Colleen McCullough - Naked Cruelty

He had listened with intense concentration, and nodded when she had ended. “Yes, I know the building, it is beautiful, and the view must be superb. But Helen! So much money! It isn’t worth a quarter of the price you paid.”

“I agree, if it were not for the fact that no more high rises will ever be built on Busquash Peninsula. It would have gone for a million at least at auction. The twins were well aware of that. Everyone is happy!”

“Have you moved in?” Kurt asked.

“Yesterday, finally. I wanted to buy all new furniture-by that I mean some very old, some middling, and some very modern.”

“I ‘d love to see it.”

“Abandon your coffee and follow me to my new home. I’ll make us Jamaican Blue Mountain.”

Amanda would not have known her apartment, Helen had wrought so many changes. The carpet and the upholstery were cobalt blue, the walls and ceiling lime-green, and interesting antiques were scattered about. Her lamps were Tiffany and her chandelier 1910 Murano glass, a collection of magnificent paintings adorned the walls, and two bronze slave-girl lights six feet tall provided the first illumination once the front door was opened. Had she paid attention to her mother, whose taste was famous, she would perhaps have chosen a less strident theme, but Helen had her own ideas and Angela hadn’t been able to budge her. Mom was a source of New York shops and galleries, nothing else.

Kurt hated it, except for the Matisse and the Renoir, which, she admitted, were on loan from her father.

“They do not belong,” Kurt said. “They are too delicate.”

“I see what you mean, and anyway, I think I have to give them back,” she said, sounding displeased. “Dad says my security isn’t good enough. I say, why should anyone know they’re here?”

“I know now, and as time goes on, more and more people will. Come, Helen, your papa is right! There is a black market for work of this caliber.”

“Come and have a look at the bathroom” was her rejoinder, leading the way through a big bedroom containing an enormous bed and into a bathroom tiled in Norwegian Rose marble. “See? It even has a Jacuzzi, and I didn’t have to change a thing, I liked it just as it was.”

“I like the Jacuzzi,” he said, smiling at her, “but I would like it better if you and I were in it minus our clothes.”

She gave him a considering look. “I’ll think about it. Come and see the kitchen. It’s so perfect that I’m thinking of taking cooking lessons.”

“Every woman should know how to cook.”

She gasped. “You male chauvinist pig, Kurt!”

His eyes flashed. “I do not mind the reference to my sex, or to being called a chauvinist, but I will not be called a pig!”

“Pig, pig, pig!” she shouted.

He turned and left her; she heard the front door slam.

“Holy shits!” she said, only half inclined to laugh. The other half was angry-was he that German, that he had no sense of humor? Why did “pig” insult him more than the rest of a famous phrase? For a moment she thought about racing downstairs and begging his pardon, but then the MacIntosh stubbornness cut in; her chin lifted. Fuck Kurt von Fahlendorf!

A Jacuzzi-she’d immerse herself in its bubbles all alone. Not that she would have consented to sharing it with Kurt or any other man. Delia laughed and called her a “professional virgin”, and she had admitted the truth of that to Delia. It didn’t mean she was a physical virgin, it meant she was a cockteaser who pretended to outraged indignation when a man tried to have sex with her, convinced that she wanted it.

“You invite rape, Helen!” one man had said, frustrated.

“Go on!” she exclaimed. “I’m not the one at fault, you are!”

What she suspected about Kurt was certainly true of her: emotional coldness. Never having experienced a strong sexual drive, Helen could only ape its externals, and wondered how many other women were the same. The few men who had attracted her were all dark in a Silvestri way rather than a Captain Delmonico way, and she knew who her next target was going to be: Fernando Vasquez. That he was married and the father of children didn’t enter into her calculations: ethics and money never did, for she had none of the first and too much of the second. Christmas would see her make her move on Fernando, who was surely ripe for an affair, a deduction made for the crudest of reasons: gossip said he’d been faithfully married for a very long time.

Now was the right moment to get rid of Kurt, who was proving hard to get rid of. Which von Fahlendorf had commissioned the Turks, Dagmar or Kurt? It could as easily have been Kurt. In fact, in some ways Kurt made more sense. Would a Muslim culture accept a commission from a woman? Dagmar knew what was afoot, yes, but had she enacted the plan? Probably not, Helen concluded. No, Kurt did that before he boarded the plane, and in such a way that these foreign thugs had obeyed orders to the letter. How did he find them in a basically law-abiding immigrant populace? Kurt might be Nietzsche’s Superman, but he was also mild-mannered Clark Kent, America’s alter ego.

Having solved all that to her satisfaction, Helen stepped into the Jacuzzi and lay being gently pummeled by streams and jets of water for twenty minutes before emerging to wrap herself in a towel and go about her very last chores-bag and gun.

Her handbag went into a Chinese coromandel cabinet inside the front door; in the early days she had left it lying around anywhere, then Delia had objected, explaining that, since the bag held a firearm, she must conceal it. Looking back, Helen knew now that more than her gun had been vulnerable. So had her work journals. Not that anyone ever read them, but Delia had been right, it was better to be sure than sorry.

Her 9mm Parabellum pistol never remained in the bag these days, hadn’t in many weeks. It went under a pillow on her bed and stayed there until the morning. If, as tonight, she came home with someone, she left the person in the living room or, in Kurt’s case, the study, while she used her private bathroom-an excuse that let her enter the bedroom so she could park her weapon. She readied the gun for firing: safety off and a round in the chamber. If an intruder woke her, she didn’t have to fiddle. Tomorrow she would eject the round, insert it in the magazine, and put the safety on. That way, no accident.

I’m tired, she thought, wandering toward the bed.

Something cannoned into her back so forcibly that she went down in a heap on the floor, her face in the white bedroom carpet, her arms behind her back. The towel had gone in the initial attack, but Helen forgot all about modesty as she fought to free herself. He had her face downward and was sitting on her ribs; part of her fight was just to breathe, and she couldn’t seem to use her legs above the knees. Cold metal closed around her ankles and fettered her, then came the click of handcuffs on her wrists. Arms and legs were almost immobilized.

He yanked her on to her back so that she could see him, at the exact moment that she opened her mouth to shout for help. She didn’t seem able to scream, but she could shout, she could definitely shout! Too late. He had the duct tape over her mouth. You fool, you fool! Why didn’t you shout?

She didn’t need to see his face to know it was Kurt. In a weird way, her subconscious had always known Kurt was the Dodo. At dinner tonight, for sure. The paperweight… Why hadn’t her consciousness seen the truth of its significance? She had known, but something in her mind refused to let her admit his name, let her see what tonight had made manifest. After his frankness at Solo’s table, he had nowhere to go except to this.

“Your bed is hedonistic,” he said, looking disgusted. “How many pigs can fit on it at one and the same moment?”