Belshazzar's Daughter

by Barbara Nadel

  If only that were true …

  If only he wasn’t entirely and absolutely of his own volition a murderer himself now. A man, furthermore, who would now have to go to the police. To do anything else would not be right, would not be him.

  And for a few moments he stood outside his own mind and considered all of this. It calmed him. It was funny really; mild-mannered teacher, ex-public schoolboy … Some of his classmates were actors, writers, captains of industry now. Doing well but unmemorable. He’d never been the captain of the rugby team, nor had a straight run of A’s in the sixth form, but soon everyone would know who he was. Robert Cornelius, the sadistic Jew-murderer, the man the Foreign Office didn’t bother to save. But people would talk, for years. Hanratty, Edith Thompson, Timothy Evans—they’d even made a film about Ruth Ellis. If you were hanged by the neck until you were dead it almost guaranteed your immortality. Perhaps that had been what he had been looking for all the time. What a dreadful conceit! He laughed. It was funny; he was funny. The desperate trier for whom nothing ever worked out, the boy who wanted so much to ride horses but couldn’t conquer his fear. It hadn’t been the speed, but the unpredictability of the animals. Perhaps there’d been a lesson somewhere in that early experience which he should have applied to the women in his life. A kind of backward echo.

  He looked up at the Galata hill again and smiled. One more time wouldn’t hurt. Of course he wouldn’t be able to have her, not that that bothered him. In fact it would be interesting to see what was left when the sex was stripped away. It would be almost gratifying if there was nothing and the great thing was that he knew that was precisely the case. She didn’t love him and yet he still wouldn’t give her to the police for her part in this débâcle. They could torture him if they liked—and they would. The perfection of the futility must be maintained. If his life had any meaning at all it had to be that. One day some author might even write a pitying book, trace it all back to the seeds of loneliness and inadequacy he’d felt at school. Well, it was extraordinary. How many other boys had cut up their arms just because of one poor examination result? He could still remember the look on Matron’s face as she applied the iodine, without kindness, to his weeping wrist. She’d been disgusted, not by the wound, but by the state of mind that had inflicted it. And that was just about it really. Nothing he had ever done had been of itself bad—until now—it was the desperation behind these acts that disgusted people. Love affairs were fine provided there was no desire to become the loved object’s slave. Teaching too was good as long as it wasn’t a substitute for something better, some great and mythical career more worthy of him and his intellect. But then perhaps he would have failed if he’d done whatever it was he’d originally wanted to do. Whatever that had been.

  Yes, going to see her one more time would be good. She’d pretend to be sickened but she would be relieved. In years to come she may even, when alone, laugh. Until and unless she found the pure, round perfection inherent in his failure, the one he knew was there. Perhaps when she learned about his history she would know, although maybe that in itself was wrong, perhaps even that marred the perfection. The perfectly farmed and nurtured pointlessness. Perhaps even future generations knowing his name was an abomination?

  Slowly now, because he was so tired, he started to trudge his way toward the Galata hill and the front door of number 12, Karadeniz Sokak.

  * * *

  Suleyman sat down heavily on the bed and sighed. He picked the small color photograph up again and looked at it. It was a good likeness, very sharp, taken with a decent camera. A portrait, head and bare shoulders. He wondered, idly, if she had been naked when it was taken. It was possible, knowing how she was. Strange, though, that her face was so somber. But then again didn’t models in dirty magazines have that look? That worn-out, desperately sad light about the eyes? Whatever Cornelius may feel for her, Natalia Gulcu was a being in whom there was little of any great value left.

  “So what now then, Mehmet?”

  He’d almost forgotten that Cohen was there. Suleyman got up from the bed and looked around the room. Apart from the photograph it was disturbingly anonymous. In his experience foreigners who lived abroad were usually more sentimental than this. But Cornelius? Not a letter, not a card, not even some old snapshot of his baby self grinning on his mother’s knee. Nothing and no one to remind him of England. Perhaps he’d cleaned everything else out of his life in order to get her in? A curious thought.

  On what seemed to Cohen like a whim, but was really a very considered act, Suleyman said, “I think we should get over to Beyoğlu now.”

  “You think that’s where the Old Man’s gone, do you, Mehmet?”

  “If Cornelius is there, which is possible, then maybe Ikmen is too. It’s where the girl in that picture lives.” He passed the photograph of Natalia Gulcu over to his deputy.

