White Moon Black Sea (25 page)

“I will want to do what I have always done: Play with big business for the benefit of my country, and in opposition to the present regime. It will be dangerous and thrilling and rewarding, just like being married to you. Will you support me in all that, if I tell you that it will come second in my life only to loving you and being your wife?”

He nodded his consent. Her heart beat faster with all the excitement felt in herself and mirrored in Rashid’s eyes. She let go of the handgrip she had been clinging to, bounced free, and then slipped into Rashid’s arms.

“How sure your instincts are! How could you have known how much I would feel for this place, what it would do for us? I don’t have your quick responses. I’m not half the accomplished seducer you are. I will make a terrible wife. I have no domestic skills. I don’t know how to run a house that would please you, I —”

He had interrupted her saying, “I don’t want to marry you for your domestic skills. Love, friendship, intimacy, sex, and personal fulfillment — those are the things I want to marry you for. Give me all that, and I’ll never let you down. Then you will be free to pursue your own interests. Now hush up and kiss me, because for the moment my needs are narrowed to just one — sex with you, getting inside you and giving you more and more of myself.”

These memories were interrupted by Rashid’s laughter. He took her hand and said to Cynthia, “Tana Dabra has
not yet seen the Southampton compound. You have given me an idea. I will take her to see it. Care to join us? Be our guest.”

Tana Dabra disengaged herself from Rashid to look at a display of accessories, unwilling to confront the beautiful but unhappy face of Rashid’s victim. How callous he could be when he found a weakness. How he instinctively toyed with it. Tana Dabra wondered why any woman invited such treatment. She could never become one of Rashid’s victims. She thought of Humayun whose role as Rashid’s sexual slave was a world away from the role of the victim. The difference was that Humayun spontaneously renewed her assent to servitude. Cynthia’s bondage was sudden, involuntary.

Pretending to be distracted by the display of handbags and silk scarves and doeskin leather gloves, a fur hat and gigantic bottles of French perfumes, she watched Rashid as he assumed the guise of the wealthy international playboy. Again her thoughts drifted back to Dominica.

His compound comprised seven square miles. One mile was white sandy beach that dipped in and out of coves where, on the long and straight parts, great white-capped Caribbean waves rolled slowly in to a palm-fringed shore of idyllic beauty. Point sur la Mer, he called it. What joy she had felt when she first saw the houses, each a different size, round with thatched roofs and not too different from the
tukuls
of her own country: the cook house, the dining house, the living house, the master bedroom-and-bath house, the guest houses, linked together by paths of crushed seashells, cut through the natural jungle. Wild parrots and orchids, rare wildflowers and trees, the sea and sex were their entertainment.

Staff assembled from all over the world, mixed happily with the locals who worked for Rashid. Descendants of the Caribe Indians who had once populated the island, and several black people who could trace back their ancestors on Dominica through two hundred years, made up a colony all their own. They remained faithful, silently condoning the sexual excesses practiced at Point sur la Mer.

There she had found another Rashid who wore only shorts and sandals, when he wore anything, and who swam naked in the rough sea. A Rashid who, day and night, furnished them with sexual games and entertainments that dazed her with their power to excite, tease, and tantalize. He taught her, reveled in her naïveté. She saw he was enchanted by the way she rose to every sexual occasion, every corruption he afflicted her with. He had declared that there was no woman he could not lure to the brink of sexual abandon. After Humayun arrived with several men to join them, Tana Dabra had realized he wasn’t teasing. He was raising a devil in her, she was certain, to mate with the devil in him. He wanted it all, and so did she. And it was there on the island that, strangely, he enticed her closer to becoming his wife.

But other, less disturbing bonds were created between them. She was a woman of the highlands of Ethiopia as well as the financial capitals of the West. She taught Rashid how to walk great distances with ease, to track in the rain forest, to live off the jungle. She found certain leaves and flowers with healing properties, and others that, when rubbed in, sensitized the genitals. She revealed some nuances of African sexual practices that refined even his cosmopolitan repertoire.

There had been the excitement he felt on news of the birth of the baby of the woman he called each day. But slowly, as days passed, they forgot the world beyond their present paradise.

Now she felt Rashid come up behind her, and together they walked back to the elevator. Cynthia had vanished.

