The Serenity Murders

by Mehmet Murat Somer

  “That’s nice,” I said, waiting for him to spit out the rest. He certainly hadn’t insisted on speaking with me in private just so he could tell me this.

  “He admires you,” he said.

  “Well, isn’t that sweet,” I said, instantly loosening up.

  Why and how he had become my admirer was not important in the least. He could have seen me from a distance, walking down the street. Never mind the why or wherefore, being admired is always, always good for the soul.

  “He wants to meet you, but he’s too chicken…”

  Now, what on earth did that mean? I knew people said I was stuck-up, arrogant, cool, and sometimes even insolent, but these weren’t reasons for people to fear me!

  “Why, ayol?” I asked.

  “He met you once before but you brushed him off…”

  “Well, darling, I can’t sit and listen to the life story of every Tom, Dick, and Harry I encounter, or talk to them for hours about the films I like, the singers I adore, the memories I have of certain songs and whatnot, can I? It must have been bad timing.”

  There are types like that: all they do is chitchat all day long, recounting this, sharing that…Just fifteen, twenty minutes into an initial conversation and all of a sudden it’s, Oh, let’s be chums, or even worse, Let’s be the best of chums. I simply have no patience for this.

  “But he really admires you,” he said, his eyes narrowing in their sockets. “You’d be impressed if you spoke to him.”

  If he was as skinny as a stick, no shoulders, had long hair, and looked like a girl, I was sure to have brushed him off. If I wanted to be with girls and women, I would. I don’t fancy effeminate men.

  “Why, ayol?” I said.

  “He wants to meet you.”

  The Şükrü I knew wouldn’t talk about stuff like this so openly. Not unless he was piss drunk. And he didn’t look drunk.

  “Your boyfriend,” I said, “wants to be with me. And you…are fixing us up?”

  This was strange.

  “Not like that,” he said. “It’s not sex that he wants. He wants to meet you, talk to you, tell you about himself. He’s got something he wants to ask you, a request of you. He says he’ll end our relationship if I don’t set this up. My relationship is at stake…”

  What did he mean, he only wanted to talk? And what to make of this “request”?

  “That’s ridiculous, ayol. How pathetic is that! If he loves you…What sort of a relationship do the two you have anyway?”

  “That’s the whole point! He doesn’t love me, I love him. I’d do anything not to lose him. Please, just this once…”

  “Ay, don’t be ridiculous, Şükrü.” I was getting angry.

  “Still, if you were to meet him and see…He’s a smart, intelligent guy. Maybe you’d get along?”

  I started to laugh, purely out of frustration. Just a few moments earlier, downstairs with Belinda D., I’d finally managed to unwind, and now here I was, once again as tense as could be. Frankly, this new admirer business was really getting on my nerves.

  “Forget it!” I said, standing up to indicate to him that the conversation was over. “Act a bit professional. Learn to separate your work from your private life!”

  It was hard for the words that had just escaped my mouth to sound believable, since not even I found them convincing.

  Dump Truck Beyza caught me at the top of the stairs.

  “Abla, for God’s sake, make that Osman play more lively stuff. That wailing fiddle’s about to put me to sleep. And I’ve got a customer, you know. I need to get out there on the dance floor and work my magic!”

  Aykut’s CD had finished, and because Osman was too scared to play anything else, he’d started playing it again, from the beginning. I signaled at him as I walked passed the DJ cabin. He’d switch on the spotlights and start playing something more animated in a moment.

  I had already started napping in the taxi on our way back to the hotel when Hüseyin, whose shoulder I’d rested my head against, awoke me by bringing up that annoying topic again.

  “Şükrü’s twink is an admirer of yours, apparently,” he said.

  “Oh, please, don’t you start too,” I said, without lifting my head. I really didn’t have the energy.

  “He was at the bar tonight, you must have seen him,” he said.

  I couldn’t possibly notice every person who came in. Besides, it had been darker than usual, as per my orders.

