Ikmen 16 - Body Count

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘That’s none of your business!’ he said. In his anger he shook his head, and it was then that he saw what Ömer was trying to do. ‘Get away from that!’ he screeched.

  ‘If you’ll just let me look inside …’ Ömer reached down.

  ‘No!’ In a movement that was both very rapid and amazingly smooth, Cem Atay took a gun out of his jacket pocket and fired it.

  They all heard the shot. It sounded as if it had come from behind the property. Ayşe Farsakoğlu, outside the professor’s front door, told the uniformed constables to kick it in. It was one of those ornate, heavy Greek doors and so it took some doing, but eventually it gave.

  Ayşe went in first and ran through the marble front hall and into the kitchen. By a light that seemed to come from somewhere underneath the house she could see three figures standing by a car. İkmen was instantly recognisable, and she thought the taller man could be Ömer Mungan. What she could see easily, however, was that the other figure had a gun. She said to the constable at her back, ‘No one down as far as I can see.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘But I’m going to get closer.’

  ‘Ma’am, don’t you want us to—’

  ‘No.’ She held up a hand to stop the men behind her. Then she moved from the back of the kitchen to the front and tucked herself down behind what she could now see was the partially open back door. In that position she could hear what was going on outside.

  İkmen said, ‘You have to see that you were always too close. And that in part was your own fault. You came to us and told us about the connection to the Mayan Long Count calendar.’

  ‘I came to you in response to a request for ideas and information you made in the press,’ Atay said.

  ‘You still put yourself on our radar,’ İkmen continued. ‘Both Inspector Süleyman and myself had doubts about you, but it wasn’t until I managed to speak to Leyla İpek’s mother this afternoon that the possibility of a deeply personal motive emerged.’

  Ayşe opened the door a little wider so that she could see the garden more easily.

  ‘The İpeks humiliated you when you were little more than a child,’ she heard İkmen say. ‘You and the girl had sex, she got pregnant and you were treated like a peasant. I understand. And now, in recent years, the parasites appear to be moving back into public life …’

  ‘And you know what, exactly? Nothing!’ Cem Atay’s body appeared to stiffen. ‘I’ve studied these people all my life. They’re still the same morally redundant, greedy, stupid, vicious family they have always been. And people want them back?’

  ‘Some people.’

  ‘Some people in the government, yes! I’ve spent my life studying and teaching the history of empire as a catalogue of failure and inequality that we have grown out of!’ His voice became shriller and shriller as his agitation increased. ‘But then in 2009 we, this country, gave one of them what amounted to a state funeral! One of those people who kept the rest of us enslaved for centuries in the mistaken belief that they were divinely appointed by a God whose every commandment they abused!’

  ‘We can talk about this,’ İkmen said. ‘We can talk about all this, just—’

  ‘This gun is all I have,’ Atay said. ‘I’m not putting it down and you are going to let me get into my car or I will kill you.’

  ‘You can’t kill both of us.’

  ‘You know, I really don’t care.’

  ‘Where is Inspector Süleyman?’

  Ayşe felt her heart jolt in her chest.

  ‘What do you care where another one of them is or isn’t?’

  ‘He’s my friend.’

  ‘He’s one of them! Do you have no consciousness of your own class at all?’ He waved his gun. ‘Now move to the back of the garden and let me get in my car and go.’

  There was a pause. No one moved, then İkmen said, ‘No.’

  Another pause followed, after which Cem Atay said, ‘I have your weapons. You’re unarmed. What are you going to do?’

  He must have taken their guns. Ayşe began to sweat. She looked at the men lined up behind her and then back into the garden again. What she needed to do was to deploy them around the property, effectively cutting off all escape routes.

  ‘If you’re not with me, you’re against me,’ Cem Atay said. İkmen moved towards him and the professor clicked the safety catch off.

  ‘Give me the gun,’ İkmen said.

  Ayşe knew that this was her moment, the one where she unequivocally proved her worth and İkmen’s job became hers by right. As she got to her feet, she saw İkmen push Ömer Mungan away from him, and then she was outside the kitchen door with her own weapon raised.

