Maestra (14 page)

‘Do you want to fuck, now?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I want to fuck now, Jan.’

So many twists had brought me to this particular moment. I knew that I might never get free, that James’s arms might still twine about me, deadly as a siren’s, and drag me to the depths. But for a few moments, I could be liberated, I could stop time.

I kept my eyes on his as I lay back again on the cushions. Holding his gaze, I unfastened my bikini top and dropped it next to me. He tilted his chin in a minute gesture of acquiescence. I undid the ribbon ties on either side of the bikini bottoms, lifted them off me and placed them with the top.

‘Show me.’

Slowly, perfectly slowly, I let my thighs open. From where he sat, my cunt was on a level with his eyes. I dipped the middle finger of my right hand into my mouth, then trailed it down between my breasts, across my stomach and between my legs. When I held it towards his mouth it was slick with my juice. He rose to his feet, easy on the swaying boards of the boat. He had a beautiful cock, thick around the base, the straining tip tight as watered silk.

‘Turn over. I want to see your arse.’

I had a brief flash of Jada Stevens before I flipped over on all fours. He put a hand between my shoulder blades and pushed me down so that my spine curved back to meet him, and slid his fingers inside me.

‘Move. I want to see your hips.’

I pushed against the hardness of his hand, swaying a slow figure eight. It felt so good I thought I might cum just from that. I turned and took the head in my mouth, slid it deep into my throat, let it rest there. It was thumping. I sucked him again and again, letting my nails play across his tight balls, then withdrew, looking up into his eyes, letting him look at the swollen tip against my lips.

‘Fuck me. I want you to fuck me.’

He got on his knees behind me, buried his hand inside my cunt once more, spreading his fingers at the top.

‘Move. Move your ass. That’s right. Show me. That’s how you get me hard. Move it like that.’

‘Give me your cock now.’

I caught the tip between the lips of my pussy, manoeuvred the head into me, then paused, clenching my muscles.

‘Be still,’ I told him. I pulled myself forward a little, releasing him, then took the head back into me, corkscrewing, taking him deeper each time until I could feel his balls against the soaked lips of my cunt.

‘Go faster now.’

He grabbed my hips, pulled me tight, gasping against him, started to work me.

‘Fuck. This is perfect. Don’t stop.’

‘You like that. You like it hard?’

‘Yeah. I like it hard. Just – don’t – stop.’

The boat was rocking crazily; a wash of water splashed us both. I could feel my wet hair heavy down my back. He grabbed it, pulling my head back so that my back curved deeper and his cock hit the sweet spot and I was going to cum, begging him to go harder.

‘Now, with me. Cum. I want you to flood me.’

He slapped my ass as he came, and that got me there, that and the short stabs of his fat cock as it pulsed three great gouts of cum up me. I screamed and ground my cunt against him, then we both fell forward, all his weight on my back, as the boat swayed slowly back to stillness. Then we ate the figs ravenously and drank some more wine, and he asked me if I wanted to go again, and I did, me on top this time, his hands gripping the muscles at the side of my waist, bringing me down on him over and over while I stroked my clit until I came and lay over him, his cock hammering up at me until he was ready, then he pushed me back, knelt between my lolling thighs and gave it to me across my mouth. I licked his cum from my lips. Salty, viscous, mineral. Then we slept a while under the sun, hand in hand, and then it was time to go back to the boat.

It had been a fantastic matinee, but we both knew, wordlessly, that there wasn’t going to be an evening performance. I knew Jan wouldn’t kiss and tell. We barely spoke for the rest of my time on the
Mandarin
, and that was just fine.

12

The summer migration across the Mediterranean moves to a rhythm as mysterious as a skein of geese in flight. A rumoured sighting of celebrity, a Kate or a Kanye, will have the unwieldy tubs of the wealthy suddenly nosing their way to a particular bar or beach, indistinguishable from its fellows: the owner will triple the prices on the chalkboard and for a few days or a week the customers will glow with the elusive fairy dust of imagined fame, the knowledge that this place, and this place only, is the right place to be. Then the rumour will skip once more across the waves, and the boats will tack clumsily off in another futile pursuit, leaving the locals to a hyenas’ feast of scraps.

This year, it was Giacomo’s near Gaeta, a baroque town on the coast south of Rome. In the nineteenth century, Pope Pius IX had promulgated the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception after meditating in the Golden Grotto of the Church of Santissima Annunziata there, and Tris announced our dinner reservation with similar awe. As we trailed up the uneven cobblestoned alleyway from the harbour to the restaurant, there was definitely a sense of mystery in the air. Before the night was out, someone was surely going to dance on a table. Giacomo’s did have an enchanting view across the bay: a terrace was built out dramatically on a promontory above the town, above a cliff draped in creamy yellow jasmine, creating a flying carpet of scent.

