The Story of X: An Erotic Tale Page 3

  “You want to talk to me about the Camorra?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do realize that is somewhat forthright?” He smiles, glitteringly. “Even a little dangerous?”

  “Yes . . . I guess it is.”

  It feels so dumb now. And, of course, very rude. Somewhat forthright. But it is also too late. I’m here; I might as well continue.

  Lord Roscarrick nods, and turns to his servant, and speaks in rapid, eloquent Italian.

  I stare again. Taking him in; no, drinking him in.

  Roscarrick’s effortlessly faded jeans have one rip above the knee, a casually yet expertly positioned flaw. I can see the dark skin of his thigh through the rip. A hint of the animal beneath. My mouth is dry again.

  Come on, X, sort it out. Get ahold of yourself. This is just some handsome, enigmatic, thirty-year-old billionaire aristocrat. In Naples. You meet them all the time.

  Roscarrick runs a hand through his flowing dark hair as he turns back to me—and that is the first faintly false gesture I have seen, the first hint of vanity, maybe. Good! Now I don’t have to desire him so much. He is vain. Yes! But the hair is so dark, so curled and coiling, and dark.

  “So . . . where were we . . . ? I’m being rude. You must call me Marc. Marc Roscarrick. But what shall I call you . . . Miss . . . ?”

  “Beckmann.”

  His eyes are still wide, still questioning. Naturally he wants my whole name. I give it. Stammering.

  “Alexandra. Beckmann. Call me Alex. Or X. People call me X.”

  “X? Really?”

  “Yes. X.”

  “So not a novel. More a spy thriller.”

  “Who’s the villain, then?”

  He pauses. And then he laughs that soft, quickening laugh. Marc’s laugh is infectious. Those flashing sharp white teeth, those flashing sharp blue eyes. He is high spirited, a mettlesome animal, a predator, a hawk that cannot be caged. The chilly blue eyes are slanted, just a fraction. There is a nervous and menacing energy in there, as well; maybe he isn’t vain, just animated and taut. I start to yield again. The shirt isn’t properly tucked into his jeans, it is lazily buttoned; I glimpse at least an inch of his hard stomach, tan and muscled.

  “Per favore . . .” He is talking brisk Italian with his servant. I try to look away, to look at the flying stone staircase, the hawk-wing staircase with its lunettes and volutes and Baroque curlicues.

  But I cannot concentrate. I am too distracted, and agitated.

  “Okay, X.” He says the name sarcastically, but not unkindly. “We can have some coffee in the Long Room, and you can interrogate me, and find out if I am a Camorrista.”

  He leads the way, and the servant disappears. The walk is short: we take a left and a right and not for the first time since I arrived here, my eyes widen in admiration.

  The Long Room is exactly that: a vast and elongated wood-paneled gallery, with fine, high windows that flood the place with Neapolitan light, and more of those modern abstract paintings rhythmically interrupted by Old Masters. I glimpse a creamy-white naked woman in one painting, coyly covering her loins with scarlet silk; her voluptuous curves are distinctive.

  “Yes, it’s Titian,” he says, following my gaze, and pulling up a chair for me to use. “We also have a couple of Mantegnas. Lots of Watteau. And Boucher. Too much Boucher. The more erotic the better, all that French nudity. My ancestors. Such reprobates.” He laughs. “But then, if they hadn’t been so sexually rapacious, I wouldn’t exist.”

  “Sorry?”

  I sit down, fumbling for a notebook in my bag. I can at least pretend that I am here to do my research, rather than to ogle and stammer.

  “Sorry?”

  Marc is also sitting, his legs lazily crossed—ankle over knee. I grip my pen. A low marble table divides us. The light slants through the endless windows; lace curtains drift on a warm Campanian breeze. I am a little hot. My top is sticking to my arms.

  “My family, on my father’s side, are English. We have a seat in Northumberland, but in the eighteenth century the ninth lord, mad George Roscarrick, did the Grand Tour and fell in love with Italy—and when he tired of all the drizzle in England he came to live in Naples, in this palazzo.” He gestures freely. “However, as Goethe said: See Naples and die. Just a few years after moving here, the ninth lord caught syphillis, went insane, tried to bite a harpsichord player in the Bourbon court—and expired in a fit.”

