Arabesk

by Barbara Nadel

  'You'll be back soon enough.' Suleyman placed a hand gently on Ìkmen's thin shoulder, Ìkmen patted the hand with dry, skinny fingers.

  'Well, whatever happens, you have quite a cast of characters for this one, don't you?'

  Suleyman laughed. 'Men in bad shirts, people with low mental ages, superstars .. .'

  The lovely Tansu Hanim .. .'

  'Who I hope to see tonight, after we've made an official statement about Urfa's child. Everybody, via the press, will be aware that she's missing by then, but... I know it's always a risk but we need to get the whole country looking. Just because the father is both an adulterer and, from my short conversation with him, rather inarticulate, doesn't mean the child should suffer. I just hope that whoever killed her mother

  'Which is why,' Ìkmen said, reaching forward and embracing his friend once again, 'I think I might do a little research around just who these overpaid people are and exactly what they do. I may even, may Allah protect me, voluntarily listen to some of their music!'

  Some things that, at first sight, appear extremely eccentric can turn out to be quite logical in genesis. Istanbul's tiny underground railway, known as Tunel, is one. It is old, it is so cheap as to be totally unviable from a financial point of view and with only two stations on the 'line', one can hardly go far by this method. History, however, as is often true of so many odd phenomena, provides the logic needed to understand the existence of Tunel. Built by French engineers in 1875 it was designed to carry European merchants resident along the Grand Rue de Pera to and from their offices in Karaköy. Whilst under the ground these privileged foreigners would be well-protected from the extreme weather conditions of winter and summer and also from the pimps, prostitutes and other desperate subjects of the Sultan who for all remembered time have haunted this part of the city. So the merchants got their business done in comfort and without distress and the Sultan earned their gratitude if not their precious pounds, francs and Deutschmarks. These days, with the aid of a jeton priced at virtually nothing, one can ride Tunel in order to save oneself the effort of walking either up or down the Galata Hill. This is particularly useful for those who do not want to experience the excitements of some of the streets round about However, for a person to continually travel from top to bottom and vice versa for a whole afternoon is odd. Tunel may well be endlessly fascinating for railway enthusiasts but for a fat man who was obviously local and rather 'simple' to boot, it was bizarre. At least that was what the jeton vendor at the Karaköy end of the line thought when he called the police late that afternoon.

  To be fair, the police were discreet although the vendor couldn't help thinking that sending plainclothes detectives to deal with the man was a little over the top. The young redhead in charge took two others with him onto the platform to wait for the train. They even bought jetons which was very strange given what some of the local 'uniforms' did with regard to fare paying, which was basically nothing.

  When the little two-carriage train sighed to a halt at the bottom of its journey, Sergeant Çöktin scanned those people exiting the carriages for a man of large girth. His two colleagues stood at the barrier in order to look at people as they came past and indicated, as soon as the rush was over, that they had not found the man in question either. The first carriage being obviously empty, Çöktin moved quickly on to the second where his efforts were rewarded by the sight of a large man counting slowly on his fingers. With a brief movement of the head, Çöktin signalled to his colleagues to come and join him. He then sat down opposite the man and, when he had caught his eye, smiled.

  'Good match last night I thought,' he said, jauntily pandering to every red-blooded male's obsession, football.

  The man just stared glassily ahead of him, his mouth open and dry looking.

  'Not enough goals, but still plenty of excitement,' Çöktin persisted, taking great care not to mention either of the teams involved (Galatasaray and Besiktas) for fear of causing offence.

  'I haven't got enough money to get back up now.' The man may have been exaggeratedly round but his voice was quite unusually flat

  Çöktin felt all the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. 'Oh,' he said, 'that is unfortunate. Do you need to get home?'

  'Need to get back up. Keep going.'

  Çöktin's two colleagues moved to sit down behind the man.

  'Do you have a cigarette?' he asked Çöktin, putting out his hand, hopefully, for what may or may not be given to him.

  'You can't smoke in here,' Çöktin replied as the carriage doors swished shut

  'For later,' the man persisted, pushing one stubby ringer against Çöktin's knee.

