Chapter 2

“That’s not all I noticed.

“I noticed your sadness. You looked so terribly sad.”

I laughed. “Did I look terribly sad?”

“Mm-hmm. I can still see it now even though you try to hide it.”

“I thought I was doing splendidly to hide it.”

“Well not from me. I’m good at spotting sadness.”

“I see,” I replied, recalling our earlier conversation about scars.

Gabrielle drew the tip of her finger on the rim of her wine glass. “So, Aurora, what makes you sad? Do you mourn someone?”

I held in my breath. I kept my eyes on Gabrielle and took a long, slow sip of my wine, as my surprise at her guess being correct coalesced into an unbearably painful memory of the one that I, in fact, mourned — my love, my Valentina.

I upturned the glass quickly to finish the wine then poured myself another glass. I laughed in a way that was not a laugh, but rather a way to force the thought of Valentina from my mind.

“Why do you laugh?” Gabrielle asked.

“No one has ever asked me such a question.”

In fact, I never expected such a question to be asked of me, so, I didn’t have an answer in mind as I might have an answer ready for questions like: Where are you going? Where are you coming from? For what purpose are you traveling? Those questions, and a multitude of other such questions I had an answer to, most of which are lies, but answers nonetheless. But to the question asked by Gabrielle, I didn’t know where to begin. At risk of letting the question linger too long, I tried, “Which Spaniard doesn’t mourn someone?”

Out the window, I could not find the landscape anymore. Instead, I found that the lamp light reflected the compartment onto the window, and I found the shade of my own reflection staring back at me.

Gabriel replied, “You could say the same for the French. But my experience with the Spanish, is that despite it all, they tend to keep a good cheer about them. What is the expression? Al mal tiempo…” She paused to try to remember the words.

“…buena cara,” I finished.

“That’s right.” Gabrielle nodded, raising her glass.

I gave a feeble smile, then drank tepidly. Without further prodding, I said, “Everyone has their point where it becomes impossible to show a good face. Even the Spanish.”

“I understand,” Gabrielle replied. “But you show your sadness as the French do. Maybe sadness is not the right word for it. Melancholy, perhaps. Melancholy is the happiness of being sad. Victor Hugo said that. I think that describes you perfectly.”

“Who’s happiness are we talking about?”

“No one’s. It’s just a very French thing to say, that’s all. But you won’t tell me what makes you sad. That’s fine. I won’t prod further. But I’ll tell you what makes me sad and maybe that’ll inspire you to come out of your shell and share your secrets with me.”

She finished her wine, coughed politely into a handkerchief, then, her face turning a shade more serious, she said, “What makes me sad… is knowing that there are people out there that want me dead.”

I went still. I held my breath. The train wheels clacked loudly below, but I was sure my heart was louder.

Gabrielle smirked. Her face was stony, and she watched me intently.

“What makes me sad is knowing that one of those people may very well be on this train. In this compartment even…sitting close enough to offend me with her cheap perfume.”

I gripped my wine glass. I stared at Gabrielle. She maintained her smirk, which was slight and serious.

I lowered the wine glass slowly. I flicked my eyes over to my purse hanging by the compartment door. Gabrielle noticed where my eyes went. Her lips tightened.

“I know what you have in your purse,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t try it, if I were you.”

I placed the wine glass on the bureau. It was still half full. In the bottom of the glass, sediment swirled. I spent a moment staring at the wine glass, and not Gabrielle, my ears ringing with anticipation for what I must do, my heart beating ferociously against my chest. Then very abruptly, without even having thought to do it — as if an animal instinct had pulled me into doing it — I lunged to grab my Astra 300, and I grabbed it swiftly, but before I could bring the pistol to bear on Gabrielle, she slammed my hand against the wall, the jolting pain causing me to release the weapon. It clattered, and slid towards the other side of the compartment. I landed a punch square on the right side of Gabrielle’s jaw, and she cried out in pain, but when I tried hitting her again, she caught my wrist, and then she caught my other wrist, and then pushed me back to slam me hard against the full-length mirror on the far side, cracking the mirror.

