This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (27 page)

They lined up on the dock as the speedboat cut a large arc in the water and pulled alongside the waving, welcoming family
dressed in fabulous antique Turkish salvar, and robes and vests and scarves and yashmaks, all sorts of period clothes.

Everyone seemed to talk at once, hug, kiss, touch, as the two gardeners secured the boat. Mirella, inundated with so much extroverted affection, stiffened, hardly knowing how to behave. But it didn’t matter; her reaction was barely noticed. And, so boisterous and amusing was the clan’s behavior that, before Mirella reached the house, her reticence melted away.

Alice, Marlo and Adam’s child, the youngest at seven years, and Memett, Aysha and Adam’s ten-year-old son, kissed Mirella sweetly on the lips. Giuliana and her daughter, Alamya, hugged Mirella affectionately, giving her a kiss on each cheek. Mirella was dazzled yet again by the resemblance of Alamya to Adam.

Muhsine patted Mirella on the back and crowded in with the others for Mirella’s attention, surprising Mirella with a kiss on her bare arm. Aysha presented Mirella with several hibiscus blossoms, tied together with long narrow streamers of red satin ribbon, which she pinned in Mirella’s hair. Her greeting was a smile and yet another kiss on the cheek. Zhara clapped her hands for attention and blew her stepmother a kiss. Only Josh and Marlo were missing.

“Come to my room, come to my room first. We can play with my toys, I will dance for you. I study ballet. Then I’ll take you to Mummy’s room. Mummy’s not home just now, she’s in Africa, but I can show you her room and all her pictures,” said Alice, who was delighted by Mirella’s arrival and was bursting with enthusiasm.

“No, no, Alice,” chided Memett, “we must take Mirella to the surprise room first. Remember, first the surprise, then the party, and after that
I
will take her to visit my zoo, and then there’s the wrestling match, and
then
she can go with you and play with your toys, and you can dance for us all at teatime. Remember the plan we all agreed on?”

“Oh, I do remember,” said a disappointed Alice, who frowned as she removed her hand from Mirella’s and slipped it into Memett’s, at the same time shoving the thumb of her other hand firmly between her lips.

The little girl looked up at her half-brother adoringly. The dark handsome boy reached out and adjusted the flower-embroidered pillbox hat Alice wore over a rosy-pink silk scarf
studded with more embroidered flowers that draped to her ankles over her salvar. Bending down, he whispered, “Alice, you’re forgetting little sisters who visit their brothers at Eton don’t suck their thumb.” Then, looking at Mirella and giving her a glance that asked for her support, he added, “Do they, Mirella?”

Mirella, charmed by the obviously loving relationship between the children, was delighted to be drawn into their private little world. She bent down and kissed Alice on the cheek and gently patted the little thumbless fist clamped over the child’s mouth.

“No little girl I ever met who loved her brother would ever go to Eton to visit him with a thumb stuck in her mouth. That’s quite true, Memett.”

Slowly and most reluctantly, while listening to Mirella, the child took several long luscious sucks on the precious thumb and then withdrew it.

“There’s your friend Moses, Alice. He’s brought you and Memett and all the others some things from Papa and me. Why not go and say hello to him too?”

Mirella saw clearly how quick and free and fickle a child’s heart can be. She watched Alice’s disappointment at not being able to sweep Mirella away to play with her in her room fade from Alice’s face, and her eyes sparkle with delight at the thought of another playmate, Moses. She curtsied politely to Mirella and, pulling Memett by the hand, tried to drag him toward the men unloading packages from the boat.

Memett shrugged his shoulders and made a not too convincing grimace as he stood his ground long enough to say to Mirella, “I had better go with her. As you see, we are the best of friends, and she does depend on me.” And with that he allowed himself to be pulled away.

The lessons. So many lessons to be learned from this unique family, thought Mirella dozens of times all through the day. What kind of love was this maternal love all these women seemed to have and she knew nothing about? Would she ever experience such a love as maternal love? And, more to the point, did she need to, or even want to?

And slowly, slowly, all through the day, revelations were made to her about the women and the children of the yali. Revelations Mirella thought she would rather not have heard. Intimate details of their relationship with her husband and his
emotional bond with them, individually and as a family. Instead of feeling jealousy and envy those vile emotions she detested and feared might possess her, Mirella was relieved to find she felt nothing but admiration and no little respect for them all.

Of all the surprises — many of which were charming, warm gestures delivered with nothing less than affection and a deep regard for Mirella’s position in their life — surely the one that affected her most was the “surprise room” Memett had referred to.

Once their greeting on the dock was over, the entourage, the Anatolian quartet still playing, had made their way into the house, Alice riding on Moses’s shoulders, Memett trying to wrestle Daoud and Fuad en-route. There she had been led to what had once been Adam’s private rooms for whenever he chose to stay in the yali with the clan. Giuliana and Muhsine had flung open the pair of doors, and Aysha had said, “From all of us to you.”

