River of The Dead

by Barbara Nadel

  Through half-closed, bloodshot eyes he looked at her. She was a very attractive woman and yet, strangely for him, he felt nothing for her. Mehmet Süleyman was and always had been in love with his wife. But that he had a weakness for other women he was the first to admit. It was partly because he himself was attractive and women came on to him. But he could also make the running himself, as he knew only too well. Inspector Taner had the look of a woman who would make any feelings she might have for a person well and truly apparent. But maybe that was just an illusion. Maybe the fact was that, however professional and liberated she appeared, she was still an eastern woman with all the modesty and restraint that went with such a background. But then again, perhaps in view of the fact that she had shown absolutely no romantic interest in him he was just choosing to think that that was so. It was possible she was indeed a very liberated woman who simply did not fancy him.

  ‘You’d still like to stay at St Sobo’s?’ she said suddenly, in that harsh staccato way of hers.

  The monastery where Dr Sarkissian’s friend lived was, so Taner had told him, about ten minutes by car from the centre of Mardin. In the scheme of the geography of the city it was no further away from police headquarters than the hotel Taner had had in mind for him. That Taner herself obviously wanted him to stay at one of the new hotels in town was evident – she was nothing if not a woman imbued with civic pride – but that was not really his problem. Brother Seraphim and a degree of peace and quiet had the feel of something far more attractive to Süleyman.

  ‘Yes, I would,’ he replied into the darkness of the road ahead.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ Taner said with a sigh. ‘The monks are interesting and, like you, educated. In the hotel you’d be bombarded with Syrians who’ve come over the border for the Easter services at our churches and monasteries.’

  He turned to look at her. ‘Easter? Is it Easter?’

  ‘Next weekend, yes,’ she said. And then she yawned. ‘We’ll all be on duty then – cops, Jandarma, military.’

  ‘In the churches.’

  ‘Protecting the Christians, yes,’ she said. ‘We wish them happy Easter as they go in to worship while we wait outside with tanks and guns just in case any lunatic or band of lunatics might have ideas about killing them. But then I believe you protect the churches in İstanbul, don’t you?’

  There was a measure of security in all places of worship in the city, but rarely were tanks employed as part of the process.

  ‘Yes . . .’

  Far, far away in the distance, unless he was very much mistaken, a glimmer of light was just beginning to be discernible. He didn’t have any idea about how long they had been on the road, whether he had in fact slept for a short time or not, but he felt that dawn had to be happening some time soon. That could be the beginning of it.

  ‘We’re about an hour away now,’ Taner said as she lit yet another cigarette. She’d chain-smoked ever since they’d left Birecik. ‘When we reach Mardin we’ll get some breakfast first and then I’ll take you out to the monastery. I expect you’ll want to sleep for a while.’

  He looked across at her. ‘Won’t you?’

  She laughed. ‘Maybe. Paperwork, you know?’

  He did. From İstanbul to Mardin and beyond, they all had paperwork. Süleyman’s head slumped forward and he went to sleep, to Taner’s amusement, yet again. When he woke up he was looking down upon what appeared to be a vast, green sea.

  İkmen had just finished e-mailing the main points about his visit to the Kartal Prison the previous day to Süleyman when İzzet Melik entered his office. Such a marvellous thing, e-mail! And everyone had it! Even monasteries! Arto Sarkissian said it would be absolutely no problem for Süleyman to pick up his messages at St Sobo’s.

  Melik shut the door behind him and sat down.

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen said, still staring fixedly at the screen with an expression of wonder on his face.

  ‘That nurse, at the Cerrahpaşa, sir,’ İzzet Melik said, ‘Murat Lole . . .’

  ‘What about him?’ İkmen said as he closed down his system with a contented sigh. It had only been in the last month that he’d been able to do this.

  ‘He’s gone back to work at the hospital, sir,’ Melik said.

  ‘No reason why he shouldn’t,’ İkmen said. ‘We have no evidence that he was involved in Kaya’s escape.’

  ‘Sir, we’re coming up negative with searching the hospital rubbish.’

  ‘You’ve found nothing that could be a nurse’s uniform? Stockings?’

  ‘No.’

  İkmen frowned. ‘Glass?’

