Land of the Blind

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘This baby is a friend’s,’ the girl on the right said. ‘She has to work.’

  ‘What does she do?’

  They looked at each other again. Was Peri mistaken or did the one on the left look as if she might be about to cry?

  ‘She is a prostitute,’ the one on the right said. ‘A bad thing to be but we don’t judge. The real Muslim way is to care and to understand.’

  Peri was sure that she was sincere. And in her experience, sincere religious people of all kinds didn’t judge. They were nice girls.

  ‘That’s a very fine sentiment,’ Peri said.

  The girl on the right began to stand up.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I think we have to go now,’ she said as she helped her friend, with the baby in her arms, to her feet.

  Peri, quickly, stood too. Then she put a hand on the baby’s leg.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘a baby went missing last week. I know you’ll know this. It was all over the news. It happened in Sultanahmet. The baby’s mother died.’

  ‘I heard about it, yes.’

  ‘Well, my brother, who is a police officer . . .’

  Both girls visibly cringed.

  ‘Yes, I know what they’ve been doing here, gassing people, beating them. But my brother is a detective,’ Peri said. ‘He’s a good man. And my brother has a colleague, another nice man like him who spends all his time at the moment looking for a baby he fears might be suffering or even dead. Now if you really do have a friend who is a prostitute who is this baby’s mother, I’d like you to take me to her, because I think she might need some help looking after the child. I can give her that help. But if there is no friend and you, for every good reason, are looking after this baby because you found him, then you need to talk to my brother’s colleague. He won’t hurt you and you won’t get into trouble, because I’m sure you’ve been looking after this baby because you care for him.’

  ‘We heard the mother was dead. We feared for him!’ the girl on the left blurted.

  ‘Fatima!’

  The girl on the left freed a hand and grabbed her friend’s arm. ‘Melda, we can’t go on bringing him here every day! What if he gets gassed?’

  Peri’s instinct was to grab the baby but she resisted. At least one of the girls was coming to the conclusion that things could not stay as they were.

  But the girl on the right began to move away.

  ‘Come on, Fatima,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to get little . . . the boy . . . back to his mother.’

  But Peri kept her hand on the boy’s leg and looked into Fatima’s eyes. The girl was close to tears.

  ‘You don’t even know this child’s name, do you?’ Peri said.

  Chapter 18

  Çetin İkmen only saw the baby for a moment, before he was taken into the care of social services. The only impression he got of him was that he was very small, very loud and he was white.

  Together with Kerim Gürsel, he interviewed the two girls, Fatima and Melda Erol, in his office. He knew that they were terrified and that exposure to one of the windowless interview rooms would make them clam up immediately. He’d given them the option of having their father or a brother with them but Fatima said that they didn’t want their family to know about the baby. Melda added that they didn’t need men.

  ‘Where did you find the baby?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘In an outhouse,’ Melda said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the street where we live.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Küçük Ayasofya Caddesi, opposite the mosque.’

  ‘So where, in relation to your home, is this outhouse?’

  ‘Towards the Nakilbent Mosque on the right.’

  Two minutes from the sphendone. Çetin İkmen began to sweat. Had he, or rather Sergeant Mungun’s sister, just found Ariadne Savva’s lost baby?

  ‘It’s just a shack,’ Fatima said. ‘Street kids play in there sometimes. But also dogs, some of them fierce. We can take you there.’

  İkmen turned to Kerim Gürsel. ‘Get Küçük Ayasofya cordoned off.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Gürsel left the room.

  ‘When did you find the child?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘The day after Gezi really started, last week,’ Fatima said.

  ‘The twenty-ninth of May.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you find the child?’

  Melda spoke. ‘It was early, six a.m. Fatima and I were taking soup to our grandmother for her breakfast.’

  ‘She lives on Nakilbent Sokak.’

  ‘She’s got arthritis,’ Melda said. ‘Our mother makes her meals every day and does all her laundry. We are always backwards and forwards.’

  İkmen said, ‘The baby . . .’

