Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  Haluk turned out to be just a short distance away, though, on his way in to lectures in a grey hooded top, clutching a brown paper bag from McDonalds. The burly man didn’t look overjoyed to see Rex.

  ‘I wondered if she’d matched the other eye up.’

  ‘What?’

  Haluk pulled the hood off. The original black eye was fading to yellow. The shaped-stubble beard was getting out of hand, too. Apart from that, Rex thought, he looked surprisingly unscathed.

  ‘I saw you last night. At Turnpike Lane. You and Kyretia were…. Having a bit of a set-to.’

  Haluk squinted at him. ‘Set-to? Aah, that? That was nothing, man. Play-fighting.’

  ‘The police didn’t seem to think so.’

  ‘They got the wrong idea. It was just… you know… a lovers’ tiff.’

  ‘A lovers’ tiff? So, not a play-fight, then?’

  Haluk was silent for a moment. ‘Started out as a joke, then it sort of got out of hand. No biggie. Kye’s got a temper, isn’t it?’

  ‘Has she? How long have you two been together?’

  ‘We liked each other at school a bit and that, but nothing happened. Then we kinda clicked when we seen each other here. It’s a bit of a on-and-off fing? Like we break up and get it back on all the time? But in the break-times, man has to see ovver gels, isn’t it?’ Haluk winked at him. ‘And Kye don’t like it.’

  ‘What did you think about her going to Turkey?’

  He shrugged, and rather studiedly eyed-up a pair of tiny, chic Asian girls clopping by with book-laden bags. ‘Why not go? Gyal spend her whole life on top of her dad’s shop, innit? And I ain’t gonna be lonely, naam’sain bruv?’ His manner changed, suddenly provocative. ‘Can I go now, please?’

  ‘One more question. Nothing to do with you. Who’s Hollow Wayne?’

  He snorted. ‘Fuck knows. Made-up name, innit?’

  ‘It would be a pretty shit real name,’ Rex conceded.

  Haluk laughed. ‘Nobody knows who it is. Serious. Even the guy edits the paper, man, dun-know, seen?

  Haluk – enough patois, seen? Rex thought that, but didn’t say it. Instead, he said: ‘So even the person who edits the newsletter doesn’t know who “Hollow Wayne” is?’

  ‘Emails it in,’ Haluk said. ‘Every week, different address.’ He started to walk off, chuckling to himself. ‘Pretty shit real name…’

  Rex called after him. ‘Why would Wayne say Jan Navitsky had a chequered past?’

  Haluk turned. ‘You gonna stop buzzin’ me?’

  ‘If I must.’

  He gave a hard man’s nod – all neck and muscle. ‘Few fings. Few fings few gels mighta said. Man tries a bit hard, naam’sain. Don’t like it when they say No.’

  * * *

  It was exactly as he’d hoped. He’d only had to wait two minutes at the door up to Sky City before a beleaguered-looking Latina mum had appeared with a buggy and a brace of kids. You held the door for her, you bowed until she laughed, you smiled, you bypassed the cruddy security. Bingo, as Victor Eastwood would have said.

  The wind had picked up and was funnelling crisp packets and sturdy bits of wet cardboard down the walkways at considerable speed. He took a wrong turn at one point and came upon two squat men, doing something furtive by a stairwell. He gave them a kind of ‘no problems here, pal’ wave and scooted off in the opposite direction, hearing mocking laughter above the clatterings of an occasionally airborne Kestrel can.

  Then he reached the sign he’d laughed at before: playground/shops. And soon he was by the door that connected the housing estate with Shopping City. The brand new, gleaming steel security door, with a digital entry pad on the side. Whatever he’d said to Tex Ochuba, or whatever Tex Ochuba had said to somebody else, things had moved fast. Maybe the modern council was really that efficient.

  Or maybe not. He took a picture of the door, thinking fast. If Tex Ochuba wasn’t lying about where he’d been on Monday afternoon, he’d certainly been lying about mending the door. Why? Because he had been there, after all, and seen something, something he didn’t want to talk about? Or because he hadn’t been there, because he was, as the little man in the bookies had said, someone who did nothing, apart from lay bets up and down Wood Green High Road all day? That would explain the bewilderment and the panic: someone else was meant to do Tex’s job on that day. But they had left it undone.

