Belshazzar's Daughter

by Barbara Nadel

“If it involves attractive Swedish women, yes.”

  Cohen turned away from the filing cabinet and gave Demir one of his world-weary and bloodshot stares. Sometimes he hated his own reputation. Every sex-starved little constable in the place came to him for advice or wanted to go out on the pick-up with him. Demir, with his long, lanky body and face like a goat, was a particular irritation. For some bizarre reason the man thought he was attractive, at least he tried to behave as if he did. But then working for forensics perhaps sharpened a person’s talent for self-deception. After all, every day of the week the boys down there had to pretend that the dreadful smells that accompanied their work didn’t exist. It was vital for survival.

  But forensics aside they were all an ugly bunch, all of Cohen’s “fans.” He wouldn’t have minded so much if at least one of them were still young, for at forty he was beginning to have difficulty attracting women himself and relying on charm and exquisite sexual technique only worked if he operated alone or in concert with a younger and more attractive man. But Demir, at any age, had never stood a prayer.

  “Well, Cohen?”

  The door to the office swung open and Suleyman entered. He smiled at them both and Cohen smiled back. Ah, his favorite person, the man to go out on the pull with—if only he would come. Cohen looked down at Demir. The Goat was scowling. He knew it! Cohen laughed inwardly to himself. Jealousy! What a fool Demir made of himself every time Suleyman crossed his path—and the whole station knew it!

  “What can I do for you, Sergeant?” He walked over to his desk and shoved Demir out of his seat. “Let the Sergeant sit down, you!”

  Suleyman was a little embarrassed by this display of naked preference and started to protest. “Oh, Demir, please, no…”

  But Demir got to his feet and tucked his shirt into his trousers. If Mehmet Suleyman was in the room, it was time for him to leave. “It’s all right—Sir,” he said, flinging a very unpleasant glance at Cohen. “I was just leaving.” He stomped heavily toward the open door and left. He did not do his colleagues the courtesy of closing it behind him.

  “Ugly bastard!” muttered Cohen under his breath.

  “Yes, well…” said Suleyman, slipping into the recently vacated seat. “Cohen, it’s about that information the Inspector wanted you to get on the Gulcu family.”

  Cohen pulled up an empty waste-paper bin, inverted it and sat down on it opposite his colleague. His face looked tired, bored and defeated. Suleyman knew the signs. Cohen didn’t hide much. His mobile, almost comic little face was used to expressing exactly what it felt, whenever it felt it.

  “We’re looking at very little progress here, aren’t we, Cohen?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Oh, no!” Suleyman groaned. “The Inspector will go crazy. You knew it was important! What have you been doing?”

  Cohen lit a cigarette and waved it at Suleyman between two very yellow and oily-looking fingers. “Oh, I’ve been working on it, Mehmet! I have! It’s just that I can’t find much. Well, nothing. Really.”

  “Nothing?” Suleyman narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  Cohen pulled a notebook from beneath his telephone and opened it on the desk in front of him. “This is what I mean, right. The house, number 12, Karadeniz Sokak, is registered as belonging to Mr. Mehmet Gulcu. All the services, with the exception of one I’ll tell you about in a minute, are registered to him also. He, apparently, pays the bills.” He paused, seemingly for some sort of dramatic effect.

  “Yes? Well?”

  “Unfortunately Mehmet Gulcu, bachelor, died in September 1935. He apparently had no children and left behind him only a strong and irrational desire to continue to pay his bills and taxes from beyond the grave.”

  Suleyman rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Mehmet he supposed had to have been the old woman’s sort-of husband. “What about Maria, Natalia and Nicholas Gulcu?”

  Cohen gave him a tired smile. “Well if they do exist they don’t work, don’t live anywhere, don’t have passports and have never paid taxes. I’ve looked for them everywhere!”

  He knew Cohen, knew how sloppy he could sometimes be. “Are you sure about this?”

  Cohen cast his eyes heavenwards. “They’re not registered in Turkey, Mehmet, I’ve told you!”

  Suleyman’s face creased into a frown.

  “And then there’s the telephone,” said Cohen.