  ‘Oh, there’s a lot of that,’ İzzet said wearily. ‘Tonnes. But it’s going to take forensic some time to first sift through it and second match any blood found on the glass to that of Kaya and his accomplices or victims. The glass has to be matched to the fragments Dr Sarkissian found inside the bodies.’

  ‘No shards have been found that could conceivably have been used as weapons?’

  ‘The killers either smashed them up or took them away,’ İzzet replied. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  İkmen looked gloomily down at the top of his desk. ‘No news about the surviving prison guard, I suppose, İzzet?’

  ‘No, sir. Still in a coma, I’m afraid.’ He rose to his feet and made ready to go. ‘I tell you who I do have news about however, sir, Hüseyin Altun.’

  İkmen looked up sharply. ‘The king of the Edirnekapı beggars?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘What of him?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ İzzet said with an unconcerned shrug. ‘Been so for some time, apparently. Stabbed.’

  İkmen was shocked. Not that he’d actually known Hüseyin Altun personally. For all his faults the talented beggar, who came from and lived in the run-down district of Edirnekapı, had never killed anyone. Even when his need for heroin had been at its most acute, Altun had always preferred street-based extortion – often via his ragged gang of street kids – to murder. Altun, İkmen knew, was known to have bought his drug of choice from dealers in or around his begging beat in Beyoğlu. Whether he had ever bought from Yusuf Kaya, İkmen didn’t know. But Altun had been a junkie and so anything had to be possible. İkmen made a mental note to try to find out about the circumstances of Hüseyin Altun’s death and what the dead beggar had actually been stabbed with.

  ‘Do you know, İzzet, whether a post-mortem was performed on Altun’s body?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ İzzet replied. ‘Dr Sarkissian’s assistant did it.’

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ İkmen said as İzzet Melik left his office. A very brief visit from his friend’s junior but one that had provided some illumination. As he watched İzzet figuratively dance round Ayşe Farsakoğlu in the corridor, İkmen pondered yet again on how well Yusuf Kaya’s escape had been planned. So far there was no evidence at all, either material or human.

  ‘Now you see why we call it the Ocean,’ Edibe Taner said as she swept her arms outwards to encompass the vast plain below them. Although she had planned to take Süleyman actually into the city of Mardin for breakfast that morning, a telephone call to Brother Seraphim at the monastery of St Sobo had changed her mind. The Brothers would be delighted to offer Inspectors Süleyman and Taner breakfast in their refectory. Now, parked on an outcrop of rock just outside the ancient honey-coloured monastic building, Taner and Süleyman were standing beside her car looking down upon just a fraction of the Mesopotamian plain.

  ‘Perhaps because this area, whether you are religious or an atheist, is acknowledged as the cradle of civilisation it has many names,’ Taner continued. ‘The plain in its entirety from Diyarbakir to Baghdad is called Al Jazeera. That is an Arabic term meaning “the island”.’

  ‘The island? I thought it was an ocean,’ a horribly weary Süleyman replied. There was a slightly chill wind coming off the vast patchwork of bright green, pale green and yellow fields and settlements below. Contained only by the mountains and hills that seemed to provide almost a frame for
the vast shimmering plain, the ‘island’ was an almost overwhelming onslaught of colour, shape and competing smells – flowers, animals, the earth itself. Süleyman felt dizzy.

  ‘To the Arabs it was an island, but to the Suriani this area is called the Tur Abdin,’ Taner continued. Remarkably she seemed to be not only awake but really quite fresh-looking too. ‘Tur Abdin, which is Aramaic, means the “Slaves of God” which refers to the fact that this place was, and to some extent still is, a place of monasteries. It is a sacred place, special.’ She looked at him pointedly. ‘I believe this, even though I know that it is tainted.’

  ‘Tainted?’

  She breathed in the cool air deeply, all cigarettes well and truly out now. ‘By gangsters like Yusuf Kaya,’ she said. ‘People like that make trouble for the ordinary people of Mardin. I don’t like that. There are others too, but . . .’ She stopped there, as if she’d said too much, and then she smiled. ‘People here in Mardin do not always speak what you would recognise as Turkish,’ she continued. ‘We are close to Syria here and so many people speak Arabic. The Suriani speak Aramaic amongst themselves. Then there are the Kurds who have their own dialects. I speak both Arabic and Aramaic and so you don’t have to worry about those. The Kurdish dialects . . .’ She looked down at the ground briefly. ‘We can manage.’

