I Was Waiting For You (17 page)

“All I want is a name and an address, Ivan.”

Ivan remained mute.

“Just a name and an address. No need for explanations or anything else. It's irrelevant. I already know what these people are all about. It doesn't please me, naturally, but all I am concerned about is eliminating any evidence of this unfortunate job you gave me. I want to draw a line under it. Get back to my life. It's nothing personal. If I don't do it, you know it well, Ivan, I will have to keep on peering behind my back for ever, not knowing if anyone is a threat or not. I want to live in peace. It's simple.”

Ivan closed his eyes, refusing to communicate. Braced for the worst.

The first cuts were to his cheeks, deep but short and Cornelia then drenched the wounds with a generous splash of his own cologne. She knew it would sting badly. That was the intention.

Ivan swore. She looked him straight in the eyes.

“No,” he whispered. “I just can't.”

“I'm sorry you feel that way.”

The next cut was savage and sudden and scythed into the already taut stretch of skin in his left arm pit and would have severed his arm from the shoulder had sinews and bone not proven an obstacle to the blade. Ivan screamed and blood began pouring down his flanks to the bathtub floor where it pooled quickly around his bare feet.

Cornelia worked slowly but systematically down the man's body, selecting targets at random, trying to imagine where the pain would be at its most acute but not fatal. When she sliced into one his nipples, his bladder inadvertently loosened.

A dozen cuts later, Ivan finally relented as the razor blades began a series of small and delicate incisions into his balls and thighs. The tears streaming down his cheeks now rivalled the myriad small rivers of blood pearling down the upper half of his body. His breath was short, his voice croaking.

He gave her a single name. It meant nothing to Cornelia, but she hadn't expected it to achieve any recognition.

She waved the gerrymandered toothbrush in front of his eyes and with her other hand took hold of his cock and squeezed it hard. She felt it pulse in her grip, almost as if he was going to have an erection.

“And?”

He supplied her with an address outside Los Angeles and a California telephone number.

Cornelia lowered her arm. Set the improvised weapon down over the nearby sink and walked across to the main living quarters where she had previously left her handbag.

Returning to the bathroom, she became aware of the strong combined smell of blood, urine and fear that now permeated the enclosed space. It reminded her of previous scenes of carnage she had been involved in. She was also aware that what she was doing now would automatically signify an end to that part of her life. But Cornelia had never been sentimental. She would adapt. There were other ways to make a living. It's not as if she had ever experienced any form of vicarious thrill executing contracts on total strangers. It had just been a means to an end. Initially, just an extra job to raise enough money for a rare book she had coveted.

Ivan's head had partly fallen across the top of his chest as he was suspended like a sorry, dangling puppet from the metal shower rail. He didn't look up when Cornelia entered the bathroom again. He was broken and had lost all capacity for added curiosity.

“I'm sorry,” Cornelia said and raised the gun to his forehead and killed him. The familiar fragrance of cordite rose, soon blending with the other smells in the exiguous quarters.

On her way out, Cornelia carefully wiped every surface she remembered touching while in Ivan's house. Pushing the dead chauffeur's body across onto the front passenger seat, she drove the car to New Haven station and abandoned it in a side street two blocks away from the station car park. The station was deserted and she spotted no surveillance cameras. She already had a return ticket and there were only two other people at the other end of the platform waiting for the day's final train.

She reached Grand Central just past midnight and took a cab directly to the gentlemen's club near Wall Street where she volunteered for a shift. She had half an hour to kill before the time to go onstage came around and, much as she hated the facilities at the club, took a long shower. She had to wash the smell of death off her skin, and out of her mind.

As she waited for her dance music to begin, Cornelia looked out from the wings of the small stage into the audience, and breathed a sigh of relief, noting that her hedge fund guy was not in tonight. She didn't think she was ready for more questions or sympathy tonight. Just the usual Friday night crowd in search of tits and ass. Well, if they wanted to see pussy, that's what she was here for, she reckoned. Not that she ever referred to her sex as pussy. It was just cunt, no more, no less. No need for euphemisms or poetry.

J
ACK HAD RETURNED FROM
Venice and slowly attempted to put his life together again. Wrote more stories and idle journalism, but his heart was not in it any longer. However, he had no other alternatives. A writer just writes. He doesn't investigate missing person cases, after all. That just made a mockery of everything, didn't it?

He got an assignment to another festival abroad. Not by coincidence, the place he and Giulia had first come together. Of course. Those fickle ways of fate …

Jack had always been a man who travelled a lot.

Which meant he used hotel rooms on almost all occasions.

If asked what his strongest memories were of foreign cities, he'd always remember the hotel, the room. Not the monuments or the museums or the architectural and cultural wonders of the place. But then he wasn't much of a tourist.

Every time he walked into a new room, shortly after arrival in a new town, Jack would sigh. He knew this particular home away from home for the next few days would prove both exhilarating in its potential for sex or eroticism, or just damn lonely if, yet again, he was to inhabit it alone for the duration.

Sex and loneliness. Two feelings that invariably went hand in hand these days.

“Here are the keys,” the uniformed young woman at reception said, handing Jack back his passport and a small folded paper wallet with keys and breakfast time information. “We've given you room 411.”

