White Moon Black Sea (3 page)

That had been the pattern Rashid had adopted in the last twenty years. But it had not always been that way. There had been a time when he would have stayed with Christos for days and sometimes weeks enjoying his hospitality. And there had even been a time during his Oxford years when he maintained one of his family’s period houses in the old port where he entertained his university friends and enjoyed the company of the foreign colony there. He thought about that as he mounted the stairs of the villa with Christos at his side. Suddenly a picture flashed through his mind: Humayun and himself, in their younger days, during their first week together in Xania. His desire for her returned, only to be quickly put aside. Hunting down another portion of the Oujie legacy possessed him more.

2

R
ashid had no idea how he expected to feel at the moment of his triumph. He had never fantasized about it. He was excited, aware of all the adrenaline pumping in his body. But that was not unusual for Rashid, it was just part of deal making. When he entered the library with Christos to complete his takeover, Mirella was the last thing on his mind.

The comfortable coolness of the room after the heat in the garden cast an aura of rightness over Rashid. Orientalist paintings — Gérôme, Lewis, David Roberts, and the prize, an Ingres — adorned the walls between bookshelves that held one of the finest collections of rare books on Greece and Turkey. White marble busts of ancient Greeks
and Turks set on shiny black marble columns under dusty kentia palms which appeared to be growing out of an enormous silk isphahan carpet of great age, seemed to be awaiting the return to the family of more of their lost heritage. Queen Anne wing chairs and silk draperies embroidered with vines, blossoms, and singing birds and Georgian furniture completed the room.

Like the garden, the room was disheveled, carrying its own kind of grand elegance in its dishevelment. Christos walked to the windows. One by one he pushed open the shutters so that the still-bright late afternoon sun streaked across the carpet and the room sprang to life. If the curtains were frayed, hanging in ribbons in some places, it hardly mattered because they were more museum-worthy than just tattered. Indeed the room reflected culture, pride — and power. And to all this the two men and their purpose added tension and excitement.

Christos and Rashid sat opposite each other, separated by a handsome mahogany George III partner’s desk. Christos glanced first at his watch and then at a sheet of paper lying on the desk. The phone began to ring. He ignored it, his eyes fixed on Rashid’s face. He thought he actually saw Rashid flinch as the phone cut into the quiet of the room.

“Your golden fleece, Rashid?” he said as he reached down and picked up a dark purple kidskin box by its handle. He stood, smiled, and handed it across the desk to Rashid, who rose to receive it.

Both men sat down again and Rashid returned the smile. A light danced in his dark brown eyes.

“Could be,” he said. “I hope so. But let’s wait for the telephone calls.” He looked at his watch and added, “Well, one of the banks is calling on time.”

“Your integrity has never been in question, Rashid. Only your involvement with Mirella. But I think a cool head rules that heart of yours. Take the box now, and enjoy your triumph. Here’s the key.”

He tossed a gold key to Rashid, who caught it in midair with one hand. Christos picked up the telephone.

Rashid listened to his cousin’s conversation, his left hand
on the box, his right clenched around the gold key. He made no move to use it.

“Ah, Mr. Phenneger. And is the sun shining in Lausanne? How does it find you, sir? Well, I trust?” There was a long pause while the banker on the other end of the line spoke. Then Christos continued, “I see. Well, thank you for being so prompt in confirming its arrival. I hope to see you soon, sir. Good-bye.”

Christos replaced the receiver, chose a Mont Blanc fountain pen, and ticked off several items on the white paper in front of him.

“The million in dollars,” he said, “and the deeds to your house in Xania and all your other property in Crete, you brought with you in the brown paper parcel. That checks out. Now Phenneger confirms a deposit in my account for six million dollars’ worth of gold bullion.” He looked up and was surprised to see that Rashid had not opened the box. He was about to say something when the second call came through. It was from a banker in Zug.

“Confirmed, five million in uncut industrial diamonds,” Christos said, and made another tick on his list. “That does it, Rashid, I’m satisfied. Now, for God’s sake, man, aren’t you going to open the box? Or don’t you like the color I chose for you?”

“Very smart, Christos. I will open the box.”

Christos watched Rashid going over the contents of the purple box. He felt the force at Rashid’s obsession with the Oujie legacy concentrated in the tiny movements of his fingers. The ancient power over Turkey of Rashid’s family was being restored to his grasp.

