The Serenity Murders

by Mehmet Murat Somer

  Something had happened to Hüseyin’s manner of speaking. He was saying things I’d never heard him say before. His tone of voice, choice of words, and the way he referred to himself in the first-person plural were all typical shantytown kahve-speak and very unlike him. After all, Hüseyin had an impeccable reputation for minding his manners in even the most distasteful situations.

  I had no intention of putting on a show for the neighbors—especially not for that nosy Ferdı, who for some strange reason fancied himself my equal and imagined an affinity between us—by screaming and shouting outside the front door. Interestingly enough, the only dark apartments in the building were mine and Ferdı’s. The lights were on in all the others. I got in the car. Not in the back as I normally would, but in the front, next to him.

  “I can’t believe my ears,” I said in all earnestness. “What’s with the jargon? Where’d you pick that up from?”

  He stared at me blankly, as if I had just said the oddest thing in the world. He’d normally smile at times like this. But this time he didn’t.

  “Say something, ayol!” I finally exclaimed, losing my temper.

  “You should be doing the talking. You’re the one who asked us to come over and said it was important.”

  He was right. I took a deep breath.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just a little out of sorts.”

  I explained the situation to him. I skipped the bit about Audrey’s film. I just told him I didn’t want to go into my apartment alone.

  “I get it. You’re going to use us as bait. We’re supposed to go in and see if there’s a trap or something.” He was really on a roll with that first-person plural, and he had no intention of dropping it.

  “No,” I said. “There’s no trap. I just didn’t feel like going in on my own.”

  All of a sudden his face lit up. I could almost see the dirty thoughts racing through his mind.

  “No,” I said again, “it’s not what you think.”

  I wouldn’t want him to get his hopes up in vain. Besides, I was fasting.

  “What am I thinking?” he said, wearing a smirk.

  “I know what you’re thinking, ayol. We can sit down and have a cup of coffee. Or beer, if you’d prefer.”

  I don’t like beer myself, but I always keep some in the fridge for visitors. It has become popular again these days. I think it’s the influence of American movies. Even those men from whom you’d least expect the answer “Beer” when you ask them what they’d like to drink. And from the can, nonetheless! Whereas in the old days, only aged uncles drank beer, and even they preferred it from the bottle.

  Before we’d even set foot through the door, I already regretted having invited Hüseyin over. He was going to keep hitting on me, and would do everything in his power to make me horny and seduce me. A past mistake was coming back to haunt me. But then, as far as I could recall, his performance was really too good to be categorized as a mistake. And even that was after he’d suffered a thorough beating and his entire body was in pain. But I was fasting. No way were the thoughts that crossed my mind going to come to pass.

  I tried to picture Master Sermet’s dead body in my mind’s eye. If I could picture it vividly enough, I would be filled with rage toward the psycho killer, and thus be able to suppress my bodily desires.

  If Satan did exist, he certainly worked hard at moments like this. Seduction, deviation, denial, recklessness: it was all his doing. Not only was I failing to picture Master Sermet, but my adventure with Hüseyin was springing to life in my imagination, and in a very physical sense.

  I chased away my pornographic thoughts. It was times like these that called for a will of iron. Thinking back on my past, though, I realized that perhaps I shouldn’t put too much trust in my own willpower. My record on that front, admittedly, was hardly impressive.

  8.

  Of course, there was no one in my apartment. The answering machine had recorded dozens of messages and the light on it was flashing. I quickly had a look around the apartment, with Hüseyin trailing behind me. We collided the first time I turned around. He smiled that smile he believed to be sexy. I ignored it and carried on looking. I even looked in the closet. There wasn’t a soul. No one had hidden a snake, spider, scorpion, or centipede. You see, I’m not very fond of those particular hundred-legged creatures. I breathed a sigh of relief. Phew!

  I gave Hüseyin, who had stretched himself out on the sofa and was scratching his chest, a can of beer.

  “Switch the television on if you like,” I said. “I’ve got a couple of things to do inside.”

