Belshazzar's Daughter (26 page)

He felt the pressure of fingers on his leg and looked down.

‘I don’t kill anyone, Robert.’ Her words were slow, calm and deliberate. ‘Not me.’

Her eyes were so clear and lovely that he almost believed her. But Robert knew what little snakes they all were - women. His wife had lied too, consistently. Women’s weakness, they couldn’t help it. But he was disappointed.

If she would only share it with him, he could wrap her guilt up in his love and take her away.

‘Mr Meyer was a very good man.’ Her words broke his train of thought and he looked down at her questioningly.

Was she just deceiving herself with this show of affection for the murder victim or what? If she was, it was a good performance. ‘Mr Meyer, the dead man. He help

Grandmother out from Russia.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. They come to Turkey together after Revolution.

For little time they were lovers.’

Robert recharged his glass and leant back into the depths of his sofa. ‘Go on.’

‘Leonid Meyer then take job in a cotton factory. He work for the German man called Mr Smits. He was not a good man, this Mr Smits.’

Robert had the distinct impression that something very important was being said here. But whether its importance stemmed from the truth or from some darker motive, he couldn’t tell. In addition, he was almost certain that he had heard the name Smits somewhere before. ‘And so?’

he said.

‘This man Smits one day see Grandmama and say to

Leonid Meyer that he want her for himself.’ Her eyes widened as her story unfolded, making her once again animated and even more beautiful. ‘Leonid Meyer argue with Smits about this and Smits then put him on a very bad job at the factory.’

‘So what happened then?’

‘When the war begin in Europe, lot of people here agree with the Germans. So Mr Smits get rid of Leonid Meyer from his job, say to him, “You go from here now, you dirty Jew,” and—’

‘Oh, what!’ Of course! Now he remembered. Ikmen

had mentioned someone called Smits, almost in passing, but …

Natalia looked at him questioningly. ‘What is it, Robert?’

‘I’ll tell you in a moment. Go on.’

She shrugged. ‘There is little more to tell. From that day Smits hate Leonid Meyer. Make certain he never get other job again. Leonid Meyer very unhappy always.’ She looked up at him. ‘What is wrong, Robert?’

‘The police asked me about this Smits man, I’m sure of it. Whether I knew him - I said that I didn’t. It was only a brief mention, but … I suppose it may indicate that they are seriously considering his part in—’

‘Grandmama,’ she put in, as if the old woman were the only authority on the matter of any merit, ‘believe that they do not take seriously this Smits.’

Although his eyes were, as ever, filled with love for her, Robert-also now viewed Natalia with some caution. ‘Oh?’

‘Also,’ she continued, ‘it may be that this man has some place in this problem that they do not yet know.’

Robert felt part of his mind harden as he considered what her words might mean.

But Natalia, as she so often did, pre-empted him before he could speak. ‘We cannot, as I tell you before, because of trouble with immigration, make any more conversation with police. Who can say what will happen if they know I am with Leonid Meyer on that day? But if some other person were to tell them about this man …’

‘You mean like me?’

‘Yes.’

He stood up and rubbed his head with his hands. Both her strange and troubling mood swings and her disturbing words were, together with the enormous midsummer heat, fuddling his brain. ‘But I can’t say anything about this Smits to the police,’ he said, ‘I’ve told them I don’t know him.

I mean they’ll want to know where I got my information from. And that’s apart from the fact that this man may well be entirely innocent.’ He turned to face her. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I do not know,’ she said simply, ‘but if you can think of something to help us in this situation then I would be grateful. And this man Smits … well, Grandmama say he was a Nazi person, so …’

‘You know that for a fact?’ He so wanted to do as she asked, so wanted for her to be grateful.

She smiled. ‘Oh yes. Smits was a Nazi, that is sure.’

