One Way or Another: A Novel (6 page)

Lucy thought quickly: she was either going to be deeply embarrassed—at the Ritz of all places—or in debt to some man, who, though he was good-looking, she did not know from Adam. “
Well,
” she said, drawing out the word to show her reluctance. “Well, perhaps, maybe, if you would be so good as to…”

“Offer my help? Of course.” He took out a black AmEx card, placed it on top of the bill, and signaled the waiter. “I think under the circumstances, I should introduce myself. Ahmet Ghulbian. And I must tell you right away, that lovely as you are, I have no evil intentions. Seriously, I saw you were in trouble, that’s all.”

“Well, thank you.” Lucy found she was blushing. “But you must give me your address so I’ll know where to send a check. Return your money, I mean.”

He shrugged. His eyes behind the tinted glasses were very dark.

“Please, it is so little, there is no need.” He looked at her for a long, silent moment, then said, “I was going on to dinner at the Italian place I’m fond of, on the Kings Road. I’m wondering if you might also be hungry? Perhaps you would join me? All cards on the table, though.” He laid his big square hands in front of him, smiling at her. “No evil intent, simply companionship and a nice meal. For two instead of one. A man traveling can get lonely. I feel the need for some conversation with my wine, a little company, no obligations beyond that.”

Lucy thought she might quite like a glass of red wine and some conversation with this stranger, who already seemed more interesting than most men she knew. Besides, she was broke and starving. “Why not?” she asked with a wide smile that enchanted.

And that’s how she first met Ahmet Ghulbian. A month ago.

10

ANGIE

I was lying on my back, looking at something round, greenish, encircled in tarnished brass. The green undulated against glass. A porthole! I was on a boat, but not the grand yacht from before. Then how did I come to be here?

My mind struggled to find the memory, my head ached with a kind of violent throb that would not stop. I lifted a hand to my head, an act that seemed to have its own momentum, with no connection to my brain. My hand did not find the expected hair. I felt only a wrapping which I realized must be bandages. Panic lit through me, my hand shook as it fell back onto the sheet that covered me from neck to toes.

I heard a rasping sound, realized it came from my chest, my own lungs, seeking air the way a drowning person might. Oh God, I had drowned. I saw myself again, sinking deeper, from azure to green, to darkness. Had I not died? Had there been a savior?

“She’s coming round,” I heard a man say. A deep voice with an accent. Greek, perhaps? I could not tell. Afraid, I kept my eyes firmly shut. I did not want to see him, knew he would not want me to be able to recognize him. Not a killer like that.

Then, “She’s young, same age as one of my own daughters. How could this happen to her?”

My brain clicked in. This man had a daughter. He was concerned about me. He was not the one who’d tried to kill me. I kept my eyes shut though, just in case I was wrong. I wondered why someone would want to kill me. I was unimportant, a nonentity, simply a young woman trying to earn a living that matched her expectations and, like most, barely succeeding.

My throat was parched, my lips dry. I put out my tongue and licked.

“See!” the man crowed triumphantly. “She is not drowned.”

Suddenly, remembering, I wished I was.

*   *   *

The man looking at her, Apollo Zacharias, realized he was stuck with a severely wounded, half-drowned woman. His three shirtless crew members stood staring down at her, wrapped like a mummy in blue towels, red hair clogged with blood. Zacharias observed that it had stopped flowing. He knew this happened when a person died. No more heartbeat to push the blood through the veins, keep the arteries working. He had never longed for anyone to bleed before.

Theos.
He was tempted to throw her back in. Get rid of her—
the body
he meant, because he was certain now she was dead and there was no way he was going to be responsible for a dead body. But then she blinked again.

Zacharias thought of his wife, of his children, the eldest only eighteen. Young, like this girl.
Too young to die.

“Carry her to my cabin,” he ordered, then he got on the radio and called for help. Another ship might be close, there might by some stroke of luck even be a doctor. To his surprise, he got an immediate answer.

“I am in your vicinity. My boat is fast. I can get her medical attention. Stand by, we will be approaching from southwest.”

