A Dead Man in Istanbul

by Michael Pearce

  ‘And take it to Miss Kassim?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And kill her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mukhtar sat back.

  ‘It is hard for you, Babikr, I know. But it was right that you should tell me. For killing Miss Kassim was a terrible thing.’

  ‘But I did not kill her!’ burst out the saz player, weeping.

  ‘But –’ began Mukhtar.

  ‘He asked me, but – but I said I could not.’

  And now, suddenly, the saz player became voluble.

  ‘I said I could not. I could not do such a thing. And then he was hard with me, and said that I must do it. That he had done much for me and could do more. That what he was asking was nothing. That she was nothing and had sinned in the sight of God, that it was right she should be punished. And I said that might be so, but that I was not the man to punish her. And then he became angry with me and spoke to me bitterly and said who was I to set up any judgement against those of my betters? But still I would not.

  ‘Then he railed against me and said he was very displeased with me. But still I would not. Then, at last, he left it, saying that if I would not do it, there were others that would, and that they would wax rich, and that I would not. But I did not mind that, for I knew in my heart that what he was bidding me was wrong, that although she was but a woman, even a woman has a place in God’s sight.

  ‘And so we left it. But before we parted he told me to give him one of my saz strings. I was puzzled, because I knew he had no saz of his own. Nevertheless, I did as he asked. But afterwards, when I heard about Miss Kassim, I was troubled, and asked myself if what I had done had made for her death. And I could not acquit myself completely. So when he suggested that I go, I went with relief.’

  ‘Well!’ said Mukhtar, after a moment. ‘You have spoken, and what you have spoken, you have spoken. Will you swear to it?’

  ‘I will swear,’ said Babikr.

  After the saz player had been taken back to his cell, Seymour returned with Mukhtar to his room. The terjiman ordered coffee and they sat for a while in silence.

  Then Mukhtar seemed to shake himself.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it is not quite as I expected. But, clearly, now, I must go and see Mr Cubuklu. I wish I had more, though, to go and see him with. It will be his word against Babikr’s. A Councillor’s against a saz player!’

  He shook his head gloomily.

  ‘Perhaps I can help,’ said Seymour.

  The little theatre manager received them uneasily.

  ‘It goes on,’ he said, distressed: ‘this terrible thing!’

  ‘It will not go on much longer.’

  ‘Of course, anything I can do . . .’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Seymour. ‘And first I would like you to cast your mind back to the day Lalagé was murdered.’

  ‘A terrible day!’

  ‘Which went wrong for all kinds of reasons. The band was playing up. The drummer –’

  A look of anguish passed over Rudi’s face.

  ‘The drummer?’ he said.

  ‘– blew what in England we would call a musical raspberry.’

  ‘In Vienna we call it a musical fart.’

  ‘Very off-putting! And it wasn’t the only thing. There was considerable antagonism between the band and Ahmet and things were very difficult that day. They reached such a pitch that in the end Ahmet flounced off in a towering rage.’

  ‘Terrible!’ moaned Rudi. ‘Terrible! But not unusual.’

  ‘But, of course, it disrupted rehearsals. You went after him to bring him back.’

  ‘As one was always having to do. The life,’ said Rudi, ‘of a theatre manager is sometimes quite impossible!’

  ‘You remember going after him?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Did you catch up with him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then what happened?.

  ‘What happened?’ Rudi passed a hand over his brow. ‘Well, I argued with him. Pleaded with him. Abased myself, you could say, which is what he liked. It usually works. But not this time. He was screaming, positively screaming, with fury. I could get no sense out of him.’

  ‘And in the end?’

  Rudi shrugged.

  ‘Left him. Left him to cool down. That usually works, too, if nothing else does. It worked on this occasion. Eventually. Only after a long time, though.’

  ‘But then he came back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you carried on?’

  ‘Yes, but only until Lalagé – She had gone off, you see, to change her costume. But then she didn’t come back. I sent someone, Monique, I think, to kick her up the ass – I’d had about enough of actors’ tantrums by then. And then Monique came back and said – Oh, my God!’ said Rudi. ‘It was terrible!’

