Arabesk

by Barbara Nadel

  Tm sure he does.' Ìkmen said, bent down to smile at the waking baby. 'Come on, let's get you to my office.'

  He led the way across the reception area and up the two flights of stairs to the offices. As they mounted the second flight the sound of Ìkmen's coughing was augmented by small whimpers from Merih.

  'I think she probably needs a feed,' Erol said.

  'Uh,' Ìkmen replied, the grunt being the only noise his congested lungs could manage at this point

  At the top of the second flight, while Ìkmen gasped painfully for air, Dr Ìrfan Akkale closed the door to the corridor behind him and made to descend the stairs. Until he saw Ìkmen. Peering closely into the inspector's greenish-white face, he said, 'What are you doing here, Ìkmen? If you have a coronary here when you should be at home, I take no responsibility.'

  'Yes, Dr .. .' Ìkmen gasped.

  'You're a very silly man!' And then with a brief 'Good evening' to Erol Urfa, Akkale descended the stairs.

  When they finally arrived at Ìkmen's office, Erol asked, 'So are you sick then, Inspector?'

  Ìkmen breathed in deeply and replied on this exhalation, 'I have a stomach ulcer, but it doesn't really bother me.'

  Erol placed Merih's seat on one of the chairs in front of Ìkmen's desk and then riffled in the bag on his shoulder until he located a bottle of milk. Merih took the drink he offered to her greedily.

  'You didn't look terribly well just now,' Erol said, feeding the child while looking at Ìkmen. 'If you will forgive me saying so.'

  Ìkmen smiled. 'I just have a few problems with stairs sometimes,' he said as he shuffled various large piles of paper around on his filthy, beloved desk. He had missed all of this sorely - the disorder, the smell, the thrill of the chase ...

  With a sigh of contentment, he flung himself down into the depths of his battered leather chair and watched the young man feed the baby across the top of a mountain of files. It wasn't that he suddenly came to the realisation that the combination of children and work constituted his own personal paradise, the sights and smells around him were just a reaffirmation of what he personally was about And that felt good. Now if he just had a cigarette or two ...

  'So, was there anything in particular you wanted to see Inspector Suleyman about?' Ìkmen said as he threw his feet up onto his desk.

  Erol sighed. 'Yes. But. ..'

  'Oh, you don't have to tell me,' Ìkmen said in tones of one who really couldn't care less. 'I was just as you can imagine, a bit curious about the statement that man who was with you made.'

  'You mean Ibrahim, my manager?'

  'If that was the rather inebriated gentleman . . .'

  'Yes.'

  Ìkmen shrugged. 'It was what he said about professional suicide. Sort of piqued my interest. But no matter.'

  They sat in silence for a while, the gentle sound of the baby's feeding interrupted only by the distant strains of Arabesk music from the street below. But there was a tension around Erol Urfa that Ìkmen felt signalled both a reluctance and at the same time an urgent desire to talk. At length, the policeman felt that the time had come to break the silence.

  'So, if you don't mind my asking,' Ìkmen said’ 'did your late wife and Tansu Hanim ever meet?' 'Yes, once, at a party.' ‘Oh?'

  'It was about a year ago,' he said, looking, Ìkmen felt, very sadly at his now motherless child, 'although to be honest they hardly spoke. But then they wouldn't would they?'

  Ìkmen smiled. 'I suppose not'

  'Although Latife, Tansu's sister, was very kind to Ruya, I must say. She sat and talked to her for quite some time. Ruya was very . . . very awkward in company.' He smiled once again at his child and made small cooing noises to her.

  'Did Tansu or her sister ever see your wife again?'

  'No. From then on Ruya was alone except when I was with her.'

  That was the country way, Ìkmen thought recalling all those little towns he had visited as a young man, towns out east that were, to all intents and purposes, entirely populated by men drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. Which reminded him . . .

  Both the personal appearance and home of Mr Resat Soylu came as no surprise to Suleyman. At around fifty, Soylu was a flat-capped, heavy-smoking brown nut of a peasant. And although he would probably have liked a little more material wealth out of life, the three-room apartment he shared with his veiled wife and severe-looking daughter was both clean and comfortable. Indeed, with the exception of the vast array of plants growing in old oil cans on the balcony and the hugely ornate chandelier in the living room, it was not unlike Cohen's place.