  I am scribbling this down. Roscarrick’s speech is quick and articulate.

  “But the taste for Neapolitan life, and Neapolitan women, became part of our DNA. The Roscarricks have intermarried with local nobility ever since.”

  A faint and very different expression crosses his face—a flash of violent anguish. Then it is gone, like a single cloud on a summer’s day, and his suave and agreeable smile is restored. He talks some more about his ancestors—the art collection, the palazzo, the duels and the drinking, amusing anecdotes. I tell him a little bit about me—my interest in history, poetry, politics—and he laughs and smiles in the right places.

  But even though this is entertaining, I am thinking something else. I saw it. I saw that pain, that flash of tragic anger. What is it? Why doesn’t someone make it better? Why doesn’t he find someone to salve this wound? Perhaps he scares them away, as he slightly scares me.

  I can smell the bodywash he is wearing, some delicate cologne maybe, nothing overt; it is darkly alluring, yet subtle. Clean but different. I realize that is what is so intoxicating: he smells deliciously clean, but different from me. He is so different from me. Eight inches taller, six foot one to my five foot five. He is stronger. Richer. A little older. Stubbled and proud, and yet there is a pain that needs healing.

  I watch as the manservant walks in and places a silver tray of coffees on the little marble table. I drink my delicious, faintly mocha’d dark coffee, trying to clear my head. But I can’t. My senses are ordering me about, slapping me. I am dizzy. Quizzed by secret police. I have the lunatic intimation that I could have met my soul mate. The way we laugh together; it fits. The bits of me that are missing, is he them? Or is he too forbidding?

  X. Calm down.

  “Why did you pay for our drinks?”

  He nods. As if it is a very fair question.

  “I saw your friend, she was appalled by the bill. I wanted to help. I have money, I like to help.”

  “And . . .”

  “And let’s be honest. There is another reason . . . Why shouldn’t I buy a Veneziano for a beautiful young woman?”

  My heart quickens, my defenses rise. This is too fast, too blunt, too cheap. He is trying to seduce me. Okay, I want to be seduced, but I don’t want to be seduced. Not crudely, not like this. I bridle. I sit back. He looks at me. And smiles.

  “Your friend is very beautiful.”

  “What?”

  “She is very lovely. I couldn’t help myself. Sorry.”

  “Oh.”

  “What is her name?”

  I am angry now, stupidly angry. Alex, you fool.

  “Jessica.”

  “Ah. Is she American as well?”

  “No, British.”

  “Thought so. She certainly liked to drink.” He laughs politely. “I apologize for my candor. I hope I haven’t offended. So, do you want to ask me about the Camorra?”

  My face is rigid with frustration. I sip the coffee and fume. He didn’t desire me. He wasn’t trying to seduce me. He thought I was Jessica. How intensely annoying. I am annoyed with myself, all those stupid, stupid feelings; it was Jessica all along. The girl from the Caffè Gambrinus. He agreed to see me because he thought I was Jessica; now he is being polite, and letting me down gently.

  Stupid. So stupid. I am such an idiot.

  The interview concludes. The coffee is dru
nk. He tells me that he is involved with import and export—and that is how he has turned the family millions into billions. He adds, with decorous modesty, that he likes to help charities—especially those that help victims of crime. It is obscure, and I don’t care. I pretend to take notes. I wonder if he is lying, if he really is just a handsome gangster covering his tracks. Who the hell cares? I am an absurd person. He tells me he loves California, the deserts of the southwest: the true America, the “frontierness.” He uses the word frontierness. I dislike this.

  He obviously senses my discomfort. Abruptly he rises and says good-bye, and he gives me a card, inviting me to call him if I need any more information. I offer a terse thank-you, feeling like I should curtsey, or scream at my own crassness, but instead I say my own good-bye and refuse the offer of assistance and flee down the vast cold marble steps, and make my own way to the door. I can remember the route, left and right, left and right, down this hall, down this corridor—past this suit of stupid overwrought armor. Just get out, get out, get out.

  The sun is burning when I step into the busy street. I look at my foolish notebook, and hurl it into the big pile of garbage.

