Lace (76 page)

“We ’re going to Israel together to start a new life on a kibbutz before it’s too late.”

Griffin put down his paper and looked warily at his wife. He couldn’t see Delia labouring in the fields and eating communal meals. He suspected a trick. “What about the
kids?”

“Fred’s hardly a child. When he’s home from school he’s practically never here as it is—he’s always out with that girl. I think he’s going to move in
with her. He’ll need a little financial help from you of course, and so shall I. But I know I can rely on you to look after me. In fact, I’ve already had a word with Marvin about
it.”

Griffin dashed down his paper, stood up and roared. “You’ve already been to a lawyer without so much as mentioning to your husband the fact that you’re leaving him?”

“Do you think I’m a fool?”

That evening Judy opened the door of her apartment to see Griffin leaning against the living room wall, swirling his usual predinner glass of ginger ale. He looked oddly taut
and gauche. As soon as she untwisted her key from the lock he strode across the room, and without pausing to kiss her, he grabbed both her wrists. As if he could no longer keep it to himself, as if
he couldn’t believe that it was true, he burst out with his news.

Judy’s mouth fell open. “You mean
she
wants a divorce?
Really
wants one? Do you believe it? This isn’t another of her cat-and-mouse games?”

“Yes, I believe it this time. She’s never been like this before—gloating, exultant, almost vengeful.”

“Griffin, to be honest, I don’t blame her.”

“None of that has anything to do with you, Judy. Delia and I had a relationship that didn’t work and she didn’t want a divorce. So we regrouped.” Gently he shook her
wrists. “Now look, I didn’t come here to discuss that guilt-and-responsibility thing again. I’m here to ask you, now that it’s possible—will you marry me,
darling?”

To her surprise, upon hearing the words for which she had waited ten years, Judy found that she couldn’t say yes.

She simply didn’t know.

PART
TEN

B
EYOND THE ORANGE
trees and marigold beds at the end of the palace gardens, a scarlet Kiowa waited on the concrete helipad.
The small, orange windsock hung limp. Two armed guards in khaki fatigues stood smartly to attention as the royal party approached.

Although in 1972, many educated Eastern women wore Western clothes in their home, Queen Serah always wore traditional robes in Sydon. Now she flicked up her long white
burka
as she was
helped into the front of the helicopter. Squealing with pleasure at the prospect of the coming flight, ten-year-old Prince Mustapha and his white-uniformed servant climbed into the three backseats
of the transparent bubble. A stickler for detail, Abdullah walked around the machine to see that all the doors were shut and handles latched. He completed his circuit at the right door, climbed in
and settled himself in the right-hand seat of the opulent custom-built cabin. The trip from Dinada Palace to the hunting lodge in the eastern mountains, which would have taken nearly eight hours by
car, was only twenty minutes in the five-seater jet turbine helicopter.

Heat shimmered on the sand as Abdullah strapped himself in. He went through the start sequence and a sudden wind whipped up the sand as the helicopter roared, shaking the bones and teeth of the
passengers. Abdullah clapped on his earphones, turned on the ADF and dialed in the eastern mountains frequency; the needle on the instrument face immediately pointed in the direction that they were
to take. As he rolled the twist-grip throttle away from him, the noise was deafening, as if their ears were being pierced by a pneumatic drill. The royal pilot flicked a last look at the dancing
numbers on the control panel, checked that pressures and temperature were stabilized, then smoothly lifted the helicopter clear of the ground.

Once in the air, the noise wasn’t so bad, more like the steady throb of a submarine. Peering down from the rear window, the small boy waved good-bye to the shrinking white Dinada Palace as
their magic dragonfly rose, then turned east before settling on a straight course. On the perimeter of the helipad below, a small cluster of guards and courtiers still stood at the salute and would
remain so until the machine had vanished over the horizon.

A sudden gust of turbulence distracted him momentarily, so Abdullah didn’t notice the needle on the oil pressure gauge shudder for a moment, then draw toward zero. At 300 meters above the
desert, Abdullah leveled off. He was looking forward to a few uninterrupted days with his son.

