Carnaro

1: Neu Mitteleuropa

July 2002.

I saw her for the first time in the hotel lobby where we were registering for the conference -- a heavy-set, early middle-aged woman, her brown hair short and tightly-permed, wearing a blue trouser suit. The jacket was military-style with two rows of brass buttons on its front, giving her the look of a Civil War-era Union officer. She caught me staring and looked at me without expression. Instead of looking away, I met and held her gaze. There was something in her demeanour that suggested a distaste for pretence. I figured she would appreciate the lack of the same in my actions.

A mutual friend introduced us that evening in the bar. After an initial awkwardness, possibly due to the scene in the lobby earlier, we got to talking. Her name was Martina and she and her husband were very significant players in the property rackets. Their names came up in the business pages occasionally -- they were part of the new class of über-developers, with interests ranging from Eastern Europe to South-East Asia. When I asked her about it, she name-dropped cities like the globe was their personal fiefdom -- Budapest, Baku, Podgorica, Pattaya. Business was good, she said, and would remain so as long as the world kept turning out people with more money than sense. Amen.

It turned out that I knew her husband and she knew my ex-wife. She had met Jane at a business breakfast some years ago, while I had been at college at the same time as Mick. He had been a year behind me and I remembered him as a major irritant, a spoiled loudmouth who thought the world owed him a living. As to what she saw in him, the answer was in the girth of the stone on her ring finger.

I found her pretty typical of a woman who had made her way in a male-dominated world -- sharp, no-nonsense, her self-confidence bordering on arrogance. In her line of work, a woman had to be all of that and more if she didn't want to sink without trace. A conventional woman, then. And yet, as we talked, I got the sense that there was a lot more to her. There were these weird lacunae in our conversation that intrigued me. Her accent was mid-Atlantic, an affectation that usually bugged me, but not in this case. The tone of her voice did something to me, as did certain of her ancillary features -- the angle at which her eyebrows were arched, the severe indentations at the edge of her mouth, the single roll of flesh beneath her chin. There were better looking women than Martina present that evening but none of them evinced the powerful sensuality that she did.

'I'm just back from Ljubljana,' she said. 'A holiday, I was told. You know what we did for most of the week? Networking. I needed a holiday once we were done with it all.'

'No RnR?' I said.

'Some. Some of us had more...opportunity than others, shall we say. But I'm not complaining. We made some great contacts. Exciting times ahead.'

When you've been in the Finance game for as long as I have, you develop a sixth sense for when a pitch is on the way. I knew Martina was gearing up to something. She was a smart woman -- she would have done her research and discovered that my outfit had a lot of capital invested in that part of the world. It was definitely coming. As to what it would be...

I was wrong. We parted a few minutes later and I didn't see her again for the remainder of the conference. But I needn't have doubted my instincts. A fortnight or so later, I received an e-mail from her requesting a meeting with regard to what she called a "significant investment opportunity."

Then it got strange.

"In light of the unique set of factors surrounding this venture, the representative will appreciate the need for a degree of discretion." In other words, we're up to something shady so keep this to yourself. Under normal circumstances, such an offer would have ended up in my Recycle Bin faster than you could say 'Balkan Mafia.' Normal circumstances, however, didn't include Martina, who I was keen to see again.

We set up a meeting for the following week. I suggested a hotel that I thought would be convenient for us both but she insisted that I come to her house.

'I'm sorry if you think I'm being over-cautious but there are good reasons for all this cloak and dagger,' she said to me on the phone. 'Who have you told about this meeting?'

'Nobody,' I said. 'My secretary knows I have a meeting but I haven't told her who. Martina, I have to ask. Are you looking to involve me in something illegal? Because if that's the case, I'll have to pass.'

'It's not illegal,' she said after a pause, 'but there is a certain element of risk...Look, all will be revealed. We're still on, aren't we?'

The breathlessness of her tone made it impossible for me to refuse. I promised her I'd be there.

*

'Mark. I need to be straight with you. My running into you at the conference wasn't an accident. I needed to talk to you myself. To see if what they say about you is true.'

