Free The Killer in My Eyes by Giorgio Faletti Page B

walked to the window and looked out. She admired his slim, well-defined body – he could have been a dancer or a gymnast. His hair rippled as he lazily stretched his neck muscles. She looked at him, silhouetted against the light, and it struck her that that was what Connor Slave was: a silhouette, a shadow. There was a dark radiance about him, something enigmatic that went beyond appearances.
    Maureen got out of bed, also naked, went to him and embraced him from behind, breathing in his smell. She laid her head on his shoulder, savouring the miracle of his skin against hers. There was respect and admiration between her and Connor, and sometime also a kind of shyness – they were at such different places in their lives – yet Maureen could not help quivering with pleasure at each embrace.
    ‘There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you,’ she said.
    ‘Go ahead.’
    ‘What’s it like, writing a song?’
    Connor replied without turning around, his voice seeming to come straight from the sundrenched panorama in front of them. ‘I can’t explain it. It’s a strange feeling. First there’s something that doesn’t exist yet, or may exist already but is hidden somewhere in the darkness inside me, asking only to be found and brought out into the light. I don’t know what others feel. For me it’s something that comes without warning, and it’s only after it’s come that I realize I couldn’t live without it. It’s one of those things we think we control but that end up dominating us completely. It’s like . . .’
    He turned and looked at her as if it was only now, letting his eyes come to rest on her, that he had found the perfect definition.
    ‘Writing a song is like falling in love, Maureen.’
    Ever since their relationship had started, she had been reluctant to define it in any way, for fear that a noun or an adjective might give it a weight it didn’t have. Now, hearing those words, hearing her name as part of them, she under stood that what she had been feeling could finally be called love.
    They stood there in each other’s arms, looking out at that picture-postcard view of Rome, the red roofs, the blue sky, the sun. Maureen lived in the Via della Polveriera, on the top floor of an old house that had belonged to her grandfather. The place had been renovated and turned into a large duplex apartment. From the terrace, which occupied part of the roof, there was an incredible 360-degree view of Rome. In the evening, you could even have dinner there without any other lighting than the reflection of the yellow floodlights on the Colosseum. As they stood there, wrapped up in each other, they both felt that nothing – not Italy, not America, not the rest of the world – could ever reach in past the borders of that room and invade their intimacy.
    Maureen recalled that amazing day they had met. Connor Slave was in Italy for a six-concert tour to promote the release of this latest album,
Lies of Darkness
. The tour had been organized by an agency called Triton Communications, run by Maureen’s best friend, Marta Coneri. On the day he was due to perform in Rome, Marta had swept into Maureen’s apartment in the whirlwind way that was typical of her and insisted that she come to the concert.
    ‘Maureen,’ she said, ‘if I had an apartment like this, I don’t think I’d go out much either. But between
not much
and
never
there’s quite a difference. And this boy’s worth going a very long way to hear.’
    Maureen knew she would need a really good excuse to deter Marta – and off the top of her head she couldn’t come up with a single one. So she had found herself sitting in a seat in the Teatro Olimpico, with an empty place beside her. Everyone who was anyone in Rome – or wanted to be anyone – seemed to be there.
    Marta joined her just before the start of the concert, collapsing into the free seat to her right. ‘Good. My work is over. Now let’s enjoy the show.’
    Maureen had no time to