by Wilbur Smith
The steering of the Chris-craft was locked into the automatic pilot and the vessel had run straight out through the channel into the open sea. It reinforced his knowledge that she had been ready for his attack. She had been acting that total concentration in steering the vessel, luring his into the attack while the Chris-craft was on automatic pilot and she was ready to throw that backward blow at him.
It did not make sense, not yet. All that he knew was that he had made some terrible miscalculation. He threw out the switch of the automatic steering, and shut down both throttles to the idle position before disengaging the main drive. The diesels burbled softly, and she rounded up gently into the wind and wallowed beam-on to the short steep blue seas of the open ocean.
Peter took one glance back over the stern. The islands were just a low dark smudge on the horizon, and then he was stumbling back to the ladder.
Magda had dragged herself into a half sitting position, but she recoiled swiftly as he came to her and for the first time he saw fear pass like cloud shadow across her eyes.
‘It’s all right,’ he told her, his own voice still ragged. Her fear offended him deeply. He did not want her ever to be afraid of him again.
He took her up in his arms, and her body was stiff with uncertainty, like that of a cat picked up against its will, but too sick to resist.
‘It’s all right,’ he repeated awkwardly, and carried her down into the saloon of the Chris-craft. His own body felt battered as though his very bones were bruised and cracked, but he handled her so tenderly that slowly the resistance went out of her and she melted against him.
He lowered her onto the leather padded bench, but when he tried to straighten up she slid one arm around his neck and restrained him, clinging to him.
‘I left the knife there,’ she whispered huskily. ‘It was a test.’
‘Let me get the medicine chest.’ He tried to pull away.
‘No.’ She shook her head and winced at the pain in her throat. ‘Don’t go away, Peter. Stay with me. I am so afraid. I was, going to kill you if you took the knife. I nearly did. Oh, Peter, what is happening to us, are we both going mad?’
She held him desperately and he sank to his knees on the deck and bowed over her.
‘Yes,’ he answered her, holding her to his chest. ‘Yes, we must be going mad. I don’t understand myself or any of it any more.’
‘Why did you have to take the knife, Peter? Please—you must tell me. Don’t lie, tell me the truth, I have to know why.’
‘Because of Melissa-Jane – because of what you had done to her—’
He felt her jerk in his arms as though he had struck her again She tried to speak but now her voice was only a croak of despair, and Peter went on to explain it to her.
‘When I discovered that you were Caliph, I had to kill you.’
She seemed to be gathering herself for some major effort, but then when she spoke it was still in that scratchy broken whisper.
‘Why did you stop yourself, Peter?’
‘Because—’ He knew the reason then. ‘– Because suddenly I knew that I loved you. Nothing else counted.’
She gasped and was silent again for nearly a minute.
‘Do you still think that I am Caliph?’ she asked at last.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more – except that I love you. That’s all that matters.’
‘What happened to us, Peter?’ She lamented softly ‘Oh God, what has happened to us?’
‘Are you Caliph, Magda?’
‘But Peter, you tried to kill me. That was the test with the knife. You are Caliph.’
Under Magda’s direction Peter took the Chris-craft in through a narrow passage in the coral reef that surrounded Île des Oiseaux, while the seabirds wheeled about them in a raucous cloud, filling the air with their wingbeats.
He anchored in five fathoms in the protected lee, and then called the main island on the VHF radio, speaking to the head boatman.
‘The Baronne has decided to sleep on board overnight,’ he explained. ‘Don’t worry about us.’
When he went down to the saloon again Magda had recovered sufficiently to be sitting up. She had pulled on one of the terry towelling track suits from the clothes locker, and she had wound a clean towel around her throat to protect it and to hide the fierce fresh bruise that was already staining her skin like the squeezed juice of an overripe plum.
Peter found the medicine box in a locker above the toilet bowl of the heads, and she protested when he brought two Temprapain capsules for the pain, and four tablets of Brufin for the swelling and bruising of her throat and body.
‘Take them,’ he commanded and held the glass while she did so
Then he carefully unwrapped the towel from her throat and lightly rubbed a creamy salve into the bruise with his fingertips
‘That feels better already,’ she whispered, but now she had lost her voice almost entirely
‘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 towelling 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 ho
w 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 touch her cheek. ‘Then they told me about you.’
‘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 élite.’
‘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 again, 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 selfmocking 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 trusted 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 th
e 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.