River of The Dead

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Were there many weapons?’ Süleyman asked.

  Edibe Taner frowned. ‘There were ten AK-47 assault rifles, two crates of grenades and a rocket launcher. It would be a good haul from a terror organisation. From a clan it is impressive.’

  ‘Who were they hoping to attack with so much hardware?’

  Edibe Taner sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Hopefully we will find out more when we pick up İbrahim Keser. A group of our officers are joining up with the small local force in Dara right now. With luck, by the time the day is over we’ll have Keser in custody.’

  İkmen really wasn’t ready to tell Sophia that he was the father of her boyfriend Aslan. He said he just wanted to help. She was pregnant and alone and he was concerned about her.

  But Sophia wasn’t convinced. ‘What is it you want?’ she said when he offered to find her a clean and safe place to stay. ‘You want fuck me? What is about you Turkish men and pregnant women?’

  He tried to convince her that he was not in any way after her body, but she wouldn’t believe him. And so eventually he told her the truth.

  ‘My wife doesn’t even know about this yet,’ he said to the girl as she sat stunned before him in his office. ‘But Sophia, when she does she will want to help as much as I do.’

  ‘You want my baby! Cannot have,’ Sophia growled darkly. Years on the streets had made any notion of trust absolutely alien to her.

  İkmen sat on the edge of his desk next to her and sighed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t want your baby. But I do want to help. I don’t know of course precisely where you live, Sophia, but I know it is in Edirnekapi. I went to Hüseyin Altun’s place up there, just the once, some years ago and so I think I know how you might be living.’

  She turned her head away.

  ‘Sergeant Farsakoğlu tells me you have a doctor, but I know many doctors who will really care for you.’ Junkies and those associated with them did frequently have access to doctors, some of whom were the types of practitioners only just on the right side of the law. ‘I know some very good doctors,’ he said. ‘My family will pay your costs and I can find you somewhere decent to live, at least for the moment. This isn’t charity, Sophia, this is making up in part for what my son has done to you.’

  He told her to think about it while he went off to join İzzet Melik in one of the interview rooms with the hospital administrator. The man now had one of the Cerrahpaşa’s own lawyers with him, a nondescript man in a grey suit. İkmen sat down and looked at the piece of paper İzzet Melik passed to him. For several seconds he just read it in silence. Then he put the paper down and looked up into the small grey eyes of the administrator, Mr Aktar. He had a rather bruised split lip.

  ‘This is a letter of resignation for your employers, not me,’ İkmen said, tipping his head towards the paper on the table.

  ‘Now that your officer has . . . discovered my addiction, I feel that, given that my job is to do with health care, I cannot continue,’ Mr Aktar said.

  His lawyer nodded his agreement.

  ‘So what will you do then, Mr Aktar?’ İkmen said. ‘What’s the career plan now? You’re not ready for retirement yet, I imagine. I believe you have dependents.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Inspector İkmen, Mr Aktar is as you can see willing to own up to his addiction,’ the lawyer said. ‘He has not done anything criminal with regard to care of patients at the Cerrahpaşa. In addition, he is alleging that a level of police brutality was used upon him by your officer here, Sergeant Melik.’

  İkmen looked briefly at Melik, knowing with certainty that what the lawyer was saying was absolutely correct. İzzet had ideas about this case and was out to prove them whatever. Back in his home city of İzmir there had been some complaints about İzzet Melik. But any discussions about that would have to come later. İkmen said, ‘The constable who was with Sergeant Melik when he was interviewing Mr Aktar at the Cerrahpaşa assures me that nothing beyond the tearing of his own shirtsleeve by your client in what I imagine must have been a fit of remorse occurred.’ He hadn’t actually spoken to the constable in question but he knew that in all probability that was what Melik had told him to say. ‘Mr Aktar, this is not about you just handing in your resignation at work and all this goes away,’ he said. He looked over at the lawyer. ‘As administrator of your hospital Mr Aktar is ultimately responsible for what happens in it. So far a prisoner has escaped from your institution, probably with the help of Cerrahpaşa nurses. The only surviving witness to that event died, in suspicious circumstances, whilst under the care of one of your doctors. We have that doctor in our custody right now.’ He leaned forward into Mr Aktar’s now lightly sweating face. ‘You know, he looks as afraid, if not more so, as you. What or who are you afraid of? Is it the escaped prisoner, Yusuf Kaya? Did he threaten to kill you if you didn’t agree to help him? Or is it much more selfish than that? Did Yusuf buy you with heroin?’

