The Story of X: An Erotic Tale (22 page)

A nausea rises in me. Enzo shakes his old hairless head.

“Everyone was paralyzed with fear. Salvatore was like a family dog, a Rottweiler,
that has begun to scare the family. Too big to control. He would sit at that cafe,
where you had your espressos, on a Sunday morning, with his acolytes. Salvatore the
pig butcher never dreamed that anyone would have the balls to just drive into Plati.”

I stare at Enzo. He nods.

“But Marc Roscarrick had the balls. The next Sunday, after the butcher had sliced
up that family, your boyfriend just drove into Plati, into that square, and he walked
up to Salvatore with a gun in his hand. Salvatore was drinking prosecco. Unprepared,
at ease, and totally shocked. Roscarrick lifted Salvatore to his feet, dragged him
into the center of the square, made him kneel, and shot the pig butcher in the head.
Then Roscarrick got into his car and drove away.”

A sip of wine, a wise little smile.

“It was the bravest thing I have ever seen, and, as I say, I admire bravery. It was
also very clever: it was so impressive it became legend, it gave Roscarrick a reputation,
a reputation he still has. Many people began to believe he had powers, influence—he
must be high up in the Camorra, how else would you find the balls to do that?”

“So he isn’t in the Camorra?”

Enzo ignores me.

“Normally the
people
in Plati would have taken revenge for such an affront, but this time we decided to
be more politic. After all, he had got rid of our problem, the dog that grew too big.”
Enzo stiffens, as if he is about to rise. “We met with your Lord Roscarrick. We called
a truce. We told him to get out of Calabria, and we agreed the ’Ndrangheta would,
for once, take no revenge. And there it is. And that is why I met with your boyfriend
last night, and again this morning. To ensure the truce remains.” Enzo smiles his
stained and withered smile. “I like Roscarrick, but he perplexes me. I still do not
know if he is saint or sinner. Where did he get his money from, to start that business?
His family were impoverished. Then his rich young wife died, so suddenly. That was
an evil fortune.”

He waves the napkin at the fly once more. “And now, Alexandra Beckmann, we must say
good-bye. If you ever come to Plati again you will find me at this restaurant; they
do excellent osso bucco in the evening. But for now you must go; I cannot keep the
dogs in the kennel all day. Go before you are taken to the forests above Gioia Tauro.
Go.”

Half stumbling, half dreaming, I rise and walk to the corner, and cross the grubby
piazza, and climb into my car. This time I am taking the main road, around the coast
of Calabria. I want safety, I want to get out. Please get me out of here. Please please
please please God.

The car roars out, and down. My mind whirls: I am escaping. I am leaving Plati. The
one good road descends the valley. I race through the olive groves, going too far,
racing like my thoughts, and then I turn a corner and I see a car coming toward me.
Two men. Two faces. The road is single tracked. We have to stop. I look at the men
in the car. One of them gets out. I stop.

It is Marc. Standing there, his face taut and sad and desperate.

I climb out of my car, my knees are shaking. He looks at me with those sad, pale,
beautiful eyes. Six yards away.

“X,” he says. “X . . . I thought . . .”

I am sobbing so hard I am close to fainting. And I am running into his open arms.

“Marc. Marc.
Marc
.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-FIVE

M
ARC PRESSES ME
close to his chest as I weep, gulping sobs. Then he lifts up my face and kisses me,
twice, on the forehead, then on the mouth. My crying mouth, salty with tears. He speaks.

“I went back to Rhoguda, to the castle.”

“But, Marc—”

“The girl, Françoise, she said you’d gone to Plati—on that terrible back road—on your
own?”

“I had no choice—”

“I thought the worst.” He kisses me. “I thought you might have driven off the road,
been killed. Then . . .” He kisses me again, twice, quickly, fiercely. “Then I thought
you . . . even if you’d made it to Plati, what then? What would you do? What would
you say? You could have been . . . anything . . . anything could have happened. I
sent someone down the back road to check, and Giuseppe and I raced here to Plati.”

He lifts my face by the chin. And he asks, “What happened?”

The sobs are subsiding. I wipe my face with the back of my hand, smearing away the
salt and wet. Giuseppe steps forward with a tissue, and hands it to me. I murmur,
“
Grazie
.”

Then I dry the tears, properly. Giuseppe is holding the car door open. Breathing deeply
and slowly, calming myself as best I can, I climb in the front; Marc follows me, taking
the wheel. Giuseppe goes to the Land Rover. We are escaping, heading south, aiming
for the Ionian Sea.

