City of the Lost (7 page)

‘Then perhaps we should invite him here for lunch tomorrow.’

‘As you wish, Father,’ said Georges. ‘But what if he says no?’

Butros smiled thinly. ‘I really wasn’t thinking of that kind of invitation,’ he said.

Iain and Karin chose a restaurant close to the hotel, too weary to explore further. They sat upstairs on an open roof terrace of polished terracotta tiles hedged by potted cypresses. Few tables were taken; the atmosphere was subdued. Every so often voices would be raised in anger, not only against the bombers, but also against the perceived feebleness of the government’s response. Everyone seemed agreed that someone new was needed to take up the fight; someone with the stomach to do whatever was necessary to restore order. And everyone seemed keen to take part in Friday’s Day of Action.

They ordered beers that arrived already poured into miniature brass tankards, to protect the sensibilities of their more devout customers. They clinked them together in a dull toast then tried some small talk, but it proved hard work and Karin soon fell into an introspective silence.

‘Tell me about him,’ prompted Iain.

‘About who?’

‘Your boss. His assistant. Whichever one it is you’re thinking of.’

Karin shook her head. ‘I really didn’t know Rick all that well.’

‘Nathan, then. What was he like?’

‘He was fine. He was nice. He was
rich
.’ She gave a sad smile. ‘I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s simply that some people have so much money it becomes part of who they are. You can’t describe them without it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I used to think of money as something you bought stuff with. That the more money you had, the more stuff you could buy. But it’s not like that, not when you’re born into an oil dynasty, as Nathan was. At that level, it’s more like a force. Like gravity. It shapes the world and everyone bends to it, whether they want to or not.’

Iain looked curiously at her. ‘Including you?’ he asked.

‘You know us Dutch?’ she said. ‘How tolerant we are. Live and let live, all that shit? Well, my family isn’t like that. Not one bit. My parents are very Calvinist. They raised us to think a certain way: that money was slightly disgusting, that hard work should be its own reward. And so I worked hard. I studied history at Leiden. I got a good degree, good enough that I was offered the chance to go study at the University of Texas in Austin. They had an excellent programme there, right in my area. I was offered a partial scholarship too, so that at least my tuition was paid for. But it’s still an expensive business, being a student in America. I had to take on a crazy amount of debt, which my parents were
not
happy about, let me tell you. Anyway, I got to know Nathan while I was there, because he was the one sponsoring the programme. It was on the Homeric Question, you see, which was his thing too. And he saw how stretched I was with my studying and my bar-jobs, so he hired me as a sort of PA to help him manage his collection and deal with museums on his behalf, that kind of thing. But the work was pretty light and really it was another way for him to support my research, you know?’

‘Yes.’

‘So eventually I got my doctorate and then Leiden offered me a job. It wasn’t exactly what I’d wanted but it was a start, a foot in the door. For some reason, however, Nathan decided he wanted me to stay and work for him full-time. He offered me twice what Leiden were. I said no. So he offered me quadruple.’

‘He must have thought highly of you.’

‘Yes. But I think also he wanted to demonstrate something. I’d been so
pleased
at the Leiden job, you see. And my attitude towards money always amused him. The
rectitude
of it. All that hard work bravely done shit. This will sound awful, but I think he wanted to corrupt me a little. And he had so much money that my salary was effectively meaningless to him. Like filling a thimble from his lake. So he kept offering me more and more until finally I said yes. It was all that student debt; suddenly I could pay it off.’ She sat back in her chair as their main course arrived: succulent charred lamb kebabs garnished with yoghurt, onions, tomatoes and eye-watering peppers. ‘But the thing about a big salary is that you start taking it for granted. You think it’s what you’re worth. So instead of paying down your debt, you rent yourself a nice apartment, you lease a car, you fly home four times a year. Which was stupid, because no one else would ever have paid me half what Nathan did. I was his friend as much as his employee. I was his escort for openings and family events. It got so that people began to talk. I tried to ignore all that. I mean, Christ, he was as old as my grandmother. Literally.’ She took a deep breath, looked defiantly at Iain. ‘Last Christmas, he asked me to marry him.’

