A Dead Man in Istanbul

by Michael Pearce

  Felicity had said that the ways of the mighty were hard to fathom, and that she had a friend who knew the terjiman, and he had told her that he was a nice man; so perhaps he was just doing his duty. The mudir’s wife said that she had made the very same point to her husband, but that he had replied, ‘Why does the one in our vilayet have to be different from all the others?’

  Felicity had sought to divert attention by going back to the original object of her enquiries, the small boys and the shooting. Was it true, she asked, that some women had been involved? For such had been the reports.

  If such had been the reports, retorted the mudir’s wife hotly, then those who had made them should be ashamed. The women of the village had discussed it among themselves and could swear to it that none of them had been anywhere near the place at the time; and if not them, what other woman could it be, in a place as remote as this? No, the reports were baseless and a malicious fabrication.

  And what, asked Seymour, about the boys’ claim that they had seen her taking off her clothes?

  ‘Taking off her clothes?’ said Felicity, staggered.

  Back at the Embassy, over small neatly cut cucumber sandwiches and tea which did not taste quite the same as that brewed in the Whitechapel police station, with the sun glinting less blindingly now on the sea so far below him, and the scent of roses, more powerful, it seemed, in the late afternoon, drifting across the carefully kept grass towards him, with the memory of a relaxed afternoon sail and of a Felicity growing less and less puddingy by the minute, Seymour thought that he could get used to this. If only the tigerish Lady C. was not coming.

  Even the difficult Chalmers, sitting by himself on the other side of the terrace, benignly surveying the bougainvillea, seemed at ease with the world, no longer entertaining his private visions of Armageddon. Catching Seymour’s eye, he raised his cup to him.

  ‘How are things going, old boy?’ he called.

  ‘Oh, fine, thanks. Fine!’

  A thought struck him.

  ‘What do you make of this road they’re planning to build up behind Gelibolu?’

  ‘Already started building it, old boy. Keeping my eye on it.’

  ‘It will make a difference to the villages, I expect.’

  ‘That’s hardly the point, though, is it?’ said the military attaché.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course not. It will be to connect the new gun emplacement that they’re building.’

  ‘Christ, there he goes again!’ Seymour heard Ponsonby mutter beneath his breath.

  Seymour dropped into a chair beside Rice-Cholmondely.

  ‘I wonder if I can tap your knowledge of the local scene?’

  ‘Certainly, old boy. Anything I can tell you.’

  ‘Particularly the political local scene.’

  ‘Well, Ponsonby’s the chap for that, really . . .’

  ‘Or maybe it’s not political but social. Can you tell me something about Prince Selim?’

  ‘Selim? Know him well. A good chap, from our point of view. Almost one of us. Went to a decent school, spent a year at Cambridge, then a couple in Berlin. Talks like us, thinks like us, interested in the sort of things that we are.’

  ‘The theatre?’

  ‘Well, yes, but that wasn’t what I was thinking of. I mean modern ways of doing things, engineering, railways, that sort of thing. Reform on Western lines. A bit of a playboy, I suppose, but compared with some of the others . . .’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘Other Princes.’

  ‘There are others?’

  ‘Dozens, old boy. It follows from the Sultan having so many wives and concubines.’

  ‘Well, yes, I can see that it might.’

  ‘Selim’s the son of the Sultan’s second wife and that puts him quite high up in the pecking order. Of course, they’re all always jostling for position. Cut-throat business, being a Prince. At least, in Istanbul.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It creates difficulties for us, of course, because the situation’s always changing and you never quite know who’s in and who’s out, so you don’t know who to work on. You’ve always got to keep your fingers on the pulse.’

  ‘And Selim’s “in”?’

  ‘Jostling, old boy. Jostling. That’s what I would say. But doing pretty well. You never quite know, and the Sultan likes to keep it like that. He doesn’t want anyone to get too far ahead of the pack. That would be dangerous. For him, I mean.’

  ‘I gather that Cunningham knew Selim quite well?’

