Belshazzar's Daughter Page 17

  She left and his mind continued to work. In order not to be able to see a tall, rather striking man across a narrow alleyway, a person would have to be very short-sighted indeed. Without recourse to either glasses or contact lenses, that person would be rendered almost blind. Natalia wore neither.

  He wished that his guilt and his lust had not silenced him. She had gone, but in her wake the ghosts of unanswered questions reverberated and echoed around him. And yet what could he do? Just before she had left he had, at her request, sworn everything she had told him to secrecy. She had given him no choice; she wanted it that way and, besides, he had been weak. The violent man, in the wrong. She’d caught him at his most vulnerable. But would the Turks really deport the family if they found out the truth? A family who had not only lived in their country for over seventy years, but had children by their men? And besides, surely if Natalia were to explain the situation to the authorities they could not in all conscience refuse an application for citizenship? She was, after all, Turkish in every practical respect. It didn’t make any sense!

  Robert shook his head impatiently. There was something else, there had to be. Something he had not managed to threaten and slap out of her. Something to do with that bony shoulder blade perhaps? A thing he would have to torture out of her. Except that he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t hurt her again—ever. But what were she and her family about, really?

  A deeper, darker truth. Robert knew this existed, somewhere. In retrospect he’d known for a long time. The inky, hidden heart at the center of her tale. But he was tired of all this thinking. He’d come back to it later when he felt stronger. He got up suddenly from the sofa and switched on the television.

  * * *

  Çetin Ikmen’s visit to the Gulcu house that night was more a whimsical than a planned act. That he found himself there was almost as much of a surprise to him as it was to them. Maria was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room when he arrived. Although she looked composed, he could however feel her anger and knew that he was far from welcome.

  “Alone?” she said. Her voice rang as if she were declaiming something of great importance. “Where is your pretty friend?”

  Ikmen stopped directly in front of her chair. “Sergeant Suleyman has another life away from this case, madam.”

  The reptile eyes smiled unpleasantly at him. Ikmen changed the subject.

  “Mrs. Gulcu, I’ve some more questions about Leonid Meyer.”

  She lit one of her Sobranie cigarettes and sighed. “A subject that holds much fascination for you, Inspector.”

  “I imagine the death of such an old and close friend would not be completely without interest to you either, Mrs. Gulcu.” Touché, Ikmen thought with some satisfaction.

  She shot him one of her clammy glances. “I cared for Leonid when he was alive, Inspector. His empty corpse is no concern of mine.” She patted the footstool beside her.

  “Sit.”

  Ikmen walked around her chair and placed himself down next to her heavily jeweled hand. Over by the window somebody coughed. Maria Gulcu turned her head slightly and said something in Russian. A young man’s voice answered her, also, Ikmen assumed, in Russian.

  In time with the voice he saw the shut curtains move slightly, and, as his eyes grew accustomed to the light, Ikmen saw a pair of eyes and a pale face staring at him through the darkness.

  When the voice spoke again Ikmen noticed that the accent was quite precise, but the tone, he felt, lacked something. It was like listening to a young child who is unused to and a little afraid of adult company. And yet the voice was clearly that of a man, as was the body. Ikmen could see the feet and the head. Slim, but well formed. The old woman followed the line of his gaze and spoke.

  “You must forgive Misha,” she said, waving one hand in the general direction of the window. “The child of a maid we once had here. She is sadly dead now, but I continue to care for the boy. He is a little simple, but useful for the more mundane household tasks.” She laughed hoarsely. “His mindless conversation sometimes amuses. When I am particularly bored.”

  Her blatant cruelty caught Ikmen unawares, but only for a moment. He might have expected it. But the notion of this young person locked away for maybe years with the reptilian Mrs. Gulcu, providing her with some sort of sick amusement, appalled him. He remembered her penchant for his young sergeant and shuddered.

  “I want to ask you about an incident that is alleged to have happened in 1918, madam.” Ikmen took his cigarettes out of his pocket and lit up.

