Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  The size of her hotel room could have matched the ground floor of a town house, one furnished with a luxury he suspected only a tyrant could demand. And once inside her private suite, there had been something about her too-smooth face, her tactical décolleté, the broad compactness of her thighs and bottom that had drawn the libidinous fool out of him, making him writhe with a reckless, hot desire that had felt toxic as it smelted his bowels.

  When her security closed the door and left them alone, the father had felt himself adrift in warm, deep waters, too far from familiar shores, but even that had been exciting. A sobering awareness of his own dissolute nature began changing positions with sudden, irrational lusts that had left him dizzy.

  After the sex, he’d known in a heartbeat that he’d made a grave mistake and placed himself somewhere unfortunate. As he left her rooms that evening, he’d been light-headed, and slightly nauseous with anxiety. Excitement had shortened his breath when he’d entered the same suite hours earlier.

  Over dinner, she’d been eager to impress him and contributed the major share of conversation, choosing the subjects, mostly connected to herself, or her idea of herself: her achievements, the seemingly effortless affluence, a version of a past he didn’t believe, and who she knew, with an emphasis on world leaders. Tantalizing suggestions of his potential in her world were also thrown out nonchalantly. And he’d liked her less as every minute passed, sensing a deep, unquenchable anger inside the woman, manifesting in a readiness to judge and castigate rivals, reformers, or opponents to her interests. Other patterns formed the more she drank. She loathed younger women and he suspected she made them suffer in her professional life. She exhibited signs of jealousy at the merest details of his past relationships. His too-familiar connection with his boss, Diane, she’d circled, like a shark smelling blood in the water. He’d been inclined to lie, feeling an instinctive need to protect his boss.

  And the more Karen drank the more she talked, and the more distant from the situation the father had felt; excluded and lessening as a true object of her curiosity. She knew all she wanted to know. His role had been assigned quickly and he’d assumed he was to be a hollow vessel with an irrelevant past that she would fill with her own judgements and aspirations. His dislike quickly became an aversion, but his distaste mingled with animal desire, making his lust ugly, volatile, urgent, even vengeful. He had gone to her bed engulfed by all of the wrong feelings.

  His repulsion manifested in a cruel appraisal, once they were in her bedroom and undressing under dimmed lights. That plasticized mask of haughty indifference, the vast hair, a coiffured, pedicured, manicured illusion, her heavy body silkily folded away inside expensive tailored suits, all suddenly combined to temper his ardour. The final revealing, the very unwrapping of her flesh, had seemed like the unveiling of a stark white madness in a penthouse-turned-interrogation cell. And she’d watched his eyes carefully for even a flicker of disappointment. So he’d focused on the stockings, the fine details of the lingerie, the cold eyes, and let that all swirl through his own drunkenness to revive his excitement.

  In bed, she’d opened to him quickly. Was hungry, not at all bashful, but the father suspected a world-weary resignation was incompletely hidden. She went into a performance that he’d thought contrived, even vulgar. She became aggressive, fierce, more than he liked. She bared her teeth, pulled his hair until his eyes watered. Look, I am a great lover, terrible in my passion: another boast amongst the many he had already weathered that evening, as her self-aggrandizing had grown monstrous after the second bottle of wine was uncorked. The unstable tyrant had engulfed him, and the father had smelled the danger growing like a gas ring left on in a small kitchen. Yet still he’d unbuckled when the call came.

  Her surrender into near-debasement, as his lust removed the last inhibitions that alcohol failed to erase, had been equally as enthusiastic as his own, and alarming enough to tarnish his enjoyment. The whole carnal episode became wrong: doggish, combustible, clumsy, competitive, near-spiteful on both sides, and his loathing of himself peaked as his climax subsided.

  Resistance would have caused friction. A trap had been sprung and he was suddenly in her debt, as if an unspoken agreement had been reached without him reading the small print. And as the last tawdry rags of his ardour for the adventure unravelled, his paranoid mind suspected that he’d become a component in a strategy, beginning the moment they established eye contact at the conference.

