This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (28 page)

“You have material on our portfolio. You know very well that within the Corey Trust’s empire is housed an enormous private agricultural development program whose economic growth and contributions to progressive agriculture are ummatched.

“You have benefited from that as well as its energy divisions in oil, gas, solar, and water power. And you know they are influential enough to control more than a few countries. One of which is yours. And if we don’t, it’s because we are not interested in that kind of power. We are merchants, interested in the profits and passing them on to our investors.

“Who do you think keeps you on the road? You know very well our airline companies and shipping networks are among the largest in the world. And what about our smaller organizations, such as railroads, bus and trucking companies, that keep lines open in remote parts of this country? Where would you be without them?

“Oh, shit, Abebe, I could go on about its communications divisions: computer, telephone, and telex companies that keep you in touch with the world. But what would be the point? It will only make me angry and you more embarrassed, and that, after all, is not our purpose.

“Josh. Please get out a copy of ‘The Corey Trust Manufacturer’s Worldwide,’ and ‘The Property Development Divisions of the Corey Trust,’ and give them to the minister.”

Josh opened his attaché case and placed the papers on the desk in front of the minister. They all watched him thumb through the information and lists of the corporate manufacturing holdings, without looking at them, never taking his icy glare from Adam’s face. The volume on property holdings was half as thick as the Boston telephone directory.

Adam was aware that he had crushed the immediate danger. Now his strategy was to grind the minister into the ground without giving him space to breathe. He had to be
flattened all at once. Adam dared not let Abebe recover his position even a little.

Adam had three things to protect: the Corey Trust’s twenty-five-year contracts with Ethiopia, the trust’s investments in the country, and Aida Desta, his white knight. It was essential that Adam, Josh, and Carmel walk out of that room leaving the minister, satisfied enough not to delve further into the Corey Trust’s affairs. He dealt his two final blows.

“You’re a shrewd and competent, more than competent, minister, Abebe. You do your homework. You know as well as I do that I don’t have to pay you a fucking dime, not a grain of rice, a kernel of wheat. I don’t in fact
have
to do anything, because, the way our contracts read, I am not in breach of one of them. I don’t pay out profits that are not there, not for you, not for anyone. That would be bad business.”

The minister had clearly had enough. He appeared shattered. All the punch and the menace was gone. Like a weak and beaten man, he slowly rose from his chair; his two aides, all pomposity shriveled from their faces, followed suit. Adam remained seated. He changed the tone of his words; they were hard and firm, but friendly now.

“I am here today, gentlemen, because I want to introduce my son to you. He will assist me, replacing Ralph Werfel, until he is ready to take over the trust’s business dealings in this part of the world. Otherwise I could have sent any number of other competent people in our corporation. Please be good enough to hear him out.”

Josh rose from his chair and began. “Mr. Minister, gentlemen, every year, according to our contracts — Miss Colsen, copies for the gentlemen, please.” Joshua waited until Carmel had placed a copy in each of the men’s hands and then he continued. “Every year we, the Corey Trust, are always pleased to pay to the Ethiopian government twenty-three percent of the profits of all the business we conduct in Ethiopia, in a commodity package of coffee, tea, rice, wheat, and sugar, and the same amount from the communications and transportation corporations. This year, however, owing to unforeseen circumstances, there are no profits, only deficits. An unfortunate situation for all concerned. The trust, however, is very much aware of how dependent Ethiopia is on the profits rendered from her contracts with the Corey Trust. It has therefore devised a method in which the hardship
of this loss can be spread across twenty-five years, the length of the contracts. Fifty years, if the contracts are renewed for another twenty-five years, which we on our part are prepared to do.

“In order to alleviate any further hardship caused by these losses the Corey Trust will make the expected payments for this year in the way of an interest-free loan, rendered against future profits. In addition, the Corey Trust is willing to increase its holdings in this country by fifty percent, under the same contractual agreement we have in our present investments here in Ethiopia. The additional revenue the Ethiopian government should receive through the years should be effective in wiping out this one year’s losses. Our increase in holdings here will come from capital designated for investment in other third world countries; these actions can be taken as soon as contracts are signed.”

