On the Bone

by Barbara Nadel

  When she arrived at the conference room, she found the door closed. She opened it and went in to find a table littered with empty wine bottles, petits fours and ashtrays overflowing with cigar stubs. So much for no smoking in enclosed public spaces. But because anyone could come in and disturb her at any time, she made straight for the kitchen.

  Originally conceived, she imagined, as not much more than a service kitchen, it had two ovens and a six-ring hob, one large fridge and a chest freezer. Compared to the vast facilities downstairs, it was little more than a domestic kitchen. And unlike the restaurant kitchens, it was not as hot as hell. The floor was clean and the work surfaces had obviously been washed down before she got there.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  The English words caught her unawares, and for a moment, she had no idea what had just been said.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He wore bright pink rubber gloves and had pieces of what looked like burnt paper in his hair. He’d been cleaning one of the ovens.

  ‘Oh, you don’t speak English,’ Boris Myskow said.

  Weirdly he was still wearing all but the jacket of his tuxedo. Cleaning an oven in a white shirt didn’t seem sensible.

  ‘I can speak English,’ she said.

  ‘Well, what are you doing here? Why didn’t you answer me? You’re just supposed to clear the table. Didn’t Tandoğan tell you that?’

  ‘No.’

  Tandoğan hadn’t mentioned the kitchen.

  ‘You just clear the table,’ Myskow said. ‘Understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I always clean down my own kitchen, capisce?’

  Halide had no idea what ‘capisce’ meant, but she just said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then go clear the table,’ he said.

  As she left, she saw him stick his head back inside one of the ovens again. Hadn’t Aysel said that the upstairs kitchen didn’t have a freezer?

  ‘Gül?’

  He was sitting on his bed with what Meltem recognised as a brand new laptop.

  ‘Oh, hi.’ He looked up.

  Meltem walked into his room. ‘I thought you’d stopped all that ages ago,’ she said.

  She’d got up to go to the bathroom. It was only 6 a.m., and Gül was deep in a computer. It was weird.

  ‘I’m just looking stuff up.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she said. ‘This from the reformed hacker who once called the web “evil”.’

  She sat down beside him and looked at the machine. It was clearly new.

  ‘Where’d you get that?’

  ‘Bought it.’

  ‘From the Apple shop in Beşiktaş?’

  He stopped what he was doing. ‘Why? I know we don’t really do tech here, but I felt like it.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I make good money now,’ he said. ‘And I’ve missed having a decent machine. We’ve got Wi-Fi for the phones, so why not this? I’m not going to hack MIT, if that’s what you think.’

  She laughed, but then her face became solemn again. She put a hand on his arm. ‘I don’t want you to get into trouble.’

  He took her hand and squeezed it. ‘That’s all behind me now,’ he said. ‘This is just me having a bit of fun.’

  ‘You have to make sure it doesn’t become a problem,’ she said. ‘You will tell me …’

  ‘Yes, I’ll tell you,’ he said. But then he went back to looking at the screen again.

  Usually Gül worked late and rose late too. Meltem knew he’d been out working most of the night and had probably not even been to bed. She feared that if he had such a hypnotic computer in his hands, he’d miss an entire night’s sleep. She hadn’t spent much time with him when he’d been a hacker. But he’d told her stories – about staying up all night on sites he shouldn’t have been able to get to, living on coffee, cigarettes and amphetamines. He’d been really good at what he did and had never got caught. But that was then. Now, with the coming of increased national security, the extension of police powers to search and arrest people perceived to be enemies of the state, usually on terrorism charges, hacking had become a very dangerous hobby.

  Meltem stood up. ‘I hope you’ve told Uğur …’

  ‘I’m not hacking,’ Gül said. ‘Trust me. I’m not putting the squat at risk. I love this place.’

  All Meltem could do was trust. Gül was a good friend who believed in the ethos of the squat. She had to hold on to that.

  As she left, she said, ‘Oh, Uğur Bey and Ziya are levelling off the ground where the old bathhouse used to be today.’

  ‘Do you know what they’re going to do with it?’

