could sit and offered to haul her bag onto the elevated luggage rail above them.

“My name is Giulia,” she said. “I come from Italy.”

“Hello, Giulia, “ one of the girls said, greeting her.

“Where are you going?” Giulia enquired.

“Spain, and then maybe some of the islands. No firm plans, really. We’re all quite open-ended.”

Some were French, one of the girls was Spanish, a boy with darker skin had Middle-Eastern looks.

It sounded just the thing for today, Giulia thought.

“I’m travelling too. No particular destination. Can I join you?”

They all laughed and Giulia took her place alongside them.

YOU OWN ME

THIS TIME AROUND, CORNELIA found herself a mid price three-star hotel in a Montmartre back street, which principally catered to the tourist trade. Best hide herself in plain sight amongst the ever-shifting crowds of foreign faces, where she would not stand out more than necessary, between incoming and outgoing coaches and corralling tour guides. She had taken the customary precautions and changed outfits at Roissy following her arrival, and booked in under an assumed name and a stolen US passport she’d held on to for years, unlike her previous trip. It would help muddy the waters if anyone was seeking her out as a result of the hit, earlier that week. There would be no official record of her having been in Paris already.

She didn’t plan to make a similar journey to the American Express Poste Restante offices in Rue Scribe. For one thing, she didn’t think she would need a weapon. For now. In addition, even if she wore a wig, it was too much of a risk visiting the same place so soon after the initial call. She would have to find other ways of getting hold of a gun, when the time was right.

She had no clue where she could find the Italian girl who had witnessed the shooting. Or even where to begin looking. For all she knew, the young woman could already have left the city. Maybe returned to Italy. But Cornelia had been informed that the girl had returned to the man’s place and taken something Ivan’s principals badly wanted. Did this mean that she knew more than she should have and was in fact no innocent bystander?

The key to the problem, Cornelia decided, was to find out more about the man she had been employed to kill. If she discovered what he used to do for a living, what he was and the possible reasons for the contract, it might shed a light on the Italian girl’s role, and consequently her whereabouts. A call to Ivan would not generate any answers to that particular question, she was aware. The organisation or man who had generated the hit knew of her existence, she recalled. How?

“Yes,” she said quietly, sipping from a cup of jasmine tea, and distractedly taking bite-size chunks from a melted cheese skewer in the Japanese restaurant she was eating in, towards the south side of the Luxembourg Gardens, her first hot meal in two days as she always turned down airplane food.

The doorman at the club échangiste.

Who had seen Giulia leave, without the man who had brought her along to the club. A tenuous connection but the only one she had right now. She hoped he would be on duty this evening, and not having a night off. She paid for her meal in cash and took the Métro back to Montmartre and her hotel and slept for six hours like a log, recharging her batteries for the likely task ahead.

Cornelia began her surveillance of the Chandelles in the same café around the corner where she had sat the earlier evening. The club only opened its doors at ten in the evening, but there was no doorman on attendance until around midnight, in view of the few customers who bothered to arrive this early. It was raining quite hard by now and Cornelia had to squint to get a better view of the man’s face when he installed himself by the club’s entrance, shielded from the weather by a thin stone ridge that protected the door and its immediate neighbourhood from the elements. He was holding a large black and white umbrella, and his collar was pulled up around his neck. But he looked familiar. It must be the right guy. Stocky, ruddy-faced, buzz-cut hair, muscular.

It was going to be a long night, Cornelia knew. She took a cab back to her hotel and changed into warmer clothing and returned to the area around two in the morning. She knew he would still be there. The café was closed by now, and there was nowhere else to keep a watch on the club’s entrance but a bus shelter with the right vantage point. By now, the arriving customers were thinning out and very soon were overtaken in numbers by departing couples the doorman would walk solicitously to the kerb under his umbrella until a cab came along. Which they always did quite rapidly. He must have a phone to call them, she reasoned.

Cornelia munched on a couple of chocolate bars to keep her energy levels up, as she waited in the cold for another few hours. Finally, nearing four in the morning, the lights on the first floor of the club went off and a few straggling punters exited. The rain was now thinning. The attendant pushed the door open and walked back in. Cornelia hoped it was just to get his gear or another coat. She didn’t care for waiting much longer. Within minutes, the rest of the staff filed out, waving at each other or engaged in deep conversation. The doorman was amongst them, now wearing a long black leather mac that gave him the appearance of a Gestapo cop in a war movie. He began walking at a brisk pace towards the Opéra. Keeping a hundred metres or so away, Cornelia followed. Half an hour later, she knew where the man lived. A 1930s building in the Rue Montholon, between the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord, a quiet residential quarter that didn’t appear to have changed much in character for half a century at least. Watching outside, Cornelia identified his flat when a solitary light lit up a window on the first floor just a minute after he’d walked through the main door. At this time of night, the rest of the building’s facade was in the dark and it would have been too much of a coincidence for a light to go on in the wrong flat to coincide with the man’s arrival. So far, so good. She even knew his name now: the list of tenants could be found by the row of letter boxes under the entrance arch. There were only two flats on the first floor and the other one happened to be a dentist’s surgery. The man looked nothing like a dentist.

He would be sleeping for a few hours now, she guessed. During which time she had to formulate her plan of action. Cornelia sighed and walked away. The journey back to her Montmartre hotel would do her good, help her concentrate, she hoped. It was a bit like trampling through thick fog, never knowing what she would come upon next. She’d trained herself to kill, mentally erasing all forms of morality and personal doubt or guilt. Just a job. And Cornelia knew she was good at it. Sometimes, awake in bed back on Washington Square Place, she stayed awake counting all her past hits, like sheep in the night, even forgetting some of the jobs. She never quite reached the same number of bodies she was responsible for on every separate occasion. They already faded in the mists of memory. But this detective palaver was not something she was used to. Give her a name, a place, a face, a gun and she could aim the deadly weapon at the right person at the right time. It was clear cut. Easy.

