Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘So why am I finding this out from you?’ Rex demanded, clinging onto the last scrap of indignation to which he had any right.

  A pause. ‘The view of my wife was that it should be better to tell you closer to the date. She ask this of the nuns, and, I am sorry, that they agree with her.’ The view of the husband, quite clearly, was otherwise. But even so, it was his ear, two hundred miles away in a Parisian suburb, that got the blast-back.

  ‘You tell your pisshead wife it would be better if she dropped dead. Sybille is NOT going!’

  * * *

  Later, in an armchair at Maureen’s – still scorning the cliché of the couch – he mentioned the incident.

  ‘Did you still send him the recording of your wife?’

  ‘No.’ Rex touched the phone in his jacket pocket. He’d toyed with fulfilling the promise, but realised that no one, neither Aurelie nor her husband, would now be in a mood to take him seriously. Restless in the latter stages of the bus journey, he’d ended up setting Sybille’s weird song as his ring-tone.

  ‘I’ve never told anyone to drop dead before.’

  ‘People have dropped dead all around you,’ Maureen observed quietly.

  A point she’d made before, but no less true. His wife wasn’t dead, but she had been snatched from him. His mother had, more literally, dropped dead: they’d parted at Lincoln bus station one blowy October morn, her to her job in the hospital shop, him to his second year at University. By the time Rex had reached Manchester on the coach, he had been orphaned by an embolism. Maureen kept trying to make him talk about it – to make him cry, as he saw it. And people had always done that to him: the WPC who broke the news, his tutor, the priest at home. The only one who hadn’t was the poised, auburn-headed French girl who’d always seemed to be nursing some private joke, always seemed to be sitting opposite him in the University Library, long before they even spoke. Sybille.

  ‘I’m wondering if that’s why deaths bother you so much,’ Maureen was saying. ‘And why you spend so much time investigating them. You want to heal them. But really, perhaps, it’s you who needs healing.’

  Rex wondered briefly what Terry would say, if he was sat in here in Maureen’s armchair. Haddaway an’ shite, woman, man.

  Maureen noted his sceptical expression. ‘Your last girlfriend… Remind me how you met her?’

  ‘I don’t see why we need to discuss someone who’s been six and a half thousand miles away for the past two years.’

  ‘Isn’t it more like eight thousand?’

  ‘No, it’s six thousand, two-twenty.’

  Maureen’s look of surprise managed to express just how unsurprised she was. She’d laid a trap, and she’d been right. He knew exactly how many miles away Diana was, because he cared that she wasn’t near.

  He sighed. This, he thought, was ultimately why the talking cure was never going to work. Therapists were like confidence tricksters, who hung around after they’d scammed you to point out how they’d done it. Having one of them lead him by the nose to sip from some well of truth only annoyed him. He should have been able to get there himself.

  He was happy to agree with Maureen about something, he thought, as he headed out over an empty concourse. Whatever the reason for it, it was true that he was driven to find things out. And Mina’s death still posed a lot of questions, questions still clamouring for an answer. That was why he zoomed in on an immaculately-clad Jan Navitsky, striding the other way with laptop and folder. He looked like they’d taught him to walk that way at his swanky international boarding school: the stride of success.

  ‘The man with the chequered past,’ Rex said, approaching him across the concrete flags.

  Navitsky slowed down and smiled, as if flattered by the reference. ‘You read widely.’

  ‘Only when something bothers me. Was Mina the only girl you had a problem with, Mr Navitsky?’

  The smile vanished, a fly swallowed by a frog. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’

  He knew he was pushing his luck now. He wasn’t a policeman. He just wanted to see the young President’s reaction. It was hard to gauge, though, because the strains of Peter’s song suddenly came out of Rex’s pocket. Someone was calling him. The dentist. He remembered sticking a note on the fridge: Don’t Forget. He’d forgotten. Hearing the song, Navitsky’s expression seemed to change like an autumn day: anger, bewilderment, then amazement.

  ‘Drobna drabnitsa!’ he said. ‘Who is the girl?’

  ‘Someone I met. What’s the song?’

  ‘A Belorussian song. Like a kind of old drinking song.’