  Then I notice the policemen, hurriedly taking photos. Of me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “HOW MANY COPS?” Jessica asks.

  “Maybe three . . . I was, you know . . . confused.”

  We are sitting on the floor in her apartment, next door to mine. The heady scent of nail polish carries in the air: we are doing a restorative DIY pedicure for both of us. This is the first time we have properly talked about What Happened in the Palazzo since I fled, two days ago.

  “Well, like I said, there are rumors he is involved.” She airily gestures at the tall French window and the city beyond. “Half the stuff that comes through the port is contraband. And that’s what he does, isn’t it, import-export?” She nods, answering herself. “But it’s bloody hard to be a successful businessman in Naples without some contact with the Mob. Everybody is involved in some way. Even the pigeons on Via Dante look a bit dodgy sometimes. The way they stare at you, like they are plotting something. God, is this ever going to dry?”

  She grabs a magazine and uses it as a fan to dry the polish on her toenails. Cotton swabs are scattered everywhere among the magazines and paperbacks. Jessica’s apartment is, as usual, something of a mess. When we roomed together in Hanover she used to exasperate me with her untidiness; now that I am living next door I find her slovenliness amiable, even lovable. Best of all, it is unchanging. In a confusing world, Jessica is the same, my best friend, my smart, funny, sane, and lovable friend. I really don’t mind if bloody Marcus Roscarrick desires her, not me.

  Her.

  Our thoughts are duetting; Jessica looks up from her newly cerise toenails and says, “So he really said I was beautiful, huh?”

  I can’t stifle the slight pang of jealousy in my heart, even though I love Jessica. She can’t hide the flash of sly delight in her cynical eyes.

  “Yes. He really said you were beautiful . . .” My smile is brave and maybe less than convincing.

  “Jessica Rushton. Apple of a billionaire’s eye? Better get my hair cut.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Dunno. Shag him?”

  “Jess . . .”

  She giggles, and then she stops giggling as she looks in the mirror tilted against a bare, painted wall.

  “Seriously, I soooooo need a haircut if I am gonna start appearing in celeb magazines.” She twists a few split ends between her examining fingers, then says, in a different voice, “The beautiful Jessica Rushton tells us about her lovely fitted kitchen, following her hundred-trillion-dollar divorce from Lord Roscarrick.” She glances my way. “We can get a Ferrari. I’ll buy you a Ferrari. Babes, I’m sorry, I know you fancied him.”

  “No, not at all—don’t be idiotic—please, Jessica.” This is again ridiculous. I am actually holding back tears. How can one stupid man turn me into such a pathetic mess? I hardly know him. He was faintly menacing. Yet I did yearn for him. I did. For that moment. My soul called, and there was a response, or so I thought. Now I feel a bit lonely. Ugh.

  Slipping on my sandals, I summon up my common sense.

  “No. I’m fine. I am in Naples. I am twenty-one. I have an excellent education. Avanti!”

  “Attagirl.”

  “I am going to work. I’m here to work.”

  And so I do: I work.

  FOR THE NEXT fortnight I settle into a satisfactory and rewarding rhythm of hard work and just a little partying. In the mornings I study in my sunlit apartment. I study hard. I am good at studying.

  Amid my scattered books, laptop, and takeout cups of weirdly unsatisfactory cappuccino, I drive away thoughts of men with conjugations of the verbs credere and partire, and the precise structure of the futuro semplice.

  Tomorrow you will prepare pasta puttanesca.

  Domani prepari la pasta alla puttanesca.

  This lasts, on average, for about two hours.

  After the language learning comes the thesis. Between the hours of eleven A.M. and one P.M., I blot out the memory of his Tyrrhenian blue eyes by rehearsing facts about the crime syndicates of south Italy, especially the Camorra, though I am also drawn to the even more sinister and mysterious ’Ndrangheta, the mafia of the toe of Italy.

  The ’Ndrangheta is a criminal organization in Italy, centered in Calabria. Though not as famous as the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, or the Neapolitan Camorra, the ’Ndrangheta is probably the most powerful crime syndicate in Italy, as of the early twenty-first century . . .

