“Alexander cleared the security checks. You know how stringent those are. I can tell you his life history, if you want to hear it. He was born in Stratford-on-Avon.”
Michael nodded. “An actor’s town, if there ever was one. That’s got the Abwehr’s fingerprints all over it.” The Abwehr, as Margritta knew, was Hitler’s intelligence bureau. “A car will be coming for me at oh-seven-hundred. I think you should go, too.”
“Go? Go where?”
“Away. Out of Egypt, if possible. Maybe to London. I don’t think it’s safe for you here anymore.”
“Impossible. I’ve got too many obligations. My God, I own the newspaper! I can’t just clear out on a moment’s notice!”
“All right, stay at the consulate. But I think you should leave North Africa as soon as you can.”
“My ship hasn’t sprung a leak,” Margritta insisted. “You’re wrong about Alexander.”
Michael said nothing. He ate another piece of mutton and dabbed at his mouth with a napkin.
“Are we winning?” she asked him after another moment.
“We’re holding,” he answered. “By our teeth and fingernails. Rommel’s supply network has broken down, and his panzers are running out of petrol. Hitler’s attention is fixed on the Soviet Union. Stalin’s calling for an Allied attack from the west. No country, even one as strong as Germany, can wage war on two fronts. So, if we can hold Rommel until his ammunition and petrol dries up, we can force him back to Tobruk. And past that, if we’re lucky.”
“I didn’t know you believed in luck.” She arched a pale blond eyebrow.
“It’s a subjective term. Where I come from, ‘luck’ and ‘brute strength’ are one and the same.”
She pounced on the opportunity. “Where do you come from, Michael?”
“A place far from here,” he replied, and the way he said it told her that there would be no more discussion of his personal life.
“We have dessert,” she said when he’d finished his meal and pushed the plate away. “A chocolate torte, in the kitchen. I’ll make us some coffee, too.” She stood up, but he was faster. He was at her side before she could take two steps, and he said, “Later for the torte and coffee. I had another dessert in mind.” Taking her hand, he kissed it, slowly, finger by finger.
She put her arms around his neck, her heart hammering. He picked her up, effortlessly, in his arms, and then plucked a single rose from where they were arranged in a blue vase at the table’s center.
He took her up the staircase, along the hall of armor, to her bedroom with its four-poster bed and its view of the Cairo hills.
They undressed each other by candlelight. She remembered how hairy his arms and chest were, but now she saw that he’d been injured; his chest was crisscrossed with adhesive bandages. “What happened to you?” she asked as her fingers grazed his hard brown flesh.
“Just a little something I got tangled up in.” He watched as her lace slip floated to her ankles, and then he picked her up out of her clothes and slid her against the cool white sheet.
He was naked now as well, and seemed larger still for the knots of muscle exposed to the candlelight. He eased his body down beside hers, and she smelled another odor under his faint lime cologne. It was a musky aroma, and again she thought of green forests and cold winds blowing across the wilderness. His fingers traced slow circles around her nipples, and then his mouth was on hers and their heat connected, flowed into each other, and she trembled to her soul.
Something else replaced his fingers: the velvet rose, fluttering around her risen nipples, teasing her breasts like kisses. He drew the rose down along the line of her belly, stopped there to circle her navel, then down again into the fullness of golden hair, still circling and teasing with a gentle touch that made her body arch and yearn. The rose moved along the damp center of her desire, fluttering between her taut thighs, and then his tongue was there, too, and she gripped his hair and moaned as her hips undulated to meet him.
He paused, holding her back from the edge, and began again, the tongue and the rose, working in counterpoint like fingers on a fine golden instrument. Margritta made music, whispering and moaning as the warm waves built inside her and crashed through her senses.
And then there it was, the white-hot explosion that lifted her off the bed and made her cry out his name. She settled back like an autumn leaf, full of color and wilted at the edges.
He entered her, heat against heat, and she clung to his back and held on like a rider in the storm; his hips moved with deliberation, not frantic lust, and just as she thought she could accept no more of him, her body opened and she sought to take him into the place where they would be one creature with two names and pounding hearts, and then even the hard spheres of his manhood would enter her, too, instead of being simply pressed against the moistness. She wanted all of him, every inch, and all the liquid he could give her. But even in the midst of the maelstrom she sensed him holding himself apart, as if there were something in himself that even he could not get to. In their cell of passion she thought she heard him growl, but the noise was muffled against her throat and she could not be sure it wasn’t her own voice.
The bed’s joints spoke. It had spoken for many men, but never so eloquently.
And then his body convulsed-once, twice, a third time. Five times. He shivered, his fingers twisting the tangled sheet. She locked her legs around his back, urging him to stay. Her lips found his mouth, and she tasted the salt of his effort.
They rested awhile, talking again, but this time in whispered voices, and the subject was not London or the war but the art of passion. And then she took the rose from where it lay on the bedside table, and she followed the trail down to his restirring hardness. It was a beautiful machine, and she lavished it with love.
Rose petals lay on the sheets. The candle had burned low. Michael Gallatin lay on his back, sleeping, with Margritta’s head on his shoulder. He breathed with a faint, husky rumbling noise, like a well-kept engine.
Still later, she awakened and kissed him on the lips. He was sleeping soundly, and did not respond. Her body was a pleasant ache; she felt stretched, re-formed into his shape. She looked at his face for a moment, assigning the craggy features to memory. It was too late for her to feel real love, she thought. There had been too many bodies, too many ships passing in the night; she knew she was useful to the service as a refuge and liaison for agents who needed sanctuary, and that was all. Of course she decided who she would sleep with, and when, but there had been many. The faces blended together-but his stayed apart. He was not like the others. And not like any man she’d ever known. So call it schoolgirl infatuation and leave it at that, she thought. He had his destination, and she had her own, and they were not likely to be the same port.
She got out of bed, carefully so as not to awaken him, and went naked into the large walk-through closet that separated her bedroom from the dressing room. She switched on the light, chose a white silk gown, shrugged into it, then took a brown terrycloth robe-a man’s robe-off a hanger and draped it around a female-shaped dress dummy in the bedroom. A thought: perhaps a spray of perfume between her breasts and a brush of her hair before true sleep. The car might be coming at seven in the morning, but she recalled that he liked to be up by five-thirty.
Margritta walked, the well-used rose in hand, into the dressing room. A small Tiffany lamp still burned on the table. She sniffed the rose, smelled their mingled scents, and put it into a vase. That one would have to be pressed between silk. She drew a contented breath, then picked up her brush and looked into the mirror.
The man was standing behind the screen. She could see his face above it, and in the second of calm recognition before terror she realized it was a perfect killer’s face: devoid of emotion, pale, and quite unremarkable. It was the kind of face that blends easily into crowds, and you do not remember a moment after seeing.
She opened her mouth to call for Michael.
3
There was a polite cough, and a peacock’s eye winked fire. The bullet hit Margritta in the back of the skull, precisely where the assassin had aimed. Her blood, bone, and brains splattered onto the glass, and her head thunked down amid the vials of beauty.
He came out, snake-quick, dressed in tight-fitting black, the small pistol with its silencer gripped in a black- gloved hand. He glanced at the little rubber-coated grapple hook that clung to the terrace’s railing; the rope trailed down to the courtyard. She was dead and the job was done, but he knew that a British agent was here as well. He looked at his wristwatch. Almost ten minutes before the car would meet him beyond the gate. Time enough to send