  “Do you have any movies?” he asked. “Like DVDs…”

  It was blatantly obvious that he was not referring to arthouse films.

  One could, out of sheer spite, have presented him with a gloomy Theo Angelopoulos film in which each scene seemed to last for an eternity. But I didn’t.

  The phone rang before Hüseyin even had a chance to open his beer. I answered it.

  “Who’s the guy you’re with?” said the now familiar voice.

  I was startled. He couldn’t be spying on me.

  “Hello!” I said.

  “Who is he?” he repeated.

  “Who is this?”

  “You know who it is. Stop pretending you don’t. It hardly becomes you.”

  Hüseyin had understood, either from the tone of my voice or the way the blood drained from my face, that something wasn’t quite right. He came to my side and pinned his questioning gaze on me.

  “Hello…” I said timidly.

  “You’re not as crafty as I’d hoped you’d be. You haven’t lifted a finger. I’m beginning to think you don’t really care all that much for those friends of yours. You spend all your time cruising around the city. It hardly becomes you.”

  I held the handset away from my ear a bit so that Hüseyin could hear too. The entire studio audience had heard his voice, there was no reason why he shouldn’t hear it too.

  “What is it you want?”

  “For you to find me. That is, if you can. When you catch me and see who I am, oh, you’re going to love it…But then, I’m afraid you never will catch me, not at this rate.”

  His self-confidence was annoying. He recounted his crimes in a perfectly nonchalant tone, as if letting me know he’d had beans for lunch.

  “Why should I catch you? The police can take care of it,” I said, though even I didn’t believe that for a minute. He burst out in hysterical laughter.

  “They’re not cut out for it,” he said. “You’re the only person who could possibly understand my clues. That is, if you’re as smart as you claim to be.”

  “But why?” I pleaded. “Why?”

  “C’mon, we’re playing a game here,” he answered cheerfully. “Think about it! A mind game! The great race, the grand chase! Tracking down your prey! And in the end, the big prize: me! And it’s more real than any of the games we’ve played so far, believe you me!”

  It seemed I was up against a genuinely pathological nutcase. If this really was how his brain worked, even if he was caught, he’d beat the rap in the end. All he had to do was plead insanity. They’d lock him up in a mental institution for three or four years, and then as soon as the first amnesty came along he’d be released for good behavior.

  “My phone is being tracked,” I told him.

  “What a joke, right! I’m calling you on a mobile. You’ll find the number, but not where I am. The convenience of pay-as-you-go.”

  But of course! It was as if the whole pay-as-you-go scheme had been created as a simple convenience for psychos like him. Picking up one of those SIM cards was as simple as buying a pack of cigarettes. After all, both were available at any local corner store. Call whomever you want whenever you want and say whatever you want. And no one can track you down.

  He stopped laughing and resumed speaking in his cold voice. “You haven’t answered my question. Who is he?”

  “Are you spying on me?”

  “What you do, wher
e you go, who you see…I know all of it.”

  So I was being followed, watched. What was it they said? Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not really after you. Or was it the opposite?

  “I don’t want to play this game,” I said. “You understand? I don’t want to, ayol!”

  “Oh, he’s losing his temmm-per! And doesn’t he sound cute,” he said, chuckling again. And then, returning to his dull tone of voice once more, he added, as serious as a heart attack, “Who is he?”

  Hüseyin moved his mouth toward the handset and yelled, “What’s it to you, you son of a bitch?”

  That was, in my opinion, uncalled for. There was simply no need to go driving the lunatic up the wall.

  “If you don’t tell me, I’ll find out myself. It’s not that hard, not at all. But it would be a shame. He sounds young. Now you’re going to make me change the order of the victim list. Watch out, sport. You’re next!”

  Hüseyin let out another, “Fuck off!”

  “Well, well! Our gentleman’s got a foul mouth on him, now, doesn’t he? It’s so unbecoming.”

