I Was Waiting for You

DANCING IN THE DARK

ONE OF THE MEN lived in Germany, so Cornelia concentrated on the two others for now. She was aware that the trail was unlikely to lead her to Giulia. The Italian girl had probably disappeared altogether, fled back to Italy, reintegrating a world of deceptive normality, and was unlikely to ever be a threat to anyone again. Good for her. But Cornelia had now been forced to intervene twice in this sorry affair and felt she had no choice but to retrace her way up through this network she’d uncovered. Maybe it was a sense of duty, being professional to the end, that now motivated her.

She hoped that,if she could ascertain why the kill had initially been sanctioned, she would be able to assess the danger and take the necessary action.

Getting to meet Enrico Santaclara proved relatively easy. A brief period of surveillance outside his suburban villa in the Neuilly area soon pinpointed his routines and he, like most men, was ready to be deceived by a woman’s good looks and sexual candour, and within a week she had inveigled herself into his life and his bed.

He lived alone behind the high gates of the expensive, sprawling property with its wild, untended gardens, in a large, sparsely furnished house of polished, wooden floors and echoing rooms. Untouched art books littered the coffee tables and expensive prints and erotic lithographs adorned the white walls, turning the labyrinth of interconnected rooms into a private museum open only by personal invitation. The kitchen was all shiny copper pans and dark, imposing black ovens and a massive ebony-coloured fridge freezer which could feed a regiment for weeks in the event of a nuclear war, but in Cornelia’s presence Santaclara would only use the microwave. Or maybe she hadn’t yet graduated to the point where he would condescend to cook for her or allow her the liberty of the kitchen. It all somehow reminded her of a stage set, every single detail perfect but awaiting the spark of life to take on the necessary added dimension that would make it resonate. In fact, there was also something theatrical about Enrico Santaclara.

The man was silver-haired, tall and lean, his voice clipped but suave and his Italian accent melodic, whether he was speaking French or English, the latter he spoke with an easy fluency, serenading Cornelia with suggestive sweet talk from the moment he realised her ready availability and evident curiosity. With him, she had quickly realised that there was no point pretending to be a naive tourist and, instead, made no secret of her worldliness and possible experience. The best way, she felt, to seduce a seducer.

She had informed him that she was in Paris for several months attending an advanced business studies course, paid for by her hedge fund employers back in Boston, but had quickly established the fact it was pretty useless and unlikely to teach her anything she didn’t already know, so was now just enjoying most of her time in the French capital to relax, philander and see whatever came up. Her name was Marti. A diminutive for Marlene, a name she didn’t truly like to be used in her presence, she had told him. The explanation appeared to satisfy him.

He turned out to be a good lover, ardent and enduring, just a tad rough at times, which she had expected from his connections with the network she had uncovered in the course of her perfunctory investigation. Demanding too. Cornelia didn’t mind the exercise in the slightest. A girl had to do what a girl had to do, and anyway body parts were just body parts and she preferred her relationships with no emotional strings attached, and enjoyed pretending that the men were in control.

“You like?”

“I like,” Cornelia replied with a hushed tone in her voice, as the man’s nose dug into her mons and his tongue brushed up and down her clit, arousing her, playing with her, pleasing her. She was tied to the bed, her hands cuff-linked to the metal bedposts, her ankles held wide apart with thin silk strips connected to a pair of leather belts nailed by metal studs to either side of the bed on the wooden floor.

She squirmed as Enrico’s warm, halting breath streamed across her bare stomach and the pressure against her cunt increased and he slipped a couple of fingers inside her, stretching her open.

“You still like,” he asked. His fingers digging deeper, while his tongue tirelessly kept on brushing up and down against her hardening nub.

“Hmmm, hmmm…” she nodded.

It was the first time he had bound her. She had offered no resistance.

“Good,” he mumbled, his lips occupied, lapping up her now flowing juices. “Ah, you taste nice…”

“Am I a slut if I tell you it feels so sexy to be tied up, to feel helpless and at your mercy, at a man’s mercy?” Cornelia whispered.

He raised his head from her genitals and looked at her with a cruel smile spreading across his lips.

“Not at all, Marti. It’s natural. Very natural. It means you are reconnecting with something that lies deep inside you, a kernel of your own sexual identity. You crave to submit. That’s what it is. Goes back to when we were cavemen. Things have changed since in society, but there is that fire still buried in the depths of your mind and body, the essential law of domination and submission, of men and women. The true balance. It’s good you accept it. Really good.”

She didn’t need any lectures.

But she quietly moaned again as another finger opened her wider. The pleasure was real. There are some things you can’t disguise.

“Good girl,” Enrico said. He looked her in the eyes. “Now I’d like to blindfold you. Is that OK? If there’s anything you don’t like, object to, all you have to do is say so, you know. I’ll stop. We can even agree on a safe word. Look at it as an adventure, see how it goes, no?”

“OK,” Cornelia said.

Shortly after her sight was taken from her, still spread-eagled across the bed and obscenely open to his touch and explorations, she felt a cold, large object being inserted into her. Then another at the rear after she had been lubed up and he had raised her rump by placing a hard cushion under her to facilitate the angle of penetration.

Next came the nipple clamps.

She held her breath. This she didn’t like. But she offered no resistance or objection.

She blanked her mind totally, banishing the genuine pain he was now casually inflicting on her, moving into a mental zone of both appreciation and indifference. At the same time, the adrenaline flowed freely inside and her endocrine system booted into action and she could even perversely manage to enjoy the way she was being defiled. It made no sense, but then she was no an average woman and she had long been aware that there was some sort of broken short circuit within her senses and soul that allowed her to do these fundamentally bad things or accept certain things to be done to her and her body. Cornelia had dabbled in the arcane rituals of BDSM on previous occasions. It had left her unscarred, if puzzled. But if this was what it took to properly close an inopportune chapter in her life, she was willing to go through with it with her eyes wide open.

She felt trussed and stuffed like a turkey when Santaclara brutally took hold of both her ankles and forced her spread legs even further apart. It made her sinews scream, as he forced her open to a yet more revealing and humiliating angle. Cornelia just hoped he wasn’t about to immortalise the session by taking photographs. That would be too tawdry. And she would then have to later locate them and destroy the evidence before the fool spread it over the Internet or wherever it served his kicks.

‘You like the view,” she joked, her voice rasping.

“Very much so. Somewhat pornographic, to say the least,” Enrico said.

More ridiculous than arousing, Cornelia reckoned. But it took all tastes.

“Just don’t put a carrot down there,” she added, with a mocking tone in her voice. “I don’t think the colour orange conjugates elegantly enough with my skin shade.”

Santaclara chuckled.

“It’s good you have a sense of humour. A virtue seldom seen in American women,” he said. “But do take this seriously, Marti. I see you’re no novice, though.”

“I’ve dabbled,” Cornelia said.

“And it excites you?” he asked.

“Sadly, yes.”

“That’s what I thought. I think you’ll make a very good subject.”

“For what?” she asked, as he tightened a new pair of thin leather buckles around her ankles and began adjusting a spread bar between them to maintain the impossible, strained angle between her legs.

“If you enjoy this sort of play, this scene, my dear Marti, I believe I can answer all your dreams and beyond. It doesn’t have to stay here. We could make it a long journey further down this intriguing road.”

“Surprise me,” she said.

“I will,” Enrico said, behind her back. “But enough of your repartee, young lady. I want you respectful, and silent.” His fingers moved to her mouth, pulled her lips apart and placed a ball gag there which he fastened at the back of her head.

“There,” he said, satisfied with the paraphernalia she was now encumbered with.

Cornelia didn’t appreciate the fact she had been silenced. It turned her into more of a victim than she wanted to be. She no longer had access to the humour that could defuse the sordid side of the power exchange. The bastard visibly knew all about the psychology of domination. She drew her breath, speculating as to what would come next.

“Let’s put this slut through her paces,” Santaclara said.

Initially, he attempted to break her physical resistance with a clever and ever fiercer catalogue of implements, from paddle to whip, until the sore skin of her buttocks screamed to high heaven and blood almost burst through the deep, raised lines of purple criss-crossing her arse cheeks. Cornelia steadfastly refused to emit the slightest sound. This only encouraged Enrico Santaclara to test her will further. He moved her around on the bed and pulled Cornelia to her feet and attached a different set of metal clamps to her nipples to which he connected small weights and then did the same to her labia. Her whole body was now on fire, pain and anger coursing like a whirlpool through her veins.

He marched Cornelia out of the bedroom and down to a cellar with padded walls. Here she was fitted with a dog collar connected to a metal chain, a leash which he pulled her by and then ordered her down to her knees, where she was made to crawl like an animal on all fours while still having to prevent the thick objects stuffed deep into her vagina and anus from falling out, parading subservient in a circular motion with her chin downwards and the ball gag was briefly removed and she was allowed to drink some lukewarm water from a dog bowl on the cold stone floor to avoid getting dehydrated.

Satisfied by her performance so far, Santaclara pulled her up to her feet by the metal leash, almost choking her in the process, ordered her to raise her arms and attached her wrists to a pair of metal links fixed to the cellar’s ceiling. With the spread bar still holding her long legs wide apart, Cornelia was now like a picture of crucifixion. Fortunately for her, the improvised dungeon did not appear to have a wooden cross or nails.

Now she was standing, the weights attached to her parts grew heavier and ever more excruciating and an involuntary tear of pain streamed down her cheek. Observing this, the man cruelly smiled, pleased with his performance and her reaction to it so far.

“Good girl,” he said.

And then punched her hard in the pit of her stomach. Cornelia exhaled violently and was unable to draw breath for a moment or even bend in reaction, totally immobilised as she was, which made the impact of his fist even worse. It would leave a bad bruise, she knew. Oh, how he would be made to pay her back for all this when the time came. But first she must play along, as distasteful as it was proving, and find more about the network he was involved in.

Santaclara walked away and out of the cellar, not saying a word, steps echoing on the stone, leaving her alone for a short while. This allowed her to regain her composure and concentrate on banishing the pain. She tried to disconnect but there was an undertow of want still playing with her cunt. There was no way she could suppress it.

When he returned, no doubt suitably refreshed, the smell of cigarette smoke on his breath, Cornelia felt like shouting at him under the ball gag to fuck her then, fuck me now. But he smirked, observing her needy expression and calmly denied her that pleasure. This was edge play.

The games continued. The man certainly had a fertile imagination and a clear-cut talent for keeping her on the thresholds of pain and pleasure combined holding back on any sort of reward or personal gratification until she was almost mentally begging for relief or further humiliation.

By the time he tired, Cornelia could hardly hold herself together, physically or mentally, and when he untied her and loosened her bonds, one limb at a time, she couldn’t help herself from collapsing into his expectant arms, which he held aloft anticipating her fall.

“There, there,” he remarked. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Cornelia tried to say something in some vain form of defiance, but her throat was too dry.

“Let’s take you upstairs, where you can relax a bit, have a sip of water, put something on, Marti. I like you: you have attitude, pride. You know you could have asked me to stop at any given time, but you didn’t. You seemed determined to test your limits.”

“You have no idea of my limits,” she spat out, straightening herself and forcing herself to raise one leg and then another to demonstrate she could walk up the stairs unaided. His hand playfully caressed her sore, marked buttocks as he walked behind her.

“But you enjoyed it, didn’t you?” he asked. “You were visibly in the zone. So wonderfully wet.”

She glanced down at her thighs. She had leaked badly, dried secretions of lust like snail trails marbling her pale white skin.

There was no way she could even deny that she had found pleasure in the pain, in the experience.

“It was… fascinating,” she said, fumbling for the right word.

“A most interesting way of putting it, I’d say.” They were now back on the ground floor of the house. He guided her to a large bedroom and pointed out the en-suite bathroom.

“You can clean yourself up there, my dear. Do join me afterwards in the study. I think we might have a lot to talk about. But take your time. I’m sure you have a lot to reflect on.”

She had found a white bathrobe and wrapped it around her weary body. Tiptoed on bare feet back to the living areas. Santaclara was sipping a cognac in the study. There was classical music playing. She recognised the melody, but couldn’t name it. She had always been a rock ’n roll sort of gal. He offered her a glass. Cornelia downed it in one gulp.

“Made you thirsty, hasn’t it?” Enrico pointed out and poured her another glass full. This time, Cornelia slowed down, brought it to her nose and sniffed, inhaling the drink’s harsh sweetness. She took a deep breath and then tipped the glass to her lips, allowing the burning liquid to swirl around her mouth before it continued its obligatory way down to her throat, soon warming her whole body.

“It’s good cognac,” she said.

“Vintage” he said. “Only the best.”

Cornelia sat on the leather sofa, finally able to relax, as if landing after a long flight, nerves no longer tingling but in a pleasurable, serene state of satori.

“You came through that really well,” the man facing her said.

“Was it a test?” Cornelia enquired.

“You could call it that.”

“Tell me more,” she asked.

“Women like you interest me.”

“Not just for sex, you mean?”

“Precisely,” he said.

“Is that why you didn’t fuck me? It would have been fine with me, I wouldn’t have minded in the slightest.”

“Any slut can provide sex,” Enrico continued. “Or any foolish girl who thinks being submissive is just an expression of love, worshipping her master and all that, read the usual books once too often and opens her leg out of sheer romantic instinct. One should never trust a book.”

“It’s true. I am not romantic, by a long way,” Cornelia confirmed.

“You have inner strength, Marti. You are evidently in possession of a fierce intelligence. You understand it’s not all about the meat of bodies, holes and penetration. Pleasure can turn out to be so much more. On a higher plane.”

“I suppose so.”

“So why did you engineer our meeting?” Santaclara suddenly asked her.

“Engineer?”

“Don’t take me for a fool,” he said. ‘An attractive young woman like you doesn’t throw herself at a man so readily. Let alone allow herself to be used as you have been. I’d rather you came clean. Now.” There was a hint of threat in his tone of voice.

“I was at the Chandelles the other day when that man was killed.”

“Really?” A worried look spread across his features as he absorbed the new information.

“Someone took me there, a guy I sometimes go out with back in the States. He’d read about the place in a guide book on Paris sex spots. Just as we were about to leave, there was this commotion. We were in a private room, across from where it happened. The man I was with was unaware of what had occurred, but I had gone to powder my nose between scenes and noticed all the staff running around in a mild state of panic. I saw you giving out orders. It’s just that the next morning, and the following days, there was just nothing in the papers or on the news. I was just curious, you know.”

“So you thought you’d arrange to meet me?”

“Well, yes. A right little Nancy Drew and all that, there must be a reason it was all hushed up, no?” She sketched a pleading smile.

“Are you sure you wish to know?”

“Well, you might say I’ve gone to great lengths to find out, no?”

“So you have. But you know what they say about curiosity, don’t you?”

“Enlighten me.”

She learnt that the man who was killed at the Chandelles club was a long established acquaintance of Santaclara and his associates. A group of them were actually the true owners of the establishment, although this was concealed through a series of dummy companies through which other more conventional businesses were also funnelled in order to muddy fiscal waters. It could be said that what they were engaged in was not actually illegal, even though in the eyes of many it could be seen as morally dubious. The men had all met through their frequentation of BDSM circles and tastes for domination.

Initially they lurked on the Internet in a variety of adult chat forums where they had advertised themselves as a group of dominant men offering women the opportunity to partake and be the objects of group sex, gang bangs even, on a purely anonymous, discreet and safe basis. It was surprising how many had proven interested and found the courage to go through with the events which normally took place in hotel rooms or the specially-appointed cellar of one of the men’s houses or the basement of another’s high-street fashion store. The open invitation had attracted women of all ages and social status, from nurses to doctors, teachers to bank executives and, more appetisingly, even school girls or students.

As Santaclara carefully pointed out, the women came willingly. There was no money involved at this stage, so it couldn’t be said that prostitution was involved. Why they attended voluntarily and offered themselves knowingly to a group of unknown men for such prolonged episodes of sexual exploitation and degradation was between the women and their conscience. Nymphomania, overbearing curiosity, a longing for submission both psychological and physical, it wasn’t for the men to reason why. Most of the women satisfied their urges, unnatural or not, and some would even return for more, become regulars of sorts, who would then graduate to open air parties in semi-public places, dogging excursions and, once the Chandelles was acquired by the main instigators of the group, to special events organised there to which outsiders were invited, after careful screening.

“Charming” Cornelia remarked.

“It’s what they wanted. They were never forced to participate,” Enrico pointed out again. “Things were always made very clear to them from the outset. It was their decision alone to become involved. On every occasion a new girl agreed to be fully used in the manner we had explicitly explained to her, she would meet every single member of the evening’s group at the hotel bar for drinks before we would go up to the room. Until she had crossed the door into the bedroom, she always had the opportunity to pull out. A few did. We accepted that, and that would then be the end of the matter.”

After the group’s activities expanded into selected exclusive evenings at the swing club, their reputation quickly grew. They were not offering professionals, whores, but normal women who, in order to satisfy their sexual needs, proved eminently willing and available for even the wildest, or even perverse, occasions. The women were never paid, although from a certain stage onwards the new punters they collected did; after all, the club had to earn its keep, didn’t it?

“And what happened to women once they had satisfied their lust and were no longer of interest to the group? Surely, it wasn’t possible for them to go on doing this for ever. Everyone has limits, and anyway wasn’t fresh meat always needed? It’s like a vicious circle, a conveyor belt, no?” Cornelia enquired.

“Exactly,” Santaclara said. “You’ve put your finger on it. That’s where the problems began.”

A member of the initial group had got it into his head that, after they had tired of certain women, maybe he could keep on exploiting them for profit, rather than discard them with relative elegance and kindness as had previously happened. Well, they had been well groomed and he felt it would be wasteful not to recycle them, so to speak.

“How?” Cornelia asked.

Santaclara frowned. The whole matter was evidently quite distasteful to him, although all the other activities he had been discussing did not present him with any problem, it appeared.

The bad man in question had somehow made a connection with a network through which women were traded from country to country, mostly to wealthy collectors. A lot of money was involved. He was beginning to funnel some of the women through that dubious pipeline.

“Sounds like slave trading to me,” Cornelia remarked.

“Maybe. But he was clever. He was one of the best groomers in the group. Had always been the best of us at discovering new girls, not only on the Internet, sometimes he’d pick them up in the street, in bars. He had a way, a je ne sais quoi, which always succeeded in convincing the women in question they were acting of their own free will. He could spot them, as if there were something written on their forehead that said ‘submissive’ or just naive. After the women grew tired, after their initial thrill had exhausted itself, he was very good at talking them into risking the next step.”

“Selling them?”

“Yes.”

So, Cornelia noted, the sordid puzzle was all now coming together.

“Who ordered his death?”

“He was becoming something of an embarrassment. He had left us no alternatives.”

No wonder they had hushed up the kill and disposed of the body with no unwarranted publicity. What a nest of vipers she had dipped her toes into.

“Who? Your group?”

“Not just us. His activities were becoming too public. He supplied girls to the network, but also double-crossed them when convenient and traded with Arabs. That was a step too far for everyone. We can’t condone white slavery.”

“How delicate of you.”

“Some of us hold important positions in business and even government. We have connections. We made contact with the network he had been dealing with. Explained the problem we were facing to them. We all agreed something had to be done to curtail his activities once and for all. We sanctioned the action but they organised the particulars.”

“I see.”

“I don’t know who they used or how. But it happened quickly. Very professional, I must say.”

Cornelia repressed a small grin.

“So that’s what I caught a glimpse of,” she said. “What a story. And whoever did the job left no clues or witnesses.”

“Actually there was a witness. Most unfortunate,” Santaclara said. “A young Italian woman the man in question had brought along to the club that night for some form of further initiation. We knew nothing of her; he’d probably picked her up shortly before. She’d been living with him for some weeks but he hadn’t yet introduced her to any of us.”

“What happened to her?”

“In the confusion, she slipped out of the club. Went on the run. Probably scared out of her wits. We don’t know her name. She stole some of the man’s files but tried to dispose of them in a railway station, in all likelihood as she was leaving the country. A friend in the police retrieved the papers for us, so no harm was done.”

“Are you or the network still looking for the Italian girl?”

“We aren’t, but I understand people in the network are concerned she might have caught a sight of the killer they employed for the job. However, that’s no concern to us.”

Cornelia felt a tinge of disappointment. She’d reconstructed the whole story, but she was nowhere nearer finding Giulia or getting Ivan’s clients off her backs. This was yet another dead end. There would be no point getting Santaclara to spill further beans. Her problem was now back in the States.

Santaclara poured her another glass.

“So what am I to do with you, young lady?” he asked.

