“Have a seat. Would you like a drink?”
“I won’t say no.”
“I have vodka and vermouth.”
“A vodka would be nice.”
“Over ice?”
“Yes, please.”
While she went to the refrigerator to get the ice, I had a chance to take a closer look at her. She was tall and had long legs, encased in blue jeans. If she had put on a little weight she would have had a nice figure. Her face was sallow and haggard from drugs, her blond hair looked thin and artificial. I wondered what kind of relationship she’d enjoyed with Ahmed Hamul.
She put my drink on the table, sat down across from me, lit a long filter-tipped cigarette, and stared at me. She looked anxious.
“Tell me, what—what can you tell me about Ahmed?”
I couldn’t think of a white lie. I also didn’t know that a white lie would be any use, so I decided to give it to her straight.
“I told you a lie back there. Ahmed is dead.”
This time she did not open her mouth. On the contrary, she compressed her lips so tight I was afraid she’d hurt herself. Her fingers crumpled the cigarette and grabbed the edge of the table.
“I am sorry about that. But I didn’t know how else to get you to let me ask you a couple of questions. I am a private investigator, and Ahmed Hamul’s family has retained me to find his murderer.”
Trembling all over, she got up, gave me a frozen glare, then spat, “Get out, you fucker!” I had underestimated the intensity of their relationship. Now, in hindsight, the idea of starting our conversation with a few white lies didn’t seem so bad at all. But it was too late for that. Pure hatred flickered in her eyes, and I wouldn’t have minded leaving on the spot. Instead, I took a big gulp of vodka and growled, “Enough. I just want to ask you a couple of things. If I had been honest, you wouldn’t have given me the time of day. Don’t you want them to find his murderer? All I know about Ahmed Hamul, so far, is that he was a dealer and had big floppy ears. That’s not very much to go on …”
“I’m telling you, get out of my sight! I don’t give a shit about any of that!”
I remembered that I’d told her that Ahmed had asked me to give her something. The notion that I had some drugs for her must have been what had got her so excited—not the news that he’d come back to life.
“Just a couple of questions, and then I’ll leave, OK?”
Her face thawed. She even gave me a little smile. “All right, but I have to go to the john first.”
She left the room. I couldn’t figure her out, but I didn’t try too hard. I sipped the cheap vodka and thought about what I wanted to ask her.
I heard the toilet flush, and Hanna Hecht returned a moment later. She was still smiling—but now rather like an imbecile.
“All right. What is it you want to know?”
“First of all: how deep into dealing was Ahmed Hamul?”
“Was he?” She pursed her mouth sarcastically.
“Oh, come on, sister. We don’t have that much time.”
“We don’t?”
She cast a glance over my shoulder, and the nickel dropped, but too late. I turned around slowly and faced the open door with an undoubtedly idiotic expression. In the doorway stood the waiter from Heini’s Fried Chicken, twirling his moustache and smirking. A few things began to dawn on me. He had not been surprised to see Hanna Hecht pay my tab; what had surprised him was that I had thought she had to pay for her food. Hence, the large amount of change.
The elegant waiter was Hanna’s pimp, and she dined at Heini’s for free. And there had to be a bell in the other room that she could use in an emergency.
I felt stupid.
“Quite so. We don’t have that much time.”
Slowly he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a black handgun.
“Tell me, Hanna, what’s your friend’s problem?”
“The asshole’s been feeding me a line. Ahmed is dead as a doornail. This guy is a snooper, he works for Ahmed’s family. He made me bring him up here so he could ask me some questions. That’s it.”
Now her face had become a distorted mask. She no longer looked at me, but stared at the floor.
“So he doesn’t have any goodies from Ahmed?”
“Shit, no.”
“All right. Then we’ll escort the young man to the door and urge him not to darken it again until further notice. In a friendly but decisive manner, of course.”
He waved his girl in the direction of the door.
“Why does it upset you two so much that I want to ask a couple of questions?”
