by Wilbur Smith
‘We went right to the very brink,’ Peter agreed.
‘Peter, why didn’t you ask me outright if I was Caliph?’ she wanted to know.
‘The same reason you didn’t ask me outright if I was plotting to kill you.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘We were just caught up in the web that Caliph had spun for us. I have only one more question, Peter chéri. If I was Caliph, do you truly believe that I would have been so stupid as to give my telephone number at Rambouillet to the man who kidnapped Melissa-Jane, and instruct him to ring me for a friendly chat whenever he felt like it?’
Peter looked startled, ‘I thought—’ he began, then stopped. ‘– No, I didn’t think. I wasn’t thinking clearly at all. Of course, you wouldn’t have done that – and yet, even the cleverest criminals make the most elementary mistakes.’
‘Not those who have been trained at the Odessa school,’ she reminded him, and seemed immediately to regret the words, for she went on quickly. ‘So there is my side of the story, Peter. I may have left something out – if you can think of anything, then ask me, darling, and I’ll try to fill in any missing pieces.’
And so they started once again at the very beginning, and went over the ground minutely, searching for anything they might have overlooked at the first telling of it, this time exhaustively re-examining each fact from every angle, both of them applying their trained minds to the full without being able to come up with more than they already had.
‘One thing we must never let out of sight for a moment is the quality of the opposition.’ Peter summed it up as the sun began lowering itself towards the western horizon, its majestic progress flanked by cohorts of cumulo-nimbus cloud rising into towering anvil heads over the scattered islands, like silent nuclear explosions.
‘There are layers upon layers, reasons behind reasons, the kidnapping of Melissa-Jane was not merely to force me to assassinate Kingston Parker, but you as well – the proverbial two birds – with a third bird to follow. If I had succeeded I would have been hooked into Caliph for ever.’
‘Where do you and I go from here, Peter?’ she asked, tacitly transferring ultimate decision-making to him.
‘How about home, right now,’ he suggested. ‘Unless you fancy another night out here.’
Peter found that his possessions had been discreetly moved from the guest bungalow to the owner’s magnificent private quarters on the north tip of the island.
His toilet articles had been laid out in the mirrored master bathroom, which flanked that of the mistress. His clothing, all freshly cleaned and pressed, was in the master’s dressing-room where there was one hundred and fifty-five feet of louvred hanging space – Peter paced it out and calculated it would taker three hundred suits of clothing. There were specially designed swinging shelves for another three hundred shirts and racks for a hundred pairs of shoes although all were empty.
His light cotton suit looked as lonely as a single camel in the midst of the Sahara desert. His shoes had been burnished to a gloss that even his batman had never been able to achieve. Despite himself he searched the dressing-room swiftly for the signs of previous occupancy—and was ridiculously relieved to find none.
‘I could learn to rough it like this,’ he told his reflection in the mirror as he combed the damp, darkly curling locks off his forehead.
The sitting-room off the suite was on three levels, and had been decorated with cane furniture and luxuriant tropical plants growing in ancient Greek wine amphoras or in rockeries that were incorporated into the flowing design of the room. The creepers and huge glossy leaves of the plants toned in artistically with jungle-patterned curtaining and the dense growth of exotic plants beyond the tall picture windows – yet the room was cool and inviting, although the sound of air-conditioning was covered by the twinkle of a waterfall down the cunningly contrived rock face that comprised one curved wall of the room. Tropical fish floated gracefully in the clear pools into which the waterfall spilled, and the perfume of growing flowers pervaded the room, and their blooms glowed in the subdued lighting.
One of the little golden Polynesian girls brought a tray of four tall frosted glasses for Peter to choose from. They were all filled with fruit and he could smell the sweet warm odour of rum mingled with the fruit. He guessed they would be almost lethal and asked for a whisky, then relented with the girl’s eyes flooded with disappointment.
‘I make them myself,’ she wailed.
‘In that case—’ He sipped while she waited anxiously.
‘Parfait!’ He exclaimed, and she giggled with gratification, and went off wriggling her bottom under the brief pareo like a happy puppy.
Magda came then in a chiffon dress so gossamer-light that it floated about her like a fine green sea mist, through which her limbs gleamed as the light caught them.
He felt the catch in his breathing as she came towards him, and he wondered if he would ever accustom himself to the impact of her beauty.
She took the glass from his hand and tasted it.
‘Good,’ she said, and handed it back. But when the girl brought the tray she refused with a smile.
They moved about the room, Magda on his arm as she pointed out the rarer plants and fishes.
‘I built this wing after Aaron’s death,’ she told him, and he realized that she wanted him to know that it contained no memories of another man. It amused him that she should find that important—and then he remembered his own furtive search of the dressing-room for signs of a lover before him, and the amusement turned inward.
One wall of the private dining-room was a single sheet of armoured glass, beyond which the living jewels of coral fish drifted in subtly-lit sea caverns and the fronds of magnificent sea plants waved in gentle unseen currents.
Magda ordered the seating changed so they could be side by side in the low lovers’ seat facing the aquarium.
‘I do not like you to be far away any more,’ she explained, and she picked special titbits from the serving dishes for his plate.