Iain nodded. He’d guessed something of the sort. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said no. I told him I was fond of him, but not like that. He kept at it. It seemed almost like a game to him. He kept making exploratory little advances. Like he’d buy me gifts small enough that I’d have been churlish to refuse them. But then the next gift would be a little bigger, so how could I fuss about that after accepting the one before. Or he’d touch my elbow in public. Then my shoulder and my back. Or he’d tease me and call me pet names. That kind of thing. And whenever I tried to draw a line for him, he’d joke about my salary, only not altogether a joke, you know. Once you’ve grown used to a good income, the prospect of losing it is a bit like vertigo.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Anyway, it got so that everyone took it for granted that we were secretly engaged. You should have seen the looks his children used to dart at me. Like they
hated
me.’

‘Ah,’ said Iain. ‘That dickhead on the phone earlier.’

‘Julian. Nathan’s eldest son. It’s hard to blame him too much. Even by his own telling, Nathan must have been a truly shitty father. He whored around until his wife finally had had enough and walked out on him, taking the kids with her. They grew up angry with him, as you can imagine; justice matters so much when you’re young. But then they grew older and realized where the money was.’

‘So they came crawling back?’

‘And he despised them for it, I think. Even though he’d inherited the company himself. And, God, he could be cruel. He’d get them to tell stories against themselves and against their mother, that kind of thing. Muse aloud about leaving everything to some absurd charity or other, or marrying again and starting a new family.’

‘But now they’ll get to inherit after all,’ observed Iain. ‘No wonder Julian sounded like he was off to pop some corks. After all that worry.’

‘Yes.’

Iain allowed himself the faintest of smiles. ‘You don’t suppose he could have been worried enough to have had his father killed, do you?’

Karin looked at Iain in consternation. ‘Have his father killed? What are you talking about?’

‘Someone set off a bomb today,’ said Iain. ‘You said yourself the crater was directly beneath his room. Maybe it really was Cypriot reunificationists out to inflict carnage for the cause. But isn’t it possible that it was a murder made to look like terrorism? That your boss was the real target?’

‘No.’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘His children aren’t angels, but they’re not like that. They
couldn’t
be. Anyway, Nathan only decided to come here two weeks ago. And he didn’t tell his family until a couple of days before we left. You’d need far more time than that to set up something like this halfway across the world.’

‘What if they had more time? What if they had weeks? Even months?’

‘Aren’t you listening? He only decided to come two weeks ago.’

Iain reached across the table to touch the back of her hand. ‘Don’t get mad at me. I’m only speculating. I don’t know Julian and these others. I owe them nothing. But I do owe Mustafa the truth. So put yourself in the shoes of one of Nathan’s sons. He hates his father for all the shit he’s made him eat. He sees him falling for you and now he’s panicked too. Maybe he’s a gambler. Maybe he has a high-maintenance mistress. He
needs
his inheritance. He needs it
now
. So he decides to act. But getting at his father isn’t easy. Rick was his
head
of security, correct? Not just a bodyguard. So he obviously took his personal protection pretty damned seriously, right? Getting to him in America was sure to have been hard. And he’d likely have been near the top of the suspects list. But what if he could lure Nathan somewhere he’d be vulnerable? He’s a collector. Dangle the right piece in front of him and he’d be on the first plane. And if he was killed by some random atrocity while he was here, no one would look at it twice.’

She shook her head. ‘And all those other people? Collateral damage?’

‘He wouldn’t necessarily have planned it that way. He could have hired a hitman and left the method up to him. It wouldn’t be the first time. Some of the gangs here are notoriously ruthless. There’s this group of ultra-nationalists called the Grey Wolves who …’ He frowned, sat back in his chair, scratched his neck thoughtfully.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

Iain didn’t answer at once. There was something darkly familiar about all this, he suddenly realized: about the worsening terrorism, the hapless government response, the growing public clamour for decisive action. But surely all that belonged to Turkey’s buried past. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘A weird déjà vu, that’s all.’

‘What about?’

‘I can’t really talk about it.’

