Maxim Jakubowski - I Was Waiting for You

A veil of shadow lowered across his eyes.

“And you want me to find her?” Jack confirmed.

“Yes,’ the Italian doctor said.

“You do know I’m not a private detective, Doctor, don’t you?” Jack said.

The other man briefly looked away, as if this was a subject he would rather not discuss. He took a deep breath, then turned to Jack again, a note of pleading in his voice.

“Please,” he asked. “If I went to the police, they would just tell me she is old enough to make her own decisions, and I have no evidence of anything criminal having happened. Just another young girl wanting to live her life. But, somewhere inside, I just know that’s not the case. Not Giulia.”

A curtain of silence swept across the two men, both sitting there in a bubble in the far corner of the Parisian bar.

“Why me?” Jack enquired.

Fearing the answer.

“She was always reading your books,” the Italian replied. “I was always asking her why. I’ve never understood her interest, or for that matter anyone’s interest in mystery stories. I used to read Agatha Christie and Giorgio Scerbanenco when I was still at the faculty, but never since. Normal people grow out of it, I thought.”

“I see.”

“And I read that short interview she did with you for her friend’s magazine. She admired you.”

“Did she?”

“Yes, it was always Jack Clive this and Jack Clive that.”

“So?”

“So, I thought you might have some idea where to look for her. I just couldn’t face employing a real private investigator. It’s stupid, I know. But, at the back of my heart, I thought that was what Giulia might have wanted me to do…”

Jack stayed silent. He had expected another explanation. A more personal one.

Before departing the bar, the Doctor left Jack a folder with photographs and a mass of other details concerning his missing daughter and made him promise to keep in touch. Inside the file, there was also a thick wad of euros. They hadn’t, of course, even discussed a fee.

He was missing a daughter and Jack was missing all the women from his past.

It was a sorry state of affairs.

Or, looking at it from a different perspective, could it be the way to begin a new book? He’d always liked the simplicity of Raymond Chandler’s books, when a client found Marlowe and launched him on his investigative ways. And didn’t Marlowe invariably come across a woman or two along the way? Some might even have called this a challenge. Only time would tell.

CORNELIA TOOK THE RER from Roissy-Charles De Gaulle. A taxi would have been easier and more relaxed after the seven-hour plane journey, but she knew she had to remain as anonymous as possible. Cab drivers have a bad habit of remembering tall, lanky blondes, particularly so those who did not wish to engage in needless conversation and reveal whether it was their first time in Paris or was she coming here on holiday?

Because she knew there were countless CCTV cameras sprinkled across the airport and the train terminal, she had quickly changed outfits in a somewhat insalubrious toilet shortly after picking her suitcase up from the luggage carrousel, and by the time she walked on to the RER train, she now had a grey scarf obscuring her blonde curls and wore a different outfit altogether from the flight. It was far from foolproof, but at least would serve its purpose in muddying the waters in the eventuality of a later, thorough investigation.

The commuters on the train to Paris looked grey and tired, wage slaves on their mindless journey to work or elsewhere. A couple of teenage Arab kids listening to rap or was it hip hop on their iPods glanced at her repeatedly, but her indifference soon got the better of them and she wasn’t bothered until they reached the Luxembourg Gardens stop where she got off.

She had booked herself on the Internet into a small hotel there the previous day. She checked in under the false name on her spare passport, a Canadian one she’d seldom used before. She took a shower and relaxed before taking the lift to the lobby around lunch hour, noticing someone new had taken over at the registration desk from the young woman who’d earlier checked her in. Cornelia then calmly walked back to her room and stuffed some clothes into a tote bag she had packed into her small suitcase and went down to the lobby again and left the hotel. Fifteen minutes later, she registered at another hotel, near the Place de L’Odéon, this time under her real name. This booking she’d openly made by phone from New York the day before. She was now the proud tenant of two separate hotel rooms under two separate names and nationalities. Both rooms were noisy and looked out onto busy streets, but that was Paris, and anyway she wasn’t here for a spot of tourism. This was work. She settled in the new room, took a nap, and just before the evening walked out and took a cab to the Place de L’Opéra. There was a thin jiffy bag waiting for her at the American Express Poste Restante. Here, she retrieved the key she had found back in Brooklyn at the Russian grocery Ivan occasionally used as a dropout. She then caught another taxi to the Gare du Nord, where she located the left luggage locker which the key opened. The package was anonymous and not too bulky. She picked up a copy of Libération and casually wrapped it around the bundle she had just retrieved from the locker and walked down the train station stairs to the Métro and took the Porte d’Orléans line back to Odéon. In the room, she unwrapped the package and weighed the Sig Sauer in her hand. Her favourite gun. Perfect.

The Italian girl had always preferred older men. Some of her friends and other fellow students at La Sapienza, Rome’s University, had always kidded her she had something of a father fixation, and indeed her relationship with her gastro-enterologist Dad was prickly to say the least, seesawing between devotion and simmering anger. At any rate, he also spoiled her badly.

But boys her age seemed so clumsy and uninteresting, coarse, superficial, so sadly predictable, and she found herself recoiling instinctively from their tentative touches all too often. Not that she knew exactly what she wanted herself.

Whenever asked about her plans for the future, she would answer in jest (or maybe not) that she planned to marry an ambassador and have lots of babies. When Peppino — the jokey name she would use in public circumstances for her much older, foreign lover so as to make him impossible to identify for her parents– queried her about this, she would add that the ambassador would also be a black man, a big man in both size and personality. He would smile silently in response, betraying his own personal fears and prejudices, only to point out that she’d be wasting so many opportunities by becoming merely a wife. After all, this was a young woman who by the age of 22 had a degree in comparative literature, spoke a handful of languages, and would surely make a hell of a journalist or foreign correspondent one day.

Her affair with the man she and her few friends aware of his secret existence had affectionately called Peppino had lasted just over a year and he had been the first man she had fucked. To her amazement, he had become not just a lover but her professor of sex; unimaginably tender, crudely transgressive, and the first time she had come across a guy who understood her so well their contact when apart became almost telepathic. However, he was also more than twice her age, lived in another country and happened to be married, which sharpened her longing and her jealousy to breaking point. The affair had proven both beautiful and traumatic, but eventually the enforced separation from Peppino could not be assuaged by telephone calls, frantic e-mails and mere words any longer. For her sanity, she was obliged to break up with him. Even though she also loved him. She had a life to live, adventures to experience; he had already lived his life, hadn’t he? Now was her time. The decision was a painful one and he naturally took it badly. Not that her state of mind was much better, wracked by doubts, heartache and regrets by the thousands as both she and Peppino could not help recalling the days and nights together, the shocking intimacy they had experienced, the pleasure and complicity, the joy and the darkness. Sleepless nights and silent unhappiness followed in her wake and she had agreed to stay with a girlfriend from her exchange months in Barcelona who lived in Paris — ironically, a city he had always wanted to take her to.