One Way or Another: A Novel (8 page)

Sadly, that magic had deserted them some years ago now, and life without them at Patrons Hall was simply not the same. Even when the girls got together, sitting on the red Turkey rug in front of the drawing room fire, toasting crumpets on a long fork, “like Jane Austen women,” they said, laughing at themselves, they did it from
nostalgie,
a wish to bring back that past, where they were all so happy. And so loved.

“Old-fashioned” was how Martha’s mother had described Patrons Hall when she first stepped through the door, brought there as a bride by the too-gorgeously good-looking husband, seven years younger than herself. She was twenty-eight, practically “on the shelf,” her already married friends warned, urging her to get a move on before it was too late.

“Too late? For what?” had been Mary Jane’s nonchalant reply.

And she’d turned out to be right. After all, look what she ended up with just by waiting a bit—a lovely husband; two lovely homes—there was one in London as well as the country house. And, best of all, three beautiful children, all girls. Mary Jane wasn’t sure how she would have dealt with boys—sending them off to school in that British way at seven years old would have broken her heart, a heart which, before she met her lovely husband, had been broken several times, once quite severely. But that was in the past.

Making up for lost time, Mary Jane entertained lavishly in both her houses. She enjoyed her daughters, saying they kept her young, which they probably did if they were not driving her crazy—well Lucy, anyhow—and she really enjoyed her husband: his company, his smile, his caring demeanor. How lovely her life was.

Until, quite suddenly, on a small twisting mountain road driving over the Pyrenees back from Spain to France, it wasn’t. One mistake, on her part, one tiny turn too wide. And it was all over.

Martha was fourteen at the time, and she made herself believe her mother was still with her, always there, invisible but protective. It was years before she could bring herself to face the truth and simply get on with her own life, something she found she was, quite suddenly, enjoying again. It was correct, the old saying, life must go on.

The girls continued to live at Patrons. Her father’s sister moved in, along with her husband and a positive tribe of children, aged four to sixteen. They took over the orphaned girls’ lives; saw them through schools, first dates, arguments, and illnesses, and somehow they all muddled through, successfully, as it turned out.

Sarah, Martha’s eldest sister, was studious. From playing childhood doctors and nurses she’d gone on to become a well-respected pediatrician, putting her love and knowledge into helping other people’s children while having none of her own. She claimed to be too busy for marriage, and perhaps she was right.

Martha was puzzled about what to do when she left school. The university degree didn’t seem to help much in the arts, to which she was inclined, so she got a job in an interior design store catering to wealthy clients, where she was the coffee girl/errand runner/folder of bolts of fabric and dropper-off of stuff in taxis, learning on the job.

Three years and three different boyfriends later, she was asked by a friend’s mother to redesign her bathroom, make it larger, grander. She was able to do that and she did it well. “So now let’s do over the kitchen,” the friend said. It had taken off from there with recommendations from friends, until she made the time for a proper design course and became a professional. Martha wanted to call her company Patrons Pleasure but was warned it sounded like a sex shop. She thought about Martha Designs but realized there was already a famous Martha in the same field. Finally she ended up, simply, as Patrons.

She was young, connected, attractive, and in demand. Life was good to her. And eventually, she met Marco in the antique store. It was the old hook, line, and sinker.

Martha was no one-night-stand woman but the sexual attraction was mutual, and high octane. When Marco sat next to her in that coffee shop, Martha had to stop herself from reaching out to touch him, to run her fingers over his sexy mouth, to put her arms round his neck, to be close to him.

Half an hour later they left together. Forty minutes later they were in bed—well, that is, lying together on the mattress on the floor of his messy studio, naked, skin on skin, body on body, mouth on mouth. She wished it would never end. And it had not. For which both she, and he, thanked God.

Now, back in New York, she wanted to get the next flight out back to Turkey, to be with Marco anywhere in the world. She knew he wouldn’t be coming home any time soon. He was too obsessed with the girl he believed he had seen drown. She hoped he was wrong.

Her phone beeped. It was her friend at Cartier in Paris. He told her the necklace with the initials had been bought by an Argentinian oil company. It had been picked up from the store by a documented messenger and delivered to a suite at the Plaza Athenée hotel, and signed for by a young woman employed as an assistant by that company.

