Harem

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘We have no evidence.’

  ‘I want to know what, if anything, the Americans know.’

  ‘And I’m saying that until we have something more than the bitter memories of a jealous and inebriated rival, possessed of a fertile imagination, I can’t just—’

  ‘Yes, you can!’ İkmen was close to Ardıç now, close enough to see the agitation in his veined cheeks. ‘You are the Commissioner of Police, you have reason to suspect that Hikmet Sivas has connections with the Mafia!’ He thrust one arm towards the stairs that led to Sivas’s bedroom. ‘I’ve got his wife’s head up there! It doesn’t get any more serious than this!’

  Ardıç, with an act of self control seldom associated with him, lowered his tone. ‘As I have told you before, İkmen,’ he said, ‘we will observe procedure. You and I will interview Vedat and Hale Sivas. Based upon that and any information our officers glean from people in the surrounding area we will mount a search for Hikmet Sivas.’

  ‘He could be anywhere!’ İkmen put what was left of his cigarette out in one of the ashtrays and lit up a fresh one.

  ‘Which is why we need to speak to those closest to him,’ Ardıç replied, ‘in order to find out where he might have gone.’

  İkmen knew that on one level Ardıç was right. Without some sort of notion about where Sivas might have gone, the police would just be moving around to no good effect. Not that either Hale or Vedat Sivas had been particularly forthcoming, as yet. The woman had just spouted religiously inspired laments through her tears while her brother, his face a sweaty shade of grey, had simply sat in silence, like one in a fugue. Undoubtedly shocked, they would, İkmen felt, talk soon. But when they did, what would they say? Their brother Hikmet hadn’t lived in the city for forty years; how would they know where he might go? Unless of course they had family connections too. İkmen thought it unlikely that Hikmet had had any part in or knowledge of Kaycee’s kidnapping and death. It looked as if he had just read the note pinned to the side of the box, realised exactly what it meant and then in his distress gone to face whatever was in store for him – either that or he had just run away in terror. Written in Turkish, probably so Hikmet could make no mistake about its meaning, the note had been cleverly targeted at a man who was known to be fascinated by his nation’s history and whose nickname in his early Hollywood days had been ‘the Sultan’.

  Ardic, although in no way an intuitive person, was also thinking about the language the note was written in.

  ‘The fact that the note was written in Turkish doesn’t suggest the Mafia to me,’ he said as he watched the gentle reflection of the Bosphorus waters outside form patterns on the ceiling of the enormous salon. ‘I mean, have you ever met an American who can speak Turkish? They have no need for Turkish. And as for Sicilians . . .’

  İkmen sighed. He didn’t know whether Ardıç was being deliberately obtuse or just plain stupid. ‘I hardly think, sir,’ he said tightly, ‘that Turkish is such an obscure language that sophisticated international crime families don’t have access to it.’

  ‘I doubt our own families can even write their own language.’

  ‘Sir, we’re not talking about our own families!’

  ‘We were at the briefing this morning.’

  ‘Yes, because Inspector İskender felt that family involvement was possible because of the silence on the streets,’ İkmen said. ‘But Kaycee’s head up there in a box apparently spirited into this house by djinn, together with what I’ve gleaned from Ahmet Sılay today, suggests a level of sophistication far more advanced than anything one would find in Edirnekapı. According to İskender you yourself wanted me to find out more about Sivas’s background. I thought I might start with this agent, Gee.’

  ‘Mmm, we must be careful, İkmen.’ Ardıç frowned. ‘Sivas is a very respected movie star. He took American citizenship some years ago. He is one of their own now. This country has good relations with the USA. Any suggestion that their crime empires are operating elsewhere could cause offence unless well-founded, and if wrong could be extremely embarrassing for us.’

  İkmen, exasperated, threw his arms in the air. ‘Oh, please don’t let us cause offence or look stupid to the Americans!’ He stared into Ardıç’s face. ‘Has it occurred to you, sir, that their law enforcement agencies might be glad of such information? If we talked to them we could establish where they stand. That’s all I want to do.’

