Tibetan Cross

by Mike Bond

  Cohen walked down the stairs and knelt over the sailor. “You can find the door, you?”

  “What's the matter up there?” howled a voice from below.

  “Madre! It's the concierge,” the woman hissed. “Make him stand!”

  “What's going on?” The concierge's shriek was a floor closer.

  “You can find the door?” Cohen repeated.

  “I want my money.”

  “It's finished, that.”

  “What's going on?” the concierge screamed.

  “I'll tell you,” the sailor stood but slipped on his vomit, cascaded down the stairs on his rump and piled into the concierge.

  “Get out, get out,” she bellowed, twisting herself from under him. “Oh, you stink, Good God, you stink.” She wiped at herself hurriedly. “All of you, out!” she yelled.

  “I just got here,” Cohen said.

  “Out anyway.”

  “I don't even know who he is,” the girl added.

  “You – saloppe, putain, whore, trollop…” The concierge halted, panting for words.

  “I did nothing!”

  “I did it,” Cohen said. “He's my brother. We always fight.”

  “Out. All of you, out, no matter what. Out! Out! Out!”

  “My money back.”

  “Money nothing.”

  “I paid for a week. Fifty francs. I have no more.”

  The concierge shoved the sailor down the stairs. “Ten minutes.” She glanced at an imaginary watch on her wrist. “Then I call the police.”

  “They'll arrest you for stealing my money,” Cohen yelled.

  “Mine, too,” called the sailor.

  “She will, she'll get the gendarmes,” the girl said. She ran back into her room calling, “Here, Lobo!” Cohen shut his door and stared stupefied at the blanketed bed, the already familiar sink and dresser. “When you're going down,” he muttered, “It's so hard to stop.” There was nothing to pack. Ten days to go, no food, no money. No place to stay. Oh Jesus find me a haven.

  As he left he looked in the girl's open door. She was throwing dresses on the bed. A German Shepherd watched him, ears forward, from the doorway. “Where will you go?” he asked.

  “Who knows? Another hole like this, with another grande dame concierge and another Samaritan to get me thrown out again.”

  “He insulted you.”

  She flung a hand at the room. “This is the insult, to have to go like this. I should be working, not moving.”

  “I have to go too. She took all my money.”

  “Good.” She jammed dresses, underclothes, a mirror and brush into a cardboard suitcase. “Serves you right for sticking your prick where it doesn't belong!”

  She caught up to him in the street, walking lopsided from her suitcase, Lobo trotting at her heel. “What'll you do?” she said.

  “I'll sleep in the street. And eat rats.”

  “They need a strong wine, plenty of body. A Spanish wine.”

  “You have one in mind?”

  “Sangre de Toro. Come!”

  15

  LA RUE THUBANEAU RIPPLED with movement: neon glittered, cars prowled the curbs, young sensual eyes challenged them. He limped painfully; twice she waited for him, shaking her suitcase and stamping her heel on the sidewalk. Up greasy stairs, at the end of a dim corridor, she rapped on a door, bracelets jangling.

  “Who's there?” A man's voice.

  “Police. Open up.” She rapped again. “Salaud, open up!”

  “It had to be you, Maria.” The man closed the door to unlatch a chain and reopened it. “The whores say they're cops and the cops are all whores. It's hard to get things straight.”

  “Keeps you on your toes, Léon.”

  Léon glanced at the suitcase, at Cohen. “Planning to elope?”

  “This white knight saved me from a sailor, and got me thrown out.”

  Léon snickered. “What should I do, give him a medal?”

  “Let us stay the night. Tomorrow I'll find a new place.”

  “You have work tonight.”

  “You want me to bring them here?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “So?”

  Léon sucked his upper lip and pointed to a collapsed rattan couch. “Honeymoon suite's there. If the dog bites me, he dies.”

  “The bite would kill him.”

  “It's good you remember.”

  “Give us some wine.”

  “In the kitchen.” Léon looked at Cohen. “You come from where?”

  “Toulon.”

  “You're not French.”

  “I live in Toulon now.”

