by Joan Fleming
‘Where is this?’ she asked. English.
‘Istanbul.’
‘Oh, my lord! Istanbul! Oh, well!’ Putting the case on the ground beside her she fumbled about in her handbag and brought out a shabby wallet. ‘Seven pounds, that’s all I’ve got. Can I change that into Turkish money?’
‘The bank will be shut now.’
Having got the case back into his own hand, Nuri bey felt a lot more comfortable. It was perhaps lighter than he had remembered, but the handle felt the same, in fact, was the same; it was the identical case and he did not intend to let it go.
‘I’m in the most awful mess.’ She shuddered. ‘I was supposed to be going on to Hong Kong. But I can’t now.’ She was half-crying and, having no pocket handkerchief, she sniffed and wiped her face with her gloveless hand, smudging her eye-black as she did so.
‘My boyfriend’s just shot someone,’ and, strangely, she giggled a little. ‘I knew he would, sooner or later. That’s what happens if you carry guns; they go off, don’t they? I mean, you may not want to …’ She started to cry now in great uncontrolled sobs, ‘Oh, my lord, I am in a mess!’
A laden taxi had approached and swung round to stop a few yards from where they stood. The two passengers and the driver were quite unaware of what was happening behind the swing doors. Their baggage was deposited beside them, they paid the driver who was looking towards the exit for other passengers when Nuri bey took a sudden decision, arising from the quick calculation as to the money he had on him.
‘Come,’ he said, indicating to the taxi-driver that he wished to become a passenger and opening the door for her to step inside. And thus, with the driver probably congratulating himself as to the speediness of his re-hire, they were being driven away.
‘Oh, very neat indeed,’ the girl remarked, sniffing. ‘Anyone would think you were a wide-boy yourself. I do seem to have fallen on my feet.’ She had brought out a small hand-mirror and was doing things to her face; her hands were trembling perceptibly, he was amazed at her poise.
‘Do they hang people in Turkey?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘they do hang people in Turkey. For murder.’
‘Oh, my lord! But maybe the chap’s not dead. He looked it, though, didn’t he?’
‘The man on the ground?’
‘Maybe he was shamming dead.’
Yes, they hanged murderers in Turkey and Nuri bey thought it unnecessary to tell her that they were public hangings.
‘He was some kind of bobby,’ she volunteered.
‘A bobby, what is that?’
‘A policeman. He’d been watching Tony. I thought there was something wrong. If I could have warned Tony that the man was watching him it might have been all right but they won’t let you out of that beastly transit lounge; they wouldn’t in Athens or Rome either. Where are we going? I hope you’re not kidnapping me, or anything.’
Nervous chatter, Nuri bey decided. Reaction.
‘But where are you taking me to, really?’
‘A hotel,’ Nuri bey said grimly.
‘Oh, my lord, no!’
‘You’ll be all right. Istanbul isn’t a savage place, you know.’
‘Not a hotel. I couldn’t! I’d have to sign the register … no, honestly, I can’t.’
This was the kind of thing one should leave severely alone. No good could come of it. Nuri bey stared unhappily at the fibre case on his knees. For a moment or two the idea of simply stepping out of the taxi and disappearing amongst the crowd in Eminonu Square seemed irresistible. He had the case … why bother about the girl? But it was a question that was to go for ever unanswered. It was unthinkable that he should leave this young, young girl alone in a strange city in such terrible circumstances. Charity occupies a large place in the mind of every Mohammedan and Nuri bey knew that it was his duty, if not his inclination, to take her to his home.
If his sister had lived in Istanbul rather than in Trebizond, he could have taken her there. Or he could have taken her to the Consulate or to his friend from the British Council who lived in a flat in Pera but under the circumstances it would be like handing her over to the police.
Though he was full of uneasiness and foreboding, Nuri bey felt that he must be doing what was right when he leaned forward and gave his address to the taxi-driver.
There was plenty of cold water from the one tap in the house, and there was enough bread but his larder was that of an ascetic; there was a little goat cheese, a stale egg and a cold section of swordfish which had been grilled on a skewer over charcoal.
