Arabesk (8 page)

With a smile, Arto Sarkissian rested his considerable behind on the edge of Suleyman's desk. 'You probably need to speak to Zelfa Halman with regard to Cengiz Temiz.'

'I've mentioned him to her,' Suleyman said in the kind of automatic fashion he knew he should avoid. For was it not just one step from talking about mentioning things to stating where that mentioning occurred? 'She advised rather more intervention with the parents at this stage, until forensic come up, or not, with something. I have instructed Çöktin to meet them when they arrive, no doubt accompanied by Mr Avedykian, later this morning.'

'They've already gone to the top for their lawyer then?'

Suleyman shrugged. 'It is their right And if they are rich enough to buyAvedykian, well. ..'

A pause hung between the two men for a while as they both recalled their previous dealings with Sevan Avedykian. Principal among these was the moment only ten months before, when Ìkmen aided by Suleyman had been obliged to tell Avedykian that his son, Avram, had been murdered by his psychopathic lover, Muhammed Ersoy. Suleyman could still vividly recall the stony silence that had accompanied the greying of Sevan Avedykian's face, as well as the hysterical screaming that had signalled Mrs Avedykian's knowledge of the facts. Arto Sarkissian had once been a friend to Avram and as a fellow Armenian had visited frequently, for a while, after that. But not recently. For as Sevan Avedykian's sorrow had grown, so his silences had hardened. Every fibre of his body shouted to Sarkissian that he should have alerted the father to the son's activities many years before. And perhaps Sarkissian should have done just that. He had, after all, known about Avram's obsession with Ersoy for many years. True, he didn't realise quite how dangerous the fabulous Ersoy was until it was too late. Not that Avedykian would have listened then any more than he did now. And so, after just one abortive attempt to explain his involvement in Avram's past, Sarkissian had walked out of the Avedykian house for what he hoped was the last time. That had now been three months ago.

After looking down briefly at his pocket diary, Suleyman broke the silence. 'I've learned who Erol Urfa claims to have been with on the night of the murder. Çöktin told me.'

'Oh?'

'Yes. Ali Mardin; he owns a small pansiyon on Yerebatan Caddesi. Like Urfa he is a .. .'

'He's Kurdish,' the doctor assisted. 'Don't you think you should take Çöktin with you, in that case?'

'No. I think it might be better if I impress upon Mr Mardin the seriousness of what has happened alone. I want to cut through as much clan loyalty as I can. These people need to know that only two things are of importance to me - the safe return of Merih Urfa and the apprehension of Ruya's killer. I don't care what values these people adhere to or what they consider their origins to be.'

'How very modern’ Arto Sarkissian said with more than a hint of irony in his voice. 'I wish you luck although I do have some anxieties. I mean, you are dealing with people -Erol, Aksoy, Tansu and now possibly Mardin - who know how to keep secrets very effectively. After all, Ruya and Merih were, until yesterday, nonexistent people’

'Yes. Strange’ Suleyman's eyes glazed over as he considered this point 'I would have thought that Aksoy would have wanted to exploit the fact that Erol honoured his village betrothal. Man of principal marries little country girl. After all, most of his fans are of a certain class . ..'

Sarkissian laughed. 'Oh, you terrible snob!' he said. 'But yes, I suppose they are mostly peasants. It does rather depend upon what Aksoy had in mind for Erol though. And his affair with Tansu was frequently headline news. That woman is so volatile she ensures whoever she is with is never out of the public eye’

'And if the public are fascinated by a person, they will buy their tapes, CDs or whatever.'

The doctor bowed in agreement. 'Precisely.'

'How horribly cynical.'

'That's business.'

There was a knock at the door. In response to Suleyman's call to enter, a smart, if rather nondescript young man, entered the office. Tipped as Suleyman's replacement, Ìkmen's new sergeant, Orhan Tepe was one of those men who always looked cheerful, whatever the occasion. And now was no exception.

'What is it, Tepe?' Suleyman said, only briefly looking away from the doctor.

'We've got some people downstairs who claim they killed Ruya Urfa. They say they've got to see you, sir.'

Suleyman groaned. 'Crazies.'

'Well, yes, but, er, not obviously so, sir,' said Tepe. 'Not mad old women in rags or men who think they're Adnan Menderes.'

