Belshazzar's Daughter: A Novel of Istanbul (Inspector Ikmen series Book 1)

by Barbara Nadel

  “Lie.”

  Ardiç flared once again. “Yes, lie! What do you want our wealthy Jews in Yeniköy and Bebek to do? Pack up all their money and fuck off to Israel?”

  Ikmen regarded him steadily. “And the poor ones in Balat? They know, remember.”

  “Ah, but they’re not telling, are they, Ikmen?”

  “No, sir, they’re too afraid. Closed communities are like that, sir. Vulnerable.”

  Ardiç growled. Little people with little money were not exactly his thing.

  Ikmen got up out of his chair and made toward the door. He didn’t want to be in the same place as this man for any longer.

  “If that’s all, sir?”

  Ardiç put his cigar back in his mouth and leaned back in his chair. “Only one thing.”

  Ikmen turned. “Yes?”

  “I had your sergeant with me when I was talking to the Consul. Even if he is a rather effeminate young man, he’s articulate.” He dropped his eyes. “I wouldn’t give him too much autonomy if I were you, Ikmen. I think he might just be able to handle it.” He sniggered, childishly.

  Ikmen’s face whitened and he marched smartly out of the office, slamming the door behind him. Ardiç’s laughter followed him all the way down the corridor and halfway up the stairs.

  * * *

  “So, you and the Consul are best friends now, is that right, Mehmet?” Cohen lit up a cigarette and smiled.

  Suleyman scowled. “Hah, hah, very funny.”

  “Well, you must admit that it’s a bit of a plus point for you.” Cohen perched himself on the edge of Suleyman’s desk and crossed his legs. “Could be the start of your rapid rise through the ranks.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Cohen laughed. “Oh, excuse me! Bright, articulate and good-looking? If I were you I’d push and scratch my way to the top and let no bastard stand in my way. I mean, just think what sort of effect the sight of a handsome inspector under thirty would have upon the females around here.”

  “Oh, give it a rest, will you!”

  But Cohen was in his stride now. “Power excites women.” His face dissolved into a leer. “I knew this girl once, had a thing about power and guns—”

  “I thought you were married,” cut in Suleyman, sourly.

  “So?” Cohen leaned down across the desk and put his face close to Suleyman’s.

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t have a little bit of variety once in a while. They like the uniform too.”

  Suleyman snorted. Cohen was so shallow it was almost a talent.

  “You always looked good in the uniform, Mehmet.” He winked lasciviously. “You’re not telling me you used to iron your whole kit every day just for the benefit of the public!”

  Suleyman nervously fingered his tie. Cohen put him on edge. He always had done, ever since they were constables together. Cohen was so … direct!

  He changed the subject. “What happened with Mrs. Blatsky anyway?”

  “Not a lot. I didn’t do much really, she spoke just enough Turkish. The Old Man did most of the talking. She was ancient and had a bit of a beard coming.”

  Suleyman removed his jacket. “I don’t suppose you listened, did you?”

  “I did, as a matter of fact,” replied Cohen archly. “She said Meyer had killed some people back in Russia.”

  Suleyman replied in kind. “Well, we know that!”

  Cohen leaned across the desk again and waved his finger in Suleyman’s face. He looked like a young child telling his best friend a naughty secret. “Ah, but did you know that he was a fully paid-up commie when he did it?”

  “No!”

  “Oh, yes. Went about killing the rich for the glory of Marx, he did. And what is more, someone who is still alive now knew all about it too!”

  Suleyman frowned. “What, someone back in Russia, or—”

  “No, here,” said Cohen. “In the city.”

  Suleyman suddenly felt his blood curdle in his veins. He knew a prime candidate for that role and so did Ikmen. The Inspector was, according to Cohen, now in with the Commissioner. He imagined the man’s impatience. Sitting there just itching to get over to the Gulcu house. And when he told him about Cornelius and his attack upon a lawyer. A Jewish lawyer …

  “Not that the old Jew’s drinking cronies were any good.” Cohen had changed the subject. “All they could do was try to ponce money off us. Although one of them did say that he saw a big black car behind the apartment block but he couldn’t remember whether it was last week or yesterday.”