“Questions, my friend, are always upsetting, and if it is possible to avoid them …” his left hand fondled the blackened steel, “then one chooses that option. Besides, I have a personal antipathy to people who deal frivolously with matters concerning the dead.”
“I respect your ethical scruples, but …”
“Enough of this small talk, my friend. I don’t have the time nor the inclination to teach you manners. Now get up slowly and come over here.”
I obeyed and walked over to him. Suddenly he rammed his gun into my stomach, pushed his hand under my coat, and extracted my Parabellum. Then he shoved me up against the wall.
“I beg your pardon. Just a precaution. So you won’t get any silly ideas later and think you can just come back again.” He pulled the magazine out, dropped it on the floor, and tossed the gun back to me.
“All right, my friend. Now we’ll walk quietly through that door and down the stairs.”
Behind me, I heard Hanna Hecht banging the ice tray again, fixing herself a drink. Then I let the polite waiter escort me down the stairs and into the street.
He gave me a few more warnings about things that might be detrimental to my health, took his leave with aplomb, and disappeared into Heini’s Fried Chicken.
It was just past midnight. My birthday was over, and it was bedtime.
As I left the subway station, the vodka began to throb unpleasantly in my neocortex. I wandered through the quiet streets and admired the delicate curve of the sickle moon.
When I reached my building, I walked into the driveway entrance to the courtyard and took out my keys. While I was still wondering who the idiot was who had parked his car right in the middle of the drive, its engine revved up and its lights came on and blinded me. The tyres squealed, and I turned and ran the fifteen metres back to the street. Not a second too soon, I managed to slide to the right and under a parked car. A small Fiat shot past me, braked quickly, then thundered to the left. I rolled and turned as fast as I could, tore my cannon out of the holster, and aimed at the tyres.
All I heard was a quiet metallic click. I saw the Fiat disappear around the corner. A window was flung open in the building across the street.
“For Chrissakes, stop that racket or I’ll call the cops!”
The window closed again with a crash.
I got up and slapped dirt off my pants. There was a smell of burned rubber in the air. It would have been tempting to go back and pistol whip the waiter with my empty gun, but I put it back in the holster, went to my apartment, and fell into bed.
DAY TWO
1
Madame Hulk looked at me across the counter with puffy, sleepy eyes.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t serve coffee. There’s no call for it. All my customers ever want is beer, even this early in the morning. It’s really a shame. But—listen, I just made a pot for myself. I’ll let you have a cup of that.”
Without waiting for a response, she shuffled off.
It was nine in the morning. My head was throbbing. I had hit the shower at eight and decided to start the day with a visit to Mrs. Ergün. Now I leaned against the kiosk counter across the street from her apartment, hoping to have a cup of coffee before I went over there.
I had called the Turkish Embassy, but even though I had impersonated an official of the German Department of the Interior, going so far as to affect a Bavarian accent, t
he gentleman at the other end of the line could not or did not want to tell me anything about Ahmed Hamul.
Coughing and wheezing, Madame Hulk returned with a paper cup of coffee.
“You wouldn’t happen to have an open-face sandwich or anything like that?”
“I can heat up some beef sausage for you, if you like.”
My stomach signalled: no beef sausage for breakfast, please. I decided to have a bar of chocolate and a pack of cigarettes.
“Will that be all then?”
“Yes.”
“My coffee’s getting cold.”
I watched her mighty backside squeeze through the door and gradually disappear. Her coffee was of that strength they say can raise the dead. I ate half of the chocolate bar, lit a cigarette, and thought about the Fiat with the squealing tyres. I doubted that it had really been the driver’s intention to hit me—there were easier ways to get rid of me. It seemed more like an action intended to give a little more emphasis to the hands-off note. And it had certainly been effective.
But who on earth considered me such a serious nuisance? The Turkish Embassy bureaucrats would hardly employ such mob tactics, waiting in the car for hours just to give me a powerful scare.
