Belshazzar's Daughter (21 page)

‘OK. Cohen told me that Mrs Blatsky was quite useful.’

ikmen brightened considerably. If only he had been able to talk like this to Ardic. ‘Our Leonid was a Bolshevik, according to Mrs Blatsky. Active, murderous and committed.’

‘And

so the people he murdered were … ?’

‘Oh, quality, Suleyman, quality. Bourgeois pigs, as the old woman had it.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Typical fodder for the times.’

‘And Mrs Blatsky does know this for certain, does she, sir?’

ikmen sighed. ‘Inasmuch as anyone could make out

Leonid’s drunken ramblings, yes. She was, however,

rather unsatisfactorily unclear on this witness to Meyer’s crime business. I presume the delightful Cohen has enlightened you about this?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Someone, the “other” she called him or her, still living in this city, knew about Meyer’s killings. The old woman didn’t know who, said Meyer never told her who or at least she doesn’t think that he did. She did register his fear of this “other” though, said that only the liquor could make him feel OK about it, actually believed it may have kept him going. The “other” …’ He sighed again, this time far more desperately and deeply than before. ‘You can imagine who crossed my mind, can’t you?’

Suleyman shuddered at the thought of her. ‘It doesn’t prove anything though, does it, sir? I mean, there are still so many questions. Did the incident happen at all or was Meyer just making up alcohol-soaked stories? And if it did happen and Maria Gulcu was a witness, why was a woman like her there witnessing the thing and why did she then leave the country with him? At the risk of putting a block upon your enthusiasm, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.’

ikmen sighed a third time. No, it didn’t make much

sense. Even he had to admit that. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps the people Meyer killed were connected to her in some way.’ He shrugged helplessly.

But Suleyman was shocked. ‘You can’t mean revenge?

Why wait’ - he worked the mathematics out in his head - ‘seventy-four years to do it? Why watch him do it and then leave the country with him? It’s madness!’

‘I know that!’ blustered ikmen. ‘But it keeps on worrying away at me. I can’t get it out of my head that Meyer’s death was an execution. Personal, targeted.’ He reached into his drawer and pulled out a large unopened brandy bottle. ‘If anti-Jewish crazy people were declaring war on the Jews there would have been more of a build-up. Nothing has happened in Balat for years, not a thing! And yet I must admit that I do feel that Smits is connected to it all in some way and there can be no hiding either from the fact of the huge swastika on Meyer’s bedroom wall.’

‘But we don’t know for certain whether Smits was a Nazi or not.’

ikmen took the top off the bottle and flung it down on his desk. ‘No, no we don’t.’ He took two big gulps from the bottle and wiped the neck on his sleeve. ‘As far as we know Meyer did nothing but sit on his arse and get pissed for the last seventy years of his life. Where the hell Reinhold Smits, Maria Gulcu, Robert Cornelius and Meyer’s large amounts of money fit into the picture, we really don’t know.’

He offered the bottle to Suleyman, who declined.

‘And then there’s the fact that the wretched man was a Russian as well as a Jew!’ ikmen put his hand up to his head in despair. ‘The fucking Russian psyche! Talk about out of your depth!’

At that point, there was a knock at the door and Cohen entered. ‘Would either of you two sirs like some tea?’

ikmen raised his head. ‘Provided you don’t accompany the drink with lewd references to your recent dealings with breasts and bottoms, yes, Cohen,’ he said.

‘Right.’ The constable left the room.

Suleyman gave way to an uncharacteristic bout of hilarious laughter.

Natalia had been gone for nearly an hour, but Robert had still not moved from his place on the sofa. His eyes frozen to the forest of television aerials on top of the opposite apartment block, he watched as the evening sun slowly dipped behind the buildings. A streak of smoky copper, thrown across the blue sky like a ribbon, marked its progress towards the west. The dying of the light.

