Belshazzar's Daughter (49 page)

But they all just watched instead. It was so unusual to see a bright light in that room. It harshly illuminated the old woman’s face and for the first time Robert saw the long, lopsided scar that ran down the side of her face. Had she got it there, in that cramped Ekaterinburg cellar? Had perhaps that old Jew, in whose death all these terrible, frightening people had had a hand, inflicted that wound? Why had he saved her anyway?

A loud, splintering, cracking noise alerted Robert to the fact that part of the bone-dry wooden wall had ignited and he moved. ‘Somebody get some water, for Christ’s sake!’

But still they didn’t move. A strange sort of calm seemed to have come over them, even Misha. They looked at

the fire as if they were watching television. It was an unreal image from which they were removed in both

time and location. It was then that Robert’s instinct for self-preservation kicked in.

Cohen swung the car into the steep, narrow alleyway beside the Pera Palas Hotel and was struck immediately by an appalling stench that hit him like a brick wall. It was a very acidic smell that actually hurt the inside of his nostrils.

He pulled a face and looked across at Suleyman. ‘What the fuck is that, Mehmet?’

Suleyman, by the disgusted expression on his face, had obviously noticed it too. He took a deep sniff and nearly choked on the contents of the air drawn in. ‘Oh, I don’t know! It’s almost like burning, although’ - he put his head through the wide-open car window and looked up at the sky - ‘I can’t see anything

Cohen pulled a face and paused the car at the top of the alleyway before proceeding across Me§rutiyet Caddesi. He saw the hotel doorman run across the road and up into the little road opposite.

‘Is that Karadeniz where that man’s just gone?’

‘Yes.’

A few other men and a young woman dressed entirely in black followed after the doorman, also running. For some reason Suleyman looked up again and saw a thick curl of black smoke rise above the grim buildings towards I stiklal Caddesi. ‘Ś

He snapped at Cohen. ‘Stop the car!’

With one clean bound he was through the door and running across Me§rutiyet Caddesi in the direction of Karadeniz Sokak. The tiny street was full of people all looking up towards the top of a house about halfway down. For a second Suleyman looked wildly about him for signs of ikmen’s presence, but when he found none he looked up too. The whole top floor of number 12, Karadeniz Sokak was on fire.

Panting heavily in the wake of his headlong dash out of the old woman’s apartment, Robert looked up through!

the ocean of woodsmoke rolling towards him from the stairwell he had just descended. They, the family, were!

moving about now, he could hear their feet running above him, their voices. His break for the door had woken them!

Nicholas had followed him as far as the bathroom and had gathered some water in a bucket.

Robert looked at the telephone on the hall table and wondered whether he should use it. But there were people outside now, lots of people, one of them surely must have called the fire brigade.

He stared up into the stairwell again. A six-foot gobbet of smoke rolled down towards him and the walls of the house creaked and splintered as they expanded in the intense heat To go up again would be insane, but none of them were coming down to him and if the brigade didn’t arrive soon they would all be incinerated or overcome by smoke. Not, of course, that they would understand that. Although why he should care …

But he did. Whatever the Gulcus claimed to be it was beyond doubt that they were human, if unworldly. If someone didn’t organise them they would all die. They would try to fight the flames with what little water they had without even thinking about getting themselves downstairs and into the street. They would do that because she, by virtue of her age, was going to be so difficult to move. And they wouldn’t leave her. Leaving her was pointless because without her they had nothing. Whatever flimsy proof had ever existed about them was contained within her. They either all came or they all didn’t.

Robert put one foot on to the first stair and took a deep breath. Of course for him it wasn’t about them and who they were at all. He didn’t really know the Gulcus and what he did understand about them painted a very ugly picture in his mind. No, it was guilt that was going to make him act. The guilt of a man who knows he has done something unforgivable - the subsequent pathetic attempt to make amends that sometimes overwhelms the most logical of minds. That old Jew he hit might be dead but if he could just save even one of the people upstairs …

The smoke was thicker now and was beginning to make his eyes smart. If he didn’t go soon, he would never go.

