minute.
“Do you still think that I am Caliph?“she asked at last.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more except that I
love you. That’s all that matters.”
“What happened to us, Peter?” She lamented softly. “Oh God, what has happened to us?”
“Are you Caliph,
Magda?”
“But Peter, you tried to kill me. That was the test with the knife. You are Caliph.” On Magda’s direction Peter took the
Chris craft in through a narrow passage in the coral reef that surrounded The des Oiseaux, while the seabirds wheeled about them in a raucous cloud, filling the air with their wingbeats.
He anchored in five fathoms in the protected lee, and then called the main island on the VHF radio, speaking to the head boatman.
“The Baronne has decided to sleep on board overnight,” he explained. “Don’t worry about us.” When he went down to the saloon again Magda had recovered sufficiently to be sitting up. She had pulled on one of the terry to welling track suits from the clothes locker, and she had wound a clean towel around her throat to protect it and to hide the fierce fresh bruise that was already staining her skin like the squeezed juice of an overripe plum.
Peter found the medicine box in a locker above the toilet bowl of the heads, and she protested when he brought two Temprapain capsules for the pain, and four tablets of Brufin for the swelling and bruising of her throat and body.
“Take them,” he commanded and held the glass while she did so.
Then he carefully unwrapped the towel from her throat and lightly rubbed a creamy salve into the bruise with his fingertips.
“That feels better already,” she whispered, but now she had lost her voice almost entirely.
“Let’s have a look at your stomach.” He pushed her down gently on her back on the long padded bench and unzipped the top of the to welling suit to the waist. The bruise where he had kicked her had spread from just below her small pale breasts to the tiny sculpted navel in the flat hard plane of her belly; again he massaged the soothing cream into her skin and she sighed and murmured with the comfort of it.
When he finished she was able to hobble, still painfully doubled over, to the heads. She locked herself in for fifteen minutes while
Peter tended his own injuries, and when she emerged again she had bathed her face and combed out her hair.
He poured two crystal oldfashioned glasses half full of Jack
Daniel’s Bourbon and he handed one to her as she sank onto the padded bench beside him. “Drink it. For your throat,” he ordered, and she drank and gasped at the sting of the liquor and set the glass aside.
“And you, Peter?” she husked with sudden concern. “Are you all right?” Just one thing,” he said. “I’d hate you to get really mad at me.” Then he smiled, and she started to chuckle but choked on the pain and ended up clinging to him.
“When can we talk?” he asked her gently. “We have to talk this out.”
“Yes, I know, but not yet, Peter. Just hold me for a while.” And he was surprised at the comfort that it afforded him.
The warm woman shape pressed to him seemed to ease the pain of body and of mind, and he stroked her hair as she nuzzled softly against his throat.
“You said you loved me, “she murmured at last, making it a question. Seeking reassurance, as lovers always must.
“Yes. I love you. I think I knew it all along, but when I
learned that you were Caliph, I had to bury it deep. It was only there at the end I had to admit to myself.”
““I’m glad,” she said simply.
“Because you see I love you also. I thought I would never be able to love. I had despaired of it, Peter. Until you. And then they told me you would kill me. That you were Caliph. I thought then I would die having found you and then lost you. It was too cruel, Peter. I had to give you the chance to prove it wasn’t true!”
“Don’t talk,” he commanded. “Just lie there and listen.
There is nothing wrong with my voice, so I will tell it first.
The way it was with me, and how I knew you were Caliph.” And he told it to her, holding her to him and speaking softly, steadily. The only other sounds in the cabin were the slap of the wavelets against the hull and the subdued hum of the air-conditioning unit.
“You know everything up to the day Melissa-Jane was taken, all of it. I told you all of it, without reservation and without lying, not once-” He started, and then he went on to tell her in detail of the hunt for Melissa-Jane.
I think something must have snapped in my mind during those days.
I was ready to believe anything, to try anything to get her back. I
would wake up in the night and go to the toilet and vomit with the thought of her hand in a glass jar.” He told her how he had planned to kill Kingston Parker to meet Caliph’s demands, exactly how he intended doing it, the detailed how and where, and she shuddered against him.
“The power to corrupt even the best,” she whispered.
“Don’t talk-” he admonished her, and went on to tell her of the tip-off that had led them at last to the Old Manse in Laragh.
“When I saw my daughter like that, I lost what little was left of my reason. When I held her and felt the fever and heard her scream with lingering terror, I would have killed-” He broke off and they were silent until she protested with a small gasp and he realized that his hand had closed on her upper arm and his fingers were biting into her flesh with the force of his memories.
“I’m sorry.” He relaxed his grip, and lifted the hand to tuch her cheek. “Then they told me about you.” to “Who?” she whispered “The
Atlas Command.”
“Parker?”
“Yes, and Colin Noble.”
“What did they tell you?”
“They told me how your father brought you to Paris when you were a child. They told me that even then you were bright and pretty and special-” He began to recite it for her. ” When your father was killed-” and she moved restlessly against his chest as he said it you went to live with foster parents, all of them members of the party, and in the end you were so special that they sent somebody to take you back to Poland. Somebody who posed as your uncle-“
“I believed he was-” She nodded. For ten years I believed it. He used to write to me-” She stopped herself with an effort, was silent a moment and then, “he was all I ever had after Papa.”
“You were selected to go to Odessa,” Peter went on, and felt her go very still in his arms, so he repeated it with the harshness unconcealed in his tone, to the special school in
Odessa.”
“You know about Odessa?” she whispered. “Or you think you know but nobody who has never been there could ever really know.”
“I know they taught you to-” He paused, imagining again a beautiful young girl in a special room overlooking the Black Sea, learning to use her body to trap and beguile a man, any man. They taught you many things.”
He could not make the accusation.
“Yes,“she murmured. “Many, many things.”
“Like how to kill a man with your hands.”
“I think that subconsciously I could not bring myself to kill you, Peter. God knows you should not have survived. I loved you, even though I hated you for betraying me, I could not really do it-” She sighed again, a broken gusty sound.
And when I thought that you were going to kill me it was almost a relief. I was ready to accept that, against living on without the love that I thought I had found.”
