The House of Four

by Barbara Nadel

She didn’t answer immediately. In that time he heard vehicles move through the district and then stop. Lots of them.

  Fatma İkmen placed a glass of tea and a plate of fresh bread, cheese, butter and honey in front of Arto Sarkissian. ‘Breakfast sets a man up for the day. Eat.’ Then, with a withering look at her husband, she left the kitchen. İkmen never ate breakfast.

  Once she was out of earshot, he said, ‘If you don’t want it, I’ll give it to the cat.’

  But Arto was already eating. ‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ he said. ‘But I assume your breakfast . . .’

  ‘In the cat,’ İkmen said as he lit up his third cigarette of the morning. ‘Vast ragged males like Marlboro need all the calories they can get round here. Sultanahmet’s female cats are only impressed by size and possibly scars. God, you’re early, Arto!’

  ‘I wanted to see you before either of us became embroiled in our work,’ the Armenian said. ‘I spent much of last night looking for my grandfather’s records, but to no avail.’

  İkmen shrugged. ‘It was a long shot.’

  ‘But I did get to speak to my Uncle Mesrob in America.’

  ‘Your father’s younger brother, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He told his friend what his uncle had said about the Teufel Ev.

  İkmen frowned. ‘I knew Perihan Hanım died from septicaemia,’ he said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Sami Nasi told me.’

  ‘Well, septicaemia may arise from numerous scenarios, including childbirth and abortion,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Rudolf Paşa had been dead for three years at the time of his wife’s death. But given what she died from, I am unsurprised.’

  ‘So not his child.’

  ‘No. Remarriage? Do you know?’

  ‘Uncle Mesrob made no reference to any husband,’ Arto said. ‘Just the woman and the baby and how sad my grandfather was that they both died.’

  ‘And yet,’ İkmen said, ‘back in the 1930s, having a bastard child would have brought shame on any family. Even more so on the family of a paşa. The death of the child, surely, was the best outcome.’

  ‘Unless she wanted it? Perhaps she really loved its father.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  ‘Mesrob didn’t know,’ Arto said. ‘Maybe it’s recorded somewhere in my grandfather’s effects, but . . .’ He shrugged. ‘All he said was that the child died, and then its mother. My grandfather felt guilty about it for ever afterwards. News to me, but I can’t see why Mesrob would lie.’

  İkmen put his cigarette out, lit another and finished his tea. ‘If Perihan Hanım did want that child, how was she going to explain it?’ he said. ‘Ignoring the wider world for a moment here, what was she going to tell her children?’

  ‘Perhaps they knew. This happened in the early years of the republic, remember. Atatürk was pulling the country kicking and screaming away from the Ottoman Empire and the strictures of religion.’

  ‘Yes, but as we know, those pre-republican attitudes persist; some would say they just get stronger to this day. I repeat, what was she going to do? Hide in that house for the rest of her life?’

  ‘Maybe she thought she could brazen it out?’

  İkmen shook his head. ‘According to your uncle, your grandfather cared that he’d lost mother and baby. Just professional pride, do you think?’

  ‘I can’t be sure, but I doubt it,’ Arto said. ‘You remember my father and how deeply he cared about his patients. One of the reasons why I work with the dead is because I know I couldn’t find enough inside myself to care as thoroughly as I should for living patients. My father inherited his clinical mores from my grandfather. I believe old Kevork cared.’

  ‘Mmm.’ İkmen heard Fatma’s footsteps in the hall. ‘She’s coming back,’ he said. ‘You’d better finish your food or she’ll shout.’

  Arto quickly buttered a piece of bread and threw it into his mouth.

  Fatma walked into the kitchen and eyed him suspiciously.

  The Armenian chewed and smiled.

  Only one letter had been written by Kanat Rudolfoğlu during 1955. It was addressed to his brother Kemal. But was it a reply to the letter from Kemal that she’d read earlier? Barçın leaned back in her chair and studied it again.

