Whirling over Long Island Sound Rashid produced a
breakfast basket. He never ceased to amaze her with the lengths he went to to surprise, please, and enchant. Once again he seduced her, only this time it was with hot black coffee and doughnuts, glazed, chocolate-dipped, jellied, and just plain, to satisfy another of her passions. He watched her dunking and eating them, then licking her fingers, and he knew he had come to the end of his tether waiting for her to set the date of their marriage. A plan was quickly taking shape in his mind.
The moment she set foot on the ground of Rashid’s Southampton compound she had a good feeling about the place. Everything about it appealed to her. It was for Tana Dabra a Hollywood version of what a multimillionaire’s Long Island house should look like.
After a full tour of the premises and introductions to the staff, they went together to the garage. “Can you drive?” he asked.
“Of course I can drive. I don’t have a license, but I can drive. Don’t look so frightened. If you can drive in the highlands of my country, you can drive anywhere. Get in,” she ordered.
She slipped behind the wheel of one of the beach buggies. “Just tell me the way,” she insisted. They drove down a small road that followed the perimeter of the compound. At the far end, near one of the pavilions, was a dirt road that led to the dunes. Tana Dabra zigzagged down over the sand to the beach.
She stopped, and they watched the waves breaking on the shoreline, dissolving and pulling back hard out to sea again. There were many whitecaps and a chill in the air which the morning sun had not dispelled yet. They had that feeling one can get by the ocean that although the day is clear rain is on its way and the night will be a wet one. There was the smell of rain at the beach.
Rashid hopped out. “All right, my lady, let’s see what you can do. And try not to get stuck in the sand.”
She laughed, and the sound of her laughter seemed to ride on the wind. She shifted gears and drove along the beach, the tires skimming the water’s edge. She went into full gear and placed her foot hard on the gas pedal. The car
shot forward, and the wind unwrapped the turban scarf from her head and carelessly wound it around her neck. Her black hair danced in the air and the soft chinchilla of her jacket was flattened by the force of the wind swirling through the open beach buggy.
There wasn’t a soul on the beach. It was rough, wild, and glorious. This was the only way Tana Dabra liked to drive: in open, lonely places at full speed. She never sat behind a wheel any other time. She was a good distance down the beach from where she had left Rashid standing, so she shifted down and turned around in a flash, raising a great spray of sand, and then shot ahead.
She drove up and down the beach several times, then rode over the sand dunes back toward Rashid and the compound. She liked to charge up one sand dune, spin off it and crash down onto the beach with a bump, then change gears and drive up another and do the same thing. Rashid walked up to the sandy path and sat on top of a dune watching her. He waved to her with thumbs up. When she got nearer to him, she drove up along the rim of a dune, riding the length of it as far as the dirt road that led back to the house. She laughed and pulled the car up next to him.
“Hello, do you want to have a go with the buggy, or me?”
“Move over, show-off. No wonder you don’t have a license.”
They burst into the kitchen, happy but chilled from their time on the beach. The aroma of fresh, exquisite food — newly cut herbs, roasting meats, and baking bread — filled the kitchen.
“I am going to cook lunch for us,” Rashid announced. “Not Jean or Li, they’re busy getting up a feast I have ordered for our dinner, but me. This evening we will dine on steamed clams served in their natural broth, soft shell crabs sautéed in black butter and lemon, hot turtle consomme. Lobster boiled in ocean water and seaweed, shelled and served hot on a bed of wild rice; roasted ears of corn just dripping with butter; and a lovely celery salad. For dessert, fresh raspberry sorbet and homemade, wafer-thin,
dark chocolate mints. Real New England fare, something else new in your life. I have selected wines you have particularly enjoyed — a muscadet with the clams, Grand Cru Chablis 1975 with the soft shell crabs, and for the lobster a Pouilly Fumé 1976.
“With all that for an early dinner, I thought I would offer you something light and elegant for lunch, to impress you. To show you yet another side of Rashid Lala Mustapha.”
“You can cook? I
am
impressed. I would never have guessed it.”
“Well, just you wait and see.”
“Would it burst your bubble if I said I think I would rather take a nap and have you surprise me with lunch?”
