by Wilbur Smith
‘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 purr in the bowl of the heads and he, relaxed. When she returned to the bunk, she had stripped off the terry towelling 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, chéri?’
‘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 Chris-craft’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.
At last she came to sit in his lap, and made a show of taking his pulse.
‘The patient is much improved,’ she announced; ‘is now probably strong enough for Phase Three of the cure.’
‘Which is?’ he asked.
‘Peter chéri, even if you are English, you are not that dense.’ And she wriggled her bottom in his lap.
They made love in the warm sunlight, on one of the foam mattresses, with the trade wind teasing their bodies like unseen fingers
It began in banter and with low gurgles of laughter, little gasps of rediscovery, and murmurs of welcome and encouragement – then suddenly it changed, it became charged with almost unbearable intensity, a storm of emotion that sought to sweep all the ugliness and doubt. They were caught up in the raging torrent that carried them helplessly beyond mere physical response into an unknown dimension from which there seemed no way back, a total affirmation of their bodies and their minds that made all else seem inconsequential.
‘I love you,’ she cried at the very end, as though to deny all else that she had been forced to do. ‘I have loved only you.’ It was a cry tom from the very depths of her soul.
It took a long time for them to return from the far place to which they had been driven, to become two separate people again, but when they did somehow they both sensed that they would never again be completely separated; there had been a deeper more significant union than just that of their two bodies, and the knowledge sobered them and yet, at the same time, gave them both new strength and a deep elation that neither had to voice – it was there, and they both simply knew it.
They slid the big inflatable Avon S 650 dinghy over the stern, and went ashore, pulling the rubber craft above the high-water level and mooring it to one of the slanting palm boles.
Then they wandered inland, picking their way hand in hand between the seabird nests that had been crudely scraped in the earth. Half a dozen different species of birds were breeding together in one sprawling colony that covered most of the twenty-acre island. Their eggs varied from cool pale blue as big as that of a goose’s, to others the size of a pullet’s and speckled and spotted in lovely free-form designs. The chicks were either grotesquely ugly with bare parboiled bodies or were cute as Walt Disney animations. The entire island was pervaded by an endless susurration of thousands of wings and the uproar of squawking, screeching, feuding and mating birds.
Magda knew the zoological names of each species, its range and its habits, and its chances of surv
ival or extinction in the changing eco-systems of the oceans.
Peter listened to her tolerantly, sensing that behind this chatter and studied gaiety she was steeling herself to answer the accusations that he had levelled at her.
At the far end of the island was a single massive takamaka tree, with dense green foliage spreading widely over the fluffy white sand. By now the sun was fiercely bright and the heat and humidity smothered them like a woollen blanket dipped in hot water.
They sought the shade of the takamaka gratefully, and sat close together on the sand staring out across the unruffled waters of the lagoon to the silhouette of the main island, five miles away. At this range and angle there was no sign of the buildings nor of the jetty, and Peter had an illusion of the primeval paradise with the two of them the first man and woman on a fresh and innocent earth.
Magda’s next words dispelled that illusion entirely.
‘Who ordered you to kill me, Peter? How was the command given? I must know that before I tell you about myself.’
‘Nobody,’ he answered.
‘Nobody? There was no message like the one you received ordering you to kill Parker?’
‘No.’
‘Parker himself or Colin Noble? They did not order you to do it – or suggest it?’
‘Parker expressly ordered me not to do it. You were not to be touched—until you could be taken in jeopardy.’
‘It was your own decision?’ she insisted.
‘It was my duty.’
‘To avenge your daughter?’
He hesitated, would have qualified it, then nodded with total self-honesty. ‘Yes, that was the most part of it, Melissa-Jane, but I saw it also as my duty to destroy anything evil enough to envisage the taking of 070, the abduction of Aaron Altmann and the mutilation of my daughter.’
‘Caliph knows about us. Understands us better than we understand ourselves. I am not a coward, Peter, but now I am truly afraid.’
‘Fear is the tool of his trade,’ Peter agreed, and she moved slightly, inviting physical contact. He placed one arm about her bare brown shoulders and she leaned lightly against him
‘All that you told me last night was the truth, only the inferences and conclusions were false. Papa’s death, the lonely years with strangers as foster-parents – of that period my clearest memories are of lying awake at night and trying to muffle the sound of my weeping with a false blanket. The return to Poland, yes, that was right, and the Odessa school – all of that. I will tell you about Odessa one day, if you truly want to hear it – ?’ ‘I don’t think I do,’ he said.
‘Perhaps you are wise; do you want to hear about the return to Paris?’
‘Only what is necessary.’
‘All right, Peter. There were men. That was what I had been selected and trained for. Yes, there were men—’ She broke off, and reached up to take his face between her hands, turning it so she could look into his eyes. ‘Does that make a difference between us, Peter?’
‘I love you,’ he replied firmly.
She stared into his eyes for a long time looking for evidence of deceit, and then when she found none, ‘Yes. It is so. You really mean that.’
She sighed with relief and laid her head against his shoulder, speaking quietly with just that intriguing touch of accent and the occasional unusual turn of phrase.