The rooms had been redecorated and were utterly exquisite, as were the clothes they had laid out on the bed. Period Turkish pieces of silver and gold embroidery and white silk, more elegant and impressive than any of the other women’s clothes. Once again Mirella had been handed a role she had never envisaged for herself. As Adam’s wife the clan had not only accepted her joyously but expected her to be the matriarch no one of them had been chosen to be.

If there had been any doubt in her mind about that, it vanished when, alone with the women after dinner that evening, she listened to them confess their love for Adam, their devotion, their gratitude to him for allowing them to remain in his life, not as cast-off mistresses but as friends and lovers.

She listened to them tell how Adam’s taking a wife had resolved many things for them. Not the least of which was that, once their children were of age, they would then exercise the freedom and security Adam had given them and go out into the world and create new lives for themselves, maybe even marry. But they assured Mirella they would always remain one united family.

She studied them closely now, one beautiful and intriguing young woman after the other. Each one of them at least ten
years her junior, a hundred years her senior when it came to understanding and practicing different kinds of loving.

They humbled Mirella with their honesty about being in love with her husband and about the life they had all created together. They were candid about the discretion they used when satisfying their erotic needs beyond those they were able to share with Adam. How, with an unspoken sanction Adam had accorded them, they worked other love affairs into their lives. Where was the bitterness, the disappointment she had anticipated from the women of the clan? She felt ashamed at having expected it.

It was very late when the women walked with her through the gardens under a black sky studded with lustrous stars, and up the steep path between the pines and cypresses to the road where one of the yali’s vintage Bentleys waited to take her home. The speedboat had long since returned to her house with Moses and Daoud. Fuad opened the car door for Mirella and the women kissed each other farewell.

At the end of the three-quarter-mile drive through the yali’s private park, the Bentley stopped and Fuad pushed open the huge ornate iron gates and the car drove through them.

All the way home Mirella kept feeling the warmth, the affection and joy of the day, the women and the children slipping away from her, and she surprised herself because she minded so very much.

In the darkness and comfort of the back seat of the Bentley, Mirella slipped her hand under the bodice of her dress and fondled her naked breast, teased and thumbed her nipple until it was erect, felt a slight flush of excitement and wondered what it was like to suckle a baby.

19

“W
elcome to Addis Ababa, Mr. Corey. It’s a long time since we have seen you here.”

“That’s true, Mr. Minister. You do us an honor to receive me at such short notice, and permitting our company jet to fly over Ethiopian territory, and according us airport space. I did not, however, expect Ethiopian MIG’s as escorts. It makes me
feel far more important than I am. May I present my son Joshua, sir, and my attorney, Miss Colsen?”

The minister all but ignored the introduction, his gaze fixed on Adam. Adam was aware of trouble. Such calculated disdain was unusual … and ominous.

The MIG’s had certainly been an unpleasant reminder of military paranoia. But saber-rattling of that sort threatened him personally no more than did the armed military in the streets and along the wide avenues of the city, who almost outnumbered the civilians. Routine, perhaps, since the revolution. But tanks were parked on the soft shoulder of the motorway from the airport to the suburbs of Addis. Armed soldiers, looking dangerously bored and trigger-happy, lolled all over them. Heavy armor at the ready signaled military unease. Clearly the revolutionary government had big trouble, real or imagined. But what link was there between civil unrest and an Ethiopian minister of commerce deliberately being rude to Adam when he was normally so friendly and charming? Adam had to establish the connection promptly.

“To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit to our part of the world, Mr. Corey? How might we be able to assist you? the minister asked, civily but coldly.

“I have come to reassess our holdings here, study our successes for myself. And to see a few old friends, such as yourself, sir. I’d like also to take on some big-game shooting and some archaeological research in the highlands, if you will permit me to do so.”

“And Mr. Werfel? Does he not accompany you on this visit, Mr. Corey?”

Adam shook his head. Ah, there was the rub: Werfel. The tone of the minister’s question cut through his manner of studied eloquence. Was Adam right to detect a more than diplomatic slyness in the man’s eyes and on the faces of the two aides flanking him? Alerted, Adam deduced that the minister knew something more about Ralph Werfel and the raid on the Corey Trust than Adam would have liked. His immediate anxiety was for Aida Desta Ras Mangasha Seyoum. He hoped for her sake that she had covered her tracks well when she became his white knight by exposing Werfel and Agristar to save his company. Had their meeting in Samos perhaps been found out?

“I found Mr. Werfel to be disloyal, Mr. Minister. He has
been disposed of. I tolerate no traitors. That is something you should understand, sir.”

