I peered through the panel. Maybe I was mistaken about the light. I tried the handle and the door opened. Terrific security. I swore under my breath. I held the door a few inches open and went inside. The door swung back and I caught it before it closed. Was she here? Was anyone else here? Were there any guns about? I ignored the mosquitoes but wiped sweat from my eyes and palms. I had the. 38 in a dry hand.
‘Claudia,’ I said firmly, not too loud. ‘Claudia, it’s Cliff Hardy. Are you there?’
Peter Corris
CH19 — The Washington Club
The dim light at the end of the passage intensified as a door opened. Then another, closer light was switched on and it dazzled me.
‘Cliff? Is it you?’
‘It’s me.’ I still couldn’t see her. An old eye injury slows down my reaction time to intense light. A faint shape was beginning to take on firm outlines as it moved towards me. ‘Didn’t mean to alarm you,’ I said. I holstered the pistol. ‘But there’s no phone and… ‘
Then I could see and smell her. She was bare-footed and wore a long white dress like a singlet reaching to her ankles. Her hair was stiff and puffed out around her face, straggling to her shoulders. She smelt of tobacco and the sea. Her eyes were enormous, staring at me, and she had caught her lower lip in her teeth and was chewing it. For a moment I thought she was freaked out on some drug but she was steady. Alarmed, but not out of control.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘You’re covered in blood.’
I hadn’t noticed that my hand was still bleeding profusely when I’d struck out at the mosquitoes and wiped away the sweat. Blood had flecked my clothes and smeared my face so that I looked like a survivor from an Apache massacre. I found this out after she conducted me to the bathroom and made me strip off my jacket, pistol harness and shirt. She sat on the edge of the bath without speaking and watched me. Blood was still seeping from the tear and she reached up into a cupboard over the basin to get a packet of Band-Aids. Her breasts rose up under the thin cotton dress and her nipples were hard. I noticed and she saw me noticing.
What happened after that was more or less inevitable. She was naked under the dress and I soon had it off her. She undid my belt, pulled down my pants and took my cock in her hand. Somehow I got rid of my shoes, trousers and underpants. Somehow we made it to the bedroom. She took me in her mouth and sucked me until I begged her to stop. I licked her nipples and her rounded belly and below that and then she produced a condom and we were joined and thrusting urgently at each other as if we were anxious to end it but neither of us wanted to. I tried to hold back, couldn’t, came in a hot, shaking rush. She lay still for a minute, then began pushing back up at me. She gripped my buttocks, hauled me with surprising strength onto my hip and shoved against me. I could feel myself shrinking but tried to synchronise with her and at last she hammered into me, shuddered deeply and I felt her tense and then relax. We fell apart. I slid out and wrapped my arms around her. We were both sweat-soaked and breathing heavily.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Good. Lovely.’
‘Yes.’ I put on a brogue. I’m a ruined man.’
She giggled. ‘Are you Irish?’
‘Irish, English, French, gypsy… ‘
She kissed me. ‘A mongrel in other words.’
I could feel myself drifting towards sleep. ‘That’s right. Claudia
… ‘
‘Have a sleep, Cliff. You’re exhausted. All I’ve done for two days is sleep, swim and smoke.’
‘An hour,’ I murmured. ‘We have to talk.’
If she replied, I didn’t hear what she said.
22
The only thing I hadn’t taken off or had pulled off me before we made love was my wrist-watch. I woke up lying on my stomach with my hands under my head. The watch was pressing into my cheek. I looked at it and found it was after midnight. Claudia wasn’t in the room. The sweat and some blood had dried on me and my mouth was raw on the outside from kissing and on the inside from hours on the road, beer and fast food. I swung my legs off the bed and was almost surprised to find that they supported my weight. I took the watch off and put it on the bedside table. A drawer in the table was partly open and I did what Oscar Wilde advocated-yielded to temptation. I slid the drawer out and saw a set of credit cards in a soft leather wallet and an Australian passport. Flip, flop: Claudia Fleischman, colour photograph, expired.
I walked to the window. I could see Claudia in a rocking chair on the deck. She was wearing her white dress and rocking backwards and forwards, with apparent serenity. There was a length of batik cloth hanging on a hook on the back of the door and I wrapped it around me and went to the bathroom.
Under the shower I washed everything and let the warm water ease some of the ache from my bones. There were several toothbrushes in a mug. I selected the most battered, used it and dropped it into the tidy bin. I put a fresh Band-Aid on my cut hand, ran a wide-toothed comb through my hair and was ready to do whatever came next. On almost every front, I had very little idea of what that would be. I went out through French windows onto the verandah, scuffling my feet so she would hear me. The wind had dropped and the surf beating on the sand was a low murmur, like a deep bass note. She stopped rocking. I went up behind her and slid my hands inside the top of the dress. How many men have attempted to soothe away doubts by feeling a pair of tits?
‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘That’s nice.’
She reached back around the chair, went inside the lap-lap and gripped my cock. Her hand was cold.
‘Nowhere to go from here,’ I said. ‘I’m a detective, not a contortionist.’
She laughed, let go and turned around. She must have washed her hair which had been stiff with salt because it was now frizzed and rippled and wafted around her face. She had no make-up on and looked pale under the dim outside light. The recent stresses and scars had put faint lines beside her mouth.
‘We have to talk,’ I said.
‘Pity. We were doing so well with no talking.’
‘Things have been happening.’
‘Not here. Nothing ever happens here. That’s why I like it.’
‘You can’t… ‘
‘Ssh. I know. I found the wine. It was sweet of you to bring it. I drank the bit of gin Angela had here and couldn’t be bothered getting any more.’
We went inside to the old-fashioned but comfortable kitchen and I sat down at a big pine table. There was a combustion stove that must have been a plus in the winter and everything was solid and functional-frying pans on hooks, a pine dresser full of unmatched cups and plates and glasses, an Early Kooka gas oven. Claudia opened both bottles of wine-my mum would’ve liked her style- and set out biscuits, cheese and salami.
‘It’s tomorrow,’ she said, drinking a mock toast. ‘I wonder what the date is. I’ve got through another day. Well, Mr Detective, tell me all about it.’
I told her everything I’d done, leaving nothing out, although I might have got the sequence wrong here and there. I told her about killing Henderson and how it happened and about the grenade parts I’d found. I didn’t go into details about Anton Van Kep’s recreational practices, but I had to tell her enough for her to appreciate how the blackmail had been applied.
She looked me straight in the eye. ‘I’m surprised,’ she said. ‘He was perfectly adequate with me.’
I drank most of one bottle and put away a fair bit of the food. Claudia had a couple of glasses, toyed with the food and smoked a few of her Salems while she listened. When I finished she sat quietly and looked at me.
‘You put yourself in danger a couple of times.’
I shrugged. ‘It happens. I did all right with Rhino but I should probably have handled Henderson some other way. Maybe I should have used Noel to get to talk to him, but I didn’t think of it at the time.’