Lace II (44 page)

*   *   *

It was almost midnight and Abdullah was working at his desk in a soft green study, scattered with rich rugs and hung with cream-gauze curtains.

As the breathless Pagan burst in, he looked up and his frown of concentration changed to a smile, as he grabbed a newspaper and said, “Look what’s in the
Tribune.”
He gestured to a two-inch front-page story which announced the death of Senator Ruskington in the Washington apartment of a French call girl. “So now, Pagan, Lili is vindicated, and it looks as if Judy’s money problems can be resolved.”

Pagan paused for breath after running along three corridors and up a flight of stairs. “That’s wonderful news, darling. I mean, I’m sorry he died, but the old bugger was asking for trouble.”

“Why are you out of breath, Pagan? What’s happened?”

Pagan held out a bit of paper. “I wanted you to see this as fast as possible. Judy’s received a second note from the kidnappers. Here’s a copy.”

Abdullah skimmed it. “I still can’t decide whether these people are cunning or crazy. This sounds like an eighteenth-century sultan’s threat. If they wanted to get rid of one of the royal concubines at Topkapi Palace, the woman was strangled with a silken cord.” He paused, then added, “Common concubines were sewn up in sacks, weighted with rocks and thrown into the Bosphorus. One sultan got rid of two hundred eighty concubines like that. A few years later, a
diver found all those ghastly sacks, still upright on the sea bed, swaying in the invisible current, as if they were dancing to music.”

“I know, darling, you’ve told me before. A long time ago. But what do you make of the rest of the note?”

“Obviously, the police will lay an ambush on the ferry and at both landings, but often, with bandits, the first rendezvous is never kept, it’s merely a test to check police reaction. However, this last sentence is strange. Why not just say that Lili will be killed?”

Pagan burst into tears. “I can’t bear to think of it.”

“My darling, it’s late and we’re both tired. Let’s go to bed and I’ll see what my people can deduce from this note tomorrow morning.”

September 5, 1979

B
UT
P
AGAN COULD
not sleep and turned restlessly on her bed in the hot night. Eventually, at three o’clock in the morning, she decided to take a soothing walk in the moonlit garden. It would be perfectly safe, because the grounds were guarded by sentries and also an electrical alarm system.

Pagan knew that someone would be watching her, as she walked between the low clipped hedges of rosemary to the circular pool, where a family of terrapins was kept. It was impossible to be truly alone wherever Abdullah slept. His bodyguards kept an endless watch outside his room, and in the corridors there were always silent servants waiting for commands or simply sleeping in corners.

As Pagan sat on the stone coping around the pool, she disturbed a skinny gray cat, which spat at her as it ran away in the half-darkness. Something in her head was prompting her; she felt that something important was laying half-hidden at the back of her mind, like an unanswered letter on her desk.

Suddenly Pagan jumped up, and nearly fell into the terrace pool. As the moonlight painted the beautiful garden in strange shades of gray, she abruptly remembered the exercise class in the
VERVE!
office, when that exercise instructor had
started to make strange jokes about his harem; that is, his grave remarks had been interpreted by the class as jokes, but Tony had obviously been nettled when the girls had laughed at him. And Pagan had told Tony that royal concubines were strangled with silken cords. It could not be a coincidence. Tony must be the person whom Lili knew and trusted, the person who had been able to lure her away from the hotel. Tony must be one of the kidnappers!

Pagan hurried back to the palace, losing a slipper as she ran along the tiled pathway, still slippery with dew. The palm trees stood out as dark silhouettes against the predawn sky, as Pagan ordered a limousine from the sleepy-eyed attendant at the main door, after failing to get Judy on the telephone. The switchboard staff of her hotel were obviously still asleep.

