A Passion for Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘It’s a job.’ He shrugged. ‘Men must work. What more can be said?’

  ‘Ah, but there are carpet dealers and there are carpet dealers, are there not?’ İkmen said.

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘And this particular carpet dealer was assistant to Raşit Ulusan, one of the oldest and most respected dealers in the Kapalı Çarşı. Raşit Bey can boast ambassadors and industrialists amongst his customers as well as the Süleyman family. Mehmet’s family and the Ulusans have been trading, apparently, for many years.’

  Metin İskender grunted by way of reply. He, too, knew and liked Mehmet Süleyman but he, probably rather more than most, found the issue of the man’s Ottoman past difficult. Although married to a very successful middle-class business woman, Metin’s understanding of once-powerful people from pre-Republican families was limited. He also, in common with a lot of people, had little patience with such families’ avowed poverty in the twenty-first century. It was Metin who changed the subject.

  ‘Of course some of the body and about half of the face has been eaten by something,’ he said as he started to make his way over to the corpse and the doctor attending to it. ‘I don’t know what animals live in this forest, but I expect our friends in the mob are only too educated on the matter. Luckily both his wallet and his mobile phone seem to be intact.’

  ‘Yes.’

  İkmen began to move over towards the body too, but then stopped just as the rich, meaty smell of rot began to assault his nostrils. Yaşar Uzun’s death did look, on the face of it, like a classic Mafia hit – except that most mobs he knew very rarely took the time to cover their tracks or even bother to hide what they had done in any significant way. He did have a feeling about Yaşar Uzun – he’d experienced it right from the start – things here were not all that they seemed. As he took his mobile phone out of his pocket, İkmen smiled. His late mother had been exactly the same. But back then, in the forties and fifties, her abilities had been interpreted as the result of witchcraft. In Üsküdar where the İkmen family lived in those days, Ayşe İkmen had been the local witch. As he flicked his phone open, İkmen wondered whether the district still had a witch and, if so, whether she was any good. He lit yet another cigarette as he scrolled through the host of numbers he had stored in the telephone’s memory and then, coming to the one that he wanted, he sighed and pressed the ‘select’ button. A few seconds later an elderly voice answered.

  ‘Ah, Raşit Bey,’ İkmen replied. ‘I am so sorry to bother you at this difficult time, but could you please give me the name and address of the person who hosted your carpet show last Monday night?’

  The old man said that he would, provided İkmen could wait for a few moments while he went into his office to retrieve the information. İkmen said that was fine and, while he waited, he looked at the deep, still slightly misty forest around him. It was gorgeous.

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  ‘Yes, I remember Emine Soylu, or Koç as she was then, and Deniz, her son, too,’ the phlegm-swamped voice of someone Süleyman could barely understand in the Hakkari gendarmerie said. Some of the eastern accents were difficult to decipher. But then for some of the people ‘out there’ Turkish was not really their first language. Often it was Kurdish and, in the case of the Suriyani Christians, it was Aramaic. Not that this man, whatever his name was, was likely to be a member of either of those groups. No, he was just a member of the local jandarma, a paramilitary force that acts in lieu of the police in some rural districts, and he had an accent you could cut with a knife.

  ‘I believe that Cabbar Soylu married her and took on the boy, Deniz?’

  Süleyman was sitting in his car outside his parents’ house with his mobile phone jammed against his ear. He’d started making inquiries of Hakkari as soon as he’d left the Soylus’ house. After all, if this investigation was to proceed as usual, and Mürsel was very keen for it to do so, he had to explore the background of the victim at the very least. Also it was quite propitious that this roughly spoken man had called at this time. He had not, after all, relished the prospect of telling his father about the death of Raşit Bey’s assistant. Death in all its forms, even of those he didn’t know, saddened Muhammed Süleyman to a quite disproportionate degree these days.

  ‘No,’ the other replied shortly. ‘Cabbar married Emine all right, but Deniz went to the hospital at Van.’

  Rahmi Soylu had described Emine’s child as a ‘demon’. Süleyman wondered whether he was deformed but his colleague in Hakkari said that he wasn’t.

  ‘Deniz Koç was mad,’ he said. ‘Cabbar had him put into the institution outside of Van. It was for the best.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Oh, he was violent, biting –’ had he said ‘biting’? – ‘touching, hitting . . . you know . . .’