Carmel Colsen took over by handing the new contractual agreements to each of the men. They accepted them and sat down to study the documents. Josh returned to his chair. Adam relit his cigar and studied Abebe’s face, which was a picture of relief mixed with exhaustion, yet not without a glimmer of enthusiasm for the future. Carmel was doing her stuff, answering all the legal questions raised by the three Ethiopians. Joshua was summoned by one of the aides to answer questions about a time frame for the deliveries of the payoff.

Adam began to relax, to enjoy the taste of tobacco in his mouth and the excitement of wheeling and dealing and winning. His mind drifted back to the telephone conversation that had brought him from the Peramabahçe Palace to Addis Ababa.

She had said few words. “You must be in Addis in five day’s time, with a solution for the losses. Speak forcefully to the minister of commerce. You must win him over, and not only maintain but better your corporate image with the regime. No one must know I was the white knight, or that we ever met. I must see you, we have business, but my position has become vulnerable. Go hunting, with a party of foreigners. Plan a secondary exit through the Sudan. It may not be necessary, but, then again, it may be. Don’t look for me, I will find you.”

The sound of her soft voice, something akin to a whisper,
with its well-educated English accent, except for her
r
’s, which she trilled, and an occasional guttural sound on some letters of the alphabet, lingered in his ears. He was doing as she had bid, and so far it was going well. Why, he wondered, why had she done it?

All he had managed to learn in their fifteen minutes together in Samos was that she was indeed his white knight. That she made the journey to Samos explicitly to tell him to stop chasing around trying to find her, as he had done in Switzerland. He was compromising her and putting her in great danger. She had made it plain to him that the identity of the white knight who came to the rescue of the Corey Trust had to remain a secret as long as possible. Yes, they had to meet, and they would. She would tell him how and where, and he was to stand by and wait for word. It niggled at him, that “why” behind her rescue of his organization. And Marlo. What did Marlo have to do with Aida Desta? Something else niggled: her regal, animal sexuality.

Adam directed his attention back to the discussions going on in front of him. Excitement was building with every question to Josh and Carmel. Two other men had been called in. Adam could read the Ethiopians’ faces like a book. He had won them back, probably saved their skins and gotten them promotions. There would be a great many unhappy businessmen from the Eastern bloc rushing to Addis Ababa’s hotel bars, and trying to get flights out of the country in the next twenty-four hours, when those contracts were signed and the news got out. The Americans would see it as a coup, the Russians as a threat, and some Mideast madman, furious, would probably blow up an airplane somewhere in the world.

“I think we must have time to renegotiate the contracts, Adam, but I believe we have an interesting and workable package here,” said the minister, all smiles now.

“I think you misunderstood Josh, Abebe. He stated clearly that you could
renew
, not renegotiate, the contracts for another twenty-five years. Now that’s the deal, and the only deal, you are going to get out of the Corey Trust. Take it or leave it.”

The smiles dissolved. The minister, with all eyes on him, said, “You’re not the only merchant looking to invest in my country, Adam.”

“Then negotiate with the others, Abebe. Competition is
always good for business. But you and I, we don’t negotiate. Not with an honorable and fair deal such as we have presented to you. It’s sign, or good-bye.” Adam looked at his watch, and then added, “An hour, that should be long enough to explain it to your chairman.”

“You are very sure of yourself, Adam.”

“Yes, very.”

Abebe returned to his office one hour and forty minutes after he had left, flanked by two of the three top men of the government. Introductions were made, and there was a formal signing of the contracts with several rubber stamps applied, two red wax seals over red and purple satin ribbons, and some billion-dollar happy faces on each side of the desk.

Adam accepted an invitation to dine with the chairman that evening, and the room cleared except for Abebe, Josh, and Carmel.

“You are a hard businessman, Adam, but an honorable one. This deal of ours will help my country and our people, now and for a long time to come. But you do not help our regime and its image, its cause.

“We understand that like Armand Hammer you are an international businessman who deals in profit and capitalism, and will respect you for it, for what you have done today. But you have to understand that what Agristar offered us was irresistible — the Corey Trust, plus a heavy commitment to this regime in arms and worldwide recognition for our political causes. Now every penny of our capital investments abroad will have to be used for military armaments.”

That was it! Of course, that was why Aida Desta wanted her role as white knight kept a secret. She was dumping liquid funds meant for arms into long-term investments they would never be able to get their hands on. Smart, very smart, but very dangerous for her when they found out. Now he knew why she did it. But why choose Adam?