  That first time, the con artist inside him began to speak the moment the sex was over: why can’t a man and a woman just enjoy intimacy and affection without any hang-ups or complications? The same routine had always been received by his lovers with coldness and contempt. Karen was no exception. Such an attitude to commitment should have been shared before sex, not after. But out it had flowed from his mouth, propelled by fear and clownishly insincere. He’d felt especially thin, meek and white as he’d hauled his trousers back on, but he dressed too quickly for her not to notice his haste.

  The incremental retraction of his enthusiasm that evening had already made her tense and angry. She may have sensed the beginnings of his perturbation and rushed into the sex to give him no way out.

  The terrible causality of actions and their consequences near-choked him now. Inside his mind, as he bowed before the cold tonnage of concrete dread in a near-derelict car park, he could see her again and more clearly, and he attributed much more to the experience than he ever had done at the time. Once again, he found his toes edging over a precipice on the floor of human depravity. This was more evidence of the kind of behaviour he’d mistakenly thought incapable of ever surprising him again. But a woman, an actual woman, and one of considerable professional status, had paid criminals to steal his daughter because he had rejected her years ago.

  He clutched his head between his hands as he struggled to comprehend the ugly affair as a motivation for child abduction.

  In the car, the father spent hours searching Karen Perucchi online. Though not a single posting about her existed in the two years following her stepping down as CEO of Open Arms: no functions, no interviews, no endorsements, chairs or boards, no gossip or retrospectives, and not a single image. The woman had no current public profile.

  Through the car’s computer, he’d used the best search services on both nets, the regulated and the dark, as far as Scarlett Johansson’s former tuition could enable him. But all traces of Perucchi’s existence had been removed from each channel. Not uncommon for the powerful and rich to delete bad press; the practice was decades old. But to erase yourself entirely from publically available electronic data on the unregulated networks was a feat only feasible for those who had the most advanced take-down and hacking expertise at their disposal, or those with friends in regulation. The super-wealthy or the most powerful criminals commanded such measures, and he guessed he was now dealing with a combination of the two.

  He abandoned the search and let the news play so he could keep up with weather reports. Roads were closed all over the south-west and south-east. Only one route could take him to the gated community that Oleg had tracked his girl to, two years gone. The rest of the news carried only one story on every channel.

  Pakistani and Indian troops increase their presence on the international border of Kashmir . . .

  . . . As part of Operation Spharaka, the Indian military has now amassed eight hundred thousand troops, and six armoured divisions, on the line of control in the Punjab.

  . . . Indian troop increases described as a response to the movement of midrange ballistic missiles by Pakistan.

  . . . The Pakistan military currently maintains four hundred thousand troops and four armoured divisions in the disputed region.

  The father racked slender recollections for more details about Karen Perucchi; his memories of evading her were clearer than those of them together. When you were forced to, you could remember most things.

  After their first dinner date, and the first time he’d slept with her, he
’d tried to cut short his association by going to ground. After two weeks of his silence, she notified him of an emotional crisis that he’d triggered and needed to repair. Only to become her old self again in other calls, or the inflated persona she’d adopted when they’d first met.

  In time, other personae appeared too, and he cared even less for those. One was more sage-like, as if Karen was a deliverer of important information about their ‘connection’. Astral and mystical links between them were suggested. Destiny was cited. And fate. Their whole coming together was practically foretold, at least to her. She’d known the moment he’d looked at her in the conference auditorium that he was the one.

  Mystical gibberish. He’d simply been intrigued, drunk, libidinous, reckless and bored. But to placate what he felt was a growing and unstable rage in the woman, and to assuage his own destructive passions, he’d met her again, and again.

