One Way or Another: A Novel (9 page)

The MV
Lady Marina
was named, he always told guests, for the goddess of the sea. He was not too sure of his facts about the sea goddess but it gave him an air of intellectual authority he needed, coming from his background. In fact, though Ahmet claimed to be Greek, he was of mixed Egyptian and Armenian-gypsy heritage, something he would never have admitted. There was no need with his fabricated story of an upbringing in a wealthy Greek family forced to roam the world, as he did himself now, when the rich were replaced by a socialist regime and no longer ruled their own world of autocrats and playboys and demimondaines, of which Ahmet claimed his mother was one.

Ahmet acknowledged secretly, and only ever to himself, that his mother was a slut. However, he also acknowledged it was her very sluttiness which had paid for his upbringing in the small apartment in Cairo, on a urine-smelling alley teeming with shady men in white caftans and women in black burkas, their faces hidden, something which excited him. He’d longed to see what lay behind those veils. That urge had never left him. A voyeur he was and would forever be.

Angie’s great tumbling mass of flame-colored hair had the same effect as that of a garment hiding her nakedness: it had turned him on so completely he had contemplated allowing her to stay. But of course he could not. He’d given her a job to do, a package to be delivered to a man who would meet her in a café he specified in the port of Fethiye in Turkey, where afterward Ahmet would pick her up. Angie did not know that the package contained several million dollars in various currencies, part of a drug deal Ahmet had made for a client.

He’d kept the promise he’d made to Angie, in bed in that expensive hotel room. She was flown to the destination by private plane—not his own, because he did not want any connection made between the two of them. It was rented from a commercial airline and paid for from an Argentinian company account that would be impossible to trace back to him. But Angie had been allowed to go shopping before she left. Thrilled, she’d bought a load of things, undergarments from La Perla, dresses from Prada and Dior, shoes from Louboutin and Manolo.

“After all, a young woman on such an important journey will need clothes,” Ahmet had said to her, teeth gleaming in a white-porcelain-bonded smile. It was an expensive smile, and very well done by one of the best cosmetic dentists in Paris, as Ahmet’s natural teeth had barely survived his poverty-stricken upbringing.

Poverty
was the one thing Ahmet was afraid of. The memory of it clung to him like the sweat-stained clothing of his youth, the odor returning every now and then to remind him, to urge him onward. Whatever it took, he was determined to do it. He had run from that room on the stinking alley, putting all thoughts of the woman he called Mother behind him, taking any job, however mean, however corrupt, however evil, Ahmet was your boy. Success had come easily after that.

Now, he wondered what to do with Angie. Should he simply allow her to die, alone in that cabin belowdecks where only Mehitabel knew she was? Or simply slide her, helpless, over the side again, where she would finally be swallowed up by the sea. The sea that had given her back to him. The sea that did not seem to want her.

Yet there was something about Angie that stuck in his mind. She was different from the other girls, a rare type, ballsy, funny, and courageous. He even liked her. He decided he would take her home.

15

Trust played no part in Ahmet Ghulbian’s life. The word itself had no meaning. He had emerged unwanted from his mother’s womb with all his self-protective instincts intact. He could only trust himself. His mother ceased to exist, disappeared. He had no other family, he was a child of the rough Cairo streets, and babyhood was a non-memory, for which, had he believed in God, he would have thanked Him. Poverty of the lowest, most humiliating kind, begging in the streets, a child offering small packets of chewing gum for a coin, rapacious men with hungry eyes wanting to buy him instead. It took a lot of fear and a lot more desire for him to begin to believe there was a way out, and that way led with himself.

He was nine or ten when he bought out the old man who sold the chewing gum to resell on the street, using the small amount of money saved so bitterly at the cost of going hungry. It was something he would never forget. At twelve he controlled his own area, three streets, each of which led into a major artery, which in turn led to a better neighborhood where families lived in apartments, and not like him, in a shed flung together from tarpaper and wooden debris with corrugated tin for a roof that broiled in the heat of summer and flooded in the rains. For a bed, he made himself a kind of bunk using two old oil drums and a couple of the planks. It didn’t occur to him, fixing up his oil drum bed, that one day he might be selling oil in drums larger than that, and sleeping in a bed bought with money made from that, and with a proper roof over his head from which no rain gained admittance. That was a long way ahead. After all, he was only a boy.