LIFT ME UP

JACK AND ELEONORA CHECKED out of the Barcelona hotel just off Diagonal and hailed a cab which took them to the principal railway station where they boarded the local train going down the coast.

Forty minutes later they had arrived in Sitges. A popular beach resort which they both associated, albeit for somewhat different reasons, with Giulia. The tourist season was coming to an end, and already many of the restaurants facing the promenade were closed, shutters up for the winter, and the main stand which sold ice-creams, waffles, sweets in all colours and churroswas boarded up. The locals and visitors from the city paraded up and down the long walk until midnight. The first thing they noticed was the sheer number of pregnant women around. By next summer, there would be a logjam of prams and buggies joining the late night ramblers here.

Jack’s gaze was distant as they walked towards the gothic promontory formed by the old town fortifications from Napoleonic times, which separated the main shore from the San Sebastian area and, a stone’s throw beyond, the new leisureport. Between the cemetery on the hill and the port stood a rocky area where new apartments were being built all over the hills all the way to the railway line which bisected the town. Further up a succession of small beaches lay, a trio of narrow coves harbouring one of the town’s gay beaches as well as an unpoliced one where nudity was tolerated.

“You are very pensive,” Eleonora remarked.

“I know,” he answered, emerging from his private thoughts.

She looked up at him. Guessed.

“It’s here you came with her, isn’t it?” she asked even as she knew the answer. “That’s why she kept on mentioning Sitges in her letters to me.”

Jack nodded.

“She’s like an invisible third person in our relationship, isn’t she?” Eleonora pointed out. They were now descending the narrow stone steps separating the beach area from the recentlydeveloped pleasure harbour which was self-enclosed, and where the hotel they had booked into was situated.

“Same hotel?” she asked.

“Actually, no. We stayed in a small place in the town itself. All the places overlooking the sea were full. It was a very short notice trip for both of us.”

“How you say, it’s a small mercy,” Eleonora remarked.

They silently took the lift to the second floor, both too tired to walk up the stairs after walking miles that day. The windows of the long corridor at the back of the hotel looked onto a wall of rocks, where the cliff had been carved into to create space for the construction of the hotel, loose stones held back by a curtain of barbed wire.

After boiling some water for coffee, they settled on the balcony overlooking the marina port where a geometrical jungle of small boats spread out, some already mothballed for the coming colder season. Further out on the jetty wall, wild cats roamed. Muzak crept through the air as the parade of restaurants below their balcony came to life.

“Where do you want to eat?” Jack asked. “In the port or should we walk back into town? Whatever suits you best.”

It was as good a way as any other to break the rising blanket of silences that was beginning to separate them. Eleonora didn’t respond. Jack persisted.

“I know you were good friends, close friends, but tell me, if you will, was there ever more?”

She lowered her eyes as she answered.

“No…” then hesitated.

“You wouldn’t have minded?”

“Exactly. But she never responded if I say something in that direction, or touch her when we talk or walk…” Jack thought he saw her blushing, but the light of day was failing, and he couldn’t be certain.

He placed a hand on her knee.

Eleonora shuddered.

“I don’t think she ever was into other women, you know,” she whispered.

And began to cry.

Jack rose from his chair and took her into his arms.

They had become fools for lust, thrown together by their loneliness and the ever-present ghost of Giulia. They had come together by accident, bodies colliding quietly as their travels and this parody of an investigation they were conducting brought them closer to each other. But there were no deep emotions, just the mechanics of sex, the call of a warm body in the night, as if mere friendship was not enough.

He couldn’t tell Eleonora that once he was inside her, thrusting, grasping, sweating, he could not help himself thinking of Giulia, and wishing it was her instead and sometimes closed his eyes and imagined her face, the soon to be forgotten texture of her skin, the different rhythm of her breath at the instant of orgasm. As if to conjure up her presence like a magician of the flesh using his darkest spells.

And, in all likelihood, Eleonora opened herself to him, to his cock, all the time picturing Giulia’s plump lips wrapping themselves around it, welcoming Jack’s penis into the hot cavern of her mouth. Yes, she and Eleonora had kissed once, mouths open, tongues clashing, but it had been out of affection and both had been drunk anyway after a birthday party in the moat by the Colosseum organised by Giulia’s father for her nineteenth. A mad moment she had never been able to forget. Or the time they had instinctively held hands during an emotional moment at the opera together, although she now couldn’t recall any longer whether it had been a Verdi or a Puccini aria. Yes, the cock stirring inside her had known Giulia’s intimacy. It was what tenuously held them together. It was a terribly vulgar thought. It was inescapable.

“We miss her.”

“So much, yes.”

Jack and Eleonora went to bed. That night they did not make love.

Sitges emptied but they had nowhere else to go.

Jack had a call from Franck in Paris, advising him that the trail left behind by Giulia had now grown cold. Something about some papers left behind at one of the main railway stations, indicatingshe had left the country. His contacts in officialdom had effectively closed the case. Jack has asked whether it was the train station from which passengers travelled to Italy? No, it wasn’t. No, Franck informed, him, you could only reach the south-west of France and Spain from there. He thanked him and bid him good-bye.

So, their instincts had been right, to come here. But she could be anywhere or might have already moved on. Jack and Eleonora took heart from the information, but their hearts were no longer in it; deep down, they did not believe they would find Giulia any more.

Skin against skin.

Sharing the same bed but often worlds apart. Grazing softness, the mechanical comfort of remembered embraces.

“Don’t think of her, please…”

“I’m trying.”

“Doesn’t it feel different with me?”

“Yes… and no. It’s difficult to explain. I’m sorry.”

“I know. Me too, I also think of Henry, you know. It’s not just you. You touch me nice, but he touch me differently. It doesn’t mean better. Just different.”

“We think too much, Eleonora.”

“Yes, but is not possible to switch brain off like a machine or an instrument, is it?”

“Sadly no.”

Memory persists.

From week to week, the colony shrank or grew in size as the ebb and flow of arrivals and departures continued. Either dots in the sand or a small shantytown of tents and a handful of huts clumsily assembled from wooden planks and discarded roofs of corrugated iron. The only constants were the huts where food and basics could be purchased from local fishermen and budding Arab entrepreneurs and the souvenir stall held by Haroun and Jamel, who were also the principal source of dope for the motley group of Europeans. Supplies came in at night, whether by sea or across the dunes. No one had ever witnessed their actual arrival.

Once the beach and endless vistas of waves and horizon had been a thing of beauty. Now it looked to most eyes more like a bleak field of dreams. If they had been living in a movie this is where there would have been music on the soundtrack by Erik Satie or the camera would have panned down the shore to the sound of melancholy of an American indie tune of woe.

Giulia’s lost months began.

She still shared the same tent as Stieg and Marta. The couple were becoming closer, and in the dark she could track the steady progress of their tenderness and affection as their lovemaking grew less noisy and more furtive, just as their moans grew deeper and the silences between each thrust lengthened. Giulia listened and touched herself inside the cocoon of the sleeping bag, her own frantic movements mimicking the rhythm of her friends, somehow attempting by thumb and index finger to reach her climax as they came in unison. But Giulia would studiously keep her lips closed and not a sound would escape when the moment came, so as not attract attention to her own climax.

Although the nights were growing colder, there were still occasions when it felt too hot inside the exiguous tent or the waves of desire flying across from the embracing couple just made her dizzy with lust and longing and loneliness and she would discreetly slip out and walk a hundred metres or so down the beach to cool down, watching the sea, dipping her toes into the fresh nocturnal water, daydreaming, imagining, looking down at her body. Invariably she would not find herself alone on the sands and one or another would join her. Sometimes she would allow a man, or two, to shyly touch her and would not resist their advances. They would fuck her on the beach. Or she would follow them to their own tents. Some proved tender. Others were rough. But Giulia always remained silent. She had no wish to bond with them or know them better or even look at their faces. It was just some ritual in the dark that tempered her emptiness.

She didn’t think of herself as some slut or a fallen woman. At the colony, sex felt natural. The casual intimacy came easy. Something that just happened. And required no emotional investment. Even though she was overcome with terrible waves of sadness after the act. Because, as pleasurable as it might have been, it was never enough.

She took refuge in the dope.

Spending days in a haze, lazing in the sand, catching up with her sleep inside the now empty tent vacated by the rutting couple, swimming, taking endless walks up and down the beach and into the vastness of the neighbouring dunes, gazing at the sea and imagining pirate stories full of blood and daring that reminded her of her own bookish youth when she had spent days buried inside the world of novels and exciting adventures.

Briefly she recalled the whispered words of the bad man in Paris one night, as he had painfully taken her anal virginity on a violent whim and as he dug ever deeper inside her, and the burning sensation spread like wildfire through her body, he kept on threatening and cajoling her. How he would train her to become a sheer beast of pleasure, a wonderful whore; how he would sell her to pirates or was it slave traders, who would take her to sea, cage her, strip her of every last veneer of civilisation and turn her into an animal fit to service every single sailor on the ship before she was auctioned on the coast of Africa, displayed naked in some flea-ridden market, shaved, painted, examined into the deepest recess of her intimacy by potential buyers before disappearing into the desert for the rest of her life. At the time, the words, the prospect of such degradation had actually excited her in a perverse sort of way and the images had imprinted themselves indelibly on her mind. Again and again Giulia watched the sea.

But most of all she would waste the hours smoking the powerful local grass the Arab boys in the shack dispensed.

Soon the money she had stolen in Paris ran out.

She could always cadge food, fruit from others in the colony. She wasn’t a big eater anyway. But she was now dependent on the grass. It kept the world at bay, offered her a form of serenity she could no longer do without. Following a couple of days in a mild, but increasing state of need which surprised her, she resolved to do something about it.

One evening she finally nervously walked up to the shack where the two Arab boys traded their wares. She had actually never really looked at them closely before, and realised now that she was facing them that they were in fact fully grown men, probably in their mid-twenties she thought. Tall and lean, dark eyes buried deep into their sun-lined features. One had a thin beard obscuring his pockmarked cheeks. She had slipped on her bikini bottom. Feeling it would be more appropriate for the occasion, even though the majority of the women in the colony ventured all over the place in the nude throughout the day.

Communication with the locals was unusually in a halting mixture of English and French, but lengthy dialogues had seldom proven necessary before.

As she approached, Jamel held up a straw hat with a long band of silk circling its diameter, trailing well beyond the hem, waving it at her with exaggerated theatricality, indicating with a smile that it might suit her. Giulia noticed for the first time the long pink scar that bisected his left cheek.

“No, no,” she shook her head. “I’m not looking for a hat…”

There was a rictus of disappointment on his face at her reaction.

“You want something else?” he said. Haroun kept silent, looking her up and down, his eyes visibly lingering over her uncovered breasts. “More food deliveries they come tomorrow. Is too late already today.”

Giulia was now facing the two young men, noticing how one was her height but the other one only reached her cheeks. She hadn’t noted their disparity in height previously. Their musky smell reached her nose.

“I want herbe… grass…” she said. Then hesitantly continued, “but no money right now. Soon. Is it possible to have a few day’s credit?”

“You not pay, can’t pay” Haroun sought confirmation.

“Money is coming, From home. From my parents. It’s OK,” Giulia lied.

“Maybe not money,” Jamel suggested. “Something else you give us, no?”

She knew others had traded for watches or jewellery. But her watch was just an old battered Swatch, and the only jewellery she had was worthless. Her leather ankle chain and the cherry and leaf necklace Jack had bought for her just before she had decided to leave him, which he had given her on the occasion of their last time together. She didn’t even wear any rings on her fingers.

“What?”

“What have you got?” the taller Arab asked.

“I don’t know,” Giulia answered. “I don’t want that much grass. Just a little.”

“Just a little?”

“Yes.”

“What will you do?” one of them asked.

A veil of weariness fell over Giulia. One part of her knew all too well what the men had in mind while the other half of her brain struggled to accept the fact she had reached such a low of emptiness that the prospect of agreeing to their demands could be dismissed as just another necessary chore.

They were observing her. She lowered her eyes. In lassitude or in shame.

Haroun and Jamel took this as a sign of acceptance.

“You come inside, to the back,” one of them said, pulling up the improvised hinged wooden counter top that normally separated sellers and buyers.

In a daze, Giulia walked into the shack and was guided to the back where their sparse merchandise was stored.

“You French or Algerian?” Jamel asked, his hand rudely grabbing one her buttocks, feeling for firmness,

“No. Italian.”

“Ah, I know you are from south. Dark hair and eyes.”

Haroun’s breath smelled of pungent spices as he breathed down her neck and weighed her breasts in the cup of his hands.

“Is small, but nice.”

“Thank you,” Giulia couldn’t help herself responding, as if the past year of wandering and bad mistakes could not totally erase the politeness bred by her upbringing.

“You do everything?”

“Yes,” she whispered, guiding her mind away from her body, attempting to detach herself from the situation.

“Show us your body,” Haroun ordered.

Giulia straightened her back and pushed her chest forward.

“No. Completely naked,” he pointed at her off-grey bikini bottom.

She obeyed. After all, everyone in the colony past and present had witnessed her nude, and so had the two Arab merchants, albeit from a distance inside their shack with an open view across the beach.

She stood there, exposed.

“You not like lots of other European girls. You not shave there?”

He was referring to her unkempt bush, the pubic hair she had never enjoyed trimming, let alone thinning or carving into all sorts of shapes on the borderlines of smoothness.

“No,” she replied. There was no point explaining why to them.

“You dirty girl?”

She wanted to protest, but quickly realised he was not referring to personal hygiene.

“I think you be very dirty girl with us, if you want good herbe. You work hard to earn it, Italian girl, no?”

Giulia kept her silence. Her breath shortened. Images of sea pirates, violators, torturers, despoilers racing through her imagination.

“Open legs and bend,” Haroun said, moving behind her while Jamel placed himself in front of Giulia and began loosening his belt.

A stray finger rudely forced its way past her sphincter, followed by a gob of spit pearling down her rump to lubricate her dry opening. Jamel’s cock stood to attention in front of her eyes, uncut, a long thin envelope of brown, protective skin dangling past his hidden glans.

Giulia closed her eyes.

In darkness there is no sin, just shadows.

The finger in her rear was joined by another as the Arab man stretched her in readiness for his assault.

“Giulia! Giulia! Where are you? Are you inside?”

It was Stieg, loudly calling out for her.

The finger roughly withdrew from her anus, a long nail scratching her deep as it did so.

“Hell! What’s happening here?”

The dreadlocked Swedish backpacker had suddenly rushed into the shack’s storage room and surprised them.

Jamel, almost out of shyness, quickly pulled his trousers up to his waist and tucked his semi-hard cock inside. Haroun drew back behind Giulia, and turned to the unbelieving Stieg.

“Is OK,” he protested. “The girl she come here happily. We agree. Is deal. We give her herbe, she offer herself to us. Is not wrong.”

“The fuck it’s wrong,” Stieg exclaimed in anger. “Giulia, you cannot do this. It’s so wrong. You should have talked to Marta or me. You mustn’t do this.”

Giulia was still bent over in the degrading position she had been assigned when he had rushed in. Stieg placed his hand on her shoulders. “Come with me. Now.”

Giulia rose to her feet and followed him out the souvenir and provisions shack. She realised she had left her bikini bottom on the ground. He took hold of her hand and pulled her away from the area of the huts.

“You come back anytime, Signorina. We always have herbe. Is the strongest and the best,” Haroun shouted out behind her. “I know you come back,” he sneered.

Both Stieg and Marta were unmercifully angry at her. How could she do what she had done? Or been prepared to do, as Giulia feebly pointed out. Nothing had yet happened.

“I don’t know. I was in a daze,” she tried to explain to them.

“You must never do it again,” Marta pointed out. “Go to the Arab men. They will give you disease.”

“You smoke too much, Giulia. You must stop, cut down. It’s just not good for you so much,” Stieg added.

Giulia nodded in agreement.

“I will. I promise.”

Like adrenaline in steep overdrive, the realisation of what she had just done overwhelmed Giulia. It was madness, there was no other way to describe it. Her shoulders slumped. They were inside the tent where Giulia sat cross-legged on top of her crumpled sleeping bag. She had slipped on a T-shirt and panties.

“The others have set up a big new campfire down the beach,” Marta said. “It seems it’s Halloween. I’d lost all track of time being down here. The German girls have brought their guitars. Come with us. We’ll sing, drink a little, dance, relax. It will do you good, Giulia,” she suggested. “Take your mind off things.”

“No,” Giulia said. “I feel tired now. I’ll sleep instead.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she crawled into the sleeping bag. Marta tucked her in with care.

But sleep wouldn’t come. The earlier scene she had been involved in flashing like a movie behind her eyes. In slow motion. Speeded up. Every word said, every single gesture captured in the amber of memory. Giulia couldn’t help herself crying. What had become of her? How could she have stooped so low?

Distant sounds of laughter reached her from the campfire down the beach where the winter stragglers of the colony were enjoying themselves but it felt like a world away.

One hour or so later, or maybe it had been longer, Stieg unhooked the tent’s flap and looked in.

“You’re crying?” he queried.

“Hmmm…” Giulia sniffed.

“I thought I’d just come and check how you were. Not feeling better, are you?”

“No.”

“What is it?” Stieg asked.

“I feel abandoned, lonely.”

“There’s no need. We love you, you know, all of us. You’re our little girl lost…”

Giulia tried to regain her composure. She wiped her tears away with the back of her hand, raised herself halfway out of the sleeping bag and sat up. The night was cold and she felt a chill fly across the thin material of her T-shirt.

“I didn’t say thank you, Stieg. You arrived just in time.”

“I’d seen you wander away towards the huts, and you were such a long time returning, I sort of wondered what was you were up to,” Stieg explained.

“You saved me,” Giulia said.

“You’re our friend. I would have felt rather guilty had I not.” He lowered himself to his knees and leaned over to take Giulia into his arms and held her tight.

Giulia drew a deep breath and held in his fraternal embrace quietly wallowed in his warmth. He smelled of the sea. It had been such a long time since a man had held her like this, in invisible chains of tenderness. He loosened his grasp on her. A voice at the back of her throat was screaming silently that she wanted to stay like this for ever. She moved her chin from his shoulder where she had buried herself during their clinch, moved her lips towards his and kissed him, her tongue desperately darting past the wall of his teeth and connecting with his wetness.

Stieg initially displayed some hesitation but soon surrendered himself to the moment. He firmly strengthened his hold on her, squashing Giulia’s thin frame against his hard chest. His outstretched hands circled her back.

Giulia lowered her right hand from his shoulder and felt for his penis through the torn jeans he was wearing.

“I want you inside me now,” she begged.

“This is wrong,” he whispered.

“Who cares?” she said.

Marta returned to the tent a short while later to find Stieg and Giulia fucking on the ground between the two sleeping bags, sand flying wildly across their bodies as they convulsed. They were grunting like animals in heat. It was desperation, not lovemaking.

Stieg did not see her enter, too busy ploughing the young Italian woman who lay on her back opening herself wide to him.

Across his heaving shoulders Giulia caught a sight of Marta and the look of first surprise and then sheer disgust spreading across her features.

Giulia silently hoped Marta would recognise the note of regret in her eyes, explaining in the language of emotions that it wasn’t Stieg really, it could have been anyone, any man right now. That it wasn’t personal.

“Bitch,” Marta mumbled and turned back and ran down the sand away from the tent.

Stieg came loudly. Giulia was unable to reach orgasm despite the savage intensity of the fuck. They separated in darkness, neither willing to speak. Both slipped into their respective sleeping bags, as if nothing had happened.

When morning came, Marta had not returned to the tent.

SHE’S COMING HOME

MARTA HAD CAREFULLY FOLDED her clothes, taken off her bracelets, ankle chains and watch and removed her wallet, placed them all in a neat pile and, without a word to anyone, walked out as the sun rose and plunged into the still cold waves, as fearless of the elements as she had been all her life.

Marta never came back. Her body was not recovered, and Giulia’s whole world fell to pieces.

The sea near the improvised colony had always been treacherous but there was no one around to look after matters or raise a red flag warning that it was sometimes unsafe to swim. No one knew if she had done this deliberately or if had been an accident. Both Stieg and Giulia kept their own council, and mourned her silently, while all the others who had not known Marta as well as they had ambled silently up and down the beach for the next couple of days, watching the horizon in the vain hope of her surfacing again, or at any rate her inert body floating on the waters.

