Suleyman forced a smile. 'I am now, Cohen.'

'Oh.'

Chapter 23.

The only time Robert had ever seen anything like it was in films. Nasty, rather frightening films about people who had been wicked and were just about to die. Of course he couldn't actually see much because his eyes still had to adjust to the weak light from the oil-lamp, the pungent sting of the incense. But they were all there - well, nearly all. He couldn't see Natalia yet, unless of course that was her in the big chair over by the window, separate from the main group. But whoever it was was turned away from him and he couldn't tell. It would be like her not to want to look at him.

The other bodies spread out and away from the huge lilac and gold structure in the middle of the room and he felt one of Nicholas's hands upon his shoulder. 'Mama would like you to sit down on her bed, Mr Cornelius.'

The cripple Sergei scuttled out of his way. Robert stepped forward and found himself at the foot of a golden prow.

It curled towards him like a gilt wave. He looked at it closely and decided that in a full light it would look like what it really was. Something cheap and tastelessly ornate.

He wasn't afraid, that feeling had disappeared some time ago, but he did wish that they would show him Natalia. He didn't want these theatrics; the sweet but stale-smelling air made him feel nauseous. He looked away from the prow and along what was obviously a bed. He stopped when he reached her face. The wrinkles parted and what were left of her painted lips smiled. All the sounds in the room including his own breathing seemed to stop.

'So you are Robert Cornelius, are you?' The English, both in content and accent, was perfect. Robert took a deep breath to steady his nerves and nodded dumbly. 'My, my, but you are covered in a lot of somebody else's blood, aren't you?' He didn't answer. The eyes of all the Gulcus and of the portraits that lined the room fixed upon him.

The red mouth opened again. 'I think we owe you an explanation, Mr Cornelius, regarding the death of Leonid Meyer.'

'You did it?' It just came out! Even though he knew that such a brittle thing as her couldn't possibly have done it, it came out.

She smiled and patted the space on the bed beside her.

'Indirectly. Please sit.'

Robert took a step forward and lowered himself slowly on to the dusty, moth-eaten bed. She gathered her long thin arms about her flat chest as if symbolically holding him close to her like a spider with its prey.

'Do you like stories, Mr Cornelius?'

He watched mesmerised as her red-tipped fingers massaged her own dry shoulders. He didn't answer.

A tiny laugh drifted up from the back of her throat. 'I know you do.' He noticed that her eyes were a very deep blue and was surprised. Old people's eyes usually lost their colour, watered down by time. 'This story, however, is different in that it is based upon a premise that only some of us in this room believe to be true.'

A woman, Natalia's mother, started crying softly.

'To start I must go back in time to 1918, Mr Cornelius.

As you must be able to tell from my appearance, it is a year that I can clearly remember.'

With a normal person he would have made at least some small sounds of protest, but this wasn't someone to whom the normal rules of anything, including politeness, applied.

'I do not I think need to waste any time talking about my nationality. In 1918, Mr Cornelius, I lived in a town called Ekaterinburg in the Urals. Before the Bolsheviks my family ... they, they had been powerful and we ...' She sighed.

'Some people, including myself, were shot.' She looked behind him at her son Nicholas. 'Before we were shot, Mr Cornelius, and some of my family, I know, struggle to understand this too, I remember very little.' She paused and bowed her head.

Sergei muttered something hard and bitter that Robert could not understand.

Nicholas coughed to attract her attention. 'Go on, Mama.'

She smiled at him, but without love. A heartless mother spider. 'My earliest real, complete memory is of lying on a filthy floor covered with blood. I looked, I should imagine, not unlike you do now. Not the same as remembering the kiss of a beloved father or sister, but there it is. Other people were on the floor too, but they were all dead. Men in uniform who I knew to be Bolsheviks were walking about amongst the corpses finishing them off with bayonets and pistols. The room was full of gunsmoke, I could taste it in my mouth.