  ‘No! No, I—’

  ‘Stole it from your employers?’ İkmen said. ‘A hospital is a wonderful place for a junkie to work, isn’t it? My own drug of choice is tobacco. It would be like me working in a cigarette factory.’

  ‘I didn’t steal from my employers!’ Mr Aktar said. ‘Never!’

  ‘So where did you get your heroin from?’ İzzet Melik asked.

  ‘I can’t tell you that! You know I can’t tell you that!’

  ‘We can search your house,’ İkmen said with a shrug. ‘I know we’ll find some there, we’re bound to. As for where it came from, if you don’t tell us, we will ask around. We know a lot of people who know people . . .’

  ‘Ask around!’ Mr Aktar said defiantly. ‘It’ll do you no good!’

  He was afraid. İkmen could see it very clearly in his face.

  ‘Mr Aktar,’ he said, ‘you should know that if my officers find heroin at your home, I will have the right to detain you here for further questioning.’

  Aktar looked over at his lawyer who simply said, ‘He can do that.’

  Mr Aktar looked back at İkmen but said nothing.

  After a pause, İkmen said, ‘It’s my belief that you are probably even more afraid than I can imagine, Mr Aktar. All I can say is that I know that drug dealers, Yusuf Kaya included, are violent and dangerous people who will slaughter entire families to get what they want. But you know we can provide protection . . .’ He saw Aktar’s face briefly break into a small, thin smile. ‘But whatever you may think of that, the fact remains that unless you decide to cooperate with us, you could be here for some considerable amount of time. Note, Mr Aktar, that we don’t allow drug-taking on our premises, and think for just a moment about how long you can normally manage between fixes before you start wanting to climb up the wall.’

  The administrator didn’t appear to respond at all except that when he spoke his voice was obviously strained. ‘What about my allegation of police brutality?’ he said.

  ‘What about it?’ İkmen replied. Then he leaned forward again and said, ‘Now, Mr Aktar, are my officers going to search your house or not?’

  ‘İbrahim Keser was neither in or around the house in Dara,’ Edibe Taner said with a sigh as she put her phone back in her bag. ‘The American woman told our officers she hadn’t seen him since the Easter service. They’re hiding him somewhere.’ She sat down on the low wall in front of the hospital, where Süleyman joined her. He, at least, had only been in the hospital for just over half an hour but the sky was already dark. Such a long and tiring Easter Day! In all the madness he had even forgotten to wish his wife a happy Easter. Not that Zelfa was a religious woman and cared about such things, but she was nominally a Catholic and so he should have phoned to send his good wishes anyway. But at that moment there was something else, something rather more immediate, troubling him.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘if the people of Mardin believe so passionately in Gabriel’s miracle, why was his father so afraid that the word of just one person could discredit his son?’

  ‘Inspector Süleym
an,’ she replied, ‘you are a sophisticated man from İstanbul. Even the languages you speak are sophisticated. French and English! Allah, those people don’t even have a notion of clan or the power of one’s neighbours or . . .’

  ‘I think they do,’ Süleyman said, ‘but maybe in a way that is perhaps unfamiliar to people in a place like this. In İstanbul there are certainly clans.’

  ‘Inspector, here, what a man’s neighbours believe about him, about his sons and about the honour of his daughters, can affect his whole life! Sometimes men can even kill because of the opinions of others.’

  ‘You mean so-called “honour” killings?’

  ‘Where a girl is murdered by her relatives because some meddlesome or envious neighbour impugns her good name? Of course!’ Taner said. ‘Some vicious, bitter old hag takes it into her head that some teenage child is no longer a virgin and the poor girl is strangled by her own brother or father. There was no truth in the allegation. The old hag didn’t even really know the kid, only by sight. But that is enough, that is plenty.’