  'Well, all right then.' Çöktin casually sorted through his pockets looking for his cigarettes. 'So what's your name then?'

  'It's . . .' His mouth, which had obviously not tasted a cigarette for some time, slavered expectantly as Çöktin slowly took a single cigarette from his packet.

  'Mr. . . ?' Holding the cigarette just slightly out of reach, Çöktin lifted one questioning eyebrow.

  'Cengiz,' the man said as he leaned forward to snatch the item from Çöktin's grasp. 'Got a light for it, have you? Got a light?'

  'We're not supposed to smoke in here, Cengiz, it's not—'

  'Cengiz Temiz,' the man said, reasoning, or so Çöktin thought later, that the revelation of his whole name might just make him change his mind with regard to the light

  With a glance at the driver who was patiently waiting outside, Çöktin leaned forward and lit the cigarette which now belonged to Cengiz Temiz.

  The doors of the carriage swished open.

  By the time most people were sitting down to their evening meal it was common knowledge that, firstly, Erol Urfa had a wife, secondly that the wife and not the star was not so much indisposed as dead, and thirdly that the Urfas' young daughter was missing. That extremely well-spoken police inspector told the nation that based upon the time of the woman's death the baby could have gone missing as early as the previous evening.

  One of those who had watched the television broadcast was a grey-faced Erol Urfa. Now ensconced, at least temporarily, in the lounge of Ibrahim Aksoy's Sisli apartment, he looked at the plate of chicken and beans that now sat in front of him almost with horror.

  'You should eat that.' Aksoy said as he poured himself yet another large raki. 'It will make you feel better.'

  'No, it won't.' His voice, which was as dead as his eyes, bluntly expressed the reality of the situation. With his wife dead and the baby Merih still missing, Erol Urfa was not going to feel better for some considerable time to come.

  Ibrahim Aksoy sat down on the sofa beside his protege’ and sighed.

  After a while, Erol Urfa spoke once again, of terrible things, in the distant tones of one who has experienced more than he or she can bear. 'I keep thinking about the word "murder!'‘ he said, 'but when I think it and I see Ruya's face I cannot put the two together. Who would want to kill her? I just don't know.'

  'You know that the police are going to interview Tansu. don't you?' Aksoy, although now outwardly recovered from his earlier interrogation by the police, still shook just a little when he spoke directly of the day's grim events.

  With some obvious difficulty, Urfa turned his tension-wracked neck to look into his manager's face. 'But Tansu knew all about Ruya. She accepted the situation. She is from a country family, she knows how things are.'

  'Perhaps,' Aksoy said as he cut and then lit a Very large cigar, 'you should tell the police about how it really is with you and Tansu.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Well, I mean how it's basically for publicity. The old sex goddess and the smooth young country boy. All that fantasy stuff that makes those hoards of middle-aged women and their silly teenage daughters buy your music'

  Erol Urfa's long, almond-shaped eyes closed up just a little, indicating that, angry as he now appeared, he was still under some sort of sedation. 'Although I know that publicity was your only intention when you intro
duced Tansu and me, I thought you knew by now that I love her.'

  ‘You do? Really?'

  'If I did not, why would I be with her, sleep in her bed, give myself totally to her?' Then suddenly with a muscular fierceness he took hold of Ibrahim Aksoy roughly by the collar. 'What kind of man do you think I am, Ibrahim?'

  'All right! Calm down!' Aksoy cried as he pulled Urfa's fingers away from his neck. 'I just thought that what with her being so old and you—'

  'You thought me the kind of man who would do anything to become famous? Well, I can understand that even if it is not so.' With calm but determined fingers, he took the cigar from Aksoy's mouth- and placed it in his own. 'But I am not that man. I love Tansu because she makes me feel things no other woman can. She treats me like a Sultan, she knows everything. And she loves me.'

  'So why - forgive me, Erol, but I am confused now - did you bring Ruya here if you felt that way about Tarisu?'