  “So, is he a looker?” I asked, just to make conversation.

  “He’s…ordinary…I think he’s someone from our neighborhood…You’d recognize him if you saw him.”

  I was terribly drowsy.

  28.

  We were planning on going straight to sleep, wrapped in a platonic embrace, like brother and sister. We were both tired.

  I was just about to fall asleep when Hüseyin began to show signs of distress, tossing and turning in bed.

  “I feel sick to my stomach,” he said.

  It was psychological. Psychosomatic symptoms were different in all of us. I, for example, would get piercing headaches often when I was under stress.

  “Let me do Reiki on you,” I said, placing my hands on his solar plexus chakra. I could feel it sucking up energy immediately. My hands instantly began heating up. His body was ice-cold, but he was sweating.

  Hüseyin couldn’t bear it any longer; he got up and rushed to the bathroom. I could hear him retching his poor guts out.

  I lit the bedside lamp and sat up in bed. I couldn’t just turn around and go back to sleep when the man was in such an awful state.

  “It must have been something I ate,” I heard him say over the sound of running water.

  He made his way back into the bedroom, and I could see that his forehead was covered in beads of sweat.

  We had eaten the same food. There was nothing wrong with me.

  “What did you drink?” I asked.

  “Coke,” he said.

  He hurried back to the bathroom.

  I got out of bed and walked over to his side. He was sitting on the floor, his head over the toilet bowl. He looked pale, but was quickly turning green. His condition appeared far from normal.

  “It’s blood…” he said, choking.

  In a panic, I drew closer to see. It was true: he was literally puking blood.

  We had to get to the hospital. The night porter at the reception desk helped me carry Hüseyin. We ruined the carpets in the elevator. We jumped into a cab and went straight to the emergency room.

  Hüseyin had been poisoned. It wasn’t food poisoning; it was pesticides. Deadly pesticides. If we hadn’t made it to the hospital in time, it would have been fatal. His stomach was pumped and he was put on a drip.

  By the time I went outside to get some fresh air and to regain my composure, the sun was already up. Our psycho had done exactly what he’d said he would and tried to finish Hüseyin off before the night was through.

  But who had given Hüseyin the poison, and when?

  He had been with me at the club all night. Besides, pesticides took effect right away. He couldn’t have been given them earlier.

  I went into the patisserie opposite the hospital and ordered a cup of coffee. The smell of freshly baked poğaça and çörek whetted my appetite. So I ordered a cheese poğaça. I hadn’t slept a wink. I needed caffeine. And I was hungry as a wolf. I sank my teeth into the poğaça. It was as soft as a sponge. It melted in my mouth. I postponed any thoughts of maintaining my figure, and thus the guilt I would feel for consuming so much fat, until later on. I considered ordering another one, but quickly came to my senses. Don’t overdo it, I told myself.

  I tried to re-create the night before in my head, like a movie. We’d had dinner, then gathered in the street for the neighborhood search operation. Then there was the police station, the tea at the station…Sure, the tea was awful, but the police station wasn’t exactly the best place to poison someone. And besides, we’d all drunk the same tea. Hüseyin had bee
n outside while I was talking with Selçuk. But Hasan had been with him. Maybe they’d eaten or drunk something while waiting for me.

  I’d call Hasan and find out once I’d finished my coffee.

  Then we were at the club. He was behind the bar, next to Şükrü, I was next to Belinda D. Then I’d had the lights turned down. There was always so much traffic at the bar, people standing there and having their drinks, or walking up to order new ones. Hüseyin must have made small talk with them. There was no way Şükrü could have put poison in his Coke. He’s too much of a coward to even think about such things, let alone do them. Afterward, I had gone upstairs with Şükrü, leaving Hüseyin alone at the bar. I didn’t remember seeing Hüseyin after I came down. I hadn’t paid attention to what he was doing until we left the bar together.

  Someone who came to the bar must have put poison in his Coke.

