One Way or Another: A Novel (17 page)

Wineglass in one hand, the clipping in the other, Marco glanced casually at it, then read it.

“Shit.” He slammed his glass onto the concrete countertop. “Martha! Do you realize what this is?”

“Of course I do.” It was Martha’s turn to lean nonchalantly against the counter. First, though, she turned off the heat under his steak. She was wearing a white short-sleeve tee and white jeans under her apron. She was barefoot and her blond hair was tied back with a green wire twist from the supermarket bag that had held the vegetables.

“It’s a picture of the girl you said you saw. It says she’s missing, that she never showed up for her job at the restaurant where she worked as a greeter. Her landlady reported to the police that she had not seen her around and got no response when she knocked on her door, nor from her telephone.”

Marco read the clipping again. “No one seems to have a cell number for her. Don’t you think that unusual, these days? Everybody communicates by cell phone.”

“What’s her name?”

“Angela Morse. Age twenty-one. ‘Home’ is a two-room apartment in an old building in Brooklyn.” He checked the address again. “Not a very good part of Brooklyn, I’d say. A young woman who looks like that, she’d have to keep her wits about her, coming home late at night, have street smarts and eyes in the back of her head.”

“So what was a Brooklyn girl doing all alone in a small Turkish seaside town?”

“More important, what was a Brooklyn girl doing on a yacht in the Aegean?”

“Falling off it,” Martha said, with a sudden lurch of her heart as she contemplated the thought that it was probably true and the red-haired girl had drowned, right before Marco’s eyes.

“I’m so sorry.” She put out a hand, touched Marco tenderly, leaning her head against his shoulder. She had no doubt now, and neither did Marco, that Angie Morse was the girl Marco had seen drown.

And Marco had no doubt that he would have to do something about it.

28

Ahmet was sitting by the fire, reduced now to a few embers. He checked his watch. Three
A.M
. He had been there, alone, five, maybe six hours. He’d finished the red wine, drinking it right from the bottle since he’d smashed the glass and it wasn’t worth getting up to go find another when all he wanted was to get drunk. The wine wasn’t enough to achieve that and he’d moved on to scotch and then tequila, his favorite liquor of the moment. He enjoyed the brashness of it compared with the honeyed malt of the scotch, though no doubt he’d switch back again before too long. He had also found tequila useful for getting women drunk, not falling-off-their-chairs pissed but enough to loosen up their “values” as they invariably called their modest stand against sex on a first date. Well, okay, he had his values too: didn’t the white roses he sent and the occasional trinket count as a form of wooing? Enough at least for them to think he was falling for them?

How many had it been now? How many women in how many countries? He wondered sometimes how it was that girls could simply disappear without any fuss being made, though of course he chose his girls very carefully. They all had to meet the same criteria: must live alone; must have no family, or at least none close enough to come looking for them; must work in the kind of job that was interchangeable, where no one would care if they moved elsewhere; and must belong to that floating population of young women on the make.

Of course almost every woman had friends, but not every woman had close friends she saw all the time. There were, he’d found, a lot of lonely girls out there, those who showed up at temporary jobs, Starbucks in hand, good-morning smiles on their faces. They went and sat in small enclosed cubicles and made cold calls selling whatever they were attempting to sell, usually without much success. A break for lunch, a sandwich or a burger, off at five or six, picking up a slice of pizza and a Coke or a bottle of cheap wine on the way “home” to a rented room with a shared bath down the hall.

His technique was simple enough. These days via his laptop he could find out almost anything about anybody. It saved a lot of time. It was easy to choose someone, manipulate a casual meeting at the pizza joint, or the coffee shop she frequented, a fancy-seeing-you-here-again kind of setup or else, like with Angie, in a restaurant. No need for Match.com or Christian Mingle; a man like him did not need to pick up a woman online, and especially one who was “looking for love.” He was rich and successful and because of that he was famous. Women wanted him. And he wanted to kill women. He’d thought about why he wanted this, thought of his hated mother, his life with veiled women, something that made him, as a male, feel exposed, vulnerable, with nowhere to hide. But that was a secret part of him and never now even acknowledged by himself. He was who he was. He did what he did. And he enjoyed the power it gave him.

