This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (31 page)

He tried not to think about his carnal savagery with Aida Desta. Not because he felt guilty or remorse. Rather, because he delighted in it so unashamedly. How far beyond that might a sequel take them?

Adam was a man who lived each day as it came. No agonizing about yesterday or tomorrow. She was gone, it was over. Maybe she would come into his life as a woman again, and maybe she wouldn’t. It didn’t much matter, either way. What did matter was that he be successful in their business
dealings and that he never let her down. In that he could save her as she had saved him and the Corey Trust. So the ribbing he received when he met up with the others in the hunting party made scant impression on Adam. Though they never asked who or what she was, where she had gone, they spoke in terms of her carnal, savage beauty, innuendos of envy in every phrase. They avoided the vulgarities of verbal rape characteristic of younger, cruder men, but there was no missing the implication that they had hoped she would take them all on, one after the other. They hinted Adam had scripted his movie selfishly. Unused to exclusion, they had all had many women from different tribes in Africa who would have obliged them and thought nothing of it, because in their society promiscuity was not a crime.

On their last night on the mountain, after Rex and Jock went to bed, Mac and Adam shared a fireside nightcap, reliving their day of superb sport.

“Was she mutilated?” Mac asked.

Surprised by the question and Mac’s interest, Adam answered, “Yes.”

“Circumcised?”

“No, that was what was so strange and so cruel. It was not a tribal circumcision, as is the way in parts of Africa. She was victim of a different custom. Her cunt was sewn closed with gold wire, leaving only a small opening for her to urinate through and one that allowed her clitoris to be masturbated. She was checked over every month to make sure she was still intact, a virgin. When I met her in Samos three weeks ago, she was still woven with gold wire. A week ago she had the wires cut away forever.”

“A lover? A jealous father? A sadistic husband?”

“No, none of those. But, in an abstract way, all of them. You won’t get me to fill in all the details, but the simple answer would be, a favored child of the royal house. She was recognized as being very clever and so was educated to be of assistance to the emperor. But financial whiz kids of either sex are scarce in Ethiopia. She was spotted as one and certain men invested heavily in her ability.

“They sought to protect their interests, first because of the emperor’s attentions to her as a small child, and later because of the power she wielded with their money. And even after she renounced her royal connections and became an example
to the Marxist regime, those men believed their investment was better protected by a mutilated virgin than by a woman who might fall in love and bear children.

“She has been like that since she was thirteen. The power took over, politics took over. It was a sacrifice never seen by her as such, but more as a way of life, until she became disenchanted with some of the policies, as of late.”

“And interesting but rather sad story for a beauty such as she. She’ll have many lovers now,” Mac said.

“How can you know that?”

“Easy, Adam. You had only to look at her once to know she is a sexual animal, a seductress who will have any man
she
wants. She wore her sexual hunger like a glorious French scent.”

“Mac, let’s keep this conversation to ourselves.”

“Okay.”

The men had one more splash of whisky and went off to bed. Adam was pleased he had leveled with his friends and told them he was carrying important documents of a personal nature for his company. He might be stopped, he had said, from leaving the country. If that did happen, he would make a run for it before he would give the documents up. His own honor and the woman they had met, to whom he was indebted, were involved. And his hunting companions had rallied around him. The meeting with Aida Desta would simply not figure in their accounts of the expedition. They would be as alert against possible infiltrators during the safari as they were for sightings of game. When they had resolved on this, they settled down to map their journey. Adam appreciated their cool, discreet response to the danger he had involved them in.

It was a week before the cavalcade of jeeps reached Lake Tana and Adam’s seaplane, the Lisborn Clipper. A week of high-tension hunting that relegated Aida Desta, the Corey Trust, his wife and family to the borders of his mind. Only the packet of documents strapped to his side impinged occasionally upon his absorption with stalking the wary animals of the region.

The Lisbon Clipper was a converted 1945 commercial passenger plane. It was a comfortable air and sea-floating home and office, and for the hunters would be their campsite during the last lap of the safari from Lake Tana over the Blue
Nile all the way to Khartoum where the Blue and the White Niles merge into the Nile.

