Maxim Jakubowski - I Was Waiting for You

THE CUBAN GUY TAKING her from behind was puffing and panting, nearing the finishing line in his race to orgasm.

Cornelia felt nothing. Neither in her body or her soul, let alone her heart.

What was the point, she wondered?

It was always like this.

Meaningless words. Hydraulics. Sweat.

No emotions.

Then her cell phone rang. It was lodged at the bottom of her handbag, but they both could clearly hear its insistent nudge.

She had no fancy tone. No classic song or silly sounds. Just a strong vibration followed by an insistent buzz.

The man inside her slowed. His tides of lust receding fast.

Possibly her body tensed, but Cornelia said nothing.

The phone kept ringing, then the sound died and there was a discreet mechanical click as the message function took over. In silence.

Its OK, she said. Ill check it later.

The man grunted and focused again on fucking her.

But whatever magic they had ridden the waves of had by now dissipated and his ardour was no longer the same. He soon pulled out of her.

Im sorry, he mumbled.

The traffic noises outside his mid-range Broadway hotel room window somehow increased in volume.

No problem, Cornelia responded.

He rose awkwardly from the bed.

Cornelia rolled over on to her back and pulled the white, crumpled sheet back across her naked body. She felt empty, again.

She remained silent.

The phone call she had not taken now separated them and the man was visibly in a hurry to cut their encounter short and be on his way.

Which was fine with her.

Cornelia had picked him up at the Oyster Bar beneath Grand Central Station. Shed been bored and the man had initially seemed clean and not too bad-looking. So shed thought, why not?

He glanced back at her, and his detumescing cock stirred a little. Cornelia just looked him in the eyes and kept on saying nothing.

Finally, he looked away and moved toward the bathroom, grabbing his shirt and trousers on the way.

Five minutes later he was stepping out of the room, after reminding her that she could stay another few hours if she wanted as the room had been booked until three in the afternoon.

She nodded. Blew him a desultory kiss, but his back was already to her, in his haste to abandon the landscape of this latest sexual fiasco.

Cornelia sighed, stretched her long, pale limbs under the thin white sheet.

She closed her eyes.

The message was short and sweet.

Call me. Today, if you can.

Ivan.

She took a cab back to her Washington Square Place apartment and rang him back from there, once she had showered and changed into a grey T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

Its me.

Good.

A job?

Yes.

I thought you wanted me off the scene for a few more months following last times small mess.

I did. But this is overseas, not on home patch. Have you got an up to date passport?

Of course.

Fine. Its in Paris. Youll find the dossier in the usual place.

Perfect.

When can you leave?

Will tomorrow do?

Absolutely.

Hardware?

Locally. A safe deposit box. Itll all be in the dossier.

Fee?

Fifteen thousand.

That works for me.

And, naturally, well supply the return ticket. Business class.

The least you can do at such short notice

Youre the best, C. You deserve a touch of luxury.

Cheap and cheerful, thats me.

She could almost hear him smile on the other end of the line. He had been her contact for two years now. They had never met. She had no idea what he looked like, although she guessed he must be in his mid forties. The voice was accent-less and impersonal. Businesslike.

Well, Cornelia reckoned, killing was just a business like any other, wasnt it?

And one she was good at.

At any rate, more interesting than sex.

JACK WAS ON THE rebound from yet another disastrous affair. Feeling distinctively sorrow for himself, drowning in a sea of regrets. Romantically inclined as he was, he would readily have stumbled into the abandon of alcoholism, but he didnt even enjoy the taste of booze. And its an uphill task to get yourself dead drunk on fruit juices or Pepsi Cola. But he knew this small bar in a Paris side street, a stones throw from the river, parked between a kebab place and a cheap souvenir shop. So there he was, now sipping his first coffee of the evening, attempting to stay awake, killing time, hoping some form of inspiration or another would strike and he would find out what his next book should be about. It had been over three years since his last one had been published, and the untamed ideas inside his head just kept on circling round and round, never quite connecting with any form of sensible plot, let alone believable characters. Or maybe, for the first time in ages, he was becoming scared of the loneliness of long distance typing?

A few decades earlier, hed been a student here. Maybe taking yesterdays early morning business commuter Eurostar to Paris on a whim had been a further desultory attempt to reconnect with his past. The bar on the Rue St Andr des Arts hadnt changed much, although another alongside it had since become a Turkish takeaway and the smell of slowly revolving skewered meat and dripping fat just a few steps away kept on drifting across Jacks nose, unpleasantly reminding him that time had moved on. Anyway, genuine students seldom came to this part of Paris any longer since most university locales had been moved out of the Latin Quarter following the riots in 1968.

Once upon a time, he could spend endless evenings here with his friends during which they would unilaterally put the world to rights, arguing fiercely about politics and art, managing with practised talent to make their drinks last until closing time. Whatever would he have then thought about his present self: this grey-haired guy and his still unruly hair, this stranger who looked a lot like him but now had a wallet stuffed with cash, twenty-pound notes, euros and US dollars which he had no one to spend on.

Jack had switched to citron press and nursed it slowly, drowning the drink in sugar. He leafed through the current issue of a film magazine hed picked up earlier at a kiosk. Most of the features were about new French actors and actresses he knew little about.

Many years ago, this place had been the very centre of his private universe, as he regularly missed lectures and sought comfort in the familiarity of these old-fashioned surroundings, the shiny metal counter, the sizzle and hiss of the coffee machine, his gaze invariably captured by the full-size glass window on the other side of which passers-by trooped by, many of them women, young, old and in between but all unapproachable and distant to him. With a quiet smile, he recalled the day Mary Ann Armshaw had walked in. Blonde and skinny, all-American and, then, his distinctive ideal of the perfect Yankee corn-fed beauty. She had not been alone, but her companion, also American, was on the curvy side and had dark hair to her shoulders. He had listened to their conversation as they sipped their coffees, unaware as they were that he was also English-speaking. They had arrived in Paris four days earlier, on a student exchange programme and both young women were still in awe of and scared of this new city which proved so different from their small Midwest town. None of his mates had been around that day so, on a whim, he had quickly decided to follow the girls when they left the caf. For two hours, they navigated the small streets and corners of the Left Bank, with him never more than fifty metres or so away. They appeared quite aimless and fancy free, peering at shop windows, at buildings, walking along the busy streets as if they had all the time in the world. More than once he almost gave up the chase and returned to his flat. Had it begun raining that evening, he would certainly have done so, but the weather just about held. The day grew darker and one of the two young American girls finally noticed his presence in their wake and they quickly glanced at him observing them from a distance, quietly conferred and then made a beeline for the nearest bar. This was still the days when almost every other door led to a caf in the Latin Quarter.