  “Traveling for pleasure?” He grinned at Cohen's clothes. “Got a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Guns are forbidden here. You have work?”

  “I'll find something. I told Maria I did because…”

  “No lies. Absolutely no lies. You have no money?”

  “The concierge took it when she threw us out.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty francs.”

  “You are arrived from where?”

  “Oran.”

  “There's little work in Marseille.”

  Maria stood the wine bottle on a crate near the couch. She patted the floor. The dog went to her, turned round, and lay down.

  “You, Léon?” She was pouring wine into water glasses.

  “No.”

  “Here,” she said to Cohen. “Blood of the Bull!” It was thick, almost black. She refilled his glass. “To Andalucía.”

  “Piss on Andalucía,” Léon said.

  “And piss on Corsica,” she answered.

  Cohen felt dizzy and sat on the couch. “It's not that strong, the wine,” Léon said.

  “Americans have no head for wine,” Maria answered.

  Léon was shouldering on a leather jacket. “You're lucky I was here.”

  “I could have gone to Mamette's.”

  “Stay clear of Mamette's.” He unchained the door. “Hook this behind me.”

  MARIA SAT NEXT TO Cohen on the couch. “I can't sleep so early.” She stood and shifted her skirt. “You should shave,” she sniffed. “Go in the bathroom and shave. And take a shower.”

  “Take one with me.”

  “For fifty francs.”

  “I've something better.”

  “Nothing's better. Go.”

  The hot rushing water was hallucinogenic, searing his knee and shoulder. He shaved left-handed with Léon's razor. She came in, tucked up her dress and squatted on the toilet. “You smell better,” she said. “What's that?”

  “I got knifed.”

  “Ugh. It's infected.” She wiped herself, stood and flushed the toilet. “You should go to the hospital. The nuns, they are free.” She ran a fingertip along his reddened wound. “Did some sailor stick you, for defending a fair virgin?”

  “I was robbed.”

  “You and money don't get along. I'll have to stay clear of you. Tomorrow you should go to the nuns.”

  “It's getting better.”

  “Nuns don't bite. What're you afraid of?”

  He slipped his left hand along her buttock. “I'm afraid you won't make it with me.”

  “I don't do it for fun.”

  “You must, sometimes.”

  She pinched his chin. “It's work, mi calentorro. Keeps Lobo and me alive.”

  “There's surely other work in Marseille.”

  “For me, coming by la miseria, from Spain?”

  “Then why did you come?”

  “With this work, each month I send money to Andalucía.”

  “And Léon?”

  “What do you think? That I could last on the street without my chulo? Without Léon or someone? He's my patron, protects me.”

  “From what?”

  “You don't know? You're truly dense.” She tossed her head, walking into the hall. “Get dressed – it's cold.”

  “Tell me.” He followed her.

  “En verdad
, you are stupid. Majadero!” Her bracelets jingled. “You get robbed. You fight a dumb sailor and get us thrown out. You lose your money. You do not understand about Léon. You – you need someone like Léon!”

  He dressed. His clothes smelt like the hold of the paquebot.

  “Qué desgracia!” she wailed. “Never will you find work looking like that. What can you do, anyway?”

  “Anything that'll pay.”

  “Hah! You ask about me?”

  He took her hand. “I don't ask. I thank you for taking me in.”

  “Léon takes you in.” Arms akimbo, she tilted back her head to inspect him. “He's partial to bobos – ‘A los bobos se les aperece la madre de Dios,’ we say in Andalucía – fortune favors fools. With my mala fortuna, though, I must be very wise! So Léon might find use for you.”

  “What could I do?”

  She glanced under her lashes. “How canuto you are! Mignon! You could work the boys for him.” She pinched his chin. “If you work for Léon, I get a bonus for bringing you in – I'll split it with you.”

  “Doing what?”

  “What do you suspect, mi calentorro?” She rattled her bracelets. “Léon'd dress you up and rent you to the old queers of la Ciotat and Cassis.”

  “No chance.”

  “Now it's for me to ask why.”

