The House of Four

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘It could be two men, or a man and a woman,’ Süleyman said. ‘The only relative certainty is that they’re young. According to the Galata Bridge witness, one of them has very pale blue or grey eyes. As to hair colour, they were both wearing hoods.’

  ‘In the bazaar and on the bridge.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then circulate that description,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t done so already.’

  ‘I was waiting . . .’

  ‘For what? For someone else to die?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Circulate it,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  He was just about to leave her office when she said, ‘Have you seen Inspector İkmen today?’

  ‘No, madam. I imagine he’s out.’

  ‘And so is his sergeant,’ she said. ‘On the Ottoman script translator’s first day. Poor organisation. I hope you are looking after Constable Demirtaş, Mehmet Bey.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he said. ‘Although I have to say that Constable Demirtaş appears very comfortable, madam. Çetin Bey set everything up for her.’

  ‘If you say so,’ she said.

  As he walked back to his office, Süleyman wondered why Teker had been so hostile, especially on the subject of Çetin İkmen. Was it perhaps because of what her predecessor Commissioner Ardıç had called ‘İkmen going esoteric’? But then rumour was that İkmen had spent much of the morning with a man who called himself an alchemist.

  Chapter 9

  Her ribs hurt. Until she realised she’d been kicked, she thought maybe she had bronchitis again.

  A man shouted, ‘Get up!’

  She opened her eyes. Ali was already standing up. He looked shaky. He was coming down. She wondered what time it was, what day.

  The man who had shouted at her was fat and sweaty. He stood beside another man who looked as if he wrestled bulls for a living.

  ‘Fucking junkies!’ the fat man said. ‘You think you can just break in anywhere and make yourselves at home!’

  Elif got to her feet. She felt cold even though she knew that outside it was blisteringly hot. The sun shone harshly through the broken windows of the old shop.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said.

  ‘Who are we?’ the fat man said. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘We needed a place to sleep, Bey Efendi,’ Ali said in his best creepy, craven arsehole voice.

  ‘So why’d you think you could come and use my place?’

  ‘We thought it was empty, Bey Efendi. We—’

  The bull-wrestler kicked him in the groin and Ali sank to the floor. Elif felt an overwhelming urge to spit at the fat man. But she didn’t. She didn’t have to prove anything to anyone, and that included herself. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have it coming. He did.

  ‘We’ll go,’ she said, picking up her rucksack as she moved towards Ali.

  ‘You’ll clear up the shit you’ve left all over my place,’ the fat man said.

  ‘What shit? We went to sleep.’

  The fat man grabbed her around the back of the head and pulled her towards the middle of the room. He pointed to a pile of what was clearly dog faeces on the floor.

  ‘That shit!’ he said.

  ‘That? That’s dog shit,’ she said. ‘Any fucking moron can see that!’

  It was then that he hit her and all hell broke loose.

  Like most of the Greek Orthodox churches in İstanbul, the Aya Triada in Moda had once hosted a large congregation. But ever since the population exchanges between Greece and the newly formed Republic of Turkey in 1923, the Greek community had been dwindling. Some academics had calculated that it was now as low as just over two thousand souls in the whole country. Father Anatoli Ralli’s disgruntled face seemed to Çetin İkmen to mirror all those years of decline, line by deep line.

  ‘He changed his name to Mustafa Kaiserli,’ the priest said.

  ‘Did his family come from Kayseri originally?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘No. His real name, Apion, is Byzantine. Yiannis is a Byzantine Greek, like most of us here in our ancestral city.’

  The subtext here was that İkmen and Gürsel, as Turks, were newcomers to İstanbul.

  ‘But I imagine, like many of our people now, he wanted to just get on with his life and not have to answer any awkward questions. So he changed his name. Last I heard, he lived in Beşiktaş.’

  ‘Does he come to Moda to attend church?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘No. Why would he?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Yiannis has made a new life. His father was almost a hundred years old when he died; he drove him mad.’

  That had to be Konstantinos Apion, the Rudolfoğlus’ gardener.