She kept on sharing the tent with Stieg, but an abyss of silence and blame quickly grew between them. Giulia wanted to feel guilty, but could not summon the right emotion. She wondered whether she had lost the capacity to feel for others, as if the cold heart Jack had once accused her of harbouring had now become a fact of life. She’d never wanted it to be that way. She’d dreamed of love, meeting the right one, having children. Where had this terrible dissatisfaction with normal life begun, she wondered?

Soon, the colony was almost deserted as others left, one at a time or in small groups, to migrate back to the world they had left behind. Winter was approaching. Barely a dozen tents survived, scattered across the immensity of the beach. Haroun and Jamel had boarded up their shack and disappeared one night.

“What do you plan to do?” Giulia had asked Stieg.

“I think I’ll stay,” he said. “Maybe she will come back.”

He kept on refusing to believe that Marta had drowned. Insisted she had just gone travelling and would return when her anger had faded.

“I’ll keep you company,” Giulia said.

He greeted the news with indifference.

Today, she would smoke that final joint, one she had found in Marta’s corner of the shared tent, half-buried in the sand beneath a pile of months-old women’s magazines she had picked up on her travels. Some sick form of inheritance, she realised. There was no more grass to be had, by any means. She convinced herself she could survive without it. Reality wasn’t that bad, was it?

Jack sat on the hotel room balcony facing the marina, counting the pregnant women walking by outside. Eleonora had gone into town to look at the shop windows, now that the siesta hour was over. He’d done that useless pilgrimage too often by now, and was long tired of the sight of leather belts at premium prices, cut-price swimming costumes and colourful and flimsy summer dresses and pharmacies advertising herbal Viagra substitutes between the handful of tapas bars.

The score was pregnant women: seven vs. prams: five. All in the space of one hour.

A small boat came swanning in and slowly inserted itself into its assigned gap and moored.

The smell of grilled fish wafted up from the parade of restaurants below that stretched all the way to the harbour’s gates.

For the first time in weeks, he had booted up his laptop and gone online earlier. Several Google Alerts for Giulia. Though not one of them actually concerned her, the search engines extracting her first name and her family name from separate locations on the web. An avalanche of e-mails, two thirds of them spam or newsletters he no longer took any interest in. Few people appeared worried by his disappearance from London. Only a few pointed comments from his literary agent. He had churned out three of his monthly book comment columns while still in Paris and the next deadline was still a few weeks away. He could always improvise another here without the need to refer to any of the actual books he was writing about. His online bank statement was still in the black. An editor in San Francisco was inviting him to contribute a new short story to an anthology on the theme of decadence. Twenty-four people wanted to become his friends on Facebook, none of whom he’d even met. He deleted messages wholesale.

The blank screen on his computer just glared at him.

He had once told Giulia, when they were still together, that he would never make her a character in one his stories or books. But he now realised he was now about to break that promise.

Writing about her would keep her alive. In his mind at least. No doubt she would hate him for doing this, he knewshe would see this as a particularly perfidious form of betrayal, but then how much worse could things be? She probably hated him already. Years ago, he would have written pages and pages full of sound and fury in the hope one woman or another would return to him, understand the savage nakedness of his love, the purity of his affection. He was older than that now and no longer held such romantic notions. It would just be a story, not a bottle in the sea.

Maybe he could try and imagine, novelise what she had been up to since she had left him behind and taken her own road on a journey where he could not follow.

Yes,she would take a train to the south and there could be guns, drugs, bad men, all the normal clichés, maybe even pirates on the high seas. A life imagined. There are no new stories, Jack reflected, just the craft of knitting familiar elements together and coming up with a new angle and enough surprises to keep the reader intrigued. The minor art of fiction.

He opened a brand new folder.

He was thinking about his opening line when Eleonora arrived back, with a baguette and a bottle of mineral water under her arms. They already had Serrano ham in the room’s fridge and had agreed to eat in tonight. She kissed him on the forehead.

“Any news?” she asked.

“No,” Jack replied. “Just doodling.”

“Doodling is what?” she looked at him and the empty laptop screen with round eyes.

“Just trying to write something.”

“I never see you write,” she said. “Is good if you start again.”

“Watching someone write is no spectacle, Eleonora. Most of the time, I just sit there, scratching my scalp or other parts, picking my nose, drinking Pepsi or coffee. There are better things to see, even on Spanish TV…”

Jack closed the folder and switched off his laptop.

The writing could wait.

Stieg opened his eyes, rubbed them, watched Giulia rise from the sleeping bag that had once belonged to Marta. Bent over to avoid brushing her unkempt head of black curls against the canvas of the tent’s roof, she slipped her jeans on, a pair of old socks and her scuffed trainers. He stretched his limbs, his vision of her still blurred by sleep as she stood there, her now-tanned skin and pert breasts contrasting with the off-blue of her washed-out jeans as she delved into her backpack where she finally found a well-creased T-shirt and a woollen cardigan he had never seen her wear before. He noticed her dropping various small items into her pockets, her purse, some papers — was it her passport? — and watched her slip out of the tent in silence. Stieg remained silent throughout.

Giulia aimed straight for the dunes, retracing the path that had brought them here months before. The upwards journey through the sand was arduous; she had grown used to wading barefoot through the sand for so long now, and her trainers now felt awkward and didn’t provide her with any grip. Half an hour later, she had reached the road which she remembered travelled north. The sun had barely risen. She sat down, took a sip of water from the plastic bottle and waited for some sign of traffic. By the time a van stopped for her, she had almost run out of water. The driver was an Arab with a lined face, his sun-ravaged skin drawn tight across his features. He was only driving to the nearest village, where he said she might find drivers journeying to Tangiers.

The next day, seven vehicles later, Giulia finally reached the city and caught a bus and then a ferry to Gibraltar where she rang her father back in Rome from a public telephone booth on reverse charges.

“I want to come home,” she told him. “I need your help.”

He asked her no questions, just listened to her explanations and what she needed now. First he would wire her some money at the General Post Office and would then arrange for a flight to be booked. There were no direct connections between Gibraltar and Rome, and she would have to catch a connection in Madridwhere she would have a six-hour wait. Giulia smiled: what were a few more hours in the general scheme of things?

“Please,” she asked him. “One thing… When I am home, I don’t want you to ask any questions, OK?”

“You’re my daughter,” he said. “The important thing is that you return to your family. I will ask no questions, that’s a solemn promise.”

“Thank you.”

The cash would likely not reach her until the next day, she knew. She sought out the beach where she would sleep tonight. A final night on the sand would not do her any further harm, she reckoned.

Eleonora was reading on the hotel room’s balcony, while Jack took a shower. Their conversation these past days had reached a total impasse, as if they no longer had anything to say to each other. Words no longer seemed necessary. They both cared immensely for the other, but there was a wall that now separated them. They slept in the same bed but no longer touched, almost like a couple who had been married or together for decades. It had only taken them three months to reach this awkward stage of comfortable companionship.

He heard her cellphone ring.

Jack was washing his hair when she came into the bathroom.

“Anything?” he said, brushing the water away from his eyes.

“Yes.”

He switched the water off and Eleonora handed him a towel. Her face was inscrutable.

“So?”

“It was Il Dottore…”

He stepped out of the bathtub, still dripping profusely onto the porcelain tiles. He held his breath as long as he possibly could. Please, not bad news. Please. Please.

“She’s returned home.”

The weight on his shoulders and heart just swept away in an instant.

They looked at each other. Extraordinary relief. Pleasure. Questions galore.

“Good,” Jack said. His vocabulary had been drained and he could thing of nothing better to say.

“Yes,” Eleonora confirmed.

“So here comes an end to our lives as amateur detectives,” he joked.

She managed a crooked smile.

They walked back to the bedroom, where he slipped on some clothes. She closed the window to the balcony to keep out the cold.

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” she said.

“I see.”

“It’s better that way. I’m not sure if I want to see Giulia again, in Rome. But my life is there. I’ll have to find a job, do something with my life. It’s been good being with you, but we both knew it would come to an end. You understand?”

“I do.”

The quest for Giulia had finally brought them together. Its ending could only tear them apart. That was the way of things.

“I’ll call reception to let them know we’ll be leaving tomorrow then.”

“What will you do?” Eleonora asked.

Jack had a wry smile. “Go back to my wife, I reckon.” He had never mentioned her before. Yet another unseen presence in his affairs of the heart. “If she will have me back.”

Eleonora moved over to the kitchen area to boil some water for coffee.

Jack called out after her.

“Maybe the next time we meet, we can make things work out better,” he suggested. “All you have to do is call me, you know that. Anywhere in the world, I will take you. Just say where and when, OK?”

“Yes, I think we need time for reflection,” Eleonora pointed out. “If we meet again, it must be a new chapter. We start again. Just us. No more Giulia and Henry looking, how you say, over our shoulders?”

Eleonora would return to Rome and he to London. She spoke to Giulia once on the phone, neither of them willing to reveal much of what had happened in the intervening months since Giulia had left for her studies in Paris.

She would find a job in Naples as the official photographer for the local sports arena where a variety of rock and jazz concerts were held. It wasn’t much but it was a living. Jack began writing stories again, in great part influenced by the past months. She had a brief affair with a drummer but she knew he would never be faithful to her. Six months later, in the throes of abominable loneliness she rang Jack. She knew he was not perfect and that they could not seriously envisage a future life together, but right there and then all Eleonora wanted was a bit of tenderness.

He sounded exactly the same. Both positive and melancholy.

“Another chance?” she asked him.

“Absolutely.”

“You won’t believe it, but I have missed you.”

“Me too… Swear.”

“That’s good,” she said. The sounds of Naples at night were crowding outside the window of her first floor apartment.

“Where?” Jack asked her.

They made the necessary arrangements.

Giulia’s flight landed at Fiumicino. Her father was unable to pick her up as he was on hospital duty, but her mother and brother had come to greet her instead. Tommaso was driving her old banged-up car, which she had been given on her nineteenth birthday. She was surprised it hadn’t yet fallen apart.

Both were careful not to ask her too many questions as they waited for her luggage to emerge along the conveyor belt.

They both remarked on how tanned she was and that she had lost weight.

The drive back into the city was loaded with long silences.

Rome seemed so quiet and provincial after all this time away. So dead. But she knew it was not the city that had changed in her absence. She was a different person now.

Giulia briefly remembered Ernesto. He was nice, but a bit boring. Years ago, during the course of her first year at University, together with two other friends they had organised a film club. He was the only boy she had brought home that her mother had approved of. Well-bred, polite, somewhat shy. But she knew he had a soft spot for her. Had been hurt and resentful when he had heard through common friends that she had become involved with a man twice her age. He’d begun to avoid her as a result. Maybe she would agree to see him again.

They reached the Circonvallazione. Tommaso’s driving manners had not improved, she noted with a wry smile, as her brother cut across the next lane of traffic with a total disregard for other cars. Her mother was wittering away about aunts and uncles and the whole gallery of their relatives. Giulia felt it difficult to feign interest.

Yes, she would phone Ernesto.

Maybe boring was what life was meant to be about.

THE FLIGHT OF THE ANGEL

HAD ENRICO NOT BEEN so suspicious, Cornelia would at some stage have cited the pretext of a previous business engagement in Paris and left the villa that very evening. And swiftly disappeared back to America to deal with the perilous loose ends. It wasn’t the people in France who represented a problem now, just her own faceless principals in America. And all for that moment of unnecessary kindness when she had briefly caught a sign of loss in Giulia’s eyes.

“So are you just an unusual girl in search of kicks or something altogether different, Marti?” he’d asked. “That is my dilemma.”

“That’s for you to decide,” she replied.

“And is your name really Marti?”

“Why do you doubt it?”

“Because you carry no papers, passport or anything that might provide a clue in your handbag. Somewhat unusual, no?”

“My mother always warned me about the danger of pickpockets in Europe.”

“Is that why you don’t even have a single credit card in your purse. So uncommon for an American.”

“I happen to be something of an uncommon gal.”

“So I’d noticed earlier. I’ve never come across a handbag so Spartan and anonymous in a woman. You certainly travel light: a handful of bank notes, a tube of lip salve, a few commonplace pills, a map of the city, Métro tickets, a vial of perfume, a spare set of underwear and paper clips. Or have I forgotten anything?”

“I like to travel light. Most ungentlemanly to go through a lady’s bag, Enrico.”

“At least it’s French perfume.”

“Duty-free has its advantages.”

Santaclara gave her an amused but probing look.

“You will stay in the house tonight, Marti.”

“Is that an order?” she asked.

“Shall we say I’d prefer it if you did.”

All she had was the bathrobe now wrapped around her nudity. She had no clue where he might have stored the clothes she had arrived in. She had little alternative.

“As you wish.”

“Just a precaution, you see. These have been strange days. Our friend’s demise and then a few days ago one of the security men from the club was found dead in somewhat ugly circumstances, so you must understand my caution. He had been on duty the night of the hit. We’re still wondering if there is a connection.”

Cornelia didn’t bat an eyelid under his intense gaze.

He emptied his glass.

She declined a refill.

“Actually, I am famished following our earlier exertions. Have you any food? Nothing elaborate, some snack maybe? I’d rather not have to go to sleep on an empty stomach. Or play further.”

“Of course, my dear. Let’s repair to the kitchen. Right now. Can’t have you hungry, can we?”

Cornelia was beginning to piece together the lay of the land and getting her orientation around the sprawling house. This had now become more than a recce as she actively concentrated to raise herself to combat mode. Santaclara was no fool and wasn’t going to dismiss her presence as lightly as she had initially hoped. There was no easy retreat. Normally, she would have accepted the prospect of a further rough fuck or two with a light heart and mind, but she now knew he wouldn’t be satisfied with such a basic outcome before setting her loose. Why would he have revealed so much under her less than probing questioning if that was the case?

Now, she was no longer certain whether he had even told her the whole story. Maybe he and his remaining partners in the club were also actively involved in the trading of women and the elimination of the man she had been assigned to kill was just a way to increase their share of the proceeds.

Did he maybe consider her to be a potential piece of no doubt valuable merchandise?

She idly wondered what sort of price she might fetch. After all, she had displayed an abnormal willingness to be stretched to her limits and had offered no resistance and she knew that white meat, blonde at that, could fetch a high price, even more so as she wasn’t Eastern European and therefore even more exotic and rare. The Middle East, Africa, South America. The possibilities were endless.

Not that she had any intention to allow herself to be funnelled further down the flesh pipeline. Her complicity had always been a means to an end, and she felt no inner need to submit or serve.

They had shared bread, cold cuts and a chilled bottle of white wine at the wooden kitchen table.

“You will have your own room, of course,” he had informed her. “I’m sure you will find it comfortable. I think I have tired you enough for today. We will have more time on our hands tomorrow. I certainly wish to explore further with you, Marti. You have the beauty, and the right body for our games but you also clearly have a brain, a most favourable combination. You will have to tell me more about your past experiences. Explain a bit what makes you tick.”

“Tomorrow,” she willingly agreed. Her buttocks were still on fire. He had carefully marked her there stopping just before drawing blood in earnest.

“Good. Oh, and my German shareholder will be joining us. I rang him earlier while you were showering. Told him about you. He is intrigued. I hope you don’t mind. He is driving down. Should be with us shortly before lunch I expect.”

“Do I have an alternative?”

“No.”

“Am I to be the main course?” she asked.

“How witty,” Santaclara said. “Now, let me show you around the house. I’m very proud of it.” Cornelia welcomed the guided tour. It would serve her well.

There was an indoor pool in the east wing of the villa, its surrounds festooned by a profusion of orchids spanning most of the colours of the rainbow, earthenware pots circling the perimeter walls of the pool. “You should swim,” Enrico suggested.

“I’ve just eaten,” Cornelia protested feebly.

“It was so light. Anyway, it’s an old wives’ tale that one shouldn’t swim after a meal. Didn’t you know that?”

“They forgot to teach me that at university.”

He beamed.

“Educated. Even better.”

“Do you have a lady’s swimming suit you could spare, then?”

“No need, Marti. Throw that bathrobe of yours off and let me see that sleek, charming body of yours. Your pallor will blend so perfectly with the blue of the water. I reckon it’s too late now to be coy, no?”

Whatever kept him happy. Cornelia discarded the robe, dipped a couple of toes in to check the temperature. She’d always disliked bathing in the sea, it was always too cold for her, even in warmer climes. And she’d never been a very good swimmer, which had been a great disappointment to her parents. She lowered herself in and swam a couple of lengths while he watched her with a satisfied grin spreading across his features. He was holding a large towel out for her as she later emerged dripping from the water. He massaged the thick material against her skin to dry her.

“Wonderful. Now let’s escort you to your bedroom. You need a good night’s sleep.” He hadn’t returned the bathrobe and she understood he wanted her to walk the rest of the way stark naked. As she stepped up the stairs, she felt his eyes as he followed below her looking straight into her most intimate parts.

The upper floor was a labyrinth of corridors and bedrooms furnished with care and taste. The room she had been assigned was right at the end.

“Get your energy back,” he said, gently guiding her past the door with a firm hand on her bare and still damp shoulder. “You’ll need it.”

The door was locked behind her. The room had no windows.

Cornelia slumped on the bed and pulled the covers and sheets towards her.

Sleep came easily.

She heard the key turn in the lock. Wiped the night away from her eyes and glanced at her watch. Past ten in the morning already. She had been so tired that all dreams had been kept at bay.

“Join me in the kitchen, whenever you feel ready to face the day,” she heard Santaclara say, as he retraced his steps down the corridor and the stairs leading down to the ground floor.

When Cornelia opened the door, she found another bathrobe, still smelling cleanly of detergent and fragrant conditioner on the floor outside. At least she wasn’t expected to parade nude again. She slipped it on and tightened the belt around her slim waist.

“Good morning,” Enrico called out as she emerged into the brightly lit kitchen. He was sitting at the table sipping from a large bowl of coffee.

“Hi,” Cornelia tentatively said.

“Bread, coffee, jam?” he offered, pointing at the spread scattered across the breakfast table.

Cornelia smiled at him, with as much innocence as she could summon.

“Actually, would you mind awfully if I took another dip in the pool. It would be a nice way to start the day, invigorate myself for later rigours. May I?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “What a splendid idea. In fact, as I watched you swim and then later walk yesterday evening, Marti, it made me think of a dancer. Yes, that’s what you reminded me of. Do you like dancing?”

“When I am given the opportunity, yes,” she said.

Was he playing with her, or was it just a coincidence? Cornelia was unsure.

“I won’t be that long. Just a few lengths and some exercise. Stretching and all that. You could even join me, why not?”

He looked at her, weighing up his options.

“An excellent idea,” he finally responded. “Let me finish here. I’ll be with you very soon. Go along,”

Cornelia made her way to the wing of the vast villa where the indoor pool was situated, rapidly scouting her surroundings as she made her way forward for anything that could suit her purpose. The final room to her right before the four-step descent into the pool area was a large, cavernous and lushly-appointed lounge with a massive home cinema screen covering its back wall and a row of deep, leather seats. To keep the light out, the windows were shielded by heavy mauve brocade drapes. Right now they were open and offered a partial view of the leafy walled garden. Cornelia swiftly advanced into the room and threaded out one of the knotted curtain cords holding the drapes in place. On her way out, she closed the door to the room. And briskly continued her short journey to the pool. It had only taken her a few seconds.

Shedding the robe, Cornelia slipped into the water, still holding the thick cord bunched up in her hand. Standing, submerged up to her chest, she looked around her and spotted the small circular outlets through which the pool’s pumping system recirculated the water. She stuffed the cord inside the furthest cavity, waded back to the other side of the pool and waited for Santaclara’s arrival.

She didn’t have long to wait.

She peered up at him, her wet hair momentarily unfurling its blonde curls all the way down her back.

“It’s so long,” he said. “You’re like a true siren.”

She had carefully avoided getting her hair wet the previous evening.

“You’re wearing trunks,” she protested. “It’s not fair. Makes things quite unequal. I get the distinct feeling you like to hold the upper hand, Enrico.”

Enrico laughed.

Hetook an elegant dive into the pool, splashing her wildly as he cut through the water. He quickly resurfaced, straightened out and whizzed past her, swimming with grace as he completed his first length. Cornelia just stood in place, her hands and feet fluttering idly, content to feel the lukewarm soup of the water wash over her body. Santaclara appeared determined to put in some genuine exercise. Which suited Cornelia just fine. With her back to the pool’s rim she inched back and pulled the cord out of its cranny and waited for him to make another vigorous turn and pass her.

