Belshazzar's Daughter (2 page)

For a few seconds he gathered himself thus, then he stood straight. She had gone. Not so much as a breath disturbed the pollution-coated afternoon air. Dazed, he made his way out of the courtyard and stopped in the street beyond. He looked up and down three or four times, but to no avail. The street, like the courtyard from which he had just emerged, was silent save for the roar of the traffic booming from the main road at its now nearby northern end. He moved towards the comforting sound of people and machines in motion, his mind a dark pit full of anxiety and a nagging distrust of what his eyes and his hands had just revealed to him. Perhaps he’d just had too much sun. Maybe the heat had fuddled his senses. And yet it had been her face!

There could be no doubt with a face like that, surely! So fine and yet so sensual, well bred and yet somehow wild.

Christ, he had to get home! If he started thinking about her now and moved in the direction of that shop …

He walked unsteadily towards the bus stop, the noises of people and vehicles growing around him with every step.

Dreamlike, that had been the quality of the experience, and yet he knew he was awake. The world of Main Street, Istanbul was too loud and intrusive to leave him in any doubt. Eighteen months ago he would have put it down to the medication and that would have been that. But …

He looked behind him to the exit from which he had

just come. From his angle of sight the buildings on either side of the tiny thoroughfare looked very close together now, as if they were sealing, closing for business. The temperature was over thirty degrees, but Robert Cornelius’s blood felt cold.

‘Fucking bastard!’ she said out loud, holding a hand encrusted with paste jewels up to the rose-coloured swelling above her right eye. She couldn’t believe it. Again! That was twice she had been beaten and denied her fee in as many days. What on earth made these men think they had the right? It was a service, like any other. Would they take bread from the bakery and then beat up the baker to avoid paying him? Of course not! But tarts? Tarts, especially of the old and very used variety, were another matter. She knew the risks, she’d always known them, but that still didn’t answer the vexed question of why. Men wanted sex, tarts provided sex. So why wave a twenty-thousand lira note in her face and then give her a black eye? Why not just take and have done with it? Guilt? A sudden vision of the broken-down wife with her prolapsed womb and ten children back home? Memories of youth when sex was free and life not quite so cheap?

But knowledge didn’t make it any better. Nothing except money assuaged the growling hunger pangs in her stomach and the urgent desire for a drink with more of a kick than tea.

‘Twenty thousand fucking lira!’ she announced to the silent, midnight streets of Balat.

Thirty-one years on the streets, pandering to the basest of men’s desires, had done no favours for Leah Delmonte.

Prostitution was no soft option. Like the movies, all couches, high-class madams and sherbet, it was not. Of course, it had not been quite as hard when she was a girl as it was now.

She had called herself Dolores in those days, and officially she had been employed as a dancer. ‘Madame Lilli proudly presents, direct from Madrid, Spain, Dolores, wild and passionate gypsy flamenco dancer!’ Just the memory of it made her want to cry. And they had known no different, all those soldiers, marines, young rich boys out for kicks, passing through her hands. Her ancestors had come from Seville, Toledo, some God-forsaken hole like that, and the Ladino language she had grown up speaking was supposed to be similar to Spanish. It was close enough for them. And she had been Dolores: she was exotic, she was beautiful, and at that time, undoubtedly, she could dance. But no more.

Turning forty had sounded the death-knell for Dolores.

That was five years back. Five years of being just Leah again. Plain Leah, good enough only for quick bunk-ups against walls.

And she was broke. She and Lilli, Madame Lilli as she had been in her youth, owed three months’ back rent on their shabby one-room apartment. Leah at least tried to get work, but Lilli - six years older than Leah, fat, blotchy, and tortured by appalling varicose veins - Lilli was not enthusiastic about working the streets any more. She sat in most evenings, eating, smoking, and listening to morbid Arabesque songs on the radio.

Leah turned the corner and found herself facing the entrance to her rundown apartment block. What a place to end up! A dirty doss-house not five minutes’ walk from the dirty doss-house where she had been born. Whatever had happened to all those dreams she had nursed so carefully as a child? Whatever had happened to her mother’s great ambitions for her daughter? Mistress to the President of the Republic by the time she reached twenty! What crap!

