Belshazzar's Daughter (3 page)

But then, realistically, what else could he do? After twenty-two years on the force, it was no longer just a job.

Like smoking or drinking, it was a habit, an addiction, an essential part of him. Giving up would mean painful withdrawal symptoms. He moved, blinking painfully, into the kitchen.

As he passed the sink he caught sight of himself in the small, cracked mirror above the draining board. Lit from behind by the merciless neon from the living room, his face stared back, an education in shadows, pits, lines and, where his cheeks should have been, deep skull-like depressions.

Although the force could never be described as boring, it did little for a person’s looks. Stress, erratic hours, long meetings in smoke-filled rooms, dead bodies …

He opened the door of the battered cupboard beneath the sink and took, from a long line of identical bottles, an unopened one. The English, he recalled from his language lessons at college, considered the dog to be man’s best friend. But Cetin disagreed. Brandy was, in his opinion, far superior. It helped him think, gave his ulcer something to do, meant he could cope with the inhumanity of his chosen field of police work. Murder. How and why had he got into that? He had never got used to it, inured to the ugliness of its consequences. But then perhaps that was the reason in itself. If he ever did he would quit.

He put his bottle on the kitchen table and scribbled a short note to Fatma on the back of an envelope. She wouldn’t be pleased. She’d never really got used to the job, or the drinking. He thought of her angry fat cheeks in the morning, her pudgy hand screwing his note up into a ball and hurling it petulantly down on to the floor. It wasn’t fair. A devout Muslim wife and mother saddled for all eternity with a drunken, largely absent policeman. But it wasn’t all bad. Cetin picked up his bottle again and smiled.

There were eight Ikmen children - so far - with another due in a few weeks’ time. Philosophical differences aside, this was a good marriage, characterised by both love and passion.

He checked his pockets for cigarettes, lighter and car keys, and made his way quietly towards the front door of the apartment. He looked around at the dim, dingy corridor and listened for the gentle breathing of his sleeping children. The unpleasant thought occurred to him that he would not be standing thus in his own home for many hours to come.

When he reached the third floor of the building he found Suleyman waiting for him at the top of the stairs. Tall and slim, his face looked drawn in the watery light of the single bulb above the stairwell. His eyes, large and sensual, looked even bigger now, widened by shock, stilled by the lateness of the hour. He tried a smile as Ikmen mounted the top step and drew level with him, but it was an effort which resulted in only a slight movement of his mouth.

‘Where is it then?’ ikmen gasped. Fifty cigarettes a day did little to enhance his stairclimbing abilities. He took the wrapper off the top of the brandy bottle and tossed it away.

‘The one at the end, sir.’ Suleyman pointed to the third door down. ‘Dr Sarkissian’s still in there.’

ikmen uncorked his bottle and took a large fiery swig from its neck. When he had finished he wiped the top with his sleeve and offered the liquor to Suleyman. His deputy shook his head, ikmen smiled. ‘Damned religious maniac!’

They walked in silence along the balcony. The immediate neighbours, like most of the other inhabitants of the block, were awake, nervously awaiting developments, clustered around doorways in their night-clothes. As they reached the second door a small, middle-aged man in a dressing gown came out to meet them. Suleyman turned to his boss.

‘Ah, Inspector, this is Mr Abrahams, the deceased’s neighbour.’

ikmen stretched out his hand in greeting. The small man took it warmly and bowed slightly over his outstretched arm. ‘Mr Abrahams,’ Suleyman continued, ‘this is Inspector ikmen. Perhaps you could tell him what you told me.’

‘Of course.’ The little Jew smiled sadly. Looking into the Abrahams’ doorway ikmen became aware of what seemed like hundreds of pairs of eyes watching him. Children, lots of children. Eight? Ten? No, more! It reminded him of home, the comfort of the couch, the endless litter of toys in the little ones’ bedrooms. The same, but different. Here there was squalor, hunger in the eyes of these children, the awful stench of too many bodies crowded together in a tiny space.

16

17

‘It was about midnight,’ Mr Abrahams continued, his voice heavily accented and obviously unused to long expositions in the Turkish language. ‘We, all persons, are sleeping. And then it comes, screaming, terrible, from Meyer apartment.

All waking now. Rivka, my wife, very frightened. She say me “go look”. So I go.’ He paused, his bottom lip beginning to tremble, pain, great pain crossing and then settling into his eyes.

ikmen put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Please go on, Mr Abrahams.’

