For a couple of days, Jack installed himself in the nearest Starbucks and sipped too many coffees while his laptop roamed the net for clues. There was no response from Giulia’s old Skype moniker. Her profile there still listed her as living in Barcelona, which she had left almost eighteen months ago, and still listed only the fifteen contacts she’d had originally. No one had been added. Evidently the account was dormant. Although Jack could not believe she would come to Paris without her computer. She’d never go anywhere without it, he was convinced. And it could be his only way of finding her.
She had no MySpace account, whether under her name or under the half dozen or so handles he knew she was likely to use. There were two other women there with the same name, but one was in San Francisco and the other in Reggio Emilia, and the photos on their main pages were quite unlike her and he did not believe she’d load a bogus photograph. In addition, the contacts for the two women showed no evidence of having any connection with the Giulia he knew, in addition to the fact their musical tastes would have literally made her scream.
There was a Facebook page though. And the black and white photo of a tall young woman dancing with her arms outstretched and her face in shadows was most definitely her. A new photograph he had never seen. He recalled her mentioning that a friend of hers had offered to shoot some pictures of her, and the shiver he had felt in his heart at the time. Not nude ones, surely. Jealousy already. She was wearing a short skirt, seemingly denim and a tight dark top which emphasised the flatness of her breasts. Her hair cascaded like a stream across her pale shoulders. Jack felt his stomach tighten.
The friends listed made sense. He recognised a few names, other girls she had sometimes mentioned in passing, from her film club and university, her brother, strangers he was unaware of, another writer she had also once interviewed at the film festival where they had first met. He made a request to become her friend, but she did not respond. Jack then blanketed her friends list. Only one reacted, a old school friend who hadn’t seen her for two years and had no clue where she might now be. None of the others reacted, but the word must have gone out to Giulia that he was trying to track her down, and on the second morning he settled at the Starbucks table with a pastry and a coffee and connected to the web on an open wi-fi link, her Facebook account had disappeared. Although repeated Google searches still revealed, like ghosts, thin electronic traces of Giulia, synapses that ran across the screen that weren’t quite there, like evidence left behind in the wake of her retreat. That photo, her name listed as part of a litany of names amongst her friends’ accounts. Already the trail had grown cold. She was there somewhere but evidently did not wish to have any further contact with him again. As it was before her disappearance, he realised. Why would the circumstances have changed? How could she know that Jack was now helping out her family, rather than following his own agenda. Well, there was that too, he couldn’t deny it, could he? Damn, he missed her so much.
He checked whether she was listed on Linked-In, but she wasn’t. Another Internet social networking group, but one mostly business people used. Bebo was no help either. Or Twitter. This appeared to be a dead alley.
He closed the laptop and sat there silently. There was an old Simon and Garfunkel song playing in the bar. On the Boulevard outside, passers-by promenaded by in blissful oblivion, hurrying businessmen in suits and winter coats, beautiful women, all angles and curves under their finery, booted, lithe, each one another world of secrets he could never know. Sure, it could never have worked with Giulia. Jack knew that. It had been a war between his heart and the cold logic of the situation. Eventually, she would have grown bored with him, or he would have become incapable of pleasing her sexually or socially, the words would have run out, the silences would have taken hold and dug the grave of that ever so fragile love that still held them together in New York and all those other clandestine places he had taken her to. But never New Orleans, he sadly knew. Yet another promise he had never kept.
He felt like crying. A grown man at a corner table in a Paris Starbucks lost in his sorry thoughts. Not quite classy enough for Edward Hopper. A fool. A tear was brewing in the corner of one eye. He wiped it away with a single finger.
His phone rang.
“A man from Marseille tells me you are looking for information,” the voice at the other end said in French.
“I am.”
“Let’s meet, then.”
Antoine Franck had once worked for the French security services. He’d been recruited covertly whilst at university. He was bright and he was ambitious, but had no ambition to later move on to one of the Grandes Ecoles where the country’s business elite were groomed. He underwent intensive training in intelligence matters and was later posted to the backwaters of Lagos in Nigeria where he managed to make the best out of an impossible place, and was later promoted to a small unit based in New York, which had been created to run discreet surveillance on United Nations delegations and identify possible sources of useful information. He was an apolitical man, but for him this was just a job, and patriotism was not a virtue that ever crossed his mind. In America, he flourished and discovered his forte was not as a man of action or a plotter in the darkness but as an analyst and gatherer of random facts with the uncanny ability to see through the murk of jungles of data and see the trees, the nuggets that would pay off. However, his insight into the clandestine financial dealings of others also provided him with a profound knowledge of the system and how it could so easily be subverted. He became greedy. Siphoned small, and then larger amounts of cash from offshore accounts held by friends and foes. Eventually, his transgressions were discovered and he returned to Paris in disgrace and jobless. He was philosophical about it, anything but angry and set himself up locally as a consultant in matters financial and discreet, offering his services to anyone who wished to manipulate the arcane loopholes of the financial underground: money laundering, setting up networks and connections which efficiently erased the trail of fraudulence. He quickly thrived. He had retained many of his contacts within the Intelligence community who were happy to use him for below the line activities, but also made him invaluable to those who lived on the other side of the divide between honesty and crime. A most useful man, with a foot in both camps.
