“I am, but I’m not really in the mood for a banana split. I’d much prefer a nice cold bottle of beer and some really salty chips, and I’d like to do it out in the garden. That’s if you don’t mind. And I think it’s time for you to tell me something that I can see is bothering you. You should know by now that anything you do or say is not something I will be uncomfortable with. So, what do you say?”
Trish laughed. “And what palace snitch told you something is bothering me?”
Malik laughed. “The snitches, as you call them, would be terribly upset if I didn’t listen to them when they feel they have news to report. Most times, I don’t even listen. I just pretend, to keep them all happy. It’s a way of life, Trish. Tell me what is troubling you. It isn’t the money you spent, is it?”
Husband and wife walked along, arm in arm, down the palace halls and out to one of the many gardens. Trish bit down on her lip. How much should she confide, or should she just blow it all off? If she did that, Malik, she knew, would drop it, but she felt the need to unload her worries. At least some of her worries. She struggled as to how to respond to his question.
“In part. In the whole of my life, Malik, I never spent more than fifty dollars at a time without hours and days of anguish. Should I? Shouldn’t I? That kind of thing. Then in a few hours I blew nineteen million dollars and didn’t bat an eye. I did that, I spent nineteen million dollars of your money, and you never once asked me what I did with it. That just blows my mind, plus the fact that you replenished the money. So, to answer your question, partly, yes, it bothers me, but I did not spend it on myself.
“Sit down and drink your beer. See? That’s what I mean. We were whispering, and here is the beer on the table even before we got here. Someday, I want to know how that really works. Someone around here must be clairvoyant.”
Trish waited until Malik was halfway through his beer and salty chips, which he wasn’t supposed to be drinking or eating, before she continued, “Do you want the long or the short version?” she quipped.
“We have all night, my dear, so let’s go with the long version.”
Trish started to talk then. She was like a runaway train as she recounted her and Emma’s life up until her last visit home to Princeton. Malik listened intently but said nothing as Trish purged herself. When she finally stopped to catch her breath, Malik asked a question.
“First of all, it is your money, not mine, and you can spend it any way you want. Why didn’t you step in sooner?”
“I tried. Emma is so proud. She thinks because she is the big sister, she has to do it all. And she was humiliated, ashamed, embarrassed. I understood all that. As for Jeff, that’s a whole other story. Until this last visit home, I had no clue that there was anything I could do other than give her money, which she simply would not accept. Networking, Malik, is where it’s at.”
“Explain that, Trish. I know what networking is, but how did you make it apply to your sister and her ex-husband?”
Trish rattled on again about the nameless, faceless person whom she’d paid five million dollars so he could buy beachfront property. She stopped in her monologue when Malik started to laugh and couldn’t stop. Thinking Malik thought she was gullible, she responded defensively.
“Aha, you think I bought a pig in a poke, eh? Well, you might need another beer for the rest of the story. But I will tell you this much up front. You will be surprised to learn that the five million I paid is already back in my account. What do you think about that, wise guy? And the whole thing went down as you were serving your walking papers on International Alliance Capital. You and your sheiks were, innocently, of course, providing the interference needed to bring it off without anyone being the wiser. So listen up now.”
Malik listened, his eyes getting wider by the second. He was so stunned, he was speechless. Finally, he found his tongue. “You didn’t make this up? That all really happened?”
“As God is my judge. They’re destitute. All four of them. All it would have cost was the money to buy a fortune’s worth of beachfront property, and even that was refunded.” This time, Trish laughed herself, but she was laughing more at the expression on her husband’s face than at the actual deed itself and its aftermath.
Gasping for breath, his beer forgotten, Malik managed to gasp out, “And you did this all yourself? I wouldn’t have known where to even begin to put something like it in motion.”
“Well, let’s be honest here. I had a lot of help. I just used your money to make it happen.”
“Again, my dear, it is your money, not mine. Let’s be clear on that. Why do I have the feeling that there’s more?”
