I Was Waiting for You

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The car pulled up along the side of a large, architect-designed single-storey country house. The driver parked on the gravel path, at a right angle to a closed garage door.

  Just as the chauffeur was about to pull the car keys from the ignition, Cornelia swiftly pulled out the small Beretta she had brought along in her slim handbag and pressed it in a single movement against the back of the man’s head. She’d screwed on a silencer before leaving Manhattan. The detonation barely echoed within the car’s interior, a hushed, repressed sound that no one inside the main building could possibly have heard.

  The man slumped against the wheel just as the engine died.

  Cornelia checked his pulse.

  He was dead. A single bullet was generally sufficient.

  She experienced a clear sense of relief. She had not used the weapon for ages. Always avoided having to utilise her own gun. Normally, each new job was supplied with its own, which was either disposed of following the hit or returned, depending on the arrangements concluded beforehand.

  She hoisted herself off the backseat, gave the dark house a rapid glance. There was no movement at any of the visible windows on this particular side of the building. She opened the door and stepped out.

  There was a soft breeze billowing between the building and the nearby stream that lay at bottom of the house’s small lawn.

  She could feel the uneven gravel under her feet through the thin leather sole of her flat ballet shoes. On this particular surface, it felt almost like walking barefoot.

  She reached the front door. It wasn’t locked. Cornelia walked in.

  The corridor beyond was lined with bookshelves. Cornelia couldn’t help herself giving the spines a rapid glance. But she couldn’t afford to be distracted. Maybe afterwards she would have some time to give the books a closer look, although at first glance they were mostly art books, not the sort of titles she collected.

  The entrance passage led to a large open-planned space with a high latticed wooden ceiling, bordered on one side by wide bay windows which overlooked the garden and the stream, and on the other by a massive stone fireplace. A couple of deep and lush leather sofas were scattered at a right angle around a low glass table. Someone was sitting in one of them, with the back of his head to her, smoking, a newspaper — the Wall Street Journal –spread in front of him, held up between his two hands.

  Cornelia coughed.

  The man turned round. Looked at her. Set the newspaper down next to him on the sofa.

  “Cornelia, I presume?”

  “Indeed,” she said.

  He kept on gazing at her.

  “Mmmm… Even prettier than I was unreliably told.”

  “Ivan?”

  “Yes. And you are my sweet angel of death? So we finally meet…”

  Cornelia smiled. In the flesh there was nothing particularly impressive about the man. The master of ceremonies she had been put in touch with nearly five years ago, the man who had assigned the jobs to her, paid her fast, no questions asked, made the arrangements, set the targets.

  He was in his mid-fifties, a tad overweight, thin grey hair just that little bit too long for social conformity, wore horn-rimmed glasses and, she noticed, had terribly thin lips. He was dressed in nondescript dull pastel colours.

  “You’re on your own?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he replied. “I assumed that what you wanted to discuss was of a private nature. It’s only me. No stray ears.”

  “Good.”

  “And, as you know, I’ve asked the driver to remain outside, in the car.”

  “Perfect,” Cornelia said.

  “Anyways, I am being a bad host; can I offer you a drink?”

  “A coffee would be nice,” she said.

  He rose from the couch and walked over to the kitchen section, separated from the main space by a thin wooden partition.

  “The Paris job?”

  “Yes,” Ivan queried.

  “What was it about?” Cornelia asked him.

  “You know I can’t reveal who my customers are, Cornelia. That would be quite unbecoming and disloyal and you should know better. I think we’ve had this conversation before, no? Why are you asking?”

  “Because…”

  “You did clean up, on your second trip? The witness — was it a young woman with dark curling hair, I was told?– has been eliminated, has she?”

  “No, she hasn’t, Ivan. First of all, she was a totally innocent bystander who just happened to have come across a bad man and, in all likelihood, knew nothing about his other activities. Furthermore, I just couldn’t find her. She’s just faded away into thin air, presumably returned to her own, quite ordinary life.”

  “But she saw you, didn’t she? There’s a link. The trail could lead back here.”

  “Yes, she saw me kill him. But I know she will do nothing about it.”

  “That’s just not the way it works, Cornelia. You’re making me angry. So what the hell have you been doing all this time?”

  “Uncovering a whole hornet’s nest.”

  “You should leave it undisturbed, you know that.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “And what does that mean exactly?”

  “It means that we are both in agreement that the whole affair must come to an end. We both want it dead and buried.”

  “So?”

  “So, Ivan, you will identify the client for me, and I will take over from there,” Cornelia suggested.

  “That is quite ridiculous. I can’t. How many times must I remind you of that? Our sort of business has its rules of conduct and they cannot be modified just because an innocent bystander was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway, even if you were to make contact with the primary client, what would you do then: plead on your knees and with your eyes wide open for the girl to be spared?”

