‘Leyla Ablak.’ His alibi for that evening, provided by a very attractive woman who lived with her aged parents, had been checked out by Ayşe Farsakoğlu, and Cem Atay had not been considered a person of interest since. Now, according to Ömer Mungan, who had met him when he’d booked in at the desk downstairs, he had come in to talk about Levent Devrim’s numbers.
‘Yes.’
Süleyman gestured towards the chair opposite his desk and said, ‘Please do sit down, Professor.’
‘Thank you.’ He sat.
Ömer Mungan, who had ushered the professor into the office, now stood behind Süleyman at the back of the room.
Süleyman, smiling, began. ‘Professor—’
‘The calculations that you found on the dead man’s walls relate to the Mayan Long Count calendar,’ he said.
For a moment, Süleyman thought he had misheard him. He’d certainly heard about the Mayan Long Count calendar, from Gonca. A lot of end-of-the-world superstitious crazy stuff as far as he was concerned. Could this very eminent historian possibly believe such nonsense? And wasn’t this Mesoamerican apocalypse meant to be happening in December? ‘Professor Atay …’
‘Just to be clear, Inspector Süleyman, I in no way believe that the world is going to end this year,’ he said. ‘But I have been engaged in a project aimed at comparing and contrasting the Ottoman Empire with that of the Imperial Spanish Empire – a project that has been picked up by a documentary film company and will eventually be televised – and during that time, of course, I have come across ideas that stem from the civilisations of ancient South America that were conquered by the Spaniards, including the Mayans.’
‘You’ve studied this, er …’
‘Long Count calendar, yes,’ he said. ‘Not in depth, but enough to know that what you describe as equations are in fact Mayan dates.’
‘Right.’ Süleyman looked down at his desk. This was either going to prove to be another complete waste of time, or Professor Atay had opened a door into Levent Devrim’s world that might prove to be the key to his death. He looked up again. ‘Professor,’ he said, ‘if you can explain this to me …’
‘I can try.’
‘Then I would like my colleague Inspector İkmen to be present too.’
‘A very charming man,’ the academic said. ‘Yes, Inspector, I am happy to explain the Mayan Long Count calendar to him as well.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Süleyman said. He turned to Ömer Mungan. ‘Will you go and ask Inspector İkmen to come to my office, please, Sergeant.’
It had been Çetin İkmen’s brother, Halıl, who had become an accountant, who had been good with figures. Çetin had been, by his own admission, useless all his life. Now, as he listened to Professor Atay talk about the Mayan Long Count calendar, he began to imagine that his brain had started to bleed.
‘The Maya worked with a three-tier calendar system when it came to time,’ the professor said. ‘They had the three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day Haab calendar, which meshed with the two-hundred-and-sixty-day Tzok’ in calendar, which they used to identify individual days in what amounted to a fifty-two-year cycle. This did not, however, allow them to look at larger spans of time or indeed to calculate years as we would recognise them. And so they developed the Long Count calendar.’
‘This is the one some people say signals the end of the world?’ İkmen asked.
‘Yes,’ the professor said. ‘The Long Count allowed the Maya to look both backwards and forwards in time. It also allowed them to cut time up into epochs. This gave them history and a future. The current epoch, or Long Count Cycle, that will end on the twenty-first of December 2012 began on the thirteenth of August 3114 bc.’
‘The twenty-first of December, you say?’ İkmen said.
‘Yes.’
İkmen looked at Süleyman.
‘Whether the world will actually end when this current cycle finishes is not known,’ the professor said. ‘However, what I believe is important for you, gentlemen, is that your victim for some reason wrote Mayan Long Count dates on the walls of his apartment. Look at this …’ He pointed to one of the original photographs of Levent Devrim’s walls on Süleyman’s desk. ‘12.19.19.17.19 = 12.19.19.17.19. Meaningless, yes? In our system, absolutely. But if we look at those numbers through Mayan eyes, they are enormously significant.’
‘In what way?’ İkmen asked. ‘Aren’t they the same?’