His salon had no door, being separated from the hall only by a large open archway. He placed her in the seat of honour, the centre of the stiff upright sofa, told her to relax and went to find food and drink. On a small tray he put everything he had to offer, with the exception of the egg. As he left the kitchen, in the manipulation of the double doors, the tray tipped sideways and he was unable to retrieve it; with a sickening crash out of all proportion to the content, everything went to the ground.
With every muscle tensed, Nuri bey waited for her to rush to his assistance. The sound of the crash seemed to hang over him, echoing and re-echoing faintly till it died away. It took him ten minutes to mop up the water, pick the pieces of glass out of the cheese, remove the wet part of the bread, reassemble the fish and reinstate the small meal as attractively as possible on another tray.
And when he returned, more carefully, to the salon, she was sitting exactly as he had left her except that she had removed her white raincoat. She was wearing a tight dark skirt and a thick white sweater and round her neck was a silk patterned scarf, with the ends of which she constantly fiddled.
‘You are a dear! I don’t know why you should bother, honestly I don’t! There was some food on the jet but I didn’t feel like it.I don’t feel like eating, I’m afraid.’
‘But you must eat,’ he urged. ‘To have a good night’s sleep you must have food inside you and it is essential to have a good night of sleep before tomorrow when you may have much to worry you.’
‘My lord! Haven’t I got enough to worry me now?’
‘Now you must relax …’
‘But you don’t understand …’
‘No, I do not understand,’ he returned grimly. All he understood was the wickedness of a mother who could allow a young girl to stray so far from her side that she was discovered in these circumstances. It was a state of affairs over which Nuri bey had often sighed, frowned and remained quite bewildered. He frequently saw, in the streets of Istanbul, perhaps arm-in-arm with a young man, very young American or English girls, no more than female children, dressed in fantastically short skirts, or even in tight trousers, with breasts outlined in strange revealing upper garments, and hair flying all over the place; children of the Western world. What kind of monsters of neglect could the mothers of these young girls be?
‘I do not understand,’ he repeated, sitting down in a chair by the low table on which he had placed the tray, ‘how your mother could allow you …’
She began to laugh. ‘My mother …’ but her eyes looked sad, Nuri bey thought. ‘What a funny old-fashioned old thing you are,’ she said kindly. ‘What on earth have mothers got to do with anything?’
This was such a strange remark that Nuri bey needed time to think it over. His own mother had died when he was twenty and the simple word mother filled him with sacred feelings.
‘Mothers are out,’ she went on. ‘I mean, we don’t bother with them any more.’ She put butter on a piece of bread and bit into it. ‘This bread is rather good.’
He was more than shocked, he was completely horrified. Here in his house, eating his food and drinking his water, was sheer heresy and naked unashamed blasphemy. He watched her eating with some enjoyment the rest of the bread. The fish disappeared too, and some of the cheese. When she had finished eating she thanked him prettily and said she felt a good deal better.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
Solemnly he told her he was a
Turkish philosopher called Nuri Izkirlak, commonly known as Nuri bey. That he lived alone in this house and studied the writings of world philosophers. She said that she was afraid she did not know much about philosophy but her brother did, he was studying it at Oxford. He was the clever one of the two.
‘Oxford,’ he repeated. ‘Oxford.’ Since he had left his house not so many hours ago, Oxford had come near, had been very real, and had as suddenly retreated so far from his grasp that it was now an imaginary place, as intangible as the twilight of the gods. And the passport remained in his inner pocket as insignificant as ever.
‘Nuri bey,’ she repeated, ‘the bey being mister, I suppose? My name is Jenny Bolton and my boyfriend’s name is Tony Grand. At least I thought that was his name, I’m not sure now. I’m nineteen and I thought Tony was twenty-five but I’m not sure about that either, now. I’m one of those English teenagers I suppose you’ve heard so much about. Some people think we’re the top people, and others think we’re an awful bore. I can see you don’t think us a bore, Nuri bey, because you’re shocked, aren’t you? You can’t be both bored and shocked at the same time.’