  Cohen’s face lit up. The picture seemed, characteristically, for just a moment, to excite him. Then, however, and for seemingly no logical reason, his expression changed to one of creased seriousness. “Mehmet, this girl, I think I might…”

  But Suleyman, intent on what had to be done, wasn’t listening anymore.

  “Come on,” he said and led the way back through the bedroom and into Cornelius’s white, white lounge. It struck him as odd that such a bright place should be so depressing, but again it was because there was nothing personal about the place. It reminded him of a hotel room, a place for someone in transit.

  Suleyman then stopped and, thoughtfully, put his hands on his hips. “OK. I don’t want to radio for back-up yet, if at all. I do however want your pistol, Constable, if you’ll be so kind.” He extended his hand for the weapon.

  Cohen, still a little dazed from the impact of the photograph, looked confused. “My pistol?”

  Suleyman didn’t want to explain. He didn’t want to have to say that he didn’t trust Cohen and would not, indeed, have trusted any of the junior officers enough to let any of them anywhere near a foreign national, even a possibly deranged one, with a firearm. Although no really high-profile offenses had been committed in Turkey by foreign nationals since the 1970s, Suleyman was only too aware of what magnitude of international wrath a dead or injured foreign national could cause. He didn’t know that he trusted himself entirely either, but as the senior officer in this instance, it was his duty both to control and protect those beneath his command. “Just give it to me, Cohen, all right?”

  The constable took the weapon out of the holster on his hip and put it into Suleyman’s outstretched hand. Suleyman made sure that the safety catch was on and then placed the firearm in the empty holster underneath his armpit.

  “Are you armed then, Mehmet?”

  Suleyman forced a smile. “I am now, Cohen.”

  “Oh.”

  Chapter 23

  The only time Robert had ever seen anything like it was in films. Nasty, rather frightening films about people who had been wicked and were just about to die. Of course he couldn’t actually see much because his eyes still had to adjust to the weak light from the oil-lamp, the pungent sting of the incense. But they were all there—well, nearly all. He couldn’t see Natalia yet, unless of course that was her in the big chair over by the window, separate from the main group. But whoever it was was turned away from him and he couldn’t tell. It would be like her not to want to look at him.

  The other bodies spread out and away from the huge lilac and gold structure in the middle of the room and he felt one of Nicholas’s hands upon his shoulder. “Mama would like you to sit down on her bed, Mr. Cornelius.”

  The cripple Sergei scuttled out of his way. Robert stepped forward and found himself at the foot of a golden prow. It curled toward him like a gilt wave. He looked at it closely and decided that in a full light it would look like what it really was. Something cheap and tastelessly ornate. He wasn’t afraid, that feeling had disappeared some time ago, but he did wish that they would show him Natalia. He didn’t want these theatrics; the sweet but
stale-smelling air made him feel nauseous. He looked away from the prow and along what was obviously a bed. He stopped when he reached her face. The wrinkles parted and what were left of her painted lips smiled. All the sounds in the room including his own breathing seemed to stop.

  “So you are Robert Cornelius, are you?” The English, both in content and accent, was perfect. Robert took a deep breath to steady his nerves and nodded dumbly. “My, my, but you are covered in a lot of somebody else’s blood, aren’t you?” He didn’t answer. The eyes of all the Gulcus and of the portraits that lined the room fixed upon him.

  The red mouth opened again. “I think we owe you an explanation, Mr. Cornelius, regarding the death of Leonid Meyer.”

  “You did it?” It just came out! Even though he knew that such a brittle thing as her couldn’t possibly have done it, it came out.

  She smiled and patted the space on the bed beside her. “Indirectly. Please sit.”

  Robert took a step forward and lowered himself slowly on to the dusty, motheaten bed. She gathered her long thin arms about her flat chest as if symbolically holding him close to her like a spider with its prey.

  “Do you like stories, Mr. Cornelius?”

  He watched mesmerized as her red-tipped fingers massaged her own dry shoulders. He didn’t answer.

  A tiny laugh drifted up from the back of her throat. “I know you do.” He noticed that her eyes were a very deep blue and was surprised. Old people’s eyes usually lost their color, watered down by time. “This story, however, is different in that it is based upon a premise that only some of us in this room believe to be true.”

