cat's watching her master.
He sat half-way up the wide couch where Julietta lay, and his sudden weight woke her. Or perhaps she'd already been awake ... waiting. Her eyes opened big as saucers; her jaw fell open; knowledge and horror painted themselves with rapid strokes upon her lovely, oval, oddly palid face. But in no way odd to Francesco. And before she could cry out, if she would:
'Did you think I would desert you? Ah, no!' he told her. And his hand crept under her blanket, under her nightgown, to her thigh, so that she could feel his fingers trembling there. 'No, for having loved you once, I shall love you all the days of your life.' But he did not say 'my life.'
As his hand climbed higher on her thigh, so Julietta's mouth closed and her fluttering breathing steadied; she began to breathe more deeply - of his breath. His essence was in it, as it was in her. And his eyes were uniformly jet, like moist black marbles in his face and unblinking, or like the eyes of a snake before he strikes. Except he had already struck, on that night six weeks ago. And the poison had taken.
He smiled with his handsome, devil's face, and the horror went out of her as she lifted her arms to embrace him. But that could not be. 'Soon,' he told her. 'Soon - at Le Manse Madonie! Can't you wait? A day or two, my Julietta. Just a day or two, I promise.' Her sigh, and her breathing suddenly quickening; the long lashes over her dark eyes fluttering, as Francesco's cool hand discovered the inside of her hot thigh. Then her nod, and a gasp of weird ecstasy as her head flopped to one side in sudden shame, or defeat, or surrender, and her thighs lolled open.
He held her lips open with his thumb and smallest finger, and let the middle three elongate into her. His hand was quite still, but the three central fingers stretched with a caterpillar's expansion, throbbing with the effort of metamorphosis like a trio of sentient penises, with pouting lips opening in their tips. And into her body they crept, while his thumb and smallest finger closed on her bud, to gentle it like a nipple.
And with the old crone watching and knowing everything - laughing silently through a gap-toothed mouth whose eye-teeth at least were still sharp and white - so Francesco found the artery he sought and used his fingers to pierce and sip at the soft centre of Julietta's sex where the marks, if he left any, would never be found, and the blood, if any continued to flow, would have its own explanation.
Then, in a few seconds, a minute - as the girl went, 'Ah! Ah! Ah!' and turned her head this way and that, until her eyes rolled up - slowly Francesco's jaws cracked open in a grin or a grimace, allowing a trickle of saliva to slop from a corner of his writhing lips. In that same moment his own eyes turned to flame, and then to blood! Julietta's blood. But: Brother! It was Anthony; not a call as such (for the brothers were not gifted with the true art), but a warning definitely. A tingling of nerves, a premonition. Julio was coming!
A moment to withdraw from Julietta, and another to lean forward and kiss her clammy brow. Then he was out of the room, flowing from Sclafani's office into the corridor, and the door marked 'Men' closing softly behind him. And his penis steaming as he plied it in the privacy of a cubicle, once, twice, three times, before it spurted into the bowl. And even his sperm was red where Francesco pulled the chain on it ...
In the corridor, Sclafani was waiting for him. 'Ah! Forgive me! I supposed you would be in there. Your brother asked me to tell you ... Your man has returned from England ... And your driver, Mario? ... A radio message?' He fluttered his hands, as if that were explanation enough. Which in fact it was.
Francesco was cool now. He smiled his gratitude, and made for the balcony with Julio hard on his heels. 'It's been such a pleasure to have you,' the fat man was babbling. 'I can't possibly bill you. What? But I'm already too deeply in your debt!'
At the table, Mario stood by in his uniform and cap while Tony spoke into a portable radio-telephone. Francesco wheeled on