Her outstretched arm holding the soaking thick curtain cord in a loop, she caught him in full flow as the improvised weapon circled his neck. It wasn’t enough to hurt him badly, but it took Santaclara by surprise and the impact and sharp pressure of the material against his Adam’s apple forced him to open his mouth wide and swallow too much water. His body jack-knifed as he floundered badly. Cornelia pounced and pulled on the cord with both her hands and all her strength while digging her right foot into his back to increase her leverage while the agitated man began to struggle like a drowning puppet, half choking, half gasping for air.

Cornelia knew he was in good physical shape and would eventually regain some instinctive form of composure and would likely be strong enough to resist being garrotted in this manner. Still pulling hard on the cord, she released her right hand and keeping her foot buried in the small of his back, she moved the freed hand to his wet scalp and viciously forced the man’s whole head under the water. She couldn’t strangle him, but drowning would suffice. Like a fish both caught in a whirlpool and speared by a hook, indistinctly becoming aware that the dual attack was getting the better of him, Santaclara began to convulse. Cornelia increased the downwards force on his head, resisting his attempts to surface for air. He squirmed unexpectedly and she briefly lost control of the upper part of his wriggling body but she sharply adjusted her stance and fiercely dug her knee into his back, without losing any of the advantage the position gave her.

The whole scene took place in complete silence, bar the splashing and the ripples coursing outwards through the water where Santaclara’s head was submerged.

Cornelia drew her breath, hoping her lesser bodily strength would hold out against the man’s diminishing energy before the balance between them might turn against her.

Gradually his frantic movements slowed, the remaining air inside his lungs thinning, undermining his strength to fight her and Cornelia knew she was winning the struggle to maintain him under the pool’s surface.

Time ground to a halt.

There was a final jolt and Santaclara’s body went limp under her hand and against the vicious downwards pressure applied by her knee. This was it. Cornelia waited an extra couple of minutes to ensure this was no unlikely ruse and eventually let go. The man’s body, face downwards in the water, just floated there. He was dead.

Throughout the struggle, Cornelia had managed to stay totally calm, emotionless. A detachment born of experience although this was the first time she had actually killed someone with her bare hands. It was only now that she pulled herself out of the pool that the adrenaline began to flow throughout her body. She sat down in one the plastic deck chairs scattered around the swimming pool’s perimeter and the wall of orchids. The sensation was intoxicating. It was better than sex.

The German associate arrived two hours later. He was a short, swarthy balding man with an annoying imperious manner.

Cornelia had lingered in an energy-restoring bath, washing all the chlorine off her skin and shampooing her hair until she felt normal again. She had located where Santaclara had stuffed her clothes and dressed and spent an hour or so exploring the villa at leisure. Her plan formed.

“So you’re the American woman?” the German said, looking her up and down with a superior manner after she had opened the front door for him. She had buzzed his car through the electronic gates of the property. A metal grey BMW 318i Estate, she noted.

“Well, I don’t see any other gals around,” she smirked, letting him in. He wore a grey pinstriped suit and black shoes polished to within an inch of mirror shade perfection.

“Where’s Santaclara?” he asked.

“Went out to the shops,” Cornelia replied. “Normal stuff, bread, milk, we’d run out, he said.”

The German looked surprised. There was an innate meanness about him. Like an aura of menace. This was a man who knew how to inflict pain and revel in its effects. Cornelia experienced a sense of relief that she would not now be used further by him and Santaclara. This bastard would have certainly displayed a cruel imagination.

“Enrico said I should entertain you, of course.”

“Good.”

“You’ve been driving a long time, I understand. We can go to the kitchen. Drink something,” she suggested.

“Perfect,” he curtly said. He dropped his brown leather attaché case to the floor and followed her.

“Water, juice or something stronger?” Cornelia offered.

She was keeping her fingers crossed he wouldn’t go for beer. There were only cans, which she had been unable to spike. She had earlier found a large cache of sleeping pills in one of the bathroom cabinets, enough to despatch a whole battalion into the arms of Morpheus. She’d wondered whether they had been for Santaclara’s sole use or were kept in such abundant reserve for possible female visitors. If that was the case, there was some poetic irony in the situation. She had emptied every single tube and bottle and carefully ground the white pills down to a fine powder which she had evenly distributed across a strategic number of bottles and carefully ensured they had fully dissolved throughout the respective liquids.

The German guy looked around the kitchen shelves, still eyeing Cornelia with some suspicion.

“Will he be long?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

Cornelia sat down at the table, not wanting to rush him in any way. She had hoped to locate a suitable gun somewhere in the house, but even after breaking into a handful of closed drawers, she had been unable to get her hands on one. Forensics however would have been a bastard and she was hoping to depart the scene later, with no obvious evidence of her passage hanging around. A bullet lodged deep inside a skull would warrant too thorough an investigation. Drowned men didn’t.

“Well, we are in France, after all. Is there some white wine in the fridge?”

There was.

He was out cold within a half hour. Much too long as far as Cornelia was concerned. Throughout, as they sat together uncomfortably in the kitchen, taking sips of wine and waiting, she could virtually read the German’s mind as he mentally planned her use and degradation later, and a manipulative smile spread across his thin lips at the thought of the abuse and how he would enjoy it.

While she had been waiting for Santaclara’s German acolyte, Cornelia had been thorough in her explorations and established the fact that the villa’s garage housed all the right ingredients for her purpose.

She had never torched a house before, but had watched enough TV crime series or read enough books to understand the basics. She also felt confident that French fire investigators did not have the same technical resources at their disposal as their American counterparts, fictional or otherwise. And, even if she slipped up, it was most unlikely that the source of the fire could be tracked down back to her. There would be no prints. Not that hers were on anyone’s records. Just a dead body drowned in the pool, and another burned to a crisp in the kitchen area whose stomach contents would by then have turned to ashes.

Once the flames had caught hold and began spreading rapidly, licks of fire streaming across drapes, swimming like a horde of lemmings over ceilings, consuming furniture and wall hangings in their hungry stride, Cornelia retreated to the front door and slammed it behind her. She had picked the German’s pockets earlier and retrieved his car keys and drove to the centre of town, where she abandoned the vehicle in an underground car par under St Germain des Prés.

She made her way to her hotel, paid the bill in cash, retrieved her meagre belongings and took the Métro to the Gare Du Nord where she took the first Eurostar train to London. She knew that neither the British or French border officials at the station or at London’s Kings Cross scanned passports in view of the sheer amount of passengers passing through. It was better to avoid her particulars being archived a few weeks in a row departing Paris. The muddier the waters the better.

She spent a week in London, acting like a normal tourist, visiting museums and theatre shows on Shaftesbury Avenue, enjoying Indian meals, walking in the plentiful parks, openly using her credit cards for the first time.

For her flight back to New York she had a choice of seats to either Newark or Kennedy. She chose Kennedy.

TAKE ME TO CARNEVALE

JACK AND ELEONORA HAD arranged to meet the man in a small café on the left-hand side of Campo Santa Maria Formosa, right opposite the church and the hospital. It was February. It was Venice. A thin morning mist still shrouded the city, floating in from the lagoon, like a shimmering curtain of silk, half obscuring the old stones, the canals and the normal sounds of the floating city.

They’d been communicating by e-mails since parting months before in Sitges.

They both knew there were still things left unsaid between them.

Thought they would give it one more chance. To see if they could banish the ghost of Giulia and past relationships.

Jack hadn’t even brought his laptop with him on this Venice trip, but the apartment they were staying in, which he had agreed to house-sit for friends travelling in India, had a computer in almost every room and a wi-fi connection and it had been, for both of them, almost too much of a temptation. Like allowing their fate to be decided by the vagaries of electronic availability.

Eleonora had been sitting on one of the sofas, half reading and half daydreaming, while he listened to music on his iPod. Right then the soundtrack by Nick Cave for The Assassination of Jesse James, he would remember later.

“I don’t know,” Eleonora had said, and he had recognised exactly the precise words she had uttered, just from reading her lips behind the threnody in his ears. It was something she often mumbled when things were not quite right.

He’d switched off the music and turned towards her.

“What is it?”

The green of her eyes emerged from a sea of sadness.

“You know…” she replied.

He knew. Oh yes, he knew. They were just going nowhere, and no earnest conversation could put them back on track. Even in Venice.

They had reached the city a week or so earlier, arriving at Marco Polo airport. To save money, they had not gone to the extravagance of taking a water taxi but, instead, the bus which took them across the Ponte Della Liberta to Piazzale Roma where they had caught a vaporettodown the Grand Canal to the Rialto Bridge stop and, following the map they had been e-mailed by his friends, had somehow made their way on foot to the apartment, dodging the customary labyrinth of small bridges and lesser canals.

By now they had visited a multitude of churches, several handfuls of Titian and Canaletto paintings, eaten too much exquisite food to jade the best of palates and suffered an indigestion of baroque and classical architecture and the silences between them were growing longer.

From their bedroom window, they could see St Mark’s Place and the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile across a bend in the Canal. But the weather was cold and humid and the old building’s heating was stuttering at its best and they’d had to wear sweatshirts most of the time both inside and outside.

Maybe he should have chosen the Caribbean where they could have lazed naked on a beach and the warmth might have seeped into their mood. But Eleonora had never been to Venice and he had promised her he would take her anywhere she wanted, and she was aware that Roberto and Barbara had once offered him the apartment here should he ever wish to visit. Jack had been to Venice several times before, and to be frank had never been too much of a fan. In summer, the canals smelt and he disliked being just an anonymous part of the tourist crowds. In truth, he was not a great traveller.

Eleonora, on the other hand, was twenty years younger and always sported an enthusiasm for new places and experiences that he no longer could pretend he had. And he secretly knew he’d never possessed the joy or curiosity even when he had been younger himself.

Although neither wanted to broach the subject they both knew to a different degree that their relationship was doomed. The age difference, the opposing temperaments, the cultural differences, the weight of his own past, her own ambitions in life. But loneliness still bound them. His, full of despair that she would in all likelihood turn out to be the last significant love of his life; hers, full of wonder that Jack had somehow become the first genuine love in her life — yes, she had now realised, Henry had just been a youthful infatuation– but with her mind, her imagination nagging her daily about the roads not taken and all the future roads that were still to be reached.

In an effort to negate the due date on their affair, they had agreed to come to Venice. In her mind, she had wanted to confront beauty. In his, it was just a melancholy vision of past literary memories of Thomas Mann, Byron, Dickens or Nic Roeg which resonated in the greyness of his soul, the delusion that a trip to a new place could repair the stitches that were coming apart in his life. The magic of Venice as suture.

“Carnival begins tomorrow,” he had pointed out to her.

“Really?” she had exclaimed, her eyes widening in anticipation.

“Yes.”

“Will you buy me a mask?” Eleonora had asked.

“Of course.”

“And I will get one for you,” she suggested. “Something darkly romantic, that would just suit you.”

“Why not?”

“And we acquire them separately, and they remain secret until the first evening we go out and wear them. A surprise!”

“A lovely idea,” Jack had readily agreed, the fleeting thought of Eleonora quite naked except for a delicate white Carnival mask shielding her face, and her green eyes peering through the disguise already warming his heart and suggestible loins.

His finger lingered on her knee, and he shuddered. The electricity between them still worked.

“Can we go online and read all about the Carnival?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said. They made their way to the guest bedroom where the nearest connected computer stood on a rickety trestle table their host used to mix his paints on.

Above it, by coincidence, hung slightly crooked on the wall by the window, was a gaudy painting of a woman in chains wearing only a black mask which obscured her eyes. Roberto’s latest BDSM variation.

They surfed freely for the next couple of hours, learning all about Carnevale and its origins, the tales of Casanova, the types of masks and their significance. One link led to another and yet another until an aimless stroke of the keyboard took them to the website where out of sheer prurient curiosity they arranged for the meeting in the bar on Campo Santa Maria Formosa the next day.

At first, Jack had been somewhat hesitant, but Eleonora’s enthusiasm had swayed him.

“It will be an experience,” she said.

“I suppose so,” he answered.

“Don’t act so old and blasé,” she added.

Jack smiled wryly. She always knew howbest to silence him.

“Yes, it’s all because of Attila the Hun.”

They were sipping espressos at the back of the small café. The man was in his fifties and had white hair and was explaining how the earliest inhabitants of Venice had been exiled all the way to the lagoon by the invasion of their native lands by foreign hordes.

“Fascinating,” Eleonora commented.

“And the bridge that connects us to the Italian mainland was only built by Mussolini under a century ago. Before that we were isolated and you could only reach the city by water.”

Jack ordered another round from the hovering waitress. Mostly San Pellegrino mineral water; neither he nor Eleonora could cope with too much coffee at this time of day.

“It’s a party,” the man who called himself Jacopo said. “But we try and organise matters so that we adhere to all the old traditions of the Venice Carnevale, not the diluted versions that have sadly evolved over the years since Carnevale’s heyday.”

“We understand,” Jack said. Eleonora looked him in the eyes, and nodded.

“It is strictly by invitation, of course,” he continued. “Normally, we try and restrict attendance to pure Venetians, but as you know, there are fewer of us now. The younger generations are all leaving the city. So sad.”

He looked at Eleonora. Her dark hair shone glossily; she had washed it just before they had left the apartment to walk here. When wet her hair then extended to the small of her back like a long curtain of silk. Jack observed her, too. She looked luminous. Already excited by the prospect of the party they were being informally interviewed for. As if a fire was rising inside her, bringing light to her features, heat to her hidden senses. Jack recognised that gleam in her eyes. It was invariably present when she had been fucked. He kept on watching, transfixed as Jacopo’s words swept soundlessly over him. The man with the white hair also kept on observing Eleonora, as if weighing her in his steady gaze.

Jack returned to reality, reluctantly abandoning his vision of Eleonora’s fascinated attention to the man’s words.

“Naturally, you remain masters of your destiny. A polite ‘no’ will always prove an acceptable response to any overture, although it is hoped that all guests will participate freely and openly in the proceedings.”

Again, Eleonora nodded, her chin bobbing up and down.

Jack sighed discreetly.

It was true that they had often discussed the remote prospect of others joining in their games, their lovemaking. But they had never reached the stage where they had actively done anything about it.

Something inside him — something rotten or diseased?– had always imagined what it would be like to see Eleonora mounted by another, harboured the curiosity to witness how another man would touch her, make her moan. Because he found her so beautiful, part of him felt she should be shared with the whole world, so that all and sundry could truly understand why his love for her was so strong and overpowering. But it was a long road from mere thoughts to the realities of the flesh.

She had even asked “Would you be jealous if it actually happened?” and he had been obliged to dig deep into his thoughts and had finally answered quite truthfully “I’m not sure. Maybe if I could watch. I wouldn’t want you to fuck another man behind my back, that’s for sure.”

“Wonderful,” Jacopo said as he rose from the café table. “You are a lovely couple. I think you will enjoy our parties a lot.”

They had jointly agreed to attend the opening of Carnevale the next day. He had slipped over a piece of paper on which he had scribbled the address.

“Every party takes place in a different locale,” the man with the white hair had said. “They can only be reached by the canals, so you will have to make arrangements accordingly.”

They all shook hands and he departed.

Left alone, Jack and Eleonora looked at each other. He tried to smile, but couldn’t raise the right rictus. He knew already that they would go. Eleonora had always been a woman of her word and once a decision had been taken, only hell and high water could ever change her mind.

“Well,” she said.

“Hmmm…”

Eleonora was dressing.

“Don’t wear panties,” Jack suggested.

“Really?”

“Yes. I think it would fit in with the spirit of the occasion.”

Eleonora chuckled softly.

“If you say so. Anyway, the dress is quite heavy, so I shouldn’t feel the cold…” She gave him a twirl. He applauded theatrically.

“Flattery will get you everywhere…” she said.

They had been shopping in Mestre. In Venice, the prices were much too unaffordable. She had found him a sleek black silk suit made in Thailand which Jack wore with a black shirt and a scarlet bow tie.

“My prince of darkness!” Eleonora laughed. As if he now reminded her of a vampire.

In contrast, the dress they had acquired for tonight’s event for her was white and made from thick linen, falling to her ankles with ornate elegance from her bare shoulders downwards, thin, almost invisible straps holding the dress up above her small, delicate breasts, unveiling just a discreet if appetising hint of gentle cleavage. Underneath she wore just dark hold-up stockings reaching to mid-thigh, their shapely black veil as sharp as her luxuriant pubic hair. A perfect conjugation of nights, when she cheekily raised the dress to her midriff, exposing herself to him.

God, she was stunning! Her lipstick was fiery red and she had surrounded her eyes with a grey circle of kohl.

They had found masks at Mondonovo, on Rio Terra Canal, near the Campo Santa Margherita, where masks could still be found that were replicas of the old historical, traditional models, and were different from the traditional fare on offer to gullible tourists in search of local colour.

For Jack, in his black outfit, they had chosen a larva, also called a volto. It was white, made of fine wax and should have typically been worn with a tricorn and cloak, which he had of course absolutely no intention of doing. After all, this was the twenty-first century! The shape of the mask would allow him to breathe and drink easily, and so there was no need to take it off, thus preserving anonymity.

Eleonora, on the other hand, had been coaxed by the old wrinkled lady at the store to select a morettainstead of the more traditional bauta. It was an oval mask of black velvet that was usually worn by women visiting convents. Invented in France it had rapidly become popular in ancient Venice as it drew out the beauty of feminine features. The mask was finished off with a veil, and was normally secured in place by a small bit in the wearer's mouth. As this was not appropriate to participate in a modern party, Eleonora’s model had been modified so it was held by a clip at its apex that was attached to her mountain of curls.

“Bella,” the old woman had said when Eleonora had tried the mask on.

“Bellissima,” Jack said in turn, with a painful stab of fear coursing through his stomach, as Eleonora stood, fully attired in dress and mask, and the jungle of her curls peering impudently above the formal mask.

“Grazie mille,” she laughed.

There was so much more he wanted to say to her. Like “Do you really want to go?” or “What will you do if another man proposes to you?” or “Do you still want me?” but the gondola they had booked had just arrived. They walked down to the waterside entrance of the building. The night air was cold and the sky full of scattered stars whose reflection glistened over the waters of the small canal like a million phosphorescent fish.

Jack read the address out to the gondolier in his French-accented Italian.

“It’s party time,” Eleonora said.

The half-abandoned palazzo dominated the Grand Canal halfway between the Ponte del Rialto and the Ponte dell’accademia, with the Campo San Polo visible from the ornate balconies on the land side of the building.

The tall man who wore the white mask with the elongated beak, similar to the head attire medics had worn in the years of the Plague, when pepper had been lodged into the furthest reaches of the bird of prey-like beak to shield its wearers from the illness, had been hovering near them most of the evening. They had briefly been introduced by Jacopo, earlier on in the festivities. Occasionally he would approach them with new glasses of champagne and would whisper in Eleonora’s ears, or casually allow his leather-gloved hands to brush against her bare shoulders. His English was nigh perfect, albeit with West Coast American inflections. Jack couldn’t remember his name. Real or otherwise. They had been introduced as Byron and Ariadne. No one here used their real name.

As neither Eleonora or Jack were particularly sociable or voluble, they had been isolated in the margins of the party and its flowing conversations. They had both drunk too much by now. Which meant he was retreating, as he often did, into longer and longer silences, whereas her demeanour was becoming looser, more joyful by the minute. How many times now had she wondered at the sheer elegance of the evening and its incomparable setting, the candles illuminating the cavernous, marble-floored rooms, the gold dishes laden with fruit, the never-ending flow of booze. She was intoxicated by both the alcohol and the sense of occasion. Was this the adventure she always claimed she was seeking whenever he would raise any questions about the future?

A hand took hold of his. Jack turned round. A woman in a red velvet dress and a white powdered wig pulled him a metre or two towards her. He looked up at her. She had endless legs enhanced by thin six inch heels. Behind her mask, he could see her eyes were the colour of coal.

“You are English, no?”

“Indeed,” he answered.

Her scent was sweet, cloying almost.

“So you like our Carnevale?”

“Absolutely,” he responded, ever polite.

Her purple-lipsticked lips moved into the shape of a kiss.

“Is it your first time in Venice?” she asked.

“Not quite,” he answered. “But the first time I’ve been here at Carnival time, though.”

“Ah…”

She moved nearer to him.

He realised they were now alone in the large room; the woman with purple lips, Eleonora, the tall guy and him. Somehow all the nearby partygoers had drifted out silently into the other neighbouring rooms, leaving faint echoes of conversations and the tinkling of crystal glasses eerily suspended in the tobacco smoke-infested air.

He took a step back.

“Oh… shy?”

“No,” he muttered.

“So?” She extended her left arm and her fingers swept across his dry lips.

