‘If you want to go away from the waiting area and into the hospital, why don’t you just go?’ she said as she sat beside him in the car.
‘I’m not supposed to go into the Taksim,’ he said, patiently reiterating what he had already gone over with her several times now. ‘Somebody doesn’t want me to talk to one of the patients in there. But that is exactly what I have to do. Hence my need for your help, Estelle and that of,’ he looked up at the shabby wooden building that the car was parked in front of and sighed, ‘İbrahim.’
Just at that moment a dark, lanky young man wearing way too much jewellery about his person came out of the shabby house and smiled at the occupants of the car. İbrahim İnçesu had been Berekiah Cohen’s best friend ever since they had played together in the streets of Karaköy as little boys. Even when the İnçesu family moved away to Hasköy, Berekiah and İbrahim remained close. Not even İbrahim’s more latterly developed tastes for drinking, fighting and generally breaking his poor mother’s heart could do any more than occasionally shake their friendship. So when Berekiah’s ‘big brother’ Mehmet Süleyman had called İbrahim to ask whether he would like to do him a favour, the twenty-six-year-old had responded immediately.
‘Does it involve any danger?’ had been his first question.
Süleyman replied that danger was possible and, what was more, shouting and general obnoxiousness was required in some quantity. İbrahim had agreed to do whatever the policeman wanted immediately. It was worrying: İbrahim was what many people would have called unhinged. Just his voice, when shouting, could chill the blood. But then what Süleyman needed – someone to create a diversion for him – did of necessity require a high level of noise and general bad behaviour. Balthazar, of course, could have created exactly the same effect just by sobbing at the top of his voice. The sight of a man with no legs weeping is difficult for even the most hard-hearted bystander to ignore. But Balthazar was not with them and İbrahim was.
As soon as the young man got into Süleyman’s white BMW, they headed off towards the Taksim Hospital. The sky was beginning to darken now and in just over an hour it would be iftar. Süleyman, aware of just how erratic the driving of those anxious to get home to eat can become, drove rather more carefully than usual. After all, Abdullah Aydın wasn’t due to be moved from the Taksim until the following morning and so theoretically Süleyman could have the entire night at his disposal. That was of course provided his ‘Auntie’ Estelle wasn’t either seen by a doctor immediately or failed in her task of pretending to be in pain. The latter case was possible but that the former was almost laughable was underwritten powerfully as Süleyman, Estelle and İbrahim entered the hospital waiting area.
‘What do you want?’ a small, but staggeringly hard-faced nurse asked them as they approached the great mass of moaning and grimacing people waiting for some sort of medical attention.
‘My aunt was injured in the Karaköy bombing,’ Süleyman said as he looked affectionately at Estelle. ‘She was taken to the Italian Hospital at the time . . .’
‘They were very kind,’ Estelle said by way of explanation.
‘But now she is having pain again, in her arm,’ Süleyman said.
‘Well, what is she doing here?’ the nurse enquired. ‘Take her back to the Italian Hospital.’
‘I can’t,’ Süleyman looked, he hoped, with dewy eyes at the nurse in front of him. Then moving in more closely to her he dropped his voice. ‘My aunt is poor,’ he said. ‘My brother and I have brought her because we don’t want her to suffer. But we cannot afford medical bills for our entire family. We have parents, wives . . .’
‘Well, we’ll need to have photocopies of her papers first,’ the nurse said as she gestured limply towards an endless line of people. ‘Over there.’
‘I presume it’s my job to get in line for Auntie,’ İbrahim said as he helped Süleyman lead Estelle towards a group of five elderly ladies who immediately made room for her on the three small chairs that they shared.
‘Yes, please, my dear brother. Auntie can’t possibly stand in her condition.’
As she sat down Süleyman noticed that his ‘aunt’ winced with pain in a very convincing manner. Estelle Cohen was an amazing woman. After all the shocks and traumas she’d been through – both recently and in the past – she was still giving this latest little adventure her all.
‘Dear Auntie,’ he said as he took her documents from her then planted a kiss on her cheek and straightened up. He then went with İbrahim over to the disgruntled line of people waiting to photocopy their documents.