‘No! That’s just it. The first one refers to the beginning of this Long Count cycle, and, as you can see, when that cycle ends, those numbers come around again.’
İkmen couldn’t really see, because his brain had shut down, but he nodded his head anyway.
‘You see here.’ The professor pointed at the photograph again. ‘That date, 13.0.0.0.0, signifies the beginning date of the new cycle we will be in after the twenty-first of December 2012.’
‘What about all the other figures?’ Süleyman asked. ‘What you’ve shown us is just a sample …’
‘Oh, I’m no expert,’ he said. ‘I recognise only the Mayan dates that were pointed out to me when I was carrying out my research. I wrote a small amount about the Mayans in relation to 2012 – people like details like that. But just looking at what that man inscribed on his wall, I can see that his numbers are annotated in the way that a writer who uses standard numerals would do. The Mayans themselves used a system of dots and lines, which were read horizontally.’
‘So Levent Devrim was not a Mayan purist,’ İkmen said.
The professor smiled. ‘I don’t think so, but if you really want to know what all these dates mean, you will have to contact a Mayan civilisation expert. I met several when I was in Mexico, and there is a Mexican lecturer in Latin American civilisations at METU I can put you in contact with.’
Süleyman said, ‘Thank you, Professor.’
İkmen was less enamoured of the professor and his Mayans. Whatever weird stuff Levent Devrim had been into, it hadn’t been the Mayans who had killed him, although the fact that he, that all the victims, had died on the magic date of the twenty-first was not lost on İkmen. Could it possibly just be a coincidence?
But then the professor said something that did interest İkmen a lot.
‘Of course where death and the Mayans are concerned, one has to be circumspect. I know that Leyla Ablak died violently and I get the impression – although I understand you’ve not released all the details to the public – that the other victims died violently too. I don’t know how relevant this is, but the Maya did practise human sacrifice, which took many different forms, one of which was to cut out the hearts of their victims.’
Sezen İpek looked at the letter again and then screwed it up into a ball. If she received any more of that nature, she’d take it to the police. They knew everything anyway. This one crude, nasty little missive could just be a fluke. Sezen felt that it wasn’t, though. She sat down on the chair by her front door, uncreased the letter and looked at it again. It was full of disgusting bile about her uncle Rafık and about what this person claimed he had done to him many years ago. Her fears made real.
The letter, menacingly put together from newspaper type, alleged child abuse, rape and some acts that Sezen couldn’t even fathom. He – if it was a man – wanted money or he’d tell all to the media and to the police. Didn’t he know that she didn’t have any money? Even if she’d wanted to meet him in the gardens of Yıldız Palace to hand over a bag full of cash, she wasn’t able to do that. And yet just the thought of how her family would be vilified and discredited if Rafik Efendi’s crimes ever came out in the press made Sezen sweat. In recent years their position in the country as national role models and assets had begun to be recognised. Some people, even in high places, had started to talk about a ‘reappraisal’ of the Ottoman Empire, which was most encouraging. But Rafik Efendi had represented the worst that the Empire had been, that louche, selfish, soft thing that Atatürk’s republic had almost wiped off the face of the planet. And now, from beyond the grave, he wa
s still undermining his family.
Although she had genuinely loved her uncle, there was a part of Sezen İpek that wished she’d had the courage to confront him and maybe even stop him years ago. She’d known for decades what he had been, what he’d done, and she’d turned a blind eye to it. Leyla had warned her. Just weeks before her death she’d told her mother, ‘You have to stop allowing rent boys into the house.’ But she hadn’t listened. If she remembered correctly, she’d turned Leyla’s argument against her and complained about her discredited husband. Now they were all dead. All except for Sezen.
It had been a long day for everyone, and Ayşe Farsakoğlu was very grateful to Ömer Mungan for inviting her to go for a drink with him once work was over. She’d put no pressure on him to do so; he’d done it out of the goodness of his heart. He was a thoughtful young man, and had she been ten years younger, she might have made a romantic play for him. But he was like the younger brother she’d never had and, further, the younger brother who knew she needed taking care of because her heart was broken. Everyone knew that because everyone knew where Mehmet Süleyman was going whenever he wasn’t going back to his own little apartment in Cihangir after work.