  ‘Oh, yes, we heard him crying,’ Melda said. ‘A very weak cry.’

  ‘We were very cautious when we went into the old outhouse because we thought there might be dogs in there,’ Fatima said.

  ‘But there was just a baby. Naked and covered in blood,’ Melda said. ‘Just lying on the ground.’

  ‘On anything?’

  ‘No.’

  Kerim returned and nodded at İkmen. They would have to obtain a basic outline from these girls and then get them over to Küçük Ayasofya as soon as possible.

  ‘I wrapped him in one of the towels Mother had laundered for Grandma,’ Fatima said. ‘Then we took him with us.’

  ‘To your grandmother’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did your grandmother have to say about that?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘He made her smile,’ Fatima said.

  ‘Did you tell your grandmother where you’d found him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She said that he was probably a prostitute’s baby,’ Melda said. ‘She said they often leave them for people to find and give a decent life.’

  This was true although, as İkmen knew, they usually ended up in state orphanages.

  ‘Grandma said we should keep him,’ Fatima said.

  ‘At her apartment,’ Melda said. ‘She told us what milk to buy and where to get some clothes for him.’

  ‘What about your parents?’ Kerim asked. ‘Did they know about the baby?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Fatima said. ‘Mother has a good heart but she is one of those Muslims who judges. She wouldn’t have had a prostitute’s baby in the house.’

  ‘What were you and your grandmother going to do with the baby in the long term?’ İkmen asked.

  The two girls looked at each other and then Melda said, ‘When we found out that a baby was missing and that its mother had been killed we became even more fearful for him. Grandma said that we had to be careful where we bought milk and clothes and not to get them locally any more. We started taking him to Gezi to give Grandma a rest.’

  ‘And because we believe in Gezi,’ Fatima said.

  ‘And so you didn’t think that it might be better to let us know you had what could be a dead woman’s baby and allow us to call off our search?’ İkmen asked. He wasn’t exactly angry with the Erol girls but he was resentful of their fearful unworldliness.

  Fatima looked down at the floor. But Melda said, ‘How could we trust you? Look at Gezi. How can anyone trust the police?’

  ‘And yet here you are . . .’

  ‘If Nurse Peri hadn’t persuaded us, we wouldn’t be,’ Melda said.

  Her sister put a hand on her shoulder. ‘But we weren’t coping, were we, Melda?’

  There was a pause. Melda too looked down now. Then she said, ‘His clothes were dirty. We couldn’t take them home to wash. And he was thin.’

  She began to cry.

  İkmen, though irritated by them, also felt some sympathy for the Erol girls. They’d done what they’d thought was right in the face of what he imagined to be a very strict and judgemental mother.

  ‘You saved the baby’s life,’ he said. ‘That’s the main thing.’

  Yiannis’ hand shook as he knocked
on the car window. Ahmet Öden, who hadn’t seen him leave his house, rolled the window down.

  ‘I don’t know what you think is in my house, Öden,’ Yiannis said, ‘but—’

  ‘I’m sure that you do.’ Öden smiled and Yiannis had to look away.

  ‘You can come inside and look for yourself tomorrow morning,’ Yiannis said.

  There was a pause. Ahmet Öden hadn’t been expecting that. However, he retained his composure. ‘Why tomorrow? Why not now?’

  Yiannis wanted to say, It’s none of your business, but he didn’t have the confidence. ‘My mother is sleeping,’ he said. ‘It isn’t convenient.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  He was cool. When he looked Yiannis in the eye the effect was unnerving. Had he done the right thing? Ahmet Öden wasn’t some kid he could enchant, some visitor with half-remembered impressions of the house in his mind. Öden, if he was telling the truth, remembered it all, and in spite of what Hakkı always maintained, he’d seen something.

  ‘Get here before midday and I’ll let you in,’ Yiannis said.

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  The coolness made him angry. As the property developer pushed a button to raise his car window, Yiannis yelled into the contracting space, ‘You’d better! Because it’s going to be the last chance you ever get!’

