Russell Deadly Endings

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62675-447-8
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 344 Seiten

A great love story and chronicle of women's empowerment over the first half of the twentieth century, with the pace and excitement of a modern day thriller. Looking back from London's Swinging Sixties, a retired couple raise their granddaughters in blissful ignorance of reality. Their secretive and dangerous existence, positions them against the Italian Mafia in Paris and Franco's Fascists in Barcelona, whose Catholic nuns are stealing babies from impoverished mothers and selling them for profit. Cruelly influenced and trained by two world wars with unfinished battles still haunting their lives, how do Sam and Phaedra finally tell the truth to their naïve loved ones, even when their young lives depend on it. They are after all, professional assassins. A rollercoaster ride covering a period of sixty years around Europe; fused with Edwardian sophistication and historically based atrocities; Raymond Russell´s Deadly Endings keeps the pages turning until the shocking finale.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Russell, Raymond

Leseproben

Chapter 2

The Grimaldi Circus

The night before the show, the circus performers carried out their usual promotional parade through the centre of the municipality, and around the old fishing port. They were colourful protagonists against a backdrop of a black and white photograph. The whole town and even people from outlying villages, lined the streets to see the vibrant and exotic strangers, who could lay claim to fifteen different nationalities. Some people even undertook the journey across the Golfo di Follonica on the ferry and in fishing boats, from the island of Elba. The kids wanted to see the wild animals and the clowns, the fathers wanted to ogle the gorgeous girls in their skimpy costumes; because most of the village women wore long black dresses and not much less in the marital bedroom. However, the whole family wanted to witness the trapeze act. The posters inferred that the flying act was so dangerous, they would more than likely witness the famous couple fall to their deaths. On both nights of the weekend show!

Zamo, the young trainee clown, ran from the dusty ring, up the shaky wooden steps, until he arrived behind most of the audience at the highest seats on the back row. He mused that his mother looked so beautiful that evening; wearing her magnificent costume that hung in their painted caravan under a gauze dustsheet each night, after the performance. Bejewelled with semi-precious stones and sea pearls, the tight-fitting corset sported long, trailing feathers to make Jullietta, with her tiny waist, voluptuous bust, jewelled green eyes and long, raven black hair, resemble an exotic bird of paradise as she soared through the air. The orchestra played their dramatic music, the drums rolled their thunderous beat and the artists started to swing across the Big Tops’ artificial sky. Vendors walked among the crowd peddling cakes, fruit and sticky sweets, calling out; ‘Zucchero filato!’ waving the new pink-cloud creation from America that children adored.

Above the audience, there were the two flyers, Jullietta, her elder brother Gustavo and one catcher, András. The good-looking young man needed his muscular shoulders and arms with a vice-like grip for the task ahead. He was part Romanian, part Hungarian, from Jullietta’s point of view; he was just her latest lover. She looked so young and robust when she was on the trapeze, flying far above the ground over the tilted heads of the spectators. Conversely, in her caravan at night, when yet another show was over, after she’d taken off her costume, the hairpieces and the thick grease paint, she looked her forty-four years. Not that Zamo noticed, to him, his mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. All he wanted was for her to notice him from time to time.

Since twenty-two year old András arrived last month, Zamo needed to find somewhere else to sleep, the colourful gipsy caravan was far too diminutive at the best of times, particularly with Zamo’s pet snake taking up half his narrow cot. And, when Jullietta acquired yet another ‘Uncle’ who was staying overnight, or a few months, he needed to find a bed somewhere in the circus compound.

When Zamo was a toddler, Jullietta would place him with the chimps. The apes were great foster parents and taught him how to swing from the cage’s bars, climb on the dead piece of tree and to eat termites with a stick, nevertheless now that he was older, he found them too rough and noisy. So, he usually ended up in the iron caged trailer with Aleser and Jansher, the old lions, they never bothered him, apart from the occasional lick on the face they usually just slept and snored noisily after the tiring show. Therefore, on that night, Zamo slumbered on the soft straw next to the great cats, with his pet snake Stephan curled up in his deep, clown’s pocket.

Jullietta was brutally honest and always told her fourth son, that he was a mistake and an unwelcome inconvenience. Like his Czechoslovakian father, who she’d only known for a month in Prague. The tall handsome professor from the university, Univerzita Karlova v Praze was infatuated with Jullietta, and pestered the performer to stay in the city with him. Nevertheless, when the circus steamed out of town, she evaporated with it. After Zamo’s three half-brothers were grown up, his mother didn’t want any more children.

