White Moon Black Sea (2 page)

Her gaze followed Rashid, his jacket now removed and slung over one shoulder. He reached up and picked an overly ripe purple fig from a huge sprawling tree weighed down with fruit. He broke it open with his thumbs and, pressing the sweet flesh to his lips, sucked it into his mouth. She could see his pleasure in the taste of the fruit. He dropped the skin on the path and, walking over it, he plucked another from a neighboring tree. “My beautiful, decadent Rashid, my destiny,” she murmured.

Christos was walking, his hands behind his back, next to Rashid and was saying, “The others in the syndicate never doubted that you would go through with this takeover. Only
I
doubted it. But then, only
I
had ever seen you with Mirella, and how different you were then. Only
I
had witnessed that night at Oda-Lala’s when she was ready to enslave herself to you, and you, at the very last minute, released her. I was so certain then that at last someone had real power over you, that at last someone had broken you, Rashid. You wanted her for more than your sexual slave, or her inheritance. You didn’t want to throw her away like the other females in your life whom you enjoy ruining. I even laughed to myself to think it had been a woman, a woman who possessed so much of the lands and their archaeological sites that you believe to be rightfully yours.

“How wrong could I be? Ever since we were children you have never ceased to surprise me. Nothing has changed; the surprises continue. You let her go. You
allowed her to leave you for Adam Corey. I don’t know how you could have done that. I could not. I believed you to have the coldest heart of any man alive until I saw your face at her wedding, when you walked her down the aisle on your arm and gave her away to Adam. I knew then. It was written all over your face, it burned in your eyes: You had never let her go. You possess that woman just as much as her husband does. You play the game of love with her; you are obsessed with each other.”

The men stepped into the dilapidated summerhouse, an octagonal wooden affair of peeling, faded turquoise-colored paint and broken windows, topped off by an onion-domed roof of tarnished copper which had over the years been repaired with lead. They sat down in a pair of high-backed, wicker rocking chairs placed next to a round table covered in crisp white damask. It was laden with marvelous sweets from Turkey and Greece, Italy and Paris. In the center was an ornate silver samovar. An old Cretan peasant woman stood off to one side at a small table on which a gas flame glowed, ready for her to make fresh Turkish coffee. Nikos, Rashid’s companion on the flight, stood at another table ready to serve anything alcoholic they wanted.

Rashid and Christos had been speaking in English. Now, Christos switched into Turkish, which the two attendants had no knowledge of. He picked up a
Fiora Paneforte Margherita
, the delicious Italian sweet from Siena that is rather like a half-inch-thick pancake mixed with candied orange, lemon, and melon rind, and solid with sugared almonds covered in a dusting of plain white flour. He broke off a piece and handed it to his cousin Rashid.

“There was a time about a year ago,” Christos went on, “that the syndicate was beginning to worry about how deep your involvement went with the heiress Mirella. All those jewels you were buying her and they were picking up the tab for. But you came through, just before they were about to order you to deliver those corporate holdings wanted. You had little choice then, you were in too deep to us. And you did understand that we would have killed her, if we had to, to get what we wanted.

“But this time is entirely different. We fronted for you, happily bought heavily for you, lied and cheated and used up a great many favors owed us to get you what you asked. We take care of our own, you know that. We felt we owed it to you because, when Mirella Wingfield sold you the corporate holdings we wanted, you made us one of the richest investment syndicates in the world and gave several of us the political power we desired.”

“Not so very different, Christos. You may take care of your own, but always at a price. True, you and the others were not cut in for a piece of these property deals, but each of you did get a twelve-million-dollar golden handshake and front money.”

“That’s true, but to be expected. After all, in our place you would have done the same. Favors for friends are good. They are even better when preceded by the thank-you gift. And now, here you are, delivering the last present. I thought Mirella meant more to you than a hundred-year-old vendetta. You will lose her over this latest betrayal of yours. She holds lands and sites in Turkey and here in Crete equivalent to the size of a small American state. Unknowingly, she handed them over to phony archaeological trusts and charitable organizations, the art and music foundations you secretly created in order to defraud her. What choice will she have? Especially since you insist upon announcing to the world that you alone have acquired them in a successful takeover that has righted an injustice to your family.”

