by Wilbur Smith
"I'll wait until you get a confirmed reservation,' he suggested.
"No, Mickey, you're a darling, but I won't have any trouble at this time of year; the holiday season is over. You go off to your interview, and I'll call you at the flat when Ramsey and I are on our way home." As she walked into the terminal she realized that she had been over-optimistic. Hordes of dejected and weary travellers blocked the aisles with their luggage. When she finally got to the head of the queue at the information-desk, she'was told that a wildcat strike by the French air-traffic controllers had delayed all flights by up to five hours, and that the Athens flight was fully booked. She would have to join the waiting list, even for a seat in first class.
She stood in another queue to use a public telephone and finally got through to Ramsey at the number he had given her in Athens. He sounded as disappointed as she felt.
"I was looking forward to your arrival. I have lauded you to the skies to the people I want you to meet here." 'I'm not going to give up,' she declared. 'Even if I have to sit here all day." It was a day of discomfort and misery and frustration. When the flight was finally called at five o'clock that evening, she stood at the check-in counter praying for a seat on the waiting-list. However, there were half a dozen other hopefuls ahead of her. In the end, the booking clerk shook her head regretfully.
"I'm so sorry, Miss. Courtney." The next flight to Athens was scheduled for ten the following morning, but there would certainly be delays and another waiting-list. Finally Isabella gave up, and went dejectedly to place another call to Athens. Ramsey was not available, so she left a message for him with someone on the other end who spoke atrocious English. She hoped that Ramsey would understand that she was aborting the journey.
There were no taxis available: hundreds of other passengers like her had abandoned hope and were trying to get home. She lugged her bag down the pavement and queued for a bus to take her into town. It was after eight when she reached it and at last found a taxi to take her back to Cadogan Square.
Her back ached from the baby, and she was close to tears of frustration when at last she let herself into the flat. There was the delicious aroma of cooking, and she realized how hungry she was. She dumped her bag in the lobby, kicked off her shoes and went through to the kitchen. It was obvious that Michael had made himself dinner. The used dishes on the table in the breakfast-nook were still warm, and there were generous leftovers in the warmer. Like her, Michael was an excellent cook. She helped herself to the breasts of chicken Kiev and a slice of the cheesecake that remained. She noticed that there were two used wineglasses and an empty bottle of Pater's Nuits St. Georges on the draining-board of the sink. The significance of this did not really occur to her. She was too weary and dejected and she wanted Michael to cheer her up.
She heard music coming from his bedroom suite upstairs, the sentimental strains of Mantovani, one of Michael's favourites. She climbed the stairs on stockinged feet, went down the passage and pushed open the door to Michael's room.
For a long moment, she did not comprehend what she was seeing; it was too distant from her wildest expectations or ima * * ~ gmmgs.
Then she thought that Michael was being attacked, and a scream rushed up her throat. She had to cover her mouth iowith both hands to contain it. At last understanding flooded over her.
Naked, Michael knelt on hands and knees in the centre of the double bed.
The satin eiderdown and bed-sheets had spilled over on to the floor, and the bed was in disarray. She knew his body so well, lithe and elegantly muscled, tanned by the African sun to the colour of ripe tobacco leaf except where his bathing-trunks had left his skin pale and vulnerable-looking.
Also naked, Nelson Litalongi knelt beside him. In contrast his torso shone with sweat like newly mined coal, so bright that it seemed to have been freshly oiled.
Michael's dearly beloved features were contorted with a deep and particular anguish. His mouth was twisted into a savage rictus that struck her to the depth of her being. For a moment, he reminded her of a stricken animal on the very point of a dreadful death.
Then his vision cleared and focused and he saw her. Before her eyes, his face seemed to dissolve and run like molten wax, and re-form in an expression of terror and deadly shame. With a violent twist of his body, he broke the grip of the man who held him and rolled away from him, reaching for a crumpled pillow to cover his own groin.
Isabella whirled and rushed from the room.
Despite her exhaustion, she slept fitfully and with disjointed and confused dreams, in which she saw Michael struggling naked and terrified in the grip of some fearsome dark monster and once she shouted out in her sleep so wildly that she woke herself.
Before dawn, she abandoned all further attempts at resting and went down to the kitchen. She saw immediately that the dishes and cutlery of the previous evening's meal had been washed and packed away. The empty wine-glasses and bottle had disappeared, and the kitchen was spotless.
She switched on the coffee-percolator and went to check the letter-box. It was too early for the newspaper to have been delivered, so she went back and poured a cup of coffee. She knew the caffeine was bad for the baby, but this morning she needed fortification.
She had taken her first sip when she smelt cigarette smoke and looked up quickly. Michael stood in the doorway with the inevitable cigarette between his lips, slanting his eyes against the spiral of smoke.
"I say, the coffee smells good.' He was dressed in a silk dressing-gown.
