The Other Side of Midnight

If only his wife did not find out what he was doing.

In the city of Athens Frederick Stavros was working in his tiny law office on the second floor of an old rundown building in the poor Monastiraki section of the city. Stavros was an intense young man, eager and ambitious, struggling to make a living from his chosen profession. Because he could not afford an assistant, he was forced to do all the tedious background legal research himself. Ordinarily he hated this part of his work, but this time he did not mind because he knew that if he won this case his services would be in such demand that he would never have to worry again for the rest of his life. He and Elena could be married and begin to raise a family. He would move into a suite of luxurious offices, hire law clerks and join a fashionable club like the Athenee Lesky, where one met affluent potential clients. The metamorphosis had already begun. Every time Frederick Stavros walked out into the streets of Athens, he was recognized and stopped by someone who had seen his picture in the newspaper. In a few short weeks he had jumped from anonymity to the attorney who was defending Larry Douglas. In the privacy of his soul Stavros admitted to himself that he had the wrong client. He would have preferred to be defending the glamorous Noelle Page instead of a nonentity like Larry Douglas, but he himself was a nonentity. It was enough that he, Frederick Stavros, was a major participant in the most sensational murder case of the century. If the accused were acquitted, there would be enough glory for everyone. There was only one thing that plagued Stavros, and he thought about it constantly. Both defendants were charged with the same crime, but another attorney was defending Noelle Page. If Noelle Page was found innocent, and Larry Douglas was convicted...Stavros shuddered and tried not to think about it. The reporters kept asking him whether he thought the defendants were guilty. He smiled to himself at their naivete. What did it matter whether they were guilty or innocent? They were entitled to the best legal defense that money could buy. In his case he admitted that the definition was stretched a bit. But in the case of Noelle Page's lawyer...ah, that was something else again. Napoleon Chotas had undertaken her defense, and there was no more brilliant criminal lawyer in the world. Chotas had never lost an important case. As he thought about that, Frederick Stavros smiled to himself. He would not have admitted it to anyone, but he was planning to ride to victory on Napoleon Chotas' talent.

While Frederick Stavros was toiling in his dingy law office, Napoleon Chotas was attending a black-tie dinner party at a luxurious home in the fashionable Kolonaki section of Athens. Chotas was a thin, emaciated-looking man with the large, sad eyes of a bloodhound in a corrugated face. He concealed a brilliants incisive brain behind a mild, vaguely baffled manner. Now toying with his dessert, Chotas s

at, preoccupied, thinking about the trial that would begin tomorrow. Most of the conversation that evening had centered around the forthcoming trial. The discussion had been a general one, for the guests were too discreet to ask him direct questions. But toward the end of the evening as the ouzo and brandy flowed more freely, the hostess asked, "Tell us, do you think they are guilty?"

Chotas replied innocently, "How could they be? One of them is my client." He drew appreciative laughter.

"What is Noelle Page really like?"

Chotas hesitated. "She's a most unusual woman," he replied carefully. "She's beautiful and talented--" To his surprise he found that he was suddenly reluctant to discuss her. Besides, there was no way one could capture Noelle with words. Until a few months ago he had only been dimly aware of her as a glamorous figure flitting through the gossip columns and adorning the covers of movie magazines. He had never laid eyes on her, and if he had thought of her at all, it had been with the kind of indifferent contempt he felt toward all actresses. All body and no brain. But, God, how wrong he had been! Since meeting Noelle he had fallen hopelessly in love with her. Because of Noelle Page he had broken his cardinal rule: never become emotionally involved with a client. Chotas remembered vividly the afternoon he had been approached to undertake her defense. He had been in the midst of packing for a three-week vacation trip that he and his mistress were going to make to Paris and London. Nothing, he had believed, could have stopped him from making that journey. But it had only taken two words. In his mind's eye he saw his butler walk into the bedroom, hand him the telephone and say, "Constantin Demiris."

The island was inaccessible except by helicopter and yacht, and both the airfield and the private harbor were patrolled twenty-four hours a day by armed guards with trained German shepherds. The island was Constantin Demiris' private domain, and no one intruded without an invitation. Over the years its visitors had included kings and queens, presidents and ex-presidents, movie stars, opera singers and famous writers and painters. They had all come away awed. Constantin Demiris was the third wealthiest, and one of the most powerful men in the world, and he had taste and style and knew how to spend his money to create beauty.