By the time she reached her room, she had regained her resolve and abolished the seeds of doubt. All she had to do was pretend this was all a prelude that would lead to another hit. The club’s doorman. Then she would move on, maybe to his associates. Then, rolling back the plot, this would lead her to Giulia and this time she wouldn’t fail. Just a matter of being utterly professional again. Settled, then. However, she was intrigued by the fact that none of the local newspapers she had read through since she’d returned to Paris had carried any mention of the murder at the club échangiste, and there was no report of the body being found. She would normally have expected an incident in such a high-profile locale to make minor headlines at least. Were the police keeping it under wraps for one reason or another? Or had people at the club managed to hush matters up or disposed privately of the body? In the latter case, this meant there was more to the affair than she had been told, and there were some questions she could possibly get some answers to, she reckoned.

The blonde American woman bumped into him on the street as he was returning from the boulangerie late that morning. He’d picked up his morning baguette and was holding a plastic carrier bag with a litre of milk, a tin of Nescafe and a kilo of apples he’d bought just before at the épicerie across from the square. He was turning back into the Rue Montholon and she was walking in the opposite direction and must have stumbled over some crack in the pavement as she fell across him, grabbing the lapel of his jacket as she attempted to retain her equilibrium, before sprawling across the pavement. It all happened in a flash. Joseph Nicolski dropped the plastic carrier bag and, helpless, watched it fall to the ground and heard the milk bottle shatter.

The woman looked up at him.

“Pardon, Monsieur. Vraiment pardon,” she said, getting back on her feet, instinctively pulling down the short Burberry skirt that had hitched up midway across her thighs. There was a quick flash of white skin. Was the damn woman not wearing panties?

“Pas de problème. Juste un accident,” Nicolski said, almost apologising himself.

She had a foreign accent. American, he thought. He’d once been based for just over two years in Chicago when he’d still been boxing. Her shoulder length hair was straw blonde. A real blonde. No way it could be peroxide. She frantically reached for the spilt contents of his carrier bag, separating the coffee tin and the half dozen apples from the mess of glass and milk.

“Don’t. There is no need, is just an accident,” he said in English, as she scrambled in a forlorn attempt to rectify the damage caused by their accidental collision.

He extended his hand forward, inviting her to stand up from her somewhat undignified position with one knee on the dirty pavement.

She rose gracefully. Tall. Thin. For a brief moment, Joseph thought there was something familiar about her face, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint where he might have seen her before. Student, tourist? he wondered silently.

“I’m sorry. So, so sorry,” the American girl said, visibly embarrassed by the whole brief incident.

“It’s nothing, really,” he said.

“You must allow me to pay for the milk,” she looked down at the bag’s contents still scattered across the pavement. “And those spoiled apples. I insist.”

“C’est pas grave. You don’t have to,” Nicolski said.

“No, no, I insist,” she replied, pointing to the épiceriewhere he had just completed his small shopping minutes before just a few metres behind him.

Joseph shrugged his shoulders.

She smiled and took him by the hand and dragged him gently back towards the shop where, still apologising effusively about the accident that had brought them together, she paid for another bottle of milk and another bag full of apples. As they were walking out of the store, she looked down at her legs and swore under her breath.

“What is it?” he asked.

“See,” she pointed to her left knee, where she had been kneeling down. Badly smudged. “I hope the skin under the dirt is not broken,” she added.

He peered at her long, svelte legs. “Appears OK to me. You should be all right.”

Looked up. Her eyes were dark brown. Unusual in a blonde. Rather striking, he felt.

“Listen,” he heard himself saying, “I live just over there. Not far at all. If you want, you can come up and clean your knee. No problem.”

“Really?’ she innocently asked.

“Don’t we French have a reputation for being gallant?”

Her beaming smile was the greatest reward.

Piece of cake. Playing the role of the naive American abroad came easy to Cornelia. Maybe she should have become an actress.

Joseph wasn’t a bad fuck. Not her first French guy — that had been the exchange student she’d met some years back in a Boston bar, who had introduced her to a few interesting variations on the standard sexual themes– but a decent lover who, at least, took his time and was relatively unselfish.

“So, tell me about this place where you work?”

Nicolski explained the concept of the French club échangisteto her.

“Wow, sounds classy even,” Cornelia noted. He now knew her as Rita. She never gave anyone her real name when out on jobs, and seldom used the same one twice. Nor was it the name listed on the stolen passport she was now using. “We have them in some cities in the States. Not that I’ve ever been to one, you understand. But they’re supposed to be somewhat sleazy, you know. Once, in New Orleans, some guy did suggest we go to one, but it just wasn’t my style. Trust the French to do it properly, eh?”

Joseph Nicolski grinned. “Of course.”

“Swinging at home is still in the dark ages. Car keys in fruit bowls, middle-aged suburban couples wanting to be naughty and daring and all that,” she said, giggling under her breath at the mere thought.

“We have that too,” Joseph told her. “I understand that in the French provinces, the clubs people go to are less sophisticated. It’s inevitable. Just the local bourgeoisie getting their kicks, being naughty. In Paris, we do things better, we’re more sophisticated. The Chandelles is one of the best. It doesn’t make you feel cheap…”

Cornelia licked her lips, pouted. She was sitting up naked on his bed, the crumpled sheets tipping over the edge. The doorman was by her side, leaning on his elbows, his hairy mass sprawling in all directions, his limp cock still leaking down his thigh and her rump.

“I’m so curious,” Cornelia said. “Do you think you could smuggle me in? Just for an hour or so, maybe? I’d love to see the place. Please?”

“Maybe,” the man said.

“I’d behave. Be discreet. I can be…” she insisted.

“Maybe,” he said again.

“I wouldn’t go with other men,” Cornelia pointed out. “I’m not a slut. I’m monogamous,” she added, laughing softly. “Only one man in any city…”

She had earlier explained to Joseph that she was touring Europe, wanted to spend a whole year moving from city to city, had already done London and soon planned to move on to Berlin and Barcelona and maybe Rome. Her father was a rich banking executive and this was his gift to her for having graduated. Once the year was over, she would be returning to America and would no doubt settle down. There were many suitors. But she wanted to enjoy life to the full until then. A magnificent packet of lies.

