Obsession (Year of Fire) (48 page)

“That’s the first time I’ve heard the boss laugh,” one commented, and the other nodded.

They flew across the living room and sprinted up the stairs. Al-Saud pushed the door closed with his foot as he pressed Matilde against the wall. They were caught up in a delirious excitement. Kissing wasn’t enough, nothing their hands could do could assuage the desperation. Matilde dug her nails into his scalp; she wanted him inside her, just the same way as his tongue was in her mouth. She slipped her fingers under his leather jacket and squeezed his pecs, caressed his tense shoulder muscles and moved her hands down until they found the indentations to the sides of his buttocks. She buried her fingers in his gluteus. She felt him tense up and also the dampness of his breath on her neck as Eliah breathed hoarsely through his mouth. She left his buttocks and moved forward until she reached the bulge straining against his riding pants. Eliah leaned his forearms against the wall over Matilde’s head, rested his forehead on them and spread his legs to allow her hand to wander freely.

“Please…” he mumbled.

“Yes, I know,” she whispered as she unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants and boxers to liberate his member. She stared at it, wondering why she found it so attractive when it wasn’t a very handsome appendage. She trailed her finger down the line of black hair that started
under his belly button and led to the bush that surrounded his penis, knowing full well that the light caress would tease him. Eliah bit the flesh of his forearm when Matilde took hold of his testicles and groaned loudly when he felt her hand close around his member. She pulled back the foreskin until she found the wet, shining head. Eliah wasn’t expecting what happened next. A convulsion made his back arch and he let out a bloodcurdling scream. Incredulous, he looked down to be sure of what was happening: Matilde, kneeling in front of him, had taken him in her mouth.

“
Oh, mon Dieu, Matilde! Mon Dieu…
”

Matilde concentrated so as not to make mistakes as she tried to remember Juana’s advice and her lessons with the bananas. Eliah hurt her when he dug his fingers into her left arm to pull her to her feet.

“Take off your pants!” he ordered her in French as he tore the wrapper off a condom.

They were so awkward, still in their riding boots with their pants around their knees, but they didn’t have time to worry about minor details. They were acting as though possessed by a strange, passionate fever in which impatience ruled and the surroundings were unimportant. They kissed hungrily until Eliah turned her around against the wall. Instinctively, Matilde stood on tiptoe and raised up her bottom toward him. He aimed the head of his penis and pushed it into her. They both let out sighs of relief that immediately transformed into groans and moans of pleasure as he started thrusting faster and faster. Matilde had an orgasm almost immediately. He bent over and kissed the hand that grasped at the wall in desperation. He rested his forehead there and continued to thrust. Matilde sensed that Al-Saud was restraining himself; sometimes he moved slowly and occasionally he stopped and pulled out, moaning as if he was in pain.

“I want us to come at the same time,” he said and felt his way around Matilde’s vulva until he found her clitoris. He massaged it, his fingers moving in sync with his thrusts as he went deeper and deeper into her. She was surprised to feel the ineffable feeling build again; she pictured it in her mind as a spark that, when it exploded, became a huge ball of light. She exploded for the second time in a few minutes and he accompanied
her with bellowing that filled their ears. The next day she would find the bruises that Al-Saud’s fingers had left from grabbing her pelvis as he ejaculated. He had been holding her so tight and with such strength that she hadn’t been able to move during the orgasm. Al-Saud lunged into her with hard, quick thrusts and emptied his seed into the condom. Somehow, being confined by his hands increased Matilde’s ecstasy. She felt dizzy and a void enveloped her.

Roy Blahetter knew as soon as he regained consciousness that his kneecap had been shattered with a single blow, and a spasm of pain plowed through him until it reached his throat and filled his mouth with a bitter taste. He howled and shook. His head hung down, and a thread of bloody saliva dangled from his lips, slowly soaking into the fabric of his jeans. It wouldn’t take much more to break him. In seconds his revolutionary invention would be worth nothing and he would hand it over just so that Jürkens, Professor Orville Wright’s thug, would put an end to the torment.

Jürkens grabbed Blahetter’s hair and wrenched his head back.

