by Wilbur Smith
"Let's have a look at your stomach." He pushed her down gently on her back on the long padded bench and unzipped the top of the to welling suit to the waist. The bruise where he had kicked her had spread from just below her small pale breasts to the tiny sculpted navel in the flat hard plane of her belly; again he massaged the soothing cream into her skin and she sighed and murmured with the comfort of it.
When he finished she was able to hobble, still painfully doubled over, to the heads. She locked herself in for fifteen minutes while Peter tended his own injuries, and when she emerged again she had bathed her face and combed out her hair.
He poured two crystal old-fashioned glasses half full of Jack Daniel's Bourbon and he handed one to her as she sank onto the padded bench beside him. "Drink it. For your throat," he ordered, and she drank and gasped at the sting of the liquor and set the glass aside.
"And you, Peter?" she husked with sudden concern. "Are you all right?" Just one thing," he said. "I'd hate you to get really mad at me." Then he smiled, and she started to chuckle but choked on the pain and ended up clinging to him.
"When can we talk?" he asked her gently. "We have to talk this out."
"Yes, I know, but not yet, Peter. Just hold me for a while." And he was surprised at the comfort that it afforded him.
The warm woman shape pressed to him seemed to ease the pain of body and of mind, and he stroked her hair as she nuzzled softly against his throat.
"You said you loved me, "she murmured at last, making it a question. Seeking reassurance, as lovers always must.
"Yes. I love you. I think I knew it all along, but when I learned that you were Caliph, I had to bury it deep. It was only there at the end I had to admit to myself."
"I'm glad," she said simply.
"Because you see I love you also. I thought I would never be able to love. I had despaired of it, Peter. Until you. And then they told me you would kill me. That you were Caliph. I thought then I would die having found you and then lost you. It was too cruel, Peter. I had to give you the chance to prove it wasn't true!"
"Don't talk," he commanded. "Just lie there and listen.
There is nothing wrong with my voice, so I will tell it first.
The way it was with me, and how I knew you were Caliph." And he told it to her, holding her to him and speaking softly, steadily. The only other sounds in the cabin were the slap of the wavelets against the hull and the subdued hum of the air-conditioning unit.
"You know everything up to the day Melissa-Jane was taken, all of it. I told you all of it, without reservation and without lying, not once-" He started, and then he went on to tell her in detail of the hunt for Melissa-Jane.
I think something must have snapped in my mind during those days.
I was ready to believe anything, to try anything to get her back. I would wake up in the night and go to the toilet and vomit with the thought of her hand in a glass jar." He told her how he had planned to kill Kingston Parker to meet Caliph's demands, exactly how he intended doing it, the detailed how and where, and she shuddered against him.
"The power to corrupt even the best," she whispered.
"Don't talk-" he admonished her, and went on to tell her of the tip-off that had led them at last to the Old Manse in Laragh.
"When I saw my daughter like that, I lost what little was left of my reason. When I held her and felt the fever and heard her scream with lingering terror, I would have killed-" He broke off and they were silent until she protested with a small gasp and he realized that his hand had closed on her upper arm and his fingers were biting into her flesh with the force of his memories.
"I'm sorry." He relaxed his grip, and lifted the hand to tuch her cheek. "Then they told me about you." to "Who?" she whispered "The Atlas Command."
"Parker?"
"Yes, and Colin Noble."
"What did they tell you?"
"They told me how your father brought you to Paris when you were a child. They told me that even then you were bright and pretty and special-" He began to recite it for her. " When your father was killed-" and she moved restlessly against his chest as he said it you went to live with foster parents, all of them members of the party, and in the end you were so special that they sent somebody to take you back to Poland. Somebody who posed as your uncle-"
"I believed he was-" She nodded. For ten years I believed it. He used to write to me-" She stopped herself with an effort, was silent a moment and then, "he was all I ever had after Papa."
"You were selected to go to Odessa," Peter went on, and felt her go very still in his arms, so he repeated it with the harshness unconcealed in his tone, to the special school in Odessa."
"You know about Odessa?" she whispered. "Or you think you know but nobody who has never been there could ever really know."
"I know they taught you to-" He paused, imagining again a beautiful young girl in a special room overlooking the Black Sea, learning to use her body to trap and beguile a man, any man. They taught you many things."
He could not make the accusation.
"Yes,"she murmured. "Many, many things."
"Like how to kill a man with your hands."
"I think that subconsciously I could not bring myself to kill you, Peter. God knows you should not have survived. I loved you, even though I hated you for betraying me, I could not really do it-" She sighed again, a broken gusty sound.
And when I thought that you were going to kill me it was almost a relief. I was ready to accept that, against living on without the love that I thought I had found."
"You talk too much." He stopped her.
"You'll damage your throat further." He touched her lips with his fingers, to silence her, and then went on. "And at Odessa you became one of the chosen, one of the elite."
"It was like entering the church, a beautiful mystic thing-" she whispered. "I cannot explain it. I would have done everything or anything for the State, for what I knew was right for "Mother Russia"."
"All of this is true?" He marvelled that she made no effort to deny it.
