Templar's Quest

29

Tipping her head, Angelika Schwärz slowly blew a smoke ring, the diaphanous spiral floating towards the coffered ceiling. Somewhat moodily she stood at the open French doors that led to a small Juliet balcony. Below her the Seine flowed past the Île St Louis, the posh island enclave where she maintained an apartment.

Like her alter ego, she’d managed to fly away at the last moment. Or, in this case, swim away.

The Dark Angel.

A play on her birth name, the nom de guerre suited her. For she was the bringer of death and destruction. The one who liberated man’s soul from his physical body. Life or death. Good or evil. Sacred or profane. She could be any or all of them. Today, she’d been good. Merciful, even. She could easily have pulled the trigger and ended it at the quay. But instead she’d decided to play with Finnegan McGuire. Taunt him with innuendo. Mystify him with shadowy allusion.

She already looked forward to the next bout.

Suddenly losing her taste for the Lucky Strike, Angelika smashed it into a crystal ashtray. As she did, a man approached from behind. Wordlessly, he pulled aside the right lapel of her red silk kimono and cupped her bare breast in his hand. Several passengers sitting on the upper deck of a bateau-mouche, one of the many tourist boats that routinely cruised the Seine, stared in slack-jawed amazement. One or two turned away, overcome with Puritanical outrage. A few pointed excitedly to the French doors where she stood, two storeys above them. Someone else aimed a video camera.

Well aware of the effect that her beauty had on men and women alike, Angelika graced them with a smile.

‘You’re quite the exhibitionist, aren’t you?’ the man whispered in her ear, tweaking her nipple between his fingers.

Thinking the answer rather obvious, she arched into his calloused hand. ‘Ah, Finnegan, a little harder.’

‘I told you, my name is Ryan,’ he whined petulantly, even as he twisted her turgid nipple that much harder.

‘Umm …’ She luxuriated in the pain, feeling every agonized jolt. ‘No. Today your name is Finnegan.’

The young man knew better than to argue. He was an American in Paris. A polite way of saying that he was a male escort, a gigolo who plied his trade to bored upper-class women with money to spend. Without being told, she knew that he was an exchange student at the Sorbonne who turned tricks to pay the rent. Not that she cared about the particulars of his life. She’d picked him because he bore a striking resemblance to Finnegan McGuire. While the accent wasn’t quite right, the colouring – brown hair, brown eyes, bronzed skin – was identical. All in all, a good match.

Finnegan McGuire.

An uncommon name for an uncommon man. When she and Finnegan had faced one another on the quay, she’d found herself sexually aroused by his rugged features and cocky self-assurance. So rough around the muscular edges.

The gigolo raised a hand to the still wet hair that was twisted in a chignon at the back of her head. Realizing he was about to remove the etched silver hair pin, she pulled away from him.

‘I just wanted to –’

‘I have paid you a generous sum of money to tend to my wants,’ she interrupted, annoyed with his presumption.

He threw up his hands in a show of surrender. ‘Hey, no problem. Like you said, you’re calling the shots.’

Actually, when she went for the kill, she preferred more silent methods. But she doubted that her paid paramour would be especially interested in the dark particulars of her life.

‘Are you thirsty?’

‘For you, baby. I’m thirsty for you.’

Angelika resisted the urge to laugh at his sophomoric repartee. Instead, she shoved him aside. ‘I was asking if you’d like a drink,’ she said over her shoulder as she strolled across to the bar.

Like a lost puppy, the gigolo trailed on her heels. ‘A drink. Yeah, sure. What have you got?’

‘La Fée Verte,’ she said, lifting a bottle for his inspection.

His brow wrinkled. ‘The green fairy?’ He took the proffered bottle and read the label. A moment later, a look of near-comical shock on his face, he said, ‘Absinthe! Is this shit even legal?’

‘More or less,’ she equivocated. French distilleries still brewed the mythical green liquor despite the fact that the original 1915 ban on absinthe had yet to be revoked.

‘I thought this stuff was outlawed for, you know, making people go insane.’

‘I don’t think you need to worry about that happening.’ Not bothering to ask if he wished to imbibe, she poured the absinthe into two hand-blown glasses. She then placed a slotted silver spoon over one of the glasses and, reaching into a sugar bowl, removed a cube.