Joseph relented. “OK. you can come with me tonight. But you must dress sexy. To fit in.”

“Absolutely,” Cornelia pecked him on the cheek and then lowered her mouth towards his dormant cock to revive him. Tasted herself there. Joseph was happy to cooperate.

“You’ll be the death of me, young lady,” Joseph said, as he felt the velvet caress of the young American woman’s tongue across his mushroom-shaped head. He closed his eyes, abandoned himself to the feeling.

He came quickly. Undaunted, she eagerly swallowed his seed like a genuine little trooper. These foreign girls sure were craftful, he reflected, slumping back on the bed.

She rose. Damn, she was a sight for sore eyes, tall, straight-backed, pale-skinned, high-breasted and so proudly naked. He felt confident that given another hour he could manage another erection. He smiled to himself.

“I have to go clean up a little,” she said, tiptoeing across his cold linoleum floor toward the neighbouring, small bathroom.

“That’s fine,” the club doorman said.

He heard her switching on the shower, hoped she didn’t mind cold water; at this time of the day, the house’s central heating was far from efficient. Soon, he had dozed off.

By the time he woke up mid-afternoon, she had expertly tied him up with some rope she had probably found in the compartment under his kitchen sink and immobilised his feet and hands with neckties. The moment he stretched his eyes open, Cornelia, waiting at his side, quickly forced a couple of handkerchiefs deep into his mouth, and he became unable to speak. She was fully dressed again, putting him at yet another disadvantage. How the hell had she managed to do this without waking him, he wondered idly before panic set in?

“What is this?” he wanted to say, but the material stuffed past his lips only allowed him to grunt or moan.

“I have some questions, Joseph, and I expect answers,” the young American woman said. Her tone was cold and there was no longer anything innocent about her at all. Just a quiet, determined ruthlessness.

He nodded.

“Good.”

His eyes were wide open, staring at her. He was still in a state of shock. How could this have happened? What the fuck did she want?

“Last week, there was an incident at the club, wasn’t there? Someone was killed.”

Joseph’s head went up and down in agreement.

“See, it puzzles me: there hasn’t been any report in the papers or the news. Has it been hushed up? And if so, why? And by whom?”

Cornelia paused as she watched the man began to realise what this was all about.

She continued, “And then there’s the curious case of the young woman you spotted leaving the premises later without the man who had brought her along, the man who was killed, as we both know. You mentioned her to someone. I would like to know who.”

She looked him in the eye. Her gaze had the hardness of blue steel.

As Joseph gathered his senses, there was now an air of defiance about him. She quickly punctured this when she raised her hand, and let him see the sharp Swiss Army knife she had come across earlier while going through his drawers.

He blinked.

“I’m not showing off, Joseph. Just want to show you I do mean business.” She smiled at him, but this time around there was no sense of play or flirtation any longer.

He shivered.

“So,” Cornelia continued. “I need some answers. And I want them now. No wasting time.” She pointed the unfolded knife at him. “I’m going to take those handkerchiefs out of your mouth so you can speak, but don’t even think of screaming, calling for help or anything stupid because I would not hesitate to use this one moment.” She glanced down at his cock hanging limply between his thighs. Joseph lowered his eyes, indicating his understanding of the situation.

“Open wide.”

She pulled the crumpled wet material from his mouth

Joseph gazed at the knife Cornelia was now holding and the cold stare of her eyes and determined expression. She was not joking. But surely she wouldn’t cut him? Or would she?

Maybe he could reveal a little to her, pacify her and she would then relax the interrogation, and he would somehow gain an opportunity to get the upper hand again. He closed his eyes one brief moment, remembering how it had felt to make love to her, how pliant she had been, how soft, how her thighs had clenched his, the deep sigh when he had entered her the first time. All lies, pretence. No mere American tourist girl, this. He could sense the ice-like sense of danger that now radiated around her. How could he have been such a fool?

Cornelia waited, observing his silence.

“Know what, Joseph, I’ve always been a great fan of French novels. I was wondering whether you’d ever read Octave Mirbeau’s ‘Torture Garden’?”

He hadn’t. Indicated so.

“Thought so,” she added. “Takes place in China early in the last century, how a man suffers the death of a thousand cuts, one little nick at a time, a cut here, a slash there, until his whole body bleeds and hurts through every pore of his skin. It takes an eternity for a man to bleed to death. Although I do seem to recall they also do quite a few other charming things to him, though. Did you know that a penis can, under the right circumstances and treatment, actually ejaculate blood? Very imaginative.” She waved the Swiss Army knife in front of his eyes.

The doorman blinked.

“So?” she asked.

“The owners of the club didn’t want to attract adverse publicity and police attention. The body was disposed of.”

“Good,” Cornelia relaxed. “Now tell me more.”

“No one knows anything about the young girl who came to the club that evening with the man who was killed. She was new meat, so to speak. Probably some kid he’d picked up somewhere and wanted to put through the motions…”

“The motions?”

“He was a regular patron. Often brought new young women there. Was known to share them with other members of his circle. I think he held shares in the business, so they turned a blind eye to his activities. It’s all one big bordello, anyway. No difference really between suburban or Parisian swingers, or the predators who would use the club as their stamping ground. A fuck is a fuck, ain’t it?”

“But you reported her leaving without the deceased to someone? Who? Why?”

“They are very important people. They were the ones who asked about the young girl.”

“And you told them the same thing you are telling me? That you don’t know who she is or where she might have gone?”

“That’s correct.”

“So no one’s the wiser?”

“Indeed.”

“How convenient,” Cornelia remarked.

Her bound prisoner was now sweating heavily. She leaned towards him.

“His circle of friends. Tell me more about them, these people who come there with more than just swinging on their mind. Women trafficking?”

“Not at all,” Joseph replied.

“Explain.”

“They’re into BDSM, you know, masters and submissives, slaves even. But for them it’s more than play. It’s a way of life. They have international connections. It’s not just a network of bourgeois thrill-seekers; they are very serious about it.”

