Butcher by Campbell Armstrong Page B

didn’t want to think Miriam would stay away. ‘I’ll visit soon. Promise.’
    â€˜Give me notice, I’ll bake. So how is Betty working out for you?’
    â€˜She’s a genius.’
    â€˜And not so bad to look at, nu?’
    â€˜No, not bad at all.’
    Perlman said goodbye, closed the connection. Hilda was always trying to matchmake. To her it was a travesty that Lou should be a bachelor, and as for that hopeless love he carried around like a precious picture in a wallet, did he really believe it was leading to the altar?
    He speeded away.
    My peripatetic Miriam, he thought. Amsterdam. Florence. Copenhagen. And men, she’d draw them to her, naturally, a lovely woman drinking coffee alone on some hotel terrace overlooking a lake. With gulls. Men would lust after her. He saw hotel rooms in the afternoon, blinds drawn, Miriam giving herself with spread thighs to a dark-eyed romancer, a man sophisticated in the ways of loving women. They’d speak Italian together, Miriam and this gigolo , and drink wine in bed and he’d lick spilled drops from her nipples and later they’d talk about Michelangelo and Leonardo. This sickening intimacy …
    Loverboy would be called Mario or something like. He’d be an expert in a kitchen too, knowing a secret ingredient that brought putanesca to life, and just how to chop garlic for maximum flavour, and the precise time to pluck fresh oregano.
    Lou couldn’t bear it, hated this fucker Mario.

14
    Samuel Montague gazed up into his wife’s eyes. Strands of black hair fell across her forehead and she had a look of euphoric abandon. He was transported by her, by the intensity of lovemaking and the words she spoke: fuck me, fuck me hard and deeper into my cunt, Sammy, oh . Sweat created a film between their bodies. It dripped from her face and landed on his lips and he tasted its wonderful saltiness.
    Straddling him, she rose and fell, her hands splayed on his shoulders, her nails digging his flesh as if she was determined to contain as much of him as she could at this crucial moment. He thought the same thought every time: this is the most exciting thing ever. His coming was a pure fire. He shouted her name and felt her shudder and she threw her head back in blissed release, and screamed even as he pushed himself up from the floor to penetrate her as deeply as he might. They were bonded, locked, devouring.
    She laid her face against his and for a while they both breathed very hard. Their hearts roared. Neither of them was ever able to speak coherently for a time afterwards, but they made sounds, sighing, purring, intimate little half-words that would mean nothing to anyone else.
    â€˜Hey, take a gander at this, boys,’ a man said.
    â€˜A porn film, intit,’ somebody else said.
    Shocked, Samuel Montague turned his face to the bedroom door.
    Three men, masked in scarves, looked down at him. He saw only their eyes. He instinctively reached for something to pull over the naked bodies of his wife and himself, and found the edge of the sheet on the bed above them, which he dragged downward, but one of the men stamped on his hand and said, ‘Naw, don’t deprive us of the view.’
    The pain caused Montague to groan.
    â€˜Jesus Christ,’ Meg said. She scrambled for the sheet but one of the men kicked her in the shoulder and she slid away from Sammy, who tried to rise, defend himself, his wife, his home.
    Montague said, ‘Please, Christ, don’t hurt her.’
    â€˜That’s up to you, Sammy.’
    â€˜If you want money just help yourself, there’s a couple of hundred pounds in my desk and my wife’s jewellery is in a room at the end of the hall and take the car if you want it, leave us alone.’
    â€˜We want none o that crap,’ one of the men said. He wore white latex gloves. Montague noticed that they all wore them.
    A shotgun was pressed into his forehead. He’d never felt such