A Noble Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  And so if the sophisticated city was indeed acting upon people like the Seyhans, whether they liked it or not, in every aspect of their lives, then why not in the sphere of ‘honour’, too? In some parts of İstanbul, it was not difficult to get a girl killed. It was just a question of hard cash and how much you were willing to part with. Recent cases of suspected honour killings involved families that now seemed to be poorer than they had been before. Yet if these families were indeed contracting out their honour killings to others, then who? Established gangsters, both domestic and foreign, were unlikely to bother themselves with such ‘cheap’ work. After all, why kill some little girl for, at most, a couple of thousand lire when a criminal rival or the inconvenient wife of an industrialist could net a quarter of a million US dollars? But then maybe it was just strutting wannabe enforcers who were doing this.

  When Süleyman had called him earlier to tell him about Mrs Ford, he’d also said that he was planning to pull in an informant he had who was a rather elderly rent boy on İstiklal Street. The late Hamid İdiz had used such people quite extensively, and there was a chance that the piano teacher’s murderer had been one of them. The character Süleyman called ‘Flower’ would, possibly, have a view on that. İkmen too would have to spread his net wider. Whether any useful information came back from Kars about the Öz family or not, he was going to have to pry around in the seedy world of the small-time enforcers for a while. They would, after all, sell their rivals down the river for sometimes as little as the price of a shot of raki. One of them, once, had been Tayfun Ergin.

  Süleyman always answered his phone, even if he was off duty and at home. İzzet Melik looked down at his own phone once again and then put it in his pocket. He’d left the Tulip over half an hour ago and had been trying to contact his boss ever since. But to no avail.

  İzzet lit a cigarette and blew smoke out on a sigh. Süleyman was, in all probability, with the gypsy woman. It had been a bad day when he’d taken up with her again. If he occasionally picked up a dancer or a tourist, nobody apart from his wife cared, because it never seemed to distract him. He got on with his work with no problem. But with the gypsy, things were different. It was said that she couldn’t keep her hands, or anything else, off him. How flattering that had to be to one’s vanity. And Allah, did the inspector have vanity! İzzet had always liked and admired Süleyman, but he had never been impressed by either the preening regard he gave to his own appearance or his delight at his role as a fantasy figure for women. The sergeant was no prude, but it wasn’t seemly for a police officer to behave like that, and besides, it took Süleyman’s mind, if infrequently, off his job. Hamid İdiz, the music teacher of Şişli, had been murdered, and Süleyman was apparently blithely choosing which lines of inquiry he wanted to pursue. İdiz’s pupils were legitimate avenues for exploration. Just because they were children did not exempt them, not as far as İzzet was concerned. And now that he’d seen Murad Emin together with Ali Reza Zafir at the Tulip, he had a nagging feeling that there was more to these boys than had at first met the eye. For a start, they both worked at the Tulip, and so what Ali Reza had told Süleyman about them only meeting for brief words after their music lessons was wrong. Also the boys, when İzzet had seen them, had been exchanging hostile, if muted words. He had no idea what said words might be about, but the look of the two boys together had made him uneasy and he had wanted to tell Süleyman about it.

  İzzet tried to call his boss one more time before he just gave up and began to walk towards the Karaköy tram stop. He’d seen the gypsy, Gonca, once and he had to admit that he’d been struck by the force of her presence. Now he imagined his superior with that woman in his arms and it made hi11m scowl.

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  Everyone knew Flower. Short, middle-aged and fat, with wiry black facial hair, his appearance belied his behaviour, which was frequently beyond what anyone would agree was outrageous. Süleyman’s wife, who had seen him several times over the years in and around İstiklal Street, described him as being ‘as camp as Christmas’. To Süleyman himself, this appellation did seem rather sacrilegious coming from a Christian woman, but he knew what she meant. Flower was someone you met away from other people, in a darkened room. Not that the Yerebatan Saray, the Byzantine cistern underneath the streets of Sultanahmet, was exactly a darkened room. But it was sufficiently anonymous and dimly lit to give both the policeman and his informant a measure of security.