  ‘Oh, yes. You get to know people like that if you’re a diplomat. It’s part of the job. And Peter had known him before, when he was in Berlin. They had struck it off together and then when Selim got home to Istanbul and found that Peter was there, well, they picked it up and carried on from there. They went round together a lot, you know, doing the shows and clubs.’

  ‘Cultivating him?’

  ‘You could say that, old boy, perhaps. But it wasn’t just the line of duty. I think they quite liked each other. But you’re right, old boy. Selim could be the coming man, and it was important to get on the right side of him.’

  ‘I wonder if it would be possible for me to meet him?’

  ‘I’m not sure about that, old boy,’ said Rice-Cholmondely doubtfully. ‘I mean, he’s a Prince . . .’

  And you’re just a policeman, thought Seymour.

  ‘What was it exactly that you had in mind?’

  ‘I wanted to ask him a few questions. About Cunningham’s swim. He was the one, after all, who took Cunningham there.’

  ‘Well, he might agree,’ said Rice-Cholmondely. ‘They were friends and he was very cut up about it afterwards. I’ll see what I can do.’

  Ponsonby came across to him and said there was another letter for him.

  ‘Not from Lady C., I hope,’ said Seymour.

  ‘Could be,’ said Ponsonby. ‘She believes in striking while the iron is hot, and keeps up a pretty high rate of striking!’

  It was not from Lady Cunningham, however. It was from someone completely unexpected. Seymour’s grandfather. Grandfather usually reckoned to delegate letter-writing. The writing on the envelope, though, was definitely his. Assuming that this denoted a crisis in the family, Seymour tore the envelope open in alarm.

  No crisis.

  Or, wait a minute, was it?

  The letter, written in a mixture of elegant French (Grandfather claimed to have moved, many years before, in Polish polite circles, where, he assured his family, French was always spoken) and uncertain English, said that since Seymour had been gone, his grandfather had been reflecting on what he had said before he left. He had mentioned a Lady Cunningham; could this be, by any chance, the Lady Cunningham he himself had known?

  Seymour did not think this at all likely. His family had spent all their lives in the East End; and Lady Cunningham clearly hadn’t.

  ‘When I was working,’ Grandfather said. Well, that was a long time ago. If ever. Thirty or forty years at least. When his grandfather had escaped from Poland just ahead of the Tsar’s police he had worked for a few years as a horse-cab driver. But that had been in the East End, where he was hardly likely to have run into Lady Cunningham –

  But wait a minute: might his journeys not have taken him into the West End?

  Well, they might. He might even have given Lady C. a lift at some point. But the letter implied a certain familiarity and that, to say the least, was highly unlikely. In class-ridden England? The Polish émigrés had cultivated, it was true, an image of superiority, superiority temporarily cast on hard times. Every Pole you met in the East End, and you met a lot of Poles in the East End, claimed to be a descendant of Polish nobility, and Grandfather had been no different. There was this in support of his claim, that he had served as an officer in the Tsar’s army, and you had to be fairly socially superior to be that. However, Seymour had always discounted the claim. If the family had been so superior, why hadn’t some of their money spilled across the
Channel to help when it was needed?

  It was true that Grandfather claimed to have quarrelled with his family. This was distinctly possible, since Grandfather quarrelled with most people. His father had thrown him out, he said. This was quite possible, too: the Tsar had done the same. For good reason, since Grandfather had tried to blow him up. ‘Fighting for Poland’s independence!’ said Grandfather. Poland was part of the Russian Empire at the time and many Poles were restive under the Tsar’s authority. But Grandfather was restive under anyone’s authority, and what Seymour was inclined to believe was that he had been restive just once too often.

  But, yes, he could tell a good tale and he might have told it to a young and impressionable Lady Cunningham who might just, just, have fallen for the allure of a tall, young, romantic rebel. Even if he was a cab-driver.

