Petrified (11 page)

He walked over to one of the trees and adjusted the tapes holding the material so that it was stretched even more tightly.

Eren Akdeniz put the bottle to her lips and drank. Afterwards, her face wrinkled in disgust at what she’d just done, she threw the bottle on to the flagstones at her feet. It smashed into many sharp, tiny pieces.

The noise caused her husband to look round. ‘What did you do that for?’ he asked.

Eren sat down on the patio table, her eyes heavy and glassy. ‘Because I shouldn’t be doing that,’ she said. ‘I should be feeling—’

‘Feeling is just what you shouldn’t be doing,’ Melih cut in sharply. ‘Start that and Allah alone knows where it might lead.’ He walked over to her, across the broken shards of glass and placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘The work is all that matters,’ he said earnestly. ‘It’s important, we agreed. It will stand for eternity, for us, for the children . . .’

At this, she looked up, her eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m losing everything that I love.’

‘No, you’re not!’ He took his hand roughly away from her. ‘You’re losing nothing, gaining everything – becoming part of everything. When we first met you were an ignorant art student – a dauber. Now you’re on the threshold of reaching the stars! If you’d stop talking to that mother of yours and take my advice—’

‘Like drinking your medication?’

Melih turned back to look at the material once again. ‘We have always shared everything, Eren,’ he said as he moved in closely to look at the details of the weave on the cloth. ‘I am the greatest artist this country has ever produced. I took you, a child and made you my muse. I have given you everything.’

‘I know,’ she said. She reached out and touched him just lightly with the ends of her fingers. ‘You are the owner of my soul. I would die in agony for you.’

‘Your pain would be an exquisite thing,’ he said as he turned again to face her. ‘Just your grief inspires me.’

She stood up and leaned into his arms. They kissed, unaware for several seconds that they were being watched.

‘I’m sorry, I let myself in,’ İkmen said as he, followed by Ayşe Farsakoǧlu, made his way up the steps from the main gate.

Melih tore his face away from Eren’s, frowning. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’d like to know why you’re standing on broken glass,’ İkmen said, shaking his head at the sight of Melih’s feet, bleeding over the shards of smashed bottle.

Both Melih and Eren looked down and, although her eyes remained rooted to the gory sight, the artist glanced away almost immediately. ‘That isn’t your concern,’ he said. ‘I repeat, what do you want? My wife and I are busy.’

İkmen, now level with the artist, surveyed his thin features sternly. ‘I want your co-operation, Mr Akdeniz,’ he said.

‘In what?’

‘I want to perform a full forensic examination of this property.’

‘Why?’

İkmen sighed and lit a cigarette. ‘Because I want to find your children, Mr Akdeniz,’ he said. ‘As I’m sure you’re now aware, I’m not convinced that your children left this property at six a.m. last Saturday.’

‘But I told—’

‘Yes, I know what you told me, sir,’ İkmen said, ‘and I do believe that you believe that to be true. But I’m not convinced. I think it’s possible that someone may have entered this property sometime during the course of Friday night and—’

‘Abducted my children?’ Melih laughed. ‘How? Even if Eren and I didn’t hear these “abductors” the children wouldn’t have just allowed themselves to be taken.’

‘No,’ Eren agreed, ‘they’re not babies.’

‘No, but if they were drugged or restrained in some way . . .’

Melih laughed. ‘This is fucking ridiculous!’ He moved in close to İkmen’s face. ‘You’re mad.’

İkmen smiled. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but if I am, then so are my superiors.’

‘We’d like your willing compliance with the investigation, Mr Akdeniz,’ Ayşe Farsakoǧlu added, ‘even though we don’t actually need that.’

Melih and Eren’s eyes met briefly before the artist brought his thin hands up to his face and groaned. ‘I’m working. I must work.’

‘The forensic team will work around you.’

Melih tore his hands away from his face and yelled, ‘If they damage any of my works, either completed or in progress, I will sue everyone involved, including you!’

There had been a time when even the rich and powerful would have balked at suggesting the notion of legal redress to a senior Turkish policeman. But times had changed and this wasn’t the first time İkmen had been threatened in this fashion. His response was both practised and typical of him.

‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘you are at liberty to do that, should damage occur. Legal action against my department is—’

‘Oh, do whatever the fuck you like!’ the artist shouted, throwing his arms in the air as he stumbled his way back towards his house.

