Belshazzar's Daughter (16 page)

Lust and love can get very confused sometimes, I know, believe me.’

‘She’s all I think about!’ He spoke very softly, almost to himself. ‘Even now.’

Rosemary clasped her hands in front of her chin and suddenly looked very determined. ‘You know, in my opinion,

and you won’t like this, you should start seeing other people a bit more. Inject some fresh air into your life, dear. I’m sure this girl is wonderful, she must be or you wouldn’t be so … Stop being the mystery man of the Londra Language School and get about like the rest of us! You’re divorced, of course you want to marry again and I’m sure that one day you will, but take it slowly, Robert. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure”, remember?’

Robert smiled, put his cigarettes back in his pocket and stood up. ‘I know, Rosemary. Anyway, I think I ought to go now, I’ve bothered you enough with my nonsense.’

‘It’s all right, I don’t mind.’ She stood and put her hands in the pockets of her dressing gown. ‘Don’t feel you have to go. Talk more if you want to. I’m manless at the moment.

It’s been really rather nice having a little male company for a change, albeit of the platonic variety.’

They both laughed. It had been very nice spending time with a woman who wanted nothing from him. As Robert left he thought how pleasant it would be to do it again sometime.

But not yet. At a point in the future when he didn’t have so much on his mind, when she, Natalia, was either out of his life or properly in it - cooking his meals, going on holiday with him, sleeping in his bed. The notion flashed briefly across Robert’s mind that he was ‘sad’. A ‘sad man’ hung up on marriage and domesticity. But from his perspective, outside, that kind of life had always looked so safe. When it worked. Even back then, even through a haze created by drugs, despite the divorce, he had never stopped dreaming about it. Hoping.

‘Goodnight, Robert,’ said Rosemary as they reached the front door. She stood on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘I’m sure that if you use a little judgement, you’ll be all right.’ But her bright face changed in an instant and she became very grave. A final thought had just occurred to her. A horrible one. ‘If the police are involved you know she’s not worth it, don’t you?’

‘I know,’ he replied, and walked briskly through the doorway and on to the landing. ‘Goodnight, Rosemary, and thanks.’

Rosemary shut the door behind him and returned to

the sitting room. From a tiny box on the windowsill she took a pinch of marijuana resin and crumbled it between her fingers. She looked around for her pipe, but couldn’t locate it. She sighed and emptied the crumbled narcotic into her mouth. It was the only way she could get to sleep without the comfort of a man in her bed. She understood her recently departed guest more than he knew.

Fatma ikmen stirred the customary ‘poor man’s breakfast’

of soup slowly and with some malice. Four small children sat at the big scrubbed table in the centre of the room and slurped noisily from metal bowls. Four down, four to go: the breakfast madness wasn’t over yet.

It annoyed her. The older children were so bad at getting up during the holidays. Lazing in bed all morning listening to their radios was all very well, but it stretched breakfast out so. It was just a mercy that neither of the two men bothered to eat in the morning. That would have been intolerable.

Fatma put a slow hand deep into the small of her back and rubbed. This pregnancy was not as easy as the others had been. She was more weary this time. She looked at her face in the small mirror above the sink. It wasn’t a particularly lined face, but it was nevertheless obviously the face of a woman who would not see forty again. It irked her a little. Perhaps it was the onset of middle age that made her feel so negative about this new baby? In retrospect it had not been one of her better ideas, and yet she had no one to blame but herself. It was the old familiar story. As soon as the last baby had started walking Fatma had wanted to be pregnant again. Most of her children had been conceived out of broodiness. Poor Cetin’ She actually felt sorry for him sometimes, although she would have rather died than told him so.

But he was good really. All she had to do was drop the appropriate hint and she was pregnant again. No lectures about lack of money, no grumbles about the restrictions placed upon his sex life when another one was on the way.

