Robert knew that if he wanted to, he could rape her. In this mood she would fight, but it didn’t stop him wanting to do it. He was stronger than her, he’d proved it before. He moved just a fraction of an inch toward her, but then he stopped. This was the bestial side, that side he’d wanted to leave behind, but hadn’t. Oh, if only she would come to him willingly! If only she loved him the way he loved her! But he knew now that she didn’t. He’d always really known. And yet that seemed to make him want her even more, if that were possible. He couldn’t, daren’t, touch her. His erection hurt and he crumpled down on to the sofa with a groan. “For Christ’s sake, Natalia!”
“What?” She looked at him with disgust, her lip curled; she knew what he wanted. Her head was very high and there was an icy light in her eyes. Cruel. “What you want, Robert?”
He groaned and leaned forward as if trying to cover and protect his aching genitals. “I want you!”
“You want fucking with me!” she screamed.
It was so loud that Robert put his fingers up to his lips and went “Sssh!” He didn’t want the neighbors, if they were in, to hear her language, or old Ali the kapıcı for that matter. Especially old Ali. But she ignored him.
“You want stinking piss inside my beautiful body!” Hot tears flew from her eyes and splashed like rain in the air around her face. It was such an excessive, insane display that for a few moments Robert found himself incapable of either movement or thought. Only the faintly unpleasant sensation of his penis softening penetrated his absorption in her madness. She screamed again. “What I do, Robert! You fucking go to police!”
Beautiful, tapered hands flew convulsively up to her face and long red fingernails clawed deeply into her cheeks. Robert came to with a jolt. Christ, she’s going to tear her own eyes out!
In an instant he was up. He rushed across the room and caught her wrists in his hands before she drew blood. As he touched her, she screamed as if burned, but he held on. Just gently, but nevertheless firmly, he shook her as if trying to vibrate some sense into her hysterical head. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Then her eyes closed and her lips curled and stretched back as if she were in physical agony. Robert pulled her still closer and stroked her face softly with one finger. Natalia gave in. She toppled forward, crushing her head into his shoulder and he felt the wetness of her tears through his thin shirt. She cried bitterly for several minutes. Her sobs were long and heartbreaking, like those of a small, distressed child. Robert, of course, knew why she was so shaken by his visit to the police and he knew that he should hate her, even perhaps fear her, but he couldn’t. It was too late for that. He stared steadily ahead, rocking her. The thick heat pressed hard upon his sweat-soaked body and despite her presence he felt very alone. He’d slipped into this thing via the long corridor of love and now he couldn’t get out.
When he felt sure that she would do herself no further damage, Robert released her hands and put his arms around her shoulders. The force of his dark passion, that old, uncontrollable friend, had evaporated, and it was with a brother’s rather than a lover’s hand that he eventually led her over to the sofa and helped dry her sodden face with a tissue. Christ, she actually thought he had betrayed her! How could she think that?
Was she so afraid, was she so guilty? Did she place so little trust in him? Could she really not tell that it didn’t matter to him what she did or had done?
As her breathing regained a regular and steady rhythm once more, Robert slipped into his bedroom and returned a few seconds later with a bottle of gin and two glasses. However she felt, he, at least, needed a drink. He sat down beside her and poured them both large measures. She drank without thanks or expression, giving him no cause to apologize for lack of mixers.
Robert, a veteran of numerous lonely sessions with neat gin, gulped his down in one and then poured himself another. For what he was about to say, he needed some fortification. Over the last few days the truth had dawned almost without him noticing and although he had tried to fight it, he had an admission to make to her and he had to make it quickly before his courage died. He hoped that it would change things. Perhaps it would even make her love him, really love him.
He took a deep breath. “Natalia, if you did kill that old man it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to the way I feel about you. I love you.”
He heard her take a last gulp of gin and swallow. She stared blankly into her now empty glass and then poured herself another large measure of spirit.
For a second Robert wondered whether she had actually heard him. But she had. He knew she just didn’t know what to say. What he actually wanted himself was a mystery too. An admission of guilt? Perhaps—although he shuddered away from the thought. He told her again. “I love you and I will do anything and everything I have to to help and protect you. I…”
It was a terrible admission and his voice failed him, his throat closing against revealing further evidence of the depths to which his infatuation had made him sink. He tipped his glass to his lips and then rested his head back against the wall behind. He stared fixedly at the ceiling and wondered what sort of thing he was becoming. He didn’t know. In love he became unpredictable, even to himself. Events happened; things, maybe parts of him, got broken or went missing—or so it seemed. It had never been any different. Even before Betty, even with “casual” girls in pubs and at discos, it had always been the same. Take them home, possess them, put them in an apron and never let them go. A woman was comfort, warmth, a wall of breasts and belly against the blackness “out there,” against the cold and inevitable loneliness of life. Sometimes he got hurt or he hurt one of his lovers—that was inevitable, especially in view of the fact that there was only ever really room for one important lover in his life at any given moment. Quick screws, to which he did sometimes succumb, amidst much self-loathing, were one thing, but it was always the main lover that was important. In the end not much mattered, only her—whoever she happened to be at the time. And Natalia was the greatest of them all. He had realized that very early on, despite all the difficulties. She was beauty, his kind; he could lose himself in her flesh, her belly and breasts.
