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Nicky gave Gavin a tour of the yacht.
Lydia
had been commissioned by Kiskalesi just after the end of World War II and was one of the first vessels to come out of the reconstructed Japanese shipyards.
    Three hundred and thirty feet long,
Lydia
was capable of twenty-three knots. It had Denny stabilizers, its own Alouette Magister helicopter, and a twin-turbo-engine Beechcraft amphibian. The art collection included a Rembrandt, two Picassos, and a Van Gogh; a collection of Georgian silver that was insured by Lloyd’s for three and a quarter million dollars, and a Coromandel screen, eighteen panels wide, that had once ornamented the royal palace of Peking.
    Gavin’s host showed him the Steinway grand piano bolted to the floor, the kitchens designed by the owner of New York’s Le Pavilion restaurant, the marble dance floor which, with the push of a button, could be rolled back to reveal an Olympic-size swimming pool. He ended the tour with an inspection of the ship’s clinic, complete with a fully equipped operating room including an X-ray machine and an iron lung.
    He gave a running commentary as he showed off his toys and Gavin wondered why he was being given the grand tour.
    “It’s not because of my pretty eyes, is it?” he said as Kiskalesi led him back up to the forward deck.
    “Nor for your sun-bleached hair,” said the billionaire as they rejoined Gail in the lounge.
    The second encounter had also been a draw.
    So far, Nicholas Kiskalesi had liked what he had seen of Gavin Jenkins. Unlike most people, he neither flattered Kiskalesi nor tried to compete with him. He was detached, polite and handled himself well. But those were only superficial traits. What Nicky was interested in was, how good was he? Or, to be precise, how good a physician was he?
    Gail had told Nicky that she felt better than she had ever felt before in her entire life. And her looks gave proof to her words. But the real test would come tonight, in bed.
    Nicky was attracted to Gail but wondered whether his attraction was to the idea of Gail — a seemingly aloof American beauty who had married into one of the most prominent families of the Spanish aristocracy. He, Nicky, had been one of eight children born to a poor Turkish peasant who harvested fruit on apricot farms in the rich agricultural valley between Izmir and Aydin. Despairing of ever being able to support his family, Nicky’s father had moved with his two youngest sons to Izmir, the big city, whose streets, he had heard, were paved with gold.
    Nicky’s father, it turned out, had heard wrong, and he had ended his life as a porter in a commercial rug-weaving factory and died leaving nothing but debts. Nicky and his younger brother, now orphaned, began to earn their own living at the ages of nine and eight, guarding the tobacco warehouses that rimmed the port of Izmir.
    At the age of ten Nicky made his first thousand dollars, when a tobacco agent who liked him tipped him off to a naive Chinese buyer who could be persuaded to overpay for inferior leaf to go into counterfeit Cuban cigars. When the buyer found out that he had overpaid and demanded repayment, Nicky refused. His brother repaid the buyer with an icepick through his left eye into the brain.
    After that, Nicky and his brother supported themselves by dealing in tobacco, both legal and contraband, until, seven months later, they had earned ten thousand dollars. Since then, the dollars had never stopped rolling in.
    Nicky had noticed that Gail’s breasts were larger but had no way of knowing that her breasts were responding to the hormones with which Gavin had been treating her excessive menstrual bleeding. All he knew was that there was something tantalizingly different about Gail de Córdoba. Something that appealed to the peasant in him.
    “He made you feel good, didn’t he?” asked Nicky. He and Gail were lying on the enormous king-size bed in Nicky’s suite.
    “And I made you feel good, didn’t I?” asked Gail. There had