  ‘Put the gun down now, Professor,’ she said.

  They all looked at her, and for just a moment Ayşe felt a glow of triumph. With her gun trained on the professor’s head, she’d brought this stand-off to a close. İkmen and Ömer Mungan behaved as if they believed that too, because they both took one step towards Cem Atay. But what none of them had noticed was that even when the others had stopped looking at Ayşe, the professor hadn’t.

  He shot her in the stomach, and she fell to the ground before the men at her back could reach her.

  Ömer kicked the weapon out of the professor’s hand and pulled him into a headlock while he took his own and İkmen’s guns out of Atay’s trouser waistband.

  Completely oblivious to anything else, İkmen ran to where Ayşe lay on the ground in the arms of a uniformed constable. Another cop was calling an ambulance and a third officer had gone back into the house to secure the front door. He heard the snap of handcuffs as Ömer disabled the professor. Before he even squatted down beside her, İkmen knew that Ayşe was dead. Not just because shots to the stomach were difficult to survive but because she looked at peace. There was no fight for survival, no struggle to take breath or attempt last, significant words.

  The constable holding her said, ‘She’s gone.’

  And although he knew that was a fact, İkmen took one of her wrists between his fingers and felt for a pulse that was never going to be there. Only then did he say, ‘Yes.’

  He heard Ömer call for backup and he felt entirely impotent to either help or advise the young man.

  The constable holding Ayşe said, ‘What do you want me to do, sir?’

  İkmen put his arms out. ‘Give her to me.’

  The constable moved out of the way and a gentle exchange of the dead body of Ayşe Farsakoğlu took place. As soon as he had her, İkmen smiled and held her to his chest as he would have done one of his own children. Because in many ways she was one of his daughters, and he had loved her.

  ‘Sir?’

  Ömer had put the professor into the custody of the constable who had called the ambulance. Its siren could just now be heard in the far distance, towards the centre of the city.

  ‘Sir?’

  İkmen looked up. ‘She’s dead.’

  Ömer sank to his knees and looked at her with eyes imbued not so much with horror as with the light of having seen some sort of miracle. Because she was still smiling. ‘She saved us,’ he said. He went to touch her hand, but İkmen gathered her still closer to himself. He put his head in her hair and he curled himself into her terrible blood-soaked wound, and Ömer Mungan knew that for the moment there was only him, and so he took charge. He had liked Ayşe Hanım a lot, but to İkmen she was almost family. Now it was his time: Ömer Mungan, the boy from the back of beyond who still had to find his boss, the man who’d chosen him above all the slick city boys in İstanbul to be his deputy. Now he had to prove whether he was prepared to fight to stay in İstanbul or not.

  Once again he checked the sack the professor had been dragging towards his car. Just like the first time he’d looked in it, it contained only a very old mattress and some bedding.

  He went over to the academic, who was now sitting on the ground in a stress position with the constable looming over him. Ömer knelt down beside hi
m and said, ‘What have you done with Inspector Süleyman?’

  There was no answer. Whether he was in shock or just noncompliant Ömer didn’t know. He took Atay’s chin between his fingers. ‘Listen to me. Where I come from, revenge is a way of life. Tell me where Süleyman is and it will go easier for you. Don’t, and I will reach inside your cell and I will increase your torment.’

  Still Cem Atay said nothing. Ömer Mungan toyed with the idea of kicking him in the head as he rose to his feet, but then decided that he had better things to do. As İkmen continued to cradle Ayşe Farsakoğlu in his arms, Ömer ordered the other constables into the house and told them to search every corner of it. He had been so convinced that Süleyman was in that sack, he couldn’t imagine where else his boss might be.

  When he did eventually find Süleyman, on the cellar floor, covered in a thin grey blanket, he was sure that he too was dead. But although his breathing was so shallow as to make it almost invisible, it was there, and when the ambulance arrived it was Süleyman who was loaded into it and taken to hospital.

