Belshazzar's Daughter (47 page)

‘He was my brother. His name was Alexei.’

Robert’s patience suddenly snapped. Here he was in the midst of the most terrible situation that had ever occurred to him and this hag was coming out with a fairy-tale almost as old as the century. And where was Natalia? He preloaded his voice with irony. ‘So you’re Princess Anastasia of Russia, are you?’

Her head snapped upwards again and those eyes of hers silenced him immediately. ‘Leonid told me my name was Maria Nicolaeva Romanova, the Tsar’s third daughter and the only survivor. It meant little to me at the time, Mr Cornelius. At the time my only feelings on the matter were that everybody I had ever known was now dead. I was totally alone.’

‘So what happens then,’ said Cohen, looking away, as was so irritatingly his custom, from the road and at the person he was talking to.

Suleyman grabbed wildly at the steering wheel and shouted, ‘Will you watch the road, or—’

‘OK! OK!’ Cohen turned his attention back on to the thick morning traffic and then returned once again to his original subject. ‘But what happens if this Cornelius person is at Karadeniz Sokak and old ikmen isn’t?’

‘Then we will bring Mr Cornelius in,’ replied Suleyman with some determination.

‘And it’ll be our kill, so to speak?’

‘Yes,’ said Suleyman with, it had to be admitted, some satisfaction. ‘Yes, it will.’

Cohen laughed. ‘That’ll show him, won’t it!’

‘Yes it will,’ the young man said through his teeth. ‘Yes it will.’

Her story was hard to follow, not because it was complicated, but because she herself, at times, appeared to be unsure about the facts that lay behind it. Leonid Meyer had taken her out of the country via Armenia. Until they reached the comparative safety of Constantinople, they both worked as casual labourers in a circus. Maria took the money at the entrance to the freak show. This memory amused her greatly. At the time she had difficulty coming to terms with who Meyer told her she was. She couldn’t necessarily trust the man, for a start. She had only vague memories of events before the execution. Events that could have happened to numerous aristocratic girls of her age. The bullet graze on her face didn’t help either and she frequently felt that her true place should be behind those filthy curtains that hid the three-legged man, the bearded lady and the Siamese twins from non-paying public gaze.

But Meyer was insistent about her identity. It seemed to excite him sexually and he took her often and without tenderness during their long and arduous journey.

‘Then, just before Constantinople, something happened.’

She looked him straight in the eyes and stared hard without blinking. Robert knew it was all so much twaddle, it had to be, but he was mesmerised. ‘One day I woke up, not with regained memories, but with the perfect certainty that Leonid was right. All the way across Anatolia he had browbeaten me with it - how I as the only surviving member of the family was now heiress to a fortune. He said someone had once told him how the Tsar had managed to get much of his private fortune transferred abroad just before the Revolution. His plan was for us to find our way across to Western Europe and claim it. I agreed at first, what else could I do? But then that day came and with it came fear.

I was the Tsar’s only surviving child, a person Russia’s new rulers had hated enough to want to kill. Under the Tsar, the old Imperial Secret Service, the Okrana, had agents all over the world, even I knew that. It was unlikely that the Bolsheviks would operate in a different fashion. And as you know, history has proved me right in this case. I became afraid for my life.’

Nicholas walked up to the head of the bed and took his mother’s hand. She had been talking for some time and was beginning to look tired. But Robert was tired too: of her and her stupid story; of the irrelevancy of everything she was telling him; of not being able to see Natalia. Also the desire to tell the police was going. Perhaps it was all the talk of death. ‘I still don’t understand what Meyer’s murder has to do with all this.’

‘You will.’ She squeezed her son’s hand and smiled at him. ‘Anyway, I refused to go along with Leonid’s plan and at Uskiidar I left him. He was very angry and threatened to expose me anyway, but I knew that he wouldn’t. You see Leonid was implicated too. It was Leonid who shot my brother, little more than a child at the time. Even then the guilt crucified his soul. So I was alone. But not for long. I met an old man, Mehmet Gulcu. Then I met Leonid again and I told him about Mehmet. Mehmet was rich and Leonid approved. We didn’t marry, but I bore him three children. The second one, Sergei’ - she looked across, Robert fancied in disgust, at the cripple - ‘confirmed my belief in my identity. Serge is as he is because he has haemophilia, just like my brother the Tsarevich Alexei.’ She stared at the wall behind Robert’s head. ‘Strange his blood was so thick, really.’