  Once the preliminaries of assuring Mr Soylu that he was not actually in any kind of trouble were over, the peasant called for tea and sat Suleyman down upon the only proper chair in the room. This was directly underneath the chandelier which, the gardener told the policeman with some pride, had come all the way from Munich. When the tea arrived and Mrs Soylu had once again made herself scarce, Suleyman started to question her husband.

  'I understand you garden for quite a few families in Yeniköy,' he said, 'including Mr and Mrs Ertiirk and the Emins.'

  'I do have that honour, yes,' the peasant replied. 'Allah, in his goodness, has always favoured my poor hands with sufficient work.'

  A little embarrassed by this effusive outpouring of religious largesse, Suleyman took a sip from his tea glass and said, 'Good.'

  Mr Soylu, pleased that Suleyman appeared to approve of him, did what a lot of peasant men do and sank back into a state of contented, straight-faced silence. With a small string of plastic worry beads in his hands, he could just as easily have been sitting beneath a tree in Cyprus or in the corner of a coffee house in distant Erzurum.

  'I understand,' Suleyman eventually offered as he sought to penetrate the clamorous stillness around his host, 'that you poisoned some rats for Mr and Mrs Ertürk. Is that correct?'

  'Yes.'

  The wife, all knotted and draped scarves, put in a brief appearance until the slow lizard-like gaze of her husband caused her to flee to another part of the property.

  'Could you tell me then, Mr Soylu,' Suleyman persisted, 'what sort of poison you used for this purpose?'

  'Cyanide.'

  He might just as well have been talking about tea, ayran or some other totally innocuous substance for all the emotion that showed, or rather failed to show, on Resat Soylu's flat, brown face.

  'And you obtained this very dangerous substance from where?'

  For the first time the peasant smiled, large fissures appearing around his eyes and down his cheeks, like those great, dry cracks left behind by earthquakes. 'From my brother in Germany,' he said and then, amazingly, elaborated, 'like my chandelier. Germany is a great bazaar of all good things. I have never been, but my brother has lived there for ten years now.' Shaking his head against the sheer wonder of the thing, he added, 'He drives a BMW and has a German wife. Not that her people will speak to my brother.'

  'Indeed.' For Suleyman, a one-word answer seemed the safest course of action at this point. Turks had been going to work in Germany for many years, and for many years had consequently come home with quality consumer goods and, occasionally, blonde-haired wives or husbands. These Europeans, although they did not always look down on their Turkish spouses themselves, usually possessed families who did that for them - people who found the Turks both primitive and backward. Suleyman's argument that the Ottomans were taking baths and writing courtly poetry when the ancestors of so many 'Hermans' and 'Dieters' were mere excrement-encrusted vassals of the Holy Roman Empire was far too vehement for the current situation, not to mention totally inaccessible to the likes of Mr Soylu.

  'And your brother obtained the substance from where?' Suleyman asked, hoping to rouse Mr Soylu from his Bavarian ecstasy.

  'He works at a steel plant,' Soylu said, adding proudly, 'in the Ruhr Valley. He brought it back with him because I asked him to. German cyanide kills far more pests than ours.'

  'Right' Not wishing to continue wit
h this theme of German superiority, Suleyman said, 'So does it work for other pests too?'

  'I've used it for wasps, to kill their nests.' 'Was it you who killed the nest at the Emin property?'

  Soylu smiled. 'Yes. That was a huge one. But I got it Tansu Hanim was very grateful.'

  Suleyman took another sip from his tea glass and then placed it on the small table beside him. 'So when you eliminate these pests,' he said, 'do you ever have any poison left over at the end of the process?'

  'Yes.'

  'What happens to it? Do you bring it back here with you?'

  Soylu smiled again and then got up and walked out into his kitchen. During the silence that wafted in in his wake, Suleyman regarded the posters of Rhineland castles that adorned every wall with a jaundiced eye. If these people would only take a little interest in their own noble past, perhaps they might be able to free themselves from, what to him, appeared to be the most awful cultural servitude.

