White Moon Black Sea
White Moon, Black Sea
Roberta Latow
Copyright © 1989 by Roberta Latow
For
Kenneth and Caroline Hawkins
good neighbors, fine friends
I shall not fear my passions like a coward.
I shall yield my body to sensual delights,
to enjoyments that one dreams about,
to the most audacious amorous desires,
to the wanton impulses of my blood, without
a single fear, for whenever I wish —
— Cavafy
A
n electrical storm gripped the aircraft, tossing the Boeing 747 from one fierce hand of wind to another as if it were a slight, silvery toy. A loud crack of thunder tearing at his eardrums, Rashid Lala Mustapha watched through the small oval window as a bolt of lightning shot across the night sky, luridly illuminating the cabin. The aisles were littered with items that had broken free from the overhead racks: cardboard boxes tied with string, handwoven baskets with cloth stretched and sewn over the tops, hand luggage, bunches of flowers, coats, blankets, pillows. In a slow dance of chaos, the last and heaviest pieces left on the shelves plummeted onto passengers, bounced off heads and shoulders and arms, and tumbled to a restless stop amid the knee-deep clutter in the aisles.
Passengers were screaming and weeping in panic. Fear settled like a dense fog inside the plane, a pungent scent that filled the nostrils and put the soul on guard.
Rashid did not travel alone, but with a man he had met secretly only hours before, a man named Nikos, who was a big handsome native of Crete, and so sure of himself that he had instantly won Rashid’s confidence. Nikos had made him feel certain the prize he had sought in vain for so long would be his at last. Now this paragon of self-confidence was weeping and screaming along with all the others on the aircraft. Tears streamed down his ghost-white face, a hand over his mouth trying to hold back sickness. Rashid was furious. He managed to get a paper bag to the man just as the cabin rolled once more to the side.
Passengers who were beyond thinking the least bit rationally released their seat belts and scrabbled through the mess to retrieve their possessions. The air pockets pulled them down and knocked them into the seats. The
noise was deafening, yet there wasn’t an attendant to be seen, nor a calming word from the intercom.
The wind changed direction and pounded against the other side of the plane as it lurched forward. The hysterical passengers still in the aisles were knocked down, hurled against the seats.
“There’s more to come,” Rashid muttered to himself. “More thunder and lightning and God knows what.” It didn’t matter, he thought, although he was not ready to die — especially not now, when he was on the brink of retrieving what he fiercely believed was rightfully his. Dicing with danger, riding on the edge, hand in hand with the devil or God, it was all the same to him. He would beat those two at their game.
The cabin was suddenly plunged into darkness as a bolt of lightning struck the plane. Then, eerily, it glowed inside and out from the light generated by another huge bolt. Rashid registered a vision of humanity that both disgusted him and reinforced his clam and fearlessness in the face of chaos … and death.
In less than three minutes Rashid realized the plane was traveling on an even keel, the air pockets gone and the blackened sky growing lighter. The rain was letting up, but within there was no calm. Havoc. Screaming and shouting mingled with the sharp stink of vomit, stale hot air, and heavy doses of body odor. The passengers, mostly Greeks, were still so hysterical they were oblivious to having ridden out the storm.
A near disaster in the air was a first for Rashid. There were always firsts in Rashid’s life. He thrived on them. He looked out the window, away from the mess around him, and saw the sky growing lighter still. There, off in the distance, was the sun, a red ball suspended in dusky light.
He spoke to Nikos, his newfound friend, his supposed protector, the man who had been sent to see that he and his plain paper-wrapped parcel of dollar bank notes were safely delivered to the island.
“Look. It’s over. It has been for minutes now. For Christ’s sake, man, look out the window. We’re safe. Pull yourself together.”
Nikos was still white, still frozen with terror. Rashid stared at him for several seconds, horrified by the fear in the man’s eyes: The danger was behind them, yet it continued to possess him. Grabbing Nikos by the lapels of his jacket, Rashid shook him violently. Should he slap him across the face to bring him to his senses? He raised his hand and then lowered it, remembering that the men of Crete never forget a humiliation. Instead he let the man go and said, “Nikos, we are safe, and you have a job to do. You must deliver me and my parcel to Mr. Mavrodakis.”
The mention of Mavrodakis had an immediate effect on Nikos. Understanding glimmered in his eyes.
A voice boomed through the din over the intercom. The pilot was shouting in Greek for calm. He repeated his demand many times before the noise in the plane began to die down. At last there was relative calm, punctuated by loud complaints that accompanied the elbow pushing and whimpering as passengers salvaged their possessions.
