Belshazzar's Daughter by Barbara Nadel Page B

ceiling paper out of her mind and turned back on to her side once again. What was it?
    And it was then that she saw the letter. Thick, stubby writing on perfumed pink paper. So very typical. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. It was someone that was out of place, not something. There was a gap in the cast-list of her life.
    Her eyes filled with tears. Slowly connections formed in her mind as the recent nightmare returned. She pushed her hair out of her face and reached for a handkerchief in the pocket of her gown. Tears, caught and held static in the folds and creases of her face, bitter with salt, stung her skin.
    How could she have forgotten? She dabbed her eyes with a corner of the handkerchief and patted away the moisture that had gathered on her flaccid cheeks. She had turned away for a second and now he had gone.
     
    The two men walked in silence as they made their way back to their respective cars. Although the suspicious, almost hostile nature of the stares they were attracting from the local inhabitants was partly at the root of this phenomenon, there was another reason too. Uncharacteristically, it was Suleyman who first articulated this latter,
    as yet unspoken point.
    ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, his far superior height forcing him to speak, as it were, to the top of Ikmen’s head.
    ‘Rabbi §imon seemed a little nervous about mentioning that Smits man.’
    ikmen sucked hard on what was probably his fifteenth cigarette of the day. ‘Well, he would be.’
    ‘How so?’
    ‘Well, he’s a Jew, isn’t he!’
    ‘Yes.’ The look of blank confusion on his deputy’s face momentarily angered ikmen to a quite unreasonable degree.
    ‘If you gave the matter more than just a cursory thought you would know, Suleyman!’ He stopped and turned to face him, his eyes intent and, Suleyman was almost tempted to think, passionate. ‘That man’s parents went through the full horrors of the concentration camps. He knows, better than most, what anti-Semitism has done and can do.’
    ‘But this country had no involvement in that war, we were neutral and—’
    ‘And because we were neutral, Suleyman, people like Reinhold Smits could express their unsavoury views without let or hindrance.’ He raised his cigarette-bearing hand up towards Suleyman’s face, pointing his crooked fingers almost into the young man’s eyes. ‘We may have been at peace with our own indigenous Jewish population for a very long time, but if a Jew brings an accusation against a Turkish citizen, albeit of German extraction, it is a very serious matter. Not because the Jew will necessarily be found wanting, but because in his own mind he will be at a disadvantage. This is something that Rabbi SJmon wants to avoid at all costs and it is why, when we go to interview Smits, we must not allude to his suspicions in any way.’
    ‘But how—’
    ‘All we have to say, Suleyman, is that we obtained the address of §eker Textiles from the old man’s notebook and then let Smits explain himself and his involvement to us. As I’ve said before, and with no disrespect to the good Rabbi’s feelings, I don’t think that there is much to be gained from exploring some fifty-year-old item of racial discrimination.
    Unless there were some other element involved …’
    ‘Like what?’
    ikmen started walking again, hurling his finished cigarette butt as he went. ‘Like a reason why Meyer still kept details about his old employer over fifty years after the event.’ He shrugged, speculating. ‘Maybe Meyer screwed Smits’s wife in the last decade - who knows!’
    Despite the fact that ikmen was so small, Suleyman did not find that he was easy to keep up with when he was tense and agitated like this. He had almost to run to catch up with him, asking breathlessly, ‘So is that what you meant when you said you thought that the murder was personal?’
    ‘Possibly. Possibly.’
    ‘But …’
    Having reached ikmen’s car, which stood out markedly by virtue of its great age