  He saw her stiffen and shift in her chair. She turned her head slightly, away from him.

  “Meyer may possibly have been involved in political violence.”

  She leaned forward to stub her cigarette out in the ashtray. The effort of moving, or maybe, Ikmen thought, something else made her suddenly labor to catch her breath.

  “I see.”

  “According to his rabbi, Mr. Meyer’s alcoholism was related to guilt over a violent incident he had been involved in.” Ikmen paused on purpose, for effect. “I was wondering if you could tell us anything about it, Mrs. Gulcu?”

  Her head snapped round savagely and she looked down her long nose at him. “What could I possibly know about some shabby Bolshevik outrage?”

  “I was hoping that you could tell me, madam.”

  “Well I cannot.”

  Ikmen smiled. “I find that very hard to believe, madam.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.”

  He paused for a moment, trying unbeknown to her to work out whether she knew what she had just said or not.

  “Well?” she said impatiently. “What?”

  “In view of the fact that you knew Mr. Meyer was a Bolshevik without my actually telling you so, I find your avowed lack of information on the subject quite unintelligible. You can, I hope, see my problem?”

  She sucked unpleasantly and noisily on her teeth for a second. “I thought you people were supposed to catch criminals, Inspector. I did not realize that the Istanbul police were also professional historians!”

  “The past is simply today with better skin, Mrs. Gulcu.”

  Even beneath the rouge and powder he could see that her face had drained of blood. She knew exactly what he meant. He had hit a nerve, a raw thing. “The Revolution is a very painful subject for all Russians in exile, Inspector Ikmen.” She spat his name like a curse. “You are a Turk, you cannot understand. When you deposed your masters you sent them all abroad and allowed them the luxury of a frustrated exile. We were never given that option. We were—”

  The man in the corner cried out, the unintelligible Russian word ripping from his throat like a sob.

  She pointed toward the curtain and her anger towered across the room like a giant. “You see!” she shouted. “All of us, not just me! Even our children. We all, all émigrés, die a little more when we remember…” Her voice trailed off and she trembled, staring into the distance as if trying to pierce the darkness with her eyes. She was seeing things, scenes played out against the sensual black background. She was living elsewhere again. Back there.

  Ikmen remained calm in the face of this graphic exposition of the great Russian soul and doggedly pursued his course. “The incident I have described may be of importance in determining whether or not Mr. Meyer had any enemies, madam. This subject, by your own admission, arouses great passions. Perhaps even now there are still those who would be prepared to act upon them.”

  Her reply was a spit. “I know nothing about Leonid’s activities before we met! All right, I knew he had been, was, whatever, a Bolshevik at some point. But love is very blind, Inspector Ikmen, and when I fell in love with Leonid and we left our country together nothing like that mattered anymore. That is all that I know!”

  “Then I take it you were not present during the violence in which Meyer was involved?”

  “Present? As in watching, you mean?” Her face, for all its great age, its massive scarring by time, betrayed genuine outrage. “Who on ea
rth do you think I am? What kind of person do you imagine me to be? I…”

  Ikmen dropped his gaze, the old woman’s reaction temporarily shaming him. “I am sorry, madam, it is just that we have recently come into possession of certain information that would seem to suggest that someone else, someone now living in this city, knew in detail about—”

  “Well, I can assure you that it was not me!”

  “Very well, madam.” He raised his head, daring now to meet her still furious eyes.

  “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I had to ask. I imagine that you can understand—”

  “Oh, I can understand, Inspector. But that doesn’t mean that I have to like it.”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  A moment of pure silence followed—a moment during which a question that had been troubling Ikmen distilled within his mind. That she answered it at all was a tribute to his audacity.

  “But did you really love Leonid Meyer, Mrs. Gulcu? I mean honestly, seriously love a poor little Jew like him?”

