Land of the Blind

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘What do you think Inspector İkmen thought of the house?’ Yiannis said.

  ‘Madam always allowed the children who visited to have the run of the house,’ Hakkı said. ‘Nikos Bey and Madam had to wait for a child of their own for some years, but in the meantime she filled the house with other people’s children. Çetin Bey’s mother was her seer. A strange woman, but she knew things.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. What passed between Ayşe Hanım and Madam was for them alone. But the Albanian predicted the tragedy of 1955, that I do know.’

  Yiannis shook his head and then went back to looking out of the window again.

  The call to prayer broke the silence. It was loud in the old city these days, the numerous muezzins’ calls amplified through high-volume loud speakers. Yiannis watched as people began to walk towards the Blue Mosque and the prayer area behind Aya Sofya. He still remembered what you had to do. In grey mosques in Hannover and in the small prayer room at the Volkswagen plant. It had been second nature. Now it made him shudder.

  Hakkı said, ‘In answer to your question, I imagine Çetin Bey would have found being escorted in this house different, but not odd. He is no longer a child and he is a policeman; he wouldn’t expect to wander at will. Who would?’

  ‘I thought I discerned shock on his face when I took him from the bathroom back to the salon. I saw him look past me into the kitchen.’

  ‘And so the kitchen is different,’ Hakkı said. ‘After all these years he would be expecting that. You over-think everything.’

  ‘Yes, but no other part of the house has changed.’

  Hakkı shrugged. ‘So what?’

  Yiannis turned away from the window. ‘If Öden gets in here what do you think he will see?’

  ‘Only you can really know that,’ Hakkı said. ‘But while he isn’t here, you should go and entertain the children with your tricks. I saw some boys at the gate this morning. When the weather has cooled later this afternoon, you can go out.’

  ‘What if Öden comes back? Who will look after my mother? Aren’t you at the doctor’s today?’

  ‘Later, yes. But you need to get out. You’re going mad. Do your tricks by the gate. Then if Öden arrives you can slip back in and lock up,’ Hakkı said. ‘The little ones, if no one else, like what you do.’

  But Yiannis didn’t know. He did enjoy performing tricks and illusions for the local children, but ever since Öden had put pressure on, the joy seemed to have gone out of everything in his life, including even that. Eventually he said, ‘We’ll see.’ And then he turned back to the window and looked out at the baking street.

  Iris was talking very intensely to a plain, middle-aged woman in a headscarf about ‘the Kurds’.

  ‘You see, that deputy from the BDP was right,’ she was saying. ‘It’s not about just individual rights, not now. It’s about Kurdish rights and identity, yeah, but it’s also about the rights of the lesbians and gays, young people, religious people, Christians, Jews – everybody in this country. We don’t want to be told stuff. You know what I mean? We don’t need to be told anything. We’re adults. Yeah?’

  The woman just nodded. Peri smiled. Back in Gezi now that her shift had ended, she could see how much the protest had grown in just one day. Now people were coming from all over İstanbul to visit the tent city and to thank the protesters for standing up for the park. Some of the opposition political parties had tents, as well as Greenpeace. Some people reckoned that the protest had swollen to 100,000 people, and yet underneath all the carnival was a threat that was all too obvious. One man was selling gas masks, and others were selling ‘Guy’ masks like the ones in that film, V for Vendetta. Lots of people were running around wearing them, looking creepy. And then there was the immediate vicinity outside the park. Beyond the tents were barricades, TOMA water cannon and more police than could be counted. She’d seen some when she’d arrived, staggering around the edge of Gezi looking sleep deprived. It was said that some of the protesters were giving them water and that they were sleeping on their riot shields. A few, it was rumoured, had expressed sympathy with the protest. But all the shops in the area had been boarded up and Peri knew that it could all kick off again at any moment.

  She bought herself a can of peach juice and sat on the grass. At least Ömer was happier now she was back at work. But he still didn’t like her visiting the park, even though he agreed with everything Gezi stood for. How couldn’t he? Maybe this was finally the chance for all marginalised groups to get a real say. Even, perhaps, their own people.

