Belshazzar's Daughter (50 page)

in sensuously and let its swollen belly billow towards him.

It kissed him, open mouthed, about the cheek and on the tip of his nose.

One of Robert’s wrecked hands moved up to push the

flame away. But as it wheeled forward it overbalanced and plunged into the pit with the waxworks taking the rest of his silent body with it. Other, smaller flames took him and consumed him.

The whole crowd as one body saw the man pull himself through the open window and stagger out on to the roof.

Everything around him was burning and if the fire brigade didn’t get someone up to him soon he was going to die very horribly and publicly. The men holding the hoses shouted at those operating the pump to switch the water off. They’d only just started spraying the building but it was too risky to continue with someone stuck precariously,!

on the roof. One glancing touch of just the spray from such powerful jets could have him overbalancing and tumbling into the street.

One particularly nimble fireman jumped up on to the hydraulic ladder and signalled to others to winch him up.

He pointed towards the man and the rest of the crew started to ease the ladder round, positioning it ready for extension.

ikmen placed his hand very heavily and obviously on Suleyman’s shoulder. It wouldn’t be long. The man was already up on the roof and very soon it would occur to him that his safest course of action was to jump. That was natural enough given Homo sapiens’s innate fear of fire. All ikmen wondered was how long it would take him to fall. He thought about ordering Suleyman to the back of the crowd, but by that time it was too late.

‘He’s going to jump!’

They all shouted it, the stupid bastards! It was almost as if they were encouraging him. The fireman on the end of the ladder urged his comrades to get him in position now.

There was a flurry of frenzied activity around the tender, ikmen only moved his eyes for a millisecond to look at this action, but it broke his concentration.

Suleyman darted forward. ‘Stay where you are! Don’t move!’

ikmen reacted immediately, but however fast he ran he couldn’t match the young man’s long athletic strides. I’ve fucked it up! he thought to himself. I’ve come all this way and I’ve fucked it up! He felt himself start to cry and brushed the tears roughly away from his eyes with the back of his hand.

‘He’s going to jump!’ They shouted it again! The poor fireman on the end of the ladder screamed at them to stop, but his voice got lost in the general sound of mayhem and panic that roared up from the crowd. Everyone was so afraid and yet no one could stop looking.

The man on the roof bent his knees and flung his arms out to the sides as if preparing to launch himself like a bird.

Suleyman had stopped now and was waving and shouting up at him. If only ikmen’s winded body could get there in time to pull him back. He urged himself forward through the pain and put one arm out in front of him. Suleyman was directly below the man now.

Oh, it was a long way down! The people looked like some toys he’d once had, little wooden people whose heads and arms moved when twisted sharply. They’d always ended up in odd, jerky poses, those figures, even when he had wanted them to be relaxed and calm.

One of the figures below was closer than the others and seemed to be shouting at him, but he couldn’t make out any words. Perhaps he was trying to tell him that he was forgiven and that everything would now be all right. But it wouldn’t. If you killed someone, even someone as wicked as Uncle Leonid, nothing could ever make that better ever again. Uncle Nicky had said so and therefore it had to be true.

The roof was very hot now. Under his feet things that were usually solid bubbled like liquid. Nobody else had come out on to the roof after him. He liked to think that somehow they’d managed to make it back down the stairs, but he knew that wasn’t so. They were all dead, which was perhaps where they should always have been. If Grandmama had died in Ekaterinburg none of it would have happened.

He wouldn’t have happened - the dynasty would have just died when it was supposed to. Perhaps there really were proper times for things. Maybe by keeping the Romanovs alive Grandmama had committed some kind of sin. That Uncle Nicky was his father had sounded odd, but whether >

that was wrong or not was beyond him.

Another man was running towards the one who continued to shout at him. This looked peculiar because surely if the Ś. second man wanted the first to stop shouting all he had to do was say so. Turks were different like that, he’d watched them. They weren’t a logical people, which explained why he didn’t like them very much. Russians were better, Grandmama had always said so. He felt a little sad when he thought about Russia. He’d always wanted to go ‘home’, but now it was too late.