  She smiled. Unexpectedly, considering what Ikmen was really doing was calling her a liar, she smiled. “Well now, Inspector, you are a clever little man. I think you know the answer to that question.”

  “So you didn’t?”

  She shrugged. “It was an arrangement. I was a young, educated, beautiful girl and he was a poor ugly little Jew. But I needed to get out of Russia, Inspector. Giving Leonid my body in return for his protection was a small price to pay for the chance to avoid the multiple beatings and raping that I would have had to endure without him. I gave him the one and only chance he would ever have to possess a—” She stopped short, pulled herself back and away from something and tried to regain her composure.

  “A what, madam?”

  She looked suddenly exhausted and stared down at the floor, her eyes glazed. “A woman who didn’t smell of the gutter.”

  It was not what she had been about to say, Ikmen felt certain. He changed tack slightly. “So, just to clarify, they weren’t your family, Mr. Meyer’s victims?”

  “My family were shot by the secret police, the Cheka.”

  “Who were Bolsheviks.”

  She leaned across and put her face close up to his. She was so close he could see, beneath the make-up, a long scar that ran from her left eye down to her chin. “Would you give yourself to a person who killed your family? Even to save your own life, Inspector?”

  “That would depend how I felt about death, madam. If I felt that death was truly the end, then I believe I might do anything to survive. I would hate, but I would probably go on. Perhaps even because of the hate.”

  The side of that cunning, crêpy face touched his cheek. Her rank breath played against his ear. “And what do you believe, Inspector Ikmen?”

  He fell silent for a moment. He didn’t know. Others believed or didn’t believe as the case may be. That was their business. He was interested, but only insofar as it aided his understanding of other people’s psychology and motives.

  “I don’t know what I believe. That is the truth, madam. But if someone murdered my family I would find my life after that point very hollow and purposeless. Although perhaps the thought of revenge would give me some direction. I mean, what use are success, principles, social position if nobody loves you?”

  “It depends.” She narrowed her eyes and smiled at the corners of her mouth. “It depends upon who one is, how valuable one’s life may be to oneself and to others.”

  “And was your life ‘valuable’ enough to allow you to give yourself to your family’s killer?”

  She laughed. It was an unexpected reaction to his question and caught Ikmen unawares. “I am an Orthodox Christian, Inspector. Death to us is merely a door to a happier and more fulfilling life. If Leonid had killed my parents, what did I stand to gain by not joining them?” She shrugged. “But all you need to know, my dear Inspector, is that I did not kill Leonid. I can say that with my hand on my heart. My conscience is clear.”

  Ikmen smiled. “I didn’t ever think, madam, that—”

  “Somebody of my advanced years could physically perform such a task?” She laughed again. “No, you are right—in my case.”

  Ikmen narrowed his eyes. “By which you mean?”

  “I mean, Inspector, that there might be other elderly people capable of such an act.”

  He looked at her questioningly.

  “There are plenty of old men in places like South America who still, occasionally, make trouble for people like Leonid and his kind.”

  “You mean like old Nazis?” He eyed her steadily. “Rather a long way away from here, aren’t they?”

  She met his gaze squarely and without blinking. “Some are, some aren’t.”

  He feigned his surprise to perfection. “Oh, you mean like the director of Şeker Textiles, Mr. Smits?”

  “Oh.” She smiled again, this time revealing cracked and yellowing teeth. “Did I say that?”

  “No.”

  “No, I didn’t, did I.”

  Ikmen sighed deeply, a little unnerved to have been so easily and quickly outwitted. “There is not, as yet, any reason to suppose that Mr. Smits had any motive with regard to the death of Leonid Meyer, madam.”

  “No?”

  “No. But”—and here Ikmen smiled, slowly and with some pleasure—“but if I find one I will be sure and come back to let you know.”