“Blahetter, open your eyes,” he demanded in English, and waited until the swollen eyelids opened in slits. “I’ll break both your legs if you don’t tell me where the designs for the uranium centrifuge are. You know I’m not joking,” he said, holding up the hammer, which he was ready to slam down on his femur.

Roy sobbed in his chair where the gigantic man from Berlin had tied him.

“Please,” he begged in Spanish. “Please, no…”

“In English! I can’t understand a bloody word you’re saying.”

“I don’t have the designs,” he expressed. “No, for the love of God, no!” he screamed as he saw the hammer coming down on his thigh.

“Should I keep going?”

“No, enough! I’ll tell you…I’ll tell you everything. A sip of water, please. I can’t…” Jürkens brought the rim of a glass up to his mouth and barely let him wet his lips. “More, please.”

“First tell me where the designs are.”

“In a locker in Gare du Nord station.”

“Do you think you’re dealing with an idiot?”

“It’s the truth!”

“Give me the key and I’ll go right now to check what you’re saying.”

“I don’t have it, my wife does.”

“Your wife?” Jürkens saw him nod and could have sworn that he saw his sky-blue eyes fill with tears. “Where is she?”

“She lives in an apartment on Rue Toullier.”

That was enough information; he knew who he was talking about: the girl with the blonde braids, Al-Saud’s new lover. Moses had ordered him to postpone that matter because he needed the plans for the centrifuge urgently. Still, things were getting unexpectedly complicated. He thought about sneaking into Gare du Nord, one of Paris’s main stations, and opening the locker with a silent explosive. He discarded the idea seconds later; since the attack on the George V, the police had been on alert, especially at train stations, where the guard had been reinforced. Even if the explosive was practically soundless, it would make a flash that would draw attention. He regretted not having the skills to pick the lock. He would have to get the key.

“Where is the key? In the apartment on Rue Toullier?”

“No. The key…”

“Tell me!”

“She has it with her, on a chain around her neck.”

Minutes later, Blahetter realized that Jürkens had gone out and left him alone. He never thought he would be happy that Matilde was with Al-Saud, but he had no doubt that the man could protect her from the German thug. For his part, he had to escape. He wasn’t sure that he’d be able to, because even if he managed to get his hands untied, he doubted he had enough strength to drag himself out to the street. Where was he? He didn’t know how much time he had spent rolling around in the back of the van. It wasn’t just his leg that hurt ferociously; he felt sharp stabs in his belly where Jürkens had taken a sadistic pleasure in hitting him. He knew that he was badly hurt.

After shaking his wrists and massaging the knot with his fingers, he managed to loosen the rope. His skin was rubbed raw, but he managed to free his hands.

The flames in the hearth were the only source of light in the living room. Outside, it was snowing, and the park was slowly being blanketed in white. Satisfied, Matilde was watching the snowflakes as they swayed in the air like white feathers before fluttering down to the ground. She didn’t know what time it was; she calculated that it must be late, around ten at night. After spending hours locked in the bedroom, she and Eliah had come down naked, wrapped in blankets, to find food. Tempted by the sight of the logs crackling, the carpet and the cushions, they decided to lie down in front of the fire to recover their strength. The CDs Matilde picked played one after the other. She didn’t know if Eliah was asleep—she couldn’t see him because he was spooning her from behind. She felt his naked, warm, relaxed body molded around hers. She smiled as she felt him tracing the outline of her behind with the hollow of his hand.

“Now I understand where this ass came from. It’s not a tarantula butt, but a Pig of Metal. That’s why it’s so soft and perky.”

Matilde, laughing, reached an arm back and whacked him on the legs with a pillow.

“I love this song!” she exclaimed when the first notes of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” by Gloria Gaynor played.

Eliah shifted and Matilde spun on the cushion to see where he had gone. He was standing, completely naked, and holding his hand out to her.

“Would you like to dance with me?”

After what they had shared in the bedroom, she didn’t expect the contact of their naked, warm bodies to excite her and make her blush. He sang into her ear in a bass voice so deep that it sounded like it came from a deep, dark well.

Matilde trembled when Eliah tightened his embrace. At some point in the song, he made her look at him. He kept singing to her, though Matilde fantasized that he was just talking to her and that the lyrics expressed
what he wanted to say to her, that he loved her. As the chorus repeated, he stopped singing and pressed her against his chest again.