Or maybe they would?
To gain some clarity on that, I simply had to find out if Ahmed Hamul had ever engaged in political activities. I finished my coffee and walked over to the house with the ripped out doorbells.
Mama Ergün opened the door. She was wearing a green-and-brown-striped terrycloth bathrobe. Her spongy yellowish feet were hard, and her toe nails were the colour of pus. She was as surprised as I had expected, apologized for her informal attitude and asked me to step inside, although she seemed reluctant.
The apartment smelled of toasted breakfast rolls, and I could hear a shower running somewhere. She took me to the kitchen. Two clean plates sat on the table, ready for breakfast, with a basket of fresh rolls.
“Yilmaz has already gone to work, and Ilter is out making arrangements for the funeral. I was just about to have breakfast with Ayse. Would you care for some coffee?”
She didn’t have to ask me twice. I kept hoping she’d also offer me one of those delicious warm rolls. I wished I could make my stomach growl at will, not to seem too obvious about it. Instead, I asked her, “Would this be a good time for me to have a word with your daughter Ayse?”
Yilmaz Ergün had made it very clear to me that I was not to have a word with his sister, but he wasn’t here now, and I had also noticed that the rest of the family did not entirely agree with his pronouncements.
Even so, my question was obviously putting Mrs Ergün in a quandary. Her words positively dragged themselves off her lips.
“Yes … When she is ready … you may speak to her.”
I began to be convinced that poor Ayse was a victim of syphilis. Her mother poured me a cup of coffee and sat down across the table from me.
“Since I talked to you yesterday, I’ve been thinking of a whole bunch of further questions, and that’s why I’m here so early. To be quite frank with you, I haven’t been able to find out a whole lot about your son in-law. All I have to go on at the present moment are certain assumptions. But perhaps you could help me.”
I was finding it hard to tear my yearning gaze away from those fragrant golden rolls. She must have noticed, because she said, as soon as I had stopped talking, “Please help yourself, if you like.”
Pretending to be a polite person, I said, “No, no, I don’t want to eat your breakfast.”
“Please help yourself. We have plenty.”
“Well, then I’ll have one.”
I cut the crisp roll in half, slathered butter and marmalade on it, and tried to chew it sedately. Slowly, it coated my stomach with a pleasant warmth.
“First of all, I would like to know a few things about Ahmed’s past. I’d like to know if he was politically active in any direction, if he was a member of any party or other organization. If so I would have to know the details about what he did in such a context.”
She seemed quite surprised.
“But Ahmed never had anything to do with politics.”
Only then did I realize how much unfounded hope I had put on that assumption. It was just like having sat all evening in a tavern engaged in the construction of a carefully planned house of beer mats: at the very moment you are about to put the last mat in place, some fat idiot stumbles and bangs into the table with mumbled apologies, You sit there in front of the collapsed project and feel like breaking the stupid bastard’s jaw.
“I see. Well, I didn’t really think he did.”
It’s bad PR for a PI to admit that his analytical abilities are more or less underdeveloped. So now all I had to go on was Ahmed the Dealer.
“You told me yesterday that Ahmed’s life became rather disorganized about two years ago. Can you remember any particular incident from that time? Like an unexpected visit or an unusual amount of mail from Turkey?”
She sipped her coffee and remained silent.
“Mrs. Ergün—did you know that your son-in-law was a heroin dealer?”
She nodded, still silent. It was quiet in the kitchen. The first rays of the sun crept through the window and cast deep shadows on her face. She gulped down the rest of her coffee.