I still can sometimes.' Her eyes met his and held them. 'I feel the incident has a familiar ring to you, Mr Cornelius.'

'No.' But he wasn't sure.

'No matter. Anyway, they thought I was dead. They loaded us on to a truck. They threw me on top. I found myself pressed between the body of a boy and a leg almost severed by bullets. When the truck moved this limb fell against my mouth and I tasted its blood. If I had ever had a name I had forgotten what it was. Can you understand that?'

But a kind of numbness had filled his body and he just continued to stare into that awful face without moving.

'Time passed, I don't know how much, and then the truck stopped. I held my breath because I knew that if they heard me they would kill me. The boy beside me moaned. He still lived but because he was now a danger to me I didn't want him to. I heard voices. I put my hands hard around the boy's neck and I squeezed. You have to believe that there was no other way. I closed my eyes but he gurgled and his arms came up to push me away. A thick rope of blood rose from his mouth and sludged against my face. And they heard him. A youth with a little sharp face like a fox jumped up amongst the bodies and looked into my eyes. Two other men followed and I took my hands off the boy's throat.'

Natalia's mother said something and the old woman smiled.

'The truth, if you want to know, Anya, is that I don't know. I strangled the boy to kill him because he was a danger to me, but whether I succeeded or not, I cannot say. I told Leonid and the other two that he was still alive.'

She turned away from her daughter and faced Robert. 'The man with the sharp face was Leonid Meyer, Mr Cornelius.

He and the other two guards took myself and the boy off the truck and hid us in some woods. He saved my life.

Unfortunately I was never able to repay the debt, as you know.' She cleared her throat. 'To explain: the boy and I were taken off the truck while the Bolshevik commanders were reconnoitring the road ahead. When they rejoined the vehicle the truck moved on. The rest of the bodies were apparently beaten and then burnt with fire and sulphuric acid at an old mine a few versts down the road. If it helps you at all, Mr Cornelius, they had to do this in order to disguise the identities of the victims.'

Oh it helped all right, but it didn't make any sense. The story was now all too familiar, almost laughably so. 'You're talking about the murder of the last Tsar, aren't you?'

She offered him a short black cigarette, which he declined.

'I might be.' She shot her son Nicholas the kind of look that silences dissent. 'Anyway, the boy, the one I'd tried to strangle, was dead when I next looked at him. I didn't attempt to bury him and just lay on the ground waiting for something to happen. And a while later it did. Leonid returned. He gave me a little bread and while he soaked the boy's body in petrol and set it alight, he told me things.'

She paused obviously for effect. Robert lost some patience with those deep blue eyes and shrugged. 'What things?'

'Leonid told me who the boy was and I was shocked.'

She looked down at her hands and her voice became quiet.

'He was my brother. His name was Alexei.'

Robert's patience suddenly snapped. Here he was in the midst of the most terrible situation that had ever occurred to him and this hag was coming out with a fairy-tale almost as old as the century. And where was Natalia? He preloaded his voice with irony. 'So you're Princess Anastasia of Russia, are you?'

Her head snapped upwards again and those eyes of hers silenced him immediately. 'Leonid told me my name was Maria Nicolaeva Romanova, the Tsar's third daughter and the only survivor. It meant little to me at the time, Mr Cornelius. At the time my only feelings on the matter were that everybody I had ever known was now dead. I was totally alone.'

'So what happens then,' said Cohen, looking away, as was so irritatingly his custom, from the road and at the person he was talking to.

Suleyman grabbed wildly at the steering wheel and shouted, 'Will you watch the road, or-'

'OK! OK!' Cohen turned his attention back on to the thick morning traffic and then returned once again to his original subject. 'But what happens if this Cornelius person is at Karadeniz Sokak and old ikmen isn't?'

'Then we will bring Mr Cornelius in,' replied Suleyman with some determination.

'And it'll be our kill, so to speak?'

