Short Pause
In the morning I took extra care in washing and checking my face for any sign of returning hair. Not finding any I made myself up in a similar way to last night, put on a bra and panty set and studied my wardrobe for something suitable. I remembered that my Aunt had another photo of herself in a button through dress and I had a denim one in the wardrobe so put it on, adding some ankle boots and jewellery. Before leaving I made sure that my passport was in my bag, along with the usual items. Down at the breakfast the girls commented on how good I looked and I told them I was going out for the day, fully paid for, and would see them on Monday morning.

At ten I was standing outside the whiskeria as a black Skoda pulled up. I went to the passenger door and got in next to Portia. We greeted each other and she drove off. We travelled through the city in silence until she said that she had really let herself go last night and apologised for her actions. I told her not to be sorry as it was a wonderful experience for us both. She then said that I looked like Yvette today as well and asked if she could keep calling me by that name. As we drove she told me that she had come to Madrid around 1990 and, with some money she had, she bought a small consultant security company, growing it to where it was today with over a hundred employees. When she told me the name of the company I realised that I had dealt with it in my former life and that it was, indeed, a very good outfit.

We went out of the city, into a leafy suburb, where she pulled into the driveway of a mansion. When she stopped we got out of the car and she led me into the house and straight up to her bedroom where we spent the next two hours, naked and sweaty. She insisted that I keep my penis in full view and not to wear a condom as she was well too old to conceive and I had a beautiful, full body, experience. I have to say she was a tiger this morning. When she could take no more we got showered and redressed and got back in the car to drive to a little restaurant where she was known. We sat at a secluded booth and had a good lunch. I saw that the restaurant had a cocktail bar and I asked her if she would like a cocktail. She smiled and said it would be nice and that it was a typical Yvette action, yet again. I told her I would surprise her with my choice and went up to the bar and ordered two cocktails. When I returned to the table I put a Black Russian in front of her and a Manhattan in my place, then sat down and said “Why don’t you tell me all about that night in 1989 when it all turned to shit, Sylphide?”

She had stiffened when she saw the two cocktails and now put her hand into her bag, beside her, and said “I have a gun in my bag, and the barrel is pointing at your guts. You will tell me now how you knew all these details and also tell me who put you up to it or I will take you somewhere quiet and shoot you.” I smiled and said that, if she could hold off a bit, I would put my own bag on the table and take out my passport before I said anything else. She said “This had better be good as you have called me by a name that no-one in Madrid knows, as well as given me a drink that holds a lot of memories.”

I put my bag on the table and slid my passport out, leaving it on the table between us. “The woman you have been trying to find; the woman you think was dead, was my Aunt, Yvette Orleon. Open the passport now, please.” She opened the passport and looked at my name. “She died that night, I know it” she snarled. “Funny” I said “she said the same about you when I used to visit her.”

She insisted that I now talk about something that only she and Yvette would know. I smiled and said “All right, how about the twenty fifth of June, 1989. The night you met. She had joined the police in Biarritz some years before and had been transferred to Paris. You and she worked from different stations but, that night, you were both rostered on as crowd control, in uniform, at a pop concert at La Cigale. It was David Bowey with a band called Tin Machine and she told me it put her off his music for life. She did have, funnily enough, a picture of him on her sideboard which she said was there to remind her of her true love. She told me that the most work you had to do that night was to keep the patrons that were leaving after the first song in some sort of order as you thought that there could be stampede injuries should someone fall. She told me about the bar you went to afterwards and these cocktails you drank before ending up in her apartment. She did also mention some of the things you got up to with the police issue mini-truncheon.”

At that she took her hand out of her bag and I saw tears forming. She said “They told me she was gone.” I said that yes, she had gone; but gone to England to a hospital near her brother and his new wife, my parents. I told her that I was born some five years later and had visited her often at the nursing home between the time I turned six and the time she died in 2016. I told her that Yvette used to keep me enthralled with her stories of police work, especially after she went into undercover operations. She was weeping freely and asked why Yvette was in the nursing home and I told her that my Aunt had seen her lover take three bullets that night before taking one herself that damaged her spinal cord. She had been in a wheelchair the rest of her life.

I then told her that I wanted to know what happened because my Aunt couldn’t tell me. She had told me that she had been given a lump sum and pension by the police but they had never told her why she was shot. I said that I had tried to research it on the internet but had only come up with reports of a stone throwing mob.

“Oh, my god,” she wailed, “Yvette lived so long and I never thought to question the facts. The truth of the story is that the night was less than a month after we met. We were rostered to go undercover to try and calm down the rioters. We had done it before and had defused a few nasty situations. We would try and shame the ringleaders by telling them that they were not doing any good by destroying street lights and throwing bins. The night was the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution and the day before the start of the G7 Summit.”

“Mitterand was keen to keep it all peaceful in front of George Bush and Margaret Thatcher and the others so there was a big police turn-out. We were caught in the front of a screaming mob in one of the side streets and a rookie gendarme got so frightened he took out his gun and fired wildly at the rioters. Unfortunately he only managed to hit the two of us. It did, however, have the effect of clearing the scene. I was told all of this some months later, after I had been in hospital for some time. They wanted it kept quiet and, in order to ensure that, they gave me an identity change and a rather generous amount of money and told me to leave the country. I was so desolate from losing Yvette I came to Spain and found a small security company that I purchased and grew into the large organisation it now is.”

She looked at my passport again and said she would now have to call me Gene and then asked me if I did any other work. I told her that, up until a few weeks ago, I had been a computer specialist and she said “That’s where I remember the name; you did some good work for us about eighteen months ago.” I nodded at that and said that I now wondered if I would ever go back to that life. She told me that I would be stupid to let my talent wither, and that I could do that work as easily as a woman, perhaps easier as people would not believe a woman had those skills. She was calming down now and we picked up our drinks and I said “To Yvette, a very lovely woman” and we drank. I can’t say that I enjoyed the Manhattan but it was an effective prop for the moment.

When we left the restaurant she took my arm and we just walked. She insisted that I tell her about Yvettes’ life in England and I also told her where she was buried. Back at the car we got in and she took me to her company. She led me into the building which, of course, ran 24/7 with security monitoring. I was led to an inner zone where several men were looking at screens, mainly showing street scenes. “This is where we search for felons and the like” she told me “we try to find out where they are likely to be from the email traffic and then set up hidden cameras. We use face recognition software and get some good results. Ha! Here is Joseph, he is looking for a particularly nasty hacker who seems to be able to insert malware into the computers of his target company, seemingly without the use of Trojan horses or embedding a virus.” I was introduced to Joseph as Gene Orleon and he said that he had thought he had been dealing with a man, all those months ago, and said that if he had known he was dealing with such a lovely lady, he would have created and excuse to visit me in England.

Portia took us both to a secure office and sat us down. She said that the hacker Joseph was after was a guy called Claude. She said they had thought he was gay but even setting him up with one of their gay operatives did not work. She said that they now thought that Claude was actually only interested in girly men and I may be able to get alongside him. Josephs’ eyes grew wide and he said, “You actually are a man? I would never have guessed. Wow!!” Portia then asked if I could help them out. I told her that I was committed to the whiskeria but was sure I could be allowed to help her as long as my time away was paid for. “After all, that’s why a puta is a puta.” She said the company would pay for my time for as long as it takes and I replied that it had better not take too long as I was leaving Madrid for two weeks come Friday morning.

Marianne G 2020