Chapter 35: Ernesto's Search

During the months of her captivity and slavery in the Golden Palace and then while she was being trained for the hunt, and hunted, just over a year had passed. During this time her husband, Ernesto Paphardi, was methodically searching for anyone who answered her description. From the note left in their honeymoon suite he knew she had been taken as a revenge matter by Kâtip al-Baghdadi, whom he had swindled. That being so he was convinced they had not killed her. If killing were intended her body would have been left in the hotel suite, after she had been ravaged and disfigured, naturally, but the body would have been there. Most likely Kâtip al-Baghdadi had had her taken to him to be enjoyed sexually as an act of revenge, or possibly to be trained and used in one of the man's brothels.

Finding Kâtip al-Baghdadi was not too difficult when you could call on the intelligence resources of the Sicilian Mafia. Two weeks later Ernesto and several of his henchmen raided a quiet house in a respectable street. Out of deference to the neighbours, whom they did not want to disturb unduly, they used silenced revolvers to execute the guards who resisted them and were soon in the bedroom of the man himself, where they found him naked beside his current mistress, a former high-class call girl from Paris who had become his full-time companion after he had addicted her to crack cocaine. Quickly overcoming the two of them they were bound securely and left lying naked side by side on the bed.

Knowing that the hated enemy was unlikely to talk, Ernesto was surprised at how much he said and how fast. The gloating was deep in his voice and showed on his face as he assured Ernesto that Rubina was indeed still alive, still, as he put it, earning money for someone, and that Ernesto would never see her again. After some considerable roughing up, he admitted that he had had her sold as a slave to some Arab or other who ran a brothel somewhere in North Africa.

"I don't know who he was, so you can do what you like to me. I can't tell you where she is, and my men didn't tell me even which auction house they used. By now she's servicing ten or more men a night and your prostitute of a wife is truly degraded and lost to you," Kâtip al-Baghdadi said with a triumphant sneer on his face.

Too late, Ernesto realised that he had shot the man in the heart. He realised that the kidnapper had goaded him into allowing him a quick death, and now his only immediate hope was that the woman might know something.

"How long have you been the mistress of this worm?" he asked.