  The Yerebatan Saray had been built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in ad 532 to store water for the city during times of drought. A complicated series of pipes and aqueducts, some still extant, ensured that water could be carried to every part of İstanbul. Now a ghostly tourist attraction, where Justinian’s great water tank with its soaring classical columns could be viewed against a background of classical music and softly phasing coloured lights, it was a place that Flower’s compatriots in Beyoğlu would not often care to go.

  ‘This is all very well for the odd tourist pick-up,’ he said as he wrinkled his nose in very obvious disgust, ‘but one does not generally troll across the Golden Horn. Not enough backpackers, too many imams.’

  ‘The district has changed,’ Süleyman said. ‘Although there are still hotels and pubs, and I think you will find that backpackers can still be found.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure they can,’ Flower replied. ‘Although all the ones I’ve come across in recent years seem to be on cultural or religious quests.’

  ‘Not so much sex and drugs.’

  ‘Sadly not.’ They walked down one of the many wooden walkways that criss-crossed over the metre or so of water that remained in the cistern. Carp made fat by all the scraps from the little café at the entrance to the cistern swam languidly beneath their feet. Then the music began, not loudly or intrusively, although it prompted Flower to say, ‘Why is it always Vivaldi in these places?’

  Süleyman, amused, shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. But we must talk about Hamid İdiz.’

  They continued on as if moving towards the two columns in the north-west corner of the cistern, known as the Medusas. Each was supported by a large carved head at its base, providing a very good site for numerous tourist photo opportunities. Süleyman and Flower turned away from this and went right into a long corridor of columns lit by phasing lights of blue, red, yellow and green. Once they had gone about as far away from other people as they could get, Flower stopped, leaned against one of the handrails and looked down into the water below.

  ‘Hamid İdiz gave the impression of being a very joyful queer,’ he said. ‘I liked him. He’d sashay up İstiklal dressed to kill and he wouldn’t give a damn. He’d size up all the trade in the back streets and then make his pick and pay whatever was asked without any argument. Being from that class, your class, Mehmet Bey, he felt that haggling was beneath him.’

  ‘Did he like young boys or—’

  ‘Mehmet Bey, dear,’ Flower said with obvious forced patience, ‘no one wants to be tossed off by a grandfather. Well, there are some. If that wasn’t the case, I’d have no business. But Hamid liked young men, and what he paid for was some hand relief or a bit of oral. A furtive fumble in a disused shop doorway, that sort of thing. It turned him on.’

  ‘Did he ever have any trouble with any of the boys?’

  ‘Well of course he did! Who doesn’t?’ Flower laughed. ‘We’ve all been ripped off, dear. But I don’t think that Hamid İdiz was any more sinned against than the rest of us. He liked to drink at the Kaktus and would eat at Rejans if he could. He wasn’t one for gay clubs and bars. As I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, it all goes off in the toilets and half the punters are trannies.’ He wrinkled his nose in disgust again. ‘Hamid wasn’t into that. Al fresco fiddling was his thing. That and the big romances he had from time to time.’

  ‘With whom?’

  Flower shrugged. ‘Who knows? We weren’t joined at the hip, Hamid and me. All I know is that every so often there would be “someone”. Usually a young
er man, sometimes a lot younger, and sometimes a bit on the rough side too.’

  ‘Do you know if he liked violent men?’ There was no evidence for this in the piano teacher’s diary, but then maybe that wasn’t really his thing and he left it out. Some people who loved a violent partner were, on one level, ashamed of it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Flower said. ‘I doubt it. Hamid was very particular. I can’t imagine him dealing well with black eyes or blood up the walls. What I do know is that he was a bitch in bed.’

  Süleyman thought he knew what this meant but he asked Flower about it anyway.

  ‘He liked to be fucked,’ Flower said baldly. ‘And you and I both know that there are plenty of takers, of all types, for that sort of action, don’t we?’