Yes was his unexpected answer. And pulling up a kitchen chair for her, he sat her down and handed her a stack of back issues of
Gourmet
magazines to thumb through. “Please don’t rain on my parade.”
She grabbed his arm as he was about to turn away from her, and she said, “I never want to do that. I just didn’t realize that cooking was so important to you.”
“It’s not the cooking that’s so important to me, it’s having you near me to admire my expertise. I’m a show-off, like you driving the beach buggie,” he answered with another of his wry smiles.
“Touché” was her reply.
Then with a proud twinkle in his eye he told her what the repast would be. Artichoke hearts with an especially light vinaigrette, individual cheese soufflés, and a crisp green salad with a lemon and walnut oil dressing. For dessert were to be slices of ginger preserve and pineapple, and chocolate-covered Brazil nuts. To finish, Turkish coffee.
He rolled up his sleeves, and Li, the Chinese cook who was in the kitchen, brought over a white chef’s apron and helped Rashid put it over his head, tying it behind him. One of the chef’s assistants, a local girl named Mary Miles, brought the ingredients out and placed them on the huge old white marble-top table in the center of the kitchen. Rashid began cracking eggs and separating them. The kitchen was buzzing. Rashid had a quality in him of
creating energy wherever he worked or played. And he occupied himself for the next hour in the kitchen making lunch for Tana Dabra.
A heavy baroque French silver tray, with a beautiful white linen and lace cloth on it, holding two short-stemmed Waterford goblets filled with a sparkling red wine, was brought to Rashid. He offered Tana Dabra a glass. He raised his own and said, “To you, my empress, welcome home.” She raised her glass and drank, then turned her back to him to stare out the window, wondering how she could achieve her escape.
The feeling of being trapped by Rashid was not new to her. It had been surfacing on and off since Paris, but it had always been dispelled because being with Rashid and in love had overridden all other feelings. Tana Dabra had time to think over her anxieties about marrying Rashid while she watched him prepare their lunch. She was most certainly in love and happy with Rashid. The idea of marriage with him seemed right and inevitable to her. Yet she stubbornly would not set a date. Was it a trapped feeling, or was it fear of making a commitment to share her life with another human being? She would have to work that out. And soon, because Rashid was showing signs of annoyance with her about it. Tana Dabra resolved not to push Rashid too far. She sensed danger in that.
They had their lunch in the all-glass building with its sliding roof, off among the trees on the other side of the compound. The pool was Olympic size, with hard white marble stairs all around it which seemed to dissolve as they descended under the water. It was surrounded by a tropical jungle of the most exotic trees: date, fan, and kentia palms almost twenty feet high; papyrus in blossom, yuccas, mimosa all in flower, flame trees. There were bushes of flowering hibiscus and a myriad of bougainvillea colors everywhere, vines of stephanotis and orchids copious in size and variety. Even a vast patch of arum lilies. Under the sliding roof a fine, almost invisible, silk net was stretched. It gently restrained the tropical birds and parrots that lived in the pool house from flying away. Here freedom was confined.
Lunch proved to be another seduction. Afterward they swam and talked away the afternoon, filling each other with visions of all they wanted to see and do in the world together. They dressed and walked along the beach once more and watched the helicopter that was to fly them back to New York that evening return across the ocean to land again on the beach.
Back in the living room of the house, awaiting dinner, they drank champagne while lolling among cushions in front of an open fire. From an imperial jade box, Rashid slid out a small, flat slab of jade and placed it on the floor next to him. From a drawer in the box he took a small jade pick. It was flat on both sides and had one edge that was sharp. On the end of the pick he scooped up some cocaine, and with the blade of jade he prepared half a dozen lines for himself and Tana Dabra. Lifting the small jade tray and a jade straw, he offered it to Tana Dabra. She took a deep sniff and gat a hit almost at once. The two sniffed all the rest of the coke before they sat down to dinner.
It was with infinite joy that Rashid watched Tana Dabra all through the delectable meal. Everything approached perfection. She ate and drank with gusto, and afterward she admitted to being extremely high, happy, and replete not only with food but with love.