He met Jack in the basement bar of the opulent Hotel du Palais Royal.
“So, you’re the writer? Jack Clive? I looked up a few of your books. Interesting. But I don’t read much.”
“Yes,” Jack replied, ordering a citron pressé. He just couldn’t take more coffee, after his Starbucks residency of the past couple of days.
“I’ve never met a writer before,” Franck said.
“Well, we look quite normal, don’t we, no different from anyone else with a real job?”
Franck smiled. “Absolutely.”
A waiter with a white regulation jacket served their drinks. Franck had ordered a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. Jack diluted his lemon juice from the water jug and tore open all three of the sugar sachets he had been provided with and emptied them into his glass and stirred the whole lot in.
“Sweet tooth?”
“Indeed.”
Franck quickly got down to business. “Why are you looking for the Italian girl?”
“A favour to her family,” Jack said.
“I see.” Franck weighed the information. There was visibly something on his mind.
“Did you find anything out, then?” Jack asked.
“Yes.”
“So?”
“So I think there is a problem. A bad problem,” the Frenchman said.
“Tell me.”
“There is this man. You don’t need to know his name, I think. A rather bad man, a dangerous man…” he briefly fell silent.
“And?” Jack’s stomach was fast embarking on the agonising process of tying itself into knots.
“She was seen with him. Someone answering her description.”
“Who is he? In Paris?”
“Yes, in Pari
s. He grooms young women…”
“Grooms?” A terrible spectre of obscene possibilities swished across his mind. The pain in Jack’s midriff sharpened.
“A predator. A very accomplished one. He somehow manages to meet all these young women, has a talent for recognising those who offer the right potential. Initially, he seduces them. Then, gradually, he takes hold of them, mentally, not just physically and soon he convinces them it’s right they be shared with others, trains them.”
“Trafficking?” The images rushing across the back of his eyes were too much to bear.
“No. There is nothing non-consensual about it all. They become willing. That’s the cleverness of it all. It never becomes illegal.”
“I don’t understand…”
“It’s a whole other world,” Franck added. “BDSM circles. Limited to a small elite but they always need new, fresh meat, so to speak. And he is one of the main suppliers. He’s no pimp, doesn’t sell them, just passes them on to others, to groups, once he has tired of them, sucked the will out of them, I am told. Ironically, there is nothing the authorities can do about the whole farrago. Various people are aware of his activities but he is beyond the law. Nothing can be done.”
“And Giulia was seen with him?”
“Just recently. A young women corresponding to her description and the photograph I was provided with was seen entering a notorious club échangiste, a swingers club as you call them, on his arm.”
“Jesus…”
“It gets worse…”
“How?” Jack felt breathless as the revelations continued.
“On the same night, this man was killed.”
“How?”
“Shot. Looked like a professional hit. But she was with him when it happened. She was later seen leaving the club without him, though.There are no witnesses to what could have taken place inside the club. In those sort of establishments people cleverly always look the other way.”
“It couldn’t be her,” Jack said.
“Of course not, from what you have told me she is not the type. But people change, you know; life intervenes.”
“Certainly not,” Jack vehemently added.
“But a lot of people might be seeking her out now. Not necessarily the police, who are possibly rather glad to be rid of him, but possibly his associates. And, I am told, others.”
“When did this happen?” Jack asked.
“Two nights ago.”
“So she might still be in Paris?”
“You know as much as I do,” Franck concluded.
Jack was struck dumb.
“A nest of vipers, Mr Clive. I wouldn’t like to be in your young woman’s shoes right now.”
“And you’re positive she is the one who was seen with the man that night?”
“Yes, the doorman was positive. It’s his job to remember faces. He’s an invaluable source of information. I trust him.”
Jack fell silent.
They promised to stay in touch.
That night Jack had nightmares of large, calloused hands roaming across Giulia’s white skin, of her body stretched and tied to a cross, of whips and men in fierce boots and all the paraphernalia of BDSM he could summon from reading Story of Odecades back. And every single cliché he could mentally summon hurt like hell. When it came to matters sexual, it took very little for his imagination to unleash.
Why did life sometimes turn into a novel, he wondered? Always the wrong sort of novel, of course.
DANCE ME
SHELTERING BEHIND DARK CLOUDS, a distant moon haltingly threw a light across the Washington Square arch. Cornelia paid the cab driver the fare from JFK and made her way up the steps to her building, swinging her tote bag behind her.
Inside her apartment, the message light on her phone was flashing. She ignored it. Slipped out of her coat. Glanced at her watch. Walked to her bedroom where she upended the contents of her bag onto the bed. She’d travelled light. She’d acquired essential toiletries in Paris at a corner pharmacieand left them behind at her first hotel. There was just a change of underwear and a couple of skirts, a spare T-shirt and the outfit she’d worn at the club. She had briefly thought of jettisoning the latter back in France, but since she’d actually not been seen wearing it that much, it would have been a bit of a waste, she reckoned.