‘So when do I start screaming?’ the younger man asked with rather more relish in his voice than Süleyman would have liked.
‘When I tell you.’
‘Which . . .’
‘I’m going to go and find the toilet now,’ Süleyman said as he looked around in order to get his bearings. ‘You stay here in the line with Auntie’s documents and no noises until I say so. OK?’
‘If that’s the deal, that’s the deal,’ İbrahim responded breezily.
‘That’s the deal, İbrahim.’
And stepping carefully over those patients who had probably lost hope long ago and were now lying asleep on the floor, Süleyman began to make his way to the front of the waiting area and the corridor which, he knew, eventually, led to the back of the premises and Abdullah Aydın’s police-guarded room.
Chapter 19
* * *
İkmen first looked out of the window towards the darkening, snow-blizzarded Fairy Chimneys opposite before he spoke. Soon the muezzin would call the faithful to prayer and the Ramazan fast would be broken. But as he looked at the assembled company around him in Menşure’s restaurant, he couldn’t imagine any of them rushing home to eat on this particular occasion. With just one more glance towards an anxious-looking Altay Salman, he said, ‘Before we start I should just tell you all that I know who kidnapped and attempted to kill me and who killed Aysu Alkaya twenty years ago.’
There wasn’t so much as a sharp intake of breath. Only the sound of Arto Sarkissian’s muted English translation of his words – for Tom’s and Atom’s benefit – made any impact upon the almost corporeal silence in that room. If he had dropped what remained of Aysu Alkaya, which the captain’s recruits had now transported back to the village, on to one of the dining tables in front of them all he could not have stunned or shocked them more. Almost a minute had passed before the only person capable of speaking did so.
‘Then give us the names, Inspector,’ Dr Ali said in that elderly, almost casual tone of his.
İkmen smiled. ‘I will,’ he said. ‘But not before we’ve all gone on a journey – into both the distant and the recent past history of this lovely village of Muratpaşa.’
Menşure Tokatlı, upon whom the irony of İkmen’s words were not lost, cleared her throat and then she busied her hands rearranging the cat Kismet on her lap. He started purring into the silence which was eventually only brought to an end by Çetin İkmen.
‘All right,’ he said as he surveyed both Nazlı Kahraman and the small figure of Haldun Alkaya who had come in with one of the jandarma at the back of the room. ‘Let us get some things out in the open in this village of secrets, shall we? Ziya Kahraman paid Nalan Senar to object to a match between Kemalettin and Aysu Alkaya.’ He looked round the room to see whether Nalan was present, but she wasn’t. Turgut, however, sat gloomily beside his erstwhile adversary, Baha Ermis. ‘He wanted the girl because he believed her to be without either genetic taint or deformity. But, sadly for Ziya Bey, he was duped by Haldun Alkaya because Aysu was deformed and he was not happy.’
A lot of people in the room turned to look at Haldun Alkaya who nevertheless remained silent.
‘She had six toes on each foot,’ İkmen continued. ‘Ziya Bey must have had a very nasty shock on his wedding night.’
‘He took her!’ Nazlı Kahraman protested fiercely. ‘The whole village saw her bloodied sheet!’
Various people murm
ured their agreement.
‘I’m sure that a bloodied sheet was held aloft and I’m sure that the celebrations of Ziya Bey’s marriage were most enthusiastic,’ İkmen said. ‘But whether Ziya Bey made Aysu Alkaya pregnant is another matter. If he did then it would seem unlikely he would have killed her – unless you subscribe to the view that the perfectionist Lemon King would have hated the possibility of having a deformed child.’
‘My father would never . . .’
‘Or that the child wasn’t indeed Ziya’s own,’ İkmen interrupted. ‘But we will leave aside who may or may not have been the father of Aysu Alkaya’s child for the time being except to say that I know that you, Nazlı Hanım, knew that the girl was pregnant.’
The old woman looked at him with real hatred on her face.
‘That first time I met you, you told me that you had washed Aysu’s clothes with your own hands.’
‘Not every day!’
