“No one’s perfect.”
“There’s a flight out of Newark tomorrow at three in the afternoon. Be on it. Usual arrangements at the other end. You know the drill. Get it right this time, please.”
“I will.”
“Clean things up once and for all. That’s all you have to do. They wanted you scratched, you know. Asked me to assign your case to another operative, but I pleaded for you. Got you this second chance. It would have been too much of a waste.”
“I understand.”
The phone in her hand went dead.
Cornelia felt ever so tired right now. She stripped and dropped onto the bed. Pulled the covers around herself and sleep finally caught up with her.
LIKE A LILY TO THE HEAT
GIULIA LOOKED AT THE cash she had retrieved from the bad man’s drawer. There was more there than she had initially thought. Sitting up in the narrow bed of the small hotel room on the Rue Monsieur le Prince, she pulled the red elastic band from the bundle and began counting the euro notes.
She could survive on this for several months, she reckoned. Easily.
She realised she had no wish to return to Rome and bury herself in the deadly, familiar routine of studies and family. It would be an admission of defeat. There surely had to be something more to life. Paris had begun on the wrong foot. She had been too weak, goal-less. A mistake she was determined not to make again.
Having wrapped the elastic band around the cash again and transferred it to her rucksack, she looked at the half dozen manila envelopes she had picked up from the drawer in her haste to leave the dead man’s apartment behind. Surely not more money? She pulled them towards her across the grey sheet that reached to her waist.
She opened one, and then the others. Just files. Dossiers with names and random information. Some of them had photos attached. Of young women. Images of their faces looking sadly into the camera. Others of their naked bodies shot against a dark photographic studio background, impersonal, stark, like a series of pieces of meat put up for sale. Giulia shivered. Leafed rapidly through the mass of files that had been divided between the envelopes. No, there was no file on her. She didn’t recall the man having taken any pictures of her. Yet. Was he planning to set up a file about her, had the fatal incident at the club échangistenot happened? Another woman in a catalogue. She had no wish, right now, to read the text that accompanied each woman’s photograph. In French, anyway, which would take her ages to decipher. There was something creepy about all the documents. She stuffed the envelopes into the rucksack, rose from her bed and quickly showered, She needed a walk. Some fresh air. Time to think.
She was wandering through the bird market just to the north of Notre-Dame when the helplessness of her situation struck her. She was alone in a foreign city, she had severed all her ties to the few friends she had here and had no wish to return and attend the courses she had been following. It had only been an excuse to leave Italy again, and allow her father to subsidise her. She already had her degree; what was the point of further qualifications when the job market in Rome was worse than it had ever been and over two-thirds of graduates could only get macjobs and still lived with their parents late into their twenties? And she had been the witness to a murder. Was it even safe to stay here?
Maybe she could go to Barcelona. She still held bittersweet memories of the city, its friendly campus, the Ramblas on Sant Jordi’s day, the beaches. The man who had joined her there. Just two years ago now; how time had flown. Or should she take a flight to America, any flight, go as far as she could from Europe? San Francisco maybe? She realised she had enough funds to do so. But what then? A question she still couldn’t find the right answer to.
The grey waters of the Seine lapped against the stone walls of the quays and Giulia shivered. Warmer weather, that’s what she needed.
She stopped. Her nose was dripping. She hadn’t brought warm clothes with her to Paris. And made her mind up right there and then. Rapidly retraced her steps back to the small hotel. Repacked her few possessions, settled her bill and walked down to the nearest Métro station on the Boulevard St Germain, the entrance opposite the banks of art cinemas and took the first train towards the Porte d’Orléans. Half an hour later she was standing in the vast and noisy departure hall of the Gare d’Austerlitz. The vast station momentarily felt like a film set, a ghost town littered with lingering extras waiting for the invisible director to call the shots and set them in motion.
Jack was stuck in a rut. Philip Marlowe by now would have called up his cronies in the police force, followed half a dozen red herrings, possibly come across murderous but beautiful twins or little sisters and been bashed over the head several times and woken up dazed and dishevelled by a lake or in some derelict industrial warehouse, but at least he would have made progress in his quest for the missing person or object he had in a fit of romantic generosity agreed to look for. Alongside consuming endless sips of whiskey. Jack didn’t even have a clue where to venture to even get beaten up properly. Damn, it was easy on the page. Marlowe would never give up on a case.
It was evening. Autumn was slip-sliding into winter and he was sitting at his usual table in the small café in the Rue St André des Arts, with a notepad open at an empty page on the table next to his glass. Clueless. His phone rang.
“Hello?”
A woman’s voice, soft, shy.
“Mr Clive, can I call you Jack, it’s Eleonora Acanfora. I knew Giulia. Her father, il Dottore, told me that you are looking for her. I also want to find her. I would like to help. I am in Paris. Arrived this afternoon by train. Maybe we can finally meet for first time?”
Jack had heard of Eleonora when he and Giulia were still seeing each other. She was a photographer in Salerno, south of Naples, who had accompanied her to take snaps on the occasions Giulia had been asked to interview movie directors or actors for the small semi-professional film magazine she sometimes freelanced for. Which was how Jack and Giulia had originally met.