13

T
he elevator bell pinged. Seconds later the door slid open. The two of them smiled as they squeezed themselves in among the other shoppers. On the ground
floor they wove their way through the people and counters toward the main exit. Tana Dabra spotted a cashmere scarf woven in a rich paisley pattern of deep reds and grays. She quickly broke away from Rashid and went to the counter and took it. Reaching into her handbag she paid the young woman. Not even waiting for it to be wrapped, she caught up with Rashid at the door to the street. Tana Dabra draped the scarf around his neck saying, “Thank you for my coat, I love you.”

He took the scarf in his hands. The cashmere was as soft, even softer than the precious sable furs she wore. He looked at it, then at Tana Dabra. He gave her one of his more sexy yet wry smiles, and said, “You thank me, and you love me. Yet still you will not marry me.” He put his arms around her. The fur felt sensuous against the palms of his hands. Once again, as so often in the weeks they had been together, an instantaneous spark caught and flared. He kissed her, and while looking over her shoulder he whispered, “I still wish you were naked under your new fur coat, and I still want to fuck you, naked in nothing but jewels, spread out on your Russian fur. And maybe I will, very soon.”

She gave him her teasing throaty laugh with a tilt of her head, and said softly as he released her, “And I, Rashid, will bind you with your new cashmere scarf and whip you into a sexual stupor with my tongue.”

He gave her a smack on her bottom, a reproach lost in all the fur he had just purchased, watched by a bevy of ladies shopping who shot envious glances at the lovers. The two of them burst hand in hand out into the crowd milling up and down Fifth Avenue.

Near the front entrance their chauffeur, Ahmed, was waiting by the open door of Rashid’s maroon-colored Rolls-Royce. Settled comfortably, they sped away from the world of Bergdorf Goodman, themselves again, unfettered by the pampering the luxury store’s staff had given them.

That morning, when the call had come through to Rashid that Tana Dabra’s gift, the sable coat, was ready, they were having breakfast in bed together. He offered her
a day out in the city, and a surprise gift. The offer included a sumptuous lunch, to which they were now winding their way through the midtown traffic.

Rashid was sitting close to Tana Dabra in the backseat of the car. He ran his hands with his fingers spread wide apart through the thick, luscious fur. He whispered, “It is so soft. Nothing softer. Except maybe you.”

He kissed her, and Tana Dabra unbuttoned her coat and arranged her legs seductively. Rashid slipped his hand under her dress. His right hand kept fondling the sable sleeve of her coat as his left hand traced the fleshy line of her thigh. He kissed her deeply. She opened to him easily and moaned softly. He felt the slight tremor that went through her body. A satin wetness flowed over his fingers. His delight in pleasuring her was evident in his eyes.

He kissed her deeply again, and then withdrew his hand reluctantly from under her dress. Tana Dabra took that hand in both of hers and, turning it palm up, raised it to her lips and kissed it tenderly. Rashid licked his fingers, then kissed her once more. Gently releasing her, he sat back and said, “How can it be I still want you all the time? The look of you, the scent of you, and, oh, the taste of you. Incredibly sexual. You still have the power to seduce me. And that is something I give thanks for, every day.”

Tana Dabra buttoned her coat, adjusted the collar, and smiled at him, “Since you first seduced me — and the seduction has been nonstop — all that time I have never stopped wanting you.”

With that she bent forward, kissed him passionately, and touched his cheek tenderly with the back of her hand. “Now, where are you taking me to lunch?”

Rashid was taking Tana Dabra to the newest restaurant in the city, the one that promised to be the best French restaurant in Manhattan, certainly the most elegant and chic. Wilsden Van Allen, its owner, had created it because he loved French cooking.

Everything about the restaurant was the best: perfect location in midtown on the East Side; doorman with twenty-three years’ service at the St. Regis; entrance even more discreet and elegant than the old Colony Club’s ever
was; interior decorations combining elegance and simplicity, not unlike the once-famous Pavillon and a small section of the Louvre in Paris. Monet, Renoir, and Picasso alternated on the walls with Turner, Manet, Pissarro, Dali, and Gauguin. If a diner complimented Wilsden Van Allen on his paintings, he could become revoltingly gallant, “Oh, it delights me, your delight in my little pictures. It is my pleasure to be able to share them with you.”

