When I came to number 306, I stopped, made a few deep breaths and knocked.
No sound came from within. I waited a little, then knocked again.
Nothing.
I pushed the door. It gave in with a click. I came in with a beating heart. I was prepared to find Ann's body in a puddle of blood.
"Ann!" I called softly. "Are you there?"
I proceeded slowly and carefully, looking around. Hers was a suite, but of a reduced size like that of a servant of an important boss, who even in his servile condition must feel his relative importance before other servants of smaller bosses. A tiny lobby led to a larger room past curtains hanging over the open door. The light was on, coming from an invisible applique. The gloomish illumination enhanced my feeling of an oncoming frightening discovery. I instinctively slowed my pace till I stayed put on the threshold of the larger room. Now I had to make only a step to see the body. How would it be: on the right side, with her head bent on her breast, or twisted towards behind in quite unnatural way to stress her violent death, would she be lying on her back with her arms spread and her eyes still open and her mouth gaping in the last smothered cry...? A faintly ominous music started sounding in my head making my already strained nerves vibrate like a tense string.
I slipped my foot forward in order to cross the line that divided death and life, as I heard a squeak and a feeble panting voice behind me:
"Will you help me, Eric?"
I turned around, dumbfounded and covered with cold sweat. In the door stood Ann who was pulling behind her an enormous trunk on wheels.
The sinister music in my head stopped, but the heartbeat was still intense. I said:
"You scared me stiff, Ann."
I made a few steps on shaking legs towards her, took the trunk's handhold from her hand, giving her a little peck on the cheek. I rolled the trunk to the middle of the room. Involuntarily I gave a quick attentive look around the room as if I wanted to be definitely sure there was no Ann's dead body in it.
"Where have you been?" she said. "I was waiting for you in the lobby downstairs."
"Perhaps I have the gift of invisibility," I said. "It must be my professional ability."
"But there was nobody in the lobby", she said, looking at me with wide open eyes. "I was very nervous and indeed I didn't take my eyes off the entrance. You couldn't slip in unnoticed."
I shook my head and opened my arms helplessly:
"I don't know what to say. I came five minutes ago. Perhaps you were engaged with the trunk. What do you have in it? Are you getting ready to leave?"
She nodded, still not convinced of my inexplicable invisible getting into the hotel:
"Yes, I have to leave. Possibly in the morning."
"I suppose you have got what you wanted," I said softly. "And you want my help? What kind of help?"
"Listen carefully," said Ann with a sudden animation. "I have the documents with me, those of vital importance. They are here," she waved to the safe over the table. A quick look in that direction allowed me to discover the briefcase – that very one - whose silver corner stuck out from under a heap of clothes. "I want you to take and keep them until I need them. I can be killed for them, for such possibility I'll give you addresses to which you must send them to punish my killers. If I'm safe – which I strongly doubt - I'll let you know where I am, and you will come to join me, will you?"
I was looking with wide open eyes at her glowing face without saying anything, feigning great confusion – which I, perhaps, was really experiencing – and finally nodded, non very convincingly.
She put her hands over my shoulders and said in a passionate whisper:
"I feel that you are a real friend, you won't let me down, I feel it."
I put my hands on her cheeks and kissed her on the lips.
"I will do whatever you ask me," I said as I took my mouth from hers.
"You're so sweet and brave," she whispered hotly. "You will stay with me tonight, will you? I'm leaving tomorrow morning. I knew I could count on you, I have nobody here to rely on. Everybody and everything is corrupt here, this is the definitive reply to your very first question." She freed herself from my arms and said:
"Now I have to pack my suitcase."
I said:
"Can I have a look at the documents?"
She shook her head:
"They're in a sealed file. You're better off not knowing what they are about. I can tell you only it's about high treason because of greed."
"Who's the traitor? Your man?"
She nodded:
"It's him."
"And you want to put him in a spot out of patriotism, or is it a sort of blackmail, an attempt to make him come back?" It was only a thought, otherwise it would be the end of our newly-born relation. But she sensed it. She was gathering her clothes and slapping them into the trunk. She suddenly stopped, looked up at me and said:
"I was wrong about him. He won't come back. I had a meeting with him today, and I felt that he was ready to give in, to promise me that we would start a new life after his return from Moscow. I felt his insincerity. He had always been a good actor, but not this time. Perhaps he met another woman, that would be typical of him."
