“You will.” She squeezed her son’s hand and smiled at him. “Anyway, I refused to go along with Leonid’s plan and at Üsküdar 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 hemophilia, 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 Möbius 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, idolized 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 toward the chair by the window in Russian.
Two pale hands braced themselves against the arms of the chair and a very familiar profile leaned 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 license-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.”
Avcı 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 license-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 behavior. 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, among 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 sulfuric 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, sulfuric 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, Mrs. 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 recognized 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 behavior? But then the shawl did allow her to get that battery out unseen and so…”
“And so,” put in Nicholas Gulcu, “we have decided now to go to police and tell them what we tell you.”
Robert Cornelius felt the skin around his forehead pull upward as his eyes widened in shock. “You are going to give your own flesh and blood, however dreadful, to the police?”
“We have no option,” the old woman replied. “I must, as I have always done, put the reputation of myself and the family as a group first.”
“But…”
“I did what I could—via yourself, unfortunately—but when that didn’t work…” She shrugged.
Robert Cornelius looked puzzled at this point. “You did what you could via me?”
“Yes, I told Natalia to get you to implicate the odious Reinhold Smits, which you did because you were so pitifully besotted. We were fortunate however in having the swastika—”
“What? What?” He held his hands aloft to stop her. She was moving too fast again and he was getting confused. “What is this about a swastika? Can you tell me that, please?”
Nicholas Gulcu whispered something into his mother’s ear and she nodded. “When Misha had finished killing Leonid, he daubed a large swastika on the wall above the dead man’s head. This was, as it were, a sort of calling card. The Empress Alexandra loved the swastika. In 1918, it did not possess the vile associations that it does now. In whatever house the family lived, she always drew one on the wall. It was as much a part of her soul as her love of the color lilac. I have them myself, swastikas, in this room, drawn in pencil underneath my lilac wallpaper. Not that the police made that connection. They came to the obvious conclusion and with my, and your help, they soon found Reinhold Smits.”
“Who is, I understand, a Nazi, and…”
“Reinhold Smits, or rather his father, became Leonid’s employer soon after he arrived in this country. Time passed and despite the obvious disparity in their social positions, Leonid and Reinhold eventually became acquainted via a rather revolting sexual preference they both shared for very young girls. In Leonid’s defense I must say that nothing illegal ever occurred on his part, but Reinhold was of a rather different order. The older he got, the younger his lovers became—a fact that he would boast about openly to his ‘poor little pet Jew’ Leonid.” She sighed, sadly so Robert Cornelius thought. “And it was at this time, during the 1920s, that I re-established my own association with Leonid once again. I was with Mehmet by this time and therefore secure in myself. So sometimes I would go and meet Leonid from work for a coffee or just a talk and … It was at one such meeting that he introduced me to Reinhold Smits who was, I thought at the time, rather more pleased to see me, a complete stranger, than he should have been.”
“Why?”
“For two reasons. Firstly, and less importantly, ‘elderly’ as I was then, he found me attractive and secondly, Leonid had told him who I really was.”
“And so he was impressed by the fact that you said you were royal?”
She smiled at the Englishman’s use of his own doubts about her when framing his question. “No, Mr. Cornelius, Reinhold was interested in me because he had plans for the person that I was. Even in the 1920s the seeds of fascism were well planted in the soil of Germany. In addition, they hated the new Bolshevik government in Russia—the young Adolf Hitler and his friends saw it as an almost pure embodiment of evil. And so did Reinhold Smits, who also when he met me started to dream about some sort of Christian crusade against the Soviet Union—preferably with this pure little Russian princess and all her Tsarist gold as a figurehead. Leonid, being the simple-minded soul that he was, saw it as a great opportunity but, as ever afraid of discovery and fearful for my life, I wanted none of it. As soon as Reinhold had gone I flew at Leonid in a fury. I told him to put a stop to this rich, powerful and arrogant German’s plans, which of course he did.”
“How? How did he do that?”
“Reinhold Smits was, by that time, a fully practicing pedophile. He showed and even gave photographs of his conquests to Leonid—so proud he was of it all, so safe he felt behind all his money.” Her face fell. “Some of the little girls were as young as six. I don’t think I have to spell out how Leonid managed to stop Reinhold putting his plan for me into action.”
Robert shuddered visibly with disgust. “Blackmail?”
“Yes. And even though Reinhold hated him passionately afterward—it informed, among other things, his later, even more florid, anti-Semitism—he kept on paying Leonid for the rest of his life. He was, in fact, and quite coincidentally, at Leonid’s apartment making payment on the day that Leonid died.”
Robert shook his head in disbelief. “What?”
“Oh, he got there after the deed had been done and was most horribly shocked. I know that because of a very grave error he made when he phoned to console me. However, even though I knew inside that he couldn’t possibly have killed Leonid himself—apart from anything else he, such a wealthy man, had no motive—I never told Reinhold that. I just let him sweat and worry and helped the police to find him.” She sighed. “Such a dreadful shame they did not
appear to be too interested.”
“Oh yes what a dreadful shame that is!”
Maria Gulcu physically bowed her head momentarily to his anger. “I can understand—”
“No you can’t! You can’t even begin to!” Robert touched one shaking hand up to his puffy, livid face and for a moment it looked as if he was about to cry. But then he collected himself. “I have, I think, done something truly terrible and, and … all right, indirectly, I think I may have done it because of this—this business. I was ill, some years ago, mentally ill, and even now when I become agitated I find that I can get out of control. And”—he looked down at the floor now—“I have been so agitated about Natalia. Because … because I think that I knew all along, Mrs. Gulcu—not all about this bloody Byzantine Russian stuff—but because I knew that she was at Meyer’s apartment and even though you say that she hasn’t killed anyone, she might just as well have. Hiding her brother’s evidence and leading me…” And then he looked up at her, his eyes shining. “But I loved her, you see.”
The old woman nodded her head in recognition. “I know. Just as Mr. Gulcu loved me. He was a good man too and had I been someone other than who I am, a fact he both protected and respected, I could have had a very good life with him. But I chose to continue to consort with people like Leonid. I chose to be different and distance myself from poor Mehmet’s world. And when he died, leaving me all of his money and his property, I chose to bring our children up as Russians—to make them wear the clothes of those long since dead—to try, through them, to rebuild the blood-line I had contaminated with Mehmet.”
Robert, his teeth now gritted in anger, said, “You’re a very evil woman, Mrs. Gulcu—princess or no princess!”
She shrugged. “I should have been more careful with regard to what I said in front of poor Misha. I let my desire to be always first in everybody’s affections get the better of me. And spite, of course, too. Knowing what Leonid really was and hearing the boy endlessly praise the man was, on this occasion, just a little too much. But then as you can see, the boy always looks as if he doesn’t have a thought in his head. But there. If only I had listened to Leonid long ago I—I would have been more careful.”
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