Rashid and Mavrodakis’s emmissary were the only ones seated when the signs flashed on, asking the passengers of the afternoon Athens-Xania flight to prepare for landing. The clouds, white now, parted, and at last there it was: the coastline of Crete rising rugged and impressive out of the sparkling Aegean. The plane began its descent with its passengers still scrambling around in the aisles among the debris.
Rashid, like the Greeks, always called Crete “the big island.” Big it surely looked, and unmalleable, with its mountain ranges off in the far distance. Rashid had a great affection for Crete and its people in whom he detected a nobler strain than in other Greeks. He liked that, as much as any Turk could like anything Greek.
The plane was now flying low over Souda Bay toward the airport. Rashid smiled to himself, remembering there was nearly always a storm around Crete before landing, whether by plane or ship, and the reaction of the Greeks to it invariably punctured his vision of their nobility. It was one of the reasons he never used commercial transportation except when, as now, he traveled in secret and as inconspicuously as possible.
No clouds now. The sky was a deep, Greek blue, and he felt the thrill he always felt as the plane flew easily over his Crete, the Crete of his ancestors, notorious Ottomans who, during the Turkish occupation, had ruled it with bloodied hands. They were robber princes who ruthlessly had stolen the best from the people along the coast from Rethymnon past Xania to the tip of the island. When the Turkish occupation was over, the world believed that the Lala Mustaphas had relinquished the land. Just a handful of people knew otherwise, Christos Mavrodakis was one of those people.
A smooth touchdown, doors open at last, a rush of hot air through the plane, and the angry Greeks with their broken property pushed their way down on to the tarmac and across to the tiny airport terminal. Rashid and Nikos were the last to leave the plane.
Two men met them at the foot of the stairs. Nikos, the smell of vomit still on him, put up a macho front for them. The Cretans, clumsily protective, walked their visitors briskly to an old black Buick waiting on the edge of the tarmac.
Down hot dusty roads, over rough terrain stubbled with silvery-green olive trees, the driver went at suicidal speed as if bent on killing everyone in his path … and in the car.
The oppressively high temperature and humidity seemed not to bother Rashid at all. He rode in the back of the car, cool in spite of the heat. The closer they came to Christos Mavrodakis’s villa, the more he savored every sight and sound of the journey. His quest was nearly over, the years of intrigue, plots, and plans that had miscarried would belong soon to the past. He could think of nothing but the imminent repossession of the Oujie lands and estates in Turkey and Crete that were rightfully his.
He didn’t care at all that he was deceiving, cheating, stealing from Mirella Wingfield Corey, the woman he also loved. He had deliberately hunted her down as soon as he’d learned about her inheritance in order to seduce her and use her to get back the Oujie legacy, to retrieve what her great-grandmother had stolen from his family. Why
should Mirella object, since she and he were not emotionally but erotically deeply in love and committed to each other in that love? He would expect her to recognize that what he did had to do with honor — family honor — and not their relationship.
The car swerved off the main highway onto a narrow road and sped onward, spraying gravel in its wake. An occasional olive tree and dry, scrubby landscape merged into miles of well-tended olive groves which extended right to the top of the mountain. The driver honked the Buick’s horn as he negotiated a steep curve in the road and approached a pair of rusting sheet-iron gates set into a high, crumbling, whitewashed wall. Dogs began to bark. A fat black cat with one eye missing, a hind leg shorter then the other three, and an ear half eaten away, rose from one of the pilasters, stretched lazily, hunched his back, and hissed menacingly at the approaching car. Two handsome young men as tough-looking as the beaten up cat, rose from rickety, weather-worn wooden chairs tilted against the pilasters flanking the gate. They wore open-necked, cotton plaid shirts and faded jeans tucked into shabby white traditional Cretan boots. Expensive-looking rifles in hand, they strutted toward the car that halted in its own dust cloud ten feet from the gates.
As soon as they greeted the men in the front seat, they slung their rifles over their shoulders and shook hands with them, then checked the backseat before shaking hands with Rashid and Nikos. Their faces broke into smiles for Rashid. They had done several jobs for Mavrodakis that had involved Rashid, and they liked him and admired not only his way with women, but also the ruthless and sometimes dangerous deals they had watched him pull off. They had seen the macho Rashid in action, and he was everything a Cretan admired in a man.