He took her hands in his. ‘All I can say, Natalia, is that I will try and—’

‘You are clever man, you will do.’ She kissed him,

silencing any further protest or doubt. And as her embrace took effect upon his body, as he once again slid his hand between the thinness of her blouse and the thickness of her breast, Robert surrendered entirely to his feelings. If Natalia said that she had nothing to do with the murder then why not just believe her? And if someone who was, or had been, a Nazi could possibly be implicated then why not nudge things along in that direction? Quite how, he did not know yet, however …

And yet …

And yet what if she were …

He felt one of her hands slip quickly, like a small dextrous fish, inside the waistband of his trousers. And for the rest of their time together his internal wrangling stopped completely.

Cetin Ikmen rolled over on to his back and peered myopically at the face of his watch. Ten to six. Just too late to try and get some more sleep (although that was a joke) and too early to start moving around. He cursed and then hit the back of the couch with murderous intent. Many more nights like this and he would go insane.

It wasn’t that he actually resented Fatma for consigning him to the couch. It wasn’t even that he would have actually preferred to sleep with her in her current condition.

Pregnant, she was both huge and restless and, if he were honest, he would have to admit that being with her would be almost as bad as being where he was now. If only he could find some way to stop almost smothering himself against the back of the confounded thing every time he turned over, he could cope. He had tried just about every position and technique he could think of, but to no avail. The couch, Allah damn it to hell, was far too cunning to allow itself to be outwitted by a mere policeman. It wanted him sleeping down on that awful smelly floor and if he wasn’t really, really dedicated to defeating it, that was where he was going to end up.

He cursed again, murmuring the word ‘bastard!’ under his breath, lest he wake his sleeping family. That done, he sat up and instead of performing his usual morning ritual of reviewing the horrors of another sleepless night, he turned his mind towards the more productive subject of his current case. Just before he and sleep had entered into their familiar nightly battle for supremacy, Ikmen had written down a few notes regarding possible routes through the maze of evidence that had accrued in the Meyer case so far. With one lazy but deft movement he picked a cigarette up off the floor, threw it into his mouth and lit up. Thus fortified, he then lurched across to the light switch, pressed it and flooded the lounge with ghastly neon brilliance. As he shuffled back to the couch from hell, rubbing his eyes as he went, he picked up the notebook from the place where he had dropped it so many agonising hours before - on top of a heap of laundry. Amid a welter of cigarette smoke, he then sat down and reviewed his handiwork. Basically there were three main bodies of information.

Firstly there was the strictly factual evidence. Leonid Meyer, an elderly Jewish man, had been first battered with some sort of blunt instrument and then subjected to torture by sulphuric car battery acid. His death had been protracted and agonising and, having witnessed its course, his assailant had then drawn a large swastika in Meyer’s blood on the wall above his head. At some time either before, during or after the event, someone - possibly the assailant had been sick over by the door. Forensic analysis had

since revealed that the main constituent of said mass was principally beetroot. The Englishman, Robert Cornelius, had by his own admission been in the vicinity of Meyer’s apartment at the time, as had, rather more tenuously, a large black car - although this latter piece of evidence, it had to be admitted, had come from an old alcoholic who couldn’t even remember his own name. In addition, further investigation of the corpse by Arto Sarkissian had revealed some extremely old but nevertheless deep burn scars on Meyer’s hand and arm - scars caused, possibly, by gunpowder. ikmen, looking at this veritable rag-bag of disconnected evidence, sighed deeply, put his cigarette out and then immediately lit another.

Around these somewhat bizarre facts revolved, so he believed, the two other bodies of information, which he had labelled ‘Two Routes to Resolution’, as he saw it so far.

The first one concerned the original and most immediately obvious explanation for Meyer’s death, which was that of anti-Semitism. Supporting evidence for this included, of course, the swastika, plus the testimonies of both Rabbi SJmon and Maria Gulcu - both of which had included

reference to the notion that Meyer had suffered from anti-Semitism before. Against this was the fact that there was not, apart from one address in Meyer’s notebook, any hard evidence to suggest that the man who had been

named as Meyer’s anti-Semitic persecutor had ever known the victim or held such unsavoury views. In any event, their supposed liaison had happened so long ago that it was almost irrelevant. In addition, there was no reason to suppose that anti-Semitism was a growing movement within the city, either amongst the young or, like Smits, the older generation. The only really concrete act of violence against Jews that had come out so far was that which had been perpetrated by Robert Cornelius. And that had happened in England for reasons, if Cornelius were to be believed, which stemmed not from anti-Semitism, but from rather more personal motives.