Leah looked towards the window of the tiny ground-floor room she shared with her ex-madam. The light was on, and through the thin nicotine-stained curtains she could clearly see Lilli. Back already. If, that is, she had even been out. Leah’s heart sank. She couldn’t face it. Lilli and her endless moaning about money, the awful scenes whenever she looked in the mirror. What Leah needed was a drink. A stiff vodka would help, or raki, even just the one would do.

But where the hell was she going to get money for alcohol?

She forced herself on towards the dimly lit entrance hall, her eyes stinging with barely restrained tears. It was the boredom of it that was so bad. The hunger, the lack of nice things, the sordidness she could take; but the dullness!

The never-changing, stupefying boredom …

And then she remembered. She stopped. Of course! Old Meyer, the Russian on the top floor. ‘Shouting’ Meyer.

Lonely, anti-social, mad, some people said. But he always had booze, lots of it. Odd really. Why someone with the economic power not only to pay the rent, but to smoke and buy at least one bottle of vodka a day, should choose to live in a filthy rat-hole like Balat was a mystery to her. But Leah was not one to question. She pushed those thoughts away from her and imagined the delicious taste of neat spirit on her tongue. Provided you kept quiet, tolerated his unintelligible raving, and could close your mind to the smell of his room, Meyer was a safe bet. His filthy bottle could be your filthy bottle, and there were always plenty of cigarettes in his place, scattered like sticks of chalk all across his floor and over his bed. It was a last resort, drinking with a lunatic, but she was desperate.

She crept past her own door on the ground floor, careful to avoid the all-too-numerous creaking floorboards, and ascended the stairs. Naturally, nosy Lilli would want in on the party if she knew, and Leah was determined that if any drink were going, she, and she alone, was going to have it. She, at least, had tried to find some work. Lilli didn’t deserve a drink. Braving Meyer’s shit-hole was Leah’s treat.

She licked her lips and moved forward.

It was heavy going for her unfit body, up three flights of stairs to the top floor. It was with great relief that she finally emerged on to the uppermost balcony and into the outside air again. She stood, hands on hips, panting for a few seconds. There were three doors giving off from this balcony. Cell-like hovels existed behind them. The first two were occupied by the Abrahams and their ever-increasing brood. The last one, at the far end, was Meyer’s.

When she had composed herself a little, Leah turned her attention to her appearance. The old man was a

complete crazy, but that gave her no excuse for turning up looking a mess. He was old, but he was still

a man. And she was a woman, a professional woman.

She still had a certain pride. A little powder on her sore and blackened eye, a dab of lipstick here, eye-shadow there …

She patted her elaborate hennaed wig with her hands, making sure it was firmly in position. A relic of happier, more solvent times, that wig. When she originally purchased it, she hadn’t actually needed it. Perhaps she’d had a vision of the future all those years ago. She replaced the make-up in her cheap mock-leopard-skin bag, drew herself up to her full height, and sashayed past the filth-encrusted doors of the Abrahams’ quarters.

Meyer’s door was open. This was not unusual; the old man rarely shut it during the summer months. His tiny cell caught the sun nearly all day and a source of ventilation was absolutely vital for both his comfort and his health. His light, however, was off. This did not augur well. It indicated that he had probably drunk all his liquor and was now sleeping it off. Leah didn’t know what to do. She had been looking forward to this drink, and to be thwarted like this …

She turned the possibilities over in her mind. She could wake the old man and ask him for a drink, thus risking a justifiably angry outburst on his part. She could go away boozeless and depressed. Or …

Or, if Meyer were dead drunk, she could switch on his light, go in and scour his room for dregs in discarded bottles.

There was unlikely to be much, but even a drop would do.

It was doubtful that he would wake unless shaken, and she was desperate.

She pushed the door gently with her foot, letting just enough light into the room to discern the bottom of his bed. A smell of sour vomit - or was it rotten vegetables?

- assaulted her nostrils. No. Burnt food - meat. Filthy old bastard! God, but she needed this drink! She knew that the light switch was on the wall just beside the door, but she couldn’t see it. She searched. Her roving hand skittered noisily over the cheap plasterboard wall as her deep-red fingernails sought out the telltale protrusion. She found it.