“Your woman isn’t anywhere as shy as you are, I see,” she remarked.

Jack’s heart dropped all the way down to his stomach as he glanced around. Eleonora was now being embraced by the tall stranger, who held her tight against the far wall of the room, his hand burrowing under her dress, his face muzzled into hers. Her eyes was closed.

“Come,” the woman with the white powdered wig said, taking him by the hand and leading him to a low couch at the opposite end of the room.

He followed, as if in a trance. Time slowed down to a crawl.

Her cunt tasted of exotic spices. Pungent, strong, savage. His tongue lapped her generous juices with quiet and studied abandon.

She spread her legs wider apart and pressed his head down firmer against her. Jack momentarily gasped for breath.

“Lick me harder,” she ordered him.

Once she had tired of his worshipping the thick folds of her labia and the invisible radiating heat pulsing through her opening all the way from her innards, she pulled him onto the worn-out couch and firmly pulled his trousers down and began sucking him off.

Somehow, even though she was talented and imaginative, he failed to get totally hard, and she gave up within a few minutes.

“No worry,” she said. “It happens.”

Red-faced, he looked her in the eyes, attempting to guess how old she might be behind that mask. Her skin was spotless and taut and her long, defined legs were those of an athlete at the peak of her form. He gulped and instantly recalled the taste of her and its striking flavours. She had been on her knees and rose to her feet. He just stood there, his black silk trousers bunched around his ankles.

“Undress,” she said. It was more of an order than a suggestion.

He meekly obeyed.

He wanted to turn around and see where Eleonora was. And the tall man. Their own noises had been muted, distant, but nevertheless insidiously present all the while he had been involved with the purple-lipsticked woman. She sensed this.

“Do so as you are. Don’t turn round,” she said, unclenching the black leather belt that circled her thin waist. “Look down to the floor as you undress.”

He noticed the smudged purple stains of lipstick on the mushroom tip of his cock, like dried wine against the ridged flesh of his masculinity. He pulled the trousers down over his laced shoes. Then kicked the shoes off and quickly slipped off his socks. Surely there was no more ridiculous sight than a naked man wearing just black socks? He then pulled himself up and began unbuttoning his shirt. As he did so, he saw the woman reach for her matching red handbag, which had been lying on the couch and pull a devious contraption out, all leather straps and ivory trunk, from it.

His stomach froze.

There was a faint cry from the other end of the room.

He was now naked.

The woman pulled her ruched dress upwards and belted the strap-on to her waist. The artificial cock jutted ahead of her like the prow of a boat. Hard, inflexible.

“Maybe this will give you a hard on?” she suggested. "Word has it that English men are much appreciative or should I say receptive?"

He knew he could say no, and just leave the room with no further expressions of protest. But the words wouldn’t pass his lips. And he also knew he could not leave Eleonora here alone anyway.

She indicated the couch and how he should bend over its sides and she positioned herself behind him.

Now, through the corner of his eyes, he could finally see Eleonora and the other man. She had also been stripped naked, and wore only the hold up black stockings. The pallor of her body was unbearable to watch. As was the shocking contrast between her skin and the dark-as-night material of the remaining stockings.

The other man’s cock was thick and dark pink and was ploughing her roughly and systematically, pulling out of her almost all the way with every stroke and then digging back into her up to the hilt with every return thrust. Machine-like, metronomic, like a deadly instrument of war.

He felt the pain explode through his own body as the woman’s artificial member breached him with one swift movement. He swallowed hard, almost bit his tongue

As he did so, he realised why Eleonora was so silent. A red handkerchief had been stuffed into her mouth, as her face rhythmically banged against the wall with every repeated movement in and out of her. He couldn’t help noticing the handkerchief was the exact same shade of red as the lipstick she had decided to adorn herself with to attend the party.

Also, her hands were tied behind her back with brown fur-lined metal cuffs.

She must obviously have agreed to the restraints.

There was another huge stab of unbearable pain as the strap on began stretching him and he felt himself being filled like he had never been filled before. For a brief moment, he feared he was going to defecate, as the pit of his stomach went totally numb then perilously loose, but the pressure against his inner walls soon reasserted itself and the pain slowly began to recede. Not that being fucked in this manner gave him any pleasure. He felt as if he was becoming detached from his own body as it was being so cleverly defiled by this woman whose name he didn’t know.

And his eyes kept on hypnotically watching the abominable movements of the other man’s massive member inside Eleonora, the way the tight skin around her opening creased inwards and then outwards again as she was being implacably drilled, and the eyelet of her anus winked open and shut with every movement below it. There was sweat dripping from her forehead. Her calves tightened, her arse cheeks shook, her hair was undone, her curls spilling in every conceivable direction as if moved by an invisible wind rising from the nearby lagoon and flying over the Giudecca to shroud the city on its way to the marshes and Trieste.

From the tremors now compulsively coursing through her body, Jack knew Eleonora had come. The stranger had succeeded in raising her senses, playing her like Jack had rarely been capable of doing.

But the man did not cease.

He would visibly continue fucking her until she begged for him to stop.

Would she ever?

Back at the apartment, they at first could not bear to look each other in the eyes. They went to bed in total silence, still coated by the dry sweat of their exertions, of their shame.

They slept late into the morning.

After breakfast, they took a vaporettoto the Lido and later to the Isola di San Servolo. A trip they had agreed to undertake a few days before they had stumbled across the website which had lured them to the party.

Over dinner in the San Polo district, they began communicating again.

“Talk about an experience!’

“I suppose you could call it that…”

“Regrets?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Were you jealous?”

“A little, I suppose.”

“You?”

“No. It’s… how can I put it… life…”

“Certainly one way of putting it…”

They tried to go for coffee at Caffé Florian, but it was closed on Tuesdays in winter. They made their way back to the apartment. There was no power. They tiptoed their way through darkness towards the bedroom.

“It doesn’t change anything, does it?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, spooning against him.

It was at that precise moment Jack knew he was about to lose her. First Giulia, now Eleonora. His radar had enough practice.

That it was too late to plea, beg, affirm his love, however impure it now was.

He didn’t sleep that night. He stayed awake in the darkness, listening to the vague sounds of the Canal delle Due Torri lapping against the building’s rotting stone facade and the imperceptible melody of her breath, as her chest moved peacefully up and down against him under the duvet.

He smelled her, listened to her as if trying to fix these memories in his brain once and for all. All that he would one day be left with.

Jack finally succumbed to sleep around seven in the morning.

When he awoke, she had left the apartment.

The morning went by. He tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate on the lines, whether a week-old newspaper or an anonymous serial killer thriller.

Eleonora returned at the beginning of the afternoon. She was wearing that black skirt he remembered buying her in Barcelona and which held so many memories. The one with the giant sunflower patch sewn into its flank. And a T-shirt he had once loaned her in the early days of the affair when their lovemaking had proven a tad rough and messy and he had left compromising semen stains across the blouse she had been wearing that day. The T-shirt that advertised McCabe and Mrs. Milleracross the Aubrey Beardsley-like face of a woman.

He was sipping a glass of grapefruit juice at the kitchen table.

He welcomed her.

“Had a good walk?”

“No.”

“Oh…”

A shadow passed across the room shielding her eyes from his examination.

“I saw him again,” Eleonora said.

The pain inside returned.

“Have you fucked him again?”

“No.”

“I see.”

“There is another party tonight. A different palazzo this time, near the Campo San Silvestro. He’s invited me. Wants to introduce me to some of his friends…”

“Do you want to go?”

“Yes.”

“Without me?”

“Yes.”

“Why? I still like you, you know.”

“I know. But liking is not enough. I need a life, you see. Alone. I don’t want to be owned… Anyway, you still think of Giulia, don’t you? Don’t deny it: every time you touch me, when you close your eyes, you think I might be her…”

“I’ve never tried to own you, you know that. You’re too much of a gypsy to be kept in a cage.” He hadn’t answered her question, as if he already knew she was right.

Eleonora smiled.

“You can come, if you wish, I reckon. As long as you promise not to interfere and allow whatever happens to happen…”

“I don’t think so,” Jack said. “Don’t much care to repeat yesterday’s foursome. Just didn’t feel right to me somehow.”

“I understand.”

She walked to the bedroom they had been using; she was holding a large Mondadori canvas tote bag.

“What have you got there? Been shopping?” he asked.

She looked away.

“No…,” she hesitated, then came clean. “Well, it’s the outfit he wishes me to wear tonight.”

“Can I…”

Eleonora interrupted him.

“I’d rather you didn’t see it, Jack.”

That evening, he left the apartment to wander the narrow streets and have several coffees in a row to allow her to dress in privacy.

By the time he returned, she had already left for Carnevale or had maybe been picked up.

She did not return that night or the following day.

His days and nights were haunted by obscene visions of her with other men, and the abominable images of alien cocks of all shapes, sizes and shades invading her. Her mouth, her cunt, her arse, her hands. Orgasmic flush invading the delicate pallor of her skin. The indelible marks of hands, ropes, whips and paddles across the familiar geography of her body. And the sound of her voice just saying ‘Yes’, ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’ again, like Bloom’s Molly. And the grateful acceptance of her smile, of her eyes. And then the terrible visions would repeat again and again, as if captive in some infernal porno film loop, and Eleonora’s face would become Giulia’s until Jack could no longer recognise who was who, and they were both determined to be unfaithful to himfor ever, leave him until he burned in hell.

Finally, she reappeared halfway through Carnevale.

She looked radiant. More beautiful than ever.

“You haven’t shaved,” she remarked. “The stubble on your cheeks is so grey.”

“Couldn’t bother,” he said. “So, you’re back.”

“Not really,” Eleonora said. “I’ve just returned to pick up my stuff, my clothes and all that.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said.

“It’s the way things are,” Eleonora remarked. “After Carnevale ends, Master has promised me that the adventure will continue. He wants to take me to Mardi-Gras in New Orleans and also the Carnival in Rio one day…”

“How exciting,” he said bitterly in response.

“Don’t be like that, please, Jack,” she protested. “You should be happy for me. Respect what I am doing, surely.”

“I find that difficult, Eleonora. I would have given you everything. Surely you realise that.”

“I know, but it would never have been enough. You know that. I’m young. I have a life to live. My life.”

Her skin shone in the pale light coming through the window, the curls in her hair like the gift of Medusa.

Jack closed his eyes. Promising himself he would not open them until she had left with her belongings.

Jack never saw Eleonora again. He stayed in Venice until the end of Carnevale. At dinner one evening, he met another woman, a legal interpreter from Arizona. They had a few drinks together and he was pleased to see that he could still chat a woman up, be reasonably witty and seductive. But when he took her back to the apartment and undressed her after some willing fumbling and a cascade of mutual kisses, he wasn’t capable of fucking her. Just couldn’t get hard enough, despite her assiduous ministrations. Lack of inspiration or wrong person, he wasn’t sure.

The next day as he sat at an overpriced café by the Rialto bridge, he caught a glimpse of a small water cab racing down the Grand Canal. A woman was standing at its prow. For a brief moment, he thought he recognised Eleonora. Same skirt and T-shirt, but the cab was moving too fast for him to be positive it was actually her. At any rate, she was alone on the small boat, standing erect behind the driver, facing the breeze. And for a brief moment, the wind shimmered, the image in his eyes blurred and he thought it maybe was Giulia, not Eleonora any longer. And then his vision blurred and she looked like yet another woman. Unknown, though.

Shortly after, his friends returned from India and he promptly made his way back to London.

He left the two masks they had worn on that fateful evening behind. Not quite the sort of apparel you could wear for the Notting Hill Carnival.

Jack would never go back to Venice.

THE SIMPLE ART OF RETRIBUTION

IVAN NEVER RETURNED PHONE calls. You had to ring three times at ten minute intervals and leave an identical message and a number where he could call you back. Never on a landline.

If he was otherwise detained and did not return the call within the hour, you had to repeat the process at the same time on the following day. Those were the rules.

Cornelia reached New York mid-afternoon and was home by four. It was the best time of day to fly in, when the traffic into the city was still sparse enough. First she showered and then, still dripping water, immediately rang Ivan on a spare cell phone she had acquired at the airport, for which she had picked up a spare SIM card from a small souvenir and touristy bric a brac store on Broadway South of Houston.

There was no answer, as she expected. She slipped on her dark blue silk kimono, stretched her long limbs, and adjusting a cushion at one end, lay down on the frayed leather sofa on which she liked to do most of her reading and thinking. She tried Ivan twice again, repeating the succinct message. And began her wait. Outside, the sun was setting over the park. She tried to concentrate on a new book she’d been waiting to read by some English crime writer she’d heard good things about. The opening pages grabbed her attention, but soon her tiredness got the better of her and she dozed off.

She awoke in the dead middle of night. Her kimono’s thin, tenuous belt had come undone and the flimsy material had parted and the skin across her stomach and thighs was littered with goose bumps. Cornelia shivered and realised with disappointment that it would be at least a further day until matters could move on. Too much time to kill. She moved to the bedroom and slipped between the sheets, shedding the kimono in her stride. She always slept in the nude, no matter the weather.

It took another three days for Ivan to call back. Maybe he had been out of town.

“Cornelia?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t realise you were back.”

“I am. Reporting back like a good little soldier.”

“So, everything cleared up? I haven’t heard back from my principals. Surprising. I’d assumed they would have told me the matter is at an end. In which case, I’m owed,” Ivan said.

“Lucky you.”

“Any problems?”

“Quite a few as a matter of fact.”

“Oh.”

“I think we should speak about it in the flesh. Meet.”

“That’s quite irregular.”

“I know. But it’s important, I assure you.”

“Something the client should know?”

“Not until you and I have spoken,” Cornelia said.

“This is most unusual, my dear Cornelia,” he continued.

“But necessary,” she added. “I insist on meeting.”

Ivan reluctantly agreed. She would have to come to him.

It took Cornelia just over an hour from Grand Central Station on the New Haven local train to reach Westport, Connecticut. By then, the sky was already darkening, sombre clouds floating menacingly over the surrounding woods. Ivan had sent a driver to the station to pick her up in a grey four-wheel drive Jeep.

The metal gates to the property slowly peeled open from the centre as the chauffeur operated a remote electronic switch on the car’s dashboard, drove in, and the gates behind them closed in their wake. The man at the wheel, a short black guy in a green woollen cardigan and heavy brown cord trousers had not spoken a word during the short fifteen-minute journey across the bridge and then through the forest roads and a labyrinth of left-hand turnings which Cornelia memorised carefully. Nor had he even glanced at her in his rear view mirror. She was wearing black from head to toe, a thin cashmere sweater which felt soft against her skin, tailored Armani slacks and flat ballerina slippers.

The car pulled up along the side of a large, architect-designed single-storey country house. The driver parked on the gravel path, at a right angle to a closed garage door.

Just as the chauffeur was about to pull the car keys from the ignition, Cornelia swiftly pulled out the small Beretta she had brought along in her slim handbag and pressed it in a single movement against the back of the man’s head. She’d screwed on a silencer before leaving Manhattan. The detonation barely echoed within the car’s interior, a hushed, repressed sound that no one inside the main building could possibly have heard.

The man slumped against the wheel just as the engine died.

Cornelia checked his pulse.

He was dead. A single bullet was generally sufficient.

She experienced a clear sense of relief. She had not used the weapon for ages. Always avoided having to utilise her own gun. Normally, each new job was supplied with its own, which was either disposed of following the hit or returned, depending on the arrangements concluded beforehand.

She hoisted herself off the backseat, gave the dark house a rapid glance. There was no movement at any of the visible windows on this particular side of the building. She opened the door and stepped out.

There was a soft breeze billowing between the building and the nearby stream that lay at bottom of the house’s small lawn.

She could feel the uneven gravel under her feet through the thin leather sole of her flat ballet shoes. On this particular surface, it felt almost like walking barefoot.

She reached the front door. It wasn’t locked. Cornelia walked in.

The corridor beyond was lined with bookshelves. Cornelia couldn’t help herself giving the spines a rapid glance. But she couldn’t afford to be distracted. Maybe afterwards she would have some time to give the books a closer look, although at first glance they were mostly art books, not the sort of titles she collected.

The entrance passage led to a large open-planned space with a high latticed wooden ceiling, bordered on one side by wide bay windows which overlooked the garden and the stream, and on the other by a massive stone fireplace. A couple of deep and lush leather sofas were scattered at a right angle around a low glass table. Someone was sitting in one of them, with the back of his head to her, smoking, a newspaper — the Wall Street Journal –spread in front of him, held up between his two hands.

Cornelia coughed.

The man turned round. Looked at her. Set the newspaper down next to him on the sofa.

“Cornelia, I presume?”

“Indeed,” she said.

He kept on gazing at her.

“Mmmm… Even prettier than I was unreliably told.”

“Ivan?”

“Yes. And you are my sweet angel of death? So we finally meet…”

Cornelia smiled. In the flesh there was nothing particularly impressive about the man. The master of ceremonies she had been put in touch with nearly five years ago, the man who had assigned the jobs to her, paid her fast, no questions asked, made the arrangements, set the targets.

He was in his mid-fifties, a tad overweight, thin grey hair just that little bit too long for social conformity, wore horn-rimmed glasses and, she noticed, had terribly thin lips. He was dressed in nondescript dull pastel colours.

“You’re on your own?” she asked.

“Of course,” he replied. “I assumed that what you wanted to discuss was of a private nature. It’s only me. No stray ears.”

“Good.”

“And, as you know, I’ve asked the driver to remain outside, in the car.”

“Perfect,” Cornelia said.

“Anyways, I am being a bad host; can I offer you a drink?”

“A coffee would be nice,” she said.

He rose from the couch and walked over to the kitchen section, separated from the main space by a thin wooden partition.

“The Paris job?”

“Yes,” Ivan queried.

“What was it about?” Cornelia asked him.

“You know I can’t reveal who my customers are, Cornelia. That would be quite unbecoming and disloyal and you should know better. I think we’ve had this conversation before, no? Why are you asking?”

“Because…”

“You did clean up, on your second trip? The witness — was it a young woman with dark curling hair, I was told?– has been eliminated, has she?”

“No, she hasn’t, Ivan. First of all, she was a totally innocent bystander who just happened to have come across a bad man and, in all likelihood, knew nothing about his other activities. Furthermore, I just couldn’t find her. She’s just faded away into thin air, presumably returned to her own, quite ordinary life.”

“But she saw you, didn’t she? There’s a link. The trail could lead back here.”

“Yes, she saw me kill him. But I know she will do nothing about it.”

“That’s just not the way it works, Cornelia. You’re making me angry. So what the hell have you been doing all this time?”

“Uncovering a whole hornet’s nest.”

“You should leave it undisturbed, you know that.”

“It’s too late.”

“And what does that mean exactly?”

“It means that we are both in agreement that the whole affair must come to an end. We both want it dead and buried.”

“So?”

“So, Ivan, you will identify the client for me, and I will take over from there,” Cornelia suggested.

“That is quite ridiculous. I can’t. How many times must I remind you of that? Our sort of business has its rules of conduct and they cannot be modified just because an innocent bystander was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway, even if you were to make contact with the primary client, what would you do then: plead on your knees and with your eyes wide open for the girl to be spared?”

“No,” Cornelia said enigmatically.

Ivan shrugged his shoulders in exasperation. “Oh Cornelia, what’s happened to you? You were one of the best. I don’t understand what’s come over you.” He took a final sip of coffee from his cup, weighing his thoughts. Cornelia remained silent.

“Tell me, Cornelia dear, in the hypothetical case where you were to discover the client’s name and location, what were you proposing to do, to say to make him change his mind?” Ivan asked again.

Face impassive, Cornelia said “Kill him.”

“You must be joking,” Ivan said.

“That would certainly put an end to the whole matter. Clean up the mess once and for all,” she added.

Ivan frowned. This was getting beyond a joke. “You’re not serious, are you?” he asked her.

“Deadly serious, if you will excuse the inappropriate vocabulary.”

Ivan looked at her. There was the hint of a smile on her lips and her eyes appeared ice-cold. And it dawned on him how efficient and utterly ruthless she had been in the past on the many occasions she had been assigned a hit. His frown grew deeper.

The woman was dangerous. And, right now, unbalanced.

He slowly began to rise from his seat.

Cornelia gave him a darting glance.

“I think I need another coffee,” Ivan explained.

“I don’t think you do, Ivan.” He looked down and saw the gun she was holding in her right hand, pointing straight at his stomach. It had appeared out of nowhere. He frantically looked at the large bay window.

“Your driver won’t be coming to help,” Cornelia said. “No cavalryto the rescue.”

