Memories of Midnight
Memories of Midnight
Sidney Sheldon
MEMORIES OF MIDNIGHT - The internationally best-selling 'The Other Side of Midnight' was dominated by the man who is Sheldon's most magnificent creation…'Constantin Demiris'Billionaire, art lover, womaniser…and killer. To Noelle, the woman who betrayed him, and Larry, the man who stole her, Demiris brought a chilling retribution. But Demiris’ terrible revenge is far from complete…'Ioannina, Greece'In the seclusion of a remote convent a young woman emerges from the trauma of memory loss…'Catherine Alexander'Larry’s widow, sees Demiris as a benefactor, the man who restores her faith in the future. How can she know the fate he has in store, or that her life is bound up with other victims of his mighty ego? From the exotic shores of the Mediterranean to post-war London, 'Memories of Midnight' is a passionate, unforgettable story of an innocent woman’s fight against a terrifying destinyIn this deadly game, there can only be one winner…If Judd is to survive he must play the game to win.This is Sidney Sheldon's first novel – a gripping, intense thriller that brought him fame as a bestselling novelist.
SIDNEY SHELDON
MEMORIES OF MIDNIGHT
Copyright (#ulink_1b2699eb-2cc2-5c58-8e1c-4aee8faa322e)
Published by Harper
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © 1990 by Sheldon Literary Trust
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Source ISBN: 9780006178699
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2012 ISBN: 9780007381937
Version: 2015-04-27
For Alexandrawith love
Sing me no songs of daylight,
For the sun is the enemy of lovers
Sing instead of shadows and darkness,
And memories of midnight
—SAPPHO
Table of Contents
Cover (#u5dc8eef4-a04a-5dfb-a8a4-59a15e867140)
Title Page (#u808ce0b0-0b58-5c17-98b0-19b40fcb9a1c)
Copyright (#u1073db5a-cd6b-5a89-9fc4-f264e1c4ee63)
Dedication (#u342ad1ed-4e01-533f-8185-a1c05c26d900)
Epigraph (#u0b00cfe0-2b01-5215-b987-60b11a499eb9)
Prologue (#u86ed6646-73b3-56fa-8cc5-1a14ebe7c8a7)
Chapter One (#ubd2aeafa-20b8-5243-b1bb-a7a9a0629734)
Chapter Two (#uc17974c6-d9ad-5af0-84f3-036fedfb08cf)
Chapter Three (#u0f720bfc-a06e-5d9e-85ac-622a47b8c58f)
Chapter Four (#u258a74ec-fbb6-5012-abd9-cca514ca47ff)
Chapter Five (#u7f768c25-6293-5812-8ca2-11cb16e0d72b)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Books by Sidney Sheldon (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_d9da85bd-017e-5436-bcf5-bb8414045ec7)
Kowloon—May 1949
“It must look like an accident. Can you arrange that?”
It was an insult. He could feel the anger rising in him. That was a question you asked some amateur you picked up from the streets. He was tempted to reply with sarcasm: Oh, yes, I think I can manage that. Would you prefer an accident indoors? I can arrange for her to break her neck falling down a flight of stairs. The dancer in Marseilles. Or she could get drunk and drown in her bath. The heiress in Gstaad. She could take an overdose of heroin. He had disposed of three that way. Or, she could fall asleep in bed with a lighted cigarette. The Swedish detective at L’Hôtel on the Left Bank in Paris. Or perhaps you would prefer something outdoors? I can arrange a traffic accident, a plane crash, or a disappearance at sea.
But he said none of those things, for in truth he was afraid of the man seated across from him. He had heard too many chilling stories about him, and he had reason to believe them.
So all he said was, “Yes, sir, I can arrange an accident. No one will ever know.” Even as he said the words, the thought struck him: He knows that I’ll know. He waited.
They were on the second floor of a building in the walled city of Kowloon that had been built in 1840 by a group of Chinese to protect themselves from the British barbarians. The walls had been torn down in the Second World War, but there were other walls that kept outsiders away: Gangs of cut-throats and drug addicts and rapists roaming through the rabbit warren of crooked, narrow streets and dark stairways leading into gloom. Tourists were warned to stay away, and not even the police would venture inside past Tung Tau Tsuen Street, on the outskirts. He could hear the street noises outside the window, and the shrill and raucous polyglot of languages that belonged to the residents of the walled city.
The man was studying him with cold, obsidian eyes. Finally, he spoke. “Very well. I will leave the method to you.”
“Yes, sir. Is the target here in Kowloon?”
“London. Her name is Catherine. Catherine Alexander.”
A limousine, followed by a second car with two armed bodyguards, drove the man to the Blue House on Lascar Row, in the Tsim Sha Tsui area. The Blue House was open to special patrons only. Heads of state visited there, and movie stars, and presidents of corporations. The management prided itself on discretion. Half a dozen years earlier, one of the young girls who worked there had discussed her customers with a newspaperman, and she was found the next morning in Aberdeen Harbor with her tongue cut out. Everything was for sale in the Blue House: virgins, boys, lesbians who satisfied themselves without the “jade stalks” of men, and animals. It was the only place he knew of where the tenth-century art of Ishinpo was still practiced. The Blue House was a cornucopia of forbidden pleasures.
The man had ordered the twins this time. They were an exquisitely matched pair with beautiful features, incredible bodies, and no inhibitions. He remembered the last time he had been there … the metal stool with no bottom and their soft caressing tongues and fingers, and the tub filled with fragrant warm water that overflowed onto the tiled floor and their hot mouths plundering his body. He felt the beginning of an erection.
“We’re here, sir.”
Three hours later, when he had finished with them, sated and content, the man ordered the limousine to head for Mody Road. He looked out the window of the limousine at the sparkling lights of the city that never slept. The Chinese had named it Gau-lung—nine dragons—and he imagined them lurking in the mountains above the city, ready to come down and destroy the weak and the unwary. He was neither.
They reached Mody Road.
The Taoist priest waiting for him looked like a figure from an ancient parchment, with a classic faded Oriental robe and a long, wispy white beard.
“Jou sahn.”
“Jou sahn.”
“Gei do chin?”
“Yat-chihn.”
“Jou.”
The priest closed his eyes in a silent prayer and began to shake the chim, the wooden cup filled with numbered prayer sticks. A stick fell out and the shaking ceased. In the silence, the Taoist priest consulted his chart and turned to his visitor. He spoke in halting English. “The gods say you will soon be rid of dangerous enemy.”
The man felt a pleasant jolt of surprise. He was too intelligent not to realize that the ancient art of chim was merely a superstition. And he was too intelligent to ignore it. Besides, there was another good-luck omen. Today was Agios Constantinous Day, his birthday.
“The gods have blessed you with good fung shui.”
“Do jeh.”
“Hou wah.”
Five minutes later, he was in the limousine, on his way to Kai Tak, the Hong Kong airport, where his private plane was waiting to take him back to Athens.
Chapter One (#ulink_24c4c35c-4f1a-5f42-88cb-3f38789f4040)
loannina, Greece—July 1948
She woke up screaming every night and it was always the same dream. She was in the middle of a lake in a fierce storm and a man and a woman were forcing her head under the icy waters, drowning her. She awakened each time panicky, gasping for breath, soaked with perspiration.
She had no idea who she was and she had no memory of the past. She spoke English—but she did not know what country she was from or how she had come to be in Greece, in the small Carmelite convent that sheltered her.
As time went by, there were tantalizing flashes of memory, glimpses of vague, ephemeral images that came and went too quickly for her to grasp them, to hold them and examine them. They came at unexpected moments, catching her off guard and filling her with confusion.
In the beginning, she had asked questions. The Carmelite nuns were kind and understanding, but theirs was an order of silence, and the only one permitted to speak was Sister Theresa, the elderly and frail Mother Superior.
“Do you know who I am?”
“No, my child,” Sister Theresa said.
“How did I get to this place?”
“At the foot of these mountains is a village called Ioannina. You were in a small boat in the lake during a storm last year. The boat sank, but by the grace of God, two of our sisters saw you and rescued you. They brought you here.”
“But … where did I come from before that?”
“I’m sorry, child. I do not know.”
She could not be satisfied with that. “Hasn’t anyone inquired about me? Hasn’t anyone tried to find me?”
Sister Theresa shook her head. “No one.”
She wanted to scream with frustration. She tried again. “The newspapers … they must have had a story about my being missing.”
“As you know, we are permitted no communication with the outside world. We must accept God’s will, child. We must thank Him for all His mercies. You are alive.”
And that was as far as she was able to get. In the beginning, she had been too ill to be concerned about herself, but slowly, as the months went by, she had regained her strength and her health.
When she was strong enough to move about, she spent her days tending the colorful gardens in the grounds of the convent, in the incandescent light that bathed Greece in a celestial glow, with the soft winds carrying the pungent aroma of lemons and vines.
The atmosphere was serene and calm, and yet she could find no peace. I’m lost, she thought, and no one cares. Why? Have I done something evil? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
The images continued to come, unbidden. One morning she awakened suddenly with a vision of herself in a room with a naked man undressing her. Was it a dream? Or was it something that had happened in her past? Who was the man? Was it someone she had married? Did she have a husband? She wore no wedding ring. In fact, she had no possessions other than the black Order of the Carmelite habit that Sister Theresa had given her and a pin, a small golden bird with ruby eyes and outstretched wings.
She was anonymous, a stranger living among strangers. There was no one to help her, no psychiatrist to tell her that her mind had been so traumatized, it could stay sane only by shutting out the terrible past.
And the images kept coming, faster and faster. It was as though her mind had suddenly turned into a giant jigsaw puzzle, with odd pieces tumbling into place. But the pieces made no sense. She had a vision of a huge studio filled with men in army uniform. They seemed to be making a motion picture. Was I an actress? No, she seemed to be in charge. But in charge of what?
A soldier handed her a bouquet of flowers. You’ll have to pay for these yourself, he laughed.
Two nights later, she had a dream about the same man. She was saying goodbye to him at the airport, and she woke up sobbing because she was losing him.
There was no more peace for her after that. These were not mere dreams. They were pieces of her life, her past. I must find out who I was. Who I am.
And unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, without warning, a name was dredged up out of her subconscious. Catherine. My name is Catherine Alexander.
Chapter Two (#ulink_72194dc9-cf6f-50e0-a9e9-1884092e4c12)
Athens, Greece
The empire of Constantin Demiris could not be located on any map, yet he was the ruler of a fiefdom larger and more powerful than many countries. He was one of the two or three wealthiest men in the world and his influence was incalculable. He had no title or official position, but he regularly bought and sold prime ministers, cardinals, ambassadors, and kings. Demiris’s tentacles were everywhere, woven through the woof and warp of dozens of countries. He was a charismatic man, with a brilliantly incisive mind, physically striking, well above medium height, with a barrel chest and broad shoulders. His complexion was swarthy and he had a strong Greek nose and olive-black eyes. He had the face of a hawk, a predator. When he chose to take the trouble, Demiris could be extremely charming. He spoke eight languages and was a noted raconteur. He had one of the most important art collections in the world, a fleet of private planes, and a dozen apartments, châteaus, and villas scattered around the globe. He was a connoisseur of beauty, and he found beautiful women irresistible. He had the reputation of being a powerful lover, and his romantic escapades were as colorful as his financial adventures.
Constantin Demiris prided himself on being a patriot—the blue-and-white Greek flag was always on display at his villa in Kolonaki and on Psara, his private island—but he paid no taxes. He did not feel obliged to conform to the rules that applied to ordinary men. In his veins ran ichor—the blood of the gods.
Nearly every person Demiris met wanted something from him: financing for a business project; a donation to a charity; or simply the power that his friendship could bestow. Demiris enjoyed the challenge of figuring out what it was that people were really after, for it was rarely what it appeared to be. His analytical mind was skeptical of surface truth, and as a consequence he believed nothing he was told and trusted no one. His motto was “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” The reporters who chronicled his life were permitted to see only his geniality and charm, the sophisticated, urbane man of the world. They had no reason to suspect that beneath the amiable façade was a killer, a gutter fighter whose instinct was to go for the jugular vein.
He was an unforgiving man who never forgot a slight. To the ancient Greeks the word dikaiosini, justice, was often synonymous with ekdikisis, vengeance, and Demiris was obsessed with both. He remembered every affront he had ever suffered, and those who were unlucky enough to incur his enmity were paid back a hundred-fold. They were never aware of it, for Demiris’s mathematical mind made a game of exacting retribution, patiently working out elaborate traps and spinning complex webs that finally caught and destroyed his enemies.
He enjoyed the hours he spent devising pitfalls for his adversaries. He would study his victims carefully, analyzing their personalities, assessing their strengths and their weaknesses.
At a dinner party one evening, Demiris had overheard a motion-picture producer refer to him as “that oily Greek.” Demiris bided his time. Two years later, the producer signed a glamorous internationally known actress to star in his new big-budget production in which he put in his own money. Demiris waited until the picture was half finished, and then charmed the leading lady into walking out on it and joining him on his yacht.
“It will be a honeymoon,” Demiris told her.
She got the honeymoon but not the wedding. The movie finally had to shut down and the producer went bankrupt.
There were a few players in Demiris’s game with whom he had not yet evened the score, but he was in no hurry. He enjoyed the anticipation, the planning, and the execution. These days he made no enemies, for no man could afford to be his enemy, so his quarry was limited to those who had crossed his path in the past.
But Constantin Demiris’s sense of dikaiosini was double-edged. Just as he never forgave an injury, neither did he forget a favor. A poor fisherman who had given the young boy shelter found himself the owner of a fishing fleet. A prostitute who had fed and clothed theyoung man when he was too poor to pay her mysteriously inherited an apartment building, without any idea of who her benefactor was.
Demiris had started life as the son of a stevedore in Piraeus. He had fourteen brothers and sisters and there was never enough food on the table.
From the very beginning, Constantin Demiris showed an uncanny gift for business. He earned extra money doing odd jobs after school, and at sixteen he had saved enough money to open a food stand on the docks with an older partner. The business flourished and the partner cheated Demiris out of his half. It took Demiris ten years to destroy the man. The young boy was burning with a fierce ambition. He would lie awake at night, his eyes bright in the darkness. I’m going to be rich. I’m going to be famous. Someday everyone will know my name. It was the only lullaby that could put him to sleep. He had no idea how it was going to happen. He knew only that it would.
On Demiris’s seventeenth birthday, he came across an article about the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and it was as though a magic door to the future had suddenly opened for him.
He went to his father. “I’m going to Saudi Arabia. I’m going to work in the oil fields.”
“Too-sou! What do you know about oil fields?”
“Nothing, father. I’m going to learn.”
One month later, Constantin Demiris was on his way.
It was company policy for the overseas employees of the Trans-Continental Oil Corporation to sign a two-year employment contract, but Demiris felt no qualms about it. He planned to stay in Saudi Arabia for as long as it took him to make his fortune. He had envisioned a wonderful Arabian nights adventure, a glamorous, mysterious land with exotic-looking women, and black gold gushing up out of the ground. The reality was a shock.
On an early morning in summer, Demiris arrived at Fadili, a dreary camp in the middle of the desert consisting of an ugly stone building surrounded by barastis, small brushwood huts. There were a thousand lower-bracket workers there, mostly Saudis. The women who trudged through the dusty, unpaved streets were heavily veiled.
Demiris entered the building where J. J. McIntyre, the personnel manager, had his office.
McIntyre looked up as the young man came in. “So. The home office hired you, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ever work the oil fields before, son?”
For an instant, Demiris was tempted to lie. “No, sir.”
McIntyre grinned. “You’re going to love it here. You’re a million miles from nowhere, bad food, no women that you can touch without getting your balls chopped off, and not a goddamned thing to do at night. But the pay is good, right?”
“I’m here to learn,” Demiris said earnestly.
“Yeah? Then I’ll tell you what you better learn fast. You’re in Moslem country now. That means no alcohol. Anyone caught stealing gets his right hand cut off. Second time, left hand. The third time, you lose a foot. If you kill anyone you’re beheaded.”
“I’m not planning to kill anyone.”
“Wait,” McIntyre grunted. “You just got here.”
The compound was a Tower of Babel, people from a dozen different countries all speaking their native languages. Demiris had a good ear and picked up languages quickly. The men were there to make roads in the middle of an inhospitable desert, construct housing, install electrical equipment, put in telephone communications, build workshops, arrange food and water supplies, design a drainage system, administer medical attention, and, it seemed to young Demiris, do a hundred other tasks. They were working in temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, suffering from flies, mosquitoes, dust, fever, and dysentery. Even in the desert there was a social hierarchy. At the top were the men engaged in locating oil, and below, the construction workers, called “stiffs,” and the clerks, known as “shiny pants.”
Nearly all the men involved in the actual drilling—the geologists, surveyors, engineers, and oil chemists—were Americans, for the new rotary drill had been invented in the United States and the Americans were more familiar with its operation. The young man went out of his way to make friends with them.
Constantin Demiris spent as much time as he could around the drillers and he never stopped asking questions. He stored away the information, absorbing it the way the hot sands soaked up water. He noticed that two different methods of drilling were being used.
He approached one of the drillers working near a giant 130-foot derrick. “I was wondering why there are two different kinds of drilling going on.”
The driller explained. “Well, son, one’s cable tool and one’s rotary. We’re going more to rotary now. They start out exactly the same.”
“They do?”
“Yeah. For either one you have to erect a derrick like this one to hoist up the pieces of equipment that have to be lowered into the well.” He looked at the eager face of the young man. “I’ll bet you have no idea why they call it a derrick.”
“No, sir.”
“That was the name of a famous hangman in the seventeenth century.”
“I see.”
“Cable tool drilling goes way back. Hundreds of years ago, the Chinese used to dig water wells that way. They punched a hole into the earth by lifting and dropping a heavy cutting tool hung from a cable. But today about eighty-five percent of all wells are drilled by the rotary method.” He turned to go back to his drilling.
“Excuse me. How does the rotary method work?”
The man stopped. “Well, instead of slammin’ a hole in the earth, you just bore one. You see here? In the middle of the derrick floor is a steel turntable that’s rotated by machinery. This rotary table grips and turns a pipe that extends downward through it. There’s a bit fastened to the lower end of the pipe.”
“It seems simple, doesn’t it?”
“It’s more complicated than it looks. You have to have a way to excavate the loosened material as you drill. You have to prevent the walls from caving in and you have to seal off the water and gas from the well.”
“With all that drilling, doesn’t the rotary drill ever get dull?”
“Sure. Then we have to pull out the whole damned drill string, screw a new bit to the bottom of the drill pipe, and lower the pipe back into the hole. Are you planning to be a driller?”
“No, sir. I’m planning to own oil wells.”
“Congratulations. Can I get back to work now?”
One morning, Demiris watched as a tool was lowered into the well, but instead of boring downward, he noticed that it cut small circular areas from the sides of the hole and brought up rocks.
“Excuse me. What’s the point of doing that?” Demiris asked.
The driller paused to mop his brow. “This is side wall coring. We use these rocks for analysis, to see whether they’re oil-bearing.”
“I see.”
When things were going smoothly, Demiris would hear drillers cry out, “I’m turning to the right,” which meant they were making a hole. Demiris noticed that there were dozens of tiny holes drilled all over the field, with diameters as small as two or three inches.
“Excuse me. What are those for?” the young man asked.
“Those are prospect wells. They tell us what’s underneath. Saves the company a lot of time and money.”
“I see.”
It was all utterly fascinating to the young man and his questions were endless.
“Excuse me. How do you know where to drill?”
“We got a lot of geologists—pebble pups—who take measurements of the strata and study the cuttings from wells. Then the rope chokers …”
“Excuse me, what’s a rope choker?”
“A driller. When they …”
Constantin Demiris worked from early morning until sundown, hauling rigs through the burning desert, cleaning equipment, and driving trucks past the streamers of flame rising from the rocky peaks. The flames burned day and night, carrying off the poisonous gases.
J. J. McIntyre had told Demiris the truth. The food was bad, living conditions were horrible, and at night there was nothing to do. Worse, Demiris felt as though every pore in his body were filled with grains of sand. The desert was alive and there was no way to escape it. The sand filtered into the hut and through his clothes and into his body until he thought he would go crazy. And then it got worse.
The shamal struck. The sandstorms blew every day for a month, driven by a howling wind with an intensity strong enough to drive men mad.
Demiris stared out the door of his hut at the swirling sand. “Are we going out to work in that?”
“You’re fucking right, Charlie. This ain’t a health spa.”
Oil discoveries were being made all around them. There was a new find at Abu Hadriya and another at Qatif and at Harad, and the workers were kept busier than ever.
There were two new arrivals, an English geologist and his wife. Henry Potter was in his late sixties and his wife, Sybil, was in her early thirties. In any other setting, Sybil Potter would have been described as a plain-looking obese woman with a high, unpleasant voice. In Fadili, she was a raving beauty. Since Henry Potter was constantly away prospecting for new oil fields, his wife was left alone a great deal.
Young Demiris was assigned to help her move into their quarters and to assist her in getting settled.
“This is the most miserable place I’ve ever seen in my life,” Sybil Potter complained in her whining voice. “Henry’s always dragging me off to terrible places like this. I don’t know why I put up with it.”
“Your husband is doing a very important job,” Demiris assured her.
She eyed the attractive young man speculatively. “My husband isn’t doing all the jobs he should be doing. Do you know what I mean?”
Demiris knew exactly what she meant. “No, ma’am.”
“What’s your name?”
“Demiris, ma’am. Constantin Demiris.”
“What do your friends call you?”
“Costa.”
“Well, Costa, I think you and I are going to become very good friends. We certainly have nothing in common with these wogs, have we?”
“Wogs?”
“You know. These foreign people.”
“I have to go back to work,” Demiris said.
Over the next few weeks, Sybil Potter constantly found excuses to send for the young man.
“Henry left again this morning,” she told him. “He’s off to do his silly drilling.” She added archly, “He should do more drilling at home.”
Demiris had no answer. The geologist was a very important man in the company hierarchy and Demiris had no intention of getting involved with Potter’s wife and jeopardizing his own job. He was not sure exactly how, but he knew without question that one way or another this job was going to be his passport to everything he dreamed of. Oil was the future and he was determined to be a part of it.
One midnight, Sybil Potter sent for Demiris. He walked into the compound where she lived and knocked at the door.
“Come in.” Sybil was wearing a thin nightgown that unfortunately concealed nothing.
“I—did you want to see me, ma’am?”
“Yes, come in Costa. This bedside lamp doesn’t seem to be working.”
Demiris averted his eyes and walked over to the lamp. He picked it up to examine it. “There’s no bulb in …” And he felt her body pressing against his back and her hands groping him. “Mrs. Potter …”
Her lips were on his and she was pushing him onto the bed. And he had no control over what happened next.
His clothes were off and he was plunging into her and she was screaming with joy. “That’s it! Oh, yes, that’s it. My God, it’s been so long!”
She gave a final gasp and shuddered. “Oh, darling, I love you.”
Demiris lay there panicky. What have I done? If Potter ever finds out I’m finished.
As though reading his mind, Sybil Potter giggled, “This will be our little secret, won’t it, darling?”
Their little secret went on for the next several months. There was no way Demiris could avoid her and, since her husband was away for days at a time on his explorations, Demiris could think of no excuse to keep from going to bed with her. What made it worse was that Sybil Potter had fallen madly in love with him.
“You’re much too good to be working in a place like this, darling,” she told him. “You and I are going back to England.”
“My home is Greece.”
“Not anymore.” She stroked his long, lean body. “You’re going to come back home with me. I’ll divorce Henry and we’ll get married.”
Demiris felt a sudden sense of panic. “Sybil, I … I have no money. I …”
She ran her lips down his chest. “That’s no problem. I know how you can make some money, sweetheart.”
“You do?”