We were sitting facing each other at the kitchen table in Mick and Martina's converted farmhouse. Martina watched my reaction to her confession with a tell-neutral demeanour. Had I heard her right?

She rearranged herself on her chair. The flesh of her thorax was scorched earth after years of exposure to foreign sun, hung with a length of fat red wooden beads that reminded me of a sex toy I had once watched emerge glistening from between her cunt lips of a former girlfriend.

'And what do they say?' I sipped my coffee, enjoying the throb in my groin.

'That you're Mister High-Risk. That you thrive on hazard. And that you always make money. Let me ask you a question. Property. And spare me the sucker talk. Where are we in ten years time?'

'Shit creek,' I said. 'The whole thing is going to pop. It's only a question of when. And ten years, you know, might be a bit generous.'

'So we understand each other.'

For an instant the room was frozen, unfamiliar, as if we had both emerged at the same time from the same stupor. To entertain sentiments so contrary to market wisdom, never mind speaking them aloud, was akin to heresy in the circles in which she and I moved. It was never done. Martina fanned our mutual panic by continuing, 'We're dangerously exposed. We need to diversify or we're going to lose everything.'

'But that's not going to happen,' I said. 'I've studied your set-up. There are things we can do to...'

'Mark, please. I'm not some groundling fretting about her Alicante shitbox. Look at this.'

She took a picture from a folder and smoothed it out on the table.

'You see that villa? That's ours. It's in Istria. Pure sucker-bait. I could flip it. I could sell it right now if I wanted. But we both know that property is bust. The trick is getting in and out at the right time. So what's next? Buy, sell, speculate. Everything has a shelf life. Almost everything.'

It started to rain heavily outside, the wind flinging droplets against the glass like handfuls of gravel.

'July,' I said.

She smiled and tapped the photo with her fingernail.

'What's the first thing that comes into your head when you look at that?' she said.

'Desire,' I said.

'Exactly. The infinite stuff. And that's the future.'

'What exactly are we talking about here?' I said.

'A thing of beauty. We sell desire. No commodities, no interlocuters. The thing itself.'

She handed me a mock-up of a brochure cover; jet black, and a slogan in red:

CARNARO everything is permitted

'I've spent the best part of the last five years in Central Europe,' she said. 'We have property in Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria. So we have a physical presence there, right? An existing bridgehead. Add in human capital in the form of connections. I mean people who know how to do business and with the clout to get business done. Now, what have we got here? July, like you say. Thousands of people looking out of windows at the July rain and dreaming. Dreaming about this.'

She picked up the picture of the villa.

'But when they dream about this, what's really going on? Desire, like you say, but desire for what? Their lives are squalid, tedious. Shitty jobs, fat, suicidal kids, flat-lined relationships. And in the midst of all this, their psychic boltholes. Romance, porno...Look at the internet statistics. Look at what people are really doing online. And that's where we come in. Everything is permitted.'

'Sex tourism?' I said.

'That's only one aspect of it,' she said. 'The possibilities are endless. We're already letting several of our properties as sets for porn shoots. We can cut out the middleman. Carnaro will produce and distribute its own product. Tailor-made fantasies at a reasonable price.'

'It's...'

I didn't know what to say. What she was talking about was both crazy and repulsive. Bridgeheads, human capital...I was no stranger to that part of the world and I knew the kind of human garbage she meant. Pimps, rapists and the brutalized peasant girls they traded in, fuck-dolls for the delectation of piss and sodomy obsessed German punters. On the other hand, from the point of view of utility, it was hard to argue with the logic of what she was selling. I'd done some speculative research in the area myself and I knew she was right. The woman knew how to make a pitch.

She leaned back in her chair, her face set in a pout. The hardness in my crotch was not just for her flesh. She was utterly corrupt in mind, body and soul and the prospect excited me as only an illicit pleasure can.

'High risk enough?' She touched the beads at her neck. 'You have the balls. I saw it in you from the off.'

'I'd need to know the particulars,' I said.

My shirt collar felt like it was strangling me and I loosened it with a finger, to her apparent delight. Her lips were greasy with pink gloss, its sheen reminiscent of secretions, sweet and toxic, that lure insects to their death upon the petals of predatory flowers.