Zacharias summoned his men back, told them to return the girl, or the body, to the deck, whichever, he did not care, she would no longer be his responsibility. He instructed them to prepare the rope ladder to lower her over the side. He was stunned when a few minutes later, a large yacht appeared on the horizon, steaming fast toward him. She must be 250 feet, he thought, impressed. Sleek as a dolphin, all coal-black and steel. A rich man’s boat, it gleamed with care. The crew were immaculate in white shorts and shirts—no bare chests here.

The black yacht looked, Zacharias thought, stunned, like a ship from the gates of hell, ready to take you over the River Styx into the flames guarded by the fierce three-headed dog Cerberus.

But the man who hailed him from its deck was clearly not from hell. He was red-faced, self-important, and gave orders like he was used to being obeyed. Zacharias noticed he did not wear a captain’s cap, yet the crew members obeyed him immediately, throwing out fenders to guard their craft from Zacharias’s lowly boat, sending two men across a rope which they attached, then slinging the cage over.

Two of the men picked up the girl in her blue blanket. They did not so much as look at her, simply laid her inside the cage, closed it up, and propelled it back to their ship. Then they went back by rope to their own smart craft, signaled Zacharias to release the rope, which he did. The grand black yacht took off, churning up a swell that lifted Zacharias’s boat to the peak of a twenty-foot wave and back down again, taking on water, half drowning them all.

Cursing, Zacharias shook a fist. The boat was already almost out of sight. He did take a silent moment, though, to think about the girl, and what might happen to her. Dead or alive, he assumed she was in good hands. Rich men’s hands anyhow.

11

Yet another week had passed and Marco was still in Turkey, unwilling to leave the peace and sunshine, and the mystery of the girl, behind. Relaxed, at Costas’s bar in the shade of the giant olive tree, he looked the very picture of a man content with his lot in life. After all, what could be bad about sipping a decent wine in a shady spot with the cheerful chatter of voices in a mix of languages around you, the clink of ice in glasses, the smell of roasting meat in the air, the dish of green olives on the table, and of course, the small dog’s soft head resting on his foot, as always. Three things spoiled this image. The mystery girl. Martha’s absence. And a memory. A slice of his past that, try as he might, he was unable to shake off.

It was strange, Marco thought, the way the past had of creeping up on you, just when you thought you had finally dismissed it. He never talked about what happened. Not even to Martha. Nary a word. It was locked in his heart, in his brain, forever.

He had been so young, eighteen, ingenuous, curious, eager for life, and for love. He thought he’d found the love part right away, his first week in college where he was studying, of all things, economics. This was, of course, at the insistence of his father, who viewed his son’s artistic talent and style—the long hair, the faded jeans, the ubiquitous T-shirt—as a personal offense.

“Ours is a family of bankers and businessmen,” he declared when Marco presented his case for art school. “There’ll be no messing around with artsy shit here.”

So Marco had had no choice but to strike out on his own, work three jobs to put himself through Rhode Island School of Art, living in a shared dump optimistically called an apartment in a bad neighborhood where you’d better have eyes in the back of your head if you wanted to keep your money in your pocket, whatever small amount that was. On those streets you could buy heroin for three bucks a packet, and addicts were desperate people.

It was a long way from his upbringing in the spacious gray clapboard house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, where a sea mist hung everlastingly in the air and the cushions smelled of damp, and roaring fires were lit every evening; where you stood, warming your backside while the front of you still felt the chill, an experience he and Martha found they had in common. Apparently vast old houses in England suffered from the same dampness, the chill that could never be quite excluded unless, in the Brits’ case, one put a small fortune into updating the central heating system, and which Martha told him only the newly very rich ever did.

“The rest of us,” she’d said, “just put on another woolly.”

Marco remembered thinking “woolly” an intriguing word, so much more descriptive and charming than “sweater,” implying softness and warmth rather than overheated sweat. It had been the basis of their first conversation, in fact. In that coffee shop he’d watched Martha un-stripping layers of scarves and jackets, an outer quilted green one, then a black gilet, worn over the black pearl-buttoned cardigan, that she’d called her “woolly.”