Marked with the exhilaration and the dirt of the trek, the tired men were looking forward to the luxury the clipper offered. They hopped one by one onto the plane from rubber dinghies, after handing up their belongings to the waiting crew. The captain took a stance at the clipper’s door extending a welcoming handshake, and gave a helping hoist to each of them. Adam was the last to come on board, and the captain gave his hand an extra hard squeeze that told Adam something was amiss. He was certain of it when the captain said, “Welcome aboard, sir.” Years on first-name terms had eliminated all such formality from their relations.

Adam entered the main cabin. His high-backed fawn-colored glove-leather chair slowly swiveled around.

“I have made time to accept your kind invitation to join your party. Unless, of course, you have changed your plans and are in a hurry to leave Ethiopia?” Abebe gave Adam a dangerous, questioning smile.

22

I
t was one of the larger rooms with high ceilings on the second floor. The library of pale walnut Louis XV
boiserie
was filled with sunshine. There were a pair of Boulle desks that came from the palace of Versailles and had been in Adam’s family for two hundred years. They were housed at opposite ends of the room, with superb high-back chairs covered in their original tapestry behind them. The large brown and white marble fireplace, opulent with its heavy yet gracious curves, was flanked by a pair of period walnut chaises facing each other. Their loose down cushions and upholstery were covered with a black and white houndstooth check woven of raw silk and cashmere. Between them was a deep and richly carved ancient white marble frieze, once a section of the great ceiling of the temple at Baalbek.

Silver disks two inches thick rested on the four corners of the frieze and, on top of them, a thick slab of glass. Adam used it as a coffee table. Each morning newspapers from
various parts of the world were placed on it. Hundreds of rare books lined the shelves. Several period French chairs and a set of elegantly curved library stairs and round reading tables completed the furnishings of the room.

The large windows affording views onto the Bosporus and the morning’s river traffic were hung in celadon green silk taffeta lined with a bright yellow color of the same material. The luscious, papery-thin draperies were held back with large antique tassels of burnished gold and black and white silk. The carpet, an extremely fine Persian silk, was of a great age, and there were large Ming and Tang bowls filled with full-blown butter-yellow roses. There was but one painting in the room: a large Gauguin from his Tahitian period. So staggeringly beautiful was it that it dominated the room and filled it with rich tropical warmth and color. It was in this room that Adam kept his favorite photographs of Mirella and they were on the tables everywhere in silver frames.

Mirella was stretched out on one of the chaises, the bundle of Adam’s cablegrams still in her hand. She was staring into the fire. The mystery of the passing of time — banal yet unfathomable — occupied her. In the big picture of things time seems irrelevant. But one cannot always look at the big picture, even though one should. She, at least, could not.

It was October. Irrelevant or not, time had made alms for oblivion of significant events in her life. Since that day she and Adam had returned from Samos to here, her new home, his beloved Peramabahçe Palace, her new life had been happy and wondrous.

Her work administering her inheritance, the Oujie legacy, was exciting and going well. Her work for the UN was successfully under control. She had eased herself into several different roles: Mrs. Corey; Mirella Wingfield Corey, the Oujie heiress; doyenne of a great house; young matriarch of a wooden palace farther up the Bosporus, full of her husband’s children and the other women in his life; discreet but recognized mistress to Rashid Lala Mustapha.

For weeks now, Mirella had made a habit of walking through the dizzying maze of Istanbul’s back streets. She was making their teeming color and life a part of herself. Often Josh accompanied her, rarely leaving her side when he was able to steal a day or two from hopscotching from one Corey Trust office to another. Sometimes she experienced the
heartbeat of the old city in company with Guiliana or Aysha or Muhsine, the women of the yali, whom she had grown to admire and had become very fond of. At other times Rashid was her guide. But constantly, wherever she went, she felt the protective presence of Daoud and Fuad, Rashid’s bodyguards. There were moments when she would try to recover memories of her life before the Oujie legacy, Adam Corey, and Rashid Lala Mustapha.

It was strange to feel those long years of loving and working and learning recede into a kind of blur of a life, a lost decade, that each day became more difficult to recover.

It sometimes felt to Mirella that she had only been born the night Adam Corey and Brindley Ribblesdale had walked into her house in New York. She recalled their shock and disappointment at her indifference then to anything that interfered with the life she had mapped out for herself. Fate and they had forced her to become involved with life and people as she had never been before.