Demiris sat in his richly paneled library now, relaxed in a deep armchair, smoking one of the flat-shaped Egyptian cigarettes especially blended for him, thinking about the trial that would begin in the morning. The press had been trying to get to him for months, but he had simply made himself unavailable. It was enough that his mistress was going to be tried for murder, enough that his name would be dragged into the case, even indirectly. He refused to add to the furor by granting any interviews. He wondered what Noelle was feeling now, at this moment, in her cell in the Nikodemous Street Prison. Was she asleep? Awake? Filled with panic at the ordeal that lay before her? He thought of his last conversation with Napoleon Chotas. He trusted Chotas and knew that the lawyer would not fail him. Demiris had impressed upon the attorney that it did not matter to him whether Noelle was innocent or guilty. Chotas was to see to it that he earned every penny of the stupendous fee that Constantin Demiris was paying him to defend her. No, he had no reason to worry. The trial would go well. Because Constantin Demiris was a man who never forgot anything, he remembered that Catherine Douglas' favorite flowers were Triantafylias, the beautiful roses of Greece. He reached forward and picked up a note pad from his desk. He made a notation. Triantafylias. Catherine Douglas.

It was the least he could do for her.

Book One

CATHERINE

Chicago: 1919-1939

1

Every large city has a distinctive image, a personality that gives it its own special cachet. Chicago in the 1920's was a restless, dynamic giant, crude and without manners, one booted foot still in the ruthless era of the tycoons who helped give birth to it: William B. Ogden and John Wentworth, Cyrus McCormick and George M. Pullman. It was a kingdom that belonged to the Philip Armours and Gustavus Swifts and Marshall Fields. It was the domain of cool professional gangsters like Hymie Weiss and Scarf ace Al Capone.

One of Catherine Alexander's earliest memories was of her father taking her into a bar with a sawdust-covered floor and swinging her up to the dizzyingly high stool. He ordered an enormous glass of beer for himself and a Green River for her. She was five years old, and she remembered how proud her father was as strangers crowded around to admire her. All the men ordered drinks and her father paid for them. She recalled how she had kept pressing her body against his arm to make sure he was still there. He had only returned to town the night before, and Catherine knew that he would soon leave again. He was a traveling salesman, and he had explained to her that his work took him to distant cities and he had to be away from her and her mother for months at a time so that he could bring back nice presents. Catherine had desperately tried to make a deal with him. If he would stay with her, she would give up the presents. Her father had laughed and said what a precocious child she was and then had left town, and it was six months before she saw him again. During those early years her mother whom she saw every day seemed a vague, shapeless personality, while her father, whom she saw only on brief occasions, was vivid and wonderfully clear. Catherine thought of him as a handsome, laughing man, full of sparkling humor and warm, generous gestures. The occasions when he came home were like holidays, full of treats and presents and surprises.

When Catherine was seven, her father was fired from his job, and their life took on a new pattern. They left Chicago and moved to Gary, Indiana, where he went to work as a salesman in a jewelry store. Catherine was enrolled in her first school. She had a wary, arms-length relationship with the other children and was terrified of her teachers, who misinterpreted her lonely standoffishness as conceit. Her father came home to dinner every night, and for the first time in her life Catherine felt that they were a real family, like other families. On Sunday the three of them would go to Miller Beach and rent horses and ride for an hour or two along the sand dunes. Catherine enjoyed living in Gary, but six months after they moved there, her father lost his job again and they moved to Harvey, a suburb of Chicago. School was already in session, and Catherine was the new girl, shut out from the friendships that had already been formed. She became known as a loner. The children, secure in the safety of their own groups, would come up to the gangly newcomer and ridicule her cruelly.

During the next few years Catherine donned an armor of indifference, which she wore as a shield against the attacks of the other children. When the armor was pierced, she struck back with a trenchant, caustic wit. Her intention was to alienate her tormentors so that they would leave her alone, but it had an unexpectedly different effect. She worked on the school paper, and in her first review about a musical that her classmates had staged, she wrote, "Tommy Belden had a trumpet solo in the second act, but he blew it." The line was widely quoted, and--surprise of surprises--Tommy Belden came up to her in the hall the next day and told Catherine that he thought it was funny.

In English the students were assigned Captain Horatio Hornblower to read. Catherine hated it. Her book report consisted of one sentence: "His barque was worse than his bight," and her teacher, who was a weekend sailor, gave her an "A." Her classmates began to quote her remarks and in a short time she was known as the school wit.

That year Catherine turned fourteen and her body was beginning to show the promise of a ripening woman. She would examine herself in the mirror for hours on end, brooding about how to change the disaster she saw reflected. Inside she was Myrna Loy, driving men mad with her beauty, but her mirror--which was her bitter enemy--showed hopelessly tangled black hair that was impossible to manage, solemn gray eyes, a mouth that seemed to grow wider by the hour and a nose that was slightly turned up. Maybe she wasn't really ugly, she told herself cautiously, but on the other hand no one was going to knock down doors to sign her up as a movie star. Sucking in her cheeks and squinting her eyes sexily she tried to visualize herself as a model. It was depressing. She struck another pose. Eyes open wide, expression eager, a big friendly smile. No use. She wasn't the All-American type either. She wasn't anything. Her body was going to be all right, she dourly supposed, but nothing special. And that, of course, was what she wanted more than anything in the world: to be something special, to be Somebody, to be Remembered, and never, never, never, never, to die.