I speak. “Marc, I saw Enzo Paselli. He told me, about . . . the butcher. What you
did.”

Marc is silent as he drives. His profile is tensed, pensive. He does not look my way
as he says, “And?”

I touch his arm.

“Take me away from here, Marc. Anywhere. Just anywhere.” He turns to me. His hand
falls onto my thigh, but it is passive, gentle, calming. I am stifling a sudden surge
of more tears. The emotions are too much.

The traffic ebbs and flows on the narrow Calabrian roads; the ugly towns blear past.
Eventually I rouse from my strange, dreamlike state.

“Where are we going?”

“The airport, then South Tyrol.”

“Tyrol . . . ?”

“Giuseppe can go back to Naples. We can get a direct flight to Verona, and drive from
there. I want to get out of the south, just for a while.”

“Okay . . . okay. Tyrol. You have a house there, a schloss.”

I remember: South Tyrol. Of course. I have never forgotten that dreamy wine. The Moscato
Rosa.

“It is peaceful and it is beautiful,” he says, staring out at one dilapidated building
with half its façade torn away. “It is safe and far away. And then,” he turns to me,
“then we are going to Venice.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SIX

B
Y THE TIME
we land at Verona airport, my nerves are calmed. Somewhat. Outside the little terminal,
Marc is greeted by a friend—or acquaintance—or servant—and given the keys to another
car: a small and fast BMW. It occurs to me how every transaction in life is made so
much smoother by Marc’s immense wealth; yet he made that money by fighting the mafias.
And in the end he had to kill someone.

I want to run away forever. Yet I also fiercely want to kiss him. Instead, I silently
climb in the car and we make the drive to Tyrol.

At first the landscape is desultory; north Italian suburbia. Carrefour supermarkets
and concrete canals; lots of commuters looking hot and irritable as the sun begins
to set. It is in the eighties here, even at eight
P.M
. The dusty sunburned plains of Veneto. Parched and brown. Like me. I feel parched
and brown. I want sex. I want to resolve the tension in my head with sex. It is the
only way I can get over this. The only way I can really get back to Marc.

Sex.

I wonder if I should just lean across and kiss him. But I can’t. Somehow. I don’t
know why. So I shall just sit here, wanting him, but watching the cypress trees whir
past. Watching the Alfa Romeo showrooms, and the shallow hills.

But then I see the mountains ahead. My eyes widen. Some of them are snow-capped; immense
and mighty, crystalline and glittering. Signs for Trento and Bolzano tell me we must
be getting close; we are certainly roaring up the autostrada, driving straight along
an enormous river valley as the mountains encroach on either side.

“It’s stunning,” I say, gazing out the car window. These are practically the first
words I have spoken in two hours. They are almost reflexive: an instinctive reaction
to the sudden splendor. I still want Marc.

“Just wait,
cara mia;
it gets better,” says Marc. And he pushes the pedal and we overtake a long Czech
truck as he races us north. And as we accelerate, I see what he means.

The landscape is now perfect, like a fairy tale. Vivid green terraces of vines and
apple orchards ascend to cliffs where dreaming castles shine in the shadows and the
sun; above and beyond the castles, and the ancient hilltop villages, are the mountains.

“The Dolomites.”

I have never seen mountains like this; they look unreal, like a gifted child’s idea
of mountains: enormous spires of gray and glacial rock loom ten or fifteen thousand
feet in the air. Quite vertical. Like stone-and-ice pinnacles. Like cathedrals waiting
in the sun. Waiting for what?

“I stayed here a lot when I was a boy,” Marc says. “My mother and sister still live
here.”

He is taking us off the autostrada; now we are threading down a narrow country road,
through more vineyards, where old men stoop and examine grapes; through lush emerald
farms where horses canter in meadows, past painted old villages with medieval churches.
I am trying not to think about Marc and me naked. Perhaps I have become obsessive.
Can you have a sexual psychosis? Have the Mysteries made me oversexual?

Abruptly, I realize.

“All the signs are in German.”

“We have passed the linguistic watershed,” he says. And I try not to look at the way
his muscled arms turn the steering wheel, or the way his stubble underlines the certain
firmness of his jawline, or the way his cheekbones slant quite dangerously, predatorily,
and aggressively. I can imagine that handsome face wrought with anger, killing someone.
I can. Yet I still want to kiss him. This is surely wrong.