On the previous afternoon, a mechanic had suspected that an oil line running on the outside of the engine to the front engine bearing was cracked and he had replaced it. It was almost unbearably
hot in the hangar, and just as he began to tighten the front end of the line, he felt a buzzing in his ears and his knees gave way. He grasped the side of the aircraft with suddenly weak hands,
slid down from the ladder and took a swig from the water bottle at his waist. When he felt better, he climbed the ladder again, checked the connections and signed off the machine as airworthy for
flight. But he forgot that the oil line connection was only finger-tight.

Suddenly, sound blared from the overhead panel. Every faculty alerted, Abdullah swiftly checked the instrument panel before him. Adrenaline flooded his blood and he tensed like a runner waiting
for the starting gun. It was unlikely, the odds were against it, but it was happening!

Then the engine-failure horn sounded. All three engine indicators were fast unwinding to zero; the continuous loud screaming from the low rotor speed horn meant that the blades were slowing
down. To Abdullah, everything that was happening so swiftly appeared to be in slow motion, but the long hours of pilot training rendered his movements fast and automatic.

He had no time to be frightened, and there was no need for fear. In the event of engine failure a helicopter doesn’t drop like a stone, it glides to the ground like a glider. Abdullah
lowered the pitch control on his left, which put the helicopter into a glide, and it entered the stabilized autorotation which Abdullah knew, after hours of practice, would safely land the
aircraft.

The helicopter dropped and for a moment became weightless.

As toys hit the cabin roof and a teddy bear was flung violently against the Queen’s head, all passengers were thrown against their safety belts and the servant in the rear began to scream
with fright.

As the helicopter dropped, the Queen instinctively grabbed the front panel and cried, “Stop playing tricks, you’re frightening the child!” She turned to look at her husband.
His face was tense and masklike as his hands and feet worked in perfect coordination, fighting to regain control of the aircraft.

The Queen had never seen him look like that and she panicked. “You’re not to let it crash, it will frighten Mustapha!” she screamed, pulling at his shoulder. “Stop it, I
say, Abdullah, stop it!”

Abdullah heard neither his wife nor the screaming servant. All his concentration and willpower were focused on the machine. He realised with relief that he had the autorotation under control,
and that when he had gone into the glide, the machine had felt exactly as it had in practice long ago, when his instructor had been sitting on the seat beside him.

Confident once more, his mind ran swiftly through the emergency checklist. He could touch down almost anywhere ahead in the sand.

“Stop it! Stop this machine immediately!” the Queen shouted hysterically. It was the first time she had ever dared raise her voice to her husband. She started to pummel his left arm
with her fists and then, screaming, she lunged for the black control stick between Abdullah’s knees.

The helicopter shuddered and dipped.

Once more his wife lunged toward him. Abdullah hit her as hard as he could with the side of his left fist. It caught her on the cheekbone, split open the side of her mouth and knocked two teeth
inward. She fell back, clapping both hands to her bleeding mouth, still screaming with fear and panic as Abdullah turned once more to the controls.

He was now down to twenty miles an hour and dropping, which was far too slow. He would have to regain a speed of at least sixty miles an hour if he was to avoid a crash. Abdullah shoved the
stick forward to regain speed by diving. Suddenly he was frightened and sweat started to run into his eyes.

Again the helicopter dropped violently and correctly, but the needle didn’t climb fast enough, and at fifty feet above ground Abdullah knew that he would have to make a sloppy emergency
landing. He flared the aircraft, easing the control stick back toward his body, in order to haul the machine out of the dive and bring it to a halt before touching ground.

Obediently the machine slowed up and started to sink. Abdullah realised that it would probably be a walkaway crash; it wouldn’t be his first. He prepared to level the helicopter before
touchdown, easing the stick forward.

It was at this moment, with touchdown imminent, that the Queen again threw herself against him, beating Abdullah’s body with her fists and wildly shouting through her bleeding mouth,
“My child! My child! You don’t care about my child!” She lunged toward him and with both hands, she yanked the control stick toward her, bent her body over it and clung to it with
surprising strength. The aircraft obediently rolled to the left.

There was an enormous, bucking jolt as the travelling blade in the back struck the ground hard and dug deep into the sand, then stopped dead.