"All of it," she nodded painfully. "I will never lie to you Peter. I swear it."
"Then they sent you back to France to Paris?" he asked, and she nodded.
"You did your job, even better than they had expected you to do it. You were the best, the very best. No man could resist you." She did not answer, but she did not lower her eyes from his. It was not a defiance but merely a total acceptance of what he was saying.
"There were men. Rich and powerful men-" His voice was bitter now. He could not help himself. "Many, many men. Nobody knows how many, and from each of them you gathered harvest."
"Poor Peter," she whispered. "Have you tortured yourself with that?"
"It helped me to hate you, "he said simply.
"Yes, I understand that. There is nothing that I can give you for your comfort except this. I never loved a man until I met you." She was keeping her word. There were no more lies nor deceptions now. He was certain of it.
"Then they decided that you could be used to take over control of Aaron Altmann and his Empire-"
"No," she whispered, shaking her head.
"I decided on Aaron. He had been the only one man who I had not been able to-" Her voice pinched out and she took a sip of the bourbon and let it trickle slowly down her throat before she went on. "He fascinated me. I had never met a man like that before. So strong, such raw power."
"All right," Peter agreed. "You might even have grown tired of the other role by then-"
"It's hard work being a courtesan--"
She smiled for the first time since he had begun speaking, but it was a sad self mocking smile. "You went about it exactly the right way. First you made yourself indispensable to him. Already he was a sick man, beginning to need a crutch, somebody he could trust entirely.
"You gave him that-" She said nothing, but memories passed across her eyes, changing the green shadows like sunlight through a deep still pool.
And when he trust
ed you there was nothing you could not supply to your masters. Your value had increased a hundredfold." He went on talking quietly while outside the day died in a fury of crimsons and royal purples, slowly altering the light in the cabin and dimming it down so that her face was all that existed in the soft gloom. A pale intense expression, listening quietly to the accusations, to the recitation of betrayals and deceits. Only occasionally she made a little gesture Of denial, a shake of her head or the pressure of fingers on his arms. Sometimes she closed her eyes briefly as though she could not accept some particularly cruel memory, and once or twice an exclamation was wrung from her in that strained and tortured whisper.
"Oh God, Peter! It's true!" He told her how she had gradually developed the taste for the power she was able to wield as Aaron Altmann's wife, and how that flourished as Aaron's strength declined.
How she at last even opposed the Baron on some issues.
"Like that of supplying arms to the South African Government," Peter said, and she nodded and made one of her rare comments.
"Yes. We argued. That was one of the few times we argued." And she smiled softly, as though at a private memory that she could not share even with him.
He told her how the taste of power and the trappings of power gradually eroded her commitment to her earlier political ideals, how her masters slowly realized they were losing their hold over her and of the pressures they attempted to apply to force her back into the fold.
"But you were too powerful now to respond to the usual pressures.
You had even succeeded in penetrating Aaron's Mossad connections, and had that protection."
"This is incredible!" she whispered. "It's so close, so very close that it is the truth." He waited for her to elaborate, but instead she motioned him to continue.
"When they threatened to expose you to the Baron as a communist agent, you had no choice but to get rid of him and you did it in such a way that you not only got rid of the threat to your existence but you also achieved control of Altmann Industries, and to put the cherry on the top of the pie you got yourself twenty-five million in operating capital.
You arranged the abduction and killing of Aaron Altmann, you paid yourself the twenty-five million and personally supervised its transfer, probably to a numbered account in Switzerland-"
"Oh God, Peter!" she whispered, and in the dark of the cabin her eyes were fathomless and huge as the empty cavities of a skull.
"Is it true?" Peter asked for confirmation for the first time.
"It's too horrible. Go on please."
"It worked so well that it opened up a new world of possibilities for you. just about this time you truly became Caliph. The taking of Flight 070 was possibly not the first stroke after the kidnapping of Aaron Altmann there may have been others. Vienna and the OPEC ministers, the Red Brigade activities in Rome but 070 was the first time you used the name Caliph. It worked, except for the dereliction of duty by a subordinate officer."
He indicated himself. "That was all that stopped it and that was how I attracted your attention originally." Now it was almost totally dark in the cabin and Magda reached across and switched on the reading light beside them, adjusting the rheostat down to a soft golden glow. In its light she studied his face seriously as he went on.
By this time you were aware through your special sources, probably the Mossad connection and almost certainly through the French SID, that somebody was onto Caliph. That somebody turned out to be Kingston Parker and his Atlas organization, and I was the ideal person to firstly confirm that Parker was the hunter and secondly, to assassinate him. I had the special training and talents for the job, I could get close to him without arousing his suspicions, and I needed only to be sufficiently motivated-"
"No," she whispered, unable to take her eyes from his face.
"It holds together," he said. "All of it." And she had no reply.
"When I received Melissa-Jane's finger, I was ready for anything--"
"I think I am going to be sick."
"I'm sorry." He gave her the glass and she drank the shot of dark liquor it contained, gagging a little on it. Then she sat for a few moments with her eyes closed and her hand on her bruised throat.
