When I Grow Rich

by Joan Fleming

  With all his reading and all his profound knowledge of the thinking of the philosophers of the world, Nuri bey realized with a crushing rush of awareness, he knew little about people.

  He also realized that there was a certain desperate urgency about the way Miasma was talking to him.

  ‘Nuri bey, get me the case back, my lion!’

  He could say absolutely nothing.

  ‘Have pity, Nuri, have pity, you who never transgress. Try to understand that I, a woman of the people, have had to spend my whole life striving. No man ever kept me, I arrived too late at the harem, I was one the Sultan never even saw! Everything I have had in my life I have had to gain with cunning, brain work,’ she tapped her forehead now covered by the lace mantilla which she affected in the Spanish manner, ‘it all comes from here!’

  The one the Sultan never saw! And she had always caused it to be believed that she was the mother of a son of the Sultan! Never even an ikbal!

  ‘Nuri bey, get me back my case!’

  Now he was feeling nothing but a gigantic bewilderment, greater than anything he had yet known. Furthermore, he had no idea where the case was, if it was in the Golden Horn, or somewhere in Jenny’s hand, or in his own house. He did not know. He could never be sure, ever again, of anything.

  ‘Five thousand dollars, Nuri, in boxes of locum! And now you have the truth, can you bear to carry such a burden? But not only that, but to lose it will be the end of my association with my friend in Hong Kong! They will say I am too old, too ridiculously old. The old are not often suspect. They liked me old once, old as I was, and a woman of some position, but now I am too old, as I have shown. Clumsy … unreliable … not to be trusted … They will say I have lost control of myself, as the old sometimes do. “She is in her dotage,” they will say, “she is crazy, senile, incontinent, incompetent, importunate … too old!” ’

  Nuri bey looked round uneasily. The man and the boy were playing yet another game of backgammon. A group of American tourists, buying souvenirs on the steps of the mosque, were the centre of attraction. A pedlar passed crying his wares in what sounded like Turkish but was, in fact, English: ‘Coloured postcards, lovely coloured postcards!’

  ‘Have pity, Nuri,’ she begged again plaintively, with her tiny claw on his arm, ‘have pity. That five thousand dollars is already partly spent! I am desperate.’

  He would have liked to shake her off and stride away through the archway into his own world of printed words, brutally telling her to live on Hadji. But he was not like that. Nuri bey had a fund of limitless kindness which was of great annoyance to him; it was like a fine well at which all comers could drink, which, in time, became everybody’s well, thoroughly cluttered up with the litter of trippers and parasites; that which is free for all is never either appreciated or respected.

  ‘Say something, Nuri bey, say something!’

  He badly wanted to say something to help the poor soul. He thought she knew that Jenny existed but now he could not be sure. And anyway, how could it comfort her to be told that Jenny, the female accomplice, probably had the case?

  ‘I do not know, Madame, I do not know where your case is, and that is the truth.’

  And then a hideous thing happened, something so ugly and degrading that Nuri bey could never again smoke the hubble bubble pipe of peace in the café in the precinct of the mosque of the pigeons.

  She uttered a really low-class Turkish oath of slum origin and slapped him hard across the mouth, then, muttering to herself, she hobbled away.

  It was only when he had gone through the archway and was standing looking down unseeing at the books arranged outside the shop near the Sultan’s grave that Nuri bey brought out his pocket handkerchief and dabbed his mouth. He looked furtively at the handkerchief and found it had blood on it from the scratch made where one of her rings had caught it.

  But, nevertheless, the pain had the effect of triggering off the latent energy that Nuri bey’s dervish father had used up so liberally in himself when he danced himself into a frothing frenzy for the love of Allah and which his son had kept folded away in a drawer of his personality … until now.

  Nuri bey quite suddenly became as the Winged Lion of the Book of Revelations, six wings about him and full of eyes, before, behind and within.