The company’s records were brief: headquarters a PO address in Cairo, a second in Buenos Aires. But there were no company records filed and no one knew who the directors or owners of the company might be. It was a mystery, as was the necklace.

14

When he wasn’t at his English house, Ahmet Ghulbian lived mostly on his yacht, the MV
Lady Marina,
sailing from port to port, country to country, the way other well-known kings of shipping and tankers had done before him. Ahmet had added the extra-lucrative business of illegal money laundering to his CV, yet he still maintained a low profile. He had seen the way to disaster in a flashy lifestyle, in expensive women who must be paid to be on his arm or in his bed, and to keep their silence.

The yacht was 250 feet of black splendor, built five years previously to Ahmet’s own design, modified, obviously, by shipbuilding professionals, but the result was exactly what he wanted. A showpiece of a craft, sleek, elegant, with luxurious accommodations for as many as thirty guests and vast social areas, complete with two swimming pools, one indoor, one out. It was decorated by the yachting world’s top designer, with the permanent crew of sixteen housed carefully belowdecks.

The “social deck,” as Ghulbian liked to call the main deck, had seen its fair share of wild parties over the years. It was an expansive space whose length gave it the feel of a large hotel, with careful groupings of sofas and comfortable chairs in pale linens around glass coffee tables. Antique lamps topped with pleated bronze silk shades cast a discreet light over the “goings-on,” whatever that might mean, but there was certainly plenty of it. Ahmet was not a man who liked women, he merely enjoyed them. Which is not to say, either, that he was a sexual expert, or even proficient, simply that he needed to be thought so. Image was all. Actually, that was not quite true.
Money
was all. Image came second, though if you had them both, then you were really in business. Which Ahmet believed he was.

He had no need for multiple properties to be maintained in countries which would demand taxes be paid. Of course, Ahmet was also an expert in the art of the payoff; he or his minions always knew the right man in the right place. So far, it had worked well. Nevertheless he worried about that unknown “tomorrow.” And, in a way, that tomorrow might have arrived in the form of the red-haired Angie, who was surely not the “angel” her name might imply.

Oddly, it was his own mother, a woman Ahmet hated, who had pointed the route to his future. “Get rid of people that stand in your way,” she’d advised at the end of a long night of drinking on her part. Ahmet had rarely imbibed then, and never more than was good for him, and he never did any form of drugs, though he wasn’t averse to using them on others, which was quite another matter. He despised people who used drugs, people “who leaned on them,” he’d say, smiling ruefully, “for moral support.” In Ahmet’s opinion they did drugs because they were unsure of themselves, had no confidence in what they were doing or their chosen path of life. Or death.

The first person Ahmet killed was a woman. Her name was Fleur de Roc. It sounded like a perfume to him but she was no flowery-scented lovely young girl: Fleur was middle-aged, fat, and well-off. Not rich, Ahmet was not then in a position to meet rich women; they lived in a different world, but to him, then, Fleur was wealthy, with three or four small shops in the Cairo bazaar, a weekend sailboat kept in Alexandria, and an overstuffed apartment with its own bathroom. Ahmet had never had a bathroom of his own until he met Fleur; he’d been lucky to have a bathroom at all.

Poverty, he recalled now, sitting at his desk on the luxurious MV
Lady Marina,
was made up of memories like that: the odors never left you.

Anyhow, one way or another, when he and Fleur were out on her sailboat, somehow she slipped, fell, drowned in a storm. He’d cried when he told the authorities the story. He ended up owning that sailboat, and Fleur’s savings. And he’d found out something new about himself. He enjoyed killing women. It was better even than sex, at which he’d always suspected he wasn’t quite good enough. In fact, if it were not for the money, the gifts, the flowers, the trinkets … who knew if those women would even so much as consider him. Sexually.

His mother found out about his affair with Fleur and her sudden mysterious death. She knew what her son was capable of and threatened to expose him unless he gave her a share of the money. The mother was as ruthless as the son, only far simpler.