He felt the pressure of fingers on his leg and looked down.
“I don’t kill anyone, Robert.” Her words were slow, calm and deliberate. “Not me.”
Her eyes were so clear and lovely that he almost believed her. But Robert knew what little snakes they all were—women. His wife had lied too, consistently. Women’s weakness, they couldn’t help it. But he was disappointed. If she would only share it with him, he could wrap her guilt up in his love and take her away.
“Mr. Meyer was a very good man.” Her words broke his train of thought and he looked down at her questioningly. Was she just deceiving herself with this show of affection for the murder victim or what? If she was, it was a good performance. “Mr. Meyer, the dead man. He help Grandmother out from Russia.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. They come to Turkey together after Revolution. For little time they were lovers.”
Robert recharged his glass and leaned back into the depths of his sofa. “Go on.”
“Leonid Meyer then take job in a cotton factory. He work for the German man called Mr. Smits. He was not a good man, this Mr. Smits.”
Robert had the distinct impression that something very important was being said here. But whether its importance stemmed from the truth or from some darker motive, he couldn’t tell. In addition, he was almost certain that he had heard the name Smits somewhere before. “And so?” he said.
“This man Smits one day see Grandmama and say to Leonid Meyer that he want her for himself.” Her eyes widened as her story unfolded, making her once again animated and even more beautiful. “Leonid Meyer argue with Smits about this and Smits then put him on a very bad job at the factory.”
“So what happened then?”
“When the war begin in Europe, lot of people here agree with the Germans. So Mr. Smits get rid of Leonid Meyer from
his job, say to him, ‘You go from here now, you dirty Jew,’ and—”
“Oh, what!” Of course! Now he remembered. Ikmen had mentioned someone called Smits, almost in passing, but …
Natalia looked at him questioningly. “What is it, Robert?”
“I’ll tell you in a moment. Go on.”
She shrugged. “There is little more to tell. From that day Smits hate Leonid Meyer. Make certain he never get other job again. Leonid Meyer very unhappy always.” She looked up at him. “What is wrong, Robert?”
“The police asked me about this Smits man, I’m sure of it. Whether I knew him—I said that I didn’t. It was only a brief mention, but … I suppose it may indicate that they are seriously considering his part in—”
“Grandmama,” she put in, as if the old woman were the only authority on the matter of any merit, “believe that they do not take seriously this Smits.”
Although his eyes were, as ever, filled with love for her, Robert also now viewed Natalia with some caution. “Oh?”
“Also,” she continued, “it may be that this man has some place in this problem that they do not yet know.”
Robert felt part of his mind harden as he considered what her words might mean.
But Natalia, as she so often did, pre-empted him before he could speak. “We cannot, as I tell you before, because of trouble with immigration, make any more conversation with police. Who can say what will happen if they know I am with Leonid Meyer on that day? But if some other person were to tell them about this man…”
“You mean like me?”
“Yes.”
He stood up and rubbed his head with his hands. Both her strange and troubling mood swings and her disturbing words were, together with the enormous midsummer heat, fuddling his brain. “But I can’t say anything about this Smits to the police,” he said, “I’ve told them I don’t know him. I mean they’ll want to know where I got my information from. And that’s apart from the fact that this man may well be entirely innocent.” He turned to face her. “What do you want me to do?”
“I do not know,” she said simply, “but if you can think of something to help us in this situation then I would be grateful. And this man Smits … well, Grandmama say he was a Nazi person, so…”
“You know that for a fact?” He so wanted to do as she asked, so wanted for her to be grateful.
She smiled. “Oh yes. Smits was a Nazi, that is sure.”
He took her hands in his. “All I can say, Natalia, is that I will try and—”
“You are clever man, you will do.” She kissed him, silencing any further protest or doubt. And as her embrace took effect upon his body, as he once again slid his hand between the thinness of her blouse and the thickness of her breast, Robert surrendered entirely to his feelings. If Natalia said that she had nothing to do with the murder then why not just believe her? And if someone who was, or had been, a Nazi could possibly be implicated then why not nudge things along in that direction? Quite how, he did not know yet, however …
And yet …
And yet what if she were …
He felt one of her hands slip quickly, like a small dextrous fish, inside the waistband of his trousers. And for the rest of their time together his internal wrangling stopped completely.
Chapter 11
Çetin Ikmen rolled over on to his back and peered myopically at the face of his watch. Ten to six. Just too late to try and get some more sleep (although that was a joke) and too early to start moving around. He cursed and then hit the back of the couch with murderous intent. Many more nights like this and he would go insane.
