The Story of X: An Erotic Tale Read online

  It’s way too much to take in.

  I drop the books and sigh. There is more—the Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, the oaths, the secret meetings, the initiations—but it is all so confusing.

  And it will have to wait for another day, because Jessica is banging on the door.

  “X! Are you up?”

  “Uh-huh . . .”

  “You got a visitor.”

  Briskly slipping on my sandals, I open the door. Jessica points excitedly to the balcony and we both step outside into the warm, sunny air.

  “See.”

  We look down. There is a small silver Mercedes sports car parked directly outside our apartment block. A man leans against it, young, handsome, smoking, in a tight and well-fitting black suit and sunglasses. Black shoes. Almost a uniform, but not quite.

  “He buzzed my bell by mistake,” says Jess, who is wearing a white minidress that manages to be demure and come-hither at the same time. “He’s hot, isn’t he? Looks like he should be in The Godfather. The one with De Niro.” She laughs. “Says he’s called Giuseppe, and works for Lord Perfect.” I gaze down as Jessica babbles away. “I may have to get a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny bit amorevole with him.”

  “Giuseppe? I think I’ve met him before . . .”

  “That’s nice. Anyway, he says he wants to see you.”

  “But—”

  “Guess he’s your designated driver, sweetie.”

  “But—”

  “Stop butting. The Jesus of Hot is down there. With a Mercedes.”

  I look down at the car and the driver. I call his name—“Giuseppe?”—and he looks up and smiles. And yes, I definitely recognize him. Because he was the first of the men who rescued me in the Spanish Quarters.

  Giuseppe smiles again, very engagingly, and does an amusing and gracious bow, gesturing at the car like a bewigged and powdered servant inviting me to step into a horse-drawn carriage somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian empire in about 1765.

  “Yo! Say hello to Cinderella!” says Jessica in a singing voice, doing a special dance move that seems to involve pointing my way, then at the ceiling. “Watch you don’t turn into a pumpkin.”

  “I shall avoid crystal slippers.”

  Jessica pouts. And sings some more. Then I say, “Why don’t you come down with me, Jess? Let’s see what it all means.”

  Two minutes later we are on the sidewalk and Giuseppe is bowing again, and smiling, and saying, in unexpectedly good English, “Hello, Miss Beckmann.”

  “Hi.”

  Another sly and winning smile. I hear Jess mutter “Gorgeousaurus Rex!” under her breath, and Giuseppe announces, “I am available to drive you wherever you like. On the orders of Lord Roscarrick.”

  Confusion returns.

  “But why?”

  “Because that is my order. Alternatively, you may wish to drive yourself, Miss Beckmann.”

  Giuseppe is dangling car keys in his hand.

  “But . . .” I gaze at Marc’s beautiful car, apparently being loaned to me. It is the sister car to his dark, silver-blue Mercedes sports, though perhaps a little smaller. “I can’t, Giuseppe. I might scratch it, Neapolitan traffic, you know.”

  Giuseppe steps closer and folds the car keys into my hand.

  “Miss Beckmann, you do not understand. This is your car.”

  “What?”

  “It is yours. All yours. A present from Lord Roscarrick.” He steps back, does another polite bow, and says, “It is yours to keep. You can drive it to Rome, or maybe Moscow, or maybe not. As you wish.” Then he turns smartly on his heels and walks down Via Santa Lucia toward the seafront.

  I am opening and closing my mouth in apparent mimicry of a dying fish. Staring at this beautiful car.

  My car?

  Jessica is gazing at the gorgeous little car in similar style. Finally she says, “A Mercedes sports? He’s given you a Mercedes sports?”

  “I know. I know.”

  She frowns.

  “It’s a bloody insult, is what it is. Only a Mercedes?”

  She is giggling. Now I am giggling, likewise.

  Putting on my best thoughtful expression, I say, “I might have to get a bit snippy with him. Tell him I won’t accept anything less than a Bentley.”