‘I did not like the men, either, Peter. I think that was why I chose Aaron Altmann. One man, yes I could still respect myself—’ She shrugged lightly. ‘I chose Aaron, and Moscow agreed. It was, as you said, delicate work. First I had to win his respect. He had never respected a woman before. I proved to him I was as good as any man, at any task he wished to set me. After I had his respect, all else followed—’ She paused and chuckled softly. ‘– Life plays naughty tricks. I found firstly that I liked him, then I grew to respect him also. He was a great ugly bull of a man, but the power … A huge raw power, like some cosmic force, became the centre of my existence.’ She lifted her head to touch Peter’s cheek with her lips in reassurance. ‘No. Peter, I never came to love him. I never loved before you. But I stood in vast awe of him, like a member of a primitive tribe worships the lightning and the thunder. It was like that. He dominated my existence – more than a father, more than a teacher, as much as a god – but less, very much less than a lover. He was crude and strong. He did not make love, he could only rut and tup like the bull he was.’
She broke off and looked seriously at him. ‘Do you understand that, Peter? Perhaps I explained it badly?’
‘No,’ he assured her. ‘You explained it very well.’
‘Physically he did not move me, his smell and the hairiness. He had hair on his shoulders and like a pelt down his back. His belly was bulging and hard as iron—’ She shivered briefly. ‘– But I had been trained to be able to ignore that. To switch off something in the front of my brain. Yet in all other ways he fascinated me. He goaded me to think forbidden thoughts, to open vaults of my mind that my training had securely locked. All right, he taught me about power and its trappings. You accused me of that, Peter, and I admit it. The flavour of power and money was to my taste. I like it. I like it very much indeed. Aaron introduced me to that. He showed me how to appreciate fine and beautiful things, for he was only physically a bull and he had a wonderful appreciation of the refinements of life – he made me come completely alive. Then he laughed at me. God, I can still hear the bellow of his laughter, and see that great hairy belly shaking with it.’
She paused to remember it, almost reverently, and then she chuckled her own husky little laugh.
‘“My fine little communist lady,”’ he mocked me. ‘Yes, Peter, it was I who was deceived, he had known from the beginning who I was. He also knew about the school at Odessa. He had accepted me as a challenge, certainly he loved me – or his version of love, but he took me knowingly and corrupted my pure ideological convictions. Only then did I learn that all the information which I had been able to pass to Moscow had been carefully screened by Aaron. He doubled me, as I had been sent to double him. He was Mossad, but of course you know that. He was a Zionist, you know that also. And he made me realize that I was a Jewess, and what it meant to be that. He showed me every fatal flaw in the doctrine of Universal Communism, he convinced me of democracy and the Western Capitalist system and then he recruited me to Mossad—’
She stopped again, and shook her head vehemently.
‘– To believe that I could have wished to destroy such a one. That I could have ordered his abduction and mutilation – Towards the end, when he was getting weak, when the pain was very bad, that was the closest I ever came to loving him, the way a mother loves a child. He became pathetically dependent upon me; he used to say the only thing that could lull the pain was my touch. I used to sit for hours rubbing that hairy belly – feeling that awful thing growing bigger inside him each day, like a cauliflower or a grotesque foetus. He would not let them cut it. He hated them, “butchers” he called them. “Butchers with their knives and rubber tubes –” ’
She broke off and Peter realized that her eyes were filled with tears. He hugged her a little more firmly and waited for her to recover.
‘It must have been about this time that Caliph made contact with Aaron. Thinking back I can remember the time when he became suddenly terribly agitated. It made little sense to me then, but he held long diatribes about right-wing tyranny being indistinguishable from tyranny of the left. He never mentioned the name Caliph, I do not think Caliph had yet used that name – and I do believe that Aaron would eventually have told me of the contact in detail, if he had lived. It was the way he was, even with me, he could be as wary and subtle as he could be overpowering. He would have told me of Caliph – but Caliph saw to it that he did not.’
She pulled away from Peter’s arms so she could again see his face.
‘You must understand, chéri, that much of this I have earned only recently – in the last few weeks. Much of it I can only piece together like a jig puzzle –
pardon, a jig-saw puzzle.’ She corrected herself swiftly. ‘But this is what must have happened. Caliph contacted Aaron with a proposition. It was a very simple proposition. He was invited to become a partner of Caliph. Aaron was to make a substantial financial contribution to Caliph’s war-chest, and to place his privileged knowledge and lines of influence at Caliph’s disposal. In return he would have a hand in engineering Caliph’s brave new world It was a miscalculation on Caliph’s part, perhaps the only mistake he has made up to now. He had misjudged Aaron Altmann. Aaron turned him down flat – but much more dangerously Caliph had made the mistake of revealing his identity to Aaron. I expect that he had to do that in an effort to convince Aaron. You see, Aaron was not a man who would indulge in a game of codenames and hidden identities. That much Caliph had divined correctly So he had to confront Aaron face to face, and when he discovered that Aaron would not join in a campaign of murder and extortion—no matter how laudable the ultimate ends – Caliph had no choice. He took Aaron, killed him after torturing him hideously for information that could have been useful, mainly information about his Mossad connection I imagine. Then he persuaded me to pay the ransom. He won two major tricks with a single card. He silenced Aaron, and he gained the twenty-five million for his war-chest.’
‘How did you learn this? If only you had explained to me before—’ Peter heard the bitterness in his own voice.
‘I did not know it when we first met, chéri, please believe me. I will tell you how I learned it, but please be patient with me. Let me tell it as it happened.’
‘I am sorry,’ he said simply
‘The first time I heard the name “Caliph” was the day I delivered the ransom. I told you about that, didn’t I?’
‘Yes’
‘So we come now to your part. I heard of you for the first time with the Johannesburg hijacking of Flight 070 I thought that you might be the one to help me hunt down Caliph. I found out about you, Peter. I was even able to have a computer printout on you—’ She paused, and there was that mischievous flash in her eye again. ‘– I will admit to being very impressed with the formidable list of your ladies.’