Dance with Death

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Thank you, Çetin Bey,’ his counterpart in Nevşehir said with a bow. ‘You know that I was the original investigating officer in this case. I was very young then. It has haunted me ever since. To solve this mystery would be the highest point of my career – my life, even.’

  İkmen, a little embarrassed by such emotional words from a fellow professional, just smiled. If all of this did come to fruition, he hoped that Erten’s superiors would have the good grace to reward him properly. The poor man’s broken and flapping shoes made even İkmen’s hideous plastic faux brogues look stylish.

  Altay Salman dropped İkmen off in the village before driving himself back to the riding school. They hadn’t spoken much about what they’d seen at the mortuary, mainly because İkmen had been trying to get through on his mobile to Arto Sarkissian. After all if anyone could ‘push things’ through the Forensic Institute with no questions asked it had to be a police pathologist. However, Arto’s assistant said he was on leave, and so İkmen tried to call him on his mobile. But he wasn’t answering it and so the inspector was forced to leave one of his stuttering, terribly inept answer phone messages.

  As soon as he got inside Menşure’s hotel, İkmen lit a cigarette and wandered up into the restaurant area. Even if they weren’t eating themselves, Menşure’s kitchen and waiting staff had to be on hand for the needs and desires of her non-Muslim guests and friends. When İkmen arrived, Rachelle Jones and another, very heavily made-up foreign woman were sitting drinking coffee and eating börek with Menşure.

  As soon as she saw him, the Australian smiled and said, ‘Inspector!’

  İkmen bowed. ‘Miss Jones.’

  ‘God, doesn’t he have just the best voice ever!’ she said in English to her companion. The woman merely smiled by way of reply. Menşure lifted her eyes to heaven in exasperation. Rachelle Jones was a woman she could respect, mainly because she alone amongst the foreign residents of Muratpaşa had never succumbed to any of the greedy young gigolos, but liking her was rather more of a stretch.

  ‘This is Miss Lavell,’ Menşure said in English as İkmen sat down beside her. ‘From New Orleans in the States.’

  The woman smiled. ‘Oh, you don’t need to be formal,’ she said in what İkmen found a most attractive Southern drawl. ‘My name is Dolores.’

  İkmen rose to stretch across the table and offer her his hand. ‘Çetin.’

  Menşure watched him sit down and then said to the American, ‘Çetin has nine children, you know, Dolores. In İstanbul. With his wife.’

  ‘Oh, how lovely,’ Dolores replied. ‘You know, Miss Menşure, I am a Catholic and we just love big families. I always wanted a whole load of brothers and sisters myself.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Although not religious, Menşure Tokatlı was an intensely moral woman with what, to İkmen, had always seemed a very strange attitude towards personal relationships. Like the English philosopher John Ruskin, Menşure had a really quite morbid horror of the human body and of the intimate ‘things’ it was sometimes required to do. And although she knew that Çetin loved Fatma with all his heart, she had been disappointed by his admission with regard to Alison. This Dolores woman was therefore going to be kept very much at arm’s length.

  ‘So when did you arrive in Muratpaşa, um, Dolores?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Dolores has been coming to Cappadocia for years,’ Rachelle Jones answered for her.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘My dad was a soldier stationed in Germany in the late fifties and early sixties,’ Dolores said. ‘He and his buddies went all over – Britain, France, Turkey.’

  ‘To Muratpaşa?’ İkmen asked.

  The American laughed. ‘Yeah, but hey, what is this? Twenty questions?’

  Menşure placed a reassuring hand on Dolores’ arm. ‘My cousin is a police officer. Asking questions is a habit he has.’

  Dolores smiled. ‘Oh, how interesting,’ she said.

  İkmen braced himself for the foreigner’s stock questions about human rights and how he, such a gentle man, could work within such a pernicious system. But strangely, neither they, nor any mention of a certain Alan Parker film* from the 1970s, materialised. Midnight Express – the story of an American convicted of drug offences and confined in a prison in Istanbul. It was highly sensationalist and covertly anti-Turkish.