Adam’s love for her no longer allowed her to sail through life with tentative feelings and commitments to mere causes and abstract relationships. A woman who hadn’t liked getting involved, she was fast learning how to do it yet still to remain her own woman. Whence, she often wondered, had she fetched up the character and strength to carry on? Rich and rewarding as her involvements were, they were paid for with moments of pain, loneliness, and sometimes fear.

Mirella thumbed through the cablegrams in her hand. If Adam had not been able to make contact with her on the telephone, there had been one for each day he had been away from her. Mirella cherished them like ikons of their tenderness, religious portraits of a love story.

There was a discreet knock at the door, and it opened. Into the room bounded Adam’s three dogs, gentle-looking beasts, nearly as large as sheep dogs, short-haired, and tan in color, with dark brown on their ears and muzzles. Mirella smiled as they galloped toward her, remembering when she had once accused them of looking like English mastiffs: she had been laughed at because the famed
kurt kopegi
were cunning killers of even the ferocious wolf, with their outsized jaws and their powerful chests.

Then came Moses carrying a heavy silver tray laden with a silver coffee service. Behind him, two of the Turkish house
staff bearing trays of cups and saucers and plates of Moses’s homemade Toll House cookies. Next, Deena and Brindley trooped in with little Alice and Memett. Adam’s ten-year-old boy. The room was filled with barking and chatter as the two children and the dogs all tried to crowd on the chaise next to Mirella.

“You really are something, Moses. It seems as if you’ve conquered the Turks of Istanbul with Toll House cookies. Mirella, have you been downstairs when he’s making them? It’s like a factory,” said Deena.

“Well, it is a factory when I bake them. I’m feeding this house and the yali and the staff for both houses, and that’s a lot of cookies. Have you ever watched Turhan and Daoud and Fuad eat cookies? What do I mean, eat, I mean devour. They disappear at marathon speed. Some change from cooking for one in New York, and the occasional dinner party. By the way, do you mind if I spend some money revamping the kitchen a bit? I’ve almost wheedled permission out of the regular kitchen staff.”

“Now, how did you manage that? Toll House cookies?” asked a smiling Mirella. This mid-morning coffeetime was like a royal levee, when anyone and everyone was welcome to join her wherever she was in the house or gardens.

“No,” said Moses, handing her a cup of freshly ground American coffee. Then, smiling, he added, “Would you believe bagels, cream cheese, and lox — they’re crazy about it.”

“Now I’ve heard everything: bagels on the Bosporus,” quipped Deena.

Mirella extricated herself from the children and the dogs, embraces. She went to one of the Boulle desks and put her bundle of cables in a drawer. The children and dogs padded after her, and, when she returned to the chaise, they all resumed trying to sit around her. Moses then played the pied piper with his plate of cookies so that the children and dogs followed him out. If they loved anyone more than Adam and Mirella in the Peramabahçe Palace, it was Moses. Their endless questions followed him everywhere when they visited, which had become very often.

Amid this scene, Deena’s gaze turned to Mirella, as it often had since her arrival in Istanbul several days before. She was astonished at the changes in Mirella, and awed by them as
well. Mirella appeared to have blossomed with her sexuality as if it were her very claim on life. As with her famed ancestors, it appeared to bring her everything her heart desired. Deena had always known that Mirella had, in a sense, been trapped in her life until the Oujie legacy offered her a rigorous freedom. Now she seemed to ride on a tidal wave of free will with the responsibility of making constructive and absolute decisions, for herself and her marriage. More, it appeared, than Deena herself was able to do, for she and Brindley had not yet married. Such thoughts prompted Deena to say, “Mirr, I wonder if you know how remarkable you and Adam are?”

“Oh, dear, what’s brought this on, Deena?”

“I think seeing you here in Istanbul, with your home and family around you; tenderness, love, all the things you never used to be able to deal with. It’s as if your own release also released the passionate inhibitions of the people closest to you.

“Take Brindley and me, for example. We know it to be true of us. And Lili, you know I am no fan of Lili but she seems to be able to deal better with human relationships. I watched her when we took her to the airport a few days ago. She was positively happy and charming. For the first time since I have known her she appeared to be content and at ease with herself and you, and me, and the world. Why, she had even won Rashid over.”

Mirella’s heart skipped a beat when Deena linked her mother with Rashid, Was it jealousy? She had to admit it was — that and fear: seeds of both already planted in her subconscious by Josh.