  “Mmm.” Suleyman wasn’t listening. His brain was too busy trying to cope with the range of possibilities this new piece of information had thrown up.

  The door banged open and performed its customary smashing operation against the side of his desk. Suleyman jumped. Cohen slid lazily to his feet and stood facing the door with his hands in his pockets.

  “Hello, Inspector.”

  Ikmen stepped forward, grabbed Cohen by the elbow and threw him roughly through the doorway. “Get out of my office, Cohen, you perverted animal!”

  As the constable dived into the corridor, Ikmen slammed the door shut behind him and stood in the middle of the room, fuming.

  “Cohen wasn’t doing anything wrong, sir!” said Suleyman in an effort to protect his junior colleague.

  Ikmen shot him a glance he was fortunate to survive. “I know that, but I’m angry and I need to take that out on someone! Would you rather I took it out on you?”

  The sergeant looked down and mumbled in the negative.

  “Oh, don’t worry, Sergeant!” Ikmen said wearily. “I’ll make it up to Cohen some other time. When I don’t want to kill everybody and myself and you and—”

  Suleyman remained calm. “Bad time with the Commissioner, sir?”

  The two men looked at each other. The younger one was secretly amused and the older one knew it. He could vent his spleen on Suleyman as much as he liked, the shock value of his rages had ceased to have an effect many years ago. A grim smile caught the corners of his mouth and he sighed. “Oh, Suleyman, what are we going to do?”

  “Sir?”

  Ikmen walked around his desk and sat down in his chair. “Ardiç wants this case wrapped up as soon as possible.” He sneered. “The political dimension! The way I see it I’m supposed to produce some mindless Nazi, preferably the very convenient Reinhold Smits, on demand. Sorry, you’re supposed to produce some mindless—”

  “Me!”

  “Yes.” His voice was flat and grim. “Ardiç wants me here for the benefit of the press. I believe he wants to turn me into some sort of media personality. You and the boys have got to do all the work from now on. I’m just supposed to sit about giving orders. I won’t, of course. He can stuff it!” He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “I hear you did a good job with our friend the Consul?”

  “Did the Commissioner tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  Suleyman laughed. “I told him what he wanted to hear basically. I simply said that we were pursuing several lines of inquiry, including a possible Nazi connection, which is where I suppose I stupidly mentioned Reinhold Smits.”

  “Well, he was bound to find out sometime. Anyway, I’m glad you did well.” And he meant it. His young protégé was learning fast. Faster than he had, that was for sure. “Of course Ardiç latched on to the Smits thing like a leech, but that’s not your fault. However…” Only then did his face drop. He looked sad for a moment. He was pleased for Suleyman, but Ikmen knew that he was treading on very shaky ground with his superior. He knew how quickly a sergeant could be promoted, an inspector sent back into the wilderness.

  Suleyman sensed his unease and changed the subject. “London called about Robert Cornelius.”

  “Ah.” Ikmen looked up. Back to the case. It was what he needed. “Well?”

  “He has a record. Assault upon a lawyer in 1987. A Jewish lawyer called Sheldon.”

  Ikmen nodded. “Interesting. Political?”
/>   “There were no details. Apparently Sheldon didn’t press charges.” He paused. “There was an alleged assault upon a child too, in the same year. That didn’t go any further either. Lack of evidence. Mr. Cornelius seems to have something of a past. Do you want him brought in, sir?”

  Ikmen considered. It was a very tenuous connection, but given Cornelius’s presence at the scene plus his surprise appearance at the Gulcu house, it wasn’t totally ridiculous. If the child were Jewish too … “Ye-es,” he said slowly. “Have one of the men pick him up first thing tomorrow. He’s not going anywhere, is he?”

  “OK. Cohen told me that Mrs. Blatsky was quite useful.”

  Ikmen brightened considerably. If only he had been able to talk like this to Ardiç. “Our Leonid was a Bolshevik, according to Mrs. Blatsky. Active, murderous and committed.”

  “And so the people he murdered were…?”

  “Oh, quality, Suleyman, quality. Bourgeois pigs, as the old woman had it.” He smiled grimly. “Typical fodder for the times.”

