White Moon Black Sea (21 page)

Rashid thanked the steward. Walking through the plane toward the exit he found it difficult to blot out the photographs of his Sheba. “No,” he said to himself, “not my Sheba, but my Tana.” She was far more magnificent than he had remembered. The intelligence, fire, and passion in her face far more pronounced and enthralling. The body, long and lean like that of a young boy yet utterly feminine, all cunt and lips and mouth, modest breasts crowned by large and luscious black nipples. All of this he had made love to with the bravado of a young buck aiming to be reckoned worth the thousand dollars she had paid him to play stud to her hungry, frustrated lady.

He bypassed the other passengers on his flight waiting for luggage. He almost never traveled with baggage. He was greeted by several of the customs men and waved through without even stopping. He was recognized at once by the immigration man and his passport was stamped. He had escaped ordeal by airport. He was on his way to her at the Ritz. His chauffeur was waiting for him. Rashid started toward him, until he saw Tana Dabra Ras Magdala Makoum, about a hundred yards away, regally walking in his direction. She was scanning the dwindling crowd for him. Was that his heart missing a beat? She was so splendid looking. His friend the Princess Eirene had warned him often enough, “It only takes a minute, just one little minute, to fall truly in love and find the other side of yourself.” It had caught up with him, his moment, his one minute was upon him.

He waved his chauffeur away, realizing he must not reveal his real identity … not yet. He walked toward
her. She looked very chic, far more so than the night she had picked him up. Her hair was pulled back severely into a glamorous twist at the nape of her neck. Large gold hoops in her ears enhanced the stunning features of her face. She wore a gray silk blouse with large pointed lapels, the V-neckline plunging between her small breasts nearly to her waist. Voluptuous and alluring balloon sleeves softened her look. The huge and magnificent ruby surrounded by sapphires upon her slender neck gleamed in its priceless beauty and elegance. With every long stride she took, her hip-hugging, wide, gray silk trousers swirled rakishly around her legs.

He raised his arm and waved, trying for her attention, and quickened his step. She saw him, and he caught the relief in her face, and the joy. She raised a hand and placed it over her heart as if to still its beating, and her smile broadened as she waved back at him. They hurried toward each other, weaving around other passengers who stood between them in the noisy, brightly lit terminal. Then they stood in front of each other, face to face. He almost swept her into his arms, wanting to kiss and crush her into himself. He hesitated.

“I didn’t expect to be met,” he murmured.

“It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to come.”

Further words failed them both. He took her in his arms and kissed her with passion and tenderness. She gave in to his kisses and, when they parted, the urgency in his voice said everything for both of them.

“You have a car? Good.”

With arms around each other’s shoulders they hurried into the waiting car, a rather vulgar, stretch limousine with black tinted glass. Neither one of them could wait. They kissed and caressed, but when he began to open her blouse, she stopped him with a hand placed gently on his wrist. She took from her handbag an envelope and slid it into his jacket lying on the footrests in front of them.

“As promised. It’s best to get the business part out of the way and forget about it.”

Again, Rashid had almost forgotten his role, so impassioned by her was he. His heart was touched, not by the
discretion she tried to use in the situation, but by her looking away from him while she did it, yet continuing to stroke the hair at the nape of his neck, seemingly unable to let him out of her hands.

“I couldn’t agree more” was all he answered, as he pulled the zipper on the side of her bony hip slowly down and raised her off the seat enough to slide the soft silk to her thighs. He kissed and caressed, licked and teased her lovingly, and she answered him with whimpers of pleasure until he dressed her again and held her in his arms and they sat in silence. Now, with the windows down, they watched the lights of Paris flash by while they waited impatiently to arrive at the Ritz.

As they rounded the Place Vendôme, he tapped the window separating the chauffeur. It slid down noiselessly, and he asked the driver to stop the car.

“You go up ahead of me,” he then told Tana Dabra. “There is something I want to pick up.”