  Everyone in Mardin knew about the snake goddess, the Sharmeran. Some of the Christians openly worshipped her alongside their own deities, but only a few had dedicated their lives just to her. The Munguns were one such family, as well as the father of a high-ranking local police inspector. But in spite of their successes and respectability, inequalities still remained, especially outside the walls of Mardin and away from the plains of Mesopotamia where the Sharmeran lived in a deep, deep cave.

  Night began to draw in almost before Peri knew. She had to decide whether to go home – she was on an early shift the following day – or stay and listen to a group of young boys singing in Armenian. She decided to stay.

  Chapter 15

  Mehmet Süleyman’s mobile phone rang just once before he answered it. It was almost morning and he hadn’t slept all night. But Gonca was asleep and he wanted her to stay that way. He’d picked a fight with her the previous evening because he was bored and he didn’t want it to start all over again. He put the phone to his ear, got out of bed and took the call in the bathroom.

  ‘Süleyman.’

  ‘Inspector.’

  He recognised the voice: Commissioner Teker. What did she want at this hour?

  ‘Madam.’

  ‘Süleyman, we have a situation that may or may not be suspicious,’ she said. ‘An apparent suicide.’

  He felt his heart sink. He wanted to have a case he could get his teeth into. Lack of meaningful work, beyond the identity of a 1950s skeleton, was making him crazy – and turning his eyes towards women who were not Gonca.

  ‘Apparent?’

  ‘Looks like a suicide but the attending officer isn’t so sure.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’ll have to let him explain,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to go there. Dr Sarkissian is already on his way.’

  ‘Madam.’

  ‘It’s in Moda, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘So you’ll have to catch a ferry. The local constabulary will pick you up from Kadıköy pier-head.’

  Against every feeling of disgust that rose up in his mind, he hoped the local officer was right and it wasn’t a suicide.

  ‘Get back to me,’ Teker said.

  ‘Of course.’

  She ended the call. Beyond Gonca’s bedroom door he could hear the rest of her family waking up and beginning to move about. Soon, all but her father and an old maid aunt would be off to Gezi Park in their brightest summer clothes, and that included Gonca. Not that he knew everything they did when they were there. Gonca, he knew, collected material for her collage art, but he suspected the others danced for money or sold flowers from the garden. He knew he was probably misjudging them, falling into every possible cliché that existed about Roma. But he didn’t see Gonca’s family as particularly politically engaged in spite of their bad experiences with property developers.

  He had a quick shower, dressed and went out into the cool morning air. The day was young, Balat looked shabbily beautiful and for a moment he almost felt optimistic. If only he could have shared that feeling with his friend Çetin İkmen.

  ‘Come on, get up!’ Fatma said. ‘The workmen are here.’

  İkmen had to struggle to get out of his dream. As soon as she’d consummated her first marriage, when she was fifty, the Byzantine Empress Zoe had spent the next decade trying to get pregnant. She’d been to doctors, seers and sorcerers, visited the shrines of saints and created potions and aphrodisiacs in
the seclusion of her own bedchamber. All to no avail – except in İkmen’s dream. In that she’d had a child, the son she’d always dreamed about, child of a ruling empress, born ‘to the purple’. Why the child had looked like his own son, Kemal, was probably because Fatma had spent much of the previous evening trying to persuade the boy to leave Gezi Park and come home. But he hadn’t.

  ‘Come on! Come on!’ Fatma said as she shooed him into the shower. ‘They want to turn the water off.’

  He got out of his apartment as soon as he could and wandered down to the old Pudding Shop for coffee and a cigarette outside in the weak early morning sunshine.

  Ever since he’d spoken to Nurettin the rubbish picker, he’d been unable to think about much except the possible existence of Ahmet Öden’s mistress. It made absolute sense that a good-looking, rich and powerful widower like him should have a woman in his life. İkmen couldn’t and wouldn’t condemn him for it, but he knew that some of those who had put Öden where he was today would. Was it really possible he had killed Ariadne Savva to silence her about this woman? And how had Savva found out about her?

