Istanbul Noir

by Mustafa Ziyalan

Faruk grabbed the telephone and answered. A few seconds later he hung up. “The chief wants to see you at 3 o’clock,” he said.

  There were five of us in the room: the police chief, the vice chief, director of Istanbul intelligence, Faruk, and me. I’d turned in a written report just two days before, but they wanted to have a face-to-face. In my report I’d written that we didn’t have nearly enough intelligence, and that the only thing the victims seemed to have in common was that they were all over fifty years old and they were all corporate executives. But this was stuff they already knew. In other words, they weren’t satisfied.

  “You’ve made no progress,” the police chief scolded me.

  The fresh-faced kid from intelligence was quick to put forth his self-defense. “The files we sent in were as thorough as could be; we didn’t leave out a single detail.”

  The finger-pointing hardly befitted such a high-level meeting. For a moment, I wondered how they would react if I told them what Haldun had told me the previous evening. I had no choice but to insist that the investigation up until then had been inadequate.

  “Either we haven’t gathered enough evidence or we’ve got a serial killer on our hands who knows how to carry out the perfect crime,” I said.

  Then, whether to provoke me or to intimidate me, I’m not sure, the wise guy from intelligence chimed in: “So tell us, which building do you think is next?”

  I didn’t even have to think about it. “Kanyon,” I said confidently.

  “How can you be so sure?” the police chief asked.

  “It’s just a hunch,” I said. “Someone’s getting back at the capitalists.”

  I went to my father’s that evening for dinner. I hadn’t been able to sit down and have a real conversation with him, my stepmother, and my stepsister since I’d arrived in Istanbul.

  At first we mostly talked about the past, about the good parts; they didn’t bring up how withdrawn I’d been as a child. My father had never wanted me to go to Ankara.

  I still felt like a stranger when I was with them.

  We had left our places at the dinner table and settled in the sofas in the sitting room. My stepsister moved to the kitchen to make coffee.

  My father wore a contented smile on his face. I sensed what he was thinking, but I had other things that I wanted to talk about.

  “Do you remember Haldun, Dad?” I asked.

  “Haldun from the old neighborhood?”

  I shook my head yes.

  “Of course I do. How could I forget him? He was a good kid, may he rest in peace. I’m surprised you remember him, you were so young.”

  I asked the next question not out of surprise, but out of fear.

  “When did he die?” My voice was quivering.

  “They arrested him after the coup. It was 1982, I think. He died during interrogation. They said it was suicide. Who were we to question the military? They buried him next to lhan. They were such good kids, the both of them. It’s a shame.”

  “lhan?”

  “You know, lhan, he used to live on the other side of the brook. You don’t remember him? He was the only blonde in the neighborhood, curly hair, the kid was like an angel. He died before Haldun did. They shot him, threw his body into the brook. It turned up two days later in Kâıthane.”

  My stepsister brought our coffees and then settled down into one of the sofa chairs. “Can’t we forget about all those bad memories for a while? We only see each other once a decade as it is,” she griped.

  “Can you take me to their graves tomorrow?” I asked. My father nodded.

  The small mosque next to the graveyard in Sanayi Mahallesi had grown immensely, like a piece of fruit pumped full of hormones. When we moved through the gate to the graveyard, Faruk asked, “Which way?”

  “Downhill and to the right.”

  We stopped next to my mother’s and my brother’s graves. I hadn’t been to visit for nearly ten years. My father held his palms facing upwards in prayer. I opened my hands and mumbled something that I thought sounded like a prayer.

  Once he’d finished praying, my father wiped his hands over his face. “It’s not far,” he said.

  We walked for a few more minutes until we reached a pair of graves surrounded by an iron fence. They looked like holy tombs where pilgrims came to pray. On both stones were written the words, Martyrs of the Revolution.

  I turned and faced Faruk. “You remember this name?” I asked.

  He looked carefully at the name on the gravestone. “It’s just a coincidence, two guys with the same name.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not it. The guy knew me.”

  Faruk was smiling as we rode up in the elevator. This time I’d asked to have someone come with me. We got off on the thirty-fifth floor and walked down a long corridor and through a glass door. The secretary stood up to welcome us before letting lhan Bey know that we were there. A few minutes later, we were ushered into his office.