  “What about the telephone?”

  “Their number is registered under the name of Mrs. Demidova. And guess what?”

  It wasn’t a giant leap. “Mrs. Demidova doesn’t exist either?”

  “Correct.” Cohen smiled. “I was just having a final triple check, knowing what old Ikmen’s like, when you came in.”

  Suleyman sighed. “So let me get this straight. We’ve a nonexistent family headed by a dead man who possess a telephone registered in the name of someone else who also doesn’t exist.”

  Cohen clapped his hands.

  “The Inspector isn’t going to like this at all.” Suleyman bit his lip nervously. Ikmen was going to think he was mad when he told him this lot. He didn’t relish the prospect. “How can they not exist, Cohen? It’s not possible! Everybody has to have papers, get a passport, visit the doctor, do a job—”

  “You don’t need papers to get a job in this city,” observed Cohen. “In fact, you must know as well as I do that the black economy all but runs the bazaars. I mean, if you arrested everyone in retail who didn’t have any papers we probably wouldn’t be able to buy anything. I do take your point, Mehmet, but jobs do not come into it if you ask me.”

  “True enough. But what about all the other things—bank accounts, military service, just going about the daily round of things? It’s very odd, but then…” He sighed. “Then again I suppose if her name were once Demidova—like a maiden name—and she came into the country as Demidova, she may very well have had papers way back which could I suppose have got lost over time. If she and her children maybe even registered as Demidova. But that doesn’t exist either, does it? I…”

  Cohen sniffed. “Seems to me they must’ve lived on old Mehmet’s money.”

  “Yes, they could, but what about paying for services and things. I mean unless they’ve always paid in cash…”

  Cohen laughed. “Perhaps Mehmet Gulcu does all that for them too!”

  The look Suleyman gave him was not kind. “This is serious, Cohen! This is, this is—weird!” He put his hands up to his face. He spoke softly, to himself. “Who are they?”

  Cohen shrugged. “Immigrants. You know what they’re like!”

  “Yes, well, Maria Gulcu was at one time, or is, whatever it is. But the others?” He pulled Cohen’s notebook toward him. “How did Mehmet Gulcu die, do you know?”

  “No. I must be able to find out though.”

  “All right, do so then please, Cohen. I’d better go and tell the Inspector right away.”

  “OK.” Cohen started to make his way back over to the filing cabinet. Halfway there, however, he stopped and turned to Suleyman again. “Oh, Mehmet?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you like we could go out and pick up some women tonight. Have a few beers, laugh, might even score if we’re really lucky—well, you might.”

  Suleyman gave him a look of complete exasperation, said, “I think not,” and left the office. Cohen sorted through a stack of papers in the cabinet and pulled those relevant to the top. It was a pity Mehmet wouldn’t go out with him, but then he never went out with anyone. Bit of a mystery man really. He wondered vaguely whether perhaps he preferred boys. It wasn’t a judgmental thought because Cohen really didn’t care. Women, men, items of furniture—it was all the same really. They could still go out on the pick-up, him for the girls and Suleyman for the boys. The young man’s body would still bring them over, but there wouldn’t be any competition. Perfect really. He would have to ask him about it at a later date. Cohen smiled.

  Chapter 10

  It was with great relief th
at Robert Cornelius climbed down from the bus that evening.

  As he started to walk up the hill toward his apartment, he felt the beginning of the cool of the night and he could see the relief at its coming written on the faces of the people that he passed. There was almost a carnival atmosphere during the evenings following these long, jungle-humid summer days. Men and women sat in the streets and on their balconies fanning themselves with just about anything that came to hand, drinking from long, cool glasses, their children playing noisily around the shops and in the gutters. All waiting to switch on their lights, shower, and retreat to their bedrooms. There, gasping like beached fish, they would lie grateful and naked on top of their bed-covers. Aching for sleep.