Somebody on the end of a ladder was coming towards, him but he remained calm. He wouldn’t reach him and even if he did it wouldn’t matter. He had his own plans.

He looked down at the ground again. It was a very long way and he had no doubt that it would hurt. The family would never have credited him with such perception, but he’d always known that he possessed that quality. He could reason and think like the rest of them. Perhaps at a different rate and along, to them, different lines, but he had always been able to do it. Duty, that was what it had been about.

And he fully understood duty - that was very important.

Grandmama had often said that people had criticised the Tsar for being too rigid in his sense of duty to the dynasty, he’d died because of it. So it had to be a good thing, didn’t it?

But then not even that mattered any more. His feet felt boiling hot and even without looking he knew that his shoes were burning. He hurt all over. Strangely, though, he wasn’t hot. The feeling was one of being stabbed many times. Not that that sensation would last for long. He was out in the open, the smoke couldn’t possibly overcome him as it had done Uncle Serge. But that wasn’t important now.

The important thing was to get off the roof away from the flames. If that could be done then at least he could retain some dignity. The others hadn’t, which meant that it was now up to him. Was it the right thing to do? He thought he’d done the right thing before …

Best to do it before too much thought got in the way!

Misha spread his arms out wide and closed his eyes. Until he hit the ground it would be quite pleasurable, like flying.

He let his knees go limp and toppled forwards.

ikmen thought his lungs would burst as he lurched forward and grabbed Suleyman with both hands and pulled him backwards.

The most sickening sound that either of them had ever heard followed as the living body of the man smashed into the pavement before them and expired. It was a damp, dark, purple noise like the sound a fishmonger makes when he slaps squid down on his wooden chopping board. For a moment both men stayed absolutely still, ikmen’s ear pressed hard against Suleyman’s back rejoiced in the sound of his strong, heavy breathing. Whatever horror lay on the ground before them, at least he was alive and for that ikmen thanked the God in which he did not believe. There was no other being he could thank, certainly not himself. It had been too close for that.

ikmen pulled himself out from underneath Suleyman’s body and looked around. Two firemen were running towards them, their faces darkened by what looked like terror.

Suleyman sank backwards on to the ground and ikmen

bent across him. Suleyman was covered with blood. He lay on his back trembling, looking at his gore-stained hands, trying not to touch them to his body.

ikmen took him gently by the shoulders and tried to pull him into a sitting position. The blood was unpleasant to the touch as it was still warm, but ikmen had to try. Suleyman was starting to cry and if he stayed on his back he’d choke on his own tears. But it wasn’t easy. Suleyman didn’t want to move. He turned his head to one side and pressed his shoulders hard into the ground in order to keep his body where it was. ikmen looked down towards Suleyman’s

feet and saw why. The body of the man had landed

on its stomach, which had burst on impact. Blood and offal were spattered in pools all around, although it was Suleyman himself who had taken the brunt of the mess It had splashed and slopped up at him; the blood into his face and eyes, more unpleasant and happily unidentifiable things clung like bloody leeches to his legs and feet. The face of the dead man was familiar to ikmen and not for the first time he felt sorry for the boy. What his place had been in the peculiar drama that had surrounded the Gulcus, ikmen realised he would probably never know. In fact everything that had passed since the death of Leonid Meyer was suddenly feeling very alien to him. The Gulcus house was burning, there was still no sign of Cornelius and now this boy, this dead boy.

‘Are you all right?’

ikmen looked round and saw the two firemen bending

over Suleyman’s weeping body. He knew he should have answered the firefighters, it was always important to ascertain who was injured and who was not. But he couldn’t

speak. That Suleyman was alive was enough for the moment because he knew that it could all have been so different, ikmen touched his sergeant’s face and felt his mouth move beneath his hand. It was a miracle.

A pair of strong arms pulled him away from Suleyman and set him unsteadily on his feet, ikmen became aware of the crowd again. The noise of their crying and screaming filtered through the temporary stop his mind had put inside his ears. They’d come to see a drama and had found themselves inside a horror. They were seeing just the edge of the blackness that had tortured his soul since the beginning of the Meyer affair: the past crashing bloodily into the present.