She sat up in bed. “Last night, Henry told me he’s just discovered some big new oil field. He’s very clever at that, you know. Anyway, he seemed terribly excited about it. He wrote out his report before he left and he asked me to send it out in the morning pouch. I have it here. Would you like to see it?”
Demiris’s heart began to beat faster. “Yes. I … I would.” He watched her get out of bed and lumber over to a small battered table in the corner. She picked up a large manila envelope and returned to the bed with it.
“Open it.”
Demiris hesitated for only an instant. He opened the envelope and took out the papers inside. There were five pages. He scanned through them quickly, then went back to the beginning and read every word.
“Is that information worth anything?”
Is that information worth anything? It was a report on a new field that could possibly turn out to be one of the richest oil fields in history.
Demiris swallowed. “Yes. It … it could be.”
“Well, there you are,” Sybil said happily. “Now we have money.”
He sighed. “It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
Demiris explained. “This is valuable to someone who can afford to buy up options on the land around this area. But that takes money.” He had three hundred dollars in his bank account.
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Henry has money. I’ll write a check. Will five thousand dollars be enough?”
Constantin Demiris could not believe what he was hearing. “Yes. I … I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s for us, darling. For our future.”
He sat up in bed thinking hard. “Sybil, do you think you could hold on to that report for the next day or two?”
“Of course. I’ll keep it till Friday. Will that give you enough time, darling?”
He nodded slowly. “That will give me enough time.”
With the five thousand dollars that Sybil gave him—no, it’s not a gift, it’s a loan, he told himself—Constantin Demiris bought up options on acres of land around the new potential strike. Some months later, when the gushers began to come in in the main field, Constantin Demiris was an instant millionaire.
He repaid Sybil Potter the five thousand dollars, sent her a new nightgown, and returned to Greece. She never saw him again.
Chapter Three (#ulink_8fca712a-fc19-50e7-bd9c-267dba188a30)
There is a theory that nothing in nature is ever lost—that every sound ever made, every word ever spoken, still exists somewhere in space and time and may one day be recalled.
Before radio was invented, they say, who would have believed that the air around us was filled with the sounds of music and news and voices from around the world? One day we will be able to travel back in time and listen to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the voice of Shakespeare, the Sermon on the Mount …
Catherine Alexander heard voices from her past, but they were muffled and fragmented, and they filled her with confusion. …
“Do you know you’re a very special girl, Cathy? I felt it from the first time I saw you. …”
“It’s over. I want a divorce. … I’m in love with someone else. …”
“I know how badly I’ve behaved. … I’d like to make it up to you. …”
“He tried to kill me.”
“Who tried to kill you?”
“My husband.”
The voices would not stop. They were a torment. Her past became a kaleidoscope of shifting images that kept racing through her mind.
The convent should have been a wonderful, peaceful haven, but it had suddenly become a prison. I don’t belong here. But where do I belong? She had no idea.
There were no mirrors in the convent, but there was a reflecting pool outside, near the garden. Catherine had carefully avoided it, afraid of what it might reveal to her. But on this morning, she walked over to it, slowly knelt, and looked down. The pool reflected a lovely-looking suntanned woman with black hair, flawless features, and solemn gray eyes that seemed filled with pain … but perhaps that was merely a trick of the water. She saw a generous mouth that looked ready to smile, and a nose that was slightly turned up—a beautiful woman in her early thirties. But a woman with no past and no future. A woman lost. I need someone to help me, Catherine thought desperately, someone I can talk to. She went into Sister Theresa’s office.
“Sister …”
“Yes, child?”
“I … think I would like to see a doctor. Someone who can help me find out who I am.”
Sister Theresa looked at her a long moment. “Sit down.”
Catherine sat on the hard chair across from the ancient, scarred desk.
Sister Theresa said quietly: “My dear, God is your doctor. In due time He will let you know what He wishes you to know. Besides, no outsiders are ever permitted within these walls.”
Catherine had a sudden flash of memory … a vague image of a man talking to her in the garden of the convent, handing her something … but then it was gone.
“I don’t belong here.”
“Where do you belong?”
And that was the problem. “I’m not sure. I’m searching for something. Forgive me, Sister Theresa, but I know it isn’t here.”
Sister Theresa was studying her, her face thoughtful. “I see. If you left here, where would you go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let me think about this, child. We will talk again soon.”
“Thank you, Sister.”
When Catherine left, Sister Theresa sat at her desk for a long time, staring at nothing. It was a difficult decision that she had to make. Finally she reached for a piece of paper and a pen and began to write.
“Dear Sir,” she began. “Something has happened that I feel I should call to your attention. Our mutual friend has informed me that she wishes to leave the convent. Please advise me what to do.”
He read the note once, and then sat back in his chair, analyzing the consequences of the message. So! Catherine Alexander wants to come back from the dead. Too bad. I’ll have to get rid of her. Carefully. Very carefully.
The first step was to remove her from the convent. Demiris decided it was time to pay Sister Theresa a visit.
The following morning, Demiris had his chauffeur take him to Ioannina. Driving through the countryside, Constantin Demiris thought about Catherine Alexander. He remembered how beautiful she had been when he had first met her. She had been bright and funny and high-spirited, excited about being in Greece. She had had everything, Demiris thought. And then the gods had taken their vengeance. Catherine had been married to one of his pilots, and their marriage had become a living hell. Almost overnight, she had aged ten years and become a fat, blowsy drunk. Demiris sighed. What a waste.
Demiris was seated in Sister Theresa’s office.
“I hated to bother you about this,” Sister Theresa apologized, “but the child has nowhere to go and …”
“You did the right thing,” Constantin Demiris assured her. “Does she remember anything of her past?”
Sister Theresa shook her head. “No. The poor dear …” She walked over to the window where several nuns were working in the garden. “She’s out there now.”
Constantin Demiris moved to her side and looked out the window. There were three nuns with their backs to him. He waited. One of them turned and he could see her face, and his breath caught in his throat. She was beautiful. What had happened to that fat, ravaged woman?
“She’s the one in the middle,” Sister Theresa said.
Demiris nodded. “Yes.” Sister Theresa’s words were truer than she knew.
“What do you want me to do with her?”
Careful. “Let me think about it,” Demiris said. “I’ll be in touch with you.”
Constantin Demiris had a decision to make. Catherine Alexander’s appearance had caught him by surprise. She had changed so completely. No one would know it’s the same woman, he thought. And the idea that came into his head was so diabolically simple that he almost laughed aloud.
That evening he dispatched a note to Sister Theresa.
It’s a miracle, Catherine thought. A dream come true. Sister Theresa had stopped by her tiny cell after matins.
“I have some news for you, child.”
“Yes?”
Sister Theresa chose her words carefully. “Good news. I have written to a friend of the convent about you, and he wishes to help you.”
Catherine could feel her heart leap. “Help me—how?”
“That is something he will have to tell you. But he is a very kind and generous man. You will be leaving the convent.”
And the words sent a sudden, unexpected chill through Catherine. She would be going out into a strange world she could not even remember. And who was her benefactor?
All Sister Theresa would say was: “He is a very caring man. You should be grateful. His car will be here for you Monday morning.”
Catherine was unable to sleep for the next two nights. The idea of leaving the convent and going into the world outside was suddenly terrifying. She felt naked and lost. Perhaps I’m better off not knowing who I am. Please God, keep an eye on me.
On Monday, the limousine arrived outside the convent gate at seven o’clock in the morning. Catherine had been awake all night thinking about the unknown future that lay ahead of her.
Sister Theresa walked her to the gate that led to the world outside.
“We will pray for you. Remember, if you decide to come back to us you will always have a place here.”
“Thank you, Sister. I’ll remember.”
But in her heart, Catherine was sure that she was never going to return.
The long drive from Ioannina to Athens filled Catherine with a series of conflicting emotions. It was tremendously exciting to be outside the gates of the convent, and yet there was something ominous about the world beyond. Was she going to learn what terrible thing had happened in her past? Did it have anything todo with her recurring dream that someone was trying to drown her?
In the early afternoon, the countryside gave way to small villages, and finally they reached the outskirts of Athens and soon were in the middle of the bustling city. It all seemed strange and unreal to Catherine—and yet oddly familiar. I’ve been here before, Catherine thought excitedly.
The driver headed east, and fifteen minutes later they reached an enormous estate high on a hill. They drove through a tall iron gate and a stone gate house, up a long driveway lined with majestic cypress trees, and stopped before a large white Mediterranean villa framed by half a dozen magnificent statues.
The chauffeur opened the car door for Catherine and she stepped out. A man was waiting at the front door.
“Kalimehra.” The word for good morning sprang to Catherine’s lips unbidden.
“Kalimehra.”
“Are you … are you the person I’ve come to see?”
“Oh, no. Mr. Demiris is waiting for you in the library.”
Demiris. It was a name she had never heard before. Why was he interested in helping her?
Catherine followed the man through an enormous rotunda, with a domed roof set in plaques of Wedgewood. The floors were of creamy Italian marble.
The living room was huge, with a high beamed ceiling and large, low comfortable couches and chairs everywhere. A huge canvas, a dark and glowering Goya, covered one entire wall. As they approached the library, the man stopped.
“Mr. Demiris is waiting for you inside.”
The walls of the library were white and gold boiserie, and the shelves lining the walls were filled with leather books embossed in gold. A man was seated behind a huge desk. He looked up as Catherine entered, and rose. He searched for a sign of recognition on her face, but there was none.
“Welcome. I am Constantin Demiris. What is your name?” He made the question sound casual. Did she remember her name?
“Catherine Alexander.”
He showed no reaction. “Welcome, Catherine Alexander. Please sit down.” He took a seat opposite her, on a black leather couch. She was even lovelier close up. She’s magnificent, Demiris thought. Even dressed in that black habit. It’s a shame to destroy anything that beautiful. At least she will die happy.
“It’s … it’s very kind of you to see me,” Catherine said. “I don’t understand why you …”
He smiled genially. “It’s really quite simple. From time to time I help out Sister Theresa. The convent has very little money, and I do what I can. When she wrote me about you and asked if I could be helpful, I told her that I would be happy to try.”
“That’s very …” She stopped, not knowing how to continue. “Did Sister Theresa tell you that I … that I’ve lost my memory?”
“Yes, she did mention something about that.” He paused and asked off-handedly, “How much do you remember?”
“I know my name, but I don’t know where I came from, or who I really am.” She added, hopefully, “Perhaps I can find someone here in Athens who knows me.”
Constantin Demiris felt a sudden frisson of alarm. That was the last thing in the world he wanted. “That’s possible, of course,” he said carefully. “Why don’t we discuss it in the morning? Unfortunately I have to attend a meeting now. I’ve arranged to have a suite prepared for you here. I think you’ll be comfortable.”
“I … I really don’t know how to thank you.”
He waved a hand. “That isn’t necessary. You will be well taken care of here. Just make yourself at home.”
“Thank you, Mr.—”
“My friends call me Costa.”
A housekeeper led Catherine into a fantastic bedroom suite, done in soft shades of white, furnished with an oversized bed with a silk canopy, white couches and armchairs, antique tables and lamps, and Impressionist paintings on the walls. Pale shutters of sea green kept the glaring sun at bay. Through the windows, Catherine could see the turquoise sea below in the distance.
The housekeeper said, “Mr. Demiris has arranged to have some clothes sent here for your approval. You are to select whatever you like.”
Catherine was conscious, for the first time, that she was still wearing the habit given her at the convent.
“Thank you.” She sank down in the soft bed, feeling as though she were in a dream. Who was this stranger, and why was he being so kind to her?
An hour later a van pulled up filled with clothes. A couturier was ushered into Catherine’s bedroom.
“I’m Madame Dimas. Let’s see what we have to work with. Would you get undressed, please?”
“I … I beg your pardon?”
“Will you get undressed? I can’t tell much about your figure under those clothes.”
How long had it been since she had been naked in front of another person?
Catherine began to take off her clothes, moving slowly, feeling self-conscious. When she stood nude in front of the woman, Madame Dimas looked her over with a practiced eye. She was impressed.
“You have a fine figure. I think we’re going to be able to do very well for you.”
Two female assistants walked in with boxes of dresses, underwear, blouses, skirts, shoes.
“Select whatever you like,” the couturièr said, “and we’ll try them on.”
“I… I can’t afford any of these,” Catherine protested. “I have no money.”
The couturièr laughed. “I don’t think money will be a problem. Mr. Demiris is taking care of it.”
But why?
The fabrics brought back tactile memories of clothes she must have once worn. There were silks and tweeds and cottons in an array of exquisite colors.
The three women were quick and efficient, and two hours later Catherine had half a dozen beautiful outfits. It was overwhelming. She sat there, not knowing what to do with herself.
I’m all dressed up, she thought, with no place to go. But there was some place to go—into the city. The key to whatever had happened to her was in Athens. She was convinced of it. She stood up. Come on, stranger. We’re going to try to find out who you are.
Catherine wandered out into the front hall, and a butler approached her. “May I help you, miss?”
“Yes. I … I would like to go into the city. Could you call a taxi for me?”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary, miss. We have limousines at your disposal. I will arrange a driver for you.”
Catherine hesitated. “Thank you.” Would Mr. Demiris be angry if she went into the city? He had not said not to.
A few minutes later she was seated in the back of a Daimler limousine, headed for downtown Athens.
Catherine was dazzled by the noisy, bustling city, and the poignant succession of ruins and monuments that appeared all around her.
The driver pointed ahead and said proudly, “That is the Parthenon, miss, on top of the Acropolis.”
Catherine stared up at the familiar white marble building. “Dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom,” she heard herself saying.
The driver smiled approvingly. “Are you a student of Greek history, miss?”
Tears of frustration blurred Catherine’s vision. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”
They were passing another ruin. “That is the theater of Herodes Atticus. As you can see, part of the walls are still standing. It once seated more than five thousand people.”
“Six thousand two hundred fifty-seven,” Catherine said softly.
Modern hotels and office buildings were everywhere amid the timeless ruins, an exotic mixture of the past and present. The limousine passed a large park in the center of the city, with sparkling, dancing fountains in the middle. Dozens of tables with green and orange poles lined the park, and the air above them was carpeted with blue awnings.
I’ve seen this before, Catherine thought, her hands growing cold. And I was happy.
There were outdoor cafés on almost every block, and on the corners men were selling freshly caught sponges. Everywhere, flowers were being sold by vendors, their booths a rage of violently colored blossoms.
The limousine had reached Syntagma Square.
As they passed a hotel on the corner, Catherine called out: “Stop, please!”
The driver pulled over to the curb. Catherine was finding it difficult to breathe. I recognize this hotel. I’ve stayed here.
When she spoke, her voice was shaky. “I’d like to get out here. I wonder if you could pick me up in—in two hours?”
“Of course, miss.” The chauffeur hurried to open the door for her, and Catherine stepped outside into the hot summer air. Her legs were trembling. “Are you all right, miss?” She had no answer. She felt as though she were on the edge of a precipice, about to fall into an unknown, terrifying abyss.
She moved through the crowds, marveling at the hordes of people hurrying through the streets, creating a roaring din of conversation. After the silence and solitude of the convent, everything seemed unreal. Catherine found herself moving toward the Plaka, the old section of Athens in the heart of the city, with its twisted alleys and crumbling, worn-down stairways that led to tiny houses, coffee shops, and whitewashed rambling structures. She found her way by some instinct she did not understand or try to control. She passed a taverna on top of a roof, overlooking the city, and stopped, staring. I’ve sat at that table. They handed me a menu in Greek. There were three of us.
What would you like to eat? they had asked.
Would you mind ordering for me? I’m afraid I might order the proprietor.
They had laughed. But who were ‘they'?
A waiter approached Catherine. “Boro na sas voithiso?”
“Ochi efharisto.”
Can I help you? No, thank you. How did I know that? Am I Greek?
Catherine hurriedly moved on, and it was as though someone were guiding her. She seemed to know exactly where to go.
Everything seemed familiar. And nothing. My God, she thought, I’m going crazy. I’m hallucinating. She passed a café that said Treflinkas. A memory was nagging at the corners of her mind. Something had happened to her here, something important. She could not remember what.
She walked through the busy, winding streets and turned left at Voukourestiou. It was filled with smart stores. I used to shop here. She started to cross the street, and a blue sedan raced around the corner, barely missing her.
She could recall a voice saying, The Greeks haven’t made the transition to automobiles. In their hearts they’re still driving donkeys. If you want insight into the Greeks, don’t read the guidebooks; read the old Greek tragedies. We’re filled with grand passions, deep joys, and great sorrows, and we haven’t learned how to cover them up with a civilized veneer.
Who had said that to her?
A man was hurrying down the street, walking toward her, staring at her. He slowed, a look of recognition on his face. He was tall and dark and Catherine was sure she had never seen him before. And yet …
“Hello.” He seemed very pleased to see her.
“Hello.” Catherine took a deep breath. “Do you know me?”
He was grinning. “Of course I know you.”
Catherine felt her heart leap. She was finally going to learn the truth about the past. But how do you say “Who am I?” to a stranger in a crowded street?
“Could … could we talk?” Catherine asked.
“I think we’d better.”
Catherine was on the edge of panic. The mystery of her identity was about to be solved. And yet she felt a terrible fear. What if I don’t want to know? What if I’ve done something dreadful?
The man was leading her toward a small open-air taverna. “I’m so glad I ran into you,” he said.
Catherine swallowed. “So am I.”
A waiter led them to a table.
“What would you like to drink?” the man asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
There were so many questions to ask. Where do I begin?
“You’re very beautiful,” the man said. “This is fate. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes.” She was almost trembling with excitement. She took a deep breath. “I—where did we meet?”
He grinned. “Is that important, koritsimon? Paris, or Rome, at the races, at a party.” He reached forward and pressed her hand. “You’re the prettiest one I’ve seen around here. How much do you charge?”
Catherine stared at him, not understanding for a moment, then shocked, she sprang to her feet.
“Hey! What’s the matter? I’ll pay you whatever …”
Catherine turned and fled, running down the street. She turned a corner and slowed down, her eyes filled with tears of humiliation.
Ahead was a small taverna with a sign in the window that read, MADAME PIRIS—FORTUNE TELLER. Catherine slowed, then stopped. I know Madame Piris. I’ve been here before. Her heart began to race. She sensed that here, through the darkened doorway, was the beginning of the end of the mystery. She opened the door and stepped inside. It took her several moments to get used to the cavernous darkness of the room. There was a familiar bar in the corner, and a dozen tables and chairs. A waiter walked up to her and addressed her in Greek.
“Kalimehra.”
“Kalimehra. Pou inehMadame Piris?”
“Madame Piris?”
The waiter gestured toward an empty table in the corner of the room, and Catherine walked over and sat down. Everything was exactly as she remembered it.
An incredibly old woman dressed in black, with a face desiccated into angles and planes, was moving toward the table.
“What can I … ?” She stopped, peering into Catherine’s face. Her eyes opened wide. “I knew you once but your face …” She gasped. “You’ve come back!”
“You know who I am?” Catherine asked eagerly.
The woman was staring, her eyes filled with horror. “No! You’re dead! Get out!”
Catherine moaned faintly and felt the hair on her scalp begin to rise. “Please—I just…”
“Go, Mrs. Douglas!”
“I have to know …”
The old woman made the sign of the cross, turned, and fled.
Catherine sat there for a moment, trembling, then rushed out into the street. The voice in her head followed her. Mrs. Douglas!
And it was as though a floodgate opened up. Dozens of brightly lighted scenes suddenly poured into her head, a brilliant series of kaleidoscopes out of control. I’m Mrs. Larry Douglas. She could see her husband’s handsome face. She had been madly in love with him, but something had gone wrong. Something…
The next image was of herself trying to commit suicide, and waking up in a hospital.
Catherine stood in the street, afraid her legs would not carry her, letting the pictures come tumbling into her mind.
She had been drinking a lot, because she had lost Larry. But then he had come back to her. They were in her apartment, and Larry was saying, “I know how badly I’ve behaved. I’d like to make it up to you, Cathy. I love you. I’ve never really loved anyone else. I want another chance. How would you like to go away on a second honeymoon? I know a wonderful little place we can go. It’s called Ioannina.”
And then the horror had begun.
The pictures that came into her mind now were terrifying.
She was on a mountaintop with Larry, lost in a swirling gray mist, and he was moving toward her, his arms outstretched, ready to push her off the edge. At that moment, some tourists arrived and saved her.
And then the caves.
“The hotel clerk told me about some caves near here. All the honeymooners go there.”
And they had gone to the caves, and Larry had taken her deep into the bowels of them, and left her there to die.
She put her hands over her ears as if to shut out the terrible thoughts that were rushing at her.
She had been rescued and taken back to the hotel, and a doctor had given her a sedative. But in the middle of the night she had awakened and heard Larry and his mistress in the kitchen, planning her murder, the wind whipping away their words.
—no one will ever—
—I told you I’d take care of—
—went wrong. There’s nothing they can—
—now, while she’s asleep.
And she remembered running away in that terrible storm—being pursued by them—getting into the rowboat, the wind lashing the boat into the middle of the stormy lake. The boat had started to sink, and she had lost consciousness.
Catherine sank onto a street bench, too exhausted to move. So her nightmares had been real. Her husband and his mistress had tried to kill her.
She thought again about the stranger who had come to visit her at the convent shortly after her rescue. He had handed her an exquisitely made golden bird, its wings poised for flight. “No one will harm you now. The wicked people are dead.” She could still not see his face clearly.
Catherine’s head began to throb.
Finally, she rose and slowly walked toward the street where she was to meet the driver who would take her back to Constantin Demiris, where she would be safe.
Chapter Four (#ulink_4a0c1d77-101b-534e-a5b4-068cbd22be73)
“Why did you let her leave the house?” Constantin Demiris demanded.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the butler replied. “You didn’t say anything about her not leaving, so …”
Demiris forced himself to appear calm. “It’s not important. She’ll probably be back soon.”
“Is there anything else, sir?”
“No.”
He watched the butler go. Demiris walked over to a window and stared out at the impeccably manicured garden. It was dangerous for Catherine Alexander to appear in the streets of Athens, where someone might recognize her. It’s too bad I can’t afford to let her live. But first—my vengeance. She’ll stay alive until I take my revenge. I’m going to enjoy myself with her. I’ll send her away from here, somewhere where no one will know her. London will be safe. We can keep an eye on her. I’ll give her a job at my offices there.
An hour later, when Catherine returned to the house, Constantin Demiris could sense instantly the change in her. It was as though some dark curtain had been lifted and Catherine had suddenly come alive. She was wearing an attractive white silk suit, with a white blouse—and Demiris was taken aback by how much her appearance had changed. Nostimi, he thought. Sexy.
“Mr. Demiris …”
“Costa.”
“I … I know who I am, and—and what happened.”
His face revealed nothing. “Really? Sit down, my dear, and tell me.”
Catherine was too excited to sit. She began to pace jerkily on the carpet, back and forth, the words tumbling out of her. “My husband and his—his mistress, Noelle, tried to kill me.” She stopped, looking at him anxiously. “Does that sound crazy? I—I don’t know. Maybe it is.”
“Go on, my dear,” he said soothingly.
“Some nuns from the convent saved me. My husband worked for you, didn’t he?” she blurted out.
Demiris hesitated, carefully weighing his answer. “Yes.” How much should he tell her? “He was one of my pilots. I felt a sense of responsibility toward you. That’s only …”
She faced him. “But you knew who I was. Why didn’t you tell me this morning?”
“I was afraid of the shock,” Demiris said smoothly. “I thought it better to let you discover things for yourself.”
“Do you know what happened to my husband and that—that woman? Where are they?”
Demiris looked into Catherine’s eyes. “They were executed.”
He watched the blood drain from her face. She made a small sound. She suddenly felt too weak to stand and sank into a chair.