  Robert knew how they felt, but he couldn’t wait that long. There was a whole bottle of gin in his bedside cabinet and he had every intention of drinking as much of it as he could. He wanted oblivion for a few short hours. Sober it wouldn’t leave him alone. Everything that had happened before his visit to the police station had been as nothing compared to that event. That Ikmen was quizzing him both about his past and about Natalia and her family could only mean that the whole lot of them, somewhere along the line, were or could be “in the frame.” And on top of that he was now starting to wonder whether the answers he had given the policeman had been indeed the “right” answers. If only he could remember the conversation in detail! If only he could be certain that he hadn’t said anything that revealed his own inner insecurities regarding Natalia.

  He drew his hand across his sweating brow and turned into the small street that led to his apartment block. Of course he would have to tell Natalia about his interview with the police. Perhaps in a way it was a good thing; it might alert her to the urgency of the situation and force her to tell him what they both really knew was the truth. Overreaction cut in sharply. Of course they would have to leave the country. He didn’t want to but it was essential now and his job didn’t matter, he was bored with it anyway. Yes, they would go away and he would look after her. It was …

  He pulled himself suddenly up short. But why had she done it? Why? She must have had a reason, but what if she refused to tell him? What if there was no reason? What if…? What? Surely no reason could be good enough to excuse murder? Lots of misdemeanors could be brushed aside, but not this. This was a human life! Taking that away from somebody was wrong! In all cases, without exception, wrong!

  And then he saw her. She was standing on the steps leading up to the front entrance of his block. His heart jumped. She looked stained and weary and a bead of sweat was running down her neck and between the swellings of her thinly concealed breasts. She did not smile as he approached. He drew level with her and looked down into her face. She returned his gaze coldly, but there was a vulnerability there now that he had rarely seen before. He liked that. It turned him on.

  He took her roughly by the elbow and kissed her mouth so hard it was almost a bite.

  * * *

  Arto Sarkissian put the folder down on the metal draining board and pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. The report from the laboratory was bald, factual and very confusing. It had been a day or so since he had seen those peculiar marks on the cadaver’s right hand and forearm and he wanted to take another look. That the scientists at the lab would lie about such a thing was impossible, but Arto wanted to be sure. Not of course that his own naked eye could tell him much. But he felt an urge to confirm the facts, his own observations and the data from the tissue samples sent to the laboratory.

  He looked across the bleak tile and chrome wastes of the windowless little room and moved toward one of the three marble slabs in the center. A small hump covered with a white sheet and an unkempt and pathetic foot sticking out at an angle lay on the largest table. Everything was ready, except perhaps Arto himself. He wanted to rub his face vigorously with his hands, to try and pump some life-giving blood into his tired brain, but his surgical gloves both repelled and thwarted his attempt. It was late and he was tired.

  Arto Sarkissian had been a police surgeon for fifteen years. In that time he had seen a lot of dead people. Women, men, children, babies. At least one example of every stage of decomposition of the human form had passed through his gentle hands. He tried, every time he pulled the covering sheet away and looked into what remained of another human face, to at least attempt to operate with some semblance of dignity. He knew he always failed. Death was ugly, it was naked, it had no control over its bodily functions and it always stank. He stank too. Even after a shower he could still smell himself—their smell on him.

  He drew the sheet up on either side of the corpse and folded it over onto its chest. He wanted to see the arms. He had no desire to see the torso and the head again. He knew what was there, the blood, the acrid sulfuric acid—car battery acid. His stomach turned at the thought, but the lab’s analysis couldn’t be wrong. Someone had actually taken the trouble to drain a car battery. It took time, effort, the persistence of a driven and malicious psyche. He felt his face burn with anger and he was glad, for once, that he was alone with his “subject.”

