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slightly cleft chin, was framed by a shock of pure white hair worn just a bit too long, thick and straight and curling up at the nape of his neck. The snow-white hair, the always dark tan, the tough masculine face were all dominated by a pair of bright blue, sensuous eyes. Lascivious eyes. The two cousins were very much alike in one thing: They were sexually hungry all the time. Both were notorious sexual seducers. But Christos chose young men and left a string of bewildered male lovers across the world.
    These casualties of love afforded him the reputation among rich, cosmopolitan homosexuals and the lower-class, rough-trade boys they sometimes favored, of a virile, highly sexed lover who was able to satisfy his men as much with his lovemaking as with his generous gifts, money, and romance.
    Where did his money come from? The host of bodyguards always around him, the mysterious callers who flew in and out of his financial empire based on the mountain of olive groves in Crete, his Athens office building in Syntagma Square, the family villa in Sounion, the large roof-garden suite he kept at the Grande Bretagne, signaled the illegal, an international crime syndicate, but his excellent political and police connections challenged the assumption.
    It always amused Rashid that with a converted Greek
caïgue
sailing the Greek Islands, a schooner moored in Cap Ferrat below his twenty-room villa there, a house in the Palais-Royal in Paris, and permanent suites reserved for him at Claridge’s in London and the Pierre in New York, Christos never conducted business except when in Greece. All who wanted to deal had to do as Rashid was doing, conduct it on Christos’s own territory, Rashid was convinced that it was true Christos held an advantage over hisbusiness associates because, by the time they had been through the trials and tribulations of the Athens airport, or of getting to Crete, they were compliant and wanted only to deal and get out of the country as fast as possible.
    That had been the pattern Rashid had adopted in the last twenty years. But it had not always been that way. There had been a time when he would have stayed with Christos for days and sometimes weeks enjoying his hospitality. And there had even been a time during his Oxford years when he maintained one of his family’s period houses in the old port where he entertained his university friends and enjoyed the company of the foreign colony there. He thought about that as he mounted the stairs of the villa with Christos at his side. Suddenly a picture flashed through his mind: Humayun and himself, in their younger days, during their first week together in Xania. His desire for her returned, only to be quickly put aside. Hunting down another portion of the Oujie legacy possessed him more.

2
    R ashid had no idea how he expected to feel at the moment of his triumph. He had never fantasized about it. He was excited, aware of all the adrenaline pumping in his body. But that was not unusual for Rashid, it was just part of deal making. When he entered the library with Christos to complete his takeover, Mirella was the last thing on his mind.
    The comfortable coolness of the room after the heat in the garden cast an aura of rightness over Rashid. Orientalist paintings — Gérôme, Lewis, David Roberts, and the prize, an Ingres — adorned the walls between bookshelves that held one of the finest collections of rare books on Greece and Turkey. White marble busts of ancient Greeksand Turks set on shiny black marble columns under dusty kentia palms which appeared to be growing out of an enormous silk isphahan carpet of great age, seemed to be awaiting the return to the family of more of their lost heritage. Queen Anne wing chairs and silk draperies embroidered with vines, blossoms, and singing birds and Georgian furniture completed the room.
    Like the garden, the room was disheveled, carrying its own kind of grand elegance in its dishevelment. Christos walked to the windows.