This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (33 page)

They had known this place for twenty years, and the vendors were always pleased to see Adam. It gave them a chance to exchange gossip and stories with him and he always bought the best of their wares. And they in turn had been very good to Adam, had introduced him to men and places that resulted in several fruitful excavations whose rewards were shared between the Metropolitan in New York and the museum in Khartoum. They had gone on at length this evening about Mirella, whom they met when she had been in Khartoum to meet him at the end of the Ethiopian safari, anxious to know if they had started a baby as yet.

That had been a surprise, the unexpected arrival of Mirella. Abebe had stayed with the hunting party on board the Lisbon
Clipper for a week, as they flew the length of the Blue Nile. Watching, listening all the time. There had been no question about it, he was suspicious about something. Maybe even looking for Aida Desta. But by the end of the week of excellent hunting, thanks to locations the men had previously chosen, the comfort of the Lisbon Clipper as a campsite, and the camaraderie of the men, Abebe had left them at the border where the Blue Nile flowed from Ethiopia into the Sudan, satisfied he had found nothing out of order.

It was then with some relief that the men had camped twice more before arriving at the Grand Hotel. They had all been in the bar drinking beer from glasses the size of flower vases, trying to quench their thirst in the 110-degree heat and humidity. It had been Rex who saw her first, standing in the doorway. He stood up and all the men’s eyes followed his. Adam was the last to reach her, as the men rushed to greet Mirella, he was so taken by surprise. She was the last thing on his mind, but obviously still the first thing in his heart, because the moment he saw her it skipped a beat and he had wanted her as he always wanted her when she appeared before him.

However, much as he did want her, at that moment she had posed a problem being there where he hoped to see Aida Desta. He therefore had set out to convince her that the heat was too much for her and had sent her back to Istanbul with Josh where he promised to be before the week was out.

It was two o’clock in the morning, the heat and humidity still oppressive. The veranda was empty now, except for the Sudanese servant in his white caftan and neat turban, standing in the dark waiting for them, Turhan lurking not far away. The dim night-lights in the lobby cast patterns of light through the windows, just enough to drink by. Night sounds reached them, a lonely clickity-clack of hooves of horses pulling an open carriage on the road between them and the Nile, whispering palm leaves, frogs croaking.

“Listen, old boy, she’s not going to show. No more than she did the last time we waited for her here in Khartoum. It’s too dangerous for her here.”

“She’ll show, Jock. And when she does, we’re going to fly her out. You be ready to leave by eleven in the morning. This cloak-and-dagger stuff is not for me. I have the Corey Trust back on its feet, and a lot of good people in the right places
working at it. You know me, ‘the business’ is not my whole life, and it’s been enough of Aida Desta’s. I’m going to help her make a life for herself.”

Jock stood up and the two men shook hands. Jock went to the room booked for Adam. They had agreed earlier that if she did appear, the chances were it would be his room, because it was off the veranda and she could more easily come and go in the night without being seen.

Adam had been right, she arrived in the still of the night. He was lying naked on the bed smoking a cigar, unable to sleep for the heat. He saw her slim dark figure slip through the French doors leading onto the balcony, a shadow in the dark.

She stood at the foot of his bed, crossed her arms in front of her and raised her dress over her head and dropped it to the floor. He watched her shadowy movements and reached out to crush the cigar in an ashtray on the nightstand. He was enthralled as he watched her glide from the bottom of the bed up between his legs, kissing the inside of his thighs.

She moved like a voluptuous slithering snake. He grabbed her as soon as he could reach her and pulled her on top of him. He abased himself to animal lust, but before all the reasons he was there for evaporated, he whispered huskily, “I am never coming for you again. You will leave with me in the morning.”

She whispered back in his ear, “You will always come when I want you.” She parted her lips again and took his ear between them and sucked and licked it.

In the morning, when he dozed off just for a few seconds, she took her chance and slipped away. This was no longer the virgin he had broken. She had become a fierce lover, fierce and thrilling, dangerous and demanding. By the time he had tamed her, he was left with long deep scratches and bruises and teeth marks where she bit into his flesh in order to quell her cries of ecstasy. She had been remarkable, but when he and jock met at breakfast he said, “She’s too dangerous, even for me. My passion for dangerous women hasn’t waned, but it has changed since I fell in love with Mirella. You were right about her, Jock. She’s a driven, sensual creature, and she won’t be coming out of hiding until she’s ready.”

