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 the Luxembourg Gardens stop where she got off.
She had booked herself into a small hotel there on the Internet the previous day. She checked herself 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, and noticed someone new had taken over at the registration desk from the young woman who’d earlier checked her in. She calmly walked back to her room and stuffed some clothes into a tote bag 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 made by phone from New York a week or so 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 purchased back in Brooklyn Beach from a Russian connection she occasionally used. 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 gastroenterologist 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 what exactly 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 name she would use for her much older, foreign lover so as to make him difficult for her parents to identify – quizzed her about this, she would add that the ambassador would also be a black man, a big man in both size and personality. Peppino 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 twenty-two had a degree in comparative literature, spoke five languages, and would surely make a hell of a journalist or foreign correspondent one day.
Her affair with the man she and her friends 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 it was the first time she had come across a guy who understood her so well that 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 any longer by telephone calls, frantic emails and mere words. For her sanity, she was obliged to break up with him, even though she 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, racked by doubts, heartache and regrets by the thousands as both Peppino and she 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 agreed to visit a girlfriend from her Erasmus months in Lisbon who lived in Paris – ironically, a city he had always wanted to take her to.
It was a wet spring and the thin rain peppered the Latin Quarter pavements with a coating of grey melancholy. Flora had gone to her grandparents’ house in the country and left the Italian girl on her own for a few days. Initially, she had looked forward to the prospect but now felt herself particularly lonely. When she was not busy exploring the city with her friend, memories just kept on flooding back.
She was sitting reading a book at the terrace of Les Deux Magots, sipping a coffee, half-watching the world pass by – women who walked elegantly, young men who looked cute but would surely prove dull in real life she thought – when she heard the seductive voice of the bad man over her shoulder.
‘That’s a quite wonderful book, Mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘I envy you the experience of reading it for the first time. Truly.’
Giuly looked up at him. He looked older. How could he not be?
Cornelia much preferred ignorance. A job was a job and it was better not to have to know any of the often murky reasons when she was given an assignment.
Had the target stolen from another party, swindled, lied, killed, betrayed? It was not important.
Cornelia knew she had a cold heart. It made her work easier, not that she sought excuses. She would kill both innocent and guilty parties with the same set of mind. It was not hers to reason why.
She had been given a thin dossier on her Paris mark, a half-dozen pages of random information about his haunts and habits and a couple of photographs. A manila folder she had slipped between her folded black cashmere sweaters in her travelling suitcase, to which she had added a few torn-out pages from the financial pages of the New York Times and a section on international investment from the Wall Street Journal to muddy the waters in the event of an unlikely snap examination of her belongings by customs at either JFK or Roissy. He was a man in his late forties, good-looking in a rugged sort of way which appealed to some women, she knew. Tallish, hair greying at the temples in subdued and elegant manner. She studied one of the photographs, and noted the ice-green eyes, and a steely inner determination behind the crooked smile. A dangerous man. A bad man.
But they all have weaknesses, and it appeared his was women. It usually was. Cornelia sighed. Kept on reading the information sheet she had been provided with, made notes. Finally, she booted up her laptop and went online to hunt down the clubs échangistes her prey was known to frequent on a regular basis. They appeared to be located all over the city, but the main ones appeared to be in the Marais and close to the Louvre. She wrote down the particulars of Au Pluriel, Le Cháteau des Lys, Les Chandelles and Chris et Manu, and studied the respective websites. She’d been to a couple of similar ‘swing’ clubs back in the States, both privately and for work reasons. She’d found them somewhat sordid. Maybe the Parisian ones would prove classier, but she had her doubts. Cornelia had no qualms about public sex, let alone exhibitionism – after all she had stripped for a living some years earlier and greatly enjoyed the sensation – but still found that sex was an essentially private communion. But then she’d always had an uneasy relationship and perception of sex, and at a push would confess to decidedly mixed feelings about it.