The switch clicked and suddenly the room was bathed in a jaundiced light from the single grimy bulb. For a second she didn’t really know what she was looking at. At first, and to her confusion, it appeared that someone had thrown a heap of old clothes and a large lump of meat on to the bed. But then she saw the eyes, crusted with blood but open, forced apart by the action of rigor, staring right at her. From the mouth downwards, right to the tops of his legs, Meyer was just a mass of blood and weeping organs.

So ravaged was he that even some of the rib bones were exposed, white, stark, covered only by thin streamers of raw, shredded flesh. As she looked on, horribly fascinated, what was left of the liver detached itself and fell glutinously on to the blood-soaked bedclothes that surrounded the body.

Leah felt a bitter sickness rise in her throat, but she couldn’t stop looking. And the smell! Leah put her hand to her mouth and gagged. She had not eaten that day and the hot bile from her stomach, its only contents, seared her throat.

Her gaze travelled up his body once more, his entrails, his eyes, his hair, the wall behind the bed … the wall …

It was there. Drawn in what appeared to be blood. Huge, its hard edges feathered by dried drips and smears of red: a swastika.

Every brittle, Jewish bone in her body screamed in

recognition. Sour yellow bile bubbled between the fingers clenched around her mouth and then she screamed. She didn’t move. Even when Mr Abrahams from next door came in to see what was wrong, still she didn’t move. She just screamed.

And twenty minutes later, when the first of the policemen and the doctor arrived, Leah, her legs wet with her own urine, was still screaming. She knew what the swastika meant all right.

‘Inspector Ikmen?’

The little man half lying on the couch was holding

the telephone to his left ear, but his eyes were closed.

It was dark. Still obviously an unhallowed hour of the night. Not the sort of time to be talking on the telephone, not the time to be doing anything apart from

sleeping.

‘Suleyman?’ he growled. ‘What do you want?’

The voice at the other end of the line took one very deep breath and sighed. ‘There’s been an incident, sir. A very unpleasant business. In Balat.’

The voice was grave and, for the normally cool Suleyman, unusually querulous, almost as if he were trembling. Cetin Ikmen half opened his eyes and observed with some irritation that he was still wearing his clothes from the day before.

It was not easy living with Fatma when she was pregnant, consigned to the couch for three months at a stretch, ikmen took a packet of cigarettes from his crumpled jacket pocket and lit up.

‘So who’s dead then?’ He sounded resigned.

‘An old man, sir. One of the old Balat Jews. A neighbour, Mr Abraham, said the victim’s name was Leonid Meyer.

That is, as far as he could identify—’

‘Where and how did he die?’

‘In his apartment, sir.’ Suleyman paused. It was a tense, troubled silence. ‘As for how he died, Inspector … well, I think you’d better come and see for yourself. The doctor’s already here, but… I’ve never seen anything like it before.

Never.’

Ikmen started to wake up. He had not been imagining things. Suleyman was upset and it took a lot to

rattle his cool exterior. It was bad, then. A nasty one.

Shit.

‘All right. Where are you?’

‘Bottom of Fevzi Pasa, turn off towards the Kariye. You’ll see the cars and I’ve got men posted outside the entrance to the block. Top floor.’

‘Any witnesses?’

‘There’s the woman who found the body, another neighbour; but she’s still in shock, sir.’

‘All right, I’m on my way.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, to wake you …’ Suleyman’s voice broke into something that sounded almost like a sob. “I think you’ll need to bring…’

“I never work without it, Suleyman, you know that.’

‘Of course, sir. I’ll see you—’

“I’ll be as quick as I can.’

Cetin replaced the receiver on its cradle and stubbed his cigarette out in one of the numerous nearby ashtrays. He rubbed his face with his hands and, rising wearily to his feet, moved unsteadily across the room to the light switch. With a flick of his finger the room was bathed in white, cold, slightly pulsating neon. The effect upon his tired night-time eyes was like having sand thrown into his face. It was at times like this that Cetin wished he had an ordinary job: in a bank, driving taxis, hotelier - anything except police inspector.