After a dinner of suprêmes de poulet à l’estragon with green beans à la provençale, a dessert of tarte aux poires et à la frangipane, and the requisite espresso, cognac, and cigarette, Nicholai studied the Guibert file. The fiction was impressive in its volume and detail, but Nicholai had no trouble memorizing apparently important trivia such as which tabac Michel favored in Montpellier, his father’s choice in whiskey, or his mother’s maiden name. His mind crammed with such detail, he changed into his gi, went to the garden to perform his kata, bathed, and went to bed.
9
HIS PROXIMITY SENSE woke him.
During his years in prison he developed an almost extrasensory awareness of the presence of another living being, a radarlike perception of the intruder’s exact distance and angle of approach.
Now someone was in the room.
In the space of a second, his mind ran through the possibilities and he selected the vase on the bedside table as the best, most easily reached weapon. Then he smelled the Chanel No. 5 and felt her presence. Enough moonlight came through the shutters to reveal Solange standing in the doorway, her body more revealed than hidden by the filmy black peignoir.
“Three years is a long time to be without a woman,” she said. “Too long, I think, no?”
Her perfume filled his head as she came to the bed and kissed his mouth, his ears, his neck, his chest, and then slid down. He was dizzy with pleasure as she did delicious things with her mouth and long elegant fingers and it wasn’t long before he gasped, “Solange, please stop. I’m afraid I’ll… and I don’t want to… before -”
Solange stopped, laughed gently, and said, “After three years, mon cher, I think you will recover quickly, no?” She resumed her ministrations and soon he felt the unstoppable wave roll through his body, his back arched like the most powerful samurai bow, and she held him tight with her full lips until he sank back onto the bed.
“Très fort,” she whispered in his ear as she slid up his body.
“Well, after three years…”
She laughed and rested her head on his chest. Her hair felt wonderful on his skin. They rested for a little bit and then he felt himself recovering. “I told you so,” she said as her hand reached down to stroke him. “I want you inside me.”
“Are you…”
“Wet?” She guided his hand for him to feel for himself. “Oh yes, my darling, for weeks now.”
She lowered herself onto him.
Nicholai couldn’t believe her sheer beauty as he watched her rise and fall on him. Her blue eyes shone with excitement, pinpoints of sweat appeared on her long neck, her rich mouth smiled with pleasure. He reached up and caressed her heavy breasts, so different from the delicate Japanese women he had known, and she moaned her approval. Her loveliness, the wet heat of her, wrapped him in pleasure. He took her by the waist and turned her over so that he was on top of her, then pressed his lips into the crook of her neck and thrust into her, steadily and insistently but without hurry.
Vocal in her arousal, she throatily whispered and then shouted the dirtiest of French obscenities as she encouraged him, dug her long nails into his buttocks, and pushed him harder. His sweat mixed with hers, they slid together, and then she announced her petite mort, her hips rose off the bed, she held him inside her and said, “Vous me faites briller. Vous me faites jouir. Come with me. Now.”
Her voice and words sent him over the edge, there was no holding back, and he poured himself into her, then collapsed on her and felt her breasts flatten beneath him. They lay there for quite a while, then he heard her say, “I suppose it would be cliché to want a cigarette.”
Nicholai got up, found a pack, put two cigarettes into his mouth, lit them both, and handed her one.
So lovemaking was added to their daily routine, although the sex was hardly routine.
Solange delighted in dressing up for the boudoir and had a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of lingerie that she enjoyed modeling for him. Nor was Nicholai loath to be the audience for this erotic fashion show, as she changed her hair, her makeup, and even her scent, to suit the outfit. Her taste was exquisite, daringly erotic without ever crossing the line into the burlesque, always stylish, never obvious. Her tastes in bed were eclectic as well, and she gave Nicholai every part of herself, reveled in his taking her. As genteel as she was at the dining table, she was equally, surprisingly earthy in the bedroom.
“You have the mouth of a sailor,” he told her one night without a trace of disapproval.
“But you love my mouth, no?” she answered, and then proceeded to prove to him that he did. Nicholai did love her mouth, her hands, her fingers, sa cramouille, sa rose. He was fast coming to the truth that he simply loved her. One night after a particularly robust lovemaking session, she inhaled her postcoital cigarette and said, “No offense, Michel, but you make love like a Japanese.”
Nicholai was a bit taken aback, but more curious than offended. “Is that bad?”
“No, no, no,” she said quickly. “It is not bad, is just different than… a Frenchman. A bit… comment vous dites… a bit ‘technical,’ no? If you are a Frenchman, you must make love d’une manière plus sensuelle, a bit more like music than science.”
She knew, sadly, that he would soon leave to perform the errand for the Americans. And as a man, he had needs, and would satisfy those needs, perhaps in a brothel. The girls would talk, and if they talked of a Frenchman who made love like a Japanese, it would not do.
“Is this part of my training?” he asked, staring hard at her. He looked hurt. “Are you part of my training?”
“For all your boyish looks,” she said, refusing to lower her eyes in shame, looking right back at him, “naiveté nevertheless does not become you. Are you asking me if I am a whore for the Americans? My darling, we are both whores for the Americans. I fuck for them, you kill for them. Don’t look so hurt, I adore making love to you. Vous me faites briller. You make me shine, no?”
He heard the formal “vous,” as opposed to the more intimate “tu,” and wondered if she perceived their relationship as only business.
In any case, Solange taught him how to make love like a Frenchman.
10
TWO NIGHTS LATER they tried to kill him.
Nicholai was halfway through a difficult kata, “Tiger Burst Through Bamboo,” when his proximity sense told him that he was not alone in the garden. The first assassin – clad all in black, a wicked dagger in his right hand – dropped down the wall in front of him. Nicholai saw his would-be killer’s eyes focus slightly over his shoulder, so knew that there was another assassin coming up from behind.
The dagger thrust came low where Nicholai expected it. He shifted into a cat stance and swung his right hand in a low, outward crescent, sweeping the knife hand away from his body. Then he stepped in, grabbed the attacker by the collar of his gi and pulled him down, pivoted, and slammed his head into the garden wall. He heard the neck break but didn’t stop to look as he ducked under the hatchet blade that the second assailant swung at his head. Nicholai came up and jammed his left hand, poised into a tiger’s claw, into the man’s eyes, the other into his groin. Dropping his left hand, Nicholai locked the elbow of the arm holding the hatchet and lifted himself onto his toes. The arm snapped like dry wood. The hatchet dropped. Nicholai spun so that his back was to the attacker and he drove an elbow into the man’s solar plexus. He released the broken arm, spun again, and delivered a shuto strike to the carotid artery.