  ‘All right! All right!’ Ardıç, seemingly defeated, sighed. ‘But I will speak to them, and to this agent too, if you wish, not you. And from now on we surround this case with silence. The media will report nothing further on the matter – I have already seen to that.’

  ‘Sir—’

  ‘I have taken control.’ Briefly Ardıç’s eyes blazed. ‘I don’t want you going off and pursuing your own. little theories and suppositions behind my back.’ He fixed İkmen with a steady gaze. ‘I know you are still meddling in the Hatice İpek investigation, İkmen. I also know that you have deduced, or think you have, some sort of family involvement in that case too.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ He knew that he hadn’t and wouldn’t have discussed any of that with Ardıç.

  ‘Just leave Hassan Şeker alone,’ his superior said and, finally tiring of the conversation, he laboriously rose to his feet. ‘That is all that I will say, İkmen. You have no evidence against him beyond his romantic involvement with that girl.’

  ‘Did he make a complaint against me?’ İkmen felt his face turn red with anger. ‘I haven’t even spoken to him.’

  ‘Just leave it!’

  And so, for the moment, that was what İkmen did. Outwardly cowed, he followed his superior into Sivas’s study where Hale and Vedat were waiting, expressionlessly, for them.

  Underneath, however, he was boiling. He had seen Hassan Şeker the previous evening when he had arrived home from work, but they hadn’t spoken. Had Hassan seen him with Rat? Everyone knew who and what Rat was, but if Hassan had heard information relating to ‘family’ business, it wasn’t clear why he would tell Ardıç. Why Ardıç should only tell İkmen about this now was also a mystery.

  Unless, of course, Hassan Şeker hadn’t made a complaint against him. Unless the information had come from somewhere closer to home . . .

  It was an extreme reaction to a line of questioning that could in no way be called aggressive. It just happened, almost before Vedat Sivas was conscious that it had occurred. He wet himself. The small, thin policeman, İkmen, asked him a question and Vedat, tortured by thoughts about what his brother might be doing now, literally let go.

  ‘I have no idea where my brother Hikmet might have gone,’ he said and looked down, horrified, as the wetness from his bladder spread across the red velvet chair cover he was sitting on. ‘Hikmet is a big star. I’m just a poor night watchman. I might live in my brother’s grand house but I’m still just a night watchman.’

  ‘You chose that,’ his sister said as she passed a box of tissues over to him, her face set in an expression of disgust.

  ‘Maybe.’ He gave his crotch a cursory dab with one tissue and then, mortified, threw the box to the floor.

  They all knew – it was plain to see – what he had done. But none of them mentioned it. Not İkmen nor his corpulent superior, not even Hale.

  ‘Where do you work, Mr Sivas?’ İkmen asked. He even smiled as he spoke.

  Far down inside, Vedat prayed for death. He needed to be careful, so careful, talking to these policemen. He took a deep breath. With luck he wouldn’t be able to take another breath, maybe . . .

  But he did and so he had to speak. ‘I have several places . . .’ His voice trailed off, his throat too dry to continue.

  ‘Oh?’ İkmen said with a smile, ‘And where are they, sir?’

  Hale looked across at her brother and then cast her gaze modestly back to the floor once again.

  Vedat cleared his throat. ‘I work two nights at the Etap Marmara Hotel, one at Yıldız Palace and one at the Ciraǧan Kempinski Hote
l.’

  ‘But you are on holiday at the moment, aren’t you, sir?’

  ‘Yes. To see my brother. I should go back, to the Ciraǧan, tomorrow night.’ He said this with some urgency as if it had only just occurred to him.

  İkmen shrugged. ‘Well, that may not be possible, sir.’ He wrote something down in his notebook and then looked up. ‘A murder has been committed here. Nobody can leave. We will need to search this house and its grounds for further evidence, possibly even your sister-in-law’s body.’

  Hale put her hands over her eyes and said, ‘Allah!’

  ‘But what about my work?’

  ‘Did your brother know where you worked and on which days?’ İkmen asked.

  Vedat felt his bladder slacken once again. ‘No.’

  ‘So you don’t think he might have gone to one or other of your places of work to wait for you? Both hotels and the palace are considerable complexes. A man could hide out for days.’

