Memories of Midnight

“How did I get to this place?”

“At the foot of these mountains is a village called Ioannina. You were in a small boat in the lake during a storm last year. The boat sank, but by the grace of God, two of our sisters saw you and rescued you. They brought you here.”

“But … where did I come from before that?”

“I’m sorry, child. I do not know.”

She could not be satisfied with that. “Hasn’t anyone inquired about me? Hasn’t anyone tried to find me?”

Sister Theresa shook her head. “No one.”

She wanted to scream with frustration. She tried again. “The newspapers … they must have had a story about my being missing.”

“As you know, we are permitted no communication with the outside world. We must accept God’s will, child. We must thank Him for all His mercies. You are alive.”

And that was as far as she was able to get. In the beginning, she had been too ill to be concerned about herself, but slowly, as the months went by, she had regained her strength and her health.

When she was strong enough to move about, she spent her days tending the colorful gardens in the grounds of the convent, in the incandescent light that bathed Greece in a celestial glow, with the soft winds carrying the pungent aroma of lemons and vines.

The atmosphere was serene and calm, and yet she could find no peace. I’m lost, she thought, and no one cares. Why? Have I done something evil? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

The images continued to come, unbidden. One morning she awakened suddenly with a vision of herself in a room with a naked man undressing her. Was it a dream? Or was it something that had happened in her past? Who was the man? Was it someone she had married? Did she have a husband? She wore no wedding ring. In fact, she had no possessions other than the black Order of the Carmelite habit that Sister Theresa had given her and a pin, a small golden bird with ruby eyes and outstretched wings.

She was anonymous, a stranger living among strangers. There was no one to help her, no psychiatrist to tell her that her mind had been so traumatized, it could stay sane only by shutting out the terrible past.

And the images kept coming, faster and faster. It was as though her mind had suddenly turned into a giant jigsaw puzzle, with odd pieces tumbling into place. But the pieces made no sense. She had a vision of a huge studio filled with men in army uniform. They seemed to be making a motion picture. Was I an actress? No, she seemed to be in charge. But in charge of what?

A soldier handed her a bouquet of flowers. You’ll have to pay for these yourself, he laughed.

Two nights later, she had a dream about the same man. She was saying goodbye to him at the airport, and she woke up sobbing because she was losing him.

There was no more peace for her after that. These were not mere dreams. They were pieces of her life, her past. I must find out who I was. Who I am.

And unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, without warning, a name was dredged up out of her subconscious. Catherine. My name is Catherine Alexander.

Chapter Two (#ulink_72194dc9-cf6f-50e0-a9e9-1884092e4c12)

Athens, Greece

The empire of Constantin Demiris could not be located on any map, yet he was the ruler of a fiefdom larger and more powerful than many countries. He was one of the two or three wealthiest men in the world and his influence was incalculable. He had no title or official position, but he regularly bought and sold prime ministers, cardinals, ambassadors, and kings. Demiris’s tentacles were everywhere, woven through the woof and warp of dozens of countries. He was a charismatic man, with a brilliantly incisive mind, physically striking, well above medium height, with a barrel chest and broad shoulders. His complexion was swarthy and he had a strong Greek nose and olive-black eyes. He had the face of a hawk, a predator. When he chose to take the trouble, Demiris could be extremely charming. He spoke eight languages and was a noted raconteur. He had one of the most important art collections in the world, a fleet of private planes, and a dozen apartments, châteaus, and villas scattered around the globe. He was a connoisseur of beauty, and he found beautiful women irresistible. He had the reputation of being a powerful lover, and his romantic escapades were as colorful as his financial adventures.

Constantin Demiris prided himself on being a patriot—the blue-and-white Greek flag was always on display at his villa in Kolonaki and on Psara, his private island—but he paid no taxes. He did not feel obliged to conform to the rules that applied to ordinary men. In his veins ran ichor—the blood of the gods.

Nearly every person Demiris met wanted something from him: financing for a business project; a donation to a charity; or simply the power that his friendship could bestow. Demiris enjoyed the challenge of figuring out what it was that people were really after, for it was rarely what it appeared to be. His analytical mind was skeptical of surface truth, and as a consequence he believed nothing he was told and trusted no one. His motto was “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” The reporters who chronicled his life were permitted to see only his geniality and charm, the sophisticated, urbane man of the world. They had no reason to suspect that beneath the amiable façade was a killer, a gutter fighter whose instinct was to go for the jugular vein.

