“Is over with Henry,” she told Jack. “Finally. I make break. Is better. For good.”
“Eleonora, it’s none of my business. You don’t have to tell me, you know,” Jack pointed out.
“Is better to be honest, Jack.”
She leaned towards him over the table and Jack caught a whiff of her perfume and smiled.
“Why you laugh?” Eleonora asked.
“Just smiling, Eleonora. Just smiling,” he said. “Your perfume?”
“Yes?” she said quizzically.
“I recognise it. It’s Anaïs Anaïs, isn’t it? By Cacharel?”
They both laughed.
“So, you and me, together, we find Giulia? OK?”
“Yes, Eleonora, we find Giulia. That’s a deal.”
But at the back of Jack’s mind, there was another nagging question worming its way through to the surface. What would happen when they found her? Or if they didn’t?
Just four Latin Quarter blocks away, unknown to them, Giulia had earlier finished paying her latest hotel bill. For two weeks now, she had been flitting from place to place, eking her funds out, having graduated down to low-grade two star hotels in a bid to make the money last. Time to move on, she had decided.
Giulia had transferred all her meagre belongings into a large, newly-acquired rucksack she had slung over her shoulders for now, after having been defeated by the complexity of its straps and appendages. In her right hand she had her customary deep-bottomed canvas bag with her laptop and other essentials.
She’d taken the Métro to the train station.
The departure hall reverberated with a cacophony of noise. Light shone through on this grey day through the station’s cantilevered glass roof. She spotted random clusters of policemen examining papers at the entrance to various platforms and she nervously moved back into the main concourse. Her heart skipped a beat.
Surely this was routine; didn’t concern her.
She noticed a sign for the public toilets and zigzagged towards them between the ever-shifting crowds of travellers.
She washed her face with cold water and then, impulsively, disposed of the stack of envelopes and their shady dossiers into the nearest waste bin and quickly buried them under a mass of crumpled paper napkins. Why was she even carrying the stuff? It was the past and she was severing her ties once and for all. Yesterday, Rome, her studies, Jack, Barcelona, that week in New York, the bad man, the murder and now Paris.
Giulia walked back into the bustling railway station and looked up at the ever-shifting jumble of destinations, times and platform numbers on the large, high electronic indicator board.
All she really knew was that she wanted to go south. She grabbed a slice of lukewarm and tasteless pizza at the station’s central cafeteria.
Anywhere south.
Giulia knew her heart sought sun and warmth.
The louder sound of cheerful, laughing voices reached her ears, catching her attention. A group of young men and girls burdened with heavy backpacks were making their way to the platform where the TGV to Madrid was parked. Giulia glanced at the indicator. The train was scheduled to leave in a quarter of an hour. She looked down and saw the group being waved through by the bored cops. Three young women in jeans and tees, and four tall boys with untidy long hair, some with basketball caps, most wearing sweat shirts bearing logos of various American universities. Which didn’t mean they were necessarily Yanks, Giulia knew. It was just the sort of thing that was fashionable with European students, she had discovered.
It occurred to her that if she hadn’t taken different roads in her past life when alternatives had presented themselves and she had made the wrong choice, she might well have been part of that group, carefree, laughing her head off at bad jokes, slightly tipsy even. She looked down at her legs, her scuffed trainers. After all, didn’t she dress just like them? Wasn’t she even in all likelihood more or less the same age?
Giulia made up her mind.
She swivelled round and rushed to the ticket counter and bought a one-way student rate ticket for the train to Madrid and ran to the platform. The cops had moved on to another part of the railway station by now and she wasn’t delayed at the gate.
She stepped on to the train. She had no reserved seat. She was still catching her breath when the doors closed with a soft electric hush. There was a deafening moment of silence then the wheels shifted into gear, slowly at first, then exponentially faster as the whole train shuddered and followed and moved out smoothly, the now empty platform unrolling like a movie through the windows.
Giulia began her journey through the train, until she came across the earlier group of young men and women all sitting together in a compartment towards the front of the train. They were quieter now. One of the girls also had dark corkscrew curled hair, just like Giulia. And one the boys, who was growing a beard which was still a faint wisp on his chin, wore the same trainers, she noted, although his were still quite new and cleaner.
“Can I join you?” she asked.
Gentle, smiling eyes looked up at her.
Someone said “Yes” and two of the young men shifted apart to create a space between them where she could sit and offered to haul her bag onto the elevated luggage rail above them.
“My name is Giulia,” she said. “I come from Italy.”
“Hello, Giulia, “ one of the girls said, greeting her.
“Where are you going?” Giulia enquired.
“Spain, and then maybe some of the islands. No firm plans, really. We’re all quite open-ended.”
Some were French, one of the girls was Spanish, a boy with darker skin had Middle-Eastern looks.
It sounded just the thing for today, Giulia thought.
“I’m travelling too. No particular destination. Can I join you?”
They all laughed and Giulia took her place alongside them.