  Our psycho or one of his accomplices had been within arm’s reach of us tonight, had infiltrated our castle, put poison in Hüseyin’s Coke under our very noses, and fled. Well, bravo, I said to myself. Our security system was marvelous! We behaved as if there were some kind of protective shield that was activated as soon as we walked through the club’s door, keeping us safe from all the dangers of the outside world. The girls, the customers, me…we were all so carefree. But there you have it, someone with such evil intentions was able to pass through the same protective shields, penetrate our shelter, and do as he pleased. How blind could we be? Was the outside world really not the remote place we believed it to be? In this vast city of Istanbul, could we not create a tiny little itsy-bitsy heaven for ourselves, one measuring just one hundred and sixty square meters?

  29.

  I had to go home. Hüseyin needed clean clothes. All his clothes were covered in puke and blood. They had given him a surgical smock to wear at the hospital; the rest of his body was naked. We were in such a rush we had even left his shoes at the hotel. I had called Hasan and asked him to stay by Hüseyin’s side. He was still half asleep but came without complaining. He was aware of how serious the situation was. At times like this, Hasan was capable of turning off his amateur histrionics and becoming coolheaded and commonsensical. I hadn’t asked for much, just for him to stay with Hüseyin while I left to sort out a few things. He could even fall asleep if he wished. Hüseyin had been sedated anyway; he was fast asleep. He clearly wasn’t going to open his eyes for quite some time, and would need no special assistance.

  I was the one still up, who hadn’t slept and was completely exhausted. There was a ceaseless droning in my head. My eyes kept twitching. I could feel a muscle pulsing in my temple.

  I had to inform Hüseyin’s family, but I didn’t know how. Their son had stayed out for two nights; on the first his car was set on fire, on the second he had been poisoned. It would be impossible for them to understand, to approach the matter logically and reasonably. They were going to hate me. As if it weren’t enough that I had led their son down the wrong path into unnatural relationships, now I had brought all this destruction upon him. All the marvelous vampy femme fatales of cinema history would seem perfectly innocent compared to what his mother Kevser Kozalak would think of me.

  I didn’t know their home phone, and I could never work out where they lived. Someone at the taxi stand was bound to know their phone number. In my head I rehearsed what I would say. None of it would be glad tidings.

  Yılmaz wasn’t at his usual spot. Seeing as I wasn’t around, it seemed he’d taken the opportunity to leave himself. I cursed him from the bottom of my heart.

  Satı had visited, scrubbed, cleaned, and tidied every corner of the apartment as promised. She had left a new note for me on the refrigerator:

  “Your home is as clean as a whistle. Have fun messing it up again. I don’t see why you’d butcher your bras. You should have given them to me if you didn’t want them.”

  I’d feel better if I took a shower.

  I had enough time for that.

  The doorbell rang before I could turn the water on.

  I dragged my feet to the door.

  My downstairs neighbor, the nosy Wimpy Ferdı, stood before me.

  I could tell I wasn’t looking good when he took a step back at the sight of me. He had that ever present annoying grin on his face.

  “I apologize,” I said, ashamed of how I must have looked. “I had a really terrible night. I’m tired and haven’t slept at all. I was just about to take a shower.”

  “Ummm…” he said. “About last night…”

  Of course he must have watched everything from his window. He wouldn’t have missed it for the world. He was wearing a faded T-shirt that was damp with sweat and clung to his scrawny little body. His trousers, on the other hand, were as loose and baggy as ever.

  “Please accept my apologies, we caused a bit of a racket,” I said. “Especially when the police arrived…”

  “Ummm…I mean…I wanted to…ummm…ask…if there was anything I could do.”

  Just because he was nosy didn’t mean he wasn’t stupid. He couldn’t string a single sentence together.

  “I was just wondering if…” he said, rolling the words around in his mouth.

  “Wondering if what?” I said, trying to speed things along.

  “You found the person you were looking for?”

  Ayol, would I be in this state if we had found him? Roses would be blossoming on my cheeks, my energy would be sky-high. I simply grunted no.

