Belshazzar's Daughter (51 page)

Questions about Cornelius and the letter he had typed to the police, questions about who the Gulcus were and why they had killed Leonid Meyer, because now he knew that they had. They had killed him for that old crime, the one in Ekaterinburg all those lifetimes ago, the one the premise for which lay between those two old photographs that had belonged to Smits - the ones that rested in his pocket now.

He knew all that. But what he had really wanted to know was now irrevocably lost. Who was Maria Gulcu really, because despite everything he still wouldn’t believe those photographs. He just couldn’t. And why had she waited seventy-four years before taking her revenge?

The realisation that he would now never know suddenly made him want to cry.

‘Are you Inspector ikmen?’

He looked up and saw a tall thin man of about his own age wearing a fireman’s uniform. He was covered with soot and filth and looked exhausted.

ikmen knew how he felt. It had been hours since they had put the fire out, even the crowd had dispersed now, but he was still there. ‘Yes, I’m ikmen. What is it?’

The fireman took his helmet off and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘One of your men told me I should let you know when we start bringing the bodies out.’

So here it was. ikmen sighed and lit yet another cigarette.

‘Yes, thanks. How many bodies have you found?’ Maria Gulcu’s last ‘Goodbye’ flashed into his mind. That had sounded very final. Had she known?

The fireman took a small cigar from his tunic pocket and joined ikmen in a smoke. ‘Three so far. Do you have any idea as to how many persons might have been in the house?’

ikmen looked at faces in his mind and counted. Maria]

Gulcu (perhaps she had been beautiful once with those hypnotic blue eyes?), Nicholas, Sergei, crippled Sergei, Natalia and … poor old Robert Cornelius. Had he been there? Where else could he have been? ikmen took a

stab at it.

‘Five, I think,’ he said. Then he remembered. ‘Oh no, six. There was a servant boy too. But I think that was the one who jumped from the roof.’

The fireman smiled. ‘Ah yes. The one that nearly killed your colleague. That was you who dragged him back,

wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ ikmen turned away. He had no desire to discuss that matter any further. If people wanted to ascribe heroics he wanted none of it. The last thing he felt was courageous.

The fireman must have understood and he left, ikmen got to his feet and followed him towards what was left of the Gulcu house. There wasn’t much. All the upper storeys had crashed through into the basement. The only thing that remained standing was the great black front door and its frame. It swung to and fro on its hinges, creaking in the dry, hot breeze blowing in from the waters of the Golden Horn. Behind it lay heaps of smoking rubble. What had once been window-frames, joists and brackets stuck up and away from the blackened mess like agonised limbs.

The fireman who had just spoken to him cleared a

small pile of rubble away from something that looked like a carbonised tree. A thing struck by lightning, ikmen’s stomach lurched and he turned away. Too tired for bodies like that.

‘Sir?’

Cohen was standing right in front of him and he hadn’t even noticed. He’d looked straight through the man as if he were a window. But then Cohen always had been shallow.

Ikmen giggled stupidly at his own joke. ‘What is it, Cohen?’

‘Avci just radioed in.’ He smiled. It wasn’t easy because ikmen looked like he was going out of his mind. ‘Your wife is fine, sir, and you have a son, who is also fine.’

‘Oh.’

Cohen carried on smiling through ikmen’s vagueness.

There was little else he could do. ‘And Dr Sarkissian’s at the morgue now, getting ready for the bodies to arrive.’

Babies and bodies, ikmen looked into Cohen’s large, sensual eyes. ‘They’ve found three bodies, four if you include the jumper.’

‘Yes, I know. It started on the top floor, you know, the fire.’ Out of the corner of his eye Cohen could see things that looked like wooden statues being loaded on to stretchers. He cleared his throat and changed the subject.

‘Commissioner Ardic would like to see you when you return to the station, sir.’

‘What a pity I don’t want to see him.’

It was his usual cynical style, which relieved Cohen somewhat, but without his customary light touch. Cohen sighed. He’d never really understood this case. ‘What now then, sir?’

ikmen chanced one glance towards the firemen and then looked quickly back at Cohen. Even his ugly face was preferable to what they were digging out of the rubble.

‘Sit here and try to make some sense of it all for a bit. Then see Ardic, I suppose. Wrap this thing up.’

‘What, you mean the whole Balat thing?’