Josh and Carmel exchanged a glance that registered shock at Adam’s new tone and the brashness of his words. Tension crackled and bounced off the walls like a broken electric cable. Adam kept a cool gaze fixed on the minister.

The Ethiopian’s fist coming down on his desk resounded in the bare, modern room. His chair scraped as he stood up. Then, leaning on the desk and bending forward, he asked, “What did you do, Adam? Throw him in prison, torture him for his disloyalty? Stand him against a wall and shoot him?” Then the ruthless eyes softened their threat and the minister began to laugh. “NO, not you, Adam. A golden handshake of a million dollars is not dispensing with a traitor. One can hardly equate that with a bullet between the eyes, or a knife thrust through the heart. He deserves worse. Myself, I would have thrown him into a concrete room and let him rot. Even that would have been too good for him. You would make a very inadequate revolutionary. Too soft. Too civilized. That comes from lack of political faith, the American overestimation of the individual, and its paranoid fear of communism. How like a capitalist society to kill off a traitor with American hard currency. You reward them for treachery. We punish ruthlessly as an example, and demand total loyalty to the cause,”

The moment the minister put himself on first-name terms with Adam, Adam sensed that he was safe. He would be able to play macho money games with the minister. But then he saw the eyes change again, become mean, nasty even, when the man warned, “Watch your back, Adam. You have dangerous enemies.”

Enemies! The plural carried a special menace. Too many innuendos without clear accusations. Tough it out, that would be all the Sandhurst-educated colonel-minister would understand. Tough it out, and pay up. That’s how Adam would get what he had come to Ethiopia for. No doubt about it.

The minister walked to the window. He looked up the wide avenue, deserted except for the occasional car and a tall, elegant black figure dressed in rags he wore proudly as if they were a cape of gold. The man walked on bare feet, a long, bent walking stick shoved under his armpits and across his
back, his hands gripping it over the top. A proverty-stricken peasant who walked like a king. Several cocoa-colored ladies with pure Semitic features hurried across the street draped in traditional white cotton, banded with colored embroidery, large silver Coptic crosses swinging freely across their breasts. A shepherd driving a few sheep in the avenue was accosted by two soldiers who pushed him ruthlessly to the ground. They drove him and his flock off the avenue and onto a side street.

The minister beckoned Adam to the window, where they stood together and silently watched for several minutes what was going on below. “You used to love my country, my people,” he said, “Ralph Werfel would have us believe that has changed. Those holdings you have come to look over — the Corey Trust has almost bled them dry. You know it, I know it. We depend on our share of your profits from those holdings. We do not intend to share your losses. You should have cut Werfel’s balls off long ago and pushed them down his throat and let him choke to death on them. But you didn’t. You gave him a million dollars instead. How do you think that looks to us?”

The minister returned to the desk, angry once again, and shouted as he pounded on its metal top. He swiped a stack of documents off it and they flew up into the air and fluttered to the floor.

“You stripped the assets of your companies in our country mercilessly. We consider that to be robbery. You have caused thousands of my kinsmen along with my government hardship they can ill afford. And you profess to love my country, my people?

“The takeover by American Agristar would have solved all your business problems and all my country’s arms problems with the money they proposed to pump into industry here in Ethiopia, and the interest-free loans they offered against the country’s future profits acquired through an advantageous profit-sharing scheme. Wars and insurrections are eating up fifty percent of our annual budget. An end must be made to these petty wars that are destroying the country. This government intends to do that.

Adam started to speak, but the minister angrily waved him silent.

“A million of our peasantry died in droughts of recent years. We have to resettle the survivors of that disaster. We
intend to combat centuries of poverty and famine with a program of villagization. Can you tell me, Adam Corey, how we can carry out our plan to relocate and rehouse virtually the entire rural population without the legitimate profits gained from our own investments here and abroad? We depend on that money. It is my country’s lifeblood. Without it, we are at the mercy of world charity, and the world’s criticism for negligence and being poor. The world condemns a Marxist government which has to shop around for assistance from regimes the West deems dangerous because our political affiliations are compatible.

“In the space of less than a decade we want to uproot thirty-three million people, and settle them in villages with running water, electricity, schools, clinics, and post offices, give them services they have never had before. But our critics claim all that is nothing but a smoke screen to herd the masses into centralized communities where the army can keep them under control and Marxist cadres can indoctrinate them.

“The money Agristar promised us after the merger could have aided our cause and silenced our critics. That dedicated, brash, simplistic Mr. Geldof rushed in screaming ‘I’ll help.’ And he did. But what is that compared to what the final solution must be?”

A less single-minded man would have avoided the phrase, thought Adam. But even to think in terms of creating “final solutions,” genocidal or not, was a sign of the ruthlessness with which these men might pursue their goals.

