‘Maybe it was somewhere she read about?’
‘Maybe. All I can say is that, in the translation we’ve been given, her enthusiasm and her joy shine through. You know Greek, you might think differently if you read the original, but at the moment of course I can’t show that to you. Professor, was Dr Savva in any way a fantasist?’
He frowned. ‘She was wildly enthusiastic about her subject but I never caught her out in a lie of any sort. So I’d have to say no. Until this business with Constantine Palaiologos came to light, I always thought that she was trustworthy. But then academic selfishness is a trait people in our profession all share to some extent.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve got over the shock, Inspector. And if that body Dr Akyıldız has been investigating is Palaiologos, nobody will be more delighted than me. To find him after so many centuries would be amazing, although now that Dr Savva is no longer with us, quite how we do that, I don’t know.’
‘We haven’t been able to find anything on her system or amongst her papers that suggests who she might have been comparing that skeleton’s DNA to,’ İkmen said. ‘I don’t suppose you would—’
‘No.’
The group of ‘country’ people moved on to be replaced by a deluge of excited middle-aged Italians. The two men got a little jostled and so the professor suggested they move out of the main building and in to the narthex or entrance hall. The entire structure was lined with varying shades of red porphyry stone ranging from pink to dark purple, but the narthex in particular was very obviously and gloomily maroon.
‘Unless Dr Savva had found another genuine Palaiologi corpse to compare the Edirnekapı bones to then she must have had a living relative in mind,’ the professor said. ‘And that I don’t think is possible. I think she may have been duped by someone who wanted her to believe that, which may be why she died. The Palaiologi are extinct. As far as I am aware, not even the patriarchate have any of their bones in their reliquaries. They are a dead end. Literally.’ He paused, then said abruptly, ‘Any news of the child?’
İkmen sighed. ‘My sergeant went out last night, into the maelstrom of Beyoğlu, to look at a dead child. But it was African. So no, Professor. The child remains enigmatic and I feel I have failed with each passing day.’
İkmen didn’t often share his innermost feelings with members of the public, but Professor Bozdağ reminded him a little of his father. And as his father would have done, Bozdağ put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Getting around this city at the moment, in these circumstances, is hell, Inspector,’ he said. ‘And you have very little to work with. I am right, I assume, in saying that nobody saw or heard anything unusual around the sphendone on the night that Dr Savva died?’
‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘Logically the child is either dead or something terrible has happened to it. Although I can’t allow myself to dwell on that.’
‘No.’
‘Instead I must concentrate on what I know about Dr Savva and her interests, and so I think I will go up to St Mary’s.’
‘They have a sacred spring there,’ Professor Bozdağ said, ‘so maybe it will bring you good fortune.’
Having information and using it were two different things. Yiannis told Anastasia nothing about his latest spat with Ahmet Öden but instead asked Hakkı whether he could remember whether Öden had ever been in the house. Hakkı told him that he had.
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ Yiannis said.
He knew that Hakkı didn’t like him, but the house was at stake here.
‘He came to put in a new window frame in Madam’s bedroom. Back in the 1980s. You weren’t here,’ Hakkı said. ‘But I watched him. He didn’t go anywhere he shouldn’t.’
‘And did you watch him in the toilet? Did he go to the kitchen?’
‘I watched him all the time,’ Hakkı said. ‘He didn’t work for his father at that time and I didn’t know that he would be the workman who came to fix the window. If I had I would have barred him. You know what I know about his family. He was not left alone.’
‘So when he spoke to me he was bluffing?’
‘Or he’s heard a rumour.’
‘Are there any?’
‘There are always stories about old places,’ Hakkı said. ‘Maybe Nikos Bey said something as he was dying? Who knows what has been said over the years.’
‘I can take him around the house but, apart from the fact I don’t want him in here, what if he doesn’t see what he remembers? Because he won’t.’
‘Then he remembered in error,’ Hakkı said.
Yiannis sat down. It was a beautiful day in the sunshine but he felt sick. Ahmet Öden had been so passionate about the house that when he’d held his hand, he’d injured him. But more importantly he had him worried. He looked up at the old man. ‘Hakkı, can I tell you something?’