They returned to the living room, and as they stood together in front of the stone fireplace wall, Rashid served her the hot and sweet Turkish coffee himself. He saw to it that she drank it all down in one swallow, insisting that it would sober her up. And then in one adept movement he caught the tiny cup and saucer as it fell from her hands. “When next you wake, you will be in Istanbul, my lovely,” he whispered in her ear as he bore her in his arms across the room and through the front door to the helicopter waiting on the grass in the center of the compound.
I
t was not unusual for Adam and his son Joshua to have a casual business meeting in the Peramabahçe Palace. But it was unusual for Joshua to bring an associate with him. The Peramabahçe Palace was home to the Corey clan. Not being in the clan signaled “intruder,” no matter how welcome the guest was made.
Mirella looked down from the first-floor balcony into the three-story, white marble great hall. The three men sat at a round marble table under a giant acacia tree. Her curiosity was aroused when servants brought three telephones and placed one before each of the men.
She walked along the gallery which encircled the room and started down the long staircase. Looking through the huge window walls which faced the garden and the Bosporus beyond, she hoped to see the clan arrive from their own house, the
yali
, some distance up the river, where they lived. Instead she caught sight of a Russian cruiser passing an enormous American cruise ship. Gigantic, especially the American ship, they blotted, for several minutes, the other river traffic from her view: the working caïques, the ferryboats, the speedboats and yachts, the merchant ships on the way to Galata and the Golden Horn to unload their supplies.
The tinkling sound of water, like soothing music from the antique Arab fountain in the middle of the hall, and the palm and date trees of great age and size, distracted Mirella from thinking winter would soon be upon them. They would once again be on the move to New York for the Christmas holidays. But the hall’s other flora — mimosa, azaleas, magnolias, and orange and cherry trees without a blossom — told the time of year. She could not ignore it.
It was an unusually warm day and the sun highlighted
the garden between the great hall and the river’s edge with contrasting patches of brightness and shadow. The garden was still beautiful with its beds of flowers, still, at this time in November, one of the finest sights on the Bosporus.
In the triple-domed, seventeenth-century pavilion in the garden sat the Princess Eirene, flanked by her two eunuchs, playing a game of cards with Marlo Channing and Rashid. Little Alice was running around the pavilion playing house with several of her favorite dolls. Servants carried things to and from the pavilion and garden in preparation for tea.
Mirella looked guiltily up the stairs to her study from where she had come. She thought of the momentous maneuvers that were being set in motion there. And Brindley had it all in hand. She had made the decisions, signed the documents, and at this very moment the writs were being issued. Within hours, every piece of skulduggery Rashid had visited upon her estates would be challenged in the Turkish, Greek, English, and American courts. She would tell him, not now in front of the others, but tonight in the love pavilion his great-grandfather had built for her great-grandmother and which Rashid had restored for Mirella.
His surprise arrival that morning in Istanbul could not have been more timely. The writs: She had worried how she would tell Rashid about them over the telephone. Now that problem was solved. Adam was leaving after tea for an archaeological expedition. That too was timely. Since the baby had been born she had seen less of Rashid than ever before. Both of them had expressed dissatisfaction with that.
The first time she had seen him was a few days after arriving from the States at the Peramabahçe Palace with the baby. He had flown in to Istanbul for only a few hours just to see her and the infant. It had been the child’s name day. They were having only the clan, the Princess Eirene, Brindley and Deena, and Rashid present for the ceremony. It was to be conducted by a longtime friend of Adam, an
orthodox monk from Mount Athos, who was on his way to Bethlehem for a conference with the Patriarch.
It had been only a few weeks since Mirella and Rashid had been together. Yet both had, in very different ways, been through tremendous emotional changes. She had given birth to a child. He had found love and the woman he wanted for his wife. Mirella at that stage had known nothing about Tana Dabra and Rashid. Her concern had been with her own feelings. Might she react differently to him? Not want him erotically anymore? Might he not want her? Those had been her anxieties until he had entered the sitting room and they had come face to face.