He remembered Giulia mentioning how much she liked Eleonora. They had even, she had once confessed to him, swapped skirts.
“Hello, Eleonora,” he replied. “It’s been a long time. I was worried that you’d grown offended with my e-mails … Anything you can do to help would be gratefully appreciated.”
“Good.”
He gave her the address of the café. She joined him there an hour later.
Out of curiosity, the year before, Jack had once visited Eleonora’s website. Initially, to see whether she had ever taken shots of Giulia he might not have seen before. It was in fact more of a blog illustrated with frequent photographs and with a hyperlink to a flickr account where the rest of her images were archived under an assortment of categories. Often reading other people’s blogs was like peeking into the lives of strangers with total impunity, a compelling variation on voyeurism and one a writer found it difficult to avoid. More so as Jack always could find time to waste on the Internet; like all writers he held the art of procrastination in high regard and online research was always a perfect excuse not to write quite yet. He had begun to scroll through the previous six months of Eleonora’s entries. More short sentences or zen-like thoughts possibly lifted from books she had read. She didn’t post every single day, and the journey hadn’t taken that long.
The initial sojourn inside Eleonora’s life had touched him more than he thought it possibly could, in addition to the fact she represented a final link to Giulia after their break-up. She didn’t use her blog as a diary, like so many other bloggers he had come across did, but in a strange way it was even more intimate. The respective entries were merely evocative, if puzzling titles “darkness’, “red room”, “blue room”, “ hold me”, “street with no name”, “raindrops on wire”, “take my soul”, “the surface of water” and so on, some accompanied by a photograph, others by a short poem or an excerpt from something she had recently read, a book or a haiku. Reading through the actual lines and sensing how apposite each photograph was to t
he words or the enigmatic title, he sensed the weight of a monumental sadness. This was visibly a woman in pain. And she moved him. There was also music embedded in the website which could be heard at the click of a link once he turned the sound back up on his computer. Some of the music he knew, some he did not recognise and was eager to identify as it also spoke of inner desolation, yearning and desire, all tropes that also anchored his own soul. And in strange ways her connection with Giulia made this surreal in a bittersweet way.
Had Jack not been in mourning for Giulia, he would have mailed Eleonora right there and then, with a myriad questions and an unhealthy curiosity for deciphering the story behind the story.
He recalled the conversations they had had about her friends. Was Eleonora the one who loved opera, or was that another, Simone maybe?
Slowly the memories coalesced. Eleonora was the friend from early schooldays who wanted to be an artist and had discovered she had a born talent for photography (and liked modern jazz, not opera…) but was not yet at a stage where she could make a living from it. She had not gone to university but the two young women had nevertheless kept in regular contact. Eleonora worked in her brother’s computer store in Salerno, but spent most of her leisure time in Naples and was always miserable in love, embroiled in an on-off-on relationship with a local musician — a piano player Jack thought he remembered — who treated her badly but that she couldn’t quite jettison. This was enough information for Jack’s unbridled imagination to pen whole stories in the gaps between her blog entries and illustrations, and think he understood Eleonora a little better.
There had been a loop of hypnotic guitar music on her website one week which had caught his imagination. He had e-mailed her, asking her to reveal its provenance. It was from the soundtrack of a movie he had already seen, but at the time it had not struck him as so compelling that it was now, accompanying her words and her images. They had then begun an intermittent correspondence, in which Giulia’s name or existence was deliberately never alluded to. A week or so later, she had posted a short sentence from one his books that had been translated into Italian — in fact some lines he could not even recall writing. Something to the effect that the bodies of women so quickly erased all evidence, traces of previous lustful excesses. Was it a signal to him or just something intimate that she recognised in herself?
A few days later, Eleonora began posting a whole series of new photographs, self-portraits, and Jack learned in an otherwise distant mail that she had broken up with her man. Again.
Every new photograph that appeared on the website — and by now, Jack was hunting them down almost obsessively at regular intervals, like a story developing, a page-turning plot, revealed another part of her, like a chameleon shedding layers of skin or pretending to be someone else. Her face, dark as night eyes, an aquiline, proud nose, wild dark, unkempt hair. And always, a sadness, a beauty made in darkness.
Some of the photographs revealed her in various states of undress, unveiling long legs, a pale shoulder, acres of white skin, her stomach, the swanlike line of her neck, the timid birth of breasts (none of the images were ever truly explicit), the shadow of her bones beneath the skin, the long-lasting pain in her eyes of coal, her strong waist (above black panties). He sometimes felt like printing up each and every image and trying impossibly to assemble them into a whole jigsaw portrait of her, but there would always be parts missing, as if yahoo or whichever server hosted her site did not allow sexual parts to be posted to a flickr account. So, Jack being Jack, he would wildly fantasise, imagining her on a bed, walking out of a shower in an anonymous hotel room. Jack had always had a perverse talent for dreaming.