  Kemal,

  You are insane. There is nothing to be done. Bear your pain like a man. I hate what you do and why. I hate you. Not as much as I hate that woman, but almost. I’d like to die soon so that I don’t have to hear your madness through my walls any more. You are dead to me. Kindly stay so.

  Kanat

  ‘That woman’ had to be Fatima Hanım. Why so much hatred for her? But then why such vitriol towards Kemal? What had they done?

  Tarlabaşı was sealed off from the world. Houses, shops, apartments, derelict sites – people ran into the streets carrying children and valuables, while addicts dropped bags of bonzai out of windows or flushed them down toilets. Half-dressed transsexuals kicked sleeping men in vests out of their beds. On one street officers led four handcuffed men out of a derelict house, followed by the three Kalashnikov rifles they’d stashed behind an old fireplace.

  Mehmet Süleyman had no great confidence in the operation, which in his opinion should have been carried out as soon as the boy in the black tracksuit had been arrested. Even if he had been given the gun by this couple he’d told them about, they had to have moved on by this time. But then a small group of uniforms had stayed in the area for most of the night, so perhaps they had been scared enough to stay put?

  Inspector Cıngı of the organised crime unit wasn’t the easiest man to work alongside. The grieving Dum family knew him well, and a huge amount of police time and energy was being used on them and their properties. Admittedly a few hand weapons had been recovered from the Dum patriarch’s house, but unless the boy had stolen one of their guns, the Dums were irrelevant. He couldn’t help thinking that Organised Crime were using large numbers of officers usually assigned elsewhere to make sure the family didn’t get any expansionist ideas in the wake of Hasan’s death.

  Ömer Mungun had gone to talk to a couple of men who only spoke Aramaic. Like him, they came from the district of Mardin and were probably of Syriani origin, which meant that they were Christians. When Ömer had finished taking their details, he walked over to Süleyman.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘No, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘Although the younger of the two, Luko, suggests we go and see old Sugar Barışık.’

  Süleyman smiled. Was she really still alive?

  Sugar Barışık was a fat, elderly prostitute who knew everyone and everything in Tarlabaşı. She ran a sex shop in a basement near the Syriani church. Süleyman hadn’t seen her for at least two years, but once inside her hovel, it was as if no time at all had passed.

  Still sitting in her broken chair, surrounded by dildos, handcuffs and countless stray cats, Sugar looked at Süleyman and said, ‘Hello, gorgeous.’

  ‘Sugar Hanım.’

  She smiled at Ömer. ‘And your young friend.’ She laughed. ‘Oh, if I were forty years younger, I’d fuck you both just for fun. We could have a threesome! You’d have liked me when I was young, you know.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘I had a figure like Venus back then, and a mouth that was the gateway to heaven, if you know what I mean.’

  He did.

  ‘Mind you,’ she said, ‘I don’t know why you brought all your ugly friends along with you. Pushing people around, taking their drugs off them . . .’

  ‘We found a very sick young boy with a powerful gun here last night,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘What? The one who shot at a rat? You arrested him? He’s out of his mind.’

  ‘Yes, but some people gave him a gun, Sugar Hanım,’ Ömer said. ‘We need to find them because we think they’ve got another one.’

  ‘Mmm.’ She looked down at the floor. The dead eyes of a disembowelled mouse stared back at her. Süleyman remembered that Sugar did
n’t often formally feed her cats. Or clean. ‘You know we get all sorts coming through here these days,’ she said. ‘Now that everyone’s on that bonzai shit, they come here to score. Posh, some of them. Doesn’t appeal to me, though. Can’t see the pleasure in being out of your head. And it gives some of them heart attacks. I could get one of them just walking up the steps into the street . . .’

  ‘Sir . . .’

  Süleyman looked at Ömer Mungun.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sir, don’t look. At the window,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a young woman with very pale eyes.’

  As the two men came out of the shop, Ali took hold of Elif’s arm and said, ‘Run.’

  ‘Er, excuse me . . .’ a voice called out.

  ‘Run!’

  He pulled her along behind him. But she was off her face.

  ‘Come on!’ he said.

