White Moon Black Sea (13 page)
She rose from her chair and proposed a toast, the men rose from their chairs, then she held out her glass and said, “Adam, my friends, I would like to make a toast to my
unborn child, the next heir to the Oujie legacy. To him or to her I intend to leave, one day, the Oujie estate, having retrieved as much of its lost property as possible in my lifetime, and in the hope that its inventory records will then read as they once did at the time of the death of my benefactress, my great-grandmother, Roxelana Oujie.”
Then she drank from her glass. Smiles slowly broke across the faces of the men in the room as they realized what she was saying. They drained the wine from their glasses. They all began to speak at the same time, but she stopped them, saying, “Please, please, do sit down and let me say a few more words. This is not simply my seeking revenge on Rashid for his fraudulent acts upon my legacy. Nor do I want to create a new vendetta or perpetuate an old one between the Oujies and the Lala Mustaphas. Nor is it just avarice, or a desire for power or prestige. I have done it for myself. Adam’s patience and character have given me the chance to appreciate my heritage, who I am and what I am, to respect the past, and live bravely and honestly in the present. Because how I live and what I do, like everyone else, is the fragment of history that I alone have the making of. So that Adam may never again think, as he once might have, of me as a pitiful descendant of a once-remarkable family. I deserved that once, but I would rather not give him the chance to think it again.”
She began to laugh out of a sense of relief that the indecision had been lifted, and she added, “Thank heavens that’s all decided and been said. Now I can get on with having this baby.”
Adam walked around to the foot of the table where she was sitting and kissed her, saying, “You’re some lady.” Then he turned to Moses. “Get the corks moving on the champagne, Moses. We’re launching a new dynasty.”
Joshua went to Mirella and raised her hand to kiss it. Then with an enormous twinkle in his eye, he asked, “No holds barred? The works? You’re going to go after Rashid, wheeling, dealing, through the law courts and all?”
No, Josh, I am not. The Oujie estate is. And none of us will ever confront Rashid openly about it. I will do that,
pick my time when I am ready, and let him know my intentions.”
Mirella felt exhausted, excused herself, and went to bed. But she could not relax into sleep. She was to have lunch at the country club with Rashid the next day, just the two of them. She found that her decision in no way diminished the thrill she felt at the prospect of being with her charismatic lover.
T
he car stopped on the Quai Anatole France and Adam stepped out and walked to the wall facing the Seine. He looked over it to the Right Bank and the Tuileries and the Palais-Royal and the Louvre, then down to the cobble-stoned quay.
There she sat, her long slender legs crossed and dangling over the side of a wooden crate with several smaller ones piled neatly next to it. Her long black wiry hair shone in the sunlight. She wore it down, and it created a softly seductive, wavy halo around her face. In a few days that face would adorn every important newspaper and periodical in the world. The face of female Africa.
Her dress was by Karl Lagerfeld, black silk, cut for her — on her body — by him. Every
haute couturier
Adam had introduced her to wanted not only to dress her but to capture her for the runway. To dress her was to robe a dark and sensual queen who carried her clothes royally. Wide, chunky, gold bangles on her wrists twinkled against the blackness of her skin and dress. Over one shoulder and arm, and draped on an angle across her breasts and long and slender torso, then tied under the other arm, she wore a black silk triangular shawl. Adam registered her as the most stunning, sensual, and interesting woman in Paris. Seeing her there excited him to remember when she had
appeared so unexpectedly from behind a tree in Pythagoria on the island of Samos, brought there by Marlo Channing for a five-minute secret meeting with him. Their next meeting had been equally thrilling — in the highlands of Ethiopia when she had stepped out of the bush flanked by her two Amharic bodyguards. The night under the stars when he had taught her how to make love, and become her first real lover. The last time he had seen her was in the Sudan, Khartoum, on a hellishly hot night in a hotel room on the Nile, when in the darkness she had slithered naked from the foot of his bed up between his legs and proved to him that he had taught her well and she practiced much.
She was watching the barge that had unloaded the crates onto the quay pull away into the center of the river. Adam spent a few more minutes looking at Tana Dabra Ras Magdala Makoum. She had been not only the white knight who had saved his company from a disastrous takeover, but also the savior of her country from a more severe and heavily armed Marxist military regime, prepared in desperation for survival to become dependent on either Russia or the CIA.
Adam found her brilliant, cunning mind as dazzling as her adventurous sexuality. But there was in her a streak of daring he found dangerous. It combined with a lovelessness that had been carefully nurtured by the men who had exploited her extraordinary acumen for international economics and stunted her natural sexual inclinations. They had given her enormous power as the controller and investor of all her country’s foreign currency, but they had made this conditional on her remaining a virgin. This cruel and damaging blight on her as a woman made Adam exceedingly concerned for her and her future.