It would be room 411. Out of all the hotel rooms in the world, what were the odds on being given room 411 again?

“Just my luck,” Jack thought, as his heart dropped or stomach sunk or whatever could best describe his body's reaction to the news. A feeling of sudden vertigo, of drowning in a sea with no water.

“Is the hotel full?”

Maybe he could ask to be moved into another room?

“Yes sir,” the receptionist looked up. “It always is at festival time.”

“OK.”

The elevator.

The long, endless corridor, which had always reminded him of
Barton Fink
, the movie, albeit in more opulent ways. Or The Overlook in Kubrick's film of
The Shining
.

The door.

The key in the lock.

The light.

The room.

The bed …

Jack dropped his luggage to the carpeted floor. Opened the window slightly to let some air in and lowered the heat level on the thermostat.

He sat himself on the corner of the bed. Closed his eyes. Opened them again. It made no difference. He could still see the long silhouette of her pale body spread across the double bed, her legs apart, her slight breasts barely hillocks amongst the blinding, white landscape of her torso as she lay on her back and earth's gravity pummelled them down to almost non-existence, the soft brown pinkness of her nipples like two minuscule beacons in the sea of flesh. The billion ebony dark curls in her hair washing over the sheets. The way the sun on a summer day past had caressed her dormant skin as its rays whispered their way through the open windows and caressed her nakedness.

It was as if she were still here.

Or maybe it was the ghost of her, following him along from country to country, from hotel room to hotel room, like a Flying Dutchman's curse as he sought to escape her memory. But he knew inside he never would. You don't forget the unforgettable.

His brain cells, out of control, now began to focus on all the sharper details of her anatomy, the angles, the curves, the indelible memories of her softness, the smell of her breath, the colour of her teeth, the longing and the thousand questions ever present in her eyes and it was like yet another stab wound piercing both his heart and his gut in one swift decisive movement.

Tears welled up inside him. He loosened his belt and pulled his trousers down to his waist and his fingers took hold of his half-hard cock and began caressing its velvety mushroom tip, arousing himself, allowing all those lost images of her to inspire him, to stimulate him. Had she not one day revealed that waiting for him to arrive from the airport in another hotel room in another southern city she had not been able to suppress her urgent need for him and had eagerly masturbated herself to a thunderous climax even though she knew they would be reunited just a couple of hours later following his own flight's arrival?

But today Jack could not achieve sufficient hardness, and soon gave up.

It was as if the hotel room itself was alive and was whispering to him on the sly that he would never know her again in the physical sense of the term and there was no point jerking himself away to her memory, to her spirit, but then, the room suggested in his ear that there were other options, weren't there?

Pulling his black trousers back up to his waist and tightening the belt, he moved over to the travelling bag in which he kept his laptop, pulled the computer out of its protective sheath.

He opened the lid and booted up.

Scoured the familiar chat rooms in search of sex.

There were some possibilities but after a few lines of dialogue with various other seekers of nsa activities, he realised there would be too much work, explanations and lies involved to convince any one to actually meet quickly enough, let alone do the deed. Unless he moved on to the gay or bi rooms, which on this occasion he was not yet in the mood for. Or desperate enough.

Jack checked his mail. Mostly spam and the customary offers of cheap Viagra, Levitra or no money back penis- and breast-enhancing products.

He undressed.

Looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. Wished he looked better, slimmer, younger, less morose.

Back in the room, he balanced the laptop on his knees and began writing Giulia a letter. Maybe now she was back in Rome she would finally respond.

Dear G.

I miss you. Terribly.

I know I have no doubt written this many times before, but you have left a hole inside of me. A deep, hollow cavern full to the brim with love and longing and despair.

You no longer even answer my messages and ignore me as if I were dead, but I don't mind. Writing to you in this way – which you probably find either despicable or pitiful
– keeps you alive in strange ways. I can't let go of you, I just can't. Sorry.

I miss you. I hope you are happy, even if it is others who are now pleasing you, touching you, making your heart flutter somewhere, far
away from here and me, which I foolishly, mistakenly still believe is where you should really be.

I'm in X. It's festival time again. You won't believe this, but I am in the very same hotel room. Room 411. Remember
? I didn't ask for it. Maybe the hotel staff had a record of me being in the room before or it was sheer coincidence or again the bookings computer proving mischievous.

Being here evokes such strange feelings, Giulia.

Little since you has ever been the same. I am now nothing without you, but in the same time you have made me a better man. A man who knows what love is, can
potentially be. No woman had ever given herself to me so freely, without reservations, so wildly, and made me realise the terrible strength of love unleashed as you did.

From that first, sometimes hesitant evening in room 411. Unveiling the beauty of your body, inch by inch, touching the paradise of your small breasts with my rough, undeserving touch, silent in awe at the perfect delicacy of the combined shades of pink of your nipples (which I had somehow expected to be much darker), slipping my fingers inside you, experiencing the divine heat of your cunt, spreading your wetness across my hand and learning the musky, hypnotic smell of you, fingertips travelling slowly through the mass of your pubic curls then moving into more dangerous territory towards your rear hole. And the worried “No, not there, please” of your voice. “Why?” “Just not there, please.”