  Süleyman did have some experience of psychiatric institutions. Apart from the fact that his psychiatrist wife had patients in several of them, over the years his job had taken him into a few in and around İstanbul. Then of course there had been his mother’s uncle Ahmet who, due to shellshock sustained during the First World War, had died in one such place. Not that anyone ever spoke about him except in whispers. If Cabbar Soylu had put his stepson into an institution it cannot have been a decision lightly taken – madness, even by association, remained a palpable stain upon one’s family.

  ‘I believe Deniz died,’ Süleyman continued. ‘I get the impression that was some time ago.’

  The phlegmy man seemed to laugh. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Deniz Koç died last year. September. He killed himself. They always do.’

  ‘Oh, I . . .’ He turned to see the confused face of his mother at the car window, her fingers tapping on the glass.

  ‘Mehmet! What are you doing?’

  He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘Mother, I’m on the phone! I’ll be in in a moment.’

  ‘Mehmet?’ She looked confused, her heavily powdered face frowning against the outside of his window.

  ‘Yes,’ the man on the phone continued, ‘took his own life and condemned his soul to damnation.’

  ‘Right . . .’

  Süleyman pressed the button to lower his window and then said to his mother, ‘I’ll be in in a moment! This is business, Mother!’

  ‘Oh, well, if you must shout at your poor mother . . .’ His mother flounced off back into her small wooden house with more of the air of a teenager than that of an elderly woman. But then that was his mother all over, she had never – and would never – grow up. His father had indulged her too much for that to ever be possible.

  ‘Inspector Süleyman?’ the voice at the other end of the phone said.

  ‘Yes . . .’ Süleyman raked one nervous hand through his thick, greying hair. His mother always had an adverse effect upon him in almost every scenario he could name. But he cleared his throat and said, ‘So, but, Cabbar Soylu, what did you make of him . . . ?’

  ‘Cabbar?’ the man laughed, properly, so it seemed, this time. ‘A loveable rogue. He has a record, as you must know, but here he was just involved in petty crime. He stole from bakkal shops, dealt illegal cigarettes to soldiers, you know . . .’

  ‘You wouldn’t describe him as a gangster?’

  There was just a moment of silence before the other man said, ‘No, not here in Hakkari. I heard he later did well in İstanbul and I wondered if it was by that criminal method, but Cabbar left no family behind when he went away from Hakkari. His mother went with him, his father and brother were dead by that time. Last I saw of Cabbar was at Deniz’s funeral here last year. Word was that he and his family were off to start a new life in Europe somewhere.’

  ‘Emine Soylu didn’t mention it,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Oh, well, maybe he changed his mind,’ the other said. ‘But whichever way it was, it was kismet that he die at this time. Where it happens matters little.’

  ‘Somebody killed him,’ Süleyman said slowly. The idea that kismet, the Islamic concept of a preordaine
d fate, was the prime mover in the death of an individual was still a prevalent notion, even amongst sections of the police force and particularly in the countryside among the peasants and the jandarma. Süleyman, for whom kismet wasn’t a totally serious consideration, tried to be patient with this man’s point of view.

  ‘Yes, but it was his time, Inspector,’ the man continued almost cheerily. ‘Life, which must conform to the Will of Allah, was always so.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ And then amid a brief further exchange of religiously inspired niceties their conversation finished.

  Süleyman took a few moments to think about what he had just been told before getting out of the car and going towards his parents’ house. Deniz Koç had been, apparently, ‘mad’, although quite what his actual diagnosis had been, he didn’t know. Out in the wild and remote east maybe he didn’t even have a diagnosis. After all, Cabbar and Emine Soylu must have put him in that place towards the end of the seventies or early eighties at the latest. A time when things had been very bad, very violent all over the country. Political unrest of the rightists, leftists and the Kurdish population had culminated in the imposition of martial law in 1981. Süleyman remembered it well. Cabbar Soylu’s early years in İstanbul must have been tough, he’d subsequently done very well for himself. His success, however, could not, by its very nature, be applauded. Soylu had been a gangster and a thug and his life was not going to be any great loss to anyone beyond his family. If the peeper had killed Cabbar Soylu, did this mean that the peeper, as well as disliking homosexuals, hated gangsters too? Süleyman got out of his car and wondered about the types of people the peeper could conceivably dislike and how Mürsel could possibly know about that.

