Maxim Jakubowski - I Was Waiting for You

There were no cars with flashing lights outside the building. She slipped in, ran breathlessly up the stairs, put her ears to the door. There were no sounds coming from inside. In all likelihood he had not been properly identified yet. Just a naked man with a bullet through his skull. She unlocked the door and quickly ran through the flat. Picking up her few belongings, the computer, her toiletries. She couldn’t see where he had put her mobile phone. Maybe he’d thrown it away. Damn! Looked at the bathroom mirror. Realised her prints were everywhere over the flat. But then reassured herself that the crime had not occurred here, so it was unlikely they would lift the prints. Anyway, she knew there had been other women here before he had taken her in, seduced her into staying as his pet.

She was about to run out the apartment, after barely four minutes flat — she had timed herself — when she noticed that the drawer under his desk in the study was still open. Just as they’d left for the club, he had considered ordering her to wear a heavy gold chain around her neck. All part of his sexual rituals, she knew. But the clasp had been too loose and he’d decided against it. They were already running late, and he’d neglected to push the drawer closed and lock it.

She peered inside. The necklace shone darkly. And beneath it a half dozen or so manila folders and a tidy bunch of bank notes tied together with a red elastic band. The money would prove useful, she reckoned. She hurriedly grabbed the drawer’s contents and scooped it all into her deep and floppy handbag. Then pulled the necklace out and put it back in the drawer. It would evoke too many bad memories, she knew. And rushed out of the man’s flat. Locked up behind her. Walked quietly down the stairs to the street. No one had seen her inside the building and the pavements outside were empty. She walked to the Place de la Bastille, where she caught a taxi to her hotel.

Back in the small room, Giulia 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’Américaine candidly smiled back at him as she made her way into the departure lounge at the airport.

“Absolutely,” she said.

THAT NIGHT, JACK DREAMED of Giulia. Of the warmth of her body in the bed at night, the scent of her hair. But every time Giulia woke up inside the dream and his hand tenderly advanced towards her in the darkness, she would draw back with a look of horror over her face and say, “Don’t ever touch my breasts, ever…” just like Mary Ann Armshaw. And he would wake up drenched in cold sweat.

Realising that maybe he and Giulia were now actually in the same city. In Paris.

Not that he could appreciate the irony in this. That he had impulsively taken the first train to Paris to bury her memories. A place he had always promised to take her to, but then somehow circumstance and life had conspired against them and time had finally run out. Was this why she had come here, according to her father? Coincidence? Fate?

But then how had her father known where to find him?

Or was it all a bad joke being played at his expense?

He emptied the folder. Photos of Giulia. As a child, more recent ones he had never seen. Smiling at the camera, pensive, cooking pasta in the family kitchen wearing a white T-shirt that adhered to her skin and highlighted her jutting nipples, standing in front of Warsaw’s Old Square, driving the camper on some unrecognisable road.

Printed-out pages, with the addresses and telephone numbers, where known, of her friends. Some of whom he was aware of, from past conversations. Others unknown to him. Many of them Spanish. He idly wondered which were the two Barcelona University students she had gone to Mallorca with. One of them had made a pass at her, and she had been tempted, he knew. Had even allowed the young man to see her naked on the beach, sprawled across the golden, wet sand.

Jack swallowed the bile rising up through his throat.

He looked at every printed sheet of paper and every photograph again and again. Seeking clues, answers, a direction to follow until it all became a blur in front of his teary eyes.

Damn, he was no detective; he didn’t even know where to begin this foolish investigation. He remembered that book he’d once written where the private eye was asked by a distraught husband to discover what had happened to his missing wife. Jack had tried to conceal from the reader that the detective in question had actually known the woman in question, and had in fact killed her, thus being recruited to investigate himself. He’d never been that good at plotting; had always been much better at characterisation.

He walked out to a nearby patisserie on the Rue Saint Sulpice, bought himself a couple of petits pains au chocolat and, on the short way back to his hotel room, a bottle of mineral water from an all-hours épicerie and settled at the desk in the narrow, fourth-floor room. He spread out the contents of the doctor’s envelope and, across a few sheets of paper, attempted to list most of the things he still clearly remembered about Giulia: the friends she had mentioned, things she had said, places she had talked about, anything that could help him now find where she had taken off for. Was she even still in Paris?

Two hours later, his mind was still scrambled and despairing and he had a bad headache.

He needed to go online. Maybe he should find another hotel, one with a broadband connection.

Jack glanced at his watch. London was one hour behind but by now people would be out of bed there, he reckoned. He called up the contacts page on his mobile phone, and selected a number. The phone at the other end took ages before it was finally picked up.

A morose South London voice, emerging from the fogs of sleep, answered.

“Hallo…”

Timbers was a small-time hustler he had once been introduced to when he needed some inside information for a book he was working on. He wanted to know how one could get hold of an illegal gun south of the river. And Jack knew all too well that he was not the sort of guy who could venture into a pub in Brixton or Herne Hill enquiring about such matters, without running the risk of being beaten up at the back or wherever his curiosity would have led him to. He had the wrong look and the wrong accent, to begin with. Someone at the Groucho Club had once mentioned Timbers, another writer maybe and once he had made contact with the petty crook, they had improbably bonded and he’d become a mine of information. They hadn’t seen each other for well over two years now, but had kept in touch with the occasional conversation over the phone every few months. Timbers loved reading mystery novels, and particularly enjoyed picking holes in plots and details, invariably pointing out that he could certainly do better should he ever find the time to actually write.

“It’s Jack Clive.”

“Wow, man, you’ve woken me up.”

“I feared I would, sorry Timbs. But I’m abroad, in Europe, and wasn’t sure what the time was back home,” Jack lied.

“It’s OK,” Timbers said, stirring his mind, dragging it laboriously towards the shores of morning consciousness.

“I need some help. And couldn’t think of anyone else to call, you see.”

Jack could almost see the sly smile spreading across the other man’s lips.

“Guns again?”

“No,” Jack said. On the occasion of that initial encounter, he’d been treated to an hour-long treatise on models, calibres and a parallel history of South London establishments of ill-repute and villains. All that for something that warranted only a line or so in the novel. But Timbers visibly was thrilled to become the professor and showing off his knowledge of the darker side of life.