The Other Side of Midnight

"That's a great help," he grinned. "It's going to keep me awake all night."

NOELLE

Paris: 1944

10

During the past year Armand Gautier had ceased broaching the subject of marriage. In the beginning he had felt himself in a superior position to Noelle. Now, however, the situation was almost reversed. When they gave newspaper interviews, it was Noelle to whom the questions were directed, and wherever they went together, Noelle was the attraction, he was the afterthought.

Noelle was the perfect mistress. She continued to make Gautier comfortable, act as his hostess and in effect make him one of the most envied men in France; but in truth he never had a moment's peace, for he knew that he did not possess Noelle, nor ever could, that there would come a day when she would walk out of his life as capriciously as she had wandered into it and when he remembered what had happened to him the one time that Noelle had left him, Gautier felt sick to his stomach. Against every instinct of his intellect, his experience and his knowledge of women he was wildly, madly in love with Noelle. She was the single most important fact of his life. He would lie awake nights devising elaborate surprises to make her happy and when they succeeded, he was rewarded with a smile or a kiss or an unsolicited night of love-making. Whenever she looked at another man, Gautier was filled with jealousy, but he knew better than to speak of it to Noelle. Once after a party when she had spent the entire evening talking to a renowned doctor, Gautier had been furious with her. Noelle had listened to his tirade and then had answered quietly, "If my speaking to other men bothers you, Armand, I will move my things out tonight."

He had never brought up the subject again.

At the beginning of February, Noelle began her salon. It had started as a simple Sunday brunch with a few of their friends from the theater, but as word about it got around, it quickly expanded and began to include politicians, scientists, writers--anyone whom the group thought might be interesting or amusing. Noelle was the mistress of the salon and one of the chief attractions. Everyone found himself eager to talk to her, for Noelle asked incisive questions and remembered the answers. She learned about politics from politicians and about finance from bankers. A leading art expert taught her about art, and she soon knew all the great French artists who were living in France. She learned about wine from the chief vintner of Baron Rothschild and about architecture from Corbusier. Noelle had the best tutors in the world and they in turn had a beautiful and fascinating student. She had a quick probing mind and was an intelligent listener. Armand Gautier had the feeling that he was watching a Princess consorting with her ministers, and had he only been aware of it, it was the closest he would ever come to understanding Noelle's character.

As the months went by Gautier began to feel a little more secure. It seemed to him that Noelle had met everyone who might matter to her and she had shown no interest in any of them.

She had not yet met Constantin Demiris.

Constantin Demiris was the ruler of an empire larger and more powerful than most countries. He had no title or official position, but he regularly bought and sold prime ministers, cardinals, ambassadors and kings. Demiris was one of the two or three wealthiest men in the world and his power was legendary. He owned the largest fleet of cargo ships afloat, an airline, newspapers, banks, steel mills, gold mines--his tentacles were everywhere, inextricably woven throughout the woof and warp of the economic fabric of dozens of countries.

He had one of the most important art collections in the world, a fleet of private planes and a dozen apartments and villas scattered around the globe.

Constantin Demiris was above medium height, with a barrel chest and broad shoulders. His features were swarthy, and he had a broad Greek nose and olive black eyes that blazed with intelligence. He was not interested in clothes, yet he was always on the list of best-dressed men and it was rumored that he owned over five hundred suits. He had his clothes made wherever he happened to be. His suits were tailored by Hawes and Curtis in London, his shirts by Brioni in Rome, shoes by Daliet Grande in Paris and ties from a dozen countries.

Demiris had about him a presence that was magnetic. When he walked into a room, people who did not know who he was would turn to stare. Newspapers and magazines all over the world had written an incessant spate of stories about Constantin Demiris and his activities, both business and social.

The Press found him highly quotable. When asked by a reporter if friends had helped him achieve his success, he had replied, "To be successful, you need friends. To be very successful, you need enemies."

When he was asked how many employees he had, Demiris had said, "None. Only acolytes. When this much power and money is involved, business turns into religion and offices become temples."

He had been reared in the Greek Orthodox Church, but he said of organized religion: "A thousand times more crimes have been committed in the name of love than in the name of hate."

The world knew that he was married to the daughter of an old Greek banking family, that his wife was an attractive, gracious lady and that when Demiris entertained on his yacht or on his private island, his wife seldom went with him. Instead, he would be accompanied by a beautiful actress or ballerina or whoever else struck his current fancy. His romantic escapades were as legendary and as colorful as his financial adventures. He had bedded dozens of motion picture stars, the wives of his best friends, a fifteen-year-old novelist, freshly bereaved widows, and it was even rumored that he had once been propositioned by a group of nuns who needed a new convent.