  CHAPTER 10

  He sprang on to a bus going north along the Europe side of the Bosphorus and after a half-hour journey and a few minutes in a dolmus he came to Istiniye in Europe, a place famous in history where ships have been built since before Christ, where the Argonauts put up a temple and where Saint Daniel squatted at the top of a pole for thirty-three years, being forcibly taken down when he became too old, and dying at the age of eighty-four.

  Though tiny, this is the largest and most flourishing harbour of the Bosphorus; it looks like an Eventide Home for old liners, which loll about in a broken-winded way and nowhere is there to be seen a lick of paint. He sought out the equivalent of the harbour master who was a friend and remained in consultation with him for some time. After which he picked his way over ropes and boles through the small forest of fishing vessels, where a fisherman softly tapped out with his palm on his drum the news that he was on his way. Tall and lean, Nuri bey moved amongst them with the strange grace inherited from his father who had danced in a waist-gripping coat with flying skirt, and everywhere he was greeted with the respectful touching of the forehead and the title ‘Efendim’. Here and there he stopped to talk and when he had made his way round the little harbour he was satisfied that no young man of any nationality had been stowed away in any vessel going anywhere up or down the Bosphorus in the last few days or nights.

  The skipper of an Arab schooner loading a cargo of simple things for ports on the Black Sea greeted him with pleasure; he had, on occasion, taken Nuri bey to Trebizond to visit his favourite sister, a widow with a son a school teacher in that city. The passage of time being one of the least important factors in an Arab’s life, it was necessary for Nuri bey to spend several minutes in the exchange of greetings and pleasantries. He was only able to interrupt the episode when he saw the ferry steamer coming round the point, and rushed to catch it.

  He disembarked at Miasma’s village, on the Asia side, but instead of going to Miasma’s yali he stayed in the village square, sitting in a café and eating a dish of the splendid yoghourt for which that village is famous. As always in these villages a clutch of dark, dusty, Arab-like characters lounged around apparently aimlessly, as much part of the scene as the dying kittens and plane trees and dwelling places that look like decrpit cow sheds. Some of these had been hired as mourners for Valance’s death, and Nuri bey, eyeing them sharply, knew that they were idling away their temporarily splendid affluence. It needed not more than a certain kind of glance to get two of them to sidle across to his table and squat upon the ground at his feet and talk about the things that Arabs do talk about, whatever that may be.

  Then, led skilfully by Nuri bey, the talk drifted to the death at the yali and how they had been paid double the usual rates for mourning the Christian death because they had all objected to such an unusual procedure and Hadji had had to bribe them with much fine gold (in other words, dirty Turkish notes).

  They told how many had left as the night advanced but that there were still a few who saw the arrival of a young man in a taxi from Uskudar, and how, almost immediately, behind the entrance door of the yali, across the courtyard, they heard strange sounds.

  ‘What sort of sounds?’ Nuri bey asked.

  ‘Shooting!’ they whispered. ‘Undoubtedly shooting.’ And, frightened and almost ashamed of what they had heard, they had crept away only to return at dawn to assist in the carrying of the bier forty steps towards the grave in order, as the Prophet had promised, to expiate a few of their mortal sins. The young man had not been one of the tiny procession which wound its way on foot up the hill to the newly-dug grave. No one had seen the young man since: the whispered words floated away like bubbles, to burst aimlessly into the
air, full of emptiness. He had not come out of the main door of the yali, though it was always possible that he had gone out of another door … They wrapped their arms round their scraggy, pin-stripe covered knees and rocked themselves almost imperceptibly to and fro, like the calamity-prone characters that they were, a human frieze denoting disaster. The only other door led out on to the Bosphorus …

  Abnormally superstitious, they were deathly afraid of what might happen to them in their connivance; that a Christian should have a Moslem burial was so unusual an event that they were not sure whether or not it was a mortal offence and naturally enough no one had dared to approach the imam with such a problem. So convinced were they that no good would come of it that Nuri bey, as he listened to all they had to tell him, tempered the information with common sense.