He was listening passionately, that is, he was listening with strained attention in order that he should not miss one word or implication that might help him towards understanding.
‘We’re kind of drunk with being young and important, some of us.’ She dragged her hands through her hair in the nervous way he had already observed. ‘Those of us who can’t do clever things, do utterly mad things … like me. “I was a teenage-rebel,” har har,’ she mimicked hollowly. She ran her hands through her hair again. ‘Oh, lord, how I’ve aged since that jet left London today. Was it only today?’
There was a long pause whilst she picked tiny pieces off the remaining goat cheese.
‘Tony has a sports car. A sports car and a revolver. And what do you think? He kept an old shirt in the car and when we went out into the country he’d hang the shirt from a branch of a tree and fire at it. That, I might tell you, was after he’d read a book I pinched from my brother, called Lolita. I wish I had never lent it to him, even though he said he was only going to read the dirty bits. The chap in that book does it to practice shooting someone he hates and kills in the end. Tony thought it a madly original idea. Actually it’s made him a pretty good shot. Oh, my lord!’ Now she put her head down into both her hands and her hair straggled forward like a ragged curtain; misery obliterated her.
Nuri bey slipped away to put up an intransigent truckle bed. Of all the rooms in his house, he chose to put up the bed in the tiny turret room. The reason for this, he told himself, was that the other rooms were full of antiques, dusty and unused and entirely unsuitable for a young girl. The turret room was empty and clean.
It was also the room farthest away from his own.
‘Jenny,’ he murmured now and again, ‘Jenny.’ Straight out of the Oxford Book of English Verse which he had studied at the University, and into his house … Jenny!
He clattered down the steep and narrow stair from the turret room and opened his mother’s best linen press on the landing. From this he chose a long-haired cream-coloured rug worked into lattice pattern from the hair of Anatolian goats. Returning to the turret room he laid it first on the bed, and then on the floor beside the bed where it gave the room a more comfortable, even luxurious look, in spite of the sheet of brown paper which hung from one drawing-pin over the window and which was all there was in the way of curtains.
Downstairs again in his own room, he picked up the telephone receiver and dialled Miasma’s number. It was engaged, as he had half expected; she spent a great deal of time talking on the telephone to her numerous friends and acquaintances. Many of them were so old that they had not been out of their houses for years but their friendship with Miasma was kept fresh and up-to-the-minute by telephone.
In the salon she was sitting as he had left her but when he came in she raised her smudged face and said: ‘Can I wash?’
Wash, there was a problem. Nuri bey was still confused with regard to the Western habits of washing. A great deal of washing was done daily here but Nuri bey understood that Western washing was of a different order, taking place less frequently but more extensively, at different times and not always, as Mohammed had ordained, in running water. After some quick thinking he remembered an early ewer, used in the Coptic Mass some three hundred years ago and still not leaking. He took this full of water, together with his red plastic washing-up bowl and an enormous lump of scrubbing soap up to the turret room and placed it on a tiny eight-sided mother-of-pearl Moorish table which he brought up for the purpose. Efficiency having taken complete hold of him, he also took from his mother’s best linen press, her third best hamam towel, a splendid striped affair with a gorgeous fringe.
Finally, with the pride of the host, he showed her up to her room.
‘You really are sweet to me,’ she said, looking round. ‘I always heard Turks were wild and woolly, but you’re a pet.’
‘Wild and woolly,’ Nuri bey repeated, puzzled.
‘Oh, never mind. It’s only my careless talk. Oh, my lord, I’m so worried about Tony I hardly know what I’m saying!’ She was carrying what Nuri bey was now thinking of as THE CASE, in capital letters. He watched her put it down.
‘You have your night requirements,’ he murmured formally.
‘I’ve nothing,’ she returned. ‘I left my case in the plane, everybody did who was in transit.’
Nuri bey stared fixedly at THE CASE.
‘Oh, that!’ she said, following his thoughts. ‘It’s Tony’s. “Here, take this a minute,” he said.’
