On the Bone

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  An arm like a metal cord pulled Süleyman close. He heard Ömer Mungun gasp. And then there was pain. And blood.

  Ömer Mungun had rarely employed his gun. He certainly hadn’t used it to beat a man. Now it was slippery with the old man’s blood.

  Süleyman, his hand pressed against the side of his face, yelled, ‘Leave him! No more!’

  Deniz Baydar lay at Ömer’s feet. In contrast to Süleyman, he didn’t put a hand to the wound he had sustained from the stock of the young man’s pistol. His eyes looked perfectly calm.

  ‘Get the custody officer,’ Süleyman said.

  Ömer banged on the cell door, not once taking his eyes off Deniz Baydar.

  Blood trickled between Süleyman’s fingers as he tried to hold what remained of his cheek up to his face.

  When the custody officer unlocked the cell door and saw blood on the floor, he said, ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Prisoner bit Inspector Süleyman. Call a medic,’ Ömer said.

  The man left.

  Now that pain had replaced shock, Süleyman groaned. Ömer wanted to go to him, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off Baydar. What was he? Crazy? Had he actually developed a taste for human flesh? Could he no longer control himself?

  The old man moved, and Ömer raised his pistol.

  ‘Don’t!’

  He looked at Süleyman.

  ‘It’s what he wants,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Isn’t that right, Baydar? Beaten to death in police custody would serve your myth of martyred honour well, wouldn’t it?’

  The old man laughed to begin with. Then he cried, and when they took him out of there and cuffed his hands and shackled his feet, he screamed.

  When the duty doctor finally arrived, Mehmet Süleyman passed out.

  The bedroom was like a cross between something from a Disney fairy-tale cartoon and a whorehouse. Basques and other female fantasy wear hung from the doors of a white rococo wardrobe trimmed with faux gold leaf. The bed, a four-poster of vast size, was festooned in so many cushions and throws it was almost impossible to see its occupant.

  Cetin İkmen sat on a chair covered in red velvet and put the bottle he’d been drinking from down on the empire-style bedside table. Then he lit a cigarette.

  ‘I assume I can …’ He waved a limp hand in the general direction of nothing in particular.

  ‘Mmm.’

  Drugged but still in pain, Süleyman could do little more than grunt.

  İkmen resumed his story.

  ‘So Myskow has gone back to America, never, I imagine, to return, and Bülent Onay will die in prison,’ he said. ‘Myskow’s famous guests will not be named at Onay’s trial. Bülent, you see, killed Halide Can to cover up the fact that the freezer he’d given Myskow had contained the body of Mustafa Ayan, which he sought to hide. You’d have thought Myskow would have noticed, wouldn’t you?’ It was pure sarcasm. İkmen was good at it.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ Süleyman murmured.

  ‘Yes. It’s been a long time since General Cognac and myself had a really good time together …’

  ‘You shouldn’t drink brandy.’

  ‘I know.’ He smoked. ‘My wife will be very upset. But how can a man retain his sanity in a country where one can pay fifteen lire for a tomato just because someone famous has made it into some sort of slime? And why is that person able to do anything he wants? He should be in a cell just for the tomato! Will you be scarred for life?’

  Süleyman didn’t answer. He’d been to hospital, where he’d had stitches, been given shots, painkillers and antibiotics. Now all he wanted to do was sleep.

  ‘This country has gone mad,’ İkmen said. ‘People adopt positions they are unable to shift from, and money infests everything. I thought Teker was above that. But you can’t trust anyone, because everyone is looking after his or her own back all the time. Fear, that’s what it is. We’re Turks, and your biting soldier is right in that we are a warrior race. A warrior race that has lost its nerve. But he’s wrong about religion. Religion’s got nothing to do with it. It’s money that’s hobbled us, money and the modern world of connectivity, which is another way of saying paranoia. We watch each other, all the time. We hit first because we’re afraid of what will happen if we don’t get that first punch in. I don’t blame Teker. She just did what anyone would do, she watched her back. Doesn’t make it any less appalling.’

  Süleyman made himself half sit up. He didn’t need a drunken İkmen at his bedside, but Gonca had let him in the house and so he was stuck with him.

  ‘Major General Baydar has confessed to the murder of Mustafa Ayan, and we have the other accomplices to the offence in custody,’ he said.

  İkmen performed a slow handclap and then drank from his bottle again.

  ‘We also have a confession from Bülent Onay, so at least Constable Can’s family may have peace …’

  ‘Peace!’

  ‘Cetin …’

  ‘Peace in a country where youths run away to a pointless war in Syria, where a brother can use his sibling’s death to, what is the expression, big himself up?’ He shook his head. ‘I wonder whether the Ayan brothers would have gone off to join ISIS if Burak Ayan hadn’t had Bloom syndrome. What if he’d been just the carrier instead of Mustafa? I wonder whether it was his physical frailty that made him so desperate to prove himself.’