  He was making fun of us, plain and simple, playing the distasteful game he himself had set up. But even cat and mouse was fairer than this. At least the mouse knew and saw who his enemy was, and could run and hide accordingly.

  “I’m not playing any games with you,” I said dryly. “You don’t even play by your own rules. You said you’d kill once a week, but now you’re doing it every day.”

  “That fag Süheyl doesn’t count,” he said, laughing. “He only got wounded. Plus, that had nothing to do with you. I shot him because I was pissed off.”

  So he’d kill someone whenever he felt like it, just because he was pissed off. Nice…

  “You’re still breaking your own rules. You can’t play a game without rules!”

  “I can break any rule I want, but if you want to catch me, you’d better get a move on. There’s no time to lose.”

  And with that, he hung up.

  I turned to look at Hüseyin. His face had gone pale and his forehead was covered in sweat.

  “What is this psycho trying to say?”

  I couldn’t tell him he shouldn’t worry. Clearly, given what the psycho had done already, there was much to worry about.

  “Take a seat,” I told him.

  He did as I said. And I sank into the armchair opposite him. He was still holding his unopened beer, as if trying to draw strength from the aluminum can.

  He let out a furious “What?” when he saw me staring.

  “What what?”

  “So is this punk going to come after me because I came to your place tonight? Well, fuck that! I can’t believe this shit! We’re out on the street all day. We pick up all kinds of people. The good, the bad, thieves, beggars…We’ve got our backs turned the whole time. All kinds of shit could happen.”

  “Oh, come on, don’t overreact,” I said, trying to calm him down.

  “That’s what you think. Haven’t you heard of taxi drivers getting their throats slit for a few measly bucks? How their bodies are found in forests or garbage dumps? Our lives are on the line!”

  I fell silent. So did he. We stared at each other, uneasy, on edge. We didn’t know whether to look at each other or to look away. What could I say? Not even I knew why all this was happening. I was waiting to wake up from the whole thing, to wake up any moment and say, Oh, it was all just a dream. But I couldn’t wait much longer.

  “How about I take a few days off?…But that’s no solution. I can’t afford to. Besides, where would I hide? There’s no rule that says the punk has to get me in the car. He could come get me in my sleep if he wanted to.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s not like he’s an angel of death who can move around unnoticed and then appear in front of you out of nowhere.”

  “Of course, you’ve got nothing to worry about. I’m the one who’s being threatened…the one who’s going to be sacrificed!”

  I had forgotten all about this childish side of Hüseyin’s. Caught up in a flood of emotion, his lower lip drooping, he sulked, confused by the entire world. For some time now I’d only seen him in the alternating roles of horny lover and melancholic romantic. Roles he played with varying degrees of success.

  “What am I supposed to do?” he said, as if I could simply wave my magic wand and give him an answer.

  “I don’t know,” I said in all earnestness. “But I’m going to check my messages immediately.”

  Hüseyin let out a big sigh as I pressed the button on the answering machine. He still hadn’t opened his beer.

  There were dozens of messages, from all sorts of people. A chaotic mix of congratulations and condolences. Alı, my partner in the computer business, had called twice and said that he had a new assignment for me. What it didn’t pay in money (which was zero), it would make up for in prestige, he said meekly. I was fed up with doing people favors. Oh, please hack so-and-so’s Web site, oh, please crash this site…I kept doing it in the hope that it would bring in customers, but the customers never came. I’d get mad and start hacking the Web sites of the thankless bastards who’d begged for the favor in the first place. Why should they get away with asking me to work for free? It wasn’t like I needed the prestige. I needed the money!