Sex with her had been thrilling — more than thrilling. He was certain it could be dangerous for the man if she chose the wrong partner. Her ambivalent feelings about men might one day easily direct a knife between some man’s shoulder blades. Adam had no fear that they would be his. The knife would probably be for a man who tried to control her sexually, one who made demands on her, one who used her.
Tana Dabra had the scars of mutilated labia and a well-developed, oversensitive clitoris after her many years of masturbation, all she had been allowed sexually by order of the regime, except for an occasional lesbian encounter. They were a constant reminder of the years of sexual humiliation and frustration men had imposed on her in the name of love of country. She had finally broken her bond with the men she had once wrongly believed were working for the people of her country, but in reality were after political power and a ruthless dictatorship backed by a vast military buildup. As soon as she had accomplished that, she had cut the gold wires lacing closed the lips over her vagina. Those wires had kept her virginity intact, making her a people’s vestal since she had been fifteen years old.
In part, Adam saw her as one of the walking wounded of this overly politicized world. She needed time to heal. Yet he knew this glorious beauty worked underground for the millions of poor peasants of Ethiopia, retrieving the hidden treasures of King Haile Selassie, the hiding places of which he had never divulged to the leaders of the coup that dethroned him. She smuggled them into the West, where she turned them into long-term investments for her people’s future. Labled a traitor by the military Marxist regime, and with a price on her head, she walked in the shadows in her country. At Adam’s insistence, with one of the best public relations firms in the world, they were about to execute a plan for her to walk openly in the political sunlight of the West. A way that he hoped would stop the regime from killing her, or kidnapping her back to Ethiopia, where she would be punished and disposed of as they saw fit. She and Adam expected no less than that for her crime of diverting every last cent of Ethiopia’s foreign currency, earmarked for heavy-duty armaments, into agriculture and communications investments in the Corey Trust’s companies. Through them her country reaped a percentage of the profits in commodities necessary for its survival. That was how she had bailed Adam out of an unwanted takeover and cut the regime’s armaments ambitions.
Adam had made up his mind always to be there for her
whenever she needed him. It was his way of paying his debt to her for what she had done for him. Yet still he was aware that ultimately she had used him and the bailout of his company for her own ends. He saw himself as friend and protector, but he had no idea how she regarded him. That was part of her charisma. Her elusive silence, her never giving anything emotional away. It was a tremendous turn-on, that sensual silence in which she was enfolded. That and the way she would appear from nowhere and draw him into her web, whether for business or sexual ecstasy.
“Tana Dabra,” he called, and waved as he walked next to the wall toward the ramp that led down to the embankment and the water’s edge. She smiled up at him and waved back. That was all it took; he was yet again seduced by her. That she had stature was one thing, but it was in her face, the fierce passion and pride that shone through the black Semitic features. The slow, seductive way she moved her long slender limbs was feral. Cunning and careful, like that of a panther, leopard, or lion, hers was dangerous beauty, the kind that could kill yet made it impossible for the hunter not to try to capture.
With hand gestures — hands as if around the wheel of a car — and the wave of an arm, she told him he was meant to make sure that both his Rolls and the small black van she had instructed him to arrive with were driven for him down the steep ramp to where she sat.
“You came,” she said, looking quite happy to see him.
He took her hand in his and kissed it. Her scent was Coco, the delicious Chanel perfume he had given her in Khartoum. It was as all the advertising promised. He bent his head to hers and kissed her lightly on the lips. She was there and must be tasted.
“Don’t I always arrive at your bidding? Had you doubts?”
“Only small ones. Obviously foolish ones.”
“You look marvelous.”
“I feel marvelous. I always do when I am in Paris. I have a passion for this city. I have always found what I needed here.”
“Tana Dabra, what are we doing meeting here? I am sure it must be against the law to use the quay as a landing dock for your crates. And I doubt that motor vehicles are allowed here either.”
“That’s true, Adam. And if you are on time, and have the four men I asked you to bring in the back of the van, then we have thirty minutes to load these wooden crates on board and no more. That’s how long we have before the gendarmes will return to their beat.”
“If that’s true, then what would you call those? Figments of my imagination?” He indicated to her with his eyes the hats, heads, and shoulders of three gendarmes walking swiftly along the street up above them, partially hidden by the wall. Fortunately for Adam and Tana Dabra they were too busy talking to one another to look down on the suspicious scene below.
“My God, you are quite mad. I can hardly believe you have done this and involved me in it.” With that he put his hands around her waist and swung her off the crate. He walked slowly, as inconspicuously as he could, to the van and instructed the men to load up, quietly and swiftly, with one eye on the hats above moving away from them. Within five minutes, the job was done.