“Bitch,” Ivan muttered under his breath.

“No need for profanity, Ivan. It’s just business, isn’t it?” Cornelia pointed out, getting to her feet, the Beretta still aimed steadily at Ivan’s midriff.

He was about to swear again, but thought the better of it.

“What now?” he asked.

“You tell me who ordered the Paris hit and where I can find him or her.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You know the cliché: we can do it the easy way or the painful way. It’s up to you. Your call.”

Cornelia now stood facing him. He could even smell her perfume and the heat her body was generating. She towered above him, his black-clad angel of death, her blonde hair spreading like a halo against the recessed lighting in the room’s ceiling. Even with the rivulets of fear now rushing through his system, Ivan could not avoid finding her beautiful. And strangely serene.

“You wouldn’t…” he protested.

But deep inside, he knew she would.

“Get up,” she ordered him.

He meekly obeyed. There were no alternatives, he realised, his thoughts scrambling in every possible direction.

She was a full head taller than him. The line of the gun did not deviate a single inch.

“Undress,” she enjoined him.

He expressed puzzlement, but Cornelia’s gaze stood firm and he began to strip.

Once he was down to his smalls, she insisted he continue until he was fully naked. He became painfully aware of how out of shape his body was, the love handles he had always meant to exercise away, the round overhang of his stomach, the pasty texture of his thick thighs. Cornelia insisted he get rid of his socks too.

“There is nothing more ridiculous than a naked man wearing socks,” she remarked. “That’s what was always wrong with so much sixties porn,” she even chuckled.

His cock had shrivelled — cold or fear?– and partly retreated into his ball sack.

Cornelia looked him up and down, quite unjudgmental in her gaze.

She raised the gun and Ivan’s throat tightened. But all she was doing was pointing it in the direction of the bathroom.

Cornelia marched him there, the muzzle of the Beretta forced into the small of his naked back, metal hard, his bare feet brushing the stone floor as he wearily lifted himself up the two small steps that separated the living space from the corridor.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Ivan protested.

“I do. Absolutely.”

It took Cornelia just over one hour to break Ivan’s resistance down. She had hoped it might take less time and not prove as messy.

The Beretta wasn’t enough of a threat. Its use was too final, and her handler knew that.

His hands tied high above his head to the shower rail, Ivan stood inside the bathtub in a distorted parody of crucifixion. Cornelia had kicked his legs apart and his genitals hung limply between his legs. She had switched the shower on and the increasingly hot water poured down across his stretched shoulders. Ivan grimaced and squirmed. Cornelia ignored him and explored his medicine cabinet. There was a small container of old razor blades, some rusting across the edges. She took hold of a couple and taped them with surgical tape to the end of a toothbrush. Improvised but a worthy instrument of persuasion, Cornelia knew. She turned back towards the bath tub and the immobilised man and sat herself on the edge and faced Ivan. Switched the water off. His pasty body was all now blotchy in all shades of pink. When Ivan saw what she was now holding in her hand, he shuddered briefly.

“All I want is a name and an address, Ivan.”

Ivan remained mute.

“Just a name and an address. No need for explanations or anything else. It’s irrelevant. I already know what these people are all about. It doesn’t please me, naturally, but all I am concerned about is eliminating any evidence of this unfortunate job you gave me. I want to draw a line under it. Get back to my life. It’s nothing personal. If I don’t do it, you know it well, Ivan, I will have to keep on peering behind my back for ever, not knowing if anyone is a threat or not. I want to live in peace. It’s simple.”

Ivan closed his eyes, refusing to communicate. Braced for the worst.

The first cuts were to his cheeks, deep but short and Cornelia then drenched the wounds with a generous splash of his own cologne. She knew it would sting badly. That was the intention.

Ivan swore. She looked him straight in the eyes.

“No,” he whispered. “I just can’t.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

The next cut was savage and sudden and scythed into the already taut stretch of skin in his left arm pit and would have severed his arm from the shoulder had sinews and bone not proven an obstacle to the blade. Ivan screamed and blood began pouring down his flanks to the bathtub floor where it pooled quickly around his bare feet.

Cornelia worked slowly but systematically down the man’s body, selecting targets at random, trying to imagine where the pain would be at its most acute but not fatal. When she sliced into one his nipples, his bladder inadvertently loosened.

A dozen cuts later, Ivan finally relented as the razor blades began a series of small and delicate incisions into his balls and thighs. The tears streaming down his cheeks now rivalled the myriad small rivers of blood pearling down the upper half of his body. His breath was short, his voice croaking.

He gave her a single name. It meant nothing to Cornelia, but she hadn’t expected it to achieve any recognition.

She waved the gerrymandered toothbrush in front of his eyes and with her other hand took hold of his cock and squeezed it hard. She felt it pulse in her grip, almost as if he was going to have an erection.

“And?”

He supplied her with an address outside Los Angeles and a California telephone number.

Cornelia lowered her arm. Set the improvised weapon down over the nearby sink and walked across to the main living quarters where she had previously left her handbag.

Returning to the bathroom, she became aware of the strong combined smell of blood, urine and fear that now permeated the enclosed space. It reminded her of previous scenes of carnage she had been involved in. She was also aware that what she was doing now would automatically signify an end to that part of her life. But Cornelia had never been sentimental. She would adapt. There were other ways to make a living. It’s not as if she had ever experienced any form of vicarious thrill executing contracts on total strangers. It had just been a means to an end. Initially, just an extra job to raise enough money for a rare book she had coveted.

Ivan’s head had partly fallen across the top of his chest as he was suspended like a sorry, dangling puppet from the metal shower rail. He didn’t look up when Cornelia entered the bathroom again. He was broken and had lost all capacity for added curiosity.

“I’m sorry,” Cornelia said and raised the gun to his forehead and killed him. The familiar fragrance of cordite rose, soon blending with the other smells in the exiguous quarters.

On her way out, Cornelia carefully wiped every surface she remembered touching while in Ivan’s house. Pushing the dead chauffeur’s body across onto the front passenger seat, she drove the car to New Haven station and abandoned it in a side street two blocks away from the station car park. The station was deserted and she spotted no surveillance cameras. She already had a return ticket and there were only two other people at the other end of the platform waiting for the day’s final train.

She reached Grand Central just past midnight and took a cab directly to the gentlemen’s club near Wall Street where she volunteered for a shift. She had half an hour to kill before the time to go onstage came around and, much as she hated the facilities at the club, took a long shower. She had to wash the smell of death off her skin, and out of her mind.

As she waited for her dance music to begin, Cornelia looked out from the wings of the small stage into the audience, and breathed a sigh of relief, noting that her hedge fund guy was not in tonight. She didn’t think she was ready for more questions or sympathy tonight. Just the usual Friday night crowd in search of tits and ass. Well, if they wanted to see pussy, that’s what she was here for, she reckoned. Not that she ever referred to her sex as pussy. It was just cunt, no more, no less. No need for euphemisms or poetry.

G IS FOR GYPSY

JACK HAD RETURNED FROM Venice and slowly attempted to put his life together again. Wrote more stories and idle journalism, but his heart was not in it any longer. However, he had no other alternatives. A writer just writes. He doesn’t investigate missing person cases, after all. That just made a mockery of everything, didn’t it?

He got an assignment to another festival abroad. Not by coincidence, the place he and Giulia had first come together. Of course. Those fickle ways of fate…

Jack had always been a man who travelled a lot.

Which meant he used hotel rooms on almost all occasions.

If asked what his strongest memories were of foreign cities, he’d always remember the hotel, the room. Not the monuments or the museums or the architectural and cultural wonders of the place. But then he wasn’t much of a tourist.

Every time he walked into a new room, shortly after arrival in a new town, Jack would sigh. He knew this particular home away from home for the next few days would prove both exhilarating in its potential for sex or eroticism, or just damn lonely if, yet again, he was to inhabit it alone for the duration.

Sex and loneliness. Two feelings that invariably went hand in hand these days.

“Here are the keys,” the uniformed young woman at reception said, handing Jack back his passport and a small folded paper wallet with keys and breakfast time information. “We’ve given you room 411.”

It would be room 411. Out of all the hotel rooms in the world, what were the odds on being given room 411 again?

“Just my luck,” Jack thought, as his heart dropped or stomach sunk or whatever could best describe his body’s reaction to the news. A feeling of sudden vertigo, of drowning in a sea with no water.

“Is the hotel full?”

Maybe he could ask to be moved into another room?

“Yes sir,” the receptionist looked up. “It always is at festival time.”

“OK.”

The elevator.

The long, endless corridor, which had always reminded him of Barton Fink, the movie, albeit in more opulent ways. Or The Overlook in Kubrick’s film of The Shining.

The door.

The key in the lock.

The light.

The room.

The bed…

Jack dropped his luggage to the carpeted floor. Opened the window slightly to let some air in and lowered the heat level on the thermostat.

He sat himself on the corner of the bed. Closed his eyes. Opened them again. It made no difference. He could still see the long silhouette of her pale body spread across the double bed, her legs apart, her slight breasts barely hillocks amongst the blinding, white landscape of her torso as she lay on her back and earth’s gravity pummelled them down to almost non-existence, the soft brown pinkness of her nipples like two minuscule beacons in the sea of flesh. The billion ebony dark curls in her hair washing over the sheets. The way the sun on a summer day past had caressed her dormant skin as its rays whispered their way through the open windows and caressed her nakedness.

It was as if she were still here.

Or maybe it was the ghost of her, following him along from country to country, from hotel room to hotel room, like a Flying Dutchman’s curse as he sought to escape her memory. But he knew inside he never would. You don’t forget the unforgettable.

His brain cells, out of control, now began to focus on all the sharper details of her anatomy, the angles, the curves, the indelible memories of her softness, the smell of her breath, the colour of her teeth, the longing and the thousand questions ever present in her eyes and it was like yet another stab wound piercing both his heart and his gut in one swift decisive movement.

Tears welled up inside him. He loosened his belt and pulled his trousers down to his waist and his fingers took hold of his half-hard cock and began caressing its velvety mushroom tip, arousing himself, allowing all those lost images of her to inspire him, to stimulate him. Had she not one day revealed that waiting for him to arrive from the airport in another hotel room in another southern city she had not been able to suppress her urgent need for him and had eagerly masturbated herself to a thunderous climax even though she knew they would be reunited just a couple of hours later following his own flight’s arrival?

But today Jack could not achieve sufficient hardness, and soon gave up.

It was as if the hotel room itself was alive and was whispering to him on the sly that he would never know her again in the physical sense of the term and there was no point jerking himself away to her memory, to her spirit, but then, the room suggested in his ear that there were other options, weren’t there?

Pulling his black trousers back up to his waist and tightening the belt, he moved over to the travelling bag in which he kept his laptop, pulled the computer out of its protective sheath.

He opened the lid and booted up.

Scoured the familiar chat rooms in search of sex.

There were some possibilities but after a few lines of dialogue with various other seekers of nsa activities, he realised there would be too much work, explanations and lies involved to convince any one to actually meet quickly enough, let alone do the deed. Unless he moved on to the gay or bi rooms, which on this occasion he was not yet in the mood for. Or desperate enough.

Jack checked his mail. Mostly spam and the customary offers of cheap Viagra, Levitra or no money back penis- and breast-enhancing products.

He undressed.

Looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. Wished he looked better, slimmer, younger, less morose.

Back in the room, he balanced the laptop on his knees and began writing Giulia a letter. Maybe now she was back in Rome she would finally respond.

Dear G.

I miss you. Terribly.

I know I have no doubt written this many times before, but you have left a hole inside of me. A deep, hollow cavern full to the brim with love and longing and despair.

You no longer even answer my messages and ignore me as if I were dead, but I don’t mind. Writing to you in this way — which you probably find either despicable or pitiful — keeps you alive in strange ways. I can’t let go of you, I just can’t. Sorry.

I miss you. I hope you are happy, even if it is others who are now pleasing you, touching you, making your heart flutter somewhere, far away from here and me, which I foolishly, mistakenly still believe is where you should really be.

I’m in X. It’s festival time again. You won’t believe this, but I am in the very same hotel room. Room 411. Remember? I didn’t ask for it. Maybe the hotel staff had a record of me being in the room before or it was sheer coincidence or again the bookings computer proving mischievous.

Being here evokes such strange feelings, Giulia.

Little since you has ever been the same. I am now nothing without you, but in the same time you have made me a better man. A man who knows what love is, can potentially be. No woman had ever given herself to me so freely, without reservations, so wildly, and made me realise the terrible strength of love unleashed as you did.

From that first, sometimes hesitant evening in room 411. Unveiling the beauty of your body, inch by inch, touching the paradise of your small breasts with my rough, undeserving touch, silent in awe at the perfect delicacy of the combined shades of pink of your nipples (which I had somehow expected to be much darker), slipping my fingers inside you, experiencing the divine heat of your cunt, spreading your wetness across my hand and learning the musky, hypnotic smell of you, fingertips travelling slowly through the mass of your pubic curls then moving into more dangerous territory towards your rear hole. And the worried “No, not there, please” of your voice. “Why?” “Just not there, please.”

That first night we did not even fuck.

Once stripped, we caressed each other, hardy explorers of new-found lands, we cuddled, we merged, we embraced rather frantically, skin against skin, lips against lips, sweat against sweat. You rode me repeatedly, like a young stallion. Dry-humping me like no one had ever done before. Rubbing your cunt and protruding bone against my hard cock, until I was even hurting but would never ask you to stop. I thought you would even tear my cock’s outer skin off in the savage assault of your passion, while all the time I tried not to come, as if ejaculating on you would have been a crime, a sad admission of my innate vulgarity.

We writhed that way all night, between torrents of words, endless stories of our respective pasts and inevitable questions about what might lie in our future. From the very first mail, months before, we knew this could only be an impossible love. But then it was also more than just animal attraction. We were so wrong for each other: ages, geography, past, activities, personalities. But, on the other hand, we were also so supremely right, weren’t we? Remember how when apart we were almost telepathically in touch, always knowing when the other was about to call or do something particular. E-mails criss-crossed the web with mighty abandon; SMS messages littered the airwaves.

But mostly we were creatures who lived in hotel rooms, as we could not be seen publicly by others, irrespective of the foreign cities we travelled to.

I told you stories about the women who came before, the other hotel rooms I had lived in, seen. How, when once staying at the Algonquin in New York one night I had been kept up until the small hours of morning by acute sounds of pleasure from a woman in the room on the other side of the thin wall, who kept on achieving incredulous orgasms one after another for hours on end. Never had I heard a woman so vocal in the throes of sex, moans, loud sighs, cries, shouts, rumblings, she went through the whole gamut of possible sounds, time after time. The bed in the opposing Algonquin room would bang repeatedly with every new thrust of her lover inside her against our common wall, and the anonymous woman would shriek, purr, scream; it was primeval, basic, awesome. And arousing: I must have come myself at least three times during the night, manually, provoked by the hurricane-like waves of pure sex streaming through from the other room. It was unavoidable. All I had to do was close my eyes, imagine the reverse image of the room I was staying in, and myself fucking her in every conceivable position of the Kama Sutra, with every new variation evincing a new kind of explosion from deep inside her throat. To say she was both loud and enjoying herself was something of an understatement. I even imagined that no man was capable of extracting such sounds of pleasure from a woman alone and that it must have been a sheer procession of men entering the room and taking turns with her as she lay there with her legs splayed open and her apertures moist and slick and ripe for plundering at every turn.

Towards four in the morning, I finally managed to get some sleep.

The next day, I had to leave the hotel shortly after breakfast to go to a business meeting downtown and just as I exited my Algonquin room, the door to the next room opened and a woman walked out. I had imagined the creature being so royally fucked in countless, alluring incarnations: sleek, blonde, redhead, brunette, tall, dusky, pale, opulent and skinny, beautiful and mysterious, but none of the visions I had evoked throughout the night corresponded with the reality!

She was a tiny little Chinese woman in her mid-fifties, with a wrinkled face and a shapeless body over which she had draped a faded brown fur coat which had known better days. She looked up at me and her face betrayed no feelings of recognition or any embarrassment at having likely been overheard in the demented throes of her sexual exertions by a neighbour.

We both walked towards the elevator in silence and went our own ways for ever.

I wonder, Giulia, whether others ever heard us and tried to imagine what we looked like, or with less obvious difficulty, what we were up to?

Not that we would have cared. Would we?

After we had technically become lovers at last, your own appetite and curiosity for the pleasures of the flesh no longer knew any bounds, surprising even me, as you wanted this whole new world and wanted it now. Within a day we were taking baths together with no shame. By the end of the first hotel room episode, that taboo word ‘love’ was already leaking freely from our hearts.

We quickly became experts at living in a world of our own, a world within the existing world of rules and conventions, rules which we openly flouted, oblivious to the eyes of others.

Like the half-assed leers of the men at the front desk of the hotel in Barcelona as they saw us pick up our key and walk arm in arm towards the elevator, noticing the disparity in our ages and looks and guessing all too well the boundless fornication we were about to embark upon. In that room, in the shadow of Gaudi’s Parc Güell, where we fucked mercilessly, leaving blood all over the sheets, as your period caught us in ambush, but never slowed our frantic ardour.

The breakfast room at the Washington Square Hotel in New York, where the Filipino waiter imprudently (or was it unprofessionally) remarked how much my daughter looked happy. The only time I saw you blush.

A bathroom in a hotel in Sitges where my sense of transgression knew no bounds and I burst on you sitting peeing and harvested your hot stream in the cup of my hands, a sensation of heat that has marked me for ever and which I have craved after ever since, not just on my hands but all over my body in my desperation to capture the sheer essence of you.

Was it Paris, New York, Calcata, Washington D.C. or somewhere else where I hastily withdrew my cock from inside you and came too early, my white seed pearls like beautiful stains across the thick jungle surrounding your cunt lips? A mishap that provided us with an unholy scare as you feared a most inopportune pregnancy and all future fucks had to be lessened with a condom from then on.

“Oh, how you fill me,” you would say.

“Oh, how I want you,” I would say.

Oh, how my heart would break into a thousand shards every time I took you from behind and the incomparable sight of my dark cock stretching your pink lips and burying itself deep inside you while the eyelet of your arse would almost wink at me, as if inviting further depredations. And the obscene thought that one day other men would see you thus, would contemplate the tragic pornography of your indecency, was enough to make me cry.

But I did not have the right to ask you to be mine and mine alone. I was scared to do so. Not because it would have been wrong; it would have been. But because I was in fear of your answer. Knowing your awful pride and will for independence. Later I realised that there were actually days and nights when you would have wanted me to do so and offer a more permanent form of commitment. Becoming genuine girlfriend and boyfriend, whatever that meant or entailed. Move to the city where you lived so we could see more of each other or you might be able to call me at any time of day to meet up, however innocently, for a coffee and a chat.

Why is it that love grows at different speeds between people who care for each other, need each other badly? Not fair, is it?

Many hotel rooms later, you finally left me. You wanted to live your life. You wanted other adventures. From the very first night, you had told me you were a gypsy and that you would not allow any man to ever catch you, imprison you. Let alone me.

An urban gypsy flitting through the lives of men, destroying hearts and souls with cheery insouciance, a falling star amongst us mortals. Oh, how you burned me.

Where are you now, embarked on what beautiful adventures with witty and sexy strangers, witnessing horizons I know nothing of? The last time we spoke, you would no longer even tell me of your plans because you guessed right: whatever news you provided me with would be betrayed by me one day, used in a story somewhere as some exotic fictional character which only you and I would recognise. You did not want to be a character in a book, Giulia. Forgive me. But then all I wanted you to be was a lasting character in my life. Fiction is only second best, you know, a consolation for the unworthy.

I still want you badly.

The warmth of your mouth around my pulsing cock.

Your fingers weighing my swollen balls, learning how a man is constructed at his most intimate.

The generosity of your eyes.

The foolishness of your wonderful youth.

The ghostly pallor of your body in a hotel room where we have just made love. The flowers in your hair when you accompany me to an official function and are proud to say “This is my man”.

So, here I sit in room 411 of the Palace Hotel. I am naked. I am pitiful. I am lonely. Hotel rooms remind me of sex, of you.

Oh, just to hear the sound of your voice.

You belong here.

I send you this forlorn kiss.

Jack

Jack pressed “Send” and the e-mail made its way to wherever she would pick it up, if she ever did. He expected no answer, of course. That would be asking for too much. Things were clear cut by now and he would never see her again. Maybe occasionally hear about her through third parties (although not Eleonora he guessed), but then even that was unlikely. Different countries, languages, ambitions.

He exhaled.