  He remembered one time clearly, in an exclusive hotel bar that he’d never have got inside without her invitation, where he’d tried to appear relaxed to cover the smell of his own discomfort and fear. He’d attempted to charm and fool his way back into a world of maturity and reason, of calmer hearts and more feasible expectations between two professional people. It had only made Karen want him more. When he began crying off the invitation to the sleepover at her flat, citing an early start at work, he’d soon found himself backing away from her physically in the atrium of the hotel, feeling absurd. Her bodyguard had looked uncomfortable too. The man must have seen similar before.

  The father had watched Karen’s expression alter from a bloodless rage to sorrow, and then to a faraway look as she rambled about her contempt for those ‘who feared responsibility’ . . . Something like that, but he couldn’t remember what she’d said with any precision, though it had that tone. Spite followed and burned into anger. They were soon in a scene amongst the tropical plants of the mezzanine. He’d not been able to see the end of her capacity for drama, but he’d known he was in trouble. He couldn’t have guessed how much. He’d broken away, to move past her scowling bodyguard, scrabbled into a cab on the forecourt, and left. Only to have her turn up at his apartment an hour later. She left the following morning. They’d both seemed intent on tormenting each other and themselves. Mutually assured destruction.

  Over the following months, her will to secure what she wanted the way she wanted it, to make the dream come alive again, made things difficult for him. At work, Karen began to pester him. His own manager, the ex-lover Diane, had made a cryptic comment in a lift going down to a reception. By that time, stiffness had replaced his ease of movement, and his boss had noticed the lack of focus in his usually quick eyes. She’d said, ‘You really should be careful where you stick it. She’s dangerous. You’re playing with the big girls now. But I don’t want her calling me again. I don’t want her near here.’

  That had snapped him out of his stupor, and he’d just stared at his boss, wordless and frozen with regret. Karen reaching into his working life should have been an indicator of what she might also do.

  Afraid of professional damage, he’d continued to meet Karen in order to play a new hand. He had tried to make himself appear pitiful, weak-willed, untrustworthy, a really bad bet. It had come easily and she hadn’t disagreed with him, but had seen through his strategy and considered it even more of an appalling rejection.

  But there was no row the last time he saw her, when he finally and decisively ended the connection. She had sneered at him; had seemed transformed into a bird of prey, a masked goddess that demanded blood sacrifice, and an angry little girl that wanted to punish all of the other little girls, who came to her party and had the audacity to talk amongst themselves.

  After that, he’d physically hidden from her for months, while missives sent under pseudonyms arrived infrequently in the early hours of the morning, when she was loaded and accessing the worst parts of herself. She haunted a few events she had no business being at. Co-opted herself into groups close to his work. Appeared bemused to see him across at least two rooms that she’d ingeniously guessed would contain his presence. The messages, demands, occasional gifts, threats, and the coincidental appearances, eventually abated. When Karen finally fell silent, about five months after they first met, the release was similar to a stream of cool air in stifling and claustrophobic humidity.

  He’d vowed to never repeat the experience with the powerful, the unstable, or the powerfully unstable, and eventually he stopped flinching when his screens chimed. In time, and after other quick affairs, culminating in the courtship of his future wife, he mostly forgot about the unfortunate interlude. Within his wife’s deep-seated gentleness and grace he’d sensed a merciful release from himself. His secret suspicion that he was condemned to forever repeat his compulsive, inebriated seductions, seemed to pass. He married and had one child, believing his marriage and daughter had saved him.

  But he’d fooled himself, and knew he’d begun to feel the destructive, libidinous demon revive inside him, around the time his daughter turned four. It had wanted to come out of retirement. And he’d slipped, but only once; the affair was never consummated, but he’d been preparing the ground the afternoon his daughter was abducted. Those messages alone had been enough for him to lose everything. They had distracted him, and his daughter had been stolen.

  He no longer knew who was most to blame for her abduction: Oleg Chorny, Karen Perucchi, or himself. He didn’t know who should be shot between the legs and left to bleed out in a ditch.

