Maxim Jakubowski - I Was Waiting for You

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 innocently 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 back, 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.”

Giulia 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 first had to walk back to the cloakroom to retrieve 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 Giulia’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.

“Most beautiful,” he remarked, and released his pressure on Giulia’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 he 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.

“Sig 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 Giulia and service his still-jutting cock. Cornelia quietly asked Giulia to move away from the man so that she might take over her kneeling position. The Italian girl, in a daze, stumbled backwards towards the bed. Cornelia lowered herself. As her mouth approached the man’s 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 Giulia’s sharp cry of surprise proved louder than the actual shot which blew the lid of his head off, the lethal bullet moving through his mouth and into his brain in a portion of a second. He fell to the ground, Cornelia cushioning his collapse with her outstretched arm.

“Jesus!” Giulia exclaimed.

She 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….” Corneliasaid. “Get your clothes.”

The young Italian girl just 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. And me. You’ve never seen me. I don’t know how well you knew him and suspect it wasn’t long. Find yourself 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.”

Giulia, still shaking from the shock of the summary execution, nodded her agreement as she pulled the knitted top she had worn earlier over her head, disturbing her 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, Giulia couldn’t quite work out the nature of the difference.

Cornelia watched her hurriedly dress.

“Go back to Italy. This never happened. It’s just Paris, Giulia. Another place. A bad dream. OK?”

Back in the street, Giulia initially felt disorientated. It had all happened so quickly. She was surprised to see that she wasn’t as traumatised now 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 to herself. “Jack”. It all felt unreal. The Paris night did not answer.

She checked her handbag; 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 crêpe with sugar and Grand Marnier from an all-night kiosk near the junction between the Rue de l’Odéon and the Boulevard Saint Germain. People were queuing outside the nearby cinemas, people mostly her own age, no older men here. She walked towards Notre-Dame and wasted time in a late-opening bookshop, idly leafing through the new books on display. She would have dearly liked to have a coffee, but none of the 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 café 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.

Giulia then remembered that she had left her laptop computer and, more importantly, her passport at the bad man’s place. And her clothes, although she was less concerned about losing them. She had never been that much a creature of fashion. More jeans and T-shirts and trainers, despite the nice things her new Paris lover had bought for her and ordered her to dress in. Back in Italy, she had always been swapping clothes with friends and acquaintances, finding a warm sense of comfort in second-hand clothes, which her aunt would often then adjust for her size. As they were leaving tonight, he had returned the keys to his apartment to her and she had dropped them in her handbag. She remembered the crime and mystery books she used to read. Surely, the police would not be investigating the man’s death yet? She took a calculated risk and hailed a cab. She could be there in under ten minutes.