‘You’re worried.’
‘I’m not comfortable,’ Süleyman said.
The baker who owned the shop downstairs had told them that he’d seen Miss Madrid come home with one of her students a couple of hours before. They’d gone into the apartment, and according to the baker, they had not left since.
‘What choice do we have?’ Süleyman said. He withdrew his gun from the holster underneath his jacket and with his free hand hammered his fist on the door. ‘Miss Madrid! Miss Madrid, it’s the police. Open up!’
Only silence washed back at him from inside the house. He looked down into the street below and was relieved to see that Gonca had finally done what she’d been told and gone home. She’d seen the look of panic in Süleyman’s eyes when Rambo had told him about Izabella Madrid and Murad Emin. The boy, she deduced, had to be a problem at the very least, possibly violent and dangerous. She had flown after her lover and his deputy and in the face of Süleyman’s entreaties had begged him not to go, pleading with him to send İzzet Melik on his own. The man from İzmir had rolled his eyes in despair at that point. Also at that point, Süleyman had rounded on her. Telling İzzet to go on ahead and wait for him outside the Ahrida Synagogue, he had looked her hard in the face and said, ‘I used you. Your insane behaviour forces me to finally tell you the truth. It was just sex, Gonca. You’re good, I’ll grant you. But you’re also old and I’m glad you finished it. Now I can find a woman of my own age.’
Then he’d walked away from her. At first she’d raced down the hill after him, hurling abuse. But once they had got near to the synagogue, her steps had slowed and she had just stopped and stared at him. Now, mercifully, she had gone.
‘Miss Madrid!’ İzzet yelled. ‘Open up!’
Still nothing happened. After a few moments, Süleyman told İzzet Melik to stand on the other side of the door, then he counted them both down to zero. They kicked in the door and stood back behind the walls on either side to look within. While Süleyman covered him with his pistol, İzzet took his torch out and shone it into the dark little apartment. From the front door they could see right through to Miss Madrid’s small living room. Straight as a ramrod she could be seen sitting up on a tall wooden dining chair. Her face was pale but not nearly as pallid as that of Murad Emin, who sat by her side. He was shaking and he had a gun up to her head.
‘Do you have any idea when Inspector İkmen will be able to talk to me?’ Saadet Seyhan asked the officer on the front desk. İkmen had apparently re-entered the station at some point, but now he was busy.
‘No.’ The officer didn’t even look up at her. Some newspaper or other was far more interesting.
‘Sir!’
‘I’ve told you!’
‘Please!’
Now he did look up and pointed to the back of the room where Lokman was reclining half asleep on the bench. ‘Go back to your son!’
‘Sir, I have urgent information for Çetin Bey!’ Saadet said. ‘Please! Please!’
‘Inspector İkmen is a very busy man,’ the officer said. ‘He’ll see you when he can and not before. Sit down or I’ll have both you and your son thrown out!’
As time had gone on, Saadet had become more and more desperate. She wanted to see İkmen, to get it over with, to have Cahit in custody before he fetched up at the station demanding that she and Lokman go home with him. İkmen had definitely returned from somewhere; she’d heard one of the other officers at the desk say so. But ever since then he’d been ‘busy’. It was pitch black outside now and she knew that Cahit had to be back from the brothel by this time. She feared what he was thinking, what he was imagining she and Lokman might be up to. More than anything she wanted to protect her last remaining child, even if he was Cahit’s son.
Before she left the desk she said, ‘I have urgent information for the inspector. About a case he wishes to solve. I can help him!’
‘Can you?’ The officer put his paper down and looked at her, for the first time, with just a small smile on his face.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I can! It’s about—’
‘You know we have a man who comes in here every day with “urgent” information for Inspector İkmen,’ the officer said. ‘It’s always about either Communists, aliens or the ghost of some Byzantine emperor.’
Saadet began to feel herself shrink. But she said, ‘I am not mad.’
‘That’s what he says,’ the officer said, and then he roared at her, ‘Sit down and wait your turn!’
Lokman, who had been asleep until then, looked around him with glazed, shocked eyes.