  When he returned, Soylu was carrying a large glass container that looked like something in which one might brew beer. It contained a darkish yellow liquid.

  'I have all I need here,' he said as he held the vessel aloft for Suleyman to see.

  The policeman walked over to the man and, taking the cork out of the top of the bottle, sniffed at the liquid inside. Bitter almonds, unmistakable.

  'I take it' he said as he replaced the stopper firmly in the neck, 'that you don't carry this with you to and from your various jobs.'

  'No. I decant it into smaller bottles. Raki are the best'

  Suleyman went back to his seat while Mr Soylu put enough cyanide down on the floor to kill most of the inhabitants of that district.

  'So when you've killed the rats or wasps' nest or whatever, if there is any poison left over . ..'.

  'I leave it there,' Soylu said simply. 'All my people have greenhouses. I leave it there.'

  'In old raki bottles.'

  'Yes.'

  Suleyman rolled his eyes to heaven in disbelief. 'Doesn't it worry you that someone might mistake it for drink?'

  Soylu shrugged. ‘I hide it well and at the Emin house it is clearly marked what it is.'

  A frown creased Suleyman's brow. 'Only at the Emin house? Why only there?'

  Although he was obviously not terribly bothered about what he said next, Soylu exhibited just a little shame when he lowered his eyes briefly to the ground. 'I can't read or write so Miss Emin writes the labels for me. None of my other employers take as much interest in the garden as she does.'

  Suleyman felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise as he asked his next question. "This is, I take it, Miss Latife Emin and not her sister Tansu?'

  Soylu grinned. 'Yes,' he said, 'she just loves to tend the plants and trees, you know. A proper country girl.'

  Suleyman felt the gravity of expression that overtook his face as he asked, 'And is cyanide at the Emin house now?'

  'Oh, yes. Enough to kill another nest if need be. They do have a lot of problems with wasps and so that's quite possible.' He lit a cigarette and then threw the dead match down beside the bottle of cyanide. 'Just not worth bringing it back here when I've got all this lot anyway, is it?' he said as he patted the side of the sinister receptacle.

  Suleyman watched, fascinated, as the gnarled peasant stroked his gently lapping personal lake of death.

  Orhan Tepe, whilst not having anything against his colleague, Ìsak Çöktin, was not exactly his best friend either. And although the man was pleasant enough to pass the time of day with, being incarcerated in a hot car with him was not easy. As the sun began to set over the distant fortress of Rumeli Kavagi and both men started to contemplate a long night together, conversation finally came to a standstill.

  It was impossible to deduce from Çöktin's fixed, blank expression anything of what he was thinking but Tepe's far more mobile face eloquently illustrated the strains and boredom inherent in long stretches of observation. Quite often such work would, once those being observed began to move, involve some sort of action on the part of the officers looking on. Pursuit of those moving on was quite common, as was the investigation of the property recently vacated. But not this time. The task at hand was merely to watch, take note and call in any outside activity or unusual occurrence within the property. To say that it was dull was an understatement After all, a person can only look at an old Ottoman gateway and ugly house beyond for so long.

  'So what's Tansu Hanim actually like, then?' Tepe asked, for want of anything more interesting to say.

  Çöktin, his eyes still fixed on the gateway, shrugged. 'I don't know.'

  'Well, you met her, didn't you?'

  'Yes.'

  A little aggravated by his partner's short and uninterested answers, Tepe said, somewhat aggressively, 'And so?'

  Turning briefly to look at the dark, annoyed man at his side, Çöktin replied, 'So she's a middle-aged woman who has a young lover, what do you want me to say?'

  'It's said she's got a bad temper, that she's controlling.'

  ‘I met her only briefly,' Çöktin said. 'What would I know?'

  Çöktin's tone, which was decidedly sulky, finally got to Tepe, who raised his voice. 'I don't know why you're so hostile about it!'

  'I'm not hostile!' Çöktin said as he turned a very hostile face on his colleague. I'm as tired and bored as you are! Plus, considering the fact we've allowed Tansu Hanim to go because we have no reason to detain her, I don't actually see the point of all this.'