  “And Mrs. Blatsky does know this for certain, does she, sir?”

  Ikmen sighed. “Inasmuch as anyone could make out Leonid’s drunken ramblings, yes.

  She was, however, rather unsatisfactorily unclear on this witness to Meyer’s crime business. I presume the delightful Cohen has enlightened you about this?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Someone, the ‘other’ she called him or her, still living in this city, knew about Meyer’s killings. The old woman didn’t know who, said Meyer never told her who or at least she doesn’t think that he did. She did register his fear of this ‘other’ though, said that only the liquor could make him feel OK about it, actually believed it may have kept him going. The ‘other’…” He sighed again, this time far more desperately and deeply than before. “You can imagine who crossed my mind, can’t you?”

  Suleyman shuddered at the thought of her. “It doesn’t prove anything though, does it, sir? I mean, there are still so many questions. Did the incident happen at all or was Meyer just making up alcohol-soaked stories? And if it did happen and Maria Gulcu was a witness, why was a woman like her there witnessing the thing and why did she then leave the country with him? At the risk of putting a block upon your enthusiasm, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.”

  Ikmen sighed a third time. No, it didn’t make much sense. Even he had to admit that. “I don’t know. Perhaps the people Meyer killed were connected to her in some way.” He shrugged helplessly.

  But Suleyman was shocked. “You can’t mean revenge? Why wait”—he worked the mathematics out in his head—“seventy-four years to do it? Why watch him do it and then leave the country with him? It’s madness!”

  “I know that!” blustered Ikmen. “But it keeps on worrying away at me. I can’t get it out of my head that Meyer’s death was an execution. Personal, targeted.” He reached into his drawer and pulled out a large unopened brandy bottle. “If anti-Jewish crazy people were declaring war on the Jews there would have been more of a build-up. Nothing has happened in Balat for years, not a thing! And yet I must admit that I do feel that Smits is connected to it all in some way and there can be no hiding either from the fact of the huge swastika on Meyer’s bedroom wall.”

  “But we don’t know for certain whether Smits was a Nazi or not.”

  Ikmen took the top off the bottle and flung it down on his desk. “No, no we don’t.” He took two big gulps from the bottle and wiped the neck on his sleeve. “As far as we know Meyer did nothing but sit on his arse and get pissed for the last seventy years of his life. Where the hell Reinhold Smits, Maria Gulcu, Robert Cornelius and Meyer’s large amounts of money fit into the picture, we really don’t know.”

  He offered the bottle to Suleyman, who declined.

  “And then there’s the fact that the wretched man was a Russian as well as a Jew!” Ikmen put his hand up to his head in despair. “The fucking Russian psyche! Talk about out of your depth!”

  At that point, there was a knock at the door and Cohen entered. “Would either of you two sirs like some tea?”

  Ikmen raised his head. “Provided you don’t accompany the drink with lewd references to your recent dealings with breasts and bottoms, yes, Cohen,” he said.

  “Right.” The constable left the room.

  Suleyman gave way to an uncharacteristic bout of hilarious laughter.

  * * *

  Natalia had been gone for nearly an hour, but Robert had still not moved from his place on the sofa. His eyes frozen to the forest of television aerials on top of the opposite apartment block, he watched as the evening sun slowly dipped behind the buildings. A streak of smoky copper, thrown across the blue sky like a ribbon, marked its progress toward the west. The dying of the light.

  The heat of the day and the frantic afternoon activity, both sexual and violent, had left him feeling limp and wasted. But it was not an unpleasant feeling and in a way he was grateful for it. His supine, undemanding body placed no strain upon his depleted energy levels. He needed what few calories he possessed in order to think. What Natalia had told him, although explaining much, had left him thoughtful. He was anxious still. No, he hadn’t “seen things.” Yes, he was still in his right mind—but …

  That she hadn’t wanted to tell him was evident. He hadn’t used violence of that order for many years. It had shaken him. He had nursed a hope that perhaps he was no longer capable of such acts, but that was obviously not yet the case. It was her lack of regard, the way she assumed she could just ignore his question and sweep out of the room, that had inflamed him. It had been exactly the same with the earlier incidents. Didn’t these people realize, Natalia, that awful barrister, that bastard Billy Smith, that if he asked a question he expected an answer? Ignoring him, pretending that he didn’t exist, was an insult. It made him feel diminished, persecuted even. Violence really was the only way out when others decided you were a non-person. Or when you deep down and secretly saw yourself in that role. It was scant justification for littering her beautiful body with bruises, however, and Robert knew it.