They all spoke in Greek and laughed when Rashid said, “My God, she is still alive, your Salome. Each time I arrive, I expect to find that old cat has not survived her last fight. But the old warrior is always here, minus another piece of herself.”
In a gesture typically Greek, one of the guards waved his hand in a series of circles and said, “Ah, that one. The
fearless one, the one with not nine but ninety-nine lives. Pttu.” He spat on the ground and bent forward and tooted the horn. All eyes were on Salome as she sprang the ten feet from the high pilaster through the air, her body flattened, legs splayed, fur flying, one eye glaring, the eye socket squinting. She landed with a soft thump on the hood of the car.
The great iron doors were slowly swung open from the inside as Salome attacked the windshield of the Buick with her paws, making fearsome hissing sounds. The driver shot the car forward. The cat swerved off the hood and up into the air to crash-land into an enormous hibiscus bush in full bloom just inside the gate. Dead, never. The fight was on. She went for the Doberman pinschers held back on leashes by the two guards who worked the inside of the gate.
Rashid watched the pitched battle through the rear window of the car as it drove through a surprisingly different landscape now: lilac, rhododendron, camelia, gardenia, hibiscus, no longer bushes but overgrown trees. In this romantic Mediterranean botanical paradise wisteria mingled with bougainvillea and jasmin and trumpet vines in dazzling patches of color which snaked over the decaying garden walls. The tendrils of the vines wrapped voluptuously over everything in the garden, even the seventy-foot date palms, royal palms aged beyond fruit-fulness but queens of the garden still. Lemon and orange trees, heavy with fruit, and huge fig trees, oozing plump purple ripeness, added to the lushness of Christos Mavrodakis’s Eden. In six acres of overgrown, wonderful gardens, only the pistachio trees lining a winding road, regimented and at attention like guards of honor, appeared to be well pruned and cared for. The dusty, rutted dirt road with its proud sentries bearing clusters of delicious pistachio nuts led to a surprisingly large and beautiful neoclassic villa. Once the color of terra-cotta, now faded to a soft warm pink, the forty-room villa evoked a charm that indeed craved guarding from the intrusion of a modern plastic world.
Rashid met Christos on the stairs leading up to the
house. They shook hands and then clasped each other warmly.
“How was the flight?”
“How was the flight!” The two men repeated the phrase in one voice and two identical mocking tones, then laughed. It was a familiar joke between them and the first thing every Cretan asked a new arrival to the island.
“Here is the package,” Rashid said abruptly.
“I did not believe you would bring it, Rashid. I thought you would back out of the deal at the end.”
“How extraordinary of you to think that. What ever gave you such an idea?” asked Rashid, apparently baffled by Christos’s remark.
The men looked at each other and the question loomed large between them. At last Christos snapped his fingers and called out, “Yannis.” A white-haired, elderly man appeared immediately at the head of the stairs, stopped for a second, and hurried down to greet Rashid.
Christos took the heavy, brown paper parcel from Rashid’s hands and gave it to Yannis, then turned back to Rashid and asked, “A drink? Tea? Coffee? Something to refresh you before we settle our business?”
“Good idea, Christos.”
“Bravo. Come, let’s walk a bit. We’ll go to the summerhouse.”
A woman watched them from an upstairs balcony, standing in the shadows, tall and majestic, an exotic beauty dressed all in white. She wore a Dior silk suit with the jacket nipped in at the waist and the skirt cut on the bias, hanging to midcalf. Wide strips of silk, cotton, and chiffon were cleverly entwined and wound around her head in a dramatic turban worn over the sheerest of veils pulled close over her face and under her chin. Tucked under her arm was a large, slim envelope handbag of the softest leather, and her feet were shod in simple Ferragamo shoes. In her ears were large, square-cut diamond earrings, and a platinum dog collar studded with matching diamonds was clasped around her long sensuous neck. Her fingers sparkled with more diamonds exquisitely cut in various sizes
and shapes. Her dramatic presence was like a fire that burned in an igloo of pure snow and clear ice.
She watched the men — Rashid, her master, and Christos Mavrodakis, his lifelong friend, her tormentor — as they walked along a path swathed through the jungle of luscious scents and blossoms toward the ramshackle summerhouse. She watched and she waited to be summoned by Rashid. They would be going home to Istanbul. She to Oda-Lala’s, the bordello where she lived waiting for Rashid’s commands and her stolen hours with her lover, the American black man, Moses. Rashid to his life and home in Istanbul, and to Mirella Wingfield Corey, the most important woman in his life.