“If it’s your clothes, a valise arrived with your things late this afternoon.”

“Oh good. No, just a few special things for us.” And he was gone before she could say another word.

A half hour later, when she opened the door to the suite, he took her quite by surprise. He made his entry, attended by several bellboys carrying beautifully wrapped parcels stacked one upon the other, several flower arrangements, four dozen white roses in a Lalique vase, two dozen sprays of white moth orchids in a rock-crystal bowl. One boy bore a silver urn chilling two bottles of Roeder Christal, and a kilo of the best Beluga chilling on ice in a large bowl of ornate silver.

She was unable to speak until he had dismissed all the bellboys from the room. He picked up one box and, taking her by the hand, led her to the Louis Philippe settee where he sat her down next to him. He opened a five-pound box of white Belgian chocolates. He offered her one, which she took, and then he spoke.

“My greatest vice. But I am beginning to think you could become an even greater threat to my virtue than
these.” He then ate two of the chocolates with emphatic delight.

He placed the box on the settee and pulled her along by the hand toward the bedroom. She had changed into a black silk caftan which opened down the front in a series of small suchet braid buttons. Slowly, one by one, he opened them and savored what he saw.

In turn she undressed him slowly, touched and caressed him, trembled at the sight of his complete nudity, the passion for him released in her.

“I am going to take that bowl of flowers off the table, and then I want you to stand upon it.”

He did as he was told, and when he was up on the round pedestal table set in the center of the all-white bedroom, his rampant penis was in a direct line with Tana Dabra’s mouth. He was so magnificent, so handsome. He had so much charismatic power over her she found it difficult to hold back from making love to him. But that was not, after all, what he was there for. She had to remind herself that she was paying for his services, she was in command, he was nothing more than a male prostitute, a human machine hired to provide lovemaking.

She walked around the table admiring him lustily. His penis responded to her beauty. Her long black hair was hanging loose over her shoulders; she stalked around the table in nothing but high-heeled shoes, black stockings, and garter belt. Her long dusky limbs, slimness, and hard and pointed nipples with their large black areolae against the glowing darkness of her body seemed to ooze depraved sexuality. Her stunning face, with its perfectly chiseled, symmetrical features, further tantalized him erotically. His memory of her voluptuous fleshy vaginal lips, mutilated by the series of evenly spaced holes pierced through them long ago, aroused anticipation of the erotic games the future would hold for them. Her enlarged clitoris, what joy it would give him to make love to her there. Make love — those were strange words for him, he realized — but they were jettisoned from his mind when she gripped his ankles and pried his legs farther apart.

“Oh, my girl, the things I am going to do to you before
this day is over. I shall whip you with sex until you beg for mercy.”

He was there to do just that, and that was what she wanted, what she had imported him from New York to do. Then why did she resent him? Was it his slight impudence, the self-assured attitude he exuded? He was hers to command, and yet there were moments when she felt he was in control of their liaison. And there was a look in his eyes, at one moment a softness, a generosity of spirit toward her, and in the next, possession and lust. He was a lady-killer, a supreme seducer of women, she thought. Worth his price, so long as love was left out of it.

11

S
he walked around the bedroom as if seeing it for the first time. It appeared to her in the midday sunlight as much larger, the sculpted plasterwork ceiling much higher. She had thought the all-white room bathed in soft lamplight the night before seductively beautiful, a perfect background to soften the intense carnal hunger she felt for her paid lover. Not so in daylight. The room was something much more than just beautiful. And might not she and her gigolo be much more than a pair of libertines devouring each other in the name of eros?