Of course there was no such thing as boyhood where he lived. “Lived” was too good a word. Existence was all it was and there were times, days on end, weeks, in fact, when young Ahmet asked himself was it worth going on. Small for his age, thin with the popped belly of malnutrition, eyes too big in his sunken face, teeth broken or lost. He was a nothing child. Disposable. He was only like all the other boys around him. One of hundreds, thousands.

In a single day he became different, a business owner with his packs of chewing gum, selling them on to other boys, making a bit here, more there, moving inexorably upward. To drugs. A ready market if ever there was one, and who would ever suspect the skinny kid in the ragged shirt with the dirty face and frightened eyes. He was, he realized, a natural. With his looks, the way he could turn on the big-eyed wonder, the helplessness, he was a success.

Of course he soon lost the need for the big-eyed wonder. Tough was what he needed to be. In his first encounter with a real street tough, of the kind that brandished a knife and threatened to cut his guts out if he didn’t hand it over, he’d had to gather his wits together and strike back. He grabbed the knife and he used it. He’d stood for a moment after he’d done it, staring at the knife sticking out between the young thug’s third and fourth ribs, right above his heart, at the blood seeping out. He had been disappointed it had not actually poured.

He’d thought enough to snatch the knife from the boy’s gut, surprised it was so difficult. Then he’d turned to face the small crowd of youngsters who’d been watching, only to find they’d all disappeared. That was the way it was—when trouble came, your friends disappeared. These were only street friends, of course. After that he would never allow anyone to be his friend.

The drug dealers were different, older, meaner, dangerous. His life depended on how quickly he could deliver the “goods” as they all called it, the packets, the parcels, the plastic bags of white powders that he never once experimented with. He knew it would be the death of him and he was only just starting to live. He made enough over a couple of years to go into business for himself, after all, he already knew all the dealers, the customers, the financial workings of the drug trade. It soon became known that he could be trusted. He was an immediate success.

He acquired an apartment, the first place of any substance he had ever lived in. It was on the third floor, at the top of the building because the ground floor was dangerous; a gun could be poked through your window, a machete could break down your door, a fire could be set to smoke you out and rob you. All anyone wanted from him was his money, hard-earned, by the skin of his teeth—now better thanks to a cut-rate dentist he had done a drug favor for. And all he wanted was to earn more. To get it. To keep it. To be a rich man.

It didn’t happen overnight.

He was eighteen, thick dark hair, burning dark eyes, olive-skinned, a lure for women on the loose and men on the prowl. Whatever, it was always his choice. But the women paid better. As he found out when he met Fleur.

And that was the real beginning of everything.

First, he opened a small café as a front for money laundering, did well at that. He found an old tanker for sale, a rustbucket but still usable if you could find men desperate enough to sail it, filled with cut-price oil that threatened to explode at the drop of a careless cigarette. It was a risk that paid off. He bought more tankers, losing only one, and that went right to the bottom along with its men but without any evidence of exactly why. Insurance paid mightily on that one, gave him his first real push upward, in the right direction.

He bought an apartment in Cairo, custom-tailored suits, ventured into the smarter cafés for a drink in the evening.

Insurance was where he’d really taken off, small, private insurance. He found shady men only too willing to be protected, found also the chink in their armor was that they needed the security he offered. He was better than they were, cleverer, a sharper businessman.

And so it went. And here he was now. Ahmet Ghulbian, reputed billionaire, which, if you counted his real estate assets, his oil business, his banking, might not amount to that, but throw in the loan-sharking and the gambling game and he was surely it.

