This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (24 page)

“I bought these for you on my last day in New York. Take them now in celebration of our voyage through the Greek islands. I was going to give them to you in Delos at the beginning of our island-hopping, and then several times during it. Now seems the right time, so that they’ll always serve as the words that we’ll never utter about those days between Leros and Samos.”

He opened his fist in her palm and removed his hand. A pair of cabochon, pigeon-blood rubies the size of a quail’s egg lay
in her palm, each of them set in a circle of square-cut diamonds. She gasped, the jewels dazzled her, so powerful was the allure of the gems. Adam began to laugh.

“They do rather leave one speechless,” he said. “Once I saw them I had to have them for you. Van Cleef and Arpels assure me they were once worn by an empress. A Russian empress. I can only assume it was Catherine.”

Adam lowered his voice and added, “Not even thank you. That would be too trite. It would spoil it, trivialize the gesture, not to mention the jewels, not to mention what we share in each other.”

“I love you,” she said, her eyes still riveted to the rubies.

“That’ll do, that’ll do just fine,” he said with a smile in his voice, as he plucked them from her hand and clipped one on each of her ears.

He handed her the duffel bag and she fished out a fair-sized tortoiseshell hand mirror. Even she was struck by how beautiful she looked with them on. So was Adam. She attempted a joke about them to cover her vanity. “I am beginning to think I was born to wear great jewels.”

“That’s what Rashid always says about you. That’s one of the reasons he adores buying them for you. And, you know, that devil is right.” Then he slipped his arm through hers and they took great long happy strides toward town.

They were a glorious sight, the two deeply tanned people dressed all in white. She wore a silk shirt tied at the midriff and hip-hugging fine, wide cotton trousers with turnups that moved provocatively with every step she took. Her raven-black hair was loose, casually brushed back, held in place with black enamel combs. The blood-red rubies and diamonds lit up her sensuous face. The stunning diamond handcuffs were on her tanned wrists, of course, and her bright fingernails and toenails flashed scarlet sunshine with every movement of her hands and feet. She looked great, she looked rich, and most of all she looked beautiful, intelligent, witty, and imaginative.

Adam wore fine white cotton Oxford pants, a paper-thin white cotton shirt, sleeves rolled up; he held his Dougie Hayward white poplin jacket suspended from his shoulder together with Mirella’s duffel bag. His dark blond hair had turned the color of ash, and the normally white streaks shone silver against his deeply tanned face. His bigness, his broad shoulders, his carriage, his sure stride, all seemed godlike to
Mirella — her Zeus or Poseidon. To the average short, dark, and hairy Greek, though, he looked like a movie star.

They walked to the back of the port and into town. It appeared to Mirella that every shop was a specialty shop — the tire shop, the used-tire shop, the electrical shop, the electrician’s repair shop, the plumber’s, the carpenter’s. They all had minute shops with thousands of used parts. The tinsmith, the blacksmith, and shoe-repair shops by the dozen. Endless shoe stores with dusty window displays and dated styles, and all selling the same models at the same prices. Shirt shops and blanket shops, trouser shops and jewelry shops. A town where you could shop for everything, and be lucky in the end to buy anything.

The town was a mad scramble of work and people. There was the constant noise of machines, powerful automatic drills digging nearby. A pump gasped and gurgled water into the street from somewhere. Hammers, saws, and shouted instructions everywhere. There was a traffic jam of two cars and a lorry, a donkey and a flat cart pulled by a man.

A modern concrete building shooting up five stories sounded the death knell for the old, the run-down, and the beautiful. Around the corner from the five-story building was a narrow street full on either side with bright blue, red, orange, and yellow plastic buckets and tubs, hoses and dishes, pots, pans and ladders, yards and yards of cloth, the best plastic, the glossiest money could buy.

At last they found the post office. It was closed. The whole town was open for trade, and the post office was closed. Adam had wanted to send a cable. He gave up, and the Coreys fled back toward the old port of Pythagorio and the more primitive shopkeepers.

“Not war, not pestilence, not poverty or politics, is murdering Greece. It’s plastic. They’re being corrupted by primary-colored plastic. And just you wait — they’ll find a way to blame even that on the CIA,” said Adam, a note of amused despair in his voice.

