I Was Waiting For You (11 page)

“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.

J
ACK 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
churros
was 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.