This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (32 page)

He had violated her nakedness with his gaze, eyeing her long shapely legs in their stockings, whose provocative tops encircled her rounded thighs. He scorned her sensuous-looking feet, shod in tarty high-heeled black satin shoes, yet still the patch of black pubic hair enslaved him. Her breasts, draped in strands of lustrous pearls and diamonds, all his gifts
in recognition of his passion for her, were heaving with her sharp and angry breathing. He had seized her in a cruel embrace from which she emerged with her hands tied together behind her back. She felt herself being dragged to his bed, picked up and dropped onto it.

He had no need to tie her to the four posts of the bed. Where, after all, could she go, naked and hands strapped together?

He had stood at the foot of the bed and slowly stripped himself naked before her.

“You have been very stupid, Mirella, and have placed a part of our lives in jeopardy by your dumb behavior. I don’t know why. But you are going to have to learn how to handle these occasional crises in our relationship. Better that you learn today.”

“Let me go, Rashid.”

“Never.”

Mirella slowly calmed herself, never taking her eyes from Rashid. His sexual charisma, his male beauty, enthralled her, enslaved her to eros, as it always did. Sexual depravity, the evil that vanquished the burden of being good, and a kind of base animal love emanated from the very pores of his honey-colored skin. It reached out and touched a passion in Mirella, drew her back to him.

She knew he was right. He would never let her go because together they represented something rare. Erotic lovers equally matched, one never overshadowing or stunting the growth of the other. Why be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free? She was free in her erotic love affair with Rashid, and in her real and true love-marriage with Adam. She was a woman doubly blessed. Rashid had been right, she had been stupid; Josh had almost broken one side of her love triangle.

In the mirror Rashid could glimpse a dark bruise rising on his cheek where she had slapped him. Returning to her on the bed, he had announced, yet again, “You will have to be punished for this, Mirella.”

And punished her he had, in ways much much worse for her than violence. He teased her with his hands, had caressed her body with oil of tuberose. Slowly, methodically, Rashid had massaged every inch of her skin with deft fingers, until she mellowed under his hands, and her flesh glistened as if made of slippery satin. And then, naked and rampant, he lay
on top of her and stroked her whole body with his until he transferred her luster to himself.

She was in a passion for him, and he knew it and went further. He used his mouth and his tongue on her clitoris and cunt until he brought her to the edge of orgasm, again and again, only to cease abruptly, cut off the flow of passion ready to burst from her. He tortured her with his body by long denying her the release that he knew his penis alone could grant her. Her humiliating punishment was to have been reduced to beg for this orgasmic release even before his passion for her forced him to concede it.

The sun had been well up over Istanbul when he returned her to the Peramabahçe Palace, replete and exhausted, and having learned her lesson. Mirella, yet again, yielded to the recognition that, no matter what, she was bound to him, and there could be no leaving him.

That very afternoon he had sent her a letter declaring his love for her. That evening at sunset unannounced he had called upon her on his schooner, the
Azziz
, and docked at the Peramabahçe Palace. They sailed several miles up the Bosporus to a small deserted inlet with steep, well-wooded hills solid with rich green terebinth and umbrella pine trees, pierced by needle-shaped, dark cypresses, rising tier upon tier high above the river. They walked up the hill through the trees on a narrow, winding dirt path scattered with pine needles, and came upon an eighteenth-century wooden pavilion.

It was a circular love kiosk with an erotic mosaic for flooring, and white marble fountains, arched floor-to-ceiling doors of glass all around it that opened onto views of the Bosporus. And from gracefully curved staircases winding delicately up to a narrow gallery, views over the city of Istanbul, and especially Topkapi Sarayi, rising romantically from what was once the acropolis of the ancient town of Byzantium. The great palace of the Ottoman sultans where Mirella’s great-grandmother had once ruled, and from where her grandmother had escaped.

Dazzlingly rich in sensuous charm and opulent privacy, the intimacy insinuated itself everywhere in the room. It was possible to forget the broken panes of glass, the cracks in the mosaic, the fountains deprived of water, the years of dust and decay.

For a moment Mirella had experienced a sense of déjà vu,
and her mind played a trick on her. She saw the room as it had once been, with its silks and its satins, its mirrors everywhere reflecting the play of fountains, and massive bowls of brightly colored flowers in full bloom; furnishings in the Oriental manner of the period, a couple in the act of making love.