‘Yes, I think so, Cohen.’ He pointed behind him towards the remains of the house. ‘One day I’ll explain all that to you, as far as I understand it myself. The curtain’s fallen on this one.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Pity it fell before the denouement.’

Fatma looked down at the baby in her arms and brushed his tiny face with her finger. He opened his mouth and screwed his eyes up tight. ‘Now then, don’t scream,’ she said, ‘you’ll wake that horrible daddy.’

But it was only a joke. Fatma knew that it would take a lot more than a crying baby to wake her husband at the moment.

She was glad that most of the other children had gone out, however. It was the clouds that had sent them whooping down into the street, the promise of rain. Fatma welcomed it too. She looked out of the window at the darkening sky and felt a tremendous relief course through her body. The city hadn’t seen so much as a spot of rain for nearly two months. If only it had come a day earlier perhaps all those poor people wouldn’t have died in that terrible house-fire.

And maybe then Cetin would have got some answers to those questions that had been torturing him. He had finally got to bed at about midnight, after nearly forty-eight hours without sleep. He’d barely looked at his new son, he’d been so tired.

Fatma hoped and prayed that his case was closed now. If it was he could take some annual leave. He had enough owing.

But then with Cetin she never really knew. Where other people would just give up and move on to other things, Cetin would continue until he was satisfied, which was frequently a very tall order indeed. His desire to root out the truth at all costs was not one of those qualities that endeared him to her. His mother had always wanted to know things too. The Albanian witch had spent her short life dabbling in things best left undisturbed.

It was so quiet in the apartment without the children, but Fatma liked it. Cetin and Timur were asleep, the younger man in his bed, the older one snoring gently in his chair opposite her. Cicek was somewhere around, but she was being very quiet too. Ever since the baby had been born she’d been thoughtful. Fatma wondered whether perhaps the arrival of a new life had made her stop and consider her own existence. Birth could do that to a person. She remembered how she herself had been affected the first time she’d witnessed a human birth. Fatma smiled at the memory.

She had been disgusted. That her lovely Aunt Mihri could be party to something that messy and undignified had shocked her. The eleven-year-old Fatma had resolved on the spot never to do ‘that’ herself. Nine children down the line she had a somewhat different view.

The front-door buzzer rang and luckily woke Timiir from his light slumber. Fatma had not relished the thought of trying to open the door with her arms full of, at the moment, quiet and contented baby. The old man rose stiffly to his feet and wandered slowly past her, chucking the baby lightly under the chin as he went. Timur could drive Fatma mad, especially when he was in wild, irreligious mode, but she couldn’t fault him when it came to doing things for her when*

the babies were tiny. He would fetch, carry, sort out the other children - sometimes he would even cook. Only plain spaghetti and courgette, but it was a meal. Fatma sometimes wondered how often he had served that food up to Cetin and) Halil after their mother died.

She heard the sound of the front door opening followed by several deep male voices. Then Arto Sarkissian walked into her living room followed by her own husband’s handsome partner. She was surprised to see Suleyman as Cetin had told her that he was in hospital.

Arto bent low and looked carefully at the baby. ‘Perfect.’

Fatma smiled.

Timur came back into the room and offered both men

seats.

Fatma looked at Suleyman’s white, drawn face. ‘I’m surprised to see you, Mehmet. Cetin told me you were in

hospital.’

‘I was discharged this morning, Mrs ikmen.’ He smiled weakly. ‘I think they needed the bed for someone who was really ill.’

‘You don’t look exactly fit to me!’ said Timur. He had strong views about the public health service and its duty to the public, which he gave vent to frequently.

Arto smiled. ‘I met the Sergeant as I was leaving to come here. He wanted to see Cetin, and of course the rest of you, as much as I did.’

Fatma shifted the now sleeping baby in her arms in order to get a little more comfortable. ‘Cetin’s still asleep, I’m afraid, but—’

Before she could finish, an extremely crumpled individual entered the room, its eyes misted with sleep. ‘Hello everyone,’

said Cetin. ‘Anyone care for a case conference?’

The three men waited until Fatma and the old man had left of their own accord before they actually started their deliberations. Cetin poured large brandies for himself and Arto and got a Coke from the kitchen for Suleyman.

Arto was the first to speak. ‘I found what was left of a British passport on one of those bodies. It’s unreadable, but they are quite distinct, you know. Hard cover, gold lettering.’