'How does all of this sit with Mick?' I said.

'This is a man who believes that Social Welfare is theft and that the non-productive should be sterilized,' she said. 'Trust me, Mick would never let something as inessential as ethics get in the way of making a buck.'

'And he's right,' I said. I reached across the table and placed my hand on hers. 'You're right. It's beautiful.'

She didn't flinch. I watched the blood rush into her face, an itch like coke bugs breaking out upon my flesh. The stone of her wedding ring nudged my finger, goading me, daring me to take the next step. There were safer ways of initiating a business venture than fucking a prospective partner but in this case, there was no alternative.

We stood up at the same time, Martina exclaiming as her hip bumped against the corner of the table. I felt the tail-end of her cry upon my lips as I pushed my mouth against hers, its sweet distress awakening something terrible in me. Her body felt tense and angular against mine, a thing from which all frailty had been banished, consistent with the inorganic taint of the hot breath I lapped up -- her taste was that of a vast breaker's yard, a mass grave of auto parts and obsolete computer hardware.

I pulled her sweater over her head and unhooked the cups of her bra while she spat my name into my mouth, her hand at my crotch, jacking me off through my slacks. My free hand squeezed her face, the thumb smudging down the sticky grossness of her lower lip. Her eyes were hateful slits, the cunts of animals, as I forced her on to her knees. Though I could feel her crushed breasts sliding against me as she inched down and the lacquer that made her hair like fibre-glass beneath the fingers that guided her on her way; though I could taste the slime of her saliva coating my mouth and smell the perfume mixed with cunt that embracing her had imparted to my clothes; though I gorged myself on the sensual overload, it was nothing to compare with the buzz I got from the aesthetic suggested by the postures our bodies had assumed. My cock was out, unleashed by her, full of potential violence, like a swung black-jack about to make contact with and smash apart the bones of her face. The spaces between the latter were full of a vicious and fascinating greed, its essence concentrated in the mouth that surrounded my glans. Her tongue was fat, displaying the same whorish glibness and superficiality in intimacy as it did in speech. I took her head and pushed it down, smearing her face along the length of my shaft. The ruby-painted tips of her fingers shimmered unnaturally around the rim of my sac as she licked its grotesque flesh. I crushed her face in profile against my thigh in an embrace that was both tender and brutal, deriving as much pleasure from the bruising clash of her eye socket against the bone of my pelvis as I did from her mouth.

Everything was permitted. I felt a surge of absolute mastery as I put her in position, telling her to lower her hands. The athlete I had once been was reborn in the precision of my hips, informing the rhythmic and sure motion that thrust my cock repeatedly into her mouth. Her eyes streamed black, swollen incredulously, as if she hadn't thought such a thing possible. An ever expanding web of white slop dangled from the underside of her chin and I managed to capture it just as it was on the point of falling. I took my cock from her mouth, cradling her muck upon the palm of my other hand, masturbating hard as I watched her lick it up with nauseating relish. She pulled me down to her and kissed me so that I could taste it, plunge my tongue into its thick and hateful heart. I licked the pools of salty blackness beneath her eyes and the gritty mess of disintegrated foundation and body fluids on her chin, trying in vain to get a handle on her face. All at once she was glorious and debased, proud and craven, guileless and calculating. Faced with such infinite unknowability, I felt the quickening of a portion of my lust into panic. I took her face in both hands and pulled back the flesh of her temples. What looked back at me was madness. The bitch was insane and I could feel the workings of its contagion on my senses.

She stood up and wriggled out of her slacks before helping me remove my own. I heaved her on to the kitchen table in a blizzard of dislodged files and paperwork, A4 sheets spelling out fantasies of confidence and control wafting to the floor like handfuls of confetti flung in honour of our union. The table creaked as she raised her legs to offer me the best point of access, both of her hard, yellow calves crossed beside the left side of my face. I clasped both of her ankles in one hand, the other guiding my cock into the vulva she held open, both of us exhaling at the instant of first contact.

