Hüseyin wondered if he might have been one of the soldiers who had attacked Aphroditi. The thought did not even enter Markos’ mind.
The door to the shop was open and they pulled the body to the dark area at the back, where they covered it with layers of sacking. Only the smell of decomposition would give it away, but by the time anyone came to look, the flesh would be gone and just the bones would remain.
Markos glanced at his watch. This episode had made him late, and he knew that the man he was meeting would be getting impatient. He felt trapped with Hüseyin standing there but knew he needed to get away as soon as he could.
‘Why were you following me?’ he asked insouciantly as they finished their work.
In those minutes as they were dragging the body, Markos had been calculating how best to win Hüseyin round. There was, of course, a possibility that this was the one and only time he had been followed.
‘I wanted to see why you were leaving the hotel when you had told everyone else they must stay,’ said Hüseyin boldly.
The effort of moving the body had left them both out of breath. It was hidden now, but the two men were still in the gloomy recess of the shop.
‘There was something I wanted to sell,’ said Markos, leaning forward and touching Hüseyin on the arm. He wanted to make it seem as if he was confiding in the younger man and perhaps even professing a little guilt. ‘I knew it was a risk.’
If he had not watched Markos Georgiou in the strongroom that night and seen for himself the look of lust on his face as he cradled the guns and gems, Hüseyin would have swallowed the man’s lie. Over the past few weeks, though, a very different picture of Markos had evolved, and he knew that there was a wide gulf between who he was and who he seemed.
Hüseyin felt he was the only person who had any idea of the reality, but he was inexperienced and did not know what reaction he would provoke. Truth mattered to him.
‘I have seen you before,’ he said. ‘Not just today.’
Markos did not instantly react. Confronted with such simplicity and openness, it was difficult to think of anything to say. Given how carefully he felt he had covered his tracks, and how assiduous he had been in every way, he was astonished to have been found out. In fact he was furious. This had never happened to Markos Georgiou, and the sense of exposure was like having a thousand searchlights beamed into his face.
His body temperature rose. How dare anyone follow him, but more importantly, how dare this Turkish Cypriot boy pass judgement on him? Anger was a rare thing for Markos, but in the back of this huge shop in an isolated part of town, he slid his hand inside his jacket.
Though he could not see Markos’ face in the darkness, a memory of the devilish grimace that he had seen in the strongroom came to Hüseyin. The other image that flashed before him was of Markos holding a small gun. He had no doubt that he had it with him now.
When they were concealing the body, Hüseyin had noticed a knife on the counter close by. It was the tool used for slitting open the sacks.
The younger man’s reactions were swift. As Markos was pulling the gun from his pocket, Hüseyin grabbed the knife that lay rusting on the surface. For the second time that day, action had to be faster than thought. He knew that Markos would not think twice. The young Turkish Cypriot was learning that killing was sometimes about self-protection.
The speed of Hüseyin’s action came as a total surprise to Markos. He hardly had time to fold his fingers round his gun before the knife was rammed into his chest.
Hüseyin had once helped his father kill a goat. There was the same disconcerting silence as the blade penetrated flesh. The sound it made as it was withdrawn, accompanied by the gushing of blood on to the ground, was more shocking than the stabbing itself.
Until that night, Hüseyin had not realised how sickeningly easy it was to rob a man of his life. He turned away, full of remorse and self-disgust, and leaned against the counter to steady himself. His hands were shaking so violently that he dropped the knife. He feared that the noise of the metal blade scudding across the stone floor would be heard from miles away.
The knife had pierced Markos through the heart. He had dropped backwards to the ground, soaked in blood. For a sudden disorienting moment, Hüseyin’s mind flashed back to a decade before, to the bloodstained shirt of his cousin Mehmet.
In a state of disbelief over what he had done, he dragged the body towards the empty sacks. It left a trail of blood that he would have to clean away before he left. Markos seemed weightless, almost insubstantial compared with the Turkish soldier. Hüseyin hid the corpse close to the first one, but not touching, and took the gun.