Sometimes she wondered if he went elsewhere … Stupid, stupid woman! She pulled herself together. Cetin, with his wretched job, barely had enough time for the family, let alone mistresses! And he was loving, both to her and the children. True, he couldn’t always remember all of the little ones’ names and his caresses were sometimes a little vague and distracted …

She heard him close the bedroom door behind him and imagined him, tatty briefcase in hand, tearing down towards the front door. She also heard another door open, slowly, a little tentatively - his father. Fatma allowed herself an infrequent scowl. It wasn’t that she actually disliked the old man and it was a fact that without the money Cetin’s elder brother gave them towards Timtir’s upkeep, life would be tough, but… It wasn’t worth thinking about. After all, they weren’t exactly young lovers, were they? The group of small children around the table attested to that. Not to mention the others who were still in their rooms. Nevertheless …

The old man put his head around the side of the door and called out to his son’s rapidly retreating back. ‘Cetin!’

His son turned to look at him, an unlit cigarette hanging at a crazy angle from his lips. He looked as if he was in a hurry, flustered and annoyed.

‘I’m leaving for work, Timur! What is it?’

The old man beckoned him over with his hand. ‘You

were very late home last night.’

He wanted details. It was difficult for Timiir Ikmen to keep himself from meddling in his son’s work. Cetin’s cases were often a source of excitement, an emotion the old man still craved with a passion. And anyway, he’d actually helped him with this one. He was owed something.

Cetin looked angrily at his watch. ‘Suleyman’s going to be picking me up in about two minutes! I’ve an old German to see at ten!’

‘What have you found out?’

The younger man sighed impatiently. His father’s eyes were eager, greedy for information. Oh, well, it was one of his few remaining pleasures! ‘I’ve spoken to both the Rabbi and that Maria Gulcu woman,’ he said. ‘The latter was a very exotic experience!’

‘Why? What was she like?’ Timur was almost breathless with anticipation.

‘Weird. She’s probably older than Allah and she lives in a sort of shrine to Old Russia.’ He cast his mind back to the events of the previous evening and tried not to shudder.

‘She said she used to be the dead man’s lover when they were both young. There was a terrible … oh, malevolence about her. It’s hard to explain. One of my - you know.’

The old man stared glassily into space. ‘A malevolent old Russian.’

‘Yes.’ Cetin picked up his briefcase from the floor and tried to pull his mind away from the unpleasant picture his father had just painted. ‘She rather fancied my pretty little sergeant.’ Suddenly and horribly, he realised that he was using Maria Gulcu’s own rather spiteful description of his colleague.

Timiir’s dry burnt laugh rattled towards him down the hall. ‘I’m not surprised!’

‘Cetin!’ Fatma’s voice wound its deep and sonorous way out of her kitchen and zeroed in upon its target.

Cetin squared his jaw and marched purposefully towards the front door. ‘I am gone!’

The old man watched his son close the door behind him and stumbled back into his room again. ‘A malevolent old Russian!’ he repeated to himself. ‘How exotic!’

The house was much more beautiful and a great deal less sinister than he had expected. In the car, his eyes narrowed against the glare from the road, Suleyman had imagined that Smits would live in a very dark, Gothic sort of place.

But logically there was no real reason why he should. Some Nazis, if indeed Smits were one of their number, presumably enjoyed classic elegance just as other people did. The enormous marble entrance hall and the immaculate English butler who showed them in did, however, strike him as a little excessive. There was rich, but there was also rich and vulgar, and Smits’s set-up definitely smacked of the latter.

‘Would you come this way please, gentlemen?’ the butler said.

Ikmen and Suleyman followed him across the hall and through a door which the menial held open for them.

Like the hall, the room they found themselves in was enormous, but unlike the hall it was dark. Books, thousands of them - some black, some dark green, a few wine-red - lined and described the contours of every wall. The bright sunlight from outside seemed to be absorbed by their spines, thinned by their no doubt yellowing pages.

An old and venerable library. The den of some impractical and absorbed academic.

‘Inspector Ikmen and Sergeant Suleyman, sir.’ The butler smiled at them both, bowed politely and then left. The man the policemen found themselves facing struggled painfully to get out of his elegant wing chair and smiled.

‘Please forgive me, gentlemen, getting to my feet is not the easy operation it once was.’ It was a deep, beautiful, almost operatic voice. He motioned them gracefully towards some chairs opposite his own. ‘Sit down, please.’

