They agreed that once inside she would have no obligation to either stay with him or fuck him, at any rate initially. Maybe later, if neither came across someone more suitable. He readily acquiesced. Cornelia knew she was good arm candy, tall and distinctive, a beautiful woman with a style all her own, and an unnerving visible mix of brains and provocation. She’d worked hard on that aspect of her appearance.
Despite its upmarket reputation, Les Chandelles was much as she expected. Tasteful in a vulgar but chic way; too many muted lights, drapes and parquet flooring, dark corners or ‘coins calins’ as they were coyly described on the club’s website, semi-opulent staircases leading to private rooms and a strange overall smell of sex, cheap perfume and a touch of discreet disinfectant not unlike the cabins of erstwhile American sex shop cabins or the tawdry rooms set asides for private lap dances in some of the joints she had once navigated through.
She spent some time at the bar with her escort and enjoyed further champagne, and allowed him to show her some of the nooks and crannies of the swing club, which he appeared to be a regular at. Now she knew the lay of the land. She offered to dance with him.
“Not my scene,” he churlishly protested.
“It warms me up,” she pointed out. He nodded in appreciation.
“Just go ahead,” he said. “Maybe we can meet up later, if you want?”
“Yes,” Cornelia said.
From the dance floor, she would have a perfect vantage point to observe new arrivals as they trooped past on their way to more intimate areas of the club. She shuffled along to a Leonard Cohen tune and marked her area between a few embracing couples, embracing the melody with her languorous movements. She’d always enjoyed dancing, it had made the stripping bearable. Cornelia closed her eyes and navigated along to the soft music. Occasionally, a hand or another would gently tap her on the shoulder, an invitation to move on and join a man, a woman or more often a couple to a more private location, but each time she amiably turned the offer down with a smile. No one insisted, obeying the club’s basic protocols.
Amongst the French songs she had not previously known, Cornelia had already delicately shimmied to recognisable tunes by Luna, Strays Don’t Sleep and Nick Cave when she noticed the new couple settling down at the bar.
The girl couldn’t have been older than 25 with a a jungle of thick dark curls falling to her shoulders and a gawky, slightly unfeminine walk. Her back was bare, pale skin on full display emerging from a thin knitted top, and she wore a white skirt that fell all the way to her ankles, through which one could spy on her long legs and a round arse just that little bit bigger than she would no doubt have wished to have, an imperfection that actually made her quite stunning, what with deep brown eyes and a gypsy-like, wild demeanour that reminded Cornelia of a child still to fully mature. She wore dark black shoes with heels, which she visibly didn’t need, as she was almost as tall as Cornelia. But there was also a sad sensuality that poured out from every inch of her as she followed her companion’s instructions and settled on a high stall at the bar. The man ordered, without asking the young girl what she actually wanted. Her eyes darted across he room, looking at the other patrons of the club, judging them, weighing them. It was evidently her first time here.
Cornelia adjusted her gaze.
The man squiring the exotic young woman was him, her target. The bad man. Her information had proven correct. As she watched the couple, Cornelia blanked out the music.
Less than an hour later, she had made acquaintance with them and suggested to her new friends they could move on to a more private space. Throughout their conversation, the Italian girl had been mostly silent, leaving her older companion to ask all the questions and flirt quite openly and suggestively with the splendid American blonde seemingly in search of local thrills. At first, the man appeared hesitant, as if the visit to Les Chandelles had been planned differently.
“I’ve never been with a woman before,” the Italian girl complained to the man.
“Would you rather I looked for a negro to fuck you here and now with an audience watching?” he said to her.
“No,” she whispered.
“So, we all agree,” he concluded and pushed his stall away, and gallantly took Cornelia’s hand. “Anyway, you can do most of the watching as I intend to enjoy the company of our new American friend to its fullest extent. You can watch and learn; I do find you somewhat passive and unimaginative, my dear young Italian gypsy. See how a real woman fucks.”
Giuly lowered her eyes and stood up to follow them.
Once they had located an empty room on the next floor, Cornelia briefly excused herself and insisted she had to walk back to the cloakroom to get something from the handbag she had left there as well as picking up some clean towels, which their forthcoming activities would no doubt require.
“Ah, Americans, always keen on hygiene,” the bad man said and broadly smiled. “We’ll be waiting for you,” he added, indicating to his young companion to start undressing.
“I’ll leave my clothes too,” Cornelia said, turning round. “Don’t want to get them crumpled, do we?”
“Perfect,” the man said, turning his attention to Giuly’s slight, pale, uncovered breasts and sharply twisting her nipples while she was still in the process of slipping out of her billowing long white skirt. There were red marks on her butt cheeks.
