As I made love to her, Aggie lifted her torso from the bed with each driving thrust, higher and higher, astonishing me with the strength of her small form. As I matched her every pushing, pumping movement, she cried out for more until suddenly she almost leaped into the air and clasped me to her with a wriggling, hip-grinding cry of ecstasy, and it was over and done with.
We lay side by side with only the bittersweet ecstasy left, the almost painful sensitivity of two spent bodies.
After a while, Aggie raised her head and I saw her eyes begin to focus, to return to earth as it were, and she looked at me as if coming out of a dream, her voice strained, hoarse.
“Christ,” she breathed. “Oh, Christ, I’d never have believed it. I didn’t think anyone could be better than Anton.”
“You shouldn’t make comparisons,” I chided.
“I’m not,” she breathed, resting her cheek on my chest. “I’m just saying what’s true.”
Once again, as I had with Marina, I didn’t hesitate to take advantage of her warm, unguarded mood, of this brief period when she was emotionally my captive.
“Did you ever hear him mention someone called Rashid the Rif?” I asked softly. I saw her head nod.
“Just before he disappeared,” she answered. “He told me he was afraid of someone called Rashid.”
I grimaced to myself. The old bastard had lied, as I felt certain he had.
“Did Karminian take you to his apartment often?”
I asked, tossing out another one.
The whole tiling was being made up of unexplainable bits and pieces. It was becoming a game of how many more contradictions I could uncover.
“Never,” Aggie murmured. “We either came here or went out.”
“He smoked, didn’t he?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Horrible, strong Turkish cigarettes. Nothing else but and he chain-smoked them.”
Contradictions, contradictions and more of the same. I let Aggie cling to me a few minutes longer and then I moved out from beneath her. I had to get away and review this puzzle of contrasts but first I was going to pay another visit to Rashid the Rif.
Karminian had dealt with him and recently. It was the one solid bit of information I had, confirmed by both Marina and Aggie.
This time Rashid would talk. I looked forward to another meeting with the evil, falcon-eyed Rif.
“You’ll come back, won’t you?” Aggie said as I finished putting on my clothes. “I meant that about wanting you to paint me.”
“Of course,” I said, taking in the compact, earthy sexiness of her body as she lay looking up at me. “I’ll stop by after you get back from the club... or perhaps just before you go. I’ll see you.”
“I like you,” she said unexpectedly. “I mean, I think you’re a nice person.”
I smiled down at her.
The remark was so like her, simple, direct, uncomplicated. I put one hand upon her round breast and she held it there. I suddenly felt very sorry for Aggie Foster. She ought to have been back in Akron, Ohio, bedding down with some nice, simple, uncomplicated guy.
“I’ll be back,” I promised, and she let my hand go and turned over to snooze some more.
I left her that way and started down the street. It would be dark before I reached the
I was deep in thought, trying to unravel a mystery called Karminian, a paragon of contradictions, a split personality to end all split personalities. What solid information I’d uncovered only served to make the overall picture of the man more puzzling. But it wasn’t just that, merely puzzling, I realized. The whole damned thing was somehow out of shape, a picture out *of focus.
Aggie Foster described a man who was a wild swinger, a big drinker, an extrovert who loved crowds.
Marina told of a shy man who hardly ever drank, an introvert who hated crowds.
Aggie knew a jazz nut who knew the styles and habits of all the jazz greats, a real jazz buff who could dig it for hours.
Marina knew a lover of Scarlatti and Palestrina and poetry.
With Aggie he smoked only strong, Turkish cigarettes.
With Marina, never anything but his pipes.
One girl he took to his apartment frequently, the other he never brought there.
According to Fatasha in the
To the barkeep at the
And one more fascinating item kept rolling around in my head. Karminian had been an AXE contact man for years but the Russians were here, trying as desperately as I was to find him. Of course, this could be because they’d found out he had something on them but somehow, in the back of my mind, that didn’t seem to hold water.
I went over the list quickly again and once more told myself that these were more than just contradictions.
Of course, I’d known people who were split personalities, contradictions within themselves. Such people were indeed studies in contrasts, their surface traits often directly opposed to each other.