‘Maybe not,’ İkmen said. ‘But if you were washing clothes at all you would know who was bleeding or had bled and who was not. You are a woman, Nazlı Hanım, a much older woman than Aysu Alkaya, but I think you would have known whether or not the girl was pregnant.’
‘I did not . . .’
‘Having said that,’ İkmen said as he raised a hand to silence her, ‘I don’t believe for a moment that you killed her, Nazlı Hanım. I don’t think either that you genuinely do know who killed her.’
All eyes were now turned towards Nazlı Kahraman who said, ‘In that, at least, you are correct, Inspector.’
‘I think you worry that people think that your father killed his last wife . . .’
‘But he didn’t.’
İkmen didn’t answer her. Some moments of what was almost silence, save for the English translation whispered by Arto Sarkissian, passed before he spoke again, this time to Turgut Senar.
‘What is so special about the American Dolores Lavell’s father?’
The American was not in the room as far as İkmen could see, but he saw Turgut Senar look for her before he answered.
‘Nothing.’
‘I disagree,’ İkmen responded.
Everybody looked at him.
‘For years you’ve seen this woman come and go. You’ve taken no notice of her at all. Then she shows you a photograph of her father and you are suddenly the woman’s best friend.’
Turgut Senar shrugged. ‘Are you saying I killed somebody, or . . .’
‘No, I’m saying that I think you remember Dolores’ father from when he used to come here years ago, when he was in the American forces. I think that his presence here has some meaning for you.’
‘What do you mean?’
İkmen panned his gaze around the entire room. ‘Do you know what kind of weapon was used to kill Aysu Alkaya?’
‘No . . .’
‘A pistol called a Colt 45,’ İkmen said. ‘An American weapon, carried by soldiers like Dolores’ father in the late 1950s and early 1960s.’
Turgut Senar turned his head away.
‘It is not a weapon one comes across every day in Turkey.’ İkmen put his cigarette out and then immediately lit another. ‘At least not in a place like Muratpaşa. Of course, all that we have of the weapon is the bullet that was fired from it back in 1983. How old the gun actually is, I don’t personally know, but I suspect it is of 1950s vintage.’ He looked for and found the pale face of Inspector Erten and asked him, ‘Have ballistics come back to you with any more information, yet, Inspector?’
‘Er, no, not yet.’
İkmen smiled. ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘no matter.’ And then he turned back to Turgut Senar once again. ‘I’m not accusing you of killing anyone with a gun or otherwise, Turgut,’ he said. ‘I just want to know whether you knew Dolores Lavell’s father and his friends back in the 1960s . . .’
‘No.’
‘What’s he saying about me?’ a voice with an American accent asked in English.
Dolores Lavell stood at the top of the stairs, panting from the climb.
İkmen switched to English and said, ‘I just asked Mr Senar whether or not he knew your father, Miss Lavell. He said that he did not. Do you think that he is telling me the truth?’
She moved further into the room, shrugging as she did so. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you ask his brother?’
‘Kemalettin?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why should I ask Kemalettin, Miss Lavell?’ İkmen asked.
Dolores Lavell sat down almost opposite a now wide-eyed Turgut Senar and said, ‘Kemalettin told me to get away from Turgut while I could earlier today. He said that his brother was only interested in me because he used to know my daddy when he was a kid. I asked Kemalettin how that could be, how a little Turkish kid could have known a big black man like my daddy, but he said he couldn’t tell me that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because, Inspector, Kemalettin said that his brother and his mom had told him never to talk about it. Could all just be in Kemalettin’s head, I don’t know . . .’
İkmen moved to stand over Turgut Senar and said, ‘Where is your brother Kemalettin now, Mr Senar?’
There was still a police guard outside Abdullah Aydın’s hospital room. Again it was an officer Süleyman didn’t recognise although, in spite of the fact that the man didn’t speak to him as he passed – he appeared barely sentient – the inspector knew it would have been foolish to assume he had not been seen. Without looking at the officer again he pushed his way into the men’s lavatory and then leaned back against the wall with a sigh.
