Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  Rex took this in. The police had done their looking. They weren’t going to look any more. But he still felt this doubt, this possibility that he’d seen someone else up there. ‘But the door’s still not there,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s why I was able to take a picture of the scorch-marks on the plywood frame. That temporary doorway thing’s still in place because they still haven’t put the finished door in.’

  Brenard considered this for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Best take that up with Texo.’

  He shuffled papers, signalling that Rex’s time was up. Rex didn’t move.

  ‘Jan Navitsky.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘You know who he is, then.’

  Rex wondered if there was a slight pause before Brenard said, ‘Why? Should I?’

  ‘I just wondered if the name meant anything to you. Apparently he and Mina had a beef, and there are references in the student newsletter to a chequered past. His, I mean.’

  ‘Probably sleeps around a lot.’

  ‘He also left the country, suddenly, on the day Mina died.’

  ‘You’re barking at shadows here, Rex. Seriously. We’ve never heard of him.’

  ‘Your computer might have.’

  Brenard sighed. ‘What do you think I am? Google Rapsheets? Go home, Rex. Get some rest.’

  * * *

  Heading up the High Street towards the office, Rex tried the Council Works Department on his phone. As he waited to be connected, he noticed a large, beaming party of Chinese businesspeople in suits heading towards him. In the midst of them, making observations that seemed to be going down awfully well, was the council boss, Eric Miles.

  Miles was a strange mix of parts. With his fondness for tweeds, his high forehead and his public school hairdo, he looked like the laird of the manor. In fact, he’d followed his father into the draughtsman’s office at the shipyard, taken OU courses at night and turned himself, over ten years, into a teacher. God had become involved along the way, as had liberal politics and a spell of mission work somewhere poor and hot.

  All these factors ought to have made Eric Miles an interesting man, but somehow they had failed to. Interviews with him always left Rex patting his pockets and checking his coat, thinking he’d lost something, until his conscious mind caught up with the unconscious, and he realised that the missing thing was Eric Miles. He was just a good bloke, Rex had concluded in the end. Jesus Christ had probably been the same – a bit dull. That was why people had made up stories about him.

  He itched to ask the council boss what he was doing with the Chinese delegation. But after six rings, the ring-tone suddenly changed, then a woman answered.

  ‘Works.’

  ‘May I speak to Texo?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Texo,’ Rex repeated, watching Miles and his entourage depart down the High Street. In the ensuing silence, he remembered there was a surname, but he’d forgotten it. ‘Hang on,’ he said, fumbling in his shoulder bag for his note-pad. Was his memory getting patchy? ‘Chuba,’ he said, returning to the phone. But the woman had gone. He rang back. Same as before, the tone changed after a couple of rings, but this time, no one answered. He gave up, puzzled.

  A council road-sweeper he recognised was just coming out of the Ladbroke’s. He’d recently won one of the paper’s ‘Community Champ’ Awards for tripping up a bag-snatcher with his broom. It was worth a shot.

  ‘Have you come across a bloke in the Works Department called Texo?’

  The sweeper chuckled. ‘Wait in there long enough, you’ll see him.’

  Rex went into the bookie’s. It smelt of old newspapers, wet shoes and defeat. Men were shouting at a TV screen, not with hope, but with anger. They, at least, were animated – unlike the row of blokes at the video poker terminals, mute, staring, pressing buttons and pushing money in as though they themselves had become parts of the machines.

  Rex, who rarely passed a day without at least four pints of strong lager and a dozen pills, couldn’t understand gambling. Like a lot of addicts, he felt his was the one true path, everyone else’s delusion.

  With distaste, he picked his way through to a booth, where the only woman in the establishment sat, screened off from the grim maleness behind toughened glass. She looked Nigerian – fiercely painted, eyebrows stencilled into an expression of permanent alert, hair tinted to stop traffic.

  ‘I’m doing some work with a man called Texo,’ Rex lied. ‘I was told he’d be in here.’

  ‘Texo?’ she echoed, with faint disbelief.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s not his name,’ she said, staring more or less up at the ceiling.

  ‘What is his name?’