  There was more than a little twinkle in Flower’s eye. Süleyman looked down into the carp-filled water below. The fish were so used to humans, they followed them around and literally begged for food. Of course he knew about passive gay men and how they were regarded. At least since Ottoman times, they had been viewed as the only true ‘sodomites.’ The men who penetrated them were different. They were real men, not homosexual at all. They could use a man like Hamid İdiz and go home to their wives or girlfriends with absolutely no anxieties about their sexuality. They, so hundreds of years of tradition dictated, were entirely heterosexual. It wasn’t something that Süleyman actually agreed with, but he said, ‘Yes. Yes, we all know about that.’

  ‘In Hamid’s mind, these men he had relationships with were his romances,’ Flower said. ‘He called them “darling” and “baby” and other nauseating things.’

  Süleyman thought about Kenan Seyhan, and wondered whether with him, Hamid İdiz had at last found his one true love. In part at least, Hamid’s death had caused Kenan to take his own life.

  Some German-speaking women began to walk towards them, clanking as they moved with numerous cameras and tripods. Süleyman and Flower went still further to the right and into a series of columns only touched on one side by the lights.

  ‘That said, he was a contradictory old bugger,’ Flower continued. ‘As soon as he got some “darling” or “honey” or whatever and was floridly in love, he’d have to treat himself to a casual tart, apparently just for the hell of it.’

  ‘He’d go to İstiklal for some al fresco sex?’

  ‘Oh no, he did that all the time anyway,’ Flower said. ‘No, he’d actually pick up or meet some boy or young man, take him home and let him fuck him. It really excited him. He told me once that he often came before any of them even got anywhere near his arse. Fancy that.’

  ‘Indeed.’ But Süleyman knew exactly what Flower was talking about, exactly how Hamid İdiz was and why. He himself was married, he had Gonca, and yet it still wasn’t enough. There were still girls and women, faceless entities in retrospect, all the time. Women he’d flattered and sometimes paid, just for their looks or their ability to make him come. ‘Do you know who any of these men are?’ The twenty-five-year-old man the kapıcı had said had come to the building on the day that Hamid İdiz died was still unaccounted for.

  ‘No. Hamid and I were not close. They were just men, boys, whatever. This city is full of queers, darling. You know that.’

  Süleyman did. He also knew that quite a lot of them, particularly in the more working-class areas of the city, were very closeted. Finding out the names of Hamid İdiz’s conquests was going to be difficult. But then the forensic evidence was still being assessed, and provided whoever had killed Hamid İdiz had a criminal record, there was just a chance he could be traced from that.

  ‘So you couldn’t point me in any particular direction?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘No. Or rather I could do, but . . .’ Flower threw his hands in the air in a theatrical gesture of frustration and said, ‘Oh, take me to the café, I am gasping for a coffee!’

  He began walking very quickly towards the exit.

  Süleyman, in hot pursuit, caught hold of his shoulder. ‘Flower . . .’

  Flower stopped and put his hands on his hips, a very acid expression on his face. ‘Yes, Inspector?’

  ‘What do you mean? Can you point me in the right direction or not?’

  Through the Vivaldi, the echoing sound of a woman’s laughter bounced off the damp, vaulted walls.

  Flower looked suddenly nervous. ‘Look, you are a policeman and I know that you protect such people and—’

  ‘What? Who? What people?’

  But Flower remained silent. People were walking towards them now, and Süleyman was aware that he must not lose this moment, whatever it may or may not mean. ‘Flower,’ he said, ‘imagine I’m not a policeman if it helps. But whether I am or not, you can tell me anything with absolutely no danger to yourself. I know you laugh at what you call my Ottoman ways, but as an Ottoman gentleman I give you my word that this will go no further.’

  There was a beat, and then Flower sighed and said, ‘You should be looking at the religious types. Those who persecute the queers. Mehmet Bey, this sort of crime is still happening. Look to those bastards for Hamid İdiz’s killer; I think you will find him amongst their number.’

  In spite of the fact that most Fatih people, if pressed, would have expressed support for Cahit Seyhan and what remained of his family, not many actually wanted to engage with him or his relations. He’d lost a daughter in a suspicious fire and a son to what some said was suicide. There was something wrong with the Seyhan family and no amount of outward piety was managing to sway the good people of Fatih. When İsmail Yıldız went to his local grocery store, everyone was talking about it.