  ‘But Hikmet knows I am on holiday.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ İkmen smiled, ‘of course.’

  ‘Why we sit here when our brother is spirited away by murderers, I cannot understand,’ Hale said, her eyes now glistening with moisture. Although she always gave the outward appearance of being tough, Hale was in fact quite soft-hearted, particularly where Hikmet was concerned. Provided he listened to her religiously motivated speeches once in a while, Hikmet could do as he pleased.

  ‘We are asking you these questions now so that we might have some chance of finding your brother,’ the older, fat policeman said.

  ‘But if murderers have him . . .’

  ‘Do you think that my brother may have killed his wife then?’ Vedat asked. It was probably stupid to say that. But he had to know, try to discover what was actually in their minds.

  The policemen looked at each other and then İkmen, again with a smile, said, ‘No, sir, we don’t.’

  Vedat felt the blood drain from his face. ‘Oh.’

  Too late he realised that his reaction had been far too muted. İkmen was well into his speech about just how absurd the notion was when Vedat finally managed to look relieved.

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  Even now, well into their sixties, Muazzez and Yümniye Heper were ‘modern’ women. Like Atatürk, General Heper, their father, believed that women could work like men, could make ‘men’s’ decisions and should be valued as highly as sons. The Heper girls had chosen to be seamstresses because they enjoyed sewing and liked fashion, not because they felt that only ‘women’s’ work was open to them. However, even in their sixties, they dressed like neither seamstresses nor Vogue models.

  A film that had enjoyed some popularity in the 1950s was Nebahat the Driver. It told the story of a female cab driver who dressed like a man and joined her fellow, male, drivers in matey banter. Nebahat, though entirely chaste, was one of the boys. And although the Heper sisters were far too posh to behave like that, they both dressed like Nebahat. Miss Muazzez particularly, İkmen recalled, had a great passion for leather jackets and thick, serviceable trousers. He smiled when he thought about it now as he strode along Nuhkuyusu Caddesi towards the sagging façade of the Heper house. There weren’t many of these old wooden places in this part of Üsküdar any more, only this one and the slightly smaller one a little bit back towards the cemetery, where İkmen himself had grown up.

  Pushing the now heavily splintered garden gate open with his foot, İkmen took a moment to look at the Heper house. Made entirely of wood, it stood upon a considerable plot of ground, which had its wild unkempt existence between a petrol station and a row of ugly shops which had been built in the 1970s. Like his own father’s house, it had always been black, but now the building looked dirty too, paint peeling in long strands from the columns that held the ornate balcony aloft, noticeable gaps in the tiles on the roof. As he mounted the steps which led up to the front door, the boards beneath his feet groaned under his meagre weight. He placed the bag that held the dress Hatice İpek had been wearing when she died down by his feet and rang the doorbell. While he waited for someone to answer, İkmen looked back casually at the street. A short, middle-aged woman with flaming red hair stood by the Hepers’ gate, staring intently at him. It was unnerving and İkmen was about to say something to the woman when the Hepers’ door opened behind him.

  Unsurprisingly it was Yümniye Heper who let him in – she who, as Lazar the gold merchant had told İkmen before, wasn’t blind.

  ‘Çetin İkmen!’ she said as her elderly and yet still clearly beautiful face broke into a smile. ‘Well, this is a surprise!’

  She held her hand out to him and İkmen took it in his. Like two men, two European men, they shook hands. Her grip was firm, even though İkmen clearly felt the grind of bone against bone as he squeezed her fingers. Arthritis – that ‘gift’ of the harsh İstanbul winter. It had plagued his father too.

  After dispensing with the traditional inquiries regarding his health and the health of his family, Yümniye Heper led İkmen into a large room at the back of the property, which was graced with numerous comfortable divans and beautiful, if somewhat faded, carpets. When she had settled him on the most comfortable divan and brought him an ashtray, Yümniye went off to get her sister who, she said, was currently labouring in their workroom. During her absence İkmen considered how he might broach the subject of the dress which Arto Sarkissian had so kindly and riskily put at his disposal. The room was not, for him, an unfamiliar space. It hadn’t changed a bit, this room the old general used to call his ‘salon’. Until the death of his mother when he was ten, İkmen and his brother Halil had been regular visitors to the Heper house. Fittings for little suits, for family weddings, for the occasional party his father gave for members of his faculty and for his sons’ circumcision had all taken place here. Occasionally, İkmen recalled, General Heper, still a hostage to his noble upbringing, would put his head round the door and say something in French.