It wasn’t that he actually resented Fatma for consigning him to the couch. It wasn’t even that he would have actually preferred to sleep with her in her current condition. Pregnant, she was both huge and restless and, if he were honest, he would have to admit that being with her would be almost as bad as being where he was now. If only he could find some way to stop almost smothering himself against the back of the confounded thing every time he turned over, he could cope. He had tried just about every position and technique he could think of, but to no avail. The couch, Allah damn it to hell, was far too cunning to allow itself to be outwitted by a mere policeman. It wanted him sleeping down on that awful smelly floor and if he wasn’t really, really dedicated to defeating it, that was where he was going to end up.
He cursed again, murmuring the word “bastard!” under his breath, lest he wake his sleeping family. That done, he sat up and instead of performing his usual morning ritual of reviewing the horrors of another sleepless night, he turned his mind toward the more productive subject of his current case. Just before he and sleep had entered into their familiar nightly battle for supremacy, Ikmen had written down a few notes regarding possible routes through the maze of evidence that had accrued in the Meyer case so far. With one lazy but deft movement he picked a cigarette up off the floor, threw it into his mouth and lit up. Thus fortified, he then lurched across to the light switch, pressed it and flooded the lounge with ghastly neon brilliance. As he shuffled back to the couch from hell, rubbing his eyes as he went, he picked up the notebook from the place where he had dropped it so many agonizing hours before—on top of a heap of laundry. Amid a welter of cigarette smoke, he then sat down and reviewed his handiwork. Basically there were three main bodies of information.
Firstly there was the strictly factual evidence. Leonid Meyer, an elderly Jewish man, had been first battered with some sort of blunt instrument and then subjected to torture by sulfuric car battery acid. His death had been protracted and agonizing and, having witnessed its course, his assailant had then drawn a large swastika in Meyer’s blood on the wall above his head. At some time either before, during or after the event, someone—possibly the assailant—had been sick over by the door. Forensic analysis had since revealed that the main constituent of said mass was principally beetroot. The Englishman, Robert Cornelius, had by his own admission been in the vicinity of Meyer’s apartment at the time, as had, rather more tenuously, a large black car—although this latter piece of evidence, it had to be admitted, had come from an old alcoholic who couldn’t even remember his own name. In addition, further investigation of the corpse by Arto Sarkissian had revealed some extremely old but nevertheless deep burn scars on Meyer’s hand and arm—scars caused, possibly, by gunpowder. Ikmen, looking at this veritable rag-bag of disconnected evidence, sighed deeply, put his cigarette out and then immediately lit another.
Around these somewhat bizarre facts revolved, so he believed, the two other bodies of information, which he had labeled “Two Routes to Resolution,” as he saw it so far.
The first one concerned the original and most immediately obvious explanation for Meyer’s death, which was that of anti-Semitism. Supporting evidence for this included, of course, the swastika, plus the testimonies of both Rabbi Şimon and Maria Gulcu—both of which had included reference to the notion that Meyer had suffered from anti-Semitism before. Against this was the fact that there was not, apart from one address in Meyer’s notebook, any hard evidence to suggest that the man who had been named as Meyer’s anti-Semitic persecutor had ever known the victim or held such unsavory views. In any event, their supposed liaison had happened so long ago that it was almost irrelevant. In addition, there was no reason to suppose that anti-Semitism was a growing movement within the city, either among the young or, like Smits, the older generation. The only really concrete act of violence against Jews that had come out so far was that which had been perpetrated by Robert Cornelius. And that had happened in England for reasons, if Cornelius were to be believed, which stemmed not from anti-Semitism, but from rather more personal motives.
The second, and perhaps most esoteric, route concerned issues surrounding Meyer’s past. One source had expressed the opinion that Meyer had been a member of the Bolshevik party when a young man back in Russia, and Maria Gulcu’s reaction had seemed to confirm this. Quite naturally, for those troubled times, he had killed people in
the course of his duties. Unusually, however, he had then traded his new life of working-class glory for a life of poverty in a foreign country, firstly with a woman who only ever tolerated him and secondly with his only true love—the bottle. Tortured by guilt and, possibly, fearful lest some, as yet unknown, witness to his old crime should come forward and reveal this horror to the world, Leonid Meyer died without any of the honors the old Soviet Government would have, no doubt, bestowed upon him had he stayed where he was. Those who mourned him included the widow Blatsky and the Gulcu family who, he now knew, possessed absolutely no legal status in Turkey. A group of ghosts headed by the oldest specter of them all, Maria Gulcu—the woman who could never love or be loved—unlike her granddaughter.
And here, once again, was Mr. Robert Cornelius, teacher of English, lover of Natalia Gulcu, destroyer of Jews—the only person in the right place at the right time.
And yet, although Cornelius seemed to pop up in each and every body of evidence or route to resolution that was contemplated, what on earth could his motive for killing Meyer be? So he knew the Gulcu family and had once hit out at a Jewish lawyer—that amounted to very little really. Even the fact that he had admitted being in the vicinity of the crime and had been identified didn’t mean that he had been involved with it. Although the fact that he had exhibited more than just a passing interest in the mechanics of the death penalty—or rather those people who might be expected from that process—did strike Ikmen as odd. Unless Cornelius actually had someone in mind with regard to this, his interest would appear to be quite unintelligible.
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