  She sucked a gold tooth. This, Rex knew, could mean anything. He sensed a man at the poker machines, small, ruddy, shabby, looking over.

  ‘What does he look like?’

  She snorted. ‘You like old movies?’

  ‘Eh?’

  She kept on gazing somewhere high over his head. African women often did this, he’d noticed. Respect? Indifference? A devotion to some Higher Power? He’d never worked it out.

  ‘He’s not in,’ she said finally, each word on a different musical tone.

  Nodding a wary thanks, he looked back at the poker machines. The little man who’d been staring over had vanished. His sudden absence, however, gave Rex a clear view of the man clamped to the adjacent terminal. Ashley Pocock.

  He remembered the fleeting look that had passed over Bilal’s face, like a squall at sea, when he’d mentioned the Planning Officer’s visit. It was worth digging. With Ellie as his new boss, he needed his pockets full of pay-dirt.

  ‘Winning?’ he asked, peering over Pocock’s shoulder. He had no idea what the configuration of cards and symbols on the screen signified.

  ‘Nah,’ said Pocock distractedly. Then, seeming to realise this wasn’t one of his betting buddies, he looked up and stared, none-too-friendly.

  ‘We met yesterday,’ Rex said. ‘The sky lights.’

  Pocock nodded warily. Rex glanced briefly back at the screen. To his surprise, he saw that ‘Poko The Magnificent’ was two grand in credit. Rex tried to look as if he hadn’t seen.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about our chat,’ Rex said, carefully. ‘I think I understand the procedure you’re talking about.’

  Full House, Rex thought. Pocock relaxed, smiled, pressed some buttons and waited for the machine to print a slip of paper. Tucking it carefully into his wallet, he led Rex over the road to the Jerk Shack.

  The Shack was an institution, tucked away unadvertised in between the cut-price pans and ersatz Tupperware at the back of the Market Hall. The sisters who ran the place knew Rex. They knew Pocock, too. As they waited for their drinks through the hiss of steam and the clatter of cups, Rex mused that it was an ideal place for secret business. Michaela and Linda, the joint proprietresses, could agree neither on the menu, the décor, the prices, nor even the choice of music. The only thing they shared was a conviction that the music needed to be loud. And so it was: old-school ska and reggae alternating with modern R&B and gospel. The people at the other tables, Pakistani pensioners on this Monday afternoon, mostly, accompanied by bags of halal chicken parts, couldn’t catch a word anyone else said.

  ‘So… if I was to go about getting the correct documentation,’ Rex said, winging it. ‘I assume I’d have to find a… consultant? To help me sort it all out?’

  Pocock beamed. ‘That sort of thing, yeah.’

  ‘Would that be expensive?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Pocock shouted over the bass-line, as two mugs arrived. ‘I could point you towards someone very good.’

  ‘And they could guarantee a favourable outcome?’

  Pocock had his mouth open to reply when a frown crossed his face and he stared behind Rex’s shoulder. Rex followed the direction of his stare as Terry bounded in.

  Terry. With his war correspondent’s multi-pocketed vest on. And a
camera round his neck. Everything short of a flashing neon PRESS sign.

  ‘Where’d you get to?’

  Rex kept eye-contact with Terry and said, ‘Hey, Terry. Long time no see.’

  Terry stared. ‘What are you on about? We were just at the community centre thing. Anyhow, the boss wants you back at the paper.’

  ‘I knew it!’ hissed Pocock. ‘You was trying to stitch me up!’ He raised his voice just as the perky reggae track ended. ‘I am a council officer and this journalist is offering me a bribe!’

  A rustling of plastic bags came with the cricking of a dozen arthritic necks. Everyone in the place stared.

  ‘What made you think I’d be up for it? ’Cos I’m black?’ Pocock continued.

  ‘You’re white,’ Rex said quietly. No new music came on. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, like you can’t tell I’ve got a black dad! Fuck’s sake!’

  Rex looked at the young man. Tight curls. A wide nose. Maybe a slight, caramel colour to the freckles. It hadn’t occurred to him. It hadn’t been important, anyway. Except…

  ‘Have you got a sister? Called Kyretia?’