The braces that held the blades in position snapped cleanly, but the huge and very expensive pin that held the blades to the aircraft did not snap. The tip of the 150-pound blade was still
travelling counterclockwise and near the speed of sound when it smashed into the front of the cabin and crashed downward, slicing through the overhead panel, silencing the screaming horns, and
slashing the Queen’s head roughly from her body.

The severed, bloody head was flung backward onto her son’s lap. Little Mustapha screamed and pushed the bloody horror away from his bare knees, down among the toys on the cabin floor, as,
with one last tremendous jolt, the blade finally hit the ground and the aircraft jerked to a halt.

A gush of blood spurted up from the severed lump of crushed bone and tattered flesh that had been the Queen’s body. The sticky scarlet fountain drenched Abdullah, the incarnadine,
inescapable spray clung to his hands and soaked his clothes, his arms, his hair and his face. He tried to wipe the blood out of his eyes, but with fingers that were red, wet and dripping.

For a few seconds he was mentally and physically paralyzed. After one look at the bloody lump of flesh on his left, Abdullah’s conditioned pilot’s mind registered that he
wouldn’t need to help her—his priority was to get the screaming servant and child out of the wreckage as soon as possible, because apart from the stench of blood and vomit from the
back, he noticed two distinct smells—the burning electrical wires in the smashed overhead panel, and the fumes from the seventy gallons of volatile jet fuel that was pouring into the back of
the cabin from the tank beneath the back seats.

He jerked into action, tore off his safety belt and tipped off the headphones. He levered his body upright, neck and shoulders protruding from the smashed and buckled front window. Then, less
than sixty seconds after the helicopter had touched ground, there was a sudden roar. Abdullah felt as if a huge hand had picked him up and flung him through the air and across the desert sand.

He landed on his stomach, winded, gulping and gasping for breath, with his leg twisted beneath him. He felt no panic or pain, although in fact he had suffered a concussion, a compound fracture
of the leg and broken several ribs. For a moment he lay dazed, then, with enormous concentration and willpower, he lifted his head.

Slowly, steadily, sickeningly, the horizon tilted forty-five degrees to the left. Trembling with the strain, Abdullah hoisted his body on his arms, the jelling blood dripping, as he faced the
helicopter. The machine had turned into a roaring ball of fire. Impotent, Abdullah gazed at the flaming mass of debris. Grimly he started to drag himself forward on his hands toward the fireball
before he collapsed unconscious on the sand. Apart from the searing, roaring flames, there was no sound in the impersonal silence of the desert.

It had been exactly seven minutes since takeoff.

I
N THE LATE
June sunshine, Lili’s scarlet Jaguar dipped along the highway, heading east of Paris. Five kilometers
after Epernay, she turned off the N51 toward Le Mesnil-sur-Oger. On the right, meadows of brilliant yellow mustard flowers alternated with stretches of golden corn, sprinkled with scarlet poppies,
blue cornflowers and white marguerites. On the left the dark green, seven-foot box hedge bordered the de Chazalle estate.

Lili swung the car to the left through a pair of open, black, curlicued iron gates. The hedges and trees looked unusually neat, the grass was freshly cut. Half a mile away, at the end of a
straight gravel drive, was the eighteenth-century French château, a perfectly proportioned stone building, with row upon row of tall windows that glistened in the sunshine.

Zimmer was right. It was time she started to go out by herself again. She had sheltered—or rather hidden—under his wing for eight months.

For all those months Lili had lived alone with her grief for Stiarkoz, refusing to discuss him even with Zimmer, with whom Lili would only talk about her work. Then one day Zimmer had entered
the dressing room where Lili sat in a mauve flowered wrapper, wiping off her makeup in front of the brilliantly lit mirror. Without asking, Zimmer shoved past her dresser and locked the door. Then
he stood behind Lili with his hands on her shoulders, looking at her in the mirror, and said, “Lili, I’ve tried to hint, but you refuse to listen, so I’m telling you directly that
to shut yourself off from the world and everyone in it is bad for your acting. My dear, Jo is dead and you are alive. You must make a conscious effort to interest yourself again in all the things
that you pursued with Jo—and you must also make an effort to make new friends and have some fun. Fun is good medicine; moping is self-indulgence.”