  ‘Flower garden,’ she said. ‘Eventually. But I’ll just be glad when we’re not all falling over bits of old concrete.’

  What would Gonca have done if the boy her daughter was in bed with had been Roma?

  The girl, Arsena, was not backwards in asking that question. ‘Well?’ she said as her mother pulled her from the bed of her lover. ‘Would you have been doing this if I was with Metin the truck driver’s son?’

  ‘Just get up and get home,’ Gonca said.

  The naked young man in the bed looked terrified.

  ‘All the way down here to hipster land just to make sure you don’t ruin your life,’ Gonca said. ‘What a mean woman I am!’ She looked at the boy and said, ‘Eh?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Right answer. You know who I am, young man?’

  ‘Yes.’ He pulled his duvet up to his chin.

  Arsena looked down at him while she put her clothes on. ‘Oh please! Don’t inflate her ego.’

  ‘You’re Gonca Hanım, the artist,’ he said. ‘You make collages out of things like horsehair and blood. Your work sells at Christie’s in New York.’

  Arsena groaned. He was obviously impressed. They always were.

  ‘That’s it, kid,’ her mother said.

  ‘You’re the only Roma artist—’

  ‘What did I tell you about inflating her ego?’

  The boy shrugged.

  ‘Go and get in the car,’ Gonca said to her daughter.

  Arsena put her shoes on. ‘I bet it was that little shit Harun …’

  ‘Your brother was out all night,’ Gonca said. ‘Don’t worry about your siblings, madam! Out!’

  The girl walked slowly towards the apartment door and let herself out.

  Gonca looked down at the boy. ‘Fuck my daughter again and I’ll chop your balls off,’ she said.

  His face went white.

  ‘She’s the only girl in my family to get to university, and you are not going to screw it up for her. Understand?’

  Out in the street, a glazed Mehmet Süleyman waited beside his car. Some cousin of Gonca’s who worked in a bar in Karaköy had phoned to tell her he’d seen Arsena going into an apartment building opposite the Turkish Orthodox church at five that morning. Gonca had pulled Süleyman out of bed, and now, at just before six, they were in Karaköy and the girl was getting into the car.

  But he wasn’t really taking much notice. He was too busy looking at who had just gone into Uğur İnan’s squat.

  Ömer Mungun didn’t understand.

  ‘My sister’s friend said they’d had one case of Bloom syndrome at the Or-Ahayim about ten years ago,’ he said.

  Arto Sarkissian shrugged. ‘Mario Politi says he’s never seen a case in his life. What does your sister’s friend do at the Or-Ahayim, Sergeant?’

  ‘She’s one of the helpers, a Pink Angel.’

  ‘With respect, Mario Politi is a surgeon,’ the Armenian said. ‘A very clever man. I can’t see him passing up an opportunity to observe what is a rare disease by anyone’s standards.’

  ‘The woman, Peri’s friend said, looked more Kurdish than Ashkenazi …’

  ‘Mmm. Has the ring of an urban legend to me. A strange disease, undiagnosed.’

  ‘Oh, it was.’

  ‘Or was it? Closed institutions like hospitals are notorious rumour mills,
’ Arto said. ‘A woman is dumped on a hospital doorstep. She’s clearly dying. She’s also dark and exotic-looking. On top of that, she appears to speak Yiddish. Why not also give her a very outré disease?’

  ‘But she did speak Yiddish.’

  ‘Maybe she’d learned it from a friend or neighbour as a child. Doesn’t mean it was her native tongue.’

  And yet it was well known that people close to death would usually revert to their native tongue.

  Arto Sarkissian put a hand on Ömer’s shoulder. ‘Mario is a very old friend,’ he said. ‘Why would he lie?’

  Ömer knew it was unlikely that a respected man like Dr Politi would lie. But what if he just didn’t know?

  Burak hadn’t called him again. Waking or sleeping, that silence echoed in his head all the time. Did this absence mean that his only remaining son was dead? Imam Ayan put the kettle on to make more tea and then sat in the sunshine waiting for it to boil. How could he carry on being a leader of his community when he had failed so badly in his own life?