He was a king amongst men, a god women aspired to know and the world envied. To himself he was still Ahmet Ghulbian, whose real name had been buried along with his mother—a kid in the Cairo bazaar, looking for a life.

16

The gray wooden house on the Romney marshland in England was Ahmet’s hideout, his special place where he could be completely alone. Its previous owner was a newspaper tycoon who’d met a sad end in a fight with his lover involving a knife with which he was about to carve the Sunday roast, an ample side of beef, locals remembered admiringly; enough to feed twenty, yet they were only the two. The place had remained empty for many years with stories of haunting and unexplained mists surrounding it on moonlit nights.

When he first inspected it Ahmet’s comment was that at least there were no hounds baying at that moon. Still, he liked the location on the edge of the marshes where the grass was greener than normal grass, a vibrant, dazzling, wet green that changed abruptly to deep dark brown mud which sucked in any wild creature unfortunate enough to make the mistake of alighting on it. The house was remote yet accessible from London, a secret kind of place with no locals loitering curiously. In fact they kept away, put off by the legendary murder and rumored haunting.

And that was the reason Ahmet was able to purchase the house for a minimal sum, the estate being only too glad to finally unload it. And, since local men were reluctant to set foot in the place, Ahmet brought in his own workforce, Italians and Croats mostly, whom he housed in temporary prefabricated buildings with the minimum amenities, but who were anyway glad of the job.

The gray wood was strengthened with stone, the roof retiled in a darker gray, windows double-sealed against the prevailing wind and winter storms. The inside was made luxurious with paneling taken from older houses, with probably better histories and reputations. In the grand hall there was a crystal chandelier, musically and permanently aflutter in the also prevailing draft, no matter how his experts tried to find its source and seal it. Silk rugs covered the gray stone floors, which were heated electrically, and the heavy-looking furnishings came from the most expensive antique stores in Paris and London. A complete restaurant-size kitchen with stainless equipment, black granite counters, and six ovens awaited a chef, a man Ghulbian imported on the rare occasions he occupied the house. Or sometimes not, when he needed to be completely alone. As he did now.

He sat in front of the fire in what used to be called the drawing room, sipping red wine, a Pétrus of noble vintage, from a glass so fine it seemed the mere touch of his teeth might shatter it. The log fire smelled of pine, the grate was aglow, flames edged with blue licked gently. The cushioned red leather chair was soft, there was the sound of the wind outside, the shift of logs in the grate, the aroma of the wine in his nose. Its exquisite flavor on his palate gave Ahmet no pleasure. He was consumed with the image, not of the redheaded girl, who was already his, but of the small blonde, of her delicate features, the wide forehead from which she pulled back her hair severely, of her almost blue eyes. Were they blue, were they gray? He could not decide. And the image of her lips as she’d pouted, wondering beneath a flutter of lashes whether to join him for that drink at the Ritz bar. Lucy.

He knew he must be patient. He had learned how to make a woman his own. He would groom her. “Groom” was the phrase he used when he thought about how to make a woman his, readying her with small gifts along with handwritten notes saying how much he had enjoyed her company. Then flowers, of course, always long-stemmed white roses, even in the depths of winter. He would suggest she might enjoy dinner again sometime. He always left the ball in the woman’s court, knowing she would be intrigued and would agree. He was so confident she would accept, he’d even make a reservation at a top restaurant in anticipation.

The young women he showered with this attention were not used to such a high-flying lifestyle. They were ordinary, not necessarily small-town but certainly with provincial mentalities. He knew how to pick them out. Angie was perfect, but she had beaten him. Temporarily, of course. Now, he was “taking care of” Angie. He’d bring her to the house on the marshes, a treacherous land where you were safe to walk only if you knew the correct path. People had disappeared in those marshes, sucked deep in the glutinous brown mire, unable to extricate themselves as the swamp closed over their heads. When he was ready, Angie would no longer trouble him.

Restless, he got up and paced the room. He needed light, space.
Air!
He was choking, and suddenly for the first time since he was a boy, he felt a thrill of what he recognized as fear.