  ‘Maybe he really believed ISIS propaganda. Maybe his brother did too.’

  ‘We’ll never know,’ İkmen said. ‘The good imam let that computer into his home and he lost his sons to it. When will people learn that a computer is as dangerous as a car? Would you leave your child alone with your car when its engine is running? You wouldn’t. ISIS squeezed into that bedroom and spread their propaganda, and now here we are.’ He drank from his bottle again. ‘Here we are.’

  Chapter 34

  Three weeks later

  Radwan was playing. The imam had found the train set his father had bought him when he’d been to Germany in the 1950s. To his delight, it still worked, and now the Syrian boy was watching the clockwork engine pull into a toy station called Berlin. Bizarrely, it looked like something from a Grimm fairy tale.

  The police had brought Radwan back to him. Finally. He’d been shot, but he’d told the imam that Burak had saved his life. Imam Ayan didn’t know whether Radwan was telling the truth or not, but he chose to believe him. Burak, wherever he was, had been a good boy once. He’d been raised with a sense of decency even if that had been eroded in recent months. He had been jealous of his brother, which was a weakness, but how could he not have been? He didn’t know that his stature and his poor health were legacies of a disease he wasn’t even aware he had. The imam knew he should have told both his sons. But the fear of revealing their mother’s ethnicity had stopped him, and that had been wrong. Zanubiya had been a Jew, and by never acknowledging that, he had brought misery to his sons and shame on himself.

  He’d taken Radwan to her grave and they’d both laid stones, as was the Jewish custom. The stones marked a visit from the living and were a sign that the deceased had not been forgotten. She never had been. Her boys, for all their faults, had loved their mother. The imam just wished that he could turn the clock back so that he could tell them who she really had been.

  But God in His mercy had sent him the child, who played in what had once been Burak and Mustafa’s bedroom. The police still had the computer he had bought them, and the imam was not in any hurry to have it back. Radwan, the war child, had told him he had no interest in computers. The imam felt that he would take him at his word.

  ‘You’re still the handsomest man in Istanbul,’ Gonca said.

  She sat down on the bed behind Mehmet Süleyman, watching him as he looked at his own face in her dressing table mirror. She knew he hated the jagged bite mark on his left cheek.

  ‘And it will fade,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’ But he frowned. />
  ‘It’s a battle scar. You should be proud.’

  ‘I was bitten by an old man who wanted to die,’ he said.

  ‘A cannibal,’ she said. She wound her arms around his shoulders. ‘You are a lion. My lion.’

  But he said nothing.

  Gonca knew that it wasn’t just Mehmet Süleyman’s vanity that was silencing him. A terrible crime had been committed in the golden city on the Bosphorus. It threw the divisions and tensions that had risen to the fore in the past few years into stark relief. At the axis between the old secular elites, religious fundamentalism and the threat to the far eastern border of the country by forces no one really understood, a boy had been killed and eaten by other human beings. Süleyman had seen a lot of horrific things during the course of his career. But never anything like this. But then nor had anyone. Gonca kissed the back of his head and then called to her grandchildren to come in from the street. Who knew who might be lurking outside in such dark times? In front of their computers in their bedrooms she knew they would be safe.

  All but two of Cetin İkmen’s five sons had performed military service. Though none of them had become professional soldiers, Fatma İkmen had insisted they all be photographed in uniform. And although Orhan, Sinan and Bülent had all finished their service a long time ago, she dusted their pictures every day.

  Arto Sarkissian had seen her do it many times. He knew she was proud of them, but he never commented for fear of embarrassing her. Good Muslim women didn’t do boasting.

  ‘I see Anatolia Gold’s share prices have slipped,’ he said.

  The İkmen apartment was clean but chaotic, as usual. While Fatma dusted, Cetin was in the kitchen treating the cat for fleas. No one ever stood on ceremony when Arto visited. He was family.

  ‘I should think so,’ Fatma said. ‘You have to be able to trust what producers say is in their food. They upset a lot of people, not to mention losing us all money. I had to throw half my tin cupboard away.’

  ‘You threw food away?’

  ‘Well no, not really,’ she said. ‘I got Kemal to take everything up to Beyoğlu. There’s a priest over there who feeds the Syrian refugees. A lot of those are Christian. Pork is filthy, as you know, but if you feel you can eat it …’

  Cetin came in and sat in his chair.

  ‘Get scratched?’ Arto asked.

  Marlboro the cat could be a handful, and Arto had heard various yowls and screeches from the kitchen.

  ‘No,’ İkmen said. ‘Just made him swear.’

  ‘Tea?’ Fatma asked.

  İkmen smiled. ‘Perfect.’

  She went to the kitchen.

  ‘So how are you feeling?’ Arto said.