“My great-grandfather built this hideaway just to make love to your great-grandmother. I am going to restore it just for you. It’s my gift to you, a place for our erotic pleasures, for you to delight in the flesh as they did, and with whom you choose. I’ll tell Adam I have given it to you because of its history, and because I feel it belongs to both of us. I know Adam well. He will know instinctively never to breach this sanctum. Only if you choose to bring him here will he see it. Just as my great-grandfather granted it as a miniature Taj Mahal to his beloved Roxelana Oujie, whose love at last destroyed him, so I give it to you.”

Mirella had accepted it, but, although it was given in love to her, she did recognize a look in his eye that she had seen before, a certain kind of helpless hatred, and it sent a shiver through her spine. It was a dangerous gift, from a dangerous lover, but she could not help herself, she fell in love with it at once. It was a passionate and thrilling place, now turned a bright golden pink in the setting sun. Echoes of past ecstasies rippled through the ruined love kiosk on the gentle evening breeze.

Yet again the past reached out and took a part of her life in its ambiguous embrace.

23

D
eena snapped her fingers. “Hey, presto. Come back from wherever you are, Mirella. You’re drifting away from me,” Deena said in her teasing, sing-song voice.

Mirella smiled. Deena always made her smile, and most especially when Deena was in one of her super organizational moods. At those times everyone had to pay attention to what she had to say.

“Yes, Deena.”

“Right. Mirella, how about Thanksgiving?”

“What about Thanksgiving?”

“What do you mean, what about Thanksgiving? The most important day of my life, and you’re asking what about it? My wedding, in your New York townhouse, that’s what about Thanksgiving. You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

The look of disappointment on Deena’s face was too sad. Mirella went and sat next to her, put her arm around her girlfriend, and said, “I’m so sorry, I drifted off, thinking about something you said earlier. Please don’t look so sad. Everything is going to be fine. I spoke to Adam last night in Paris, and he assures me the house will be ready long before Thanksgiving. So you’re on. Wedding bells and turkey at the Corey house, Fifth avenue, New York City, three o’clock,
khupe
, rabbi, and all,”

Deena broke down and began to cry. Brindley went and stood behind her, and passed her a clean white linen handkerchief.

“This is ridiculous, you know, Deena. Getting married is making a wreck of you. I have never heard of so much fuss over two people getting married.”

“Then you’ve never gotten mixed up in a Jewish wedding?”

“No, never.”

“Oh, my God, how can I do this to you?”

“More to the point is, how can you do this to us?”

“Good question, Brindley. Should we just forget our families and run off and do it in the Istanbul city hall?”

“You’re at it again, Deena, dragging me into an unnecessary fuss about a wedding. I warn you. I could get fed up with it.”

“Do you think it’s destiny? Are we fated never to marry, but to live in delicious sin?”

“One would have thought so, the way you fix dates for the nuptials with the vicar at Lyttleton Park, and then cancel them. I warn you now, we walk up that aisle on Christmas Eve with or without having had a Jewish ceremony in New York for your family. Christ, Deena, I am marrying you, not the Jewish race.”

“That’s what you think.”

“Talk to her, Mirella.”

“Leave everything to me and to Adam, Brindley. All you have to do is arrive at the altars on time.”

Deena jumped up from the chaise. “He’s right,” she said. “I’m making a real
tsimes
out of this whole marriage thing. Oh, God, I’m as bad as my mother; I don’t mean to be. Not another word will I expose you to. I hate myself when I behave like a Yenta Ranger. Why don’t you get on with your work? I can finalize things with Mirella and be done with all the details once and for all, I promise.”

Brindley looked relieved, positively happy. He took his fiancée in his arms and kissed her.

“You mean it?”

“Yes, I mean it.”

“Then I’ll see you at lunchtime. Until then, I’ll be in town at the antiquities department, for the Oujie estate.”

Mirella announced that she would walk Brindley to the car as she had a few things to tell him. She slipped her arm through his, and as they were walking down the main staircase, he said in a whisper, “What’s a
tsimes
?”

“I think it’s a big mess or tempest in a teapot. That’s one of her mother’s phrases, but I wouldn’t quote me on that. Deena would probably call that a WASP’s interpretation.”

“And a ‘Yenta Ranger’?”

“Well, for one thing, I am sure it is quite the opposite of a Sloane Ranger. Maybe it’s a Sloane Ranger, New York Jewish Princess-style. What I do know is that a yenta is a talkative woman, a female blabbermouth.”

“I don’t always understand her, but isn’t she wonderful, Mirella?”

“Yes, wonderful, Brindley.”

“I do hope she does, in the end, marry me. But it would not entirely surprise me if she left me high and dry at the altar.”

“Never,” Mirella said, laughing, although she was concerned that Brindley might just be right.