She didn’t speak again for a while. Nicholas took up the story. ‘When Papa died, Mama had little to think of except her past. She read, you know. It grew. This room she painted violet, just like the boudoir of the Tsarina Alexandra. She collected pictures of “herself” and others. Sometimes she thinks maybe she remembers something … Shut in this house, so afraid, the blood becomes very important to her.

Romanov blood, so she tells us. At twenty years old I want to marry some girl, but Mama says no. The blood—’

Anya screamed. Robert turned to look at her. What he saw was a trembling white ghost, its mouth twisted like a Mobius strip. Strangely, Nicholas smiled. ‘Mr Cornelius, my sister Anya is also the mother of my two children. Mama was most specific about preserving Romanov blood.’

For the first time in his life Robert really felt his skin crawl.

Not because of what Natalia and her sibling, brother, sister, whatever it was, were. That wasn’t their fault, but the mind behind it … A young male voice interjected. It came from over by the shuttered window. The person Robert had hoped might be Natalia, but wasn’t. The old woman cooed at him in dark, liquid Russian. Robert remembered that most of the ‘Anastasias’ hadn’t actually been able to speak their ‘own’

language.

‘Cruel, isn’t it?’ Maria Gulcu turned her attention to him once again. ‘But it was necessary and Leonid, who had by this time taken to drink, approved.’ She smiled.

‘All my family loved Leonid; he had saved me. If Uncle Leonid said a thing they knew that thing must be right.

The grandchildren particularly, idolised him - until that is, some of us older people, well, myself, really, became a little careless with our talk. When one day, just prior to that fateful Monday of yours, I became sick of the endless paean of praise that always surrounded mention of my poor old Jewish friend. When, out of jealousy, I told a dear young person a truth that shattered each and every heroic Meyer illusion.’

She looked around the room at her almost complete

family, her face set and impassive. Robert followed her eyes with his, but they came to rest nowhere. ‘You see, sadly, Mr Cornelius, when secrets do come out, some people find it very hard to come to terms with them.’ She called out towards the chair by the window in Russian.

Two pale hands braced themselves against the arms of the chair and a very familiar profile leant into view.

‘Do you have any idea what would happen if a stray cigarette end or spark landed in the back of your rig?’

The pop-eyed driver crossed his arms on top of the

half-open cab window and nodded his head aggressively.

‘What?’

Of course he could be genuinely stupid, although ikmen, in his present state of mind, preferred to think of the man as criminally negligent. After all his accursed truck had just rendered his back bumper into the shape of a tormented letter ‘S’.

He shouted, ‘You drive around with a fucking great waxed bag full of gasoline, exposed to every element going, and you want me to tell you what happens if that little lot meets a flame!’

The driver paused for a second before spitting his reply.

‘Yeah.’

‘Well it catches fire of course, you dull cunt! What do you think it’s going to do? Run to the doctor for a bandage?’

He took his notebook and pen out of his pocket. ‘What’s your licence-plate number and whom do you work for?’

The driver puffed indignantly and folded his arms. ‘You’re not in the traffic division. I don’t have—’

‘Don’t fuck with me, you little shit! One more smart word from you and you’ll find yourself in a very small room sharing toilet facilities with a homosexual rapist for the rest of the week!’

Several hundred horns at the back of the accident all sounded in unison. The truck driver’s mouth turned down at the corners and he mumbled: ‘34 KV7 99 and I work for my brother.’

ikmen wrote it down. ‘Who is?’

‘Adnan Kemal.’

Avci tapped ikmen on the shoulder once again. ‘Sir, there’s a traffic cop coming over from the cigarette kiosk.’

‘Good,’ ikmen snapped back to the driver of the truck.

‘And where does Mr Kemal live?’

‘iskender.’

The traffic cop drew level with ikmen’s disgruntled little party, ikmen tore a page out of his notebook and thrust it into the traffic policeman’s hand. ‘Here. There’s his licence-plate number and the name of the man he works for. I’m busy, I’ve had it with this bastard, you do it!’

He’d only been on duty for ten minutes. He’d only been a policeman for six months. ‘Oh,’ he said ineffectually.

It wasn’t Natalia. But then, thinking about it, she had to be at work now, didn’t she? Robert peered, his eyes watering, through the smoke-encrusted gloom and felt his breath stop.

It was a young man and he was crying. His voice broke as he spoke in their language. He pleaded with her, his hands stretched out trembling before him, but her face was stone.

Like her soul, Robert thought. The pleading continued like a soft dirge. She spoke over the top of it, drowning its dark, melodious lower registers.

