White Moon Black Sea (20 page)

That Moses was shattered was so evident from the expression on his face that Humayun felt compelled to look away. She removed her hands from his wrists and then once again looked him straight in the eyes, as she had during her compulsive erotic confession. He rose from his knees and stood over her.

“Why did you have to tell me all that? It was so … sordid, so depraved,” he said.

Humayun heard his words and was disappointed. She had not expected a different reaction from Moses. Yet, in her heart she had hoped for something else. She rose from the dressing table bench. Gathering her kimono around her, she slipped her arm through his and walked with him back to the foot of the bed, where they sat down together.

“There is a footnote to that tale, Moses. When Rashid arrived, the very first thing I did was to tell him the story I have just told you. No more, no less. I had experienced something new and thrilling, and I had learned something more about my own sexual nature. I wanted to share it with him. He found it no more sordid and depraved than I did. He simply called on the man and invited him and his sons to dinner. Of course, when they saw who Rashid was, they accepted at once. And after dinner we indulged the interest that had brought us together.

“You see, my dearest Moses, having you listen to my tale, one you didn’t want to hear, has forced us both to face the truth. I am a sexual adventuress and I don’t want to be anything else, and you see that as sordid and depraved. There is no future for us, Moses, except to be together at those times when your raw instincts are set free and you are prepared for a few hours to enjoy being my sexual slave. Times when we can love each other for who we are and what we are. Times when neither of us has to pretend to be something we are not.”

“Then you can see ours only as an impossible love.”
Moses’ question turned into a statement even as he framed it.

“Well, don’t you?”

He hesitated before he answered, trying desperately to lie to himself. But it was far too late for lies. His soul was no longer so blinded by love that he saw nothing. Her tale had restored his sight. His eyes and his heart were open to the truth about Humayun and himself. He looked at her and his heart skipped a beat. He stroked her hair and he traced her lips with his finger. He opened her kimono and caressed the tantalizing henna arabesques tattooed around the nimbus of each nipple. Then he tilted her chin up, looked into the emerald green of her eyes, and answered her.

“Yes, but something deep, something genuine, even if it has to be impossible love. I think you will have to agree with that.”

“Without doubt,” she answered.

Pierced to the quick, she winced somewhere deep inside. She was scarcely able to hold back the cry that gathered within her. No woman, she thought, ever had made a greater sacrifice for love than she had for Rashid and for Moses. She had done as Rashid asked, and she prayed that she would never again have to suffer or inflict such pain.

She bit the inside of her lip until she felt a trickle of her blood on her tongue. The flow seemed to stanch her acute emotional anguish.

They remained facing each other, still on the end of the bed. Lifelike sculptures, a hollow man and woman whose souls had been whipped to death. There was an awkward silence. It lasted several minutes and seemed to Humayun to demand to be broken. They needed something to breathe life into them, to return them to the roles that, accepted now, they would play, she imagined, each to the other for the remainder of their lives.

Humayun understood instinctively what she must do — entice him into a fresh and exciting sexual exploit. She remained silent but engaged him with demanding eyes. When she rose from the foot of the bed he followed. As she raised her arms, a seductive smile formed on her lips. She
parted them and allowed her tongue slowly to trace on them a moist sensuous gloss. Her motions set up a voluptuous ripple in her sleeves of sparkling embroidered wings. She opened her kimono.

He sighed. Her majestic charisma slowly drew him to her. She was the most perfect voluptuary. Enchanted, he opened his robe to let it fall around his feet. She was a feast for his eyes. He began nibbling at her breasts, licking her mound. She teased him into action by slithering her body in snakelike movements up against his. The scent of Coco, blending with the faint musk from her body, accosted his senses and made him dizzy with desire. He placed a hand around her neck and pulled her head to his, his lips upon hers. His other hand sought between her legs for her vaginal lips and caressed the moist slit he loved so passionately. She enveloped him in her winged sleeves and dressing gown. All thought evaporated from them. Lust ignited their skins. A sexual flame flickered into blazing life for them, and they were happy. Pleasure followed and yielded to bliss. They forgot the world, themselves, and passed a night suspended as if floating between sexual heaven and hell.

