He watched her carefully and could almost hear her mind clicking away. Then she clapped her hands together just once and said, “Anything?”
“Yes,” he said, unable to imagine what she might ask for.
“Guarantee me a credit line for three hundred and fifty million dollars to form an international trading company, the bulk share of whose profits will be invested in my country for the good of the people.”
“No,” he said, shocked and giving her a tremendous shock. Then he added, “But I will, however, give you two hundred million dollars as a wedding gift, deposited in the Swiss bank of your choice, and look forward to seeing what you can do with it.”
“Rashid!” exclaimed an overwhelmed Tana Dabra.
Rashid walked away from her to the desk and wrote something on a piece of paper. Then he walked around the desk back to Tana Dabra and handed the telephone to her.
“Place your calls. It’s a direct and open line to the international operator. You can call anywhere in the world without delay on this end. If you cannot complete a transaction, give them the number I’ve written on this piece of paper. That is where we will be. When your plans start coming together, then just tell me what you want me to do.”
She made three phone calls and left three messages as to
where she could be reached, and then she said to Rashid, “It’s important for me that you believe that, up until now, I had no real understanding of how wealthy and powerful a man you are. It had begun to sink in in Paris, but not really. In New York it was really — but with reservations. You see, I keep falling in love with you, the gigolo you, the erotic, libertine you, and now the super-rich you, and all the other yous you are. I’m marrying all of them, and for no other reason other than the thrill of a life with you, the excitement of sharing what we can with each other.”
“You needn’t have said any of that to me. Remember, we don’t complain and we don’t explain. I think that’s a good rule to live by for two fast-lane lovers like us who want to remain their own masters in a tight and loving togetherness.”
“And the very intelligent you,” she said, and then added, “Now, are you going to feed me? I’m famished.”
Rashid walked over to a chair and picked up a full-length, white fox cape. He slipped it over her shoulders and said, “Feed you? I am about to feed you as never before. Come on, we’ll have to hurry. I have something to show you at exactly midnight, a few minutes from now.”
Not many people really did know the extent of Rashid’s power in Turkey and especially in Istanbul. He was very secretive about it, for personal and political reasons. It was some of that power that allowed him to give Tana Dabra her first view of Istanbul as few other women had seen it.
The night was bright with stars, and the crescent moon that had shown for him and Mirella the night before did not fail him this night either. From the house they went by car to a waiting speedboat and crossed from the shore to Rashid’s ocean-going cruiser which lay at anchor at the mouth of the Bosporus, with the Sea of Marmara on one side and the Golden Horn on the other.
From there they had a sight that for centuries had dazzled the world. They stood on the prow of the ship in the chilly night air, their arms around each other, and looked across the water at the hills and shore of Istanbul while riding the waves between Europe and Asia Minor. A twinkle of lights was spattered like many still-glowing
fallen stars, a mirror image of the night sky above, only more so. And then, as if by magic, every light in Istanbul was extinguished. As if blown out by one gigantic breath from some invisible god in the heavens or some serpent surging up from the depths of the sea.
Twentieth-century Istanbul vanished. Two minutes later, Ottoman Istanbul appeared as every building and monument of that period or before sprang to life with light. Nothing else shone in the blackness of the night, just the Palace of Topkapi and the domes and minarets of Islam and Byzantium, lit from within and without. An entire modern city was banished to darkness for the pleasure of one man and his love. Rashid had the power to command as a latter-day sultan of Turkey, with the same flair, decadence, and selfishness that others before him had possessed, a streamlined grandeur reminiscent of what they had wallowed in and which had finally crushed them. His self-indulgences overwhelmed Tana Dabra, but before the night was over she understood that Rashid without them would have been no Rashid at all.
The yacht sped forward to the triangle of land between the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara where Topkapi Sarayi waited for them, mysterious and inviting. Once again a speedboat carried them from the yacht to the shore. A dozen small boys awaited them, and Rashid put flame to each of their torches. They lit a path from the water’s edge up through the trees of the palace and kiosks above by rotating their positions as they climbed. One boy ran in front of them, illuminating the stones under their feet.