  “No,” Cornelia said enigmatically.

  Ivan shrugged his shoulders in exasperation. “Oh Cornelia, what’s happened to you? You were one of the best. I don’t understand what’s come over you.” He took a final sip of coffee from his cup, weighing his thoughts. Cornelia remained silent.

  “Tell me, Cornelia dear, in the hypothetical case where you were to discover the client’s name and location, what were you proposing to do, to say to make him change his mind?” Ivan asked again.

  Face impassive, Cornelia said “Kill him.”

  “You must be joking,” Ivan said.

  “That would certainly put an end to the whole matter. Clean up the mess once and for all,” she added.

  Ivan frowned. This was getting beyond a joke. “You’re not serious, are you?” he asked her.

  “Deadly serious, if you will excuse the inappropriate vocabulary.”

  Ivan looked at her. There was the hint of a smile on her lips and her eyes appeared ice-cold. And it dawned on him how efficient and utterly ruthless she had been in the past on the many occasions she had been assigned a hit. His frown grew deeper.

  The woman was dangerous. And, right now, unbalanced.

  He slowly began to rise from his seat.

  Cornelia gave him a darting glance.

  “I think I need another coffee,” Ivan explained.

  “I don’t think you do, Ivan.” He looked down and saw the gun she was holding in her right hand, pointing straight at his stomach. It had appeared out of nowhere. He frantically looked at the large bay window.

  “Your driver won’t be coming to help,” Cornelia said. “No cavalryto the rescue.”

  “Bitch,” Ivan muttered under his breath.

  “No need for profanity, Ivan. It’s just business, isn’t it?” Cornelia pointed out, getting to her feet, the Beretta still aimed steadily at Ivan’s midriff.

  He was about to swear again, but thought the better of it.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “You tell me who ordered the Paris hit and where I can find him or her.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “You know the cliché: w
e can do it the easy way or the painful way. It’s up to you. Your call.”

  Cornelia now stood facing him. He could even smell her perfume and the heat her body was generating. She towered above him, his black-clad angel of death, her blonde hair spreading like a halo against the recessed lighting in the room’s ceiling. Even with the rivulets of fear now rushing through his system, Ivan could not avoid finding her beautiful. And strangely serene.

  “You wouldn’t…” he protested.

  But deep inside, he knew she would.

  “Get up,” she ordered him.

  He meekly obeyed. There were no alternatives, he realised, his thoughts scrambling in every possible direction.

  She was a full head taller than him. The line of the gun did not deviate a single inch.

  “Undress,” she enjoined him.

  He expressed puzzlement, but Cornelia’s gaze stood firm and he began to strip.

  Once he was down to his smalls, she insisted he continue until he was fully naked. He became painfully aware of how out of shape his body was, the love handles he had always meant to exercise away, the round overhang of his stomach, the pasty texture of his thick thighs. Cornelia insisted he get rid of his socks too.

  “There is nothing more ridiculous than a naked man wearing socks,” she remarked. “That’s what was always wrong with so much sixties porn,” she even chuckled.

  His cock had shrivelled — cold or fear?– and partly retreated into his ball sack.

  Cornelia looked him up and down, quite unjudgmental in her gaze.

  She raised the gun and Ivan’s throat tightened. But all she was doing was pointing it in the direction of the bathroom.

  Cornelia marched him there, the muzzle of the Beretta forced into the small of his naked back, metal hard, his bare feet brushing the stone floor as he wearily lifted himself up the two small steps that separated the living space from the corridor.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Ivan protested.

  “I do. Absolutely.”

  It took Cornelia just over one hour to break Ivan’s resistance down. She had hoped it might take less time and not prove as messy.

  The Beretta wasn’t enough of a threat. Its use was too final, and her handler knew that.

  His hands tied high above his head to the shower rail, Ivan stood inside the bathtub in a distorted parody of crucifixion. Cornelia had kicked his legs apart and his genitals hung limply between his legs. She had switched the shower on and the increasingly hot water poured down across his stretched shoulders. Ivan grimaced and squirmed. Cornelia ignored him and explored his medicine cabinet. There was a small container of old razor blades, some rusting across the edges. She took hold of a couple and taped them with surgical tape to the end of a toothbrush. Improvised but a worthy instrument of persuasion, Cornelia knew. She turned back towards the bath tub and the immobilised man and sat herself on the edge and faced Ivan. Switched the water off. His pasty body was all now blotchy in all shades of pink. When Ivan saw what she was now holding in her hand, he shuddered briefly.

  “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.

  G IS FOR GYPSY

  JACK 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.