  Rain came at him, briefly, like a spray at sea. He headed back into the estate. This high place had clearly been designed with Mediterranean and Levantine villages in mind: tiered rows of little box-shaped maisonettes, reached by short, steep staircases. The place wasn’t as abandoned as everyone said: there were ply-boards and tin shutters, for sure, but there were also curtains in other windows, untarnished satellite dishes with new names – Romani-Sat, BieloTel – pointing towards the homelands of the poorest, freshest arrivals.

  Something struck him then. If Mina had been absent for a week before her death, could she have been here – right next to where she’d died? Sky City was a good place to hide out, if you were hiding: huge, confusing, high above the streets, and full of folks minding their own business. So what had Mina’s business been?

  The answer, surely, was going to lie with a person. Mina had been close to Kyretia Pocock. They’d been going to Turkey together. Kyretia had been away from university and her place of work ever since Mina’s death – sick, apparently, with grief. So where was she? He needed to find her. Could she be close by?

  He turned a corner to find a group of Roma boys: four or five of them, the youngest with a runny nose, the eldest with peach fuzz on his lip. They approached him as he approached them.

  ‘You live up here?’ he asked. ‘In Sky City?’

  They stood around him, rather like kids with a teacher. ‘Yes, Sky City,’ said the eldest, obligingly. They moved in closer, smiling.

  ‘You know a black girl?’ Rex pulled at his hair. ‘Braids?’ It was worth a try.

  ‘Black girl!’ came the reply, as they huddled in closer. He caught an odd whiff from them – sweet, chemical – had a memory of Airfix kits.

  ‘Kyretia?’ He tried to step back, but they were all around him. ‘Kyretia Pocock.’

  ‘Suck your cock!’ said the littlest one. The boys all laughed but the eldest cuffed the child hard, and the child began to cry.

  ‘Hey don’t –’ Rex began, but then there were suddenly hands all over him, pulling lightly at his coat, inside his coat, fingers in the back pocket of his jeans. He had a sudden, absurd vision of nature documentaries: the kill.

  ‘Kakhilia ma pe tutte!’ he shouted. I’ll shit down your throat. A helpful man from the Roma Gypsy Traveller Network had taught him that, years back. The boys halted for an instant, shocked to hear a curse in their language. It gave him just enough time to barge through them and down towards the stairwell. He didn’t know if they’d stolen anything from his pockets, and he didn’t care, he just knew they were behind him, shouting, running, a lot quicker than him. The Roma weren’t into random nastiness. The few who were into crime – and it was fewer than people thought – were mainly into stealing things and legging it. But there’d been a distinct smell of glue around this crew; the eldest one had definitely looked high. If he had a blade, and a point to prove to his little brothers…

  Shafts of sheer agony went up his leg as he landed on the bad foot at the bottom of the last stairs. He fell on the metal release button, rather than pressing it, sure he would pass out and the boys a few feet behind would overwhelm him on the ground.

  He was out in the street as they were coming through the door. A big, black car sounded its horn as he ran towards it. Someone leant across and flung open the passenger door.

  ‘Rex!’

  He didn’t know who it was. If they knew his name and they had a car, then they’d do for now. He dived in, and the car screeched off with expert ease as the Roma boys spilled off the kerb, gesturing and flinging cans from the overflowing bins.

  Rostam Sajadi
grinned at him as he deftly steered his hundred-large hunk of Vorsprung through the double-parked clutter of Caxton Road towards the Morrison’s car park. An egg-shaped object rolled across the dashboard.

  ‘You annoy people, I think.’

  Rex, who was struggling to catch his breath, managed to say, ‘I’ve had complaints,’ before a coughing fit seized him. Sajadi said nothing, merely manoeuvred his car into a space, while the on-board computer made assorted, tasteful dings and bleeps.

  ‘Your office,’ he said, resting his hands on the steering wheel and pointing with the blunted finger towards the unit in the far corner. s: Haringey shared its entrance with a call centre and a mysterious outfit called Limassol Forwarding.

  ‘So you know where I work,’ Rex said, as sweat bloomed on his brow. Sajadi was neat and cool, as usual, the faint tang of cologne amid the new upholstery. He’d ditched the suit for a black granddad cap and a bomber jacket.

  ‘You’ve been asking questions about me,’ Sajadi said. ‘So I asked about you.’

  ‘What did you find out?’