Hakkı sat down beside him and lit a cigarette. ‘Yes.’
‘It must go no further.’
‘No.’
‘I know something about Öden I could use against him.’
‘What’s that?’
‘But I can’t use it because of where I got it from.’
‘Which was where?’
Yiannis paused. Hakkı looked at him.
‘I can’t say.’
‘You can to me.’
He had a notion that the old man might be taking pleasure in his discomfort. It stemmed from Hakkı’s distrust as well as from what he and Yiannis alone knew.
Yiannis looked at him coldly. ‘I can’t and I won’t. I’d be sick. You know why,’ he said. ‘But Öden has a mistress. I’ve seen her.’
‘Have you? How?’
‘You know who he knew!’ he said. ‘Don’t taunt me. You know! The mistress’s name is Gülizar, she’s Roma and he keeps her in an apartment in Moda. Can you imagine what his pious backers and his oh-so-clean-living workforce would think about him if they knew? Gülizar is a big, brassy gypsy who used to strip for a living before Ahmet started paying her to do things the faithful would never do.’
‘Blackmailing Öden would be risky,’ Hakkı said.
‘I’d do it to save this house, you know I would!’ Yiannis said. ‘But how do I explain how I know? Why would I ever have gone to Moda? He knows I never leave this house. Someone would have to have taken me. Which was what happened.’
‘He’ll cover it up. He may even kill you,’ Hakkı said. ‘Don’t speak of it. Not unless there is no other way to stop him.’
‘I can’t. How would I know where this mistress of his lives unless someone had told me?’
‘We must trust in Çetin Bey and hope these young people in Gezi Park make the government rein these developers in.’
‘Do you think that will happen? Really?’
Hakkı shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘And if it doesn’t and Çetin Bey can’t keep Öden away from this house? What then?’
Hakkı rose stiffly to his feet. ‘Then we fight,’ he said. ‘And we use every weapon we have to do that, including what you’ve just told me. We can invent a reason why you went to Moda. We can invent a person who took you there. Madam will die in this house as she has always wanted and the Negroponte family’s legacy will continue.’
The old man went back into the house, leaving Yiannis wondering how any of that might be done. The bottom line was that Öden could just bulldoze the place if he wished. That was what he wanted to do. So why not let him do it?
There had been a time, shortly after he’d arrived in the city, when he hadn’t cared. He’d not grown up in the house and there were many days when its dampness and inconvenience had been all he’d noticed. But over that year it had seeped into him.
The sacred spring wasn’t so much as a trickle. Dedicated, apparently, to St Anthony, it had dried up years ago according to the custodian.
‘There’s nothing else there,’ he called down the steep stone staircase to Çetin İkmen. That immediately began to make the policeman suspicious and so he looked around. There were definite signs of walls h
aving been excavated.
‘You have archaeologists down here?’ he asked. ‘A woman from the museum?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
The custodian was suddenly at his shoulder. A small, miserable looking man, all he’d wanted to talk about when İkmen arrived was the copy of the irade, or order, signed by Mahmut II guaranteeing the church of St Mary of the Mongols to the Orthodox patriarchate in perpetuity. He’d really wanted to impress on İkmen just how great a concession that had been.
‘So why does this place look as if it’s being excavated?’
He shrugged. ‘The patriarchate do what they want. They can, it’s theirs. You saw.’
He was fixated.
‘I’ve heard,’ İkmen said, ‘that there could be a tunnel that leads from here to the Aya Sofya. Do you know anything about that?’
‘A tunnel? No. Why should I?’
‘Because when you let me in you proudly told me you’d been custodian here for the last twenty years,’ İkmen said. Ignorance irritated him and this man had a lot of it. ‘Do you actually know anything about this building apart from the fact that it was protected by an imperial irade?’
‘That was a very good—’
‘Listen, tunnel, yes or no?’
‘No.’
‘Right, so ask the patriarchate, yes?’
‘Yes.’
İkmen left. He hadn’t actually been able to see any sort of ingress leading elsewhere from underneath the church but that didn’t mean that one didn’t exist. And maybe the patriarchate had given Ariadne Savva permission to study the building which she had kept from the museum.