  A slightly cross-eyed man wearing metal-framed glasses stood up when we entered the room. He was short and chubby.

  Faruk looked at me, I gently shook my head.

  He motioned for us to have a seat at the conference table. “How can I help you, Sadık Bey?” he asked.

  Faruk was glancing around anxiously. “I came here two days ago, but they took me to see someone else on this floor by the same name,” I said.

  lhan Bey smiled. “That’s impossible! There’s nobody here with the same name as me.”

  “But I was here. In this conference room.”

  “Well, I’m the only lhan on this floor,” he said with a smile. “I’m sure I would know if there was anybody else here with the same name!”

  A cell phone started to ring. Faruk grabbed his phone and headed for a corner of the room so as not to interrupt us.

  “Where did you go to college, lhan Bey?” I asked.

  “Bosphorus University. I studied computer engineering,” he said.

  Just then Faruk approached and whispered in my ear: “They found another body a few minutes ago. At Kanyon this time. They’re waiting for us.”

  I did my best to give lhan Bey a smile; after all, it was probably the last time I’d be seeing him.

  BURN AND GO

  BY SADIK YEMN

  Kurtulu

  “It was you who pushed him. Then you made some kind of pact to keep quiet about it.”

  I was so shocked, on so many levels, I couldn’t respond. “Kevork told me. He said it was an accident, an accident that became a source of lifelong agony.”

  Anfi pushed back her long hair, which, though white now, was the feature most reminiscent of her younger days. Her large brown eyes were exactly like those of her son Yani; they were full of sorrow. They weren’t accusatory. There was no hate in them. For now, at least.

  “When did he tell you that?”

  “Two months ago, when I bumped into him on my way back from shopping. He’s changed the least of all. Still has the same thick red hair, square face, large, timid eyes.”

  “I was eighteen the last time I saw him.”

  “You know what they say, coincidence is a fickle thing. Just five more minutes and I would’ve missed him. He was looking for me. He was shocked at how much the neighborhood had changed in the last forty years, just like you were. He’d knocked on my door, but there was no answer, and so he was about to leave. Clearly, some part of him was thankful. That the past hadn’t opened the door. He jumped when I called his name. You should have seen how he hugged me though. We could’ve been models for some ad. One part of him didn’t want to find me. But the part that did was deeply shaken.”

  And Anfi had had no trouble finding me. “Google knows everything, maallah,” she had said. She had found Avram first, then me. She was very sick. Her days were numbered. She wanted to see us all one last time.

  My schedule at the university was flexible. I’d been separated from my wife for two and a half years. My dog Ganz had died of old age. I had been involved with one of my stu
dents and caused something of a scandal. I’d lost all desire to complete the piece I needed to turn in to gain full professorship. I accepted Anfi’s invitation and immediately booked my Vienna—Istanbul ticket over the Internet. The part of me that was afraid of changing its mind quickly took care of plans for the trip, before I had time to lose my resolve.

  We were supposed to meet at 2 o’clock, but my plane was delayed and we had to postpone until that evening. It had been thirty-seven years since I’d seen either Kevork or Avram. We had parted ways when I left for college in Ankara, and chance hadn’t brought us together since. The only place that could possibly reunite us had quickly built bridges, thanks to Anfi.

  “Yani liked you best of all.”

  “It was an accident, Anfi. I was pushed into that same hole at least half a dozen times myself. It was just soft, squishy soil, full of worms. You’d be scared, you’d get scratched up here and there, but that was it. How could I have known? I loved him. You know that.”

  “Why didn’t you bring him home right away? To me, to the pharmacy … You might have saved him.”