“Too many fools who’ve read Story of Oand have mighty delusions of grandeur,” Cornelia ventured.

“Don’t kid yourself,” Joseph said. “These people are dangerous. And powerful. You’d be a fool to get involved with them.”

“I am involved, whether I like it or not,” Cornelia pointed out.

The Frenchman nodded.

Without a word of warning, Cornelia waved the knife and the blade slashed across the naked man’s stomach, just below his navel.

Joseph roared. “Fuck. Why did you have to do that? Fucking hell!”

“Just to show you I am deadly serious,” Cornelia said, wiping the fleck of blood on the knife’s tip on a towel that was lying around. The cut was not deep.

“That was totally uncalled for,” he said, catching his breath.

“Yes, it was. Just a taste of what I might be provoked to do if I find you lying to me.”

“I haven’t. I’d never seen the girl before, nor again after that night, I bloody well swear. No clue who she is or where she might have pissed off to.”

“I need the names of some of the dead man’s associates.”

“They’re dangerous. I can’t,” Joseph protested.

Cornelia’s hand took a firm hold of his dangling testicles and squeezed. “Next time, it’s the knife I’ll use,” she warned him.

“Bitch…”

“And being offensive will make no damn difference.”

“You can’t get away with this…”

“I have so far,” Cornelia said.

The man sniggered and was about to spit at her, but he reined back his anger, thought better of it. She’d get what was coming to her if she messed with those people, Joseph knew.

He just hoped they would not blame him for her interference.

“Spill,” she insisted. “Now.”

Joseph provided her with the names of three men he knew had been involved with the murdered man and were active in the circle. He did not have their addresses or telephone numbers but advised Cornelia that the information in question must be stored somewhere at the club. Hinting that if she let him out, he might obtain it for her. Cornelia smiled.

He was no longer of any use to her.

“I’ve given you what you wanted,” Joseph said. “Will you let me go now, come on” he enquired. “At least, let me dress, this is so undignified.”

Cornelia did not answer. She stood up, looked down at his naked, immobilised figure, moved the knife to her other hand and expertly cut across his neck at an acute but premeditated angle.

Blood spurted. She stood aside to avoid being caught by the thin torrent geysering from his throat. The words forming around his lips ended up a gurgle, his eyes wide open in amazement and he slumped as the realisation he had barely a minute to live dawned on him.

By then, Cornelia had already turned her backon him and was calculatingly trashing the small apartment. Making it look like a burglary gone wrong would delay any official investigation into his death, she knew. She then untied the body’s hands and legs and rolled him out across the floor, where she wetted a rag and cleaned his limp cock of any secretions that she might have spilled when he had fucked her. Not that she believed the authorities would waste too much forensic time on the dead club doorman.

It was only midday.

THE LIFE IMAGINED

BY THE TIME THE train reached Madrid, Giulia felt as if she had rolled back the years. This instinctive camaraderie with the other boys and girls in the travelling group reminded her of those final years at college and the initial time at La Sapienza University back in Rome. Laughs, sipping from bottles of beer, smoking joints, silly jokes, loud conversation. It just felt natural again. As if the past unending months of older men and anguish had not even happened. Instead of small cafés off Piazza Navona or Manzoni around the midnight hour, it was just a railway carriage hurtling through the landscape and heading towards the blessed South.

They all communicated on a simpler level, unburdened by thoughts of the future, fear of consequences, any form of calculation. It was like a massive weight being taken off her shoulders. Her mind was in a haze, but totally at rest, as she slumped back in her seat, leaning against Paolo, the Portuguese boy with the shaven head, relaxed, blissfully retreating from the real world.

In Madrid, someone knew of a friend of a friend who had a spare room, where they all slept that night, sprawled between sofas and spread across the wooden parquet floor cocooned in sheets and blankets and sleeping bags. The aimless conversation went on well into the small hours and morning easily bypassed them. The rest of the day was spent wandering across the city, pausing in gardens and tapas bars for smokes or food and by evening there were already two more group members, picked up almost by accident, a local young woman with a leonine mane of hair and her Swedish boyfriend, a tall blond Viking with dreadlocks and a skeletal frame.

They all agreed they wanted to continue the journey southwards, and most of them expressed the wish to reach the sea, where they could lounge for days on end until another better plan occurred to them. One member of the initial group was unable to come along as he had made arrangements to meet friends in Sevilla a few days later, but promised he would attempt to convince his mates that they should all assemble a week later at the beach they had agreed would be the group’s next port of call and rejoin the fray. The news was greeted with another round of drinks. Someone was despatched to the main railway station to investigate the timetables.

Paolo’s eyes pleaded poverty and Giulia agreed she would pay for his ticket. She could still afford it.

That same night, he shared his sleeping bag with her. There were too many others in the room for them to be able to fuck with any relative discretion, but once inside cuddled up to his musky warmth, she slipped out of her T-shirt and knickers and slept naked against his skin, which brought back memories of that one night almost centuries ago now when she had lain naked with her tennis instructor. It felt comfortable if weird to be sleeping with someone again like this, chastely, listening to the other breathe softly, heartbeat against heartbeat.

“This is nice,” Giulia said, but the boy was already sleeping. Whispers and sighs flittered across the room, the sound moving between couples and singles and other random combinations of bodies huddled together. Not everyone had decided to be as discreet as she and Paolo, what with the familiar halting melody of hushed lovemaking hopscotching its merry way between the walls. Giulia guessed it must be Stieg and Marta. She smiled.

By the time they all reached Tangiers ten days later, the group had fragmented and half of the original Paris contingent had scattered to be replaced by other young kids on the summer trail. Giulia had kissed Paolo on the ferry from Gibraltar and slept with him properly the same night on the African side of the waters in a sultry cheap bed and breakfast room. He had proven clumsy if tender, and came too fast. Had Jack and her Paris seducer spoiled her, she wondered? She was sensual by nature, they had all told her, but surely not all young men were as inattentive to a woman’s desire. Or was there something twisted inside her that men her age could not satisfy? The next morning at breakfast, out of frustration and anger, Giulia had a bad argument with Paolo and he took the next ferry back to the mainland. Which now made her the only unattached female in the small travelling group.