İkmen lit a cigarette and looked around. Fener was the old Greek quarter of the city and so there were a few significant Byzantine buildings in the area as well as some that were just shells. Almost opposite the church was what could have either been an old hamam or a Byzantine ruin that had looked like a sort of half dome on top of a wall for years. Now almost completely sunk into the ground, it was a rubbish dump and İkmen, disgusted, spotted bags of used babies’ nappies.
‘Thinking of buying it?’
He knew the voice. Deep and female and seductive.
‘Gonca.’
He looked up at her and smiled. As usual her hair hung down her back like a glossy carpet and her breasts swelled out of the top of her dress. How could she still be so gorgeous after so many years? At times like this it was easy to see why Süleyman was still bewitched by her. The bastard.
İkmen smiled. ‘No, no, I’m not buying anything.’
Gonca lived in the neighbouring district of Balat, what had been the old Jewish quarter.
‘Well, should you buy property around here you’ll either make a killing or get fleeced,’ she said.
He sighed. ‘Balat and Fener now up for redevelopment?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I brought my whole family here from Tarlabaşı when they developed that and so we’ll stay and fight if it comes to it.’
Before Tarlabaşı, Gonca’s people had lived in the centuries old gypsy quarter of Sulukule which had submitted to the bulldozers years ago.
‘Mmm. So I suppose you’re hoping this Gezi Park protest will make the authorities listen.’
‘Roma are in Gezi in force,’ she said. ‘Have you been? It’s an amazing atmosphere.’
‘Yes, I have.’
They began to walk down the hill towards the Golden Horn. His car was parked on a steep slope in front of a few gentrified houses people said belonged to Armenians.
‘Mehmet has seen it but he’s not been into the park,’ she said. ‘We don’t talk about it.’
İkmen didn’t answer.
‘You don’t talk about it with him either, do you?’ she said. ‘But then you don’t talk at all unless you have to.’
She was right but İkmen didn’t want to discuss it.
She put a hand on his arm. ‘Çetin Bey, don’t be so hard on him,’ she said. ‘I know you’re angry about what he did to Sergeant Farsakoğlu but that was as much my fault as it was his.’
İkmen stopped. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But you didn’t string her along, did you? You took him, because you love him.’
‘And he loves me.’
He said nothing. Süleyman was infatuated with the gypsy but whether he loved her or not, he didn’t know. Whether he loved anyone except his son Yusuf was a fair question. And what would happen when he either tired of Gonca or some other women inflamed that sexual itch inside him? Would he only stop when he became as old and demented as his own father? Was he ever going to grow up?
‘I took him away from her,’ Gonca said. ‘Deliberately.’
‘And he let you.’
He began walking again, sideways and gingerly towards his car.
She walked completely normally, sure-footed in her own terrain. ‘I seduced him.’
‘Oh, and I imagine that was such a difficult seduction.’
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘Well of course it wasn’t!’
‘I just can’t bear to see your friendship disappear like this,’ she said. ‘You were so close. That is rare.’
İkmen skidded down a line of cobbles and came to rest, just about upright, leaning against the boot of his car. ‘Gonca,’ he said, ‘it was Mehmet who acted without any thought for anyone but himself.’
‘And me.’
He didn’t respond. There was a slight desperation in what she was saying that made him wonder how sure she was of Süleyman. Had something gone wrong between them?
‘When Mehmet left her for you, my Sergeant Farsakoğlu lost hope and became reckless. It was that recklessness that was the direct cause of her death,’ İkmen said. ‘If he’d still loved her she wouldn’t have put herself at risk.’
‘But Mehmet said that she saved you and him and Sergeant Mungun!’
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ İkmen said. He took his car keys out of his pocket. ‘Her killer may have given his gun up to us if she’d not surprised him. He was surrounded.’
Professor Cem Atay had killed Ayşe Farsakoğlu, when he had been holding İkmen and Mungun captive. He had already drugged and almost killed Süleyman. Farsakoğlu’s intervention had brought what had been a stalemate to a head. But she’d died for it.