“Of course. I knew it all along. Everybody knew. Ilter was the only one who went on believing Ahmed’s lies …”
She followed that up with a couple of maxims on the blindness of women in love. Then she came back to Ahmed and to her late husband, Vasif. Just like Ahmed, the latter had come home one day with a lot more money than he could have earned at his low-paying job. About a year before his fatal accident, Vasif had started spending his nights in bars and clubs. Mrs. Ergün knew this because she had tailed him several times on these excursions. He had never admitted it, but everything pointed to the fact that he had been dealing heroin. She had not been able to find out who supplied him with the stuff. There had been no new visitors, no unusual mail. At some time during this period, Ahmed must have been introduced to the same business by his father-in-law. According to Mrs. Ergün, it had not seemed strange that Ahmed and Vasif went out and spent time together.
They had been best friends even before that time. Ahmed Hamul must have seemed like an adventurous soul in that otherwise rather cautious and provident family. The old man had liked him, and besides, Ahmed was only ten years younger than Vasif.
Soon Vasif preferred Ahmed’s company to that of his own children, especially that of his son Yilmaz. Vasif and Ahmed’s relationship was like that of two happy vagabonds who enjoy plotting pranks together, not the usual relationship of in-laws. This created tensions in the family. Yilmaz, especially, often gave vent to his jealousy by coming up with mean accusations against his father and brother-in-law.
I began to understand Yilmaz’s negative attitude towards me. After Vasif’s death, Ahmed had gone on dealing by himself and had not put in many appearances here at home. Everybody except his wife Ilter had felt quite relieved. Mrs. Ergün paused, and I observed myself spreading things on yet another roll. She wrinkled her dark, leathery brow and sat there, brooding. Only the squeak of my knife against the china cut the contemplative silence.
I was beginning to get a picture of the Ergün family. There was Vasif, the paterfamilias who had first provided for the family by working as a garbage collector and did not find much joy in this strange land among its sullen, staid inhabitants. His relationships with his children were tenuous. They had been very young when they came to Germany, and had grown up in the new environment. Having no choice, they had adjusted to it, and in the process had grown remote from their father. On the other hand, Yilmaz, a hard and ambitious worker, did not receive much positive reinforcement from a father who would have preferred a livelier son. Yilmaz grew embittered, concentrated on professional success, and probably related only to his mother—to Melike Ergün, the nurturing mother, who had not been strong enough to prevent her husband’s tr
ansformation into a heroin dealer. But she took care of the children and was the backbone of the family.
Then there was Ilter, shyer and more reserved, the oldest daughter, who helped her mother, soon became a mother herself, and also dedicated her life to childcare and housekeeping. Ayse Ergün was the only one I was still unable to describe. For some reason, she had to be the blackest sheep of the family.
Then Ahmed Hamul, relatively fresh from the old homeland, burst into the sombre family scene. He married Ilter, made friends with her father, and caused a split in the family. On one side stood Yilmaz, Ayse, and their mother; on the other, Vasif and himself. Ilter and the young ones occupied some kind of no-man’s-land in between. I looked at a large aerial view of Istanbul that hung framed on the yellow kitchen wall. I asked Melike, “Don’t you remember anything out of the ordinary from the time when your husband first became a heroin dealer? Please try to remember! Anything at all. Things that may not have seemed to have anything to do with that.”
“No. I don’t. Really, I can’t think of anything.”
“So you don’t really know when he started dealing?”
She looked pensive, rubbed her hands together.
“I think it was quite soon after the accident … Yes, that’s when it started.”
“What accident was that?”
“Oh, it wasn’t a bad one. Vasif just ran into another fellow’s car.”
“Did your husband have many accidents like that?”
I bit my tongue. I hadn’t meant to ask her that.
“No, it was the only one he ever had. Except for the one that killed him.”
It was a very skinny little straw, but it was one to grasp.
“Were you there when it happened?”
“Yes. We were on our way to visit some friends.”
“Do you remember the date?”
“No, not exactly. It was in February, but I can’t remember the date.”
“Whose fault was it? Your husband’s or the other driver’s?”
“I don’t really understand those things, but I thought it was Vasif’s fault. The other car came from the right. But then it turned out it wasn’t his fault after all.”
Happy Birthday, Turk! Page 6