Marta had come across some good local dope in the market that same morning. They both sat on a balcony overlooking the blue sea passing the handmade roll-up between them. The stuff was very strong, and Giulia imagined she was floating in the air even as she could feel the cold stone of the terrace under her bum, barely shielded by the wafer thin material of her long white linen skirt. As if she were in two places at the same time. Observing herself. Serenely detached.

“What about you?” Marta asked. She was Hungarian, dead on beautiful with her medusa hair now haloed by the Mediterranean sun like a crown of fire.

Giulia blinked. “What about me?” She hadn’t even properly heard the question. Or followed the gist of the other girl’s conversation, her monologue, for some time now.

“What brings you here?”

“I don’t know. Really,” Giulia answered, taking another puff, inhaling deeply and feeling a haze of sloth shroud her whole soul.

Marta was peering at her.

“Well,” she added, hesitating, “I witnessed a murder back in Paris and I didn’t want to get involved with the police and all that. It was accidental. Nothing to do with me. A bad coincidence. But I just don’t wish to talk about it.”

“What did you do? Before?”

“Just studying. I have a degree in languages, but not actually sure what sort of job I want to do. Probably journalism or publishing. That’s what my thesis was about. Citizen journalism.”

“What is it, citizen journalism? Sounds communist,” Marta chuckled.

Giulia sketched a half smile across her dry lips. She felt sleepy.

“No, it’s all about how ordinary people can do personal sort of journalism on the Internet… You know, sort of going beyond blogs and all that.”

“Oh…” Marta observed. “I never even learned how to use a computer.”

“Really?”

“I was never interested.”

Giulia remembered that it had now been ages since she’d even logged on. Her laptop’s battery, long dead, probably badly needed recharging. Anyway, this small place where they were staying had no Internet access and she had no desire to go into the town hunting for a cyber café. In all likelihood all she would find in her mailbox would be more messages from her father or Jack claiming how much he missed her or Eleonora worried about her whereabouts. She didn’t feel guilty that she had gone off the map. She had drawn a line, needed this time for herself. Even if it hurt others. This was her time to be selfish, she reasoned.

She took another puff from the joint. Felt blissfully light-headed.

“This stuff is strong,” Giulia remarked, “so what about you?”

“Just a boring story,” Marta replied. “I wanted to see the world, I suppose. Wanderlust. Did a few bad things to get the cash.”

“What sort of things?”

“A couple of films for a Dutch company. Porn. Amateur stuff. Pretend casting videos done in a hotel room. Just a means to an end.”

“What was it like?” Giulia enquired.

“Felt very dirty afterwards but, like you, it’s something I don’t want to talk about much. I’ve drawn a line. The moment I had the money, I left Budapest. They were hoping I would do more, but it was never my intention. I met Stieg on the road. He’s okay. I like the way he smells. Different somehow from the guys back in Hungary. Strange, no?”

“Yes, life sure is strange,” Giulia remarked. “Even if I still haven’t a clue what it’s all about, family, men, sex, adventures, sometimes it makes no sense.” Her mind was sinking in a haze of dope. It was relaxing. It was good.

“Stieg knows this place two hours down the coast to the east,” Marta said. “Some sort of artist’s colony. Very remote. Almost private. Apparently the grass you can get hold of there is not only terribly pure but also quite cheap. We’re talking of heading there in a few days. Maybe you should come with us?” she suggested.

The initial group Giulia had been travelling with since Paris had now fragmented to all corners of the south and she had no longer had any loyalty to it. She hazily recalled Marta’s earlier words, “a means to an end”.

“Sure,” she nodded. The African sun above was sensually wrapping her into a warm cocoon of laziness. She knew she should get up and move out of it, or her pale skin would burn badly, but it felt difficult to summon the necessary energy.

Marta’s voice punctured Giulia's reverie.

“Our room’s shower is not working properly. Do you think we could use yours, Giulia? I do love this weather, but it makes me sweat like a pig.” There was a thin sheen of perspiration on her forehead and cheeks.

“Of course,” Giulia said.

They both rose unsteadily to their feet and walked into the shade. Stieg was at the bar downstairs nursing an absinthe and daydreaming. Flies buzzed. The three of them slowly walked past the tiled central patio of the building and down the corridor to Giulia’s room.

Once in her room, Giulia collapsed onto her bed and watched Marta and Stieg undress. They looked beautiful. Shiny. An innocent form of nudity. Stieg winked at her as he slapped Marta playfully on her rump and then took her by the hand and led her to the narrow shower stall.

Giulia took a final puff from the dregs of the joint now beginning to burn her fingers and listened to the sounds of water, laughter, splashing and then lovemaking.

She lowered her right hand and slipped it under her white linen skirt and inside her panties and touched herself. The hair that had been shaved away in Paris was growing again.

The next morning they all packed their few belongings into a rucksack each and ventured down the coast towards the colony. The bed and breakfast owner agreed to store Giulia’s laptop and her winter clothes while she was away. In her own mind, she knew there was little certainty she would even return.

Eleonora had moved into Jack’s hotel. She had her own room but for a week they would spend most of their days together. Speculating. Comparing notes. Evoking memories. Growing ever more familiar with each other. They visited Flora again but failed to extract any further information that might prove useful.

Unlike Giulia, she was allowed to eat spicy food so Jack introduced her to some of his favourite eating places in the Latin Quarter. The Japanese kebab place a few doors away from the hotel, Chez Bebert the couscous restaurant on the Boulevard St Germain, the Korean BBQ near the Bastille, the Crêpes stand near the Luxembourg. All places he had once wanted to take Giulia to, naturally.

Sitting together at a large wooden table in the hotel’s reception area, laptops facing each other, they had systematically explored their respective inboxes for Giulia’s old e-mails, a process Jack found painful as it evoked too many memories and reminded him of the so many words of tenderness and affection she had once bestowed upon him. Searching for forgotten words, throwaway remarks that might give them a clue to her present whereabouts or intentions.