The last thing Adam did before leaving the Grand Hotel in Khartoum was to call Mirella in Istanbul. Jock and Adam were halfway to Cairo when Adam discovered three cases
filled with gold bars tucked under the seats. How had Aida Desta done it? Jock’s plane had been locked, and the lock had not been broken.

Adam called Mirella the next evening from Cairo. They spoke at length about changes she wanted to make in her life, radical changes that would give her more time for them to be together. And they made plans to achieve those ends. From Paris the next day they planned for their future and agreed to meet in New York in two weeks, at which time they would be able to move into their new townhouse.

It was Rashid who took Deena and Mirella to Paris to shop for Deena’s wedding dresses, his wedding gift to Deena and Brindley. He timed it so that Adam would be in New York and unable to join them.

Deeply in love as he was with Mirella now, his vision was always of her as his erotic mistress-wife of sorts. But of late, since the day he gave her the love pavilion, schemes took shape in his mind that might one day give him the total possession of her that had so far eluded him.

Where once he had shared Mirella with no one there was now the void left in his life by Adam’s possession of her in marriage. These days Rashid filled that void with erotic games with several other women, contenting himself with a vacant amusement.

Lili was proving a far more amusing victim than he thought she would be. A fantasy formed of the day he would be successful in manipulating both mother and daughter to join him in an erotic tryst. He promised himself depravity would assume a new look on that day. There were others to fill the void. A seventeen-year-old English beauty, who was completely beguiled by him. A spoiled wealthy American divorcée, who was a perfect masochistic foil to his sadistic whims. And there were others — he picked them up everywhere and enjoyed them all, from the lowest sleazy whore to ladies in society. And, of course, there was always Humayun. The pleasures he gained from sex and intrigue with Humayun were infinite.

Rashid was an intriguer and often he obtained amusement from giving Humayun to other men as a sexual gift. Then he would stand back and watch her transform their sad, often pathetically boring sex lives. She was the most accomplished enticer of men he had ever come across. She alone matched his
ability to draw from men the sexual corruption latent within them. Only once had he regretted his intrigues with her. And now he felt a sympathy for the man involved, and must find a way to save him.

The man was Moses, and it had happened when he wanted to give Moses a gift, sexual delight, in return for all the help Moses had given Rashid with Mirella’s wedding preparations. And so he had instructed Humayun to seduce Moses, after Mirella’s wedding. This, perhaps the one time Rashid had given Humayun out of a whim born of charity rather than intrigue, was proving to be a problem. How could he have foreseen they would fall hopelessly in love?

In the arms of the ravishing and clever Humayun, Moses, who had never been enslaved by anything or anyone, and who believed totally that man must be free, had discovered that sexual fulfillment, so earnestly desired, was paid for by its own kind of enslavement.

With Moses erotically enslaved, Humayun was now using him in the same way that Rashid used her. It disturbed her to have released in him desires that rendered him, however briefly, so abject. In love with Moses in the only way she knew how — through sexual depravity and enslavement — and unable to make Moses understand that the great joy of her life was to please her master, Rashid, because of the total pleasure she achieved from belonging to Rashid body and soul, Humayun had appealed to Rashid to destroy the relationship between her and Moses. Not a prospect Rashid was looking forward to, because he had a gut feeling it would start a chain of events he was not ready to deal with. So, for the moment he did nothing. It was, instead, Josh who he was about to deal with. Rashid wanted him to stop disturbing the fine balance achieved in his love triangle with Mirella and Adam.

From Paris, Deena flew off to London, ostensibly to begin the redecorating of Brindley’s Mount Street flat, their London home. After three days she gave up, and began to enjoy its English shabbiness, and to enjoy London and Brindley on their own terms, which seemed to suit her admirably. She had never been more happy.

Rashid flew on the Concorde from Orly in Paris to Kennedy in New York, and then on a private jet to the Midwest of the United States on business. At least that was the route he told the women. He promised to meet them on
or before the Thanksgiving family dinner-wedding at Mirella’s in New York, and to present himself as an usher at the ceremony at Lyttleton Park, on Christmas Eve.

Mirella boarded Adam’s Learjet for Istanbul and the Peramabahçe Palace, where she would enjoy life with the clan until it was time to leave for New York.

But before the three parted, they had a bottle of champagne together in the back seat of Rashid’s maroon-colored Rolls on the tarmac close to Mirella’s jet plane. It was there that Mirella made her announcement.

