Belshazzar's Daughter

BELSHAZZAR’s Daughter.

by

BARBARA NADEL

Istanbul police inspector Cetin Ikmen, never without his brandy and cigarettes, has his hands full when an old man turns up dead in Balat, the rundown Jewish quarter of the city. With his handsome partner, Suleyman; medical examiner Dr. Sarkissian; and skirt-chasing officer Cohen offering assistance, Ikmen begins investigating the puzzling crime. He discovers a strange group of expatriate suspects: a bored, lovesick Englishman teaching at a language school; an old German textile manufacturer with Nazi sympathies; and an odd Russian family stuck in the prerevolutionary past. As the team slowly unravels the complex chain of events that led to the victim’s demise, Ikmen’s wife gives birth to their ninth child, and Suleyman tries to find the courage to keep his mother from arranging an unwanted marriage. Nadel’s first novel is a real treat. The city of Istanbul provides a rich background for an engaging plot and a cast of remarkably well developed, colorful characters. Add Inspector Ikmen and his motley crew to the growing list of outstanding fictional cops plying their trades across all parts of Europe and Asia, which have become hotbeds of police procedural excellence.

Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel is now a public relations officer for the National Schizophrenia

Fellowship’s Good Companions Service. Her previous

job was a mental health advocate in a psychiatric

hospital. She has also worked with sexually abused

teenagers and taught psychology in both schools and colleges. Born in the East End of London, she has

been a regular visitor to Turkey for over twenty years.

HEADLINE

Copyright Š 1999 Barbara Nadel

The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in hardback in 1999 by

HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

First published in paperback in 1999 by

HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious

and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN 0 7472 6217 9

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

A division of the Hodder Headline Group

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.headline.co.uk

www.hodderheadline.com

To Malcolm and Alexis

with all my love

A room. Four flat, tar-and nicotine-stained walls. A window: filthy, caked with viscous, black dust. Not that it matters.

Some windows don’t have views. Some windows just reflect, like mirrors.

Chairs and a table. Rough-hewn, this stuff, like the poor sticks country peasants might have in their hot little sun-baked hovels. But this is not the country. The air is thick - almost solid. The city chokes upon its love affair with the internal combustion engine.

Not a sound, save the roar of the traffic. The shrieking silence of the inner city.

There’s a bed too. A small, narrow cot. It has an iron headboard, a series of hard, cold tubes. Functional, it recalls hospital wards, prisons, institutions for the sad, the bad, the less than whole.

Recently there was fierce activity; the bedclothes are rumpled like old skin. One stained pillow lies burst open on the floor. Its guts flutter about on the tiny floor-level breeze. Small grey and white feathers, curled for ever into short, permanent waves.

And yet there is not the smell of sex here, that faintly sweet odour, the one that not even bathing can erase.

Turning away from the bed it is possible to look at what lies upon it via the reflection in the mirror that hangs on the opposite wall. A sharp movement causes the flies that lie across the bed like a rug to stir and take flight. There’s a lot of blood. That which hasn’t oozed into the mattress drips lazily down an arm, along one outstretched finger on to the floor. In the wide, pinned-back eyes lies the still, silent reflection of the open doorway. A reflection within a reflection - the fascination of the infinite.

An empty bottle rolls over the exhausted carpet underneath the table and encounters an empty cigarette packet.

The door creaks very gently on its ancient, rusted hinges and a sickness, unexpected, rises rapidly. Too rapidly to be controlled.

The door swings open a little wider and light footsteps sprint almost soundlessly down and out into the

street below.

The door remains open and after a while the flies regroup.

They cannot be seduced away for very long. The sound of the feet is not even a memory before the insects get back to the business of feeding. The thing on the bed has spread its goodness far beyond its own cracked shell. The flies make a large, mobile pattern on the wall, slipping and sliding with the movement of the thick liquid. They must be quick. The hot sun will dry it soon and then it will be useless. The flies know this and bloat themselves.

The final class of the afternoon, eight wealthy, spoilt and sulky boys between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, had been difficult. It had been a pure grammar session too.

Probably not a good idea for a hot afternoon in August, but what choice did he have? The tests were coming up in just over a week and none of the students was ready, not even the painfully devout headscarf brigade, the girls from Bursa. And who could blame them? Few of them possessed even the most elementary grasp of the English language, and to be shut up in a stuffy room for hours on end during the hottest month of the year … He didn’t want to be there himself! But he didn’t really have a choice. He never did.

But now he was going home. The best part of the day had finally arrived. Though still breathlessly hot, there was that slight feeling of relief in the air which comes as afternoon slips imperceptibly over into early evening: the promise of night and a slight drop in temperature becoming a reality.

It wasn’t an unpleasant walk either, his route to the bus stop. Unless of course one had to live in this rundown and commercially defunct quarter of the city.

Balat. He tramped its filthy streets, its winding labyrinthine alleys, six days a week, but it never bored him.

Dickensian charm was what this district possessed. David Copperfield, Pip, Mr Jingle, Fagin: none of them would have been out of place within Balat’s ambience of poverty, petty crime and picturesque filth. Fagin, especially, would have fitted in perfectly. Jews, old Jews, were the one and only commodity that Balat could boast of having in anything approaching abundance.