Washed his face with cold water and slipped on the white terry cloth bathrobe and returned to the computer.

The emptiness weighed on him. Once again, he clicked his way into a chat room.

A sharp sense of unworthiness settled on his mind.

As if Jack finally realised that he had done Giulia wrong.

Guilt was a dangerous thing.

It called for punishment.

Oh yes.

There was a discreet knock on the door. Jack walked across, still wearing the white bathrobe. Outside the hotel room windows, night was falling and the sound of distant sirens — police? — ambulance? — firemen? — echoed through the town as it pursued its descent into darkness. He opened the door.

The stranger looked even larger than the photo he had posted online and forwarded to him during the course of their conversation and ensuing brief negotiation.

A swarthy guy, gym-sharpened and feral.

“You ‘slave of G’?” the man asked brusquely.

“Yes,” Jack lowered his eyes submissively. It was the unimaginative handle he had earlier used online.

“Good,” the man said, taking a decisive two steps into the room. He looked Jack up and down, maybe checking that the few details he had been willing to reveal during their halting chat room conversation and then over the telephone were correct. He appeared satisfied and slammed the door shut behind him.

A point of no return had been crossed.

“So, this what you want? You’re sure? No going back now?” the visitor asked.

“Yes,” Jack meekly answered. Fear was now turning to resignation.

“Yes, sir,boy,” the man ordered sharply.

“Yes, sir,” Jack said in a low voice.

“That’s better.”

The taller man approached Jack and forced him to take a few steps back into the room, until he was standing by the bed. The visitor lowered his hands and took the bathrobe belt and undid it, then quickly pulled the garment off Jack.

Jack stood naked.

Again, the visitor looked him up and down. And smirked.

Jack had already obeyed the initial instructions he had been provided with once the assignment had been arranged. He was fully bare, having shaven all the hair around his cock and balls while the stranger was en route to the hotel. Jack shivered briefly.

“Nice cunt, looks clean enough,” the man remarked, examining him.

“Thank you, sir,” Jack answered obediently. The act of shaving down there made him feel even more naked, available, ripe for all sorts of humiliation.

“On your knees, slave,”

Jack duly obeyed.

The man untied his trousers and exposed himself, presenting a thick, half-hard already cock to the kneeling, naked host.

“Open your face hole wide,” the visitor said.

Jack took the semi-tumescent cock inside his mouth, where it hardened like rock within a few seconds, thrusting hard against the back of his throat, as he tried not to choke. The man took a violent hold of his hair and conducted his movements with brutal, steady regularity.

The man’s penis had an acrid taste and its texture was surprisingly spongy, which Jack had not expected. As he mechanically continued sucking the stranger’s member, the room surrounding him seemed to murmur to him “See, now you know what it felt for her, and all those other women, to take your cock into their mouths… now you know what it must feel like to be a woman, to be on the receiving end…”

There was another gentle knock on the door.

The visitor pulled his cock out of his drying mouth.

“Who is it?” he asked.

Catching his breath, Jack said “Another guy I spoke to in the chat room. I wasn’t sure whether either of you would actually show up. You know how it is with chat room meets. I reckoned if I made two appointments, there was a better chance one of you at least would show up. We don’t have to open the door, if you don’t want to.”

The other man smiled, cock still at full mast.

“Why not? The more the merrier. Let him in.”

He rose from the floor and went over to the door and opened.

The new visitor was a wiry Oriental guy. His gaze greedily focused on Jack’s exposed, bare cock. The earlier stranger walked over and explained the situation, offering the Asian man the opportunity to withdraw, should he wish to do so.

The new visitor seemed to enjoy the possibilities afforded by the new situation and elected to stay.

“A greedy slave, indeed,” one of the men remarked.

They both undressed.

The Oriental man lay on the edge of the bed offering his uncut but already unsheathed erect cock and the larger of his two visitors took hold of their new found slave by the scruff of his neck and forced Jack down to his knees again.

“Suck him, worship his dick,” he ordered.

The new cock was thinner, veiny and tasted differently. Jack diligently set to work, already mentally comparing the experiences.

As he did so, the first visitor to the room sharply took hold of his soft cock and balls and pulling both backwards and slightly upright by his genitals, forced Jack into the position he required. He spat across his raised, exposed rump and with two fingers lathered the abundant saliva into his anal opening, testing his elasticity and resistance.

“Nice and tight,” he remarked. “That’s how I enjoy my slaves.” He suddenly slapped Jack’s arse cheeks and then violently thrust himself inside him, breaching the moist ring of flesh in one single movement.

Jack couldn’t help himself from screaming. It burned like hell as the foreign penis buried itself deep inside his innards. But he still managed to keep on sucking the cock now fucking his mouth.

“Good boy, good boy,” the Asian man said.

Later, the two men changed places and used him thoroughly in all his available holes.

Jack’s mouth was dry and the muscles in his cheeks hurt, come dripped from his well-stretched opening and inside it felt like the fires of hell still and as the men dressed in silence and he lay on the bed, exhausted, willingly degraded as he had wished, he briefly imagined the strangers keeping him in slavery together, abducting him from this luxury hotel room, putting a black, studded leather collar around his neck and transporting him still naked under a coat to another seedy hotel room which would smell of piss and shit and stale tobacco, where he would be offered to all-comers, fucked, whipped, beaten, peed on and hosed like an animal until death would prove a welcome release.

But they just walked out, closing the door to room 411 behind them in continued silence.

Maybe it was a form of penance, Jack imagined.

Or more likely just more self-pity.

“Oh Giulia,” he wrote inside his head, “this is what I now am without you, a lost soul, a creature of sex of loneliness. A man who travels a lot and gets up to abominable things within the sacred secrecy of hotel rooms. Without you.”

Just another letter he would never send.

And decided to go to Rome.

ROGUE FEMALE

CORNELIA WAS SITTING ON a high stall in an open all-hours bar called Phillies with her back to the nocturnal street. Across from her to the left, a man and a woman silently stared straight ahead at the white-capped, blonde barista busy cleaning dishes. The fedora-wearing man negligently nursed a cigarette while the woman, red-haired, in her late thirties she guessed, peered down at her well-manicured nails. There was no juke box or ambient muzak, no noise except for the occasional gurgle of the twin coffee percolators on the nearby counter; it was a perfect three in the morning form of silence, made for nighthawks and lonely hearts. The woman was thin, even gaunt, the silky fabric of her red dress draped across her shoulders, opening up across a V of indifferent, pale flesh. She sported cerise lipstick, just like one imagined vamps did in black-and-white forties noir movies. The couple hadn’t spoken to each other since Cornelia had walked into the joint. But their body movement clearly betrayed the fact they were a couple. Only deep familiarity expressed itself, communicated with such a display of common silence.

Outside, it had been ages since even a car had driven by. They were enveloped in a sea of dead time, listening to the mute voice of the downtown Los Angeles night. Figueroa Boulevard was just a few city blocks away, even more of a desert at this forsaken time. There was no game tonight at the new Staples Center Stadium by the nearby convention buildings, so no stragglers ambling by or zigzagging their way past the flaming radiance of this old-fashioned street corner bar in search of a car parked forgetfully around the block some hours earlier.

Cornelia was sipping her second glass of mineral water. The ice had long melted and a lone wilted slice of lemon floated over the bottom of the thick square-shaped glass. She kept on watching the couple, idly imagining their back story, mentally embroidering a whole scenario to justify their presence here, explaining the way they had once met and the unknowable reasons that seemingly kept them together when they visibly had so little to say to each other any longer. Surely, they had somewhere to go back to? Cornelia hadn’t. In a few more hours she would call a cab and get him to drive her back to LAX for the first morning flight of the day to La Guardia and her apartment on Washington Square Place full of books and CDs, where she would while the days away until the next telephone call, improbably in view of recent circumstances, summoned her for a job. No rush, she didn’t need the cash. But practice made perfect, they said and she had never said no in the past when offered a hit. She had a reputation. She would always find new customers, somehow.

She quietly wondered whether the other insomniacs keeping her company in Phillies also speculated about her own presence there? She didn’t think so. She was anonymous. No one remembered her face. She was wearing a dark, dull bobbed wig and librarian glasses and her two-piece standard issue female junior executive suit was a boring anthracite blue, her hair shielded by a shawl and her shape somewhat indistinguishable behind the suit’s dull material. She wore flat shoes, to distract attention from her height. She guessed she looked like any other anonymous office worker. Good; it was a suitable appearance. Forgettable, indifferent. Safe. She should know by now. By hook or by crook she had learned the rules of the game, the occult conventions, the precautions, the limiting of risks since she had undertaken her first job. When had it been? Nearly five years back already. Once you’d swum with the sharks, it all became second nature, even if this particular job was not being done for monetary reasons. Just a final necessary evil to get these people off her back and close the chapter. It was a pity about Ivan. But there would surely be other handlers. She was too useful a commodity. She now knew what to do and what not to do. And Cornelia had never much been encumbered by rules and regulations, or least of all morality.

So, now she was just a woman in a bar whose true face others would never see or remember, watching the world go by. Your average, anonymous contract killer. Working on her own account for a rare occasion.

Killing off what is left of the night.

The woman at the bar in the red dress briefly glanced her way, but she visibly didn’t note Cornelia’s presence, her gaze passing straight through her and likely alighting on some passer-by walking outside, turning the corner on a slow journey towards Chinatown just a mile or so away to the east. The other woman’s eyes were rimmed with too much kohl; didn’t suit her, made her look older than she was, Cornelia reckoned. She looked away, her indifference returning. The woman’s partner lit another cigarette while the attendant refilled his cup of coffee.

Cornelia attempted to recall the eyes of the other woman earlier this evening. The younger one. What colour were they? She just couldn’t. Much of what had taken place did so in semi-darkness, an oppressive penumbra in which she had played the leading, murderous role. There had been a haunting quality in those eyes when she had pleaded for her life. She had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet another one. Damn!

“My name is Sarah,” she had said, looking towards Cornelia with a sadness full of resignation, as if she already knew she could not be swayed. There were rules in this unholy game which must not be ignored. And even though Sarah was not a player, she had instinctively been aware of the fact.

Cornelia had not responded immediately.

“I will do anything you wish me to,” the young girl had continued. “Or rather you can do anything to me you want. Anything.”

Maybe it was the cold heart she saw in Cornelia’s eyes that made her plead with such desperation. She had once been told by someone she trusted that they were sometimesgrey, steely and unfeeling. When she cleansed herself every morning with cold water and no soap and examined her features in the mirror, she saw no such thing. Eyes are just eyes. They convey nothing. Colours changed somehow.

The body of the man she had tracked down to this hotel room was sprawled just a few feet away on the carpeted floor, stone cold dead. One bullet had sufficed. It seldom took more; don’t believe what you see in the movies. Killing a man with a gun was simplicity itself if you knew where to aim and had a steady hand and, of course, the advantage of surprise. Ivan had supplied her with his address on the West Coast when she had forced him to spill the beans and Cornelia had quietly observed him for several days to identify the patterns he followed, trailing him from his office as a realtor in Beverly Hills (no doubt a cover, but that wasn’t her concern) to the Figueroa, a rococo hotel downtown with a fascinating over-the-top decor that blended equal doses of terracotta Mexican colours with Indian artefacts and monstrously sized potted plants throughout its dark lobby area. The guy had parked his Chevvy in a lot at the back of the hotel, which had given her time enough to move ahead and innocently share the elevator with him up to his floor. He hadn’t even given her much of a look. She’d jumped him just as he was opening the door to his room. As the lock clicked Cornelia had put the gun to his head and sharply shoved against his shoulders and forced him into the room.

It had taken her barely a second or so to take it all in. The young woman sitting on the bed adjusting her stockings, looking up at her and the man barging through the door. The way the girl’s mouth formed a puckered O of surprise. The man was just about to say something in protest when Cornelia had pressed the trigger, and the muffled sound of the weapon’s silencer had interrupted the nature morteof the scene unfolding in overdrive. He slumped to his knees, and then almost in slow motion to the hotel room floor, his limbs spreading incongruously across the floor, his face three-quarters burying itself into the lush softness of the carpet.

The young girl’s mouth returned to its normal thin-lipped shape and she froze on the spot, no doubt a million emotions, questions and fear spreading through her body.

The hit was clean. There wasn’t even that much blood, yet.

Cornelia looked at her again.

Their eyes locked.

A torrent of communication surging through the darkened, pastel room in the utter stillness of the late afternoon. All things unsaid but sadly clear in both their minds.

Witnesses have no rights.

This was when she told Cornelia her name. In a forlorn bid to humanise herself. To make Cornelia reshape her resolve.

But there was no way she could commit the same mistake again. Giulia, Paris. Was this a circle of hell through which she was wading, every event cursed to repeat itself in infinitesimal variations?

Cornelia didn’t respond, just stood there, her legs now straddling the inert body of her appointed victim.

“I can’t offer you money. I haven’t any,” the girl continued. “But I promise I won’t say anything. Please. To anyone…”

She certainly didn’t look like a whore he had picked up somewhere. Not a cheap one at any rate. Maybe a girlfriend, or another man’s wife he was enjoying on the side? Or another woman he intended to groom? That’s what hotel rooms were for, weren’t they? Perfect havens of anonymity where anything could happen. Sarah’s white blouse and pleated linen skirt had a conservative cut, only spoiled by the fact that the skirt had been hoisted up to mid thigh as she had been straightening the line of her stockings as Cornelia and the man had forcibly entered the room. The upper, uncovered half of her thigh was creamy, white, almost virginal, above the darker, flesh coloured fabric of the hold up stocking. No garter belt, Cornelia couldn’t help noticing.

“Will you let me go?” she asked quietly, as if she no longer even believed it could happen.

“I don’t think so,” Cornelia replied. “I just can’t. Not this time.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

Sarah lowered her eyes.

Cornelia felt unbearably sad. There was no enjoyment to be found in killing innocents. She was not a sadist. Didn’t they call it ‘collateral damage’?

“Now?” the young woman enquired, seemingly resigned to her fate, her voice low.

Cornelia walked up to the bed where Sarah was sitting.

Looked down at her.

“A waste, I know,” as if apologising.

“Yes,” Sarah agreed, her voice a thin sliver escaping from her mouth, touching the very root of Cornelia’s heart, or was it her stomach? Sometimes, emotions affected her in curious physical ways.

All of a sudden, she wanted to ask the girl so many questions. Who she was, why she was here, the nature of her relationship with the dead man? She desperately wanted to know her. But she also knew it was impossible. She didn’t have the time. Yet another unnecessary risk.

Her name was Sarah. That was all she could allow herself to find out.

“Get up,” she ordered.

Sarah rose from the edge of the hotel bed, and stood, her gloved hands by her side. She was shorter than Cornelia had initially estimated.

The young woman looked towards her, waiting for further instructions, a veil of sadness drifting across her pale face.

“Had he paid you in advance?” Cornelia asked her.

Sarah blushed. Cornelia wasn’t sure if this was caused by embarrassment or anger. Or even pride.

It made her look quite beautiful, though. Her cheeks an attenuated shade of pink that served to emphasise the sharp delineation of her cheekbones.

“With him,” Sarah answered, “it had nothing to do with money. Absolutely nothing.”

“Love?” Cornelia continued.

“No. Nor lust either,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

No, Cornelia would never understand truly why certain women invariably agreed to surrender themselves to the wrong men.

When Cornelia ceased responding, Sarah brazenly straightened out her whole body, almost growing by an inch or so as her back snapped into position.

“You just wouldn’t understand,” Sarah defiantly continued. “Not in a month of Sundays.”

No, Cornelia couldn’t.

“Undress,” she asked her.

Sarah obeyed unconditionally, and Cornelia knew it was no longer because of fear. Just submission. Like many women when they shed their clothing, she began by the bottom. She unzipped the invisible fastening on the right side of her skirt and the light fabric of the garment slid to the floor where she elegantly stepped out of it. She wasn’t wearing any undergarments, revealing that her plump mound was shaven totally smooth, which Cornelia somehow hadn’t expected, although she did the same to her own genital area, but then it was something the punters in the clubs preferred. Standing there motionless now, Sarah allowed Cornelia a minute of oppressive silence to collect her thoughts and drink in the vision of her obscene nudity, upright in her stockinged legs and nothing else.

Her sexual slit was a straight line gash from which no inner or outer labia protruded, like a raw wound, a scar that hypnotised Cornelia. Like an image in a mirror. She felt another twinge in her stomach. She couldn’t help but stare at Sarah’s cunt.

Then she quickly shed the rest of her clothes, the opaque white silk blouse and a small, and somewhat unnecessary brassiere, which then unveiled slight dark-nippled breasts even the smallest of men could cup in one hand, delicate hills in the porcelain landscape of her body.

Cornelia kept on peering at her.

Forgotten desires of school crushes on other girls flooded back. It had been ages since she had been with a woman.

Having taken in Sarah’s prominent sexual characteristics, Cornelia quickly noted that the whole geography of the young woman’s body was dotted with small bruises. These blemishes travelled across a whole spectrum of colours from dark, almost blue to brown and pale yellow as the skin had begun repairing itself.

These bruises had been created over a period of time; there was no way they could have happened on the same occasion.

“Turn round.”

Sarah did so, with elfin grace.

The bruises also generously populated her back, prominently spread across her thighs, with even redder lines, like the forgotten remnants of whip lashes or continued caning, criss-crossing her slightly androgynous buttocks.

In the small of her back, there was the tattoo of a Chinese ideogram, which Cornelia was unable to recognise. She should have asked her, but she didn’t.

She still had a million questions for Sarah, but none could travel the tortuous journey from her brain cells to her lips.

“Touch me,” Sarah pleaded.

It was her turn to give orders.Topping from below?

Hesitantly, Cornelia moved an arm forward, brushed her fingers against one of the younger girl’s shoulders. Her skin felt damp. But electric. She slowly moved upwards, sliding her fingers through the short ash blonde hair. Like a journey through silk.

She noted one of the more prominent bruises on Sarah’s body, a soiled few square inches of skin between her navel and her cunt where the skin had almost broken and still waltzed between dark tones of black and a borderline crater of yellow. She tenderly touched her there. The softness was divine. She perversely pressed harder.

“Does it hurt?” Cornelia asked.

“No,” she replied.

Her fingers lingered over the flatness of Sarah’s lower stomach, bathing in the nearby heat emanating in concentric circles from her sexual opening outwards. The pink gash was short and as straight as a ruler, highlighted by her depilation. Cornelia had witnessed a variety of shaven cunts in the clubs where she had worked, but it was the first time she had been allowed to look at one so close, so long. Is that what I look like, she wondered?

“Not him,” Sarah said. “Others.”

“More than one?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” that was all Cornelia could prosaically say in the circumstance.

“I don’t mind,” Sarah said.

“Really?”

“You can, too, if you so wish.” Sarah was inviting her to hurt her, defile her, mistaking the confused signals Cornelia was putting out.

“I’m not that sort of girl, you know.”

“How do you know?” she responded, with the bare hint of a smile on her lips, as she glanced over at the dead body by the door.

“I just know,” Cornelia answered.

“Anything you wish to do,” Sarah suggested. “I’m available, I’m here, I’m yours for the taking, any way you wish. I won’t scream.”

As she said that, all Cornelia’s imagination could conjure was the image of the young girl willingly being punched and whipped by other men, while she carefully kept silent and tears rolled down her cheeks.

How could she enjoy it, she wondered?

“You know I can’t,” Cornelia finally said. Then added “But you are indeed very beautiful. Really.”

The nude girl sighed.

“Do it now, then.”

But Cornelia knew she couldn’t shoot her. Not like this. Not after seeing the wonder and questions of her nude body, feeling the tremor of life and softness coursing through her skin, the unknown history buried inside her soft southern voice.

If she shot her, it would be showing her total disrespect, assimilating her to that piece of shit now dripping dark blood over there by the door across the hotel room flooring. And whose bowels had undignifyingly now opened.

She deserved better.

Cornelia nodded to her, indicating the window that opened onto South Figueroa Boulevard. Sarah’s eyes questioned her silently. Cornelia blinked once and she understood.

The flight of her naked body through the air was not unlike the dance of a butterfly in the summer breeze, weightless and beautiful, as she swam towards the ground in seemingly slow motion, fluttering her invisible wings, the bruises like a kaleidoscope of colours inked across her white skin, floating, smiling.

Cornelia looked away before she hit the ground.

She was now waiting for the long Californian night to end so she could catch the first flight back, wasting the remaining hours of darkness in an almost empty bar called Phillies. The couple across from here were still communicating in total silence.