The second of the two firemen lifted Suleyman to his feet and led him away from the scene in front of ikmen.

Behind them the house burnt on in spite of the hoses pouring thousands of litres of water at its white-hot heart.

All sorts of substances were playing their part: wood, gas, oil, the complicated biochemistry of the human body.

Around the back of the largest fire tender an ambulance was waiting. At its open back door, beside the paramedics, was a very shaken Constable Cohen. The paramedics took Suleyman from the arms of the fireman and loaded him silently into the vehicle. He didn’t look at Cohen, or even appear to be aware that he existed. Shock. At least if Suleyman was in shock it meant that he would be blank and therefore without anguish for a few hours, ikmen thought grimly.

As for himself? Even though ikmen knew that he should go to hospital himself and let a doctor just check him out, he had already decided that he wouldn’t. When the fire was out there would be time enough for that. That he was just as helpless as all the other spectators was not sufficient excuse.

He’d found the Gulcus, he couldn’t leave them now.

ikmen disengaged himself from his fireman escort and walked across to Cohen. He opened his mouth to speak, but only found one word. ‘What … ?’

Cohen clasped one hand across his eyes and sighed. He replied in kind. ‘What?’

ikmen breathed rapidly and shallowly as if panicking.

‘What … what … were you doing here?’

Cohen looked at ikmen somewhat askance. He didn’t

tend to trust people in shock. ‘We came to find you, sir. And to look for this Englishman who might have done for—’

‘But I told Suleyman to take the day off! I told him because I …’ His head hurt and he put his hand up to it gently. He must have banged it on the ground when he fell, not that he could remember.

Cohen took him by the arm and led him away from the ambulance. He too knew ikmen should go to hospital, but he also knew that the Old Man would resist if forced. ‘Hasn’t anyone told you yet then, sir?’

‘Told me what?’ There was smoke everywhere and it

made him cough, but he lit a cigarette anyway.

Cohen sat him down on a bollard. ‘Your wife went into labour this morning.’

‘Oh.’ It was a very flat and uninterested response from a man just about to become a father. But then both of them were in the middle of a scene that looked like something from Dante’s Inferno. The smoke was so thick that even the faces of some of the spectators were smudged and smutted with soot. There was also a smell of burning meat on the air now. Cohen knew what that was, but he didn’t point it out to ikmen. ikmen sighed. ‘Fatma will kill me.’

‘Well, I can drive you there now, sir, if—’

‘Where’s Avci?’

‘Oh, er, I don’t know.’ Cohen looked about him but the boy was nowhere to be seen.

‘Well, look for him, will you, Cohen?’ It was a panicky request, ikmen needed to know that everyone was safe now.

It was important.

‘All right, yes, um …’

‘Tell him to go to my apartment and inquire after

my wife.’

‘You don’t want to go yourself?’

ikmen scowled. ‘Just do it.’

With some reluctance Cohen left his boss and went to look for Avci. Considering the gruesomeness of the occasion he fully expected to find him hiding somewhere.

The ambulance carrying Suleyman sped off down the narrow street and was almost immediately replaced by another, empty vehicle. There were three paramedics attached to this one and they all looked very grim. One of their number, a short, stocky, Armenian-looking man, opened the back of the ambulance and took out a folded blue bag. ikmen looked inside the vehicle and noticed that none of the patient stretchers had either pillows or mattresses. The Armenian unfolded the thick blue body bag. This wasn’t transport for the living.

ikmen stared straight ahead of him at the back of one of the fire tenders. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that at last the men of the fire brigade were getting the flames under control. Strange really that wood should give them so many problems. If ikmen hadn’t known better he might have said that the building actually wanted to burn.

He laughed grimly to himself. Prophecy was one thing, but ascribing intelligence to fire? Sometimes he felt like the old fool Fatma always said he was. All he could do now was live in hope that at least some of them had survived the inferno not that there was much chance of that. And with them had gone all the answers to those questions he had come to ask.