Chapter 29
Oxana’s sitting in the Medusa’s galley with Feris and Andreas. All three are drinking green smoothies prepared by Andreas.
‘So,’ Feris says. ‘How are you finding it?’
‘The girls, you mean?’ Oxana scratches her sunburnt nose. ‘They’re teenagers. What can I say?’
Andreas grins. ‘That Buse. Woooh, boy. She’s trouble, man.’
Feris stares at him suspiciously. ‘Don’t tell me she’s eyeing you up.’
Andreas shrugs.
‘Seriously?’
‘I mean… Yeah. She checks me out.’ He holds Feris’s stare and grins. ‘Why wouldn’t she?’
She folds her arms across her chest. ‘You’re so full of bullshit. I don’t know what to believe.’
‘Defne likes one of the deckhands,’ Oxana says. ‘That French boy. I think his name’s Noah?’
‘That’s a pity,’ Feris says. ‘Noah had to go home. Some family issue. Atlas took him ashore yesterday evening, while you guys were at the club.’
‘Did you see him leave?’
‘No,’ Feris says. ‘Andreas and I had, um… an early night.’ She grins self-consciously. ‘The captain told us what happened this morning.’
‘Right,’ Oxana says.
Andreas’s kingdom is a gleaming space, lit by circular portholes and walled and surfaced in brushed steel.
The worktops are bare; everything is stowed in easily accessible units.
Without appearing to, Oxana focuses her gaze on the Japanese knives attached to a magnetic strip near the oven.
There are a dozen of them, all different, with dark wood handles and shimmering Damascus steel blades, but the one which catches Oxana’s eye is the boning knife.
The lightest of the set, it has a slender blade designed to slip through organic tissue and execute intricate cuts with finesse.
Useful though it looks, Oxana knows that the best knife in the world is no match for a gun, and that when the time comes, she’s almost certainly going to need some kind of firearm.
Which is a problem, because the only firearm on board, as far as she knows, is the one carried by Atlas.
But it’s good to know that the knives are here.
Andreas and Feris’s affair must be encouraged.
He runs a tight galley, but there’s an outside chance that, in the first flush of passion, he might overlook a missing knife.
Oxana makes her way back to the sundeck. She’s here to keep an eye on Defne and Buse, and however irritating the two girls might find it, she intends to go through the motions of doing so. She finds them dozing on their sun loungers, each with a tall glass of pomegranate-mint spritz at her side.
‘You again,’ Buse murmurs. ‘Great.’ She’s now completely nude. Her body gleams with sun cream, and the scent of coconut and gardenia hangs on the breeze.
‘Me again,’ Oxana confirms.
Buse actually looks rather amazing. She has the kind of skin that tans easily, great hair, and those amazing pale green eyes.
Not crazy about her breasts, which point upwards like two halves of a grapefruit, but some people like that barely legal porn star look, I guess.
Defne, though. She’s so much cooler than she knows.
Sprawled in her bikini, brown arms akimbo, she looks like a sleepy lioness.
Imagine her in ten years’ time. The world’s hers, if she wants it.
Buse half-opens her eyes. ‘I thought we asked you to go somewhere else.’
‘You asked me,’ Oxana says quietly. ‘And I went, because I don’t want to impose on you, or to spoil your holiday. But ultimately, where I go and what I do is for my employer to decide, and that employer is Mr Yilmaz.’
Buse eyeballs her malevolently. ‘I still have no fucking idea why you’re here. Neither of us does.’
‘Let me put it like this, Buse, Defne’s father is an important and wealthy man.
That makes Defne – and by extension, you – a target for every hustler, con-man and scam artist around.
You may think you’d be able to spot someone like that, but trust me, you wouldn’t be.
That’s why I’ll be coming with you tonight. ’
‘For fuck’s sake.’ Buse sighs.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep out of your hair. I don’t want to spoil your fun.’
‘It sounds as if that’s exactly what you want to do.’
‘Buse, please,’ Defne murmurs. ‘Let it go.’
‘Put it like this,’ Oxana says. ‘Defne’s father is your host, he has a duty of care to you, and he sees it as part of that duty to ensure your safety.’
Buse closes her eyes and turns her head away. ‘Whatever. Just keep your fucking distance, OK?’