  ‘Kenan Seyhan was a sodomite,’ he heard one man say. ‘And so to take his own life could be considered an honourable act. Given his nature.’

  ‘Suicide is never right,’ another older man said gravely. ‘To end one’s own life without allowing Allah to determine one’s natural span is an abomination.’

  A young lad, little more than a boy, who stood at the older man’s side said, ‘The daughter was bad too. Girls who die like that have always known men.’

  Whether the men knew that İsmail was the brother of a police officer or not, they stopped their conversation as soon as they saw him. He didn’t know any of them and so busied himself deciding what he was going to prepare for dinner that night. Eventually he decided that he would roast some aubergines with garlic and olive oil. The men left just as he took the ingredients up to Rafik Bey at the counter.

  ‘The aubergines are good today,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘I think that you and your brother will be pleasantly surprised.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  He handed over a ten-lire note and waited for his change.

  ‘Oh, that work I was telling you about,’ Rafik Bey said as he took a handful of notes out of the till and handed them to İsmail, ‘I spoke to someone who said he would be interested in discussing it with you. Can you be at the Gül Mosque for sunset adhan?’

  ‘Yes.’ Although İsmail was unsure. In spite of the fact that he would be meeting this stranger at a mosque, he was still a stranger.

  ‘He wants to meet you at the mosque because he is a good person,’ Rafik Bey said, as if reading İsmail’s mind. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  İsmail took his change with a frown on his face. All this seemed a bit too cloak-and-dagger for him, the brother – if reluctantly – of a police officer. ‘How will I know this man?’ he asked. ‘How will I find him?’

  Rafik Bey smiled and tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially. ‘He will know you,’ he said. ‘Have no fear of that.’

  It was halfway through the afternoon when Çetin İkmen got back to his office. The days were beginning to heat up a little now and he was sweating.

  ‘Well,’ he said to Ayşe Farsakoğlu as he slumped down behind his desk and lit a cigarette, ‘what a deeply unpleasant morning that was.’

  Ayşe smiled. Her superior had spent the morning, to use his own words, ‘down among the sub-gangster wannabes, the pitiful gan
gland fan-boys’. He had a sad little contact in the form of a crippled man-boy called Ali, who had reached the dizzy heights of playing court jester to the Tayfun Ergin gang. Basically he got rebuffed by the various women other members of the gang dated, and Tayfun and his heavies laughed. In return for this humiliation, Ali was given food and lodging above one of the bars that Tayfun protected. Although hardly the brightest star in the sky, Ali knew what was happening to him and was not forgiving. His occasional involvement with İkmen was his way of getting his own back.

  ‘I met a friend of Ali’s,’ İkmen said, ‘a boy of at most nineteen who apparently amuses members of the Karabey gang up in Edirnekapı with his hilarious impression of a human ashtray.’

  Ayşe winced.

  ‘Believe me, I tried to take the boy to hospital, but he wouldn’t have it. Still glamoured, it would seem, by old Hakan Karabey and his whores, his jewels and his explosions of mindless violence,’ İkmen said gloomily. ‘Why do these kids still want lives like this? We shot Hakan’s son last autumn. The shock of it killed his wife. What’s to like?’

  ‘The whores, the jewels and the mindless violence, I imagine, sir,’ Ayşe replied. ‘Little boys with big guns.’

  ‘Yes, little boys who will be stopped by our big boys – in the end.’

  Ayşe smiled. One of the things she really admired about İkmen was his unfailing belief in the power of good. Evil might have its day, but good would triumph in the end. At least that was what he always said to her. ‘So did you find anything out?’ she asked.

  ‘I found out that Ali’s friend rather approves of honour killings, like his boss Hakan Karabey,’ İkmen said. ‘But I don’t think he has actually performed one. I don’t think he’s mentally capable. Ali, on the other hand, is against such killings and was very open to the idea of keeping his ear to the ground amongst his fellow gangster fans. He said he’d never heard of or even imagined such a thing as payment for honour killing. He said that Tayfun certainly wouldn’t bother himself with such a venture, and I am inclined to believe him.’