“I don’t …”
“They were executed by the state, Catherine.”
“But … why?”
Careful. Danger. “Because they tried to murder you.”
Catherine frowned. “I don’t understand. Why would the state execute them? I’m alive …”
He broke in. “Catherine, Greek laws are very strict. And justice here is swift. They had a public trial. A number of witnesses testified that your husband and Noelle Page attempted to kill you. They were convicted, and sentenced to death.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Catherine sat there, dazed. “The trial …”
Constantin Demiris walked over to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “You must put the past out of your mind. They tried to do an evil thing to you, and they paid for it.” He struck a more buoyant tone. “I think you and I should discuss the future. Do you have any plans?”
She did not hear him. Larry, she thought. Larry’s handsome face, laughing. Larry’s arms, his voice …
“Catherine …”
She looked up. “I’m sorry?”
“Have you had any thoughts about your future?”
“No, I … I don’t know what I’m going to do. I suppose I could stay in Athens …”
“No,” Demiris said firmly. “That wouldn’t be a good idea. It would bring back too many unpleasant memories. I would suggest that you leave Greece.”
“But I have nowhere to go.”
“I’ve given it some thought,” Demiris told her. “I have offices in London. You once worked for a man named William Fraser in Washington. Do you remember that?”
“William … ?” And suddenly she did remember it. That had been one of the happiest times of her life.
“You were his administrative assistant, I believe.”
“Yes, I …”
“You could do the same job for me in London.”
She hesitated. “I don’t know. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but …”
“I understand. I know everything seems to be happening very quickly,” Demiris said sympathetically. “You need some time to think about all this. Why don’t you have a nice quiet dinner in your room, and in the morning we’ll discuss it further.”
Asking her to have dinner in her room was a last-minute inspiration. He could not afford to have his wife run into her.
“You’re very thoughtful,” Catherine said. “And very generous. The clothes are …”
He patted her hand and held it a fraction longer than necessary. “It’s my pleasure.”
She sat in her bedroom watching the blazing sun set over the blue Aegean in an explosion of color. There is no point in reliving the past. There is the future to think about. Thank God for Constantin Demiris. He was her lifeline. Without him, she would have had no one to turn to. And he had offered her a job in London. Am I going to take it? Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. “We’ve brought your dinner, miss.”
Long after Catherine had gone, Constantin Demiris sat in the library thinking about their conversation. Noelle. Only once in his life had Demiris permitted himself to lose control of his emotions. He had fallen deeply in love with Noelle Page, and she had become his mistress. He had never known a woman like her. She was knowledgeable about art, and music, and business, and she had become indispensable. Nothing about Noelle surprised him. Everything about Noelle surprised him. He was obsessed with her. She was the most beautiful, the most sensual woman Demiris had ever known. She had given up stardom to be at his side. Noelle had stirred emotions in him that he had never felt before. She was his lover, his confidante, his friend. Demiris had trusted her completely and she had betrayed him with Larry Douglas. It was a mistake Noelle had paid for with her life. Constantin Demiris had arranged with the authorities for her body to be buried on the grounds of the cemetery on Psara, his private island in the Aegean. Everyone had remarked on what a beautiful, sentimental gesture it was. In fact, Demiris had arranged for the burial plot to be there so that he could have the exquisite pleasure of walking over the bitch’s grave. At Demiris’s bedside in his own bedroom was a photograph of Noelle at her loveliest, looking up at him and smiling. Forever smiling, frozen in time.
Even now, more than a year later, Demiris was unable to stop thinking about her. She was an open wound that no doctor could ever heal.
Why, Noelle, why? I gave you everything. I loved you, you bitch. I loved you. I love you.
And then there was Larry Douglas. He had paid with his life. But that was not enough for Demiris. He had another vengeance in mind. A perfect one. He was going to take his pleasure with Douglas’s wife as Douglas had done with Noelle. Then he would send Catherine to join her husband.
“Costa …”
It was his wife’s voice.
Melina walked into the library.
Constantin Demiris was married to Melina Lambrou, an attractive woman from an old, aristocratic Greek family. She was tall and regal looking, with an innate dignity.
“Costa, who is the woman I saw in the hall?” Her voice was tense.
The question caught him off guard. “What? Oh. She’s a friend of a business associate,” Demiris said. “She’s going to work for me in London.”
“I caught a glimpse of her. She reminds me of someone.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” Melina hesitated. “She reminds me of the wife of the pilot who used to work for you. But that’s impossible, of course. They murdered her.”
“Yes,” Constantin Demiris agreed. “They murdered her.”
He watched Melina as she walked away. He would have to be careful. Melina was no fool. I never should have married her, Demiris thought. It was a bad mistake. …
Ten years earlier, the wedding of Melina Lambrou and Constantin Demiris had sent shock waves through business and social circles from Athens to the Riviera to Newport. What had made it so titillating was that only one month before the wedding the bride had been engaged to marry another man.
As a child, Melina Lambrou had dismayed her family by her willfulness. When she was ten, she decided she wanted to be a sailor. The family chauffeur found her at the harbor, trying to sneak aboard a ship, and brought her home in disgrace. At twelve, she tried to run away with a traveling circus.
By the time Melina was seventeen, she was resigned to her fate—she was beautiful, fabulously wealthy, and the daughter of Mihalis Lambrou. The newspapers loved to write about her. She was a fairy-tale figure whose playmates were princesses and princes, and through it all, by some miracle, Melina had managed to remain unspoiled. Melina had one brother, Spyros, who was ten years older than she, and they adored each other. Their parents had died in a boating accident when Melina was thirteen, and it was Spyros who had reared her.
Spyros was extremely protective of her—too much so, Melina thought. As Melina reached her late teens, Spyros became even more wary about Melina’s suitors, and he carefully examined each candidate for his sister’s hand. Not one of them proved to be good enough.
“You have to be careful,” he constantly counseled Melina. “You’re a target for every fortune hunter in the world. You’re young and rich and beautiful, and you bear a famous name.”
“Bravo, my dear brother. That will be of immense comfort to me when I’m eighty years old and die an old maid.”
“Don’t worry, Melina. The right man will come along.”
His name was Count Vassilis Manos and he was in his middle forties, a successful businessman from an old and distinguished Greek family. The count had fallen in love instantly with the beautiful young Melina. His proposal came only a few weeks after they met.
“He’s perfect for you,” Spyros said happily. “Manos has his feet on the ground, and he’s crazy about you.”
Melina was less enthusiastic. “He’s not exciting, Spyros. When we’re together, all he talks about is business, business, business. I wish he were more—more romantic.”
Her brother said firmly, “There’s more to marriage than romance. You want a husband who is solid and stable, someone who will devote himself to you.”
And finally Melina was persuaded to accept Count Manos’s proposal.
The count was thrilled. “You’ve made me the happiest man in the world,” he declared. “I’ve just formed a new company. I’m going to name it Melina International.”
She would have preferred a dozen roses. The wedding date was set, one thousand invitations were sent out, and elaborate plans were made.
It was then that Constantin Demiris entered Melina Lambrou’s life.
They met at one of the dozen or so engagement parties that were being given for the betrothed pair.
The hostess introduced them. “This is Melina Lambrou—Constantin Demiris.”
Demiris stared at her with his brooding black eyes. “How long will they let you stay?” he asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Surely you’ve been sent from the heavens to teach us mortals what beauty is.”
Melina laughed. “You’re very flattering, Mr. Demiris.”
He shook his head. “You’re beyond flattery. Nothing I could say would do you justice.”
At that moment Count Manos approached and interrupted the conversation.
That night, just before falling asleep, Melina thought about Demiris. She had heard about him, of course. He was wealthy, he was a widower, and he had the reputation of being a ruthless businessman and a compulsive womanizer. I’m glad I’m not involved with him, Melina thought.
The gods were laughing.
The morning after the party, Melina’s butler walked into the breakfast room. “A package has arrived for you, Miss Lambrou. It was delivered by Mr. Demiris’s chauffeur.”
“Bring it in, please.”
So Constantin Demiris thinks he’s going to impress me with his wealth. Well, he’s in for a big disappointment. Whatever he’s sent … whether it’s an expensive piece of jewelry, or some priceless antique … I’m going to send it right back to him.
The package was small and oblong, and beautifully wrapped. Curious, Melina opened it. The card read, simply: “I thought you might enjoy this. Constantin.”
It was a leather-bound copy of Toda Raba by Nikos Kazantzakis, her favorite author. How could he have known?
Melina wrote a polite thank-you note, and thought: That’s that.
The following morning another package arrived. This time it was a recording by Delius, her favorite composer. The note read: “You might enjoy listening to this while reading Toda Raba.”
From that day on there were gifts every day. Her favorite flowers, and perfume, and music, and books. Constantin Demiris had taken the trouble to find out what Melina’s tastes were, and she could not help but be flattered by his attention.
When Melina telephoned to thank Demiris, he said: “There’s nothing I could ever give you that would do you justice.”
How many women had he said that to before?
“Will you have lunch with me, Melina?”
She started to say no, and then thought: It can’t hurt to have lunch with the man. He’s been very thoughtful.
“Very well.”
When she mentioned to Count Manos that she was having lunch with Constantin Demiris, he objected.
“What’s the point, my dear? You have nothing in common with that terrible man. Why are you going to see him?”
“Vassilis, he’s been sending me little gifts every day. I’m going to tell him to stop.” And even as Melina said it, she thought: I could have told him that over the telephone.
Constantin Demiris had made reservations at the popular Floca restaurant on Panepistimiou Street and he was waiting for Melina when she arrived.
He rose. “You’re here. I was so afraid you might change your mind.”
“I always keep my word.”
He looked at her and said solemnly: “And I keep mine. I’m going to marry you.”
Melina shook her head, half amused, half annoyed. “Mr. Demiris, I’m engaged to marry someone else.”
“Manos?” He waved a hand in dismissal. “He’s not right for you.”
“Oh, really? And why is that?”
“I’ve checked on him. Insanity runs in his family, he’s a hemophiliac, he’s wanted by the police on a sex charge in Brussels, and he plays a dreadful game of tennis.”
Melina could not help laughing. “And you?”
“I don’t play tennis.”
“I see. And that’s why I should marry you?”
“No. You’ll marry me because I’m going to make you the happiest woman who ever lived.”
“Mr. Demiris …”
He covered her hand with his. “Costa.”
She withdrew her hand. “Mr. Demiris, I came here today to tell you that I want you to stop sending me gifts. I don’t intend to see you again.”
He studied her for a long moment. “I’m sure you are not a cruel person.”
“I hope not.”
He smiled. “Good. Then you won’t want to break my heart.”
“I doubt if your heart is that easily broken. You have quite a reputation.”
“Ah, that was before I met you. I’ve dreamed about you for a long time.”
Melina laughed.
“I’m serious. When I was a very young man, I used to read about the Lambrou family. You were very rich and I was very poor. I had nothing. We lived from hand to mouth. My father was a stevedore who worked on the docks of Piraeus. I had fourteen brothers and sisters, and we had to fight for everything we wanted.”
In spite of herself, she was touched. “But now you are rich.”
“Yes. Not as rich as I am going to be.”
“What made you rich?”
“Hunger. I was always hungry. I’m still hungry.”
She could read the truth in his eyes. “How did you … how did you get started?”
“Do you really want to know?”
And Melina found herself saying, “I really want to know.”
“When I was seventeen, I went to work for a small oil company in the Middle East. I was not doing very well. One night I had dinner with a young geologist who worked for a large oil company. I ordered a steak that night, and he ordered only soup. I asked him why he didn’t have a steak, and he said it was because he had no back teeth and he couldn’t afford to buy dentures. I gave him fifty dollars to buy new teeth. A month later he telephoned me in the middle of the night to tell me he had just discovered a new oil deposit. He hadn’t told his employer about it yet. In the morning, I started borrowing every cent I could, and by evening I had bought options on all the land around the new discovery. It turned out to be one of the biggest oil deposits in the world.”
Melina was hanging on his every word, fascinated.
“That was the beginning. I needed tankers to ship my oil in, so in time I acquired a fleet. Then a refinery. Then an airline.” He shrugged. “It went on from there.”
It was not until long after they were married that Melina learned that the story about the steak was pure fiction.
Melina Lambrou had had no intention of seeing Constantin Demiris again. But, by a series of carefully arranged coincidences, Demiris invariably managed to appear at the same party, or theater, or charity event, that Melina was attending. And each time, she felt his overpowering magnetism. Beside him, Vassilis Manos seemed—she hated to admit it, even to herself—boring.
Melina Lambrou was fond of the Flemish painters, and when Bruegel’s “Hunters in the Snow” came on the market, before she could purchase it, Constantin Demiris sent it to her as a gift.
Melina was fascinated by his uncanny knowledge of her tastes. “I can’t accept such an expensive gift from you,” she protested.
“Ah, but it’s not a gift. You must pay for it. Dinner with me tonight.”
And she finally agreed. The man was irresistible.
A week later Melina broke off her engagement to Count Manos.
When Melina told her brother the news he was stunned.
“Why, in heaven’s name?” Spyros asked. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to marry Constantin Demiris.”
He was aghast. “You must be crazy. You can’t marry Demiris. He’s a monster. He’ll destroy you. If…”
“You’re wrong about him, Spyros. He’s wonderful. And we’re in love. It’s …”
“You’re in love,” he snapped. “I don’t know what he’s after, but it has nothing to do with love. Do you know what his reputation is with women? He …”
“That’s all in the past, Spyros. I’m going to be his wife.”
And there was nothing he could do to talk his sister out of the wedding.
A month later Melina Lambrou and Constantin Demiris were married.
In the beginning it seemed to be a perfect marriage. Constantin was amusing and attentive. He was an exciting and passionate lover, and he constantly surprised Melina with lavish gifts and trips to exotic places.
On the first night of their honeymoon, he said, “My first wife was never able to give me a child. Now we’ll have many sons.”
“No daughters?” Melina teased.
“If you wish. But a son first.”
The day Melina learned she was pregnant, Constantin was ecstatic.
“He will take over my empire,” he declared happily.
In her third month, Melina miscarried. Constantin Demiris was out of the country when it happened. When he returned and heard the news he reacted like a madman.
“What did you do?” he screamed. “How could it happen?”
“Costa, I …”
“You were careless!”
“No, I swear ”
He took a deep breath. “All right. What’s done is done. We’ll have another son.”
“I … I can’t.” She could not meet his eyes.
“What are you saying?”
“They had to perform an operation. I can’t have another child.”
He stood there, frozen, then turned and stalked out without a word.
From that moment on, Melina’s life became a hell. Constantin Demiris carried on as though his wife had deliberately killed his son. He ignored her, and began to see other women.
Melina could have borne that, but what made the humiliation so painful was the pleasure he took in publicly flaunting his liaisons. He openly had affairs with movie stars, opera singers, and the wives of some of his friends. He took his lovers to Psara, and on cruises on his yacht, and to public functions. The press gleefully chronicled Constantin Demiris’s romantic adventures.
They were at a dinner party at the house of a prominent banker.
“You and Melina must come,” the banker had said. “I have a new Oriental chef who makes the best Chinese food in the world.”
The guest list was prestigious. At the dinner table was a fascinating collection of artists, politicians, and industrialists. The food was indeed wonderful. The chef had prepared shark fin soup, shrimp rolls, mu shu pork, Peking duck, spareribs, Canton noodles, and a dozen other dishes.
Melina was seated near the host at one end of the table, her husband next to the hostess at the other end. To Demiris’s right was a pretty, young film star. Demiris was concentrating on her, ignoring everyone else at the table. Melina could hear snatches of his conversation.
“When you finish your picture, you must come on my yacht. It will be a lovely vacation for you. We’ll cruise along the Dalmatian coast …”
Melina tried not to listen, but it was impossible. Demiris made no effort to keep his voice down. “You’ve never been to Psara, have you? It’s a lovely little island, completely isolated. You’ll enjoy it.” Melina wanted to crawl under the table. But the worst was yet to come.
They had just finished the sparerib course, and the butlers were bringing silver finger bowls.
As a finger bowl was placed in front of the young star, Demiris said, “You won’t need that.” And, grinning, he lifted her hands in his and began slowly to lick the sauce from her fingers, one by one. The other guests averted their eyes.
Melina rose to her feet and turned to her host. “If you’ll excuse me, I—I have a headache.”
The guests watched as she fled from the room. Demiris did not come home that night, or the next.
When Spyros heard about the incident, he was livid. “Just give me the word,” Melina’s brother fumed, “and I’ll kill the son of a bitch.”
“He can’t help it,” Melina defended him. “It’s his nature.”
“His nature? He’s an animal! He should be put away. Why don’t you divorce him?”
It was a question Melina Demiris had asked herself often in the still of the long, lonely nights she spent by herself. And it always came down to the same answer: I love him.
At five-thirty in the morning, Catherine was awakened by an apologetic maid.
“Good morning, miss …”
Catherine opened her eyes and looked around in confusion. Instead of her tiny cell at the convent, she was in a beautiful bedroom in … Her memory came flooding back. The trip into Athens. … You’re Catherine Douglas. … They were executed by the state …
“Miss …”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Demiris asked if you would join him for breakfast on the terrace.”
Catherine stared up at her sleepily. She had been awake until four o’clock, her mind in a turmoil.
“Thank you. Tell Mr. Demiris I’ll be right there.”
Twenty minutes later a butler escorted Catherine to an enormous terrace facing the sea. There was a low stone wall that overlooked the gardens twenty feet below. Constantin Demiris was seated at a table, waiting. He studied Catherine as she walked toward him. There was an exciting innocence about her. He was going to take it, possess it, make it his. He imagined her naked in his bed, helping him punish Noelle and Larry again. Demiris rose.
“Good morning. Forgive me for awakening you so early, but I must leave for my office in a few minutes, and I wanted the opportunity for us to have a little chat first.”
“Yes, of course,” Catherine said.
She sat down at the large marble table opposite him, facing the sea. The sun was just rising, showering the sea with a thousand sparkles.
“What would you like for breakfast?”
She shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”
“Some coffee perhaps?”
“Thank you.”
The butler was pouring hot coffee into a Belleek cup.
“Well, Catherine,” Demiris began. “Have you thought about our conversation?”
Catherine had thought of nothing else all night. There was nothing left for her in Athens, and she had nowhere else to go. I won’t go back to the convent, she vowed. The invitation to work for Constantin Demiris in London sounded intriguing. In fact, Catherine admitted to herself, it sounds exciting. It could be the beginning of a new life.
“Yes,” Catherine said, “I have.”
“And?”
“I—I think I would like to try it.”
Constantin Demiris managed to conceal his relief. “I’m delighted. Have you ever been to London?”
“No. That is—I don’t think so.” Why don’t I know for sure? There were still so many frightening gaps in her memory. How many more surprises am I going to get?
“It’s one of the few civilized cities left in the world. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it very much.”
Catherine hesitated. “Mr. Demiris, why are you going to all this trouble for me?”
“Let’s just say it’s because I feel a sense of responsibility.” He paused. “I introduced your husband to Noelle Page.”
“Ah,” Catherine said slowly. Noelle Page. The name sent a small shiver through her. The two of them had died for each other. Larry must have loved her so much.
Catherine forced herself to ask a question that had been tormenting her all night long. “How … how were they executed?”
There was a small pause. “They were shot by a firing squad.”
“Oh.” She could feel the bullets tearing into Larry’s flesh, ripping apart the body of the man she had once loved so much. She was sorry she had asked.
“Let me give you some advice. Don’t think about the past. It can only be hurtful. You must put all that behind you.”
Catherine said slowly, “You’re right. I’ll try.”
“Good. I happen to have a plane flying to London this morning, Catherine. Can you be ready to leave in a little while?”
Catherine thought of all the trips she had taken with Larry, the excited preparations, the packing, the anticipation.
This time, there would be no one to go with, little to pack, and nothing to prepare for. “Yes. I can be ready.”
“Excellent. By the way,” Demiris said casually, “now that your memory has returned, perhaps there’s someone you’d like to get in touch with, someone from your past whom you would like to let know that you’re all right.”
The name that instantly sprang to her mind was William Fraser. He was the only one in the world who remained from her past. But she knew she was not ready to face him yet. When I get settled, Catherine thought. When I start working again, I’ll get in touch with him.
Constantin Demiris was watching her, waiting for her answer.
“No,” Catherine said finally. “There’s no one.”
She had no idea that she had just saved William Fraser’s life.
“I’ll arrange a passport for you.” He handed her an envelope. “This is an advance on your salary. You won’t have to worry about a place to live. The company has a flat in London. You’ll stay there.”
It was overwhelming. “You’re much too generous.”
He took her hand in his. “You’ll find that I’m …” He changed what he was going to say. Handle her carefully, he thought. Slowly. You don’t want to scare her away. “… that I can be a very good friend.”
“You are a very good friend.”
Demiris smiled. Wait.
Two hours later, Constantin Demiris helped Catherine into the back seat of the Rolls-Royce that was to take her to the airport.
“Enjoy London,” he said. “I’ll be in touch with you.”
Five minutes after the car departed, Demiris was on the telephone to London. “She’s on her way.”
Chapter Five (#ulink_010499b4-39a3-5c28-8fea-e71c4a0b9e84)
The plane was scheduled to leave from Hellenikon Airport at 9:00 a.m. It was a Hawker Siddeley, and, to Catherine’s surprise, she was the only passenger. The pilot, a pleasant-faced middle-aged Greek named Pantelis, saw to it that Catherine was comfortably seated and buckled in.
“We’ll be taking off in just a few minutes,” he informed her.
“Thank you.”
Catherine watched him walk into the cockpit to join the co-pilot, and her heart suddenly began to beat faster. This is the plane that Larry flew. Had Noelle Page sat in the seat I am now sitting in? Catherine suddenly felt as though she were going to faint; the walls began to close in on her. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath. That’s all over, she thought. Demiris is right. That’s the past and nothing can change it.
She heard the roar of the engines, and opened her eyes. The plane was lifting off, heading northwest toward London. How many times had Larry made this flight? Larry. She was shaken by the mixture of emotions that his name brought. And the memories. The wonderful, terrible memories …
It was the summer of 1940, the year before America got into the war. She had been fresh out of Northwestern University, and had gone from Chicago to Washington, D.C., for her first job.
Her roommate had said: “Hey, I heard about a job opening that might interest you. One of the girls at the party said she’s quitting to go back to Texas. She works for Bill Fraser. He’s in charge of public relations for the State Department. I just heard about it last night, so if you get over there now, you should beat all the other girls to it.”
Catherine had raced over, only to find Fraser’s reception office already packed with dozens of applicants for the job. I haven’t a chance, Catherine thought. The door to the inner office opened and William Fraser emerged. He was a tall, attractive man, with curly blond hair graying at the temples, bright blue eyes, and a strong, rather forbidding jawline.
He said to the receptionist, “I need a copy of Life. The issue that came out three or four weeks ago. It has a picture of Stalin on the cover.”
“I’ll order it, Mr. Fraser,” the receptionist said.
“Sally, I have Senator Borah on the line. I want to read him a paragraph from that issue. You have two minutes to find a copy for me.” He went into his office and closed the door.
The applicants looked at one another and shrugged.
Catherine stood there, thinking hard. She turned and pushed her way out of the office. She heard one of the women say, “Good. That’s one down.”
Three minutes later, Catherine returned to the office with the old copy of Life with a picture of Stalin on the cover. She handed it to the receptionist. Five minutes later Catherine found herself seated in William Fraser’s office.
“Sally tells me that you came up with the Life magazine.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I assume you didn’t just happen to have a three-week-old issue in your purse.”
“No, sir.”
“How did you find it so quickly?”
“I went down to the barber shop. Barber shops and dentists’ offices always have old issues lying around.”