After we had played with the tuna tartare and grilled sea bass with fennel (if I saw another sea bass soon, I’d have to stick a fork in my eye), Steve drew me aside to look out at the harbour and the massive fortress of the one-time kings of Aragon.

‘Having fun?’ he asked dutifully.

‘Of course, darling. It’s beautiful. You?’

‘Sure,’ he replied unconvincingly.

Steve may have been fundamentally uninterested in people, but I couldn’t afford to be. I had to sweat what few assets I had, which meant being alert to the tiniest calibrations of this strange new world, to work out where I could find a foothold in its nexus. I scanned the view, looking for something to liven Steve up.

‘That’s Balensky’s boat.’

I couldn’t have done better if I’d announced that there was a run on the rouble.

‘
He’s
here?’

‘Guess so. The boat anyway. I saw it back in Cannes.’

I’d never seen Steve look nervous, but he was suddenly shifty, fiddling aimlessly with the permanent pacifier of his phone.

‘I want to meet him.’

‘Why?’

‘Not here. Later, when we get back to the boat.’

I was intrigued, something of a novelty in Steve’s company, but I kept quiet until we were safely in his bedroom. As I stooped to unfasten my Lanvin wedges in just my knickers, I realised I’d stopped noticing or caring whether Steve looked at me or not. We could have been married. I slipped on an embroidered Antik Batik kurta and patted the bed next to me.

‘So. What’s this all about?’

‘I need some information.’

‘And you want me to get it?’

Of course he did, and of course it was majorly out of order. And then, with the same sudden rush of clarity I’d experienced back on the dock at Portofino, I saw that I had been adrift, just allowing the days to unroll. Maybe a shrink would have said it was delayed shock, but I preferred to see it as getting into character. Steve had never asked anything of me. But this could make him vulnerable, put him in my debt. This was a tipping point, a chance to change the game. So far, I’d been a passenger on this trip, but now I wondered if I could start to feel like a player.

‘Steve, you’re asking me to do something totally fucking illegal.’

‘Tell me about it.’

I sat up from my nest of pillows. ‘No, you tell me. I might need to tell it to the judge, after all. Why do you need this?’

Steve looked weary. ‘It’s just . . . he’s here, in Italy. I wanted to check up on something, something I’d heard, that’s all.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll tell you when I know.’

‘Well,’ I said carefully. ‘For a start he needs to know you’re here, too. Put it on Twitter if you have to.’

‘But I don’t do Twitter.’

‘Fine. Get Tris to call his PA then.’

‘But what should he say?’

Oh God. I reached for my phone and googled Balensky. ‘He collects art,’ I said as I held out the screen to Steve. ‘Just like you,’ I added encouragingly. ‘Get Tris to say you want to pick his brains, that’ll flatter him.’

‘Brilliant.’

No shit, Sherlock. I took a deep breath, and suggested a few refinements to Steve’s plan. To leverage the trade between us, I was going to need knowledge, not to mention a decoy. Steve seemed pretty impressed with my solution.

*

It was a simple ruse, but it worked as I had hoped. The following afternoon, Steve joined me in the plunge pool.

‘Have you got an evening dress, Lauren – you know, something long?’ I’d been on the boat a month, and an evening gown was about the only thing I hadn’t yet bought.

‘Not with me, no. Why, darling?’

‘We’re invited to a dinner.’ As ever, Steve had half an eye on Bloomberg on the flat screen installed just above the water line. ‘Black tie,’ he added, morosely.

‘Where?’

‘On Balensky’s boat.’ He raised what he obviously thought was a dashing eyebrow.

Result.

‘We’re meeting him tomorrow, near Ponza.’

‘Sounds grand.’

Above us on the sundeck, I could sense Carlotta pricking up her ears, or maybe her tits. Her nipples probably had built-in oligarch radar. I flipped over and swam a couple of side strokes to bring me next to him.

‘I could pick something up.’

‘Yeah, you need something smart. Get Tris to sort it.’

Carlotta’s face popped over the rail. ‘I hate you,’ she mouthed sulkily, condemned to a romantic supper for two with her beloved.

‘Get over it, Cinderella,’ I called. ‘It’s your lucky day. We’re going shopping.’