They left the freezer and the fridge shops behind, and turning onto a small street with bookshops and stationers came as a relief to both. Under a scorching midday sun they got lost in a maze of winding streets that flattened out at the back of the port. They were tired because of the humidity that
accompanied the heat, and they were hungry and looking forward to a shaded table near the water.

They turned a corner and then, suddenly, the ugliness was behind them. Spread out in front of them was the dusty old picturesque port, a few unimpressive caïques bobbing up and down in the water. They looked straight out across to the Mykale foothills on the coast of Asia Minor. Adam’s face shone with pleasure.

“Look, over there! That’s home, our real home: Turkey.” He placed his arm around Mirella’s shoulder. “Where once the women of your family ruled their men and were clever and beautiful and held great power. We’re going home where you can take your place among them.”

It was only then, in the quiet old port of Pythagorion, within sight of Asia Minor, that Mirella realized Adam meant what he said. He was not just taking her home to his beloved Peramabahçe Palace for a few months. He expected her to put her power and position to use as her ancestors had in their lives and their family and their country. In Mirella’s case, not country but countries: the USA
and
Turkey. She had a station in life she would no longer be able to shrink from when she chose, as she had in her situation at the UN as assistant director of translations in New York.

Of the few people in the port some were busy eating their lunches at tables crowded together under the faded blue awning in front of the restaurant. She watched and listened to Adam instructing a waiter to place a table and two chairs under a gnarled tree. Behind the vast trunk of the port’s solitary tree, someone sat at the only other table, engrossed in a newspaper.

Money, power, love, she had them all, and more — she had famous ancestors to live up to. And she had Adam and Rashid to support her. And it had all come in the prime of her life. It was as if fate had issued its challenge. Mirella Wingfield Corey knew one thing for certain: as long as she had the love of her husband she could take it up. Take up the challenge, indeed! she thought. She would take it up and shake it for all the world to see. Her spirit expanded and she sensed excitement at the prospect of all she was going to do with her life.

When Adam returned to her side, she was laughing to herself, reminded of the party she had gone to for a Middle Eastern king and his American consort at the UN a few
months before. She remembered looking around the room with a degree of inverted snobbery at Nancy Reagan, Betsy Bloomingdale, Wynn Taggert, and all those stunning American women with rich and powerful husbands, who were invading the world and terrorizing ladies who had less.

Mirella suddenly felt a sympathy for all those New York-rich, Washington-rich, Dallas-rich ladies with their reserves of hard-earned knowledge worn like bulletproof vests under their Ungaros, Blasses, Galanoses, and de la Rentas. The Nans and the Annes, the Lynns and the Judys, the Pats and the Jackies. They, too, had it all in their prime; and maybe she had something to learn from them of how
not
to live her life. They chose their way, she would choose hers. She would opt for more than a wrinkleproof life in society. In her life there would be time for sexual ecstasy and dying to the world as she had the past few days with Adam, as she had with Rashid. Her own sensuality and theirs was a part of her future, and she would, as her Oriental ancestors had, weave it into the highly wrought tapestry of her life.

They sat down at the table, and Adam said, “I’ve ordered for us. I’m famished and I’m sure you are. Lots of different local dishes and some
kalamari
, because I know you like squid and some freshly caught
barbounia
. I know red mullet is not one of your favorite things in life, but never mind, we’ll dine better tonight in Istanbul.”

Mirella heard the voice before she recognized its source. Then, when she did, she could hardly believe it possible.

“I wouldn’t bet on that if I were you, Mirella,” said Marlo, as she lowered the newspaper to reveal her face and tilted her rickety wooden chair at a precarious angle so she could lean from behind the tree to see Adam and Mirella.

Before either of the Coreys could say anything, Marlo pointed and continued, “Adam, Mirella, meet my friend. You are going to love her. In some circles she gets called a white knight.”

The phrase alerted Adam’s business self. He rose, instantly the courteous company man, only to confront a vision of feminine beauty beyond even his experience. Having emerged from behind the tree, she stood before him, silent and proud, no greeting on her lips but a passionate fire in her large black-brown eyes. The six-feet-tall woman locked her gaze into his. Her long, ultraslim body matched arms and legs that appeared
to go on forever. Her hips and breasts and belly were straight, flat, as if nonexistent, except for nipples that protruded beneath the loose bright red shift of finely woven cotton.