François, the eldest, was born when Jullietta was fifteen: the son of her Parisian lover, a crazy and passionate artist from Montmartre. Albert was born in Moscow, an issue from her Russian lover, a handsome and moody poet. Paul, the youngest, was the offspring of her Italian lover, ‘the best chef in Naples.’ Well, that’s what he claimed, ‘but Italian men are like that,’ she thought. Most of her lovers were physically puny and wore glasses; she loved men in glasses. Unlike Jullietta whose body was sculptured in polished steel, some of her former men insinuated that her heart was equally tensile. Nevertheless, the flying bird knew that she needed to protect herself from the emotions that once wounded her so deeply, when she was young and innocent.

Young Jullietta was an incredibly beautiful child and developed at an early age into an exotic and voluptuous teenager, many men wanted her and most women hated her. The Victorian circus business was hard on all of the performers, though to be the star, a female star at that, alone, without a man to fight your battles, you needed to defend off any weakness, like a lone leopard. Make your babies with the best man you can find, keep your heart locked up tightly, then move on, and when the kids could fend for themselves, chase them off as well. One day, even they would try to take your place at the top. After all, for Jullietta, nothing was more important than being the best flyer in the world.

The elder children were now fully grown men and successful registered clowns. Jullietta didn’t have much contact with them, even though the siblings worked in circuses, clowns worked in the basement, yet trapeze artists worked the penthouse. Besides, she reflected often, grown up children only reminded her that she was getting older, and what’s more, the possibility of her not being able to fly one day. The four children, well in fact, all of the circus performers were polyglottal, speaking a circus slang that included over ten languages. It was almost impossible for an outsider to converse with them, unless they decided to speak in one language at a time, like the Ringmaster when he made his announcements in each of the countries on their tour. The circus travelled constantly, as habitually as Gnus searching for rich pastures from the azure Mediterranean to snow-white Russia.

As the excitement of the night grew in intensity when the three trapeze artists reached the top of their climb, Jullietta and Gustavo stood on the springboards; these were narrow pieces of wood attached to the ropes for the flyers to use as a base. The couple checked the canvas aprons, attached the ropes, which helped catch them when they landed at high speed, and then they made sure that the risers were a good height. These extra bars were slotted at two different heights above the planks and allowed the flyers to take off from a higher point, to increase speed for some of the tricks. The circus royalty were waving to the spectators and showing off, balancing on tiptoe and spinning around the ropes horizontally. Jullietta’s choreography included bending into beautiful balletic shapes, doing the classic pirouette, arabesque and plié. Masking the fact that she was checking her rigging and the grips, which were a type of thick bandage around the hands and wrists, covered in chalk.

All of a sudden, the band started to play the famous circus music, Entrance of the Gladiators. Without warning, Jullietta leaped into the open space in front of her, diving through the air at speed and the crowd gasped, expertly she caught the bar twenty feet below, sent by her brother at the appropriate moment. She clenched the cold metal firmly in her strong grip and warmed up with a few classic cutaways and reverse knee-hangs. The long feathers flowed in the wind when she was swinging at over twenty miles an hour through the open space. She did a force-out to gain height, which involves opening and closing the legs at the right moment. Then she started to calculate the first single somersault. Gripping the bar, she dived into a hollow and then a sweep, Gustavo called out. ‘Listo!’ Signalling that he was ready, the two flyers swept towards each other and just as their bodies almost collided in the middle of the void. Jullietta let go of her bar and somersaulted over his head, the audience were up on their feet swooning, until she finished her spin and caught the third bar sent by the catcher, which was falling away from her at high speed.

Both flyers landed on opposite boards waving their arms triumphantly and the crowd cheered in admiration and disbelief. Gustavo then started to swing to the music wafting up from the band below and the crowd joined in singing: ‘ The Man On The Flying Trapeze…’

His rippling muscles blew up as fat as an inflated dingy, because G-forces put tremendous pressure on his arms, back and shoulders. Ten minutes elapsed and the siblings executed increasingly more dangerous passes, when they suddenly came to a halt on their boards and the band became silent. The limelights left them to recover; panting in the shadows, below clowns ran out onto the sawdust ring and started to remove the safety net; making jokes, juggling and fooling around at the same time. Zamo’s elder brother François played the trumpet while walking on a tightrope. The spectators moved to the edges of their seats, and when there...