  Erol Urfa gave Aksoy back his cigar and then put his hands up to his face. He gently rasped his chin with his fingers. 'Because I am a man of honour. Because we were betrothed as children.' Then looking up quickly at Aksoy he added, 'What is written cannot be unwritten. Not even love can do that'

  Inwardly Ibrahim Aksoy gave thanks that he, with his well-known propensity towards multiple lovers, was neither from the country nor of 'mountain Turk' extraction. The customs of these people, or so it seemed, were imbued with a rigidity that transcended both wealth and social position.

  That police inspector won't arrest Tansu, will he?' Erol Urfa asked.

  'I don't know.'

  'She didn't kill Ruya. I know this.' Ibrahim Aksoy frowned. 'How do you know? Were you with Tansu last night?'

  'No.'

  'So where were you?'

  The young man looked down at the large and complicated kilim at his feet 'I was with a friend. I told the policeman.'

  'The inspector with the bad smell under his nose?'

  'No. The other one.' He turned away as he spoke as if he did not want Aksoy to see his eyes. 'The one with the red hair. We spoke,' and then turning back, his eyes now full of tears, he added, 'you know?'

  'Ah.' He had, Aksoy recalled now, vaguely wondered about the young policeman with the slightly harsh accent. So he had spoken to Erol in what must be their own language, had he? Silently he wondered whether the urbane Inspector Suleyman was aware of this fact He wondered at a still deeper level just who this friend Erol had been with was and whether he or she or the events that were now crowding around his charge would have any impact upon sales of Erol's latest album. Not that he could air such views to Erol without looking like a heartless dog.

  As the images on the television moved from factual news items into that strange, land that is inhabited by dubbed Brazilian soap operas, Aksoy leaned forward to switch the set off. As he reached out, a woman who looked not unlike Tansu thrust her heaving breasts towards the face of an elderly man wearing a bad wig.

  'Do you think my daughter is dead, Ibrahim?'

  Aksoy pushed the ‘Off' button and then slid back into his seat again. He didn't know. How could he? In so many ways Erol was like a small child with his constant asking of impossible questions. How? What? Why? When? He had come to the city like this and, unlike other migrants who had built a kind of cynical second skin, he had remained childlike in this respect. If he didn't know him better, Aksoy would think that perhaps Erol was using this innocence of his to cover .. . To cover what? To cover the fact that perhaps he was capable and willing to ki—

  'I don't know what has happened to Merih any more thanyou do, Erol.' He spoke quickly, anxious to block out what was developing into a worrying thought. There were whole swathes of Erol's time outside of work and Tansu and his publicity that he knew absolutely nothing about Time, he imagined, Erol spent with his own kind.

  'Yes, but—'

  And then the telephone rang. As he went to pick it up, Ibrahim Aksoy noticed that Erol Urfa did not take his eyes off his face for a second. He hoped the young man couldn't sense what he was thinking.

  Suleyman switched the car radio off as soon as Tansu Hanim's familiar voice floated out of the machine. He'd had quite enough of that for one night He took a tape at random out of the glove compartment and he pushed it into me machine. He was pleased to discover that the music he had chosen was Dvorak's New World Symphony - civilised and yet, to him, undemanding. The music together with the inky darkness of the night provided some little comfort for his tired mind. He still had to remain alert enough to be able to get home, or rather to Cohen's place which was the nearest thing he had to home now, but it was a whole lot easier without that woman's raucous tones in his ear.

  Just over two hours ago he had entered a house that quite frankly beggared belief. Tansu's home combined the worst excesses of progressive architecture with the tastes of a person who would be far more comfortable in what remained of the old gecekondu shanty districts. The woman herself, who had greeted him lying prone across a large pink sofa, had he could see, been beautiful at some point. Small and thin with the exception of her enormous silicone-enhanced breasts, Tansu Hanim did indeed look a lot younger than her years until one went up close. Even the thick make-up couldn't hide either the old acne scars or the quite livid tracks of the plastic surgeon's knife. Magazine photographs could be air-brushed, movie cameras could have any number of filters available for close-ups, but real life was quite different and Tansu the star was not the same as Tansu in the flesh.