  But what then? Lady Cunningham would certainly have forgotten it, and, probably, just as well. Grandfather, too, had forgotten it up to this point. At least, it was the rare one of his stories that Seymour had not heard before. But now he had remembered and the memory had evidently been so vivid as to prompt him to give some advice to his grandson, which he had never done before.

  ‘Watch out!’ he had said; and he had felt the need for emphasis so great as to underline the words three times.

  Seymour felt less impressed by this, however, than by his postscript. ‘Do not tell your father!’ it said. There was a second postscript: ‘Nor your mother!’ and a third: ‘Nor your sister!’ Well, Seymour could understand that, as his sister was always difficult. However, taking it altogether, and all in all, Seymour definitely had the feeling that this was part of Grandfather’s life description which he thought better suppressed.

  As for the warning, Seymour was unmoved. He was just doing his job and doing it as well as he could. More than that he could not do, and he was not at all bothered by the imminent arrival of what was evidently a lively domineering old lady, even if she had put the fear of God into everyone she met.

  Including his grandfather. That, admittedly, was a thought.

  Chapter Nine

  The Prince’s boat would pick him up outside the Dolmabahce Palace.

  ‘Boat?’

  ‘He’s at his estate at Beylerbey,’ explained Rice-Cholmondely.

  Beylerbey, it transpired, was on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, more or less straight across from the Dolmabahce, one of a number, said Rice-Cholmondely, of pretty villages. It wasn’t far, just far enough to allow the Prince to distance himself from Istanbul when he wished to.

  Then a thought struck Seymour.

  ‘Boat? Would that be his felucca?’

  ‘I expect so,’ said Rice-Cholmondely offhandedly.

  And there, when Seymour got to the Dolmabahce, an hour later, was the felucca, with its distinctive green flag flying, drawn up alongside the long, marble quay.

  A splendidly dressed cavass showed him on board and at once the felucca drew away from the quay. There was, apparently, no other passenger aboard.

  They moved quickly to the other side and then went along the coast for a little way. The shore was thickly wooded but there were small villages tucked among the trees. The white minarets of their mosques poked out above the green and here and there were other white buildings, deserted kiosques and small, rejected palaces, graceful relics of past Sultans’ temporary enthusiasms. The villages, with their wooden houses, sometimes came down to the water’s edge, and among the acacia and maple and plane trees he could make out winding, cobbled streets, often with little cafés under the trees.

  Beylerbey was like that, a small village, all cool and green, with a single street, at the end of which was the Prince’s country palace. They disembarked and the cavass set off up the street.

  Ahead of them was an old man in a turban. From time to time he stooped and picked something up, offending litter, perhaps, and pushed it into a cranny of the nearest wall. When they caught up with him Seymour saw that they were pieces of paper. The cavass, shaking his head at this display of rustic backwardness, explained – in perfect French – that it was the custom among the simpler Muslims to pick up any piece of paper that had printing on it, on the grounds that among the writing might be one of the Holy Names, on which it would be disrespectful to tread.

  They came to an imposing gate with several resplendent cavass-like figures lounging outside it. Seymour’s cavass had a word with them and then told Seymour that the Prince was awaiting him in the garden. For a moment Seymour thought that he was going to be left to find the Prince himself, which might prove tricky as the garden was more like a park, with great plane trees, clumps of shrubbery which shut off any view and hosts of little streams, with bridges, admittedly, but which required crossing. However, one of the subsidiary cavasses came with him to guide him.

  The Prince was standing beneath a plane tree looking up into its branches. He had a young man beside him who was carrying a rifle. The Prince pointed up into the foliage and the young man raised his gun and fired. A pigeon came fluttering down. The young man bent over it, picked it up and threw it into a basket.

  The Prince saw him and came to meet him.

  ‘Seymour, is it?’ he said, in excellent English. They shook hands.

  ‘Do you know Ahmet?’ he said, gesturing towards his companion.

  Unexpectedly, Seymour did. It was the sulky youth he had seen talking to Mukhtar outside the theatre.