Trish burst out laughing. “Because there is more. That’s why. Now listen up. This happened last night. Emma just called me a little while ago to tell me. Seems she was too wired to sleep, and she wanted me to know.”
Malik’s eyes twinkled. This was the most animated she’d seen her husband since her return. She told him then about Jeff’s visit, the way the women attacked him, then stripped him down and pushed him out into the snow. “Emma said it took Jeff over ten minutes to clear the snow off his windshield, in his birthday suit. When he was finished, mostly because she wanted no reminder of his visit, she threw his clothes out the door. He scooped them up, got into the car, and drove off.”
This time Malik rolled off his chair onto the grass and kept on rolling, shrieking with laughter. Inside the palace, hundreds of eyes watched these strange goings-on. Then more eyes appeared when Shaykhah joined the emir and started rolling in the grass, their laughter bouncing all over the place.
“What the hell are they doing out there?” Rashid hissed to his wife.
Soraya tried not to laugh. “Maybe we should try it and see what happens.” Rashid looked at his wife as though she had sprouted a second head. “I think in America this might be called a mating dance, even though they aren’t dancing, but rolling around. I think it’s the same thing. I’m game, Rashid, now that I’m fixed.”
The panic on Rashid’s face was palpable. “Well, that . . . that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
Soraya pressed on and started to shed her clothing. “Just remember how lonely and cold you were down in the bowels of the palace.” A shoe went flying. “And how angry I was.” The second shoe joined the first. “And how you gasped in delight when I allowed you to take me in your arms.” Her top sailed up, then down, to land on top of a fluted lampshade.
“I can’t. . . . You can’t. . . . This is . . . I am the acting emir now. Stop that right this instant!”
Soraya stepped out of her skirt, picked it up, and started to twirl it as she undulated her hips. Then the skirt sailed across the room. She stood in all her glory in the push-up bra from Victoria’s Secret that she’d purchased in Las Vegas. The leopard-skin thong was so skimpy, Rashid covered his eyes as Soraya danced around.
Out in the garden, Malik stopped long enough to glance down at a text that was coming through. He blinked, tried not to laugh, then blinked again. “C’mon. This is something we both need to see. It’s happening right now, outside my sister’s apartments.”
Trish had to run to keep up with Malik’s long-legged stride.
“Shhh, not a sound now. This is the perfect spot. It’s called spying, Trish.”
“Oh, my Goddd,” Trish hissed as Malik clapped a hand over her mouth. He covered his own mouth with his other hand.
“You need to stop this right now, Soraya.”
Soraya ignored her husband and his words. “Ooh, I wish I had some music. I could really do a number with music.” Soraya giggled as she moved one way, then the other. Rashid tried to catch her, but she nimbly danced out of his way. Which was her intention all along. “Wait till you see what I can really do with a pole! I took lessons in Las Vegas. Later, if you’re good, I might, I say I might, give you a lap dance.”
Malik looked at Trish, who shook her head violently.
The chase was on.
Rashid was all legs and arm
s as he did his best to capture his wife. Finally, when he did, Soraya looked up at him and said sweetly, “Sorry. Four more weeks to go before we can have sex. Did you forget that I just had a baby?”
Rashid sat down on the floor and dropped his head into his hands. Soraya gathered up her clothes and shoes and blew her husband a kiss.
Malik reached down for Trish’s hand. “Play along, okay? He’s such a stiff sometimes.”
“Ah, Rashid, is there a reason you’re sitting here on the floor? It doesn’t look very emirish to me. Is something wrong?”
“You know damn well what’s wrong. Go ahead. Torture me. See if I care. I suppose you watched it all.”
“Well, not all of it. Just the last part. Sometimes, as you well know, the palace snitches are a little slow on the uptake. Is there anything Trish or I can do for you before we return to our quarters?” Malik’s laughter and Trish’s giggles did not go unnoticed by Rashid.
“Just shoot me and put me out of my miser y,” was Rashid’s comeback.
Malik laughed again. “Look at it this way, my good, true, and loyal friend. You are the envy of every man in this palace.” He turned to Trish and said, “Come along, dear. We’ve invaded my dear friend’s privacy long enough.”