‘The door is open and first I see Leah Delmonte. She live downstairs. Leah screaming, screaming like, like … crazy!

She sick on dress too. I go her and then I see. Leonid on bed, Inspector, but not Leonid.’ Mr Abrahams cast his eyes down towards the ground beneath his feet. ‘Like someone cut and pull him body with swords. Terrible. Blood and, and smell too. Like meat. Leah screaming, but not look at Leonid, Mr Meyer. She look at wall. Because on wall …’

Shaking violently now, overcome by the horror of his recent experience, Mr Abrahams broke down in tears.

‘There was a large swastika drawn on the wall, sir,’

Suleyman whispered softly into ikmen’s ear. ‘Looks like it might have been drawn in the victim’s own blood.’

The night was hot, but ikmen suddenly felt a chill ripple through his body. He turned again to the little weeping Jew.

‘Thank you, Mr Abrahams. I realise it must have been hard.’

His words seemed so trite under the circumstances. ‘You’ve been most helpful.’

The two policemen pushed gently past the traumatised little man. From the apartment a dozen necks craned to watch them go.

‘You catch him, yes, Inspector!’

ikmen turned. Abrahams was ramrod stiff now, pulled up to his full height, his face trembling with fury.

“I will do everything I can, Mr Abrahams.’

Avci was barring the door to the Meyer apartment, his arms crossed over his barrel chest. It was difficult for ikmen to believe that this giant of a man was only twenty-one years old, younger even than his own eldest son. Though alert, Avci was not on this occasion looking his usual cheerful Neanderthal self.

‘Hello, Inspector,’ he said as ikmen and his deputy approached. Both men nodded briefly in reply and Avci moved smartly to the left to allow them admittance. As he did so a short, fat man wearing pebble spectacles emerged from behind him.

‘Hello, Cetin!’ His voice was spirited, jolly even. He looked down at the bottle in ikmen’s hand and smiled broadly. ‘I’m glad to see your habits are still as disgusting as ever,’ he said, holding his hand out in the direction of the brandy. ‘May I?’

ikmen placed the bottle in the man’s sweaty palm and lit a cigarette. ‘Hello, Doctor. What’s all this about then?’

Dr Arto Sarkissian uncorked ikmen’s bottle and took a long, satisfying draught from its depths. ‘Wonderful!’

He recorked the bottle, wiped his wet mouth upon the sleeve of his shirt, and returned the brandy to its rightful owner. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘it’s all very fascinating actually, Cetin. Horrible, but fascinating. In fifteen years I’ve never seen anything like it.’ He clapped his fat hands up to his fat cheeks. ‘You’ll see in a minute, but, just to summarise …’

There was an awful stench somewhere on the air. Even through the thickness of his cigarette smoke ikmen could smell it. Burning mixed with blood.

‘The victim received blows to the head. Some sort of blunt instrument, I should imagine. Considerable force was used, breaking the skull and exposing sections of the brain tissue.

After that came the acid.’

‘Acid?’

‘Yes. Sulphuric would be my guess. Poured over the body and, interestingly, down the victim’s gullet. It’s possible he was still alive when that occurred.’

‘I told you it was unpleasant, sir,’ Suleyman muttered as the doctor related his findings. Avci fanned his livid face with his left hand. Trying to push the nauseating smell away, ikmen supposed.

‘What about this swastika?’

‘Drawn in the victim’s blood, I should say.’ Sarkissian crossed his strong arms across his chest. ‘The murderer used a cloth, rag, something like that. From the condition of the corpse, its rigor, I’d put time of death at around four, five, maybe five-thirty yesterday afternoon. Come and have a look.’

Suleyman visibly whitened at the invitation. He looked at the doctor and smiled weakly. ‘Dr Sarkissian, if you don’t mind …’

The doctor laughed loudly and punched one gross palm with his other fisted hand. ‘No, not you, Suleyman, I know you’ve seen it already,’ he said. ‘Come on, Cetin.’ He turned and bustled merrily back into the apartment.

ikmen took one last swig from his bottle and issued his orders to his deputy. ‘All right, Suleyman, while I’m in there there’s some things you can be getting on with. First, I want a complete press blackout on the acid and the swastika, understand? We don’t want panic or this city’s lunatic fringe getting new and interesting ideas. That means silencing the neighbours, everything. Give no details to anybody, do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Also, speaking of the neighbours - in this block and across the street - I want our men talking to them. I want to know where they all were and what they were doing around the time of the murder. I want to know if they saw anything, heard anything, any odd people about the place. And I want background. Anything and everything that they know about Meyer.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Suleyman turned and made his way back down the stairs.