  ‘I know Dad came to Muratpaşa because he sent me a postcard,’ Dolores continued. ‘I was only a kid and all the shapes hereabouts fascinated me. I don’t know whether or not Dad stayed in this actual village, though. He used to tell stories about hiking through the valleys. I know he stayed in Ürgüp, which is where I went on my first trip. But then when I came to Muratpaşa I just fell plain in love.’

  ‘With the village,’ Rachelle Jones put in in Turkish. ‘Not some conscript half her age.’

  İkmen smiled. ‘Has your father ever been back?’

  ‘Daddy died in 1977.’ Dolores’ eyes instantly filled with tears, as if her father’s death had taken place just the previous week.

  ‘I am sorry,’ İkmen said. ‘I did not mean to bring back painful memories for you, Miss Lavell.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ But she’d lowered her head now, carefully avoiding eye contact with anyone. Some people, as İkmen knew only too well, close down when they grieve.

  It was Rachelle Jones who eventually broke the ensuing silence when she asked İkmen, ‘So, Inspector, what were you doing out with the dashing Captain Salman this crisp, snowy morning?’

  İkmen couldn’t help but laugh. Very little got past village people, both natives and incomers. Rachelle Jones expressed this trait in a very direct way he found refreshing and amusing. But before he could reply he caught yet another of Menşure’s disapproving glances and so his response was not quite as illuminating as it could have been. ‘We had some business together,’ he said noncommittally.

  ‘Oooh,’ Rachelle mugged dramatically. ‘Old crimes. The murder of Aysu Alkaya?’ She smiled. ‘We all know now, Inspector, so you can be straight with us.’

  ‘Can I indeed? You seem to know a lot about this village, Miss Jones,’ İkmen said. ‘I may need a guide out to some of the more distant valleys if or when the snow clears. Can you recommend such a person?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He waited for her to continue, but she just kept on looking at him, smiling.

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘Turgut Senar is the most experienced guide in the village,’ Menşure said in Turkish. ‘And yes, before you ask, Çetin, he is the brother of the somewhat unfortunate Kemalettin Senar.’

  İkmen raised an eyebrow. Of course both Erten and Altay Salman had mentioned that Kemalettin’s brother was a guide. He had a gun. If Turgut Senar was so knowledgeable about the valleys – including, he imagined, the fantastic Valley of the Saints – was it possible that his brother also knew a thing or two about the more obscure caves and chimneys?

  ‘So maybe if you go out hiking with Turgut, you might learn a thing or two,’ Rachelle said. ‘Or maybe not. Turgut can be a bit tight-lipped, especially about his family.’

  İkmen was rather more alarmed by the word ‘hiking’ than by the prospect of spending time with a man of few words. Exercise had always been anathema to the policeman and the guide he had imagined had had a jeep like Altay Salman.

  When the two women finally left, Menşure turned a very stern eye upon İkmen and said, ‘Can’t stop yourself being the charmer with women, can you? You should smile less and not take their compliments as easily as you do. It’s indecent. If you don’t behave yourself, I will let Kismet into your room one day when you’re out.’

  In spite of the fact that it just wasn’t logical to get so worked up about a dumb animal, İkmen felt his face blanch. ‘He’s still alive?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Menşure said with what seemed to be a degree of smugness, ‘And despite being so very, very old, he is still quite capable of frightening his peers, small children and middle-aged policemen. Careful breeding, you see, Çetin. Healthy
blood. My father, you know, said that my grandfather mated Kismet’s mother with a lion.’ She raised a warning finger up to heaven. ‘So be warned, Çetin, no more smoking in public and no flirting with anyone. And remember that I have eyes in every place in this village.’

  A whole society made up of informants! It put İkmen in mind of the tens of thousands of spies who had been employed by the paranoid nineteenth-century Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Although the snow had started to melt now, it was still very cold outside – but that didn’t prevent İkmen from opting to continue his researches away from Menşure’s hotel. As he left, however, he checked to make sure that he didn’t inadvertently step on Kismet. After all if he was still alive and active he – and his ‘healthy’ blood – could be just about anywhere.

  Mehmet Süleyman didn’t mention what he thought he might have seen in Zelfa’s garden in the early hours of the morning. In fact he and his wife didn’t really speak at all before he left for work. If not exactly embarrassed by what had happened between them, they didn’t know quite what to say to each other.