  The breaking news intruded into his thoughts. He stared at the screen vacuously.

  Washington, Moscow, Beijing and the UN have all appealed to Islamabad and New Delhi to exercise restraint and prevent further escalation in Kashmir.

  A voice from the back seat. ‘You still watch this? Why?’

  The father grimaced. ‘You’re not interested in the opportunities it presents to you? The shortages your kind can exploit, the destitute that you can run as slaves or whores?’

  ‘I am retired. I have learned to pursue less worldly matters.’

  ‘Your visions? Graffiti daubed on walls?’

  ‘I think you are being facetious. I do not respond well to the facetious.’

  The father ignored his captive and sank again into his wretched and morbid reverie. Karen had clearly not been able to forget him, and she must have studied his life from afar before she made her own move. Tracked him, perhaps, his fortunes, movements, his marriage to a younger woman, and all from a safe distance. And in the intervening gap, the world had become a different one; the people different. Rules and boundaries were always changing. Ways of enforcing the older rules were decaying. Everything was on fast-forward now.

  He wondered whether memories of the distant affair, and the woman’s psychosis, should have mattered more to him after his daughter was taken. Had the spectre of Karen Perucchi appeared in the long interrogation of his soul, when his guesses about why his daughter was abducted veered from the ludicrous to the unbearable? Once or twice, he seemed to recall, but Karen had never been a true suspect because Karen had not been the first. He’d been through similar bad scenes with at least four other women before her. Borderline stalkings, and one fist fight that he’d lost to a man who punished him on behalf of a very disappointed woman in France. And the father had simply been unable to suspect a woman of such a crime. He knew of no precedents.

  But his rejection had been sufficient cause for Karen to abduct his child. Karen’s fury at his choice of a younger woman, and at his wife’s subsequent fertility, must have been incandescent. And neither could Karen have expected that anyone would suspect her. She’d even paid Yonah Abergil to kill the abductors, and she’d nearly got away with it. Only a painted, drug-addled corpse had somehow survived the purge, by playing dead under a hideous chapel. And Oleg’s presence troubled him more than he wanted to admit.

  His captive smiled at him now, the azure- and gold-inked shoulders spiking out of the blanket on the rear seat, the reptilia
n mouth seeming to recognize the father’s acknowledgement of such terrible truths.

  The father sought an escape from the yellow eyes within his preoccupations, and they were many. Why had Karen waited for so long, until his daughter was four? She’d waited years to avenge herself. So long? There must have been a continuing slippage into a bitterness and resentment so vast and black, and endured amongst the worst kind of company, a criminal fraternity, until she’d decided to steal a former lover’s only child. He had no other theory.

  Without any help from the weather, the father felt colder than he had ever done in his life. Had he truly been a victim of a long, patient campaign driven by a scarred woman’s vengeance? Maybe Karen was infertile? But the desire to wound and disable others on this scale, because of a trivial romantic disappointment, struck him as grotesque, ludicrous, spiteful, and hateful beyond belief. The motivation seemed too monstrous, too fantastical, to unreal for credence. But when he, in turn, considered the dying world, and how his species turned upon itself daily, and what he had done in the private homes of those he suspected of wronging him, then he had to accept that what Oleg Chorny had told him was possible.

  Ultimately, his intuition failed. A sudden crime of passion was one thing, but to actually wait years to steal a man’s child was inhuman, and he didn’t know who, or what, he was dealing with. Or what such a maniac might have done to his daughter subsequently. Had she . . . would she have killed . . . or had his daughter killed?

  Killed. Sold. Transported.

  Those seemed the most likely options.

  Or would she have kept her? To gloat and prolong her revenge by plunging him and his wife into abject despair and desolation, since they had both wronged her by defying her? Satanic. Is that where society was now? A place where the most affluent, using their affiliates in organized gangs, abducted the children of private citizens over slights, while the authorities would no longer properly investigate their crimes?