raised her arms still at full stretch to him, folding them gracefully around his neck, still holding her back arched so that the prominent dark-red nipples brushed lightly against the crisp dark mat of curls that covered his own chest.
“Let’s pretend this will last for ever,” she whispered, with her lips an inch from his, and her breath was rich as an overblown rose,
heavy with the smell of vital woman and rising passion; then her lips spread softly, warmly against his and she sucked his tongue deeply into her mouth, with a low moan of wanting and the hard slim body began to work against his, the hands breaking from his neck and hunting down his spine, long curved nails pricking and goading him just short of pain.
His own arousal was so swift and so brutally hard that she moaned again, and the tension went out of her body, it seemed to soften and spread like a wax figure held too close to the flame, her eyelids trembling closed and her thighs falling apart.
“So strong-” she whispered, deep in her throat and he reared up over her, feeling supreme, invincible.
“Peter, Peter,” she cried. “Oh yes like that. Please like that.”
Both of them striving triumphantly for the moment of glory when each was able to lose self and become for a fleeting instant part of the godhead.
Long afterwards they lay side by side in the enormous bed, both of them stretched out flat upon their backs, not touching except for the fingers of one hand intertwined as their bodies had been.
“I will go away-” she whispered, but not now. Not yet.” He did not reply, the effort was beyond him, and her own voice was languorous with a surfeit of pleasure.
“I will make a bargain with you. Give me three days more. Only three days, to be happy like this. For me it is the first time. I
have never known this before, and it may be the last time-” He tried to rouse himself to deny it, but she squeezed his fingers for silence and went on.
“ It may be the last,” she repeated. “And I want to have it all. Three days, in which we do not mention Caliph, in which we do not think of the blood and striving and suffering out there. If you give me that I will do everything that you want me to do. Is it a bargain,
Peter? Tell me we can have that.”
“Yes. We can have that.”
“Then tell me you love me again, I do not think I can hear you say it too often.”
because I have to, He said it often during those magic days, and she had spoken the truth, each time he told her she accepted with as much joy as the last time, and always each seemed to be within touching distance of the other.
Even when tearing side by side across the warm. flat waters of the lagoon, leaning back with straight arms on the tow lines, skis hissing angrily and carving fiercely sparkling wings of water from the surface as they wove back and forth in a pas de deux across the streaming, creaming water, laughing together in the wind and the engine roar of the Chriscraft, Hapiti the Polynesian boatman on the flying bridge looking back with a great white grin of sympathy for their joy.
Finning gently through mysterious blue and dappled depths, the only sound the wheezing suck and blow of their scuba valves and the soft clicking and the eternal echoing susurration that is the pulse beat of the ocean, holding hands as they sank down to the long abandoned hull of the Japanese aircraft carrier, now overgrown with a waving forest of sea growth and populated by a teeming fascinating multitude of beautiful and bizarre creatures.
Flying silently down the sheer steel cliff of the canted flight deck, which seemed to reach down into the very oceanic depths, so that there was the eerie fear of suddenly being deprived of support and falling down to where the surface light blued out in nothingness.
Pausing to peer through their glass face-plates into the still gaping wounds rent into the steel by aerial bombs and high explosive,
and then entering through those cruel caverns cautiously as children into a haunted house and emerging victoriously with carrier nets of trophies, coins and cutlery, brass and porcelain.
Strolling on the secluded beaches of the outer islands, still hand in hand, naked in the sunlight.
Fishing the seething tide-race through the main channel at full spring tide, and shouting with excitement as the golden amberjack came boiling up in the wake, bellies flashing like mirrors, to hit the dancing feather lures, and send the Penn reels screeching a wild protest, and the fibreglass rods nodding and kicking.
Out in the humbling silences of the unrestricted ocean, when even the smudge of the islands disappeared beyond the wave crests for minutes at a time, with only the creak and whisper of the rigging, the trembling pregnancy of the main sail, and the rust leas the twin hulls of the big Hobie cat knifed the tops off the swells.
Strolling the long curving beaches in the moonlight, searching for the heavenly bodies that so seldom show through the turbid skies of
Europe Orion the hunter and the Seven Sisters exclaiming at the stranger constellations of this hemisphere governed by the great fixed cross in the southern heavens.
Each day beginning and ending in the special wonder and mystery of the circular bed, in loving that welded their bodies and their souls together each time more securely.
Then on the fourth day day Peter woke to find her gone, and for a moment experienced an appalling sensation of total loss.
When she came back to him he did not recognize her for a breath of time.
Then he realized that she had cut away the long dark tresses of her hair, cropped it down short so that it curled close against her skull, like the petals of a dark flower. It had the effect of making her seem even taller. Her neck like the stem of the flower,
longer, and the curve of the throat accentuated so that it became delicate and swan-like.
She saw his expression, and explained in a matter-of-fact tone.
“I thought some change was necessary, if I am to leave under a new identity. It will grow again, if you want it that way.” She seemed to have changed completely herself, the languid amorous mood given way to the brisk businesslike efficiency of before. While they ate a last breakfast of sweet yellow papaya and the juice of freshly squeezed limes she explained her intentions, as she went swiftly through the buff envelope that her secretary had silently laid beside her plate.
There was a red Israeli diplomatic passport in the envelope.
“I will be using the name Ruth Levy-” and she picked up the thick booklet of airline tickets, and I have decided to go back to Jerusalem.
I have a house there. It’s not in my name, and I do not think anybody else outside of Mossad is aware of it. It will be an ideal base, close to my control at Mossad. I will try to give you what support I can,
try to get further information to assist you in the hunt-” She passed him a typed sheet of notepaper.
That is a telephone number at Mossad where you can get a message to me. Use the name Ruth Levy.” He memorized the number while she went on talking, and then shredded the sheet of paper.
“I have modified the arrangements for my departure,” she told him.
“We will take the Chriscraft across to Bora-Bora.
It’s only a hundred miles. I will radio ahead. My friends will meet me off the beach after dark.” They crept in through a narrow passage in the coral with all the lights on the Chriscraft doused,
Magda’s boatman using only what was left of the waning moon and his own intimate knowledge of the islands to take her in.
“I wanted Hapiti to see me go ashore alive, “she whispered quietly,
leaning against Peter’s chest to draw comfort from their last minutes together. “I did not exaggerate the danger you might be in if the local people thought what we want Caliph to think. Hapiti will keep his mouth shut-” she assured him and will back up your story of a shark attack, unless you order him to tell the truth.”
“You think of everything.”
“I have only just found you, monsieur she chuckled. “I
do not want to lose you yet. I have even decided to speak a word to the Chief of Police on Tahiti, when I pass through.
He is an old friend. When you get back to Les Neuf Poissons, have my secretary radio Tahiti-” She went on
