“Where’s your fireplace poker?” he asked as he crouched in front of the fire again, apparently not satisfied with its output.
“In the kitchen. I was going to use it to knock you unconscious before I knew it was you.”
“You gave me a key to your house. Don’t be surprised if I use it.”
“I gave you the key so you could feed Moussolini when I was gone on my trips, not so you could raid my refrigerator.”
“You didn’t specify I could only use the key for feeding your cat. And I refuse to call him by that name.” He took his usual seat in the large red and gold armchair with the gilt legs. A chair fit for a king. Probably because it had once belonged to King Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia.
“Moussolini doesn’t care what you call him as long as you feed him,” she said, lifting her small drowsing black and white tuxedo cat out of his basket at the end of the love seat. The cat immediately spied the poinsettia and hopped on the sofa arm. With his one white mitten, Moussilini batted at a red leaf. “Isn’t that right, sweet Mous-Mous?” She tickled his chin whiskers.
“Don’t let him eat that,” Marcus said. “I heard they can poison pets.”
“Holly berries,” she said. “Those are poisonous. Poinsettias aren’t. He’d have to eat dozens of leaves to get sick from a poinsettia.”
Still, Magdalena plucked the cat from the chair arm and scratched his ears. It was an activity Moussi usually enjoyed, except her naughty tyke suddenly noticed his favorite human was in the room. The cat leapt lightly off her lap, trotted across the Persian rug, and jumped into Marcus’s lap.
“Go away,” he said to the cat.
“It’s Christmas Eve. You have to be nice on Christmas Eve. If you can’t have compassion for your fellow man, surely you can have compassion for a cat.”
“He’s shedding on my trousers.”
“It’s what cats do. And you know you love him.”
“I sympathize with him, that’s all,” Marcus said as he stroked the cat between the ears. “He’s named after someone terrible. I’m named after someone terrible. He has to put up with you. I have to put with you. We share many sorrows, don’t we, Mus?”
“Mus?”
“Danish for ‘mouse.’ ”
“You speak Danish. Your first language?”
He cocked his eyebrow at her. “I also speak Swedish and Norwegian and French and Latin and German and Italian and—”
“I only want to know where you’re from. Why don’t you tell me more about your childhood?” she asked. “Why all the secrets?”
“You know enough of my secrets.”
“Never enough,” she said, grinning. “I want all of your secrets.”
“Ask Mus. I told him my secrets in August when you were in Greece, and he and I had the house to ourselves.”
“He’s a cat. You can’t get a straight answer out of a cat. I’ve tried.”
“You know perfectly well you could find out anything you want to know about me. You have your ways,” he said.
Magdalena leaned forward and rested her chin on her hand. “But I don’t want to know your secrets,” she said. “I want you to tell me your secrets. The secrets aren’t the prize. You giving up your secrets to me—that is the prize.”
“You know about Kingsley,” he said.
“He’s only one of your secrets.”
“He’s the only secret that matters.”
She smiled at him. “You want to believe that,” she said. “But you don’t, and neither do I.”
He leaned back in the chair and stroked Moussi from the tips of his ears to the end of his tail. Moussi stretched and preened and purred under the attention.
“My pussy loves you,” she said.
“Mus, are you old enough to be living in this den of iniquity?” he asked the cat.
“Moussi is two years old, which is twenty-five in cat years, which is still older than you are, Bambi.”
“Do you hear what she calls me?” he said, looking down at the cat. “Why do we put up with her?”
“Because I give you both exactly what you need to stay alive—food for him, willing victims for you.”
“She makes a good point, Mus.” Marcus scratched Moussi under the chin and if a cat could smile, this one did. “I wish I could argue with her, but she’d take my willing victims away.”
“No willing victims tonight, I’m afraid. All the kids are home for the holidays.”
“You’re the only madam I know who refers to the women in her employ as ‘the kids.’ It’s somewhat unnerving.”
“I am the only madam you know. Also, I like unnerving people. It’s what I do for a living. Unnerving, undressing, unmanning…”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Did you come here for release tonight? If so, we can call Caterina. She’s home with her lover, and he lives close by.”
“I came because it’s Christmas. And to eat your food. But mostly because it’s Christmas.”
“You knew I’d be alone?”
“I knew I’d be alone.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t play me,” she said. She didn’t like it when Marcus voluntarily showed any vulnerability. She didn’t trust it. It was a game and she was the Game Master around here, not him.
“I like playing people,” he said. “It’s what I do.”
“You won’t make me feel sorry for you. I refuse to feel sorry for you.”
“Then why did you take me in?”
“Because you’re beautiful and rare, and I like looking at beautiful, rare things. As you see…” She waved her hand around the room, at the eighteenth-century Seymour card table, at the van Dyck painting hanging over the fireplace, at the priceless Qianlong jade bowls on the end table. “And this of course.” She stroked one bright red poinsettia leaf. “My only Christmas decoration. I tell the kids I don’t keep Christmas so they’ll leave me alone in the house for two days.”