Tana Dabra touched the white damask-patterned silk of the walls, ran her hand across the polished, tinted oak of the wainscoting below it. She touched the silk of a lamp shade, switched the lamp on and then off, and trailed her fingers languidly across the marble tabletop it rested upon. She opened the French windows and the noise of the traffic whirling around the Place Vendôme thundered into the room. She closed them at once: Why should the essence of the room and what had passed there the night before be disturbed by the reality of the world beyond? She drew
back the sheer, white, silk chiffon curtain with one hand and for a few minutes peered through the glass at the monument outside her windows, the elegant circle of eighteenth-century buildings in the Place Vendôme, and the people rushing from
rendez-vous
to
rendez-vous
.

She let the curtain fall and turned her back to the window. She surveyed the room, wanting every detail of it etched unforgettably in her mind. Something had awakened in Tana Dabra in that room during the night. She had sensed a hint of something similar with the man she called Sharif the other time she had been with him. But she had only sensed it. This was real, a genuine feeling of sublime wholeness. For a woman who had, all her adult life, been doing a high-wire balancing act by shifting from being controlled to being in control, and who had as a result always felt fragmented, this new feeling of wholeness was inexplicably joyous and fulfilling. She felt free, easy, and uncomplicated, full of physical pleasure for everything she could see and hear and smell and touch. He had triggered it, Sharif, from the moment she had seen him in the airport terminal. All this was implicit in their erotic relationship, this and her wholeness. If something more were to grow out of the relationship, that was fine. If not, that was fine too. How could it be otherwise, given their positions and the circumstances of their relationship?

Tana Dabra walked across the room, and the scent of white roses, faint and romantic, inspired a smile. At the foot of the bed she scrunched up in her hands some of the rumpled white linen sheets and the white silk bedcover whose satiny tulip pattern seemed to bloom in her hands. She pressed her face into them. The faint aromas mingled: his Armani cologne, the rumpled linen, her perfume, the musk of sex, and the sweetness of chocolate, which made her extend her tongue as if to lick a satin tulip. She threw her head back and gave an enchanting throaty laugh. She turned around and, with the bedclothes straggling behind her from one hand, she moved across the floor to stand in front of the round pedestal table where she had had her lover stand like the living replica of a god. How liberatingly “wicked” she had felt walking around the table
admiring him as man, sexual machine, beauty. She dropped the bed linen to the floor and spanned the table with her arms till her hands gripped the far edges of it. She bent forward and put her cheek gently on the table and remained thus for a few seconds.

Standing then, in the center of the room, she crossed her arms over her breasts and ran her hands up and down her arms, ever so gently hugging herself. It felt so good to be alive. As she turned to walk toward the black-and-white marble fireplace and pluck one of the white orchids from its arrangement in the rock-crystal bowl on the mantel to pin in her hair, she saw him leaning against the doorjamb of the sitting room. Tana Dabra felt suddenly embarrassed that he should catch her so romantically involved with the room and her feelings.

He remained silent and waited for her to say something. She watched him walk toward her, savoring him, handsome and elegant in his white crewneck jersey and casual Armani suit of putty-colored cotton poplin, its sleeves pushed up above his wrists, the yellow-and-white polkadot silk hankie decoratively flopping out of the breast pocket, the woven, yellow, canvas belt, silver-buckled, around his waist, the well-polished black shoes.

And now, after last night, she knew him to be more than elegant, a wit more than witty even, a connoisseur of women, sex, food, and wine. Consorting with a gigolo was new to her; and she found it amazing that a man in that sort of work should be so princely and display such gallantry toward women as the man walking toward her had. It suddenly occurred to her that he must be a famous and extremely sought-after middle-aged toy-boy. His fee should have told her that.

He slid one arm under hers and around her waist and pulled her deliberately, slowly into his arms. She felt herself melting into the embrace. She touched his cheeks with her fingertips. An Asiatic allure was in his eyes, along with mischief and something quite dangerous. Sexual ecstasy and promiscuity were trapped in the shape of his lips. Every feature was perfect and sensual, so handsome that any woman would fall for him. She was aware
of that, just as she sensed in him a brave man, skilled, wily, charming, and ruthless, a man who lived beyond the rules. It was all there in his face, that side of him that aspired to achievement, to ideals, but was controlled by a spirit working furiously within him. The way he moved from ferocity to charm and back, even that showed in his face. She found him scary — at once seductive and threatening — and imagined there were few women who would not succumb to the erotic about him, bound up though it was with menace.