  ‘A folk song? What does it mean?’ Rex asked, as the messaging service now made an automatic call, and Sybille’s recital began again.

  ‘Not a proper folk song, just kind of old peasant thing,’ Navitsky said, an almost pained look forming in his eyes. ‘Like, “from a Monday to a Monday, we rascals getting drunk in the rain, if you laugh at us, we knock you down.” Why have you got this?’ He asked the question as if Rex might have been playing the song as an insult.

  Had someone else laughed too loud at Navitsky, Rex suddenly wondered? A girl. Who had to be knocked down?

  The young man’s expression changed again, to intent focus, as the second repetition of the song gave way to the odd bit, at the end, where Sybille suddenly sounded as if she was reading the news. Navitsky’s mouth seemed to be shaping the words.

  ‘Another folk song?’

  Navitsky shook his head. ‘The Bible. Khassiy… one of the prophets. You call the book Hosea, I think.’ He made a wry face. ‘In Belorussian Sunday school, you don’t just listen to a few stories about Jesus. You sit and you learn the whole Bible. Can I…?’

  Rex played it again. Like a wave suddenly hitting, doors opened all around the compound and students surged out. Navitsky stood, oblivious to them, like some Old Testament figure banishing the seas, reciting from his childhood.

  ‘I wish for mercy, not sacrifice. And for knowing of God, not burnt offerings.’

  Rex stood marooned, too, unnnoticed by the hordes with their modern student kits of lanyards and smart-phones. Not burnt offerings. Why would someone have taught his wife to say that?

  * * *

  Back at his desk, he had more than enough to occupy him before the tea-time update. Periodically, throughout the afternoon, Ellie would leave her desk and peer through the slatted blinds at him. Reminding him, as he saw it, of the rash assurances he’d made earlier on. But before he could continue digging, there was today’s mess to report. There were reactions, official and otherwise, to the Trabzonspor club collapse to write up, cross-borough traffic chaos caused by the cordoning-off of the adjacent bus station to be reported on, some mention – without names at this stage – of an old man’s ugly, unnecessary death. He remembered the two fellow club-members who’d stood on the pavement opposite by the Bosphorus café, and the unhealthy-looking man, a former builder, who’d said it had been waiting to happen. Rex should have got a name – that would be a useful line to pursue. But there was no point calling the club for a members list. Was there some Turkish-Cypriot tradesmen’s directory, he wondered – like the kosher Yellow Pages that circulated in the Hasidic areas of Stamford Hill, for when only a Yiddish-speaking plumber would do? He decided this would all have to wait for tomorrow.

  Meanwhile, the mother hit by the window at Tottenham Hale had emerged as a rare treat in a hard day.

  ‘I just feel lucky that it hit me, yeah?’ she’d said when he rang her for a quote. Her name was Ms Marquetta Driscoll, she was 29, and she worked as a cleaner in a local authority nursing home. ‘’Cos I’ve got a very hard head. Serious. I’m lucky. The nurses and doctors all spoiled my little boy, so he got sweets and his mum just got stitches. And now I’m back at work, so. It worked out all right.’

  She hadn’t mentioned suing anyone, compensation, making heads roll. Her view seemed to be that life occasionally hurled heavy objects from the sky, and if you dodged
them, it was to be celebrated. He wondered whether Ms Marqueta Driscoll, Tottenham-born and with a quick-fire delivery suggesting some West Indian heritage, was a churchgoer.

  Someone clearly was – someone whose words had kept nudging at him during the pauses in the day’s activity, like a dog begging for a walk. Belarus, the origin of Sybille’s Old Testament lines – and presumably whoever had taught them to her – was a religious country: mostly Eastern Orthodox, some Roman Catholic, even the odd Muslim Tartar. Belarus was also, as he’d discovered from a glancing search on the internet, a troubled economy, a tuberculosis disaster-zone and, until the party championed by Jan Navitsky’s father had gained some sway, as unfriendly towards protest and the general speaking of minds as Turkmenistan. On a website of UK census statistics, he read that some 1,500 Belarussians had declared themselves resident in 2001, but that there were thought to be at least four times that number living and working here now.