‘It’s my own stupid fault,’ the old woman said as she looked at the two policemen at the end of her hall. ‘I should have got rid of that gun years ago.’ She shrugged. ‘It was my father’s, he was very fond of it. I kept it on the piano. Just in case.’
‘Just in case?’
‘Just in case someone should try to rob me,’ Izabella Madrid said. She looked over at Murad Emin, whose sweaty hand now held that gun, and added, ‘You know my father fought in the War of Independence, with Atatürk. Fought the Greeks, the British, the French. That weapon came through all that with him. I reckoned that if it could protect him, it could protect me. But the world turns and things change and what do you know, now I’m going to be killed by it.’
She seemed very calm. But then as Süleyman had frequently observed, quite a few elderly people were calm when faced with their own mortality. ‘Is it loaded?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I always made sure of that.’
‘Murad, son,’ İzzet Melik said, ‘we just want to talk.’
‘No you don’t,’ the boy said. ‘You want to arrest me.’
‘What for?’ Süleyman asked. ‘Why would we want to arrest you?’
Murad Emin didn’t answer.
‘If it’s about the DVDs we found at the Tulip, then we do need to talk,’ Süleyman said. He didn’t mention that he thought that Murad could have killed his old piano teacher, Hamid İdiz. He didn’t want to alarm the boy, not in this position. ‘Watching that stuff isn’t good for you, Murad. The people who do those things are sick.’
‘No they’re not, they’re good Muslims!’ the boy said. ‘If the infidels will not change their ways, then they have to be killed.’
‘No they don’t,’ Süleyman said.
‘What do you know?’
‘I know that the Koran is a sacred and noble text that exhorts Muslims to care for others, to refrain from killing and to be understanding of and kind to unbelievers, whoever they are,’ he said.
The boy did not reply. So many kids like this, radicalised by shrill clerics, evil videos and toxic pamphlets, hadn’t even read the Koran. They just took in the bile of others to plug the gaps in their own sad, lonely or unfulfilled lives. Murad Emin, a musical genius, did not entirely fit that profile. But he was still angry, unstable and armed.
‘Miss Madrid has only ever had your best interests at heart, Murad,’ Süleyman said. ‘You don’t want to hurt her. Put the gun down and let’s talk.’
‘Why should I do that?’ He pushed the muzzle of the pistol still further into the old lady’s temple.
‘Because at the moment we have a situation that is not too serious,’ Süleyman said. ‘But if you pull that trigger, if you kill somebody . . .’
‘How do you know that I haven’t done that already?’ Murad said. ‘Have you thought about that? Have you wondered whether I may have killed someone else?’
Süleyman hadn’t wanted to even get near to any sort of discussion about Hamid İdiz, even though he thought that Murad might very well have killed him. Talk of İdiz would agitate the boy whichever way one looked at it. If he had killed him, he would be worried about what might happen to him now. If he hadn’t, then there could be more talk about ‘unbelievers’ and also no doubt about ‘sin’ and ‘perversion’ too.
‘Murad, this can be fixed,’ Süleyman said. ‘You are a very talented boy. This can all—’
‘With both my parents on the gear, my mother on the streets and absolutely no future? Who cares whether I can play the piano? I’m not like Ali Reza! I’m nobody!’ Murad’s face turned bright red. ‘There is only one way for me, and I have chosen that way.’
Süleyman looked at İzzet Melik, who was, he felt, thinking the same thing as he was. The boy was going to kill not Miss Madrid, but himself. In the ‘war’ that existed only in the twisted acts of violence that he glorified, Murad Emin was preparing himself to go to Paradise.
‘You know that it isn’t true, don’t you?’ Süleyman said.
‘What isn’t true?’
‘That people who kill themselves, for whatever reason, go straight to Paradise,’ he said. ‘It’s a lie.’
‘No it isn’t,’ the boy said without so much as a flicker of doubt.
‘Yes it is,’ Süleyman said. ‘Think about it. Why would we be created just to be destroyed? Why have earth at all if our time on it is not useful, philanthropic and joyful?’