It had been magic. Nothing — no one, distance, or time — could dispel what they felt for each other. Mirella’s heart had pounded so hard upon seeing him that she had feared someone in the room would hear it. She had wanted him. She had been in an agony of passion until he had walked up to her and taken her hands in his, kissing them and then each cheek and then her lips. Sweetly and tenderly, to cover his own wild desires for her. She had calmed down the moment they made physical contact. Their mutual chemistry had created and maintained composure. No one in the room saw them as other than they always appeared: the closest of friends, happy to see each other, thrilled to be in each other’s company.
Adam had been in the room, too, with Deena and Moses. All the others were downstairs milling around in the great hall, or en route from the
yali
. Rashid had shaken Adam’s hand, slapped him on the back, and, after greeting the others, insisted he see the baby at once. The nurse and nanny were sent for and the child produced.
Rashid had fallen in love with her at once. He had felt an immediate bond of love with her. He kissed and caressed the baby and played with her fingers and looked at her toes. The intense feeling he had toward her could have been embarrassing, had not Rashid kept saying to Adam how proud he was to be the baby’s godfather, how grateful he was for the honor, how happy he was for them both.
When at last he was finished admiring her and the little girl was taken away, Rashid produced a gift for Mirella in
honor of the birth of her first child. A pair of earrings of perfect, dazzingly beautiful, icy pink pearls, the size of a child’s marble, set in a circle of diamonds. The luster of the pearls was a marvel of natural beauty. Mirella placed them on her ears at once. For Adam he had six boxes of the finest vintage Havana cigars to “accompany his ruminations on fatherhood.”
The baby had been named and blessed next to the fountain Mirella was looking at now. But that day the room had been filled with fresh white flowers — lilies and tulips, large branches of lilacs, orchids, poppies, hundreds of white roses — whose scent had hung upon the air. In the fountain had floated white gardenias, dozens of them.
As godfather, Rashid would hold her at the christening, which was to come a few weeks later. But on her name day it was Joshua, the infant’s half-brother, number two godfather, who held the baby. Behind him stood Mirella, dressed in a heavy white silk wraparound blouse that crossed over in a low V between her full breasts and was tied at the side on her waist. Its long and voluptuous billowing pleated sleeves closed tight on her wrists just above her diamond cuff bracelets. Her long, black silk, crepe skirt clung sensuously to her now nearly trim figure.
At her neck were the three diamond-link necklaces, with the seal of her great-grandmother carved into the huge single jewel hanging from each. The famous Oujie necklace that had once belonged to Rashid’s great-grandfather’s two brothers. They had been stripped of them when the two men fell from grace for plotting against the sultan’s great love, the Kadin Roxelana Oujie, the Jewess, the most powerful woman at court during the last opulent years of the Ottoman Empire. She was Mirella’s great-grandmother, her benefactress, the ancestor who had lately materialized in the form of a legacy. The seal of her influence was on Mirella’s life as surely as her seal now hung threefold upon Mirella’s neck.
She wore no other jewels, not even her wedding band. And that should have told Rashid something. It should have been an indication to him of how serious Mirella was
about this name day, of why she had refused to tell anyone but Adam her choice of the name for her baby.
But Rashid was Rashid. When he saw them he took no warning. He could only think that soon, one day soon, just as he had taken back so much of the Oujie legacy, those too would be his. That, much as he loved Mirella, she would be stripped of them as once his family had been. He would replace them, compensate her with even finer necklaces, but those she could not have. They would pass back to the Lala Mustapha family. And, for the first time since he had left her in bed that morning, he thought of Tana Dabra, and what a happy day it would be for him when he draped each of them over her head and around her neck.
When the old monk had asked Joshua the baby’s name, Joshua had turned to Mirella. She hesitated for a few seconds while she slipped her arms through those of Rashid and Adam who were standing on either side of her. Then she announced very clearly to Joshua and the clan standing behind them, “We name the baby Kadin Roxelana Oujie Wingfield Corey, in honor of my great-grandmother. And with her name goes a vow to restore to the Oujie legacy all that it once was, when my great-grandmother was in power, my gift to our first daughter”
Joshua was quick to understand the significance of the baby’s name and Mirella’s vow. He was so proud of his stepmother. The fight against Rashid’s treachery was on. He loved Mirella more than ever for going after what was hers, and the style with which she had fired the first shot. He had repeated the name at once to the monk. Then the brief ceremony was over.
