The Story of X: An Erotic Tale (14 page)

“What the hell? What’s going on?”

I gesture at the fires, crackling in the chilly night breeze. Jessica nods, and yawns.

“You’ve never seen this before?”

“No.”

She rubs her tired face and says, “It’s the Camorra—they burn garbage, illegally.
Toxic waste, factory trash, anything. They burn it at night. In a zone, like an arc,
all around the bloody outskirts of Naples. Some people also call it the Triangle of
Death.”

“Great. Because?”

“Poisonous waste enters the water system from illegal dumping and burning; the incidence
of cancer here is one of the highest in Italy—there’s a triangular zone where the
Camorra are particularly active.”

The traffic speeds up and we drive past more fires. I gaze across the satanic scenery
of flames and wind and darkness.

The most paradoxical thing, the most disturbing thing, is that the scenery is kind
of beautiful—a glittering nightscape of fires and moonlit palms and desolate concrete
suburbs, white as bones. Here is beauty and evil in one. Like a handsome man with
a tendency toward violence.

Next week Marc Roscarrick takes me to Capri.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

“I
CAN’T ACCEPT
it, Marc.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s too much. It makes me feel like a kept woman. Like a kind of pet.”

“Would you prefer a plane?”

I gaze at him across the gear well. He is joking. I am not smiling. We are sitting
in
my
car, which is now
his
car; we are parked in Vomero, one of the hills overlooking Naples, with its green
squares of garden and high walls with security cameras, and garbage that actually
gets collected.

“Marc, I’m yours to keep already, you know that. I just don’t want—
this
.” I grimace and gesture at the dashboard of the car like it is something repugnant,
though Alex the Harlot inside me is saying:
Keep it, keep it. Keep the damn car!

“How about a flat? Can I buy you a flat?” he says. “I could buy you . . . Diego Maradona’s
apartment. He used to live around here, wouldn’t that be nice? Santa Lucia is so . . .
sea level
.”

He is laughing. And joking. I think.

“I don’t want an apartment!”

“Okay, diamonds. Rubies. All the emeralds of Kashgar?”

“Stop teasing, Marc.”

“But I like teasing you,
piccolina
. When I tease you, you wrinkle your nose like a naughty girl and you look . . . ah
. . .”

“Spankable?”

“Tut tut,
dolcezza,
don’t tempt me.”

He squeezes my knee.

“Marc . . .”

He frowns and smiles at the same time. Then he looks at my bare legs under my humble
blue dress. He pats my left knee again. And laughs quietly, showing his white teeth.

Marc is in a pale gray suit with a pale blue shirt and a pale yellow necktie, everything
is exquisitely pale except his suntanned face and his stubbled jaw, and his coiling
dark hair that roils me so. It is Saturday. I am trying to return the car, but he
insists we go for one last drive before I make a final decision.

I am still absolutely determined not to keep the car. My misgivings about Marc’s present
were only reinforced by that dreary drive to Caserta, with its slums dominated by
the Camorra—then the return journey past the fires that ring the city, through the
Triangle of Death, the mafia-infested badlands, the circles of mafia hell.

I guess I need to tell Marc some of this, or he may think I am being petulant.

So I do. As he sits there in the passenger seat, I describe my day trip to Caserta
with Jess. His frown deepens until his impossibly handsome face is, once again, quite
ugly with anger. He spits the words “
cornuti
”—insulting the gangsters. I tell him it was like Dante’s hell. Like driving through
the circles of hell.

“ . . . in the Inferno—the cold and the flames.”

He nods, and turns away from me, staring through the windshield as he speaks the words,
immaculately: “
Non isperate mai veder lo cielo: i’vegno per menarvi a l’altra riva, ne le tenebre
etterne, in caldo e ’n gelo
.” Then he shrugs. “I love that canto: Forget your hope of ever seeing Heaven: I come
to lead you to the other shore, to the eternal dark, to fire and frost.” A second
shrug. “Chilling. Very chilling. It is a good description of Campania under the Camorra.”

Now he bows his head—ashamedly? But then he turns and gives me the full 100 percent
cold metal blue of his eyes and says, “You really do think I am
Camorrista,
don’t you?”

I am flustered.

“No, of course not, but . . .”

“But what, X? What? That’s part of the reason you want to return the car, right? You
think it has been bought with blood, bought with violence, paid for by all the dead
junkies in Scampia.”

“No, Marc, I just . . .”

“Do you want to see how I make money? Do you?”

“Well—”

“Do you?”