‘This is a speciality of Les Neuf Poissons. You will eat it nowhere else in the world.’ She selected small deep-sea crustaceans from a steaming creole sauce of spices and coconut cream and at the end of the meal she peeled chilled grapes from Australia with those delicate fingers, using the long shell-pink nails with the precision of a skilled surgeon to remove the pips and then placing them between his lips with thumb and forefinger.
‘You spoil me,’ he smiled.
‘I never had a doll when I was a little girl,’ she explained, smiling.
A circular stone staircase led to the beach fifty feet below the dining-room and they left their shoes on the bottom step and walked bare-footed on the smooth, damp sand, compacted as hard as cement by the receding tide. The moon was a few days past full, and its reflection drew a pathway of yellow light to the horizon.
‘Caliph must be made to believe that he has succeeded,’ Peter said abruptly, and she shivered against him.
‘I wish we could forget Caliph for one night.’
‘We cannot afford to forget him for a moment.’
‘No, you are right. How do we make him believe that?’
‘You have to die—’ He felt her stiffen.
– or at least appear to do so. It has to look as though I killed you.’
‘Tell me,’ she invited quietly.
‘You told me that you have special arrangements for when you want to disappear.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘How would you disappear from here if you had to do so?’
She thought for only a moment. ‘Pierre would fly me to Bora-Bora. I have friends there. Good friends. I would take the island airline to Tahiti-Faaa on another passport – and then a scheduled airline in the same name to California or New Zealand.’
‘You have other papers?’ he demanded.
‘Yes, of course.’ She sounded so surprised by the question, that he expected her to ask‘– doesn’t everybody?’
‘Fine,’ he said.
‘And we’ll arrange a suspicious accident here. A scuba diving accident, shark attack in deep water, no corpse.’
‘What is the point of all this, Peter?’
‘If you are dead – Caliph is not going to make another attempt to have you killed.’
‘Good!’ she agreed.
‘So you stay officially dead until we flush Caliph out,’ Peter told her, and it sounded like an order but she did not demur as he went on. ‘And if I carry out Caliph’s evident wishes by killing you, it’s going to make me a very valuable asset. I will have proved myself, and so he will cherish me It will give me another chance to get close to him. At least it will give me a chance to check out a few wild hunches.’
‘Don’t let’s make my death too convincing, my love. I am a great favourite of the police on Tahiti,’ she murmured. ‘I’d hate to have you end up under the guillotine at Tuarruru.’
Peter woke before her and raised himself on one elbow over her to study her face, delighting to find new planes and angles to her high broad cheekbones, gloating in the velvety texture of her skin, so fine that the pores were indefinable from farther than a few inches. Then he transferred his attention to the curve of her eyelashes that interlocked into a thick dark palisade seeming to seal her eyelids perpetually in sleep – yet they sprang open suddenly, the huge black pools of her pupils shrinking rapidly as she focused, and for the first time he realized that the irises were not pure green but were flecked and shot through with gold and violet.
The surprise of finding him over her changed slowly to pleasure, and she stretched her arms out over her head and arched her back, the way a lazy panther does when it rouses itself. The satin sheet slid down to her waist and she prolonged the stretch a little longer than was necessary, a deliberate display of her body.
‘Every other morning of my life that I woke without you there was wasted,’ she murmured huskily, and raised her arms still at full stretch to him, folding them gracefully around his neck, still holding her back arched so that the prominent dark-red nipples brushed lightly against the crisp dark mat of curls that covered his own chest.
‘Let’s pretend this will last for ever,’ she whispered, with her lips an inch from his, and her breath was rich as an overblown rose, heavy with the smell of vital woman and rising passion; then her lips spread softly, warmly against his and she sucked his tongue deeply into her mouth, with a low moan of wanting – and the hard slim body began to work against his, the hands breaking from his neck and hunting down his spine, long curved nails pricking and goading him just short of pain. His own arousal was so swift and so brutally hard that she moaned again, and the tension went out of her body, it seemed to soften and spread like a wax figure held too close to the flame, her eyelids trembling closed and her thighs falling apart.
‘So strong—’ she whispered, deep in her throat and he reared up over her, feeling supreme, invincible.
‘Peter, Peter,’ she cried. ‘Oh yes like that. Please like that.’ Both of them striving triumphantly for the moment of glory when each was able to lose self and become for a fleeting instant part of the godhead.
Long afterwards they lay side by side in the enormous bed, both of them stretched out flat upon their backs, not touching except for the fingers of one hand intertwined as their bodies had been.
‘I will go away—’ she whispered, ‘– because I have to, but not now. Not yet.’
He did not reply, the effort was beyond him, and her own voice was languorous with a surfeit of pleasure.
‘I will make a bargain with you. Give me three days more. Only three days, to be happy like this. For me it is the first time. I have never known this before, and it may be the last time—’
He tried to rouse himself to deny it, but she squeezed his fingers for silence and went on.
‘– It may be the last,’ she repeated. ‘And I want to have it all. Three days, in which we do not mention Caliph, in which we do not think of the blood and striving and suffering out there. If you give me that I will do everything that you want me to do. Is it a bargain, Peter? Tell me we can have that.’