Matilde bit her fist to stop the sob from exploding out of her. She loved him so much! The immensity of the feeling pressed down on her diaphragm and took away her breath. She had known from the second she laid eyes on him on the plane.
Avoid him!
she had urged herself.
Get away from this alluring man because you’ll only end up hurt.
Her iron will had abandoned her and she had ended up succumbing. She would suffer more than she had ever suffered in her life, which hadn’t exactly been free of suffering. But if she loved him in this crazy way, their relationship should end. She would go to the Congo and he would get on with his life. The idea panicked her. She trembled and clutched his waist.

“Matilde, what’s wrong, my love?”

“Nothing. I’m cold.” Eliah picked up a blanket and wrapped it around her. “What time is it?”

“Five past twelve,” he said.

“I’ll be right back!”

Al-Saud watched her gather the blanket and run upstairs. He put on a new log, poked the embers and settled back onto the cushions. Until he had paid attention to the lyrics of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” he hadn’t noticed how exactly they described his feelings. He pointed the remote control at the stereo and the song started to play again. He hummed a few parts while he thought about them in French.

Matilde came back and knelt at his side.

“Happy birthday, Eliah,” she said, holding a package out to him.

“How did you know?”

“Alamán told me. I’m so happy that he did! I made you a present. It’s not much but I made it myself.”

Al-Saud tore off the wrapping paper. It was a wooden frame with a portrait of Matilde. He took it over to the hearth to see it in the reddish firelight. He lingered over the picture because he wasn’t ready to face her yet.

“Do you like it?” he heard her say. “I painted it.”

“Really?” He stubbornly kept his head down.

“Yes. I called my aunt Enriqueta and asked her how to do it. Do you see what I did?” Anxious as she was, she didn’t wait for him to answer.
“It’s our love story. See? Here’s the plane, where everything started. Then I painted the subway, though it looks like a train,” she lamented. “But you and I know that we found each other on the subway. This is my aunt Sofía’s living room. The teacups are there, very tiny. They were hard to paint with a nib and Chinese ink.” Not noticing that he wasn’t lifting his head, she continued her explanations. “This is the facade of the Healing Hands headquarters, on Rue Breguet, where we saw each other again after your trip. And this is the little flower-shaped room outside your bedroom, where you made a woman of me and cured me.” At that point, Eliah’s eyes misted up. “And this is the table in the Mercure conference room and this is the Aston Martin, the most exotic places where we’ve made love. The photo isn’t very good. Juana took it with one of those disposable cameras. I’m in the Luxembourg Gardens. Anyway, it’s not a big present, but I made it with all my love.”

Not wanting her to see how emotional he was, Al-Saud wrapped her in his arms and buried his face in her hair. He laid her down on the cushions and kissed her with all the tenderness that had been absent when he took her standing up, against the bedroom wall.

“Matilde…Matilde.”

“What?”

“You always manage to surprise me. Just like when you gave me the dulce de leche.”

“You’re not going to tell me if you like my present?”

“Everything you give me is the best. This portrait is worth more to me than anything else in the world. I swear on my life.”

“I made it so you would never forget our story.”

“I could never forget it. Impossible. Plus, I’m always going to have you at my side to remind me.”

Matilde didn’t answer, and he felt an instant of profound fear. The sensation lodged in his throat; it hurt his neck and burned in the pit of his stomach. Between the cushions, with her blonde hair taking on a red glow from the fire, her cheeks rosy and her silver eyes incredibly dark, Matilde’s ethereal quality was more vivid than ever. Sometimes he was afraid that he would wake up and discover that she had returned to her world of fairies and angels.

“Eliah, I want you to know that I treasure every moment we spend together. Every moment. They’re worth a fortune to me.”

He nodded, incapable of speaking.

The next morning, after eight, Al-Saud surprised her by appearing with a breakfast tray in the bedroom. He had made her mate, a distinctive kind of South American leaf infusion.

“Mate! I can’t believe it! Thank you, Eliah! We ran out of it weeks ago. We were getting withdrawal symptoms. Where’d you get it?”