  Rex wondered what they found when they arrived. Since they weren’t EU citizens, it could only be low-paid work, like the stuff on offer via that shabby office off the roundabout. No training, no tax, no insurance, no questions, no rights. And if you lost your job, what then? Perhaps only the woods. Like Peter. Who spoke of sacrifices and burnt offerings. And why?

  As he celebrated the passing of the day’s mini-deadline with fresh baklava and a mug of Brenda’s Special-Brewstrength tea, he heard the ‘pop’ of a new email.

  It was another one from the UN address. It was from the account of the Scandinavian-sounding colleague, Kristian Lund, and Rex’s first thought was that it had come from Helena, whom he’d tried to contact a couple of times since the morning.

  Hello, it said, I am Dr Kristian Lund, Chief Consultant of the United Nations’ War Crimes, Atrocities and Genocide Research Commission, based in Nicosia, Cyprus. I am writing because I will shortly be travelling to the UK, to visit, interview, make archive recordings with and, where invited, obtain DNA samples from members of your area’s sizeable Greek, Greek-Cypriot, Turkish and Turkish-Cypriot communities. I wonder if your publication would be interested in running an article…

  At first he thought the original email must have somehow got itself re-sent. But this wasn’t the original email. This one was signed Kristian Lund, and it had a different phone number at the bottom. He rang it.

  He heard that long, low tone again – pictured a phone ringing on a desk by a shuttered window: through the slats outside, things like heat, dust, date palms… He laughed at himself – he didn’t have a clue what Nicosia was like. Helena hadn’t really told him. And whatever exotic view Dr Kristian Lund’s phone had, it wasn’t being answered, and it didn’t allow for the leaving of a message. Rex was glad. As soon as he’d thought about Helena, he’d realised the proper thing was to talk to her.

  She answered her phone, pleased to hear from him, but she couldn’t speak. An organisation of prominent Greek-Cypriot businesswomen was giving her tea. From the tone of her voice, and the alacrity with which she agreed to meet him later in The Salisbury, it sounded a long and painful tea.

  She confirmed as much, with a shudder, as they met and kissed over cold, amber glasses of Czech lager that evening. She took a long, long draft from her drink, and he watched it, with pleasure, going down her neck.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Ask in three glasses’ time.’

  Life offered many more intense experiences, of course, but whenever it happened, he couldn’t think of one finer than sitting here, amid the dependable dark oaks of his favourite pub, with a beautiful woman, just talking, laughing, being. He was reluctant to spoil it with questions.

  Helena didn’t mind, though. ‘That’s the U.N. all over. We’re a very small office, and while Dr Lund has been away in Rwanda, I got the ok to come over here from our parent unit in New York. If he got back last weekend, as I think he was due to, he won’t have seen anyone to tell him what has happened. Sorry. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.’ She took another drink, almost polishing the pint off. ‘There was just as much of a mix-up when he vanished to Rwanda.’

  ‘And where did you vanish to this morning?’ Rex asked, after fetching over a couple of fresh ones. ‘The ambulance came, but I couldn’t see you anywhere.’

  ‘I told the paramedics I was a doctor and I’d been trying to help. They said to get out.’

  ‘Nice of them.’

  She shook her head. ‘They said it for my own good. I don’t have a license to be a doctor here. If it turned out there was something I should have done, or something I did wrong… I mean, I know there wasn’t, but… People could make things difficult. I’m afraid that’s how it is now. Doctors don’t rush in and try to save lives. A lot of the time they rush away.’ She smiled. ‘Kind of the opposite of your job.’

  ‘Maybe I should run away sometimes. Might make for an easier life.’

  He told her what he’d said to Ellie that afternoon – the promise he’d made. She listened, watching him carefully.

  ‘Well – I’m glad you went back to your job. But be careful. Sometimes, you are looking for one thing, and you find something else completely. It’s not always good.’

  ‘Has that happened to you?’

  She looked reflective for a short while, then shrugged. ‘The strange thing is, in my country, all this wouldn’t even be a story for the back page. Everyone expects the government to be corrupt. Same in most places. Look at that thing from Turkey today.’