I look deep into his eyes, and I do not blink as I say, “Yes.”

“Give me the keys. To my car.” His voice is stiff and tense—with anger.

I climb from the driver seat and we swap sides. He ignites the engine and then roars
down the hill of Vomero at approximately 150 kilometers per hour. He may or may not
be
Camorristi,
but he certainly doesn’t mind breaking a few highway laws.

Maybe six seconds later we pull into the rear of The Palazzo Roscarrick. Marc yanks
the keys from the dashboard and hands them to a servant. Then, as the Mercedes is
valet-parked, he strides imperiously into his palazzo with me scurrying along behind.

I haven’t seen him this
alpha
before. His face is grim; his pace fast and determined. We cross through several
hallways of the lovely, grave, and beautiful palazzo like we are walking through a
depressing shopping mall as quickly as possible, and then he abruptly faces a door,
slaps it open, and ushers me inside.

The room is semidark; it smells of cedarwood and leather. There are computers on a
very large steel desk. The walls are painted gray, and almost entirely unadorned,
apart from a couple of, I think, Guy Bourdin photos—faintly erotic, surreal, unsettling,
abstract. Just distracting enough to let the mind wander before getting back to the
task at hand.

“Here,” he says, very curtly. “
This
is what I do.”

He is pointing at two of the luxuriously slender laptops on the desk. I step closer.
Their bright screens are showing cascades of figures in rows and columns, blinking
and changing, flashing red and black and gray, like a drizzle of integers. Symbols
wink at either side of the columns.

“I don’t understand.”

He steps close, and points to one of the laptops.

“I am speculating. To be exact, right now, this morning, I have been exploiting a
tiny discrepancy in Canadian dollar futures in respect to the interest rate yield
on ten-year T bonds.”

“What?”

“Canada equals commodities. People emotionally genuflect to commodities in times of
instability: they turn to oil, coal, iron, shale, gold. If it gets even worse they
will return to Treasuries.”

“You’re day trading?”

“Exactly. You want to watch me do it? It is nothing special. It’s like playing the
harpsichord.”

He pulls out a very modern leather office chair, sits down, and then clicks on the
laptop. He begins typing numbers and keys, then he studies the rows of integers, some
of which are now flashing very red and very black, like they have been disturbed,
like tiny creatures in suspension, alarmed by a predator, emanating distress signals.
His fingers flicker over the keys skillfully. It is indeed a bit like someone playing
the harpsichord—it is even more like watching J. S. Bach play his own cantata on a
church organ, mastering several keyboards at once.

And it is quite erotic. I always find the sight of a man doing his job, with expertise
and accomplishment, rather arousing. That job could be farming, it could be archaeology,
it could be cutting trees. All that matters is that it is done well. I suppose this
is evolutionary. The only time I ever really desired the Deck-Shoe Mathematician was
when he was working equations, swiftly and cleverly. On his own. Then I wanted to
kiss him. Right now I want Marc to fuck me.

I resist the urge to confess this.

“So,” I say, staring at the whirl of digits blinking red and pink. “What happened
there?”

He pushes the chair back and shrugs.

“I think I just made about sixteen thousand dollars. And some trader in London might
be going home in a bad mood.”

“Does that make you feel good?”

“Yes,” he says. “But not as much as it used to. It’s . . . capitalism. It is the world.
It is the way things are. What can we do? And it is a little safer than what I used
to do.”

This is the nub.

I stand here in my forlorn blue dress, staring at the billionaire who wants to give
me a car.

“What
did
you
used
to do, Marc?”

“I imported Chinese goods into Campania and Calabria. I paid the locals decent money
and I also made sure there was no skimming, no bribes, no sweeteners, nothing. And
I hired very hard guys to protect my business. So I undercut all the cheap Camorra
factories in north and east Naples. I made a huge amount of money and I made a lot
of
Camorristi
and ’Ndranghetisti quite . . . angry. They were going to kill me. But I didn’t care.
I was so angry myself.”

He stands and looks at me, arms folded—defiant, but not superior. Just himself.

“Why?” I ask.

“When I grew up, X, we were genteel yet very poor, we were aristocratic but impoverished,
everything was in decline, just as it had been in decline for decades, centuries even,
and this house”—he gestures—“was falling apart, almost a ruin. Likewise the estate
in Tyrol, the manor in England. The Roscarricks were doomed. Everything was going
to be sold, the palazzo was on the market, my history was about to be auctioned. This
made me furious, as only an eighteen-year-old can be furious—
incandescent
. I truly wanted to be a painter, an artist, an architect, but I didn’t have the luxury.
So I went into business as soon as I could, because I was determined to restore our
fortunes, whatever it took, to save this great old name,
Roscarrick
. So I did. That is what I have done. I’ve made enemies, but I’ve made many millions.”