“Do you want me to leave you alone?”
“No. I want you to stay,” she said. “Although I don’t know why I do. You’re wholly unlikeable.”
“You did say I was pretty.”
“No, I said you were beautiful. And I do have a Christmas gift for you, so it’s good you came by.”
“You do? Why?” Not what. He didn’t ask what the gift was. He asked why. He didn’t trust her any more than she trusted him.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You mentioned something you wanted a while ago, and I decided to get it for you. Of course you’ll wish I hadn’t given it to you when I do give it to you. If I give it to you. What do you think I should do, Moussi?”
Moussi only answered with his roaring, rumbling purr. That whoring slut of a cat had rolled onto his back and offered Marcus the soft underbelly for scratching, which Moussi never did with her. She was taking all his Christmas sardines back to the store.
“I’ve received very few Christmas gifts in my life,” Marcus said as he buried his fingers deep into Moussi’s fur. “I went to school in England and spent holidays with fairly distant relatives. Distant in every sense of the word. I was nothing but a boarder. My mother gave me a Christmas gift last year, and I didn’t know how to thank her.”
“What did your mother give you?”
“A lovely handcrafted straight razor that had belonged to my grandfather.”
“Your mother gave you a straight razor. How appropriate. Considering.”
“I only use it for shaving.”
“You’re old enough to shave now?”
Marcus looked at her. That look again. She did love that look.
“What about you?” he asked. “What was Christmas like for you as a child?”
“No gifts for me either,” she said. “Christmas was nothing but going to mass. Mamma would take me to church with her on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day if she wasn’t working. My father was Roma and they weren’t married. Mamma was an outcast from her own family. She had to move us to another town to escape the scandal
and our poverty was extreme. We had no money for gifts, no money for large holiday meals—only the Church.”
“Your family had an excuse—poverty,” he said. “Mine didn’t. Except for a poverty of the soul, perhaps. I worry sometimes I inherited their poverty.”
Magdalena sat on the arm of his chair and tucked a strand of golden blond hair behind his ear. “Bambi, darling, I’m going to tell you something and you must believe that it’s true.”
“Yes?” he asked.
“You did.”
He looked at her for a very long time before laughing. A year and a half ago he wouldn’t have handled such a bare-faced insult so well.
“You are a magnificent bitch.” He made it sound like a compliment, and she took it as such.
“It’s true,” she said. “You had to have your own confessor tell you to bring me a Christmas gift because otherwise it wouldn’t occur to you to give something to the woman who took you in. Would it? Sounds like poverty of the soul to me.”
“You only took me in because you find me attractive.”
“No, I took you in for the same reason I took in Moussolini—I needed help keeping the vermin out. A baby priest is as good as a bodyguard.”
He leaned his head back on the chair and stared flatly at her. “I brought you a Christmas plant. Couldn’t you pretend to be nice to me for one minute?”
“I can be nice to you for…” She glanced at the grandfather clock on the opposite wall. “Fifteen seconds. Starting now. Bambi, I do find you very attractive despite the fact that you are cold and distant and self-absorbed, thoughtless, a snob, utterly entitled and—”
“Your fifteen seconds is almost up.”
“There is a spark of something inside you that’s as beautiful as the outside. Since I can see that spark, I feel it’s my duty to blow on it and start a wildfire.”
Magdalena leaned forward, pressed her lips together and blew, aiming for the hollow of his throat. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, baring his throat to her. She wanted to bite it, hard, sink her teeth into him and make him bleed. She’d had more than one lover accuse her of being a vampire and perhaps she was. But she had no desire to drink blood. No, she wanted to drink pain and Marcus…her Marcus, his pain was the finest of vintages. Old pain, well-ripened, seasoned with sex and betrayal and sadism—her favorite flavors.
“I should have asked for your body for Christmas,” she said.
“It’s not going to happen,” he said.
“Why not?” She pouted at him. He hated pouting.
“I have a very good reason,” he said. “And it’s not the reason you think it is.”
“That you’re a coward who is terrified of his own sexuality?”
“No. Nor am I terrified by yours.”
Magdalena’s blood cooled a few degrees.
“What do you mean?” she asked too innocently, too casually. “My sexuality?”
She leaned across his lap, Moussi in-between them.
“You are the most beautiful woman in Rome. This is saying something,” Marcus said.
“You really think so?” She batted her eyelashes to make him laugh. He didn’t laugh.
“You have the thickest, most luxurious black hair I’ve ever seen. It’s a starless night in your eyes. Your breasts are magnificent and your hips are everything a man who loves women could hope and dream of. You have long shapely legs. You dress like a fashion plate. You smell like an orchard in June—everything delicious and ripe for the plucking. And you’re tall. I love how tall you are. And you have exquisite warm olive skin like Kingsley’s and to say there’s anything like you that’s like him is the highest compliment I can give anyone. There is nothing undesirable about you. That is all I will say on the subject.”