They moved forward. As he passed the old man, Suleyman took a good look at him. Reinhold Smits had been very handsome once. His hair, though grey, was still luxuriant and the bones of his face had that chiselled look that was almost stereotypically German in its hardness. He dressed well too. Given that he had at least to be somewhere in his eighties, Reinhold Smits wore stylish clothes. He dressed like a young businessman, rather like Suleyman himself, and it suited him. A pale grey double-breasted suit with matching shirt and tie flattered his thin, languid form. As he reseated himself his bony legs jutted out in front of him like tall silver birch trees.

ikmen sat down and Suleyman seated himself beside

him.

‘Well,’ said Smits, lacing his fingers underneath his chin.

‘How can I help you gentlemen?’

ikmen smiled in that slightly sad way that people do when they wish to be both friendly but also convey bad news of some sort. ‘We’ve come about one of your ex employees, sir.’

Smits smiled also, although his was patient rather than sad. ‘That much I gathered from my secretary. I have had many employees over the years. Might I ask who you wish to inquire about?’

‘I’m afraid it’s someone who worked for you many years ago in the packing department,’ ikmen said. ‘One Leonid Meyer.’

Knowing how vitally important Smits’s reaction to this information would be, Suleyman was not surprised to see that ikmen leant forward a little in order to observe the old man more closely. Not that there was anything, not even a flicker of recognition to see.

‘I’m afraid,’ Smits replied, ‘the name is not immediately familiar.’

‘Oh,’ said ikmen, ‘that surprises me.’

‘How so?’

‘Our interest in Mr Meyer stems from the fact that he was recently found murdered in his Balat apartment. He was named in the newspapers and so I assumed …’

‘Ah.’ Smits held up one long, thin, silencing finger. ‘Ah yes, the old gentleman battered to death. Yes, I am aware of that. But as for his being one of my people …’ He shrugged. ‘I mean he may well have been, but if as you say it was many years ago …’

‘Yes,’ said Ikmen. ‘I’m sorry sir. I realise that it must be difficult when one employs so very many people.’

‘Quite.’ Smits twirled one delicate wrist through the air like a magician and changed the subject. ‘May I interest you gentlemen in a cup of tea?’

The rapid change of direction caught both policemen unawares.

‘Er, yes, thanks,’ said ikmen. ‘That would be nice.’

Smits then turned to Suleyman. ‘And you, young man?’

‘Oh, thank you, yes.’

‘Good!’ Smits took a small silver bell from the table beside him and rang it. He then leant forward and raised his eyebrows as if he were imparting some great and scandalous secret. ‘Of course the tea will be au lait, to the English taste, but Wilkinson cannot make it after any other fashion. I hope that is acceptable?’

Suleyman hated English tea, but it seemed churlish

having accepted now to refuse. ‘Fine.’

Ikmen was obviously of the same mind. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, but Suleyman could see from his face that he didn’t relish the prospect either.

For several minutes after this exchange they all sat in silence, until the butler appeared and Smits gave him his orders. Suleyman noticed that Smits’s tone was quite different with the servant. It was harsh and without warmth.

Perhaps, he speculated, Smits was one of those who believed the ‘lower orders’ undeserving of common politeness.

As the butler left, ikmen opened up the conversation once again. ‘Getting back to Mr Meyer …’

‘Yes?’

‘And acknowledging that this was all a very long time ago …’

‘Your point being?’

‘Two quite independent sources have led us to believe, sir, that you actually dismissed Mr Meyer from your employ sometime in the early 1940s.’

‘Really? Might I know who or what these sources might be?’

‘I’m afraid I cannot divulge that information.’

‘No, no of course you can’t. Stupid me!’

ikmen looked across at Suleyman who nodded very slightly, well aware of what was now expected of him. He took over.

‘What we can tell you however, Mr Smits,’ he said, ‘is that Leonid Meyer still had the name and address of your Uskiidar plant in his address book at the time of his death.’

‘Did he really?’ A look that was almost impossible to interpret passed across his features. ‘How very odd.’

ikmen, who had now silently slid back into the depths of his chair was, Suleyman observed, watching closely.

‘Er …’ Smits paused briefly as if trying to gather his thoughts in the right order. ‘Did either of these sources of yours say why I might have dismissed this man?’

‘Not really—’