"Does he know that the documents are still with you?"
She hesitated a little before she said:
"He does. It's a kind of guarantee of my safety."
"And a huge risk, you know. The only sure way of dealing with a blackmailer is to kill him."
"I told him the documents have been duplicated and are hidden in a safe place."
"He could send somebody here to try to get them."
"That's a possibility."
"And another reason why you want me here tonight," I thought.
She had a very sharp intuition that night. She said:
"And that's another reason why I want you here tonight."
I nodded and grinned.
I joined her in her wanderings about the room gathering her clothes.
"Why did you bring so much stuff here? There's at least for a month here, or I know little woman's nature."
"You wouldn't believe, but the plans were to drop everything and run away."
"So romantic! I envy you."
She stopped gathering and looked sharply at me:
"We could do the same thing, you and me."
"Run away? Where to? South Pacific Islands?"
"Why not? Or some other similar place, more equipped for beautiful and good life."
I picked up her crumpled hot pants from under a chair, stood up and said with a short laugh:
"And what shall we do for a living? My sociological research among the natives? They will hardly pay us with maize."
"I have got money," she said simply without stopping gathering the things. "Enough to live the rest of our life."
I gaped (and I wasn't pretending):
"Ann, but you don't know me! I don't know you! And you want to stay with me for the rest of your life! How can that be?"
She straightened up with a skirt in her hand, then put it into the other hand and came up to me.
"I trust my gut instinct, when I did so I'd never mistaken. When I calculated my chances and tried to build my relations on what is better because more advantageous or profitable, I've always lost. You're right, I don't know who you are, I simply feel that you are a good man and we'll get along."
"As simple as that?" I said softly.
"Yes, as simple as that. I don't want to regret losing you afterwards, and to rack my heart making up for lost time. I'm fed up with petty considerations for my future personal life..."
Ann was now sincere, I had no doubt about that. But what was going to happen when her brain calmed down?
The moment was ripe for action and it had to be lived fully or it would be irrecoverably lost. I was pleasantly flustered, but controlled all my feelings and sensations.
I took her lovely face with my both hands and kissed her on the lips, first gently, then once more, pressing and parting them with the tip of his tongue. She stood with her eyes closed, I felt her trembling, lowered his hands under her shoulder blades, pressed her body to mine... She dropped the skirt she held in her hand. I lifted her body with my arms under her neck and back and carried it to the bed in the next room. It would be the third time on this very long day, but I wasn't afraid to fail. The female every time was different.
Fifteen minutes later she was exhausted and asleep. I let her lying so, only pulled the blanket on her legs. She had her hair in lovely confusion, her pinky cheeks were burning. She was breathing lightly, but unevenly, gently starting every now and then.
I had to hurry. I slid back to the lobby where I had noticed the corner of the briefcase. I pulled it out and examined it carefully. It seemed the same, but to be on the safe side I had better open it. I tried to do so, but it was locked. A quick check in the vicinity gave no results. Where could be Ann's handbag? Now I wished it all had not happened so fast, and Ann had told and handed me over everything, the documents and stuff. That was the nasty side of my work. The romantic factor was difficult to handle if I wanted to be sincere. At the moment of kissing Ann I couldn't interrupt and say "Listen, all this is very nice but let's first finish the business, then start pleasure". Besides, I was really involved. I always had to. Women feel falsity in an extraordinary way. The best way of faking sincerity is to be sincere and to be able to express it professionally. Sometimes it suffices the last, but with women like Ann it wouldn't be enough.
I shook the briefcase, it gave out a hollow thumping similar to paper packs tightly fit in a cramped space. Were also the documents there? Hardly. I looked around. There was a safe in the wall, with the door closed. I tried it. It wouldn't open. I flung to the cupboard, feverishly opened its drawers, one of it tremendously squeaked. I feared it would wake Ann and froze with my breath held.
"Eric, Eric!" I heard her anguished voice and ran to the other room.
She was asleep. I bent over her, passed his hand over her hair, kissed her gently on the forehead, on the tip of her nose. She smiled in her sleep. I stayed some seconds over her, then went back to the cupboard on tiptoe.