His eyes were underscored with leaden smudges, and there were shadows, sickly with guilt, in the blue of his eyes. Uncertainty and diffidence puckered at the comers of his mouth as he said: 'I thought you were in Athens - I'm sorry." They stared at each other across the kitchen for only a few seconds, but which seemed like an age. Then Isabella stood up and crossed to him. She reached up on tiptoe to embrace him, and kissed him full on the mouth.
Then she held him close and pressed her cheek against his cheek that was raspy with new beard.
"I love you, Mickey. You are the dearest, sweetest person in my life. I love you without reservation or qualification." He sighed deeply. 'Thank you, Bella. I should have known that you would be generous and understanding, but I was afraid. You'll never know how terrified I've been that you might reject me." 'No, Mickey. You had no reason to worry." 'I was going to tell you. I've been waiting for the right moment." 'You don't have to tell me, or anybody. It's your business alone." 'No, I wanted you to know. We've never had any secrets between us. I knew you would find out sooner or later. I wanted - oh God, I would have given anything for you not to have found out the way you did. It must have been a terrible shock for you." She closed her eyes tightly and pressed her face harder to his, so that he could not see her expression. She tried to shut the image of what she had witnessed from her mind. However, Michael's face in that contorted rapture of log anguish still floated before her like a reel from a horror movie'.
"It doesn't matter, Mickey. It makes no difference to us or to anything." 'Yes, it does, Bella,' he contradicted her, and then gently held her away from him so that he could study her face. What he saw there made him sadder. With an arm around her shoulders he led her back to her seat at the table in the breakfast-nook, and sat beside her on the banquette.
"Strange,' he said. 'In a way it's a relief that you know. I still hate the way you found out, but at last there is one person in the world with whom I can be my true self; somebody for whom I no longer have to lie and dissemble." 'Why hide it, Mickey? This is nineteen sixty-nine. If that's the way you are, why not be open? Nobody cares any more." Michael fished a packet of Camels out of his dressinggown pocket and lit one. For a moment, he studied the burning tip, and then he said: 'That might be true for others, but not for me.' He shook his head. 'Not for me.
Like it or not, I'm a Courtney. There are Nana and Pater, Garry and Sean, the family, the name." She wanted to deny it, but then she saw that it was futile.
"Nana and Pater,
' Michael repeated. 'It would destroy them. Don't think that I haven't considered it - coming out of the closet.' He grinned wryly.
"God, what an awful expression." She squeezed his hand hard, beginning at last to have some faint understanding of her brother's predicament. She knew he was right. He could never let Nana and Pater know. For them it would be as bad - no, it would be worse than Tara. Tara had been a foreigner; Michael was Courtney blood.
They would not survive it. It would destroy part of them, and Michael was too kind, too unselfish, too loyal ever to let that happen. 'How long have you known - about your nature?' she asked quietly.
"Since prep school,' he answered frankly. 'Since those first pre-pubescent gropings and explorations in the log showers and the bog shop...'He broke off. 'I've tried to deny myself I've tried not to let it happen. Sometimes for months, a year even - but it's like a beast inside me, Bella, a ravaging beast over which I have no control." She smiled softly, indulgently. 'As Nanny would say, it's the hot Courtney blood, Mickey. We all have it; none of us can control it very well, not Pater and Garry and Sean - nor you and V 'You don't mind talking about it?' he asked diffidently. 'I've kept it bottled up so long." 'You talk as much as you like. I'm here to listen." 'I've lived with it for fifteen years now and I suppose I'll have to live with it for another fifty. The strange thing -something that would make it even worse as far as the family is concerned - is that I am attracted by coloured men. That would aggravate my guilt and degradation in the eyes of Nana and Pater, in the eyes of our courts at home. God, the scandal if I were discovered and charged under that Immorality Act of our enlightened government!' He shuddered, and stubbed out the cigarette, and immediately lit another from the crumpled pack.
"I don't know why black men attract me so powerfully. I've thought about it a great deal. I suppose I'm like Tara, in a way. Perhaps it's a kind of racial guilt, a subconscious desire to appease and mollify their anger.' He chuckled sardonically. 'We've been screwing them for so long. Why not give them a chance to get their own back?" 'Don't!' Isabella said softly. 'Don't degrade and belittle yourself by talking like that, Mickey. You are a fine and decent person. We are, none of us, responsible for our instincts." Isabella remembered Michael as the gentle shy boy, self-effacing but with boundless affection and concern for every being around him, yet always with that wistful air of sadness about him. She understood now the source of that sadness. She realized what spiritual agony he must have been suffering, that he still suffered. Her heart went out to him as it never had before. The last vestiges of her physical repugnance faded. She knew she would never again hate what she had seen taking place in the room upstairs. She would think only of the agonies which stiff lay in wait for this dear person, and her instincts became fiercer and more protective.