  “I like women, not men.”

  “A hole's a hole.”

  “The one's more natural to me.”

  She reached between his thighs. “If we went to bed, I could drive you crazy with my mouth. You would not fight that?”

  “Hardly.”

  “You would do that to me, also, sí?”

  “I'll show you, right now.”

  She sat back. “So what's the difference?”

  “With what?”

  “Pues! You're not too bright! Between a man and a woman?”

  “I wouldn't put my mouth on a man there.”

  “It's for both the same exit.”

  “You – you'd do it with another woman?”

  “I haven't been asked. But I would. It's a job, like mending the street, driving a bus, being President.”

  “Men don't excite you?”

  “When I was a girl that excited me, a man. After I've made enough money, I'll return to Andalucía, find a good husband. Perhaps then…”

  “You have what age, Maria?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “When did you come to Marseille?”

  “It makes eight months. You are so old?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “You're younger than I, calentorro.”

  “For Léon, there's nothing else I could do?”

  “He's afraid – Qué comico!” She carried the wine bottle into the kitchen. “Listen – it's Léon. With someone.”

  Léon tweaked her ear as he came in. “Don't open the chain till you know who it is.”

  “I can tell your smell. From afar.”

  A thin, chestnut-haired girl, perhaps sixteen, stepped into the room behind Léon. She appraised Cohen and Maria, shook her hair back on her shoulders, and slipped off her black imperméable.

  “This is my new cocotte, Thérèse,” Léon said.

  “We're not that busy.” Maria said.

  “Some of us aren't busy at all, are we, chérie,” Leon countered. He turned to Thérèse. “Take off your clothes.”

  “Already you have had me. You saw nothing?”

  “Take them off.”

  The girl gave Cohen an exasperated look. Her eyes were very large, pale brown, long-lashed. Her graceful mouth curved down. “Zut!” She unbuttoned her blouse, slid it from her shoulders. She wore no bra and her breasts were small and round as peaches, a tiny gold crucifix dancing in the satiny cleft between them. She stepped out of her red shoes, unhooked her skirt and let it swing free, slipped her thumbs under the hem of her silver panties, pulled them down, and tossed them to one side with her toe. She shook her hair forward till it fell to her belly like a glowing brown waterfall. “Voilà,” she smiled. “Enough?”

  “Qué puta!” Maria sneered. “She's too thin.” “Go over there, Thérèse,” said Léon, pointing at Cohen. She approached. Her sex smelled sweet and dark. Pink lips showed through her feathery vaginal hair.

  “Let him try her,” Léon said. “You, Little Flower, fifty francs for him.” He bent and tucked a note in her pocketbook.

  “She's too young,” Cohen said.

  “Make him happy, Thérèse,” Léon said. “If you don't want to go back to Manosque.”

  “No.” Cohen stood.

  “My dear white knight,” Léon whispered, “you need work? Huh? I'm trying you out. Don't muff it.” He stepped into the hall. “I'm going to sleep. Watch them, Maria, see they do the job.”

  “If I can stay awake,” she muttered.

  Léon tossed blankets from the bedroom onto the floor.

  “Some of you'll have to sleep on these. In the morning, Maria, find her a place.”

  “There's a kindergarten in la rue d'lsoard.”

  “Be gentle, Maria. You were young once, too.”

  “Not such a skeleton as this.”

  “When you first came from your blessed Andalucía? I should've taken your picture.”

  Maria grinned at Cohen. “You were so quick to yank out la pistola? Give this girl a chance.”

  “I can't just like that.”

  “You'd expect it of a whore.”

  Thérèse was unbuttoning his shirt, her eyes faraway. She stopped when she saw the wound, then pulled down his pants and began to kiss and lick at him.

  He tucked her hair aside from her breasts. The little brown nipples were pliant; he played with them until they began to stand. Her hair tickled his stomach; he brought his hands down the curve of her waist to the widening of her hips. “Your skin's so soft, Thérèse.”

  “It's how le bon Dieu made me.”