Not long to go.

She had a bit of a cramp, a muscle giving her grief in her right shoulder, maybe caused by the recoil of the gun earlier. She must be getting older, no longer properly absorbing the reverse shock wave in her gun arm. She shifted imperceptibly in the high stall and across her shoulder she saw a man outside in the street sketching on a pad. For him, she guessed, we must be bathed in an eerie pool of light and an image worth remembering, just anonymous shapes in a composition of light and darkness. Not unlike an Edward Hopper painting. He was quite tall and balding, an imposing man with a Patrician allure.

As Cornelia turned around a bit more to look into his eyes, the sketch artist drew a final flourish on his pad and, satisfied, closed it and began to walk away, almost immediately melting into the night’s surroundings.

Cornelia adjusted her position on the bar stool, took another sip from her now lukewarm glass of water.

When morning came, she left the all-night bar and walked up the Boulevard in search of a cab, like a night ghost fading into day.

REMEMBER ME WITH KINDNESS

JACK’S BUDGET FLIGHT LANDED at Fiumicino. It was a hot, humid summer day.

Even though he held a CEE passport, the uniformed border officer at immigration control looked up and actually asked him whether he was visiting Rome for business or pleasure. As inquisitive as an American airport official.

“Sentimental reasons,” he answered, and was then allowed through with no further comment.

Maybe the border guard had been bored or something, as he had never been asked any such question on the occasion of his previous, numerous visits.

He had only hand luggage so went straight through into the main terminal’s arrivals hall and made a beeline for the car-hire desks. He had no need for anything fast or fancy in the way of transport, but he still had to convince the rental clerk that he actually did prefer a car with manual gearshift rather than an automatic. Habits die hard. After filling in the necessary forms and signing in all the dotted places, Jack was handed the keys to a dark blue Fiat and given the directions to the parking lot where it was kept.

He walked out into the midday sun and looked around. On his last time here, Giulia had been waiting, with her usual both wanton and joyfully innocent smile, wearing a white skirt and carrying a huge canvas bag embroidered with sunflowers, an accessory she’d bought six months earlier in Barcelona and which made her look like a schoolgirl rather than a full-grown woman. Three years ago already.

He settled into the driver’s seat, keeping the door open for a few minutes to allow the heat to escape from the car’s interior before the air-conditioning kicked in, while his feet got the measure of the pedals, getting himself accustomed again to driving a car on the opposite side of the road, and having the steering wheel on the left-hand side of the car. It always took a little acclimatisation, however many times he had to rent cars abroad.

And finally, he drove off towards the city. Considering it was the main road connecting Rome to one of its major airports, there was something old-fashioned and narrow about this road which made him think of all the legions of Caesar and past emperors and despots who’d in all likelihood marched down these avenues upon returning or departing for battle many centuries before. No modern highway this, more of a cobblestone alley in places, with twin ramparts of trees on either side and occasional low stone walls pouring with ivy, possibly erected long before even the Mussolini era.

It was as if the twenty-first century hadn’t yet broken through here despite the gleaming modern cars racing up and down the road, all splendidly oblivious to any hint of a speed limit. Jack was in no real hurry and, irritated by his leisurely pace, some of the other drivers would hoot at him repeatedly.

He’d found a room on the Internet in a small residential hotel close to Piazza Vittorio Emmanuelle II. It was a quiet side street and easy to park, even though he wasn’t sure if the parking space he had chosen was illegal or not. At any rate, he couldn’t be bothered about parking tickets and was confident the Fiat wouldn’t be towed away since it wasn't blocking anyone, and many other local vehicles were lined up on the same side of the street. The hotel was situated on the fourth floor of a massive apartment building and suited him fine: a clean, spacious if somewhat Spartan place, just a reception desk manned by a young student busy revising her exams, she informed him, and a small breakfast salon at the other end of the corridor. Jack didn’t require anything more. There were bars all across the city, and anyway he wasn’t much of a drinker. Never had been. More taste than principle, even if he found that some people gossiped behind his back back in London, and he was often suspected of being an ex-alcoholic. Print the legend, he thought; it’s miles more glamorous than the truth.

He changed into a clean shirt and walked toward Via Cavour and Stazione Termini. Here, the parcel he had ordered waspresent, as promised by Timbers, who had set it all up back in London when Jack had phoned him with his unusual request, left in the luggage locker he had been posted a key for the week before. The transaction had not proven cheap, but then again, money was now the least of his worries. The gun had been left at the bottom of a plastic Rinascente bag in which the seller had buried it, with no sense of irony, under a crumpled mess of seemingly used women’s silk lingerie. This was not the ideal place to check the weapon out, but it appeared in good shape, and should contain six bullets. He would not require more. He treated himself to an espresso at one of the station’s countless cafeteria counters and watched with melancholy how the two spoons of sugar drifted slowly towards the bottom of the small cup. Just the way espresso coffee should behave, he recalled her teaching him when they were still together. He sketched a wry smile for any curious onlookers. The coffee and sugar boost gave him a new sense of purpose, renewed his determination to see this all through.

He walked away from the bar and the busy train station and took the direction of the Campo dei Fiori, past the inescapable ancient monuments surrounded by wide-eyed tourists. Shortly after crossing the Piazza Vidoni, the Roman streets became quieter again, as if foreigners no longer ventured this far, beyond their self-circumscribed tourist enclave and he made his way down Corso Vittorio Emmanuelle II until he reached the Feltrinelli bookshop. He walked upstairs and ordered his second espresso of the day and a panini and sat at the edge of the shop’s balcony watching the customers mill below as they picked up random books and browsed at their leisure. She had once written to him, a long time ago before they had even slept together and were still enjoying a mildly flirtful stream of e-mail communications, that this was her favourite spot in all of Rome to waste time, meditate, observe others, casually do her homework. On his fateful initial visit here, this was also the first place she’d taken him and they had spent an hour here, nervously silent most of the time, knowing that a few hours later they would be in bed together for the first time. He remembered every single moment — the perfume she had worn, the heat radiating from her white skin as their knees brushed against each other and she contrived to make her cappuccino last forever as if scared to move on to the next, concrete and physical stage in their affair.

He didn’t expect to find her here today. She was now studying in a different area of the city, he’d found out,but still he had to come and visit the place again. Just in case. To commune with the past. To reopen old wounds. To feel the hurt inside. It was foolish, he knew, but if he had to march down this Calvary road of his own making, the Feltrinelli bookshop could not be avoided. The latest novel by Walter Veltroni and the Italian edition of the final Harry Potter book were piled high by the cash registers and staff kept on replenishing the displays on a steady basis. He’d sent her the English-language edition of the Rowling when it had appeared but by then they were no longer on speaking terms and she had not even thanked him or acknowledged the gift, one of many over the months they had known each other. The first book she had sent him as a gift was a collection of stories by Italo Calvino. Strange how he remembered every single, irrelevant detail.

Finally, his stomach reminded him he hadn’t had a real meal since a dim sum in London’s Chinatown the day before, so he left the bookshop and headed across the CorsoVittorio Emmanuelle II towards the Campo dei Fiori and the Pollarolla Restaurante where he had a pleasant memory of fragole di boscowith a fine dusting of sugar. Of course, he had also taken her there, once upon a time. Because of a stomach condition, she was not allowed to eat any spicy food, which Jack had always considered something of a tragedy. But the meal today, insalata verdeand risotto ai funghi, could not feed the pain inside and later, as he walked back to his hotel, he made a detour by Stazione Termini and under cover of darkness surrounded by rushing commuters and loitering teenagers he slipped his left hand deep into the plastic bag he had now been carrying for half of the day and felt the hard grip of the gun down there. It felt real. By Stazione Termini Jack sat down and wept.

He woke up early.

Escaping the inevitable dreams of her, of them. The sheer epiphany of her body, the ever so subtle and patently unique colour of her nipples, the broadness of her smile, the terrible harshness of her words on the phone the last time he had called her, the luscious sound of her sigh every time he had penetrated her. The places they’d been, the things they’d said.

He always woke up early these days, maybe as an automatic reaction to the sleeping memories of her and the abominable pain they invariably inflicted on his soul.

He adjusted his eyes, wiped the night away and moved his right leg.

Yes, he was back in Rome.

Alone.

He passed on breakfast, picked up a map of the city from an older woman now manning the hotel’s reception desk and, avoiding the lift and its ornate metal grille, walked down the stairs to the street and found his rental car. He hadn’t been ticketed, after all. Small mercies.

Jack pulled the gun from the depths of the Rinascente plastic bag and moved it to the glove compartment. Not an ideal place to keep it, but there were few possible hiding places in the hotel room. He would just have to drive carefully and not attract undue police attention. The busy Roman traffic would help.

Before driving off, he phoned Alessandra, Giorgio and Marina and made appointments to see them separately throughout the day. They were all surprised to find out he was in Rome, but sounded happy enough to meet him.

With the festival organisers he gossiped freely about books and movies and cultural politics. As they always did when they met at events. It was amazing how buoyant they remained every single year in the face of mounting difficulties in obtaining funding, grants and sponsorship. Of course, they asked him why he was in Rome. “Just passing through”, he would answer, with a fake smile and this seemed to satisfy them. They embraced and made a vow to see each other again at the next festival and went their separate ways.

Alessandra knew a small trattoriain the Trastevere, concealed in a labyrinth of cobbled streets and small churches only a local could navigate with impunity and find a way out of again. Jack meekly followed her. Night was falling. Inside, he felt ever so empty. Following the break up with Giulia, he had almost once fallen into bed with Alessandra as both had been on the rebound from heart-shattering affairs. But it hadn’t happened. They knew each other professionally, and she had also been aware of his relationship with Giulia, as they both freelanced for the same magazine. Maybe it was because neither Jack or Ale were sufficiently head over heels over the other, or maybe lacked the energy for purely recreational sex. Sometimes you want the tenderness and the feelings, and the physicality wasn’t enough to conquer the inner thirst. At any rate, after a failed attempt at meeting up in Paris for a tryst, they’d both drifted apart, either to other adventures or, in Jack’s case, his desert of loneliness. He expected nothing of tonight either. It was just a way of saying farewell to a friend. No less, no more.

The cuisine was Sicilian and for the first time ever he tried pasta with sardines, followed by great bowls of steamed shellfish, with a succulent sauce they both soaked up with freshly-baked local bread. The small piazza outside the restaurant was shrouded in darkness as he looked out of the windows of the restaurant, somehow expecting Giulia to walk by at any moment, like a revenant straight out of the past.

“Still thinking about her?” Alessandra asked. He had sometimes used her as a confidant.

“Yes,” he answered. “It’s a sickness. I know. Don’t tell me.”

“There’s a character in Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholerawho tries to cure himself of a case of unrequited love by later bedding 622 women,” she remarked, as if proposing a cure.

“It would feel too much like revenge,” Jack pointed out. “Anyway, it wasn’t unrequited. I have pages and pages of e-mails, text messages and letters to prove it. And I know every square inch of her body at rest and play, every obscene crease and every single silky surface, intimately,” he said.

“You always had a wonderful way with words…” Alessandra sighed.

“But now, words are insufficient,” he answered. “Powerless. She no longer answers my messages, won’t ever listen to me, answer the telephone. She probably thinks I’ve gone mad. And she’s probably right.”

“Did you come to Rome to try and see her?” Alessandra asked.

“No,” Jack said. “Oh, I don’t know any more. Maybe I just came for myself…”

He offered to drive her back to her apartment on the other side of the river.

The car moved along the Tiberon the Lungotevere heading north. Even at this time of night, the traffic was thick. Alessandra insisted on smoking a cigarette. He opened his window and looked out. Across the river was an old-fashioned building, white and functional under the light of a three-quarter moon: the San Filippo Neri Hospital. A knot twisted inside his stomach — wasn’t this where she had been born or where her father, the surgeon, worked? Or both?

Alessandra invited him up for a final coffee, but he declined.

“I have to get up early in the morning,” he said. It would have been pointless.

Back on his hotel bed, Jack prayed for sleep. When it finally came, hours later — the sounds of the Roman night punctuated by sirens and the odd boisterous laugh of passers-by in the street outside — it carried an ocean of despair and memories he just couldn’t banish. It was a warm night and he kept on wiping away the sweat between his legs and under his chin, as he thrashed around feverishly between the crisp white sheets.

Even sleep was no longer a refuge.

Giulia lived in the hills behind the Stadio Olimpico.

He painfully managed to find his way there, manoeuvring the car with difficulty with an unfolded map on his knees and dodging cars that sped past him. She had pointed out the area to him when they had driven nearby on the way to secret places where they could fuck, but he had a hell of a time today finding his way past the Stadio Olimpico. Once in the hills, it was no better and he arrived at the top by mistake, enjoying a view of both central Rome and all the neighbouring hills he remembered from his history and Latin lessons all those years past. Oh, there was the Vatican. And there was the road that led out of town to the lake and Calcata, past the neglected area whose name he couldn’t recall where, she had told him, prostitutes and low-life came out at night, then further down the road the RAI buildings. She had confessed to an unholy fascination with the whores there when she had been a troubled teenager and how she had always imagined what they were doing or how she would act if she were one.

Jack studied the map carefully and found her street. He drove off downwards in its direction.

Via Luigi Credaro was a cul-de-sac and a small supermarket occupied the ground floor of the apartment building where she had returned to live with her parents. He managed to park a hundred metres away on the opposite side of the road.

Though he had never been here, he seemed to remember Giulia saying that the family’s apartment occupied the top two floors of the building. Did her bedroom overlook the street, or was it on another side of the building facing the hills or another part of the city?

So, this was where she had mostly grown up, apart from those years in the country when she had commuted to school in the city by train. It felt strange being here. He kept his eye on the door to the building; the supermarket was now open and customers trickled in and out.

Jack opened the glove compartment and took out the gun and placed it between his thighs on the car seat. He’d never fired a gun in his life, let alone owned one. But he had read enough books and articles and knew the basics — the safety, the calibre, the damage it could invariably cause.

I’m crazy, totally crazy, he thought. He’d been in love before, of course, but never had he been so obsessed by a woman, a girl, or missed her so much. Without her, he had sadly realised, he was nothing.

However much he knew that things could never have worked out between them after the initial yearlong honeymoon of covert meetings and fiery fucks in forbidden placesand foreign cities, Jack still couldn’t give up on her totally, admit defeat, let her, and him, get on with their respective lives. She was younger. She still had a life — adventures, as she’d so often put it — ahead of her. Even after whatever she might have done since Paris and that other older man. He didn’t. Not without her.

It was a few weeks before when he had been researching for some still unfinished story that he had stumbled across a pornographic website replete with photos actually submitted by non-professionals; openly voyeuristic images of nudity, both simple and extreme, and of couples enjoying sexual intercourse. He had distractedly spent a quarter of an hour surfing through the images and noting the monotonous repetition of positions and angles, when he had come across a series of eight shots in which the woman’s face was always out of the frame but her opulent white arse stood front and centre, her wet, pink gash circled by unruly black curls, fully exposed along with the puckered, darker areola of her back door. The young woman was on her knees, her rear right in the camera’s face. From image to image the arse came nearer and nearer to the fore and in the final three photographs a resplendently thick and hard penis took aim at the woman’s cunt and was then seen entering it, finally ending deeply embedded in it up to the ball sack.

He had of course seen a thousand photographs of this kind before, but this time the shape, the colour, the details of the woman’s arse recalled Giulia’s in indelible resemblance. Jack had been violently sick, rushing to the bathroom and spewing out all the contents of his stomach over the carpet long before reaching the safety of the ceramic bowl. It had been like a knife to his heart. Naturally, Jack knew there could be no way she had not moved on to other men after him and the sad episode with the dead man in Paris in the years following their break-up, and since when do women in their twenties have to act as nuns? But somehow the images on his laptop had brought it all home, the sheer reality of another man fucking her, owning her, playing with her and, worse, getting her to allow him to even broadcast photographs of their terrible intimacy across the web.

A few hours later, he had hesitantly peered at the photographs again and realised it wasn’t her, couldn’t actually be her. A few meshes of the woman’s hair were in the frame of one of the images and the shade was assuredly not hers; also, there was also a distinctive mole absent in a familiar area of her lunar landscape, he discovered, to his relief. But the scar was still there. Inside Jack. Who was she with now? Who did she love now, she who had once loved him?

The door to the building opened and a woman walked out, plump, dark-haired, almost a vision of what Giulia might look like twenty years later. Her mother? Would Giulia also age badly and put on so much weight around her waist and backside?

The heat of the day hammered against the parked car, but Jack couldn’t switch the air-conditioning on or the battery would rapidly go flat.

Was she now alone in her roomin the large two-floor apartment?

Or maybe she was now in a small hotel room by Lake Bracciano, being ploughed by another man? It had been, after all, she who had once discovered that hideaway.

Enough. Enough.

I am sick. I am sick.

Sick enough to climb the stairs to the apartment, ring the bell, confront her when she opened the door and brandish the gun? If you can’t be mine, you can’t be anyone else’s…? The pitiful stuff of tabloid journalism. Come on!

He could sit here all day and not see her, he realised. And even if she did emerge, what would he thendo? Follow her? Stalk her? He’d lose her in traffic most likely.

In her anger, when he would refuse to let her go and beg for a last meeting, a final embrace, a penultimate conversation, she would always fire back that he had no respect for her and could not accept what she felt. She had these crazy ideas about respect, but he understood what she meant.

In a letter, one of so many, too many, he had written that loving her was also knowing when to let her go, but it was a precept he had proven incapable of adhering to.

What the fuck was he doing in Rome? What the hell was he doing with a gun?

There was just no way he could kill her. Let alone a sensible reason…

Damn.

Jack drove off, found the highway that led out of town, past the desolate and empty market place where the whores were said to congregate at night like in a Fellini movie, sped past the RAI buildings and into the countryside.

The sky was blue.

Maybe he could find peace after all.

There was a junction with a road that led to Lake Bracciano and Trevignano. He sighed and drove past it, his mind assaulted by more memories of nearby hotel rooms where they had made love and had once been unbearably happy. Watching her emerge from the shower, her wet, unfurled hair hanging all the way down her back. Jack putting that cheap necklace around her throat. His final gift.

The next turnoff was for the medieval town of Calcata. He was just over forty kilometres from the city, in the Parco Treja Tuscia region. Here, behind the high, fortified ramparts in a small stone house, where the February cold had chilled their bones to the marrow and forced them to spend almost two whole days in bed — talking non stop between the tender fucking, learning about each other, getting accustomed to the taste of each other, growing bolder with mind and body and plunging headfirst into transgression– he had moved inside her for the first time and fallen in love with her. For ever.

Calcata looked the same. In all likelihood it had not changed in a few hundred years. Once abandoned, the small town had been repopulated several decades ago by hippies and was now turning into a historical arts centre, with medieval summer houses for rich Romans, artists or visiting lovers, art galleries and a handful of tiny country restaurants. The whole town, whose population still didn’t number more than nine hundred people normally, was built on a hilltop of volcanic rock.

He parked the rented blue Fiat outside the ramparts and walked up the stone street into the town, past the arches and fortifications.

The small cottage where they had frozen and spent a whole thirty-six hours all that time ago was still there. He wondered what sort of couple was now inside in that unforgettable bedroom you could only access through a shaky wooden ladder (aaahhhh, the vision of her climbing those stairs, stark naked, his eyes looking straight at the voluptuous and bouncing flesh of her arse as he ascended behind her, his cock hard and ready, his mind aglow with tenderness and desire…).

Jack walked past the steep stone steps leading to his forgotten paradise and ventured past narrow alleys, closed craft shops and freshly washed clothes hanging loose from windows until he reached the narrow promontory that dominated the valley below.

The view was quite beautiful, rugged, untamed. In the distance, forests dominated the far landscape, but below the damaged stone walls protecting this side of Calcata was a lunar expanse of rocks as far as the eye could see.

Jack sighed.

Best remember the good times.

When she smiled at him and her eyes expressed a million things unsaid.

He pulled that silly gun from the plastic bag and hurled it into the gaping void. It fell in a large arc and it felt like almost a minute before he saw it actually hit the ground some five hundred metres below. It didn’t go off. He had left the safety catch on. No need to draw attention to himself even though there didn’t appear to be a soul for a mile around.

He closed his eyes.

“My sweetie,” she would call him.

He took a deep breath.

“My wild gypsy,” he would often say to her.

Jack pulled his left leg over the wall, raised himself energetically so that he now stood on the edge of the precipice.

Looked down one final time.

Those fierce and distant rocks should do the job, he reckoned.

And jumped.