  As he walked into the station, he saw İzzet Melik leaning against his office door talking to İkmen’s deputy, Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu. She, to her credit, was ignoring his leering expressions with some dignity.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at the hospital?’ Süleyman asked as he broke up this somewhat disturbing tableau with just the sound of his voice. Looking İzzet straight in the eye, he continued, ‘The Aydın boy. Someone needs to be there in case he wakes up.’

  ‘Well, there’s Constable . . .’

  ‘I mean someone with some experience of asking questions of – note I do not use either the word “questioning” or “interrogating” – victims of crime.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ For a moment İzzet just stood there, awkwardly shifting from foot to foot, still half smiling at Ayşe Farsakoğlu.

  ‘Well, off you go, then,’ Süleyman said as he pushed open the door to his office and walked inside.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Süleyman was just about to close the door behind him, when he noticed that Ayşe Farsakoğlu was still standing outside, obviously waiting to see him.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked nervously. ‘Sergeant?’

  As well as being very beautiful, with long dark hair and a perfectly curvaceous figure, Ayşe Farsakoğlu was also a young woman with whom Süleyman had enjoyed a brief affair just prior to his current marriage. And although that was all very firmly in the past now, he was still not entirely comfortable with her. She was, he knew, if not still exactly in love with him, still vulnerable to feelings that he did not share.

  ‘Inspector İkmen said that I was to help you as much as I could during his absence, sir,’ she said without preamble. ‘Sergeant Melik was just telling me about that poor boy in hospital.’

  ‘Possibly the peeper’s latest victim, yes,’ Süleyman said as he sat down behind his desk and lit a cigarette.

  She’d been off sick for a couple of days and so, in a sense, it probably had been useful that Melik had brought her up to speed. After all, it saved him from having to do so himself and he did, he knew, want to use Ayşe where he could in this investigation. Apart from anything else she was going to be a lot more sympathetic with the peeper’s young, mainly gay victims than Melik was.

  ‘I’ve received intelligence,’ he said, referring to his recent conversation with Metin İskender, ‘that there is a belief within the homosexual fraternity that the peeper is an enemy of their kind.’

  ‘But I thought that he’ – she swallowed hard before using the word – ‘masturbated in front of them. And wasn’t one boy sexually assaulted?’

  ‘In the same way that misogynists sometimes assault or even rape women, so there is a school of thought that says men who dislike homosexuals sometimes seek to humiliate them by asserting sexual supremacy over them.’

  Ayşe sat down in front of him. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What I want you to do, Ayşe, is to check our records for men who have been convicted of offences against homosexuals in the past. Now, as you may or may not know, Sergeant Melik has already run a check, but what I’d like you to do is look at the details surrounding the offences committed by these individuals. There is a possibility that the peeper is connected to, or habitually present at, homosexual meeting places – clubs, hamams. Find out which of our offenders is either known to frequent such places or was maybe apprehended in a homosexual meeting place.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He took several sheets of paper out of his desk drawer and passed them across to her. ‘Here is the list,’ he said, and then added with a smile, ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you which clubs are which, do I?’

  She smiled too. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘All right then.’

  Taking this as her cue to leave, Ayşe made her way towards the office door. Just before she turned the handle he added, ‘Oh and Sergeant, if Sergeant Melik . . .’

  ‘Oh come on, sir,’ she said with a smile, ‘I can handle a maganda.’

  And with a slight raising of her eyebrows she was off. Süleyman laughed. The concept of the maganda, a coarse, arrogant, sexually inept macho man, had been born out of the satirical İstanbul weeklies of the early 1990s. Read, in the main, by youthful intellectuals, these magazines had sometimes slipped into Süleyman’s world via his young friend Berekiah Cohen who found them very amusing. The maganda, Berekiah was fond of saying, bore more than just a passing resemblance to his father, Balthazar.

