One Way or Another(20)

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.