  Cem Yeğenoğlu, who claimed to be the first and only hypnotherapist in our country, had also left a message. “It may no longer interest you, now that you’re famous, but I thought I’d let you know that there’s going to be a pleasant little get-together at the Brahma Kumaris Society. But in case you are interested…” Then he explained that the meeting was to be held at the Brahma Kumaris, in other words the Brahma’s Daughters Building in Erenköy, and repeated the date and time twice. Loud and clear. I had no intention of going. I was bored of this fascination with Far Eastern disciplines, a fad that was spreading like wildfire. I’ve always had a keen distaste for that which is popular. It was quite a surprise to see how hungry our people were for such things. From the most innocent feng shui books to translations of the sacred Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita, all this ancient foreign esoterica had suddenly become fashionable. No, I didn’t want anything to do with Brahma Kumaris. I’d gotten a whiff of their worldview at a couple of meetings I’d gone to. I didn’t like that they seemed to want to impose it on others. I refuse to be imposed upon! Cem Yeğenoğlu could very well go if he was interested. In the meantime, I couldn’t make my mind up whether to tell him or not. I knew his name had landed on the psycho killer’s list as well. Then again, what was he going to do about it even if he did know?

  Should I let everyone know who was on the killer’s list? But then that would put everyone in a panic. What was going to happen? What was I going to do? What were we going to do?

  Hüseyin finally opened his beer.

  “I’ve got to check the computer too,” I told him.

  “I’m coming with you,” he said, rising from his seat. He was a grown man, for Pete’s sake, he could hardly be afraid of being alone, could he?

  There were dozens of messages from our psycho; I say “our” because, after all, he qualified as Hüseyin’s psycho now too. It seemed he’d logged on to a different computer every time he got a little bored and sent me an e-mail. In one it said, “Check out your Web site!” and in another there was the address of the location of today’s Reiki meeting and a list of the names of the attendees. This guy was one busy bee. For him to know all this was equivalent to him being right inside my head. It was pretty much as if I’d been walking around with a camera planted on my shoulder.

  Jihad2000 was asking what was going on, and was again making sexual innuendos. I was growing annoyed at the way he insisted upon forcing the conversation to sex at such a crucial time, when I needed his help the most. I sat down and composed a stern response. I explained to him that his behavior was simply out of line, and then went on to tell him about how I was dealing with a psychotic murderer, about how poor, innocent Master Sermet had been killed, a
bout how everyone who had contact with me was in danger, about the grave responsibility that weighed upon my shoulders, and so on and so forth.

  “Isn’t that the cripple that lives in Beşiktaş?” asked Hüseyin. He had dropped me off at Kemal Barutçu’s, a.k.a. Jihad2000’s, house a couple of times.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What’s he going to do?”

  “He’s good at tracking people down,” I told him. The question, however, remained perfectly relevant. What exactly was Jihad2000 going to track down? What could he possibly track down about someone who logged on from anonymous addresses and called on pay-as-you-go SIM cards?

  “You could do that yourself.”

  Of course I could. In a different window I opened the program that tracked my landline. The last call was from a pay-as-you-go mobile. I could find out where the card had been purchased if I tried, but what good was that going to do, when the corner store that sold it wasn’t going to know who they sold it to anyway?

  “There,” I said, shoving what appeared on the screen into Hüseyin’s face. “Nothing. One big nada!”

  He moved his head closer to the screen, as if by doing so he’d understand. He studied it carefully.

  “Right,” he mumbled in response.

  “Look at your Web site,” he’d written. And so I did. He’d recorded his new achievement. The date of Sermet Kılıç’s death was written next to his name. And whenever you clicked on another name, the same question appeared on the screen: “Who’s next?” Bravo, I thought. Okay, my Web site didn’t have any special protection, but it wasn’t that easy to tinker around with it as you pleased. So it seemed he’d decided to devote every ounce of his energy to messing with me. He knew about computers. He must have had loads of free time. What a clue indeed!

  Why exactly was he so obsessed with me anyway? It couldn’t have been just an ordinary obsession with transvestites. If that were the case, well, the streets were filled with our girls. Was it because I had entered the public eye? Because I had helped solve a couple of complicated cases? What was his problem with me? Everyone around me was now under threat. I had suddenly turned into poison ivy. Anyone connected to me might be done for. The Nazi doctor Josef Mengele had earned himself the nickname “Angel of Death,” but at this rate, they’d be using it for me soon too!