  There is something about the ’Ndrang that intrigues me. Maybe it is just the apostrophe before their name? Like the The in The Palazzo Roscarrick.

  No. Study. Come on, Alex. Study.

  The principal difference from the Mafia is in recruitment methods. The ’Ndrangheta recruits members on the basis of blood relationships. This makes the gangs extremely clannish, and therefore impenetrable to police investigation. Sons of ’Ndranghetisti are expected to follow in their fathers’ footsteps . . .

  Gang membership descends by blood. It is hereditary?

  Inevitably I think of Roscarrick and his tales of the crazy ninth lord. Marc fits the picture, maybe. But then it is all blood here, the descent of blood, the ties of blood. Everything is related to everyone. I am the pure outsider. I want to know more.

  By lunchtime my mind is fried so I change my focus. Every afternoon I put on some little sports socks and my sneakers, and in my innocent summer dresses from Zara I go exploring the intricate and historic suburbs of inner Naples. Whence the Camorra derive their strength, where they recruit their killers and hunt their enemies.

  Am I naïve, just wandering around these supposedly dreadful places? I would never do this in the States: go wandering in the bad neighborhood of a big city alone. And yet I do not feel menaced. Why? Perhaps it is because these slums are so seductive, so charming in their dark and chaotic and sun-dashed poverty—it is hard to feel threatened.

  Walking the narrow, vivacious, operetta-singing lanes of Spaccanapoli or the Quartieri Spagnoli is like having a bit part in an Italian movie, made just for God, a movie called Italy. It is all so authentic: the women sitting outdoors in the narrow alleys washing potatoes over buckets, trimming bearded blue mussels, and gossiping loudly about sex; the old ladies in black, changing flowers and lightbulbs in glazed roadside shrines to Holy Mother Mary; the pretty boys eating drooping triangles of pizza as they sit on their sky blue Lambretta scooters, leaning forward so they don’t drip pomodoro on their expensive pants; the over-tall feminelli—the transsexuals—skittering on the black lava-stone cobbles from Vesuvius as they walk down to the ferry port in heels, heading for sexual assignations with the rich on Ischia and Capri.

  Less pleasing are the inexplicably silent, garbage-filled p
iazzas of Materdei, where tubby, half-shaven men in business suits disappear around the corner as soon as I show up—leaving me all alone in the eerie, siesta-quiet sunlight in my Zara dress, staring at a peeling old poster of Diego Maradona.

  And then, of course, the unthinkable happens.

  It is day fourteen of my work-hard-and-don’t-brood-about-him regime. It is all going well. I have a slight hangover. I am in the Quartieri Spagnoli. I spent the previous night drinking cheap Peronis and Raffis with Jessica and a couple of her Italian friends in a bar near the university. We had a nice night. It was fun. We didn’t talk about him and we have diligently avoided the Caffè Gambrinus—and the other fashionable and pricey places where he might be encountered.

  But my head is slightly fuzzy this morning. And I am rather lost. I have wandered down an empty and yawning cul-de-sac. I look up at the strip of blue sky, caged between the high slum buildings. It is very hot. Laundry flutters in a desperately weak midday breeze. I am dehydrated. I stare at the lurid panties and erotic lingerie, red and blue and black, swinging in the gasp of breeze, the anarchic and drooping flags of sexuality.

  “Hey.”

  I turn.

  “Soldi.”

  “Dacci i soldi!”

  Four kids—no, youths—are standing at the end of the alley. Five meters away. They are tall and skinny and walking toward me, and they want money. My Italian is good enough to understand that.

  Give us money.

  I swivel, and then I despair. I forgot. I am in a damn cul-de-sac. Desperate now, I look up—maybe someone is at a window, taking some air. But all I sense is a shutter being closed. People turning away, retreating. Don’t watch, don’t witness, don’t tell. Omerta.

  “Dacci i soldi!”

  “But I don’t have any money!”

  Why am I doing this? Why am I resisting? These kids are surely junkies—four of the thousands of smack addicts of Naples, enslaved by the drugs of the Camorra. Dirty jeans, yellow faces, bloodshot eyes, entirely bad news. They just want some euro to score. Right?

  But I have so little money, and I have worked so hard for it. I want to fight them.