  She was laughing now. Her arm felt like a piece of waterlogged vinyl, and the toes of her trainers caught on every stone in the road so that he had to hold her up.

  ‘Stop! Police!’

  ‘I’ve got a fucking gun!’ she yelled.

  Ali saw her try to put her hand in her jacket pocket, but she was so fucked, she couldn’t get anywhere near the weapon.

  A very dark young man was almost catching them up, while an older, taller man brought up the rear. And there were other coppers: on the street corner in front of them, coming out of a shabby grocer’s shop, cuffing some kid with his head in his hands. They’d either be caught or shot. No other scenario was realistic. Ali stopped.

  Elif laughed. ‘I’ll shoot the lot of you! Bastards.’

  But as she moved her hand, Ali got in first and took the gun. Suddenly the noise on the street stopped completely. Then the sound of multiple weapons being primed and raised and aimed made him wet his pants.

  Chapter 13

  Mustafa Kaiserli was married but had no children. His apartment in Beşiktaş was, İkmen reckoned, worth about a quarter of a million euros. He owned it and so he had money. But other than that, his life seemed to be quite sparse and dull.

  ‘Ceyda works,’ he said in answer to Kerim Gürsel’s question about his employment status.

  ‘Your wife.’

  ‘Yes. She’s a tour guide. You know there’s not much I can tell you about the Devil’s House.’

  İkmen had told him on the doorstep what he wanted to talk to him about.

  ‘Your father worked there.’

  ‘Yes. But way before I was born,’ he said. ‘He left when Rudolf Paşa’s wife died.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘No. All he ever told me was that shortly after the woman died, he was asked to leave.’

  ‘By the children?’

  ‘I imagine so,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Kaiserli, did you know that your father caught one of the Rudolfoğlu children, a boy called Kemal, desecrating the ayazma of St Katherine in Moda?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Yes, although I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘What do you mean? You don’t know why the boy was damaging the shrine, or why your father was there?’

  ‘Neither,’ he said. ‘My father never spoke about it.’

  ‘So how do you know about it?’ İkmen said.

  ‘I’m Greek,’ he said. ‘We’re a small community. When something happens to one of us or to one of our historic places, we know about it.’

  ‘Do any of your fellow Greeks have any theories about it, do you know?’

  He sighed. ‘Only about when it happened,’ he said. ‘We weren’t popular at the beginning of the republic. We were seen as traitors, a fifth column invading from Greece. That boy was very young, he’d recently lost his father, the Ottoman Empire had disintegrated, his country was ruined and even his place in society as a member of the aristocracy had gone.’

  ‘I’ve worked out, if indeed Kemal Rudolfoğlu was thirteen at the time, that the attempted desecration happened in 1931,’ İkmen said. ‘Quite a long time after the republic was declared in 1923, but the same year as Perihan Rudolfoğlu’s death and the same year your father was let go from the Devil’s House. Do you think he was dismissed because of his intervention at the shrine?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He didn’t ever say?’

  ‘No.’

  Mustafa Kaiserli, aka Yiannis Apion, clearly didn’t want to talk. A small, grey man in his fifties, he had the look of someone for whom life was a spectator sport.

  ‘Do you know what your father did after he left the Devil’s House?’ İkmen said.

  ‘I wasn’t born until the fifties,’ Kaiserli said. ‘My father was in his forties by then, and disabled.’

  ‘How did he become disabled?’

  ‘He was hit by a tram and lost a leg. Before I was born. I don’t know what he did for work after he left the Devil’s House. I don’t ever remember him working. My mother worked.’

  ‘Is your mother still alive, Mr Kaiserli?’

  ‘No, she died back in the 1960s,’ he said.

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘Four years ago. I nursed him myself. He was ninety-eight years old.’

  ‘Incredible,’ İkmen said. ‘You know that the four Rudolfoğlu siblings were all over ninety when they were murdered.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Did you ever see the Rudolfoğlu siblings?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘No. Why would I?’

  ‘You were born and brought up in Moda.’