  Chapter 9

  There was a downside to living in Istanbul. The sunshine, the friendliness of the people, the exotic excitement of the place were things that Robert loved and would not have changed. The heavy and often irritating presence of the authorities, however, was another matter. The last of many military coups had taken place in 1980. It had left its mark. Armed police and even more heavily armed troops were never far away: stalking the streets with young grim faces, looking for signs of dissent and insurrection, stopping and questioning people for, as Robert perceived it, completely pointless reasons. Horrific stories circulated about what happened to people should they have the misfortune to be taken into police or military custody: stories of medieval torture and mind-bendingly protracted interrogation.

  When he had first arrived in the country, Robert had been to visit the British Consulate. Among the pieces of advice dispensed by that office was one about “keeping your nose clean” with the police. Turkey was a friendly nation and in the event of any “misbehavior” by a British national it was made quite plain that Turkish justice, albeit amid some protest, would be allowed to take its course. In other words, Her Majesty’s Government was quite prepared to let you sweat it out on your own.

  Through his albeit brief contact with Ikmen, however, Robert was almost tempted to believe that he had seen the human face of Turkish bureaucracy. But he was not convinced. The odd smile and an undeniably charming demeanor cost little. The shrewd, dark eyes had hardened as Robert had struggled to answer his questions and the Englishman wondered what more drastic methods were at the Inspector’s disposal should he decide to get really tough with a suspect. Why he was thinking about this again he didn’t exactly know. He had done nothing wrong! Well … But he’d woken with it on his mind and now it just wouldn’t go. He got a twinge, just a suggestion, of wanting to be back in London.

  He put his books and papers into his briefcase and tried to forget about it all.

  Until, that is, the knock at the door. Robert stopped what he was doing and went to answer it. It was probably only old Ali, the kapıcı, with his drinking water. He usually called before Robert left for work, checking that everything in the block was fine, dispensing water and elaborate, religiously inspired good wishes.

  But when Robert opened the door and saw a tall, young man wearing a blue police uniform, he felt his face blanch. It was as if his earlier thoughts had taken on the guise of eerie premonitions.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Robert Cornelius?”

  “Yes.” He knew his voice had started trembling but there was nothing he cou
ld do about it. He looked at the large gun holster on the officer’s hip. Thick leather and cold, hard metal.

  The young man smiled. He had nice teeth, but rather too many for Robert’s liking. A lot of the younger Turks were like that. The officer spoke. “You please come to police station. Inspector Ikmen need to talk with you.”

  * * *

  “Natalia?”

  “Grandmama?” She walked over to the bed and pulled aside the purple netting.

  “We have a problem, don’t we? Need to talk.”

  “We?” The girl pulled away from her grandmother’s caress and averted her face.

  Maria Gulcu hauled herself painfully up on her pillows and reached across for her cigarettes. “Something needs to be done about these policemen. They are becoming very tiresome.”

  Oh, it was easy for her to say, but what? Natalia flung herself down into the chair beside Maria’s bed. “And what do you suggest that might be, Grandmama?” Her voice was calm, but it definitely had an edge.

  “I don’t know, Natalia.” Maria’s hands dropped into her lap and she cast her eyes downward. The innocent. “I haven’t been out of this house since before you were born.”

  “But you nevertheless want a convenient solution.” The sentence snapped out of Natalia like a bullet. Already it was all too obvious to her who exactly was supposed to provide this solution.

  Maria rose to her unpleasant attitude. Her eyes fixed on the younger woman’s face and turned to ice. “Oh, yes!”

  “So what do you suggest I do then, Grandmama?” She returned the old woman’s basilisk gaze and coughed a little in the back of her throat. Maria’s incense had recently started to affect her chest. Like the old woman herself, it was beginning to cloy. When Maria didn’t answer, Natalia continued. Her tone was one of heavy mockery. “Bribe the Inspector? Buy him lunch? Sleep with him?”

  “No.” Maria lit her cigarette and then blew large, expertly rounded rings of smoke at the ceiling. “No, I was thinking of approaching the problem from a more oblique angle.”