“Are you that bright about everything?”
“No, sir.”
“We’ll find out,” William Fraser said. She was hired.
Catherine enjoyed the excitement of working for Fraser. He was a bachelor, wealthy and social, and he seemed to know everyone in Washington. Time magazine had called him “The most eligible bachelor of the year.”
Six months after Catherine started to work for William Fraser, they fell in love.
In his bedroom, Catherine said, “I have to tell you something. I’m a virgin.”
Fraser shook his head in wonder. “That’s incredible. How did I wind up with the only virgin in the city of Washington?”
One day William Fraser said to Catherine, “They’ve asked our office to supervise an Army Air Corps recruiting film they’re shooting at MGM studios in Hollywood. I’d like you to handle the picture while I’m in London.”
“Me? Bill, I can’t even load a Brownie. What do I know about making a training film?”
Fraser grinned. “About as much as anyone else. You don’t have to worry. They have a director. His name is Allan Benjamin. The army plans to use actors in the film.”
“Why?”
“I guess they feel that soldiers won’t be convincing enough to play soldiers.”
“That sounds like the army.”
And Catherine had flown to Hollywood to supervise the training film.
The soundstage was filled with extras, most of them in ill-fitting army uniforms.
“Excuse me,” Catherine said to a man passing by. “Is Mr. Allan Benjamin here?”
“The little corporal?” He pointed. “Over there.”
Catherine turned and saw a slight, frail-looking man in uniform with corporal’s stripes. He was screaming at a man wearing a general’s stars.
“Fuck what the casting director said. I’m up to my ass in generals. I need non-coms.” He raised his hands in despair. “Everybody wants to be a chief, nobody wants to be an Indian.”
“Excuse me,” Catherine said. “I’m Catherine Alexander.”
“Thank God!” the little man said. “You take over. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I had a thirty-five-hundred-dollar-a-year job in Dearborn editing a furniture trade magazine, and I was drafted into the Signal Corps and sent to write training films. What do I know about producing or directing? This is all yours.” He turned and hurried toward the exit, leaving Catherine standing there.
A lean, gray-haired man in a sweater moved toward her, an amused smile on his face. “Need any help?”
“I need a miracle,” Catherine said. “I’m in charge of this, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.”
He grinned at her. “Welcome to Hollywood. I’m Tom O’Brien, the assistant director.”
“Do you think you could direct this?”
She saw the corner of his lips twist. “I could try. I’ve done six pictures with Willie Wyler. The situation isn’t as bad as it looks. All it needs is a little organization. The script’s written, and the set’s ready.”
Catherine looked around the soundstage. “Some of these uniforms look terrible. Let’s see if we can’t do better.”
O’Brien nodded approvingly. “Right.”
Catherine and O’Brien walked over to the group of extras. The din of conversation on the enormous stage was deafening.
“Let’s hold it down, boys,” O’Brien yelled. “This is Miss Alexander. She’s going to be in charge here.”
Catherine said, “Let’s line up, so we can take a good look at you, please.”
O’Brien formed the men into a ragged line. Catherine heard laughter and voices nearby and turned in annoyance. One of the men in uniform stood in a corner, paying no attention, talking to some girls who were hanging on his every word and giggling. The man’s manner irritated Catherine.
“Excuse me. Would you mind joining the rest of us?”
He turned and asked, lazily, “Are you talking to me?”
“Yes. We’d like to go to work.”
He was extraordinarily handsome, tall and wiry, with blue-black hair and stormy dark eyes. His uniform fitted perfectly. On his shoulders were the bars of a captain, and across his breast he had pinned on a splash of brightly colored ribbons. Catherine stared at them. “Those medals … ?”
“Are they impressive enough, boss?” His voice was deep and filled with insolent amusement.
“Take them off.”
“Why? I thought I’d give this film a little color.”
“There’s one little thing you forgot. America’s not at war yet. You would have had to have won those at a carnival.”
“You’re right,” he admitted sheepishly. “I didn’t think of that. I’ll take some of them off.”
“Take them all off,” Catherine snapped.
After the morning’s shooting, while Catherine was having lunch at the commissary, he walked up to her table. “I wanted to ask you how I did this morning? Was I convincing?”
His manner infuriated her. “You enjoy wearing that uniform and strutting around the girls, but have you thought about enlisting?”
He looked shocked. “And get shot at? That’s for suckers.”
Catherine was ready to explode. “I think you’re contemptible.”
“Why?”
“If you don’t know why, I could never explain it to you.”
“Why don’t you try? At dinner tonight. Your place. Do you cook?”
“Don’t bother coming back to the set,” Catherine snapped. “I’ll tell Mr. O’Brien to send you your check for this morning’s work. What’s your name?”
“Douglas. Larry Douglas.”
The experience with the arrogant young actor rankled Catherine, and she was determined to put it out of her mind. For some reason, she found it difficult to forget him.
When Catherine returned to Washington, William Fraser said, “I missed you. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about you. Do you love me?”
“Very much, Bill.”
“I love you too. Why don’t we go out tonight and celebrate?”
Catherine knew that that was the night he was going to propose.
They went to the exclusive Jefferson Club. In the middle of dinner, Larry Douglas walked in, still wearing his Army Air Corps uniform with all the medals. Catherine watched unbelievingly as he walked over to their table and greeted not her but Fraser.
Bill Fraser rose. “Cathy, this is Captain Lawrence Douglas. Larry, this is Miss Alexander—Catherine. Larry’s been flying with the RAF. He was the leader of the American squadron over there. They talked him into heading up a fighter base in Virginia to get some of our boys ready for combat.”
Like the rerun of an old movie, Catherine remembered how she had ordered him to take off his bars and his medals, and how he had cheerfully obliged. She had been smug, overbearing—and she had called him a coward! She wanted to crawl under the table.
The next day, Larry Douglas telephoned Catherine at her office. She refused to take his calls. When she finished work he was outside, waiting for her. He had taken off his medals and ribbons and was wearing the bars of a second lieutenant.
He smiled and walked up to her. “Is this better?”
Catherine stared at him. “Isn’t—isn’t wearing the wrong insignia against regulations?”
“I don’t know. I thought you were in charge of all that.”
She looked into his eyes and knew that she was lost. There was a magnetic force about him that was irresistible.
“What do you want from me?”
“Everything. I want you.”
They had gone to his apartment and made love. And it was an exquisite joy that Catherine had never dreamed possible, a fantastic coming together that rocked the room and the universe—until there was an explosion that became a delirious ecstasy, an unbelievable shattering journey, an arriving and a departing, an ending and a beginning. And she had lain there, spent and numb, holding him tightly, never wanting to let him go, never wanting this feeling to stop.
They were married five hours later in Maryland.
Now, seated in the plane, on her way to London to begin a new life, Catherine thought: We were so happy. Where did it all go wrong? The romantic movies and the love songs tricked us all into believing in happy endings and knights in shining armor and love that never, never died. We really believed that James Stewart and Donna Reed had A Wonderful Life, and we knew that Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert would be together forever after It Happened One Night, and we shed tears when Frederick March returned to Myrna Loy for The Best Years of Our Lives, and we were sure that Joan Fontaine found happiness in the arms of Laurence Olivier in Rebecca. And they were lies. All lies. And the songs. I’ll Be Loving You, Always. How do men figure always? With an egg timer? How Deep Is the Ocean? What did Irving Berlin have in mind? One foot? Two feet? And … Forever and a Day. I’m leaving. I want a divorce. Some Enchanted Evening. We’re going to climb Mount Tzoumerka. … You and the Night and the Music. The hotel manager told me about some caves near here. … (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons. No one will ever … now, while she’s asleep. Be My Love. And we listened to the songs and we watched the movies and really thought that was what life was going to be like. I believed in my husband so much. Can I ever believe in anyone again? What did I do to make him want to murder me?
“Miss Alexander …”
Catherine looked up, startled, unfocused.
The pilot was standing over her. “We’ve landed. Welcome to London.”
There was a limousine waiting for Catherine at the airport. The chauffeur said, “I’ll arrange for your luggage, Miss Alexander. My name is Alfred. Would you like to go directly to your flat?”
My flat. “Yes, that will be fine.”
Catherine sank back in her seat. Unbelievable. Constantin Demiris had arranged a private plane for her, and a place to live. He was either the most generous man in the world, or … She simply could not think of any alternative. No. He’s the most generous man in the world. I’ll have to find a suitable way to show my appreciation.
The flat, on Elizabeth Street off Eaton Square, was utterly luxurious. It consisted of a large entrance hall, a beautifully furnished drawing room with a crystal chandelier, a paneled library, a kitchen stocked with food, three attractively furnished bedrooms, and servants’ quarters.
Catherine was greeted at the door by a woman in her forties wearing a black dress. “Good afternoon, Miss Alexander. I am Anna. I am your housekeeper.”
Of course. My housekeeper. Catherine was beginning to take it all in stride. “How do you do?”
The chauffeur brought Catherine’s suitcases in and placed them in her bedroom. “The limousine is at your disposal,” he told her. “Just tell Anna when you’re ready to go to the office, and I will pick you up.”
The limousine is at my disposal. Naturally.“Thank you.”
Anna said, “I’ll unpack your bags. If there’s anything else you need, just let me know.”
“I can’t think of a thing,” Catherine said honestly.
Catherine wandered around the flat until Anna had finished unpacking. She went into the bedroom and looked at the beautiful new dresses that Demiris had bought her, and thought: All this is like a wonderful dream. There was a feeling of total unreality about it. Forty-eight hours ago, she had been watering rose bushes at the convent. Now she was living the life of a duchess. She wondered what the job would be like. I’ll work hard. I don’t want to let him down. He’s been so wonderful. She felt suddenly tired. She lay down on the soft, comfortable bed. I’ll just rest a minute, she thought. She closed her eyes.
She was drowning, and screaming for help. And Larry was swimming toward her, and when he reached her he pushed her under water. And she was in a dark cave, and bats were coming at her, tearing at her hair, beating their clammy wings against her face. Catherine awakened with a shuddering start and sat up in bed, trembling.
She took deep breaths to steady herself. That’s enough, she thought. It’s over. That was yesterday. This is today. No one’s going to hurt you. No one. Not anymore.
Outside Catherine’s bedroom, Anna, the housekeeper, had been listening to the screams. She waited a moment, and when there was silence she walked down the hall and picked up the telephone to report to Constantin Demiris.
The Hellenic Trade Corporation was located at 217 Bond Street, off Piccadilly, in an old government building that had been converted years earlier to an office building. The exterior of the building was a masterpiece of architecture, elegant and graceful.
When Catherine arrived, the office staff was waiting for her. There were half a dozen people near the door to greet her.
“Welcome, Miss Alexander. I’m Evelyn Kaye. This is Carl … Tucker … Matthew … Jennie …”
The names and faces became a blur.
“How do you do?”
“Your office is ready for you. I’ll show you the way.”
“Thank you.”
The reception room was tastefully furnished, with a large Chesterfield sofa, flanked by two Chippendale chairs and a tapestry. They walked down a long carpeted corridor and passed a conference room with heavy pine paneling and leather chairs along a highly polished table.
Catherine was ushered into an attractive office with worn, comfortable furniture and a leather couch.
“It’s all yours.”
“It’s lovely,” she murmured.
There were fresh flowers on the desk.
“From Mr. Demiris.”
He’s so thoughtful.
Evelyn Kaye, the woman who had shown her into the office, was a stocky middle-aged woman with a pleasant face and a comfortable manner. “It will take you a few days to get used to the place, but the operation is really quite simple. We’re one of the nerve centers of the Demiris empire. We coordinate the reports from the overseas divisions, and send them on to headquarters in Athens. I’m the office manager. You’ll be my assistant.”
“Oh.” So I’m the assistant to the office manager. Catherine had no idea what was expected of her. She had been thrown into a fantasy world. Private planes, limousines, a beautiful flat with servants …
“Wim Vandeen is our resident mathematical genius. He computes all the statements and puts them into a master financial analysis chart. His mind works faster than most calculating machines. Come along to his office and meet him.”
They walked down the corridor to an office at the end of the hall. Evelyn opened the door without knocking.
“Wim, this is my new assistant.”
Catherine stepped into the office and stood there, riveted. Wim Vandeen appeared to be in his early thirties, a thin man with a slack-jawed mouth and a dull, vacant expression. He was staring out the window.
“Wim. Wim! This is Catherine Alexander.”
He turned around. “Catherine the First’s real name was Marta Skowronka she was a servant girl born in 1684 who was captured by the Russians she married Peter I and was empress of Russia from 1725 to 1727; Catherine the Great was the daughter of a German prince she was born in 1729 and she married Peter, who became Emperor Peter III in 1762, and she succeeded to his throne that same year after she had him murdered. Under her reign there were three divisions of Poland and two wars against Turkey …” The information poured out like a fountain, in a monotone.
Catherine was listening, stunned. “That’s … that’s very interesting,” she managed.
Wim Vandeen looked away.
Evelyn said, “Wim is shy when he meets people.”
Shy? Catherine thought. The man is weird. And he’s a genius? What kind of job is this going to be?
In Athens, in his offices on Aghiou Geronda Street, Constantin Demiris was listening to a telephone report from Alfred in London.
“I drove Miss Alexander directly from the airport to the flat, Mr. Demiris. I asked her if she wished me to take her anywhere else, as you suggested, and she said no.”
“She’s had no outside contacts at all?”
“No, sir. Not unless she made some telephone calls from the flat, sir.”
Constantin Demiris was not worried about that. Anna, the housekeeper, would report to him. He replaced the receiver, satisfied. She presented no immediate danger to him and he would see that she was watched. She was alone in the world. She had no one to turn to except her benefactor, Constantin Demiris. I must make arrangements to go to London soon, Demiris thought happily. Very soon.
Catherine Alexander found her new job interesting. Daily reports came in from Constantin Demiris’s far-flung empire. There were bills of lading from a steel mill in Indiana, audits from an automobile factory in Italy, invoices from a newspaper chain in Australia, a gold mine, an insurance company. Catherine collated the re-ports and saw to it that the information went directly to Wim Vandeen. Wim glanced at the reports once, put them through the incredible computer that was his brain, and almost instantly calculated the percentages of profit or loss to the company.
Catherine enjoyed getting to know her new colleagues, and she was awed by the beauty of the old building she worked in.
She mentioned it to Evelyn Kaye once in front of Wim and Wim said, “This was a government custom house designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1721. After the great fire of London, Christopher Wren redesigned fifty churches, including St. Paul’s, St. Michael’s, and St. Bride’s. He designed the Royal Exchange and Buckingham House. He died in 1723 and is buried in St. Paul’s. This house was converted to an office building in 1907, and in the Second World War during the Blitz, the government declared it an official air-raid shelter.”
The air-raid shelter was a large bomb-proof room located through a heavy iron door adjoining the basement. Catherine looked into the heavily fortified room, and thought about the brave British men and women and children who had found shelter there during the terrible bombing by Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
The basement itself was huge, running the entire length of the building. It had a large boiler for heating the building, and was filled with electronic and telephone equipment. The boiler was a problem. Several times Catherine had escorted a repairman down to the basement to take a look at it. Each one would tinker with it, pronounce it cured of whatever had ailed it, and leave.
“It looks so dangerous,” Catherine said. “Is there any chance that it might explode?”
“Bless your heart, miss, of course not. See this safety valve here? Well, if the boiler should ever get too hot, the safety valve releases all the excess steam, and Bob’s your uncle. No problem.”
After the work day was over, there was London. London … a cornucopia of wonderful theater, ballet, and music concerts. There were interesting old bookstores like Hatchard’s and Foyle’s—and dozens of museums, little antique shops, and restaurants. Catherine visited the lithograph shops in Cecil Court and shopped at Harrods, and Fortnum and Mason, and Marks and Spencer, and had Sunday tea at the Savoy.
From time to time, unbidden thoughts came into Catherine’s mind. There were so many things to remind her of Larry. A voice … a phrase … a cologne … a song. No. The past is finished. The future is what’s important. And each day she became stronger.
Catherine and Evelyn Kaye became friends and occasionally went out together. One Sunday they visited the open-air art exhibition on the Thames embankment. There were dozens of artists there, young and old, displaying their paintings, and they all had one thing in common: They were failures who had been unable to have their works exhibited in any gallery. The paintings were terrible. Catherine bought one out of sympathy.
“Where are you going to put it?” Evelyn asked.
“In the boiler room,” Catherine said.
As they walked along the London streets, they came across the pavement artists, men who used colored chalks to paint on the stone of the pavement. Some of their work was amazing. Passers by would stop to admire them and then toss a few coins to the artists. One afternoon on her way back from lunch, Catherine stopped to watch an elderly man work on a beautiful landscape in chalk. As he was finishing it, it began to rain, and the old man stood there watching his work being washed away. That’s a lot like my past life, Catherine thought.
Evelyn took Catherine to Shepherd Market. “This is an interesting area,” Evelyn promised.
It was certainly colorful. There was a three-hundred-year-old restaurant called Tiddy Dols, a magazine stand, a market, a beauty parlor, a bakery, antique shops, and several two-and three-story residences.
The name plates on the mailboxes were odd. One read “Helen,” and below it “French lessons.” Another read “Rosie,” and below that “Greek taught here.”
“Is this an educational area?” Catherine asked.
Evelyn laughed aloud. “In a way I guess it is. Only the kind of education these girls give can’t be taught in school.”
Evelyn laughed even louder when Catherine blushed.
Catherine was alone most of the time, but she kept herself too busy to be lonely. She plunged into her days as though trying to make up for the precious moments of her life that had been stolen from her. She refused to worry about the past or the future. She visited Windsor Castle, and Canterbury with its beautiful cathedral, and Hampton Court. On weekends, she went into the country and stayed at quaint little inns, and took long walks through the countryside.
I’m alive,she thought.No one is born happy. Everyone has to make his own happiness. I’m a survivor. I’m young and I’m healthy and wonderful things are going to happen.
On Monday she would go back to work. Back to Evelyn and the girls and Wim Vandeen.
Wim Vandeen was an enigma.
Catherine had never met anyone like him. There were twenty employees in the office, and without even bothering to use a calculator, Wim Vandeen remembered every employee’s salary, national insurance number, and deductions. Although all of this was on file, he kept all the company records in his head. He knew the monthly cash flow from each division and how it compared with the previous months, going back five years, when he had started with the company.
Wim Vandeen remembered everything he had ever seen or heard or read. The range of his knowledge was incredible. The simplest questions on any subject would trigger a stream of information, yet he was anti-social.
Catherine discussed him with Evelyn. “I don’t understand Wim at all.”
“Wim is an eccentric,” Evelyn said. “You just have to take him as he is. All he’s interested in is numbers. I don’t think he cares about people.”
“Does he have friends?”
“No.”
“Does he ever date? I mean—go out with girls?”
“No.”
It seemed to Catherine that Wim was isolated and lonely, and she felt a kinship with him.
Wim’s range of knowledge amazed Catherine. One morning, she developed an ear ache.
Wim said gruffly, “This weather’s not going to help it any. You’d better go see an ear doctor.”
“Thanks, Wim. I …”
“The parts of the ear are the auricle, auditory meatus, tympanic membrane, the chain of ossicles—hammer, anvil, and stirrup—tympanic cavity, the semicircular duct, oval window, and eustachian tube, auditory nerve, and the cochlear duct.” And he walked away.
On another day, Catherine and Evelyn took Wim to lunch at the Ram’s Head, a local pub. In the back room, customers were throwing darts.
“Are you interested in sports, Wim?” Catherine asked. “Have you ever seen a baseball game?”
“Baseball,” Wim said. “A baseball is nine and a quarter inches in circumference. It’s made of yarn wound on a hard rubber cone and covered with white leather. The bat is usually made of ash, not more than two and three quarter inches in the greatest diameter, and not more than forty-two inches in length.”
He knows all the statistics,Catherine thought,but has he ever felt the excitement of actually doing it?
“Have you ever played any sports? Basketball, for instance?”
“Basketball is played on a wooden or concrete floor. The ball has a spherical leather cover thirty-one inches in circumference, inflated by a rubber bladder to thirteen pounds of pressure. It weighs twenty to twenty-two ounces. Basketball was invented by James Naismith in 1891.”
Catherine had her answer.
Sometimes Wim could be an embarrassment in public. One Sunday, Catherine and Evelyn took Wim to Maidenhead, on the Thames. They stopped at the Compleat Angler for lunch. The waiter came up to their table. “We have fresh clams today.”
Catherine turned to Wim. “Do you like clams?”
Wim said, “There are long clams, quahog, or round clams, razor clams, surf clams, single shells, and blood clams.”
The waiter was staring at him. “Would you care to order some, sir?”
“I don’t like clams,” Wim snapped.
Catherine liked the people she was working with, but Wim became special to her. He was brilliant beyond her comprehension, and at the same time, he seemed withdrawn and lonely.
Catherine said to Evelyn one day: “Isn’t there some chance that Wim might lead a normal life? Fall in love and get married?”
Evelyn sighed. “I told you. He has no emotions. He’ll never get attached to anyone.”
But Catherine did not believe it. Once or twice she had caught a flash of interest—of affection—of laughter—in Wim’s eyes, and she wanted to draw him out, to help him. Or had it been her imagination?
One day, the office staff received an invitation to a charity ball being held at the Savoy.
Catherine walked into Wim’s office. “Wim, do you dance?”
He stared at her. “A bar and a half of four-four-time music completes one rhythmic unit in a fox-trot. The man starts the basic step with his left foot and takes two steps forward. The woman starts with her right foot and takes two steps backward. The two slow steps are followed by a quick step at right angles to the slow steps. To dip, the man steps forward on his left foot and dips—slow—then he moves forward on his right foot—slow. Then he moves to the left with his left foot—quick. Then closes his right foot to his left foot—quick.”
Catherine stood there, not knowing what to say. He knows all the words, but he doesn’t understand their meaning.
Constantin Demiris telephoned. It was late at night and Catherine was preparing to go to bed.
“I hope I didn’t disturb you. It’s Costa.”
“No, of course not.” She was glad to hear his voice. She had missed talking to him, asking his advice. After all, he was the only one in the world who really knew about her past. She felt as though he were an old friend.
“I’ve been thinking about you, Catherine. I was concerned that you might find London a lonely place. After all, you don’t know anyone there.”
“I do get a little lonely sometimes,” Catherine admitted. “But I’m coping. I keep remembering what you said. Forget about the past, live for the future.”
“That’s right. Speaking of the future, I’m going to be in London tomorrow. I would like to take you to dinner.”
“I would enjoy that very much,” Catherine said warmly. She was looking forward to it. She would have a chance to tell him how grateful she was to him.
When Constantin Demiris replaced the receiver, he smiled to himself. The chase is on.
They had dinner at the Ritz. The dining room was elegant and the food was delicious, but Catherine was too excited to pay attention to anything except the man who was sitting opposite her. There was so much she had to tell him.
“You have a wonderful office staff,” Catherine said. “Wim is amazing. I’ve never seen anyone who can …”
But Demiris was not listening to the words. He was studying her, thinking how beautiful she was, and how vulnerable. But I mustn’t rush her, Demiris decided. No, I’ll play the game slowly and savor the victory. This one will be for you, Noelle, and for your lover.
“Are you going to be in London long?” Catherine was asking.