  ‘Yes, but my father never spoke about his past,’ Kaiserli said. ‘All I knew as a child was that he’d worked as a gardener for an Ottoman family. I didn’t know where until I was much older. I’m sorry the old people are dead, but I don’t think I can help you.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ İkmen smiled. ‘Although I do have to ask whether your father was maybe bitter about losing his job at the Devil’s House.’

  ‘What, all those years ago?’ He laughed. ‘If you’re looking for a reason why the Rudolfoğlus were murdered, then you’ve come to the wrong place. My father didn’t care about them, and I never knew them.’

  Later, back in his car with Kerim Gürsel, İkmen said, ‘There are so few Greeks in the city these days. I wonder what they think. I mean, imagine if you felt you had to change your name just to fit in.’ Then he remembered that he knew something about Kerim that most certainly set him apart. ‘But of course you do know,’ he added.

  ‘I’ve never had to change my name, sir.’

  ‘No, but . . .’

  ‘And I am married – to a woman.’

  ‘Yes, but both of you . . . Well, you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Kerim and his wife Sinem’s sexuality was a closely guarded secret, known only to a select few.

  İkmen started the car. ‘Logically the Rudolfoğlus got rid of the gardener Konstantinos Apion when their mother died to save money. But as we know, the house belonged in law to Fatima Hanım, and she was only twelve.’

  ‘Her brothers must have had a hand in it too,’ Kerim said.

  ‘Normally I’d agree,’ İkmen said. ‘But in this case, I do wonder. When Perihan Hanım died, the siblings parted. I wonder how quickly after his employer’s death Konstantinos Apion was let go from the Devil’s House.’

  His phone rang.

  ‘Shit.’ He took the call, which was from the Forensic Institute.

  Hanging out of his office window, a cigarette between his lips, Mehmet Süleyman was trying to make himself feel normal. With his heart smashing against his ribs, this wasn’t easy.

  The man had just given himself and the gun up without a murmur. But the woman . . . Ömer had borne the brunt of her. Kicking, scratching, biting. Once they’d brought her under control, Süleyman had sent his sergeant to hospital. Like the man, the woman was a junkie, which meant that she could be carrying all sorts of bacteria.

  The man, Ali Erbil, was being booked in by the custody team, who would
sort out whether he wanted a lawyer or not. Süleyman knew he’d have to interview both of them, but he also knew he’d start with Mr Erbil. The woman, who was called Elif, was currently screaming in a cell awaiting the arrival of a psychiatrist, who would, hopefully, sedate her.

  Unlike the gun they’d recovered from the black-tracksuited boy, the weapon Erbil had given up was a very ordinary Glock. He wondered whether the man would continue to be compliant.

  A knock on the door almost made him scream. But frayed as his nerves were, he knew he hadn’t locked his office door. And he didn’t care.

  ‘Come in, it’s open.’

  It was the Kurdish traffic cop.

  ‘Oh, er, sorry to disturb you, sir,’ she said. ‘Do you know when Inspector İkmen is getting back?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t,’ he said.

  She was looking at him strangely, with her head on one side, her brow furrowed.

  ‘Is anything the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I just need to show him something. His phone is off, and . . . Inspector Süleyman, are you all right?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re very pale, sir,’ she said. ‘And you have some blood on your collar. I saw you leave early this morning . . .’

  ‘We may have arrested the people responsible for the killing in the bazaar and the murder on the Galata Bridge,’ he said. ‘I’ve yet to interview the suspects. One of them put up a fight.’

  ‘And injured you!’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m fine. A little shocked, that’s all. The blood, I’m sorry to say, is Sergeant Mungun’s.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  He motioned for her to sit down and offered her a cigarette.

  ‘Bitten and scratched. I sent him to hospital,’ he said. ‘Our suspects are both, from the state of their arms, heroin users, and so one can’t be too careful.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is there anything I can help you with, Constable?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘As you know, sir, I’m transliterating letters found at the crime scene in Moda.’ She shook her head. ‘The victims had such strange relationships with each other. At times it almost seems as if they were living in a fantasy. Not a pleasant one.’

  ‘Perhaps they were. Living in a fantasy.’