  “Or a Lamborghini. With leopard-skin seats.”

  We laugh. Then I say, “I can’t take it, obviously.”

  Jessica pouts. Again.

  “What? Why not?”

  “Look at it, Jess. It’s a Mercedes. It’s just wrong.”

  “But wait, X, wait. Don’t be too hasty. Let’s give this a good long think.” Jess pauses for a third of a second, then says, “Okay, finished thinking: I say you keep the car, and we go for a ride.”

  I ponder for a moment. I am very sure I am going to refuse this gift; it is too much, too outrageous. But maybe we could have just one ride. One single day of fun. Then return it.

  “I’m not going to keep it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Really.”

  “Okay . . .” Jess nods. “Okay, yes, that’s probably best. Tell you what: shall I look after it? I’ll give it to a nunnery. Honest.”

  “But we can go for a ride, for just one day.”

  Jess punches the air.

  “Yay! But where?” Jess moues pensively. “Where shall we go? Amalfi? Positano?”

  “Can’t. Might run into Mom. How am I going to explain a Mercedes sports car?”

  Jessica nods.

  “I know,” she says. “Let’s go to Caserta, that big palace . . .”

  “Biggest garden in the world, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve always wanted to go there. Come on, Cinderella. Drive like a pirate.”

  We climb in. I insert the key gingerly. Jessica starts playing with the GPS, eagerly tapping in our destination. I just sit there, staring at the dash in amazement, and with a little trepidation.

  I’ve never driven a sports car before. I’ve never driven a Mercedes before. And I have very definitely never driven a brand-new Mercedes sports car through the chaotic, chariot-racing streets of Naples, with its battered Fiats and almost-as-battered Alfa Romeos, jostling with garbage trucks that never collect garbage and sinister limousines with very tinted rear windows.

  But I turn the key, pull out, and drive anyway. And despite my nearly running over an old lady near Scampia, and despite my nearly driving straight into the plateglass storefront of a Supero Supermercati just outside Marcianise, after a giggly lunch, we make it to the Palace of Caserta.

  Yet strangely enough, this famous eighteenth-century place somehow disappoints us.

  It is said to be the Versailles of Bourbon, Italy, and yet—perhaps like Versailles—it is simply too big. The grandiose marble staircases rise like the endless staircases in dreams and they lead into huge echoing rooms filled with melancholy and nothingness, with gigantic windows that gaze at the rather slummy streets of Caserta town. And the gardens are just numbingly enormous, stretching miles into the sunlit haze. They intimidate rather than inspire.

  Dwarfed and inert, we stand here as Jessica reads from her guidebook: “The palace has some twelve hundred rooms, including two dozen state apartments, a large library, and a theater modeled after the Teatro di San Carlo of Naples.”

  “Twelve hundred rooms?”

  “Twelve hundred rooms,” Jessica repeats. “The population of Caserta Vecchia was moved ten kilometers to provide a workforce closer to the palace. A silk factory, San Leucio, was disguised as a pavilion in the immense parkland.”

  “You could hide New York in this garden.”

  Jessica nods, and sighs, and we both look up the long, long path that stretches to some faraway fountains. The fountains could be as big as the pyramids; it is i
mpossible to tell at this distance. She goes on. “The Caserta Palace has been used as a location in a number of movie productions. In 1999 it appeared in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, as the setting for Queen Amidala’s Royal Palace on Naboo.”

  “Naboo? Who knew? We’re in Naboo!” I am laughing, but I am also tired. “Come on, Jess. Let’s go home.”

  And so we do. But my mood is darkening swiftly with the day. By the time we are halfway back to Naples the sky is dusky, with threatening rain clouds skidding across the rising moon, and the traffic is slow and painful. Which gives me time to stare out the window in amazement at all the fires dotted across the half-urban countryside; fires on the outskirts of scruffy townships, fires next to tatty old factories.

  “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.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “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.”