She was part animal, he thought. A gazelle, an impala. No, not quite. An oryx, yes — that black hair pulled tight to her head and coiled on the top. And all female, ruthlessly female. He was right: she was all that and more. Her bearing was regal. She was more like a female king than a queen.

Mirella sensed Adam’s response to this presence. The woman’s skin glowed like dark brown satin catching the sun. Her dramatically handsome Semitic features declared profound intelligence. Mirella directed her mesmerized attention from the dusky royal of the Upper Nile to her husband.

Adam and the woman stood silently taking each other in. They were as if locked into a trance, not saying a word. Mirella herself seemed more shocked than surprised by the appearance of the woman standing before her. She wanted to rise from her chair and break the spell between the lady and Adam, but she was unable to move. The heat reverberated to the cicadas’ midday symphony and the tide lapping the stones on the beach. She felt the sun burning one arm not shaded by the tree. There was a tension in the air that immobilized her. Her gaze drifted from the tabletop and some flies stalking across it to the boats in the harbor, to the women standing on either side of the tree. But she could not look at her husband — she was both frightened and embarrassed at what she might see.

She ignored them and fixed her gaze on Marlo, her antagonist. She wondered why Marlo had done this to her. Marlo was dressed in her attractive rag-bag fashion. Today her hair was tucked under a wide-brimmed man’s white panama hat with a slim black band around the crown. Her ears bore handsome big gold hoops from Senegal. A white cotton jumpsuit was cinched at her waist with a bright blue embroidered silk shawl from China worn like a wide sash, its fine silk fringe dangling decoratively to her knee. Something about the sash thankfully distracted Mirella into thinking of Gainsborough’s “The Blue Boy.” The hat, Somerset Maughamish, evoked the South Seas. Her eyes met Marlo’s, smiling and mischievous.

It was Marlo who made the move, not Mirella. She rose, placed a hand on Adam’s shoulder for a minute and patted it
affectionately. She passed behind him and walked directly to Mirella. She took Mirella by her elbow and kindly but firmly pulled her up out of her chair, and in a low voice said, “I think you and I might go for a little walk.”

Mirella followed Marlo toward the end of the quay, and when they were out of earshot, Marlo looked at Mirella. Mirella saw a change in her face: the smiling eyes turned sad and just a little frightened.

“Try not to think or worry about it,” Marlo said. “They have something to resolve. Remember, I want her back no less than you want him. In spite of what you might think, I’m not your rival, she is. Look, Mirella, we don’t have much time, so I’ll be brief. Her name is Aida Desta Ras Mangasha Seyoum. She is the brains behind a Geneva-based conglomerate at work in the third world. She has just saved Adam’s skin and the Corey Trust from a disastrous takeover by becoming what is called in the financial world his ‘white knight.’ She is a red-hot Ethiopian Marxist who controls all the money siphoned off from the treasury for foreign investment. It was important that she and Adam meet and talk, and, for her, essential that it be in secret, since she is under constant government surveillance, and as of late not completely trusted. They track her every move. I was able to organize this meeting because I am officially traveling back to Ethiopia with her on an assignment for her government.”

“How did you know we would be here?”

“Oh, shit, Mirella, never mind all that, it’s not important. What is important is that they have met, and Adam will not pursue her in the open. They’ll be making plans for future secret meetings, which it’s best that neither of us know anything about. Now I must go. We came over from Kusadasi by fast motorboat, supposedly for lunch, after conveniently losing her bodyguards somewhere among the ruins of Ephesus. That was hours ago. We must go back and reclaim and chastize them for their inefficiency.”

The two women started back toward the table under the tree — anger just spurting within Mirella at Marlo for being far too dramatic, and talking down to her. Then, as was typical of Marlo, she did something to charm and endear herself. She placed her hand on Mirella’s arm and said, “Adam and I adore our little girl, Alice. Please love her too, Mirella. She loves you; she thinks of you as a glamorous princess in the castle
since the wedding. Every day she asks when you’re coming home. She loves you. Take good care of her for me. The whole clan is waiting for you in Istanbul. But put Alice first. Saddled with a mother like me she needs you most.”