That first night we did not even fuck.

Once stripped, we caressed each other, hardy explorers of new
-found lands, we cuddled, we merged, we embraced rather frantically, skin against skin, lips against lips, sweat against sweat. You rode me repeatedly, like a young stallion. Dry-humping me like no one had ever done before. Rubbing your cunt and protruding bone against my hard cock, until I was even hurting but would never ask you to stop. I thought you would even tear my cock's outer skin off in the savage assault of your passion, while all the time I tried not to come, as if ejaculating on you would have been a crime, a sad admission of my innate vulgarity.

We writhed that way all night, between torrents of words, endless stories of our respective pasts and inevitable questions about what might lie in our future. From the very first mail, months before, we knew this could only be an impossible love. But then it was also more than just animal attraction. We were so wrong for each other: ages, geography, past, activities, personalities. But, on the other hand, we were also so supremely right, weren't we? Remember how when apart we were almost telepathically in touch, always knowing when the other was about to call or do something particular. E-mails criss-crossed the web with mighty abandon; SMS messages littered the airwaves.

But mostly we were creatures who lived in hotel rooms, as we could not be seen publicly by others, irrespective of the foreign cities we travelled to.

I told you stories about the women who came before, the other hotel rooms I had lived in, seen. How, when once staying at the Algonquin in New York one night I had been kept up until the small hours of morning by acute sounds of pleasure from a woman in the room on the other side of the thin wall, who kept on achieving incredulous orgasms one after another for hours on end. Never had I heard a woman so vocal in the throes of sex, moans, loud sighs, cries, shouts, rumblings, she went through the whole gamut of possible sounds, time after time. The bed in the opposing Algonquin room would bang repeatedly with every new thrust of her lover inside her against our common wall, and the anonymous woman would shriek, purr, scream; it was primeval, basic, awesome. And arousing: I must have come myself at least three times during the night, manually, provoked by the hurricane-like waves of pure sex streaming through from the other room. It was unavoidable. All I had to do was close my eyes, imagine the reverse image of the room I was staying in, and myself fucking her in every conceivable position of the Kama Sutra, with every new variation evincing a new kind of explosion from deep inside her throat. To say she was both loud and enjoying herself was something of an understatement. I even imagined that no man was capable of extracting such sounds of pleasure from a woman alone and that it must have been a sheer procession of men entering the room and taking turns with her as she lay there with her legs splayed open and her apertures moist and slick and ripe for plundering at every turn.

Towards four in the morning, I finally managed to get some sleep.

The next day, I had to leave the hotel shortly after breakfast to go to a business meeting downtown and just as I exited my Algonquin room, the door to the next room opened and a woman walked out. I had imagined the creature being so royally fucked in countless, alluring incarnations: sleek, blonde, redhead, brunette, tall, dusky, pale, opulent and skinny, beautiful and mysterious, but none of the visions I had evoked throughout the night corresponded with the reality!

She was a tiny little Chinese woman in her mid-fifties, with a wrinkled face and a shapeless body over which she had draped a faded brown fur coat which had known better days. She looked up at me and her face betrayed no feelings of recognition or any embarrassment at having likely been overheard in the demented throes of her sexual exertions by a neighbour.

We both walked towards the elevator in silence and went our own ways for
ever.

I wonder
, Giulia, whether others ever heard us and tried to imagine what we looked like, or with less obvious difficulty, what we were up to?

Not that we would have cared. Would we?

After we had technically become lovers at last, your own appetite and curiosity for the pleasures of the flesh no longer knew any bounds, surprising even me, as you wanted this whole new world and wanted it now. Within a day we were taking baths together with no shame. By
the end of the first hotel room episode, that taboo word ‘love' was already leaking freely from our hearts.

We quickly became experts at living in a world of our own, a world within the existing world of rules and conventions, rules which we openly flouted, oblivious to the eyes of others.

Like the
half-assed leers of the men at the front desk of the hotel in Barcelona as they saw us pick up our key and walk arm in arm towards the elevator, noticing the disparity in our ages and looks and guessing all too well the boundless fornication we were about to embark upon. In that room, in the shadow of Gaudi's Parc Güell, where we fucked mercilessly, leaving blood all over the sheets, as your period caught us in ambush, but never slowed our frantic ardour.

The breakfast room at the Washington Square Hotel in New York, where the Filipino waiter imprudently (or was it unprofessionally) remarked how much my daughter looked happy. The only time I saw you blush.

A bathroom in a hotel in Sitges where my sense of transgression knew no bounds and I burst on you sitting peeing and harvested your hot stream in the cup of my hands, a sensation of heat that has marked me for
ever and which I have craved after ever since, not just on my hands but all over my body in my desperation to capture the sheer essence of you.

Was it Paris, New York, Calcata, Washington D.C. or somewhere else where I hastily withdrew my cock from inside you and came too early, my white seed pearls like beautiful stains across the thick jungle surrounding your cunt lips? A mishap that provided us with an unholy scare as you feared a most inopportune pregnancy and all future fucks had to be lessened with a condom from then on.