Without visible effort he tantalized with the most exquisite food imaginable. He had stolen the pastry chef from the Connaught in London, whither he had fled his native France as one of the finest chefs in that country. The wine steward had been weaned away from many years at Le Grand Véfour in Paris. From Lyons, a gourmet paradise, he snitched the best vegetable chef. An offer the master chef had found himself unable to refuse closed the shutters of his restaurant in Paris, then considered one of the five best in the world, and the doyen of French chefs came to New York. The maitre d’ and waiters, who ran the restaurant to utter perfection, had been gathered from the best restaurants in Manhattan and Los Angeles.

An ardent Francophile, a multimillionaire, as accomplished a snob as he was an art collector, darling of the millionaire dowagers of Palm Beach, Wilsden offered them as sublime crepe suzettes as would the best restaurants of France. For his adoring patronesses, however, sex with him was not on the menu, only the crepes. He was a notorious queen for rough trade.

Wilsden Van Allen was a dichotomy and there was strict apartheid of his sex life and his public, business life. Through the wee hours of the night he would expend himself at fashionable night spots, or cruise the grottiest of steam baths for a trick. Snobbery stopped with his sex life — even the roughest or most debasing sex was never low enough for Wilsden. Dancing at gay clubs, hustling tricks, enjoying S-M and kinky sex were one thing; society, culture, and business, another. And he never let this personal life cross the door of his restaurant.

He was dining with his guests a few tables away from Rashid and Tana Dabra. Wilsden was delighted that they
had come to his restaurant. Occasionally and most discreetly he looked over to their table. Tana Dabra, the newest love in Rashid Lala Mustapha’s life, was wondrous looking. She was a new but instantly famous face. Rashid was a jet-setter as well as belonging to the cultured
haut monde
. These were the sorts of people he liked to see in the restaurant. He knew Rashid’s houses around the world were overflowing with rare and beautiful objects. After the Kennedy’s digs in Hyannis Port, Rashid’s compound in Southampton was a retreat high on the list of sought-after invitations. As yet Wilsden had not received one.

Wilsden remembered the couple from a few weeks before, when he had been the guest of a Greek millionaire, Christos Mavrodakis, a friend of Rashid, on a yachting trip through the Greek islands to Side on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. He had been invited as the escort of his current society dowager. He and Rashid had met many times in society, but that was the first time he had met Tana Dabra. He noted that they made an extraordinarily good-looking couple. Undoubtedly she was his mistress. They had been aloof and kept more or less to themselves and their host. Something about them made him feel superficial and small. He did not know why. They had certainly been more than civil to him. Now they were in his restaurant. It occurred to him to send a bottle of rare wine with his compliments, but he thought better of it. Instinct whispered to him that this would be wrong. It was accepted practice to tread carefully around Rashid Lala Mustapha. He turned back to his friends, content that at least Rashid and Tana Dabra were dining there. But not before he recalled something strange that had happened.

It had been in the ancient port of Side. They had all gone ashore and were roaming over the amphitheater. The locals were making a great fuss over Rashid. He was standing among some of them engrossed in conversation. His woman, the Ethiopian, had climbed to the uppermost tier of seats and was sitting there alone, contemplating the wonders of the marble architecture and the sea beyond, when shots, rifle shots, resounded. Everyone scattered or took cover, except Rashid. He sprinted like a young athlete
and bounded up over the rows to his woman. He took her in his arms; she was unhurt. Their anguish had been acute, and they had promptly had a fight. Had she been the target for the sniper? No one knew. Several hours later two Turkish bodyguards arrived to watch over her. Rashid disappeared for twenty-hours, and on his return the cruise had continued as if nothing had happened.

Tana Dabra and Rashid were having a happy time together. The food was fantastic. Not since the years when Monsieur Point presided at La Pyramide, his world-famous restaurant in the French countryside, had Rashid dined so well. With the taste of such food, memories flooded back. Memories merged into one another, and he laughed and loved Tana more because their memories were few, their history almost nonexistent because it was yet to be created by them, and they had years ahead to do it in.

Rashid raised her hand to kiss it. “I have not sent for the car. Why not walk home? We could do some window shopping on the way. If you feel up to it, we might stop in a gallery or two.”