  ‘And at this time,’ said Seymour, ‘Ahmet was back with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But previously he had not been with you. When you left him, after failing to persuade him to come back, where was he?’

  ‘Where was he?’

  ‘When you caught up with him.’

  ‘On his way back to the dressing rooms.’

  ‘You are sure about that?’

  ‘Yes. I went with him. I was trying to persuade him.’

  ‘And where did you leave him?’

  ‘At the end of the corridor. The one the dressing rooms were in. I realized it was useless to go on. He was hysterical. He took off his tunic and threw it on the floor. He said that this was the last straw, that he had had enough, that he was leaving the theatre and would never come back. He has said things like that before, it’s best just to leave him to cool down –’

  ‘And when you last saw him he was going along the corridor?’

  ‘Yes, he took off his costume. It was all an act, of course, he wouldn’t really –’

  ‘The dressing rooms?’

  ‘Yes, he was in costume, and – My God!’ whispered Rudi. ‘The dressing rooms!’

  ‘Ahmet,’ said Mukhtar, ‘do you recognize this?’

  ‘No,’ said Ahmet. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It is a saz string,’ said Mukhtar. ‘Like the one you used on Lalagé Kassim.’

  The dancing boy lost colour.

  ‘You do not know that!’ he said. ‘You cannot know that!’

  ‘She was alone in the dressing room,’ said Mukhtar. ‘You knew she would be there. Alone. When did the idea occur to you, Ahmet? As you rushed from the stage in anger? When your heart was full of rage and spite and you wanted to strike at someone? Or was it earlier? Had the idea already been there? Been put there, perhaps? And you were merely biding the opportunity? Which was it, Ahmet? This is important.’

  ‘Neither!’ said Ahmet. ‘Neither!’

  ‘Shall I tell you which I think it was? I think the idea had been there before. Planted in you. And that when you were onstage and you saw Lalagé walk off to change, you thought, this is my chance! She will be alone, and everyone else is here and will not interrupt us.’

  ‘This is nonsense!’

  ‘And do you know why I think the idea was there before? Because of the saz string. You would not have had a thing like that with you unless it had been planned before.’

  ‘I know nothing about a saz string. Why don’t you ask Babikr, the saz player?’

  ‘I have. And he says he gave a saz string to someone. And that someone, I think, passed it on to you.’

  ‘A saz string? What is a saz string?’

  ‘Something that is not exactly common. And so it can be traced.’

  ‘Look to the man with the saz, then, and not to me!’

  ‘But you were there, Ahmet, and he was not.’

  ‘Who says I was there?’

  ‘Rudi. He came with you almost to the door. And then he parted from you. She was there and you were there. The two of you. Alone.’

  ‘How do you know that? It could be anyone. Anyone could have been up there!’

 
‘Ah, but no, they couldn’t. The rehearsal was going on, remember. Everyone was onstage. Or in their appointed place. I know. I have checked.’

  ‘Someone could have come in off the street –’

  ‘But Abdul, the porter, sits at the door, and he swears that no one came in. You were the only person there at the time, Ahmet. At the same time as Miss Kassim. And so I ask you again, Ahmet, who put the idea in your head? And gave you the saz string?’

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘But I still don’t see,’ said Lady Cunningham, ‘what all this had to do with the murder of my nephew.’

  They were sitting at what Seymour reckoned must be the best table in the hotel’s restaurant. It looked out over green grounds and then down at the blue waters of the Bosphorus; and then, beyond that, to the woody glades where Prince Selim had his estate. The sun had just gone down and the sky was still flame-coloured, and in places the blue of the water had become coppery red.

  Lady C. believed in dining well. There was a different bottle for every course, several courses, and an array of glasses. Mukhtar, with a Muslim’s strictness on alcohol, was not drinking; so Seymour felt a certain compulsion to see that Lady Cunningham’s bounty was not wasted. He rather wished that he had suggested that Felicity should be there, too, and had even mentioned as much to her. Felicity, however, still recovering from her early breakfast with her aunt, had firmly turned the hint down.