  ‘It has been a very long time since our esteemed inspector sat in this room,’ Yümniye Heper said as she re-entered with her sister, an elegant, slightly younger version of herself.

  ‘Indeed.’ And Muazzez Heper smiled, her eyes mobile as if they still possessed sight. When she addressed İkmen, however, it was obvious that she couldn’t see him. As Yümniye helped her into the only chair which stood over by the French windows, Muazzez spoke to their guest as if he were by the fireplace – until she heard his voice and shifted her leather-clad form to face him.

  ‘So what brings you over to Üsküdar, Inspector?’ Muazzez asked when her sister had gone to make tea and collect the requisite number of sweets she imagined their guest might require.

  İkmen smiled. Even without sight, Muazzez Heper, who had always been the more direct and ‘European’ of the two, could see that this was no social call. After all, İkmen had only seen the Heper sisters three or four times since he joined the police in the late 1960s. After that he and his young bride and infant son Sınan had moved across the Bosphorus to Sultanahmet. There he had achieved success, confining Üsküdar and the bitterness that surrounded his mother’s death in 1957 to the darkness of the past.

  ‘I’ve come to show you a dress actually, Miss Muazzez,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’ She took a packet of cigarettes out of one of her trouser pockets and lit up. ‘Why?’

  İkmen bent down to unzip the bag, ‘Because I think you or Miss Yümniye might have made it,’ he said. ‘Some time ago, it’s old.’

  ‘It’s possible.’ She shrugged. ‘What colour is it? Design?’

  ‘It’s similar to one I believe you made recently for a wealthy bride,’ İkmen replied. ‘Nineteenth-century Ottoman. I saw the bridal gown at Lazar’s in the Kapalı Çarşı.’

  Yümniye returned with a traycovered with tea glasses and saucers containing lokum and chocolates, which she placed on the table that stood between the divans. She served İkmen and her sister and only when everyone was settled did she sit down, next to the po
liceman.

  Muazzez Heper was the first to break the silence. ‘Çetin has a dress to show us, Yümniye,’ Muazzez said. ‘He thinks it might be one of ours.’

  Yümniye looked at their guest quizzically.

  İkmen reached into the bag and pulled the dress out so that the skirt spread across the floor like a fan.

  ‘Mmm.’ Yümniye Heper frowned. ‘Yes, I think that you may be right.’

  ‘It is one of ours?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Yümniye took the edge of the skirt between her fingers to examine the stitching on the hem more closely. ‘Although it would have to be one that we made a long time ago. It’s marbled satin,’ she said, looking across at her sister’s sightless eyes, ‘cream and pink. Faded though, as it does, over time.’

  ‘And the design?’

  Yümniye’s eyes and hands travelled up the gown to the sleeves. ‘Ottoman bridal,’ she said. ‘Covered with those little fabric roses they used to like so much. You made them out of green netting and—’

  ‘No, not roses.’

  Her sister looked up from the dress. Muazzez’s face was turned away from her and from İkmen now. Her profile, its strong curves delineated by the light from beyond the French windows, pointed directly towards the old hooded fireplace in the corner of the room.

  ‘Muazzez,’ Yümniye began, ‘I think that—’

  ‘I made tulips. The tulip is an Ottoman bloom. Roses would have been unsuitable. If roses are involved it can’t possibly be one of our gowns.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No. No it isn’t, Yümniye. Roses tell me that it can’t be.’ She put her cigarette out in her ashtray and lit another immediately. ‘You forget these things. I don’t. You know?’

  Yümniye shrugged and laid the bodice of the gown back down onto the bag and then looked up at İkmen. ‘Well, Çetin,’ she said, ‘I could have sworn it was one of ours, but if Muazzez thinks not . . .’

  ‘My poor sister is afflicted in the same way as the General,’ Muazzez said. ‘She becomes easily confused.’