Rashid was more amused by this mysterious Ethiopian lady than he had been by anyone for a long time. He had seen her only once, and under such bizarre circumstances. But when he had woken up and she was gone, she had left behind a new sparkle in his life. Humayun, too, had often done the same for him, gladdened his heart. She still did. Mirella also was able to amuse him, but not in the same way as the other two women. There was an undercurrent of hate he had for Mirella’s ancestors and her own reticence in not committing herself to him that made her more fascinating than amusing. He would always have his special relationship with Mirella. But she would never be totally his. She wore Adam’s love for her like a protective vest to stop herself from submitting completely to him. Rashid smiled to himself. Like his great-grandfather before him, who had been unable to tame the Kadin Roxelana Oujie, Mirella’s great-grandmother and benefactress, he
felt confined to an always tenuous and constantly changing part in Mirella’s life. It was almost, though not quite, enough. Everything within him demanded that he try to bring her to a complete submission.

The Concorde had started its long descent. Rashid was delighted by his own boyish enthusiasm at the prospect of seeing his exotic black beauty again. He smiled to himself, thinking of her voice on the telephone several hours before.

“Is this my Turkish delight?” had been her first words to him. He had replied with laughter. Though familiar with Western habits of speech, Rashid delighted in the childish charm of her cheekily converting him into a kind of candy. The literal meaning of her phrase tickled him. It was odd, an Ethiopian teasing a Turk in so thoroughly Western a way.

Rashid had recognized her voice immediately.

“Oh, it’s you,” he replied. “I was beginning to think I hadn’t given satisfaction.”

“And what made you think that?”

“Most women don’t wait weeks before chasing after me.”

“I am not most women.”

“I had noticed. Now what can I do for you?”

“You know very well what you can do for me. But you would have to come to Paris to do it. Are you free?”

“That depends.”

“On money, I suppose.”

“You suppose right. On money. But there are other considerations.”

“Like what?”

“Like, how much you want me. And for how long, and when, and where.”

“Haven’t you forgotten something? The ‘how much will you pay?’”

Rashid had snapped his fingers and thought it dumb to have slipped in playing his role of money-hungry gigolo. He quickly retrieved the situation. “Hardly. I make my price after I hear what you want. Had you forgotten?”

“Paris, tonight, for two days. A room at the Ritz,” she
had declared. He had sensed a note of irritation in her voice and that had spurred him on.

“That’s awfully short notice. I would have to disappoint someone here to satisfy you. That’s poor business, but I might do it if you make it worth my while.”

There was a moment of hesitation on her part. He had waited, and then finally she had answered him, “Spoken like a perfect whore. Your arrogance, I assure you, is difficult to overlook, but it appears to come with the package.”

Rashid had raised an eyebrow at her bitchiness, but he relished every move in the game he was playing with her. He wondered what she would do when she found out who he was. Would she tolerate his stringing her along in her mistaken assumption that he was a toy-boy?

“I’ll pay the same as before,” she continued. “A thousand dollars a day, and your air fare, economy class.”

He had begun to scoff at “economy,” then stopped abruptly. She might hang up. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll be on the Concorde, the flight that leaves Kennedy at one o’clock this afternoon. It arrives at ten forty-five Paris time. My price is ten thousand plus the Concorde round-trip airfare. You should arrange for the ticket to be paid for by the time I pick it up at the Concorde ticket counter at Kennedy. My money is to be paid upon my arrival. For that you get me for three days. I come with a guarantee to make them memorable. Take it or leave it.”

“Room 921. Bring a dress suit” had been her reply. He detected a tremor that was either in the electronics or in her voice, not there before, and then a click in his ear and the empty drone of the disconnected telephone.