Christos had no such obsessions, either private or public, and certainly none about family. So a second private deal with Rashid was easy. He had consented to act as chairman for the syndicate backing Rashid’s scheme to swindle Mirella of another part of the Oujie legacy. Their private deal had suited both.

Their mothers had been sisters, high-born Turkish women of impeccable Ottoman lineage. Whereas Rashid’s mother had married into an even more princely Ottoman family, her sister, Christos’s mother, had married out of
her faith and into an enormously rich and cultured Greek family from Istanbul.

Christos’s paternal great-grandfather had foreseen the persecution of the Greeks in Istanbul as inevitable, so he had moved his family into Greece. This explained the mix of Turkish and Greek among Christos’s holdings. When it became clear to Christos that Rashid wanted to own as much prime Turkish property as possible, he approached his cousin about a trade-off — all Christos’s property in Turkey for Rashid’s in Greece.

For each man, this was the end of a long road to greater power in the country of his choice. Had Rashid fully sensed the significance of the contents of the purple box? Could he register the singular power and importance they conferred on him in his beloved homeland? Once, long ago, Mirella’s ancestor, Kadin Roxelana Oujie, had been loved beyond reason by a sultan. His passion had enabled her to oust Rashid’s forefathers. She had passed the power that had been theirs to Mirella. Now, by cunning, Rashid was about to steal back that power from Mirella.

It was all there. Every document Rashid needed. He replaced them in the box. The lock clicked shut. He set the key carefully alongside the others on his key ring. Then Rashid sat back in the wing chair and heaved a sigh. He began to chuckle to himself and then relaxed into a deep interior laughter that finally brought tears to his eyes. Some time passed before Christos placed a goblet of cold water before Rashid and a hand on his shoulder.

“And what now, Rashid?”

A scent of lilac and jasmine, and she was there. The two men rose from their chairs, their eyes riveted on the lady in white whose very presence changed the atmosphere in the library. She walked directly to Rashid, stood before him, and submissively lowered her head. He raised her hand and then lowered his lips to kiss the long slender fingers in a quite courtly manner. That was the way they always greeted each other in public. In private it was a different matter. At those times she would drop elegantly to one knee and kiss his hands, first one, then the other, address
him as master, and never raise her eyes to his until he allowed it by word or gesture. She would usually be naked except for a diaphanous scarf or an odd jewel, worn not to cover but to excite.

Rashid reacted at once to her presence. She was one of his most prized possessions. Rarely had he wanted her more than he did upon seeing her at this moment. He was gripped by the power of a raunchy sexuality that showed through her Junoesque beauty cocooned in the whiteness of her garb. Her regal bearing and the desire he read in her eyes possessed him, as they had so often during the many years she had been his sexual slave.

She had captured the erotic hearts of numerous men in those years. And still she was dazzling the two men in the room, making them oblivious to all but their sexual desire for her.

He held his golden fleece, the purple box and its contents, in one hand, and Humayun in the other. His first words to her were, “Are you ready to leave?”

She did not speak but merely nodded, affirming her readiness. He smiled at her and charmed her by kissing her hand again.

“Good. I have a surprise for you. A change of plan.” Then he turned to his cousin and said, “Christos, I have decided to accept your invitation. Until the morning then.” He stretched his hand across the desk to shake Christos’s and was aware of a look in his cousin’s eye that asked to be included not in the morning but now. Rashid ignored it.

“Rashid, I’d like to give Humayun a gift to thank her for her company this past week, if that’s agreeable to you,” Christos asked, knowing very well it would be, because that was the form. A gift to this remarkable woman was a way to say thank you to Rashid without offending his generosity in sharing his sexual goddess. It was the form, and it had made Humayun a very wealthy woman in her own right. One of Rashid’s great joys was the sexual intrigues they created together at his behest in which many men had acquiesced.

What happened next took Rashid rather by surprise. He
had nodded his consent to his cousin, who then went around the desk to Humayun and presented her with a dark blue leather jeweler’s box, one that would hold a necklace of some importance. Rashid stepped back a few paces from Humayun as a courtesy to his cousin. Christos and Humayun gazed into each other’s eyes. It was not a happy or loving look that passed between them. Then Christos said, “Wear these for me the next time, and, I hope, for yourself and no one else.” Then he offered her the jewelry case.