Trish leaned over and whispered in Rashid’s ear. “Be glad she cares enough for you to do such a thing. A love like that, my friend, is hard to find. Treasure it.”
Rashid raised his eyes to Trish. “No, she did not learn that in Las Vegas. She was teasing you. You really need to pay more attention to your wife, Rashid. You truly do.”
Rashid sat quietly for almost an hour as his thoughts took him everywhere and nowhere. Why was life so complicated? Why were women so much smarter than men? Why were men like him so stupid? When he received no answers to his agonizing thoughts, he got up and stomped his way into his apartments, where Soraya was waiting for him with a cup of tea and a plate of sweet cakes.
She smiled at him, stood on her toes, and kissed him gently. “Like the song says, Rashid, I will always love you.”
“And I you.” Rashid knew in his heart that no truer words had ever come out of his mouth.
Chapter 23
WINTER GAVE WAY TO SPRING; THEN SPRING SPRINTED INTO summer. It was autumn before Trish knew it. Her thoughts took her back to Princeton, where she’d grown up. This was football season, the leaves were changing, and there was wood smoke in the air from burning leaves as parents and youngsters decorated their porches with jack-o’-lanterns that some doting fathers had carved for the little ones. Stories of goblins and witches were the order of the day as children planned their costumes for the parties and parades that always took place on Halloween, a glorious, fun time when she and Emma were little kids. Then it would be Thanksgiving, and in the blink of an eye, the Christmas season would arrive. Surely, Emma would do it up royally for the first time in her new house. She’d always loved the holidays, just the way Trish had.
Emma’s last call had been so upbeat. She’d met a man, she said. The foreman of the construction company the girls had hired to renovate the building in which they had their new business. It had started out as a friendship and had developed into something more. Emma was what Trish called a happy camper these days. The last thing Emma had said before ending the call was, “Trish, I think I’m in love with Alex Thornton.”
If there was any blight on her sister’s newfound happiness, it was her daughter, Missy, who blamed her entirely for the misery her father was going through. To say they were estranged was to put it mildly. Emma, while sad at the estrangement, had said perhaps someday Missy would come around.
The Four Js were living together in a three-bedroom apartment in the same complex Emma and the girls had moved out of. Talk about payback. What Trish found incredibly amusing was that the Four Js, with not a day’s worth of litigation experience and not even that much criminal-law experience, were representing themselves, which just went to show, as the old adage had it, that their lawyers had fools for clients. Prison was guaranteed, but if there was some way to delay the inevitable, the Four Js knew how to play it. The trophy wives were long gone. Emma had said she couldn’t be sure, but she’d heard that the various kids were donating money to their fathers to ensure that they at least had enough to eat and pay the rent.
Clare was talking of marriage, Robin was fending off two suitors, and Alice was content to go out from time to time on a dinner date but wasn’t ready for a commitment anytime soon. All in all, everyone on her side of the aisle was happy, according to Emma.
Trish tucked her cell phone into the pocket of her slacks. She was tired. No, she was numb. She could barely think these days. And she thought of these days, as she put it, as the last days. Time was reduced to hours. She wished she could cry, but there were no tears left to cry. She’d been banished from the sickroom, as she called it, because Malik was being bathed.
Hours. Minutes. Seconds. How many? She yanked at the cell phone in her pocket, scrolled down till she found Zack’s cell phone number. She tried to calculate the time difference, but her mind refused to cooperate. She pressed in the digits and waited. Zack picked up on the fifth ring. She almost smiled when she heard, “It’s your nickel. Talk to me.”
“It’s Trish, Zack. Is this a good time to talk?”
“Anytime is a good time to talk to you, Trish. What’s up?”
Trish drew a deep breath. She could do this. She really could. She had to do this. “Malik is dying, Zack. We’re down to . . . hours right now. I wanted to call you and the guys sooner, but Malik made me promise not to because he said you would all drop everything and hustle on over here. He . . . he said he didn’t want you all to see him the way he is now. I tried to tell him it wouldn’t matter, but he was adamant. Please say something, Zack. Maybe I should just hang up.”