  However, memories of Berekiah also brought to mind images of the hamam in Karaköy which he had spent some hours watching two nights before. In view of what he’d seen in Zelfa’s garden, was it possible that someone had seen him there, followed him to his car and then pursued the white BMW home the following night? Could it possibly be the peeper who maybe thought that he was homosexual? He’d spoken to a rather smart man who had appeared to be attracted to him – they had indeed watched each other leave the vicinity. There had also been that fellow lurking further away, down the hill in a shop doorway. It was all speculative and tenuous, of course, but then it was well known that middle-aged homosexual life in the city was itself furtive and opportunistic. Süleyman ground his cigarette out in his ashtray and then shook his head impatiently. But this was all utterly ridiculous – and paranoid. Why anyone should follow him home was stupid. He wasn’t young, he wasn’t gay – not really. What he was was somewhat guilty about his unofficial trip to the hamam as well as being aware of the effect that his undisputed good looks had had upon some of the men outside the bath. But to think that one of them would go so far as to follow him home had to be a deeply paranoid and arrogant notion on his part. He resolved to put it to the back of his mind. He did not, however, resolve not to observe the Saray Hamam ever again.

  ‘Up there it is a completely different experience,’ the German said with a smile. ‘In a sense you can almost see those ancient tectonic catastrophes as they happen.’

  He was so enthusiastic, it was difficult not to be carried away by it all. However, as he had told İkmen in some detail, balloon flights were not cheap.

  ‘Because we have to be expert pilots and because of the maintenance we have to do on the equipment,’ he’d said in English and had then gone on to quote İkmen a price in US dollars which translated into a truly horrific lire tariff.

  ‘I was actually thinking of hiking through the valleys, maybe with Turgut Senar,’ İkmen said as he downed the last dregs of his cappuccino before calling for another. The Cappudocia Coffee Bean, or rather its signature product, did its Anglo-Turkish management proud. As a meeting place for expatriates of various hues it was also quite interesting too. Maybe outside Ramazan they were not so conservative in their beverage tastes, but certainly in the Holy Month cappuccino in the hours of daylight seemed to be de rigueur. Ferdinand, the German hot air balloon pilot, obviously used the place a lot because it was directly across the road from his own business, Muratpaşa Balloon Flights.

  �
��Well, now that you say this,’ Ferdinand said with a smile, ‘did you know that we do a combined short flight and then a hike with Turgut through the White Valley and up into the Valley of the Saints?’

  İkmen’s ears pricked up at the mention of the latter destination.

  ‘We fly out to the head of the White Valley where we land and then customers go off with Turgut to walk to the Valley of the Saints – five kilometres.’

  Appalled at the way this man so glibly uttered such a vast distance, İkmen nevertheless managed to quash the urge to laugh nervously and instead smiled at the English partner in the Cappudocia, the very lively Marion.

  ‘Cappuccino with cinnamon sprinkles, Inspector,’ she said as she placed a huge white cup and saucer down in front of him.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And when Turgut has shown you the Saints, one of our support vehicles will come to bring you back to the village,’ Ferdinand continued. He then mentioned a rather smaller dollar figure for this service and, once İkmen had told him that he was related to Menşure Tokatlı, that figure reduced still further. It was good to see that at least one of the many foreigners resident in the village had some understanding of its hierarchies.

  However, it was still rather a large amount of money for a mere policeman to afford and İkmen knew that he should speak to Fatma about it first. But then he thought about how hard he had always worked and how much he deserved that one, paltry credit card that only he knew about, and so he signed up with Ferdinand right away.

  ‘You won’t regret it,’ the German said as he handed over a handwritten ticket for the next day’s flight. ‘The snow will be almost gone by the morning and the air will be as clear as spring water. I know these conditions, trust me.’

  It was only then that Ferdinand hit İkmen with the news that they would be setting off at 4 a.m. in order to catch the sunrise over the valleys. But by then it was far too late.

  Once the German had gone, İkmen, alone with his cappuccino, began to wonder about the advisability as well as the utility of what he had just done. In order to see where Aysu Alkaya had been killed he needed to get out to the Valley of the Saints and, had he asked him, Inspector Erten from Nevşehir would probably have arranged it for him. But there was a lot about being guided there by Kemalettin Senar’s brother that intrigued him. That someone who had, at one time, been suspected of killing the girl had a brother who knew the valleys so well had to be known to the police in Nevşehir. He wasn’t therefore doing anything that he shouldn’t. The balloon flight itself was, of course, a total extravagance that so ably demonstrated his own physical laziness. But even so, five kilometres . . .