  Immediately across the road, from the back of the yali, the ground rose sharply, covered with the styles or pole-like stones which take the place of ordinary Christian gravestones, leaning together like drunkards unable to stand, or fallen to the ground. Cemeteries are not tended in any way and weeds and bushes grow up amongst the styles in great disorder. A hedge of rhododendrons almost hid the melancholy sight of the rising cemetery from the road and it would be amongst these bushes that, all day and possibly all night, one or two of them would lie, keeping a constant watch upon the yali, because they had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.

  A young girl, they said, was now at the yali, last night there had been nobody there, unless the young man had been lying asleep, or drugged, or dead, the house had been empty. But they had returned an hour after dawn, Hadji driving the car and Madame in the back with a young woman who laughed and made much joyous noise as she was led into the yali. An American, perhaps, or an English young woman, or perhaps French, she had laughed very much and talked in English and French very loud, and Madame had hustled her inside. Since then Madame and Hadji had both left the yali, once more Hadji driving the motor car towards Uskudar. The young girl was not with them, and the woman who went in to clean had let herself in with her key, as usual.

  The young girl had not left the yali by the main door …

  So either there were two young people now in the yali … or not.

  And with these saturnine remarks they stared at Nuri bey out of their black cavernous eyes, full of apprehension.

  Nuri bey ate steadily, ordering a second bowl of yoghourt and sprinkling it well with sugar. No lines marred the smoothness of his impassive silvery-tan face, he might not have been listening at all, though in fact not one syllable of what was being said escaped him. When it was clear that his source of information was now as empty as the bowls, he left the table and strode away towards the villa, scattering the proles at his feet, whilst some of them trailed after him to see the fun.

  In Miasma’s courtyard a splendid rhododendron flourished and now great crimson flowers hung foward over the marble flags. Nuri bey paused to pick some petals and eat them, as his ancestors had eaten such flowers on the eve of battle. Fortified, he banged loudly on the door and the followers, peering through the gateway, cringed nervously because it was clear that the Efendi was on the warpath.

  The cleaner, a woman of such humble proportions as to be barely human, with her head and a quarter of her face wrapped tightly in an unbecoming black shawl, opened the door a crack and peered out.

  Allah be praised, it was the Efendi! Mysteriously she drew him inside, closing and barring the door. As she did so, the new Nuri bey, being, as he was, full of eyes before, behind and within, at once saw the bullet marks.

  She had something to show him and, as she hurried off to get whatever it was, Nuri bey touched the bullet marks with his fingers. There were two of them on the door and one mark, which may have been that of a glancing bullet, on the wall beside the door. There must have been some pretty wild shooting.

  What she had to show him was a pair of fine shoes in dark brown suede; she was clearly under the impression that they belonged to Nuri bey and handed them to him with the air of triumph. Nuri bey asked where she had found them and she readily confessed that she had found them ‘hidden’ in Hadji’s bedroom next to the kitchen. It would appear that the woman did not like Hadji, thought that he had stolen the shoes and was glad that she was able to do Nuri bey the service of returning them to him and at the same time implicating Hadji.

  Nuri bey thought it expedient to admit that they were his and she immediately went on to tell him that a young girl was lying asleep in Valance’s bed. There was nobody else in the house, Madame and Hadji had gone out before she arrived, she did not know where they had gone because it was not Madame’s day at the hamam, and if it had been, Hadji would only have taken her as far as Uskudar, and would have returned long before now. It was now nearly nightfall and though she should be gone she had stayed on because she did not like to leave the young lady, whoever she might be, alone. And why was she sleeping so soundly? The woman was afraid the young girl was ill. She was pleased that Nuri bey had come so that she could hand over responsibility.

  There was no question of deciding whether or not he should go into Valance’s room to observe the young girl asleep; she forced it upon him, excitedly leading him up the stairs and into the room.

  Jenny’s healthy pink cheeks were the colour of goat’s cheese, her hair straggled damply across the huge, French, square feather-pillow and she was breathing heavily, her mouth slightly open.

  ‘Is she ill, Efendim?’

  Bending over her Nuri bey smelt her breath, which was far from fresh, as he had known it would be. He touched her bare shoulder and was embarrassed to find she was wearing only a bra.

