by Joan Fleming
But overriding all this was the certainty that to propose these things would be to blacken himself in her eyes.
And furthermore, Nuri bey faced the truth, as he always did because his life was spent in the search of truth, that he was now deadly afraid of Miasma. He had always been in awe of her because, though old, her craftiness was something out of the ordinary; now he was suddenly afraid that she was wicked as well as astute; he did not allow himself to formulate, in his own mind, wherein her wickedness lay but he was filled with an unease which stirred the small hairs along his spine and gave him an actual nausea.
To be excessively old and excessively cunning was, at best, an unpleasing combination, but now Nuri bey realized that she had been using him so that his act of simple friendship in going to her house weekly to read the papers to her had surely not been, as he had thought, simply the desire to keep in touch with world affairs.
But the most immediate problem was the case; he must examine the contents … at once. And this seemed to him to be the trickiest problem of the lot. If, as was almost certain, Jenny knew that it was the key to the whole affair, she was not going to leave him alone with it until she knew more about him. And if, as was also possible, she was entirely innocent, he did not want to draw her attention to it because, if it contained something of serious significance, it would be a great deal better for her if she did not know.
Or would it?
If she knew, it could have a salutary effect, as would the shaking by the shoulders he had contemplated, making her realize how serious her position was.
‘Tony’s going to be frantically worried about me,’ she went on, after a long pause, and Nuri bey hoped she was right. ‘The thing is, will he know I’ve had the sense to stay here, or will he think I’ve flown on? Because if he knows I’m still here in Istanbul he’ll find me somehow, he won’t rest till he does, I’m sure.’
‘He’ll never find you here in this house,’ Nuri bey said firmly.
‘Then I’ll have to go out and find him.’ There it was, the expected.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snapped. ‘This is a big city of three-quarters of a million people; you could spend a lifetime looking for him and not find him.’ He did not, of course, believe this, but he believed that he should put that viewpoint to her. Amongst those three-quarters of a million people, Nuri bey had many, many friends; lawyers, a judge, doctors, members of the police force, brass hats in the Army and the Navy, schoolmasters, priests, imams, owners of stalls in the Covered Bazaar and the Spice Market, cargo boat owners, steam-boat operators, waiters and restaurant owners, hotel directors, business men, museum attendants, roast chestnut sellers and many more.
From the ferrymen and fishermen at Eyup, at the far end of the Golden Horn, news of a missing young English gunman could, literally, be passed on the drums over that stretch of water and along the whole length of the Bosphorus coast on both sides, and quite some distance along the Marmora coast, too.
He could be out now, putting the news about, were it not that he must not leave Jenny alone with the case until he had inspected the contents.
CHAPTER 4
And then, as though to underline how unused he was to this kind of thing, when the front-door knocker was banged he went straight to the door and threw it open with the expansive gesture with which he welcomed all comers to his house.
‘Good day, Efendim, good day!’
Hadji stood there in his usual cowering and self-effacing manner and, seeing Nuri bey was at home, he went down the steps to the taxi at the gate and helped Miasma down. Nuri bey’s smile of welcome faded but he hurried down the steps to help her mount them and it was only when all three had gained the top step and she was pressing forward into the house that he remembered that Jenny must not be seen. There was nothing he could do about it now; furious with himself he followed her into his hall, looking across to where he had left Jenny on the sofa in the salon.
Not only had she gone but she had taken away the remains of their breakfast on the tray.
Miasma began by saying that she had tried to telephone to him earlier and getting no reply she had decided it would be better to come in person; they had things to talk over which could not be discussed on the telephone.
She had been up all night; the delayed shock of Valance’s death had prevented her sleeping. The funeral had taken place at an early hour, in fact the imam and his attendants had arrived before it was fully daylight. She had found the walk up the hill in the wake of the bier extremely trying; she had been obliged to pause for breath many times. However, it had all been well-timed. As the sun rose Valance’s body was lowered to its resting place. And that was that.