  It seemed to İkmen that Ariadne Savva had been a woman ruled by great passions: for her work, her heritage, even for the rubbish pickers of Gizlitepe. But would she have put her life on the line for them? Considering the professional breakthroughs she seemed to have been making, this didn’t make sense. Had Öden reacted in a way she hadn’t anticipated? And if he had done so, why had he taken her child? If he’d taken it.

  İkmen went inside the Pudding Shop, got another coffee and returned to his chair in the sunshine and the third cigarette of the day. Öden was well known to have a disabled daughter. Occasionally he displayed this girl in public with an expression on his face, İkmen always thought, that looked halfway between pride and constipation. He obviously loved her and would probably do anything he could to make her life pleasant and wealthy. And if Ariadne Savva had threatened that . . . Then why hadn’t Öden just given the rubbish pickers some cheap, shonky old flats to live in and shut her up that way? That was what, according to Nurettin, she had wanted. But then that was bypassing the issue of Öden’s character, which didn’t allow for defeat. The Negropontes knew all about that.

  İkmen wanted to confront Öden, but knew he couldn’t. Where was his proof for this mistress outside the mind of a bitter alcoholic?

  Arto Sarkissian stood back from the bathtub and narrowed his eyes.

  ‘It isn’t right,’ he said to Süleyman, ‘because I would expect far more blood.’

  ‘There’s blood in the water,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Not enough. Remember, a small amount of blood goes a long way, and while I accept she was probably put in the water while she was still alive, she didn’t survive for very long.’

  A scene redolent of ancient Rome had greeted Kadıköy Sergeant Tuncel when he’d been called in the early hours of the morning to an apartment on Rıza Paşa Sokak in the pretty waterfront district of Moda. A man en route to Ataturk Airport had found a neighbour’s front door open. Fearing it had been broken into, he’d gone inside, where he’d found his neighbour, a Mrs Ayşel Ocal, dead in her bath. Both wrists had been slit.

  ‘And then of course we come to the cuts, which are equally as deep on both arms. That’s difficult to pull off with the first arm weakened by the first cut,’ the Armenian said. ‘They run vertically up the arm as opposed to horizontally, which shows that the cutter knew what he or she was doing. But her heart had all but stopped when she entered the water.’

  ‘So she didn’t cut her wrists in the bath?’

  ‘No. Her heart was already beating its last by then,’ he said. ‘What killed her? Did she kill herself? I won’t know until I can get her on the table. But I can see no sign of head injury or any other marks on the body apart from the cuts to the arms.’

  ‘Poison?’

  ‘Maybe. Toxicology as ever is on my “to do” list,’ he said.

  Sergeant Tuncel, a uniformed officer in his forties, joined them.

  ‘Er, Inspector . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  Arto Sarkissian saw the man flinch. Süleyman’s manner had always been arrogant but as he was getting older it was becoming more exaggerated. But he was unhappy, which wasn’t helping. Arto would have to have a word with İkmen and get him to end this feud between them. Hell would freeze over before Süleyman would make it up with him.

  ‘Neighbours say the woman was a bit of a lively sort,’ Tuncel said. ‘Dressed very loud, if you know what I mean. Never covered her head.’

  ‘Managed to rouse the kapıcı?’ Süleyman asked, referring to the building’s concierge. Kapıcıs usually knew just about everything about the people they served, including details of their private lives.

  ‘Gone,’ Tuncel said.

  ‘Gone? Where?’

  ‘Gezi, the neighbours think. Went about three days ago,’ Tuncel said.

  ‘Then we’ll need to find him.’ He turned to the Armenian. ‘How long do you think she’s been dead, Doctor?’

  ‘Given her condition and when she was discovered, a few hours ago at the most,’ he said.

  ‘Did Mrs Ocal live alone?’ Süleyman asked Tuncel.

  ‘Yes, but a man visited.’