This was not an argument that he’d just picked out of his head. It was something he had asked the extremists he had come across many times over the years. Their various replies were now summed up by Murad Emin.
‘Life is total obedience,’ he said. ‘Joy is a sin.’
Süleyman, at least, had just resigned himself to a long night of tension peppered with philosophical discussion, when he heard the sound of feet on the stairs up to the apartment behind him. He had called for uniformed back-up just before they went into the apartment, but he knew, or at least he hoped, that couldn’t be them. He had instructed them specifically to stay back until he told them otherwise. But footsteps there were, and although he wanted to look around to see who might be approaching, the fact that the boy had heard a noise he didn’t understand meant that Süleyman had to try and keep eye contact with him.
‘Who’s that?’ the boy asked. ‘Keep back! Keep back!’
Süleyman watched the old pistol push against Izabella Madrid’s head again. ‘It’s nothing, Murad, nothing at all!’
‘Yes it is!’ the boy said. His eyes were bright now, wide and bright and staring. He took the gun away from the old woman’s head and pointed it out in front. ‘Tell them to—’
‘Get back!’ Süleyman yelled. ‘Whoever you are, get back!’
‘Mehmet, I—’
The gun went off with such force that the boy completely lost his hold on it. It flew out of his hand, hit the floor and skidded to a halt beside İzzet Melik’s heavily shod feet.
The old woman screamed, Melik picked the gun up and Murad Emin collapsed in a fit of shuddering, screaming fury. Over at the door, Süleyman bent down to cradle Gonca the gypsy in his arms.
‘I came back,’ she said as she tried to staunch the blood that was pouring out of her abdomen, ‘to tell you that you are a bastard.’
Chapter 30
* * *
Saadet Seyhan finally got in to see Çetin İkmen just as news about the shooting in Balat was coming through. İkmen had taken a moment away from his so far fruitless interrogation of Cem Koç in order to find out what was happening. He had been very surprised to see Saadet, especially in company with her son Lokman. He had barely shut the door of the interview room when she said, ‘Çetin Bey, it was my husband, Cahit Seyhan. Kenan was right, Cahit killed Gözde!’
İkmen frowned. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Well, he didn’t actually kill Gözde himself,’ she said. ‘It was a sort of arrangement, you know, a . . . you know, a business thing . . .’
‘My mother believes, Inspector İkmen,’ Lokman Seyhan said, ‘that my father paid a man to kill my sister.’
‘Your mother believes?’
‘I have come around to the idea that she could be right,’ Lokman said. ‘Although I knew nothing about it at the time.’
‘My son knew nothing. Nothing!’ Saadet continued. She was tired and cold and hungry, but she was so elated to finally be in İkmen’s presence, finally able to get some justice for Gözde, that she was almost in tears. ‘But I did. I knew what evil that husband of mine would do! May Allah forgive me!’
‘Do you know who this man was?’ İkmen asked. ‘The one your husband employed to kill your daughter?’
‘If you mean do I know his name, then I don’t,’ she said. ‘But I did see him once, Çetin Bey. I cannot and will not ever forget his face.’
‘Well if you could give us a description . . .’ He also thought it might be a very good idea to get Saadet Seyhan to have a look at Cem Koç. ‘Mrs Seyhan, there is another—’
Ayşe came through the door without knocking.
‘Sergeant . . .’
‘Sir, may I speak to you?’ she said. She looked upset. ‘It’s urgent.’
İkmen excused himself to the Seyhans and went outside into the corridor. ‘What is it?’ he asked her. ‘What has happened?’
‘That shooting in Balat,’ Ayşe said. ‘Inspector Süleyman and Sergeant Melik were there!’
İkmen felt sick, but he put a calming hand on Ayşe’s shoulder and said, ‘Are they OK?’
‘I don’t know!’ Then she broke down. She liked İzzet Melik a lot and would miss him badly if he were to die. But for Süleyman to die was impossible for her to contemplate. Long, long ago they had been lovers, and she still had a lot of feelings for him.