  ‘What thing?’

  She showed him via her phone a page on the BBC’s news site. One of those strange slipstreams of global randomness whereby, as Haringey’s Trabzonspor social club was collapsing, the real Trabzon had been, too. A former chief of police in the Black Sea town had been gunned down in the market: a clean, professional hit. The blogosphere was teeming with theories, from a clash with Georgian mobsters to some sort of government cover-up stretching decades back. Rex nodded as he read – remembering the images on the little portable tv in the club: the ambulance, the words Polis, fanatik. It explained why his web report about this insignificant Turnpike Lane social club had been getting an extraordinary number of hits from abroad.

  ‘People here have reasons to be cynical, too. But they’ve had two years of getting used to Eric Miles, doing what he says he’ll do, clearing the rubbish, opening the libraries up again. If this is true, and it comes out, it won’t just kill people’s trust, it will kill him. I feel sorry for the guy.’ He took a drink. ‘I feel even sorrier for Bilal, if I’m right, and it turns out some bent bastards in the council he worked and fought for basically caused his father’s death.’

  She was silent at that, as if she’d suddenly had enough of the subject. He remembered, then, how distracted she had seemed inside the half-open social club, as the emergency unfolded. He mentioned it. It didn’t seem to ring a bell.

  ‘Before you legged it, you were staring at a picture,’ he said. ‘A group of Turkish guys. Army shirts. Lot of hair.’

  She smiled. ‘Was I?’

  He showed her the picture on his phone. She took another drink.

  ‘It reminded me of the Atrocity Museum.’ She shuddered. ‘It’s a place in Cyprus. You go on a school trip there – everyone has to go. The Turks have one, too. The bodies. The graves. The soldiers, before and after. The burnt-out villages.’

  ‘They make children see that?’

  ‘Den Ksechno.’ Like Bilal, she almost seemed to become someone else as she spoke her mother-tongue. ‘I do not forget. It’s written everywhere. Signs. The side of mountains. Like they need to say it. Who do they think is going to forget?’

  ‘I thought things had got better – people going across the borders and things?’

  ‘Turks don’t go back much. Mostly just Greeks do it, to look at their old houses, and feel worse.’

  ‘Did your mum do that?’

  She shook her head, took another drink. ‘After they opened the Green Line in 2003, an old neighbour, a friend of hers, went to Lapithos, to the village
. And when she came back, she brought my mother a bag of white plums, it’s a very special kind, from the trees that had been ours. My mother threw them at her. Chased her down the street, throwing the plums after her. I will eat the fruit when the trees are mine!’

  ‘I guess they’re not friends any more.’

  She made a face. ‘They never really were. She was just someone who tried to do something kind. Everyone knows how my mum is. In the bakers, they understand she will always accuse them of selling a light loaf because she’s ashamed, she’s been ashamed for 41 years that she has to buy her bread from shops now, not make it, like before. She’s not the only person like that, who is never going to be all right. Just maybe the worst in our street.’

  ‘You don’t live with her, though, do you?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s still the street I grew up in. She could be okay – sometimes – but you knew she was only okay because she was trying very hard. Like at school, going to see the teachers. Or at Church, at Easter. And you’d also know she could… explode, at nothing. A dropped spoon. A schoolbook not put back in your bag. And then slap you, slap you so hard and keep on doing it, so you knew the only thing you could do – to save her, really, as much as yourself – was to get away, get right away.’

  She’d coloured as she dredged up these memories, as if they stained her, and her eyes had become wet, but she seemed to want to tell him.

  ‘But you could never know. Which one you were going to get. Like the time Yiannis locked me in the room… the room at the top we called the Turk’s room. It was a day and a night he kept me in there. I had to, I had to wet on the floor.’ Her soft brown eyes flicked to his face and down, embarrassed. ‘I thought we would all be in trouble. But she did nothing. Not to Yiannis. Not Alex. Not me. She gave me this ring the next day. She left it on my bedside table.’ She showed him a simple trio of garnets on her middle finger. ‘Like she was sorry. Sorry because –’