Cetin sighed. ‘I expect you’ll find it belonged to a man called Robert Cornelius.’

‘I intend to notify the Consulate.’

Suleyman looked deeply into his can of drink. ‘What about the other bodies?’

‘Two women and three men.’

Cetin smiled sadly. ‘Maria, Natalia, Sergei, Nicholas and the servant boy. I wonder which one of them killed Leonid Meyer? Because one of them did. If you want I’ll tell you the story as I see it. I told Ardig yesterday.’

‘What was his reaction, sir?’

‘Well, Suleyman, he didn’t believe me, but then I never really expected him to. That it conveniently wraps up the case he liked, but, as he said, my reasons for pointing the finger at the Gulcus will have to be “reassessed”. A picture of him lying to all the big nobs, the Israeli Consul and the Mayor et cetera, passed through my mind at the time and I thought how much he was going to enjoy it. Ardig is good at lying. By the time he’s finished I will probably discover that I actually caught Reinhold Smits red-handed as he tried to knock off the poor old Rabbi and that that was the reason for his suicide.’

‘So what’s the truth of it then, Cetin?’ Arto leant forward >

in his seat and stared hard into his friend’s face.

Cetin lit a cigarette. ‘Well, it’s wild, Arto, and it revolves around these two women’ - he placed the two photographs he had discovered on Smits’s desk down in front of his colleagues <

- ‘who may or may not be one and the same.’

‘Who are they, sir?’ Suleyman asked.

‘The woman with the two men is Maria Gulcu. Incidentally, that’s Reinhold Smits and the dark one is Leonid!

Meyer.’ ‘Ś]

Suleyman looked closely at the face of Meyer particularly.!

It seemed to fascinate him, possibly, ikmen thought, because!

the last time the younger man had seen Meyer had been under such appalling circumstances. But, at length, he pointed to the other photograph. ‘And this one?’

Cetin smiled. ‘Ah, this one. Yes. This is a photograph, I have since discovered, of Tsar Nicholas II’s third daughter, the Grand Duchess Maria. The words below it refer to an inscription that was discovered on one of the walls in the Ipatiev House where the family died. They were written by Smits. If you look at the photograph of Maria Gulcu and then at this one, you can see the similarities.’

Suleyman’s eyes widened. ‘You don’t mean …’

‘Now then, hold on,’ said the good doctor, picking up both pictures and holding each in turn up close to his eyes. ‘We all, I hope, know how easy it is to see similarities where they do not really exist.’

Cetin grinned.

‘For instance,’ the doctor continued, ‘something that is absolutely unalterable is the width of a person’s face. If you look closely you can see that the Gulcu woman’s bone structure is narrow while this one is wide and, if I were called to make a judgement, I would say that the lovely Grand Duchess has a far more typically Russian shape to her countenance. The eyes, I admit, are very similar in character, but the noses, which are quite different types, do not, I feel, bear close examination.’ He looked up in order to gauge the reactions of those around him. ‘I may be wrong, I mean I am no expert with photographic evidence …’

‘Oh, I don’t think that you are wrong, Arto.’ Cetin smiled again, if a little sadly. ‘I, although I must say that I didn’t to begin with, share your opinion. Unfortunately Reinhold Smits, who left these on his desk for me to discover after his death, did believe that they were one and the same.’

‘Meaning what exactly, sir?’

Cetin sighed heavily. ‘Meaning, in the absence of all of the protagonists in this story that I can only, at best, theorise about things like meanings.’

‘Well, tell us anyway,’ said Arto as he replenished both his and Cetin’s drinks.

‘All right.’ Cetin took a deep breath and, despite his still debilitating tiredness, launched enthusiastically into his story. ‘On or around 16 July 1918, Leonid Meyer, a young Bolshevik soldier, for want of a better term, found himself assigned to guard duty at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg which is where the ill-fated Romanov family were held at the time. Under the command of another Jew, Yacob Yurovsky, Ś

this posting was both dangerous - because of the large numbers of Royalist White Russian forces which were advancing into the area - and prestigious because he was going to kill the Tsar. And on 17 July 1918 Leonid Meyer and his comrades did just that. Shot the Romanovs, chopped up their bodies, destroyed them with sulphuric acid - poetic? - felt very pleased with themselves. With, that is, one exception.’