  ‘Always the same man?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Find out.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He went to leave but Süleyman called him back. ‘And find out what Mrs Ocal did for a living, will you?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘And I want this place searched. Specifically looking for this woman’s contacts. So computer systems, phones, address books, diaries, photographs.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He left. They both looked at the body in its pool of red-tinged water. Mrs Ocal had been a large woman with wide hips and a narrow waist. Her breasts, which were also large, were very obviously enhanced by silicone implants. Naturally honey-brown skinned, she had long, thick, dyed dark red hair. She looked either eastern or foreign. As to her age, Arto had to say over twenty, but how much over he really wouldn’t know until he examined her properly.

  Then Süleyman said, ‘So, Doctor, would you concur with Sergeant Tuncel?’

  ‘That this is a suicide? No,’ he said. ‘Given what we can see here, I’d say murder is the most likely scenario.’

  ‘OK. Thank you.’

  Süleyman turned away. But as he moved, Arto Sarkissian was horrified to catch sight of a smile on his face.

  He’d been there when Kelime had woken, which had been the main thing. But now Semih had called him and he had to go.

  Ahmet Öden kissed his daughter on the head and left the house. Some bastards in Gizlitepe had attacked the site overnight and he had to go and assess the damage. Animals! Why did they fail to realise that it was people like him who were turning their İstanbul into a world city? Why did they want to live in hideous old slums?

  He drove south to the Bosphorus Bridge, which was at a standstill, and then just moved forwards centimetre by centimetre until he got to the Asian side. Why all the crazies had come out to oppose a new, third Bosphorus Bridge he just couldn’t fathom. So it had been decided to name it after a particularly punitive sultan? So a few hectares of trees would have to be sacrificed? If nothing was done the city would come to a standstill.

  He turned right towards Kadıköy and Gizlitepe. He had wanted to get to the Negroponte House but his brother had insisted he look at the Gizlitepe damage first.

  ‘It’s a disgrace,’ he’d said. ‘All the windows in the lower part of one tower have been broken and what looks like faeces smeared all over the equipment.’

  He’d called the police, such as they were. Most of them were up at Gezi Park and, apparently, there’d been a murder too. The dregs of the police world had turned up according to Semih. How could second-rate old men hope to catch anything other than a cold?

  Öden put his hand on the briefcase on the passenger seat. He’d had his lawyer draw up
a contract for the Negropontes which, although it was for far more money than he had wanted to pay, had to be for an amount that would finally impress them. But if that didn’t work, he’d take Yiannis to one side and tell him what he’d done after he’d scratched his hand, with Yiannis’ blood and skin.

  That would be a gamble, because there was always a chance that Yiannis really was who he claimed to be. But Ahmet doubted it. He’d heard the way the old man Hakkı spoke to him, seen how he looked at him too. With suspicion.

  There were, it was said, over a hundred thousand people in Gezi Park, and the politicians the Prime Minister had left behind when he went on his North African trip appeared to be trying to appease them. There were now protests similar to Gezi in Ankara, Izmir, Adana – all over the country. If they brought the government down, they’d bring him down with them and then he’d never get the Negroponte house. He’d never be able to fulfil his promise to his father.

  It wasn’t easy trying to second guess where a disgruntled kapıcı would be in a crowd of over a 100,000 people. Cafer Ayan was a small man in late middle-age with grey hair and a thick moustache. How many millions of those were in the city?

  All Ömer Mungun really had to distinguish the kapıcı of Ayşel Ocal’s apartment in Moda from the common herd of disappointed middle-aged Turkish men was that he had a limp. He’d lost his right leg in the Cyprus war of 1974. What had replaced it was apparently made of metal.

  None of the residents had known anything more about Mr Ayan. Divorced and childless, apparently he was a miserable man addicted to daytime television and, some speculated, pornography. According to Süleyman, Ayşel Ocal had been a handsome woman. Had Ayan decided to murder her after she had rebuffed his advances? If he’d ever made any advances.

  Ayan’s story, according to his residents, was that he’d left the apartment block three days before after having a row with a man on the fourth floor known for his piety. It had started because Ayan had wanted to have the radio on when he washed the apartment’s staircases. The man on floor four had said he found the music offensive. They’d argued, Ayan had told the man to ‘fuck off’ and then he’d yelled that he was off to Gezi and fuck them all at the top of his voice.