He kissed her, eased her lips apart with his tongue, and crushed her to him until she lay weak and nearly limp in his arms. Then he carefully released her and, placing an arm around her, walked with her to the telephone and rang for their breakfast. He placed the receiver back in its cradle and his first words to her were, “After breakfast we’ll go shopping, Cartier’s or Van Cleef’s, whichever you prefer. Then we’ll parade around Paris like the lovers we are and show off the lust and happiness we share in each other. Then we’ll come back here and make love — passionate, erotic love that will make last night seem just an overture to paradise.”

They walked from the bedroom through to the sitting room, where there was a round table covered in snowy white damask with a bowl of white lilies in the center. Placed in front of the French windows, overlooking the same view of the Place Vendôme she had seen from the bedroom windows, the table was set for breakfast with silver and crystal and white Limoges china. Rashid picked up a tall, slender Lalique champagne flute, stuffed to the brim with small, white, pitted Italian peaches, and poured chilled champagne over them. Handing one to Tana Dabra, he remarked in a curious tone, “You are very quiet this morning. Have you nothing to say to me? Are you not as happy with me as I am with you? Have I displeased you in some way? What have I done to dull the love I saw in your face when you were memorizing the bedroom where we discovered each other?”

His anxiety over her feelings calmed the disappointment she felt in him. The wholeness and love she was feeling for
herself and for life in general included him — for the moment. She had no problem admitting that to herself or to him. She answered him frankly. “I have a lot to say to you, and you make me very happy. And not even your greed can shatter what you saw in my face and I feel in my heart. It simply left me speechless to think that you should want me to reward you with a present for last night. Diamond studs, sapphire cuff links, how many women have had to reward you with a tip like that? I must be forgiven for my silence and my naïveté. You are the first man I have ever paid for, and I simply don’t know the form.”

She touched the rim of her glass to his, and he began to laugh. He carefully removed the flute from her hand and placed it with his own on the table. Taking her hands in his, he held them while he calmed his amusement. And then an extraordinary change came over him: He found it difficult to hold back tears. He struggled with that for a few seconds before he smiled at her and said, “I was not asking you to take me to the jeweler’s. It’s
I
who wants to take you there. I am the one who feels humbled — by the love I feel for you. And I want to shower you with all that’s beautiful in this world, in celebration of what we discovered together last night under the spell of eros. My feeling for you is very strong, I thought you understood that.”

Tana Dabra had lowered her head in embarrassment, unable to look into his eyes while he confessed his love for her. When she raised it again, she smiled at him and said, “I came to life in your arms as I have never before. It was more than I could hope for, that you should feel the same and we should have a romance. When you mentioned the jeweler, I could only think that if we were having a spellbound romance, it was my fantasy and your business. How was I to know otherwise?”

“This should be enough to tell you,” was his answer. The urgency and roughness with which he pulled her into his arms, and the passion with which he kissed her, did tell her.

They drank their peach-flavored champagne, and another
glass and another, and he seduced Tana Dabra again with his appetite for sex. He double-locked the door before he laid her on the floor of the sitting room and teased her warm pink slit with the coolness of the white peaches as he slid them into her during their passionate kisses. One by one he sucked them from her, now covered in her juices. They ate them while he told her of the many ways they would come together that night. She was out of control, his sexual protégée now, wanting everything he offered. He delighted in her lust, but he was a master seducer of women, able to transform the erotic seduction of Tana Dabra into a romantic affair and hold her right where he wanted her.