It had been so easy with Fleur that drowning was to become Ahmet’s favorite method of disposal. His mother was his second victim, after, of course, he had taken out an insurance policy on her life, not a vast amount because he did not yet have the funds to pay for anything like that, but sufficient to get him to his next goal in life. Which was away from Egypt, away from home, away from his own identity. Ahmet needed to become a new man. So he reinvented himself.

Ahmet was intelligent and now he claimed to have attended good schools, a fact no one ever seemed to check, and certainly never challenged, taking him at his confident word. He’d become an attractive man, middle height, stockily built with olive-toned skin and eyes so deeply set and so dark they looked almost black behind the tinted lenses he always wore. Those glasses were to become a part of his “look,” along with the Savile Row suits, the floral silk pocket handkerchiefs, and the faint aroma of Violettes de Parme, a perfume made only for him in Paris.

But it was Ahmet’s charm that brought him success. He worked hard at losing his accent and his deep soft voice acquired an almost British tone, though he was careful not to overdo it, which might have meant one of those upper-class Brits asking what school he had attended. He would have had to lie, and he knew lies had a way of coming back at you, leaving you more entangled than when you started out. He’d also learned that the hard way. Life’s experiences accounted for a lot of the way Ahmet had turned out, the man he finally became: rich, successful, admired by many, sought after by women, who mostly, he suspected, would like to get their hands on his money, but he had Greek billionaire examples to show him that was not the way to go.

Besides, he did not like women. He used them for sex, always charming them first, of course, then later for the other, deeper pleasures. There was no longer anything rough at the edges about Ahmet. He did not want cheap hookers; he wanted women who responded to his wealth and his billionaire aura, yet somehow he still could not get along with aristocratic, wealthy women. With his hidden background and the mental issues that remained from his poverty-stricken youth and his slut of a mother, as well as the father he had never known, Ahmet needed to keep himself strictly private. Upper-class Brits knew everything about everybody else. That was how you counted in their world.

Which is why he had so often ended up with girls like Angie. Nice, simple young women, attractive of course, that was a given, and with no background to speak of, no one to look out for them, no one to come looking for them when they disappeared. He believed no one would miss the Angies of the world, and so far they never had. Angie was the perfect target. He enjoyed her so much, enjoyed best of all seeing her long red hair floating in the wake of the
Lady Marina
as he’d taken off, full-speed ahead. None of the crew so much as knew she was missing, since it was none of their business where she was at any time or, in fact, who their boss was with or even if she was on the ship. Only his longtime assistant, Mehitabel, who had been with him forever and was utterly devoted, knew anything about Ahmet’s sexual proclivities, his need for violence, his ultimate fascination in death.

Pleased, Ahmet had decided it was time to move on. And that’s when the call came through from the gulet,
Zeus,
that they had taken on board a badly injured young woman, an almost drowned young woman. Ahmet did not have to ask if she had red hair. There could only be one half-dead young woman in the Aegean right then. He gave orders to turn the
Lady Marina
around, asked the master of
Zeus
his exact nautical location, and set off to get Angie back. To “rescue her,” he thought with a sardonic smile. Now he would have to start all over again. And now there were witnesses.

Of course he had not pushed Angie off the deck of his boat. There had been no need. Enough pills in her champagne, the kind of pills roving guys out for an easy hookup slyly slip into women’s drinks at a bar, worked like a charm. Once Angie was sufficiently doped, all he had to do was threaten her, let her escape onto the deck, where Mehitabel was waiting with the bottle of champagne. He watched Angie take the blow, watched her slip to one side, fall overboard. Then they had taken off smoothly across the green waters, leaving her to her fate.

She’d had to be gotten rid of. The lonely, isolated young women he employed to “help” in his business, secretly delivering parcels of cash, or documents, when he bought and sold armaments, always had to go. In fact Ahmet was surprised none of them ever
understood
that was part of his game; that he was hardly likely to keep them around after they had done what he’d asked, done their job, so to speak, so afterward they could sell their tale to the tabloids, or go to the international police. Murder
him,
in a way. Did that make him a serial killer? Though he enjoyed killing them, it was, after all, part of the sexual thrill, Ahmet thought not. He was simply a man doing what he had to do in order to survive.
Survival of the fittest,
wasn’t that what it was called? In fact, more likely it was survival of the cleverest.