‘He gave it to you in the transit lounge?’
She nodded. ‘It all happened so quickly I hardly know what did happen but it seems to me he passed it to me over the barrier: “Hold this a minute,” he said. I took it and he walked away. I wasn’t watching exactly but suddenly there was a frightful great bang, and several others. Of course, I knew it was Tony’s revolver, I’ve heard the sound often and I turned quickly and saw him putting what I knew was his gun back in his pocket. He vaulted the barrier and shot out through the transit lounge on to the tarmac whilst everybody was standing wondering what on earth had happened. Then I saw the man lying on the ground and everybody started shouting.’
Both of them stared down at the small case.
‘What do you think?’ she asked at last, turning her head and looking straight at Nuri bey, her huge eyes still blotched and puffy.
Nuri bey started back slightly. He was not in the habit of being asked so directly what he thought, and by a young woman.
‘I suppose he shouldn’t have handed me the case, but, you see, he told me to carry it back into the jet for him. I didn’t think anything of it because, you see, he is a Zenobia Airways steward.’
Having begged her several times to relax, to exclaim that the information made the situation even more serious and complicated would have been inconsistent and unkind. Nuri bey received this new jolt with no outward manifestation whatever.
It was clear from the way in which she was looking at the case that she was not without brains; it was also clear that she was considering it objectively for the first time. There was something about the way she was suddenly tense and avoiding his eyes that told Nuri bey she had ceased completely to trust him; loyalty to her wretched Tony now included loyalty to the case he had given her and she must already be regretting that she had mentioned it at all.
Both of them now stared down at the little fibre case fascinated as though it had suddenly taken upon itself a life of its own and was emitting sparks or blue smoke.
When she spoke, her voice was thinner and higher and shook slightly. ‘There’s probably a pair of pyjamas in Tony’s case, I’ll use them, though I shan’t need his electric razor.’ The feeble little joke was a complete failure and she hung her head so that her hair came forward to hide her embarrassment.
‘Well, I’ll say “good night”.’ She held out
her hand, having the idea, apparently, that foreigners shook hands upon every occasion. ‘And thank you for being so very, very kind.’
He took her hand and shook it as he did with all his European friends. ‘Good night, and try not to worry,’ he murmured, ‘too much … Jenny.’ The name stayed on in his mouth like a delicious sweetmeat.
On the way downstairs Nuri bey did what he did every night. He took from his room the heavy carpet-bag, the English travelling luggage of a well-to-do forebear, packed with his most valuable treasures, and carried it down to the hall where he left it behind the hanging Shirvan rug which in winter served as a curtain for the front door. No insurance company would take on Nuri bey’s house, built as it was of inflammable old timber with the stove-pipe in the salon rising in the corner behind the white porcelain stove and running round two sides of the room before disappearing through the wooden ceiling. So Nuri bey took this simple precaution in order that he might snatch up at least some of his treasures as he raced for safety in the very likely event of fire.
Tonight, however, there was a slight variation to his usual procedure. After bolting the front door, he locked it and carried the key up to his room, where it spent the night under his pillow.
CHAPTER 3
He was up at six, washing up under the cold-water tap and thinking over the wording of his report to Miasma. The slightest mishap would send her into a raging torrent of words which, by now, had no effect upon him at all.
Nuri bey was a great collector, not only of objects of art and beauty, but of human beings, and Miasma was one of the prizes of his collection. Though no details had ever been supplied, it was always understood that, in her early youth, by a series of mishaps, Miasma had missed being the Validé by inches. The Sultan Validé, or the mother of the Sultan, used to be the most important person in the whole great Turkish Empire, but jealousy and ambition for the position ran so high in the harem that any woman who did finally become the Validé earned all the honour that was due to her for sheer tenacity of purpose. She would, of necessity, have to be a woman beautiful, nubile and seductive, ruthless, cunning, single of purpose and satanically clever. Miasma had simply not made the grade. When the imperial harem was finally dissolved, she had emerged into the modern world with a few jewels and a yellow, hairless, dead-eyed eunuch as her only prize.