She tipped her head quizzically to one side. ‘You have a past,’ she said.

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘I told you mine.’

He sighed and splayed fingers on the starched white tablecloth. ‘I was in the army kind of thing for a few years.’

That made her smile. ‘The army kind of thing?’

‘Afghan, Iraq, a bunch of other places. I saw the usual horrible things. I did the usual horrible things. It got to me. I left. Now I’m a business consultant. Nice, safe and boring, you know. All that shit well behind me. Until today. Until Mustafa.’ He shook his head. ‘Let’s not talk about it, eh? Not tonight. There must be happier topics.’

‘Fine,’ smiled Karin. ‘You lay off Nathan’s kids, I’ll forget the army kind of thing. Deal?’

‘Deal.’

‘Then what do we talk about?’

‘How about this Homeric Question of yours,’ said Iain. ‘Surely it can’t get any safer than that.’

The drive to Nicosia was gruelling. Zehra Inzano
ğ
lu kept so far to the left-hand lane that her passenger-side wheels sporadically left the tarmac altogether and she’d bump her way over mud and loose chippings for a second or two before correcting herself, sometimes too sharply. Cars, minivans and lorries sped past in a blur of headlights, tooting resentfully at her slow crawl. She tried once to change up to third gear, but metallic harpies screeched at her from beneath the bonnet and she veered dangerously from her lane and almost side-swiped an overtaking bus whose indignant blare unnerved her all the more and turned Katerina stiff as a shop mannequin in the seat beside her.

Zehra had intended to drive straight to the Professor’s house and thrash it out with him that night, but she was simply too shattered by the time they reached Nicosia’s outskirts. She therefore followed signs to her son’s neighbourhood instead then had Katerina direct her in. His apartment block was run-down and ugly, its car park a patch of deeply rutted earth. The lift wouldn’t answer repeated summons so they trudged wearily upwards with their bags instead. Zehra’s spirits sank as they climbed. How could anyone choose to live in a city? Lift doors opened and closed continuously above her. She could hear men whispering. Something wasn’t right. She called out. Footsteps came scampering down towards them; two youths in leather jackets with collars up, cans of spray-paint in their hands, their laughter now echoing up from beneath.

A red plastic chair was lodged between the lift doors on her son’s floor, stopping them from closing. The landing lights were poor, the red spray-paint moist and dripping. Instantly, Zehra was swept back forty years. Then, the slurs had been aimed at her father, not her son; and in Greek, not Turkish. Yet the message was the same. And an immense gloom settled upon her, a sense of troubles not her own, yet which threatened to snare her even so.

‘The Homeric Question,’ said Karin doubtfully. ‘Are you sure?’

‘At least tell me what it is. Maybe I’ll be able to answer it for you. Or is that what you’re scared of? That I’ll put you out of a job.’

‘I’m out of a job already.’

‘Shit. Sorry. Yeah.’ He raised his empty tankard at a passing waiter to request refills. ‘But tell me anyway.’

‘It’s not that simple,’ said Karin. ‘For a start, it’s really a series of questions rather than a single one. Who was Homer? Where was he born? When? Where did he live? How old was he when he composed his various works? Which of the places he wrote about had he visited? Who and what were his sources? Was he a woman?’

Iain laughed. ‘Really?’

‘Really. And was there only one of her, or was it a family enterprise, passed down from parent to child?’ She sat forward in her chair as she got into her subject, her cadence quickening and her eyes brightening; and Iain could soon see exactly why Nathan had bid so fiercely for her services. Enthusiasm became harder to generate yourself as you grew older, but you could still warm yourself on the radiated enthusiasm of others. ‘Or maybe Homer was simply an honorific title, like “bard”,’ she said. ‘There are some reasons to think that the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
were composed by different people, for example.’

‘Like what?’

‘Style. Vocabulary. Attitudes towards races. Homer praises the Phoenicians in the
Iliad
, for example, but then derides them in the
Odyssey
. And the
Odyssey
also pokes fun at the
Iliad
, which is odd if he wrote them both.’

‘Maybe he didn’t take himself too seriously,’ said Iain.