Not that they were obvious, these ancient, winter-clad, shy little Jews, muttering gently in some language they kept exclusive, secret, like themselves. If others had not told him of their existence it is doubtful whether he would even have known they were there. They blended. Suspicious of strangers and a perceived outside world that largely hated them, they would turn their faces to the wall as he approached and disappear into the brickwork, the concrete, the stone. For centuries the Ottoman Empire, now the Turkish Republic, had provided a safe haven for Jews. It was famed for its humane attitude towards the Hebrews.

But old, suspicious habits, learnt in the hard schools of Western Europe, die hard. It wasn’t personal.

Of course, at its root it was all economic. In ‘better’

parts of the city there were thousands of middle-class and wealthy Jews who lived lives identical in almost every

way to the Turkish majority. But in Balat things were different. When money and comfort are absent, other more fundamental aspects take on greater importance. Traditions, rules, taboos.

Robert turned the corner into the nameless, snakelike back street that ultimately gave on to the main road and the bus stop beyond. It was exceptionally sultry. Even putting one foot in front of the other was an effort. He stopped and delved deep into his shirt pocket for his cigarettes and lighter. It was, for him, one of the luxuries of living in a city like Istanbul, this freedom to smoke in the street without attracting reproving glances. How different it all was from London. In so many ways. He lit a cigarette and took a long, deep, luxurious drag.

As he stood smoking, looking towards the thick distant traffic of his destination, a door creaked open behind him.

He turned to look. There was nothing there save the blankness of a very shut, very old apartment building.

Shut, that is, with the exception of a small wooden door on the ground floor that swung and creaked rustily upon its ornate iron hinges. There was nobody about. Like a ghosttown scene from an old Western movie, late-afternoon Balat was silent and, on the face of it, uninhabited. But Robert knew that it was only an illusion. Thousands of people lived in Balat. As soon as the outsider was gone, hundreds of old Jews would disengage themselves from the walls, pass from stone into flesh, from silence into rapid unintelligible chatter. At six foot three, with hair the colour of varnished pine, Robert knew what they thought. Knew what type of foreigner they would, quite naturally, assume him to be.

He turned back again, but, as he did, a movement just on the periphery of his field of vision caught his attention.

He did a double-take and found himself face to face with what looked remarkably like a small gnome or elf framed in the doorway, its hand upon one rusty hinge. It was a woman, tiny, dressed all in black, her eyes momentarily caught in his, filled with fear and distrust. Then she dropped her gaze, her eyes sinking to the floor beneath her feet as she moved slowly backwards, dissolving into the deep shadows of the tenement that was, with her shyness, her prison. A sharp needle of pity pierced his consciousness as he watched her go. There was no way he could make her understand that he was safe, that he meant her no harm. Few of these people could speak Turkish, much less English, and for all he knew she might be one of the real unfortunates, the ones with numbers tattooed on their wrists, forearms or buttocks.

Some Jews from Eastern Europe and Germany had settled in the comparative safety of Turkey just after the War; the names Belsen, Auschwitz and Ravensbriick still rang in their ears forty-seven years on. She disappeared.

Robert finished his cigarette and ground the smoking butt beneath his heel, pushing it deep down into the thick dust of the road surface. He felt better for his short rest and was just about to continue on his way home when a second figure appeared, this time in the doorway of the apartment block directly in front of him. At first, although the figure was familiar, he was so surprised that he almost ignored it. But the face, if not the tattered black jeans and unfashionable baggy shirt, was unmistakable, wasn’t it? He moved his head forward a little, the better to see it. Could it be, possibly? Natalia? In Balat? The figure moved. It looked once up the street and then, sweeping its gaze down towards him, froze.

It all happened very quickly. He smiled and went to raise his hand to wave in greeting. She flinched, dropped her gaze and then, like the natives of the quarter, turned her back as if trying to blend herself with the wall. Robert took one pace forward and was just opening his mouth to speak when, visibly trembling, she sprang to one side and started running down the street in the direction of the main road.

Without really thinking about what he was doing, Robert followed. Now oblivious to everything else around him, he ran. Before him, running more swiftly on almost silent feet, was Natalia, slim, raven-haired, exquisite. Running away, frightened. Of him? If he had had time he would have felt hurt, affronted even. But there wasn’t and she was fast, faster than he had imagined.

Just before Natalia reached the bottom of the winding back street, she turned off sharply to the left. Robert was nearly upon her now. As she veered to the side he briefly, just for a moment, caught her. Long strong fingers grabbed at, but could not grasp, one bony shoulder blade. His arm recoiled as if burnt. It was thin, that shoulder blade, through the cheap cotton. Not round and luxurious and sexy like he remembered. Could he be wrong? Could this be someone else? She gasped, panicking under his touch, and increased the speed and thrust of her legs. Robert stopped.

He was in a courtyard, windows and squat green doors on all sides. As usual, not a soul in sight. Before him, so narrow it was more like a tunnel than a street, stretched an alleyway down which Natalia had disappeared. As he stood panting heavily, hands braced against his knees for support, he looked down into the depths of the warren-like thoroughfare. All he saw was the absence of things. Light, movement, colour, Natalia’s fleeing figure …