  The cleaning woman said darkly that she was in an unnatural sleep. Nuri bey took both her shoulders and shook her firmly but still she did not wake. He asked for water and a cloth and when the woman brought it he wiped her face with the cloth soaked in cold water. It was several minutes before she opened her eyes and several more minutes before she came round completely, wondering where she was but at once recognizing Nuri bey.

  ‘Stay here!’ he sternly ordered the cleaning woman, and then he drew back the bedclothes and pulled Jenny from the bed. She was wearing an acid green waist petticoat of startling brilliance which he at once extinguished beneath Valance’s best lace and satin-lined bedspread. He marched her across to the window and firmly held her standing in front of it whilst she took some deep breaths of fresh air.

  It was some time before she said anything and then a number of disjointed sentences escaped her swollen lips. ‘Oh, my lord, what is going to happen to me next … oh, that ghastly hanging … oh, my lord, I do feel sick!’ She retched into the pail of cold water. ‘Oh, Nuri bey, you are an angel … oh, my lord, whatever next!’

  Nuri bey drew a chair up to the window and gently sat her down. The woman crouched on the floor by the door. ‘Stay there!’ Nuri bey ordered again, though, fascinated by events, she had no intention of going. And then Jenny started to cry and Nuri bey took out his pocket handkerchief and mopped her eyes and put his arm round her shoulders, as though she were a child.

  It was mainly about the hanging, she said, it was like a nightmare, she could hardly believe it had really happened, and listening, shocked, Nuri bey could hardly believe it either. He was probably far more shocked at what had happened to Jenny than she was herself. Kneeling on the floor beside her chair and listening to what she was saying, Nuri’s heart cringed within him.

  She went on to tell him how sorry she was that she left his house the way she did, and why. It became so dark that the woman officiously switched on the light, a central pendant round which Valance had arranged a lace and satin-lined shade. ‘Do not leave,’ Nuri bey again ordered, unnecessarily.

  ‘You must come away with me, Jenny,’ he stated. ‘I shall telephone for a taxi to take us to the ferry. You shall come back home with me.’

  But no, Jenny could not do that. She must stay. She was sure that Tony was here. She had searched the house and there ha
d been no sign of him, but nevertheless she was sure this was his headquarters, and to prove her point she asked Nuri bey to open the top left-hand drawer of the chest.

  He stared down at the photograph of the handsome, wry face of Tony Grand and tried to understand why it should be found in Valance’s drawer.

  ‘You see?’

  Even his inward eye failed to function fully, so that he did not, in fact, see reason, he only guessed that Tony came to the yali from the airport, and asked for protection, with Valance already dead and lying on her bier in the hall ready for burial.

  ‘You must come away with me,’ he repeated, looking round for her clothes.

  ‘I can’t, Nuri bey, really I can’t. Madame has been quite kind to me since the hanging. I must show Tony some loyalty, even if he hasn’t seemed to show me any. But maybe he simply couldn’t help leaving me like that. Don’t you understand? I must stay, if only to explain to him what happened to the case.’

  ‘What did happen to the case?’ he asked grimly.

  ‘I told you!’

  ‘That case is worth thousands of dollars to Madame.’

  ‘I dare say, but if I’d been found with it I’d probably have been hanged. You must think I’m a bit of a fool, Nuri bey. I’m not the sweet and simple young thing you insist on thinking I am. Naturally I examined the case. I went into a public loo and opened it and I undid the packets of locum; they were neatly packed with all the Haci Bekir wrapping and what have you, but inside they were solid blocks of heavy green stuff that smelt pretty horrid. Anyone with any sense could see it was raw opium, or something like that, mechanically compressed and cut into blocks the same size as a box of locum. That’s why I went to the Turkish Delight shop near the bridge to have a look and see how it was packed. It was exactly the same and the boxes were made airtight by the Cellophane wrapping, so that the smell didn’t escape till I opened them. Oh, my lord, what a sickly smell!’