For a brief moment, her mind wandered back to the moment of execution yesterday evening, the lightning flash of recognition on the man’s face as he looked up from the small tattoo in her crotch to the weapon in her hand. The muffled sound of the shot and the eyes of the young Italian woman as she uncomprehendingly watched the scene unfold. Cornelia shuddered. She felt dirty. She hurriedly tore off the clothes she had worn for the flight.
It was the same after every kill. This delayed reaction. Not disgust at having killed another human being. Just emptiness. The adrenaline had now retreated from her system, and left her void, with a sense that her whole existence was meaningless. She didn’t mind the killing. It was a job like any other, and in some cases she managed to pump herself up enough to actually dislike the targets she had been assigned. It was not even a question of morality. She sighed and made a beeline to the shower.
The water dripped, a Niagara of heat streaming across her wide shoulders. Her eyes were closed as she stood motionless, allowing the insistent warmth to surge through her body, cleansing her, waltzing her every thought away, when a phone in the other room rang. The cell phone she’d transferred from her bag to the bed cover. Barely a handful of people knew the number. Cornelia didn’t move. The phone drifted into silence. A few minutes went by. Then it rang again. It could wait, she knew. It WOULD wait. The anonymous ring tone ceased again and the quiet returned, punctuated only by the water hiccupping down across her skin to the bathtub floor.
She dried herself briskly, dropped the white towel to the wooden floor, grabbed an old pair of jeans folded over the back of a chair and fumbled her way into them. Searched for a clean T-shirt and settled on a light V-necked beige Walkabouts on Tour one. Her leather jacket hung on its usual hook on the back of the apartment’s door. It was old and battered, an imitation WW2 aviator’s jacket, from which she had carefully detached all the irrelevant and pretentious sewn-on badges and insignias after she’d found it in a thrift store in San Diego a few years ago while on a job there.
It was approaching ten at night. As she locked the door behind her, the cell phone which she’d left behind, still on the bed, amongst her discarded clothes, rang again. She made her way towards the Bowery.
The club was half empty, even at this time of night. The recession was biting, and Wall Street types visibly had less cash to spend these days. Nor was it anywhere as opulent, or pretentious as the swing joint in Paris, Cornelia knew. Functional was the right word for it.
She’d checked on the way over whether she could work a shift, and Stangaler had agreed. Although he’d warned there weren’t many big tippers around. Cornelia wasn’t bothered. She just wanted something that could take her mind off the last job. Something she could do with her brain switched off. As she had walked down Lafayette, the thought that the Paris job was somehow far from over niggled her. Loose ends were always unwelcome and she suspected the Italian girl was one. Why in hell had she spared her? It had been a mistake, she realised. Hopefully, one that would have no lasting consequences. The girl had dark brown eyes and, following the surprise of witnessing Cornelia pull the gun from below the towel and her execution of the man who had dragged her there, there had been a shadow flying across those eyes that spoke of resignation, not of pleading as would normally be expected.
Maybe that acceptance of her fate, that sadness was what had momentarily touched Cornelia, interrupted her in murderous flight.
There were only three other dancers on tonight’s bill. No wonder that her proposal to come and do an impromptu shift had been so cheerily welcomed.
It had been a couple of weeks since Cornelia had worked last, but she kept a locker here with a couple of
spare outfits and a bunch of discs pre-recorded with numbers she could dance to.
She changed into a black leather two-piece bustier and bikini bottom, each item garlanded with a plethora of zips, most of which only served a decorative purpose, then sat and pulled on a pair of matching thigh-high leather boots with pencil-thin five-inch heels. She’d always resisted wearing stockings for her act, unless specifically required to by the locale’s management. There were already so many clichés in the stripping arsenal, and stockings had never pleased her. Fortunately, her dancing was sufficiently sexy (she preferred to call it erotic) for her to be forgiven her idiosyncrasies and there were at least half a dozen small clubs dotted across Manhattan who were happy to provide her with a stage on the occasions she made herself available. Cornelia never agreed to long-term residencies. She was strictly a freelance stripper. And, for convenience sake, she only worked in Manhattan, although word was reaching her that Brooklyn was fast becoming the in place. A better class of audience, it appeared. But, deep down, Cornelia only danced for herself, not for an audience. Take it or leave it.
From a hook on the far wall of the changing room, floating full of static across the make-up lamp, she grabbed hold of a thin wrap, all gauze and transparency.
She glanced at her discs and selected one. It had to be the right mood for today. On the other side of the curtain where the stage and its central pole stood, the sounds of a Beyoncé song were nearing their climax. Cornelia walked over to the sound and lighting technician’s pokey cabin and handed him her music.
“Welcome back, gal,” he said. “Been a long time.”
“You know me, Pete,” she said. “I have another life on the side.” Little did he know.
“Good to see you again. This joint always needs a touch of extra class,” he said. Pete studied sound engineering at Columbia and was in his final year. His job here paid the bills.
“It’s good to be back,” Cornelia said. “It’s about time I exercised again. Been travelling. Too much food…” She’d almost mentioned she’d been to Paris before she caught herself. Too much information.
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