At the other end of the city, the man who was waiting for Markos had finally lost patience. With increasing fury, he realised that there would be no delivery that day. The Greek Cypriot had let him down, in spite of the fact that he had paid in advance, as always. He had never asked questions, as he had always known that he was getting the better side of the deal, handling magnificent pieces of jewellery for less than half of what they were worth. The item that he had been promised this time was the most valuable and expensive piece he had ever acquired, and now he felt a fool. He would come back each night until Markos turned up. He had been an acquaintance of the manager of the Clair de Lune for a long time, but he was not going to let him get away with this.
Hüseyin hurried back to The Sunrise, stumbling as he went. He arrived just as the light was coming up, hoping to get to his room before anyone saw him.
Unexpectedly, the door to Room 105 opened. Emine saw her son standing there, ashen-faced, his clothes smeared with blood.
‘Hüseyin!
Aman
Allahım!
’ she said. ‘My God! What on earth has happened?’
Leaving Hüseyin in the corridor, Emine immediately woke Halit and sent him to make sure that Mehmet was still asleep. ‘Bring one of Hüseyin’s shirts when you come back, and some of his trousers.’
It was too early in the morning for even Halit to argue, so he carried out the instructions without questioning them. When he returned, bleary-eyed, Hüseyin was in their bathroom.
It was only when he saw his mother’s horrified face that Hüseyin realised he was spattered head to foot with Markos’ blood. Once he had scrubbed it off his hands and arms, he began to stop shaking. The clothes he had been wearing were rolled into a ball and thrown into a corner.
‘Now tell us what happened,’ said his mother gently once he was dressed again.
Hüseyin told his parents everything. Neither of them interrupted even for a second. He described how he had been following Markos for some time, had seen him leaving the city and watched him handling guns and jewellery down in the vault.
At first, Emine was full of disbelief. She had been bewitched by Markos’ charm. He had made all of them feel loved, from the youngest to the oldest.
‘Do you think he was selling Kyria Papacosta’s jewellery?’ asked Halit.
‘It sounds likely,’ said Emine.
Then Hüseyin recounted what had happened that day and how he had killed the soldier who was tracking Markos.
‘It wasn’t Markos I wanted to save,’ he said. ‘It was the Georgious … and us.’
Sitting on his parents’ bed, like a child who had wandered in to seek comfort after a nightmare, Hüseyin broke down and sobbed. Emine sat with her arm around him, waiting.
The first killing had felt remote. He had made no physical connection with the soldier. Perhaps it was the same if you shot a man. With Markos it had been different. There had been a true sense of tearing someone’s breath from them. Even though he had loathed the victim and was defending his own life, the horror of finding himself Markos’ murderer was overwhelming.
‘
Canım bemni
,’ said Emine. ‘My darling, you had to do it. You had no choice.’
Halit was pacing up and down the bedroom.
‘You should have done it before!’ he shouted. ‘He deserved it!
Pezevenk!
Bastard!’
‘Halit! Shhhhh! We don’t want anyone to hear,’ warned Emine.
They sat in silence for a while. Gradually Hüseyin calmed down. He was a young man, but at this moment he looked more like a child.
‘Mother, you know the worst thing about him?’
‘There were plenty of bad things,’ interjected Halit.
‘That he was going to kill you?’ said Emine.
‘No,’ replied Hüseyin firmly. ‘The worst thing was that he didn’t help Kyria Papacosta.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Emine.
‘That night. He was there. I think he saw it all.’
Hüseyin described what he had seen. For a moment, both his parents were lost for words. Halit could not contain himself for long.
‘What man would behave like that?’ he roared.
‘Halit! Please … we don’t want to wake everyone.’
‘The problem we have now,’ said Halit, ‘is how to tell the Georgious. They have to know that Markos is dead.’
Emine began to weep. ‘Poor Irini,’ she said quietly. ‘She loves him more than anyone in the world.’
‘They have to know what he was doing,’ insisted Halit.
‘But the truth might kill her,’ said Emine. ‘And in any case, I don’t know if she would believe it. There is no point.’
Together they agreed how they would go about it. Halit’s main concern was to protect his son. Emine’s was the same, but she wanted to protect the Georgious too, and to be as gentle as possible with them.