“Involved you? How are you involved? As far as the world is concerned, you were riding along the Quai Anatole France and suddenly decided to get out and walk. Much to your amazement you saw a beautiful lady sitting on a crate. A lady obviously abandoned and in distress. You recognized her as an Ethiopian, a stranger to Paris, and your curiosity got the better of you. Finding her not unattractive, you walked down from the street to see if you could be of assistance. You approached her, and while you were finding out she was waiting for a friend who seemed to be elsewhere engaged, a van drove down on to the quay and several men stepped out of it. They asked her politely to get off the crate as they were there to collect the boxes for the Sûreté. A shipment of bullet proof vests is what their papers state. Hence the weight.”
Adam looked at the bright blue stenciled letters on all the cases. They read “Deliver to Sûreté, Quay d’Orsay. Pick
up from Quay Anatole France.” He was actually speechless for a minute. The moving men tipped their hats to the lady, returned to the now loaded van, stepped in, and pulled the doors closed behind them. The laden vehicle labored across the cobblestones and slowly up the ramp leading to the main street. It disappeared into the traffic.
Adam began to laugh, shook his head in disbelief, and remarked, “Not bad. The police. Labeling the cases for the police headquarters. Inventing this barge drop-off station.”
“Quite so. Unbelievable but simple. How else would you smuggle 663 million dollars’ worth of gold, jewels, and currency into France past Customs and avoid questioning by the Sûreté? It had to be out in the open and right under their noses.
“Let’s walk,” she said, slipping an arm through his. Then she recited, as if she had memorized something she had read somewhere, “We walked along the embankment together after the van left, followed by your car. You mentioned you had a great love for my country, and, softened by talk of Ethiopia, we exchanged names and were amazed to find that we had known each other by reputation for many years but had never met before this chance encounter. That’s very important, Adam. We lunched together at Le Grand Véfour in the Palais-Royal, where I informed you that it is my intention to make my home in the West and become a high-fashion model in order to earn a living for myself. Not an easy decision, but one of necessity, since I have lost my position of standing with the regime and feel too burned out in the world of high finance ever to put my head in that particular oven again. You were surprised but impressed when I told you that the politics of my country are beyond me and I no longer can cope with them, that I have served with my comrades as well as I could for a very long time, and I am proud of that. But, now, I want to have a good time as that other self that has been neglected, the female, the self-indulgent, frivolous female. In my spare time I hope to use my business acumen to raise funds and invest them in solid shares and stocks and bonds. These, I hope, will multiply and be used wisely for the good of my people. And even
that, at this point, seems an enormous burden that I am not sure I am capable of handling since I have been made persona non grata in Ethiopia. And you? You have taken it upon yourself to call the Minister of Foreign Affairs to inform him of all this, because you feel that it would be very bad form to block my good intentions and alienate the support of the Western world. Have you got all that, Adam?”
The scream of police sirens pierced the steady hum of Left Bank morning traffic. The loud sound and warning raced closer. Hooting horns blared and silenced Tana Dabra. The chaos of flashing lights and police cars cutting through the jam of cars on the road just above them sparked fear and set the adrenaline racing. They watched three police cars flash by the top of the ramp and away from them, and their relief showed in their faces. They turned away from their fear and looked at each other. Tana Dabra smiled at Adam and placed her arm again through his. They resumed their walk.
“Meantime, Adam, in three days I will have converted the contents of those crates into dollars — approximately 663 million of them — and will have had the bank drafts sent to your office to invest in any Ethiopian-owned-and-based companies you think need an injection of capital — any, that is, that the Corey Trust and my country share the profits of. Of course, as in the past, you will not convey any of those profits to those monsters in control of my country.
“This will have to be my last run from Ethiopia for a long while. It has become too dangerous for me. I was almost caught twice. The government must be made to think I have given up, copped out for a glamorous life in the decadent Western world. Then in time, when they believe it for certain, when they’ve abandoned their pursuit of me, and I have made myself conspicuous and popular with the right people and the Western press, I will sneak back in and begin my smuggling runs again.”
Adam took her firmly by the arm and together they stepped into the back of his Rolls, and he instructed his
chauffeur to drive on. Then in a firm, almost angry voice, he spoke to Tana Dabra.
“I want you to listen very closely and understand what I have to say to you, Tana Dabra. You have had it all the way you wanted it and have escaped with your life. What you have done for your country is phenomenal. And, as a result of that, what you have done for me is no less so. I have gone along with you because in the first instance you were clever enough to have left me no choice. I will never tolerate your doing that again, for many reasons — not the least of which is that I do not want you, ever again, to take the chances you have taken in the past with your life. You have been lucky, but luck runs out. I and my company have worked very hard in the background to help create a new persona for you. We’ve set you up to take the world by storm with your brains and your beauty. Now I want you to promise me that you will try to put out of your mind the hardness and ruthlessness of the business world and power struggles. They have dominated your life and robbed you of first your youth, then your young adulthood and what should have been your glorious womanhood. Now learn to enjoy this new life of yours. I care for you, Tana Dabra. Enough to want you to take a few years off from the political ambitions you have for your country and to find yourself as a woman and enjoy being one. Now, enough said, and on with this extravagant charade you have designed.”