It would have been more pleasant for Süleyman had he been alone in the toilet, but he wasn’t. The hospital was packed and so it was logical that the toilets should come in for a lot of punishment as a consequence. Not all of the men in there with him were bleeding, but a significant minority were engaged in doing just that into the sinks and, in one case, on to the floor. Some groaning was going on, too, as well as a lot of coughing, which was not made any better by the fact that everyone was smoking. Süleyman, braced against the wall, closed his eyes. In order to force the police officer away from Abdullah’s room, İbrahim was going to have to make a scene so terrible he would probably end up being imprisoned for years. Now that he’d walked the route Süleyman realised just how far it was. With great impatience he sighed. İbrahim making an exhibition of himself in the waiting area just wasn’t going to be good enough.
‘Kemalettin was standing outside the Cappudocia Coffee Bean last time I saw him,’ Rachelle Jones said to İkmen. ‘That was, I suppose, about half an hour ago. He was just letting the snow fall on his head. Looked like a snowman.’
‘Go and see if you can find him,’ İkmen said to the small group of jandarma that had gathered around him. ‘Oh and bring his mother here, too, if you can, we need all the “actors” in this drama now.’
‘Yes, Inspector.’
As the jandarma left, İkmen went back over to Turgut Senar, still uncomfortably seated beside Baha Ermis, and said, ‘You know that it’s my belief all of this – Aysu Alkaya’s death, my abduction – is about money.’
‘I thought you said you knew who killed Aysu Alkaya,’ Turgut Senar replied. ‘And who kidnapped you.’
‘I don’t know why, if you know, you don’t just come out and tell us,’ Nazlı Kahraman put in. ‘It seems to me, Inspector, that you’re getting some sort of pleasure out of our discomfort.’
‘I’ve just been stuck out in a frozen valley with a half-burned corpse!’ İkmen blustered. ‘I’ve been beaten up. Of course I want to make you suffer, Nazlı Hanım.’
The room became very still. İkmen caught Altay Salman’s nervous eye. Menşure Tokatlı cleared her throat in what could only be described as a threatening fashion.
‘The people who abducted me tried to burn Aysu Alkaya’s body,’ İkmen said rather more calmly now. ‘I rescued what I could of it from the flames and what remains will accompany Dr Sarkissian and myself back to İstanbul for
analysis.’ He swept his gaze quickly around the room. ‘In view of my abduction everyone in this village will be DNA tested and if anything matches what remains on Aysu’s body or on my clothes, that person will have to give an account of his or herself . . .’
‘But, I repeat, if you know who did it, Inspector,’ Nazlı Kahraman said, ‘why not just tell us? Surely you want to arrest this felon . . .’
‘Felons,’ İkmen corrected. ‘Quite a few people kidnapped me, Nazlı Hanım. One was wearing very distinctive items of clothing.’
And then came the call to prayer, signifying the end of the fast for that day. Considering the fact that most of those present were fasting, the number of people moving over to the samovar for tea was surprisingly small even if a veritable host of individuals lit cigarettes once the call was at an end.
‘God, this is exciting,’ Tom Chambers whispered to his Armenian companions. ‘The inspector is magnificent.’
‘Çetin can at times overcome the impression that his small and shabby appearance can sometimes give,’ Arto Sarkissian replied. ‘I just hope that everyone is as awestruck as you, Mr Chambers.’
‘Why’s that?’
Arto Sarkissian leaned in more closely to the Englishman. ‘Because while they are dazzled by him, they will not be asking themselves whether he is telling them the truth about what he says he knows.’
‘Oh.’
‘He is taking a sort of a gamble if you will,’ Arto said.
İkmen watched closely the comings and goings from the samovar. The German, Ferdinand Mueller, gave him what İkmen interpreted as a knowing look.
‘Yes, I know, I will get to that,’ he said to the balloonist in English.
‘It may be nothing . . .’
‘It may be, but we will see,’ İkmen said.
He may have said more had not the jandarma returned with a very white-faced Nalan Senar. Behind her, but holding her hand, was a snow-drenched Kemalettin. They moved straight away to sit next to Turgut. İkmen did not try to stop them.
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