  He’d let the boys down and he’d let their mother down too. What would she have thought had she lived to see the day her sons went off to die in her old country for a cause she would have despised? Maybe even killing some of her relatives? Who knew?

  ‘I can take you to Burak if you want.’

  The Syrian child Radwan had returned from only God knew where. Since he’d taken the child in, he’d noticed that when alone he wandered, speaking to no one that the imam could see. When the imam came round from his waking dream, Radwan was standing in front of him.

  ‘Do you know where Burak is?’

  ‘In Syria.’

  The imam shook his head. ‘This is more nonsense, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Don’t you believe that my boys are in that house in Karaköy any more?’

  ‘Mustafa is. But Burak is in Syria. I know that now because of the phone call he made. I can take you.’

  The old man put his head in his hands. ‘God help me.’

  ‘What?’

  He looked up. ‘Boy, I cannot help my son. I couldn’t help his mother. I’m an old man who has lived a life underneath too many secrets. I am a bad person, Radwan.’

  The boy thought for a moment, then said, ‘Maybe you should do jihad to make up for it.’

  ‘I don’t want to kill anyone. I—’

  ‘No, just come to Syria, with me,’ the boy said. ‘I can’t live in this city any more. I have to go home now.’

  The imam shook his head. ‘But Syria is a place of death. You can’t go there.’

  ‘I can’t stay here,’ Radwan said. ‘I can’t live in a park …’

  ‘Live with me.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Come with me to Syria and we’ll find Burak. I know we will.’

  The old man put his arm around the boy and cuddled him.

  ‘And will we find your family too, Radwan?’

  ‘Oh no,’ the boy said calmly. ‘They’re all dead. Their ghosts are here now and I just can’t stand it.’

  Major General Baydar had not suffered as much as some of his colleagues when he’d been in prison. He’d managed to keep relatively fit and healthy and had never given any indication that he had endured physical abuse. But the stain it had put on his good name was one, or so Mehmet Süleyman felt, that would never go away. Every interview with Baydar he’d ever read or seen on TV had been characterised by a bitterness that was visible. A veteran of the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Deniz Baydar was an old-style patriot who was a Turkish soldier first, everything else in his life coming a very far-away second.

  Childless, he regarded his men as his sons, and when the Islamically rooted ruling party came to power in 2002, a rumour went around that Major General Baydar told his boys the news with tears in his eyes. A proud product of the secular republic, the old man now immersed himself in the study of the Turks’ pre-Islamic past, an era he called the ‘glory days’. Baydar wasn’t the sort of man readily associated with civil disobedience. So what had he been doing at the Karaköy squat at six o’clock that morning?

  ‘We know that the opposition in this country is made up of strange bedfellows,’ İkmen said to Süleyman. ‘I can’t think why you find that odd. Deniz Baydar and General Kavaş are friends. Kavaş’s son was often in the squat. There are covered women in that house. The spirit of Gezi has persisted in very disparate groups. Anyway, what were you doing in Karaköy at six o’clock this morning?’

  He shook his head. ‘One of Gonca’s daughters was sleeping in a bed she shouldn’t have been.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Gonca’s daughters were well known for such behaviour.

  ‘I also noticed that Uğur Bey and his squatters have flattened the land where some sort of extension used to be,’ Süleyman said.

  Ömer Mungun entered İkmen’s office. ‘Oh, are you in a meeting?’

  ‘No, we’re just talking about the Kavaş case,’ İkmen said. ‘You’ve had a conversation with Dr Sarkissian, I believe.’

  Ömer sat down. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘I received information via my sister about a possible Bloom syndrome patient at the Or-Ahayim Hospital about ten years ago. Dr Sarkissian knows a surgeon there, who told him there was no record of such a person.’

  ‘Who did your sister get her information from?’

  ‘A Pink Angel,’ Ömer said. ‘She’s a friend.’