  ‘Is Yiannis an old man?’ Kerim asked.

  ‘Not compared to me,’ the priest said. ‘Fifty something.’

  ‘His father had him late . . .’

  ‘His father did a lot of things wrong,’ the priest said. ‘When he stopped working for the Rudolfoğlus, he just did nothing. Kept by his own mother, whose house he eventually inherited. Some people said he had been cursed by that family.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think that the children of Rudolf Paşa who told poor Konstantinos to go were as evil as their father. I don’t remember them, but my parents did. Horrible, unnatural children.’ He shook his head. ‘No wonder their poor mother died young, after living with that German for all those years, and then with those children.’

  ‘What was the matter with the children?’

  ‘My mother said that they were just like statues. Always silent, staring, looking down their noses at people.’

  ‘They were the children of a paşa,’ İkmen said.

  ‘They kicked my father’s dog to death,’ the priest said. ‘Apparently they laughed. Said it didn’t matter because it was a Greek dog. Do paşas’ children normally behave like that, Inspector?’

  İkmen sighed. ‘No. No, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘My mother always believed that one or all of those children of the Devil’s House killed Perihan Hanım.’

  ‘Their own mother? Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  The priest looked at him with stern, stony eyes.

  İkmen waved a hand. ‘Well, anyway,’ he said, ‘do you know anything about the desecration of the ayazma of St Katherine by Kemal Rudolfoğlu?’

  ‘Of course. That was why Konstantinos Apion was dismissed by the Rudolfoğlus,’ he said.

  ‘Because he caught the young Kemal digging up the floor?’

  ‘If you already know the story, why ask me?’

  ‘Because you might know why a thirteen-year-old boy was trying to raise a stone floor,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Well, I don’t.’

  ‘Anything underneath the ayazma?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘So why would Kemal dig it up?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was a little vandal.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you can be any clearer about this Mustafa Kaiserli’s whereabouts than just Beşiktaş?’ İkmen said.

  The priest thought for a moment, then he said, ‘No.’

  Sergeant Mungun was sweet. First thing in the morning he’d walked into her office with a cezve and a tiny handleless cup and poured her the first cup of mirra coffee she’d ever had in İstanbul. Bitter and powerful, it was the genuine article made by a genuine son of Mardin. Barçın was bewitched. Whenever she filled her cup from the cezve, she smiled. Not so when she looked down at the Rudolfoğlus’ letters.

  A letter from Kanat to his younger brother Kemal dated, in the Muslim calendar, 14 Shaban 1369 barely made sense. Barçın had calculated that the year 1369 corresponded to 1950, so the Rudolfoğlus had all been under forty. The letter started abruptly, then it rambled.

  Kemal,

  Hamlet wrestled with mortality. I wrestle with consciousness. Why is it? Why can’t you do something about it? You who create life (I’ve heard you). And if I h
ear you, so will she. You have been warned. Yücel is silent. Do you think he might be dead? Have you done anything to him? The lavatory is broken and I don’t know what to do.

  Your brother,

  Kanat

  Sergeant Gürsel had told her something about the Rudolfoğlus and their apartments. Kanat’s had been the dirtiest. When he’d gone into the bathroom, Gürsel had found that neither the lavatory nor the shower worked. Could the lavatory have been broken since 1950? Only the bath had been operational. Had he used that as a toilet?

  ‘Constable Demirtaş . . .’

  The sound of a voice shocked her a little, and she gasped.

  ‘I’m sorry I startled you,’ Çetin İkmen said.

  She looked up at him. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘I realise that what you’re doing must take a very high level of concentration.’ He sat down opposite her. ‘That said, I wondered whether we could have a discussion about what you’ve discovered so far.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Are you yet gaining any impressions of the Rudolfoğlu siblings? Character traits? Habits?’

  ‘The way they write falls into two groups,’ Barçın said. ‘One group is the three men, and the second group is Fatima Hanım.’

  ‘The way they write?’