The ensuing silence extends for several minutes, then Atlas comes into view as he ascends the stairs from the bridge deck below.
He walks purposefully towards Oxana and the two girls.
He’s wearing Crocs, which slap on the teak decking.
Buse unhurriedly drags a towel over her loins but Atlas, his eyes fixed on the horizon, ignores her.
The silence blurs into a faint, distant pulse.
A helicopter, small as a toy, appears over the skyline, and slowly gets larger until it’s suspended overhead, its rotors noisily swishing.
As it descends towards the helipad on the foredeck, Defne and Buse clutch their wind-whipped hair, and the discarded halves of Buse’s bikini, twitched from the deck by the rotor-wash, fly overboard.
The passenger door of the helicopter swings open, and a young man steps out onto the foredeck.
His hair is dark, and his features aquiline, and even if his face is a little less broad than his father’s, he’s still recognisably the son of Tahir Yilmaz.
He’s wearing Ray-Bans, a loose white shirt and jeans, and has a backpack slung across one shoulder.
‘Emir,’ Buse squeals, and runs for the foredeck, her towel held across her chest with one hand.
Defne watches her. ‘My brother,’ she tells Oxana. She bites her lip. ‘I’m sorry about Buse. She can be a real bitch when she wants to be.’
‘Forget it.’ Oxana lowers her voice. ‘About Noah.’
‘Yes?’ Defne looks at her expectantly.
‘He had to go home. Some family issue. Sorry.’
‘Shit. Shit. Just my fucking luck.’
‘I’m really sorry, Defne. Just tell yourself that… a really cute boy liked you.’
‘I guess.’ She shrugs fatalistically. ‘It couldn’t have gone anywhere, anyway. Not with my father around.’
‘There’ll be other boys,’ Oxana says softly.
Defne nods. She watches Buse chattering excitedly to Emir. ‘I meant what I said, by the way. It’s really not OK, the way she talks to you.’
‘Honestly,’ Oxana says. ‘I get it. She’s not legally an adult, but she doesn’t want to be treated like a child. She doesn’t want to be…’
‘Nannied?’
‘Exactly. And I’m sure you don’t either.’
‘No.’ Defne smiles sadly. ‘But I have a rather better grasp of the situation than she does.’
What does she mean by this? Does she mean that she knows who her father is, and what he does?
Is she already, at seventeen, burdened with the knowledge that her father runs one of the most ruthless organised crime gangs in Europe?
It wouldn’t have worried me, but Defne is nothing like I am, and nothing like I ever was.
She’s a bright seventeen-year-old with a golden future in front of her, if she cares to embrace it. I was a promiscuous, heartless savage.
‘This is Oxana,’ Defne says. ‘She’s here to keep an eye on us.’
‘In that case, we’ll have to be careful.’ Emir Yilmaz removes his Ray-Bans and directs a sardonic smile at Oxana. He looks older, and shrewder, than his eighteen years.
Be colourless, Oxana reminds herself. Be forgettable. ‘Have you come far?’ she asks.
‘Kanyon heliport, near Istanbul. There was a conference I had to attend, so sadly I missed the last few days.’
‘Better late than never.’
‘As you say.’ He inclines his head courteously. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must pay my respects to my father.’
As he carries his backpack into the interior of the yacht, Oxana watches him go. Defne shakes her head. ‘Seriously, it’s tragic. You’re a grown woman, and old enough to know better.’
Oxana smiles. ‘You’re a good-looking family.’
‘Slippery answer, Miss Vorontsova.’
‘What does he do? He said that he’s just come from a conference.’
‘He’s at business school, near Paris. But recently he’s got very caught up in art. Old Master paintings, that sort of thing. You’ll have to get him to tell you about it.’
‘I’ll do that.’
‘I bet you fucking will. It’s kind of unfair, you know.’
‘What?’
‘When there’s a brother and a sister and he’s the beauty.’
‘Defne, don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
Oxana turns to face her and grips her arms. ‘Look at me, Defne. Look me in the eye. Your day will come, I promise you that. And when it does, there’ll be no stopping you.’
Defne smiles and closes her eyes. ‘You’re nice.’
‘I’m not nice, Defne. But I am right.’