  ‘Well, let me outline the connection,’ said Seymour. ‘You will remember that your nephew originally set out to replicate Leander’s feat of swimming the Dardanelles.’

  ‘Yes, but he didn’t,’ said Lady Cunningham. ‘He swam the wrong way.’

  ‘I think he originally intended to swim it the right way, from Abydos to Sestos, but then he learned about the possibility of there being mines on the Abydos side and decided to make a switch so that he could take a look under cover of the swim.’

  ‘That would have appealed to him,’ said Lady Cunningham. ‘He always believed that traditions could be improved.’

  ‘Just so. What it meant, though, was that his Hero had now to be on the other side. When he had first thought about it, he had envisaged Hero as being in her true place on the Sestos side and had, indeed, when he was still thinking of Felicity as a possible Hero, placed her there. But then, for some reason, he changed his mind.’

  ‘He probably thought,’ said Lady C., ‘that Felicity couldn’t be his Hero because she was his cousin. In some ways Peter was surprisingly strait-laced.’

  ‘But having a Hero had always been part of his intention; so I was surprised when on the actual day she was missing. Only she wasn’t missing.’

  ‘But I thought –’ began Lady C.

  ‘In the initial reports there was no mention of a woman waiting for him. Mohammed, the boatman, had not seen one, and by the time the kaimakam had arrived, the woman had gone. But she had definitely been there. My colleague, here, had learned as much from some small boys. And I confirmed it myself. So the question was, what had happened to her?

  ‘With the aid of your niece, Lady Cunningham –’

  ‘Felicity? What has come over the girl? She used to be such a pudding!’

  ‘– I learned that someone had been picked up from the Abydos side after the shooting. Only that person was not a woman.’

  ‘Then –’

  ‘It was a man. And a man had, actually, been put ashore in the cove earlier, before the shooting. A man. However, there was one interesting thing that I had learned from the small boys and that was that when they had seen the woman, after the shooting, she had been taking off her clothes.’

  ‘Really?!’ said Lady Cunningham, surprised, a little shocked, and rather entertained.

  ‘I had heard that, too,’ said Mukhtar. ‘But I had dismissed it as the smutty talk of little boys.’

  ‘But it turned out to be crucial,’ said Seymour. ‘For it meant that the Hero was not a woman but a man. The fiction that Leander was swimming across to a woman was maintained. I have a feeling that your nephew quite enjoyed playing with the legend in this way. But, of course, it also meant that after the event it was particularly difficult to track Hero down.

  ‘And this was important, for, you see, if, as appears to have been the case, the Hero was the only person present when your nephew landed, then he was the only person who could have killed him.

  ‘Now, once one accepts that the Hero was actually a man dressed up in woman’s clothes, some questions immediately suggest themselves. What sort of man? And one answer could be a man who was used to dressing up as a woman, a man who quite liked dressing up as a woman. And there was one man that Cunningham knew who fell strongly into this category, an actor at the theatre he frequented. Now, we know that in his search for a Hero, he had asked various actresses at the theatre if they would take on the role, but they had refused. Might he not have gone on to ask the actor? I think that would have quite appealed to him, too. And it would certainly have appealed to the actor, and for a number of reasons, which I will come on to.

  ‘You will have guessed that I am talking about Ahmet, the dancing boy, the person who also murdered Lalagé Kassim. And there is your connection, Lady Cunningham, the one you asked for: the person who murdered Miss Kassim also murdered your nephew. He was waiting for him when he landed; and he killed him with a single shot. It was a very good shot. But, then, Ahmet was a good shot. I have seen him shooting, myself. He was very keen on shooting. He even had ambitions to go into the army.’

  Mukhtar stirred restlessly.

  ‘He may have had ambitions,’ he said, ‘but I can assure you that the army does not make up its ranks from dancing boys.’