  They, as in the Mardin police, would have to manage the Kurdish dialects somehow, Süleyman thought. Although relatively quiet in recent months, the whole area had been by turns closed to outsiders and under curfew for many years, in part, at least, because of the Kurdish separatists. Even through his half-sleeping state, Süleyman had noticed how much military traffic – tanks, armoured cars, troop carriers – there had been on the road east of Birecik. He looked around at the wonderful and yet frightening absence around him and, although not exactly cold, he shuddered.

  ‘I have just the thing for cold bones,’ a deep male voice cut in.

  Süleyman turned round and saw a very upright man of about sixty standing behind him. Heavily bearded, he was dressed in a long black robe, while on his head he wore a dark cap embroidered with stars. Inspector Taner, on seeing him, first smiled and then stepped forward to take one of his hands, which she kissed.

  ‘Brother Seraphim.’

  ‘And this, I take it, Inspector Taner, is Inspector Süleyman from İstanbul.’

  ‘Yes, Brother.’

  He held his hand out to Süleyman which, for a moment, gave the İstanbul man pause. Was he supposed to shake the monk’s hand or kiss it? Things were obviously done very differently out here, but then Brother Seraphim as a friend of Dr Sarkissian had to know that. Süleyman smiled and shook the monk firmly by the hand.

  ‘Come inside,’ the monk said as he led the two officers towards the huge stone monastery building. Its walls were studded with numerous arched and latticed windows and covered with intricate, if to Süleyman incomprehensible, carvings.

  ‘I do hope that you will like the room we have prepared for you, Inspector,’ Brother Seraphim said as he mounted the stairs towards the main door of the monastery. ‘It is simple, I am afraid, but clean.’ And then he turned round and looked upon both of them with troubled eyes. ‘We live, sadly, in difficult times.’

  He put the strange dream he was to have later down to the unaccustomed location, his utter exhaustion and that damn coffee too!

  Once inside the monastery, Brother Seraphim had ushered him and Taner into a very light and clean dining room. There, seated at a plain wooden table, they had been plied with a variety of food and drink, including bread, cheese, preserves and meat, fruit juice and coffee. Literally sick with tiredness by that time, Süleyman had opted just for coffee. He had not paid attention, however, to the kind of coffee he was being given.

  Mirra coffee is a traditional beverage in south-eastern Turkey. Bitter and thick in a way that ordinary Turkish coffee does not even approach, it is boiled and reboiled so many times over a twenty-four-hour period that, eventually, it achieves the consistency of dark syrup. Beloved by the people of the south-east, especially Mardin, it has a kick like a bull and can stain a china cup on contact. It is also deemed exceedingly rude to refuse one of the tiny cups of mirra one is routinely offered by almost everyone on the Ocean. Süleyman eventually drank three of these thimble-sized cups which led to the kind of head-spinning experience one would normally associate with alcohol poisoning. Luckily Brother Seraphim was well aware of the rapid change of state in his guest and, while Taner carried the İstanbul officer’s luggage, the monk very gently raised Süleyman from his chair and took him to his room. As they all walked into what was a small but bright and clean-smelling chamber, the monk said, or rather Süleyman thought he heard the monk say, ‘We’ve looked and looked and still we can’t find him. I think he must have gone to her . . .’

  Then he lost consciousness. He was adrift on a sea of green fields being tossed and turned by what looked like vast snakes or eels. Strangely these creatures did not provoke any sort of fear, rather a curiosity that extended to the fact that although he was under water he could, somehow, breathe.

  ‘Inspector Süleyman. Inspector Süleyman.’ It wasn’t said along with physical movement, as in someone shaking him awake. It wasn’t even said with much urgency. But he was nevertheless brought out of his serpent-filled world by a voice that was firm in its intention.

  Süleyman blinked. ‘Brother Seraphim?’

