I Was Waiting For You (4 page)

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

“I hope you enjoyed your stay, Mademoiselle?”

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

“Absolutely,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack swallowed the bile rising up through his throat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hallo …”

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

“It's Jack Clive.”

“Wow, man, you've woken me up.”

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

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

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

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

“Guns again?”

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

“Tell me, Jack, I'm all ears.”

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

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

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

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

“Ah, a French Timbster …”

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

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

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

There was a brief silence.

“Can probably do, man.”

“That would be just great …”

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

“I understand,” Jack nodded.

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

“Yes.”

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

“Great, really great.”

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

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

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

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

“Personal?” Timbers said.

“You could call it that, I suppose.”

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

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

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

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

“I know,” Jack said apologetically.

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

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

His interlocutor made no further comment.

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

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

“That's generous of you.”

“I'll ask around,” he concluded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Was she happy?”

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

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

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

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

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

“And she just packed all her stuff?”

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

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

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

A thought occurred to Jack.

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

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

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

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

Flora nodded.

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

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