  Ömer tried to tell İkmen the good news, but he didn’t appear to be able to hear anything.

  Chapter 33

  Proximity to the death of a loved one put those who experienced it under a sort of a spell. Çetin İkmen had seen it a hundred times in his work and had experienced it himself when his father and his son had died. It involved an increasing appreciation of the irrelevance of time, a conviction that one was dying from the pain one was experiencing, as well as a terrible fear about where and what the dead person was about to be subjected to next. Even when Forensics arrived to investigate the scene, still he wouldn’t give Ayşe up. They were a team. In the real world she was meant to be his successor when he retired, and until she left him, how could he leave her?

  For a good hour nobody came near them. He told her how much he appreciated everything she did for him and what a brilliant career she had ahead of her as he desperately tried to cling on to the real world that had existed just that morning, just that afternoon. But far away inside the depths of his mind, he knew it couldn’t last. He just didn’t know how to end it. Because if he left her then he’d know she was dead and she was never coming back.

  ‘Çetin?’

  The voice was soft and familiar and it washed against his strained nerves like water, because it was a sound that came right from the roots of his childhood. He looked up into Arto Sarkissian’s face.

  ‘You need to give Ayşe to me now, Çetin,’ the doctor said. ‘You know I will take good care of her.’

  It was true. Arto always took care of the dead; it was what he did. And impervious to the spell they cast, he could find out exactly why and how they had died, which sometimes helped to bring them justice.

  Arto put an arm between the body and his friend. ‘It’s OK to let go now, Çetin,’ he said.

  And it was. Arto took her, and together with two of his orderlies he put her on a stretcher, then he covered her face and her body with a sheet.

  İkmen looked down at himself for the first time since he’d taken Ayşe in his arms and suddenly her blood disgusted him. It wasn’t where it was meant to be. While the orderlies took the body away, Arto helped him to rise to his feet. As Ayşe receded into the distance, everything about her faded: the smell of her perfume, the feel of her skin, the spell that she had put on him. Did he imagine it as a mist that followed her corpse into the plain green transport that would carry her to the Armenian’s laboratory, or was there really a mist that had come up from the Bosphorus, giving the pretty Arnavutköy garden an eerie feel?

  ‘You must go home and rest,’ Arto said.

  Suddenly everything he had to know and do came crashing in upon him. ‘Yes, but we must find Süleyman,’ he began, as adrenalin burst out of his glands and flooded his bloodstream.

  ‘He’s been found,’ Arto said. Recognising the signs of mounting panic, he added, ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘You’re not lying to me, are you? You’re not …’

  ‘I’m telling you the truth, as I always have,’ Arto said. He put a hand in his pocket and took out a small bottle of pills. He shook one out into his palm. ‘Now I want you to take this.’

  İkmen looked at the pill as if it were a live hand grenade. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a mild tranquilliser.’

  ‘What? Diazepam?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t want that! What do I want that for?’ He pulled away from his friend, stuck a hand in his jacket pocket, took out his cigarettes and lit up. His legs buckled and he fell to the ground.

  Arto helped him to his feet again. ‘A sudden rush of nicotine, oddly, isn’t always a panacea for all your ills, Çetin,’ he said. Then he pushed the tablet between İkmen’s lips and made him swallow. ‘And no spitting it out.’

  İkmen did as he was told. ‘But what about the man who lives in this house?’ he said. ‘Professor Atay?’

  ‘Your colleagues have taken him to the station,’ Arto said.

  ‘I’ll have to interview him!’

  Arto put one of his arms through İkmen’s and led him into the professor’s house. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you have to go home and rest,’ the doctor said.

  They passed into the marble hall with the silent Greek fountain. In front of them, the wreckage of the academic’s door lay splintered across the threshold.

  ‘But who will interview Professor Atay?’ İkmen said. ‘Who?’

  When Gonca arrived at the hospital, she found Nur Süleyman beside her son’s bed talking to a doctor.