  Whether the monk was smiling underneath that huge beard of his was impossible to tell. But his voice was soothing and apologetic. ‘I am so sorry to wake you, but Inspector Taner has arrived and apparently you need to go somewhere with her,’ he said. ‘Were it up to me I would have let you sleep, but . . .’

  Süleyman, with some difficulty, sat up. Still fully clothed, he must, he now saw, have just collapsed on to that small but comfortable bed and then not moved a muscle. He looked out of the narrow arched window at his side and saw a huge, green ‘sea’ sweeping down into a misty nothingness, just as in his dream. He shook his head and said, ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It is midday,’ the monk replied. ‘I have telephoned my friend Arto Sarkissian to tell him you have arrived. He sends his greetings and was relieved to know that you were safe.’

  Safe? Süleyman rubbed his face with his hands and tried to make his brain think straight. Now that he was in the east, of course people would routinely enquire about his safety.

  ‘I need to have a wash,’ Süleyman said at length. ‘Can you please tell Inspector Taner I’ll be with her as soon as I can?’

  ‘Of course.’ The monk rose to his feet and began to walk back towards the door.

  ‘Oh, Brother Seraphim?’

  He turned. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you know if Inspector Taner has managed to get some sleep too?’

  Brother Seraphim shook his head. ‘Oh, no,’ he said as if this were the most natural thing in the world. ‘She doesn’t need to.’

  ‘Doesn’t . . .’

  ‘Her father, Seçkin Taner, is a Master of Sharmeran,’ the monk said gravely. ‘Those people are not like the rest of us, Inspector, as I am sure you will very soon learn.’

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  It was difficult to see what the prison guard Ramazan Eren really looked like. Lost underneath a spider’s web of tubes, canulas and tapes he could have been any age; almost, İkmen felt, any sex. Dr Eldem, Eren’s physician, standing on the other side of the bed from İkmen and Ayşe Farsakoğlu, said, ‘He sustained one stab wound to the chest which grazed his heart. We’ve stopped the bleeding, but as to the damage caused . . .’ He shrugged. ‘To be honest with you, Inspector, this man is lucky to be alive on any sort of level.’

  ‘I know it is impossible to say when he may regain consciousness,’ İkmen began. ‘However—’

  ‘However nothing,’ the doctor responded shortly. ‘It is not when he regains consciousness, it is if.’

  ‘His brain is exhibiting electrical activity,’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu said a
s she looked up at the monitor above Eren’s head.

  The doctor, offended as some physicians can become when confronted with a non-medic with some knowledge, blustered, ‘Just because his brain is showing activity doesn’t mean that he will ever recover. If he wakes he may be perfectly normal in every way but then again he may emerge a blithering idiot. One must be patient, madam. He who owns patience, owns Egypt, as is said!’

  It was not a saying with which either İkmen or Ayşe was familiar, but they got the gist of it anyway. İkmen, who thought the whole conversation had become far more hysterical than it needed to be, said, ‘I’m going to continue to post a guard at the door of the ward just in case one of Kaya’s people should try to come back and finish Mr Eren off.’

  ‘You do as you wish,’ the doctor said as he made his way over to the door leading out of the room. ‘Whether this man recovers or not is in the hands of Allah!’ And then he left.

  Ayşe Farsakoğlu breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Not very helpful,’ she said, watching Ramazan Eren breathe with the aid of a respirator.

  ‘What else can he say?’ İkmen shrugged. ‘None of us can know when or if this man will wake. Until he does, of course, we can’t know exactly what happened when Yusuf Kaya was rescued. All we do know is that Eren was supposed to die and so we have to guard him for the foreseeable future. By the way, Ayşe, did Sergeant Melik tell you about Hüseyin Altun?’ He knew that she’d arrested the beggar a few times in the past when she was still a constable working the beat.

  ‘Yes,’ she said without emotion. ‘No loss.’

  ‘Stabbed, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Apparently,’ she said, still without any great interest.

  İkmen took his eyes off the waxen figure beneath the pipes and the tubes and looked into Ayşe’s face. ‘I spoke to Dr Sarkissian’s assistant. It was she who performed the autopsy on Altun earlier this morning,’ he said. ‘Apparently he was stabbed with a serrated metal blade of some sort. Not glass.’