YOU OWN ME
THIS TIME AROUND, CORNELIA found herself a mid price three-star hotel in a Montmartre back street, which principally catered to the tourist trade. Best hide herself in plain sight amongst the ever-shifting crowds of foreign faces, where she would not stand out more than necessary, between incoming and outgoing coaches and corralling tour guides. She had taken the customary precautions and changed outfits at Roissy following her arrival, and booked in under an assumed name and a stolen US passport she’d held on to for years, unlike her previous trip. It would help muddy the waters if anyone was seeking her out as a result of the hit, earlier that week. There would be no official record of her having been in Paris already.
She didn’t plan to make a similar journey to the American Express Poste Restante offices in Rue Scribe. For one thing, she didn’t think she would need a weapon. For now. In addition, even if she wore a wig, it was too much of a risk visiting the same place so soon after the initial call. She would have to find other ways of getting hold of a gun, when the time was right.
She had no clue where she could find the Italian girl who had witnessed the shooting. Or even where to begin looking. For all she knew, the young woman could already have left the city. Maybe returned to Italy. But Cornelia had been informed that the girl had returned to the man’s place and taken something Ivan’s principals badly wanted. Did this mean that she knew more than she should have and was in fact no innocent bystander?
The key to the problem, Cornelia decided, was to find out more about the man she had been employed to kill. If she discovered what he used to do for a living, what he was and the possible reasons for the contract, it might shed a light on the Italian girl’s role, and consequently her whereabouts. A call to Ivan would not generate any answers to that particular question, she was aware. The organisation or man who had generated the hit knew of her existence, she recalled. How?
“Yes,” she said quietly, sipping from a cup of jasmine tea, and distractedly taking bite-size chunks from a melted cheese skewer in the Japanese restaurant she was eating in, towards the south side of the Luxembourg Gardens, her first hot me
al in two days as she always turned down airplane food.
The doorman at the club échangiste.
Who had seen Giulia leave, without the man who had brought her along to the club. A tenuous connection but the only one she had right now. She hoped he would be on duty this evening, and not having a night off. She paid for her meal in cash and took the Métro back to Montmartre and her hotel and slept for six hours like a log, recharging her batteries for the likely task ahead.
Cornelia began her surveillance of the Chandelles in the same café around the corner where she had sat the earlier evening. The club only opened its doors at ten in the evening, but there was no doorman on attendance until around midnight, in view of the few customers who bothered to arrive this early. It was raining quite hard by now and Cornelia had to squint to get a better view of the man’s face when he installed himself by the club’s entrance, shielded from the weather by a thin stone ridge that protected the door and its immediate neighbourhood from the elements. He was holding a large black and white umbrella, and his collar was pulled up around his neck. But he looked familiar. It must be the right guy. Stocky, ruddy-faced, buzz-cut hair, muscular.
It was going to be a long night, Cornelia knew. She took a cab back to her hotel and changed into warmer clothing and returned to the area around two in the morning. She knew he would still be there. The café was closed by now, and there was nowhere else to keep a watch on the club’s entrance but a bus shelter with the right vantage point. By now, the arriving customers were thinning out and very soon were overtaken in numbers by departing couples the doorman would walk solicitously to the kerb under his umbrella until a cab came along. Which they always did quite rapidly. He must have a phone to call them, she reasoned.
Cornelia munched on a couple of chocolate bars to keep her energy levels up, as she waited in the cold for another few hours. Finally, nearing four in the morning, the lights on the first floor of the club went off and a few straggling punters exited. The rain was now thinning. The attendant pushed the door open and walked back in. Cornelia hoped it was just to get his gear or another coat. She didn’t care for waiting much longer. Within minutes, the rest of the staff filed out, waving at each other or engaged in deep conversation. The doorman was amongst them, now wearing a long black leather mac that gave him the appearance of a Gestapo cop in a war movie. He began walking at a brisk pace towards the Opéra. Keeping a hundred metres or so away, Cornelia followed. Half an hour later, she knew where the man lived. A 1930s building in the Rue Montholon, between the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord, a quiet residential quarter that didn’t appear to have changed much in character for half a century at least. Watching outside, Cornelia identified his flat when a solitary light lit up a window on the first floor just a minute after he’d walked through the main door. At this time of night, the rest of the building’s facade was in the dark and it would have been too much of a coincidence for a light to go on in the wrong flat to coincide with the man’s arrival. So far, so good. She even knew his name now: the list of tenants could be found by the row of letter boxes under the entrance arch. There were only two flats on the first floor and the other one happened to be a dentist’s surgery. The man looked nothing like a dentist.
He would be sleeping for a few hours now, she guessed. During which time she had to formulate her plan of action. Cornelia sighed and walked away. The journey back to her Montmartre hotel would do her good, help her concentrate, she hoped. It was a bit like trampling through thick fog, never knowing what she would come upon next. She’d trained herself to kill, mentally erasing all forms of morality and personal doubt or guilt. Just a job. And Cornelia knew she was good at it. Sometimes, awake in bed back on Washington Square Place, she stayed awake counting all her past hits, like sheep in the night, even forgetting some of the jobs. She never quite reached the same number of bodies she was responsible for on every separate occasion. They already faded in the mists of memory. But this detective palaver was not something she was used to. Give her a name, a place, a face, a gun and she could aim the deadly weapon at the right person at the right time. It was clear cut. Easy.