“I’m no longer even sure whether she even loved me once,” Jack remarked.

“She did,” Eleonora answered.

“Really?”

“Yes, she spoke to me so much about you. And she wrote to me about it too. Here, in some of her mails. Do you want to see?” she asked, ready to move her computer across the table.

“I’d rather not,” he said. They had agreed at the outset that they would refrain from looking back at the past under a microscope darkly. Some things were better left private.

Eleonora fell into a deep silence. Jack’s mouse danced a distracted fox trot on the rubber pad as he moved on-screen between past messages.

She looked up and gazed deeply into his eyes. “What did you see in Giulia?” she asked him.

Jack pondered at length. He didn’t want his answer to be flippant.

“Life,” he finally said.

Eleonora squinted.

“She was so lively, almost childish at times,” he added. “Selfish, but in a healthy way. She made me look at things in a new way, in a positive way. Just one look at her and the whole day felt better, something I wouldn’t have to struggle through. Essentially, she made me a better man. Not someone who had seen it all and become a cynic. She became life itself for me.”

“That’s true. She is a force of nature. Always so cheerful. And determined. Nothing could ever make her change her mind once she had decided on something. Like the time, she borrowed her father’s camper and drove us to Venice for the film festival…”

“Could she be there?” he suggested. ‘Venice?” he wondered briefly.

“Something inside tells me it can’t be Italy. She’d feel a sense of defeat having to return to her own country, I believe.”

“You’re probably right. But then the Giulia you knew is not the one I did…”

“I know. After she met you, it’s strange. On one hand, she was so happy but also, on the other hand, there was a sadness about her.”

“My melancholy can be contagious,” Jack stated. But he knew this was not the sole reason. He had not been fully available then, and this had been like a worm eating away at her mind and her insides. He had proven incapable of giving all of himself. And Giulia was young and when she wanted the world, she wanted it now.

“It’s not just you,” Eleonora pointed out. “When I was with Henry,” she said, “I was both happy and sad. That’s what love is, isn’t it? One goes automatically with the other.”

“But does it always have to be this way?’

Eleonora didn’t answer. She scrolled down her screen. Looked up at Jack.

“I think it was in Barcelona she was happiest,” she remarked.

“That’s true,” Jack said. “It was her first time away from home on her own, before San Francisco.” Giulia had been arguing with her father for months to allow her to go on the student exchange programme. Her first genuine taste of liberty, of independence.

“I visited her there,” Eleonora said.

“Me too,” Jack said. Which they both knew.

Eleonora snapped her laptop screen down.

“She’s left Paris. We both agree on that. People often return to places they have been happy in, don’t they?”

“So they say,” Jack confirmed.

In books, yes. In real life?

“We should go to Barcelona,” Eleonora decided. “I know the names of some of the friends she met there. Boys. Girls too. The bars she enjoyed drinking in.”

“Maybe.”

“We have to do something,” she said. “Have you any better ideas?”

It might work. It might also make things worse, Jack reflected, returning to the steps of Parc Güell or that café on Plaza Catalunya where they’d had their first serious row.

How would he feel setting foot in Barcelona again? At least, they could stay in a different hotel, not the Condal where the uniformed men manning the reception desk always gave him strong disapproving looks or smirked when he picked up his room key, hand in hand with a young woman visibly half his age. As Giulia had been. And Eleonora was too.

“Barcelona it is,” he said. He would confront the ghosts of the past. He had little choice.

The beach went on for miles. Sand of gold and the sea a shimmering blue against a cloudless horizon. They had travelled across a set of undulating dunes for half an hour after abandoning the main coast road as it bent inwards. It was as if a desert extended straight into the warm waters of the Atlantic, melting into the rhythm of the lapping waves as they caressed the shore with white endless tongues.

Giulia caught her breath. It was like a vision of paradise.

In Italy, most beaches were heavily regimented, with deck chairs and parasols organised into geometric configurations, straight lines and right angles that allowed no fantasy or freedom. She had been told there were some unspoilt, wild beaches in Sicily and Sardinia, but she had never had the opportunity to go there.

As far as her eyes could see the sea merged with the sky.

“Worth the journey, no?” Stieg remarked.

The two young women agreed.

“There is a small village a further three kilometres down the coastline, I gather. With a few shops where one can get food and drink, and a handful of buildings and a scattering of huts, it’s pretty basic but I’m told most people stay in tents on the beach at this time of the year.”

“Feels like the end of the world,” Marta remarked, gazing at the sun-scorched vista unfolding before them until the distant point where land and sea melted into each other.

Giulia followed the couple as they marched briskly down the sand. By the time they reached the colony the sweat was pouring down her back and her whole body felt as if she was wading through an open-air sauna. She should not have worn jeans.

It was just a hodge podge of fragile beach shacks and dozens of tents of all colours dotted in a zigzagging pattern across the sand beyond the reach of the tide line.

“We’re here,” Stieg shouted out.

“Is this it?” Marta queried, visibly disappointed by the Spartan aspect of the place. They could hear voices further down in the water where the stick insect silhouettes of a dozen or so people were playing around in the sea. A red and green flag floated above the nearest tent.

“Isn’t it great?” Stieg remarked, throwing down his heavy rucksack to the sand, taking the weight off his shoulders. Giulia did likewise. All she could feel was the discomfort of the heat holding her body in a vice.

“I take it all back,” Marta said. “It’s not the end of the world, more like the beginnings. Before civilisation established itself.”

Giulia could understand it. It was bare, sparse, primitive.

Next to her, Stieg was pulling his soiled T-shirt off above his head.

“Let’s swim,” he shouted out. “Wash all the grime of the journey away …”

Marta enthusiastically followed his example. Giulia copied her and slowly unbuckled the belt of her jeans. By now, Stieg in his haste had already stripped totally, and stood there naked, the sun already deepening the deep tan of skin. Giulia looked away. Turned to Martha as she unbuttoned her wet shirt. The Hungarian girl was down to her smalls. With no hesitation, Marta unclasped her black bra and swiftly pushed down her matching panties. Giulia hesitated. She had on occasion gone topless on beaches, but had never stripped down in public totally. She peered ahead. The others in the sea all appeared to be nude too.