"My poor darling Mickey,' she whispered.
"Poor no longer,' he denied it. 'Not with your love and understanding."
Two days later, while Michael was out on one of his interviews and Isabella's desk was a jumble of open books and scattered papers, the telephone rang. She reached for it distractedly and for a moment she did not recognize the husky voice, or understand the words.
"Ramsey? Is that you? Is something wrong? Where are you? Athens?" 'I'm at the flat..
"Here in London?" 'Yes. Can you come quickly? I need you." Isabella pushed the Mini through the lunch-hour traffic, and when she reached his flat went up the stairs two at a time and arrived on the landing flushed and breathless. She fumbled with the key and at last threw the door open.
"Ramsey!' There was no reply, and she ran through to the bedroom. His valise was open on the bed, and a crumpled shirt lay in the middle of the floor.
It was stained with blood - patches of old dried blood, almost mulberry black in colour, and also newer brighter blood.
"Ramsey! Oh God! Ramsey! Can you hear me?" She ran to the bathroom door. It was locked from inside. She stood back and kicked the lock with her heel. It was one of the judo kicks he had taught her, and the flimsy lock snapped and the door flew open.
Ramsey lay on the tiled floor beside the toilet. He must have grabbed at the shelf above the washbasin as he fell, and her cosmetics had cascaded down into the basin and III across the floor. He was naked from the waist up, but his chest was heavily strapped with bandages. She could tell at a glance that the bandages had been tied by a professional hand. Like his abandoned shirt, the white bandages were soaked'with concentric rings of blood, some dark and old, some fresh and wet.
She dropped on to her knees beside him, and turned his head. His skin was pale, almost opalescent, with a sheen of nauseous sweat upon it. She lifted his head into her lap. Then she snatched up the face-cloth that hung over the edge of the bath. She could just reach the cold-water tap from where she sat. She soaked the cloth and wiped his face and neck.
His eyelids quivered and opened, and he looked up at her.
"Ramsey." His eyes focused. 'I keeled over,' he murmured.
"My darling, what happened to you? You've been badly hurt." 'Help me to the bed,' he said.
Kneeling beside him, she propped him into a sitting position. She was almost as strong as a man, with arms and torso trained by riding and tennis. However, she knew that even she could not lift him unaided.
"Can you stand, if I steady you?" He grunted and made the effort, but halfway to his feet he winced and clutched at the blood-stained bandages as the pain knifed him.
"Take it easy,' she whispered, and for a minute he remained doubled over, then he straightened slowly.
"All right.' He gritted his teeth, and she led him through, taking most of his weight on her shoulder, and lowered him on to the bed.
"Did you come all the way from Athens in this condition?' she asked incredulously.
He nodded the lie. He had summoned Isabella to Athens to act as a courier.
The need had risen urgently and unexpectedly. There had been no other agent available immediately, and it was time for her to be blooded in the field. She was ripe for it. By now she had been conditioned to accept his orders without question, and it was an easy first assignment that he planned for her. She was the perfect innocent, an attractive and pregnant female who would instantly evoke sympathy. She was unmarked, unknown to any of the world's intelligence organizations, including Mossad. In the jargon of the trade, she was a virgin. In addition, she carried a South African passport, and Israel had cordial, indeed intimate, relations with that country.
The plan was for her to catch the flight from Athens to Tel Aviv, make the pick-up and leave by the same route. It would have been a day's work. The plan had foundered when she had not been able to make the flight to Athens.
The pick-up was crucial. It involved details of the co-operation between Israeli and South African scientists in the development of tactical nuclear weapons systems. Even though there was a high probability that he was marked by Mossad, Ramsey had been forced to make the pick-up in person.
He had disguised his appearance as best he was able, and of course he had gone unarmed. It was madness to attempt to carry a weapon through an Israeli security check. He had used his Mexican passport in an assumed name. However, they must have got on to him at Ben Gurion Airport and tailed him to the pick-up.
He had spotted the tail and taken emergency evading procedure, but they had cornered him. He had broken the neck of one Mossad agent and in return had taken this hit. Even severely wounded, he had made it to the PLO safe house in Tel Aviv. Within twelve hours they had smuggled him out on their pipeline to Syria.
However, London was his safe ground. Despite the risks and his injuries, he had too much in play to remain in Damascus. The local KGB head of station had escorted him on to the Aeroflot flight to London. He had made the call to Isabella as he staggered into the flat. Then he had just managed to reach the bathroom before he collapsed.
"I must call a doctor,' she said.
"No doctor!' Despite his weakness, his voice took on that cold sibilant tone which she was so con
ditioned to obey.
"What must I do?' she asked.
"Get me the telephone,' he ordered, and she hurried to bring the instrument through from its jack in the sitting room.