The second, and perhaps most esoteric, route concerned issues surrounding Meyer’s past. One source had expressed the opinion that Meyer had been a member of the Bolshevik party when a young man back in Russia, and Maria Gulcu’s reaction had seemed to confirm this. Quite naturally, for those troubled times, he had killed people in the course of his duties. Unusually, however, he had then traded his new life of working-class glory for a life of poverty in a foreign country, firstly with a woman who only ever tolerated him and secondly with his only true love - the bottle. Tortured by guilt and, possibly, fearful lest some, as yet unknown, witness to his old crime should come forward and reveal this horror to the world, Leonid Meyer died without any of the honours the old Soviet Government would have, no doubt, bestowed upon him had he stayed where he was.

Those who mourned him included the widow Blatsky and the Gulcu family who, he now knew, possessed absolutely no legal status in Turkey. A group of ghosts headed by the oldest spectre of them all, Maria Gulcu - the woman who could never love or be loved - unlike her granddaughter.

And here, once again, was Mr Robert Cornelius, teacher of English, lover of Natalia Gulcu, destroyer of Jews - the only person in the right place at the right time.

And yet, although Cornelius seemed to pop up in each and every body of evidence or route to resolution that was contemplated, what on earth could his motive for killing Meyer be? So he knew the Gulcu family and had once

hit out at a Jewish lawyer - that amounted to very little really. Even the fact that he had admitted being in the vicinity of the crime and had been identified didn’t mean that he had been involved with it. Although the fact that he had exhibited more than just a passing interest in the mechanics of the death penalty - or rather those people who might be excepted from that process - did strike Ikmen as odd. Unless Cornelius actually had someone in mind with regard to this, his interest would appear to be quite unintelligible.

That Cornelius was close to Meyer’s apartment at the time of his death, and that he was also involved with a family who knew the dead man and possibly also knew about that man’s guilty past, seemed like more than mere coincidence. However, this did beg the question of why the Englishman had so willingly admitted to being in Balat on that fateful afternoon. Surely if he had known what was happening, he would have at least tried to distance himself from the event?

ikmen got up, went over to the window and opened the curtains. The full, fierce heat of the day was still several hours away, but already the shopkeepers were washing down the pavements with water. By lunchtime everyone would be well and truly frazzled in the heat and the dust and the ever-present swarm of flies. By then, he knew, thinking would be next to impossible. By then he, like everybody else, would be simply going through the motions. He put the light out, returned to the couch and sat down again.

What his boss, Commissioner Ardic, wanted was, of

course, a neat and quick solution. He’d even told the press that they were indeed on the brink of a major breakthrough.

Not that ikmen had done so in person, of course. He’d made very sure that he was well and truly out of the way when that press conference had started. Ardic had nearly gone berserk. What he wanted was Smits and, furthermore, ikmen’s backing for the Nazi connection theory. And, to be honest, ikmen had to agree that if Smits’s past or present allegiances could be proved as well as a rather more current connection with Meyer, this probably was the most fruitful direction in which to move. Of all the people that ikmen had interviewed so far, Rabbi SJmon had seemed to be the most reliable and he had been of the opinion that Smits could be involved at some level. The big black car as reported by the raving alcoholic was a tenuous link but Ikmen had seen such vehicles on Smits’s drive.

What really puzzled ikmen most was not, however, something that was, or seemed to be, central to the case. It was how and indeed why the Gulcu family appeared to live in the country without any official status. There had to be a reason, although he could not fathom what that might be. But that it was connected in some way to Leonid Meyer was, irrationally but pervasively, on his mind. He was just pondering how, now that he was in possession of this fact, he might effectively hide this information from the heavy-handed clutches of immigration until after his investigations were concluded, when the lounge door burst open and his father staggered in.