It was that seemingly perpetual Atlantic mist that had drawn Marco to the warmer ends of the earth. To the south of France, the shores of Italy, the beaches of Greece and Turkey. He loved the smell of sun-warmed rocks, the salt tang of the sea, and most of all the color palette. The first time he experienced it, he was on a trip alone trying to salve his conscience, eking out a couple hundred dollars over as many months as possible, sleeping where he could, in some long-dead grandparents’ small whitewashed room in a village not unlike the village where he now found himself, only perhaps even more remote; or on a fishing vessel where the rough seas made him ill. The sea had been his blessing and his tragedy. That he had now overcome the memory and loved his small place with its water view was the best, and hardest, decision he had made in his life.

Back then, though, he had slept rough, grown a beard by necessity, carried his few belongings in a canvas knapsack, taken a job here, a job there, anything he could get where they paid him in cash, enough for the next meal, the next bus ticket to the next place. Wherever that might be.

A year passed. Thirteen, fourteen months, before the memory of his sister faded, just enough that she was not the first thing in his mind the moment he woke. She was nine years old when it happened. He was sixteen, old enough to be left in charge, his father had said. There was no mother, had not been since the sister, whose name was Elinor, always shortened to Ellie, was born. “Mom went to a better place,” Ellie would inform people solemnly. “She left me for my father and my brother to take care of.”

Marco could remember her voice as clearly as if she were speaking now. He remembered her running through the spiky sea grass that nicked your legs in little smarting cuts, berry-brown from a summer at the beach, long dark hair swinging in a ponytail, slipping and sliding, jumping over the rocks, shrieking as the waves rolled in at her. And then she was out of sight.

He had gone after her in minutes, seconds maybe. Seconds too late.

Ellie disappeared from that beach in those moments he’d taken his eyes off her. He could still hear her now though, laughing as she jumped, shrieking when she slid into a rock pool, making him smile. “Hope a clam bites your toe,” he remembered yelling after her as he scanned the horizon to see if the whales were spouting that day. She never answered.

When she did not return he went to look for her but the bit of beach where she had been was empty. Holding a hand to his eyes he’d looked around; he checked the rocks, then with a lurch of his heart ran to the water’s edge, stood scanning the ocean hurling itself almost gently that day onto the pebbles, then slurping back, only to rush in again in a froth of white foam.

Ellie was not in the water. She was no longer on the beach. In the space of minutes she had been taken. A sexual predator, the police told him. He was known to be in the area. A repeat offender.

“No way,” Marco remembered himself saying as the horror of what might have happened to Ellie took hold of him.
“I’ll kill him if he’s hurt her!”
he’d yelled. He’d even, later, found out where and how to buy a gun. It was tucked in his belt when the police called his father to say they had found Ellie’s body, and Marco immediately went in search of the man.

The cops got there first, shot the predator before Marco even knew where he was. But never in his life would he forget the primitive urge for revenge; an eye for an eye, a life for a life. And he would never forget Ellie, whose childish sweet voice he could still hear in his head, even though he was sitting under the old olive tree in Costas’s bar, smelling the sweetness of jasmine and the aroma of roasting meat and the salt lick of the sea, viewing its blueness that was so unlike the gray Atlantic where her abused body had been found.

It was the reason, he supposed now, that he was so concerned about the red-haired girl in the blue dress. What had happened to her was not so far from what had happened to his sister. It made it that much more urgent to find out.

From his seat in the bar, he saw a boat approaching. It was the
Zeus
. He’d heard a rumor that its captain had rescued a half-drowned girl. He was in the Jeep in a flash.

The tires screeched as Marco swung to a stop on the jetty. He was out and running toward the black gulet, Em yapping alongside him, casting a wary eye at the water. As the boat edged to the mooring Marco saw the man in a gold-braided captain’s hat throwing a fender over the side. A young T-shirted man was at the helm.

He hailed the captain, said he needed to speak with him. “About a young woman,” he called as the gangplank was lowered, “a half-drowned woman you rescued.”