“Come on,” Stieg said. Marta giggled. “It’s the way we were all created. Naked. You’d stand out, if you were the only one here to keep your bikini bottom on. Don’t be such a prude, Giulia.”

Her two friends began running towards the soft lapping waves, leaving her behind. Sounds of laughter breezed across the beach, or was it the shriek of distant birds? Giulia braced herself and stripped. She felt self-conscious about it. Her small breasts, the whiteness of her skin, the increasing bushiness of her pubes, the size of her bum. Only five men and members of her family had ever witnessed her naked.

She took a deep breath and trooped down to the edge of the water, dipped her toes in. It was surprisingly warm. Stieg and Marta were already well beyond the crest of the waves, up to their waist in the sea, splashing water at each other and shrieking with delight. Giulia raised her arms and waded in.

Barcelona had proven a dead end. No one there had seen or heard of Giulia since she had completed her Erasmus exchange programme and duly returned to Rome, although many had fond memories of her and expressed dismay at the news she had disappeared. Eleonora had tracked down a girl who had been in the same Catalan Literature class at the University and had visited Giulia in Italy six months later, on which occasion the three young women had all met up for a late night drink in a joint off Via Veneto which had always been one of their teenage haunts. The Spanish girl, Mariana, had remembered how Giulia had once mentioned she had spent a wonderful time in Sitges, a beach resort thirty minutes south of the city.

Jack and Eleonora had conveyed this sparse piece of news to Giulia’s father who had flown in to Barcelona for the day to enquire about the progress, or lack of, of their investigation. Giulia’s uncle, his brother, was a pilot for Alitalia, so members of the family had easy access to cheap flights.

They met up in the café of a bookshop that Giulia had been known to frequent, a few blocks off the Ramblas.

“I still don’t understand why she has left,” the surgeon said. “She never missed for anything at home, you know. She was spoilt even.”

“She just wants to live her life, Dottore,” Eleonora pointed out. “I’m sure it’s nothing personal against you or your family.”

“But why run away?” he sighed.

Jack stayed silent.

“I’m sure she’s all right,” Eleonora said. “Once she has satisfied her curiosity, she will come back, I am sure.”

“I hope so,” her father said. “Her mother and I worry so much.”

“None of us believe any harm has come to her,” Jack intervened, not that he had any evidence of the fact. They all looked at each other with concern. The possibility of suicide was like an elephant in the room.

“She wouldn’t,” her father firmly said. “I just know. Not my daughter.”

He had to make his way back to the airport. They walked him to the coach stop on Plaza Espaňa.

“Any news, we will be in touch. Absolutely,” Jack assured him. Eleonora nodded approvingly and kissed the doctor on both cheeks. Jack and he shook hands.

It was the last week of the tourist season, fiesta time, much fireworks the following weekend theyhad been informed at reception, and they had been unable to get two separate rooms in the same hotel. He had offered to place a cushion between them in the large king-size bed they would have to share on this night, but Eleonora had just shrugged her shoulders in response. They both felt emotionally drained, sensing that their hapless quest was reaching yet another dead end.

Jack woke up several times during the night, as he usually did. A thin sliver of moonlight peered through the open window which looked over a panorama of flat roofs and terraces where a variety of neighbouring houses hung their washing out to dry overnight. Eleonora slept soundly, the warmth of her body reaching him in peaceful waves, the muted sound of her breathing like an even serenade. Her partly naked back faced him. She was wearing a long purple silk night-gown. He, just his underpants. He had turned his back to her when she had changed before bedtime. Once, he realised she was also awake and looking at him in the darkness, the cadence of her breath now different. Were they both thinking the same thing? Or of the same person? He kept his eyes closed, willing sleep to return.

At five in the morning, he woke again, noted the time on the LCD of the radio alarm on the bedside table. In her sleep, Eleonora had moved nearer, and was now barely an inch away from him. Somehow, the thin blanket had been pulled away to her side and Jack was now only half-covered. Not that it was cold by any means. Jack turned over. The movement was more instinctive than deliberate as he navigated in a blur between sleep and consciousness. He just wanted to smell her, decipher that distinctive sweetness in her fragrance. As if she was sensing this, it was Eleonora who shifted imperceptibly and slid over the sheet until their bodies met.

Spooned.

Through her skin, he could feel her heartbeat, its strong vibration swimming across her skin like electricity. Jack’s arm was in an awkward position, unready as he had been for Eleonora to bridge the gap between their bodies and he knew that if it remained where it now was under his flank, he would soon cramp badly. He pulled his arm out and his hand grazed her rump. Her night-gown had hitched up during her sleep. Her softness overwhelmed him. He knew she was now awake. Neither said anything.

His hand slowly journeyed across the skin of her arse. It felt as if she was on fire. Silk and flames.

He felt himself hardening. His cock growing against the back of her thighs. There was no way she could not feel his arousal. Eleonora could have moved away to her side of the bed, but she didn’t.

Now fully awake and encouraged, his heart beating the light fantastic, Jack moved his wandering hand away from her rear and moved it upwards under the thin material of her slip until he reached her right breast, cupping its firmness, almost weighing it. He extended his finger until it grazed her nipple, landing on its sharp promontory, rubbing against its uneven texture then circling it slowly but steadily. Now it was her time to harden.

Eleonora moaned.

“You OK?” Jack whispered.

“Hmmmm…” Her voice had deepened.

Another lengthy curtain of silence settled across them. They both had known for a few weeks that this moment might come. There had been an inevitability about it. They had always been attracted to each other, even when they had both been with others. Only a sense of betrayal had slowed the progress of the lust.

“Yes,” Eleonora said. The sound came from the depths of her throat.

