“In short, a catch.” I interrupted her rhapsodizing.
“Yes. Exactly. And I could have caught him, too, if not for those two bitches. I met him first. He was most attracted to me. I could really have held him if they hadn’t pushed their way into the picture and turned it into a competition. I really had the inside track until then. And we had an agreement not to step on each other’s toes. But that didn’t stop them. Oh, no!” She looked off into space, brooding over the memory.
“What did they do?” I prompted her.
“Behaved like the sluts they were. While I was playing the lady of virtue, they began vying with each other to see who could get him into bed first.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I had to get down in the gutter and play their game, didn’t I? Let’s face it. Virtue is no match tor sex, no matter how hoity-toity the milieu. I decided to lot the count seduce me. But I was determined that there wasn’t going to be anything cheap or tawdry about it. I was playing the grand lady and I wasn’t going to step out of character to crawl between the sheets. Oh, I know what you’re thinking! And I suppose you have every reason to think it. But I had a lot more control over my sexual desires then than I do now. Believe me, I really did. I wasn’t just a man-hungry slut like those other two. I was out for bigger stakes than just a roll in the hay and a hundred-dollar bill by way of appreciation. And so I arranged things very carefully, to befit the lady of station I was pretending to be.”
“Arranged things how?"
“I selected a picturesque little roadside inn on the outskirts of Rome for our assignation. One of those places that reeks of atmosphere. Overlooking a lake, bowers of flowers, no electricity, only candlelight—well, you get the picture. I arranged for him to meet me there at night. I gave him the number of my room. He was to come straight to me and I would be waiting in bed with open arms. But not too open. I intended to play it very coyly. I would tell him not to light the candle. I would be very shy. I would succumb slowly, by stages, and with tears. And even when he possessed me, it would only be a taste of the joys I might bring him if I was his legally wedded wife. That was the whole idea, you see. A taste in the dark to convince him of how wonderful it would be to have me to go to bed with every night.”
“But he didn’t fall for it, hey?”
“I’ll never know,” she sighed.
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“I made one fatal mistake. I confided in my two companions about what I intended to do. I couldn’t resist bragging, I suppose. They’d been trying so hard to cut me out that I just had to tell them I‘d arranged to beat them. I told them about the assignation and about just how I intended to manage it. I enjoyed rubbing their noses in it. They were so coarse and vulgar, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity of showing them what a girl with some sense of breeding could do. And that was my undoing. I never dreamed of how really vicious they could be.”
“What did they do?”
“You’ll see. Let me tell you about that night first. I went to the inn and took a bath, doused myself with perfume, and got into my sexiest nightgown. I snuffed out all the candles and lay on top of the bed to wait for my noble lover. I must have changed the position of that bed half a dozen times before I had it set up so that the moonlight streaming through the window highlighted my long black hair and the mounds of my breasts pushing up against the transparent nightie. Oh, how carefully I arranged everything. Finally, there was a gentle rapping at the door. Raising my voice scarcely above a whisper, I called out to my lover to enter. He slipped through the door quietly and came straight over to the bed. I couldn’t see him, but I felt the eagerness of his embrace immediately. I tried to be coy and take things slowly, but he was far too impetuous. He fairly tore off his clothes and leaped onto the bed with me. I tried to remonstrate with him to be more gentle, but he simply ignored me. He took me brutally, forcefully, and despite myself I was carried along by his ardor.” She paused, her face a study in bitterness.
“Well, it may not have been the way you planned it,” I started to say, “but—”
“You don’t understand. Neither did I until after it was all over. Throughout, he hadn’t uttered a word. And when he was done, he immediately began putting his clothes back on. I said something to him—I don’t remember what -- something calculated to recoup a little bit of my status as a lady, I suppose. Still he didn’t answer. I wondered at his silence, and that’s when I lit the candle.”
“It wasn’t the count,” I guessed.
“It wasn’t the count.” She confirmed my guess. “Those two bitches had called the count and left a message breaking the date for our assignation. But they’d arranged that I shouldn’t spend the night alone. Oh, yes, they’d been most considerate in that respect!"
“Who did they send?”
‘I don’t know his name. I never did find it out. But one look at him in the candlelight as I was dressing and I was horrified. In all my years in one brothel or another, I’d never been called upon to make love to such a disgusting creature as the man with whom I’d just had sex. His eyes were wild and rheumy and sick, his face and chest were crusted with filth—I could only guess at the filth of the lower part of his body because he was putting on his trousers by now—his skin was all broken out with red blotches. I screamed and he bolted from the room. But even then I didn’t know how disastrous the evening really was. I didn’t find out until a week later.”
“Find what out?”
“That he was venereal. That he’d passed his filthy dose along to me. Those two tramps had purposely arranged it so that would happen. Now do you wonder that I hate them?”
“No. What did you do?”
“What could I do? It was impossible to continue with the count under the circumstances. And I was afraid that if I stayed in Rome I might murder those two. So I found a clinic in Cannes and went there to take a cure. Thank God for sulfa drugs. It wasn’t too long, or too painful. And the convalescence was just long enough to capitalize on Friedriksenn’s interest so that he’d ask me to marry him.”
“Friedriksenn? You mean you met him in this clinic for venereal disease?”
“It wasn’t a clinic. More like a sanitorium, really. But yes, that’s where I met him. He was there for the same reason I was. So you see, we really don’t have any secrets from each other.”
“It must have been one hell of a courtship,” I reflected.
“There were certain difficulties.” She smiled slightly. “But we managed to surmount them.”
“What about the other two girls? Did either of them snag the count?”
“No. And the reason is ironic. None of us could really have landed him—not even me. He had a wife and six kiddies in Argentina or somewhere that he conveniently forgot to mention when he was playing around Rome. I found that out quite by accident from a South American I met in Cannes who knew him and his family quite well.”
“And you have no idea where Barbara Thomas or Françoise Laval might have gone after you left them in Rome?”
“No. But wherever it was, I would bet that they didn’t go together. They were already showing signs of stepping on each other’s toes when I left them.”
“Think about it, Gina; maybe—”
“Don’t call me Gina! My name is Carmella now. Gina is behind me, buried in the past, and I want her to stay buried.”
“Sorry. Carmella then. Maybe they discussed their plans.”
“No. I have no idea. Wait a minute! I just remembered something that might be a lead for you. Françoise always used to talk about how she was going back to Paris. She was in love with a man there. I’m pretty sure from the way he talked that he must have been a pimp. Probably the one who got her started on the life. Some of these Parisian streetwalkers get very sentimental about that one, you know. No matter how many men they have, no man can ever compete with the memory of the procurer who broke them in.”