by Judith Gould
Three talented women as fiery as priceless diamonds, three lives burning with power, beauty, passion, talent and determination.
DAZZLE
The Complete Unabridged Trilogy
Book One
SENDA
She escaped the pogrom-haunted woods of a Jewish ghetto for the scented palaces of St. Petersburg to become the most famous actress in czarist Russia and mistress to a man as powerful as he was perverse, a meteoric star of the stage bewitching a generation doomed to die in the blood-splattered snows of revolutionary Russia...
Book Two
TAMARA
Her mother’s supreme sacrifice gave her passage to America where she became the golden-haired goddess of the silver screen. Her face was her fortune and Hollywood her Kingdom. But who was she? Where had she come from? Not even she knew. Only that one man had made her for the dream machine, and that he had the power to make or break her...
Book Three
DALIAH
The most gorgeous and gifted off all she was the film idol of millions in whom the multi-generational legend lives on. Caught up in a world of danger beyond theatrical make-believe, she found herself trapped in a Mid-East terrorist hell where she is forced to pay for the sins of her legendary forebears and forced to act her greatest role in the arms of a man she desperately wanted to hate but cannot stop loving...
Novels by Judith Gould
Sins
The Love-Makers Trilogy:
Texas Born
Love-Makers
Second Love
DAZZLE
The Trilogy*
Volume One—SENDA*
Volume Two—TAMARA*
Volume Three—DALIAH*
The Complete Unabridged Trilogy*
Never Too Rich*
Forever
Too Damn Rich
Till the End of Time
Rhapsody
Time to Say Good-Bye
A Moment in Time
The Best is Yet to Come
The Greek Villa
The Parisian Affair
Dreamboat*
The Secret Heiress*
Greek Winds of Fury
*Available as an e-book
www.judithgould.com
* * * * *
DAZZLE
THE COMPLETE UNABRIDGED TRILOGY
By Judith Gould
* * * * *
Published by Malden Bridge Press
Dazzle
The Complete Unabridged Trilogy
Copyright © 1989 by Judith Gould
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used ficticiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, livind or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover Photo Copyright © Nuno Silva
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All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It
Prologue
Payday
ALOFT . . .
Flying.
After all these years, she still couldn't get used to it. She would tense when the plane hurtled down the runway, and only begin to relax once it was airborne and the houses below looked no bigger than those on a Monopoly board. Only on night flights, such as this, El Al's nonstop flight 1002 from JFK to Ben-Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, could she settle down and sleep. She felt safe in the darkness. Then, once the plane began its descent and her ears started popping, the nervousness would gnaw at her again, and increase its bite until the aircraft touched ground.
She was a tall, slim woman who held herself with dignity and grace. Her world-famous face blended a disquieting combination of serene aristocrat and jungle amazon. Carelessly combed long straight black hair, so lustrous it shone blue-black, framed her features with a severe Madonna simplicity, but one sensed rather than saw the innate tawny tigress lurking just beneath the veneer of smooth creamy skin. She possessed that alluring quality of devil-may-care beauty that drove men to fantasize about her and women to emulate her. Even casually dressed, there was something disturbingly sensual about her. The cream silk duster from Luciano Soprani lent her the bohemian quality of a serious but highly successful painter, while the wide-sleeved black crepe-de-chine shirt beneath it, open at the throat, hinted at a smouldering sexual perverseness, and the pleated silk trousers, the colour of dried tobacco, contradicted it all with a kind of inborn Marlene Dietrich elan. Had it not been for the curious looks she'd been getting, those sidelong, knowing flickers of recognition, she would have been able to forget that she was one of the world's three greatest box-office attractions. She, Jane Fonda, and Meryl Streep. And usually in that order.
Even after nine years, I still don't feel like a movie star. She caught a man across the aisle staring at her, and quickly turned away. They think they know me. They think I'm some sort of goddess. They probably wouldn't believe it if I told them I get diarrhoea from drinking the water in Mexico.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' a disembodied voice announced over the intercom, in English, 'the captain has turned on the no-smoking sign. Please extinguish all smoking materials and see that your seats are in the upright position and that all tray tables are stowed. We hope you have had a pleasant flight, and given the opportunity to fly again, you will choose to fly El Al.' The message was repeated in Hebrew.