‘Yes. We can have that.’
‘Then tell me you love me again, I do not think I can hear you say it too often.’
He said it often during those magic days, and she had spoken the truth, each time he told her she accepted with as much joy as the last time, and always each seemed to be within touching distance of the other.
Even when tearing side by side across the warm flat waters of the lagoon, leaning back with straight arms on the tow lines, skis hissing angrily and carving fiercely sparkling wings of water from the surface as they wove back and forth in a pas de deux across the streaming, creaming water, laughing together in the wind and the engine roar of the Chris-craft, Hapiti the Polynesian boatman on the flying bridge looking back with a great white grin of sympathy for their joy.
Finning gently through mysterious blue and dappled depths, the only sound the wheezing suck and blow of their scuba valves and the soft clicking and the eternal echoing susurration that is the pulse beat of the ocean, holding hands as they sank down to the long abandoned hull of the Japanese aircraft carrier, now overgrown with a waving forest of sea growth and populated by a teeming fascinating multitude of beautiful and bizarre creatures.
Flying silently down the sheer steel cliff of the canted flight deck, which seemed to reach down into the very oceanic depths, so that there was the eerie fear of suddenly being deprived of support and falling down to where the surface light blued out in nothingness.
Pausing to peer through their glass face-plates into the still gaping wounds rent into the steel by aerial bombs and high explosive, and then entering through those cruel caverns cautiously as children into a haunted house and emerging victoriously with carrier nets of trophies, coins and cutlery, brass and porcelain.
Strolling on the secluded beaches of the outer islands, still hand in hand, naked in the sunlight.
Fishing the seething tide-race through the main channel at full spring tide, and shouting with excitement as the big golden amberjack came boiling up in the wake, bellies flashing like mirrors, to hit the dancing feather lures, and send the Penn reels screeching a wild protest, and the fibreglass rods nodding and kicking.
Out in the humbling silences of the unrestricted ocean, when even the smudge of the islands disappeared beyond the wave crests for minutes at a time, with only the creak and whisper of the rigging, the trembling pregnancy of the main sail, and the rustle as the twin hulls of the big Hobie cat knifed the tops off the swells
Strolling the long curving beaches in the moonlight, searching for the heavenly bodies that so seldom show through the turbid skies of Europe – Orion the hunter and the Seven Sisters – exclaiming at the stranger constellations of this hemisphere governed by the great fixed cross in the southern heavens.
Each day beginning and ending in the special wonder and mystery of the circular bed, in loving that welded their bodies and their souls together each time more securely.
Then on the fourth day day Peter woke to find her gone, and for a moment experienced an appalling sensation of total loss.
When she came back to him he did not recognize her for a breath of time.
Then he realized that she had cut away the long dark tresses of her hair, cropped it down short so that it curled close against her skull, like the petals of a dark flower. It had the effect of making her seem even taller. Her neck like the stem of the flower, longer, and the curve of the throat accentuated so that it became delicate and swan-like.
She saw his expression, and explained in a matter-of-fact tone.
‘I thought some change was necessary, if I am to leave under a new identity. It will grow again, if you want it that way.’
She seemed to have changed completely herself, the languid amorous mood given way to the brisk business-like efficiency of before. While they ate a last breakfast of sweet yellow papaya and the juice of freshly squeezed limes she explained her intenti
ons, as she went swiftly through the buff envelope that her secretary had silently laid beside her plate.
There was a red Israeli diplomatic passport in the envelope.
‘I will be using the name Ruth Levy—’ and she picked up the thick booklet of airline tickets, ‘– and I have decided to go back to Jerusalem. I have a house there. It’s not in my name, and I do not think anybody else outside of Mossad is aware of it. It will be an ideal base, close to my control at Mossad. I will try to give you what support I can, try to get further information to assist you in the hunt—’
She passed him a typed sheet of notepaper.
‘– That is a telephone number at Mossad where you can get a message to me. Use the name Ruth Levy.’
He memorized the number while she went on talking, and then shredded the sheet of paper.
‘I have modified the arrangements. for my departure,’ she told him. ‘We will take the Chris-craft across to Bora-Bora. It’s only a hundred miles. I will radio ahead. My friends will meet me off the beach after dark.’
They crept in through a narrow passage in the coral with all the lights on the Chris·craft doused, Magda’s boatman using only what was left of the waning moon and his own intimate knowledge of the islands to take her in.
‘I wanted Hapiti to see me go ashore alive,’ she whispered quietly, leaning against Peter’s chest to draw comfort from their last minutes together. ‘I did not exaggerate the danger you might be in if the local people thought what we want Caliph to think. Hapiti will keep his mouth shut—’ she assured him,’ – and will back up your story of a shark attack, unless you order him to tell the truth.’
‘You think of everything.’
‘I have only just found you, monsieur,’ she chuckled. ‘I do not want to lose you yet. I have even decided to speak a word to the Chief of Police on Tahiti, when I pass through. He is an old friend. When you get back to Les Neuf Poissons, have my secretary radio Tahiti—’