  He was still sulky and gave Seymour just a bare nod.

  The Prince noticed it and gave a little laugh. He pushed the boy away, in friendly fashion.

  ‘Go and look for a fat one,’ he said. ‘I want to talk. Or, rather,’ he said, looking at Seymour, ‘I fancy Mr Seymour does.’

  He was dressed in a white suit and silk shirt and tie. The tie was – well, Seymour would have said it was regimental. Chalmers wore a tie like that. There was something army-like in general about the Prince, as if he had been to Sandhurst, although, to the best of Seymour’s knowledge, he hadn’t. He was certainly very English.

  ‘Well, my dear chap –’

  There it was: that British, upper-class way of speaking, the product, presumably, of the schools they all went to, and the lingua franca of the top part of the institution they worked in, the officers in the army, the senior civil servants, the diplomats in the Embassy. The governing class, you might say.

  ‘– how can I help you?’

  ‘It is very kind of you to receive me. As I expect you know, I am out here to investigate Peter Cunningham’s death –’

  The Prince laid his hand on his sleeve.

  ‘And I am very glad you are,’ he said. ‘If ever a thing needed investigating, this is it. And for a number of reasons.’

  He cleared his throat, as if he were going to make a speech.

  ‘First, obviously – and someone like me has to think of that – because of the effect it could have on relations between Britain and ourselves. Secondly, and I hope you will believe this, because it’s true, because my whole family is shocked and ashamed. That something like this could happen to Peter, a man whom we all knew and liked . . .’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Let me just say that my father is particularly sad. He is very anxious that whoever did this terrible thing should be brought to justice. But there is a third thing.’

  His voice lost its stiffness and formality.

  ‘Peter and I were very close. We met first at university but then ran into each other several times when he was working in Europe. We got to know each other particularly well in Berlin.’

  He smiled.

  ‘We even went on holiday together. To Biarritz, I remember.’

  He smiled again at the recollection.

  ‘So when I came back to Istanbul and found that he had been posted out here I was delighted. It can be very lonely, you know, if you’re someone like me. You get depressed. Well, Peter could always jolly me out of it. He was such good company. And he’d put you on to things you’d never heard of.
And they might be here in Istanbul! In my own city, and he knew it better! That’s how it is, I’m afraid, if you belong to a family like mine. You’re cut off, you don’t even know your own people. Well, Peter knew them.’

  They had been walking while he spoke and he had unconsciously quickened his pace. By the end they were almost racing along. He suddenly became conscious of this and slowed embarrassedly.

  ‘Sorry, old man, but Peter meant something to me.’

  The decent reticence, thought Seymour, was upper-class British, too.

  ‘He was a good chap,’ said Selim. ‘It’s very important to me personally to find out who killed him.’

  He half turned away so that Seymour could not see his face.

  ‘I keep telling myself,’ he burst out, ‘that surely I could have done something. Even, maybe, to put him off the whole crazy idea. I tried, you know, but he made a joke of it, it seemed pompous, elderly, to argue with him.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘But I should have, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘You were on the other side of the Straits,’ Seymour pointed out. ‘There was nothing you could have done.’

  The Prince was silent.

  ‘Well, no,’ he said after a moment. ‘Perhaps not. All the same . . .’

  ‘May I ask how it was that you came to be there at all?’

  ‘I suggested it. “Look, old chap,” I said, “if that fellow of yours is going to row you there to start with, he’s going to be dead beat before you even get to the swimming. I can help you with that. But I’m not – I’m definitely not! – going to do the swim with you. It’s foolhardy, old man. And a Prince, even if not a diplomat, has got to show some sense!”’

  ‘Well, it was helpful of you,’ said Seymour. ‘He’d have had to get hold of another boat, somehow or other, to get there. So he would have been glad of your help, I’m sure. And of your company. But there is something that puzzles me. After he had set out, on the swim, I mean, you stayed there for quite some time. You even had a haircut.’