When Cornelia returned a few minutes later, the bad man was stripped from the waist down and the Italian girl was sucking him off while his fingers held her hair tight and her head forcibly pressed against his groin, even though his thrusts were making her choke. He turned his own head towards Cornelia, a blonde apparition, now fully naked and holding a bunch of towels under her left arm.
“Beautiful,” he said, and released his pressure on Giuly’s head. “Truly regal,” he observed, his eyes running up and down Cornelia’s body. “I like very much,” he added. His attention now centred on her groin. “A tattoo? There? Pretty? What is it?”
Cornelia approached the couple. The man withdrew his cock from the Italian girl’s mouth, allowing her to breathe better, and put a proprietary hand on Cornelia’s left breast and then squinted, taking a closer look at her depilated pubic area and the small tattoo she sported there.
“A gun? Interesting” he said.
“Sieg Sauer,” Cornelia said.
There was a brief look of concern on his face, but then he relaxed briefly and nodded towards the American woman, indicating she should replace Giuly and service his still jutting cock. Cornelia quietly asked Giuly to move away from the man so that might take over her position. The Italian girl stumbled backwards to the bed. Cornelia kneeled. As her mouth approached his groin, she pulled out the gun she had kept hidden under the white towels, placed it upwards against his chin and pressed the trigger.
The silencer muffled most of the sound and Giuly’s cry of surprise proved louder than the actual shot which blew the lid of his head off, moving through his mouth and through to his brain in a portion of a second. He fell to the ground, Cornelia cushioning his collapse with her outstretched arm.
“Jesus,” Giuly said.
And looked questioningly at Cornelia who now stood with her legs firmly apart, the weapon still in her hand, a naked angel of death.
“He was a bad man,” Cornelia said.
“I know,” the Italian girl said. “But...”
“It was just a job, nothing personal,” Cornelia said.
“So...”
“Shhhh....” Cornelia. “Get your clothes.”
The young Italian stood there, as if nailed to the floor, every inch of her body revealed. Cornelia couldn’t avoid examining her.
“You’re very pretty,” she said.
“You too,” the other replied.
Cornelia folded the gun back inside the towels. “Normally, I would have killed you too,” she said. “As a rule, I must leave no witnesses. But I’m not big on killing women. Just dress, go and forget him. I don’t know how well
you knew him and suspect it wasn’t long. Find a younger man. Live. Be happy. And...”
“What?”
“Forget me, forget what I look like. You don’t know me, you’ve never known me.”
Giuly nodded her agreement as she pulled the knitted top she had worn earlier over her head, disturbing the thousand thick dark curls. The other woman was in no rush to dress, comfortable in her white nudity. Her body was also pale, but a different sort of pallor, Giuly couldn’t quite work out the nature of the difference.
Cornelia watched her hurriedly dress.
“Go back to Rome. This never happened. It’s just Paris, Giuly. Another place.”
Back in the street, Giuly initially felt disorientated. It had all happened so quickly. She was surprised to see that she wasn’t as shocked as she should have been. It was just something that had happened. An adventure. Her first adventure since Peppino. Under her breath, she whispered his real name. The Paris night did not answer.
She checked her bag; she had enough money for a small hotel room for the night. Tomorrow, she would take the train back to Rome.
The Louvre was lit up and she walked towards the Seine, and towards the darkness. At her fourth attempt, she found a cheap hotel on the Rue Monsieur le Prince. The room was on the fourth floor and she could barely fit into the lift. Later, she went out and had a crepe with sugar and Grand Marnier from an all-night kiosk near the junction between the Rue de l’Odeon and the Boulevard saint Germain. People were queuing outside the nearby cinemas, people mostly of her own age, no older men here. She walked towards Notre-Dame and wasted time in a bookshop, idly leafing through the new books on display. She would have dearly liked to have a coffee, but no Latin Quarter bookshops also served coffee, unlike her favourite haunt, Feltrinelli’s in Rome where she had almost spent a majority of her teenage years. But she knew that if she walked into a cafe and took a table alone, someone would eventually try a pick up line and disturb her, and tonight she felt no need for further conversation. So she finally went back to her small room and slept soundly. A night without nightmares or memories.
The man in the Police du Territoire uniform handed her passport back to Cornelia.
“I hope you enjoyed your stay, Mademoiselle?”
L’Americaine candidly smiled back at him as she made her way into the departure lounge at the airport.
“Absolutely,” she said.
Other titles by Maxim Jakubowski
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We Mate in the Dark Page 6