  ‘We’ve given your son a drug called flumazenil, which is the antidote to a benzodiazepine overdose,’ he was saying. ‘If his respiratory function had been better we could have just left him to wake up. But there is an outside risk of coma in some of these cases, which I now think we’ve averted.’

  ‘He will live, won’t he?’ the old woman asked.

  Gonca looked at the long, pale figure of her lover and began to cry.

  ‘Benzodiazepine overdose is rarely fatal,’ she heard the doctor say. Then she saw him look at her. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

  She looked a mess. She’d been trying to get some sleep, more for her father’s sake than for her own, when the constable had called. Sergeant Mungan had sent him; such a nice boy, that boy from the east. He’d told her that Mehmet Bey was in the Taksim. So she’d come.

  ‘Madam?’ The doctor looked at her as if he had a bad smell under his nose. But then she was dishevelled. Her hair was uncombed and knotted and she wore a dirty shift, with no bra, over which she had just flung a skirt that wasn’t even hers. On her feet she wore her father’s slippers. Who was she going to say she was? What relation could she possibly be to a high-ranking police officer?

  But then an old, cultured voice said, ‘Oh, Doctor, this is a friend of my son’s.’

  And although Nur Süleyman wasn’t exactly smiling at her, Gonca did not get the impression that she wanted to bite her.

  Nur urged her forward. ‘Come along,’ she said. ‘The doctor has said that he can be sat with.’

  Gonca, tentatively at first, moved past the doctor and joined the old woman at the bedside. At first she stood, but then Nur told her to go and get a chair. She found one in a corridor and returned to see what she hoped was a little more colour in her lover’s cheeks. It turned out to be just a smudge of blood from his nose, which was swollen and pushed to one side.

  After what seemed like an eternity of silence, the old woman said, ‘You know, I hate my son doing this job. Again a madman tries to kill him. You must hate it too.’

  Gonca, taken aback by this tacit acknowledgement of her position in Mehmet’s life, took a few moments to gather her thoughts. ‘It’s what he does,’ she said.

  ‘You are very accepting.’

  ‘As you know, Hanım, I am a gypsy. We have no choice but to accept.’

  The old woman – who
had once, Gonca could see, been very beautiful – said, ‘And yet you are a very successful artist. I don’t think you always have to accept what fate hands out to you.’

  ‘My father lives in Tarlabaşı and today they began to pull it down around him,’ Gonca said. ‘That I have to accept. And my brother Şukru, some terrible person murdered him and then burnt his body. What remains of him we have to bury in the morning. These are things I can do nothing about, Hanım.’

  ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ Nur Süleyman said, following up with the more traditional exhortation to the bereaved to ‘live long’.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘As for Tarlabaşı …’ The old woman shook her head. ‘You know, my husband’s Armenian wet nurse came from there. It makes me sad to see it disappear. Some people talk in terms of what they call “new Ottoman” projects. But what connection that has to my husband’s family is anybody’s guess. The old Ottomans want things to be left as they are. Who these new Ottomans are I do not know.’

  Gonca said nothing. She didn’t really care who was tearing down Tarlabaşı or why, she just wanted it to stop. ‘They moved us on from Sulukule,’ she said. ‘Where I was born and my brother and all of us.’

  ‘And that too was a disgrace,’ Nur said. ‘Our city is famous for many things, and one of those is the fact that we used to have one of the most colourful and happy gypsy communities in Europe.’

  ‘A thousand years.’

  ‘As you say, a thousand years of living side by side in peace.’ She turned to look at Gonca. ‘You know, Hanım, I will not pretend to be happy about my son being with a woman like you. You do not conform to the norms of life as my family understand them and you are far too old for him, but I will never try to dissuade him from you again. On that you have my word. I can see that you love him, and that is worth something. There has been too much interference with love in the past.’

  It was hard to know how to respond to what was hardly a compliment; more a declaration of peace. But Gonca was gracious and she was truthful. She said, ‘I expect nothing, Hanım, except the right to love your son. Loving him is something I cannot help and I will not apologise for it.’