White Moon Black Sea (34 page)

He could hear the bells of a small, domed, and whitewashed church down the cliff behind the cemetery, a hundred feet above the sea. As if in answer, bells sounded now not only from the church below, but from another on the other side of town. Then another and another. The Greeks ring the bells when someone has died, and bells in many little white chapels and churches around Xania were ringing now for someone. Rashid had his sign.

At last Rashid was able to mourn the death of Humayun. In the taxi all the way back to Rethymon, where his sleek,
black yacht, the
Aziz
, lay at anchor offshore, memories of their years together became vivid in his mind once again. All good memories.

For the first time since her death a terrible blackness that had settled over him now began to lift. The deep emotional depression that had dragged him down into a lonely pit he had never known before, where no one and nothing could reach him, began to dissolve. Life was flowing back. The very air that he breathed once again had a scent to it. The glare of light returned to the sun, and he was able to feel its heat. He was aware of his limbs. He lifted his hand and squeezed it and felt the bones under the skin. He realized how anesthetized he had been since that horrible night when he had claimed Humayun’s body from Adam in Istanbul.

The driver was leaning on the horn, blasting everyone off the road, as Greek taxi drivers were wont to do. He actually heard the horn. It grated on his nerves and he smiled, happy that he was feeling and reacting to his senses and the world once again.

He boarded the
Aziz
and they set sail at once from Crete. Rashid watched the big island recede until it was no more than a dot on the skyline. His self-doubt about his role in Humayun’s life vanished. The weeks of torment since her death were over. His pilgrimage to her grave had set them both free. His mind was clear, unfettered from shock and grief. Events that had occurred one after the other, suddenly, like pieces of a puzzle seemed to fit together and make a picture.

On his return from Lyttleton Park, he had spent the night with Humayun, just the two of them. Tana Dabra had flown on to Switzerland. They had had a glorious erotic idyll. He remembered now, for the first time, their last words to each other.

“Some would say I am addicted to you, Rashid. What would you say?”

“We love each other and the erotic life we have made together. We’re not tired of it or each other. If that’s an addiction, we are both hooked.” Then he had kissed her good-bye and was gone.

Two days later she was dead. Adam had secretly removed the body from Lyttleton Park, trying to avoid a scandal and to keep the tragedy from Mirella and Deena. A coroner had been called in and an autopsy performed in Istanbul. Cause of death was water in the lungs. But their verdict hovered between murder and suicide. Adam, with the help of the Princess Eirene, returned the body to Humayun’s home. A remarkably beautiful and romantic two-hundred-year-old Ottoman town house, painstakingly restored to its original splendor, in the Old City not far from Topkapi. Rashid did not believe that she had run away with Moses or that she was dead, until Adam took him to the house. In the enclosed courtyard he had stopped next to the marble fountain, dipped his hands in the water, and held them to his face. It was at that moment that he knew it was true: The spirit of the place was gone. When he saw the body he had completely lost his senses. He refused to leave her side. Intermittently he would come back to life for a few minutes and be able to make rational decisions. That was how she had come to be buried where she wanted, near Xania. Christos was called in to help.

Rashid felt cold and left the deck of the
Aziz
, In the salon he poured himself a glass of champagne. The picture became even clearer.

Adam had confirmed to Rashid that the first thing she had said to him was “I have made the most dreadful mistake of my life”; the second, “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

He had believed Adam. Of course, that piece, too, fitted into the picture Rashid was constructing. For some reason, which for the moment Rashid could not work out, Humayun had been unable to stay away from Moses. For argument’s sake he would call it love of a good man, because, if nothing else, Moses was a very good man. What reason could there have been strong enough to force her to make the decision to abandon Rashid still escaped him. He knew the exclusivity of her love for him was unquestionable.