‘This is Misha, Mr Cornelius, Natalia’s twin brother. We don’t show him to many people because he’s not quite right.

Sometimes people mistake him for his sister, which is very convenient. When, on the very rare occasions he leaves this house, and people who know us see him they just assume it is Natalia. It takes their minds off his bizarre behaviour.

It is a mistake, I believe, you once made yourself.’

But he’d already made that connection. Misha’s body was thin, all of it. ‘So what’s wrong with him?’ Robert kept his eyes firmly fixed on to what looked like a carnival mask of his lover’s face.

The old woman sighed. ‘He is inbred. What more do I need to say? They can be more stupid than the rest of us, Mr Cornelius, and Misha is very stupid.’

Robert hated the malice in her voice. If Misha was stupid it was hardly his fault. ‘Well, you created him.’

‘Yes, God forgive me.’ She paused and lit another cigarette.

‘However, stupid though he may be, my poor grandson knew full well after I had done my business what Uncle Leonid had done to his great-grandfather the Tsar and his family and he decided that the old Jew was going to have to pay for that.’

‘So it was Misha who killed Leonid Meyer?’

‘Yes. You saw the boy, I believe, on your way home from your work.’

Robert looked across at the sad, slack-jawed but sickeningly familiar face. It all made sense now, or at least

that part of it did. The thin shoulder, the unfashionable clothes …

‘But then, if you knew …’

‘Oh but I didn’t even for a second dream that he would act upon his new knowledge,’ she replied. ‘I stupidly thought him far too dull and passive even to think about doing such a thing. However, when Misha went missing just after lunch on the Monday, I did become alarmed. He rarely left the house and had never done so on his own and then when Nicholas found that part of Mr Gulcu’s old car had been tampered with …’

‘Car?’ Robert frowned. ‘What car?’

She smiled. ‘When Mehmet died he left, amongst other things, a car in the cellar, which is also a garage, beneath this house. Because none of us could or wanted to drive we let Misha play with it, which he did. And as Nicky explained to the boy, provided he didn’t tamper with the battery, which contained a powerful, corrosive acid, no harm could come to him. He obeyed this dictate about the battery until that Monday when he removed it for precisely its devastating destructive powers.’

‘Acid?’ Robert felt his mind reel and spin with information that was coming both too rapidly and too late.

Quite inappropriately, he thought, she smiled. ‘If you had been listening to me as you should, Mr Cornelius, you would know that after the Bolsheviks shot the Romanovs they attempted to destroy their bodies with sulphuric acid.

Our little Misha here has lived and breathed that story all of his life, and so when it came to selecting a weapon with which to kill Leonid, a hated Bolshevik murderer, sulphuric battery acid seemed to offer him the kind of poetic justice he was seeking.’

Robert paused for a moment before speaking. The notion!

of using acid as a murder weapon was proving rather too much to take in. After all, hadn’t the police said that Meyer had been battered to death? ‘So what you are saying, MrsJ

Gulcu …’

‘What I am saying, Mr Cornelius, is that Misha went to!

Leonid’s apartment that afternoon, hit him over the head with either the battery or something else, I don’t know, and]

then emptied the acid down his throat and over his body.’; ‘But the police …’

‘The police did not make the more dreadful aspects of this crime known to the public, Mr Cornelius, fearing as they always do that demented people may copy it. I know of these things only because Misha and Natalia told me about them.’

‘Natalia?’ His heart jerked. ‘Where does she come into all this?’

‘When Nicky told me that Misha had gone, taking with him something of potential destructiveness, I called Natalia at her place of work and told her to get over to Leonid’s apartment. I was hysterical by this time and bitterly regretful of what I had said to the boy. As soon as Nicky had told me about the battery, I knew what Misha was about to do. Knowing little else besides Romanov history in his poor blighted little life and, in the light of what I had so recently told him about Leonid, it seemed obvious to me. But when Natalia reached the apartment, the deed had already been done and Misha had gone. Left with only Leonid’s dreadful body, which reduced the poor girl to violent sickness, she then had very quickly to decide what to do. Fearing that when the police did finally arrive they would find her brother’s fingerprints on the old battery she took it away with her when she went and then deposited it on some waste ground on the way home. She was there very soon after her brother and you may even have seen her as you chased Misha down the road. Not that you would have recognised her. She always covered her head and face with a shawl when she went to visit her uncle in Balat she didn’t like the way the Jews stared at her. Odd, don’t you think, given her usual outlandish behaviour? But then the shawl did allow her to get that battery out unseen and so …’