White Moon Black Sea (12 page)

She distracted herself from thoughts of Rashid by
switching to the most immediate problem she had, the plan she was hatching with Brindley to retrieve every lost asset of the original Oujie legacy, including those she had a year before sold off of her own volition to Rashid. Brindley had assured her that it would probably take her the remainder of her life to do it, and she would have to take a much more active and public position if she was to achieve her goal. So far it had been mere planning and plotting — all talk. Was she actually capable of hardening herself into a more ruthless Mirella Oujie Wingfield Corey, able to keep her lover and deceive him in order to save the Oujie heritage for generations to come?

The helicopter dropped low over Fire Island and followed the magnificent long sandy beach. Too late in the day, and too cool for sunbathers and swimmers, the beach was almost entirely deserted. Mirella watched the waves crashing up against the shoreline — a sight she always found thrilling. They passed over the fashionable little houses and minute gardens clumped together that made up the famous or infamous communities along the narrow strip of land facing the Atlantic Ocean on the one side and the bay where the ferries crossed from the mainland to deposit the summer people. Mirella watched one community drift into the next as they flew the length of the island. She noted, too, sections of scrubby pine, a few uninhabited places left to the wind and the rain.

Seen from the air, the island lay like a thin thread of sandbar waiting to be washed by the Atlantic Ocean into the numerous bays. It narrowed down and shifted inward toward the mainland. Where Fire Island ended, up popped the long sandbar that turned into Westhampton beach.

Pulling the helicopter higher, Sam piloted it just above Dune Road. It flew parallel to the ocean and Shinnecock Bay. Eventually the thin strip of land melted into the coastline and Southampton beach, then the Southampton Beach Club. They whirled over it and on up the ocean’s shoreline, then flew over Rashid’s compound. His estate ran between the exclusive Gin Lane and the ocean for a distance of a mile, and along the beachfront for three quarters of a mile.

They swooped low over the beach and at the end of it swept the helicopter up over the sand dunes toward the main house. They flew over the magnificent blanket of bright green lawn between the neatly clipped, twelve-foot-high boxwood hedge that served as a wall along Gin Lane, and the huge glass and stone house set in a forest of Japanese pines. With its formal lawns and hedges on one side, and sand dunes and long, windswept, wild dune grass undulating down to the cold, rough, glorious Atlantic on the other, the setting was undeniably impressive. Other modern architectural perfections, small pavilions for guests, tennis courts, pools, working studios, a pavilion for his jade collection, where several antique opium beds of infinite charm were arranged so that one could lie there and listen to music, were left behind as they turned into the wind and headed for their own compound farther along Long Island in East Hampton.

Mirella turned and looked over her shoulder as the compound receded behind them. There was Rashid’s white Porsche convertible passing through the gates and pulling up to the main house. As she turned back Mirella’s gaze caught Adam’s, and suddenly she was absorbed by memories of the first night they had met, when Brindley had brought Adam to Mirella’s house, as a friend, a Turkophile, the archaeologist who had discovered the Oujie journals.

He had been there when Brindley had announced how wealthy and vast the Oujie legacy was. He had been shocked at her indifference toward it, and her lack of interest in Turkey, where it originated and the country he loved. She could remember his words as if he were repeating them in front of her now.

“Mirella,” he had said in a soft, hypnotic tone, “I know part of your great-grandmother’s estate. I have seen fields of poppies that go on for miles broken only by an ancient Greek temple, and Hittite burial mounds and excavated Hittite cities that are on your land. I have walked up Mount Ararat and found ancient treasures, sailed along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey and watched the waves wash over the ruins of an ancient white marble amphitheater
on your property. I have for years dealt with dubious men exploiting your land and seen bad management there that could destroy part of the history of civilization. And that, too, was on your land. I have canoed down the Euphrates: whole sections of it are yours. I have saved caravansaries, for the sheer architectural and historical beauty of them: some are yours too. I have slept in the conical churches of Cappadocia, part of which belongs to you. I have stood where Paul of Tarus preached, on stones trodden by your ancestors. All this and much more is yours, and you have no time to go to Turkey? You have no interest to see Turkey? How can you liquidate your heritage? … Why, Mirella? Is it because it gives you a sense of your own mortality, and you don’t want to face that?”