Eleonora never offered him any encouragement and the little correspondence they exchanged was cryptic and mostly one-way traffic as she seldom clearly answered any of Jack’s questions. Which became highly frustrating as she usually took a week at least to answer Jack’s invariably longer e-mails. But every new photograph she posted online felt to him like a veiled, personal message.
He thought of her a lot. Maybe because of the connection with Giulia. The fact they both happened to be Italian. And attractive.
But he didn’t even know the sound of her voice.
Or the smell of her skin.
Let alone the taste of her lips. Or the texture of her hair slipping through his fingers.
From all those images on his computer screen, he knew intimately the shape of her back, the curve of her knee, the black shiny boots she once wore, a dress, a top, the ring that circled one of her fingers, the coat that buttoned at her neck, the deep sense of yearning in the deep pool of her eyes. He wondered unendingly what it might feel to sleep with her in the same bed, to feel the warmth of her body as they unconsciously switched positions at night in a bed too small for two, what her eyes would look like in the morning as she woke by his side. Harmless dreams.
One day, Eleonora had written to him, asking if he thought it would be easy for her to find a job if she ever came to London. She felt she had to get away from southern Italy and her present, confining surroundings. Just to get away from things. As Giulia so often did. Jack knew that she had seldom travelled outside Italy, except for two trips to Germany when her boyfriend’s band had toured there. It felt to him like a cry for help.
He cautiously answered that in all honesty it might prove difficult as he was aware that her spoken English was halting (they both wrote to each other in their own, respective language) but he was happy to do all he could to help.
It took Eleonora another fortnight to answer. Just a few words. Not really an answer. Telling him she was trying to sort herself out. Then their patchy correspondence had just petered out.
Out of gallantry, he had sent her flowers for Valentine’s Day months later. Roses, of course. As he used to do for Giulia when they were an item. She took a photograph of the flowers and placed it on her website as a blog heading. Enigmatically titled “Thanks, J.”
One week later, a new stream of photographs began to appear on Eleonora’s website. A plate of sushi on a restaurant table, the boyfriend (Henry Miller to her Anais Nin) sitting across from her in the same restaurant.
Then, as the days went by, a succession of photographs of Eleonora with her boyfriend, both topless, in unchaste embrace, sitting on a bed, against a wall, holding hands, fighting almost, touching, littering the horizon of her blog. One followed by another, relentlessly. Like an unfolding newsreel. Forever witnesses of afternoons and nights there were spending together — or, it once occurred to Jack, maybe they were earlier images of when the couple had been together and this was just a final visual requiem. To Jack, the other man almost looked like a Neanderthal. Rough, unfeeling, not the sort of guy he could ever understand Eleonora being attracted to. Every single time he logged on, Jack began to fear that the next image he would uncover might actually see them actually fucking.
For several days in a row, the images continued. Never had Eleonora appeared more beautiful and lost. There were now daily photographs of Eleonora and the other man, no text, no titles, no haikus. Then one day it just stopped and the blog stopped being active.
Maybe it was best this way, Jack had decided. What was he thinking of, falling for a woman he had never even met? And a friend of Giulia’s. It would have been like treading on thin ice, surely?
He sent Giulia yet another e-mail; asking her where she now was, and why she still refused to communicate with him, assuring her that he still missed her abominably and shackled himself to his keyboard to finally write another book. Yet again, Giulia refused to answer his pleas.
Six months later, Jack deleted everything he’d written. It just didn’t feel right. Once upon a time, the longing he felt inside was capable of generating stories, feelings. Now it was just a parade of words full of emptiness.
He’d packed lightly and taken the next morning early train to Paris.
He recognised her the moment she walked into the café. She was so much shorter than he had expected. All tho
se photographs he had seen of her had not prepared him for this. Jack smiled.
“Sit down,” he invited her.
They both looked at each other.
“Is nice to finally meet,” Eleonora finally said.
“It is. Really,” Jack answered. “It’s so good to see you. Have you taken time off from your brother’s store?”
Eleonora’s smile broadened. She wore all black from head to booted toe.
“Oh no,” she said. “I not work there any more. For four months now I just do official photography at Naples clubs and music places. Tomorrow, if you want, I will show you my new portfolio. Is all pictures of musicians. I manage to become official photographer for many Naples venues where they have music. Is six months contract. Not pay too much but is still good. Better than my brother’s shop, for sure.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“But then, il Dottore, Giulia’s father, he come to see me and ask if I hear from her this year.”
“Have you?”
“No. I not even know she had come to Paris. She stops communicating totally after she finish with you. I not know if sadness or not. But she was always such good friend when she was happy, I decide I must do something. But now I not sure what.”
“Welcome to the club,” Jack said.
“But then I think that maybe together we know enough about Giulia. We have ideas. We talk and know where to look, no?”
“Maybe.”
“Il Dottore, he give me a bit of money and I have some of my own. I just I feel I owe it to Giulia. She help me when I was sad with Henry, you know.”
Jack knew. She would call him Henry after Henry Miller, and she thought herself as Anais, an Italian incarnation of Anais Nin. He’d seen the photographs. The images of their bodies together in the stark black and white photographs.
Eleonora read his thoughts.
I Was Waiting for You Page 7