“Ten miles back they speak mostly Italian, here it is German, yet they are still Italian
by nationality. Italians who park sensibly.”

Another sudden turn takes us onto a long graveled drive. I gawp. It ends at a very
large and handsome old house, covered with vines and bougainvillea, and boasting a
large and battlemented tower in the corner.

“Schloss Roscarrick. My mother and sister are away; they will be here tomorrow.”

He spins the car, flamboyantly, on the gravel, and parks in front of the big main
door. A middle-aged man comes hurrying out. He is in shorts and sandals and a T-shirt,
yet I gather from his demeanor that he is a servant.

“
Guten tag,
Klaus,” Marc says, climbing out. The servant smiles, takes the key and nods, very
politely, my way. Then the servant says something, apologetically, about working in
the garden. At least, this is what I surmise, from “
garten,
” as my German is pretty poor. Marc nods and happily accepts the apology. He gestures
at the luggage in the back. “
Ein uhr? Im Zweiten Schalfzimmer. Danke,
Klaus.”

Marc takes my hand. He leads me to the big door. I cannot bear this anymore. As soon
as the door shuts behind us, I reach for his face and kiss him.

He does not require encouragement. He actually lifts me off my feet, and we kiss.
And kiss again.

“Marc,” I say, half crying, half smiling, “I think you have to fuck me. Or I am going
to run away.”

He drops me to the floor, and starts ripping at my clothes. But I am also ripping
at his. His shirt, I tear at it. I want to bite his bare and toned chest. Make him
bleed. I want to see him aroused by me. I want that power over him.

“This way,” he says, pulling me roughly and gorgeously by the hand. “The bedroom is
up here.”

The stairs are huge and wide and grand. And he is trying to strip me even as we ascend.
Pushing him away, I kick off one shoe, then another. Now I am barefoot. And running.
He is running after me. Tearing off his own shirt, throwing it over the balustrade.
It flutters in the warm, soft air, a pennant of his lust.

“Where is the bedroom?”

“In here,” he says. I turn to him. The bedroom door opens to his hand. We step inside
and the door slams shut behind. His shirt is off. My dress is pulled away. I am in
my underwear, panties and bra. I want to be naked for him, naked with him. But I am
hot—sweaty and hot after that long drive, and the flight. I want to be clean.

“I need a shower.”

“Then let me wash you.”

He picks me up, and carries me, draped facedown over his shoulder, into a big and
bright and fabulously modern bathroom. Steel glitters everywhere. I gaze around. Marc
paid for this. He paid for all of this.

Now my Lord Roscarrick sets me down on the bathroom floor. He unclasps my bra and
peels down my panties; I am naked, impatient and perspiring.

“So wash me.”

Once more he picks me up, like an ice skater hoisting his partner, and he takes me
and he drops me in the shower. He turns a steel dial and warm water comes gushing
out. Shirtless, Marc takes the showerhead, on its bending steel hose, and he begins
to bathe me. His hands are soaped and warm. It is the same soap he uses in Naples.
The soap from Firenze. The scent is divine, and Marc is cleaning me.

He gushes water over my feet, soaping my toes, carefully, sweetly, elegantly. He lifts
my feet and washes them clean, toe by toe. When the washing is done he kisses them.
And sucks one, then two. Now he drops my feet and he foams and waters my calves, my
knees, my thighs. He is studious, dedicated. Diligently he massages my ass with soap
suds and clean hot water, and the pleasure throbs somewhere within me; but I wait,
and watch, as he turns me around and directs the hot and lovely water on my pubic
hair, and my sex, his hands slip between my wet, soapy thighs. And this is too much.

“Get in the shower with me.”

“In a minute,
cara mia,
just a minute.”

He is soaping my breasts now. Frowning, massaging, covering me with this scented and
angelic foam, his soft hands, his hard hands. Lifting the showerhead above my head
he jets the water onto my hair and my face; I close my eyes as the water sluices the
very last of the sweat from my face. My eyes are shut tightly. And then I can feel
his soft mouth on my lips. Kissing me quite hard.

Marc is in the shower. He has kicked off his jeans. He is naked with me and his erection
is there. I can feel it against me. I open my eyes. I reach down and hold his cock,
his adorable thickness, in my hands. I take some of the foam and I wash his desire.
Reverent and careful. I love his erection. I love him. I love his desire for me. How
could I doubt him?