  He pulled the body’s right arm from under the sheet and held it, knuckles uppermost, to the light. There it was, patch of scar tissue one. Down the right-hand edge of the forearm, extending up the hand and stopping just short of the knuckles. He could even see the place where he had excised the tiny piece of tissue to send off to the lab. He turned the arm over and examined the palm of the hand. Patch of scar tissue two, palm of the hand, extending to the tips of the fingers and the thumb. That he had missed such obvious blemishes during his first examination seemed strange to him now. The massive scarring leaped out at him, throwing itself into relief. Perhaps the appalling acid injuries had distracted his attention, perhaps he just wasn’t much good anymore. He allowed himself a little laugh and pulled the heavy, cold arm up level with his eyes. “Severe burns, probably consistent with the handling or use of gunpowder” was how the lab had described them. They were old too, sustained when the victim was a very young man, sixty or maybe seventy years ago. Arto looked at the deep discoloration and traced the edges with his finger. Where the damaged tissue met the healthy skin, ridges of hard, callused flesh had formed like small mountain ranges. It was obvious that no attempt had ever been made to repair the damage with grafts. Meyer had probably just bound the affected areas in bandage and hoped that infection wouldn’t set in, a not unusual way of dealing with a wound in the early part of the century. Arto wondered how his subject would have managed with the pain in the weeks or even months that it must have taken for his burns to heal. He could clearly see evidence of puckering, the painful fusing of pieces of burned tissue. On the palm this was so bad that he doubted whether splaying of the hand had been possible since.

  Arto replaced the arm and leaned his back against the opposite slab. It was intriguing to speculate how the injuries had been sustained. Of course it was hardly germane to the current investigation, but then Arto wasn’t really concerned directly with that. Finding who had murdered Leonid Meyer was Çetin Ikmen’s job and one that Arto didn’t envy him. Rumor had it that the authorities wanted the Meyer case brought to a successful conclusion as soon as possible. He could imagine the pressure and it made him glad that he was an academic and not a man of action.

  He walked back to the sink, removed his surgical gloves and threw them into a waste bin. Lolling down on the draining board, he pored once again over the results of the laboratory report. At the bottom of the second page, Dr. Belge, the author of the document, suggested that a consultation with Faud Ismail in ballistics might prove instructive should Arto wish to know how the burns were sustained. He did want to know, it had piqued his interest and he was certain that Çetin would be curious too.

  Arto took off his lab coat and flung it into the laundry basket. He looked at his watch and saw that it was already nearly eight o’clock. He shrugged. His day was not finished, but it didn’t matter. His wife, God rot her, wouldn’t miss him. Arto scowled briefly and
then turned his mind to other, more professional things. He had to telephone Çetin Ikmen, pass on his latest findings, and give him the rather surprising news about the regurgitated food found near the entrance to Meyer’s apartment. It wasn’t the old man’s, and its main constituent was not usual, and yet it had been expelled on the day of Meyer’s death. Unless evidence turned up to the contrary it would seem very likely that it had belonged to the murderer. An odd thing which painted a curious picture. A torturer with a weak stomach, someone not cut out for killing. A calculated, brutal, but nevertheless amateur murder.

  Arto walked through into his small adjoining office and picked up the telephone.

  * * *

  “You went to police!” Her voice was a screech, ugly.

  “I didn’t really have much of a choice, Natalia! They came and got me!”

  She slapped the palm of her hand against her forehead and muttered a familiar Turkish oath.

  “They didn’t want to know anything about you!” Robert lied. It seemed pointless at this stage to increase her anxiety, if that were possible. “They wanted to know about me, some incidents in my past. Back in London, years ago.”

  She hopped nervously, almost pawing the ground with her feet, and yet despite her agitation she had, he felt, that look in her eye, that teasing sensual expression that never failed to arouse him. He felt his flesh stir. Hardly appropriate, given her distress, but he couldn’t help himself. Without thinking he put his hand out toward her and slipped it between the thin material of her blouse and her flesh.

  “No!” She turned her head and pulled his hand away. Eyes ablaze she punched him roughly from her with one hard, clenched fist.

  Even under such fraught circumstances, it came as a shock. Robert gasped. He staggered a little from the blow, but managed to retain his balance, if not his dignity.

  He knew he’d behaved badly, made a play for sex at the wrong time, but he still wanted her. For a few seconds they stood perfectly still, staring like two gladiators across the arena of Robert’s lounge, both, for different reasons, breathing with difficulty. Although unable to think straight, Robert was hit by the distasteful notion that since the murder and his deepening suspicion about his lover, he had actually wanted her more. It was not the first time that thought had occurred. Even as they stood facing each other out, she twisted, spiky with anger like a weasel, he ached to get inside her body, to take her.