"All right? "he asked at last.
"Yes. All right now. Go on."
"It worked perfectly except for the tip-off to the hideout in Ireland. But nobody could have foreseen that, not even Caliph."
"But there was no proof!" she protested. "It was all conjecture. No proof that I was Caliph."
"There was," he told her quietly. "O'Shaughnessy, the head of the gang that kidnapped Melissa-Jane, made two telephone calls. They were traced to Rambouillet 47-87-47." She stared at him wordlessly.
"He was reporting to his master to Caliph, you see." And he waited for her reply. There was none, so after a minute of silence he went on to tell her the arrangements he had made for her execution the sites he had chosen at Longchamp race course and in the Avenue
Victor Hugo, and she shuddered as though she had felt the brush of the black angels" wings across her skin.
"I would have been there," she admitted. "You chose the two best sites. Yves has arranged a private showing for me on the sixth of next month. I would have gone to it." Then you saved me the trouble. You invited me here.
I knew that it was an invitation to die, that you knew I had become aware, that I had learned you were Caliph. I saw it in your eyes during that meeting at Orly Airport, I saw it proven by the way you were suddenly avoiding me, the way you were giving me no opportunity to do the job I had to do."
"Go on."
"You had me searched when I landed at Tahiti-Faaa." She nodded.
"You had the grey wolves search my room again last night, and you set it up for today. I knew I had to strike first, and I did."
"Yes"
she murmured. "You did." And rubbed her throat again.
He went to recharge the glasses from the concealed liquor cabinet behind the bulkhead, and came back to sit beside her.
She shifted slightly, moving inside the circle of his arm, and he held her in silence. The telling of it had exhausted him, and his body ached relentlessly, but he was glad it was said, somehow it was like lancing a malignant abscess the release of poisons was a relief, and now the healing process could begin.
He could feel his own exhaustion echoed in the slim body that drooped against him, but he sensed that hers was deeper, she had taken too much already and when he lifted her in his arms again she made no protest, and he carried her like a sleeping child through to the master cabin and laid her on the bunk.
He found pillows and a blanket in the locker below. He slid into the bunk with her, under the single blanket, and she fitted neatly into the curve of his body, pressing gently against him, her back against his chest, her hard round buttocks against the front of his thighs, and her head pillowed into the crook of his arm, while with his other arm he cuddled her close and his hand naturally cupped one of her breasts.
They fell asleep like that, pressing closely, and when he rolled over she moved without waking, reversing their positions, moulding herself to his back and pressing her face into the nape of his neck, clasping him with one arm and with a leg thrown over his lower body as though to enfold him completely.
Once he woke and she was gone, and the strength of his alarm surprised him, a hundred new doubts and fears assailed him from the darkness, then he heard the liquid puff in the bowl of the heads and he relaxed. When she returned to the bunk, she had stripped off the terry to welling track suit and her naked body felt somehow very vulnerable and precious in his arms.
They woke together with sunlight pouring into the cabin through one porthole like stage lighting.
"My God it must be noon." She sat up, and tossed back the long mane of dark hair over her tanned bare shoulders but when Peter tried to rise, he froze and groaned aloud.
"Qu'a tu, cheri?"
"I must have got caught in a concrete mixer," he moaned.
His bruises had stiffened during the night, torn muscle and strained sinews protested his slightest movement.
"There is only one cure for both of us," she told him. "It's in three parts." And she helped him off the bunk as though he was an old man. He exaggerated the extent of his injuries a little to make her chuckle. The chuckle was a little hoarse, but her voice was stronger and clearer and she favoured her own bruises only a little as she led him up onto the deck.
Her powers of recuperation were those of a young and superbly fit thoroughbred animal.
They swam from the diving platform over the Chriscraft's stern.
"It's working," Peter admitted as the support of warm saltwater soothed his battered body. They swam side by side, both naked, slowly at first and then faster, changing the sedate breast-stroke for a hard overarm crawl, back as far as the reef, treading water there and gasping at the exertion.
"Better?" she panted with her hair floating around her like the tendrils of some beautiful water plant.
"Much better."
"Race you back." They reached the Chris-craft together and clambered up into the cockpit, cascading water and laughing and panting, but when he reached for her, she allowed only a fleeting caress before pulling away.
"First Phase Two of the cure." She worked in the galley with only a floral apron around her waist which covered the dark bruises of her belly.
"I never thought an apron could be provocative before."
"You are supposed to be doing the coffee," she admonished him and gave him a lewd little bump and grind with her bare backside.
Her omelettes were thick and golden and fluffy, and they ate them in the early sunlight on the upper deck. The trade wind was sheep-dogging a flock of fluffy silver cloud across the heavens, and in the gaps the sky was a peculiar brilliant blue.
They ate with huge appetites, for the bright new morning seemed to have changed the mood of doom that had overpowered them the previous night. Neither of them wanted to break this mood, and they chattered inconsequential nonsense, and exclaimed at the beauty of the day and threw bread crusts to the seagulls, like two children on a picnic.