His voice is slightly raised. “And as soon as I was able—before the Camorra and the
’Ndrangheta took revenge—I got out of the import stuff and put everything into a few
computers.” He points at his laptops and his expression is dismissive, even contemptuous.
“Now it is easy. It is like I have built a virtually perfect machine. I merely have
to tweak it, to oil the humming engine, and every day the machine churns out money.”

The silence in the room is profound. The integers glimmer in scarlet and black on
the laptops.

“I’m still not taking the car, Marc. Give it to the poor?”

He laughs unexpectedly.

“Maybe one day you will take it.”

“Maybe, but probably not. I want you. Not your money.”

He advances toward me, puts a hand around my waist and kisses my neck. The trills
of pleasure cascade down me like the numbers on his market screen, flashing red and
pink. Oh, Marc, kiss me again.

But he pulls back and says, “Fair enough. But we really
do
have to buy you some clothes. Enough Zara. This time you are not allowed to refuse.”

I try to stop myself from blushing. I didn’t even realize he’d noticed what dresses
I wore.

Yet my yearning for new clothes is sincere and urgent. A smart car I can do without,
but if Marc wants me to go to upscale places—like Capri—then I need clothes, I do;
I really need them. And that means Marc will have to provide them. Because I simply
can’t afford to trawl the designer stores.

And provide these clothes is just what he does next.

For the following six hours he takes me on a tour of the most scented, gorgeous, glittering,
minimalist retail spaces in Campania, the shops with the huge windows and the tiny
stacks of exquisite silk and cashmere, the shops with the acres of unused space and
the assistants who look like bored supermodels, the shops that I barely dare to step
inside, the shops where you wincingly check a sticker to just look at the price and
you think the decimal point is in the wrong place.

And the words! Oh these
words
: they flow around me like honey on this honeyed afternoon: Prada, Blahnik, Ferragamo,
Burberry, Armani, Chanel, Galliano, Versace, Dior, YSL, McQueen, Balenciaga, Dolce
e Gabbana. Words and words and words.

Gossamer ruffled 100 percent mulberry silk, delicate bias-cut mink on suede, hand-beaded
new season mini-jackets, endless dresses of violet and cerise and cream and Neapolitan
midnight blue, skirts and pants and miniskirts and entire armloads of diaphanous silk
lingerie, high-necked velvet peplum, Sicilian orange print frocks, Lolita pink Mary
Jane pumps, Jimmy Choo Jimmy Choo Jimmy Choo.

There are boxes in the back and bags in the front; at one point, Marc switches credit
cards and orders a second car; there are so many new clothes and shoes to transport
it is embarrassing. And now the snooty girls in the lofty shops are looking at me
with envious admiration, like I am the Queen-of-England-to-be; and I am horribly,
hatefully, blissfully happy.

“I want you to look like you,” Marc says. “But also like you
should
be. The way you
deserve
to look.”

And then he takes my hand and he kisses my fingers, as we walk out of the final store
and jump into his Mercedes. I put on my new four-hundred-dollar sunglasses and I feel
essentially like a younger, happier Jackie Kennedy, as we drive in the sunshine to
my apartment.

We both know what is going to happen just as soon as the car is parked. The electricity
between us is like an oncoming storm, Marc has seen me in and out of clothes all day,
he has seen me nude in dressing rooms, topless in front of mirrors, he has admired
my ass and my breasts and the way I bend over in lingerie by La Perla, and he has
lusted, he has
lusted
—but he has kept his hands off me. Just.

I know he can’t keep his hands off me anymore.

We open the door to my apartment and he tears into me. He flings his jacket away and
grabs me, embracing me, jailing me in his arms. Our mouths meet—no, they collide.
We kiss as if we haven’t kissed since the eighteenth century. His tongue fights mine;
I bite his lip, quite hard. He kisses me more: his tongue inside my mouth. But I want
all of him inside me.

I have brought up some of the clothes, so there are bags and dresses and tissue paper
everywhere—but it doesn’t matter. Marc is lifting up my dress, revealing me. He has
ripped away my bra, and now he squeezes my nipples, hard, then soft, then softer,
until I want him to do it harder.