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might not save me from what happened that made me run from them, to fall—or did I jump?—into the sea to escape.
    They brought towels, wrapped her in them, carried her into Zacharias’s cabin, laid her down in the shade. Zacharias himself bathed her face with clean fresh water. He himself lifted her long red hair out of the way. He saw the gaping wound, the broken skull, and drew in his breath sharply, asking who could have done this to her? And why?
    Because I knew too much, she wanted to tell him. I was a fool, an innocent, or more probably merely dumb. I believed what they said. I did as they asked. I thought it was the adventure I had been looking for. I did not understand that I was perfect for their plans, a young woman alone in the world, no family, only the usual friendships that could be dismissed with talk of plans to move to the West Coast. No one really to care or come looking for me. What a sad state of affairs, that I could reach the age of twenty-one and have no one who cared enough to find out what happened, or where I was.
    *   *   *
    It began on a cold night in a luxury hotel in New York.
    I had known Ahmet Ghulbian for exactly one month. He was lying in bed next to me, propped on one elbow, gazing into my eyes. A half-empty bottle of champagne and two glasses waited on the table. He sat up, leaned over to refill them, offered me one. I shuffled upright, tossing back my hair, allowing it to fall forward again over my breasts because I suddenly felt very naked in front of this man who had just made love to me and had already seen it all.
    “You’ll have a private plane, of course,” he said.
    “A private plane,” I repeated, wondering what he was talking about. I seemed to be having memory lapses these days, sometimes forgetting what day it was and whether I was supposed to be at work, or what. Ahmet had been giving me some pills. He said he suffered from the same thing and they would help.
    “Think of it,” he’d said, smiling, popping another pill into my champagne. “A private plane, all to yourself. Just you and the pilots. Then a yacht where my friends will look after you. Oh, you can trust me, dear little red-haired Angie, they will certainly look after you. Anything you want will be yours. Caviar, foie gras, breakfast in bed, sunset drinks on deck. It will be champagne all the way.”
    “All the way to where?” I’d asked, puzzled. I really did not understand what he was talking about.
    He laughed at that. “Private yachts do not have to go anywhere. They float free as birds in the air, letting whim take them where they might at that very moment they choose. You can be part of that, my dear little Angie.”
    Through the champagne blur and my foggy brain it sounded great, though somewhere the person still in my head, the rational young woman I used to be before I met this man and took his pills and drank too much, asked the question, Why me?
    “Why me?” I vocalized the query that so puzzled me.
    “Because, my dear little Angie, I care for you, I am falling in love with you, I want you to meet my friends, and then my family. I am serious about you, you must know that by now.”
    His eyes, dark without his glasses, melted into mine, he wrapped his arms around me, held me to his naked chest. I could feel his heart beating, beating for me, I thought happily. At last I had found a man who loved me. My mother would have been thrilled, as I myself was. At least I thought I was, at that moment, anyhow. Yet I hardly knew this man, I did not even know where he came from, or anything about his family; I had never, in the few weeks I had known him, met so much as a friend of his.
    “It’s our lives, our private lives,” he’d reassured me, when I’d questioned this. “I want to keep you to myself while I can. In the beginning, anyhow.”
    Now, though, in the hotel room, he stretched behind him and opened the drawer on the nightstand, took out a slender red leather box and offered it