'Yes,' said Suleyman with, it had to be admitted, some satisfaction. 'Yes, it will.'

Cohen laughed. 'That'll show him, won't it!'

'Yes it will,' the young man said through his teeth. 'Yes it will.'

Her story was hard to follow, not because it was complicated, but because she herself, at times, appeared to be unsure about the facts that lay behind it. Leonid Meyer had taken her out of the country via Armenia. Until they reached the comparative safety of Constantinople, they both worked as casual labourers in a circus. Maria took the money at the entrance to the freak show. This memory amused her greatly. At the time she had difficulty coming to terms with who Meyer told her she was. She couldn't necessarily trust the man, for a start. She had only vague memories of events before the execution. Events that could have happened to numerous aristocratic girls of her age. The bullet graze on her face didn't help either and she frequently felt that her true place should be behind those filthy curtains that hid the three-legged man, the bearded lady and the Siamese twins from non-paying public gaze.

But Meyer was insistent about her identity. It seemed to excite him sexually and he took her often and without tenderness during their long and arduous journey.

'Then, just before Constantinople, something happened.'

She looked him straight in the eyes and stared hard without blinking. Robert knew it was all so much twaddle, it had to be, but he was mesmerised. 'One day I woke up, not with regained memories, but with the perfect certainty that Leonid was right. All the way across Anatolia he had browbeaten me with it - how I as the only surviving member of the family was now heiress to a fortune. He said someone had once told him how the Tsar had managed to get much of his private fortune transferred abroad just before the Revolution. His plan was for us to find our way across to Western Europe and claim it. I agreed at first, what else could I do? But then that day came and with it came fear.

I was the Tsar's only surviving child, a person Russia's new rulers had hated enough to want to kill. Under the Tsar, the old Imperial Secret Service, the Okrana, had agents all over the world, even I knew that. It was unlikely that the Bolsheviks would operate in a different fashion. And as you know, history has proved me right in this case. I became afraid for my life.'

Nicholas walked up to the head of the bed and took his mother's hand. She had been talking for some time and was beginning to look tired. But Robert was tired too: of her and her stupid story; of the irrelevancy of everything she was telling him; of not being able to see Natalia. Also the desire to tell the police was going. Perhaps it was all the talk of death. 'I still don't understand what Meyer's murder has to do with all this.'

'You will.' She squeezed her son's hand and smiled at him. 'Anyway, I refused to go along with Leonid's plan and at Uskiidar I left him. He was very angry and threatened to expose me anyway, but I knew that he wouldn't. You see Leonid was implicated too. It was Leonid who shot my brother, little more than a child at the time. Even then the guilt crucified his soul. So I was alone. But not for long. I met an old man, Mehmet Gulcu. Then I met Leonid again and I told him about Mehmet. Mehmet was rich and Leonid approved. We didn't marry, but I bore him three children. The second one, Sergei' - she looked across, Robert fancied in disgust, at the cripple - 'confirmed my belief in my identity. Serge is as he is because he has haemophilia, just like my brother the Tsarevich Alexei.' She stared at the wall behind Robert's head. 'Strange his blood was so thick, really.'

She didn't speak again for a while. Nicholas took up the story. 'When Papa died, Mama had little to think of except her past. She read, you know. It grew. This room she painted violet, just like the boudoir of the Tsarina Alexandra. She collected pictures of "herself" and others. Sometimes she thinks maybe she remembers something ... Shut in this house, so afraid, the blood becomes very important to her.

Romanov blood, so she tells us. At twenty years old I want to marry some girl, but Mama says no. The blood-'

Anya screamed. Robert turned to look at her. What he saw was a trembling white ghost, its mouth twisted like a Mobius strip. Strangely, Nicholas smiled. 'Mr Cornelius, my sister Anya is also the mother of my two children. Mama was most specific about preserving Romanov blood.'

For the first time in his life Robert really felt his skin crawl.