Adam could not help but smile. What a game. What a woman. She was courageous and dangerous, and that excited him. He looked forward to their next meeting with sharp relish.

“You smile, Adam. There is a joke?”

Adam switched off all thought of Aida Desta and returned his attention to the minister. “No, Abebe,” he answered, “not
a joke, my old friend. A curiosity, Ralph Werfel. It turns out that by his failure to destroy me, he has in fact been a traitor to your cause. And we know how you treat traitors.”

The eyes of the two men met unsmilingly.

20

A
dam stood in the shadows of a crumbling stone wall and crushed out his cigar against it. The glow might have given him away. He swore under his breathe. He hated ruining a good cigar. But he hated more the idea of getting caught in the muddy alley while trying to get into a house that looked empty and abandoned. An open American jeep with a machine gun mounted next to the driver’s seat and manned by a professional killer, was making a sweep through the neighborhood. The authorities were searching for anything subversive: leaflets, people of the old regime, weapons.

To be picked up could do no good for his friends inside, once members of the emperor’s court, and certainly no good for him. He would be abusing an official authorization, received earlier in the evening, to roam freely through the country with his hunting party, or to fly his Cessna anywhere through Ethiopian air space.

When the jeep shone its swiveling spotlight down the alley, the guide next to him was trembling so much Adam was afraid the man would give them away. None too gently, Adam clamped his hand over the Ethiopian’s mouth, while flattening him against the wall. He could feel the man’s heart pounding, but his violent shaking did subside, and his breathing grew more calm.

They had a clear view of the radioman sitting in the back of the jeep taking orders over a blaring, crackling radio that issued jumpy-sounding instructions. The expressionless, ebony faces of his cohorts, the driver and machine gunner, were partially obscured by motorcycle goggles and heavy metal helmets caked with dust. Sinister, beetlelike, the trio belonged to the night.

There was a burst of gunfire not very far off, followed by hoarse screams. Commands crackled and wheezed from the
radio. And Adam watched the spotlight inch its way down the alley. Suddenly the alley went dark.

The jeep backed into a high-speed turn, throwing its headlights down the center of the alley, but remained blocking it at the head. Dogs were barking everywhere. Then, without warning, the armed vehicle streaked at full speed through the mud. It was going to pass right by them.

Adam was furious. They were sure to catch him and his guide. With a screech of brakes, the jeep stopped twenty feet from where they stood. Shouts among the three monsters in the jeep, a rending of the gears, a burst from the radio, and they were reversing out of the alley, headlights striping across the houses on the back street. Another high-speed turn and the jeep kicked up mud and disappeared in bursts of machine-gun fire.

Adam and his guide stayed frozen in place, not passing a word between them. They heard the wild dogs of Addis Ababa, a population of pedigreed dogs riddled with vermin and malaria, with filthy tangled hair, left abandoned to run free through the streets of the city at the time of the revolution. Poodles and griffons, Airdales and boxers, greyhounds and Shih Tzus, red setters and Dobermans, after losing their pampered homes, had made the city theirs. Adam prayed they would deem the alley unworthy of them and look for their scraps elsewhere.

Their barking and howling reminded him of a time just after the revolution when one of the managers at the Corey Trust’s wheat depot told him a story of a man who’d come in asking for work. His last job, he told the manager nervously, was in the palace. He had worked for the emperor. His Majesty had a Japanese dog, Lulu, the man had said. The emperor’s great bed was where Lulu slept, His Majesty’s lap was where Lulu sat. When the emperor held court the dog would sometimes leap from His Majesty’s lap and run around peeing on the shoes of the dignitaries. The venerable gentleman, thought they felt their feet getting wet, were never allowed to flinch, or show displeasure. The man’s job for ten years had been to walk among the dignitaries from all over the world, wiping urine from their shoes with a satin cloth.

Adam felt the guide’s hand gently cover his, and he removed it. The Ethiopian patted it in thanks. And again they stood very still and silent. Adam had no idea how long they
remained that way in the foul-smelling alley. Addis Ababa was a dust bowl, and he had had to get stuck in the one alley with an open and running water pipe. He detached himself from his present predicament by wondering how long the water had been running. Days? Weeks? A month? Two months?

