herself spent the night before the meeting in the city of Shkoder.
So as not to arouse suspicion by her presence in the city, she had arranged to dine with the archbishop and formally announce her endowment of a chair of moral metaphysics at the Jesuit college there. But she retired from the banquet early, telling the archbishop that her kidney stones were bothering her.
Well before dawn a fishing boat, with rags tied around its oars, was carrying Sophia across the dark lake toward the barge.
The barge had formerly been used to transport lemons from the lake down to the Adriatic. Its old worn planks were deeply impregnated with a rich lemon smell, and in fact Sophia had sentimentally chosen the barge for that very reason.
For nearly seventy years she had treasured the smell of lemons above all others, ever since that distant afternoon in her youth when she and her Skanderbeg had wandered hand in hand through the lemon groves beneath his castle, smiling and laughing and finally sinking into the grass to become lovers, both of them knowing another for the first time in the heady perfume of that blossoming Mediterranean spring of long ago.
The exterior of the barge had been disguised with earth and bushes and vines to make it look like a small island, but inside it was nothing less than lavishly decorated. Magnificent Oriental rugs and tapestries abounded, giving the chamber an opulent Levantine atmosphere. Instead of a conference table there was a circle of thick satin pillows where the syndicate representatives could lounge comfortably while sipping cups of strong Turkish coffee. The soft flickering light cast by the tapers along the walls, together with the dishes of delicate incense and the sweet all-pervasive smell of lemon trees in bloom, added to the sense of Oriental ease.
Above the circle of pillows a small yet particularly splendid Oriental rug had been cleverly suspended on thin wires, the wires invisible in that dim light, which gave the impression that the rug was a flying carpet from one of the traditional Arab tales of romance. On this Sophia had positioned herself to meet her guests, standing on the flying carpet which had been raised to a height where she could greet the men eye to eye.
The English and French representatives began to arrive, dressed as gentlemen on a fishing holiday, rowed to the barge by Sophia's servants dressed as local fishermen. They presented their credentials to Sophia, who indicated the circle of pillows. When everyone was comfortably stretched out she sat down on her flying carpet and gave a short welcoming speech, emphasizing that the syndicate now owned all the oil reserves in the former Ottoman Empire. She then asked for presentations from the floor.
It was immediately apparent the other members of the syndicate had no idea what the boundaries of the former Ottoman Empire enclosed. Maps were spread out in the middle of the circle and consulted, but none of the maps agreed with one another. The extent of the former Ottoman Empire was utterly confused by its long history of decay.
An hour passed. The English representatives were still mumbling repetitiously, the French still jabbering passionately, but nothing had been jointly discerned. Throughout this time Sophia had remained absolutely silent, sitting on her flying carpet overhead, chain-smoking cheroots and watching the proceedings. At the end of an hour, however, she apparently said something in Tosk or Gheg to her servants, because the flying carpet suddenly began to move.
Everyone in the room stopped talking. The men lounging on the pillows watched in wonder as the flying carpet slowly descended into the middle of the circle, coming to rest a few inches above the floor, Sophia sitting rigidly in her flat black hat and her black gloves, her thin black veil with the cheroot sticking through it. They could now see she was holding something in her left hand, what looked like an exquisite porcelain cup.
Sophia raised the cup in front of her and leaned out over the edge of the flying carpet. She studied the large map laid out on the floor and dipped her right forefinger into the cup. She touched the map.
The men gasped. A heavy black viscous substance spread where her finger had been.
Sophia nodded to herself and blew a smoke ring in the air. She had touched Constantinople, obliterating it with oil. Now the flying carpet moved gracefully around the circle, still hovering inches above the floor, and the steady black line traced by Sophia's finger began to lengthen.
From Constantinople she was floating with conviction down the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The flying carpet paused. Sophia again dipped her finger in the milky white porcelain cup. The spellbound delegates leaned forward on their pillows, holding their breath, as Sophia arrived at the Red Sea and banked to the left, speeding east around the tip of the Arabian peninsula, heading now across the water toward the Persian Gulf, the line of crude advancing with her.
Their eyes narrowed. The flying carpet drifted over Abadan and floated inexorably north in the direction of the Black Sea, the space enclosed by Sophia's black line gradually taking on the shape of an ellipse, an enormous area that would contain all the future oil-producing lands of the Middle East except for Persia.
A final dip in the cup of crude and the ellipse was closed. The line had returned to Constantinople, the former capital of the Ottoman Empire.
Sophia triumphantly raised her veil, the only time the men in the room would ever see her face. She was smiling happily and puffing her cheroot, but perhaps what they would all recall later was the dreamy quality of her eyes. It was true she looked no more than half her age, if that, which was astonishing in itself. But it was the softness of her eyes that held them, not at all what they would have expected at a time like this.
It was almost as if she had created the drama of this momentous occasion with the guileless simplicity of a child.
Yes, they were sure of it.
Sophia smiled shyly, then all at once her face was serious. Another command in Tosk or Gheg and the flying carpet floated to the middle of the circle above the map. She put her tiny right fist in the fragile porcelain cup of crude, wiggled it around and brought it out dripping. With a gesture of authority she flattened her hand in the very center of the map.
An unmistakable
Now the flying carpet gently rose in the air, withdrawing to a position of height just outside the circle.
After fixing each man in the room with her eyes, Sophia lowered her veil. She waved her cheroot commandingly and spoke in a quiet voice.
Yes, gentlemen, there you see it This is the former Ottoman Empire for our purposes, and this is the area covered by our charter. We have the agreement of your governments and I now solemnly declare the syndicate in operation. You will return to your countries and issue the necessary orders. We begin digging, pumping and distributing at once.
Thus the most brilliant moment of her career. Speeding on an exquisite flying carpet, tiny Sophia the Unspoken had silently circled the entire Middle East in minutes and transformed herself into Sophia the Black Hand.
From an opulent Oriental chamber on a lemon-scented barge, a vast international cartel had been launched. And the tiny Armenian woman in black would thereafter be known, among the very few men in the shadowy upper reaches of power who were aware of her true role in the world, as the phenomenal
Oil and immense wealth.
Yet within the tiny old woman there still lived a haunting innocence, as witnessed by others on the lemon- scented barge where she had once floated on a flying carpet, the innocent simplicity of an eight-year-old peasant girl who had found a broken man lying at the gate of a ruined castle, the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins home from his unparalleled ordeal in the Holy Land, and with the perfect faith of her years fallen in love with him forever.
Indeed, there were still mornings when Sophia rose long before dawn with a strange distant smile on her face, silently to descend the stairways of the castle to a small unused room in its foundations, a servants'
kitchen where she had been born and lived in poverty with her mother during her first years, the room where the two of them had tenderly nursed the last of the Skanderbegs back to life on their bed of straw, while they slept on the stone floor.
Sophia had kept the room exactly as it had been then, with its bare walls and its little hearth, the one or two pots and the bed of straw, the broom by the door.
On those mornings she took the broom and proudly swept the floor of the little kitchen. Went down on her