Ömer, who was hungry, had gone inside the little restaurant they had chosen to sit down outside in Nevezade Sokak, to look at the fish and meat on offer that evening. Ayşe, who wasn’t hungry, sat with her untouched beer and smoked. When he returned, the young man said, ‘Fish is a ridiculous price.’
‘So what are you having?’ Ayşe asked.
‘Chicken şiş.’ He sat down. ‘Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat, Ayşe Hanım?’
‘No thank you, Ömer.’ She smiled. He still referred to her either as Sergeant Farsakoğlu or Ayşe Hanım even when they were on their own. Acknowledging her seniority and her experience in the job they both loved.
Ömer, who was drinking red wine, said, ‘I don’t know about you, Sergeant, but I’m still reeling from today.’
‘I think we all need time to take it in,’ she said. Briefly Ayşe thought, spitefully, Except for you, Mehmet Süleyman, who are being given all the occult help you need by that whore Gonca the gypsy!
‘What do you think about this idea that the killer has some sort of fixation on the Mayans?’ Ömer said.
After Professor Atay had given İkmen and Süleyman the names of his academic contacts in Turkey and Mexico, he had left. İkmen had immediately called the expert at the Middle Eastern Technical University in Ankara, a Dr Maria Santa Ana. All four of them had been in İkmen’s office when he’d put the Mexican on speaker phone.
‘I don’t know,’ Ayşe said. She put one cigarette out and lit another. Unhappiness was turning her into her superior.
Çetin İkmen had told Dr Santa Ana, who had communicated with him in English, the relevant facts about the four murder cases and had emailed – or rather, instructed Ömer to email – photographs of Levent Devrim’s equations over to her. It had been Dr Santa Ana’s opinion that if one added in the fact that three of the victims had ‘royal’ blood, the case for some sort of Mayan-influenced fixation became still stronger. ‘The Maya liked to sacrifice high-status victims to their gods,’ she’d said. ‘Better blood meant a better offering, which they believed would produce better crops in the year to come.’ She’d also told them that there had been more than one method of dispatch. ‘Everyone knows about the heart-cutting, but sometimes the Maya decapitated their victims, and there was another method too, which was to throw people into a sink hole called a cenote. This was usually done in order to propitiate the rain gods.’
All their thoughts had gone back to the image of Leyla Ablak floating, dead, in that therapy pool. But it was what Dr Santa Ana had said just before she’d had to go to give a seminar to her students that had really chilled the four police officers. ‘The Maya believed that the blood they spilled, when collected and smeared on to idols or significant buildings, ensouled those items, giving them power to enter the world of men and influence their lives. High-status blood would have a particular power especially at a time like this when a Great Cycle is coming to an end. According to how Mayan belief is interpreted, we are in a dangerous place in time where the cycle may end successfully and peacefully or everything may just explode.’
İkmen had said, ‘The end of the world?’
‘The coming of Ah Puch, the god of death,’ she’d said.
Ayşe sipped her beer. ‘But why here, Ömer? This is Turkey; nobody believes in gods of death here.’
‘No, but have you heard about the village of Şirince?’ he said.
‘No. Where’s that?’
‘Somewhere near Efes. There’s a movement building amongst New Age people to put it forward as a place where the Mayan apocalypse won’t reach.’
‘How can a global apocalypse not reach everywhere?’
‘I don’t know.’ His chicken şiş with bulgar wheat and salad arrived and Ömer began eating.
‘How do you know that?’
He chewed on a nugget of chicken, swallowed and said, ‘Oh, my sister works as a nurse in the German Hospital and they get all sorts of people through. She found this magazine about astrology and fortune-telling and there was an article about Şirince in there. The local people are going to open up more pansiyon rooms to cope with the demand they are expecting.’
Ayşe shook her head. When she’d been a child in the 1970s, such superstitions had been frowned upon. Now that religion was having a resurgence, so, apparently, were a lot of other beliefs and practices that until very recently had been discouraged by the state. She couldn’t find it in herself to approve.