  He'd been ushered into 'the presence' by a woman who announced herself as Tansu's sister. Although possessed of the same platinum-blonde hair and a fairly extensively renovated face, the similarities between the two stopped there. While Latife went off to make tea with her very own hands, her sister wept copiously for her 'beloved’ Erol Urfa and for the tragedy that had so recently overwhelmed him. It had of course been Tansu who had, via a few well-chosen words about her lover's supposed 'indisposition', sent the press corps screaming up' to the apartment on Ìstiklal Caddesi. In a civilised block like the Ìzzet Apartments, Suleyman had been able to keep the crime scene unusually discreet; since so few people actually knew that Erol had aflat there, it was really quite easy. Until, that is, Tansu's performance at the officers' club. That alone made him dislike her and as he'd struggled to get any sort of sense from her thickly rouged mouth, his feelings had become more and more hostile.

  All she could talk of was Erol Urfa. Although she did from time to time, briefly, express her sorrow at his wife's death and the disappearance of his daughter, most of her words alluded to how she was feeling. But then some of these older women who had younger lovers were both obsessed and desperate to retain their affections. But Suleyman quickly turned his mind away from that particular subject and thought about what he had actually learned from the conversation with Tansu.

  Erol had not been with her on the night of the murder. According to Çöktin, Urfa had been with some old friend of his from back east. No name had, as yet, been forthcoming but Suleyman had already determined to question Urfa himself at the earliest possible opportunity. Çöktin had spoken to the star in his own language, exhibiting an implicit solidarity that may or may not have been helpful with regard to the extraction of information. Tansu had been at home all that evening, mainly sitting out on her veranda which had become, or so she said, so pleasant since she'd had a nearby wasps' nest destroyed. Her sister said that she had been with her on the veranda too, for all that was worth. Of the woman's two brothers, the eldest, Galip, had been at the Inonu Stadium watching the football match live while apparently the younger one, Yilmaz, had watched the match on television. Both men had been co-operative in a bemused sort of way until, that is, their sister, finally catching on that she could be a suspect in this affair, became quite hysterical during the middle part of the interview. Leaping like a cat, all claws bared, from her sickbed, she had paced the room spitting verbal bile at quite imaginary accusers for some time. Suleyman had been horribly embarrassed at
the time. It had been ' difficult, after that, to have any sympathy for a woman who was, though ageing, still a spoilt, vicious child at heart Suleyman knew he would have to take care not to condemn her out of hand. She, if anyone, had good reason to want Ruya Urfa dead but there was nothing, as yet, to connect either her or her relatives directly to the scene.

  But time would tell. Forensic had lifted several sets of fingerprints from the apartment, as well as some faint footprints. Soon the process of identifying to whom these belonged would begin, as would the interrogation of Cengiz Temiz who had been discovered finally on a Tiinel train. According to Çöktin he would say absolutely nothing beyond denying that he had killed Ruya Urfa. Now down in the cells for the night, he would have, ample time, if he were capable of such thoughts, to reconsider his words. His parents had, apparently, already engaged one of the city's top defence lawyers.

  The mobile telephone that was sitting on the seat beside him buzzed into life. Suleyman picked it up and put it to his ear.

  'Suleyman.'

  'Hello, it's Sarkissian. Just thought I'd let you know that the cyanide that killed Mrs Urfa was administered in a sweet.'

  'Oh?'

  'Yes, almond halva to be precise. Clever, eh?'

  An almond sweet to cover the smell of the bitter poison? Yes, it was, and if Çöktin was right about Cengiz Temiz, it was far too clever for him.

  'Thank you’ Doctor,' Suleyman said at last. 'Will I see you in the morning?'

  'You will. Your office. At what time?'

  'About nine.'

  The doctor laughed. 'You rise too early for me. Make it ten and I'll be there.'

  'I look forward to it' Suleyman smiled as he switched the phone off again.

  So Mrs Urfa was seduced to her death by sweet things, was she? No remnants of the sweet had been found outside of Ruya Urfa's body, which suggested that whoever had given her the halva had taken the residue away with them. After, that is, he or she had watched the victim fight for breath and then die. Cyanide, which is a very quick-acting agent, robs the bloodstream of oxygen thereby effectively asphyxiating the victim.