  ‘What’s she got to do with it?’ Pocock kissed his teeth. ‘Man a racisss!’

  He stalked out. The two sisters glared at him from the counter. Terry looked baffled.

  ‘That went well, I thought,’ said Rex.

  * * *

  ‘They were wrongly dubbed devil worshippers by the neighbouring Alevi and Sunni Kurds, you see, on account of a misidentification of their Tawsi Melek with Lucifer.’

  ‘Who were, Lawrence?’

  Rex wasn’t in the mood. Still fuming at Terry, he’d necked a couple of pills from his desk drawer, but they were old, mail order from India, and they’d got him, irritatingly, just to the threshold of what he needed to feel and then no further. A chirpy, pungent IT technician had been called out to the printer, and was whistling, muttering and reeking just a ruler’s length behind Rex’s back. Meanwhile his keyboard was sticking, with random letters inexplicably needing to be whacked with great force in order for him to be able to finish the teatime update of the website, causing, in turn, a miniscule paper cut on his right index finger to smart. He felt certain he was going to blow.

  ‘Yezidis,’ Lawrence said. ‘They’re an ancient Middle Eastern sect.’

  Rex sat back and took a deep breath.

  ‘Our Lucifer, who was an angel, who got too big for his boots and was sent down to Hell, is their Tawsi Melek. Except for them, he didn’t go to Hell. He wept for 7,000 years over his general big-headedness, filled seven buckets with his tears and extinguished the flames of Hell. As a reward, God forgave him and made him one of the seven angels who run things on earth. He takes the form of peacock. And also a rainbow.’

  ‘A peacock.’ Rex thought about the bird at the back of the shop. He sat up. ‘They own one. Mina’s family, I mean. And she had a peacock brooch. Her brother told me it was from their mother, and he said… He said those words to me. Same as the guy in the gözleme shop. Tawsi Melek. So they must be these…Yezidis, then, don’t you think? Not Kurds?’

  Lawrence shook his head. ‘Very unlikely. Anyway, they’d still be Kurds. In our way of looking at it, anyway. It depends who’s talking. The Arabs say they’re Kurds. The Turks say they’re Kurds. Even the Kurds call the Yezidis Kurds, when it suits them. The Yezidis, on the other hand, well, some of them occasionally say they’re Kurds, some of them say they’re a completely different race to the Kurds. As, indeed, do the wider Kurds when the Yezidis aren’t playing ball. I thought you’d got a degree in anthropology.’

  ‘I did India. I think. I can’t really remember.’

  ‘Well this lot were all over the news a couple of years back.’

  Yezidis. Rex did remember the name. Recalled some tribe of Iraqis, stuck up a mountain, being raped and massacred by rabid fundamentalists, forced over the borders into Southern Turkey. But then they’d been swallowed by the bigger, still-running tragedy of all the people, Kurds and Shia and Christians and those who just tied their shoelaces the wrong way, being butchered by the latest breed of monsters to crawl out He didn’t follow the world news very much these days. In any case, the world always came to Haringey.. And two years ago, there’d been a lot going on, with the local elections and the boundary changes.

  ‘Anyhow,’ Lawrence was saying. ‘Your peacocks must be just coincidence. There’s no Yezidis in this country. The lucky ones got out of Turkey and Iraq in the 1980s and 1990s. And they’re all in Germany. In the northern town of Celle, actually. Very nice place.’ He adjusted his Rotary Club tie, the signal that a long segue was about to commence. ‘Twinned with Tavistock in Devon…’

  Rex interrupted him, more thinking aloud than responding. ‘But they were in Germany. The uncle’s got a German car. Mina’s peacock brooch came from her mother. Who died in Germany. And anyway, two separate people said that name to me. Tawus Melek.’

  Lawrence shrugged. ‘Or something else that sounds like it. I really can’t see a breakaway group moving to West Green Road, Rex. There’s no inter-marriage. In fact there was a very creepy case in Germany some years back. Yezidi girl, caught hanging out with a non-Yezidi Kurd…’

  ‘What was creepy about it?’ Rex asked, then exclaimed, ‘Shit!’