Rashid could not remember any time, ever, that he had been more surprised by Mirella. He had waited and waited for some reaction after he had successfully, with the help of Christos and the business syndicate, masterminded his vast property takeover of the Oujie legacy. When not only she but Adam too had seemingly chosen to ignore what he had done, Rashid could only assume that Mirella might have not liked it but did not want to lose him over it. He surmised that perhaps she was taking her losses in silence and like a lady. That probably Adam was furious with him
for pulling off the coup, and with Mirella for allowing him to get away with it.
Mirella, at the moment of the naming, had waited for some reaction from Rashid. His body to tense. A look of anger in his eye. Even for him to walk out. There had been nothing. Not one indication that he was angry, or even aware that it had been a declaration of war, a new vendetta in the age-old saga of two Turkish dynasties.
But fury had gripped Rashid, impassive as he had seemed. Mirella was being hurtful. She was devious. Ever since she had received the legacy she had vacillated: proud one minute to be involved with something so momentous, overwhelmed the next, and anxious simply to liquidate, to cast off such responsibility. Whereas with himself, the situation was clear-cut. It was strictly a passionate hatred and vendetta of the Lala Mustaphas against Roxelana Oujie. Yet she had given her beautiful baby those dreadful names, Kadin — how could she have taken the gross liberty of changing a title into a given name? — Roxelana Oujie. She knew how he despised them and the woman who had borne them. The only thing that made it easier for him to accept what she had done was that he had really had no idea that she could be such a vindictive bitch. And he rather liked that. He had found something new in Mirella to play with.
As the monk had intoned his blessings, Rashid had asked himself, why she had done it? And the only motive he had been able to come up with was some kind of revenge for his latest coup. With that in mind, and disappointed that she had not given the infant at least one of his names, as he had expected, he exerted every bit of his willpower to conceal his anger.
She had seen him alone for only a few minutes that afternoon. During the party Mirella quietly retreated to the nursery to feed the baby. Rashid bided his time and then found a moment to slip away unnoticed. He entered the nursery very quietly. Mirella was sitting in a rocking chair, her arms cradling Kadin. One of her breasts was fully exposed as Kadin suckled voraciously from it.
Mirella smiled at Rashid. He turned around and twisted
the key in the door lock. Then he went to Mirella, down on his knees, and watched the baby take Mirella’s milk. She was the most beautiful seductive infant he had ever seen and he loved her. He felt he would always love her. No matter how many children he might himself father, he would never love any one of them more than this one. Mother and child brought a tear to his eye. Rashid slipped his hand under Mirella’s blouse. Without disturbing Kadin, he exposed the other breast and cupped it in his hands. He saw Mirella react to his caresses, sensed the change in her breathing. He rolled the enlarged nipple between his fingers and watched the rich milk ooze from it. He lowered his lips to it, took the breast as fully as he could in his mouth, and sucked.
It was a moment of near sexual excitement for both. When he released the nipple, milk kept spurting and ran over Mirella’s breast. Rashid took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and wiped her breast. He kept dabbing the nipple in the hope of stanching the flow of milk, then he placed the handkerchief over it and then Mirella’s hand to keep it in place. He had said no word to her until after he kissed her passionately on the lips. Overcome with desire for her, all he could whisper was, “I will always want you, and have you, and it would be good for you to remember that it is your love for me that has broken down my resistance to commitment and an enduring love. I love our baby, yours, Adam’s, and mine. You have done so well for all of us. I have to go now. I’ll call you in the morning as usual.”
The next time she saw him, he had again flown in for just a short visit for the christening. A small but magnificent affair he arranged by telephone from various parts of the world. And he had arrived with a christening gown fit for a princess.
The Princess Eirene had offered the material for the dress, an antique piece of dark ivory silk-satin, still perfect although it dated from the early eighteenth century. Its fifty-two exquisite lace flowers were antique as well. Each one of them had been hand-stitched onto the dress. Likewise a hundred and fifty-eight small but perfect, icy pink
pearls. The hem was an inch deep of rose-cut diamonds. The baby’s cap matched the long flowing dress.