She had been discussing with Adam for the last week the new outline she would give to her life now she was married. She had decided to resign her position at the UN, and devote more of her time to Adam and his family, whom she had grown to enjoy enormously. Grafted onto it at first, she felt herself growing to be a part of it. As she put it, “Family present and family past have become the most important things in my life. I have had my career, and I think I’ve earned the right to retire from one life to begin another. I want to do creative, adventurous things, for myself and my family. I’m going to build a small museum in Istanbul, something similar to the Benaki Museum in Athens. It is the Oujie legacy, the archives of generations of remarkable ancestors, whose treasures will be the basis of the collection.”

Deena gave an inward sigh of relief and an outward hug to Mirella. Rashid had kissed her hand gallantly and said, not without awe in his voice, “When a goddess like you founds a museum, it can only become a shrine to beauty.” But Mirella, her mind earthbound by the practicalities of her task, found something heartless in the vapidity of Rashid’s compliment.

What Rashid did not express was his uneasy feeling over her desire for a fuller family commitment. He would have to do something about that.

24

T
hey had been physically apart for a considerable time and, although that had not worried either of them unduly, there was a moment of tension before the plane door opened, created by their desire to be together and the hope that time and distance had not changed how they felt about one another.

Adam’s first sight of Mirella stimulated him on all levels, mental, emotional, sexual. Her desire for union, which was always strong, seemed more acute than ever, and Adam loved that in her. Mirella simply felt weak-kneed.

She was struck dumb with happiness that she was still, at the very sight of Adam, madly in love and overwhelmingly filled with desire. There was an extra dimension to her feelings, too, that she could not define, but both she and Adam were aware that it emanated from her and it was picked up like an exotic aroma by him. It was something like the scent of love; invisible threads as strong as tempered steel holding them together, or one soul shared by two people.

He wanted to make love to her right there and then, go to extreme sexual lengths to satisfy her, but the time and the place were wrong, even though he knew his desire was right. All the way home in the back of the plum-colored Rolls, he wanted to express what he was feeling, but it was impossible. Over the heads of Alice and Zhara and Muhsine and Moses, all of whom had traveled with Mirella from Istanbul and were chattering to him all at the same time, his gaze told Mirella what he was feeling.

The atmosphere between them seemed charged with an extra invisible energy like those sometimes-minute particles of dust in the air that one sees only when the light hits them at the correct angle. Maybe it was just life being lived to the very edge of fullness, yet contained and not spilling over. Neither knew, and neither asked the question.

It was cold, New York cold, and damp, the sort of raw weather that eats into the bones, after the bite of a cruel, bitter wind. The end of a sunless November day, the windows in
the shops along Madison Avenue were lit and gave a warm glow that spilled onto the hard city streets. There was an early-evening bustle of people moving from the cocktail hour to the dinner hour — what New Yorks call the last of the evening rush hour. It would have been far faster to walk than to ride, but the cold left them no option.

Riding through the streets of Manhattan in the warmth of a luxurious automobile, smothered in furs, alongside a man you are madly attracted to and who is your husband as well, is not a hard thing to take. Mirella was happy.

She window-shopped from the car and listened to him talking with his children, and read the look of desire for her in his eyes when their glances met, and she prayed that she was not reading him wrong. And what if she were? What if he no longer wanted her as she wanted him? How could she face those horrifying moments, the worst fear of all, the dreaded fear of loss? No, she couldn’t be reading him wrong, it would be too cruel, too unfair. She put the thought right out of her mind and took up his hand and held it.

The excitement of New York City, and especially from Thanksgiving through to the New Year, would have been enough for any of the people in the car. But for Mirella and Adam that was secondary to their being together again and moving into their new family house. For Moses there was the added joy of returning to what he considered his home town and 165 East Sixty-fifth Street, Mirella’s house, where he hoped to get a better perspective on his love affair with Humayun. For little Alice the excitement of traveling and the promise of seeing Marlo, her mother, was what New York meant. To Muhsine, New York was a frightening adventure, but as always her joy lay in being next to Adam and now his wife, Mirella. As for Zhara, moving in with Josh and sharing his fifteen-room apartment at the Dakota for the New York winter social season suited her just fine. Mirella couldn’t help smiling at what she was saying to her father.

“You’re just like all the New Yorkers who live on the Upper East Side. The only good thing they ever condescend to say about the Dakota is that the apartments have great space for little money. They always think there’s something second-rate about the West Side. Just like New Jersey.”