For whatever reason, Humayun had run off with Moses to Lyttleton Park, and had known at once it had been a
mistake. The lines of the picture were defined even more. Once there, Humayun was thrust into a foreign world. She realized that even Moses’ love could not redeem her from her need to be sexually enslaved by Rashid. Her years of debauchery had become an addiction she desired even more than love and affection, security and freedom with her black American lover. She discovered that she was incapable of hurting Moses by rejecting a life with him, or of leaving one steeped in sexual depravity and erotic love with Rashid. Perhaps there mingled in her the fear that age and time were no longer on her side at just the moment when Tana Dabra became very much a part of their lives. Could she have been sure that Rashid would forgive her mistake? Humayun chose the only way out she thought would redeem her.

Or was Humayun murdered. Unlikely.

Rashid poured himself another glass of champagne. After slipping into a heavy-knit jacket, he walked out on deck, glass in hand. The air felt good to him. He drank half a glass of the chilled wine in one swallow. He looked out on to the black sea, and then up at a white, nearly full moon. He knew in his heart she had taken her own life. So he needed only to know the one thing that had pushed her over the edge.

A great dark cloud slipped over the moon just then. He watched and waited till the white moon reappeared. He guessed the person who would have that knowledge — the Princess Eirene. She had spent some months a few years back with Humayun when, at the Princess Eirene’s request, Rashid had lent Humayun to her as an erotic companion on a world cruise with friends. After Rashid himself, Eirene knew her best. He would go to see her at once upon his return to Istanbul.

Rashid walked the deck for some time. He was feeling his old self again, yet not unaware of the debt that he owed Adam. And indeed Brindley, who, more than anyone, had been compromised by this tragedy. Adam had been clever enough not to let Brindley know what had happened until he had removed the body from Lyttleton Park. He had had no choice. As a solicitor, Brindley could not have allowed
the body to be touched before the police were called in. The ensuing scandal would have been ruinous for the Ribblesdales and Lyttleton Park. For a friendly enemy, a competitor in love and on the tennis court, and often in business, Adam had proved himself forever a friend. Rashid would never forget it. Most of all, he would never forget the kindness Adam had shown to Rashid’s beloved sexual slave, Humayun, in the hours before and, indeed, after her death.

And Christos. He would not forget, ever, the passive, cool look on Christos’ face when he viewed the body of Humayun. Nor the look of sadness in his eyes when he clasped Rashid to him and ordered him to pull himself together. Nor his wise refusal to allow Rashid to accompany the body to Crete. Christos had seen he was in no state to conduct himself with dignity in front of islanders so inured to tragedy, so scornful of weakness in bearing it.

The Princess Eirene of course had saved his sanity by taking over. Her staff and Humayun’s had seen that the corpse was dressed and cared for and laid out to look no less beautiful and sensuous in death than she had in life. It was Eirene who arranged religious and traditional ceremonies for the dead in the house, had prayers said in mosques all over the city, and had pilgrimages made, with flowers and offerings, to Eyyup and other sacred shrines.

The house that Humayun treasured was only one of several Rashid had given her over the years. Her village house in Central Anatolia, a wooden
yali
on one of the Princess Islands, another on the shores of the Mediterranean between Side and Urfa, were all opened and filled with flowers and food to receive those who wanted to pay their last respects.

And it was Eirene who had had Humayun’s period caïque filled with flowers and sailed to the Black Sea. On its return voyage down the Bosporus to the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn, flowers were cast into the waters leaving a trail of blossoms in her memory.

It was also the princess who had taken over the practical side of things for Rashid. She sent the obituaries to the Istanbul newspapers as well as those in other capital cities,
brought letters and cables, flowers and charitable donations in Humayun’s name from men who had known her, friends of Rashid’s who understood his loss. Rashid in his few moments of clarity during that period was impressed by the people from all walks of life who trooped through the house and wept for Humayun. Princess Eirene had arranged obsequies befitting a great courtesan of Topkapi’s harem. Only now, restored to his old self, could Rashid understand how important that had been for them all.

He sat in a deck chair and watched the stars shine brightly, and the white moon glow over the water. Moses. He had not spoken to Moses. Nor had Moses approached him. Every day Moses had come to the Ottoman house with fresh flowers, lilies of the valley, which he placed in her hands. He had sat there for an hour, never taking his eyes from the casket, and then he would leave. Rashid had never seen a tear, heard a sob, or glimpsed an agony in Moses’ face such as he himself was suffering. There was strength there, a superior kind of strength that was sustaining him through a loss no less devastating to him than to Rashid. Rashid thought about those times he had seen Moses there. He recognized that now, on his return to Istanbul, he was ready to speak to Moses.