“No, no, don’t hang up.” The voice was so tortured, Trish bit down on her lip and tasted her own salty blood. “Is there anything I can do?”
“I wish there were, Zack. God, how I wish that. No, there is nothing. Well, you can pray for a miracle. That’s what I’ve been doing. Before you ask, I found out only when I got back here. I have to go now, Zack. You’ll tell the others?”
“Yes, of course. Will you call me when . . .”
“I will, Zack.” Trish broke the connection and stuffed the phone back in her pocket. It was the first and only time she’d disobeyed her husband’s wishes. She looked up to see Soraya standing over her.
“You called Zack?”
“Yes. Yes, I did. I had to do it.”
“It was the right thing to do. Come along. Malik wants to talk to you. He said they prettied him up for you,” Soraya said, her voice choked with emotion. “Rashid is almost catatonic. You and I have to hold things together, Trish.”
“Did I tell you my sister is in love?” Trish said inanely. “Her daughter still refuses to talk to her and blames her entirely for the mess her father is in.”
“That will change in time. Time heals all wounds. Do you believe that, Trish?” she asked fretfully.
“No.”
“Me either.”
“How are the children?”
“Fine. More or less. They sense something is awry. I guess Rashid and I give off vibes even the little ones can pick up on. Oh, Trish, I just want to go to sleep, wake up, and pretend this was all just a bad dream.”
“Me too,” Trish said softly. “Did the doctor say anything?”
“Not verbally. He didn’t have to. His eyes said it all for him. You need to hurry. The doctor said Malik is fretting because you aren’t there. He has something to tell you.”
Trish sprinted down the corridors and ended up winded as she came to the door of Malik’s sickroom. She took a moment to try to calm herself. She took a deep breath, smoothed down her hair, tried to relax her facial muscles so she could smile when she entered the room.
Malik’s voice was so weak, Trish had to lean over to hear his tortured whisper. She listened, her eyes poppi
ng wide. She looked across at Rashid, who just stared at her. He gave a slight nod to indicate he knew and agreed with what Malik was saying. She sensed there was no time to argue, just time to agree, which she did.
Trish squeezed Malik’s hand in both of hers, hoping she wasn’t breaking the now-fragile bones. Trish leaned over again.
“Tell me. I want to hear you say the words, Trish.”
Trish tried to swallow. Her tongue felt like it was three sizes too big for her mouth. Somewhere, somehow, she found the words. “I will do all you asked of me. I promise. I never broke a promise to you, Malik. Never.”
Rashid stepped closer and reached for Malik’s other hand and clasped it in his. Soraya stood at the foot of the bed, tears trailing down her cheeks. The doctor and the two nurses stood near the door, their eyes wet, their faces solemn.
Malik struggled to breathe. He needed to say something, wanted to say it, and he fought to get the words out. Only Trish could hear them.
And then he was gone.
The doctor raced over, his cheeks wet. He did what he had to do and pronounced Sheik Malik bin Al Mohammed dead.
Everyone in the room clamored to hear what the sheik’s last words were.
Trish smiled. “He . . . said . . . he said that he always loved a good conspiracy.”
And then everyone bustled. A gurney appeared like magic. Then everything moved at the speed of light, and before she knew it, Trish was in the back of a long white van, Rashid, Soraya, and the doctor alongside her. They all prayed over Malik’s still body. The van raced away from the palace and through the streets, which were somehow free of traffic. Fourteen minutes later, the driver swung into a parking lot that was bare of vehicles and backed up to what looked like a loading platform. The gurney was unloaded. The occupants of the van scrambled out and walked around to the entrance of the crematorium.
They were served tea, which no one drank. They sat quietly, no words passing among them for four long, unbearable hours. When the huge mahogany doors opened, they all stood. A man in Western dress approached with a wooden box, which was sealed. He handed it to Trish.
A Family Affair Page 22