  He turned his mind to what she had told him. That he had wrested her story from her by force gave it a certain credibility. But it had—he couldn’t quite think of the right word—Ruritanian aspects to it. Aspects that were hard to believe.

  Gulcu was not, according to Natalia, the family’s real surname. When her grandmother came to Turkey as a refugee from Russia in 1918, she had met a man called Gulcu and had three children by him. She neither legally married him, nor did she apply for Turkish nationality. Quite why she omitted to do this or how in fact the family managed to live without any legal status was not explained. Likewise, where Natalia’s own apparently Turkish and again dead father fitted in was also a mystery.

  The murdered man in Balat had been a friend of her grandmother. Like her he was Russian, another refugee from the violence that tore apart and destroyed Tsarist Russia in 1917. In the past they would get together frequently and share memories of their homeland. On these occasions, Natalia’s grandmother would always provide a meal for the impecunious Meyer. He was given to hard liquor and frequently forgot to feed himself properly. But time passed and Meyer and Maria, the grandmother, became too old to socialize. The Gulcus’ provision of food to their less fortunate old friend, however, continued.

  Every week one of the younger members of the family would journey across the Golden Horn to Balat and present the old man with a parcel of food. He was rarely sober, but always grateful. Maria apparently maintained that it was only by virtue of her parcels that the old man survived.

  On Monday it had been Natalia’s turn to make the journey. She took a long, late lunch break from work and arrived at Meyer’s apartment at about three-thirty. She gave the old man his provisions and talked with him for a while. But more time passed than she realized and she was appalled when she looked at her watch to discover that it was already four-thirty. She was due back at the shop. She left Meyer, very much alive, and ran d
own the stairs and into the street. Emerging into the sunlight her own and Robert’s paths briefly crossed.

  The lead-up to this point in her story had been strange and outside his own experience, but Robert could neither prove nor disprove any part of it. The final section, her rendition of their encounter, was a different matter.

  According to Natalia she ran because she had to get back to work. She was not aware of anybody else on the street and just headed straight toward Fevzi Paşa Caddesi and the buses. The reason she gave for not acknowledging Robert was a) she was in a panic and b) because of her short-sightedness she couldn’t actually see him.

  Things had calmed down considerably between them by that time. She was apologetic and, once again, loving toward him. She was like she used to be just after they first met: tenderness and caring lending substance to her sensuality. His own guilt at handling her so roughly had also intervened. She had kissed him and slipped her hand into his trousers, gently massaging his penis. What he had to understand was that contact with the police could be very dangerous for her and her family. It was bad enough the authorities knew her grandmother was friendly with Meyer, but if they knew that she, Natalia, had been in the vicinity when the old man was murdered things could get very difficult. The police would almost certainly require a statement, they would run a check on her, she may even be required to appear in court. The check would reveal her true status; the court would take a dim view of evidence supplied by an illegal alien. The family could be deported. Back to Russia, penniless, standing forever in an endless queue for bread … It was an unappealing image but it dissolved when she lowered her open mouth down upon him and he released himself into a warm stream of erotic pleasure.

  It was only as she raised her head up from him that the small tears in her story started to open up and become holes. The bellow that accompanied his climax had faded and given way to a smile as she had turned to look at him. Grateful, he had stroked her strong, fleshy back. But his fingers tensed as they explored a softness that had not been there only three days before. He remembered the clothes she had been wearing: hard, thick jeans, that coarse and unflattering shirt. Clothes he had never seen before—or since. Clothes she would have deemed unfit to clean the house in. Clothes that could easily be burned. Perhaps had to be. As he came down from his sexual rush, his mind began working again.