A kind of madness still clung to Rashid, still shattered by her death, although he was lucid for longer periods of time than he had been. He went into a phase where he did little but lose himself in a world of erotic pleasure, either with Mirella in her love pavilion on the hill, or in the arms of Tana Dabra and others in the House of Oda-Lala.

Tana Dabra, his wife. Only she had been strong enough to penetrate his grief during this tragic time in his life. Only she truly had understood her husband’s erotic relationship with the dead woman and what it meant to him, and her understanding touched him deeply. He had chosen well when he chose this Abyssinian of royal blood whose remarkable courage had sustained him during these terrible weeks. He wished she were with him right now to seduce him as she always did, by playing off her apparent aloofness against the fire that burned within her. He loved all those traits in her that had made him want her for his wife.
He knew they would eventually make her the mother of his children as she had made herself the new keeper of his sexual depravity and his darker nature.

Rashid rose from the deck chair, his heart beginning to feel glad once more. There were only two pieces of the puzzle to put together. One he would acquire from Princess Eirene. The other he had to work out himself. What did those two words borne on the wind at the cemetery mean? “Help him? Help him?” Who? Was she asking the gods to help Rashid? Or was she asking Rashid to help Moses.

Rashid arrived at the Princess Eirene’s
yali
a few minutes before five. It was for Rashid still the most beautiful
yali
on the Bosporus. Much had to do with its color, that lovely, faded oxblood-red, pinkish in the sunlight. And, of course, the quality of time standing still. One of the servants came to help him tie up the speedboat he had driven himself. He was in black tie at Eirene’s request. She explained she was giving a little dinner that he was expected to attend, with only the clan, the Coreys, and the Lala Mustaphas. He had been delighted because it would be an undemanding reintroduction to the life he must continue to lead despite Humayun’s death.

The invitation had been extended when he had called her from on board the
Aziz
two days before to tell her he wished a word in private when it was convenient. There had been something in her voice, a kind of enthusiasm that he knew always meant surprise. Now, as he walked up the stairs to the
yali
, he felt a boyish anticipation.

She was coming down the staircase when he entered the hall, so beautiful still that he stood stock-still admiring her. She was wearing a silver lamé dress whose top was simplicity itself, with its high, round neck and long, tight-fitting sleeves. Around her waist she wore a belt of gold and rubies, a treasure in its own right. From under it, the long skirt was accordion-pleated and rustled as she walked. Diamonds of unimaginable beauty and size were in her ears and in the dazzling bracelets on her wrists. She looked splendid. Behind her, muttering were Hyacinth and Narcissus.
In this house it was always as if the Ottoman Empire retained a mute domination still.

They kissed and went into the drawing room overlooking the Bosporus and sat together near the window. From his inside pocket Rashid withdrew a slender, black velvet box. He opened it and slid a magnificent diamond bracelet from it. “I had a selection of these sent from Paris this morning. This was the finest among them. A bauble that can hardly say thank-you for all that you did for Humayun and me. But something I would like you nevertheless to have.” He clasped it around her wrist.

“My dear Rashid, it’s wonderful to see you so much recovered. How lovely. I am delighted with it. You always spoil me and I adore it. It has been my life being spoiled by men. There is nothing better for a woman, no matter what they may tell you.”

“Eirene, I have to ask you something. I sense that only you will know the answer to this. This tragedy, Humayun herself did it?”

“Yes, I am certain of that.”

“Why?”

“It was not uncommon for the women of the harem who could no longer go on to drown themselves. There is such a history of it. Not only did they do it themselves, in the way that Humayun did, but sometimes, because of violent intrigues at court, they were thrust into sacks weighted with stones and thrown into the water from the cliffs below Topkapi. There were even mass drownings. Once as many as three hundred at one time. Humayun would have known all that. She would have seen it as an honorable way out of her dilemma.”