  A woman, Natalia’s mother, started crying softly.

  “To start I must go back in time to 1918, Mr. Cornelius. As you must be able to tell from my appearance, it is a year that I can clearly remember.”

  With a normal person he would have made at least some small sounds of protest, but this wasn’t someone to whom the normal rules of anything, including politeness, applied.

  “I do not I think need to waste any time talking about my nationality. In 1918, Mr. Cornelius, I lived in a town called Ekaterinburg in the Urals. Before the Bolsheviks my family … they, they had been powerful and we…” She sighed. “Some people, including myself, were shot.” She looked behind him at her son Nicholas. “Before we were shot, Mr. Cornelius, and some of my family, I know, struggle to understand this too, I remember very little.” She paused and bowed her head.

  Sergei muttered something hard and bitter that Robert could not understand.

  Nicholas coughed to attract her attention. “Go on, Mama.”

  She smiled at him, but without love. A heartless mother spider. “My earliest real, complete memory is of lying on a filthy floor covered with blood. I looked, I should imagine, not unlike you do now. Not the same as remembering the kiss of a beloved father or sister, but there it is. Other people were on the floor too, but they were all dead. Men in uniform who I knew to be Bolsheviks were walking about among the corpses finishing them off with bayonets and pistols. The room was full of gunsmoke, I could taste it in my mouth. I still can sometimes.” Her eyes met his and held them. “I feel the incident has a familiar ring to you, Mr. Cornelius.”

  “No.” But he wasn’t sure.

  “No matter. Anyway, they thought I was dead. They loaded us on to a truck. They threw me on top. I found myself pressed between the body of a boy and a leg almost severed by bullets. When the truck moved this limb fell against my mouth and I tasted its blood. If I had ever had a name I had forgotten what it was. Can you understand that?”

  But a kind of numbness had filled his body and he just continued to stare into that awful face without moving.

  “Time passed, I don’t know how much, and then the truck stopped. I held my breath because I knew that if they heard me they would kill me. The boy beside me moaned. He still lived but because he was now a danger to me I didn’t want him to. I heard voices. I put my hands hard around the boy’s neck and I squeezed. You have to believe that there was no other way. I closed my eyes but he gurgled and his arms came up to push me away. A thick rope of blood rose from his mouth and sludged against my face. And they heard him. A youth with a little sharp face like a fox jumped up among the bodies and looked into my eyes. Two other men followed and I took my hands off the boy’s throat.”

  Natalia’s mother said something and the old woman smiled.

  “The truth, if you want to know, Anya, is that I don’t know. I strangled the boy to kill him because he was a danger to me, but whether I succeeded or not, I cannot say. I told Leonid and the other two that he was still alive.” She turned away from her daughter and faced Robert. “The man with the sharp face was Leonid Meyer, Mr. Cornelius. He and the other two guards took myself and the boy off the truck and hid us in some woods. He saved my life. Unfortunately I was never able to repay the debt, as you know.” She cleared her throat. “To explain: the boy and I were taken off the truck while the Bolshevik commanders were reconnoitering the road ahead. When they rejoined the vehicle the truck moved on. The rest of the bodies were apparently beaten and then burned with fire and sulfuric acid at an old mine a few versts down the road. If it helps you at all, Mr. Cornelius, they had to do this in order to disguise the identities of the victims.”

  Oh it helped all right, but it didn’t make any sense. The story was now all too familiar, almost laughably so. “You’re talking about the murder of the last Tsar, aren’t you?”

  She offered him a short black cigarette, which he declined. “I might be.” She shot her son Nicholas the kind of look that silences dissent. “Anyway, the boy, the one I’d tried to strangle, was dead when I next looked at him. I didn’t attempt to bury him and just lay on the ground waiting for something to happen. And a while later it did. Leonid returned. He gave me a little bread and while he soaked the boy’s body in petrol and set it alight, he told me things.”

  She paused obviously for effect. Robert lost some patience with those deep blue eyes and shrugged. “What things?”

  “Leonid told me who the boy was and I was shocked.” She looked down at her hands and her voice became quiet. “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 pre-loaded his voice with irony. “So you’re Princess Anastasia of Russia, are you?”

  Her head snapped upward 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 Constantino
ple, they both worked as casual laborers 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 mesmerized. “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.”