'Oh,' the doctor said with a smile, 'unusual crazies, eh?'

'Well, if you call two teenage girls wearing chadors unusual then, yes, they are, sir.' Turning back to Suleyman, he said, 'Shall you be coming to see them, Inspector, or shall I just get their parents to collect them?'

I am an addict for the sorrow that you bring I embrace the knife's edge of your disdain I am lost I am gone I am dead

Until your sweet return into my life happens once again.

As he looked at what he had just written,
Çetin
Ìkmen shook his head in disbelief. 'You know’ he said calling out to Fatma over the top of the tape he had been transcribing, 'I think the state should give the Ministry of Culture some sort of award for attempting to get this dross banned back in the eighties.'

'That's Tansu at her best!' his wife answered as she walked over to the stereo and made to turn up the volume. 'She sings of universal emotions,
Çetin;
of love and loss and—'

'Don't touch that dial!' he shouted. 'In fact, turn it down, will you? Makes me want to jump into a bottle of brandy and stay there. I don't think I can stand any more ungrarnmatical sorrow-filled insults to my intelligence.'

'All right, all right!' Fatma said as she laid the towel she had been using across the back of a chair and then turned the music down to almost silence.

'No wonder the suicide rate in dumps like Sivas keeps on going up. They listen to this stuff all the time out there. Being in the country
is
bad enough but with this going on day and night. . . I'd be slitting my throat within hours.'

Fatma, already wearied by the younger children, who were on vacation, and the housework, sat down beside her husband. 'Oh, you've been listening to Arabesk all your life without noticing,' she said. 'People play it everywhere. I play it I like it'

'You,' he replied, touching just the end of her nose with stern affection, 'should know better.'

'It's romantic.' She shrugged. "The stars themselves are romantic. Women like such things. Even Cicek will sing along to Arabesk at times, when she's not listening to those Western musicians. We are Turks, we like to imagine ourselves involved in grand passions like the singers. And then we like to have a good cry.'

'A rather sweeping generalisation there, Fatma,' her husband said with not a little amusement in his voice, 'confounded, of course, by people like myself who want to vomit when we hear it.'

'Oh, that's just you!'

'And Suleyman and Arto. I can't really even see Commissioner Ardiç. getting damp around the eyes just because some spoilt old plastic-surgery victim has been cast aside by a lover who is young enough to be her son. I may be wrong, but... It's just all "Oh, I can't live without you", "I think I want to die"; it's so unremittingly morbid! It's helpless too, which I don't like. I mean, have you seen that photograph of Tansu on the front page of
Hurriyet?’

'No. I haven't really had time for reading.'

He reached over to the table and grabbed hold of one of the newspapers stacked behind a heap of ironing.

'Look at this,' he said as he spread the paper across his wife's knees. A large photograph of an anguished Tansu howling into a white-and-silver lace handkerchief screamed off the page. 'Poor Mrs Urfa lies dead on a slab, her baby, who is described but not shown, is missing and what do we get? A photograph of some adulterous old has-been who reckons that her poor Erol is so badly traumatised their love will never be as it was ever again. It's sick!'

'I agree we should see a photograph of the baby. If members of the public are to look for her they need that.' Fatma's face was set with the seriousness of the subject 'But people do like this romance thing with Tansu and Erol. I myself find it disgusting because he's so young. I would hate it if one of our sons became involved with an older woman. But bad as they are, Allah has punished them now and it is not for us to judge.'

Ìkmen, whose opinion of religion of whatever type placed such phenomena somewhere between folk tales and the astrology columns in newspapers, rolled his eyes with impatience.

'And also,' Fatma continued, 'you have to remember that Tansu, anyway, is not always helpless.'

'Oh, I know that, 'Ìkmen blustered on a laugh. 'She's reputed to have the most volcanic temper, be totally selfish—'

'No, I mean in her music,' Fatma said. 'There are some songs where the words are resentful rather than sad. They're often songs about her lover being stolen by another woman. They're really quite, well, I suppose you'd call them sort of tough.'

'A bit masculine, you mean?'

'No, her tone is much the same as in the others. But in songs like "I Want None of You" or "Hate Is My Only Friend" the words are very strong, very .. ‘ She thought hard to find the right words, 'very sort of bitter, I suppose you'd say.'