I had expected Martina's cunt to be inhospitable, but what I felt myself sinking into was the inviolate meat of a teenage girl. And it was there in her eyes as well, a combination of anguish and delight that I had last seen in the eyes of a young German whore I had ordered up one night in Frankfurt during a trouble-shooting visit. Thus, I didn't think it uncanny when Martina began to sigh in a language I didn't recognize but which sounded Slavic. We were unmistakably creatures of Western Europe, she and I. Our naked flesh spoke of a state of physical and spiritual malnourishment, of incubation under conditions of bland temperateness. But in the furious blood and avidity of our genitals, in the angle at which our bodies were joined and the barbarity dripping from her mouth and mine, I witnessed our rebirth as citizens of a new Mitteleuropa; a vast, sleepless city of infinite novelty. All that remained of the otherwise effaced past were those parts deemed to have charm and thus potential. Memory was a drain upon libidinal reserves that could be expended more usefully.

I moved an inch or two deeper inside her, bending forward to kiss her breasts for the first time. She gnawed at the thread of a portion of necklace she had taken into her mouth, her stomach collapsed into a chasm between the opposing ranges of her ribs and pelvis. Though I was glutted to bursting on her physicality, it was this void in the centre of her that I felt most intensely. Her flesh, from upper thighs to breasts, seemed transparent, affording me a hallucinatory glimpse of the works beneath her skin -- the meat and sinew of her thighs sweating with oxygenated blood, the stem of her clitoris ablaze with transmitted and received impressions above a dense root system of neurons, the walls of her vagina hot and elastic around the fully intruded length of my cock.

I withdrew myself with deliberate langour and felt her hand upon the one I held myself with, eager to assist in my re-insertion. The kiss we shared in the process was ravenous but with none of the fury that had characterised our initial embraces. Her mouth wanted mine as thoroughly as her cunt wanted my cock, as thoroughly as I wanted every atom of oxygen and drop of saliva in her body. She drew me down against her, winding herself beneath the bulk of my torso, then slapped a hand against either of my buttocks, holding on tight as I began to fuck in earnest; her eyes were black with menace beneath mine, telling me that she was almost there and how she would kill me if I stopped.

Her fingers tautened against my flesh, as did her legs, now swaddling my hips. Locked against her, I felt all of the internal violence of her coming, the stillness of the test range trembling almost imperceptibly in response to the detonation beneath its surface. She gagged on rags of breath, riding her pelvis up against mine as the initial implosion gave way to another. My lips surrounded an ear, breathing into her with the heat and roar of a fire-storm. She almost fell from the table but I managed to hold on to her, spinning our bodies around until we had swapped positions.

The wood of the table was hard under my arse, still warm from the body now sitting astride me. I clasped the bones of her hips, mine arching upwards in concert with her descent. Our bodies docked in mid-air for a brief instant of weightlessness before the mass of her thrust us down, her pelvis boring into mine, forcing me to a depth and a degree of constriction I had never before encountered. She took advantage of her supremacy by grabbing my arms and pinning them to the table by the wrists. Her eyes were cruel as her hips began to ride up and down, giving me a taste of how it would be for one indentured to her; the incessant nature of her demands; the impossibility of satisfying her. The profundity of her evil and lack of empathy thrilled me more than the grip of her cunt and I felt sick with a desire to become a part of them.

She released my hands and swung her upper body erect, then backwards into an arc, her head thrown back, her spine curved into a reaping hook. I placed my palms upon her breasts, succumbing to powerlessness as I felt myself beginning to come. Now it was my turn to experience the lack of substance I had earlier sensed in her. The brute fact of her physicality lorded it over the negation of my own with savage vindication. My hips attempted to jerk upwards only to be restrained by her thighs, ballast-like in contrast to the lightness of the undertaker's fingertips she used to smooth close my eyes. I became one with the come I shot into her, propelled with the same exhilarating velocity into the darkest zones of her interior, the killing floor of her uterus, the drowning pools of her atria, terror and ecstasy revealed to me as different aspects of the same essence. In the distance I could see an exponentially dilating spot of light, more punishingly luminous as it came ever closer, and though I knew that I was going to die in there, the knowledge only made me anticipate the moment of impact all the more. Blast, shock, heat, fire...I intoned the words mentally, like a liturgical response...