  ‘You’re a journalist. My brother-in-law says a good one.’ He looked at Rex. ‘I say there is no good journalist. You make decisions about people, like judges.’ Here Sajadi mimed a hammer, a judge’s gavel. Rex wondered if he’d ever been in court. ‘But you have no evidence. All the horse-shit you are saying about Mina. All those articles, in the newspapers, calling her a head-scarved activist. She was wearing a hairband! A hair-band to keep the hair from her eyes when she made that… film for the website, but to you it becomes the headscarf of a fanatic!’

  ‘Other papers have said that. Mine didn’t,’ he said. He knew though, that for a few minutes at least, there’d been something just as bad on s: Haringey’s website. Long enough for a few dozen hits – although, so far, no feedback, no backlash.

  ‘Come with me,’ Sajadi said.

  It wasn’t an invitation. The vehicle swung out of the car park, sailed over the lights and onto Lordship Lane, the plastic egg hurtling back and forth across the dashboard like a pinball. Sajadi’s driving wasn’t aggressive, but Rex had the strange sense of the traffic parting as they swept along, east towards Tottenham, of vehicles trying their damnedest not to get in the way.

  He was uneasy. Not because of Sajadi’s manner, or even because he was effectively a captive. But because he’d been driven this way before, a year ago, by a woman called Rescha Schild, who’d deliberately ploughed the vehicle over the Angel Road roundabout in an attempt to kill them both. She had been fifty percent successful. Rex had only sat in the front of a car four times since.

  ‘Were you waiting for me?’ Rex asked. Sajadi jerked to a stop at the lights and the plastic egg shot into Rex’s lap.

  ‘No, I wasn’t waiting for you,’ Sajadi growled. ‘I was sitting. Like I’ve been sitting there every day since Friday, for hours, trying to understand what happened to my niece!’

  The egg in Rex’s hands was a copy of the Disneyland picture he’d seen in Mina’s bedroom. A photograph of Mina, with her uncle, clutching an egg. Printed, for reasons unclear, onto a further, plastic egg and stored in Sajadi’s car. Sajadi pressed a button, and something resembling a glove compartment flipped open in front of Rex. He got the idea that the egg was meant to go in.

  ‘She gave it to me last New Year,’ Sajadi said, as the lights changed. ‘Mina. Our joke.’

  ‘Is it a Kurdish New Year thing?’ Rex asked. ‘The egg?’

  ‘Yezidi,’ came the gruff reply. ‘Different. God made the world like an egg. Then he sent his angel down. Tawsi Melek.’

  ‘The peacock?’

  Sajadi snorted, seemingly unimpressed. ‘Tawsi Melek pecked the egg and cracked it. Then the flowers and the trees could come. So, every New Year, eggs.’

  ‘I was given to believe the Yezidis all live in Germany.’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘Except the ones who live round the back of the Bosphorus Continental Supermarket.’

  ‘It’s my tradition. Not theirs.’

  ‘I thought there was no kind of intermingling, though, so how did your sister…?’

  Sajadi turned and gave Rex a stare so long, so pained that his words simply dried up. Then the man turned back to the road, saying nothing. After a while, Rex dared to ask where they were going, but Sajadi just said he’d soon see. He felt reassured, slightly, by the man’s comments about Mina and the egg, so he sat back for a while, trying to get some control over the pain in his foot and leg. At least, he thought, as yet another white van waited respectfully for them to pass before pulling out, there was no chance of an accident in this car. It was a battle cruiser.

  They turned onto the A1. It was too early to know whether the destination was the motorway, or the marshes. Neither prospect filled him with joy. The doubts had not taken long to resurface and now Rex was racking his brains to think who he’d asked questions of, how Sajadi could have heard that he’d been digging. The man in the Gözleme Shop? Serious, fat Bilal from the council?

  They pulled over. The marshes. A very familiar bit of them, screened off behind a wire fence. Half a building. It looked almost as if it had been suddenly abandoned – stray gloves and thermos flasks lay about the site, amongst rain-filled wheelbarrows. Some wags had walked a long way to write What Fucking Zoo? on the sign that hung on the wire. The sign itself announced that there was 24-hour security on the site. But there was nothing to secure.

  Or so Rex thought. Sajadi beckoned him out, marching determinedly over the wet soil in his loafers and pointing towards a dark red shipping container resting just to the west of the site. Sajadi refused to admit the finger had gone, Rex realised. He’d been like that himself, too, at the start, with his mangled foot, forcing it into old shoes that almost made him faint, jumping off the old Routemaster buses, damage-first. In a way, he admired the stand.

  ‘Want to see inside?’ Sajadi asked, zipping up his bomber jacket. ‘Come.’

