I Was Waiting For You (6 page)

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

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

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

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

“Music?”

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

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

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

Three minutes can sometimes feel like a wilderness of eternity.

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

The allotted time ran out. Cornelia began to rise.

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

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

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

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

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

“You never say much, do you?”

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

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

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

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

“Thank you, kind sir.”

His tone changed. His eyes looking darkly into hers.

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

Cornelia sharply interrupted his hurried flow.

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

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

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

Cornelia continued.

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

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

Her punter was now fully silenced.

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

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

Puzzled, he said “Yes.”

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

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

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

A nagging feeling of unease had settled on her mind.

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

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

“Hello.”

“Where the fuck have you been?”

“Here and there,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Very unlike you.”

“So, sue me …”

“Cornelia, you've fucked up.”

“Have I?”

He snorted on the other end of the line.

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

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

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

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

“It just happened, Ivan.”

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

“Let me guess: the doorman reported back?”

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

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

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

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

“That's just not good enough.”

“So?”

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

“Me?”

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

“Oh, Ivan …” she began to plead.

“Go back. Eliminate her.”

“A tall order …” Cornelia said.

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

“Who are these principals of yours?”

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“Damn.”

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

“No one's perfect.”

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

“I will.”

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

“I understand.”

The phone in her hand went dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello?”

A woman's voice, soft, shy.

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

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

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

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

“Good.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or the smell of her skin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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