“Don’t be silly, Zhara, I’m the one who found the apartment at the Dakota for your brother. It’s true, though,
what you say. Other East Side New Yorkers feel the Dakota is on the wrong side of the park. Periodically the West Side has had its time, when it was considered smart and chic to live there, and this is one of those times. However, my beautiful and spoiled Zhara, remember you’re an East Side girl going to live in a more ethnic community.

“It’s more of a melting pot over there, more homey, with its little grocery shops, its Jewish delicatessens, its Italian spaghetti houses, its huge Broadway cafeterias. The West Side is very tolerant in its acceptance of the rich and of the expensive buildings around the corner from the worn-out, cockroach-infested apartments in the run-down brownstones.”

Then Adam began to laugh, and putting his arm around his daughter, he teased her. “Zhara, it will be a change for you, the West Side. It’s a place where you will always find a laundry, a cleaners, a shoe-repair shop, and an all-night liquor store. It’s a community that rushes around working at life, and I hope you’re not too spoiled to appreciate that.”

“That’s unfair, Papa, and you know it.”

“Yes, maybe it is unfair. I don’t suppose the West Side of Manhattan has any less color than the streets of Istanbul, and I do know how well you enjoy and take advantage of them. It’s just that I brought you up at the Sherry Netherland, and that’s not exactly a neighborhood where you’ll find a yeshiva next door to an all-black whorehouse. Or be exposed to the humiliation of survival. Have you ever seen a pasty-faced ten-year-old boy in a shiny black satin coat, who looks like a forty-year-old man, tucking his long skinny side curls where his sideburns should be up under his Orthodox black felt hat as soon as he gets out of sight of his rabbinical school so that the Puerto Rican kids won’t beat him up?

“I saw that once, and I saw the look of terror and embarrassment on that child’s face when the rabbi came running down the stairs of the yeshiva, his longer, fatter curls bouncing and his black satin coattails flapping after him as he ran down the street, one hand on top of his head trying to hold down his wide, fur-trimmed hat. He was screaming, ‘Revolting, disgusting fellow; evil person, nasty fellow.’
Paskudnyak
, that’s right,
paskudnyak
, that was the word he kept repeating as he ran after the unfortunate boy, waving a cane I suppose he was going to beat him with. The boy ran away from the teacher as fast as his legs could possibly carry
him, only to be trapped at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue by a gang of blacks and Puerto Ricans. No, I think not, you wouldn’t see a sight like that. On the east side of the park, the humiliations are practiced behind closed doors.”

“Not always, Papa. Look over there. That bunch of rags piled in the alleyway next to the supermarket cart with the rubbish in it.”

At that moment the rags moved and revealed the haggard, dirt-streaked face of a middle-aged woman. She began screaming as she pounded the damp, ice-cold wall she was leaning against. Several passersby eyed her, but only for a second. Not one of them stopped. They hardly broke their stride.

New Yorkers are hardened to screamers. On the buses, in the subways, and always on the streets. The Rolls purred past the shrieking bundle of rags. The last they saw of the desperate, homeless creature, a pair of filthy scrawny bare hands, red and raw from the bitter cold, was reaching out of the darkness to drag her back into the alleyway from the glitz and glamour of the Upper East Side avenue.

“The homeless live all over New York now, Papa. They are the men, women, young people, and kids with almost all options gone. Many of them prefer to suffer in poverty on the streets than endure those shelters the size of football fields packed with row upon row of neatly lined up cots … and lots of dangers. New York is getting to be more like Bombay or Calcutta. Papa, I’m not blind or insensitive to humiliation. More shocked, I guess. I never dreamed I would see whole families with tiny children living on the streets of New York City.”

“I guess what I was trying to say, dear heart, was there is a New York street life out there you’ve never been exposed to before, but I can see I was wrong about that. Well, just don’t be an East Side girl slumming it on the West Side. If you’ve chosen to stay there with Josh instead of with us, don’t use the Dakota like some East Side castle-fortress on the wrong side of the park to emerge from in a taxi and return to in a taxi. Take advantage of the richness of the life around you there, and learn from it.”

Zhara looked at Mirella and the two women smiled at each other. Like all of the clan she had become friends with Mirella, so much so as to have taken Mirella into her confidence. They
had a secret that Zhara was not yet prepared for the world to know. She was in love, and doing just what her father suggested she should not do, hiding away in the Dakota in the hope that the privacy she got there would give her romance a chance to flourish away from the Upper East Side gossips.