He missed no opportunity to discredit Rashid to Mirella, and he was far from subtle about it, in fact downright ruthless. “He was always interested in stealing the Oujie legacy from you. Isn’t it enough that you sold him what he wanted without even opening it up for tender from other interested parties? And for what? The razzmatazz of his jet-setting life, and being made love to by the famous Turkish Don Juan. Famous, that’s a laugh. The moment a real man like Papa came along, the baubles and the lifestyle he offered were shown up as tinsel and dross. And thank God you gave him up for Papa and us. I love you, Mirella, and hate to see and hear you linked with that bum.”

There was an almost boyish earnestness in his claim, “Can’t
you understand it’s a sickness with the man? He has to destroy every woman he touches. You’ve seen it. Papa’s seen it, we’ve all seen it. There was the American heiress from San Francisco, who ended up on a marble slab in Mexico, having died during an orgy aboard his yacht. The Hollywood starlet who died of an overdose in his garden. The endless stream of jet-setting beauties who have loved him like crazy and been ditched. Only you never succumbed. But perhaps you should tell your mother how you did it. I saw them together in New York, coming out of Cartier. Stay away, Mirella, he will ruin your marriage. He is out to ruin you and Papa because he can’t possess you. That’s how I read him.”

Here was a kind of ultimatum that she give up her attachment to Rashid, not see him except in the company of his father or himself. She had had to remind Josh that what she did had little to do with Josh or his wants or needs, and they had parted on bad terms — he chastened, and she unhappy about Rashid and Lili, because she knew in her heart Rashid could be evil as well as amoral, and he was not above taking on mother and daughter. The thought had repelled her: it had driven an invisible wedge between them. Along with that went the worry over her stepson: was she about to lose the easygoing relationship she desired with him?

Mirella had to confront for them both the attraction she exercised over Josh. Tempering frankness with a loving tact had brought some success. But the situation disturbed the delicate balance achieved in the love triangle between Mirella, Adam, and Rashid, and that was not good for any of them. She was therefore relieved when Josh sent ten dozen long-stemmed white roses and a note asking her forgiveness. She gladly rewarded a nocturnal phone call from Paris with just that.

But Joshs words had goaded Mirella into also confronting Rashid about Lili.

“Tell me it’s not true. You’re not having an affair with my mother?”

“How very stupid of you to ask me who I sleep with! You don’t have the right. You left me for marriage, and I ask you nothing about how, when, where you make love with your husband. Or indeed if you have taken his son on as a lover. What I do and with whom I do it are no concern of yours. Suffer it like a lady, and in silence. Did you forget I had other
women in my life? Were you perhaps under the delusion that you possess me? Not so, my dear. Only partially — no more, no less than I possess you.

“Ah, we know each other’s minds too well. I can see that, in your head, you had decided to be magnanimous and allow me the occasional flirtation — good for the gossip columns and to keep the Corey–Lala Mustapha triangle relatively quiet. All right as long as it was someone anonymous. Or, you would allow me Oda Lala’s and my Humayun, a consolation prize because you married Adam. I am going to punish you for that, Mirella, for not being above that.”

His anger had surprised her, but what terrified her was that she saw such cruelty in his face, and such passion. Violent passion that comes with erotic love that knows no bounds.

She had had her answer without a word of admission from him, and she was repulsed by the evil side of his nature he so enjoyed exercising. She had raised her arm and smashed him across the face with the flat of her hand as hard as she could, turned on her heel, and stalked to the door of his bedroom. She flung it open, and her eyes fell on the diamond handcuffs around her wrists. They appeared to stop her at the open door, and she began to weep. Mirella was finished with him. She had tried to rip one of the diamond bracelets from her wrist, even though she knew it was impossible to do so.

He had come up behind her, grabbed her by the waist with one arm and pulled her tight to him. With his free hand he had slammed the door closed and double-locked it. She tried to flail out against him, but he had been too quick for her.

Rashid had pushed her flat up against the door, and pinning her there with the weight of his body, he had torn her black crêpe de chine dress in half straight down the back. In the tearing of the silk she suddenly felt her defenselessness, and she had tried to wriggle away from him. In vain. He ripped the black panties from between her legs, hurting her, spun her around and slid the dress off her arms and flung it to the floor. Then he slapped her hard across the face.