My ears still rang, but I heard the tick-tick-tick of the clock above my head. I guessed it must be about ten o’clock now. Five more hours until Zaragoza. Ten until Canfranc. The train wheels clicked against the track in time with the clock like an impatient metronome. Gabrielle’s grip was like a vice. I tried wresting herself from her, but I could not. Gabrielle was stronger than she looked, but I suppose anyone fighting for their life would fight with strength they had in them, as long as they had a strong desire to live, and Gabrielle’s desire was strong. Stronger than my own, at least.

It took a few heartbeats for me to recognize the tang of sharp steel against my neck.

Her fierce eyes went across my face busily, her lips were turned into a smirk. Her chest was pressed up against mine, and so I felt she was breathing as heavy as I was. And I smelled the citrus of her perfume and it was intoxicating. It was a lovely fragrance, and for whatever reason, that fragrance, and her breathing was what I focused on, and not my failing my mission, or my impending death.

I fully expected her to shout for help, but that did not happen. Instead, she pressed her body harder against mine, centered her eyes on mine, and she hissed, “I could do it. It would not be hard.”

She pressed the knife harder against my throat. It’s edge bit into my neck.

“Then stop wasting my time and do it,” I snarled.

“You’d really like me to, wouldn’t you? Do you have a death wish?”

I said nothing more in response. I maintained a stoic fury, like a wild cat backed into a canyon by hunting dogs, waiting, watching for any opening. Any opening at all.

And then I saw it and I felt it — the doubt, the hesitation. Her expression softening. Her swallowing, the blade lightening from my neck. That was the moment. I brought my head forward, butting her forehead hard. A flash of pain blinded me. When my vision came back, I found Gabrielle stumbling backwards, stunned. I dove at her, taking her to the floor. Her knife-hand hit the edge of the bureau, causing the knife to clatter to the floor. I grabbed it before she could, and I mounted her, and I turned the blade tip downward, aiming it at her heart, and I focused all my attention, and all my strength on driving that blade down into her heart. But then, for whatever reason, divine intervention perhaps, or some other force just as powerful, a thought of my love, my Valentina, and the last moments of her life flashed before my eyes. The memory, came to me lucidly. I saw Valentina’s eyes just as clearly as I saw Gabrielle’s now, widening with fear, as she brought her hand up from her heart to see it soaked in dark, glistening blood — her own blood — and then clutching onto me as I cradled her on the street, crying for her life which she knew with certainty she did not have much more of, while I rocked her back and forth, muttering to her over and over that she would be fine, all the while knowing, as life flickered from her eyes, that there was nothing that I could do to stop her heart from failing. Shrapnel had pierced it.

That sudden, vivid memory of Valentina stopped the knife a hair from piercing Gabrielle’s heart. I held it there, paralyzed, and Gabrielle was paralyzed too. She did not breathe. She only watched me with fear in her eyes for her life, which reminded me of Valentina’s fear, and then I knew that I could not do it. Not now. Not with my sadness paralyzing me like venom.

In my ringing daze, I laid the knife gently flat atop Gabrielle’s chest. She grabbed it, and did with it what I did not expect for her to do: she placed it cautiously on the bureau, and then she slid herself up from under me, to sit against the banquette while her eyes stayed on my face. And then she did another thing which I did not expect for her to do: she put a hand on my cheek to caress it.

I looked into her eyes and saw that they had lost their fear, and in place of that fear, there was something else. Compassion or some such rotten thing. And I was embarrassed by it, because I must have been misreading her, because how could she have felt compassion for me in such a moment? I deserved it least of all from her. Perhaps it wasn’t compassion. Perhaps it was something else entirely. Maybe sympathy. Maybe desire. Maybe an unquenched thirst for touch and intimacy drawn to the watering hole of desire by the exciting heat of near death. Yes, that was it. My heart pounded, and my veins coursed with heat, and I felt thoroughly parched. What other explanation could there be? My instinct told me that it couldn’t be it, but in the heat of the moment, I could only think that.