It still irked Ahmet that he was not accepted by the British upper classes. Of course he mingled with them, at Ascot where he sometimes had a horse running, and at Henley for the boat races where he would hold a Pimm’s Cup party of his own. Pimm’s was the traditional gin-based Henley drink, served in tall glasses brimming with fruit. It sank like gentle rain into the stomach and before you knew it you were tipsy, in the very nicest possible way. To prevent the tipsiness he served regular grilled sausages, American-style, in hot dog buns, which his amazed English guests said “went down a treat.”

He was well-known for his generosity: he gave to all the important charities that would be reported in the media, but he also contributed to a smaller charity whose aim was to rehabilitate young vagrants found huddled in cardboard boxes under railway arches and in shop doorways. It never failed to cross his mind that there—not “but for the grace of God,” but for the murder of Fleur de Roc—was he. Fleur had unknowingly set him on the path to greatness.

What he could not forget, though, was Angie’s open eyes, staring at him from the blue Aegean. And the anger in them.

Now Angie was here, sedated and shut in a room, watched over by the amazing Mehitabel, whose icy blood sometimes chilled even Ahmet’s own. He was an evil man. Evil was born in him. It was what he was, and it was the path he had taken despite his success and all its accoutrements. As it was in Mehitabel, yet even he never failed to marvel at her chilling lack of emotion. She was the perfect partner.

They had met ten years ago when she’d attended a cocktail party he was giving to raise funds for the survivors of some global disaster, a party which would give him plenty of media coverage, praising his work for charity and his generosity. Mehitabel arrived arm in arm with another woman, a blond
Playboy
-page-three-in-the-sun type who she unloaded quickly onto him, saying she thought he might enjoy meeting her.

They both understood what she meant by “meeting.” Unfortunately Mehitabel had got it wrong; the blonde was not the type Ahmet liked at all. He wanted a classy woman on his arm, not someone who looked as though he’d paid for her, and who anyhow would no doubt expect him to pay. He’d offloaded her quickly and left his own party to walk the streets. For the first time in years he’d found himself wondering what was to become of him, where he was headed, even who he was. In fact all he was, was who he had invented. Nobody really knew Ahmet Ghulbian. Including himself.

Mehitabel followed him out onto the street. He heard her heels click-clacking on the sidewalk behind him but he did not slow his pace and allow her to catch up. What he did was walk for miles through the darkened streets of London, a city where he did not even own a home. He felt as homeless as the young men his charity rescued from their cardboard boxes under railway embankments; he was no better. He knew the life they lived intimately. He was still one of them. Only cleverer.

He turned the corner and stepped quickly into a shop doorway. Mehitabel came clacking round the corner. He threw his arm round her throat, dragged her backward, held her tight against him. He growled the question at her: what did she want?

“You” was Mehitabel’s answer.

He let her go. They’d stood looking at each other. There was only a faint light coming from where the archway ended.

He put both hands around her throat this time. Her skin was silky under his thumbs; all he had to do was push down, right there where the pulse beat. He stared, hypnotized, at the beating pulse, at the living flesh under his hands, then up at her unfrightened face.

“I can kill for you,” she whispered.

Her throat moved under his fingers as she spoke and Ahmet was suddenly drenched in sweat. His knees shook, he wanted her yet he did not want her. She was too like him.

“I can find the women you want, I know what you are looking for.”

He let his hands drop to his sides. “How do you know?”

“Because I am like you. I knew it before we even met, before that cocktail party for the homeless boys. You were helping them because you had been one of them. Good can only come from an evil heart when it is touched by personal memory.”

It was true, Ahmet thought, sitting restless in front of the dying embers, the bottle of tequila in his hand, acknowledging the suddenly terrifying loneliness in his heart. He had no friend, no man who really knew him. Those boys he’d helped along with his charitable foundation showed up for the reunions, the presentations, the public thank-yous, and many of them wrote to express their gratitude and say how their lives had changed because of him. But none wanted to be his friend. He was the famous billionaire and they were sure he would want nothing to do with their ordinary small lives.

And the rich men he knew? Perhaps it was because they sensed something different beneath the jolly bonhomie façade, the pleasant well-dressed man, flaunting his riches, his Bentleys, his helicopters, his yacht. He must be the only yacht owner who had a hard time finding friends to fill it on vacation, though God knows he issued enough invitations, often refused politely, even warmly, thanking him for his offer but the timing was wrong, there was an important family wedding, a prior trip arranged.