As soon as he has washed himself down, he flicks the water off, and we step onto towels,
and we dry each other. Then we look at each other and we actually
run
into the bedroom, naked and clean and young and in love. And ready to fuck. Like
normal lovers. But better. But worse. But wait.

We are on the bed. He wants to take me. I stop him, and shake my head. Then I reach
out a hand, and I grasp him
there
in my hand. And now I look him in the eye. And I say, “You killed a man.”

He nods, his blue eyes glittering.

“I killed a man.”

“You had to do it?”

“I had to do it.”

“I can forgive you . . .”

“Can you?”

I grasp his cock tighter. His eyes narrow. Our faces are inches apart.

“Yes. I can. Because I love you. Roscarrick, I fucking love you. And I wish I didn’t.
But I do.”

It is the first time I have said it. One or two tears are rolling down my face. I
let go of Marc. I lie back on the bed.

“Now do it, do it, take me, please, before—before I change my mind—before it falls
apart—before I give up and run away.”

He nods. Then he stoops down to lick me. But I don’t want this. Reaching out again,
I take his face in my hands, and I lift him up; I kiss him on the lips, his red, fine
lips, and then I kiss him again.

“Marc, I am ready.”

Wordless, he pushes me onto my back, he slaps my thighs open. And then he leans forward
and looks me hard and commandingly in the eyes and he smiles very faintly—and enters
me hard.

The sense of relief is
intense
. I am grinding my teeth together. This is painful. This is brilliant. He drives his
cock into me again. And again. I am so very wet. And not from the shower. He thrusts,
and I gasp. Out loud. Almost crying again. This is vivid, this is what I want: nothing
gentle, not now, not after today. No languid foreplay. Just this. Just him. Hard.
Possessing me. All of me.

We fuck each other. That is the only way to describe it. We are fucking each other.
Taking what we want from each other. Devouring and appetitive. I kiss him on the shoulder,
magnificent and hard. Then I bite him. Hard. And kiss him again.

He gasps.

“You.”

I scratch my nails down his back as he enters me again, deep and deeper. He gasps.
I know this is painful. I want it to be painful. For him as well as me. I gaze into
his eyes as he rises and closes, entering me, once and again. And I say, “I love you,
you bastard.”

I scratch again. He thrusts again. I caress the cruel and tender beauty of his jawline.

“I hate you but I love you.”

“X,
X
. . .”

He lifts my legs so my feet are pressed on his chest, even as he fucks me. My small
and bare white feet. Pressed on his hard, suntanned, and dark-haired chest. He fucks
me. Then he separates my feet, his hands hard around my ankles, and he moves my legs
higher, doubling them back, almost painfully, like he wants to go even farther into
me. Deeper, so I am crushed underneath him.

I am submitting. He is dominant. He has my feet pushed so far back I can feel the
wall with my toes. I like this, I like the subtle pain; I let him ride me, drive me,
control me. Do what he wants with me. He is close to coming, I can tell by the angry
beauty in his eyes. Abruptly, he lets my legs fall. And he relaxes for a second, pausing,
waiting.

Now I come back at him.

I bite the skin on his shoulder as he enters me again. That heavy, masculine shoulder.
These murderous arms. These lethal hands. This duelist. Marc Roscarrick.

“From behind.”

Who am I? Giving orders?

Marc obeys. He turns me over. In that balletic way, twirling me in his hands, spinning
me round. Like I am a toy, or a favorite tool. Then he opens my thighs again. Oh,
oh yes. Now we are nearly done. I sink my face into the pillow. Knowing what comes
next. Delighted by what comes next.

But what comes next is different. He thrusts inside me eight or nine times, dominant
and hard, and gorgeously deep—but then he withdraws. He reaches under my stomach and
picks me up, bodily, and carries me across the room.

To the window. And the big window is wide open. I can see the mountains and the forests,
and the darkening blue evening sky. The mountains are red, glowing gorgeous red, in
the setting sun. Marc drapes me over the window ledge. It is cushioned with leather.
I am facing out, at the mountains. He is behind me.

Then he enters me again. He is fucking me over the window ledge. From behind. I can
feel the cooling sweet evening air on my breasts. I can smell the pine forests and
the mountains. I can see the glaciers of the Dolomites. I can feel his fingers on
my clitoris. I can feel his desire inside me. I can feel the tears on my face. I can
feel the shudder of my orgasm approaching. Like horses in the distance. Thundering.