  ‘Mmm. They generally know what’s going on,’ İkmen said. ‘You made a note of what was said?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Let me have it.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Inspector Süleyman was just talking about the fact that the residents of the squat in Karaköy have demolished an old extension to the side of the building.’ He looked at Süleyman. ‘We’ve no reason to think that the squatters are involved in the Kavaş case.’

  ‘Apart from a report from an Imam Ayan that his sons, both of whom are now missing, used to give the squatters a hard time. This in itself is nothing, but—’

  ‘Oh, wasn’t this something about a boy who had an idea the Ayan kids had been taken by the squatters?’

  ‘Yes. A Syrian kid. But it’s a complete dead end. Both Mustafa and Burak Ayan are in Syria with ISIS.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Kerim was circulating descriptions.’

  ‘We checked the imam’s phone, and he was indeed called by his son Burak from Syria. He told his father that his brother had died for Islam.’

  İkmen put his head in his hands.

  ‘I’ve no reason to doubt that is true,’ Süleyman said. ‘But of course I’m uneasy, shall we say, when I see suspicious behaviour happening in a property connected in any way to an investigation.’

  ‘I agree with you.’ İkmen looked up. ‘Fortunately for us, the hacker I engaged yesterday to look into the possibility of Internet cannibal fetish activity in the city lives in the squat.’

  ‘Oh? Who is it?’

  ‘A young zenne, would you believe, called Gül.’

  Kerim Gürsel came into the office as İkmen spoke. He looked surprised.

  Chapter 17

  Halide Can put her phone down. The lab technician she’d spoken to had been certain the meat she’d taken from the Imperial Oriental Hotel had been wild boar. She immediately picked her phone up again and told Cetin İkmen. She also told him her other news.

  ‘I met a junior chef who actually liked Celal Vural,’ she said.

  The missing waiter had been generally avoided by his colleagues, but this chef had a different opinion.

  ‘Vural even told him that his father was Jewish,’ she said.

  ‘Interesting. Who is this man?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Bülent,’ she said.

  ‘Bülent who?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he and Celal were close.’

  ‘How did you get into conversation?’

  ‘On a cigarette break,’ she said. ‘I noticed this guy standing apart from everyone else and I went over to talk to him. He said he was thinking of refus
ing any more shifts at the Imperial Oriental now that his friend had left.’

  ‘Left?’

  ‘Yes, sir, he thinks that Celal has disappeared intentionally.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Hated his job and was having marital problems, apparently.’

  ‘Well that’s new,’ İkmen said. ‘Wife says differently. Find out who this Bülent is, Halide. We may need to speak to him officially.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Even by day, the place made him tired. It had been many years since Imam Ayan had been to Esenler bus station. He’d only ever travelled to and from the vast Istanbul terminus at night. But daytime was no better. Maybe the toilets were a little bit more sanitary, but …

  ‘Gaziantep,’ Radwan said. ‘You got tickets to Gaziantep?’

  He was looking at the wretched things, but of course he couldn’t read or speak Turkish.

  ‘Yes,’ the old man said. ‘Twenty hours.’

  ‘Took me four days,’ Radwan said.

  The boy had hitched lifts and insinuated himself inside melon trucks to get to Istanbul. The imam didn’t like to think about what he might have had to do to persuade drivers to let him into their cars.

  ‘This will just feel like four days,’ the imam replied.

  The boy laughed. The old man had dressed him in some of Burak’s old clothes, but even they swamped him. He looked exactly what he was, an undernourished displaced Arab child. And because he could only speak Arabic, everyone probably thought they were both Syrians.

  The old man sat down on a bench. Their bus didn’t leave for five hours. Even taking prayer time into account, that still left oceans of empty time to kill.

  The only person the imam had told of his plans was the Twisted Boy’s mother, Aylin Hanım. Over the years, Imam Ayan and Aylin Hanım had shared much that was painful. Her son’s illness coupled with her husband’s desertion had almost driven Aylin to despair. The imam had helped her in practical ways, like obtaining work for Ramazan, and offered a kind word when she needed one. But then he owed Aylin Hanım. And he would be in her debt again. She had after all agreed to look after his house and his cats while he was away.