  It was then that the mental block I had erected to keep myself from dwelling on that moment cracked wide open, and the image of Yani lying motionless in the hole forced its way into my mind. His eyes were half-open. He wasn’t breathing. I thought he was faking it. The sand covered the blood on his neck. He let out a scream when he fell, the way we all did. We’d already started walking away. Such was our routine. If you fell in a hole or some trap, you’d follow after the rest of the gang and give them hell once you’d caught up. Finally, we stopped and waited, and when we realized he wasn’t coming, we went back. We couldn’t see that he had a huge piece of glass rammed in his stomach and that his jugular was sliced open. It wasn’t until I’d gone down into the hole and grabbed his shoulders, until I’d seen how his eyes had already gone dull … My gut froze. He wasn’t faking it … I saw the fear, the finality of it all, in the faces of Avram and Kevork. Yani was no more. Our lucky charm was gone. Mourning the death of our closest friend was like a two-way mirror, our cursed faces crying and smirking at the same time. In retrospect, how disturbing that we made a pact with hardly a word. Like the plan was already there, in our minds, just waiting to spring. We would pretend we’d never seen it.

  That’s what we did. We kept quiet.

  “It was at least ten minutes later when I went down into the hole. He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing, Anfi. Just imagine how scared we were. We didn’t grow up with all those gory horror films like kids do today. It was such a heavy, bizarre burden. We were terrified. We felt guilty. And not just for pushing him into the hole.”

  Anfi, sighing, looked away. She fixed her eyes upon her long, wrinkled fingers, giving me time to unwrap our crime of thought. She was like a young woman, her slim body shrouded in a somber brown dress. Everybody envied Yani. Especially the boys. We were his buddies. We got to know luck at its source. He was the only one whose mother had a college degree. Anfi was a pharmacist at Life Drugstore. It wasn’t the best-known pharmacy in the neighborhood, but still, it was the place where we dropped our pants to get those painful injections in our butts. Anfi was intimately acquainted with our behinds, our rashes, and the secrets of the neighborhood women.

  Later, I developed this kind of habit, where every time I lowered my underwear in the presence of a woman, I’d think of those fingers feeling for just the right spot to stick the needle in and then quickly rubbing away the hurt with an alcohol swab. Sometimes the image of a kid lying at the bottom of a pit, gazing at the sky with hollow eyes, would attach itself to these thoughts and spoil the fun.

  Yani was an only child. He was fair-skinned like his mother. He was a smart, lively, and kind kid. He wasn’t rough, he didn’t curse or connive or sneak into movie theaters for free, or drop frogs or crickets into girls’ shirts, or take a piss in inappropriate places like we did, but he’d pretend he did all of it. Accept me the way I am, he’d say. And we did. His greatest asset was his luck. In games of chance, he always won. If a wasp stung somebody, that somebody would never be Yani. The neighbor whose window was smashed by a soccer ball would never make out Yani among the group of children. His mischief, his mistakes never lingered long in the collective memory. It was the same in school. He wasn’t always on his best behavior. He’d tattle, copy, cut class, things like that, yet he was always considered innocent as an angel. His innocence was his cross to bear. Yet with time, it became something of a burden that he imposed upon us, his closest friends, to bear in his stead. Until now, I’ve never thought of it in those terms. It’s true, though, that it was a burden. We were the ones shouldering it. It was exhausting. And maybe we just grew sick and tired of it. Even that part of me that still believes I’m making excuses for our envy concedes this point. Such was his luck, that shadow of his innocence. So that his luck might prosper, we had to face the lack of it.

  “Has this room changed much?”

  I looked at Anfi. A new expression had appeared in her eyes. I didn’t know what to make of it. It was like a moment of decision.

  “It’s the same as far as I can recall.”

  “Can you say what’s on the windowsill without even looking?”

  I hadn’t even glanced in that direction since I first walked in. But I knew.

  “A small coal-heated iron, a dark blue kerosene lamp, a miniature icon of Virgin Mary, and one of the Virgin Mary with Jesus. Let’s see … a small box with a blue bow, and inside of it—”

  “You were always the one with the best memory. A kind of blessing. Now tell me, what’s in that box?”

  “Yani’s hair.”

  “You left him to the vultures. They didn’t find him for two days. His eyes, ears, nose, fingertips were all eaten away. Two days. It could have been five, or ten.”

  I thought of saying something like, Hair holds up really well though, but then decided to keep it to myself.

  “It was the barber from the next street over who dumped that glass into the hole. Everybody knew. A car drove by and scattered a bunch of stones, that’s how it broke. It was a big deal. Nobody forgets a window glass that size.”

