The Other Side of Midnight

"When did you get back to town?" Catherine asked stiffly.

Larry looked at her, puzzled. "About an hour ago. Why?"

"I saw you in a taxi yesterday with a girl." It was as simple as that, Catherine thought. Those are the words that ended my marriage. He's going to deny it, and I'm going to call him a liar and leave him and never see him again."

Larry was standing there staring at her.

"Go ahead," she said. "Tell me it wasn't you."

Larry looked at her, nodding. "Of course it was me." The sudden sharp pain Catherine felt at the pit of her stomach made her realize how much she had wanted him to deny it.

"Christ," he said, "what have you been thinking?"

She started to speak and her voice trembled with anger. "I--"

Larry held up a hand. "Don't say anything you'll be sorry for."

Catherine looked at him incredulously. "I'll be sorry for?"

"I flew back to Athens yesterday for fifteen minutes to pick up a girl named Helena Merelis to fly her to Crete for Demiris. Helena works for him as a stewardess."

"But..." It was possible. Larry could have been telling the truth; or was it polymechanos, fertile in devices? "Why didn't you telephone me?" Catherine asked.

"I did," Larry said curtly. "There was no answer. You were out, weren't you?"

Catherine swallowed. "I--I went out shopping for your dinner."

"I'm not hungry," Larry snapped. "Nagging always makes me lose my appetite." He turned and walked out the door, leaving Catherine standing there, her right hand still raised, as though it was silently beseeching him to come back.

It was shortly after that that Catherine began to drink. It started in a small, harmless way. She would be expecting Larry home for dinner at seven o'clock, and when nine o'clock came and he had not called, Catherine would have a brandy to help kill the time. By ten o'clock, she would have had several brandies, and by the time he came home, if he did, the dinner would have been long since ruined, and she would be a little tight. It made it much easier to face what was happening to her life.

Catherine could no longer hide from herself the fact that Larry was cheating on her and had probably been cheating from the time they were married. Going through his uniform trousers one day before sending them to the cleaners, she found a lace handkerchief with dried semen. There was lipstick on his shorts.

She thought of Larry in the arms of some other woman.

And she wanted to kill him.

NOELLE AND CATHERINE

Athens: 1946

17

As Time had become Catherine's enemy, so it had become Larry's friend. The night in Amsterdam had been nothing less than a miracle. Larry had courted disaster and in so doing had, incredibly, found the solution to all his problems. It's the Douglas luck, he thought with satisfaction.

But he knew that it was more than luck. It was some obscure, perverse instinct in him that needed to challenge the Fates, to brush against the parameters of death and destruction, a testing, a pitting of himself against Fortune for life-and-death stakes.

Larry remembered a morning over the Truk Islands when a squadron of Zeros had zoomed out of a cloud cover. He had been flying point, and they had concentrated their attack on him. Three Zeros had maneuvered him away from the rest of the squadron and opened fire on him. In a kind of supraclarity that came to him in moments of danger, he was blindingly aware of the island below, the dozens of ships bobbing on the rolling seas, the roaring planes slashing at each other in the bright blue sky. It was one of the happiest moments of Larry's life, the fulfillment of Life and the mocking of Death.

He had put the plane into a spin and had pulled out of it on the tail of one of the Zeros. He had watched it explode as he opened up with his machine guns. The other two planes had closed in on either side. Larry watched them as they raced down to him, and at the last instant he pulled the plane into an Immelmann, and the two Japanese planes collided in mid-air. It was a moment Larry savored in his mind often.

For some reason it had come back to him that night in Amsterdam. He had made wild, violent love to Noelle, and afterward she had lain in his arms, talking of the two of them in Paris together before the war, and it suddenly brought back a dim memory of an eager young girl, but good God, there had been hundreds of eager young girls since then, and Noelle was no more than an elusive, half-recalled wisp of memory in his past.

How lucky it was, Larry thought, that their paths had crossed again accidentally, after all these years.

"You belong to me," Noelle said. "You're mine now."

Something in her tone made Larry uneasy. And yet, he asked himself, what do I have to lose?