*

Like all the charming fishing villages we’d passed on our way down the coast, the port at Ponza, the tiny strip of an island where the Romans go to play, no longer took the fishing part that literally. Most of the ramshackle ochre and yellow houses tumbling down to the sea contained million-euro
pieds à terre
, though a few still displayed washing at the windows and old ladies gazing placidly from their doorways. Maybe they were actresses sponsored by the government to give the place some colour. And even the sleepiest village square would contain a boutique or two where the women of the floating tribe of Eurowealth could pop in to make an offering. I pulled Carlotta into the nearest shop, which featured a window display of thousand-euro La Perla bikinis.

‘You need a dress. You’re going to be Steve’s girlfriend tonight.’

‘You mean, like, a threesome?’ I didn’t have the impression that this was a particularly novel request.

It was a struggle not to roll my eyes. ‘Duh. No. Just for this party. You don’t have to do anything except look devoted. Now, how about this?’

‘What about Hermann? He won’t like it.’

‘Tris’ll square it. He’ll have a fine time, don’t worry.’

Carlotta picked out a full-length white Marc Jacobs shift with the tiniest of spaghetti straps that made her breasts look more improbably gravity-defying than ever. With her hair down and simple jewellery she would look like a Fellini goddess. I chose a vintage-style long-sleeved lurex dress in gold, much more covered up at the front, but scooped out and draped down to the coccyx behind. We found nude python Giambattista Valli sandals for us both – I assumed that a black-tie evening would dispense with the no-shoe nonsense – and two Fendi python clutches, emerald and silver for Carlotta, pink and gold for me. Carlotta watched appraisingly as I peeled off just over 7,000 euro in 500-euro notes.

‘He really likes you, Steve.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Still, whatever. You want to get good stuff you can keep.’

Before we went back to the Mandarin we stopped at the café and snarfed down two
pizzettes
and a
gelato affogato
, swimming in Baileys and espresso. Carlotta speculatively pinched a fold of skin above her elbow.

‘I’m always starving. Hermann hates me to eat, but two prawns and a piece of watermelon is not lunch, you know? When I’m old, I’m going to get like totally fucking fat.’

*

As we boarded the tender that evening. Carlotta was really getting into character, holding Steve’s arm and playing with his collar. He actually looked quite handsome in a dinner jacket, though at the last minute he’d defiantly left off the tie. I hissed at Carlotta to take off her engagement ring and she whipped it into the Fendi. She’d happily have chucked it into the sea, I thought, if there was a chance of her method acting becoming reality. Hermann had been diplomatically removed by Tristan for a scuba excursion, a night dive to some famously inaccessible caverns, from which Carlotta reluctantly had to be excluded as she didn’t have her PADI scuba certificate. Maybe I’d better see about doing that.

‘So did you hear about that father and son last year in the caves at Capri? They got, like, stuck, and the father had to decide whether to save himself and leave the son or die with him, so like –’

‘Jesus, Carlotta,’ I said, ‘It’s like being on holiday with Edgar Allen Poe.’

She looked blank.

‘Nothing. You look gorgeous. We’ll have a great time.’

The trip in the Riva took a while, as Balensky’s boat was moored further out, in deeper water. Five decks loomed up at us; it seemed the size of a shopping mall, so huge that we drove inside it into an inner dock and were shown into a copper-lined lift to whizz us up to the deck. I’d had many moments since being on the
Mandarin
when I wanted to freeze-frame my surroundings, to look at myself and remember incredulously how it felt to be hauling my briefcase along the Piccadilly line. This was one of those moments.

The biggest of the decks was decorated with garlands of pink orchids, twined around the rails and the staircases. Globes of heavily sherbet-scented pink roses formed an aisle along which waiters stood with magnums of pink Krug. Carlotta and I refused grilled tartines with caviar of truffle and tomato confit and tiny dishes of pink lobster bolognaise. Balensky was waiting at the top of the aisle, in a midnight blue silk jacket with padded shoulders that was working overtime to disguise the fact that he was practically a dwarf. His sallow skin hung in wattles from his Botoxed forehead, which sported a few strands of carefully woven in, weirdly henna-coloured hair. Maybe this was the one thing money couldn’t buy, I thought. No matter how much wedge you threw at it, a restored scalp still looked like a nuclear disaster. I thought Balensky must be in his eighties, but his face was timelessly malicious. He supposedly had a wife and children stashed away somewhere, although braver Web gossips also claimed that he gave boys-only parties at his restored Roman villa outside Tangier. Balensky shook Steve’s hand with a politician’s enthusiastic pump, then bowed over Carlotta’s wrist as Steve introduced her. I hovered behind, the spare friend, but made sure I turned my hip so he could glimpse my naked back as he greeted me.