Deena was pouring another cup of coffee for herself when Mirella returned. They both began to speak at the same moment. Deena laughingly conceded, “Okay, it’s your house, you go first.”

“Truth games?” asked Mirella.

Both women smiled. “We’re back to that, are we?” responded Deena. Then she appeared to sober up because characteristically they played their truth twosome for real. They believed in it and worked at it.

The rules were simple. Each was obliged to answer the
other’s questions with a ruthless honesty. If one of them believed she was being lied to, she would call out “Nixon.”

Their truth game was their way of helping each other to resolve uncertainties that were causing them conflict. And most of the time it worked. Mirella began.

“Brindley — are you going to marry him?”

“Yes,” Deena answered.

“Are you unsure about being able to handle the marriage?”

“No, not in the least.”

“Then why do you keep canceling the dates you set for the ceremony? Once might have been acceptable, but three times?”

“I’m not afraid to lose my identity, not afraid of giving up my work, which, as you know, I’ve already done; not afraid of becoming an expatriate — and you know how much I love being an American and living in New York; not afraid I won’t fit into Brindley’s very English life. Why, I’m not even scared of marrying Church of England style.”

“Then what are you afraid of?”

“Losing my Jewishness, having a husband and children who will not understand the horrors of a Jewish meal, who will never know what it is to suffer gefilte fish, heartburn after a plate of
kishke
, chopped liver on rye bread loaded with caraway seeds that ends up feeling like a hard ball in the pit of your stomach. Having a husband who doesn’t understand what it is to be Jewish and overemotional, and he not knowing how to say kiddush.”

“But, Deena, you don’t even eat those things, or practice at being Jewish.”

“Don’t you think I know that? That I’m aware that I’ve wanted to be more of a WASP than a New York Jewish Princess? But what has that got to do with it? Don’t you see? I’m Jewish, I know about Jewishness, and now that I’m on the Damascus road and have the chance to trade it in, I don’t want to. It’s a part of me that I’m proud of and don’t want to lose. But I will, because I’m going to intermarry. And because whatever Jewishness I have, it’s mine and I don’t particularly want to push it onto anyone else. I never did it to you, did I?”

“Never.”

“And I don’t really want to do it to Brindley. I’m not out to turn Lyttleton Park into a Jewish kibbutz, any more than I’m out to turn Lady Margaret’s beloved village fetes into B’nai
B’rith jamborees, or expect Brindley to drop cricket for pinochle games with the boys from the borscht belt.” Then she punctured a little her own earnestness. “Even this
oy vey iz mir
attitude about getting married to a non-Jew is very Jewish.”

“That’s all that’s worrying you?”

“Absolutely all.”

“Then for God’s sake — anybody’s god — just drop it.”

Deena hesitated for a moment and then announced, “Done, consider my conflict at an end.”

“Nixon,” cried Mirella.

“No. No Nixon.”

“You’re sure you’re not Nixoning me, Deena?”

“Positive, and to prove it I’ll tell you how we’ll solve the whole thing. Big church wedding at Lyttleton Park on Christmas Eve, as planned. Rabbi and khupe at your house with the whole Corey clan, my mother and father, and Lady Margaret. Strictly a private and personal thing for me on Thanksgiving Day. You and I and Brindley and Adam in front of a rabbi, and that’s it. I don’t want to do another thing about it, or hear another word about it. Except go shopping with you for the dresses to wear. And get a promise that you and Adam will end this odd estrangement you’re having and come together in time for my weddings. Okay?”

Mirella nodded her assent, and then said, “There is no estrangement between Adam and me. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Nixon,” Deena said somewhat loudly.

“It’s not.”

“Oh, it’s Nixon all right. Otherwise, why aren’t you with him now in New York helping him move into your new house? Why didn’t you go to him when he asked you to meet him in Paris last week? Ever since he went on that hunting trip in Ethiopia, you hardly speak about him. Why wasn’t he with you for those anniversary ceremonies at the UN, when you were there in New York? Or, for that matter, where were you when the news broke in all the financial papers about that Ethiopian Marxist princess who turned up trumps for him by becoming his white knight? Not estranged? That’s a load of Nixon.”

Mirella, remaining silent, walked to the window and
watched the mid-morning river traffic. But Deena would not let up.

“Why don’t you face up to what’s wrong?”

Mirella turned to where Deena was sitting.

“Okay. There is a kind of estrangement.”

“Nixon.”

“We seem to be drifting apart.”

“Nixon.”

“I hesitate to leave Rashid and get more deeply involved in my married life with Adam, because if I do I’m afraid to lose Rashid.”