‘Are you going to set it on fire? I once saw Susan Sarandon do that in a movie.’

Although Angelika had not seen the movie in question, she knew that he referred to the modern ritual of setting the sugar cube aflame. While dramatic, she preferred the Zen-like simplicity of the old ways.

‘The fire will come later,’ she promised.

‘I bet. I mean, man alive, you’re one hot babe. Usually my clients are, you know, older women who schedule me between morning shopping sprees on the Champs-Élysées and afternoon tea at the Ladurée Salon.’

‘Poor bébé. Such a difficult life,’ she said with a taunting sneer.

Reaching for a decanter, she slowly drizzled cold water over the sugar cube, the green liquid replaced with an opalescent cloud. Within moments, a strong liquorice aroma wafted from the glass.

‘Way cool!’ her companion enthused, his earlier hesitancy about drinking absinthe having vanished.

Angelika repeated the ritual with the second glass.

‘A votre santé,’ she said, handing him the milky green beverage.

Doing a fair imitation of a thirsty man in the desert, he quaffed half the contents of the glass in one swallow. Like most Americans, he drank to get intoxicated, the subtlety of the honeyed herbs and floral bouquet beyond his appreciation.

Wearing an asinine expression, he giggled. ‘I can’t feel my tongue. Jeez, no wonder Van Gogh cut off his ear. Talk about a buzz.’ Two gulps later, he’d finished his drink.

Ah, ‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’.

Wordlessly, Angelika turned away from the bar and walked down the hall to her bed chamber.

‘Nice digs,’ her companion remarked as he stepped into the bedroom, the stark space a study in white fabric and ebonized furniture. ‘It’s like, what, contemporary Asian?’

Not in the mood for chit-chat, she impatiently waved a hand in his direction. ‘Remove your clothes. I wish to see what I paid for.’ She sat down on the white leather chaise adjacent to the bed, her kimono fanning out from her bare legs like a giant blood stain.

‘Whatever the pretty lady wants. I’m not one to brag, but I think you’ll be pleased,’ the young man said with a brash smirk as he unzipped his Levi jeans. ‘I work out five times a week.’

‘Very nice,’ she complimented once he’d removed all of his clothing. Not nearly as impressive as Finnegan McGuire, but more than satisfactory. She jutted her head towards the king-size platform bed. ‘On the bed. Spread-eagle.’

‘A lady who knows her mind. I like that. Most of my clients aren’t nearly so assertive.’

Because I’m not like any of your other clients, she silently mused as she got up from the chaise. Taking a last sip of her absinthe, she placed the glass on the Tansu cabinet before walking over to the bed. Pleased to see that he was fully aroused, she let the red kimono slide off her shoulders and drop on to the white carpet.

The young man’s eyes opened wide. ‘What’s that tattooed on your left tit?’

She glanced at the circular tattoo with the Black Sun symbol. ‘That is my talisman,’ she said as she straddled his hips. Grasping his erection in her right hand, she pulled it towards her, impaling herself with one quick plunge.

‘Oh, babe, that’s good!’ her paramour crooned, moving his hands towards her waist.

She slapped at his groping hands. ‘I want you spread-eagled.’

‘Just like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, huh?’

Annoyed with his non-stop banter, she quickened the pace.

‘You need to slow down,’ he moaned. ‘I’m about to come.’

‘I sincerely hope so,’ she quietly remarked. Reaching behind her head, she removed the ornately incised stiletto from her rolled chignon, damp locks tumbling past her shoulders.

She spared a quick glance at the silver emblem of the sacred Irminsul, the ancient Saxon tree of life that adorned the slender hilt. Her lips curved into a smile.

Closing her eyes, Angelika conjured Finnegan McGuire’s image in her mind’s eye, able to see his brown eyes roll to the back of his head as he writhed beneath her. Able to feel his strong, muscular hips buck to and fro. Pleased with the image, she grasped the stiletto in her fist and, just at the moment of mutual orgasm –

– plunged it into the young man’s heart. Then across his throat. His face. His chest.

Warm blood splattered her bare breasts, Angelika gasping with pleasure.

Die, Finnegan McGuire, die. A thousand deaths. Each more painful than the one before.