She asked Nuri’s forgiveness for such an early appearance, unannounced, but with the telephone unanswered … it had to be. It was many years since she had crossed the Bosphorus at so early an hour but here she was; they must now discuss the very serious occurrence at the airport last night. He would be thinking that it was a little strange that Miasma had not mentioned that the young man to whom he had to give the case was an Englishman called Tony Grand. But in fact it was not at all surprising.
The whole thing was, really, of no consequence at all, a frivolity, and she pronounced the French word with lightness and a flick of the fingers. A little locum for a friend in Hong Kong, Nuri bey had surely often heard Miasma speak of her, a Turkish woman married to a Chinese business man, the same woman who had so generously given her the beautiful Pekingese some years ago; a present of a little Turkish delight for which the native of Turkey longed. To think that the tiny gesture to please an old friend should have developed into this shocking accident had frightened her very much indeed.
‘Accident!’ he exclaimed.
‘The poor young man evidently had a bad record, a guilty conscience, eh?’ Seeing himself observed, she went on, he took fright, brought out his revolver and … there it was. An accident. She was quite sure that he had not intended to do anything more than give everyone a nasty fright. It was a great pity, she went on smoothly, that Nuri bey, having put himself out to do something which in the ordinary way would have been entrusted to her companion, Valance, should have become involved …
So much talk and all so smooth and comfortable, as though she were talking to a half-witted child; she was insulting him, prattling along about locum for a friend in Hong Kong.
Slow to anger, Nuri bey was now convulsed with a wild rage. He was tense from head to foot and his face was grimly set. He held on to the back of a chair, using both hands, which seemed to want to act on their own impulse. With control he left the chair upon the ground and did not raise it above his head to bring it crashing down to the floor.
In a corner by the front door Hadji cowered.
‘Yes, my lion,’ she soothed, not meeting his eyes nor looking into his grave face, but putting one of her small hands, like a dead mouse’s tiny claw, on his arm. ‘I regret very much that you should have become so entangled …’
Her voice tailed out because she had seen the raincoat, hanging over the back of a chair, where Nuri bey had spread it early this morning; the white raincoat which Jenny had worn last night when she left the transit lounge and stood at the exit, looking for a taxi in which to run away from the scene inside.
From then onwards she seemed to have changed into another gear. She seemed easier in her mind, more confident. ‘And so, Nuri, my lion, we must help this young man as far as is possible.’
He collected himself. ‘It is no business of ours. If he lost his head and used a gun, it cannot possibly have anything to do with us …’ But she was staring so fixedly at the raincoat that he closed his mouth over a thousand unsaid things. What did she know about the raincoat? Was it in any way distinctive? Was it any raincoat left by any woman whom Nuri bey might have been entertaining for the night? Or as a guest for a meal the previous day? Or did it proclaim itself an Anglo-Saxon raincoat? Or was it that she recognized it as the raincoat of … Jenny?
The
Turkish language is soft and sibilant, sounding like a lot of vowels with s and k as the only consonants, the dominant word always seeming to be yok, which means no, a very definite and final no.
Yok, Nuri bey now said, yok, yok, and again yok. He would have nothing more to do with the affair; it was none of his business. He was a well-known and respected citizen of Istanbul; it was quite impossible for him to mix himself in any anti-social business. And if the case was of such trivial importance as Miasma had implied there was no need for her to get any further involved either. They could now leave everything to the airline’s security officers and Interpol.
He had not invited her to sit and he now wished to get her out of the house quickly whilst he was still able to keep his anger in control. She had moved across the hall but continued to stand, stroking the shoulders of the raincoat thoughtfully and he realized that he would have to fulfil the requirements of the owner of the house when a caller comes, he must offer something to eat or drink.