Half a dozen books had been written about Demiris, but none of them had ever touched on the essence of the man or managed to reveal the wellspring of his success. One of the most public figures in the world, Constantin Demiris was a very private person, and he manipulated his public image as a facade that concealed his real self. He had dozens of intimate friends in every walk of life and yet no one really knew him. The facts were a matter of public record. He had started life in Piraeus as the son of a stevedore, in a family of fourteen brothers and sisters where there was never enough food on the table and if anyone wanted anything extra, he had to fight for it. There was something in Demiris that constantly demanded more, and he fought for it.

Even as a small boy Demiris' mind automatically converted everything into mathematics. He knew the number of steps on the Parthenon, how many minutes it took to walk to school, the number of boats in the harbor on a given day. Time was a number divided into segments, and Demiris learned not to waste it. The result was that without any real effort, he was able to accomplish a tremendous amount. His sense of organization was instinctive, a talent that operated automatically in even the smallest things he did. Everything became a game of matching his wits against those around him.

While Demiris was aware that he was cleverer than most men, he had no excess vanity. When a beautiful woman wanted to go to bed with him, he did not for an instant flatter himself that it was because of his looks or personality, but he never permitted that to bother him. The world was a market-place, and people were either buyers or sellers. Some women, he knew, were attracted by his money, some by his power and a few--a rare few--by his mind and imagination.

Nearly every person he met wanted something from him: a donation to a charity, financing for a business project or simply the power that his friendship could bestow. Demiris enjoyed the challenge of figuring out exactly what it was that people were really after, for it was seldom what it appeared to be. His analytical mind was skeptical of surface truth, and as a consequence he believed nothing he heard and trusted

no one.

The reporters who chronicled his life were permitted to see only his geniality and charm, the sophisticated urbane man of the world. They never suspected that beneath the surface, Demiris was a killer, a gutter-fighter whose instinct was to go for the jugular vein.

To the ancient Greeks the word thekaeossini, justice, was often synonymous with ekthekissis, vengeance, and Demiris was obsessed with both. He remembered every slight he had ever suffered, and those who were unlucky enough to incur his enmity were paid back a hundredfold. They were never even aware of it, for Demiris' mathematical mind made a game of exacting retribution, patiently working out elaborate traps, spinning complex webs that finally caught and destroyed its victims.

When Demiris was sixteen years old, he had gone into his first business enterprise with an older man named Spyros Nicholas. Demiris had conceived the idea of opening a small stand on the docks to serve hot food to the stevedores on the night shift. He had scraped together half the money for the enterprise, but when it had become successful Nicholas had forced him out of the business and had taken it over himself. Demiris had accepted his fate without protest and had gone ahead to other enterprises.

Over the next twenty years Spyros Nicholas had gone into the meat-packing business and had become rich and successful. He had married, had three children and was one of the most prominent men in Greece. During those years, Demiris patiently sat back and let Nicholas build his little empire. When he decided that Nicholas was as successful and as happy as he was ever going to be, Demiris struck.

Because his business was booming, Nicholas was contemplating buying farms to raise his own meat and opening a chain of retail stores. An enormous amount of money was required. Constantin Demiris owned the bank with which Nicholas did business, and the bank encouraged Nicholas to borrow money for expansion at interest rates that Nicholas could not resist. Nicholas plunged heavily, and in the midst of the expansion his notes were suddenly called in by the bank. When the bewildered man protested that he could not make the payments, the bank immediately began foreclosure proceedings. The newspapers owned by Demiris prominently played up the story on the front pages, and other creditors began foreclosing on Nicholas. He went to other banks and lending institutions, but for reasons he could not fathom, they refused to come to his assistance. The day after he was forced into bankruptcy Nicholas committed suicide.

Demiris' sense of thekaeossini was a two-edged sword. Just as he never forgave an injury, neither did he ever forget a favor. A landlady who had fed and clothed the young man when he was too poor to pay her suddenly found herself the owner of an apartment building, without any idea who her benefactor was. A young girl who had taken the penniless young Demiris in to live with her had been given a villa and a lifetime pension anonymously. The people who had had dealings with the ambitious young Greek lad forty years earlier had no idea how the casual relationship with him would affect their lives. The dynamic young Demiris had needed help from bankers and lawyers, ship captains and unions, politicians and financiers. Some had encouraged and helped him, others had snubbed and cheated him. In his head and in his heart the proud Greek had kept an indelible record of every transaction. His wife Melina had once accused him of playing God.

"Every man plays God," Demiris had told her. "Some of us are better equipped for the role than others."