By the time she reached her room, she had regained her resolve and abolished the seeds of doubt. All she had to do was pretend this was all a prelude that would lead to another hit. The club’s doorman. Then she would move on, maybe to his associates. Then, rolling back the plot, this would lead her to Giulia and this time she wouldn’t fail. Just a matter of being utterly professional again. Settled, then. However, she was intrigued by the fact that none of the local newspapers she had read through since she’d returned to Paris had carried any mention of the murder at the club échangiste, and there was no report of the body being found. She would normally have expected an incident in such a high-profile locale to make minor headlines at least. Were the police keeping it under wraps for one reason or another? Or had people at the club managed to hush matters up or disposed privately of the body? In the latter case, this meant there was more to the affair than she had been told, and there were some questions she could possibly get some answers to, she reckoned.
The blonde American woman bumped into him on the street as he was returning from the boulangerie late that morning. He’d picked up his morning baguette and was holding a plastic carrier bag with a litre of milk, a tin of Nescafe and a kilo of apples he’d bought just before at the épicerie across from the square. He was turning back into the Rue Montholon and she was walking in the opposite direction and must have stumbled over some crack in the pavement as she fell across him, grabbing the lapel of his jacket as she attempted to retain her equilibrium, before sprawling across the pavement. It all happened in a flash. Joseph Nicolski dropped the plastic carrier bag and, helpless, watched it fall to the ground and heard the milk bottle shatter.
The woman looked up at him.
“Pardon, Monsieur. Vraiment pardon,” she said, getting back on her feet, instinctively pulling down the short Burberry skirt that had hitched up midway across her thighs. There was a quick flash of white skin. Was the damn woman not wearing panties?
“Pas de problème. Juste un accident,” Nicolski said, almost apologising himself.
She had a foreign accent. American, he thought. He’d once been based for just over two years in Chicago when he’d still been boxing. Her shoulder length hair was straw blonde. A real blonde. No way it could be peroxide. She frantically reached for the spilt contents of his carrier bag, separating the coffee tin and the half dozen apples from the mess of glass and milk.
“Don’t. There is no need, is just an accident,” he said in English, as she scrambled in a forlorn attempt to rectify the damage caused by their accidental collision.
He extended his hand forward, inviting her to stand up from her somewhat undignified position with one knee on the dirty pavement.
She rose gracefully. Tall. Thin. For a brief moment, Joseph thought there was something familiar about her face, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint where he might have seen her before. Student, tourist? he wondered silently.
“I’m sorry. So, so sorry,” the American girl said, visibly embarrassed by the whole brief incident.
“It’s nothing, really,” he said.
“You must allow me to pay for the milk,” she looked down at the bag’s contents still scattered across the pavement. “And those spoiled apples. I insist.”
“C’est pas grave. You don’t have to,” Nicolski said.
“No, no, I insist,” she replied, pointing to the épiceriewhere he had just completed his small shopping minutes before just a few metres behind him.
Joseph shrugged his shoulders.
She smiled and took him by the hand and dragged him gently back towards the shop where, still apologising effusively about the accident that had brought them together, she paid for another bottle of milk and another bag full of apples. As they were walking out of the store, she looked down at her legs and swore under her breath.
“What is it?” he asked.
He peered at her long, svelte legs. “Appears OK to me. You should be all right.”
Looked up. Her eyes were dark brown. Unusual in a blonde. Rather striking, he felt.
“Listen,” he heard himself saying, “I live just over there. Not far at all. If you want, you can come up and clean your knee. No problem.”
“Really?’ she innocently asked.
“Don’t we French have a reputation for being gallant?”
Her beaming smile was the greatest reward.
Piece of cake. Playing the role of the naive American abroad came easy to Cornelia. Maybe she should have become an actress.
Joseph wasn’t a bad fuck. Not her first French guy — that had been the exchange student she’d met some years back in a Boston bar, who had introduced her to a few interesting variations on the standard sexual themes– but a decent lover who, at least, took his time and was relatively unselfish.
“So, tell me about this place where you work?”
Nicolski explained the concept of the French club échangisteto her.
“Wow, sounds classy even,” Cornelia noted. He now knew her as Rita. She never gave anyone her real name when out on jobs, and seldom used the same one twice. Nor was it the name listed on the stolen passport she was now using. “We have them in some cities in the States. Not that I’ve ever been to one, you understand. But they’re supposed to be somewhat sleazy, you know. Once, in New Orleans, some guy did suggest we go to one, but it just wasn’t my style. Trust the French to do it properly, eh?”
Joseph Nicolski grinned. “Of course.”
“Swinging at home is still in the dark ages. Car keys in fruit bowls, middle-aged suburban couples wanting to be naughty and daring and all that,” she said, giggling under her breath at the mere thought.
“We have that too,” Joseph told her. “I understand that in the French provinces, the clubs people go to are less sophisticated. It’s inevitable. Just the local bourgeoisie getting their kicks, being naughty. In Paris, we do things better, we’re more sophisticated. The Chandelles is one of the best. It doesn’t make you feel cheap…”
I Was Waiting for You Page 8