  Mr Wilhelmus Klaassen of the consulate of the Netherlands in İstanbul was an extremely tall, dark-haired man in his late forties. Like most Dutchmen he spoke flawless English but, in addition, he spoke Turkish too, which was quite a treat for İkmen. Mr Klaassen’s Turkish was the best the policeman had ever heard coming from the mouth of a foreign national.

  ‘How long have you been in Turkey, Mr Klaassen?’ İkmen asked as he followed his host into the latter’s enormous modern home.

  ‘Three years now,’ Mr Klaassen replied. ‘And you don’t have to be formal. Call me Wim, please.’

  Wim. He was so friendly and seemingly open that İkmen was almost tempted to ask him to call him ‘Çetin’. But thirty years plus of maintaining a professional distance from ‘the public’ militated against it and so he just smiled as he sat down in a very large chair beside a very bright window.

  Wilhelmus Klaassen and his wife Doris lived in one of the higher up and more prestigious parts of Peri. Their property consisted of a two-storey house with four bedrooms and two bathrooms as well as a considerable garden with a swimming pool. Every room afforded spectacular views of the Belgrad Forest, like the one İkmen was gazing at now. Stunned, he was still trying to take in the knowledge that ‘Wim’ had only started to learn Turkish one month before his posting to İstanbul when ‘Doris’ brought him a very welcome glass of tea.

  ‘We have to learn other languages, Inspector,’ she said as she handed the glass and saucer over to him with a smile. ‘No one but the Dutch speaks Dutch.’

  ‘Not many people outside Turkey speak Turkish, present company excepted,’ İkmen said and then with a view to just getting the next question over with because he had to, he said, ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

  Western people, especially Americans and Canadians, didn’t generally like smoking and so he didn’t have very high hopes. But he was to be pleasantly surprised.

  Wim laughed. ‘Oh, you look so worried, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Don’t be.’ He took an ashtray off one of the many coffee tables in that vast living room and gave it to İkmen. ‘I am a Dutchman, I smoke cigars. It’s what we do.’

  The three of them passed pleasantries then about the house, the view and the various lovely things the Klaassens had in their home before they got down to what they all knew they had to talk about.

  ‘How well did you know Yaşar Uzun?’ İkmen asked as the couple both surveyed him sympathetically with their big, blue eyes.

  ‘Not very well,’ Wim replied pulling on a long, black cheroot as he did so. ‘We know Raşit Bey. We were introduced to him and his shop by the previous Dutch consul who did a lot of business with him. It was from the previous consul that Doris and myself kind of inherited Raşit Bey’s carpet shows. When he left we took over. We first met Yaşar last year when he came along with Raşit Bey to see how things were done. Then this year he came just with the boys and gave, I must say, an even better talk than Raşit Bey. His English is – was – excellent. Do you know how his car came to come off the road, Inspector?’

  ‘No.’ He hadn’t told them that it was thought Yaşar Uzun had been murdered. Plenty of time for that shock later. ‘So tell me about this carpet show, Mr, er, Wim, if you will.’

  The Dutchman shrugged. ‘Once a year the boys and either Raşit or Yaşar come to us for the evening with a selection of their carpets. Doris and myself are avid collectors of village carpets as I’m sure you can see, Inspector.’

  There were various brightly coloured rugs hanging on the snow-white walls and spread out across the floorboards, but İkmen didn’t have a clue about what precisely these carpets were.

  ‘Our friends likewise,’ Wim continued. ‘And because Raşit Bey and his boys are so knowledgeable, we like to buy from him.’ He looked at İkmen with a sudden serious cast in his eye. ‘Do not take this the wrong way, Inspector, but there are a lot of useless, cheating dealers out there . . .’

  ‘Oh, you don’t have to tell me about cheating carpet dealers, Mr – Wim, I can assure you,’ İkmen replied.