Rashid was in love and wanted to marry her on impulse. He was dazzled by the feminine energy she exuded. Their love affair had begun as compulsively as his love affairs always did. But this one had started out as no other ever had, and he was certain it would end in a happy marriage between them. Before Tana Dabra, and with the exception of Mirella, he had ensured that his affairs had always been short-lived. Preoccupied with escaping, he believed that no matter how durable an affair might appear to be, the sooner it ended the better.

He draped the skirt of her mocha-colored linen dress back down over her legs and helped her up off the cushions he had thrown from the sofa to the floor.

“Say you love me, Sheba,” he demanded.

“My name is Tana Dabra Ras Magdala Makoum, not Sheba. That is a lot of name, but I think there are other things, too, that you should know about me.”

“Fine. I want to know everything about you, as I want you to know everything about me. But for the moment, just say you love me, and then we’ll talk.”

“No, I don’t think I dare do that,” she answered hesitantly.

“Why are you being sensible? That’s not enough. We’re two people who have got to run risks. Our being here together today proves you are a risk taker. You know how to throw over applecarts and leap off cliffs, and you are as wild and free as I am. Commitments of the heart don’t
come easily to me. I don’t know how to live inside a relationship, how to say, ‘I love you,’ how to open up and let you into my life. But my defenses are down. Goddamn it, woman, say you love me, because I am going to marry you, Tana Dabra Ras Magdala Makoum, so you had better get used to the idea as quickly as I have got used to your name.”

They heard the key in the lock, and then a knock at the door. Rashid ran his fingers nervously through his thick straight black hair. The knock came again. And the pair of lovers began to smile and then laugh at the timing of the intrusion. “Saved by the bell, as they say. Well, you just keep in mind what I have told you.” He gave her a quick hug on his way to unlocking the door, laughed good-humoredly at himself, and thought, ‘Here I am at a moment of truth, and it’s turning out more like some second-rate romantic farce. But this scene isn’t played out yet, my girl.’ He turned to her just before he opened the door to a brigade of waiters about to roll in the breakfast under silver-covered dishes on portable tables covered in crisp white damask, and he announced, “My name is not Sharif. It’s Rashid Lala Mustapha. Try that for size.” Then he pulled open the door. He turned back, glancing at her to see if his name had had any effect on her. It hadn’t. The name meant nothing to her, and he realized that she thought she had had a proposal of marriage from a gigolo. Yet again, in spite of seriousness of his intentions, he smiled wryly at the situation.

They sat opposite each other and ate luscious, fresh, skinned, ripe purple figs. The waiters put the finishing touches to their Oeufs Carême before serving them. Scrambled eggs mixed with diced goose liver, white chicken meat, and truffles in a flat puff pastry shell, garnished with lashings of sliced truffle and surrounded with a fine demi-glace — it was one of Rashid’s favorite breakfast dishes. After that they shared another: lightly poached quail eggs on a bed of thick, creamed spinach and long, thin strips of crispy bacon. They ate their way through a pyramid of fresh, hot croissants, rich with butter, melting on their tongues, with raspberry and kirsch
preserve, which Rashid spooned out copiously, and they drank cups not of coffee, but steaming hot, exquisitely blended Chinese tea. The couple was ravenous and ate with gusto. Tana Dabra was yet again dazzled by the man sitting opposite her; Tana Dabra was trying to keep a cool head and in control. She felt herself slipping further and further under his romantic spell.

Their conversation settled on Paris and the things and places they favored most about the city. Waiters hovering over their meal denied them any intimate speech with each other. Not a bad thing, she thought. But not so, he. Until she acknowledged love and agreed to marry him, nothing else in his life would be quite right. That seductive sweet laughter with which the Princess Eirene used to enchant her friends tinkled in his ear. Or so he imagined. How the princess would have laughed to see him smitten, longing for marital commitment, having to beg the woman of his choice to marry him. Well, for years she had warned him that some woman might, one day, dangle him on the end of a long string. Yet still he would only suffer a fraction of the pain of unrequited love that he had inflicted on so many women.