One Way or Another: A Novel (5 page)

ANGIE

Am I now a “body”? A mere creature? A person from whom all emotion has been stilled? It’s strange but I can see myself, a smaller image of me, somewhere above my broken head, floating in a deep blue sky crisscrossed with meshes that tangle with my hair, pulling at my head, pulling me upward. Please, I want to say, please leave me. I am calm and peaceful here. I do not want to feel again, to have to remember my own vulnerability, my “innocence,” or at least the kind of innocence I thought I had, where I knew who I was. I knew how to deal with men, how to take care of myself; I was no silly girl ready to be duped by the next smooth talker. After all, I worked in the smart restaurant where men always gave the eye to an attractive girl. We expected it, knew how to fend off the pushy ones, how to smile at the guys out for the night from under the wife and kids. Girls like me “understood” them. And if sometimes, we had a “fling,” well why not, though the truth was we were always hoping to find Mr. Right. Or at least be “discovered.” And that is what happened to me. I was suddenly, amazingly, discovered, and all because of my red hair.

Mom would have been surprised. She had always wondered where the red came from. She herself had been blond as long as I could remember, covering up the gray as she grew older, only to depart this world, my world, too young. It was the saddest day of my life, the saddest year before it when she was sick, the saddest after, when she was gone. It had been two years now and I still could not think of her without tearing up. Which was another reason I was ready for an adventure, a change; a radical change.

It was a fairly quiet night when Ahmet Ghulbian first came into the restaurant and made himself known to me. Well, made a pass, to be frank. I was used to it but this time I was also attracted. Still, I was wary. He was different, foreign looking. “Exotic” was the word I used to myself. Of course I did not call the number on the card he gave me, I figured that was that, just another guy wanting to hook up for the night. I thought of my mother and what she would think of me, her daughter, who by now should have been on her way to being married. Sometimes, standing in five-inch heels and a narrow skirt, white shirt strategically buttoned so as not to reveal what should not be revealed to the restaurant’s customers, believe me, I wished I was that girl my mom had hoped I would be.

That night, disappointment filled my mouth like bile; I had achieved nothing, not even my “potential,” as Mom called it. I had done well in school, good enough to be accepted by a college, though of course I could not go. I had to work, bring in some money; pay the rent on the third-floor, two-room apartment in Queens, the grocery bills; vodka; cigarettes. It was the latter which killed her, though to her credit she had stopped. Too late. It’s because of her I never so much as put a cigarette between my lips, just to try; neither that, nor marijuana, because I was afraid of that too. Drugs were sold on the streets where I lived, I’d seen the results and wanted no part of it. I was, I guess, what was known as “a good girl.” The truth is I had never wanted to be “bad.”

I did not go in for one-night stands. My first relationship was head-over-heels passionate. We were so madly in love nobody else mattered. His name was Henry, always known as Hank, and for a year we were all we knew; all we saw was each other. Then one day, it was over. Thanks for everything, hon, he said, as he left for a Southern college where he would stand out like an onion in a field of tulip bulbs. And I went to work the cash register at the local supermarket, where I blended into the background as though I belonged. Which I did. Apart from the red hair of course, but in a tearful downbeat moment after watching an old DVD of Audrey Hepburn in the movie
Roman Holiday,
like her I had it all cut off, shorn like a sacrificial lamb. Which, looking horrified at the result, I knew I might well have been. I had sacrificed myself to the ego of Hank, the new college boy, and now look at me. It took ages to grow in again.

And now. At the moment of my demise I had this cloud of coppery red hair standing out from my head as though electrified, spiraling in tendrils around my face, curving in the glossy waves that attracted Mr. Ghulbian and were to be the cause of my death.

“I’ll rest in peace with you now, Mom” was my final thought when the blow had vibrated through my head, sending me spinning, tumbling over myself, my hand to the bloody spot. I’d staggered forward, caught from the corner of my eye a glimpse of them, watching me. Him and the woman who had struck me with the champagne bottle. Watching me about to die.