She remembered vividly the look of disgust and disappointment that scorned her as not prepared even to learn with an open mind about her fabulous legacy, only wanting to liquidate it as soon as possible and get on with her life and her work at the United Nations.

Those lands he spoke of were some of the very ones Rashid now possessed. If Mirella had been angry these last weeks about Rashid’s raid on her property — and she had — remembering Adam’s words focused all that fury in an instant. She suddenly understood that she had no choice but to turn anger into legal cunning. She placed her hands on her large swollen belly and felt her baby. She took Adam’s hand and placed it there. The infant soon obliged with a filial kick.

“Isn’t it marvelous, that old miracle?” he said, a smile of delight on his face as he bent to kiss her tenderly on the lips. “Don’t be afraid, I’ll help you, I’ll be there with you and help you through this.”

“Like you do with everything in my life. What a good man you are.”

“No. What a good couple we are,” he generously corrected her.

She watched him change seats and take the controls of the helicopter. Adam: rock-solid, morally just; a shrewd man whether in business or in love, as much an adventurer
as a family man. A man in love with a woman he happily shared with Rashid because he knew and understood her. Knew that a
ménage à trois
need not be a threat to their love for each other or their relationship. If anything, it heightened what they shared.

Although Mirella never made sexual comparisons between her lover and her husband, never questioned or tried to analyze her erotic attachment to both men, she was often puzzled by the difference in their characters. Her pregnancy, for example. There was no question in her mind that she conceived with Adam during their first lovemaking in the new house on Fifth Avenue. They had been apart for several weeks when he had gone off to Africa, ostensibly on safari. Adam had returned to the West having effectively bound up the Marxist regime in Ethiopia in a business and financial coup that had launched him as a significant force in business in that part of the world. If Adam had any doubts that the child was his, he had never let on to her about them. Rashid, on the other hand, dared to hope that the baby was his. His constant insistence that she have a test to prove paternity had provoked Mirella into endlessly reassuring Adam that he was the father of their child. So Mirella had been perturbed to find out, although certain that it was true, Adam would not be upset if he discovered it was Rashid’s.

As the East Hampton house came into view on the horizon, she was wondering what sort of vanity it was that made her angry about that, actually jealous that her husband should accept the child if it were Rashid’s? She remembered how that had shocked her into breaking the unspoken taboo about discussing the triangle with Adam. Adam’s reaction had been curt. “Why are we talking about this, Mirella? Is it so difficult for you to understand that I love you? That I trust your love for me enough to want you to remain a free spirit? If that entails a love triangle such as we have, so be it. Rashid and I can live with the relationship because it enhances the lives of all three of us. And because we maintain a loyalty, respect, and an immense consideration for each other and our positions. We don’t ever challenge them. What have we to talk about
vis-à-vis our unusual relationship? It just is, and it will exist until one day it isn’t.” So she gained a single, brief glimpse of how he had and would cope emotionally with the situation. The taboo of silence then reasserted itself. Their marriage and
ménage à trois
flourished and enriched their lives. She had sensed once more the broad emotional stability of the man she had married.

Rashid, in his own fashion, was no less remarkable about her pregnancy. His love for Mirella and the unborn child she was carrying seemed to enchant him. Yet she was aware that it drove him further into sexual depravity with Humayun. He made no secret of it. Neither did he make a secret of Humayun’s emotional control over him. So much so that, for a time, Mirella feared it was going to be a threat to the
ménage à trois
.

She had been wrong about that. The three were as close as ever, in spite of Rashid’s thievery and Mirella’s pregnancy. But all of that was about to change. Soon the baby would arrive and she would have her confrontation over the stolen property with Rashid. A confrontation all of them had obviously been avoiding. Rashid, true to himself as always, after his original attempt to tell Mirella himself, had been stopped by her outburst against him and had never approached her about it again. Ruthless man that he was, and thrilled with his achievement, he had allowed the international newspapers and
Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Paris Match
, and
L’Express
to print the news. The fact that Mirella and Adam chose to ignore the subject of his property coup, and what it meant to him, seemed not to affect him at all.