  ‘There’s paranoia in the men’s letters,’ she said. ‘They all talk about concepts like consciousness, redemption, freedom, interspersed with banal stuff about broken lavatories and power cuts. Between the three of them there is a lot of discussion of “her”, which I take it is Fatima Hanım.’

  ‘How do they talk about her?’

  ‘Yücel seems to tread carefully when he writes to her or mentions her to his brothers. The other two are angry. In fact they’re all angry at her for something, but Yücel doesn’t seem to be afraid. In this letter I’ve just read from Kanat to Kemal, it looks as if the latter may have had a woman with him in the house. That was back in 1950. Kanat talks about Kemal creating life, which I assume alludes to sex. He tells his brother that he can hear him, and warns him that “she” might be able to as well.’

  İkmen leaned back in his chair. ‘The old woman’s cleaner said that in the last weeks of her life, Fatima Hanım heard voices in the walls.’

  ‘But this was 1950.’

  ‘Mmm. How does Fatima Hanım communicate with her brothers?’

  ‘With great affection,’ she said. ‘From her perspective, if her letters are to be believed, there is no issue between herself and her siblings. She asks after their health, and towards the end of her life, she begs her brother Yücel to let her into his apartment so she might see him. This was in response to a letter from him begging her to allow him to tell about something. He says that Kemal is a madman because of this thing, and Kanat is consumed with grief. As yet I’ve no idea what it might be. Yücel won’t tell while Fatima is still alive, so he says. But he will if and when his two brothers die.’

  ‘Long ago Rudolf Paşa and his wife engaged a Greek gardener,’ İkmen said. ‘We’ve been trying to trace his son, who apparently still lives in the city. I’ve just come from an interview with a Greek priest over in Moda who very powerfully underlined the conviction some people had that the children had somehow taken on the supposed evil from their father. He even expressed a belief that maybe the children killed their mother.’

  ‘Well that would cause chaos in a family, to say the least,’ Barçın said. ‘But if that happened, how would they be able to get away with it, sir? They were children. When did their mother die?’

  ‘Nineteen thirty-one,’ he said. ‘Her husband had died three years earlier. I suppose I need to know how she died. Not just the myth, the real story.’

  ‘Do you think the gardener’s son might know?’

  ‘He might. I also have to speak to the family lawyer, who, hopefully, returns to the city tonight. Then we will find out who, if anyone, is now the proud owner of the Devil’s House. Have you found any communication about money in the letters?’

  ‘No, sir,’ she said. ‘Could that be significant?’

  ‘Yes. The family banker told me that Rudolf Paşa left all his assets to his daughter when he died. She was nine at the time. Everything her brothers had, she gave them.’

  ‘That is extraordinary!’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed.

  ‘It could account for their strange relationship,’ Barçın said. ‘But then again, would someone go mad or suffer from grief over something financial?’

  İkmen smiled. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Most definitely. Although I do think there is more to this than just money. A gut feeling only, but then as you will discover through working for me, Constable Demirtaş, I have come to trust those over the years.’

  He rose to go.

  ‘Oh, sir,’ she said. ‘There are a few letters written in modern Turkish mixed in with the Ottoman. Do you want me to look at those?’

  ‘Yes, when you can,’ he said. ‘Especially if, although it is unlikely, they are between the siblings.’

  ‘Are you going out?’

  He put his phone back in his pocket before Ceyda could see it.

  ‘Maybe. Why?’

  ‘I heard you talking on the phone,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, I couldn’t understand anything you were saying.’

  ‘Ceyda . . .’

  ‘And I don’t care,’ she said. ‘Go, stay, do what you like.’

  He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t be like this,’ he said. ‘Don’t you want me to get a job?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course I do.’

  ‘To get a job I have to leave the house.’

  ‘Yes. And yet much as you leave the house, you never get even close to a job, do you? Don’t speak to me.’

  She walked into the kitchen and shut the door. Once again his wife wasn’t talking to him. It didn’t make him happy, or sad either, if he were honest.

  Mustafa Kaiserli left his small apartment in Beşiktaş and made his way to the ferry stage.