  Hürrem Teker had hoped, in a way, that the erotic photographs of Ahmet Öden and Ayşel Ocal had been Photoshopped. Dealing with people like him was always a nightmare. But they hadn’t been. In the opinion of the photographic expert who had looked at them, they were genuine. Öden had had an affair with the woman she now knew was also called Gülizar.

  She knew why he’d lied about it. Öden was famous for his piety, his devotion to his Down’s syndrome daughter and his espousal of family values. Fucking a gypsy woman didn’t fit in with that. Briefly she thought about her own officer, Süleyman, in thrall to a gypsy. Then she looked at the photographic report again. There was no getting around it. Öden had been with the woman, he may even have bought the apartment for her. It was in her name, but where would a stripper in low-rent clubs have got enough money to buy an apartment in Moda for cash?

  The neighbours said that a man did visit, but none of them knew who he was. Those who had seen him said he always wore an overcoat and a fedora hat, whatever the weather. And he always turned his face away from anyone he met on the stairs. Clearly he didn’t want to be recognised. And that would fit with Öden very well. But what the neighbours had also said was that the kapıcı had been seen talking to the man. The kapıcı who, again according to the neighbours, was somewhere in Gezi Park.

  What was certain now was that Ahmet Öden had lied. He’d been having an affair with Ayşel Ocal – at some point – and he’d denied it. And in the absence of final results from forensic tests on the body and the apartment, he was the only subject in the frame.

  ‘But he was in his daughter’s bedroom all night,’ Süleyman said when Teker called him to give him the photographic expert’s opinion. ‘The nanny said he didn’t leave. She was awake all night.’

  ‘Maybe the nanny lied,’ Teker said. ‘Maybe she’s in love with Öden and wants to protect him.’

  She heard Süleyman sigh. ‘One thing I have been told is that the connection between Öden and Inspector İkmen’s hippodrome victim was more visceral and more pertinent than we thought.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘According to one of the Gizlitepe rubbish pickers Çetin Bey interviewed, Dr Savva knew that Öden had a mistress. She didn’t tell this Nurettin who she was or where she lived. But it’s possible she tried to use that knowledge to blackmail Öden.’

  ‘For money?’

  ‘Çetin Bey thinks it more likely she was trying to force Öden to rehouse the rubbish pickers.’

  ‘How noble.’

  She hadn’t meant it to sound sarcastic, but that was how Süleyman took it.

  ‘I think so,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, and so do I,’ Teker said. ‘I wasn’t being . . . Look, Süleyman, what we need to do before we go back to Öden is to re-interview the nanny. Get her in here to make a formal statement and impress upon her the full, shall we say, force of Turkish law.’

  ‘Madam?’

  ‘She’s British,’ Teker said. ‘She’s not young and so I’m pretty sure she has seen that ghastly old film, Midnight Express.’

  ‘Oh the one—’

  ‘Where the nasty Turks rape and murder everything that moves,’ she said. ‘Don’t lay a finger on her but play up to it.’

  ‘Play—’

  ‘Oh use your imagination, Süleyman,’ Teker said. ‘Walk her past the cells. They’re busy at the moment.’

  Still full of protesters from the very first few days of Gezi.

  ‘Throw some old cigarette ends around in one of the older interview rooms and break a chair. You have my permission. Tell her,’ Teker said, ‘just how long it can take to bring a case to court in this country and just where people are held while they are waiting.’

  No blood was visible. The floor of what the Erol girls had called the outhouse was covered in oil, faeces and probably, from the smell of it, urine. Blood was almost certainly there. The whole area would need to be treated with luminol. Not that, apart from providing support to the girls’ story, blood was needed. A DNA swab had already been taken from inside the child’s mouth which would be compared to Ariadne Savva’s results. Maternity would be proven, or otherwise, in a few days.

  Kerim Gürsel showed his ID to the constables at the entrance and joined his boss. ‘This used to be a garage,’ he said.

  ‘Did it belong to the house next door?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  The old wooden house on the right was derelict.

