one. He was lucky, he knew, to have Tamara to care for her and to be so willing to keep to his rules. He knew that the woman was crazy, maybe psychotic. But she was strong and had a will of iron. She had her whip and she was not reluctant to use it.
Tamara was actually related to the Turk. She was Turk’s mother’s second cousin. They had come to America from the same village in Turkey many years ago. The old man, whose name was Agfa, also came from that village. While he had learned English and worked in a factory, she had remained home with their sole child, a beautiful and sweet girl named Fatima.
At that time, Turk had been a youth, ambitious, smart and wholly dedicated to making it in America. He had fallen in love with Tamara’s daughter. She was sixteen and he was 22, an appropriate age difference under their customs. He would have to wait until she finished school, for Tamara wanted her daughter educated before she married. The Turk often contemplated the anticipated idyll of married life with Fatima.
But one day, walking home from school in the dirty Northeast city in which they lived, she had been followed by some of the white boys from school. Fatima was lovely but her dark skin and slightly oriental appearance set her apart from the other girls. She did not go to their dances and did not hang out at the soda shops. She studied hard, got good grades and was resented by many.
The boys may not have initially intended what happened. Their original purpose was probably to waylay Fatima and humiliate and tease her. They pulled her into an alley, tugging at her skirt, calling her names. Fatima fought back, scratching one of the boys in the face. He got angry and punched her, knocking her to the ground. As she fell, her skirt rode up on her thighs, revealing her simple cotton panties. The boy who hit her noticed the door to a cellar in the alley open and he grabbed the girl and dragged her down the stairs. There all the boys raped her, one after the other, five of them in all.
Fatima limped home. The boys were prosecuted. Three were sent to the juvenile jail and two placed on probation. Although the boys had been punished, Fatima could not live with her shame and was found by her mother one morning hanging from the transom to her bedroom.
The mother was never the same. The father cursed the boys, America and God. The Turk swore revenge.
It took him five years, but one by one he had slain all five of the boys. During that time he became a denizen of the underworld, a hired killer and enforcer. He had also sworn vengeance on the society that had produced these five callous young men. He would wage war on the women of that society. At first he contented himself with cruel, violent rapes. But then he had come into contact with the world of female slavery and he knew that he had found his true engine of revenge. The women he kidnapped and delivered to lustful masters would be raped a hundred, two hundred times, more than he could ever do. He profited by it too by learning to select the most becoming and winsome women he could find and delivering them to wealthy men and women rich enough to maintain women in abject slavery without fear of legal interference.
But now, he had become a prisoner of his own emotions. He had felt the humanity of one of his victims, Cheryl, and now was cursed day and night with the memory of her. He looked at the naked prisoner at his feet and felt nothing but anger. He detested the feelings that Cheryl had awakened in him. Denise had become both the fulcrum of his anger and his means of assuaging it. He could make love to her with all the tenderness and passion that his memory of Cheryl evoked. Or he could ravage her with all of the cruelty and spite that he was capable of.
He watched Denise, her eyes closed as she let the soothing sounds of the delicate music wash over her. His blood began to boil.
Standing, he interrupted Denise’s reverie by pulling on her chain. He unlocked it from