  He slid his fingers across the chestnut down of her belly and along the insides of her thighs. Her skin was like scented silk, yet softer and warmer, damask but smoother. He could not keep his fingers from the crease between her thighs; gently he spread the matted hair and ran his fingers up and down it. She kneeled above him and swung her hair gently round and round his penis. She moved forward and nudged her crease against it, soothing the front of her lips along its tip, backing away as he tried to enter.

  With one hand behind her thighs he lifted her so that he could move his tip back and forth along her crease, making the lips wetter and wetter, rubbing against the softness of her cleft. She sighed, biting her lip, as he eased her down upon him, and she began to move in gentle rising circles, urging her hips forward and back, letting him slowly further and further inside her until his tip forced open the second mouth deep within her and she winced with pain and drew upward.

  “Hurry,” he gasped, “I can't stop.”

  She pulled up and rotated round his tip, pushing him down each time he tried to drive into her, teasing him again with her crease, her schoolgirl's belly indenting with each thrust, her hair swinging like a veil across her breast and tangling in her gold crucifix, her eyes still faraway, until he came surging into her. She expelled a breath and moved aside. “T'as un cigarette?” she asked Maria.

  “Non.”

  She turned to Cohen; he shook his head.

  “Merde. Where does one piss?”

  “Half way down the hall. Don't wake Léon.”

  “The way he screws he won't wake till Easter.” Thérèse crossed the hall, her slim cheeks shadowed by the ceiling bulb.

  “When I first met Léon,” Maria yawned, “he did me four times in a row. Said I had promise.”

  “This was strange.”

  “It was to see she could do it, just like that.”

  Cohen stretched out on a rough blanket, Thérèse lying curled with her back to him, the second blanket over them, and slipped quickly down a long slope of fatigue into darkness.

  He wakened as Thérèse stepped across him. “I
've got a weak bladder,” she said when she came back, a trickling toilet in the distance. “From sleeping on cold floors.”

  “I'm sorry about tonight.”

  She sniffed. “What for?”

  “It wasn't much, forced like that.”

  “Life isn't always what you want.” She began to snore.

  He could not sleep. What if I fail – if all this horror comes to nothing? All these deaths drowned out, no one ever knowing? If I've been hunted so hard, how could Paul escape?

  MORNING SUN SPLINTERED dusty windows; traffic filled the room with clatter and rumble. “Will you fuck me now?” Cohen asked Maria as they ate croissants with café au lait in a corner café.

  “All you think about is fucking.”

  “You must have a boyfriend.”

  “Léon doesn't favor it.”

  “You always do what he wants?”

  “Of course.” She raised one eyebrow. “He protects me from the cops, the syndicates.”

  “How does he protect you from the cops?”

  “You don't know?” She wiped sugar from her mouth with the back of her hand. “They import the drugs and he distributes. Everybody knows that.” She gave him a girlish grin. “You're too curious.”

  “A stupid habit.”

  “A fatal one, with Léon.”

  “The cat in the proverb had nine lives but curiosity finally killed him. Once I was curious about a place few people ever see. As a result, seven of my friends died. One more lives, perhaps. I'm the ninth. All my troubles derive from curiosity.”

  “We don't have that proverb in Andalucía.” She tossed back her head. “Yet you're fortunate.”

  “People tell me that.”

  “But you're such a virgin. Now you're feeling sad for yourself, caught up in yourself like a boy fucking for the first time. A virgin in life…as if nothing ever happened to you.”

  He leaned across the table, shouting over the roar of a bus. “Too much has happened to me.”

  “Pah! You are playing at poverty. When it becomes tiresome you can return to America, drive your car, have enough food. You know, in Andalucía my brother prays for no children, fearing they will hate him as he hates our father?”

  “He hates him?”

  “Claro que sí! For bringing him into the misery and hunger of Andalucía. When I was a small girl, calentorro, I begged in the marketplace on Wednesdays, or before the church on Sundays, sitting on the concrete while the well-dressed and pious stepped around my dirty little gypsy body like a rat squashed on the pavement.”