Speeding through the pale gray streets, Pagan sniffed the spray of jasmine that she’d pulled from the garden’s ancient, high walls, and thought how cruel this twice-over loss of her daughter was for Judy. Pagan remembered the
VERVE!
cover photograph of Judy and Lili, and the way it highlighted their similarities: the tiny, doll-like build and the little, paw-like hands—as well as the differences between mother and daughter. Judy looked so blond, blue-eyed and Nordic whereas Lili was so dark and exotic. The cover photograph had also emphasized their odd apartness. However hard they tried, and however much they longed for intimacy, Pagan didn’t reckon they’d achieve it; their relationship seemed almost a casual juxtaposition of two completely un-alike people. There was so much they had shared, but so much they couldn’t seem to share. However much a mother might want closeness, however much a daughter might want closeness, often it isn’t truthfully possible because they have so little in common; hence those dutiful birthday cards, Pinteresque monosyllabic Christmas dinners, and uneasy outings to the theater or the movies: anywhere where they could avoid conversation.

Pagan thought of the intimacy that Judy and Lili had struggled to achieve, the intimacy of love. I wonder if it will be like that with Abdi and me, Pagan mused. Sometimes, when they made love, Pagan looked at her pale English skin next to his tawny flesh and felt curiously apart from Abdullah,
no matter how sensitive his caresses, or how strongly her body responded.

In some ways, I suppose Lili’s like Abdullah, thought Pagan, as she crushed the sprig of jasmine and sniffed the cloying perfume of the dying sprig. Lili and Abdullah are both aggressively defensive; they both have that quick temper; they both have that greedy, sweet tooth. And sometimes, when Lili throws back her head and glares, she has that same angry-falcon look as Abdullah.

Abruptly, the kaleidoscopic jumble of Pagan’s random thoughts fell into a sinister shape. Then, reluctantly, the corroborating evidence flooded into Pagan’s mind. At first, the conclusion that she reached was so unpleasant that she tried to push the whole idea out of her head and look out of the window at the leaden waters of the Bosphorus, but the unwelcome notion pushed back into her mind with a force of its own. Could Judy have slept with Abdullah? Could he be Lili’s father? Pagan remembered Judy’s expedient lies, from the desperate deceptions of her early, poverty-stricken years to that odd white lie she had told Lili about her father. Why she’d even repeated on television that Lili’s father was poor Nick, who’d been shot in a jungle war, when Judy’s friends knew that although Nick had had a crush on Judy, she would have nothing to do with him. So certainly Nick could not have fathered Judy’s child. Then Pagan remembered her dead husband Christopher’s last joke. He had said that two clearly blue-eyed parents could not produce a brown-eyed baby; he had been definite about it. Curtis and Angelface both had blue eyes. Spyros Stiarkoz wasn’t around when they were all in Gstaad, so it couldn’t have been him. Maybe I won’t win the Nobel prize for genetics, Pagan told herself bleakly, as the car drew up in front of Judy’s hotel, but I can’t ignore the facts.

*   *   *

“I’ll bet Tony wrote that ransom note,” Pagan insisted to a puffy-eyed Judy, who was sitting up in bed. “Don’t you remember that silly argument about harems we had in the exercise class in New York?”

“I vaguely remember.”

“But you were present when I told Tony about strangling
disobedient concubines with silken cords,” Pagan insisted. “The second ransom note is too much of a coincidence.”

“I should imagine that half of Istanbul knows that tourist-guide story. Pagan, are you telling me that some guy who’s only capable of pumping iron on Fifth Avenue could fix a kidnapping in Turkey?” Judy was still only half-awake.

“No, I don’t believe that dumb ox could work this out by himself,” said Pagan. “He must be working with somebody else.”

“That’s certainly a possibility!” Judy jumped out of bed and pulled on an ivory-cream negligee. “But that still doesn’t tell us where Lili’s being held.”

“I’m not so sure.” Pagan walked to the window and looked out. In spite of her tenseness, she appreciated the glittering sweep of water on which the Sancta Sophia Mosque and the Blue Mosque seemed to float. She said, “The link between Tony and the second ransom note is the royal concubines. Where were they kept?”

Pagan looked at the rounded domes and soaring minarets of the Topkapi Palace and, suddenly, she had an idea where Tony might hide out. A place that would never be searched, because it was guarded: a place that nobody was allowed to enter.

