Sidney Sheldon - The Other Side of Midnight

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 towards 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 defence. He had been in the midst of packing for a trip that he and his wife were going to make to New York where their daughter had just had her first baby. 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 harbour 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 panelled 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 furore 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’ favourite flowers were Triantafylias, the beautiful roses of Greece. He reached forwards 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.

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 Scarface Al Capone.

One of Catherine Alexander’s earliest memories was of her father taking her into a bar with a saw-dust-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 travelling 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 humour 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 jewellery 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 armour of indifference, which she wore as a shield against the attacks of the other children. When the armour 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 affect. 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 grey 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.