  “I’d like to help,” he said, doing his best to drag this unbearable conversation out even further. “I have immense respect for you. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything I can do. If you need to talk, you know, or anything.”

  “Merci,” I said, indicating that that would never happen, not in a million years.

  He wasn’t the only man on earth yet.

  I was getting ready to close the door when he grabbed it.

  “Oh, yeah, and the gentleman downstairs.…” he said, holding the door open.

  “Yılmaz,” I said, yawning for real. “You mean Yılmaz Karataş?”

  “He couldn’t find you, so he knocked on my door this morning.”

  I was waiting for the rest of his story, but he kept trying to poke his head into my apartment. Apparently he was incapable of craning his neck and talking at the same time.

  “And did he say anything?” I asked. “I was just about to go take a shower…I’m sort of in a hurry.”

  “I understand…” he said, staring blankly.

  If he really truly did understand, he’d deliver Yılmaz’s message and be gone.

  “What did Yılmaz say?” I repeated, this time in a sharper tone.

  “That he was going to take a shower, change his clothes, refresh his packed lunch box, and then be back.”

  What an important message! I would have worried all day long if I hadn’t received it.

  “Thank you,” I said, pushing the door closed.

  He stopped it with his hand again. The ink stains on his hands made him look even filthier than he really was.

  “It was seven o’clock in the morning when he knocked…”

  What was I supposed to do about that? The man had spent all night perched on the edge of a portable stool and knocked on my wimpy neighbor’s door as soon as the day dawned.

  “I apologize if he woke you,” I said, making one final attempt. “I’m really in a hurry. My friend is in the hospital. I have to get back.”

  He must have had a tic. His mouth twitched to the right again.

  “If you’d like me to come with you…”

  I had always managed to maintain a respectable distance between my neighbors and myself and I had no intention of changing that policy today. I was not in the mood for building neighborly relations. Especially not with Ferdı.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’ll handle it myself. Bye-bye.”

  And then I shut the door, tight.

  I felt better after the shower. I’d grounded my negative
energy in the process. I stayed under the water longer than usual. I sent him a message in the shower in case my psycho was recording. It was an offensive swear word. I repeated it several times in case he had missed it.

  I quickly shaved. My reflection in the mirror looked awful. I had purple rings under my eyes. A nod of gratitude to my psycho for that! Thanks to him, I was on the verge of becoming a walking cadaver. I quickly stepped away from the mirror. I wasn’t happy with how I looked. What good would it do me to study myself and fray my nerves even further? I’d have the opportunity to sleep at some point, and I’d look better after I’d done so. Then, after a good, thorough skin-care treatment, I’d be completely revived. Thank God for cosmetics, I said to myself.

  Coffee and a shower had made me feel good, if only temporarily. Still, I took a vitamin pill, just in case—at least it would keep me on my feet.

  I was planning on taking some clean underwear and clothes from Hüseyin’s bag, but then I decided taking the whole thing made better sense. There was no point in leaving it at home.

  The message light on the answering machine was flashing. I ignored it. My mobile was switched off too. I had no intention of chitchatting on the phone with anyone.

  Sleep had already started descending upon me before I even left the house. I must resist it.

  At the bottom of the stairs I bumped into Yılmaz, who was drinking his morning tea and reading his paper. As promised in the message, he was back and already seated on his portable stool.

  “Morning, sir,” he said.

  “Good morning.”

  He had changed his clothes and put on something more comfortable, but he still had the tie and V-neck sweater.

  “Is everything okay? Are you all right?”

  Did he have to remind me that I looked like a hag? As if I didn’t know already.

  “I didn’t sleep very well,” I said.

  “I just ran home and back myself. I left you a message. With number three.”

  “Yes, he told me,” I said. “He said it was seven in the morning when you left.”

  I expected him to understand that seven o’clock was a bit early to be knocking on people’s doors, but he just responded with a self-assured smile, displaying his missing tooth.