The helicopter landed on the beach below the house. Mirella clumsily struggled from her seat, watched over by Adam, who laughingly picked her up in his arms and carried her down from the copter to stand her on the sand.

“You find my clumsy movements funny, do you?” she challenged.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I do. Funny and endearing.”

“Sometimes I think you enjoy this pregnancy more than I do.”

“I don’t know about that, but I am enjoying it. As I have
done with every woman who has carried my child. I like pregnant women. Especially those I have impregnated. Marlo used to say it’s the male chauvinist pig in me, pregnant with his own pride at having put her in the place where he thinks she belongs, tied down to motherhood. But I don’t believe that’s true. And I never thought for a moment she would succumb to motherhood, which, as you know, she never has done. Partial motherhood would be more like it.”

“I don’t feel very maternal, Adam. Do you think that will matter to the baby?”

“Maybe it matters to some babies. But it won’t to ours, because of our extended family. Remember, our baby will be brought up in the clan with all my other children and their mothers. There will be enough maternal love among you and Marlo, Giuliana, Aysha, and, though she is not a mother, Muhsine. The baby won’t lack mother-love. My other children surely must be an example to reassure you of that.”

That was true. She herself had experienced the maternal love the women of the
yalis
had shown her. And she knew it to be rich and genuine. Her child, like all the others, would be enriched by life in this unusual household. Why, she had to ask herself, had it taken her so long to accept that? Was she in fact still suffering from her straitlaced Boston background. From middle-class American morality which demanded she be a
Reader’s Digest
kind of mother. She was quite embarrassed for herself.

At dinner that evening, Mirella felt less fragmented than she had been for months. Brindley was there, and Joshua and Adam. The Coreys usually made a point of dressing for dinner, and this evening Mirella had made a special effort to look beautiful for Adam and their guests. It was her response to her own wandering thoughts, to the doctor’s harsh words, to her decision to get back what had been stolen and to leave a vast legacy to an Oujie-Wingfield-Corey dynasty. Most of all it had to do with at last being able to relax into her pregnancy.

She wore her hair up, pinned in place by tiny diamond birds set on combs, in a casual, very pretty manner. Her
off-the-shoulder, white, cotton batiste evening dress clung to her hugely full breasts and showed their luscious roundness and a hint of darker areole and nipple. Her belly for once looked frighteningly large, as the thin material clung to it and outlined her flat pubis and seductive thighs with every step she took. Around her throat she wore a narrow ribbon, a bunch of fresh violets tied to it on one side. She entered the room. The men were stunned into silence by her rich, ripe beauty that appeared to be ready to open to them. When had she looked more voluptuous? For the first time she wore her pregnancy like a priceless jewel and dazzled them with it.

They looked in wonder and amusement at this new Mirella who ravenously ate through Moses’ superb dinner of cracked-crab mousse, followed by fresh rainbow trout grilled with lemon, buttered, and topped with slivers of toasted almonds served on a bed of fresh fried parsley and surrounded by steamy rice dumplings. Then came a course of fresh white asparagus served cold in a vinaigrette dressing, a remarkably perfect Brie with water biscuits, and finally a Pavlova of mouth-watering meringue, crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside, filled with fresh whipped cream, raspberries, and red currants.

They were dining by dozens of candles under hurricane lamps to a symphony of night sounds: the ocean lapping the shore, the frogs croaking from their watery beds in the nearby ponds, and the crickets chirping on the wide veranda which circled the house. A heavy scent from the garden — end-of-summer flowers, roses, lilies, and hydrangeas, fragrant creeping vines, and mown grass — traveled on the night. The moon and the stars came out in a grand display. Moses and two maids waited on them with the splendid food and exquisite white wines, Montrachets of excellent vintages. Mirella kept trying to find a right moment to tell them, at last, what she was going to do about her losses. She did, finally, between the cheese and the dessert.