  Ömer had made a pot of that awful mirra coffee for İkmen’s linguist. He’d brought it in with an almost feverish look on his face. Süleyman hadn’t seen his deputy present his gift to Constable Demirtaş, but he could imagine the scene. The garbled speech, the blushing. He’d done that himself when he was young. What he’d rarely done in his youth, however, was fail to pick up on signs women gave out about whether they found him sexually attractive. Constable Demirtaş liked Ömer Mungun, but that was all – mainly because she only had eyes for his boss.

  Süleyman had seen it so many times before, he knew he wasn’t mistaken. And she was a very attractive, intelligent and sexy young woman. Her body, voluptuous but firm, actively aroused him. But his days of cheating on Gonca Şekeroğlu were over. He’d decided some years ago that what he didn’t need in his life was a feud with a tribe of gypsies. He just hoped that Ömer didn’t get hurt.

  He was on the point of closing his eyes after a hard day’s work when Gonca arrived home surrounded by grandchildren.

  ‘There’s a rumour that the Corpse Eater is dead,’ she said as she shooed the kids into the garden and unpacked her bag on the floor. When she finally found what she was looking for – her cigarettes – she lit up.

  Süleyman swung his legs down from the couch and sat up. ‘I don’t really know what you’re talking about. Is this some sort of criminal?’

  ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘You know him! The yalı gypsy. His family live in Tarlabaşı. Owns property in all the posh places on the Bosphorus.’

  ‘Do you mean Hasan Dum?’ he said.

  ‘That’s him. He owns not just one yalı, but every other yalı on the Bosphorus. They say he put his own brother’s eyes out. My father hid me from him when I was a girl because he knew that if he saw me he would want to marry me. And although the Corpse Eater was rich even back then, my father didn’t want me to go to him because he was so ugly.’

  ‘Not because he kills people?’

  ‘He doesn’t really eat corpses,�
� Gonca said. ‘But he comes from Zonguldak, where the stupid Turks believe we eat our dead.’

  Süleyman had never heard of that before, but he could believe it. In the past, the fact that the gypsies didn’t bury their dead immediately had confused some people.

  ‘So what have you been told about Dum?’ he asked.

  She sat down next to him on the sofa and moulded herself into his side. ‘He and his Hungarian bodyguard, Gabor, were found dead in one of his properties in Yeniköy.’

  ‘He had properties in Yeniköy?’ Süleyman had known that Dum owned a lot of the waterside villas known as yalıs, but he hadn’t realised that the gypsy had climbed to the heights of the very poshest Bosphorus villages.

  ‘Only recently,’ she said. ‘The rumour is that he and Gabor were found cut to pieces. I don’t know how. Hasan was the only proper gypsy crime lord in the city. All the others are just kids buying up shit land and defending it with illegal guns. The Corpse Eater and his man were always heavily armed. How did that happen?’

  If the rumour was true, then Süleyman too wondered about that. Hasan Dum, his men and his family had no limits. Whoever had killed him would pay in ways Süleyman didn’t want to think about.

  ‘Let’s find out. I’ll call headquarters,’ he said.

  Gonca shrugged. The rumour had been enough for her. Now that it was out of her system, she was no longer interested.

  Süleyman made the call in their bedroom, away from the many Şekeroğlu kids, Gonca and her numerous daughters. He’d known Deniz Akgunduz for years. Younger than he looked, grizzled, addicted to a range of substances, he’d worked for the organised crime unit for most of his career. Much of that had been spent undercover inside some of İstanbul’s most violent gangs.

  ‘I’ve heard that Hasan Dum is dead,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Fucking right.’

  Sergeant Akgunduz had been obliged many years ago to adopt the casual cussing that characterised so many gang members. Now it was just part of who he was.

  ‘How? Didn’t he have his bodyguard with him?’

  ‘Gabor Karpathy. Yes. Equally dead. Fantastic fucking day for this city, Mehmet Bey. Two psychopathic cunts finished off in one day.’