'Expressing the collective frustrations of the lahmacun-eating classes?'

'Those are your words, not mine,' she said as she rose and picked up her towel once again. 'Anyway, I have things to wash. I haven't got time to sit about with you. Oh, and you might have a word with Bulent whenever he decides to come in.'

Ìkmen looked up and frowned.'Why?'

'He's lost his job.'

'At the Pudding Shop?' Ìkmen's face took on a thunderous look. 'Why this time?'

'He turned up drunk,' Fatma said with more than a little edge to her voice. 'I think you should speak to him, don't you?'

'I've never been drunk at work!' he roared as he followed Fatma's retreating figure with his eyes. 'I used to take a drink, but only what I could handle: I was never drunk! What was the boy thinking, I mean—'

'He doesn't care, Çetin,' Fatma called out from the kitchen. 'As long as he's having fun he doesn't care.'

'Well, I'll just have to make him care then, won't I? If he's wobbling around in public he could get arrested even!'

'I think that may be the object of the exercise, actually.' Fatma put her head round the door of the kitchen and sighed. 'I mean, what better way to get back at you, eh?'

'But why would he want to get back at me? Am I not a good father? Do I not listen to his ghastly adolescent ravings without complaint? Have I not always had a stable job in order to provide for my—'

'I think that's the problem.'

For a moment he just sat and stared at her, his mouth open and a little dry. 'You mean the job?'

'Well, it's a bit sort of with the establishment, isn't it? He's young. It's what they do, Q!etin.'

'Is it indeed?'

'Yes, and you're going to have to be very calm when you tell him off or he'll do it all the more. I don't know how you're going to achieve this, Çetin, but you're going to have to be very "modern" indeed.'

And then she was gone, leaving her husband even more desperate for a drink than he had been before.

Although they gave the outward appearance of being devout Muslims, Deniz and Gulsum Ertürk were in fact obsessed with only one thing - sex. That they didn't realise this was a tribute both to their youth and to the fact that the twins had been raised with only scant education in that area. All they knew was that ever since they had seen Erol Urfa for the first time three years before, they had been in love. They'd been fourteen when Erol's plaintive tones had entered their lives and ever since that moment he had dominated their every waking moment.

As much as they loved Erol, the sisters hated Tansu. One of their favourite games was to ascribe all her successes, both personal and professional, to witchcraft Deniz had once heard that some people in the far east of the country worshipped Shaitan and she had taken it into her head that Tansu might be one of them. These people, it was said, always avoided blue, a colour that Tansu with her shades of dramatic red, black and white seemed to shun.

The death of Erol’s wife had, however, taken the twins to a new dimension. Now, as they sat silently looking at the stern inspector across the table from them, was their finest moment as fans of Erol Urfa.

'We could stand it no longer, you see’ Gulsum said as she nervously twisted one edge of her chador between her fingers. 'Erol is special, he deserves so much better than just a peasant girl’

'And so you killed her,' Suleyman said, noting the fine, cultured accent of the two young women. A lot of high-born girls had taken to the veil in recent years. In some cases it was a form of rebellion against Westernised, materialistic parents. But they still, he reflected with grim amusement, retained all of their prejudices against 'peasants'.

'She was no good for him.. She didn't love him,' Deniz added as she leaned across her sister's chest

'So how did you kill her then?' Suleyman asked.

For just a few seconds the sisters exchanged a glance and then Deniz said, 'We poisoned her.' 'With?'

'With the stuff that Resat uses to kill the rats,' Gulsum said, enthusiastically adding, 'It contains cyanide.'

Suleyman frowned. Although the press had reported that Mrs Urfa had been poisoned, the substance involved had not been named. This could just be a coincidence, however. 'And who is Resat?'

'He is our father's servant. He tends the garden. Rats come up from the water sometimes and so he kills them.' Deniz gave her sister a slow, sly smile. 'But we used it for another purpose.'

'And the child.' Suleyman leaned forward the better to see into their sweetly deranged and identical eyes. 'What did you do with Erol Urfa's child?'

Gulsum looked at Deniz and then stared blankly back at Suleyman. Then she tipped her head just lightly towards her sister and smiled.