He was an unforgiving man who never forgot a slight. To the ancient Greeks the word dikaiosini, justice, was often synonymous with ekdikisis, vengeance, and Demiris was obsessed with both. He remembered every affront he had ever suffered, and those who were unlucky enough to incur his enmity were paid back a hundred-fold. They were never aware of it, for Demiris’s mathematical mind made a game of exacting retribution, patiently working out elaborate traps and spinning complex webs that finally caught and destroyed his enemies.

He enjoyed the hours he spent devising pitfalls for his adversaries. He would study his victims carefully, analyzing their personalities, assessing their strengths and their weaknesses.

At a dinner party one evening, Demiris had overheard a motion-picture producer refer to him as “that oily Greek.” Demiris bided his time. Two years later, the producer signed a glamorous internationally known actress to star in his new big-budget production in which he put in his own money. Demiris waited until the picture was half finished, and then charmed the leading lady into walking out on it and joining him on his yacht.

“It will be a honeymoon,” Demiris told her.

She got the honeymoon but not the wedding. The movie finally had to shut down and the producer went bankrupt.

There were a few players in Demiris’s game with whom he had not yet evened the score, but he was in no hurry. He enjoyed the anticipation, the planning, and the execution. These days he made no enemies, for no man could afford to be his enemy, so his quarry was limited to those who had crossed his path in the past.

But Constantin Demiris’s sense of dikaiosini was double-edged. Just as he never forgave an injury, neither did he forget a favor. A poor fisherman who had given the young boy shelter found himself the owner of a fishing fleet. A prostitute who had fed and clothed theyoung man when he was too poor to pay her mysteriously inherited an apartment building, without any idea of who her benefactor was.

Demiris had started life as the son of a stevedore in Piraeus. He had fourteen brothers and sisters and there was never enough food on the table.

From the very beginning, Constantin Demiris showed an uncanny gift for business. He earned extra money doing odd jobs after school, and at sixteen he had saved enough money to open a food stand on the docks with an older partner. The business flourished and the partner cheated Demiris out of his half. It took Demiris ten years to destroy the man. The young boy was burning with a fierce ambition. He would lie awake at night, his eyes bright in the darkness. I’m going to be rich. I’m going to be famous. Someday everyone will know my name. It was the only lullaby that could put him to sleep. He had no idea how it was going to happen. He knew only that it would.

On Demiris’s seventeenth birthday, he came across an article about the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and it was as though a magic door to the future had suddenly opened for him.

He went to his father. “I’m going to Saudi Arabia. I’m going to work in the oil fields.”

“Too-sou! What do you know about oil fields?”

“Nothing, father. I’m going to learn.”

One month later, Constantin Demiris was on his way.

It was company policy for the overseas employees of the Trans-Continental Oil Corporation to sign a two-year employment contract, but Demiris felt no qualms about it. He planned to stay in Saudi Arabia for as long as it took him to make his fortune. He had envisioned a wonderful Arabian nights adventure, a glamorous, mysterious land with exotic-looking women, and black gold gushing up out of the ground. The reality was a shock.

On an early morning in summer, Demiris arrived at Fadili, a dreary camp in the middle of the desert consisting of an ugly stone building surrounded by barastis, small brushwood huts. There were a thousand lower-bracket workers there, mostly Saudis. The women who trudged through the dusty, unpaved streets were heavily veiled.

Demiris entered the building where J. J. McIntyre, the personnel manager, had his office.

McIntyre looked up as the young man came in. “So. The home office hired you, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ever work the oil fields before, son?”

For an instant, Demiris was tempted to lie. “No, sir.”

McIntyre grinned. “You’re going to love it here. You’re a million miles from nowhere, bad food, no women that you can touch without getting your balls chopped off, and not a goddamned thing to do at night. But the pay is good, right?”

“I’m here to learn,” Demiris said earnestly.

“Yeah? Then I’ll tell you what you better learn fast. You’re in Moslem country now. That means no alcohol. Anyone caught stealing gets his right hand cut off. Second time, left hand. The third time, you lose a foot. If you kill anyone you’re beheaded.”

“I’m not planning to kill anyone.”

“Wait,” McIntyre grunted. “You just got here.”

The compound was a Tower of Babel, people from a dozen different countries all speaking their native languages. Demiris had a good ear and picked up languages quickly. The men were there to make roads in the middle of an inhospitable desert, construct housing, install electrical equipment, put in telephone communications, build workshops, arrange food and water supplies, design a drainage system, administer medical attention, and, it seemed to young Demiris, do a hundred other tasks. They were working in temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, suffering from flies, mosquitoes, dust, fever, and dysentery. Even in the desert there was a social hierarchy. At the top were the men engaged in locating oil, and below, the construction workers, called “stiffs,” and the clerks, known as “shiny pants.”