She hesitated, and a kind of anger seemed to emanate from her. She placed her hand on the case, and for a minute Rashid thought she was going to push it away from her. It would have been an outrageous rejection of Christos and Rashid alike, an aggressive act on Humayun’s part, completely out of character, and meriting severe punishment. Then, much to their relief, the moment of anger passed and she accepted the case, saying, “Until the next time then.” Nothing more, not a word or a gesture to express what she was feeling. There was neither a note of promise in her voice, nor one of indifference for that matter. There was a kind of thrilling silence, an inscrutability about Humayun that was part of her powerful erotic beauty.

With those words, Rashid could actually see desire for her in Christos’s face. Desire and excitement. There was something else: a kind of decadence and even a spasm of hatred for his being so vulnerable to a sexuality so evidently feminine. Not so for Rashid. He loved and adored female sexuality, and he quickly swept her away and into the old battered Buick that had brought him to the villa. He watched the driver and Nikos, the bodyguard, as they devoured her with their eyes while they stood at the open doors of the automobile when Christos and Rashid exchanged a few last words.

And then they were off down the drive. Quite suddenly now for Rashid, Humayun had displaced Mirella, and even his amazing success in acquiring what he had sought so long and so desperately. He hardly saw the garden as they sped through it. He had eyes only for Humayun. So he missed seeing Salome leap onto the roof of the car. He
heard only the huge thump and then a yowl as the cat rebounded through the air and landed somewhere, doubtless upright and unperturbed.

As they passed through the gates, he waved to the four guards who were about to pull them closed. Then he turned his full attention to Humayun. First, and without a word, he removed her veil and turban. Her golden-red hair tumbled around her shoulders. He took her face in both hands and reveled in the beauty of her cream-colored skin and clever, seductive green eyes. Yet again he was captivated by the raw sensuousness of her looks. Her face was alluring with its proud patrician nose. He ran his finger down it and along the high cheekbones, held the finely pointed chin between his fingers, and drew her face to his, placing a deep and sensuous kiss upon her lips. He wanted to feel the swell of her large voluptuous breasts in his hands, to mouth their tantalizing nipples and the large halo around them decorated with henna-dyed arabesques, to lay his cheek against her lovely, seductive mound where her pubic hair had been replaced by more of the reddish arabesques.

His heart felt full of her. He touched her hair and then raised her hand and kissed it. Humayun sensed a different kind of closeness with Rashid today which they had not shared for a very long time. A kind of loving that had happened to them only once during the first week they were together, after Rashid’s father had given her to Rashid for life as a sexual gift. She had been paid well by the elder Lala Mustapha to see that his son would be kept always sexually happy and assured. Nothing had been said about love.

The years rolled back with every kiss Rashid gave her now, and she tried to keep her balance through those kisses as the old Buick swung down the mountain of olive groves. Mental balance no less than physical, because there was Moses now to consider. It was a losing battle. She was slipping back into her love for Rashid, in defiance of all her newer instincts.

“I don’t think I tell you often enough that you are the most beautiful and exciting woman in the world.”

“No, you don’t,” she answered him with a dazzlingly sexy smile on her lips. “In fact, you rarely tell me anything as flattering as that.”

“Oh, surely I do.”

“Perhaps the first week we spent together. Many, many times then. But that was a very long time ago.”

“But you have known?”

“Oh yes, I have known.”

“That’s all right then?”

She did not answer but gave him another of her exquisite smiles. He raised both her hands in his and turned them over to kiss the palms and lick them with an eager tongue. She closed her eyes in ecstasy, so sensitive was she to his every touch. He looked up and whispered huskily, so the men in the front seat would not hear. “I want you so much, all to myself, and I will have you that way soon, very soon.”

“Oh yes, please,” she answered as she opened her eyes.

“Don’t you want to know where we are going?”

She nodded eagerly.

“To Xania. I have sold my house in the old port to Christos, and we are going to spend the last night there together. Just you and I and the servants will be there. Does that please you?”

“I spent the happiest days of my life in that house and in Xania, Rashid. So many times I have wanted to return. Yes, it pleases me very much.”

“Do you remember how we met?” asked Rashid. “The way I remember, as if it were yesterday? How I wasn’t home when my father arrived with you. I stayed away deliberately. I had seen my father and you together several times and from the very first wanted to snatch you away from him. He was so old, and you so young and fresh and beautiful. I could hardly believe you were to be mine. I wanted you, and yet I didn’t want you, because I knew you would change my life. I would no longer be as free with my friends. They would never understand our relationship. Remember how I made you promise you would never speak of it to anyone? But it has been good. Happy, no?”