Magdalena exhaled heavily. “I see you know my little secret,” she said. “May I ask how you know?”
“You were right—my mother is Danish. I visit her in Copenhagen when I can. Copenhagen is both a large city and a small town. When I came by in August to feed Mus and bring in your mail, I saw you had received two letters from a surgeon in Copenhagen. A legendary surgeon. There’s only one reason people outside of Denmark go to Denmark for surgery, only one reason they go to this particular surgeon.”
She nodded slowly. “I see.”
“You know I don’t care, yes? I need you to know that.”
“You’re being considerate of my feelings. How…unlike you.”
“If you’re going to think ill of me—”
“Which I do.”
“I want you to think ill of me for the right reasons, not because I care you weren’t born female.”
“I was born female. But there were…are some ‘abnormalities’ present, as the doctors called them. These ‘abnormalities’ have caused complications in my life. This particular abnormality is something some men find horrifying and other men with a particular fetish find irresistible. Then again, you’re not most men, are you?”
“Are you having surgery? I realize this is not any of my concern.”
“But you’re still asking.”
“You ask me rude personal questions all the time.”
He had a point but she hardly wished to concede that.
“My mother raised me as a boy until puberty started and it became obvious that a boy wasn’t what God had intended me to be despite the presence of what looked like a very male organ on my person. As I developed as a girl, I started dressing like one, acting like one. The priest at our church called me ‘demon seed,’ ‘unnatural,’ an ‘abomination.’ You don’t forget something like that. You don’t forget being called demonic. It stays with a person like a brand or a burn. You carry it with you, in you.” She touched her chest over her heart where the anger still burned.
“That’s why you left the Church?”
The first night Marcus had come to her house she’d almost refused him. He wasn’t the first priest to seek release in her home, but he was the first she’d let in—if only because he wasn’t a priest quite yet, and she thought perhaps she could save him from that path. When he’d asked her about her hostility toward the Catholic Church, she’d told him only that her priest had hurt her family, that she could not forgive the Church. If God wanted her back, he could send the Church to her. For she would never return to it.
“I didn’t leave the Church,” she said. “The Church left me. It rejected me, cast me out. I do not go where I am not wanted.”
“You are perfect as you are,” he said. “You are not demon seed.”
“A priest said I was.”
“Yes, a dried-up evil old priest who lusted for the little boy he thought you were and despised you for failing his sick pedophilic fantasies.”
“Tell me how you really feel, Bambi.”
“I would never tell you what to do with your body. But—”
“That’s not true at all,” Magdalena said. “You once told me exactly what I could do to my body. I believe the statement started with ‘go’ and ended with ‘yourself,’ with a third word in-between that was most unbecoming a priest-in-training.”
“That was a figurative statement I said only after you had a police officer arrest you in front of me—for murdering a client. It wasn’t until he had you in his car that you revealed it was all a joke. At my expense.”
“That was a fun evening, wasn’t it? I love jokes.”
“You don’t need surgery. You need psychoanalysis.”
Magdalena laughed and laughed. Nothing made her happier than driving Marcus mad. And it wasn’t easy to do, which is why it was so rewarding when she succeeded.
“If I had psychoanalysis and started behaving myself, then would you want to sleep with me, Bambi?” She tossed her hair over her shoulder, placed her finger on her lip in a perfect pout, feigning innocence.
“Oh, God no.” He sounded utterly disgusted by the very idea of her behaving herself. “Sleeping with you would be enjoyable for an hour or two. Torturing you by not sleeping with you? That w
ill never cease to be fun for me.”
“What if I let you hurt me like you hurt Caterina?” Torturing beautiful men was her absolute favorite hobby. She could do this all day. And usually she did.
“I couldn’t hurt you with a chainsaw and a Kalashnikov.”
“That’s true enough,” she said. “But you and I both know that’s not it. You’re terrified of falling in love again, aren’t you?”
“You would be too if you were me.”
“Eventually you will have to let go of your fears for Kingsley. He’s an adult.”
“He is if he’s still alive. Both his parents are dead, his sister is dead. And he has a bad habit of engaging in incredibly reckless behavior even under the best of circumstances.”
“He did sleep with you.”
“My point exactly.”
His jaw was set like a granite statue and he wouldn’t meet her eyes. She and Marcus taunted and teased each other constantly and the insults were never-ending, but when the subject of his former lover Kingsley came up, Marcus did not play.
“I haven’t seen him since he left school, and he still drives me to distraction. He’d be so proud of himself if he knew I worried every day he was dead.” He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. “Kingsley.”
The name sounded like a plea.
Or a prayer.
“Love is a curse,” Magdalena said. “Love is a burden. A beautiful curse. A beautiful burden.”
“I’d cut out my own heart if I could,” Marcus said.
Winter Tales Page 17