Rashid looked at his reflection in the window of the Concorde and was pleased by the excitement he saw in his face. He ran his fingers through his hair and was delighted by his own sensual good looks, surprised that he wanted her to want him beyond anything or anyone in the world, that he wanted her to be devastated by his beauty and his sexual prowess. He smiled at his image in the glass. How remarkable, he thought, that he should be so smitten by this woman who wanted to pay for his sexual services. He
reached up and switched off the small stream of light from the reading lamp above, and his image was swallowed into the blackness beyond the pane.

He sat in his pocket of darkness. How satisfying it would be when the mysterious unnamed woman he called Sheba would take him between her lips and slowly fill her mouth with every last inch of him. How he would come with every pull of her mouth on him. How he would go down deep into the small of her throat. Oh, the tightness of her lips around him, the wetness and softness of the inside of her mouth as she worked on him. She would leave him shiny, covered with her moistness, and have to draw back and admire the gleaming energy of his erection throbbing at her.

She would say things to him in admiration. “If she placed him on a pedestal, how much more beautiful he would be than any Greek god he so resembled. How she adored the very tang of his skin. How she wanted the ambrosia of his sperm.”

He imagined her returning to his penis, wanting to absorb him into her mouth. Her tongue would play with the open eye at the tip of his phallus. She would bring him to the exquisite edge of orgasm. He wanted her to love and adore him.

He thought of her body, the hardness of her nipples that ached to be sucked and kissed. How wet with come she would be between her legs, but how she would wait because she would not be through making love to him. She would find his buttocks as sensual and as sexual as his phallus, and she would spread them and after kissing, licking, and caressing with all her passion on his testes, she would find his anus and play with that secret, tight, puckered place. Kissing it and the inside of his cheeks, putting her tongue over it, she would lose herself in an animal tenderness for him. And still she would not be done with him.

He could bear such fantasies no longer. A stack of magazines had been lying on the seat next to him but he had never bothered to look at them. Now he picked them
up as a distraction, something to cool down his sexual thoughts.

He looked through the pile of magazines. He was stunned. She was there on the cover of more than one of the seven. Her name was not Sheba, it was Tana Dabra Ras Magdala Makoum. It was all there, page after page of her, a life story that was perfect magazine fodder.

“Mr. Sharif, Mr. Sharif. Excuse me, but all the passengers have left the plane, and you must too, sir.”

Rashid finally acknowledged the steward when he tapped Rashid on the shoulder. “Mr. Sharif.” He had forgotten that was the name he had been using, the one she had given him that he had pretended she had guessed correctly to be his. He had been so engrossed in the photographs and the articles about her that he had missed the lights of France below him and had been unaware of the landing.

One fact about her had riveted his attention. She had been the Ethiopian woman who had been linked in business with Adam Corey. She was said to be indirectly responsible for the magnificent financial coup that launched him into the Dr. Armand Hammer league vis-à-vis geopolitics in business. Well aware of Adam’s influence and connection with Ethiopia, he had toyed with the idea of asking Adam to help him find the mysterious woman he had called Sheba when the detectives he had hired had failed. Something had prevented the appeal to Adam: He had wanted to find her himself.

It was coincidence on a grand scale now to have been picked up by her. To have been taken for a male prostitute, a successful gigolo, he had found amusing, and nothing more — until he had bedded her. Then feelings had invaded his performance as paid stud. She fascinated him, and when she reversed roles with him and took his body over and made love to it, she ran the gamut of passion and gave everything she had. In the final hours of their sexual encounter he had once again taken over. He had tamed her wild, pagan, sometimes primitive sexuality with his polished sexual performance. As he had done so, he had begun to sense that something more than sex was happening to
them. When he had awakened, she was gone. He was disappointed. He had found it doubly amusing when he had counted the money and found she had left him an extra hundred dollars. A tip. At the time he had simply slotted her into his pigeonhole for special one-night stands — until several days had passed by and he realized that he had been waiting for the telephone to ring. When she did not call the charity of his choice was deprived of the money she had paid him. He gave it instead to the best detective agency in Paris, instructing them to find her.