Hadji stood in the shadows by the door, a shabby and ludicrous figure. The Turks did themselves a great disservice when they discarded their robes for European dress; the lower classes are quite unable to keep themselves even reasonably tidy and well-groomed; their trousers are too wide and too long and made of such poor material that they soon go into holes so that nearly all Turkish trousers are patched to a greater or lesser degree; braces lose their elasticity, belts get lost or broken and more often than not the trousers are kept up only by the Will of Allah. The final result cannot possibly be called ‘European dress’. As the chauffeur of a well-to-do lady, Hadji was a comic figure. Wearing a cloth cap, he stood with head bowed, hands thrust into each opposing sleeve; his thoughts apparently far from the present scene.
Nuri bey looked at him; in the ordinary way he would have sent him into the kitchen to prepare coffee or tea but now he went himself, not to make tea, which would take too long, but to bring a dish of sweetmeats to offer his guest.
Jenny was standing at the open back door, holding one of the scraggy and pathetic kittens with which Istanbul is overrun. ‘Look,’ she cried as soon as he came in, ‘look at this poor thing … it’s dying of starvation.’
Nuri bey pressed his finger to his lips, shook his head, frowned and gently pushed her outside, closing the door. ‘Stay there,’ he hissed, ‘for a few minutes more.’
He snatched up the dish of sweetmeats and opened the door into the hall only to encounter Hadji now standing immediately on the other side: listening, of course. He looked into his sad, old monkey’s eyes and something he saw there caused him to keep the words he had been going to utter, something about the raincoat being the property of the wife of a professor friend who had called yesterday morning on his way through Istanbul, behind the barrier of his teeth.
Instead, he said to Miasma as he offered the sweetmeat: ‘All the same, I do not understand why you came. To come all this way to discuss what happened last night … I don’t understand.’
She gave her attention to the extremely sticky small piece of shredded wheat, soaked in honey. ‘I rang only to see if you were in. There are things one cannot discuss on the telephone,’ she declared. An absurd answer from someone who spent a large part of the day discussing everything and everybody with her friends on the telephone. Furthermore, getting no reply, why did she come knowing he must be out?
‘You must accept, my friend, that by misfortune in carrying out a small favour, asked of you by me—’ she tapped her own shrivelled chest to make sure that there was no mistake as to whom she referred—’ you have involved yourself in something of international importance. One thing leads to another; in the strangest way Kismet suddenly has us caught in the web of destiny.’
This form of speech sounds less absurd in Turkey where Kismet, and Destiny and the Will of Allah are everyday words. Having finished the sweetmeat, she brought out a handkerchief from which came an expensive scent and dabbed her sticky lips. ‘Delicious, my lion.’ She tucked the handkerchief away in her crocodile handbag. ‘A tiny clot of blood in the brain of my poor Valance and the heavens can fall about our ears. Old Turkey and new Turkey, the difference is only superficial; underneath the thin coating of Western civilization we are unchanged.’
‘But this has nothing to do with us. It was one foreigner wildly shooting another foreigner,’ Nuri bey almost shouted.
‘Nonsense, my friend, it has everything to do with us; you cheat yourself if you think otherwise. I gave you a case with simple innocent contents …’
‘Why a shabby used case, Madame? If the contents were so simple why was it not a parcel of boxes of locum wrapped in the paper of the shop of Haci Bekir from which they were purchased, I take it?’
‘Because—because that case is continually used by me to send locum to my friend in Hong Kong; she, in her turn, sends me bean shoots, soy sauce, tinned chow chow in thick syrup and other Chinese delicacies, which you, Nuri, have occasionally enjoyed in my house. With our absurd customs restrictions one cannot, as you should know, bring foreign consumer goods into this fiercely nationalist country. That small case has made many trips over the years, through the customs.’
‘Ah, a simple explanation, Madame. I thank you. Perhaps there is an equally simple explanation about how you come to know Tony Grand, a young steward in Zenobia Airways.’
‘Yes, you are right, there is an equally simple explanation for that. Tony Grand is a relative of a friend …’
‘All these mysterious friends,’ he exclaimed impatiently.