The chief steward appeared from the galley behind her, which separated the first-class section from economy. Solicitously he picked up her empty wineglass and the little square cocktail napkin, then pushed the tiny plastic beverage tray back into the armrest. 'We have arranged for you to disembark first, Miss Boralevi.' She had been born Daliah ben Yaacov twenty-nine years earlier, but upon embarking on her film career had adopted her mother's maiden name, Boralevi. 'One of our representatives will come to the plane to meet you. He'll see to it that you're sped through customs and baggage claim with as little fuss as possible.'
Daliah turned her emerald-eyed film-star gaze to meet his. 'Thank you,' she said throatily, her voice naturally smoky and peculiarly beguiling. 'I appreciate it.'
He lingered tentatively, hoping to strike up a conversation. 'Are you excited about visiting your homeland?'
She nodded, pushing a cascade of glossy hair from her face. She raised her face to his. 'Yes,' she said softly, 'I am a sabra. Born and bred.' She smiled.
'I know. Me too.' He returned her smile, automatically switching to Hebrew. Then the magic moment was gone: someone was signalling for him. 'Excuse me,' he told her and hurried down the aisle.
Daliah smiled slightly. Simply knowing that th
ey were both sabras had given them common ground, something precious to share and cherish. A fierce pride. All native-born Israelis felt it, no matter how many years had passed since they'd been home.
Suddenly a wave of depression and guilt swept through her.
I've been gone eleven years, she admonished herself sternly. That's how long it's been since I last set foot on my native soil, if I don't count the various embassies and consulates when it came time to renew my passport.
The jet engines changed pitch, and for a long, drawn-out moment the airliner seemed to stand still in midair. Daliah clutched the armrests with such force that her knuckles stood out whitely on her thin hands. Then the jumbo jet banked and slid forward with another muffled thrust of power.
She let out a deep sigh of relief and, turning back to the window, saw, not the ever-nearing white-capped waves, but images of her family. She wondered if they would meet her at the airport or send a car instead.
They know I love them dearly. They know I haven't deserted them these long, past years. They, better than anyone, understand that I had to go out into the world and make my mark to prove myself. To show them I'm worthy of the Boralevi blood coursing through my veins.
And what blood it was! What a fine, fierce lineage was her heritage!
Her smile returned as she exultantly thought of her distinguished flesh and blood, remembering them in a brilliant flash of absolute clarity the way she had last seen them, in person, not frozen in the photographs they had exchanged regularly by mail over the years: a passionately close, loving family, proudly gathered at the airport to see her off in the silvery World War II-vintage DC-3, its twin propellers already whirling, which was to fly her and twenty other passengers to Athens. From there, connecting flights would take her to London and on to New York.
Daliah could imagine her mother in precise detail on that stark sunny morning, one hand pressing down the crown of her wide-brimmed straw hat against a gust of hot wind. At fifty-four, Tamara had still possessed a startling, eye-catching beauty, with teeth—flawlessly capped back in 1930—as toothpaste-advertisement-perfect as they had been when she was the toast of thirties Hollywood. Tamara's hypnotic emerald eyes, gleaming with jewelled radiance so like Daliah's own, coupled with the extraordinarily high Slavic cheekbones and plucked, pencilled-arch brows, had made her the most fabulous face of them all and had been, on that tearful but exhilarating departure, as theatrically expressive as they were in her old black-and-white films.
During the eleven years of separation, Daliah had religiously watched Tamara's old classics whenever they were played at nostalgia festivals or repeated and re-repeated on the late and late-late shows. She had sat through them enthralled, barely believing that the beguiling film siren on the screen could actually be her mother. By the time the end flickered on the screen, she always felt a morose, gnawing pang of guilt and homesickness, vowing to fly to Israel as expeditiously as possible for a long visit.
Now Daliah felt a warm pleasure radiate throughout her body, and her eyes sparkled in anticipation of the reunion she had put off so often, and yet waited and longed for with such keen desperation.
Her thoughts and images switched fondly to her father. How incredibly handsome he had looked that morning when he had come to send her off, his starched short-sleeved khaki shirt stained damp under the armpits, his thick, dark chest hair curling out from the V of his open-throated collar. His manner had always been so authoritative, but beneath it lurked a profound strength, an unshakable belief in what he had helped create, and a bottomless depth of love for his family.