The car at last made some headway and turned onto Fifth Avenue. Central Park seemed to sparkle darkly in the coldness of the evening. Several blocks later they arrived at their new home. All the windows were ablaze with light in the neo-Georgian limestone mansion, standing solidly on the corner of Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. A forty-room building famous for its elegant architectural restraint and its classy detail, the entrance to it was on the side street rather than the avenue.

The Rolls purred around the corner of Fifth Avenue and almost immediately through the iron gates onto the horseshoe-shaped drive up to the impressive front doors.

The excitement of their arrival peaked when they rushed from the cold into the house and were greeted by the warmth of its fine, rich but sedate interiors, and by a pair of huge English mastiffs belonging to Adam, and four gold and white Shih Tzus barking and yelping as they ran down the grand staircase with short little feet hardly touching the stairs and hair flying.

All was chaos in the entrance hall, and between the laughter and shouts of “Heel, heel, heel,” the barking, and the chatter, Adam whispered in Mirella’s ear, “Welcome home, my love.”

They only had a second to exchange glances of affection before he gathered up the small dogs from the arms of those around him and placed all the dogs in Mirella’s arms.

“Here, I bought these for you. This is Misha, Masha, Winnie, and Wonkie. Aren’t they wonderful? They’re small enough to travel with us, and they provide nonstop, in-transit entertainment.”

“Oh, God. Papa’s gone on an animal spree again,” Zhara said and laughed.

For Zhara and Alice there were pure white, long-haired Persian cats with emerald-green eyes that were produced from the sitting room off the hall by one of the housemen, even before coats and hats were removed.

They were at last allowed a glass of sherry by an open, woodburning fire in the sitting room. Here Josh arrived in
time to receive a Kerry blue terrier and join a tour of the new New York City family residence, along with everyone else and all the pets.

Mirella felt twinges of loving toward Adam while touring the house, brought on by the fact that he had used nearly every suggestion she had contributed, when together they pored over the plans of the new house, which had already been under way for some time before she ever met Adam Corey.

All were surprised to find several sets of glass doors on the top floor, leading onto a roof garden that Adam declared out of bounds to the clan, announcing it was private territory for Mirella and himself. They might visit by invitation only. Otherwise the run of the house was for all.

Sending Moses and Muhsine down for coats for everyone on their return, they all tramped out over the vast roof where Adam had built studios for Mirella and himself. The two studios were divided by gardens and sunken terraces, and sheltered from the wind by trees and shrubs, ornamental pools, and an animal shelter, Adam’s biggest surprise of all. By the subtle but adequate lighting they traipsed across the roof gardens under a light snow flurry to visit Adam’s favorite pets, Tao and Chi, his panda bears.

The family dined on oysters on the half-shell and a perfect chilled Chablis, followed by a rack of lamb served pink, with
petis pois
, roast potatoes, several bottles of Lafite Rothschild 1961, a first growth of fabulous style and perfume. There was a green salad, and Alice’s favorite dessert, banana cream pie.

The room was very still. A chink of dawn seeped in through the sliver of space made by the parting in the draperies. There was just enough light so one could see shapes in the dark, the objects in the room, and the two people cradled together in the huge bed.

Mirella lay wrapped in the arms of her husband. The smoothness of his skin, the warmth of his body against hers, and the steady, even breathing that came from his deep and restful sleep took the edge off her anxiety.

Mirella had been surprised when, after Adam had tucked Alice in for the night, he excused himself to her, saying he wanted to take Josh and Zhara home to the Dakota. He had
something very private to discuss with them. She had been fast asleep when he returned.

Their desire and need to confirm their feeling for each other in sexual bliss had been put aside, and although she understood it, she could not help wishing he had wakened her and made love to her. She watched him sleeping; he was so handsome and big and manly, with none of the delicate yet masculine beauty of Rashid. Different, that was the thing about the two men. They were so completely different it stopped her from making comparisons, and in turn stifled conflicts in her about these two men in her life.

When she woke for the second time that morning, Adam was gone. On his pillow was a note that said, “Good morning,” and nothing else. She felt let down, but not for long. When she rang for a breakfast tray, the maid first arrived with an enormous Revillon coatbox. Mirella scrambled through the tissue paper to find a sumptuous chinchilla coat. She rushed to the mirror in her dressing room and tried it on over her silk nightgown. A note in the pocket said, “I love you, and missed you. See you at teatime.”