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Sidney Sheldon
MEMORIES OF MIDNIGHT - The internationally best-selling 'The Other Side of Midnight' was dominated by the man who is Sheldon's most magnificent creation…'Constantin Demiris'Billionaire, art lover, womaniser…and killer. To Noelle, the woman who betrayed him, and Larry, the man who stole her, Demiris brought a chilling retribution. But Demiris’ terrible revenge is far from complete…'Ioannina, Greece'In the seclusion of a remote convent a young woman emerges from the trauma of memory loss…'Catherine Alexander'Larry’s widow, sees Demiris as a benefactor, the man who restores her faith in the future. How can she know the fate he has in store, or that her life is bound up with other victims of his mighty ego? From the exotic shores of the Mediterranean to post-war London, 'Memories of Midnight' is a passionate, unforgettable story of an innocent woman’s fight against a terrifying destinyIn this deadly game, there can only be one winner…If Judd is to survive he must play the game to win.This is Sidney Sheldon's first novel – a gripping, intense thriller that brought him fame as a bestselling novelist.
SIDNEY SHELDON
MEMORIES OF MIDNIGHT
Copyright (#ulink_1b2699eb-2cc2-5c58-8e1c-4aee8faa322e)
Published by Harper
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © 1990 by Sheldon Literary Trust
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Source ISBN: 9780006178699
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2012 ISBN: 9780007381937
Version: 2015-04-27
For Alexandrawith love
Sing me no songs of daylight,
For the sun is the enemy of lovers
Sing instead of shadows and darkness,
And memories of midnight
—SAPPHO
Table of Contents
Cover (#u5dc8eef4-a04a-5dfb-a8a4-59a15e867140)
Title Page (#u808ce0b0-0b58-5c17-98b0-19b40fcb9a1c)
Copyright (#u1073db5a-cd6b-5a89-9fc4-f264e1c4ee63)
Dedication (#u342ad1ed-4e01-533f-8185-a1c05c26d900)
Epigraph (#u0b00cfe0-2b01-5215-b987-60b11a499eb9)
Prologue (#u86ed6646-73b3-56fa-8cc5-1a14ebe7c8a7)
Chapter One (#ubd2aeafa-20b8-5243-b1bb-a7a9a0629734)
Chapter Two (#uc17974c6-d9ad-5af0-84f3-036fedfb08cf)
Chapter Three (#u0f720bfc-a06e-5d9e-85ac-622a47b8c58f)
Chapter Four (#u258a74ec-fbb6-5012-abd9-cca514ca47ff)
Chapter Five (#u7f768c25-6293-5812-8ca2-11cb16e0d72b)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Books by Sidney Sheldon (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_d9da85bd-017e-5436-bcf5-bb8414045ec7)
Kowloon—May 1949
“It must look like an accident. Can you arrange that?”
It was an insult. He could feel the anger rising in him. That was a question you asked some amateur you picked up from the streets. He was tempted to reply with sarcasm: Oh, yes, I think I can manage that. Would you prefer an accident indoors? I can arrange for her to break her neck falling down a flight of stairs. The dancer in Marseilles. Or she could get drunk and drown in her bath. The heiress in Gstaad. She could take an overdose of heroin. He had disposed of three that way. Or, she could fall asleep in bed with a lighted cigarette. The Swedish detective at L’Hôtel on the Left Bank in Paris. Or perhaps you would prefer something outdoors? I can arrange a traffic accident, a plane crash, or a disappearance at sea.
But he said none of those things, for in truth he was afraid of the man seated across from him. He had heard too many chilling stories about him, and he had reason to believe them.
So all he said was, “Yes, sir, I can arrange an accident. No one will ever know.” Even as he said the words, the thought struck him: He knows that I’ll know. He waited.
They were on the second floor of a building in the walled city of Kowloon that had been built in 1840 by a group of Chinese to protect themselves from the British barbarians. The walls had been torn down in the Second World War, but there were other walls that kept outsiders away: Gangs of cut-throats and drug addicts and rapists roaming through the rabbit warren of crooked, narrow streets and dark stairways leading into gloom. Tourists were warned to stay away, and not even the police would venture inside past Tung Tau Tsuen Street, on the outskirts. He could hear the street noises outside the window, and the shrill and raucous polyglot of languages that belonged to the residents of the walled city.
The man was studying him with cold, obsidian eyes. Finally, he spoke. “Very well. I will leave the method to you.”
“Yes, sir. Is the target here in Kowloon?”
“London. Her name is Catherine. Catherine Alexander.”
A limousine, followed by a second car with two armed bodyguards, drove the man to the Blue House on Lascar Row, in the Tsim Sha Tsui area. The Blue House was open to special patrons only. Heads of state visited there, and movie stars, and presidents of corporations. The management prided itself on discretion. Half a dozen years earlier, one of the young girls who worked there had discussed her customers with a newspaperman, and she was found the next morning in Aberdeen Harbor with her tongue cut out. Everything was for sale in the Blue House: virgins, boys, lesbians who satisfied themselves without the “jade stalks” of men, and animals. It was the only place he knew of where the tenth-century art of Ishinpo was still practiced. The Blue House was a cornucopia of forbidden pleasures.
The man had ordered the twins this time. They were an exquisitely matched pair with beautiful features, incredible bodies, and no inhibitions. He remembered the last time he had been there … the metal stool with no bottom and their soft caressing tongues and fingers, and the tub filled with fragrant warm water that overflowed onto the tiled floor and their hot mouths plundering his body. He felt the beginning of an erection.
“We’re here, sir.”
Three hours later, when he had finished with them, sated and content, the man ordered the limousine to head for Mody Road. He looked out the window of the limousine at the sparkling lights of the city that never slept. The Chinese had named it Gau-lung—nine dragons—and he imagined them lurking in the mountains above the city, ready to come down and destroy the weak and the unwary. He was neither.
They reached Mody Road.
The Taoist priest waiting for him looked like a figure from an ancient parchment, with a classic faded Oriental robe and a long, wispy white beard.
“Jou sahn.”
“Jou sahn.”
“Gei do chin?”
“Yat-chihn.”
“Jou.”
The priest closed his eyes in a silent prayer and began to shake the chim, the wooden cup filled with numbered prayer sticks. A stick fell out and the shaking ceased. In the silence, the Taoist priest consulted his chart and turned to his visitor. He spoke in halting English. “The gods say you will soon be rid of dangerous enemy.”
The man felt a pleasant jolt of surprise. He was too intelligent not to realize that the ancient art of chim was merely a superstition. And he was too intelligent to ignore it. Besides, there was another good-luck omen. Today was Agios Constantinous Day, his birthday.
“The gods have blessed you with good fung shui.”
“Do jeh.”
“Hou wah.”
Five minutes later, he was in the limousine, on his way to Kai Tak, the Hong Kong airport, where his private plane was waiting to take him back to Athens.
Chapter One (#ulink_24c4c35c-4f1a-5f42-88cb-3f38789f4040)
loannina, Greece—July 1948
She woke up screaming every night and it was always the same dream. She was in the middle of a lake in a fierce storm and a man and a woman were forcing her head under the icy waters, drowning her. She awakened each time panicky, gasping for breath, soaked with perspiration.
She had no idea who she was and she had no memory of the past. She spoke English—but she did not know what country she was from or how she had come to be in Greece, in the small Carmelite convent that sheltered her.
As time went by, there were tantalizing flashes of memory, glimpses of vague, ephemeral images that came and went too quickly for her to grasp them, to hold them and examine them. They came at unexpected moments, catching her off guard and filling her with confusion.
In the beginning, she had asked questions. The Carmelite nuns were kind and understanding, but theirs was an order of silence, and the only one permitted to speak was Sister Theresa, the elderly and frail Mother Superior.
“Do you know who I am?”
“No, my child,” Sister Theresa said.
“How did I get to this place?”
“At the foot of these mountains is a village called Ioannina. You were in a small boat in the lake during a storm last year. The boat sank, but by the grace of God, two of our sisters saw you and rescued you. They brought you here.”
“But … where did I come from before that?”
“I’m sorry, child. I do not know.”
She could not be satisfied with that. “Hasn’t anyone inquired about me? Hasn’t anyone tried to find me?”
Sister Theresa shook her head. “No one.”
She wanted to scream with frustration. She tried again. “The newspapers … they must have had a story about my being missing.”
“As you know, we are permitted no communication with the outside world. We must accept God’s will, child. We must thank Him for all His mercies. You are alive.”
And that was as far as she was able to get. In the beginning, she had been too ill to be concerned about herself, but slowly, as the months went by, she had regained her strength and her health.
When she was strong enough to move about, she spent her days tending the colorful gardens in the grounds of the convent, in the incandescent light that bathed Greece in a celestial glow, with the soft winds carrying the pungent aroma of lemons and vines.
The atmosphere was serene and calm, and yet she could find no peace. I’m lost, she thought, and no one cares. Why? Have I done something evil? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
The images continued to come, unbidden. One morning she awakened suddenly with a vision of herself in a room with a naked man undressing her. Was it a dream? Or was it something that had happened in her past? Who was the man? Was it someone she had married? Did she have a husband? She wore no wedding ring. In fact, she had no possessions other than the black Order of the Carmelite habit that Sister Theresa had given her and a pin, a small golden bird with ruby eyes and outstretched wings.
She was anonymous, a stranger living among strangers. There was no one to help her, no psychiatrist to tell her that her mind had been so traumatized, it could stay sane only by shutting out the terrible past.
And the images kept coming, faster and faster. It was as though her mind had suddenly turned into a giant jigsaw puzzle, with odd pieces tumbling into place. But the pieces made no sense. She had a vision of a huge studio filled with men in army uniform. They seemed to be making a motion picture. Was I an actress? No, she seemed to be in charge. But in charge of what?
A soldier handed her a bouquet of flowers. You’ll have to pay for these yourself, he laughed.
Two nights later, she had a dream about the same man. She was saying goodbye to him at the airport, and she woke up sobbing because she was losing him.
There was no more peace for her after that. These were not mere dreams. They were pieces of her life, her past. I must find out who I was. Who I am.
And unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, without warning, a name was dredged up out of her subconscious. Catherine. My name is Catherine Alexander.
Chapter Two (#ulink_72194dc9-cf6f-50e0-a9e9-1884092e4c12)
Athens, Greece
The empire of Constantin Demiris could not be located on any map, yet he was the ruler of a fiefdom larger and more powerful than many countries. He was one of the two or three wealthiest men in the world and his influence was incalculable. He had no title or official position, but he regularly bought and sold prime ministers, cardinals, ambassadors, and kings. Demiris’s tentacles were everywhere, woven through the woof and warp of dozens of countries. He was a charismatic man, with a brilliantly incisive mind, physically striking, well above medium height, with a barrel chest and broad shoulders. His complexion was swarthy and he had a strong Greek nose and olive-black eyes. He had the face of a hawk, a predator. When he chose to take the trouble, Demiris could be extremely charming. He spoke eight languages and was a noted raconteur. He had one of the most important art collections in the world, a fleet of private planes, and a dozen apartments, châteaus, and villas scattered around the globe. He was a connoisseur of beauty, and he found beautiful women irresistible. He had the reputation of being a powerful lover, and his romantic escapades were as colorful as his financial adventures.
Constantin Demiris prided himself on being a patriot—the blue-and-white Greek flag was always on display at his villa in Kolonaki and on Psara, his private island—but he paid no taxes. He did not feel obliged to conform to the rules that applied to ordinary men. In his veins ran ichor—the blood of the gods.
Nearly every person Demiris met wanted something from him: financing for a business project; a donation to a charity; or simply the power that his friendship could bestow. Demiris enjoyed the challenge of figuring out what it was that people were really after, for it was rarely what it appeared to be. His analytical mind was skeptical of surface truth, and as a consequence he believed nothing he was told and trusted no one. His motto was “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” The reporters who chronicled his life were permitted to see only his geniality and charm, the sophisticated, urbane man of the world. They had no reason to suspect that beneath the amiable façade was a killer, a gutter fighter whose instinct was to go for the jugular vein.
He was an unforgiving man who never forgot a slight. To the ancient Greeks the word dikaiosini, justice, was often synonymous with ekdikisis, vengeance, and Demiris was obsessed with both. He remembered every affront he had ever suffered, and those who were unlucky enough to incur his enmity were paid back a hundred-fold. They were never aware of it, for Demiris’s mathematical mind made a game of exacting retribution, patiently working out elaborate traps and spinning complex webs that finally caught and destroyed his enemies.
He enjoyed the hours he spent devising pitfalls for his adversaries. He would study his victims carefully, analyzing their personalities, assessing their strengths and their weaknesses.
At a dinner party one evening, Demiris had overheard a motion-picture producer refer to him as “that oily Greek.” Demiris bided his time. Two years later, the producer signed a glamorous internationally known actress to star in his new big-budget production in which he put in his own money. Demiris waited until the picture was half finished, and then charmed the leading lady into walking out on it and joining him on his yacht.
“It will be a honeymoon,” Demiris told her.
She got the honeymoon but not the wedding. The movie finally had to shut down and the producer went bankrupt.
There were a few players in Demiris’s game with whom he had not yet evened the score, but he was in no hurry. He enjoyed the anticipation, the planning, and the execution. These days he made no enemies, for no man could afford to be his enemy, so his quarry was limited to those who had crossed his path in the past.
But Constantin Demiris’s sense of dikaiosini was double-edged. Just as he never forgave an injury, neither did he forget a favor. A poor fisherman who had given the young boy shelter found himself the owner of a fishing fleet. A prostitute who had fed and clothed theyoung man when he was too poor to pay her mysteriously inherited an apartment building, without any idea of who her benefactor was.
Demiris had started life as the son of a stevedore in Piraeus. He had fourteen brothers and sisters and there was never enough food on the table.
From the very beginning, Constantin Demiris showed an uncanny gift for business. He earned extra money doing odd jobs after school, and at sixteen he had saved enough money to open a food stand on the docks with an older partner. The business flourished and the partner cheated Demiris out of his half. It took Demiris ten years to destroy the man. The young boy was burning with a fierce ambition. He would lie awake at night, his eyes bright in the darkness. I’m going to be rich. I’m going to be famous. Someday everyone will know my name. It was the only lullaby that could put him to sleep. He had no idea how it was going to happen. He knew only that it would.
On Demiris’s seventeenth birthday, he came across an article about the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and it was as though a magic door to the future had suddenly opened for him.
He went to his father. “I’m going to Saudi Arabia. I’m going to work in the oil fields.”
“Too-sou! What do you know about oil fields?”
“Nothing, father. I’m going to learn.”
One month later, Constantin Demiris was on his way.
It was company policy for the overseas employees of the Trans-Continental Oil Corporation to sign a two-year employment contract, but Demiris felt no qualms about it. He planned to stay in Saudi Arabia for as long as it took him to make his fortune. He had envisioned a wonderful Arabian nights adventure, a glamorous, mysterious land with exotic-looking women, and black gold gushing up out of the ground. The reality was a shock.
On an early morning in summer, Demiris arrived at Fadili, a dreary camp in the middle of the desert consisting of an ugly stone building surrounded by barastis, small brushwood huts. There were a thousand lower-bracket workers there, mostly Saudis. The women who trudged through the dusty, unpaved streets were heavily veiled.
Demiris entered the building where J. J. McIntyre, the personnel manager, had his office.
McIntyre looked up as the young man came in. “So. The home office hired you, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ever work the oil fields before, son?”
For an instant, Demiris was tempted to lie. “No, sir.”
McIntyre grinned. “You’re going to love it here. You’re a million miles from nowhere, bad food, no women that you can touch without getting your balls chopped off, and not a goddamned thing to do at night. But the pay is good, right?”
“I’m here to learn,” Demiris said earnestly.
“Yeah? Then I’ll tell you what you better learn fast. You’re in Moslem country now. That means no alcohol. Anyone caught stealing gets his right hand cut off. Second time, left hand. The third time, you lose a foot. If you kill anyone you’re beheaded.”
“I’m not planning to kill anyone.”
“Wait,” McIntyre grunted. “You just got here.”
The compound was a Tower of Babel, people from a dozen different countries all speaking their native languages. Demiris had a good ear and picked up languages quickly. The men were there to make roads in the middle of an inhospitable desert, construct housing, install electrical equipment, put in telephone communications, build workshops, arrange food and water supplies, design a drainage system, administer medical attention, and, it seemed to young Demiris, do a hundred other tasks. They were working in temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, suffering from flies, mosquitoes, dust, fever, and dysentery. Even in the desert there was a social hierarchy. At the top were the men engaged in locating oil, and below, the construction workers, called “stiffs,” and the clerks, known as “shiny pants.”
Nearly all the men involved in the actual drilling—the geologists, surveyors, engineers, and oil chemists—were Americans, for the new rotary drill had been invented in the United States and the Americans were more familiar with its operation. The young man went out of his way to make friends with them.
Constantin Demiris spent as much time as he could around the drillers and he never stopped asking questions. He stored away the information, absorbing it the way the hot sands soaked up water. He noticed that two different methods of drilling were being used.
He approached one of the drillers working near a giant 130-foot derrick. “I was wondering why there are two different kinds of drilling going on.”
The driller explained. “Well, son, one’s cable tool and one’s rotary. We’re going more to rotary now. They start out exactly the same.”
“They do?”
“Yeah. For either one you have to erect a derrick like this one to hoist up the pieces of equipment that have to be lowered into the well.” He looked at the eager face of the young man. “I’ll bet you have no idea why they call it a derrick.”
“No, sir.”
“That was the name of a famous hangman in the seventeenth century.”
“I see.”
“Cable tool drilling goes way back. Hundreds of years ago, the Chinese used to dig water wells that way. They punched a hole into the earth by lifting and dropping a heavy cutting tool hung from a cable. But today about eighty-five percent of all wells are drilled by the rotary method.” He turned to go back to his drilling.
“Excuse me. How does the rotary method work?”
The man stopped. “Well, instead of slammin’ a hole in the earth, you just bore one. You see here? In the middle of the derrick floor is a steel turntable that’s rotated by machinery. This rotary table grips and turns a pipe that extends downward through it. There’s a bit fastened to the lower end of the pipe.”
“It seems simple, doesn’t it?”
“It’s more complicated than it looks. You have to have a way to excavate the loosened material as you drill. You have to prevent the walls from caving in and you have to seal off the water and gas from the well.”
“With all that drilling, doesn’t the rotary drill ever get dull?”
“Sure. Then we have to pull out the whole damned drill string, screw a new bit to the bottom of the drill pipe, and lower the pipe back into the hole. Are you planning to be a driller?”
“No, sir. I’m planning to own oil wells.”
“Congratulations. Can I get back to work now?”
One morning, Demiris watched as a tool was lowered into the well, but instead of boring downward, he noticed that it cut small circular areas from the sides of the hole and brought up rocks.
“Excuse me. What’s the point of doing that?” Demiris asked.
The driller paused to mop his brow. “This is side wall coring. We use these rocks for analysis, to see whether they’re oil-bearing.”
“I see.”
When things were going smoothly, Demiris would hear drillers cry out, “I’m turning to the right,” which meant they were making a hole. Demiris noticed that there were dozens of tiny holes drilled all over the field, with diameters as small as two or three inches.
“Excuse me. What are those for?” the young man asked.
“Those are prospect wells. They tell us what’s underneath. Saves the company a lot of time and money.”
“I see.”
It was all utterly fascinating to the young man and his questions were endless.
“Excuse me. How do you know where to drill?”
“We got a lot of geologists—pebble pups—who take measurements of the strata and study the cuttings from wells. Then the rope chokers …”
“Excuse me, what’s a rope choker?”
“A driller. When they …”
Constantin Demiris worked from early morning until sundown, hauling rigs through the burning desert, cleaning equipment, and driving trucks past the streamers of flame rising from the rocky peaks. The flames burned day and night, carrying off the poisonous gases.
J. J. McIntyre had told Demiris the truth. The food was bad, living conditions were horrible, and at night there was nothing to do. Worse, Demiris felt as though every pore in his body were filled with grains of sand. The desert was alive and there was no way to escape it. The sand filtered into the hut and through his clothes and into his body until he thought he would go crazy. And then it got worse.
The shamal struck. The sandstorms blew every day for a month, driven by a howling wind with an intensity strong enough to drive men mad.
Demiris stared out the door of his hut at the swirling sand. “Are we going out to work in that?”
“You’re fucking right, Charlie. This ain’t a health spa.”
Oil discoveries were being made all around them. There was a new find at Abu Hadriya and another at Qatif and at Harad, and the workers were kept busier than ever.
There were two new arrivals, an English geologist and his wife. Henry Potter was in his late sixties and his wife, Sybil, was in her early thirties. In any other setting, Sybil Potter would have been described as a plain-looking obese woman with a high, unpleasant voice. In Fadili, she was a raving beauty. Since Henry Potter was constantly away prospecting for new oil fields, his wife was left alone a great deal.
Young Demiris was assigned to help her move into their quarters and to assist her in getting settled.
“This is the most miserable place I’ve ever seen in my life,” Sybil Potter complained in her whining voice. “Henry’s always dragging me off to terrible places like this. I don’t know why I put up with it.”
“Your husband is doing a very important job,” Demiris assured her.
She eyed the attractive young man speculatively. “My husband isn’t doing all the jobs he should be doing. Do you know what I mean?”
Demiris knew exactly what she meant. “No, ma’am.”
“What’s your name?”
“Demiris, ma’am. Constantin Demiris.”
“What do your friends call you?”
“Costa.”
“Well, Costa, I think you and I are going to become very good friends. We certainly have nothing in common with these wogs, have we?”
“Wogs?”
“You know. These foreign people.”
“I have to go back to work,” Demiris said.
Over the next few weeks, Sybil Potter constantly found excuses to send for the young man.
“Henry left again this morning,” she told him. “He’s off to do his silly drilling.” She added archly, “He should do more drilling at home.”
Demiris had no answer. The geologist was a very important man in the company hierarchy and Demiris had no intention of getting involved with Potter’s wife and jeopardizing his own job. He was not sure exactly how, but he knew without question that one way or another this job was going to be his passport to everything he dreamed of. Oil was the future and he was determined to be a part of it.
One midnight, Sybil Potter sent for Demiris. He walked into the compound where she lived and knocked at the door.
“Come in.” Sybil was wearing a thin nightgown that unfortunately concealed nothing.
“I—did you want to see me, ma’am?”
“Yes, come in Costa. This bedside lamp doesn’t seem to be working.”
Demiris averted his eyes and walked over to the lamp. He picked it up to examine it. “There’s no bulb in …” And he felt her body pressing against his back and her hands groping him. “Mrs. Potter …”
Her lips were on his and she was pushing him onto the bed. And he had no control over what happened next.
His clothes were off and he was plunging into her and she was screaming with joy. “That’s it! Oh, yes, that’s it. My God, it’s been so long!”
She gave a final gasp and shuddered. “Oh, darling, I love you.”
Demiris lay there panicky. What have I done? If Potter ever finds out I’m finished.
As though reading his mind, Sybil Potter giggled, “This will be our little secret, won’t it, darling?”
Their little secret went on for the next several months. There was no way Demiris could avoid her and, since her husband was away for days at a time on his explorations, Demiris could think of no excuse to keep from going to bed with her. What made it worse was that Sybil Potter had fallen madly in love with him.
“You’re much too good to be working in a place like this, darling,” she told him. “You and I are going back to England.”
“My home is Greece.”
“Not anymore.” She stroked his long, lean body. “You’re going to come back home with me. I’ll divorce Henry and we’ll get married.”
Demiris felt a sudden sense of panic. “Sybil, I … I have no money. I …”
She ran her lips down his chest. “That’s no problem. I know how you can make some money, sweetheart.”
“You do?”
She sat up in bed. “Last night, Henry told me he’s just discovered some big new oil field. He’s very clever at that, you know. Anyway, he seemed terribly excited about it. He wrote out his report before he left and he asked me to send it out in the morning pouch. I have it here. Would you like to see it?”
Demiris’s heart began to beat faster. “Yes. I … I would.” He watched her get out of bed and lumber over to a small battered table in the corner. She picked up a large manila envelope and returned to the bed with it.
“Open it.”
Demiris hesitated for only an instant. He opened the envelope and took out the papers inside. There were five pages. He scanned through them quickly, then went back to the beginning and read every word.