‘All I know,’ he continued, ‘is that had Mehmet still been in her life she would have been more cautious. In my opinion. I can’t help the way that I feel, Gonca. It’s tough for me to look Mehmet in the eye, and I don’t know what, if anything, I can do about that.’
‘But he misses you!’
İkmen doubted whether Süleyman had actually verbalised this, but he didn’t doubt it was so. He himself felt the lack of their close friendship in his life and he mourned it.
‘You know he will never come to you. You’ll have to come to him,’ Gonca said. ‘It’s what he’s like. His pride—’
‘His pride is not something I miss,’ İkmen said. Reference to Süleyman’s famous Ottoman gentleman’s pride had made him angry. ‘And Gonca, he will have to come to me. He was in the wrong. Not me.’
He staggered around to the side of his car and opened the door.
‘Çetin Bey, he is so unhappy!’
‘That’s not my problem, Gonca.’
İkmen got into the driving seat and then looked at her in his rear-view mirror. She wasn’t crying but her eyes looked pained. A moody and unhappy Süleyman was not doing much for the gypsy, but that wasn’t his problem. Now he had to go to the Greek Orthodox patriarchate at the bottom of the hill and find out what he could about a mythical – or not – tunnel. Süleyman and his woes were not his concern.
Except that they were and he knew it.
Chapter 12
Ahmet Öden would have to wait. The online DNA test was going to take at least week and even then it wouldn’t tell him whether or not Yiannis Negroponte was Anastasia’s son. For that he had to get some DNA from her, and that was going to be difficult. But at least he’d be able to discover whet
her Yiannis was Greek.
Ahmet Öden didn’t like waiting. Not even playing with his daughter made him feel better. In fact, too much time with Kelime made him feel worse. Food and toys comforted her but the greed he had encouraged in her appalled him. Mary the nanny still occasionally braved his displeasure and complained about how she found it hard to control Kelime because of her addiction to sweets and ice cream. He turned over in bed and looked at Gülizar. She made him feel better. Twenty-five and as firm as a drum, her flesh was augmented with implants that he had paid for. He touched her breasts and she moaned. She claimed they’d become more sensitive since she’d had surgery.
He’d never meant to take a mistress. He’d met Gülizar in a cheap strip club and had paid her for what he imagined would be a one-night stand. But then he’d gone back, again and again. Soon he was visiting her every week. Sexy rather than beautiful, Gülizar would do anything to please men. Some activities she claimed to have invented. She’d do anything he wanted and so Ahmet began to explore those areas of his sexuality that religion forbade. Sometimes she would involve other people, men and women, although the men were never allowed to touch her.
As Ahmet grew richer his ability to hide a mistress successfully grew correspondingly. He put Gülizar in an apartment in Moda and had her breasts made huge. She couldn’t sleep on her stomach but they made him want to come every time he looked at them.
‘Gülizar.’
He woke her up. He was hard again and he pushed himself roughly inside her. She made noises and rolled her tongue around her lips. Some men, he’d heard, said that it was important for a woman to take pleasure in sex as well as a man. He had never believed in the truth of that, but with Gülizar he wondered. She always seemed aroused and when he’d watched her with another girl she’d become wild. When the two of them had finished she’d fallen on him like a beast. He’d felt terrible about that and about how much he’d wanted to do to Gülizar what that girl had done. But he couldn’t.
Thinking about it, though, made for better sex. When he came, and although she was only half awake, Gülizar told him he was a ‘lion’. Ahmet threw himself back on the bed and tried to enjoy a moment of post-coital contentment. But he couldn’t. He never could. Whenever he visited her it had to be in disguise and always at odd times. Guilt squeezed his heart and he had to fight an urge to beat Gülizar until she died for making him do such things with her. And although he knew that other men like him had mistresses too, it didn’t bring him comfort. Gülizar was his sin and he’d have to take his punishment for her in the afterlife. In this life, if anyone found out, he’d suffer a more immediate form of censure. Those opposed to him, and people like him, would eat him alive. He’d be thrown to the Gezi Park mob, which was getting bigger and more vocal every day. If they didn’t stop soon he’d have to move to take the Negroponte House while he still could. İkmen or no İkmen.
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