İkmen, Ayşe Farsakoǧlu and his own wife watched Melih go – his long hair joining his arms, flailing in the hot, still air. İkmen noted that Melih seemed immune to the wounds on his feet. With what he hoped was a reassuring expression on his face, he turned to Eren Akdeniz and said, ‘I will also need to speak to your brother in due course, Mrs Akdeniz. He was, I understand, here on Friday night collecting one of your husband’s art works.’

Eren Akdeniz first regarded him blankly, then her face lost all of its colour and she sat down slowly on one of the garden chairs.

On both the European and Asian shores of the Bosphorus sit many yalıs – summer houses. Although anyone with the money to do so may now own a yalı, traditionally these residences were occupied by Ottoman royalty and dignitaries. In Tarabya and Büyükdere the yalıs belonged to the European ambassadors, in Kuruçeşme to the wealthy Ottoman Armenians and Greeks. The large wooden yalıs of Sarıyer were, however, and still remain, the most prestigious. These tall, ornate properties, now priced well beyond the reach of anyone but the most wealthy, were the summer residences of the Ottoman princes. As İsak Çöktin entered the oval-shaped central area of the yalı, a space known as the sofa, he wondered whether this was the type of building Mehmet Suleyman, his boss, had been raised in. There was a common concensus that Suleyman had been born in a palace – maybe he spent his childhood summersin a place like this. Yalıs, even Çöktin knew, had been, to those who possessed them, rather downmarket, slightly amusing places for the over-privileged to spend a few months in the summer playing at being ‘rural’. Çöktin smiled as he recalled an old photograph he’d once seen in a tourist shop of a group of Ottoman princes lounging around in silk şalvar trousers and heavily embroidered waistcoats, being peasants. Such a long way from his own experience: the sight of his uncle in dung-stained şalvar trousers and the thin, hungry looks on the faces of almost everyone in sight.

The current owner of this, the Pembe Yalı, was the late Rosita Keyder’s sister-in-law. Tall, thin and dressed in a most severe shade of grey, Miss Yeşim Keyder was an unsmiling woman in, what Çöktin calculated, was probably her early seventies. She was not, he quickly discovered, a woman either well versed in or approving of the traditional Turkish niceties.

‘Sit there,’ she said, pointing to a brown chair over by the door which led out to a landing stage.

Çöktin sat, his eyes directly in line with a black and white photograph of a graceful dancer snapped in mid-step. Not, he felt, the grim Miss Yeşim Keyder as a girl.

‘So you said you had some bad news for me,’ Yeşim Keyder said as she lowered herself down into an identical chair across the other side of the sofa. ‘What is it?’

Çöktin, uncomfortable with the vast amount of space between himself and this woman, leaned forward.

‘I’m afraid I have to tell you that your sister-in-law, Rosita Keyder, has passed away,’ he said. ‘I’m—’

‘When?’ Both the thickness of her voice and the sudden blanching of her face told Çöktin that Yeşim Keyder hadn’t been expecting this. She obviously hadn’t read the newspaper reports.

‘Our doctor has recorded last Wednesday as the date of Mrs Keyder’s death, Miss Keyder,’ Çöktin said. ‘She died from something called an aneurism, which is—’

‘I am fully aware of what the word “aneurism” means,’ the woman snapped, ‘and it’s Dr Keyder, not Miss Keyder, for future reference.’

‘I’m sorry . . .’

‘So what happened? How did you get involved?’

Çöktin told her about how Father Giovanni had raised the alarm and when and why he himself and his officers had entered the Kuloǧlu apartment. Through all of this Yeşim Keyder looked on impassively, regarding him coldly with her pale blue eyes across the vast wastes of the sofa.

‘Of course, Father Giovanni would like to bury your sister-in-law after the Christian fashion,’ Çöktin said, ‘but he, and ourselves, are aware that Mrs Keyder may still have relatives in Argentina, who may want her body to be returned to that country.’

Yeşim Keyder sighed. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said tightly. ‘Rosita was an only child. By the time she married Veli her father was already deceased. Her mother died sometime in the nineteen sixties.’

‘Yes, but if we knew the family name . . .’