  This wasn’t in response to Lawrence, but to what Rex had just seen on the screen as he finally made the updates live. The piece he’d written about Mina’s family – supposedly for Ellie’s paper – was in front of him, on the local website.

  But it wasn’t the piece he’d written. Even though it had his name on it.

  ‘Family members aired the possibility that Mina may have had a boyfriend, who had influenced or even encouraged her actions. Mina, who had publicly praised the self-immolation of other Kurdish activists…’

  ‘What did you do?’

  He bull-raged his way into Ellie’s office, making her jump back in her chair.

  ‘I didn’t write that! That was confidential information that I agreed to withhold! And what the hell is it doing on our website?’

  ‘Could you stop shouting?’

  She was still tensed up, expecting an attack. He knew he couldn’t stop shouting. So he kept his mouth shut, breathing hard. Everyone else came to the doorway.

  ‘I offered it to HQ, they decided not to use it. So I made some amendments and put it on the local site instead.’

  ‘Amendments? You used information that you overheard, that you sodding well overheard me saying in a restaurant, and which may cause serious harm to that family. I didn’t write that bollocks.’

  ‘Well, you did, actually,’ she said, pushing over a sheaf of printed papers. It was the notes he’d tried to print out earlier. ‘And under the terms of our contract with us, we own it. Not you.’

  ‘Take it down!’

  ‘Since we’re discussing your contract, Rex, I’m issuing you with a verbal warning.’

  He lowered his voice. ‘For what?’

  ‘You’re irrational, aggressive, your time-keeping is poor and several members of staff have raised concern about the amount of painkillers you take.’

  He glanced round at his colleagues in the doorway. Terry. Lawrence. Brenda. Did they agree with her? He had to admit it – they looked like people who agreed.

  ‘I’ve emailed you some contact details of organisations who can help, and I’d like you to consider going for some form of one-on-one…’

  ‘Take it down and I’ll go for one-on-one sumo training, whatever you like,’ he snarled.

  ‘I’m not going to be –’

  ‘Take the page down, Ellie, and I’ll do it.’

  A stand-off. Then she nodded, turning the monitor towards her and she logged in. ‘The warning still stands on your record,’ she said, not looking up from her keyboard. She still hadn’t learnt to touch-type, Rex noted. ‘And if it goes unheeded, I will issue a written warning…’

  He’d already pushed his way out. Lawrence caught him by the arm
. Rex really hoped this wasn’t the moment for a bit of Lawrence Berne wisdom.

  ‘That German Yezidi girl going out with the wrong boy?’ Lawrence said, in a low, solemn voice. ‘You asked me what happened to her. Well, they set light to her. She died of 80% burns.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Sisters of St Veronica of Jumièges were not a secluded order. They dwelt in world cities like Toronto and Sydney, tended to their most sick citizens in the midst of the well and strong. The nuns left the premises often, and the distinctive, pigeon-grey dresses of the London chapter could be spotted all round Muswell Hill, from the Sainsbury’s to the Pound Shop and even, on certain saints’ days, the O’Neill’s. The nuns’ choice of location, however, suggested a wish for distance from the temporal plane. To reach their dwellinghouse, it was necessary to leave the already secluded path from Muswell Hill to Alexandra Palace, in favour of descent down a dim track that wound through thick trees. At night-time, the only lighting was provided by an unreliable lamp on the nuns’ porch at one end, the 144 bus-stop far back above and, if you were lucky, the moon.

  It was easy to think you were being watched and followed as you went down through the wooded parkland, and, in fact, Rex had experienced both in the past. Tonight, despite being preoccupied with the events of the day, he had a strong sense of someone, or something, out there, amongst the moving darkness of the trees, just watching, and somehow keeping him in its sights whichever way the path led. An unpleasant feeling – like an uninvited finger in his collar.

  He was glad that the door opened almost as soon as he’d rung the bell. Sister Florence, the tiny Belgian nun who admitted him, would normally clap her hands in delight, and immediately begin discussing her current, favourite TV viewing in tones that other nuns reserved for the Sacred Heart. Tonight, her greeting was as subdued as it had been over the phone for the last couple of weeks. And Rex knew why.