  ‘A Jewish family lived there until about ten years ago, when they moved to Israel,’ Kerim said. ‘They had one of those old American cars they used to keep in here.’

  ‘Did the bakkal owner know who owns the house now?’ İkmen asked.

  Across the road from the outhouse was a neighbourhood grocery store or bakkal. People who ran such places generally knew everything about their local area.

  ‘He says he thinks it’s the original family. They had money, apparently, and when they went to Israel they just left the house to rot,’ Kerim said.

  ‘Get a name?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Nabarro. Recep Bey, in the bakkal, says that kids are always having to be chased out of this place and the house. He also said that working girls ply their trade here.’

  One of the reasons İkmen had chosen Kerim to be his sergeant was because he always spoke about everyone with respect. Most officers he knew would have described the prostitutes who worked the area as ‘whores’ or ‘slags’. But not Kerim. Then perhaps now he knew why.

  ‘So we mustn’t get too excited,’ İkmen said. ‘The child could belong to almost anyone.’

  ‘But he is the right sort of age, sir.’

  ‘Indeed. And I will inform Mr Savva that a child has been found. But I will impress upon him the possibility of disappointment.’ He looked around the building. ‘I wonder how many other children have been conceived, born or dumped in this place.’

  ‘And I wonder what the Erol sisters and their grandmother thought they were going to do with the child,’ Kerim said.

  İkmen had briefly been to see the grandmother before he arrived at the crime scene. A more outspoken old secular republican woman it would have been hard to imagine. But then that made sense. In the cities it was generally the under-sixties who were religious. The old people had seen that long ago and rejected it.

  ‘The old woman just wanted to save a prostitute’s baby,’ İkmen said. ‘Wanted to try and bring it up without, as she put it “stigma and superstition”.’

  ‘Sounds very liberal.’

  ‘She is,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Obviously her granddaughters don’t take after her.’

  İkmen laughed. ‘Oh, don’t you be so sure. And do
n’t be fooled by the covering. Muslims Against Capitalism, the group they belong to, want to completely change society. And they embrace all colours, races and creeds. They are radical people. The Erols’ grandmother must be proud.’ Then he turned towards a group of officers who had been waiting patiently at the back of the old garage. ‘OK, the scene is yours.’ He said to Kerim, ‘Let’s go and look at the sphendone again.’

  The forensic team began setting up their equipment as İkmen and Kerim Gürsel walked out into the sunshine.

  İkmen lit a cigarette. ‘I noticed that Mr Öden wasn’t outside the Negroponte House when I drove past,’ he said. ‘Maybe his more recent travails are taking up his time.’

  ‘With Inspector Süleyman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They walked the short distance to the sphendone in silence. It was very close. A baby could easily have been taken from the ancient Hippodrome and placed in the Jewish family’s outhouse. For someone light on their feet, it was the work of seconds. On the other hand, lack of any further evidence in the sphendone was underlining İkmen’s growing belief that Ariadne had given birth elsewhere, before she had entered the ancient space.

  Still cordoned off, the sphendone was guarded by a constable who asked İkmen if he wanted to go inside. He said no. He’d seen what he needed to see.

  İkmen and Kerim walked back to their cars in silence, İkmen thinking about the short conversation he’d had with his cousin Samsun early that morning. Breathless and overcome with excitement, she’d said, ‘Oh Çetin, I promised not to tell, but I just can’t keep it to myself any longer! I went to Gezi and I met this lovely trans girl called Rita, American. Well, she introduced me to this other trans girl who is having a thing with your Sergeant Gürsel!’

  İkmen hadn’t been shocked but he had been surprised. ‘Kerim is married,’ he’d said.

  ‘To a lesbian, yes,’ Samsun had replied. ‘Çetin, the wife is a beard! A disguise to hide what your sergeant really is. He likes chicks with dicks, Çetin, trust me, and his “wife” – ill little thing – well, she likes girls. Now you won’t tell him I told you, will you? I promised his lover that I wouldn’t tell anyone, so she mustn’t find out I’ve told you.’

  Then she’d put the phone down.