  İkmen had taken two weeks’ annual leave after the Karaköy squat had been closed down. He’d watched his colleagues board up the windows and put metal screens over the doors. A boy wearing an ISIS T-shirt had stood across the road laughing until the owner of the café had chased him away. He was no more wanted in Karaköy than the police. Istanbul had always been a city of discrete quarters, but now, İkmen felt, parts of it were ghettoising. And that wasn’t healthy.

  ‘Ready to go back to work?’

  İkmen shrugged. ‘What else is there to do?’

  ‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You found out who killed Mustafa Ayan, and why.’

  ‘But not Halide Can.’

  The two men sat in silence. Boris Myskow had put the Imperial Oriental up for sale. Apparently he was in negotiation to buy a new restaurant in Madrid. The gourmet dining caravan had moved back to its heartlands in the West.

  ‘Well the forensic investigations are at an end,’ Arto said. ‘So Imam Ayan may bury his son’s remains.’

  ‘That’s good. I heard that Defne Baydar finally managed to bury her brother too.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He’d seen İkmen despondent before, but never this deeply.

  Arto said, ‘You know, Cetin, I can’t think of any society that isn’t undergoing some level of fragmentation at the moment. The riches globalisation can bring set us at each other’s throats. That ghastly building that is being constructed next to my house is, I believe, destined to be occupied by wealthy foreigners. The developer will make a fortune. But I doubt it will be his last.’

  ‘Greed,’ İkmen said. ‘Why be a millionaire when you can be a billionaire, eh?’

  Arto smiled. ‘It has always been the way of things, but now it has accelerated. How are you with Teker?’

  İkmen lit a cigarette. ‘Still angry, but I’ll put it behind me.’

  ‘Will you?’

  He smiled. ‘Oh yes. But if Mr Myskow misbehaves himself now he’s in Spain, I will be on the phone to the Guardia Civil.’

  ‘She won’t like that.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ İkmen said. ‘The only reason that man is free to inflict piss and blood and whatever other mad stuff he chooses to call food on his customers is because he knows people. He knew people back in the States, he got involved with prominent people here, and that’s the entire reason why he walks free.’

  ‘You don’t know he killed Halide Can …’

  ‘I don’t know that Bülent Onay did either,’ İkmen said. ‘And I may never know now, and that offends me. Halide’s family should know for sure who killed her.’

  ‘We do not live in a perfect world.’

  ‘No, but we should do our best to get as close as we can to perfection. Isn’t that the point of being alive?’

  Arto sighed. ‘For some.’

  ‘Oh yes, I forgot,’ İkmen said. ‘For others there are different reasons, aren’t there? To enforce their ideas by raping women and cutting people’s heads off.’

  ‘Or eating people.’

  İkmen shook his head. ‘No winners in this war of attrition, eh, Arto?’

  ‘Between the secular and the religious? No,’ he said.

  Fatma came in with glasses of tea and plates of börek and olives.

  ‘But we do always have good food and drink,’ Arto said as he took his glass from Fatma and put it down on the coffee table.

  And this time Cetin İkmen smiled properly.

  ‘Ah yes, but it is real food and drink, my dear friend. Made with love by a real person.’

  Fatma said, ‘Well I should hope I’m a real person.’

  İkmen took her hand. ‘I can assure you that you are.’

  ‘Oh, well that’s good.’

  He closed his eyes and launched himself into the music. Hot, sweaty but exuding the smell of the rosewater he had mixed with his body oil, Zenne Gül could feel his heart pounding as the excitement of the moment grew. He was dancing. In spite of all his recent trials, the loss of his home, of his good friend Uğur Bey, and in the face of so much horror in the world, he was still in the city and he was still dancing.

  Madame Edith had let him move into her rat-scented hovel. Tarlabaşı was a good neighbourhood. Full of bonzai addicts it might be, but all Gül could feel for them was pity. And there were others he could build friendships with – Gezi protesters, trans girls, gypsies, even an old soldier in a basement underneath a brothel. Although perhaps old soldiers were best avoided …

  Gül opened his eyes. Green, red and pink lights played across his slim body and illuminated the audience at his feet. He recognised many of the faces. The club was one of Istanbul’s foremost gay venues, but a lot of audience members were girls. Meltem and Ahu had been here once, long ago. Gül wished they’d come again. In fact he wished that everyone he loved was in the audience. That way he would know they were safe and happy.

  But then he saw a face that didn’t bring him joy. He didn’t know who the man with the neat designer beard right slap bang in front of him was, but he knew his type from his eyes. Those boys who had hurled abuse at everyone in the old squat had possessed eyes like this man’s. They looked at him with disapproval and disgust, and Gül felt a chill run through him. He glanced away.When he became bra
ve enough to look down again, the man with the frightening eyes had gone, replaced by a joyful and outrageous drag queen. It was almost as if he had never existed.

  Gül continued his performance and lost himself in the music.