The heat of the day and the frantic afternoon activity, both sexual and violent, had left him feeling limp and wasted. But it was not an unpleasant feeling and in a way he was grateful for it. His supine, undemanding body placed no strain upon his depleted energy levels. He needed what few calories he possessed in order to think. What Natalia had told him, although explaining much, had left him thoughtful. He was anxious still. No, he hadn’t ‘seen things’. Yes, he was still in his right mind - but …

That she hadn’t wanted to tell him was evident. He hadn’t used violence of that order for many years. It had shaken him. He had nursed a hope that perhaps he was no longer capable of such acts, but that was obviously not yet the case. It was her lack of regard, the way she assumed she could just ignore his question and sweep out of the room, that had inflamed him. It had been exactly the same with the earlier incidents. Didn’t these people realise, Natalia, that awful barrister, that bastard Billy Smith, that if he asked a question he expected an answer? Ignoring him, pretending that he didn’t exist, was an insult. It made him feel diminished, persecuted even. Violence really was the only way out when others decided you were a non-person.

Or when you deep down and secretly saw yourself in that role. It was scant justification for littering her beautiful body with bruises, however, and Robert knew it.

He turned his mind to what she had told him. That he had wrested her story from her by force gave it a certain credibility. But it had - he couldn’t quite think of the right word - Ruritanian aspects to it. Aspects that were hard to believe.

Gulcu was not, according to Natalia, the family’s real surname. When her grandmother came to Turkey as a

refugee from Russia in 1918, she had met a man called Gulcu and had three children by him. She neither legally married him, nor did she apply for Turkish nationality.

Quite why she omitted to do this or how in fact the family managed to live without any legal status was not explained.

Likewise, where Natalia’s own apparently Turkish and again dead father fitted in was also a mystery.

The murdered man in Balat had been a friend of her

grandmother. Like her he was Russian, another refugee from the violence that tore apart and destroyed Tsarist Russia in 1917. In the past they would get together frequently and share memories of their homeland. On these occasions, Natalia’s grandmother would always provide a meal for the impecunious Meyer. He was given to hard liquor and frequently forgot to feed himself properly. But time passed and Meyer and Maria, the grandmother, became too old to socialise. The Gulcus’ provision of food to their less fortunate old friend, however, continued.

Every week one of the younger members of the family would journey across the Golden Horn to Balat and present the old man with a parcel of food. He was rarely sober, but always grateful. Maria apparently maintained that it was only by virtue of her parcels that the old man survived.

On Monday it had been Natalia’s turn to make the

journey. She took a long, late lunch break from work and arrived at Meyer’s apartment at about three-thirty.

She gave the old man his provisions and talked with him for a while. But more time passed than she realised and she was appalled when she looked at her watch to discover that it was already four-thirty. She was due back at the shop. She left Meyer, very much alive, and ran down the stairs and into the street. Emerging into the sunlight her own and Robert’s paths briefly crossed.

The lead-up to this point in her story had been strange and outside his own experience, but Robert could neither prove nor disprove any part of it. The final section, her rendition of their encounter, was a different matter.

According to Natalia she ran because she had to get back to work. She was not aware of anybody else on the street and just headed straight towards Fevzi Pasa Caddesi and the buses. The reason she gave for not acknowledging Robert was a) she was in a panic and b) because of her short-sightedness she couldn’t actually see him.

Things had calmed down considerably between them

by that time. She was apologetic and, once again, loving towards him. She was like she used to be just after they first met: tenderness and caring lending substance to her sensuality. His own guilt at handling her so roughly had also intervened. She had kissed him and slipped her hand into his trousers, gently massaging his penis. What he had to understand was that contact with the police could be very dangerous for her and her family. It was bad enough the authorities knew her grandmother was friendly with Meyer, but if they knew that she, Natalia, had been in the vicinity when the old man was murdered things could get very difficult. The police would almost certainly require a statement, they would run a check on her, she may even be required to appear in court. The check would reveal her true status; the court would take a dim view of evidence supplied by an illegal alien. The family could be deported.

Back to Russia, penniless, standing for ever in an endless queue for bread … It was an unappealing image but it dissolved when she lowered her open mouth down upon him and he released himself into a warm stream of erotic pleasure.

It was only as she raised her head up from him that the small tears in her story started to open up and become holes. The bellow that accompanied his climax had faded and given way to a smile as she had turned to look at him.

Grateful, he had stroked her strong, fleshy back. But his fingers tensed as they explored a softness that had not been there only three days before. He remembered the clothes she had been wearing: hard, thick jeans, that coarse and unflattering shirt. Clothes he had never seen before - or since. Clothes she would have deemed unfit to clean the house in. Clothes that could easily be burnt. Perhaps had to be. As he came down from his sexual rush, his mind began working again.

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 centre 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.

Cetin 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.’ Touche, 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 jewelled 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.