Penthesilea's Wish: [Vol. 3]

Chapter Twenty-three

Driving her white, Mercedes Smart on the freeways south of the City, Daniela had time to think about things. She realized Nicasio's warnings, though seeming to be an over-reaction, might have some truth to them. Yet still she could not envision the women she had been in touch with through emails at Professor Vasiliou's house were any threat to all Mankind. At best, she imagined, the society was shaking up the men of the world who were perennially brutal to females, and maybe that was long overdue. She was convinced that the work of Professor Vasiliou and the women who contacted her were indeed carrying out far-reaching improvements for women.

Daniela placed her hand on the center of her chest as she drove, listening to the radio. She felt reassured by the little stone horse which she had worn around her neck since leaving Greece. What information this gift to her from the professor actually held, in its little digital memory, she could only imagine. But it was a matter of principle that she wished to keep her promise to deliver it, and in the process, make the acquaintance of the elusive Emel Bahar, Vasiliou's associate and longtime friend. This in itself pressed her on, non-stop over several freeways covering the uneventful distance from San Francisco to the junction of California Highway 101. There the roadway left the hot, California inland interior and passed out towards the cooler coastline.

Smelling the fresher air when she opened the window of her two-seat Smart that afternoon, Daniela remembered the dryer, sunnier atmosphere of Southern California as she crossed over its unofficial border into a different climate and geography. Remembering this journey from her university years, she automatically took the interchange near Paso Robles and negotiated the steep mountain pass down to the beaches of Santa Barbara County. The eventual view of the Pacific Ocean was a pleasant greeting as the highway inevitably passed down parallel to it. Daniela looked up at the green hills on the left, above the city, dotted with homes on landscaped lots. This familiar sight loomed over her as she took an off ramp just past the small community of Goleta.

There she pulled into a gas station to refill her tank, used the restroom to freshen up, and bought a large iced tea—all reminiscent of her younger days and the long weekend commute from home. Looking over toward the shoreline, and palm tree-lined boardwalks, Daniela nostalgically also remembered her dormitory and apartment years living on the UCSB campus. She had made so much growth since those uneventful years, she thought. But admitted to herself that most of that evolution had only been acquired in the last several months.

Back on the freeway, she saw the signs to Montecito up ahead and knew she was only twenty to thirty minutes from the home of Emel Bahar—a person whom she strangely felt she already knew. Having been to this exclusive community a few times in the past, many years before in the presence of her parents—and remembering the simple directions the professor had given her back on Andros, Daniela drove up into the leafy hills confidently. She followed the main boulevard beyond a rich-looking shopping village into the posh residential estates, which suddenly seemed to be the norm of all the homes there. Upward still she journeyed, passing many gated, forested properties. She knew full well from what she had learned while at university, that some of these homes south of Santa Barbara belonged to celebrated movie stars, 'Fortune 500' moguls, and were the hidden private worlds of some of the wealthiest people on earth. Some of them, she had heard seldom ventured out, living an opulent and self-contained existence.

Armed only with the name of Emel's estate, 'Ephesus West,' which she had committed to memory since staying in the village of Stenies, Daniela began to look at the signs on the gates—if and when they presented themselves along the smooth, tree-lined roadway. In a few locations when the drive passed into a clearing of tall pines, a vantage below was offered of just how dramatic the views of the Pacific Ocean to the west were from these incomparable tracts of land.