By the end of that day, the Georgious were becoming anxious. Especially for Irini, Markos was always at the centre of everything. When he was absent, it was as if the sun was behind a permanent cloud, or the birds had stopped singing on a spring morning.
Hüseyin stayed in his room and Emine made an excuse for him. She told the others he was sick.
In actual fact, Hüseyin felt as though he was. In the eyes of Allah, he had committed a terrible crime.
That evening, just as he had planned with his parents, Hüseyin came down to the kitchen to be told the news that Markos was missing. Irini was in tears. Vasilis sat in silence. Hüseyin knew his mind would forever be haunted by the look on Irini Georgiou’s sweet, lined face that night. He saw frantic anxiety, but also gratitude that he, Hüseyin, had volunteered to go out looking.
In the early hours of the morning, moving through the streets carelessly, almost wishing to be caught, he returned to the store. He could see that the lumps beneath the sacks were exactly where they had been left. There had been something of the magician about Markos, and a small part of Hüseyin had almost expected his body to be gone. As he dragged the lighter of the corpses from where it lay, a bunch of keys fell from a pocket.
He rested a moment and then, despising himself for doing it, decided to go through the rest of Markos’ clothes. There was nothing else in the jacket. In the trousers he found a velvet pouch, identical to the one that had been in Kyria Papacosta’s bag, with the name of a Famagusta jeweller printed on the outside. Hüseyin put it in his left-hand pocket – the keys already filled the right one. He suddenly felt Markos’ glassy eyes on him and could not stop himself looking into them. The handsome features were disturbingly unchanged. He took a last glance at his face before covering it with a piece of sacking. With a wave of adrenalin giving him extra strength, he moved the body to another empty shop closer to The Sunrise.
Having ‘located’ Markos, he returned to The Sunrise. He found his parents waiting.
‘I’ve found him,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll take Panikos there when he’s ready.’
Emine said that she and Halit would tell the Georgious.
The Greek Cypriot couple were sitting at the big kitchen table holding hands. Emine did not have to say anything. Irini read it in the look on her face. Words were superfluous. The elderly woman crumpled forward, her head on the table, and sobbed. Vasilis held her close.
Hüseyin had never forgotten the tidal waves of emotion that he had witnessed with the death of his cousin and more recently his aunt and cousins in Maratha. All of these were premature losses of life, sudden, unexpected and brutal. Such murders elicited an appropriately violent level of grief. Hüseyin vanished to his room and hid beneath the bedclothes. He could not bear to hear the sound of Irini’s wailing.
A few hours later, it was agreed that Panikos should accompany Hüseyin to bring back the body. As soon as it was dark, the two men set off. When they got to the shop, Hüseyin realised that Panikos was too unfit to be of much help and found himself taking the brunt of Markos’ weight. They seemed the longest fifteen minutes of his life as he lugged the body slowly back to the hotel. Panikos helped him take it down the side passageway and in through the fire door.
They laid Markos on an upholstered couch in the reception area and Emine helped Maria change him into clean clothes. He wore a dark suit and a fresh white shirt, exactly as he always had done in the days managing the nightclub. By the time they had cleaned him up, he looked as immaculate, calm and beautiful in death as he had in life. Finally Maria carefully combed her brother’s dark, silky hair in the way he had liked it.
When she saw the body, Irini gave way to even greater grief. It was unfettered. Emine knew that her anguish would have been the same had she known the truth about her son’s character.
‘Love is blind,’ she said quietly to Hüseyin.
Hüseyin knew from his own mother’s love how warm and uncritical maternal devotion could be, but even he had noticed that Irini’s feelings for Markos were close to hero-worship.
Maria had prepared a long table in the ballroom with white sheets and gathered armfuls of artificial flowers from the various vases that stood in the darkened corridors of the hotel. The icons that both Irini and her daughter had brought with them when they left home stood close by on a table, gently illuminated by an oil lamp.
This was how Markos lay, while his family prayed close by and watched him. Even in the absence of a priest, they observed what rituals they could.
There was silence except for Irini and Maria’s bursts of keening. Vasilis sat, head bowed, next to Panikos. Some respectful distance away, Emine and Halit also remained throughout the night.