  ‘So Brother Gabriel . . .’

  ‘İbrahim Keser is a liar. But he was undoubtedly behind Gabriel when he returned from the desert all those years ago. Everyone saw him. Minimal contact but again, enough. This is a small place, Inspector, a small poor place where people have very little of value. Their beliefs and their honour are very precious to them. But our lifestyle here is brittle because it is so old. Our beliefs and customs are threatened and made thin by a present that very few, including myself, can really understand. And so if someone might have deceived them, or they only perceive that as being the case, it can be serious. People can and do die over what you may consider such non-problems.’

  The mobile telephone in her handbag began to ring and she took it out and answered it. The call could, Süleyman knew, be either business or personal and so, because he didn’t want to intrude were it the latter, he drifted back into his own thoughts. On the face of it Mardin seemed very different from İstanbul. For a start, with the exception of a couple of the restaurants and hotels, there was no discernible night life in the city. Few places served alcohol, and as soon as night fell the city was, as far as he could tell, pretty much shut for business. There were certain quarters of İstanbul, the religious district of Fatin for instance, that were like that. But the centre of the city was a twenty-four-hour riot of activity and life. All of that, however, was at a very surface level. Deeper within the life of İstanbul there were, he knew, uncomfortable similarities. Honour killing was not unknown and, on a far more mundane level, people cared about the opinions of others, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. His mother, for instance, still told her friends, even her lifelong bridge partner, that her son Mehmet’s wife was exactly the same age as he, even though Zelfa was twelve years his senior. His mother’s friend was not a stupid woman and had eyes in her head that had to inform her that what her friend Mrs Süleyman was telling her was a lie. But the old woman had never, Mehmet Süleyman knew in his soul, even hinted that she thought her friend might be mistaken. It wasn’t done.

  ‘Inspector?’

  He turned to where Edibe Taner was sitting with her mobile phone cradled in her lap. Her conversation had obviously come to an end.

  ‘Do you remember the Jandarma captain we met in Birecik, Captain Erdur?’ she asked. Her face looked suddenly small and crushed. Süleyman frowned.

  ‘Yes? Has something happened to him?’

  ‘No.’ She breathed in deeply and then spoke on a rush of breath as if she wanted or needed her words to be over with as soon as possible. ‘The body he and his men pulled out of the Euphrates when we were there wasn’t an American soldier, it was Yusuf Kaya.’

  ‘What? What!’ He could hardly take it in. ‘No. It was in a uniform and—’

  ‘Inspector,’ she said, ‘the Americans tested the body. It was not one of their men. The DNA sample taken apparently by a doctor in Urfa matched exactly the sample taken from Kaya by yourselves in İstanbul. The dead body in the Euphrates belongs to Yusuf Kaya.’

  Literally speechless now, Mehmet Süleyman simply sat.

  ‘Someone must have put him in an American uniform,’ Taner continued. ‘Obviously the face was taken off to disguise his identity. According to the captain, the Americans are very worried by the fact that someone clearly from or based in this country could take the clothes and identity discs of one of their servicemen in Iraq. We all know, or those of us who are realistic know, that there is movement across the border, but this particular incident is unprecedented.’

  ‘I’ve been chasing a dead man,’ Süleyman said. ‘For the last I don’t know how long, I’ve been chasing a dead man!’

  ‘The doctor in Urfa reckoned that Kaya probably died only shortly before his body was dumped in the Euphrates,’ Taner said. ‘He also told the captain that in his opinion Kaya’s body hadn’t been in the river for more than five or six hours before it was found. You started off chasing a live man, Inspector.’

  He looked at her very hard for a moment and then he said, ‘You are sure, aren’t you?’

  ‘I have the captain’s word. Why would he lie?’ Taner said. ‘This isn’t his area. He didn’t know Yusuf Kaya. The DNA from the body in the river matches exactly that which is held in İstanbul.’

  There was another short pause before Süleyman took his telephone out of his jacket pocket and said, ‘I must tell my colleagues in İstanbul.’