  ‘I don’t want to see inside it,’ Rex said.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Sajadi with pantomime bafflement. ‘Oh? You think there’s something bad in there? Full of heroin maybe, because I’m a Kurdish businessman with a nice car?’

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘This is what’s in there,’ Sajadi said, curtly, pulling out a wad of papers and shoving them at Rex. They amounted to some sort of Bill of Lading for the stuff inside the container. Heating ducts. Pipes. Energy condensers. Misters, coolers, fans, boilers, solar cells. All from Hamburg.

  ‘All the things they need to finish the job,’ Sajadi barked. ‘See? I am giving it to them. Me. I want them to call it Mina’s Place. On account of she loved animals so much. That’s who I am, Mr Tracey. Okay?’

  Eric Miles. That’s why Sajadi had been talking to Eric Miles. To make a donation to the zoo.

  ‘I never thought anything different,’ Rex said. ‘You’re big in German dry-cleaning circles. I know.’

  ‘You thought something else.’ The collar of Sajadi’s jacket rose up in the breeze, like a photoshoot from a catalogue: a mannequin-sized man. He leaned in, eyebrows raised, always acting. ‘Didn’t you? Admit it.’

  ‘I don’t think. I look. That’s what good journalists do.’

  Sajadi looked at him sceptically. Then he turned on his heel to look at the shipping container. Hanseatic League. He remembered the name from his history ‘A’ level: a 14th-century German trading cartel. Was it really still going?

  Sajadi swivelled back again. ‘You were right. If you are Yazidi, and your sister goes with someone outside the group, it’s bad blood. You are supposed to seek revenge.’

  Rex didn’t like the quietly threatening way Rostam had spoken. He wondered what the man was about to confess to. ‘It’s not just the Yezidi who do that,’ he said.

  ‘Sure. Kurds. Turks. Iranians. Pakistanis.’ He chopped a hand sharply in the air, delineating tribe after tribe, like those colonial bureaucrats who’d divvied up the East with rulers and string. ‘Yezidis don’t even mix
with others, though. Live in their own villages. Lots of… restrictions. Special numbers. Colours. Can’t wear blue. Can’t eat lettuce.’

  ‘Lettuce?’ Rex blinked. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Blue is the peacock colour, so a man can’t wear the colours of God. Lettuce, it’s… something to do with the word Shaitan… you know, the devil, and trying to make the Muslims people understand we don’t follow the devil.’ Sajadi gave Rex a long look. ‘You’re nodding like you understand. Don’t pretend to understand. It’s horse shit, Mister Tracey. It’s all horse shit. Everything somebody asks you to believe – equality, God, miracles, lettuce – horse shit. This is real.’ He pointed at the shipping container. ‘That’s real.’ Back at the big German car. Suddenly there were tears in the man’s eyes. His moods shifted like Wood Green weather. ‘Forty-two days. Forty-two days it took us, in 1991, to walk, through the mountains, to escape Saddam. Another eighty-one days, on the border, between Iraq and Turkey, waiting. My mother died there. Of cold. Your government dropped blankets. Sometimes 1,000 Kurdish people dying in that camp every day. Babies, grandmothers, from hunger and sickness. Even still, in the camps, they were fighting amongst themselves. “You – you are Yezidi, you must go over there.” Sunni Kurd won’t eat with Alevi Kurd. You think God was there? That anybody’s God was with us, in those places? Stupid. And the ones who didn’t believe in their Gods, they believed in Britain and the USA. Like me. I believed you.’ He tapped his breast fiercely. ‘And you know what you did? You dropped blankets. And the Turks stole them. Six months later, I saw them selling British army blankets at the market in Mardin. Because that was real. Not the promises of your government. The market, the money.’

  ‘So you’re actually Iraqi, then, not Turkish like Keko?’

  Sajadi squinted at him, disparaging. ‘You never understand. Your people decided these things. Not us. Your people, who knew nothing about Kurds and Turks, nothing about Alevi and Sunni and Yezidi. Same as now. Why is my brother-in-law’s café called Bosphorus? Because he is a Turk? No. Because if he called it Murat, if he called it River Zab, you wouldn’t understand! On the way back, I’ll show you, just by Tottenham Hale, a café called Bodrum. No one inside there has been to Bodrum. They’re Kurds, from Diyarbakir, in the east! They call it Bodrum because their customers have all been to Bodrum on package holidays. Diyarbakir you don’t understand!’