  ‘Ah! But he hoped it would. And he had someone who had influence and would speak up for him with the army. And who was prepared to do that if Ahmet would do what he asked him.’

  Seymour looked at Lady Cunningham.

  ‘Your nephew, Lady Cunningham, had made friends in high places. In particular, he had a very intense relationship with one of the Sultan’s sons. He knew, of course, about your nephew’s plan to swim the Dardanelles. Indeed, he offered to help him. He took him and the small rowing boat that was to accompany him to the starting place. The plan was that he would pick him up from the other side when he had completed his crossing.

  ‘Unknown to your nephew, though, his felucca had already sailed to the proposed landing place earlier that morning and had put ashore the man who was to kill him. He did indeed cross to the landing place that evening but it was to make sure that the killing had taken place. Then, from another point, he picked up the killer and took him back to Istanbul.

  ‘While your nephew was swimming across he returned to the other side. In fact, he walked to the nearest town and had his hair cut. This puzzled me: why would a Prince go to a bazaar barber to have his hair cut? It didn’t seem at all likely. Then I realized: it was to establish his presence on that side of the Straits at the critical time. If anyone asked about his connection with your nephew’s death, he had an independent alibi.’

  ‘But why,’ said Lady Cunningham, ‘would he want to kill Peter? They were friends, were they not? A particularly intense relationship, I think you said?’

  ‘Yes. And reinforced by the fact that your nephew believed that he could establish Selim as the next Sultan and so, under his guidance, make sure that the Ottomans were on the British side when the war that he was sure would come, did come. In that way, he thought he might even stop it happening. But his plans came apart precisely because of the intensity of their relationship – that, and its peculiarity.

  ‘Someone told me – a lady herself, actually – that, as I gather is sometimes the aristocratic way, they even shared girlfriends. But she added something that I found intriguing, that while the Prince seemed unable to take the first step in a relationship himself – he needed your nephew to do it first – once he had committed himself, he felt peculiarly strongly about it. He became what my informant described as almost insanel
y jealous. And also extremely uncertain, for, describing her own experience, she said he appeared to be jealous of both the woman concerned and your nephew.

  ‘The same pattern was repeated when your nephew introduced him at the Theatre of Desires. He was attracted to Miss Kassim, with whom your nephew was already having an affair. I don’t think your nephew minded at first but then as the relationship between the Prince and Miss Kassim gained in intensity he tried to get the Prince to step back.

  ‘He had initially encouraged her in the relationship in the hope that she would pick up court information which would be useful to him. But when he saw how the relationship was developing he became uneasy. He had seen, on the occasion that I previously mentioned, the Prince’s behaviour become increasingly unstable and, indeed, violent and he feared that the same thing was happening in Miss Kassim’s case.

  ‘He tried to put an end to the relationship but it had gone too far. The Prince refused to back off. Indeed, he insisted that it should be your nephew who backed off. Your nephew refused, and the two quarrelled violently. Now normally your nephew was able to sort this out and resume the friendship, but on this occasion he couldn’t. The Prince did, indeed, back off but his friendship for your nephew had turned to hatred. So much so that in his rage he needed to kill him.

  ‘The tool was already to hand. He had previously made the acquaintance of the dancing boy. Again, ironically, your nephew had encouraged this. But the Prince had discovered things about Ahmet that your nephew had not: his ambition to join the army. The fact that he was an unusually good shot, his stupid vanity and his intense jealousy. All this and the Prince’s superior social position made it easy for him to persuade Ahmet to kill your nephew.’

  ‘So,’ said Lady Cunningham, ‘if I have followed you correctly, Ahmet, the dancing boy, murdered both my nephew and Miss Kassim: but in the one case at the instigation of Prince Selim and in the other case at the instigation of . . .’

  ‘Mr Cubuklu, who was acting on behalf of Prince Hafiz and trying to thwart Selim’s attempt to present himself as a progressive and a modernizer. May I say that I think Mr Cubuklu also saw himself as acting on behalf of conservative court circles who were shocked at Selim’s open flirtation with a woman they regarded as totally unsuitable.’