Her hand that was on my cheek, she put on the back of my head, and pulled me closer to her.

I looked at her confusedly, and momentarily resisted. But she drew herself near to me, and her lips near to mine, so I knew what it was she wanted from me, and, for perhaps the same awful compulsion that stopped me from plunging the knife into her heart — divine intervention, let’s say — I found desire. I met her halfway.

I touched my lips to hers, not as a kiss at first but as timid parlay. I wasn’t sure if she fully accepted it, even if she were the initiating body, so I did it again, more softly this time, and when her lips softened, when her mouth opened, I knew that she accepted parlay, and so I was free to give her what we both wanted. I turned the parlay into a soft kiss. And after the kiss, we watched each others’ eyes for a long, tentative moment, nothing said between us, and then we kissed again. And then for a third time, and this time, the kiss was long, and breathless, messily open-mouthed, wet, and lip-stick smearing.

I pressed a hand against her cream-white satin blouse and tugged her pearl buttons one by one from their holes, and she slid her hands up my blouse to touch my breasts. Her hands were cold, but they warmed quickly rubbing against my skin.

Almost subconsciously, we slid up onto the banquette together. It was barely big enough to hold the both of us, but it would hold us as long as one of us was on top of the other. I positioned myself atop her, straddling her, and she let me.

A nest of her hair spread around her face. Her bangs partly covered her face. I brushed them aside and planted many kisses on her face, and I removed my blouse, and she put her hand into my skirt, and touched me between my legs where I was hot and becoming wet.

We did not speak. The only sounds that escaped our mouths were the confused panting of desire.

How did it come to this? Oh how could it ever come to this? My mission, which I had ritualized like a nun at her Lauds, was to kill Gabrielle D’Aubigny, and I was committed to it. I was committed to it to the bitter end. But somehow, I could not stop myself going in for another kiss, and we kissed in a heaving fashion, and our hands were over each other’s bodies frantically, moving without logic, with a droughted desperation.

I kissed her neck, and she tilted her head to give me more of it to kiss. Then I kissed her collar, and her shoulders, and her breasts, and when I put my mouth on one of her rose-pink nipples, and teased them with my tongue and teeth, she moaned, and she uttered her first words to me since I had tried to kill her: “Ne t’arrête pas.” Don’t stop.

She twisted her face into an intense, lip-bitten grimace while she dug her nails into the velvet fabric of the banquette upon which we were dubiously positioned. Her labored, stilted breathing filled the air with steamy noise. Outside, footsteps belonging to a pair of silhouettes in the frosted glass of the sliding door window paused. Voices murmured in animated conversation, and then laughed, and then the silhouetted pair moved on. Whoever they were, they would not have known that just within the compartment in front of which they stopped, an assassination attempt had turned into heated passion.

After they were gone, Gabrielle pushed down on my head. “Surtout ne t’arrête pas,” she muttered impatiently. Don’t you dare stop.

I obliged, unfastening the buttons on the side of her skirt with impatience to match hers, then slid the skirt off her legs. Then I unclipped her cream-colored stockings from their garters, and rolled them down her legs, taking care not to tear or stretch them, planting kisses on her newly naked skin.

When she had become fully nude, I stopped to admire her body. From her finely sculpted breasts, to the fine, arcing curves of her hips, and the soft tuft of chestnut hair that covered her sex, I found desire embodied.

She sat in a lazy manner, putting her legs like a V on either side of me, her eyes wet with excitement as I knelt between them.

I looked over my shoulder to my pistol lying on the ground, immovable.

I looked back at Gabrielle. She put her hand on my cheek and her thumb into my mouth.

“I should’ve killed you,” I said, gnawing on her thumb.