8

Zacharias trawled Angie in like a fish from the ocean. Her red hair tangled in the meshes of the net; her skull gleamed white in the sun; her open eyes stared into his.

“She is a dead woman,” he said, peering closer. And then she blinked. He jumped back. “How can she be still alive? She must be drowned. No woman could survive that, and that broken head.”

But I am alive, she wanted to say. And you are right to call on God, because I need all the help I can get. You saved me from drowning but you might not save me from what happened that made me run from them, to fall—or did I jump?—into the sea to escape.

They brought towels, wrapped her in them, carried her into Zacharias’s cabin, laid her down in the shade. Zacharias himself bathed her face with clean fresh water. He himself lifted her long red hair out of the way. He saw the gaping wound, the broken skull, and drew in his breath sharply, asking who could have done this to her? And why?

Because I knew too much, she wanted to tell him. I was a fool, an innocent, or more probably merely dumb. I believed what they said. I did as they asked. I thought it was the adventure I had been looking for. I did not understand that I was perfect for their plans, a young woman alone in the world, no family, only the usual friendships that could be dismissed with talk of plans to move to the West Coast. No one really to care or come looking for me. What a sad state of affairs, that I could reach the age of twenty-one and have no one who cared enough to find out what happened, or where I was.

*   *   *

It began on a cold night in a luxury hotel in New York.

I had known Ahmet Ghulbian for exactly one month. He was lying in bed next to me, propped on one elbow, gazing into my eyes. A half-empty bottle of champagne and two glasses waited on the table. He sat up, leaned over to refill them, offered me one. I shuffled upright, tossing back my hair, allowing it to fall forward again over my breasts because I suddenly felt very naked in front of this man who had just made love to me and had already seen it all.

“You’ll have a private plane, of course,” he said.

“A private plane,” I repeated, wondering what he was talking about. I seemed to be having memory lapses these days, sometimes forgetting what day it was and whether I was supposed to be at work, or what. Ahmet had been giving me some pills. He said he suffered from the same thing and they would help.

“Think of it,” he’d said, smiling, popping another pill into my champagne. “A private plane, all to yourself. Just you and the pilots. Then a yacht where my friends will look after you. Oh, you can trust me, dear little red-haired Angie, they will certainly look after you. Anything you want will be yours. Caviar, foie gras, breakfast in bed, sunset drinks on deck. It will be champagne all the way.”

“All the way to where?” I’d asked, puzzled. I really did not understand what he was talking about.

He laughed at that. “Private yachts do not have to go anywhere. They float free as birds in the air, letting whim take them where they might at that very moment they choose. You can be part of that, my dear little Angie.”

Through the champagne blur and my foggy brain it sounded great, though somewhere the person still in my head, the rational young woman I used to be before I met this man and took his pills and drank too much, asked the question, Why me?

“Why me?” I vocalized the query that so puzzled me.

“Because, my dear little Angie, I care for you, I am falling in love with you, I want you to meet my friends, and then my family. I am serious about you, you must know that by now.”

His eyes, dark without his glasses, melted into mine, he wrapped his arms around me, held me to his naked chest. I could feel his heart beating, beating for me, I thought happily. At last I had found a man who loved me. My mother would have been thrilled, as I myself was. At least I thought I was, at that moment, anyhow. Yet I hardly knew this man, I did not even know where he came from, or anything about his family; I had never, in the few weeks I had known him, met so much as a friend of his.

“It’s our lives, our private lives,” he’d reassured me, when I’d questioned this. “I want to keep you to myself while I can. In the beginning, anyhow.”

Now, though, in the hotel room, he stretched behind him and opened the drawer on the nightstand, took out a slender red leather box and offered it to me.

“For my lovely girl,” he said.

I had seen the ads in magazines, knew a red Cartier box when I saw one. I’d never held one in my hands, though, never expected to. I took it, smiling questioningly into his eyes. He touched me lightly, two fingers on my lips, like a kiss. “Go on, open it.”

I almost did not want to, didn’t want to end the surprise, the pleasure, like holding back when making love, delaying the final moment. I opened it.