Then the opportunity would be lost and he would be just like every other man of violence who had ever lived. Cruel and thoughtless - not like the self he knew he had really always been at all.

Robert took another deep breath, put his hand over his mouth and ran up towards the black, curling smoke. The house sighed around him.

Dr Koc took hold of Fatma’s sweaty hand and smiled. ‘It’s all right, Mrs ikmen, you can push this time.’

‘I won’t tear?’ There were tears running down her cheeks.

She wiped them gently away with the back of her hand.

‘No, you won’t tear. You’ve been very brave and you’re going to be fine.’

She gripped her hand hard and for a second Dr Koc.

thought that she was starting another contraction, but she only wanted to attract her attention. ‘Was that my husband at the door just now?’

How could she tell her when she was in the heat of

heavy labour? But her expression had already given everything away.

‘I’m afraid it wasn’t, no. Just your father-in-law.’

She wanted to give vent to her anger, but the pain in her pelvis gripped like a vice and she took in a deep, rasping breath. Dr Koc let go of her hand and ordered Ci^ek, who was sitting behind her mother, to grip Fatma’s shoulders very tightly. She moved over and peered between Fatma’s wide-open legs.

Fatma let her breath out with a loud bellow and bore down hard with every atom of her strength. There was a movement inside her followed by the slight feeling of relief obtained when the baby’s head crowns the cervix.

The old Mercedes rolled down the street just in front of two fire appliances, their sirens wailing like agonised I muezzins. Avci banged his fist down hard on the horn f and left it there. So many people were crowded into the street it was almost impossible to drive, ikmen looked at them with disgust. The ghouls, the sickos, the watchers of accidents and other natural and unnatural disasters.

He’d seen the smoke as soon as they reached Taksim.

And he’d known. A high place. He looked up at the

burning roof of number 12, Karadeniz Sokak, the whole top storey and half of the next one down were violently ablaze. Naturally. That was the problem with the old wooden houses, especially in summer. All it needed was a spark.

Avci pulled the car over by a small grocery shop and stopped. The two fire appliances moved into position and men began unravelling hoses.

ikmen got out of the car and shook his head in disbelief.

A little old man shuffled towards him, away from the scene, ikmen hailed him. ‘Hey, Uncle!’

‘What’s that?’ He walked with a limp and wore his War of Independence medals pinned to a very holey green cardigan.

He peered at ikmen. ‘What do you want, boy?’

‘The burning house - do you know if anyone’s in there?’

‘Oh yes. Couple of minutes ago one smashed a window.

There’s several of them, all screaming, they have been. If Allah wills it the fire brigade will get them out. If not …’

He shrugged.

ikmen looked back at the fire again and the old man shuffled off. If the Gulcus died, he would never get to ask her that question, confront her with old Smits’s photograph. Of that he was certain. But there was nothing he could do apart from what everybody else was doing - just let the firemen do their job. His only consolation was that Suleyman wasn’t around.

He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his cigarettes.

People around him, including Avci, looked at him as if he were mad.

The firemen lined their hoses up and switched on the water. As the water poured down the rubber tubing the hoses bucked and thrashed. People tried to get out of the way, but one woman got her ankle caught and fell over.

Avci immediately went to her aid. She was, ikmen noted vaguely, young and pretty. He felt a movement behind his back as that section of the crowd parted. He took no notice and shouted to Avci to make their presence known to the fire officers. A long, slim hand landed on his shoulder. ‘Sir?’

It felt like going to sleep again in the full knowledge that a hideous nightmare was about to return. He looked around and up and there were tears in his eyes. ‘Suleyman.’

Now that the floor was alight their only hope lay with the firemen in the street below. If they could swing their ladders up to the window he’d broken they could get out that way.