“You never did understand women, Christos. Especially not women sexually devoted to a man. In time she will forgive me. If she doesn’t, it will have been her loss, not mine. You know what I demand of women. Total submission has always been the goal, the heart of a relationship for me. And leading a woman down that path is the sexual adventure I delight in. Mirella has kept me enthralled. She’s one of the most fascinating women in the world, and I played an enormous part in making her that. You have to remember I was there, on the spot, from the time she inherited her great-grandmother’s estate. I helped her to change from a sexually repressed woman, a mere
high-powered American executive at the U.N., to one of the most sensuous, free-spirited, glamourous, and wealthy women in the world. She left me to marry Adam Corey for true love, whatever that may be, but she returns to me for another kind of love, an unadulterated sexual love. She’ll never leave me again. She is no less bound to me than she is to her husband. I am as sure of that as I am of anything in this world. Adam is a famous lover of women, and I know he holds Mirella as much by sexual love as by the affection they share. But he hasn’t the temperament to love only erotically. I do, and that’s how I am able to keep Mirella, no matter how many times I betray her.

“Ah, I begin to see. You were the last one to be paid off. You are the one to turn over all the deeds involved in the takeover. And so you thought, ‘This is his last chance. Rashid may renege on the deal and keep us all as front men and offer us shares, just so he can save his secret love.’ That’s why you demanded I give you Humayun for a week before the transfer and final payment. It was to keep her as a kind of hostage until I followed through. Or to make sure I followed through. It was a little extra insurance against nondelivery of your twelve million. And you chose Humayun because only you know how deep my involvement is with her. Tut, tut. Bad, Christos. That was bad. You didn’t need a hostage. You know how ruthless I can be. I would never give up my quest, not for any woman.”

“Not
only
as a kind of hostage, Rashid. I did enjoy Humayun. She is the most sexually accomplished, inventive, and obedient woman I have ever encountered. In fact, I want to keep her. Name your price.”

“You know better than that, Christos. I’ll never set Humayun free, ever. Don’t be greedy. Have I ever denied her to you? I can’t remember a time when I have. Nor will there be a time when I will. And what, after all, would be the point? You would only lock her away and become more cruel toward her with every sexual encounter and orgasm you achieve together. You’ll never settle the conflict that tortures you. It isn’t as if you are a bisexual who can’t make up his mind. You are and have always been, mentally and sexually, a homosexual. Boys are what
you want. You can never have enough of them. You hate Humayun and you hate yourself. Why? Because she is a woman, but you cannot resist her. Whatever it is you want from her gets right under your homosexual skin. All you would do if I did sell her to you is torture her to death. Your problem, Christos, is that you have never recovered from the shock of discovering that it’s a woman who is the most debauched, depraved sexual turn-on in your life. A woman who is your sexual outlet, the only person who joyously will do anything, even to the death, to deliver you into sexual oblivion.”

Christos’s face clouded. Rashid watched the vein just under the skin at his temple pulsate. He studied his cousin’s handsome, but cruelly decadent face. Visions of Humayun, stripped and confronting a group of handsome young men, came to mind. Confused memories of sick and corrupt sexual delights that carried an erotic intensity far beyond wantonness. Suddenly Rashid was filled with a prurient passion. He wanted Humayun and he wanted her now, right here in his cousin’s summerhouse. His craving for sexual delight was so great that under normal circumstances he would have had Humayun brought to him at once. But these were not normal circumstances. His quest was nearly at its end and that overrode everything else in his life.

Rashid squatted down before his cousin. They gazed into each other’s eyes. Rashid patted Christos on the shoulder, then gently on the cheek.

“Christos, you, Humayun, and I have had amazing sexual adventures together. There will be more, there will always be more for the three of us. I’ll see to it for you, as I always have. Oda-Lala’s door is always open to you, and Humayun is under orders to deny you nothing. The three of us will know greater ecstasy than we have ever had, I promise. But I cannot sell Humayun to you. She belongs to me. Now let’s have some coffee.”