Together Pagan and Judy tumbled into their limousine. As it drew away from the curb, another battered Mercedes pulled out from the side street and followed them.

In the limousine, a reluctant Judy finally admitted to Pagan that Abdullah was Lili’s father. So then she had to explain to Pagan how the conception occurred. In the nasty silence that followed, a grim Pagan finally asked, “But why didn’t you tell me at the time?”

“How could I?” pleaded Judy. “You were my friend and you were in love with him. How could I tell you that your beau had raped me? And what good would it have done? I know that it probably didn’t seem a rape to Abdullah. To him, it was merely a prince having his way with a servant. I’m sure he doesn’t remember it, and I’m sure he wouldn’t do it now. All our values have changed so much in the years since we were sixteen.”

Pagan was silent. Judy put her hands on her shoulders and turned Pagan to face her. Earnestly, Judy said, “Please don’t
wreck
your
future because something horrible that happened years ago in
my
past.”

Pagan looked mutinous. Judy said, “And you mustn’t say anything to Abdullah about it, for the same reason I can’t tell Lili who her real father is. Because the whole world knew that they had a passionate affair. Because, unknowingly, they committed incest. Why lay that burden of guilt on two human beings we care about, when it’s unnecessary and will achieve nothing?”

Eventually Pagan asked, “Does anyone else know about it?”

“Only one person. Maxine guessed, as soon as she saw Lili at the Pierre. She didn’t say anything at the time, but she asked about it later, one Sunday when Tony was driving us up to Westchester to have lunch with Griffin. Maxine said that the resemblance isn’t so strong today, but that as soon as she saw Lili she was reminded of Abdullah as a youth. Lili had his coloring, his features, his mannerisms … and his abrupt temper.”

Judy remembered that she didn’t even have to admit it. Maxine had seen from her face that she’d guessed correctly. What’s more, Maxine had immediately understood why Judy had found it difficult to establish a warm, loving relationship with Lili. Because Lili’s beauty had come from a man who had raped Judy. She had always tried to push the thought to the back of her mind, but Judy couldn’t help feeling forlorn because Lili was not a child of love. Lili didn’t know it, but she was a child born from violence and hatred.

*   *   *

“We’d like to go into the other part of the Harem Quarters, the part that isn’t normally shown to tourists.” Pagan folded a five-hundred-lira note and tried to tuck it into the shirt pocket of one of the Palace guides. Accustomed to curious tourists with more money than sense, the guide said, “I’m sorry, it is forbidden. There is nothing I can do.” He swept Pagan and Judy out of the entrance.

“Damn.” In the bright morning sun, Pagan stamped on the ancient stone courtyard. “I suppose I should have offered him more.”

Judy wasn’t listening because she was peering across the courtyard. She jammed her tortoise-shell glasses on her nose,
and again stared at the colonnade across the courtyard. “Pagan, I know this sounds crazy,” she said, “but I think I just saw Mark.”

Slowly they walked down the path to the entrance gate, then Judy spun around, almost tripping up two German tourists behind them. “It is him! I’m sure I saw him. Mark! Mark!”

She ran toward the colonnade, still calling Mark’s name, and the familiar khaki-clad figure appeared between two columns. Judy, breathless, stopped in front of him. “What are you doing here, Mark? We thought you were in jail, number one suspect.”

“They let me out when my editor pulled rank, long distance, on Colonel Aziz. I’ve been following you, on the fire engine principle—follow the fire engine and you’ll find a story at the end of it. So where’s the fire engine, Judy? Why are you rushing off on this mad sightseeing tour with Pagan?”

Slowly, Judy smiled. “We think we’ve found out where the kidnappers have hidden Lili.” Judy wasn’t ready to confess to Mark, but she needed help to get into the Harem. “We think they’re in the old part of the Palace Harem, but we can’t get in because it’s closed. D’you think you can help us to get in?”

Mark said, “Should be easy. Come on, let’s fall in with the next guided tour. It starts at ten o’clock.” He thought, first chance I get I’m going to grab her. I’m no good at explaining how I feel with words.