One Way or Another(40)
And Marco had no doubt that he would have to do something about it.
28
Ahmet was sitting by the fire, reduced now to a few embers. He checked his watch. Three A.M. He had been there, alone, five, maybe six hours. He’d finished the red wine, drinking it right from the bottle since he’d smashed the glass and it wasn’t worth getting up to go find another when all he wanted was to get drunk. The wine wasn’t enough to achieve that and he’d moved on to scotch and then tequila, his favorite liquor of the moment. He enjoyed the brashness of it compared with the honeyed malt of the scotch, though no doubt he’d switch back again before too long. He had also found tequila useful for getting women drunk, not falling-off-their-chairs pissed but enough to loosen up their “values” as they invariably called their modest stand against sex on a first date. Well, okay, he had his values too: didn’t the white roses he sent and the occasional trinket count as a form of wooing? Enough at least for them to think he was falling for them?
How many had it been now? How many women in how many countries? He wondered sometimes how it was that girls could simply disappear without any fuss being made, though of course he chose his girls very carefully. They all had to meet the same criteria: must live alone; must have no family, or at least none close enough to come looking for them; must work in the kind of job that was interchangeable, where no one would care if they moved elsewhere; and must belong to that floating population of young women on the make.
Of course almost every woman had friends, but not every woman had close friends she saw all the time. There were, he’d found, a lot of lonely girls out there, those who showed up at temporary jobs, Starbucks in hand, good-morning smiles on their faces. They went and sat in small enclosed cubicles and made cold calls selling whatever they were attempting to sell, usually without much success. A break for lunch, a sandwich or a burger, off at five or six, picking up a slice of pizza and a Coke or a bottle of cheap wine on the way “home” to a rented room with a shared bath down the hall.
His technique was simple enough. These days via his laptop he could find out almost anything about anybody. It saved a lot of time. It was easy to choose someone, manipulate a casual meeting at the pizza joint, or the coffee shop she frequented, a fancy-seeing-you-here-again kind of setup or else, like with Angie, in a restaurant. No need for Match.com or Christian Mingle; a man like him did not need to pick up a woman online, and especially one who was “looking for love.” He was rich and successful and because of that he was famous. Women wanted him. And he wanted to kill women. He’d thought about why he wanted this, thought of his hated mother, his life with veiled women, something that made him, as a male, feel exposed, vulnerable, with nowhere to hide. But that was a secret part of him and never now even acknowledged by himself. He was who he was. He did what he did. And he enjoyed the power it gave him.
It still irked Ahmet that he was not accepted by the British upper classes. Of course he mingled with them, at Ascot where he sometimes had a horse running, and at Henley for the boat races where he would hold a Pimm’s Cup party of his own. Pimm’s was the traditional gin-based Henley drink, served in tall glasses brimming with fruit. It sank like gentle rain into the stomach and before you knew it you were tipsy, in the very nicest possible way. To prevent the tipsiness he served regular grilled sausages, American-style, in hot dog buns, which his amazed English guests said “went down a treat.”
He was well-known for his generosity: he gave to all the important charities that would be reported in the media, but he also contributed to a smaller charity whose aim was to rehabilitate young vagrants found huddled in cardboard boxes under railway arches and in shop doorways. It never failed to cross his mind that there—not “but for the grace of God,” but for the murder of Fleur de Roc—was he. Fleur had unknowingly set him on the path to greatness.
What he could not forget, though, was Angie’s open eyes, staring at him from the blue Aegean. And the anger in them.
Now Angie was here, sedated and shut in a room, watched over by the amazing Mehitabel, whose icy blood sometimes chilled even Ahmet’s own. He was an evil man. Evil was born in him. It was what he was, and it was the path he had taken despite his success and all its accoutrements. As it was in Mehitabel, yet even he never failed to marvel at her chilling lack of emotion. She was the perfect partner.
They had met ten years ago when she’d attended a cocktail party he was giving to raise funds for the survivors of some global disaster, a party which would give him plenty of media coverage, praising his work for charity and his generosity. Mehitabel arrived arm in arm with another woman, a blond Playboy-page-three-in-the-sun type who she unloaded quickly onto him, saying she thought he might enjoy meeting her.
They both understood what she meant by “meeting.” Unfortunately Mehitabel had got it wrong; the blonde was not the type Ahmet liked at all. He wanted a classy woman on his arm, not someone who looked as though he’d paid for her, and who anyhow would no doubt expect him to pay. He’d offloaded her quickly and left his own party to walk the streets. For the first time in years he’d found himself wondering what was to become of him, where he was headed, even who he was. In fact all he was, was who he had invented. Nobody really knew Ahmet Ghulbian. Including himself.
Mehitabel followed him out onto the street. He heard her heels click-clacking on the sidewalk behind him but he did not slow his pace and allow her to catch up. What he did was walk for miles through the darkened streets of London, a city where he did not even own a home. He felt as homeless as the young men his charity rescued from their cardboard boxes under railway embankments; he was no better. He knew the life they lived intimately. He was still one of them. Only cleverer.