  'But if Suleyman ordered it—'

  'He ordered it under the direction of Ìkmen and we all know,' he said, his face resolving into a scowl, 'what he's like.'

  Tepe frowned. 'What do you mean?'

  'I mean he goes off onto his own private missions.'

  'Which frequently prove to be very valuable. And if I do eventually get to work with him I will feel very honoured.' Tepe eyed Çöktin closely. 'Anyway, I thought you liked him, I thought you got on well.'

  'I do like him.' He lit a cigarette and then puffed hard on it for a few moments. 'I just don't always understand what he's thinking.'

  Tepe laughed. 'That's the whole point,' he said. 'He's an enigma. He likes it that way, it's part of his legend.'

  'I find it unnerving,' Çöktin said with an almost visible shudder.

  'If you have something to hide then it probably is,' Tepe replied, unwittingly bringing to a close any discussion of that particular topic.

  Çöktin cleared his throat as he watched several lights come on at the front of the Emin house. It had been a long day for all of the residents and he wondered, in view of recent events, whether Erol had now rushed to Tansu's side. That he loved her was evident. But whether or not he would now break his vow to keep some, distance between them was not clear. Çöktin could not see Erol's car, though it might be parked at the back of the property.

  'So do you have any ideas about who might have killed the Urfa woman?' Tepe said as he turned the air conditioning up a notch.

  'No. Do you?'

  Tepe shrugged. 'I'd still put money on Tansu.'

  Çöktin turned to look at his colleague. 'Why?'

  'Female rivalry. In my opinion, most women will content themselves with just one man.' He smiled. "They're not like us. I mean men lived very happily with harems for centuries. It was the women who fought and plotted against each other. They don't like sharing and they don't usually, have the wit to look elsewhere.'

  'If they do we call them sluts.'

  'Which they are.' He stopped speaking to peer closely at the long driveway that led to Tansu's house. 'Is that some movement down by that garage or . . .'

  Çöktin, too, looked in the direction indicated and then tipped his head slightly backwards to signify his assent. 'Yes.'

  'You can't see who it is, can you?'

  At the distance they were from the scene it was almost impossible to identify people as anything more than just blobs. 'No. Except that there are two of them.'

  'The car looks li
ke a . . .' Tepe considered just what exactly the low-slung, bright red sports model might be for a few seconds before he said, 'a Ferrari, I think.'

  ‘Mmm.'

  As the two officers watched, someone switched the car lights on and, moments later, the vehicle started moving forward.

  'Well, someone's going somewhere,' Tepe said as he put his own lights on and turned the key in the ignition.

  Çöktin, who was watching the approaching vehicle intently now, observed that even for a high-performance model, the Ferrari was being driven by someone who was obviously in a hurry. Even with the motor of their own car ticking over beneath them, both the officers could clearly hear the loud roar of its highly tuned engine. By the expression on his face, Tepe, at least, showed that he was very impressed.

  The vehicle pulled up, very sharply, in front of the large main gates’ Leaving the engine running and the door open, a figure emerged from the driver's side. It was quite clearly a woman.

  'Tansu,' Tepe said in response to the sight of white-blonde hair and a voluminous fur coat. It was not an assessment Çöktin could easily argue with.

  Frantically, as if pressed for time to an almost unbearable extent, the woman fumbled with the padlock on the gates until she managed to free it from the wrought iron that surrounded it Then, pushing the gates open just enough to allow the car to pass through, she ran back to the Ferrari, taking the padlock with her. A terrible gunning sound was heard as she revved the engine-hard. And as the brake was released the vehicle shot forward towards the road.

  'You'll have to really move to keep up with that thing,' Çöktin said to Tepe as the latter put the car into gear and took the handbrake off.

  ‘I hope that wasn't a criticism of my driving.'

  'I wouldn't dare!' Çöktin said, acknowledging the intimate relationship that exists between the Turkish male and his car.

  Tepe's foot had just pushed down hard onto the accelerator pedal when the sickening crunch that brought the Ferrari's progress to a halt occurred. The vehicle it appeared to have just rammed was a lorry, the driver of which was already out of his cab and yelling loudly.

  However, there was as yet no sign of life from inside the buckled Ferrari.