‘You too have friends, many friends, Nuri,’ she returned, grieved but unruffled, ‘and if I remember rightly,’ she went on silkily, ‘you sent an illustrated Koran to a friend of yours in Edinburgh by a friend of mine whom you met in my house.’
‘That was to a professor friend of mine who had been very kind and had me many times to breakfast at the Hilton Hotel.’
‘You see? Do not attribute to the actions of others a significance which you would never dream of attaching to your own.’
‘But this particular person wasn’t armed with a loaded revolver,’ Nuri bey returned nastily, ‘and did not shoot a detective in a crowded waiting lounge and then run for his life.’
The score now standing in his favour, he picked up the raincoat, smoothed it affectionately and took it across into the hall where he folded it slowly and carefully and laid it gently upon the hall table.
‘The raincoat of another friend, I suppose,’ she called sharply.
‘Certainly,’ he replied smoothly, ‘I shall return it to her this evening.’
She followed him and he felt considerably heartened because she was now pulling on her long black gloves, clearly on her way.
‘There is no mystery, my lion. It is all perfectly simple.’
‘Everything is far from simple, Madame.’
‘But look, my friend, Valance was to perform a simple task, one of many such small commissions she did for me. She died suddenly, the poor soul, and I, having made the arrangements, ask you to oblige me by doing this small thing for me. May I remind you that the body of my poor Valance was resting in my house overnight until her burial today at dawn; would you have wished for me to be alone with the corpse whilst I sent Hadji on this trivial errand? What could be more natural than that I should ask you to do it for me?’
Nuri bey thought that it would have been a good deal more natural to have forgotten the present of locum for the friend in Hong Kong, under the circumstances.
As he did not reply she gave him a really dirty look and tapped her fingers impatiently upon the blue-satin-covered table top. ‘Why will you not tell me in detail what passed at the airport last night?’
‘There is barely anything to tell. The young man approached me …’
‘What did you say to him?’
‘I did exactly as you instructed me, Madame. In fact, he asked me first if I had come from Madame Miasma, and then he asked if “the old woman” was ill. I asked which old woman. He said, “The
French companion.” ’
‘What did you say, Nuri?’
‘I was not sure if I should say she was ill or what I should say. But remembering your instructions I said nothing. The young man said “Just one of those things” in English. Up to then we had spoken English. This was an idiom I did not quite understand. However, he thanked me and took the case. He walked away into the waiting lounge, and that was the last I saw of him.’
‘From my standpoint the affair is innocent, simple, but in view of what actually happened … why are you keeping back information that might help us?’
‘Help you in what way?’
‘To understand what happened last night there, at the airport, and why.’
‘If it is all so simple and innocent we don’t need to know. The man who was to carry out your tiny commission was a gunman, perhaps a dangerous lunatic. A detective has been killed. Your hand case has been lost.’
He felt suddenly as though he were bullying. She was old and looked frail, though he knew she was not. The early start, the unaccustomed excitement were making their mark; she looked grey and pinched.
‘I would like it back,’ she murmured mildly.
‘If I had it, you should have it back,’ he said, almost gently now. ‘If I had it.’
She gave his face a long searching look, which was a very unusual thing for her. ‘I do not understand you, Nuri bey.’ She turned away. ‘Come, Hadji,’ she said.
He stood at his door, watching them going down the steps to the waiting taxi, all his anger gone.
*
In the kitchen, pinned to the table with a sharp-pointed french cooking knife which Nuri bey used for chopping onions, was an envelope on the back of which was written in lipstick:
GONE OUT BACK SOON. J.
It was a used envelope and Nuri bey turned it round, thinking instantly that he would now have her English address and would therefore be able to communicate with her parents. But reading the address made him, somehow, less hopeful: Miss Jenny Bolton, The Three Diamonds Hotel, Greek Street, London, W.l. It sounded distinctly transitory and not very wholesome.