‘A lot of people do believe in the Mayan Long Count calendar and they are frightened that the world will end on the twenty-first of December this year,’ Ömer said.
‘And our victims have died on the twenty-first of each month since January.’
‘Yes.’
‘So, as Inspector İkmen said, we have to take that into account, but without jumping to conclusions.’ When İkmen had put the phone down on Dr Santa Ana, he’d told his colleagues that although he felt that the Mayan connection could be significant, he believed that something else had to be present as a motive to kill too.
Ömer finished his şiş and said, ‘Maybe he just dislikes aristocrats, Levent Devrim excepted, of course.’
‘Or maybe he fears them,’ Ayşe said.
‘Fears them? Why?’
She frowned. She knew why she feared them, or rather one of them. But for other people the issue was not personal.
‘Those who admire and maybe always have admired the Ottomans feel free to talk about them positively now,’ she said. ‘For some people the Empire was a golden age. Our new bogeymen are our military, like General Ablak. Republicans …’
‘You don’t approve, Ayşe Hanım.’
But she said nothing. In light of the sensitive Ergenekon investigation, Ayşe didn’t want to lay her cards on the table even with Ömer.
‘Well, whatever the rights and wrongs may be, it must be nice for someone like Inspector Süleyman to feel that he and his kind are valued again,’ Ömer said. He said it thoughtlessly and without malice, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth he knew he had done wrong.
Ayşe drank her beer quickly to try and cover the fact that just the mention of his name had made tears spring to her eyes. But Ömer saw.
Chapter 16
Even though he didn’t tell the police where he was going, Arthur Regan had copied his son’s work on to a disk, which he left at his apartment in Beyoğlu. The computer John had used to write his book on had been given back to him by İkmen the previous week. He took only a paper copy of his son’s novel with him to Şişli. Just in case.
He hadn’t seen the man who had once been his reluctant brother-in-law for over forty years. As he remembered him, Abdurrahman had been a good-looking, vigorous man who spoke flawless English and enjoyed tennis, swimming and horse-riding. But the shrunken creature that met him a
t the door of the Şafak apartment, which hadn’t itself changed a bit in four decades, was a very frail copy of the man that Arthur remembered.
‘You look well,’ Abdurrahman said as he offered Arthur the very same seat his father had offered him when he had come to Şişli to ask for Betül’s hand in marriage.
Stumped as to what he could possibly say in return, Arthur just smiled.
Abdurrahman said, ‘I have cancer and so I look appalling.’ He smiled, and Arthur noticed that his lips were yellow. ‘I know it and you know it. It’s made me even more cruel than I was before, too, which is something maybe you don’t know. Would you like tea?’
Arthur muttered a ‘yes’ and wondered what the hell he was doing in that mausoleum of an apartment again. Betül had run away from it with a glad heart and he hadn’t given the place or anyone he’d met in it any thought until John’s murder. But then his brother-in-law had tracked him down. İstanbul, for the natives, could be a very small village indeed.
After an awkward silence, a girl not much more than a child brought tea and lokum in vessels made from precious metals. Arthur worked hard at not looking impressed. Last time he’d been in that place he’d done quite the opposite. He’d been sneered at by the whole family, including Abdurrahman.
‘So this book your son was working on,’ Abdurrahman said. ‘Did you bring me a copy?’
Arthur took fifty pages of A4 out of a carrier bag and put them on the table in front of his host.
Abdurrahman looked up at him. ‘Is that all?’
‘He had only been writing for just over a month,’ Arthur said. ‘There’s a lot of research material, but—’
‘Lies written by liars.’ Abdurrahman picked the manuscript up and glanced at it, then put it back down on the table again.
On one level Arthur wanted to scream at him, challenge him about calling his son a liar, but he didn’t. What was a sick man like this going to do about it? When he did speak, it was gently, even if the message he delivered was barbed. ‘Your opinion is noted by me, Abdurrahman. But I’m irrelevant.’
Ikmen 16 - Body Count Page 17