Rashid’s words seemed to dissolve Christos’s anger and disappointment. A light returned to his eyes, but no joy. When he spoke his voice was hard, but not empty of affection. Relieved, Rashid listened to Christos say,
“There is a devil in you. But I find also a real generosity. That is what corrupts me.”

Rashid and Christos rose and clasped each other in a hug, and nothing more was said about the matter. He listened to his cousin give instructions to the old woman to make coffee, black, thick, and sweet, and to bring tumblers of ice-cold water, the Greek and Turkish complement to all the sugar and fruit in their pastries. He watched Christos slice the cakes and tarts and other rich delicacies, spoon out Greek preserves in their thick sugary syrup on to small white plates for them to sample.

All the while Rashid kept thinking how like Christos it was to drop one line that cut straight to the truth. Not a condemnation but a statement that told it the way it was and, at the same time, announced that the subject was closed.

Christos had always fascinated Rashid. It was the strange mix in him: tantalized by boys, in love with beauty and elegance, yet often restrained by his passion for what was simple and lofty in Greek island life. A shrewd, agile mind; an intelligence never flaunted. In his reclusive and private world, he managed to wield enormous power with close acquaintances who were statesmen, artists, media celebrities. He was a valued troubleshooter for them, hence the wealthy erudite dilettante he was today, yet one who had not shed the friends he had made on the way up.

Celebrated, but unavailable to international society because of his manic insistence on privacy; reputedly a man of culture and generosity who could be hard, ruthless, and shrewd, Christos remained shrouded in mystery. No one really knew him. The notoriety and gossip, the extravagant stories about his personal and public life, gave him no joy. Who could say what did — except perhaps, Rashid, his closest friend, and the men who shared his brief, indeterminate affairs?

Christos had two passions that nourished him. His love for young nubile boys and conquering and educating them, and using his sharp, quick mind to exploit situations to their fullest. Everything in life he dealt with passionately, in extroverted joy and affection. All surface and very
little depth. He lived his life like a Greek tycoon, without display, and with the heart of a poet and the eye of an artist.

Rashid enjoyed the contrast in looks between Christos and himself. His cousin was still very handsome, short — only five feet eight inches tall — with wide shoulders and a chunky body. His rugged, perfectly proportioned face, with a squarish, slightly cleft chin, was framed by a shock of pure white hair worn just a bit too long, thick and straight and curling up at the nape of his neck. The snow-white hair, the always dark tan, the tough masculine face were all dominated by a pair of bright blue, sensuous eyes. Lascivious eyes. The two cousins were very much alike in one thing: They were sexually hungry all the time. Both were notorious sexual seducers. But Christos chose young men and left a string of bewildered male lovers across the world.

These casualties of love afforded him the reputation among rich, cosmopolitan homosexuals and the lower-class, rough-trade boys they sometimes favored, of a virile, highly sexed lover who was able to satisfy his men as much with his lovemaking as with his generous gifts, money, and romance.

Where did his money come from? The host of bodyguards always around him, the mysterious callers who flew in and out of his financial empire based on the mountain of olive groves in Crete, his Athens office building in Syntagma Square, the family villa in Sounion, the large roof-garden suite he kept at the Grande Bretagne, signaled the illegal, an international crime syndicate, but his excellent political and police connections challenged the assumption.

It always amused Rashid that with a converted Greek
caïgue
sailing the Greek Islands, a schooner moored in Cap Ferrat below his twenty-room villa there, a house in the Palais-Royal in Paris, and permanent suites reserved for him at Claridge’s in London and the Pierre in New York, Christos never conducted business except when in Greece. All who wanted to deal had to do as Rashid was doing, conduct it on Christos’s own territory, Rashid was convinced that it was true Christos held an advantage over his
business associates because, by the time they had been through the trials and tribulations of the Athens airport, or of getting to Crete, they were compliant and wanted only to deal and get out of the country as fast as possible.