When Sophia entered the dining room the opening chords of Bach's Mass in B Minor boomed forth from the organ in the balcony at the far end of the room. That piece of music had been the favorite of her common-law husband, Nubar's grandfather, and Sophia always had it played during meals at the castle.
Nubar kissed his grandmother lightly on the lips and went to his chair in the middle of the table. At the far end, nearer the organ and facing Sophia, the usual place had been set for his dead grandfather.
Sophia was then in her eighty-sixth year. She was dressed entirely in black as she had been for half a century, ever since the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins had ceased to recognize her upon the birth of their natural son, Catherine, Nubar's insane dead father. She wore a flat black hat and black gloves and a thin veil, raised only at meals. But the firmness of her unlined face made her look much younger than she was.
Her stature gave the same impression. Sophia was a tiny woman who had shrunk with age, and who kept on shrinking, until now she was not much bigger than a large doll. In fact Nubar sometimes wondered what would happen to her if she lived another ten or fifteen years. At the rate she was disappearing, wouldn't she be the size of a baby by then?
Or was that the point. There was no denying Sophia's whimsical eccentricities. Having been grown up for decades, had she now decided to retrace the stages of her extraordinary life back to its origins?
In order to sit at the table, Sophia used a special high chair with a folding stepladder built into it. Except when eating she chain-smoked black Turkish cheroots through a hole in her veil, an extremely mild cigar made to order for her in Istanbul. Nubar's earliest memories were of a soft white face in black lace hovering over his cradle, a mixture of lavender scent and pungent cigar fumes suddenly engulfing him.
Then she had seemed large to Nubar, but of course he hadn't been aware that she was standing on a chair beside his cradle.
Once long ago when she had been rebuilding the Wallenstein fortune lost by his grandfather, and modestly saying very little as she did so, she had become known in the district as Sophia the Unspoken.
The name had lingered into Nubar's youth, but now she was always referred to as Sophia
Various explanations for the name existed. Among the local peasants it was assumed she was called this because she always wore black gloves. Farther afield in the Balkans it was suspected she must have played some decisive part in the Black Hand terrorist organization that had been active in Serbia before the war. While elsewhere in Europe the name was considered a natural epithet for someone whose manipulations in oil were vast and conclusive.
All of these explanations were true as far as they went. Sophia obviously did wear black gloves and she had assisted the Balkan nationalist movements before the war. And her influence in the Middle East had made her the single most powerful oil merchant in the world.
But none of these facts had given birth to her epithet, which had actually come from an unpublicized meeting that took place on a lemon barge in 1919, an event so ruthlessly suppressed only a few men in the world knew about it.
And with reason, they felt, since it proved that an international oil cartel of scandalous proportions did indeed exist in Europe after the First World War.
The steps that led to that highly secret meeting had begun a decade earlier. For three years after the death of her beloved husband in 1906, Sophia had remained in absolute seclusion in the castle caring for Nubar, who had been born prematurely the day after his grandfather died. But then the resilient powers of her forebears had reexerted themselves.
Although no one in the twentieth century suspected the truth, Sophia wasn't an Albanian but an Armenian, the descendant of a woman who had been brought to the castle two hundred years ago by an illiterate Wallenstein warrior serving in the forces of the Ottoman sultan. That Skanderbeg had helped crush an uprising in Armenia, and for his part in the brutal slaughter he was offered the pick of some captured prisoners. As would any of the Skanderbegs save for the last, he naturally chose only very young girls of eight or nine. With a half-dozen of these little girls roped behind his horse he began the journey back to Albania, looking forward to a lusty military holiday.
But that early Skanderbeg fared poorly. Before he reached the Black Sea a raiding party of Armenian patriots managed to free three of the girls. While waiting for a sailing vessel a fourth girl escaped in a rowboat, and the following night a fifth slipped away while he was getting drunk in order to rape her.
Thus only Sophia's ancestress reached the castle in Albania, still a virgin because the Wallenstein warrior could only rape when thoroughly drunk, and he had been too afraid of losing the last of his spoils to drink on the latter part of the journey.
By the time he sighted his castle, that Wallenstein was desperate with craving. He locked the girl and himself in a tower room and emptied a flagon of arak in a frenzy.
After weeks of abstinence, the drink had an immediate effect. He was insensible and slobbering, the room a blur, his mind a cave of swirling bats. His left eyelid was drooping heavily and an unmistakable tightness was in his groin. On his hands and knees he groped his way ecstatically across the room toward the little girl cowering by a window.
The girl was frightened but not incapable of thought. She was ready to jump out the window, but first she wanted to see if she could take advantage of his drunkenness as others had done. In particular she noticed how the drooping left eyelid seemed to confuse his movements.
She therefore praised his magnificent virility. She said she had been waiting weeks for this moment and offered him another flagon of arak, hoping, she said, that this would double the time he spent on top of her. The Wallenstein warrior, laughing hysterically at his own prowess, staggered to his feet and drank off the arak.
His left eye snapped shut. He lunged and smashed into the wall, reeled backward blindly and went crashing through the window, landing on his face in the moat several hundred feet below, instantly dead in his sexual frustration.
The little Armenian girl was put to work in the castle stables until she was ten, old enough not to attract the attention of the next Skanderbeg. When she was fifteen she began to sneak down into the villages at night, determined to find an Armenian who could father a child for her and thereby keep alive her Armenian heritage in the barbaric foreign land where fate had brought her. Before long an itinerant Armenian rug dealer chanced to pass through the district and was happy to oblige her. A girl was born and fifteen years later another itinerant Armenian rug dealer spent a pleasurable week with another young Armenian woman in one of the villages.
Thus these mothers and daughters, while cleaning the Wallenstein stables, maintained their pure Armenian blood down to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Sophia broke the tradition by becoming the common-law wife of the last of the Skanderbegs, the forger of the Sinai Bible.
In 1909 Sophia ended her period of formal mourning and emerged from seclusion in the castle.
Agriculture no longer interested her so she turned her attention to the problems of energy, opening several low-quality lignite mines on her estate. Then when the British navy switched from coal to oil in 1911, Sophia decided she should go to Constantinople and learn what little was known about oil in the Middle East. She studied diligently there and became convinced that oil could be found along the Tigris.
In 1914 she executed the second most brilliant maneuver of her career by putting together a syndicate, in Constantinople, of English oil companies and German banks to exploit the oil along the Tigris, obtaining a charter from the Ottoman government for that purpose.
As broker of the agreement, Sophia retained for herself a share of seven per cent of all future profits.
Because of the war the syndicate was inactive for the next five years. Then in 1919 Sophia convened the highly secret meeting of its members.
The English responded eagerly and so did the French, new partners in the syndicate, Sophia having cleverly transferred to them the shares formerly owned by the defeated Germans. England and France now administered the Middle East through various mandates. And the oil companies of the two countries, at her insistence, had successfully persuaded their governments that the syndicate's charter should apply not just to the Tigris valley, but to all the lands that had previously been a part of the Ottoman Empire.
The meeting was to be held on a barge in the middle of Lake Shkoder, on the Albanian-Yugoslav border, thereby allowing members to approach the meeting from different countries for added diplomatic security. Sophia