In the marble courtyard a pair of black horses, decorated in gold, silver, and diamonds, and a splendid carriage was waiting. Tana Dabra saw only the outside of the palace, as she was immediately handed into the carriage, followed by Rashid. The gates of Topkapi Sarayi were opened. The boys ran in front of the carriage with their torches through the narrow, twisting streets of the old city all the way to the Covered Bazaar. All around were people with candles and gaslights, chattering in the streets about what might have caused the blackout.
They alighted from the carriage and were surrounded by several of Rashid’s bodyguards. They walked swiftly through the darkened bazaar and all its stalls and shops and teahouses. Tana Dabra was enthralled, but no more so than the people of the streets who had seen the carriage and a dusky woman, more like a black queen, robed in white fur. And others would later gossip of a black goddess draped in soft white animal skins from her neck to the ground, surrounded by men as she walked swiftly, seemingly glided, through the bazaar to vanish suddenly behind a secret door in the center of the old Bedesten, the five-century-old domed hall at the very center of the Covered Bazaar.
Rashid lifted a gauzy white silk curtain and said, “This is the House of Oda-Lala. And now I will feed my hungry lady.”
Before partaking of sensual delights, Rashid and Tana Dabra dined with Humayun, who was, if anything, yet more seductive and beautiful than she had been in Dominica. Barefoot and with her golden-red hair worn long and loose, she appeared naked except for a narrow chain, whose links were inlaid with diamonds, draped loosely around her waist, and huge diamonds in her ears. Yet she wore a transparent silk coat of a silver color with no more weight to it than a spider’s web. Open all the way down the front, it seemed to float around her like a veil of sensual smoke. Her every movement with her hands, her exquisite slender fingertips with brilliant red polish on the nails, seduced, spoke with utter sensuousness. Every nuance of her body, the way she sat, disposed her legs or arranged her thighs, exposed a fleshy crevice, a crack, a slit or the lips beyond, was a masterful posture that tantalized.
Nothing was measured, yet everything was right; nothing was planned, but the spontaneity amounted to perfection. They dined on Turkish cuisine as varied as it was delicious. They drank French wines blessed by the gods. They saw among the clientele of Oda-Lala’s exotic sexual sights that fed their own fires burning within. Tana Dabra abandoned herself to the House of Oda-Lala as if she had always belonged. As Humayun and the House of Oda-Lala
were part of Rashid’s life, so they became part of hers. And through her in this Rashid felt he had augmented his life.
They remained there for two days, and sexual self-indulgence took on a new meaning for Tana Dabra.
A bond can be sealed between two people without words or explanations. Wordless and unexplained, a bond fused Tana Dabra and Humayun. Paradoxically, Tana Dabra felt it form as she watched Humayun sexually seduce Rashid away from her. The excitement and mystery, the ethereal quality of what was passing between Rashid and Humayun, piqued her senses, kept her riveted, and enveloped her. When she saw Rashid assume command and take Humayun with such abandoned, imaginative expertise, Tana Dabra lay down next to Humayun so that she might partake, that he might take them both alternately in the same way.
Rashid, on the other hand, thought he had first seen the bonding between them in Dominica, not here in Istanbul. So it came as no surprise to him when Tana Dabra told him she thought she had met her first friend in Istanbul. Only with Humayun did they share their secret wedding plans. Neither bride nor groom doubted Humayun’s reaction to the news. They were both aware of her love for Rashid, and that really she wanted only one thing in life, to remain his sexual slave. With Tana Dabra as Rashid’s wife, Humayun knew her position was safe, that her relationship with Rashid would remain as stable as ever. They were all three happy.
Just as they were about to take their leave of Oda-Lala’s and Humayun, Rashid placed his arm around Humayun and said, “I want to give you a present, anything you like. Name it and it’s yours.”
Humayun was suffused with a glow. Rashid’s offer couldn’t come at a more perfect time for her. His generosity would solve a dilemma that had been causing her extreme anxiety.
“Are you sure, anything, Rashid? There is something that I would like,” she answered in her most enchanting and coquettish manner.
“It’s yours, you have my word. Now what is it?”