General Dani ben Yaacov was more than a family figurehead adored by his worshipping daughter. He had been a fierce Haganah fighter, battling to thrust Palestine into the fledgling state of Israel, and then had hawkishly protected that most precious of almost holy treasures with a motherlike ferocity so that it might remain an oasis of Jewish freedom amid the simmering turmoil of the otherwise Arab Middle East. Since her departure, he had retired from the military, ironically rising in power in the process: a civilian finally, but nevertheless the staunchest of loyal patriots, he had scoffed at the idea of enjoying his golden years in quiet privacy, and had easily been swayed into being a consultant to the Israeli parliament, swiftly emerging as one of the country's most powerful and influential men. National treasure that he was, it was pitiable that the world knew him primarily as the man for whom the legendary movie queen Tamara had given up the dizzying ivory heights of her Hollywood tower for true love—a love firmly implanted in bedrock from the beginning, a love which had endured all obstacles and grown in strength with each passing year.
Daliah's thoughts were invaded by the imposing presence of Grandpoppa, Schmarya Boralevi himself. Grandpoppa— the only man alive who could, even now, instill a girlish fear and healthy respect in his sophisticated twenty-nine-year-old movie-star granddaughter. At seventy-two, the one-legged patriarch of the family had already been an unofficially deified living legend, a superhuman monument to the era when Jews still fled the pogroms of the Rusian Pale—that area of Eastern Poland and the Ukraine which had been a ghetto since the time of Catherine the Great—to the raw, brawny Promised Land. Now Grandpoppa would be . . . eighty-three? Was that possible? Yes, and doubtless he would exude the same robust health he always had.
Ever since Daliah could recall, Grandpoppa had been the easiest member of her illustrious family to conjure up visually, no matter where he might have been at the moment. His gnarled and gaunt body, with its deeply engraved hide toughened and tanned by decades spent in the relentlessly burning sun, and his shock of unruly sun-bleached white hair and long bushy white beard lent Grandpoppa the foreboding portentousness of a biblical prophet. Which, Daliah considered with gentle blasphemy, wasn't that far from the truth. Grandpoppa had been a modern prophet of sorts, resolutely envisioning a land for the Children of Israel long before it had ever been concretely fought for. His exploits had assumed almost mythic proportions. 'Thundering Schmarya,' he'd been reverently and affectionately nicknamed long ago, and the name had stuck. He could rightfully claim his bigger-than-life stance in the annals of Israeli history alongside such fellow luminaries as Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion, although he incessantly bellowed that he didn't deserve it.
Only Ari ben Yaacov, her tall and handsome older brother, a proud sabra like her, had not yet achieved legendary status.
But he will in time, Daliah assured herself loyally. Ari's made of the same starch and fibre as the rest of us, only he hasn't had the opportunity to prove himself yet. He's a late bloomer, but his time will come. He's liable to outshine us all.
Then the corners of her orange-glossed, sculptured lips puckered into a frown as she was once again confronted with the purpose of her visit. Soon she and Ari would be reunited, but not for long. His wedding loomed two days hence on the horizon, and then he would scoop up his bride and carry her off alone somewhere.
She sighed. Eleven long years had passed, but now Flight 1002 from New York had floated in right on time, and she was home. Home.
What a wonderful word that was. Yet ... A tiny fear nibbled at her. Was this really her home? Or had she been gone for so long and had so much changed that she would find as foreign a place as myriads of others she had visited around the globe?
The chief steward's head appeared over the top of Daliah's seat. 'Welcome home, Miss Boralevi,' he said cheerfully in Hebrew. 'I trust you enjoyed your flight?'
She unclasped her belt and turned her face up to his. 'Yes, I did, thank you.'
He grinned. 'If you'll please follow me now, we'll hustle you off first.'
She leaned over, yanked her Bottega Veneta shoulder bag from under the seat in front of hers, and got to her feet, cautiously testing her land legs. They could use some stretching and exercise; her calves were in knots.
Swiftly sidling from between the seats, she tossed her hair over her shoulders and followed him to the exit. Her spine was straight, her shoulders squared, and her w
alk, despite the tingling pinpricks of sleeping feet, was as casually graceful and conquering as the most seasoned model's on a fashion runway. As a stewardess prematurely pulled aside the curtain to economy class, Daliah studiously avoided the sea of upturned prying faces and gaping mouths.
She could imagine what they were thinking. Look! For Christ sakes! A real-life movie star! Hey, I wonder, could you autograph . . . ? Could I snap a shot of you and the little woman? . . . Did you see her last flick, the one where she did the nude scene with Mel Gibson? Christ, I'd jump in the sack with her anytime.
The chief steward took his position beside the already open exit to the accordion tunnel connecting the jet to the terminal, a massive square umbilical cord. As promised, an El Al VIP representative was waiting for Daliah.
'Elie's not on duty?' the chief steward asked the VIP rep in surprise. 'I thought he was supposed to meet this flight.'