“Is that information worth anything?”
Is that information worth anything? It was a report on a new field that could possibly turn out to be one of the richest oil fields in history.
Demiris swallowed. “Yes. It … it could be.”
“Well, there you are,” Sybil said happily. “Now we have money.”
He sighed. “It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
Demiris explained. “This is valuable to someone who can afford to buy up options on the land around this area. But that takes money.” He had three hundred dollars in his bank account.
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Henry has money. I’ll write a check. Will five thousand dollars be enough?”
Constantin Demiris could not believe what he was hearing. “Yes. I … I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s for us, darling. For our future.”
He sat up in bed thinking hard. “Sybil, do you think you could hold on to that report for the next day or two?”
“Of course. I’ll keep it till Friday. Will that give you enough time, darling?”
He nodded slowly. “That will give me enough time.”
With the five thousand dollars that Sybil gave him—no, it’s not a gift, it’s a loan, he told himself—Constantin Demiris bought up options on acres of land around the new potential strike. Some months later, when the gushers began to come in in the main field, Constantin Demiris was an instant millionaire.
He repaid Sybil Potter the five thousand dollars, sent her a new nightgown, and returned to Greece. She never saw him again.
Chapter Three (#ulink_8fca712a-fc19-50e7-bd9c-267dba188a30)
There is a theory that nothing in nature is ever lost—that every sound ever made, every word ever spoken, still exists somewhere in space and time and may one day be recalled.
Before radio was invented, they say, who would have believed that the air around us was filled with the sounds of music and news and voices from around the world? One day we will be able to travel back in time and listen to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the voice of Shakespeare, the Sermon on the Mount …
Catherine Alexander heard voices from her past, but they were muffled and fragmented, and they filled her with confusion. …
“Do you know you’re a very special girl, Cathy? I felt it from the first time I saw you. …”
“It’s over. I want a divorce. … I’m in love with someone else. …”
“I know how badly I’ve behaved. … I’d like to make it up to you. …”
“He tried to kill me.”
“Who tried to kill you?”
“My husband.”
The voices would not stop. They were a torment. Her past became a kaleidoscope of shifting images that kept racing through her mind.
The convent should have been a wonderful, peaceful haven, but it had suddenly become a prison. I don’t belong here. But where do I belong? She had no idea.
There were no mirrors in the convent, but there was a reflecting pool outside, near the garden. Catherine had carefully avoided it, afraid of what it might reveal to her. But on this morning, she walked over to it, slowly knelt, and looked down. The pool reflected a lovely-looking suntanned woman with black hair, flawless features, and solemn gray eyes that seemed filled with pain … but perhaps that was merely a trick of the water. She saw a generous mouth that looked ready to smile, and a nose that was slightly turned up—a beautiful woman in her early thirties. But a woman with no past and no future. A woman lost. I need someone to help me, Catherine thought desperately, someone I can talk to. She went into Sister Theresa’s office.
“Sister …”
“Yes, child?”
“I … think I would like to see a doctor. Someone who can help me find out who I am.”
Sister Theresa looked at her a long moment. “Sit down.”
Catherine sat on the hard chair across from the ancient, scarred desk.
Sister Theresa said quietly: “My dear, God is your doctor. In due time He will let you know what He wishes you to know. Besides, no outsiders are ever permitted within these walls.”
Catherine had a sudden flash of memory … a vague image of a man talking to her in the garden of the convent, handing her something … but then it was gone.
“I don’t belong here.”
“Where do you belong?”
And that was the problem. “I’m not sure. I’m searching for something. Forgive me, Sister Theresa, but I know it isn’t here.”
Sister Theresa was studying her, her face thoughtful. “I see. If you left here, where would you go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let me think about this, child. We will talk again soon.”
“Thank you, Sister.”
When Catherine left, Sister Theresa sat at her desk for a long time, staring at nothing. It was a difficult decision that she had to make. Finally she reached for a piece of paper and a pen and began to write.
“Dear Sir,” she began. “Something has happened that I feel I should call to your attention. Our mutual friend has informed me that she wishes to leave the convent. Please advise me what to do.”
He read the note once, and then sat back in his chair, analyzing the consequences of the message. So! Catherine Alexander wants to come back from the dead. Too bad. I’ll have to get rid of her. Carefully. Very carefully.
The first step was to remove her from the convent. Demiris decided it was time to pay Sister Theresa a visit.
The following morning, Demiris had his chauffeur take him to Ioannina. Driving through the countryside, Constantin Demiris thought about Catherine Alexander. He remembered how beautiful she had been when he had first met her. She had been bright and funny and high-spirited, excited about being in Greece. She had had everything, Demiris thought. And then the gods had taken their vengeance. Catherine had been married to one of his pilots, and their marriage had become a living hell. Almost overnight, she had aged ten years and become a fat, blowsy drunk. Demiris sighed. What a waste.
Demiris was seated in Sister Theresa’s office.
“I hated to bother you about this,” Sister Theresa apologized, “but the child has nowhere to go and …”
“You did the right thing,” Constantin Demiris assured her. “Does she remember anything of her past?”
Sister Theresa shook her head. “No. The poor dear …” She walked over to the window where several nuns were working in the garden. “She’s out there now.”
Constantin Demiris moved to her side and looked out the window. There were three nuns with their backs to him. He waited. One of them turned and he could see her face, and his breath caught in his throat. She was beautiful. What had happened to that fat, ravaged woman?
“She’s the one in the middle,” Sister Theresa said.
Demiris nodded. “Yes.” Sister Theresa’s words were truer than she knew.
“What do you want me to do with her?”
Careful. “Let me think about it,” Demiris said. “I’ll be in touch with you.”
Constantin Demiris had a decision to make. Catherine Alexander’s appearance had caught him by surprise. She had changed so completely. No one would know it’s the same woman, he thought. And the idea that came into his head was so diabolically simple that he almost laughed aloud.
That evening he dispatched a note to Sister Theresa.
It’s a miracle, Catherine thought. A dream come true. Sister Theresa had stopped by her tiny cell after matins.
“I have some news for you, child.”
“Yes?”
Sister Theresa chose her words carefully. “Good news. I have written to a friend of the convent about you, and he wishes to help you.”
Catherine could feel her heart leap. “Help me—how?”
“That is something he will have to tell you. But he is a very kind and generous man. You will be leaving the convent.”
And the words sent a sudden, unexpected chill through Catherine. She would be going out into a strange world she could not even remember. And who was her benefactor?
All Sister Theresa would say was: “He is a very caring man. You should be grateful. His car will be here for you Monday morning.”
Catherine was unable to sleep for the next two nights. The idea of leaving the convent and going into the world outside was suddenly terrifying. She felt naked and lost. Perhaps I’m better off not knowing who I am. Please God, keep an eye on me.
On Monday, the limousine arrived outside the convent gate at seven o’clock in the morning. Catherine had been awake all night thinking about the unknown future that lay ahead of her.
Sister Theresa walked her to the gate that led to the world outside.
“We will pray for you. Remember, if you decide to come back to us you will always have a place here.”
“Thank you, Sister. I’ll remember.”
But in her heart, Catherine was sure that she was never going to return.
The long drive from Ioannina to Athens filled Catherine with a series of conflicting emotions. It was tremendously exciting to be outside the gates of the convent, and yet there was something ominous about the world beyond. Was she going to learn what terrible thing had happened in her past? Did it have anything todo with her recurring dream that someone was trying to drown her?
In the early afternoon, the countryside gave way to small villages, and finally they reached the outskirts of Athens and soon were in the middle of the bustling city. It all seemed strange and unreal to Catherine—and yet oddly familiar. I’ve been here before, Catherine thought excitedly.
The driver headed east, and fifteen minutes later they reached an enormous estate high on a hill. They drove through a tall iron gate and a stone gate house, up a long driveway lined with majestic cypress trees, and stopped before a large white Mediterranean villa framed by half a dozen magnificent statues.
The chauffeur opened the car door for Catherine and she stepped out. A man was waiting at the front door.
“Kalimehra.” The word for good morning sprang to Catherine’s lips unbidden.
“Kalimehra.”
“Are you … are you the person I’ve come to see?”
“Oh, no. Mr. Demiris is waiting for you in the library.”
Demiris. It was a name she had never heard before. Why was he interested in helping her?
Catherine followed the man through an enormous rotunda, with a domed roof set in plaques of Wedgewood. The floors were of creamy Italian marble.
The living room was huge, with a high beamed ceiling and large, low comfortable couches and chairs everywhere. A huge canvas, a dark and glowering Goya, covered one entire wall. As they approached the library, the man stopped.
“Mr. Demiris is waiting for you inside.”
The walls of the library were white and gold boiserie, and the shelves lining the walls were filled with leather books embossed in gold. A man was seated behind a huge desk. He looked up as Catherine entered, and rose. He searched for a sign of recognition on her face, but there was none.
“Welcome. I am Constantin Demiris. What is your name?” He made the question sound casual. Did she remember her name?
“Catherine Alexander.”
He showed no reaction. “Welcome, Catherine Alexander. Please sit down.” He took a seat opposite her, on a black leather couch. She was even lovelier close up. She’s magnificent, Demiris thought. Even dressed in that black habit. It’s a shame to destroy anything that beautiful. At least she will die happy.
“It’s … it’s very kind of you to see me,” Catherine said. “I don’t understand why you …”
He smiled genially. “It’s really quite simple. From time to time I help out Sister Theresa. The convent has very little money, and I do what I can. When she wrote me about you and asked if I could be helpful, I told her that I would be happy to try.”
“That’s very …” She stopped, not knowing how to continue. “Did Sister Theresa tell you that I … that I’ve lost my memory?”
“Yes, she did mention something about that.” He paused and asked off-handedly, “How much do you remember?”
“I know my name, but I don’t know where I came from, or who I really am.” She added, hopefully, “Perhaps I can find someone here in Athens who knows me.”
Constantin Demiris felt a sudden frisson of alarm. That was the last thing in the world he wanted. “That’s possible, of course,” he said carefully. “Why don’t we discuss it in the morning? Unfortunately I have to attend a meeting now. I’ve arranged to have a suite prepared for you here. I think you’ll be comfortable.”
“I … I really don’t know how to thank you.”
He waved a hand. “That isn’t necessary. You will be well taken care of here. Just make yourself at home.”
“Thank you, Mr.—”
“My friends call me Costa.”
A housekeeper led Catherine into a fantastic bedroom suite, done in soft shades of white, furnished with an oversized bed with a silk canopy, white couches and armchairs, antique tables and lamps, and Impressionist paintings on the walls. Pale shutters of sea green kept the glaring sun at bay. Through the windows, Catherine could see the turquoise sea below in the distance.
The housekeeper said, “Mr. Demiris has arranged to have some clothes sent here for your approval. You are to select whatever you like.”
Catherine was conscious, for the first time, that she was still wearing the habit given her at the convent.
“Thank you.” She sank down in the soft bed, feeling as though she were in a dream. Who was this stranger, and why was he being so kind to her?
An hour later a van pulled up filled with clothes. A couturier was ushered into Catherine’s bedroom.
“I’m Madame Dimas. Let’s see what we have to work with. Would you get undressed, please?”
“I … I beg your pardon?”
“Will you get undressed? I can’t tell much about your figure under those clothes.”
How long had it been since she had been naked in front of another person?
Catherine began to take off her clothes, moving slowly, feeling self-conscious. When she stood nude in front of the woman, Madame Dimas looked her over with a practiced eye. She was impressed.
“You have a fine figure. I think we’re going to be able to do very well for you.”
Two female assistants walked in with boxes of dresses, underwear, blouses, skirts, shoes.
“Select whatever you like,” the couturièr said, “and we’ll try them on.”
“I… I can’t afford any of these,” Catherine protested. “I have no money.”
The couturièr laughed. “I don’t think money will be a problem. Mr. Demiris is taking care of it.”
But why?
The fabrics brought back tactile memories of clothes she must have once worn. There were silks and tweeds and cottons in an array of exquisite colors.
The three women were quick and efficient, and two hours later Catherine had half a dozen beautiful outfits. It was overwhelming. She sat there, not knowing what to do with herself.
I’m all dressed up, she thought, with no place to go. But there was some place to go—into the city. The key to whatever had happened to her was in Athens. She was convinced of it. She stood up. Come on, stranger. We’re going to try to find out who you are.
Catherine wandered out into the front hall, and a butler approached her. “May I help you, miss?”
“Yes. I … I would like to go into the city. Could you call a taxi for me?”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary, miss. We have limousines at your disposal. I will arrange a driver for you.”
Catherine hesitated. “Thank you.” Would Mr. Demiris be angry if she went into the city? He had not said not to.
A few minutes later she was seated in the back of a Daimler limousine, headed for downtown Athens.
Catherine was dazzled by the noisy, bustling city, and the poignant succession of ruins and monuments that appeared all around her.
The driver pointed ahead and said proudly, “That is the Parthenon, miss, on top of the Acropolis.”
Catherine stared up at the familiar white marble building. “Dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom,” she heard herself saying.
The driver smiled approvingly. “Are you a student of Greek history, miss?”
Tears of frustration blurred Catherine’s vision. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”
They were passing another ruin. “That is the theater of Herodes Atticus. As you can see, part of the walls are still standing. It once seated more than five thousand people.”
“Six thousand two hundred fifty-seven,” Catherine said softly.
Modern hotels and office buildings were everywhere amid the timeless ruins, an exotic mixture of the past and present. The limousine passed a large park in the center of the city, with sparkling, dancing fountains in the middle. Dozens of tables with green and orange poles lined the park, and the air above them was carpeted with blue awnings.
I’ve seen this before, Catherine thought, her hands growing cold. And I was happy.
There were outdoor cafés on almost every block, and on the corners men were selling freshly caught sponges. Everywhere, flowers were being sold by vendors, their booths a rage of violently colored blossoms.
The limousine had reached Syntagma Square.
As they passed a hotel on the corner, Catherine called out: “Stop, please!”
The driver pulled over to the curb. Catherine was finding it difficult to breathe. I recognize this hotel. I’ve stayed here.
When she spoke, her voice was shaky. “I’d like to get out here. I wonder if you could pick me up in—in two hours?”
“Of course, miss.” The chauffeur hurried to open the door for her, and Catherine stepped outside into the hot summer air. Her legs were trembling. “Are you all right, miss?” She had no answer. She felt as though she were on the edge of a precipice, about to fall into an unknown, terrifying abyss.
She moved through the crowds, marveling at the hordes of people hurrying through the streets, creating a roaring din of conversation. After the silence and solitude of the convent, everything seemed unreal. Catherine found herself moving toward the Plaka, the old section of Athens in the heart of the city, with its twisted alleys and crumbling, worn-down stairways that led to tiny houses, coffee shops, and whitewashed rambling structures. She found her way by some instinct she did not understand or try to control. She passed a taverna on top of a roof, overlooking the city, and stopped, staring. I’ve sat at that table. They handed me a menu in Greek. There were three of us.
What would you like to eat? they had asked.
Would you mind ordering for me? I’m afraid I might order the proprietor.
They had laughed. But who were ‘they'?
A waiter approached Catherine. “Boro na sas voithiso?”
“Ochi efharisto.”
Can I help you? No, thank you. How did I know that? Am I Greek?
Catherine hurriedly moved on, and it was as though someone were guiding her. She seemed to know exactly where to go.
Everything seemed familiar. And nothing. My God, she thought, I’m going crazy. I’m hallucinating. She passed a café that said Treflinkas. A memory was nagging at the corners of her mind. Something had happened to her here, something important. She could not remember what.
She walked through the busy, winding streets and turned left at Voukourestiou. It was filled with smart stores. I used to shop here. She started to cross the street, and a blue sedan raced around the corner, barely missing her.
She could recall a voice saying, The Greeks haven’t made the transition to automobiles. In their hearts they’re still driving donkeys. If you want insight into the Greeks, don’t read the guidebooks; read the old Greek tragedies. We’re filled with grand passions, deep joys, and great sorrows, and we haven’t learned how to cover them up with a civilized veneer.
Who had said that to her?
A man was hurrying down the street, walking toward her, staring at her. He slowed, a look of recognition on his face. He was tall and dark and Catherine was sure she had never seen him before. And yet …
“Hello.” He seemed very pleased to see her.
“Hello.” Catherine took a deep breath. “Do you know me?”
He was grinning. “Of course I know you.”
Catherine felt her heart leap. She was finally going to learn the truth about the past. But how do you say “Who am I?” to a stranger in a crowded street?
“Could … could we talk?” Catherine asked.
“I think we’d better.”
Catherine was on the edge of panic. The mystery of her identity was about to be solved. And yet she felt a terrible fear. What if I don’t want to know? What if I’ve done something dreadful?
The man was leading her toward a small open-air taverna. “I’m so glad I ran into you,” he said.
Catherine swallowed. “So am I.”
A waiter led them to a table.
“What would you like to drink?” the man asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
There were so many questions to ask. Where do I begin?
“You’re very beautiful,” the man said. “This is fate. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes.” She was almost trembling with excitement. She took a deep breath. “I—where did we meet?”
He grinned. “Is that important, koritsimon? Paris, or Rome, at the races, at a party.” He reached forward and pressed her hand. “You’re the prettiest one I’ve seen around here. How much do you charge?”
Catherine stared at him, not understanding for a moment, then shocked, she sprang to her feet.
“Hey! What’s the matter? I’ll pay you whatever …”
Catherine turned and fled, running down the street. She turned a corner and slowed down, her eyes filled with tears of humiliation.
Ahead was a small taverna with a sign in the window that read, MADAME PIRIS—FORTUNE TELLER. Catherine slowed, then stopped. I know Madame Piris. I’ve been here before. Her heart began to race. She sensed that here, through the darkened doorway, was the beginning of the end of the mystery. She opened the door and stepped inside. It took her several moments to get used to the cavernous darkness of the room. There was a familiar bar in the corner, and a dozen tables and chairs. A waiter walked up to her and addressed her in Greek.
“Kalimehra.”
“Kalimehra. Pou inehMadame Piris?”
“Madame Piris?”
The waiter gestured toward an empty table in the corner of the room, and Catherine walked over and sat down. Everything was exactly as she remembered it.
An incredibly old woman dressed in black, with a face desiccated into angles and planes, was moving toward the table.
“What can I … ?” She stopped, peering into Catherine’s face. Her eyes opened wide. “I knew you once but your face …” She gasped. “You’ve come back!”
“You know who I am?” Catherine asked eagerly.
The woman was staring, her eyes filled with horror. “No! You’re dead! Get out!”
Catherine moaned faintly and felt the hair on her scalp begin to rise. “Please—I just…”
“Go, Mrs. Douglas!”
“I have to know …”
The old woman made the sign of the cross, turned, and fled.
Catherine sat there for a moment, trembling, then rushed out into the street. The voice in her head followed her. Mrs. Douglas!
And it was as though a floodgate opened up. Dozens of brightly lighted scenes suddenly poured into her head, a brilliant series of kaleidoscopes out of control. I’m Mrs. Larry Douglas. She could see her husband’s handsome face. She had been madly in love with him, but something had gone wrong. Something…
The next image was of herself trying to commit suicide, and waking up in a hospital.
Catherine stood in the street, afraid her legs would not carry her, letting the pictures come tumbling into her mind.
She had been drinking a lot, because she had lost Larry. But then he had come back to her. They were in her apartment, and Larry was saying, “I know how badly I’ve behaved. I’d like to make it up to you, Cathy. I love you. I’ve never really loved anyone else. I want another chance. How would you like to go away on a second honeymoon? I know a wonderful little place we can go. It’s called Ioannina.”
And then the horror had begun.
The pictures that came into her mind now were terrifying.
She was on a mountaintop with Larry, lost in a swirling gray mist, and he was moving toward her, his arms outstretched, ready to push her off the edge. At that moment, some tourists arrived and saved her.
And then the caves.
“The hotel clerk told me about some caves near here. All the honeymooners go there.”
And they had gone to the caves, and Larry had taken her deep into the bowels of them, and left her there to die.
She put her hands over her ears as if to shut out the terrible thoughts that were rushing at her.
She had been rescued and taken back to the hotel, and a doctor had given her a sedative. But in the middle of the night she had awakened and heard Larry and his mistress in the kitchen, planning her murder, the wind whipping away their words.
—no one will ever—
—I told you I’d take care of—
—went wrong. There’s nothing they can—
—now, while she’s asleep.
And she remembered running away in that terrible storm—being pursued by them—getting into the rowboat, the wind lashing the boat into the middle of the stormy lake. The boat had started to sink, and she had lost consciousness.
Catherine sank onto a street bench, too exhausted to move. So her nightmares had been real. Her husband and his mistress had tried to kill her.
She thought again about the stranger who had come to visit her at the convent shortly after her rescue. He had handed her an exquisitely made golden bird, its wings poised for flight. “No one will harm you now. The wicked people are dead.” She could still not see his face clearly.
Catherine’s head began to throb.
Finally, she rose and slowly walked toward the street where she was to meet the driver who would take her back to Constantin Demiris, where she would be safe.
Chapter Four (#ulink_4a0c1d77-101b-534e-a5b4-068cbd22be73)
“Why did you let her leave the house?” Constantin Demiris demanded.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the butler replied. “You didn’t say anything about her not leaving, so …”
Demiris forced himself to appear calm. “It’s not important. She’ll probably be back soon.”
“Is there anything else, sir?”
“No.”
He watched the butler go. Demiris walked over to a window and stared out at the impeccably manicured garden. It was dangerous for Catherine Alexander to appear in the streets of Athens, where someone might recognize her. It’s too bad I can’t afford to let her live. But first—my vengeance. She’ll stay alive until I take my revenge. I’m going to enjoy myself with her. I’ll send her away from here, somewhere where no one will know her. London will be safe. We can keep an eye on her. I’ll give her a job at my offices there.
An hour later, when Catherine returned to the house, Constantin Demiris could sense instantly the change in her. It was as though some dark curtain had been lifted and Catherine had suddenly come alive. She was wearing an attractive white silk suit, with a white blouse—and Demiris was taken aback by how much her appearance had changed. Nostimi, he thought. Sexy.
“Mr. Demiris …”
“Costa.”
“I … I know who I am, and—and what happened.”
His face revealed nothing. “Really? Sit down, my dear, and tell me.”
Catherine was too excited to sit. She began to pace jerkily on the carpet, back and forth, the words tumbling out of her. “My husband and his—his mistress, Noelle, tried to kill me.” She stopped, looking at him anxiously. “Does that sound crazy? I—I don’t know. Maybe it is.”
“Go on, my dear,” he said soothingly.
“Some nuns from the convent saved me. My husband worked for you, didn’t he?” she blurted out.
Demiris hesitated, carefully weighing his answer. “Yes.” How much should he tell her? “He was one of my pilots. I felt a sense of responsibility toward you. That’s only …”
She faced him. “But you knew who I was. Why didn’t you tell me this morning?”
“I was afraid of the shock,” Demiris said smoothly. “I thought it better to let you discover things for yourself.”
“Do you know what happened to my husband and that—that woman? Where are they?”
Demiris looked into Catherine’s eyes. “They were executed.”
He watched the blood drain from her face. She made a small sound. She suddenly felt too weak to stand and sank into a chair.
“I don’t …”
“They were executed by the state, Catherine.”
“But … why?”
Careful. Danger. “Because they tried to murder you.”
Catherine frowned. “I don’t understand. Why would the state execute them? I’m alive …”
He broke in. “Catherine, Greek laws are very strict. And justice here is swift. They had a public trial. A number of witnesses testified that your husband and Noelle Page attempted to kill you. They were convicted, and sentenced to death.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Catherine sat there, dazed. “The trial …”
Constantin Demiris walked over to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “You must put the past out of your mind. They tried to do an evil thing to you, and they paid for it.” He struck a more buoyant tone. “I think you and I should discuss the future. Do you have any plans?”