İkmen took her gently over to the side of the corridor, out of the way of the increasing human traffic. ‘Ayşe, you must try to be calm,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you know.’
‘But I don’t . . . they . . .’
‘Tell me anything you know about the incident,’ İkmen said. ‘Anything.’
She took a deep breath to calm herself as much as she could and said, ‘All I know is . . . a woman has definitely been shot. I . . . Officers have taken her to the Jewish Hospital in Balat.’
‘Officers?’
‘I don’t know which officers,’ she said. ‘No one seems to know! No one knows if anyone apart from the woman has been hurt.’ And then her calm façade broke down again and she cried.
‘Ali Reza?’ Light from the many spotlights in the kitchen ceiling illuminated the boy dressed for the street and carrying a rucksack. He looked round at his mother, who stood in the kitchen doorway, blocking his exit. Sleep-sodden, her hair tangled into what looked like a nest on the top of her head, Mrs Zafir said, ‘What are you doing? It’s the middle of the night.’
‘I thought I might go out for a walk,’ Ali Reza said.
‘In the dark!’
‘Why not? It’s not raining.’
She walked forward and grabbed hold of his rucksack. He tried to stop her, but his mother was too quick for him.
‘Don’t!’
She unzipped the bag and looked inside. There were a lot of clothes, as well as Ali Reza’s asthma inhaler and also his passport. Mrs Zafir pulled that out of the bag and held it up for him to see. ‘What’s this for?’
Ali Reza looked down at the floor and said, ‘It’s my passport.’
‘I know what it is,’ she said. ‘What I want to know is why.’
The boy shrugged. He had been planning to get some food and drink for the journey, but that was probably out of the question now.
Mrs Zafir looked closely at her son. ‘Was it the police? Did they upset you coming here and asking questions?’
Well of course it was the police! They were the whole reason he was going. But he wasn’t going to tell her that. ‘No.’
‘Because I know you’ve been very upset and unsettled since Hamid Bey died,’ she said. ‘But Ali Reza you still have the competition to think about. That’s very important to you.’
‘I wasn’t going to leave or . . .’
‘Then why the passport?’ his mother said as she once again held the document aloft. ‘Ali Reza, I’m your mother, you must tell me the truth. I’m not going to move from here until you do.’
And that was, Ali Reza felt, a shame. Because what would have to happen next was not what h
e wanted to happen. He loved his mother, but she wouldn’t budge, so there was going to be no choice. No choice at all.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you.’ He smiled. Then, knowing exactly what her reply would be, he said, ‘Can I have some hot chocolate, please?’
She sighed with what he knew was relief. She felt she’d cracked him. ‘Mummy’s special? Of course,’ she said. His mother did make the absolute best hot chocolate in the world. He’d miss that. For a moment he thought that maybe he ought to let her make it for him one last time, but then he decided against it. She went over to the refrigerator and leaned inside to get the milk. Ali Reza picked up the heavy chopping board that was on the preparation island beside him and brought it down on her head with all his force. Mrs Zafir dropped to the ground without a murmur just as the boy’s father entered the kitchen to find out why his wife hadn’t come back to bed.
Once Dr Zafir had managed to wrestle his son to the ground and disarm and disable him, he checked his wife’s neck for any sign of a pulse. But there was nothing.
News travels fast in small, tight-knit communities. As soon as Gonca’s brothers and father knew what had happened, gypsies came from all over to wait outside the Jewish Hospital in Balat. They neither cried nor spoke but just stood in a large, silent group, waiting. Gonca was not their most moral or noble sister but she was a famous woman and a generous member of their community. Only her father and three of her brothers were allowed inside while the doctors performed the operation that could save her life.
İzzet Melik, whose job it was now to stay at the hospital and monitor the situation, introduced himself to Gonca’s family. Her brother Şukru, at least, already knew who he was.
‘You work with Inspector Süleyman,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ İzzet did not expand upon that and neither did the gypsy. ‘This is an excellent hospital. Your sister is in very good hands.’
‘The Jews are good at medicine,’ Gonca’s ancient walnut-coloured father said.
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