With every word the minister uttered Adam was rapidly understanding why Aida Desta Ras Mangasha Seyoum had sought such secrecy in becoming his white knight. All that CIA money backing Agristar — and indeed Agristar itself — would give the regime total political power ruthlessly to drag this noble but backward nation, the world’s poorest and most desperate people, into the twentieth century. Money is power. And too much money, too fast, like too much power, might wipe out a country that had changed little since biblical times. It would, under this regime, turn it into a Marxist state and curtail the basic freedoms of the people — the very future so infuriatingly predicted by the critics of the regime.

Adam’s admiration for the acute corporate mind of Aida Desta soared. She had saved the Corey Trust, tied up vast sums of her country’s hard currency where she knew it was
safe. And she had made deals that would produce an annual income of hard foreign currency and commodities within the country, while it stimulated industrial expansion. It would yield sums large enough to allow a transition to modernity, the reconstruction of a poor and desperately illiterate society, that would be as rapid as was possible under the circumstances, yet slow enough to allow the people time to adjust to a new world and freedom of choice.

“Mr. Geldof is a humanitarian who has opened the world’s eyes to my country’s plight, not a businessman like you,” the minister continued. “Though dedicated in the same way you are to not getting involved in politics but only with people, he does what he can. Now I want to hear what you’re going to do. And before you answer that, let’s remember that Agristar is not going to come here to take over, and from our point of view it should have. We are not very happy with Mr. Werfel or Agristar for failing in that takeover bid. It has caused much trouble. But most of all we are not happy with you. We trusted you. Yet, according to Ralph Werfel, who, as your number-one man for years, presumably has had all the figures of the Corey Trust, you are unable to pay out the trust’s yearly dividends. There are no profits, only debts, and this condition will exist over the next seven years at least. His reports say all you were able to do was to save the Corey Trust from going under. You haven’t been too clever, Adam. Now, I ask you for the last time, what are you going to do about it?”

Adam walked slowly from the window where he had remained during the minister’s tirade. He reached inside his jacket and withdrew his cigar case, and offered one to the minister and to the minister’s hitherto silent henchmen. Then; towering above the three seated army officers dressed in their combat fatigues, revolvers worn menacingly on their hips, as if ready for hostilities to erupt any moment, Adam lit his cigar, turning it between his fingers until it burned evenly.

The silence in the room was deafening. All waited for Adam to answer the minister. He seemed in no hurry. He walked back to the window, sought permission to open it, and got a nodded assent. He returned to his chair directly in front of the minister. Before taking his seat he removed the cigar from his mouth, stared into the minister’s eyes, and said, in a voice stiff with anger, “Nothing. I shall do nothing out of
the ordinary. As far as I and the Corey Trust are concerned, it’s business as usual.”

The minister started to rise out of his chair, his face contorted with rage, his breathing labored with anxiety. He was shocked back into his seat by Adam’s booming voice.

“Sit down. You had better listen to me and listen well. If you or anyone in your government ever accuses me, as you have done today, of being a thief, ready to exploit not only my own companies but my partners, I will close down all our operations in your country so fast you won’t even have time to sequester them.”

One of the minister’s colleagues tried to rise from his chair, but Adam stopped him by slamming Carmel’s briefcase on the desk. He propelled it along the desktop toward the seated men, shoving their papers and pads into their laps, clearing a place for himself on his side of the desk. Then Adam sat down and scrutinized them with an air of disdain.

“Don’t you move,” he ordered the aide who had attempted to rise in support of his superior. Then, directing his gaze back to the military trio, he added, “Not one of you, until you hear me out.”

The men kept their seats. Then Adam, too, sat down, and smoked his cigar in silence. Josh followed his father’s example and placed his attaché case on the table, but quietly.

Finally Adam spoke. “Abebe, I have no concern for you, or your regime, any more than I did for the former government of Emperor Haile Selassie. I have
never
, I repeat
never
, left you in any doubt about that. I am a merchant, albeit a high-powered corporate executive, a man who lives by trading. I obtain ingredients, I put them to work. I live by taking profit. You, Abebe, and your regime are gentlemen warriors who master the virtue of weapons. You are strategists and appreciate the role of weaponry. I do not ask you to sympathize with my job, and I insist you
never
attack me for not sympathizing with yours.

“You’re a lucky bastard, Abebe, that the Agristar takeover failed, because like you, those people try to mix politics with big business. The best you would ever get out of that arrangement is a banana republic, African-style.

“You suffer from an ambition for power to impose sociological success on your people, rather than survival and slow, consistent growth with stability and freedom as a
foundation. And your desperation to legitimize your political ideology before the world has blocked out your memory of who and what the Corey Trust is. You forget that it is a vast network of corporations under the umbrella of the parent company. It is spread across forty percent of the world. What made you think it would submit to a takeover without a fight that would go on for years? By God, that fight never even got out of the boardroom.