I noticed a sheet of paper in the last drawer. It seemed to me for a second that it was that that had treacherously squeaked.
I took out the sheet without moving the drawer. It was written in a neat handwriting and ran:
"Annie, my beloved!
My heart aches as I write this letter. I love you, and we both know that our love will be our ruin and death. The world is highly unjust, two people perfectly fit to each other like you and me, are doomed to die if they stay together. ..."
Ok, that's clear. What's next? I skipped a few lines and went to something more interesting:
"I must finish my business here. In fact, it will be the start of such a great undertaking that will take me into a position giving me a full independence from the humiliating obligation that suffocates me now. Then I'll be able to return to you."
Very convenient. Now what?
"I beg you to believe me, try to avoid exerting pressure on me, or worse, blackmailing me. That isn't going to make better your condition, but it will dim our deep internal bond that will never die. You must be patient, our child will be grateful to you, whatever happens to me. I really may be running a very big risk and I can't involve you into all this, not untill some time has gone by."
No mention about the documents, only a remote allusion to a possibility of a blackmail, clearly it was written before his trip to Moscow.
"What are you doing here?" the simple words struck me like a thunderstorm. Ann stood in the door with disheveled hair and crumpled dress. "Are you reading other's letters?"
"No," I said, folding up the letter. "No, I just didn't want to wake you up, I only wanted to find the documents you were going to hand me over, that's all, nothing more." She was looking at me with wicked eyes, there wasn't anything of the rapturously loving expression she had only fifteen minutes before.
She came up to me and snatched the letter.
"What else are you looking for?" she said in a bad voice. "Money?" Her glance fell on the briefcase that was staying right beside him:
"And you think you have found it?"
"Money? What money?" I said with a slight amazement in my voice. "I'm telling you, I didn't want to wake you up, so I allowed myself to look for the documents by myself. I'm sorry if you think I'm violating your privacy and stuff..." I dropped my head. Much to my relief I felt my face going red.
She noticed it and relaxed at once. She sighed and smiled. She put her hand on my cheek and caressed it. "You're sweet," she said and gave me a tender kiss. She dropped the letter she held in her hand, didn't bother to pick it up, stretched slowly and sinuously with her whole body like a cat. Then she took the briefcase and said:
"This is money indeed. A lot of money. I've earned it. I've dreamed of this moment all my life, I'm free," she sighed, "and I don't know now what to do with my freedom. I'm lonely, and I don't trust anybody. I thought I could trust you, you seemed to me a person totally uninvolved in this world of sharks and hyenas, and for a few seconds you made doubt your honesty and innocence. I'm sorry."
I felt ashamed. What would she do if she knew me well like I knew myself? I should do everything to hide my true identity from her.
Her tension dissolved, she yawned as she turned away from me.
"When do you have your flight?" I asked.
She didn't answer at once, she seemed lost in her secret thoughts.
"Ah, my flight?" she said finally. "I don't know, really. I don't know where to go. If you come with me, we could choose, right now." She was looking at me with childishly dreaming eyes. "What do you say?"
I said trying to stay in the same mood:
"You're fabulously convincing. I'm ready to drop everything and go with you to the end of the world."
She said:
"You're unswedishly romantic, Eric. You must have read too much of Russian literature. I'd prefer you were Russian. But it's all the same."
I said cautiously:
"Ann, I always keep in mind that you're still in danger. Let's finish at least this part."
She sighed, her glance got a bit stern:
"You're right. I'm giving you the documents, you hide them in a safe place and come back. Then we decide what to do next, right?"
"You smart girl,"I thought and said:
"I think that's the best course of action."
She bent to the trunk that lay before her, stuck her hand into the side pocket and took out a file with papers in it.
She handed the file over to me and said:
"These are the documents. It's enough to send some people in prison for the rest of their life. There is the address on the first sheet where you must send it if something happens to me." She gave me a long glance straight into my eyes and added:
"Now you're in danger too, you know?"
I said, as I was taking the file:
"But why don't you just leave it in a bank with an appropriate instruction?"
"I did it, be sure. But somehow I feel it isn't enough. They are very powerful and have got connections everywhere. So hurry up. Go hide it wherever you want and come back as soon as possible." With the last words she pecked me on the cheek and slightly pushed me towards the door.
I turned on my heels and walked out of the room.