Jack’s fingers sharply pinched her nipple while he adjusted his position so that his cock now faced her opening. Immense heat radiated outwards from her. He breached her tenderly. She was very wet. They docked. Below the distant and invisible ghost of Giulia. As if she were giving them her blessing.

The Atlantic night was littered with a million stars. They had spent the day swimming, playing in the waves and snoozing on the beach, Giulia carefully sheltered from the sun’s rays naked under her old Strangers in Paradise T-shirt, now punctured with small holes, and the billowing white skirt. Her pale skin reddened much too fast. Tomorrow, she had decided, she would acquire a sun hat at the shack where you could also find sunglasses, shawls, second-hand tourist souvenirs and all sorts of African knick-knacks. They’d found a free tent and stocked up on mineral water, fruit and cans at the hut where food was on sale, dispensed by little black kids in djellabas sporting sparkling ivory teeth who spoke pidgin English and always appeared to be taking the piss out of the visiting foreigners and hippies who’d migrated down here.

Half a dozen fires burned at regular intervals along the beach, with small groups of young people huddled around them. Guitar playing here, off-key singing there, lazy conversations drowning the sound of the waves dying against the shore. Most of the kids in the group Stieg, Marta and Giulia had now joined around the campfire came from Eastern Europe, boys with hair down to their shoulders, unkempt, rangy, girls with plump lips and voluptuous curves. Everyone was still naked after the afternoon’s exertions.

Joints were passed around and Giulia, light-headed, relaxed. Her mind floated in a soup of warm pleasure. Sitting cross-legged, now oblivious to the fact that everyone could see all the way inside her, beyond her burgeoning-anew forest of pubic curls no doubt, she took yet another deep puff from the thick hand-made cigarette making its leisurely way around the circle. A hand landed on her shoulder just as she we was beginning to lean back, on the point of blissfully dozing off.

“Hey, piccola signorina,try this one,” a stocky guy with a severe buzz cut so unlike most of the other men at the colony, was handing her another joint. “This is the real stuff, the good stuff. I see you’re a fan …”

Giulia extended her hand and took the new cigarette between two fingers and brought it to her lips. Inhaled.

Jesus. It was powerful. A wave of drunkenness surged across her brain and she could feel the vibrations extend like tendrils through every cell in her body.

“Wow,” she mumbled,”this is good. Really good.” All of a sudden she felt as if she were pinned to the ground.

She closed her eyes to surf this powerful new sensation.

Someone laughed. Close to her or was it maybe miles away?

Giulia could feel the blanket of the night surrounding her, protecting her, as every single past memory haunting her until today slowly began fading away into the gulf of yesterday. She felt in the darkness for her bottle of water and drank the rest of it down in one single gulp. Then inhaled again from the magical joint that killed all bad memories. Sighed. Then cried a little, a thin line of tears gliding down her warm sun-streaked cheeks. She was floating on air. A pair of hands lowered her head to the ground and settled her on an improvised cushion created by wrapping a partly-empty rucksack with some discarded piece of clothing.

The joint was delicately taken from her fingers.

Did she actually sleep or was she just daydreaming?

An instant later or maybe it was already hours beyond the stroke of midnight, Giulia opened her eyes. There was a chant swirling across the campfire, drunken or stoned voices singing an old barely recognisable sixties song in unison. Marta was dancing, her wild hair flying, obscuring the crescent of tonight’s moon; another couple, right by Giulia’s side, were embracing, limbs entwined, murmuring sweet nothings or could it be gentle obscenities into each other’s ears. Giulia looked around, here was a tangle of legs to her left, all moving tentatively as if their dance had slowed down and was unfolding in deliberate slow motion. As she moved her head, a powerful wave of dizziness engulfed her. With difficulty, as if fighting against a river’s current, Giulia peered up at all the legs, the unsynchronised ballet gesticulating in front of her eyes.

Overcome by sudden nausea, all she could register was the four or five cocks dangling just inches away from her face, as the men continued their unstable movements in a parody of dancing. Her eyes focused on the varied penises. Dark, pink, long, thick, cut and uncut, floating in the shadow of the thin slice of moon, illuminated by the sparks from the camp fire.

She tried to raise herself but she was still too disorientated and she stumbled. To regain equilibrium, she had to grab hold of one of the dancing men’s legs. It was the guy with the buzz cut. She was so close to his crotch that she could even smell a trace of urine rising from his semi-hard cock. He was circumcised. Memories came flooding back like an uncontrollable torrent. Giulia’s throat tightened.

A hand settled on her head, guiding her even closer to the rising cock of the man.

“Good girl,” someone said.

The penis made contact with her parched lips.

The other men in the circle all moved closer.

She remembered the large sunflower sewn to her old tote bag in Barcelona. She smiled as if she compared herself to the flower, she was now its apex, its centre, and every cock surrounding her was a petal.

She half-opened her lips and allowed the man’s penis to enter her mouth. Closed her eyes. The group began to clap as she started sucking the thick meaty trunk.

The first man came quickly, but as he retreated from her taking a few steps back nearer to the campfire, another cock was presented. She swallowed and opened her mouth wide open. This was unreal, she thought, her stomach tingling, knowing all eyes were on her, as if she was putting on a show for everyone there on that endless beach.

She serviced them all. One by one. By the end she felt hollow and the effect of the pot had begun to fade, and her mind was now in turmoil at what she had just done so willingly. No one had even attempted to force her. Although mentally disembodied, she had somehow called them to her, to her mouth, her warmth, like some crazy form of primeval earth mother. And they had answered her call and the circle of men had naturally converged towards her.

It occurred to her that every man had tasted sort of different.

But tiredness now got the better of her, and Giulia slumped to the ground pulling her scattered clothing around her and quickly fell asleep.

At dawn, she awoke. Stieg and Marta were no longer there, but many others, some strangers, others whose faces she recognised still from yesterday, were curled around the embers of the fire. It was like a topsy-turvy landscape of bodies after a battle.

Her head was now quite clear although she had the beginnings of a migraine. She rose, throwing the remnants of her improvised clothing aside, and headed towards the sea to cleanse herself. Naked in some twisted form of paradise, she reckoned.