One Way or Another(19)

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.

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.