As a man claiming he never played politics, Adam wondered what in hell he was doing in that alley at four o’clock in the morning. But he knew the answer: friendship and loyalty. He knew he could locate some of his friends in hiding and bring them out safely. The chairman gave him his word it would be safe, that there was no need for anyone in the country to hide. Trapped still in the alley, pinned down by fear of a bullet through the darkness, Adam had to question that guarantee.

The sun was coming up when he returned to the Italian Embassy compound where he left the two friends from the old regime. He knew they would be safe there until Josh could establish them in their new positions as top executives in the Corey Trust. Those jobs would protect them from their past associations with the emperor and give them a chance to rebuild a life in their homeland.

Coffee in the embassy was spiced with accounts he had heard before of the last days of the emperor. For some reason he had not perceived then the cruelty of the way Mengistu Haile Mariam had treated the emperor. Mengistu’s relentlessness struck him now.

It was eight o’clock in the morning when Adam left the embassy and began his walk back to the Addis Ababa Hilton across from the National Palace, the embassy’s black Fiat a hundred yards behind in case he preferred to ride.

Adam had a genuine fondness for Addis Ababa, the city built on hills amid eucalyptus groves, born when he first saw it with his father thirty years before. He always thought of it as a vast village pretending to be a city, a folly of the emperor’s. He liked the strange mélange of embassies and houses, walled-in compounds that blocked out the primitive city peasantry in their ramshackle tin-roofed hovels. He was amused by the huge ghostlike city with its enormous buildings and wide avenues, where cows and sheep grazed the main streets amid Haile Selassie’s concrete dream that housed almost no one. As late as 1963, the nomads driving their herds
of frightened camels across the streets had right of way. He enjoyed enormously the tall eucalyptus trees, pungently scented, swaying in the wind, and the excitement of the high plateau on which the city was built. Only minutes away in the surrounding countryside were cheetah and baboons, lions roaming the hills, hippopotamuses in the river. Adam’s heart still raced at the thought of going down to the source of the Blue Nile.

And the church, the glorious Coptic church and its special Christianity, so pagan and so pure. Still one of the great sights in the world for Adam was to walk through the streets of Addis and see the faithful making a hundred genuflections, standing, dropping to the knees, arms outstretched and forehead to the earth. And this they did all over the city, because the Ethiopian Copt will only go into or as close to the church as he feels himself worthy to.

Addis never impressed Adam as a happy city, but it was a fascinating, exotic one ruled by a tiny despot who charmed the world with his vanity, his country’s poverty, and his wily, ruthless control of his people amid spurts of mad opulence.

Having just spoken about the last days of the emperor’s life with Admassu Lemma and Assefa Wajo, the two men he had brought in from hiding so many years, their recollections occupied Adam’s mind. How Mengistu Haile Mariam in those early days in August 1974 was a slight, tense, but controlled Army officer who knew the structure of the court because his mother had been a servant in the court. His secret had been to know who was who, whom to arrest, how to cripple the palace so that it no longer functioned. And he had acted on his knowledge, paralyzing the palace’s staff, turning the system into an ineffectual shadow of itself, then abandoning it to deteriorate into the thing it was now.

Early one August, the military committee, the Dirg, had decided to gradually arrest the five hundred dignitaries and courtiers who surrounded the emperor. One by one they were removed by the Dirg. They disappeared from the court, never to be seen or heard of again. A slow, sinking loneliness surrounded the emperor, until finally His Most Extraordinary Majesty occupied the palace in the company of a single servant.

And still they did not touch the emperor. They had good reason: for that, they had to prepare public opinion. Addis
Ababa had to be made to understand why its monarch was being removed. And so he was left to wander in solitude from empty room to functionless office.

Adam saw Haile Selassie at the end as a figure like King Lear — a vain autocrat who selected an entourage from men who were mean and servile. Favorites rewarded with privileges. No step would be taken, no word said, without his knowledge and consent. If everyone spoke with his voice, that suited him perfectly. There was only one condition for remaining in the emperor’s private circle: to practice the cult of the emperor. “They flattered me like a dog,” he admitted. If you didn’t play that game, you lost your place. You were stripped of your power, you disappeared. Haile Selassie tolerated only shadows of himself. Men made in his image alone could satisfy his vanity, give body to the gestures that kept him aloft on a pedestal for the world to see.