Not because of what Natalia and her sibling, brother, sister, whatever it was, were. That wasn't their fault, but the mind behind it ... A young male voice interjected. It came from over by the shuttered window. The person Robert had hoped might be Natalia, but wasn't. The old woman cooed at him in dark, liquid Russian. Robert remembered that most of the 'Anastasias' hadn't actually been able to speak their 'own'

language.

'Cruel, isn't it?' Maria Gulcu turned her attention to him once again. 'But it was necessary and Leonid, who had by this time taken to drink, approved.' She smiled.

'All my family loved Leonid; he had saved me. If Uncle Leonid said a thing they knew that thing must be right.

The grandchildren particularly, idolised him - until that is, some of us older people, well, myself, really, became a little careless with our talk. When one day, just prior to that fateful Monday of yours, I became sick of the endless paean of praise that always surrounded mention of my poor old Jewish friend. When, out of jealousy, I told a dear young person a truth that shattered each and every heroic Meyer illusion.'

She looked around the room at her almost complete family, her face set and impassive. Robert followed her eyes with his, but they came to rest nowhere. 'You see, sadly, Mr Cornelius, when secrets do come out, some people find it very hard to come to terms with them.' She called out towards the chair by the window in Russian.

Two pale hands braced themselves against the arms of the chair and a very familiar profile leant into view.

'Do you have any idea what would happen if a stray cigarette end or spark landed in the back of your rig?'

The pop-eyed driver crossed his arms on top of the half-open cab window and nodded his head aggressively.

'What?'

Of course he could be genuinely stupid, although ikmen, in his present state of mind, preferred to think of the man as criminally negligent. After all his accursed truck had just rendered his back bumper into the shape of a tormented letter 'S'.

He shouted, 'You drive around with a fucking great waxed bag full of gasoline, exposed to every element going, and you want me to tell you what happens if that little lot meets a flame!'

The driver paused for a second before spitting his reply.

'Yeah.'

'Well it catches fire of course, you dull cunt! What do you think it's going to do? Run to the doctor for a bandage?'

He took his notebook and pen out of his pocket. 'What's your licence-plate number and whom do you work for?'

The driver puffed indignantly and folded his arms. 'You're not in the traffic division. I don't have-'

'Don't fuck with me, you little shit! One more smart word from you and you'll find yourself in a very small room sharing toilet facilities with a homosexual rapist for the rest of the week!'

Several hundred horns at the back of the accident all sounded in unison. The truck driver's mouth turned down at the corners and he mumbled: '34 KV7 99 and I work for my brother.'

ikmen wrote it down. 'Who is?'

'Adnan Kemal.'

Avci tapped ikmen on the shoulder once again. 'Sir, there's a traffic cop coming over from the cigarette kiosk.'

'Good,' ikmen snapped back to the driver of the truck.

'And where does Mr Kemal live?'

'iskender.'

The traffic cop drew level with ikmen's disgruntled little party, ikmen tore a page out of his notebook and thrust it into the traffic policeman's hand. 'Here. There's his licence-plate number and the name of the man he works for. I'm busy, I've had it with this bastard, you do it!'

He'd only been on duty for ten minutes. He'd only been a policeman for six months. 'Oh,' he said ineffectually.

It wasn't Natalia. But then, thinking about it, she had to be at work now, didn't she? Robert peered, his eyes watering, through the smoke-encrusted gloom and felt his breath stop.

It was a young man and he was crying. His voice broke as he spoke in their language. He pleaded with her, his hands stretched out trembling before him, but her face was stone.

Like her soul, Robert thought. The pleading continued like a soft dirge. She spoke over the top of it, drowning its dark, melodious lower registers.

'This is Misha, Mr Cornelius, Natalia's twin brother. We don't show him to many people because he's not quite right.

Sometimes people mistake him for his sister, which is very convenient. When, on the very rare occasions he leaves this house, and people who know us see him they just assume it is Natalia. It takes their minds off his bizarre behaviour.