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?
With Noelle under his control, he could stay on with Demiris forever, if he wanted to.
She was studying him as though reading his mind, and there was an odd expression
in her eyes that Larry did not understand.