Free One Way or Another: A Novel by Elizabeth Adler

Marina, sailing from port to port, country to country, the way other well-known kings of shipping and tankers had done before him. Ahmet had added the extra-lucrative business of illegal money laundering to his CV, yet he still maintained a low profile. He had seen the way to disaster in a flashy lifestyle, in expensive women who must be paid to be on his arm or in his bed, and to keep their silence.
    The yacht was 250 feet of black splendor, built five years previously to Ahmet’s own design, modified, obviously, by shipbuilding professionals, but the result was exactly what he wanted. A showpiece of a craft, sleek, elegant, with luxurious accommodations for as many as thirty guests and vast social areas, complete with two swimming pools, one indoor, one out. It was decorated by the yachting world’s top designer, with the permanent crew of sixteen housed carefully belowdecks.
    The “social deck,” as Ghulbian liked to call the main deck, had seen its fair share of wild parties over the years. It was an expansive space whose length gave it the feel of a large hotel, with careful groupings of sofas and comfortable chairs in pale linens around glass coffee tables. Antique lamps topped with pleated bronze silk shades cast a discreet light over the “goings-on,” whatever that might mean, but there was certainly plenty of it. Ahmet was not a man who liked women, he merely enjoyed them. Which is not to say, either, that he was a sexual expert, or even proficient, simply that he needed to be thought so. Image was all. Actually, that was not quite true. Money was all. Image came second, though if you had them both, then you were really in business. Which Ahmet believed he was.
    He had no need for multiple properties to be maintained in countries which would demand taxes be paid. Of course, Ahmet was also an expert in the art of the payoff; he or his minions always knew the right man in the right place. So far, it had worked well. Nevertheless he worried about that unknown “tomorrow.” And, in a way, that tomorrow might have arrived in the form of the red-haired Angie, who was surely not the “angel” her name might imply.
    Oddly, it was his own mother, a woman Ahmet hated, who had pointed the route to his future. “Get rid of people that stand in your way,” she’d advised at the end of a long night of drinking on her part. Ahmet had rarely imbibed then, and never more than was good for him, and he never did any form of drugs, though he wasn’t averse to using them on others, which was quite another matter. He despised people who used drugs, people “who leaned on them,” he’d say, smiling ruefully, “for moral support.” In Ahmet’s opinion they did drugs because they were unsure of themselves, had no confidence in what they were doing or their chosen path of life. Or death.
    The first person Ahmet killed was a woman. Her name was Fleur de Roc. It sounded like a perfume to him but she was no flowery-scented lovely young girl: Fleur was middle-aged, fat, and well-off. Not rich, Ahmet was not then in a position to meet rich women; they lived in a different world, but to him, then, Fleur was wealthy, with three or four small shops in the Cairo bazaar, a weekend sailboat kept in Alexandria, and an overstuffed apartment with its own bathroom. Ahmet had never had a bathroom of his own until he met Fleur; he’d been lucky to have a bathroom at all.
    Poverty, he recalled now, sitting at his desk on the luxurious MV Lady Marina, was made up of memories like that: the odors never left you.
    Anyhow, one way or another, when he and Fleur were out on her sailboat, somehow she slipped, fell, drowned in a storm. He’d cried when he told the authorities the story. He ended up owning that sailboat, and Fleur’s savings. And he’d found out something new about himself. He enjoyed killing women. It was better even than sex, at which he’d always suspected he wasn’t quite good enough. In fact, if it were not for the money,