“That sounds more like it. Jimmy Carter at least. A little off target, maybe, considering how involved and happy you are with the ready-made family and home Adam has given you. Not to mention how fast you’ve learned to love this palace of his and Turkey the same way he does. The look on your face when a cable from him comes or you hear his voice over the telephone, the way you speak to him — there’s a softening of your whole being. You
are
deeply involved in your intimate married life with Adam. Surely Rashid knows and accepts that? You are not the only married woman in the world to have a lover. It’s up to you to keep them in balance.”

“That may be so, but you have no idea how powerful a love exists between my husband and myself. It’s so real and so true, and so natural. It overpowers the erotic love I share with Rashid, and all three of us know it. I’m bound to these men, and I don’t want to lose Rashid. I’m always running away from him to Adam, because our love transcends Rashid’s mere sensuality.”

“Mirella, I’m asking you not to widen this separation you’ve created between you and Adam. You’re too self-indulgent with Rashid at the moment. And, if I know Adam, he will do nothing until you’ve worked it out. He’ll never help you in this. He is a man as hard as he is soft, and he will simply carry on with his life in the assurance that what you have together will win out. Do it for me, if for the time being you cannot do it for yourself. I need us all to be together. Brindley and I both want to share these times, the happiest of our lives, with you and Rashid and Adam, but we will never be able to unless you get it right.”

Then the two women hugged each other and both knew without speaking another word that the truth game had
unloosed a knot for them yet again. Their conflicts dissolved. As soon as Mirella had a few minutes to herself, she picked up the telephone receiver and called Paris, only to find Adam was no longer there.

Adam flew directly from Paris to Cairo with Turhan on a commercial flight, changed to a smaller waiting plane that followed the Nile up to Aswan. There he changed planes once more to a Learjet, piloted by Jock Warren-Williams. They took off immediately for Khartoum.

“Thanks for coming to get me, Jock.”

“No problem.”

“Did you book me in at the Grand?”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen anything of Marlo, heard anything of Aida Desta?”

“Marlo, yes. She’s doing a picture story on the Dinka people and is down there with them now, but she has become the Mahdi’s favorite distraction. She’s been living with him in one of his mud palaces in the Bayuda Desert. They make some pair. He, dark and Oxford-serious, all in sparkling white flowing robes and grandly wound white turban, with a staff in one hand, a book, usually the Koran or poetry, in the other. While she’s in my twenty-two-year-old Abercrombie and Fitch, khaki Bermuda shorts, with my best Turnbull and Asser tie strung through the belt loops, my best white dress shirt, tied in a knot under her tits, sneakers — I don’t know where she found them — and her hair wrapped in a turban the color of purple figs. And, of course, his whole court of Sudanese officials in their white-white robes padding along after her, hanging on to every word she utters, as she snaps, snaps, snaps away.

“But not a word about your Aida Desta. Not since your financial wizardry with the Ethiopian government was disclosed in all the papers — along with photographs of her and her telex statements to the world press from Kampala — two weeks after we all left Khartoum after our hunting expedition.”

Adam sat back and lit one of his cigars. He thought first about Aida Desta, and how clever she had been with those statements to the press. She had tied their destinies to her will; ruined Agristar forever in Ethiopia; stopped her government
from using the foreign investments under her control for anything but the welfare of the people; used Adam and the Corey Trust as protectors; manipulated her superiors in the government by making her statements to the world in their name, giving them credit for the entire scheme, white knight and all, and then resigning her position in favor of the minister of commerce, Abebe Afeworq Maskal. About the only thing she hadn’t done was surface in Paris, New York, or London, where she had a better chance of survival. She had crossed too many people.

Not since he fell asleep in her arms had he heard a word from her, nor had she sent him a sign through anyone that she was safe. Then in the early hours of the morning a call, a voice, her voice, speaking in French. “It is your black princess, come as quickly as possible to where Jock lives.” Then a click, and the whine of a disconnected telephone line.

The two men were sitting on the wide veranda of the Grand Hotel. They had watched the sun set over the Blue and the White Nile where they joined. They had talked with the vendors who came with their wares and spread them out on mats for the tourists to buy, ivory bits and pieces of no great beauty but considerable charm, wooden carved animals, primitive and endearing, some wooden instruments of sticks and animals skins, some very good iron work and knives, most of which were made by the craftsmen across the river at Omdurman. There, Jack had an old wooden house where he sometimes lived among the Sudanese, when he was not living in the suite of rooms he kept on the ground floor of the Grand Hotel.