The summer she was fifteen, Catherine came across Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy and for the next two weeks she spent an hour a day before her mirror, willing her reflection to become beautiful. At the end of that time the only change she could detect was a new patch of acne on her chin and a pimple on her forehead. She gave up sweets, Mary Baker Eddy and looking in the mirror.

Catherine and her family had moved back to Chicago and settled in a small, dreary apartment on the north side, in Rogers Park, where the rent was cheap. The country was moving deeper into an economic depression. Catherine's father was working less and drinking more, and he and her mother were constantly yelling at each other in a never-ending series of recriminations that drove Catherine out of the house. She would go down to the beach half a dozen blocks away and walk along the shore, letting the brisk wind give wings to her thin body. She spent long hours staring at the restless gray lake, filled with some desperate longing to which she could not put a name. She wanted something so much that at times it would engulf her in a sudden wave of unbearable pain.

Catherine had discovered Thomas Wolfe, and his books were like a mirror image of the bittersweet nostalgia that filled her, but it was a nostalgia for a future that had not happened yet, as though somewhere, sometime, she had lived a wonderful life and was restless to live it again. She had begun to have her periods, and while she was physically changing into a woman, she knew that her needs, her longings, this aching-wanting was not physical and had nothing to do with sex. It was a fierce and urgent longing to be recognized, to lift herself above the billions of people who teemed the earth, so everyone would know who she was, so when she walked by, they would say, "There goes Catherine Alexander, the great--" The great what? There was the problem. She did not know what she wanted, only that she ached desperately for it. On Saturday afternoons whenev

er she had enough money, she would go to the State and Lake Theater or to the McVickers or the Chicago, and see movies. She would completely lose herself in the wonderful, sophisticated world of Cary Grant and Jean Arthur, laugh with Wallace Beery and Marie Dressier and agonize over Bette Davis' romantic disasters. She felt closer to Irene Dunne than to her mother.

Catherine was in her senior year at Senn High School and her archenemy, the mirror, had finally become her friend. The girl in the mirror had a lively, interesting face. Her hair was raven black and her skin a soft, creamy white. Her features were regular and fine, with a generous, sensitive mouth and intelligent gray eyes. She had a good figure with firm, well-developed breasts, gently curving hips and shapely legs. There was an air of aloofness about her image, a hauteur that Catherine did not feel, as though her reflection possessed a characteristic that she did not. She supposed that it was part of the protective armor she had worn since her early school days.

The Depression had clutched the nation in a tighter and tighter vise, and Catherine's father was incessantly involved in big deals that never seemed to materialize. He was constantly spinning dreams, inventing things that were going to bring in millions of dollars. He devised a set of jacks that fitted above the wheels of an automobile and could be lowered by the touch of a button on the dashboard. None of the automobile manufacturers was interested. He worked out a continuously rotating electric sign to carry advertisements inside stores. There was a brief flurry of optimistic meetings and then the idea faded away.

He borrowed money from his younger brother, Ralph, in Omaha to outfit a shoe-repair truck to travel around the neighborhood. He spent hours discussing the scheme with Catherine and her mother. "It can't fail," he explained. "Imagine having the shoemaker coming to your door! No one's ever done it before. I have one Shoe-mobile out now, right? If it only makes twenty dollars a day, that's a hundred and twenty dollars a week. Two trucks will bring in two hundred and forty a week. Within a year I'll have twenty trucks. That's two thousand four hundred dollars a week. A hundred and twenty-five thousand a year. And that's only the beginning..." Two months later the shoemaker and the truck disappeared, and that was the end of another dream.

Catherine had hoped to be able to go to Northwestern University. She was the top scholar in her class, but even on a scholarship college would be difficult to manage, and the day was coming, Catherine knew, when she would have to quit school and go to work full time. She would get a job as a secretary, but she was determined that she would never surrender the dream that was going to give such rich, wonderful meaning to her life; and the fact that she did not know what either the dream or the meaning was made it all the more unbearably sad and futile. She told herself that she was probably going through adolescence. Whatever it was, it was hell. Kids are too young to have to go through adolescence, she thought bitterly.

There were two boys who thought they were in love with Catherine. One was Tony Korman who was going to join his father's law firm one day and who was a foot shorter than Catherine. He had pasty skin and myopic watery eyes that adored her. The other was Dean McDermott, who was fat and shy and wanted to be a dentist. Then of course, there was Ron Peterson, but he was in a category by himself. Ron was Senn High's football star, and everybody said he was a cinch to go to college on an athletic scholarship. He was tall and broad-shouldered, had the looks of a matinee idol and was easily the most popular boy in school.

The only thing that kept Catherine from instantly getting engaged to Ron was the fact that he was not aware she was alive. Every time she passed him in the school corridor, her heart would begin to pound wildly. She would think up something clever and provocative to say so he would ask her for a date. But when she approached him, her tongue would stiffen, and they would pass each other in silence. Like the Queen Mary and a garbage scow, Catherine thought hopelessly.