“A holiday. I would like to take a holiday all by myself. Well, with my maid. For four months. Just the time you and Tana Dabra plan to be away. I will make sure to be here waiting for you on your return. A holiday, just here in Istanbul. And maybe going to stay in one or two of my village houses. I will always leave word where I can be reached. I would like that so much.”
Rashid didn’t think her request particularly odd, although she had never asked him for such a gift before. During their years together they had often been separated for months at a time. But she had always been on call, or he had lent her to someone, a man besotted with her, a man like Christos, or to several friends of his on a cruise to keep them erotically amused. Once even to the Princess Eirene to accompany her as an erotic playmate while the princess was the guest of an Arab ruler and in residence at his palace.
“Then you shall have it. Draw whatever money you require from my secretary. Use her to make your travel plans. I will just insist that you take not only your maid but your bodyguard.”
The three kissed goodbye. Then, as an afterthought, Rashid turned around to have a last look at his magnificent sexual slave. He surprised them both with his final inquiry, “And Moses? That is under control?”
“Yes,” she answered, “under control.”
Walking through the Grand Bazaar, dressed in street clothes that had been sent from Rashid’s residence on the hills of Perama on the other side of the Galata Bridge, Tana Dabra asked, “Who’s Moses?”
“Moses? Well, he’s all sorts of things. But he’s also a problem that I hope has been solved for Humayun.”
And now Rashid felt as if it were he who had been kidnapped. Rashid and Tana Dabra traveled with two Turkish bodyguards, thirty pieces of luggage, and Serge Orloffsky, the pilot who was about to land them on a flat strip of Sudanese desert floor on the shores of the Red Sea, just inside Sudanese territory. Before he set the plane down, they flew five miles along the coastline into Ethiopian
airspace toward Massawa, where it was too low for radar to pick them up and close enough to note the absence of border patrols.
In place of them, half a mile apart, were ten or twenty men. Among them Tana Dabra recognized some of her loyal helpers in what she was trying to accomplish for her country. Others, devoted highlanders, had come down from the mountains to see her wedded in her homeland.
An intensity in Tana Dabra as she smiled and waved from the cabin windows was a new feature Rashid noted in the woman he was about to marry. He was not unhappy with this aspect of her, but he told Tana Dabra that the brave adventure sort of stuff was more up Adam’s alley than his own. She laughed joyously, kissed him, and assured him she would protect him. Not that she expected any problems. Her friends had arranged for their safety for the short time they would be there. She and Rashid would be wed and gone before the regime even heard they had arrived.
The plane banked sharply out over the Red Sea, still ducking the radar, and landed on the strip of Sudanese desert they had chosen. The beauty of the desert sand drifting down into the sapphire blue of the Red Sea, empty and silent under a burning white sun, was not lost on Rashid. They stepped out from the plane and the heat smacked them breathless before their feet touched the hot sand.
“Look, there they are.” Tana Dabra pointed to an Arab dhow under full sail, the one they had seen from the air going toward their landing place. On board were friends who had come to help and to attend the wedding.
It wasn’t going to be in one of the rock churches in Lalibela, as she had wanted. There were too many people, too many tourists, and an excess of soldiery for them to handle. But she was to be married a mile down the coast in Ethiopia. On the sands, with the waters of the Red Sea lapping the shore. Some time in the next few hours, as soon as she could ready herself. A brace of bishops was reportedly en route, one from Gondar where he was on a pilgrimage, the other from Addis Ababa. Three priests and
sundry deacons of the Coptic church had already arrived in the area from Imrahanna Kristos, the eight-hundred-year-old church, a remote shrine built in the back of a cave under a mountain on the western slops of Abuna Joseph.
Tana Dabra boarded the dhow with her entourage of fifteen men: Amharas and Tigreans, tall, slender, and handsome with their proud black Semitic features and long, dark, curled and shiny hair, dressed in their best for the occasion. The less-educated, more pagan and primitive of them, who considered her a living goddess, dropped to their knees and kissed the hem of her dress. Four of them who had gone to Western universities dressed not as natives but in suits of white cotton poplin and seersucker. Though incongruous, they were no less respectful; they too bowed their heads and kissed her hand.