Inside was a slender gold chain with a small animal ornament, a panther, and my initials also in gold. The initials sat exactly in the hollow of my throat as I held it up. Ahmet turned me around so he might fasten it, then turned me back again, and looked expectantly at me.

“You like it?”

“
Like?
Why, I
love
it. I
adore
it. It’s the best present anyone ever gave me.” I didn’t need to say it was the most expensive present anyone had given me, he obviously knew hostesses in restaurants were not millionaires.

“Well, then.” He stroked my hair back, gently fingering the tendrils around my ears, smoothing my eyebrows, the two fingers again, like a kiss, on my mouth. “Well, then, now maybe you can give me a present in return.”

I laughed. “Anything you want,” I promised recklessly.

It was that promise that left me drowning in the beautiful azure and green Aegean Sea. The blow with the champagne bottle had been carefully aimed, I knew it now. In fact I had seen it coming. He was standing there with the woman I had not even seen earlier. I was to be gotten rid of, that was clear. I knew too much, knew what they were selling, and I was the only witness to the transaction.

As I sank into that blueness, blood drifting upward with my long hair, with what might be my last conscious thought, I vowed I would be back. I would get them. One way or another. It wasn’t revenge I wanted. It was justice.

9

Martha Patron had a younger sister named Lucy. She lived in London and seemed to Martha to base her philosophy on life and how to live it to the full on a song called “It Can’t Be Bad If It Makes You Feel Good.” Unfortunately this also led to that Janis Joplin winner that went,
Take another little piece of my heart, now, baby
, which is precisely what happened, in what seemed to Martha to be the space of a few days.

Lucy first encountered a man Martha eventually find out was Ahmet Ghulbian a month previously—sexy, dark, exotic—in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in London. It was a Thursday evening and she was awaiting the arrival of a girlfriend with whom she was supposed to have a drink. Both girls were “actresses” who so far had acted only in drama school, but they were hoping. “Being seen” was, they believed, the best way to get “discovered,” and the Ritz was where they hoped they might meet someone important in showbiz and be asked to audition, or maybe even do a TV commercial. Anyhow it beat sitting home waiting for a phone call from some elusive director that never came.

Lucy was too well brought up to perch at the bar; she sat discreetly alone at a table, making her champagne last because she could not afford a second glass. She heard her stomach rumble and longed for a sandwich, to say nothing of a good meal. A chicken sandwich, she thought, closing her eyes, visualizing the chicken on sliced white bread, her favorite. Even if sliced white was supposed to be rubbish, to her it still made the best sandwich and the slices were all the same size, which they were not if she was the one doing the slicing. Tomato, lettuce, mayo, no ketchup, perhaps just a hint of mustard. Her mouth watered at the thought and she took a sip of champagne. Over the rim of her glass, her eyes caught those of the man at the adjacent table. Well, not exactly his eyes because he was, oddly, since they were indoors, wearing glasses with tinted lenses. Still she could tell he was looking at her.

Her phone played its little tune. A text from her friend to say she couldn’t make it. Lucy, dismayed, stared at her half-drunk glass of champagne. She had trusted her friend would pay because she had no money, well, barely enough. They always did this, took care of each other when one was broke. Now what?

“Excuse me, but I can see you are troubled. Is there some way I could help?”

It was the man in the dark glasses from the next table. Lucy thought quickly of her overdrawn credit cards, any one of which might be rejected. She thought of the small amount of cash in her purse, of her overused checkbook. She
might
just be able to swing it, it would have been okay sharing with her friend, but right now she was kind of stuck. Accepting money from a stranger was against all her principles and she gave the man a searching stare, a small frown between her lovely eyebrows, a look that definitely questioned his intentions.

“I only seek to help a damsel in distress,” he said, and then his face lit up with amusement. “Sorry, I sound like a bad poet, but I saw you were concerned about the bill. I’m guessing your boyfriend, fiancé…? did not arrive and now you are compromised. Please, allow me. It will be my good deed for the day.”