One Way or Another(86)

“Fire!”

I heard the shout go up; help would soon be to hand. I hoped it wouldn’t be too late. I had not wanted to drown, I did not want to burn. What would Ahmet do now, I asked myself, crouched near the window where the remains of the curtains fluttered, ragged black strips of what had once been fine blue silk. A gun was what sprang to mind; first water, then fire, then a bullet. That would be Ahmet’s final move.

I’d started out as a personal sadism project for him, a sexual encounter, an unknowing messenger, carrying his illegal drug money. That finished, I had become merely a nuisance to be hidden away until I could be gotten rid of—silently—when the media had lost interest and were no longer asking whatever happened to that red-haired girl who disappeared. So many girls went missing every year. I wondered how many were ever found. And here I was, in my midnight-black velvet ball gown, the golden panther chain around my neck, wearing a wig as red as my own hair. Yet now, I saw a way out.

Sirens blared as fire trucks approached, blending with the shouts of terrified guests running from the house. I stuck my head out the window,

“Help!” I yelled. “Help!”

The firemen spotted me, a truck stopped beneath my window, a ladder was thrust upward, and climbing it came two men in yellow hard hats who, when they got to my too-small window and saw my terrified face, proceeded to hack out the glass and then the frame and haul me out through the gap.

“Good thing you’re not a heavyweight,” the one carrying me over his shoulder muttered as he descended the ladder and deposited me on the soggy ground. He looked at my smoke-blackened face, my wig tilted crazily to one side of my bald head, the golden jewelry, the black velvet gown, and the satin-and-feather mask I somehow still managed to clutch in one hand.

“Jesus,” he said. “What was going on here anyway?”

I spotted Ahmet in the crowd and shrank back into the dark. “There’s the owner, why not ask him what happened?”

“I have to see you’re okay first; you’ve inhaled smoke, you might need hospitalizing.”

I saw the emergency Red Cross station already set up, assured him I would go there immediately. Behind me the house was starting to burn room by room. Shadows and light danced across the wild, wet marshlands and rain clouds, even darker gray than the smoke, pressed down. The fumes choked us.

“Everybody out of here!” the fireman yelled, marching back to his crew as the sound of more sirens crashed across the night. “Out, everybody out!”

Men in tuxedoes ran to help haul precious antiques and women in sparkly evening dresses carried stuff onto the lawn until it looked like a valuable bric-a-brac sale. A rock group kept on playing like it was the sinking of the Titanic. Candelabra, with their white tapers still lit, made the disaster festive.

People in evening finery, seeking a way out, pushed one another out of the way, piling onto the chartered buses that had brought them, or into limos, searching the sky for helicopters that, of course, could not land, some begging lifts from strangers.

I looked for Mehitabel, I knew she had to be here. She hated Ahmet, even though he was the man she wanted. But Ahmet did not want her, and very possibly he wanted someone else.

I ran for one of the elegant chartered buses just as the door was about to slide shut.

“We’re full, miss, overloaded already,” the driver yelled at me.

“You can’t just leave me here,” I said, but he crashed through the gears and took off down the driveway with its old stunted trees and the new ones alive with white fairy lights, leading from the mansion behind me that was burning in hell.





63

Earlier, Lucy had managed to lose Ahmet in the crowd, and unaware of the beginning fire in the front, was sitting at the table in the kitchen at the back of Marshmallows, the only room she liked. She was chatting to the Tunisian chef she also liked in a mixture of English and his language, French, of which she had thankfully managed to absorb a few words at school, as well as on those long holidays on the French coast. That holiday language had mostly consisted of how much did chocolate lollipops cost at the wooden snack shed at the top of the beach, or why wasn’t the outdoor shower working anyway because she had to get the sand off her feet before they would allow her into the car to go home. “Home” being the usual rented holiday villa, gradually being demolished under a pyramid of damp towels, wet bathing suits, grotty old sneakers, and single flip-flops for which never a match was to be found. Lucy had declared there was a flip-flop thief in the house and when they found him they would make him buy everybody new sandals, but no one ever owned up or got caught.

Now, she’d also lost Phillip, who’d probably had enough and decided to leave. Anyhow, kitchen tables were her favorite haunt; she could hitch up her black velvet, take off her smart new gold sandals, put her feet up on a chair, and sneak a taste of whatever the chef was bringing out next. Right now it was something called kofta, a tiny curried pastry which she loved. “I could eat the whole plate,” she said, sneaking a second, or was it her third?

“You do that and I’ll lose my job,” the chef said. He stopped in his tracks, looking puzzled. “Did I leave an oven on?” he said, sniffing. “Something is burning.”

And then they heard it, the shrill call, “Fire!”

Lucy grabbed her shoes. She stood for a minute, not knowing where to go. Then, “Oh my God, where’s Martha?” And she slammed through the kitchen’s swing door into a swirl of gray smoke.