  ‘Raşit Bey’s prices are very good,’ Doris put in. ‘And the Nomadic Trappings he gets hold of are amazing. A couple we knew from the Swedish consulate, they love those. Turkoman camel bags, baby slings, salt bags, even sometimes old dowry trappings. Raşit Bey has so many wonderful pieces.’

  Including, İkmen remembered, some of the Süleymans’ carpets from their many and various defunct palaces.

  ‘So anyway,’ Wim returned to the subject at hand, ‘the show. On Monday Yaşar and the boys arrived at about four in the afternoon with the carpets. Unloading from the van took them just over an hour, they bring so much. Then Doris made us all some drinks and sandwiches and we sat talking in here until our guests started to arrive at about seven.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Well, it took a while for everyone to arrive, people come from both here in the village and from İstanbul too.’

  ‘All consular people?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Some. We have friends in the NATO coterie too,’ Wim said. ‘On Monday night we had people from the Netherlands, Sweden, Israel, Canada, the United States, United Kingdom and one couple of Turkish friends too. Yaşar started his talk, which is about the different types and grades of Turkish carpets, at about eight fifteen. By the time all the buying and selling had finished the boys didn’t get away with the remaining carpets until, I suppose, about twelve-thirty.’

  ‘Mr Uzun, I understand, stayed on a little after the carpets had gone.’

  ‘Yes, Doris made him coffee,’ the Dutchman said. ‘He was tired and asked for a coffee before he set off back to İstanbul. We talked. Amongst other things we bought a very rare Turkoman tent-door decoration. Inspector, forgive me, but was Yaşar’s accident of a suspicious nature?’

  But before İkmen could answer, the front doorbell rang and Wim excused himself in order to answer it. Because of the open-plan nature of the lower floor of the house both İkmen and Doris Klaassen could see who was at the door almost as soon as Wim. It was a rather flustered-looking, thin man in his fifties who spoke English with a pronounced British accent.

  ‘Oh, Wim,’ he said distractedly, ‘God! You haven’t heard from that bloody Yaşar Uzun, have you? I called the shop yesterday, but they say he’s missing. I’ve rung and rung
his mobile . . .’

  ‘Ah, Peter, yes, come in,’ Wim replied also in English. ‘You must talk to our . . .’

  ‘I had a deal with that bastard!’ the Englishman continued. ‘Months of negotiation. Now, possibly, I can complete . . .’

  ‘Peter, this is our guest, Inspector İkmen from the İstanbul police,’ Wim said as he gently ushered the much slighter man into his living room. ‘I am afraid that he has some bad news about Yaşar.’

  İkmen looked up into a small, grey face and began, ‘You are a friend—’

  ‘Mr Melly was at the carpet show on Monday night,’ the Dutchman explained a little nervously now, İkmen felt. ‘He is from the British Consulate.’

  ‘Mr Melly.’ İkmen rose and extended his hand, which the Englishman took in what could only be described as a cursory manner.

  ‘Yes?’

  He remained standing even after İkmen and the Dutch couple had seated themselves once again. İkmen looked up into a pair of craggy-browed dark grey eyes. ‘I am afraid, Mr Melly, that Yaşar Uzun is dead,’ the policeman said. ‘And in answer to your question, Wim, we do have some grounds to suppose that the reason Mr Uzun’s car left the road was not purely accidental.’

  ‘Fuck.’ The Englishman dropped into the nearest empty chair and immediately lit a cigarette. ‘Shit.’

  ‘It’s a shock, isn’t it?’ Wim said in the English they were obviously now all using. ‘And you say it might not have been an accident, Inspector?’

  ‘You mean someone killed Yaşar?’ his wife, her brow furrowed in shock, interjected.

  ‘It would seem so,’ İkmen said as he looked at the Englishman who was visibly trembling.

  ‘But how? He . . .’

  ‘I can’t tell you any details at the moment, Mr Melly,’ İkmen interrupted. ‘However, if you had business which, from what you have said so far, would appear to be unfinished, with Mr Uzun, I will have to ask you a few questions. If you don’t mind, that is.’ One had to, İkmen knew, be very careful around diplomats. They could, if they wanted, just disappear back to their own countries in a very short space of time. Every policeman he had ever met, both Turkish and foreign, hated dealing with them. Holding on to a diplomat was, as one British policeman had once told him, like trying to grab on to water.