The Other Side of Midnight

"But it is wrong to destroy the lives of men, Costa."

"It is not wrong. It is justice."

"Vengeance."

"Sometimes it is the same. Most men get away with the evil they do. I am in a position to make them pay for it. That is justice."

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

When Demiris had had three small freighters and needed a loan to expand his fleet, he had gone to a Swiss banker in Basel. The banker had not only turned him down but had telephoned other banker friends of his to advise them not to give the young Greek any money. Demiris had finally managed to borrow the money in Turkey.

Demiris had bided his time. He decided that the banker's Achilles' heel lay in his greed. Demiris was in negotiation with Ibn Saud of Arabia to take over leases on a newly discovered oil development there. The leases would be worth several hundred million dollars to Demiris' company.

He instructed one of his agents to leak the news to the Swiss banker about the deal that was about to take place. The banker was offered a 25-percent participation in the new company if he put up five million dollars in cash to buy shares of the stock. When the deal went through, the five million dollars would be worth more than fifty million. The banker quickly checked the deal and confirmed its authenticity. Not having that kind of money available personally, he quietly borrowed it from the bank without notifying anyone, for he had no wish to share his windfall. The transaction was to take place the following week, at which time he would be able to replace the money he had taken.

When Demiris had the banker's check in his hand, he announced to the newspapers that the arrangement with Arabia had been canceled. The stock plummeted. There was no way for the banker to cover his losses, and his embezzlement was discovered. Demiris picked up the banker's shares of stock at a few cents on the dollar and then went ahead with the oil deal. The stock soared. The banker was convicted of embezzlement and given a prison sentence of twenty years.

There were a few players in Demiris' 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. It was like a chess game, and Demiris was a chess master. 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.

This, then, was the man who appeared one afternoon at Noelle Page's Sunday salon. He was spending a few hours in Paris on his way to Cairo, and a young sculptress he was seeing suggested that they stop in at the salon. From the moment Demiris saw Noelle, he knew that he wanted her.

Aside from royalty itself which was unavailable to the daughter of a Marseille fishmonger, Constantin Demiris was probably the closest thing there was to a king. Three days after she had met him Noelle quit her play without notice, packed her clothes and joined Constantin Demiris in Greece.

Because of the prominence of their respective positions it was inevitable that the relationship between Noelle Page and Constantin Demiris become an international cause celebre. Photographers and reporters were constantly trying to interview Demiris' wife, but if her composure was ruffled, she never betrayed it. Melina Demiris' only comment to the press was that her husband had many good friends around the world and that she saw nothing wrong with that. Privately she told her outraged parents that Costa had had affairs before and that this would soon wear itself out like all the others. Her husband would leave on extended business trips, and she would see newspaper photographs of him with Noelle in Constantinople or Tokyo or Rome. Melina Demiris was a proud woman, but she was determined to endure the humiliation because she truly loved her husband. She accepted the fact, though she could never fathom the reason, that some men needed more than one woman and that even a man in love with his wife could sleep with another woman. She would have died before she let another man touch her. She never reproached Constantin, because she knew that it would serve no purpose except to alienate him. They had on balance a good marriage. She was aware that she was not a passionate woman, but she let her husband use her in bed whenever he wished, and she tried to give him what pleasure she could. If she had known of the ways that Noelle made love to her husband, she would have been shocked, and if she had known how much her husband enjoyed it, she would have been miserable.

Noelle's chief attraction for Demiris, for whom women no longer held any surprises, was that she was a constant surprise. To him who had a passion for puzzles, she was an enigma, defying solution. He had never met anyone like her. She accepted the beautiful things he

gave her, but she was just as happy when he gave her nothing. He bought her a lavish villa at Portofino overlooking the exquisite blue, horseshoe bay, but he knew that it would have made no difference if it had been a tiny apartment in the old Plaka section of Athens.

Demiris had met many women in his life who had tried to use their sex to manipulate him in one way or another. Noelle never asked anything of him. Some women had come to him to bask in his reflected glory, but in Noelle's case she was the one who attracted the newspapermen and photographers. She was a star in her own right. For a while Demiris toyed with the idea that perhaps she was in love with him for himself, but he was too honest to maintain the delusion.

In the beginning it was a challenge to try to reach the deep core inside Noelle, to subjugate it and make it his. At first Demiris had tried to do it sexually, but for the first time in his life, he had met a woman who was more than a match for him. Her sensual appetites exceeded his. Anything he could do, she could do better and more often and with more skill, until finally he learned to relax in bed and enjoy her as he had never enjoyed another woman in his life. She was a phenomenon, constantly revealing new facets for him to enjoy. Noelle could cook as well as any of the chefs to whom he paid a king's ransom and knew as much about art as the curators he kept on yearly retainers to seek out paintings and sculpture for him. He enjoyed listening to them discussing art with Noelle and their amazement at the depth of her knowledge.

Demiris had recently purchased a Rembrandt, and Noelle happened to be at his summer island when the painting arrived. There was a young curator there who had found the painting for him.

"It's one of the Master's greatest," the curator had said as he unveiled it.

It was an exquisite painting of a mother and daughter. Noelle was seated in a chair, sipping an ouzo, quietly watching.

"It's a beauty," Demiris agreed. He turned to Noelle. "How do you like it?"

"It's lovely," she said. She turned to the curator. "Where did you find it?"

"I traced it to a private dealer in Brussels," he replied proudly, "and persuaded him to sell it to me."

"How much did you pay for it?" Noelle asked.

"Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds."

"It's a bargain," Demiris declared.

Noelle picked up a cigarette, and the young man rushed to light it for her. "Thank you," she said. She looked at Demiris. "It would have been more of a bargain, Costa, if he had bought it from the man who owned it."

"I don't understand," Demiris said.

The curator was looking at her oddly.

"If this is genuine," Noelle explained, "then it came from the estate of the Duke of Toledo in Spain." She turned to the curator. "Is that not so?" she asked.