  What woke Zeynep Kaya was no more than a click. If it had not been followed by a long sigh from the sleeping child next to her, it probably wouldn’t have woken her. But exhausted by grief though she was, when it came to one of her children being disturbed, she instantly went on to the alert.

  ‘Tayyar?’ she whispered to the child beside her. ‘Are you all right?’

  He didn’t make a sound. Poor baby, to learn that his daddy had been killed at such a tender age! The police had been with them for hours, that unnatural cousin of hers telling them all that Yusuf wouldn’t ever be coming back.

  ‘Tayyar?’

  She put a hand up to his mouth and felt absolutely nothing. Zeynep’s heart jumped to her throat just as she felt something move in the early morning shadows on the other side of her bed. Caught between a child who was not breathing and something or someone in the shadows who could mean her harm, she said, ‘Who’s there? What do you want?’

  Surprisingly the voice that replied was familiar and, she had thought, friendly.

  ‘Tayyar is dead,’ it said. ‘Just like you.’

  And then there was another click and Zeynep felt a raging pain in her chest. As she lay dying she saw through the open bedroom door one of her daughters fall over the balcony and into the courtyard below as a bullet, from somewhere, took her life away.

  Chapter 19

  * * *

  That morning was a lot warmer in İstanbul than the weather forecaster on the television said it was in Mardin. The south-east, apparently, was even under slight risk of snow. Çetin İkmen, who had been awake for much of the previous night, was, however, as cold as he imagined he would have been in Mardin. Yusuf Kaya was dead! He still couldn’t really believe it. But Arto Sarkissian had quickly confirmed Süleyman’s story and so it was certainly true. Who had killed Kaya and why were still mysteries, cloaked as they were in the gruesome details that surrounded the disposal of his body. Clearly it had not been sent down the river from Iraq to its final resting place in Birecik. The American owner of the ID tags had apparently been killed just outside Baghdad. Somehow his tags and maybe even his uniform had ended up on Kaya’s body in Turkey where, it was reckoned, the drug dealer had been killed.

  So the hunt for Yusuf Kaya was off. The hunt for whoever had helped him to escape and had killed to do so was still however very much on – as was the search for Kaya’s own murderer. Monstrous though Yusuf Kaya had been, whoever had killed him had done so for a reason which, if İkmen was correct, was almost certainly drug-related. Someone as yet unknown was making
a bid for Yusuf’s property. In the meantime the Cerrahpaşa administrator, Mr Aktar, was still in the cells at police headquarters. A considerable quantity of narcotics had been found in the garage of his rather nice house in Kumkapı and, as İkmen looked down at his watch now, he wondered how Aktar was feeling after a whole night without access to heroin. It was only five a.m., but he imagined the administrator was still up. İkmen’s wife Fatma certainly was. As she came into the living room he thought about pretending to be asleep but decided that it was probably best not to try to deceive her. She had been deceived quite enough by Bekir, whose potential child he had only told her about less than an hour ago. It hadn’t been easy.

  ‘So this girl, this Sophia,’ she began.

  ‘When I came back from the interview room she had gone,’ İkmen said, referring to the fact that Sophia the pregnant Bulgarian girl had walked out of his office and disappeared the previous afternoon. ‘I offered help, she appeared to be thinking about it, but then she disappeared. Fatma, we can only help her if she wants to be helped.’

  Fatma looked outraged. ‘She is carrying our grandchild! Don’t you care about that?’

  ‘Well, of course I—’

  ‘You are a policeman! Look for her!’

  ‘Fatma!’

  ‘Çetin, this is our grandchild!’ Fatma said with tears in her eyes. ‘I know that you don’t care about Bekir, but you have to care about his child! The child is innocent!’

  İkmen lit up a cigarette and then leaned forward in his chair. ‘Fatma,’ he said, ‘our son Bekir is a wanted man. When caught he will go to prison. This Sophia, his girlfriend, is an illegal immigrant who has sold her body on the streets. She is also, she says, an ex-heroin user. She may still be taking the stuff; junkies do lie, as we know. Of course I want to find her and try to protect that baby of hers. But it isn’t easy.’