Except perhaps for her. She still hadn’t moved from the bed and now her daughter had joined her. Robert could see them through the flames. The daughter was screaming. Her hair was on fire, it made her look like an agonised saint, a halo of red and gold tongues around her head. The old woman, by contrast, was quite calm. The agony of burning hadn’t yet started for her. But even when it did Robert had the oddest feeling that it wouldn’t elicit so much as a single murmur. In her mind she’d already gone elsewhere. Back to Ekaterinburg maybe? Perhaps it had happened while he’d tried to escape downstairs. While Nicholas desperately tried to put out the flames with buckets of water. That had been a useless exercise.

For some reason at this point Robert remembered the old Jew, the way he had looked down at him with kindness and concern, the way he, Robert, had reacted with violence.

Notwithstanding the bad associations he had built up against Balat, it was still extraordinary that he had done what he did. ]

Mistrust, the instinctive lashing out at the unknown other, Ś

the barely restrained prejudices of nearly two thousand years. And how easy it had been! How simple to look into a sharp, pointed face and see, actually see the eyes of a demon.

He looked down at the floor and saw Sergei’s twisted body stretched out before him like a broken mannequin. He knew that if he touched him he would find no sign of life. He had gone to join the old Jew and Meyer and all the other dead people whose lives his mother Maria had touched.

The smoke was so thick now that he could hardly see anything any more and his lungs felt heavy and painful.

Misha alone stood by the window and if Robert knew

what was good for him he should join the boy. Robert moved slowly through the darkening smoke. There was a smell like roasting meat and he ducked down closer to the floor to avoid it. Oxygen always gathered at floor level and if he was to survive he had to get some into his clogged lungs soon. He bent low and scampered quickly across the smouldering carpet towards the light. As he ran he fancied he passed another body moving in the opposite direction, back into the room, but he couldn’t be sure. Things shifted in the smoke. Shapes loomed and then subsided, like figures in fog.

Misha was still at the window when he got there, trembling.

He and Robert looked at each other, but nothing

passed between them. The young man was almost totally blank, Natalia’s cunning face rendered passionless and insensible. It was an obscene travesty. It taunted Robert.

On the one hand he wanted to kiss her thick red lips one more time but on the other …

A noise like the creaking of a large boat groaned agonisingly from the centre of the room. The two men at the

window looked round. But there was nothing to see. All that had been in the room: the great bed, the golden ikons, the sad mock-empire furniture, the people - all were covered in red and yellow and the eerie green that signifies the presence of gas. Evil green, Natalia’s favourite type of gold.

A gulp of air, big, like a wind, funnelled in through the open window. Sucked up by the house. The flames rejoiced and lengthened their bodies in celebration. It was like watching some sort of joyous tribal dance. Joyous because the fire loved it so, because the bigger it got the more beautiful it became. Natalia had been a flame.

Illusions live in fire. In cold countries like Britain people gather round their fires in the winter and look for pictures amongst the liquid, shifting fingers of brightly pulsating and impermanent colour. Robert’s grandmother, Millie, had seen the Devil once, or so she had claimed. He’d had a thin blue chin like a stiletto. Robert had always been good at seeing pictures too. His family had commented on it. But as he saw the side walls of the house puff outwards like old, dry cheeks he wondered, as he had done when he’d seen Misha in Balat that day, whether it was not just his mind deceiving his eyes. What sounded like a clap of thunder from beneath his feet punched its way into the body of the room. The sound hit what remained of the ceiling and for just a fraction of a second everything was still. As the flames subsided he saw three burning heads. Features, if that is what they once were, slid down their faces and gave their static forms the appearance of waxworks. Sad, defunct waxworks.

Misha saw it too and with a scream climbed out of the window and on to the roof. But Robert didn’t follow him.

What the boy was doing was without point. There was nothing left to do now but wait.

The floor gave way beneath the weight of her bed and all the other accumulated gewgaws of self-delusion. Robert gripped tightly on to the burning window-frame and felt the sickening sensation of fat and blood boiling in his hands.

The three waxworks plunged down into the white-hot pit and were replaced by a massive, muscular tongue of thick red fire. It seemed to turn and look at him and Robert knew that it had both sense and intent. His feet scrabbled backwards as he tried to maintain some sort of hold on the thin ledge of floor that remained. The huge flame breathed 1