Marshmallows might have been a house on the moon for all the visitors it got. Now he was hoping that by involving Martha Patron, he might also gain access to people she knew. When it was finished he would throw a party, ask her to invite them all. He would floodlight the house, the marshes would glimmer, beautifully green and seductive under all that light. He would have a band, a singer, whoever Martha said would be the best, the most famous. He would serve Veuve Clicquot champagne and five-pound tins of the best caviar; he’d even have chefs carving sides of roast beef the way the man who had once owned the house had done, before being knifed by his lover.

Martha would lay a parquet floor in the hall for dancing; he would have tumblers and acrobats and magicians. He would invite dukes and movie stars and tell them to wear only black or white, like Truman Capote’s famous ball in New York. He would present Lucy, bring her out in couture, a black gown from Dior or Valentino. And a mask. Of course everyone must be masked, that’s what made it so much fun, not knowing exactly who you were holding in your arms as you danced, or who felt safe confessing secrets in your ear not really meant for you.

It was all there. His plans were perfected. Tomorrow he would put them into action. Meanwhile, what was he going to do about Angie? He couldn’t keep her locked up. And he wanted her. Not the way he wanted Lucy, his lovely young Lucy, so well brought up she wouldn’t even finish her dinner because it was bad manners; so innocent she probably didn’t know what real sex felt like; and so sweet she recoiled with horror at the thought of a lamb becoming meat on her dinner plate.

For once in his life he had some interesting women, one he might hope to marry and one he meant to kill. He had already thought of an attractive way to accomplish the latter, since the first attempt had gone so dramatically wrong. Not this time. This would be final. He’d let Mehitabel take care of that.

He put a bottle of the very rare tequila to his lips, drained it, then threw it into the fireplace where it joined the shards of the three-hundred-dollar glass he had pitched in there earlier.

He felt pretty good.

29

Lucy got the e-mail from Ahmet the following day.

Dear Lucy, now you are to be working on reinventing my house into a “home,” along with your sister, Martha, I think I am safe in inviting you to come look at it, and perhaps have dinner? Lunch? So we can discuss your own views on its new look, as well as Martha’s. Do tell me you think this a satisfactory idea and of course I will send a car and the helicopter for you. Remember, I told you, all square and above board! No funny business! Ha ha! May I look forward to your visit?

Lucy sighed. Ahmet was persistent, she’d give him that. It was probably why he’d gotten where he was: persistence; cunning; smarts; and—she had to admit with a smile—charm. She didn’t fancy him exactly, but he was kind of creeping into her life despite that. Was he attractive? According to the gossip columns and girlie reports, he was. Sexy, too. That was also on the gossip rounds: well endowed; fast but knows how to use it; always sent flowers and gave small, pretty, expensive gifts. Ahmet knew his way into a woman’s heart, that was for sure; Lucy would bet there were half a dozen right now willing to step into the role of Mrs. Ahmet Ghulbian. Thankfully, she was not one.

She was lying amid the tangled sheets of her bed, which truth to tell could have used a wash, only her flat had no washing machine and she was too broke to buy a second set of sheets and too lazy to rush over to her sister’s place and ask to use her washer, so for now she just avoided thinking about them.
“Buggie-wuggie,”
she whispered to herself, which was her code for the curse word “bugger,” which she tried never to say. Martha would have hated it and Lucy respected Martha, who anyhow she guessed was right. Curse words coming out of the mouth of a young woman were even less attractive than her grubby sheets. So? What was she going to do? Call Martha, of course, and ask about the job and how much she would be paid, when she could start, what would she do, where to even think about beginning. You had only to look at her scruffy bedsit to know interior design had never so much as entered her thoughts. The futon, saved from her schooldays, had an old kelim rug flung across it, that was actually quite good and had come from the family home where it had once graced the drawing room. The scuffed dark wood floors had claw marks from some previous owner’s dog, with a blue and cream dhurrie rug donated by her sister to cover the worst and stop her feet from freezing when she stepped out of bed—well, off the futon—in the morning. And plenty of afternoons and evenings too. Not that she was the kind of girl—“woman” as she liked to think of herself now—that went to bed with every guy she met. Truth be told again, not with any of them, really. Sometimes, she’d been tempted in the heat of the moment, when she was in the latest boy/man’s arms and that flushed feeling ran through her, heating her blood, tingling in her veins and other places she had rarely previously even thought about, but she’d been too busy playing lacrosse and winning the spelling bee and trying on other girls’ clothes to think much about “the end result,” which is what all the girls at school called it. “It” being sex, of course.