“Lovely idea, Rashid.”

Walking along upper Madison, they peered in the windows that tempted the rich with marvelous goodies of all sorts. Occasionally, they would stop and Rashid would take out a slim black crocodile notepad and write something down. An object to inquire about, something to have sent around to his rooms, a possible gift for someone. They walked among the crowds of people until suddenly Tana Dabra had had enough. She stopped in the middle of the pavement. They faced each other and Rashid put his arm around her. Crowds of people were passing around them, crossing to the other side of the street.

“Rashid, I never dreamed I would like New York so much. It’s the fastest, most exciting city in the world. The adrenaline seems to run off the skyscraper walls and down the streets. The streets, they’re more like man-made canyons. And the people, what a cross section of humanity, or inhumanity, maybe. It’s mind-bending. And the sex. From what you have shown me, it’s the best equipped sex shop in the world. As someone I met, though I can’t
remember who, said, ‘Ya puts your money down, babes, and ya gets what ya pays for. That’s sex and love in the Big Apple.’” She began to laugh. “Ah’s putting ma body down, man, so let’s us get home quickly. I don’t wanna be out here anymore. I want to go home and make love to you, really thank you for my coat. I have wanted to all day.”

He began to laugh. “I don’t have a problem with that, my beautiful street talker. Let’s go. And, if you are very good I’ll put
my
money down on a spicy little something to amuse you, and
we’ll
see what we get, babe!”

Often when Tana Dabra made love to Rashid, he would, in a delirium of lust, question her about who had taught her to make love the way she did. At those times she thought of Adam Corey, so thankful for his being the first man to take her and to teach her how to excite lust in men. That was her secret, and she would never tell Rashid. It was that expertise and a base, animal ruttishness she emanated that excited Rashid. She was different from any woman he had ever had, and he often admitted to himself that her multilated genitalia, and the bizarre ways she was able to excite with them, were especially depraved. And depravity was something that triggered in Rashid that streak of evil he relished so much in sex. Mirella accepted it, and loved him in spite of it. Humayun accepted it, and nurtured and even loved it in him. But only Tana Dabra understood it and, in her understanding, became a part of it.

He lay now under her tongue, her probing fingers, and her seductive sucking. He watched her. He was on the edge, about to yield to the spasm of release. But he was a master of control, and he knew the longer he waited, the more would be their pleasure. Overcome with lust, she asked him to take her, begged him. She could bear it no longer, she had to feel him spurt inside her. He taunted her with his control a little while longer until there was no love or affection left in their movements. Nothing but raw lust. Then he took her.

Without interrupting his rhythm he pushed pillows under her back, and, pulling her even tighter up against
him, and her legs even father apart, he paced his thrusts with such power and timing that she came again and again in infinite pleasure between gasps and intermittent speech peppered with sexual obscenities that spurred him on. He fucked her not only with his phallus, but with his mouth and then his hands, leaving none of her erogenous places unserved. Tana Dabra was barely able to catch her breath between thrusts and orgasms. Finally Rashid let go and gave himself to her in an orgasm that seemed to him to go on forever. Afterward, unable to speak, they stayed locked together for a few minutes, exhausted from so long treading the edge of oblivion.

Reluctantly he withdrew, and with his hand he scooped up their lust, then together they licked it out of his palm and from his fingertips. On her side facing him, with a passionate voice on the edge of cracking, Tana Dabra said, “With sex you take me out of this world.” Rashid raised her up and had her lie flat over his body. Their skins melted into one. He reached out and poured some champagne for them, which they drank from the same goblet.

Each of them, exhausted yet exhilarated, fell into a light sleep, knowing that their afternoon of sex was far from over. It was no surprise then when the doorbell of the suite rang, waking first Rashid, then Tana Dabra.

The young man introduced himself as Richard Ram. He was a twenty-four-year-old Cuban refugee. Richard Ram was of average height. He was a superstud who was paid super fees by rich sexualists like Rashid Lala Mustapha to perform with a young lady, a young man, or, on occasion, something more bizarre. He seemed to adore new people to fuck with and was therefore perfect for foursomes. And he was even better at large orgies. Richard Ram loved his work and managed to take it seriously at seven hundred dollars an hour, with bonuses for special deviations. He was into everything, a real pro.