  “Anfi, is that why you invited us here? To talk about these things? It was an accident. I regret it. And I’m sure Avram and Kevork do too. It happened a long time ago.”

  “We’ll have another coffee, won’t we?”

  I looked at my watch. Quarter to 9. Anfi had said that Kevork and Avram would be here at 9. I had been looking forward to seeing them and rehashing the past, but now I wasn’t so sure. The idea of topping off the night in a meyhane still beckoned, though.

  Google knew us, indeed. Avram was the producer of a popular television show in Canada. He lived in Ottawa. He was the honorary president of a gay club called The Diamond Gator. Kevork had studied interior design. He had lived in New York for several years before moving to Rome. He had his own studio. It seemed he’d made it big time. I had learned all of this within fifteen minutes, just after Anfi first called me a week ago.

  “Let’s have our coffee. Come to the kitchen.”

  I followed her with a resignation similar to the one I used to have when pulling down my pants in anticipation of a big, thick needle.

  I was surprised when I saw the same beaded curtain still hanging at the kitchen door after all those years. It let out a surreal tone as Anfi passed through it. She had done her best to freeze everything as it had been forty years ago, but she couldn’t help the modern kitchen appliances: an electric kettle, a new oven, an electric lighter.

  Anfi put water, sugar, and coffee in a cezve, which she then placed on the stove. Both of us were having our coffee with lots of sugar. As she stirred it in silence, I ran my hand over the curtain of beads. My senses perceived in its sound a cryptic message. Had I forgotten something? This thing that was happening, was it a moment of the past, lodged somewhere in my memory, thrashing, struggling to right itself in the present? A sliver, a shard, a splinter of a memory? When, a
fter several seconds, the revelation failed to appear, I removed my hand.

  “I replaced it twice. Fortunately those things became touristy, so they’re not hard to find.”

  Though still relatively large, the kitchen felt smaller than it had in my childhood. I took a step inside and saw the black-and-white photograph hanging on the left wall. It was in a wooden frame, protected by glass. I knew it well, because my mother, too, had had a copy of the same photo. Four of the five women in the picture were grinning at the camera, with babies in their arms and several older children standing in front of them. March 1951, Tatavla. Barely two months old, I was the youngest of them all; Avram and Kevork were six months old. Yani was looking at the photographer from the bosom of his mother, wide-eyed. How new to the world we were.

  “So, your mother died two years ago, huh? I remember when she moved to join her siblings in zmir, after your father passed away. To think that was twenty years ago! She was a helpful person, very sincere, from the heart. She made a mean fava. Reminds me of those fava bean festivals, haven’t thought of those in a while. You never did care much for fava beans … So why didn’t you have any children? Your mother so desperately wanted a grandchild, as you know.”

  “That’s just the way things happened. Monique, my wife, had two miscarriages. And then we never … And now we’re divorced …”

  Anfi nodded sympathetically. “There aren’t many of us left from that photograph. Avram’s mother Rosa died five years ago. You remember the woman next to her, right? Rachel. She was so young when she died, the poor thing. From a brain hemorrhage. She just collapsed in the street. On Papaz Street. She was coming back from a visit to her cousin. Kevork’s mother was as healthy as a horse. You should have seen how she used to hike up Tatavla slope at that age of hers. And then she died too, of pneumonia. About three years ago. Maybe even four now. And those two boys, I forget their names. That blond one, and the one with those sparkling eyes …”

  “Metin and Kirkor.”

  “Right. They went into business together. Import, export. They kept it up for quite some time. Business was good. They stayed in Kurtulu, in luxury apartments built on the old gardens. They had a two-story shop in Valide Çeme. They always remained true to their roots. Their money evaporated during the crisis of ’99, though, so they took a third partner. Turns out the guy was connected with the mafia, and he killed both of them. In Bodrum. In public. In broad daylight. That girl to the right in front of Rachel married a Spaniard. I heard that she drowned somewhere near Barcelona. I didn’t know her family very well. She was just a girl next door who showed up whenever there was a camera around. Anyway, that’s fate for you.”