The swastika was larger than he had imagined. Really quite huge. It dominated the tiny, litter-strewn apartment, making it look even more like a cell or one of those awful concentration camp barrack rooms in old documentaries about World War II.

‘Bit of a shock, isn’t it?’ chirped Sarkissian as he removed a bloodstained sheet from the ancient iron bedstead. ‘Here’s your victim. He was in bed when he was attacked.’

ikmen could see that it had once been human. It had arms, legs, eyes, hair. But from the mouth to the groin it was like looking in a butcher’s shop window. Blood, offal, misshapen lumps of meat, even at places bones sticking through torn and twisted ribbons of flesh. Now he was actually next to the thing the smell was overpowering. And those eyes! The horror in them! Was that why Sarkissian reckoned that Meyer was still alive when the acid was poured down his throat?

He couldn’t speak, and silently indicated to the doctor that he should recover the corpse. He’d seen enough. As Sarkissian replaced the sheet over Meyer, ikmen tried to come to terms with what he had just seen. He felt sick. Not enough to vomit, but distinctly unwell. Suleyman had been right. It was impossible to put that thing, an obscenity on that scale, into words. And the swastika - it was so personal somehow. As if it justified the act.

‘Your man Suleyman’s a very professional officer,’ the doctor said lightly. ‘There were two others with him when he arrived on the scene. Youngsters, younger than him.

You can imagine how they were when they saw all this.

Poor Suleyman admitted to going quite green himself. But he took charge, got them out, assigned tasks to them straight away. Tried to take their minds off it.’

ikmen found his voice. “I wish someone would take my mind off it.’ His shaking hand brought the bottle of brandy up to his lips.

‘Like I say,’ the doctor continued, suddenly grave and devoid of his usual chirpy lightness, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before. The acid was obviously used as an instrument of torture. The killer didn’t apply enough to consume or conceal the victim’s identity. I can’t really let myself think about the kind of agonies this poor old man went through before he died.’

ikmen wiped the top of the bottle with his sleeve and passed it silently to the doctor. He was going to have to be careful now. Looks, he knew from long hard experience, could be deceptive. He gazed up again at the swastika.

Meyer was - had been - a Jew. A racist murder, on the face of it at least. Until he had more information at his disposal perhaps. But for now it was the only lead that he had to go on. It was awesome! So blatant! It was hard to believe that even they - Nazis, Hitlerphiles, whatever - would be quite so brazen. Such people existed, he knew. But now, at this vast distance in time? Unless it was a crank, a sick mind working alone, killing for thrills.

‘Do you think it’s anti-Semitic, Arto?’

‘Looks like it. The way the world is these days, it wouldn’t surprise me. Hate is endemic to the human race, I thought you knew that.’

‘But here?’

‘Why not? It’s happening all over Europe, Cetin. Germany, France; there’s even been a Mussolini revival in Italy Communism, Fascism, it’s cyclic: Reds for a few years, then Nazis for a few more, then Reds again. It’s why neither of us gets involved in politics.’

‘Or religion.’

‘Or religion. We’re individualists and individualists don’t join. That way we don’t get sucked into ideologies that lead to things like this.’ He tilted his head sourly in the direction of the body on the bed.

ikmen sighed. ‘I wonder why him, why Meyer in particular?’

‘That’s

your job to find out,’ the doctor replied, giving the policeman back his bottle, ‘unless of course you subscribe to the concept you Turks call “kismet”.’

‘That it was his fate? No, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that anything this horrible could be … ordained, if you like.’ He paused. ‘What’s Armenian thinking on it, Arto?’

The little doctor’s many chins wobbled as he laughed.

‘What, kismet? I don’t think we have any thinking as such. We’re Armenians, hated infidels, outsiders, there’s never been enough time to philosophise. Too many people trying to kill us, just like the Jews in fact. Grab your wife’s jewellery, hope for the best, and run like the Devil’s on your tail!’