‘Arancibia.’ It was, to Çöktin, a strange, foreign word, but it was one Yeşim Keyder said without hesitation. ‘My brother met her in Buenos Aires in nineteen forty-nine,’ she continued. ‘Rosita Arancibia.’ She spelled the word out for him, lapsing afterwards into silence.

Çöktin smiled. ‘So how did they meet,’ he asked, ‘your brother and Mrs Keyder? I mean, she was a Christian Argentinian and he a Muslim Turk. In those days surely—’

‘My brother was a scientist,’ she replied, ‘a biologist – religious differences meant nothing to him. There was a scientific convention in Buenos Aires, he went – he stayed with one of our uncles who emigrated there – and met Rosita.’ She scanned her surroundings haughtily. ‘My father fought alongside İnönü in the War of Independence. Quite correctly for a family possessed of both nationalistic fervour and intelligence, we have done well.’

‘I see.’

‘As far as I am aware, Rosita corresponded with no one in Argentina,’ she said.

‘I will check this name out with the Argentinian authorities.’

‘That’s up to you. But as far as I’m concerned her priest may bury her. She had, I believe, some friends at St Anthony’s. They may wish to attend her funeral. Rosita and Veli were childless and so the property will revert to me. I will call my advocate.’

There was no emotion. It was impossible to tell whether or not Yeşim Keyder had been close to the dead woman. Given her tone, one could be forgiven for thinking she was only interested in what she might gain materially from Rosita’s death.

‘Father Giovanni was always of the opinion that Rosita lived alone after your brother died,’ Çöktin said.

‘Yes, she did.’

Çöktin took a deep breath. Quite how he was going to broach the subject of the young man’s body he hadn’t really thought through. During the pause in which he pondered this, she looked at him quizzically.

‘I have to tell you that we found another body in your sister-in-law’s apartment,’ he said, ‘that of a young man.’

Yeşim Keyder remained motionless and silent.

‘We’ve no idea who he was.’

‘Maybe he was an intruder.’

‘No.’

She looked down at the floor. ‘If you don’t know who he is, how do you know that?’

Çöktin wasn’t sure just how much or how little he should tell this woman. Given what Dr Sarkissian had said about the body, its embalmed state, the sergeant didn’t feel confident getting into such bizarre territory with a family member before he knew a little more.

‘There are indications that this person might not have been unknown to Mrs Keyder,’ he said. ‘I can tell you there are no signs of foul play. He died naturally.’

‘In that case, I can’t see why I need to be involved in this,’ Yeşim Keyder responded harshly. ‘As far as I am concerned, Rosita lived alone. And, if as you say, this man died naturally, I would suggest that you bury his body with all haste.’

As a Muslim, particularly in the height of summer, it was logical that she should suggest such a sanitary move. Although she knew that he was nameless, Yeşim Keyder didn’t know how important it was to discover this man’s identity. Probably Argentine, definitely embalmed some long time ago, whether he had been murdered or not was almost immaterial. What he needed was a name, a nationality, a religion and, ideally, an ‘owner’ to put an end to what seemed to Çöktin a most peculiar state of death within a simulacrum of life. Displayed by that window in Kuloǧlu, the young man reminded Çöktin of one of those Ancient Egyptian mummies on display in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

There was no point going any further with this at the present time. Yeşim Keyder knew nothing about the unknown man and cared, apparently, little for her deceased sister-in-law. And so Çöktin decided to leave her to call her advocate in peace. She saw him to her front door and then shut it behind him with alacrity – probably because she didn’t want him to see what she did next. But he heard her anyway, bitterly weeping her way back into the sofa. As he got into his car, Çöktin thought about how wrong one can be about people and found himself feeling sorry for the strange, stiff old woman rattling around in her great, lonely yalı.

‘Valery Rostov is going to take possession of twenty kilos of heroin tonight,’ Suleyman said as he stood, almost to attention in front of his superior, Commissioner Ardiç.

Metin İskender, who was standing next to his colleague, cleared his throat.

Ardiç, who was a large and, in this heat, red and sweaty man, removed the enormous cigar from his mouth and viewed his officers with a harsh eye.

‘That’s a huge amount. Very tempting. Where did you get this information?’ he said. ‘The Rostovs of this world are not above starting a gun battle, I’m not prepared to commit officers unless this is going to be worth it.’