She did not hear him. Larry, she thought. Larry’s handsome face, laughing. Larry’s arms, his voice …
“Catherine …”
She looked up. “I’m sorry?”
“Have you had any thoughts about your future?”
“No, I … I don’t know what I’m going to do. I suppose I could stay in Athens …”
“No,” Demiris said firmly. “That wouldn’t be a good idea. It would bring back too many unpleasant memories. I would suggest that you leave Greece.”
“But I have nowhere to go.”
“I’ve given it some thought,” Demiris told her. “I have offices in London. You once worked for a man named William Fraser in Washington. Do you remember that?”
“William … ?” And suddenly she did remember it. That had been one of the happiest times of her life.
“You were his administrative assistant, I believe.”
“Yes, I …”
“You could do the same job for me in London.”
She hesitated. “I don’t know. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but …”
“I understand. I know everything seems to be happening very quickly,” Demiris said sympathetically. “You need some time to think about all this. Why don’t you have a nice quiet dinner in your room, and in the morning we’ll discuss it further.”
Asking her to have dinner in her room was a last-minute inspiration. He could not afford to have his wife run into her.
“You’re very thoughtful,” Catherine said. “And very generous. The clothes are …”
He patted her hand and held it a fraction longer than necessary. “It’s my pleasure.”
She sat in her bedroom watching the blazing sun set over the blue Aegean in an explosion of color. There is no point in reliving the past. There is the future to think about. Thank God for Constantin Demiris. He was her lifeline. Without him, she would have had no one to turn to. And he had offered her a job in London. Am I going to take it? Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. “We’ve brought your dinner, miss.”
Long after Catherine had gone, Constantin Demiris sat in the library thinking about their conversation. Noelle. Only once in his life had Demiris permitted himself to lose control of his emotions. He had fallen deeply in love with Noelle Page, and she had become his mistress. He had never known a woman like her. She was knowledgeable about art, and music, and business, and she had become indispensable. Nothing about Noelle surprised him. Everything about Noelle surprised him. He was obsessed with her. She was the most beautiful, the most sensual woman Demiris had ever known. She had given up stardom to be at his side. Noelle had stirred emotions in him that he had never felt before. She was his lover, his confidante, his friend. Demiris had trusted her completely and she had betrayed him with Larry Douglas. It was a mistake Noelle had paid for with her life. Constantin Demiris had arranged with the authorities for her body to be buried on the grounds of the cemetery on Psara, his private island in the Aegean. Everyone had remarked on what a beautiful, sentimental gesture it was. In fact, Demiris had arranged for the burial plot to be there so that he could have the exquisite pleasure of walking over the bitch’s grave. At Demiris’s bedside in his own bedroom was a photograph of Noelle at her loveliest, looking up at him and smiling. Forever smiling, frozen in time.
Even now, more than a year later, Demiris was unable to stop thinking about her. She was an open wound that no doctor could ever heal.
Why, Noelle, why? I gave you everything. I loved you, you bitch. I loved you. I love you.
And then there was Larry Douglas. He had paid with his life. But that was not enough for Demiris. He had another vengeance in mind. A perfect one. He was going to take his pleasure with Douglas’s wife as Douglas had done with Noelle. Then he would send Catherine to join her husband.
“Costa …”
It was his wife’s voice.
Melina walked into the library.
Constantin Demiris was married to Melina Lambrou, an attractive woman from an old, aristocratic Greek family. She was tall and regal looking, with an innate dignity.
“Costa, who is the woman I saw in the hall?” Her voice was tense.
The question caught him off guard. “What? Oh. She’s a friend of a business associate,” Demiris said. “She’s going to work for me in London.”
“I caught a glimpse of her. She reminds me of someone.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” Melina hesitated. “She reminds me of the wife of the pilot who used to work for you. But that’s impossible, of course. They murdered her.”
“Yes,” Constantin Demiris agreed. “They murdered her.”
He watched Melina as she walked away. He would have to be careful. Melina was no fool. I never should have married her, Demiris thought. It was a bad mistake. …
Ten years earlier, the wedding of Melina Lambrou and Constantin Demiris had sent shock waves through business and social circles from Athens to the Riviera to Newport. What had made it so titillating was that only one month before the wedding the bride had been engaged to marry another man.
As a child, Melina Lambrou had dismayed her family by her willfulness. When she was ten, she decided she wanted to be a sailor. The family chauffeur found her at the harbor, trying to sneak aboard a ship, and brought her home in disgrace. At twelve, she tried to run away with a traveling circus.
By the time Melina was seventeen, she was resigned to her fate—she was beautiful, fabulously wealthy, and the daughter of Mihalis Lambrou. The newspapers loved to write about her. She was a fairy-tale figure whose playmates were princesses and princes, and through it all, by some miracle, Melina had managed to remain unspoiled. Melina had one brother, Spyros, who was ten years older than she, and they adored each other. Their parents had died in a boating accident when Melina was thirteen, and it was Spyros who had reared her.
Spyros was extremely protective of her—too much so, Melina thought. As Melina reached her late teens, Spyros became even more wary about Melina’s suitors, and he carefully examined each candidate for his sister’s hand. Not one of them proved to be good enough.
“You have to be careful,” he constantly counseled Melina. “You’re a target for every fortune hunter in the world. You’re young and rich and beautiful, and you bear a famous name.”
“Bravo, my dear brother. That will be of immense comfort to me when I’m eighty years old and die an old maid.”
“Don’t worry, Melina. The right man will come along.”
His name was Count Vassilis Manos and he was in his middle forties, a successful businessman from an old and distinguished Greek family. The count had fallen in love instantly with the beautiful young Melina. His proposal came only a few weeks after they met.
“He’s perfect for you,” Spyros said happily. “Manos has his feet on the ground, and he’s crazy about you.”
Melina was less enthusiastic. “He’s not exciting, Spyros. When we’re together, all he talks about is business, business, business. I wish he were more—more romantic.”
Her brother said firmly, “There’s more to marriage than romance. You want a husband who is solid and stable, someone who will devote himself to you.”
And finally Melina was persuaded to accept Count Manos’s proposal.
The count was thrilled. “You’ve made me the happiest man in the world,” he declared. “I’ve just formed a new company. I’m going to name it Melina International.”
She would have preferred a dozen roses. The wedding date was set, one thousand invitations were sent out, and elaborate plans were made.
It was then that Constantin Demiris entered Melina Lambrou’s life.
They met at one of the dozen or so engagement parties that were being given for the betrothed pair.
The hostess introduced them. “This is Melina Lambrou—Constantin Demiris.”
Demiris stared at her with his brooding black eyes. “How long will they let you stay?” he asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Surely you’ve been sent from the heavens to teach us mortals what beauty is.”
Melina laughed. “You’re very flattering, Mr. Demiris.”
He shook his head. “You’re beyond flattery. Nothing I could say would do you justice.”
At that moment Count Manos approached and interrupted the conversation.
That night, just before falling asleep, Melina thought about Demiris. She had heard about him, of course. He was wealthy, he was a widower, and he had the reputation of being a ruthless businessman and a compulsive womanizer. I’m glad I’m not involved with him, Melina thought.
The gods were laughing.
The morning after the party, Melina’s butler walked into the breakfast room. “A package has arrived for you, Miss Lambrou. It was delivered by Mr. Demiris’s chauffeur.”
“Bring it in, please.”
So Constantin Demiris thinks he’s going to impress me with his wealth. Well, he’s in for a big disappointment. Whatever he’s sent … whether it’s an expensive piece of jewelry, or some priceless antique … I’m going to send it right back to him.
The package was small and oblong, and beautifully wrapped. Curious, Melina opened it. The card read, simply: “I thought you might enjoy this. Constantin.”
It was a leather-bound copy of Toda Raba by Nikos Kazantzakis, her favorite author. How could he have known?
Melina wrote a polite thank-you note, and thought: That’s that.
The following morning another package arrived. This time it was a recording by Delius, her favorite composer. The note read: “You might enjoy listening to this while reading Toda Raba.”
From that day on there were gifts every day. Her favorite flowers, and perfume, and music, and books. Constantin Demiris had taken the trouble to find out what Melina’s tastes were, and she could not help but be flattered by his attention.
When Melina telephoned to thank Demiris, he said: “There’s nothing I could ever give you that would do you justice.”
How many women had he said that to before?
“Will you have lunch with me, Melina?”
She started to say no, and then thought: It can’t hurt to have lunch with the man. He’s been very thoughtful.
“Very well.”
When she mentioned to Count Manos that she was having lunch with Constantin Demiris, he objected.
“What’s the point, my dear? You have nothing in common with that terrible man. Why are you going to see him?”
“Vassilis, he’s been sending me little gifts every day. I’m going to tell him to stop.” And even as Melina said it, she thought: I could have told him that over the telephone.
Constantin Demiris had made reservations at the popular Floca restaurant on Panepistimiou Street and he was waiting for Melina when she arrived.
He rose. “You’re here. I was so afraid you might change your mind.”
“I always keep my word.”
He looked at her and said solemnly: “And I keep mine. I’m going to marry you.”
Melina shook her head, half amused, half annoyed. “Mr. Demiris, I’m engaged to marry someone else.”
“Manos?” He waved a hand in dismissal. “He’s not right for you.”
“Oh, really? And why is that?”
“I’ve checked on him. Insanity runs in his family, he’s a hemophiliac, he’s wanted by the police on a sex charge in Brussels, and he plays a dreadful game of tennis.”
Melina could not help laughing. “And you?”
“I don’t play tennis.”
“I see. And that’s why I should marry you?”
“No. You’ll marry me because I’m going to make you the happiest woman who ever lived.”
“Mr. Demiris …”
He covered her hand with his. “Costa.”
She withdrew her hand. “Mr. Demiris, I came here today to tell you that I want you to stop sending me gifts. I don’t intend to see you again.”
He studied her for a long moment. “I’m sure you are not a cruel person.”
“I hope not.”
He smiled. “Good. Then you won’t want to break my heart.”
“I doubt if your heart is that easily broken. You have quite a reputation.”
“Ah, that was before I met you. I’ve dreamed about you for a long time.”
Melina laughed.
“I’m serious. When I was a very young man, I used to read about the Lambrou family. You were very rich and I was very poor. I had nothing. We lived from hand to mouth. My father was a stevedore who worked on the docks of Piraeus. I had fourteen brothers and sisters, and we had to fight for everything we wanted.”
In spite of herself, she was touched. “But now you are rich.”
“Yes. Not as rich as I am going to be.”
“What made you rich?”
“Hunger. I was always hungry. I’m still hungry.”
She could read the truth in his eyes. “How did you … how did you get started?”
“Do you really want to know?”
And Melina found herself saying, “I really want to know.”
“When I was seventeen, I went to work for a small oil company in the Middle East. I was not doing very well. One night I had dinner with a young geologist who worked for a large oil company. I ordered a steak that night, and he ordered only soup. I asked him why he didn’t have a steak, and he said it was because he had no back teeth and he couldn’t afford to buy dentures. I gave him fifty dollars to buy new teeth. A month later he telephoned me in the middle of the night to tell me he had just discovered a new oil deposit. He hadn’t told his employer about it yet. In the morning, I started borrowing every cent I could, and by evening I had bought options on all the land around the new discovery. It turned out to be one of the biggest oil deposits in the world.”
Melina was hanging on his every word, fascinated.
“That was the beginning. I needed tankers to ship my oil in, so in time I acquired a fleet. Then a refinery. Then an airline.” He shrugged. “It went on from there.”
It was not until long after they were married that Melina learned that the story about the steak was pure fiction.
Melina Lambrou had had no intention of seeing Constantin Demiris again. But, by a series of carefully arranged coincidences, Demiris invariably managed to appear at the same party, or theater, or charity event, that Melina was attending. And each time, she felt his overpowering magnetism. Beside him, Vassilis Manos seemed—she hated to admit it, even to herself—boring.
Melina Lambrou was fond of the Flemish painters, and when Bruegel’s “Hunters in the Snow” came on the market, before she could purchase it, Constantin Demiris sent it to her as a gift.
Melina was fascinated by his uncanny knowledge of her tastes. “I can’t accept such an expensive gift from you,” she protested.
“Ah, but it’s not a gift. You must pay for it. Dinner with me tonight.”
And she finally agreed. The man was irresistible.
A week later Melina broke off her engagement to Count Manos.
When Melina told her brother the news he was stunned.
“Why, in heaven’s name?” Spyros asked. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to marry Constantin Demiris.”
He was aghast. “You must be crazy. You can’t marry Demiris. He’s a monster. He’ll destroy you. If…”
“You’re wrong about him, Spyros. He’s wonderful. And we’re in love. It’s …”
“You’re in love,” he snapped. “I don’t know what he’s after, but it has nothing to do with love. Do you know what his reputation is with women? He …”
“That’s all in the past, Spyros. I’m going to be his wife.”
And there was nothing he could do to talk his sister out of the wedding.
A month later Melina Lambrou and Constantin Demiris were married.
In the beginning it seemed to be a perfect marriage. Constantin was amusing and attentive. He was an exciting and passionate lover, and he constantly surprised Melina with lavish gifts and trips to exotic places.
On the first night of their honeymoon, he said, “My first wife was never able to give me a child. Now we’ll have many sons.”
“No daughters?” Melina teased.
“If you wish. But a son first.”
The day Melina learned she was pregnant, Constantin was ecstatic.
“He will take over my empire,” he declared happily.
In her third month, Melina miscarried. Constantin Demiris was out of the country when it happened. When he returned and heard the news he reacted like a madman.
“What did you do?” he screamed. “How could it happen?”
“Costa, I …”
“You were careless!”
“No, I swear ”
He took a deep breath. “All right. What’s done is done. We’ll have another son.”
“I … I can’t.” She could not meet his eyes.
“What are you saying?”
“They had to perform an operation. I can’t have another child.”
He stood there, frozen, then turned and stalked out without a word.
From that moment on, Melina’s life became a hell. Constantin Demiris carried on as though his wife had deliberately killed his son. He ignored her, and began to see other women.
Melina could have borne that, but what made the humiliation so painful was the pleasure he took in publicly flaunting his liaisons. He openly had affairs with movie stars, opera singers, and the wives of some of his friends. He took his lovers to Psara, and on cruises on his yacht, and to public functions. The press gleefully chronicled Constantin Demiris’s romantic adventures.
They were at a dinner party at the house of a prominent banker.
“You and Melina must come,” the banker had said. “I have a new Oriental chef who makes the best Chinese food in the world.”
The guest list was prestigious. At the dinner table was a fascinating collection of artists, politicians, and industrialists. The food was indeed wonderful. The chef had prepared shark fin soup, shrimp rolls, mu shu pork, Peking duck, spareribs, Canton noodles, and a dozen other dishes.
Melina was seated near the host at one end of the table, her husband next to the hostess at the other end. To Demiris’s right was a pretty, young film star. Demiris was concentrating on her, ignoring everyone else at the table. Melina could hear snatches of his conversation.
“When you finish your picture, you must come on my yacht. It will be a lovely vacation for you. We’ll cruise along the Dalmatian coast …”
Melina tried not to listen, but it was impossible. Demiris made no effort to keep his voice down. “You’ve never been to Psara, have you? It’s a lovely little island, completely isolated. You’ll enjoy it.” Melina wanted to crawl under the table. But the worst was yet to come.
They had just finished the sparerib course, and the butlers were bringing silver finger bowls.
As a finger bowl was placed in front of the young star, Demiris said, “You won’t need that.” And, grinning, he lifted her hands in his and began slowly to lick the sauce from her fingers, one by one. The other guests averted their eyes.
Melina rose to her feet and turned to her host. “If you’ll excuse me, I—I have a headache.”
The guests watched as she fled from the room. Demiris did not come home that night, or the next.
When Spyros heard about the incident, he was livid. “Just give me the word,” Melina’s brother fumed, “and I’ll kill the son of a bitch.”
“He can’t help it,” Melina defended him. “It’s his nature.”
“His nature? He’s an animal! He should be put away. Why don’t you divorce him?”
It was a question Melina Demiris had asked herself often in the still of the long, lonely nights she spent by herself. And it always came down to the same answer: I love him.
At five-thirty in the morning, Catherine was awakened by an apologetic maid.
“Good morning, miss …”
Catherine opened her eyes and looked around in confusion. Instead of her tiny cell at the convent, she was in a beautiful bedroom in … Her memory came flooding back. The trip into Athens. … You’re Catherine Douglas. … They were executed by the state …
“Miss …”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Demiris asked if you would join him for breakfast on the terrace.”
Catherine stared up at her sleepily. She had been awake until four o’clock, her mind in a turmoil.
“Thank you. Tell Mr. Demiris I’ll be right there.”
Twenty minutes later a butler escorted Catherine to an enormous terrace facing the sea. There was a low stone wall that overlooked the gardens twenty feet below. Constantin Demiris was seated at a table, waiting. He studied Catherine as she walked toward him. There was an exciting innocence about her. He was going to take it, possess it, make it his. He imagined her naked in his bed, helping him punish Noelle and Larry again. Demiris rose.
“Good morning. Forgive me for awakening you so early, but I must leave for my office in a few minutes, and I wanted the opportunity for us to have a little chat first.”
“Yes, of course,” Catherine said.
She sat down at the large marble table opposite him, facing the sea. The sun was just rising, showering the sea with a thousand sparkles.
“What would you like for breakfast?”
She shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”
“Some coffee perhaps?”
“Thank you.”
The butler was pouring hot coffee into a Belleek cup.
“Well, Catherine,” Demiris began. “Have you thought about our conversation?”
Catherine had thought of nothing else all night. There was nothing left for her in Athens, and she had nowhere else to go. I won’t go back to the convent, she vowed. The invitation to work for Constantin Demiris in London sounded intriguing. In fact, Catherine admitted to herself, it sounds exciting. It could be the beginning of a new life.
“Yes,” Catherine said, “I have.”
“And?”
“I—I think I would like to try it.”
Constantin Demiris managed to conceal his relief. “I’m delighted. Have you ever been to London?”
“No. That is—I don’t think so.” Why don’t I know for sure? There were still so many frightening gaps in her memory. How many more surprises am I going to get?
“It’s one of the few civilized cities left in the world. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it very much.”
Catherine hesitated. “Mr. Demiris, why are you going to all this trouble for me?”
“Let’s just say it’s because I feel a sense of responsibility.” He paused. “I introduced your husband to Noelle Page.”
“Ah,” Catherine said slowly. Noelle Page. The name sent a small shiver through her. The two of them had died for each other. Larry must have loved her so much.
Catherine forced herself to ask a question that had been tormenting her all night long. “How … how were they executed?”
There was a small pause. “They were shot by a firing squad.”
“Oh.” She could feel the bullets tearing into Larry’s flesh, ripping apart the body of the man she had once loved so much. She was sorry she had asked.
“Let me give you some advice. Don’t think about the past. It can only be hurtful. You must put all that behind you.”
Catherine said slowly, “You’re right. I’ll try.”
“Good. I happen to have a plane flying to London this morning, Catherine. Can you be ready to leave in a little while?”
Catherine thought of all the trips she had taken with Larry, the excited preparations, the packing, the anticipation.
This time, there would be no one to go with, little to pack, and nothing to prepare for. “Yes. I can be ready.”
“Excellent. By the way,” Demiris said casually, “now that your memory has returned, perhaps there’s someone you’d like to get in touch with, someone from your past whom you would like to let know that you’re all right.”
The name that instantly sprang to her mind was William Fraser. He was the only one in the world who remained from her past. But she knew she was not ready to face him yet. When I get settled, Catherine thought. When I start working again, I’ll get in touch with him.
Constantin Demiris was watching her, waiting for her answer.
“No,” Catherine said finally. “There’s no one.”
She had no idea that she had just saved William Fraser’s life.
“I’ll arrange a passport for you.” He handed her an envelope. “This is an advance on your salary. You won’t have to worry about a place to live. The company has a flat in London. You’ll stay there.”
It was overwhelming. “You’re much too generous.”
He took her hand in his. “You’ll find that I’m …” He changed what he was going to say. Handle her carefully, he thought. Slowly. You don’t want to scare her away. “… that I can be a very good friend.”
“You are a very good friend.”
Demiris smiled. Wait.
Two hours later, Constantin Demiris helped Catherine into the back seat of the Rolls-Royce that was to take her to the airport.
“Enjoy London,” he said. “I’ll be in touch with you.”
Five minutes after the car departed, Demiris was on the telephone to London. “She’s on her way.”
Chapter Five (#ulink_010499b4-39a3-5c28-8fea-e71c4a0b9e84)
The plane was scheduled to leave from Hellenikon Airport at 9:00 a.m. It was a Hawker Siddeley, and, to Catherine’s surprise, she was the only passenger. The pilot, a pleasant-faced middle-aged Greek named Pantelis, saw to it that Catherine was comfortably seated and buckled in.
“We’ll be taking off in just a few minutes,” he informed her.
“Thank you.”
Catherine watched him walk into the cockpit to join the co-pilot, and her heart suddenly began to beat faster. This is the plane that Larry flew. Had Noelle Page sat in the seat I am now sitting in? Catherine suddenly felt as though she were going to faint; the walls began to close in on her. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath. That’s all over, she thought. Demiris is right. That’s the past and nothing can change it.
She heard the roar of the engines, and opened her eyes. The plane was lifting off, heading northwest toward London. How many times had Larry made this flight? Larry. She was shaken by the mixture of emotions that his name brought. And the memories. The wonderful, terrible memories …
It was the summer of 1940, the year before America got into the war. She had been fresh out of Northwestern University, and had gone from Chicago to Washington, D.C., for her first job.
Her roommate had said: “Hey, I heard about a job opening that might interest you. One of the girls at the party said she’s quitting to go back to Texas. She works for Bill Fraser. He’s in charge of public relations for the State Department. I just heard about it last night, so if you get over there now, you should beat all the other girls to it.”
Catherine had raced over, only to find Fraser’s reception office already packed with dozens of applicants for the job. I haven’t a chance, Catherine thought. The door to the inner office opened and William Fraser emerged. He was a tall, attractive man, with curly blond hair graying at the temples, bright blue eyes, and a strong, rather forbidding jawline.
He said to the receptionist, “I need a copy of Life. The issue that came out three or four weeks ago. It has a picture of Stalin on the cover.”
“I’ll order it, Mr. Fraser,” the receptionist said.
“Sally, I have Senator Borah on the line. I want to read him a paragraph from that issue. You have two minutes to find a copy for me.” He went into his office and closed the door.
The applicants looked at one another and shrugged.
Catherine stood there, thinking hard. She turned and pushed her way out of the office. She heard one of the women say, “Good. That’s one down.”
Three minutes later, Catherine returned to the office with the old copy of Life with a picture of Stalin on the cover. She handed it to the receptionist. Five minutes later Catherine found herself seated in William Fraser’s office.
“Sally tells me that you came up with the Life magazine.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I assume you didn’t just happen to have a three-week-old issue in your purse.”
“No, sir.”
“How did you find it so quickly?”
“I went down to the barber shop. Barber shops and dentists’ offices always have old issues lying around.”
“Are you that bright about everything?”
“No, sir.”
“We’ll find out,” William Fraser said. She was hired.
Catherine enjoyed the excitement of working for Fraser. He was a bachelor, wealthy and social, and he seemed to know everyone in Washington. Time magazine had called him “The most eligible bachelor of the year.”
Six months after Catherine started to work for William Fraser, they fell in love.
In his bedroom, Catherine said, “I have to tell you something. I’m a virgin.”
Fraser shook his head in wonder. “That’s incredible. How did I wind up with the only virgin in the city of Washington?”