When like King Lear he let go of his power, they whittled away his retinue. Doomed, as it seemed, to reenact Lear’s fate to the end, the emperor was abandoned to the mockery of a single attendant. And what an end, an Emperor alone with his valet.

With a grim smile, Adam conjured for himself a further vignette of that time: the officers of the revolution asking His Benevolent Majesty to give back the money supposedly concealed in his fifteen palaces, in the homes of his devoted dignitaries, or deposited in secret foreign bank accounts. How naïve they must have been to think he would surrender one penny.

Adam could not help wishing he had been there when the officers, frustrated by the emperor’s denials that he had any hard currency anywhere, in desperation even rolled back the great Persian carpet. Astounded, they came upon an underlay of rolls of dollar bills stuck together, one next to the other, a thick undercarpet of green money. And when the officers raided the bookshelves and dollar bills fluttered from between the leaves of holy books, how the wily old despot must have laughed up his sleeves at the pittance they were getting.

And what of the great riches he had amassed himself? He had become greedy in his dotage, and he had had it all buried somewhere. They might nationalize his palaces, but they could never repatriate his bank accounts in countries all over the world. The Dirg claimed billions, but it was more like
hundreds of millions of dollars that he never returned to the state. There it languished in foreign banks even as Adam mused about it.

Adam had to admire his pathological vanity. For here was a man who kept saying to the end that the army had never disappointed him, and that if the revolution was good for the people, then he, too, would support the revolution, would not oppose even dethronement. Yet he gave them nothing.

Adam thought about the egocentricity of the emperor, who, after being systematically stripped of his power and prestige, isolated from his court, his family, his friends, deprived of his retinue of servants, and left to wander through the empty rooms of a palace no longer his, bridled when he was made to get into the back seat of a green Volkswagen. It was his only gesture of protest, before he was driven away from his palace and his world, and through the gates of the Fourth Division barracks.

Adam called the black Fiat forward and climbed into the back seat. The last days of His Royal Highness, “the King of Kings,” seemed terribly ugly and sad to Adam, and he was suddenly anxious to get back to the hotel and call Mirella. His spirit lifted, thinking of her in his house on the Bosporus, working in her office on the Oujie legacy and archives, organizing her department’s next year’s program at the UN, and getting to know his children and Istanbul. The lovely Mirella, his wife. Adam’s heart sang for the other side of his soul.

Abebe was waiting for him at the hotel surrounded by a dozen aides. Gone were the battle fatigues, replaced by pale gray business suits expensively tailored on Savile Row, ties and shoes from Jermyn Street in London. There wasn’t a hip holster or gun in sight. Josh and Carmel and Adam’s faithful manservant, Turhan, all looked peeved at having been given the slip by Adam the night before, but relieved to see him safe and sound.

Adam looked away from them out through the entrance of the hotel. He focused on what had seemed so different to him walking through the street or riding in the back of the Fiat: the street suddenly lacked soldiers. They had simply evaporated, transformed themselves into well-dressed civilians. Their crisis was over — over for the moment anyway.

Their greeting was friendly, and while Abebe and his aides
spoke of a press and TV conference due at ten o’clock in the ballroom of the hotel, Adam drew Abebe and Josh to one side.

“Abebe, your propaganda wheels may be in motion. That’s okay with me, but I have a team of the Corey Trust’s top executives flying in from all over the world to play that game with you. You can have them for as long as you like. But not me. Nor Josh. One still photograph with you and your Mr. Big, and that’s all you get, I’m going hunting. How about joining us? It’ll be like old times.”

Abebe’s eyes twinkled revealing his yearning to take off for the interior of the country that he loved so well. And then Adam saw it pass, as he’d imagined it would, as he’d
depended
on the knowledge it would. It was a calculated gamble that had to be, because somewhere out there he would meet up with Aida Desta. The invitation was another insurance policy of Adam’s against Abebe’s suspecting he would be doing anything in the country but hunting. It appeared to have paid off.

Adam drove the lead jeep with his favorite hunting guide sitting next to him. Turhan and Jock Warren-Williams, Adam’s companion, in the back. The second jeep was driven by Macalister Whittington, Kenya-trained, and a man with a reputation as the sort one liked to have at his side when things went wrong in the bush. Next to him was Rex Walker, a lifelong friend from New York. The other two jeeps were driven by Jock’s and Mac’s men, Sudanese hunters and trackers.