One day William Fraser said to Catherine, “They’ve asked our office to supervise an Army Air Corps recruiting film they’re shooting at MGM studios in Hollywood. I’d like you to handle the picture while I’m in London.”
“Me? Bill, I can’t even load a Brownie. What do I know about making a training film?”
Fraser grinned. “About as much as anyone else. You don’t have to worry. They have a director. His name is Allan Benjamin. The army plans to use actors in the film.”
“Why?”
“I guess they feel that soldiers won’t be convincing enough to play soldiers.”
“That sounds like the army.”
And Catherine had flown to Hollywood to supervise the training film.
The soundstage was filled with extras, most of them in ill-fitting army uniforms.
“Excuse me,” Catherine said to a man passing by. “Is Mr. Allan Benjamin here?”
“The little corporal?” He pointed. “Over there.”
Catherine turned and saw a slight, frail-looking man in uniform with corporal’s stripes. He was screaming at a man wearing a general’s stars.
“Fuck what the casting director said. I’m up to my ass in generals. I need non-coms.” He raised his hands in despair. “Everybody wants to be a chief, nobody wants to be an Indian.”
“Excuse me,” Catherine said. “I’m Catherine Alexander.”
“Thank God!” the little man said. “You take over. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I had a thirty-five-hundred-dollar-a-year job in Dearborn editing a furniture trade magazine, and I was drafted into the Signal Corps and sent to write training films. What do I know about producing or directing? This is all yours.” He turned and hurried toward the exit, leaving Catherine standing there.
A lean, gray-haired man in a sweater moved toward her, an amused smile on his face. “Need any help?”
“I need a miracle,” Catherine said. “I’m in charge of this, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.”
He grinned at her. “Welcome to Hollywood. I’m Tom O’Brien, the assistant director.”
“Do you think you could direct this?”
She saw the corner of his lips twist. “I could try. I’ve done six pictures with Willie Wyler. The situation isn’t as bad as it looks. All it needs is a little organization. The script’s written, and the set’s ready.”
Catherine looked around the soundstage. “Some of these uniforms look terrible. Let’s see if we can’t do better.”
O’Brien nodded approvingly. “Right.”
Catherine and O’Brien walked over to the group of extras. The din of conversation on the enormous stage was deafening.
“Let’s hold it down, boys,” O’Brien yelled. “This is Miss Alexander. She’s going to be in charge here.”
Catherine said, “Let’s line up, so we can take a good look at you, please.”
O’Brien formed the men into a ragged line. Catherine heard laughter and voices nearby and turned in annoyance. One of the men in uniform stood in a corner, paying no attention, talking to some girls who were hanging on his every word and giggling. The man’s manner irritated Catherine.
“Excuse me. Would you mind joining the rest of us?”
He turned and asked, lazily, “Are you talking to me?”
“Yes. We’d like to go to work.”
He was extraordinarily handsome, tall and wiry, with blue-black hair and stormy dark eyes. His uniform fitted perfectly. On his shoulders were the bars of a captain, and across his breast he had pinned on a splash of brightly colored ribbons. Catherine stared at them. “Those medals … ?”
“Are they impressive enough, boss?” His voice was deep and filled with insolent amusement.
“Take them off.”
“Why? I thought I’d give this film a little color.”
“There’s one little thing you forgot. America’s not at war yet. You would have had to have won those at a carnival.”
“You’re right,” he admitted sheepishly. “I didn’t think of that. I’ll take some of them off.”
“Take them all off,” Catherine snapped.
After the morning’s shooting, while Catherine was having lunch at the commissary, he walked up to her table. “I wanted to ask you how I did this morning? Was I convincing?”
His manner infuriated her. “You enjoy wearing that uniform and strutting around the girls, but have you thought about enlisting?”
He looked shocked. “And get shot at? That’s for suckers.”
Catherine was ready to explode. “I think you’re contemptible.”
“Why?”
“If you don’t know why, I could never explain it to you.”
“Why don’t you try? At dinner tonight. Your place. Do you cook?”
“Don’t bother coming back to the set,” Catherine snapped. “I’ll tell Mr. O’Brien to send you your check for this morning’s work. What’s your name?”
“Douglas. Larry Douglas.”
The experience with the arrogant young actor rankled Catherine, and she was determined to put it out of her mind. For some reason, she found it difficult to forget him.
When Catherine returned to Washington, William Fraser said, “I missed you. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about you. Do you love me?”
“Very much, Bill.”
“I love you too. Why don’t we go out tonight and celebrate?”
Catherine knew that that was the night he was going to propose.
They went to the exclusive Jefferson Club. In the middle of dinner, Larry Douglas walked in, still wearing his Army Air Corps uniform with all the medals. Catherine watched unbelievingly as he walked over to their table and greeted not her but Fraser.
Bill Fraser rose. “Cathy, this is Captain Lawrence Douglas. Larry, this is Miss Alexander—Catherine. Larry’s been flying with the RAF. He was the leader of the American squadron over there. They talked him into heading up a fighter base in Virginia to get some of our boys ready for combat.”
Like the rerun of an old movie, Catherine remembered how she had ordered him to take off his bars and his medals, and how he had cheerfully obliged. She had been smug, overbearing—and she had called him a coward! She wanted to crawl under the table.
The next day, Larry Douglas telephoned Catherine at her office. She refused to take his calls. When she finished work he was outside, waiting for her. He had taken off his medals and ribbons and was wearing the bars of a second lieutenant.
He smiled and walked up to her. “Is this better?”
Catherine stared at him. “Isn’t—isn’t wearing the wrong insignia against regulations?”
“I don’t know. I thought you were in charge of all that.”
She looked into his eyes and knew that she was lost. There was a magnetic force about him that was irresistible.
“What do you want from me?”
“Everything. I want you.”
They had gone to his apartment and made love. And it was an exquisite joy that Catherine had never dreamed possible, a fantastic coming together that rocked the room and the universe—until there was an explosion that became a delirious ecstasy, an unbelievable shattering journey, an arriving and a departing, an ending and a beginning. And she had lain there, spent and numb, holding him tightly, never wanting to let him go, never wanting this feeling to stop.
They were married five hours later in Maryland.
Now, seated in the plane, on her way to London to begin a new life, Catherine thought: We were so happy. Where did it all go wrong? The romantic movies and the love songs tricked us all into believing in happy endings and knights in shining armor and love that never, never died. We really believed that James Stewart and Donna Reed had A Wonderful Life, and we knew that Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert would be together forever after It Happened One Night, and we shed tears when Frederick March returned to Myrna Loy for The Best Years of Our Lives, and we were sure that Joan Fontaine found happiness in the arms of Laurence Olivier in Rebecca. And they were lies. All lies. And the songs. I’ll Be Loving You, Always. How do men figure always? With an egg timer? How Deep Is the Ocean? What did Irving Berlin have in mind? One foot? Two feet? And … Forever and a Day. I’m leaving. I want a divorce. Some Enchanted Evening. We’re going to climb Mount Tzoumerka. … You and the Night and the Music. The hotel manager told me about some caves near here. … (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons. No one will ever … now, while she’s asleep. Be My Love. And we listened to the songs and we watched the movies and really thought that was what life was going to be like. I believed in my husband so much. Can I ever believe in anyone again? What did I do to make him want to murder me?
“Miss Alexander …”
Catherine looked up, startled, unfocused.
The pilot was standing over her. “We’ve landed. Welcome to London.”
There was a limousine waiting for Catherine at the airport. The chauffeur said, “I’ll arrange for your luggage, Miss Alexander. My name is Alfred. Would you like to go directly to your flat?”
My flat. “Yes, that will be fine.”
Catherine sank back in her seat. Unbelievable. Constantin Demiris had arranged a private plane for her, and a place to live. He was either the most generous man in the world, or … She simply could not think of any alternative. No. He’s the most generous man in the world. I’ll have to find a suitable way to show my appreciation.
The flat, on Elizabeth Street off Eaton Square, was utterly luxurious. It consisted of a large entrance hall, a beautifully furnished drawing room with a crystal chandelier, a paneled library, a kitchen stocked with food, three attractively furnished bedrooms, and servants’ quarters.
Catherine was greeted at the door by a woman in her forties wearing a black dress. “Good afternoon, Miss Alexander. I am Anna. I am your housekeeper.”
Of course. My housekeeper. Catherine was beginning to take it all in stride. “How do you do?”
The chauffeur brought Catherine’s suitcases in and placed them in her bedroom. “The limousine is at your disposal,” he told her. “Just tell Anna when you’re ready to go to the office, and I will pick you up.”
The limousine is at my disposal. Naturally.“Thank you.”
Anna said, “I’ll unpack your bags. If there’s anything else you need, just let me know.”
“I can’t think of a thing,” Catherine said honestly.
Catherine wandered around the flat until Anna had finished unpacking. She went into the bedroom and looked at the beautiful new dresses that Demiris had bought her, and thought: All this is like a wonderful dream. There was a feeling of total unreality about it. Forty-eight hours ago, she had been watering rose bushes at the convent. Now she was living the life of a duchess. She wondered what the job would be like. I’ll work hard. I don’t want to let him down. He’s been so wonderful. She felt suddenly tired. She lay down on the soft, comfortable bed. I’ll just rest a minute, she thought. She closed her eyes.
She was drowning, and screaming for help. And Larry was swimming toward her, and when he reached her he pushed her under water. And she was in a dark cave, and bats were coming at her, tearing at her hair, beating their clammy wings against her face. Catherine awakened with a shuddering start and sat up in bed, trembling.
She took deep breaths to steady herself. That’s enough, she thought. It’s over. That was yesterday. This is today. No one’s going to hurt you. No one. Not anymore.
Outside Catherine’s bedroom, Anna, the housekeeper, had been listening to the screams. She waited a moment, and when there was silence she walked down the hall and picked up the telephone to report to Constantin Demiris.
The Hellenic Trade Corporation was located at 217 Bond Street, off Piccadilly, in an old government building that had been converted years earlier to an office building. The exterior of the building was a masterpiece of architecture, elegant and graceful.
When Catherine arrived, the office staff was waiting for her. There were half a dozen people near the door to greet her.
“Welcome, Miss Alexander. I’m Evelyn Kaye. This is Carl … Tucker … Matthew … Jennie …”
The names and faces became a blur.
“How do you do?”
“Your office is ready for you. I’ll show you the way.”
“Thank you.”
The reception room was tastefully furnished, with a large Chesterfield sofa, flanked by two Chippendale chairs and a tapestry. They walked down a long carpeted corridor and passed a conference room with heavy pine paneling and leather chairs along a highly polished table.
Catherine was ushered into an attractive office with worn, comfortable furniture and a leather couch.
“It’s all yours.”
“It’s lovely,” she murmured.
There were fresh flowers on the desk.
“From Mr. Demiris.”
He’s so thoughtful.
Evelyn Kaye, the woman who had shown her into the office, was a stocky middle-aged woman with a pleasant face and a comfortable manner. “It will take you a few days to get used to the place, but the operation is really quite simple. We’re one of the nerve centers of the Demiris empire. We coordinate the reports from the overseas divisions, and send them on to headquarters in Athens. I’m the office manager. You’ll be my assistant.”
“Oh.” So I’m the assistant to the office manager. Catherine had no idea what was expected of her. She had been thrown into a fantasy world. Private planes, limousines, a beautiful flat with servants …
“Wim Vandeen is our resident mathematical genius. He computes all the statements and puts them into a master financial analysis chart. His mind works faster than most calculating machines. Come along to his office and meet him.”
They walked down the corridor to an office at the end of the hall. Evelyn opened the door without knocking.
“Wim, this is my new assistant.”
Catherine stepped into the office and stood there, riveted. Wim Vandeen appeared to be in his early thirties, a thin man with a slack-jawed mouth and a dull, vacant expression. He was staring out the window.
“Wim. Wim! This is Catherine Alexander.”
He turned around. “Catherine the First’s real name was Marta Skowronka she was a servant girl born in 1684 who was captured by the Russians she married Peter I and was empress of Russia from 1725 to 1727; Catherine the Great was the daughter of a German prince she was born in 1729 and she married Peter, who became Emperor Peter III in 1762, and she succeeded to his throne that same year after she had him murdered. Under her reign there were three divisions of Poland and two wars against Turkey …” The information poured out like a fountain, in a monotone.
Catherine was listening, stunned. “That’s … that’s very interesting,” she managed.
Wim Vandeen looked away.
Evelyn said, “Wim is shy when he meets people.”
Shy? Catherine thought. The man is weird. And he’s a genius? What kind of job is this going to be?
In Athens, in his offices on Aghiou Geronda Street, Constantin Demiris was listening to a telephone report from Alfred in London.
“I drove Miss Alexander directly from the airport to the flat, Mr. Demiris. I asked her if she wished me to take her anywhere else, as you suggested, and she said no.”
“She’s had no outside contacts at all?”
“No, sir. Not unless she made some telephone calls from the flat, sir.”
Constantin Demiris was not worried about that. Anna, the housekeeper, would report to him. He replaced the receiver, satisfied. She presented no immediate danger to him and he would see that she was watched. She was alone in the world. She had no one to turn to except her benefactor, Constantin Demiris. I must make arrangements to go to London soon, Demiris thought happily. Very soon.
Catherine Alexander found her new job interesting. Daily reports came in from Constantin Demiris’s far-flung empire. There were bills of lading from a steel mill in Indiana, audits from an automobile factory in Italy, invoices from a newspaper chain in Australia, a gold mine, an insurance company. Catherine collated the re-ports and saw to it that the information went directly to Wim Vandeen. Wim glanced at the reports once, put them through the incredible computer that was his brain, and almost instantly calculated the percentages of profit or loss to the company.
Catherine enjoyed getting to know her new colleagues, and she was awed by the beauty of the old building she worked in.
She mentioned it to Evelyn Kaye once in front of Wim and Wim said, “This was a government custom house designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1721. After the great fire of London, Christopher Wren redesigned fifty churches, including St. Paul’s, St. Michael’s, and St. Bride’s. He designed the Royal Exchange and Buckingham House. He died in 1723 and is buried in St. Paul’s. This house was converted to an office building in 1907, and in the Second World War during the Blitz, the government declared it an official air-raid shelter.”
The air-raid shelter was a large bomb-proof room located through a heavy iron door adjoining the basement. Catherine looked into the heavily fortified room, and thought about the brave British men and women and children who had found shelter there during the terrible bombing by Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
The basement itself was huge, running the entire length of the building. It had a large boiler for heating the building, and was filled with electronic and telephone equipment. The boiler was a problem. Several times Catherine had escorted a repairman down to the basement to take a look at it. Each one would tinker with it, pronounce it cured of whatever had ailed it, and leave.
“It looks so dangerous,” Catherine said. “Is there any chance that it might explode?”
“Bless your heart, miss, of course not. See this safety valve here? Well, if the boiler should ever get too hot, the safety valve releases all the excess steam, and Bob’s your uncle. No problem.”
After the work day was over, there was London. London … a cornucopia of wonderful theater, ballet, and music concerts. There were interesting old bookstores like Hatchard’s and Foyle’s—and dozens of museums, little antique shops, and restaurants. Catherine visited the lithograph shops in Cecil Court and shopped at Harrods, and Fortnum and Mason, and Marks and Spencer, and had Sunday tea at the Savoy.
From time to time, unbidden thoughts came into Catherine’s mind. There were so many things to remind her of Larry. A voice … a phrase … a cologne … a song. No. The past is finished. The future is what’s important. And each day she became stronger.
Catherine and Evelyn Kaye became friends and occasionally went out together. One Sunday they visited the open-air art exhibition on the Thames embankment. There were dozens of artists there, young and old, displaying their paintings, and they all had one thing in common: They were failures who had been unable to have their works exhibited in any gallery. The paintings were terrible. Catherine bought one out of sympathy.
“Where are you going to put it?” Evelyn asked.
“In the boiler room,” Catherine said.
As they walked along the London streets, they came across the pavement artists, men who used colored chalks to paint on the stone of the pavement. Some of their work was amazing. Passers by would stop to admire them and then toss a few coins to the artists. One afternoon on her way back from lunch, Catherine stopped to watch an elderly man work on a beautiful landscape in chalk. As he was finishing it, it began to rain, and the old man stood there watching his work being washed away. That’s a lot like my past life, Catherine thought.
Evelyn took Catherine to Shepherd Market. “This is an interesting area,” Evelyn promised.
It was certainly colorful. There was a three-hundred-year-old restaurant called Tiddy Dols, a magazine stand, a market, a beauty parlor, a bakery, antique shops, and several two-and three-story residences.
The name plates on the mailboxes were odd. One read “Helen,” and below it “French lessons.” Another read “Rosie,” and below that “Greek taught here.”
“Is this an educational area?” Catherine asked.
Evelyn laughed aloud. “In a way I guess it is. Only the kind of education these girls give can’t be taught in school.”
Evelyn laughed even louder when Catherine blushed.
Catherine was alone most of the time, but she kept herself too busy to be lonely. She plunged into her days as though trying to make up for the precious moments of her life that had been stolen from her. She refused to worry about the past or the future. She visited Windsor Castle, and Canterbury with its beautiful cathedral, and Hampton Court. On weekends, she went into the country and stayed at quaint little inns, and took long walks through the countryside.
I’m alive,she thought.No one is born happy. Everyone has to make his own happiness. I’m a survivor. I’m young and I’m healthy and wonderful things are going to happen.
On Monday she would go back to work. Back to Evelyn and the girls and Wim Vandeen.
Wim Vandeen was an enigma.
Catherine had never met anyone like him. There were twenty employees in the office, and without even bothering to use a calculator, Wim Vandeen remembered every employee’s salary, national insurance number, and deductions. Although all of this was on file, he kept all the company records in his head. He knew the monthly cash flow from each division and how it compared with the previous months, going back five years, when he had started with the company.
Wim Vandeen remembered everything he had ever seen or heard or read. The range of his knowledge was incredible. The simplest questions on any subject would trigger a stream of information, yet he was anti-social.
Catherine discussed him with Evelyn. “I don’t understand Wim at all.”
“Wim is an eccentric,” Evelyn said. “You just have to take him as he is. All he’s interested in is numbers. I don’t think he cares about people.”
“Does he have friends?”
“No.”
“Does he ever date? I mean—go out with girls?”
“No.”
It seemed to Catherine that Wim was isolated and lonely, and she felt a kinship with him.
Wim’s range of knowledge amazed Catherine. One morning, she developed an ear ache.
Wim said gruffly, “This weather’s not going to help it any. You’d better go see an ear doctor.”
“Thanks, Wim. I …”
“The parts of the ear are the auricle, auditory meatus, tympanic membrane, the chain of ossicles—hammer, anvil, and stirrup—tympanic cavity, the semicircular duct, oval window, and eustachian tube, auditory nerve, and the cochlear duct.” And he walked away.
On another day, Catherine and Evelyn took Wim to lunch at the Ram’s Head, a local pub. In the back room, customers were throwing darts.
“Are you interested in sports, Wim?” Catherine asked. “Have you ever seen a baseball game?”
“Baseball,” Wim said. “A baseball is nine and a quarter inches in circumference. It’s made of yarn wound on a hard rubber cone and covered with white leather. The bat is usually made of ash, not more than two and three quarter inches in the greatest diameter, and not more than forty-two inches in length.”
He knows all the statistics,Catherine thought,but has he ever felt the excitement of actually doing it?
“Have you ever played any sports? Basketball, for instance?”
“Basketball is played on a wooden or concrete floor. The ball has a spherical leather cover thirty-one inches in circumference, inflated by a rubber bladder to thirteen pounds of pressure. It weighs twenty to twenty-two ounces. Basketball was invented by James Naismith in 1891.”
Catherine had her answer.
Sometimes Wim could be an embarrassment in public. One Sunday, Catherine and Evelyn took Wim to Maidenhead, on the Thames. They stopped at the Compleat Angler for lunch. The waiter came up to their table. “We have fresh clams today.”
Catherine turned to Wim. “Do you like clams?”
Wim said, “There are long clams, quahog, or round clams, razor clams, surf clams, single shells, and blood clams.”
The waiter was staring at him. “Would you care to order some, sir?”
“I don’t like clams,” Wim snapped.
Catherine liked the people she was working with, but Wim became special to her. He was brilliant beyond her comprehension, and at the same time, he seemed withdrawn and lonely.
Catherine said to Evelyn one day: “Isn’t there some chance that Wim might lead a normal life? Fall in love and get married?”
Evelyn sighed. “I told you. He has no emotions. He’ll never get attached to anyone.”
But Catherine did not believe it. Once or twice she had caught a flash of interest—of affection—of laughter—in Wim’s eyes, and she wanted to draw him out, to help him. Or had it been her imagination?
One day, the office staff received an invitation to a charity ball being held at the Savoy.
Catherine walked into Wim’s office. “Wim, do you dance?”
He stared at her. “A bar and a half of four-four-time music completes one rhythmic unit in a fox-trot. The man starts the basic step with his left foot and takes two steps forward. The woman starts with her right foot and takes two steps backward. The two slow steps are followed by a quick step at right angles to the slow steps. To dip, the man steps forward on his left foot and dips—slow—then he moves forward on his right foot—slow. Then he moves to the left with his left foot—quick. Then closes his right foot to his left foot—quick.”
Catherine stood there, not knowing what to say. He knows all the words, but he doesn’t understand their meaning.
Constantin Demiris telephoned. It was late at night and Catherine was preparing to go to bed.
“I hope I didn’t disturb you. It’s Costa.”
“No, of course not.” She was glad to hear his voice. She had missed talking to him, asking his advice. After all, he was the only one in the world who really knew about her past. She felt as though he were an old friend.
“I’ve been thinking about you, Catherine. I was concerned that you might find London a lonely place. After all, you don’t know anyone there.”
“I do get a little lonely sometimes,” Catherine admitted. “But I’m coping. I keep remembering what you said. Forget about the past, live for the future.”
“That’s right. Speaking of the future, I’m going to be in London tomorrow. I would like to take you to dinner.”
“I would enjoy that very much,” Catherine said warmly. She was looking forward to it. She would have a chance to tell him how grateful she was to him.
When Constantin Demiris replaced the receiver, he smiled to himself. The chase is on.
They had dinner at the Ritz. The dining room was elegant and the food was delicious, but Catherine was too excited to pay attention to anything except the man who was sitting opposite her. There was so much she had to tell him.
“You have a wonderful office staff,” Catherine said. “Wim is amazing. I’ve never seen anyone who can …”
But Demiris was not listening to the words. He was studying her, thinking how beautiful she was, and how vulnerable. But I mustn’t rush her, Demiris decided. No, I’ll play the game slowly and savor the victory. This one will be for you, Noelle, and for your lover.
“Are you going to be in London long?” Catherine was asking.
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Сидни Шелдон
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: MEMORIES OF MIDNIGHT – The internationally best-selling ′The Other Side of Midnight′ was dominated by the man who is Sheldon′s most magnificent creation…′Constantin Demiris′Billionaire, art lover, womaniser…and killer. To Noelle, the woman who betrayed him, and Larry, the man who stole her, Demiris brought a chilling retribution. But Demiris’ terrible revenge is far from complete…′Ioannina, Greece′In the seclusion of a remote convent a young woman emerges from the trauma of memory loss…′Catherine Alexander′Larry’s widow, sees Demiris as a benefactor, the man who restores her faith in the future. How can she know the fate he has in store, or that her life is bound up with other victims of his mighty ego? From the exotic shores of the Mediterranean to post-war London, ′Memories of Midnight′ is a passionate, unforgettable story of an innocent woman’s fight against a terrifying destinyIn this deadly game, there can only be one winner…If Judd is to survive he must play the game to win.This is Sidney Sheldon′s first novel – a gripping, intense thriller that brought him fame as a bestselling novelist.