Petrified (2 page)

But Nilufer had faith. She bought her materials and set up her kiln in the small courtyard garden at the back of the house. She slowly and lovingly created the most exquisite ceramics, and at the same time made, rather more rapidly, artefacts the tourists would like to buy. Deals struck with various tourist outlets in the Grand Bazaar kept Nilufer in clothes, food and materials while her ‘real’ work – modern renditions of traditional Turkish ceramics – started to gain some attention from the artistic élite. One of her friends from university, another aspiring artist, moved, briefly, into the district afterwards and for a while Nilufer nurtured fantasies about an artists’ colony in Balat.

When Melih Akdeniz first exploded on to the international art scene in 1979, Nilufer was ecstatic. The most famous artist in Turkey was living, had in fact always lived, in Balat. Her dreams of a colony buzzing excitedly around in her head, Nilufer went to see this so-called phenomenon in his great ochre house opposite the Greek Boys’ School. And although his work was not to her taste, she appreciated it for its innovation and felt that as a statement it was extremely exciting. She never thought that Melih would really appreciate her work, but perhaps, like her reaction to his art, it would interest him in an academic sense. So Nilufer took one of her ceramics with her on her long, breathless climb towards the great ochre house and its almost unrivalled views of the Golden Horn.

When Nilufer arrived, Turkey’s greatest artist was in the midst of one of what later became his legendary heroin binges. Drunk as well as delusional, he wasn’t amused by the appearance of this sober, middle-class young woman carrying something he sneeringly derided as ‘some tourist junk’.

But Nilufer wanted him to like her, wanted him to help her build up a colony, regenerate the area, bring Balat into the mainstream. And so she gave him her beautiful green and blue tile with its abstract images of Seljuk representational forms and he smashed it at her feet.

‘This is shit!’ he cried. ‘Fucking gutless, Turkish virgin’s shit!’

Both he and the two prostitutes he’d paid for that day laughed as Nilufer, tears streaming from her eyes, ran back down the hill to the safety of her own studio.

Not once during the twenty-three years since that event had Nilufer even so much as looked at the great ochre house at the top of the hill. Until very recently no other artists had come to join either herself or Melih in their respective artistic isolation. Though always working, Nilufer had not lived up to her potential, and had achieved little recognition in the intervening years, certainly nowhere near as much as Melih. It was, however, Nilufer, as opposed to Melih, who knew the few but significant artists who had started to colonise Balat since the beginning of the new millennium. The English writer who had inherited his neat rose-coloured house from his native grandparents; the couple who specialised in portraiture; and Gonca, the big gypsy woman whose collages made of equestrian and fortune-telling artefacts had been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in Ankara. The colony, or so it seemed, was finally happening, and without any intervention from Melih Akdeniz, who, although now married and a father, had not, it was said, moderated his lifestyle in any significant way. Drugs and alcohol still influenced both his work and his behaviour to which Nilufer now, for the first time in twenty-three years, was exposed once again.

‘I was sorry to hear about your children,’ she shouted up to the shaggy-headed figure eyeing her suspiciously from one of the second-floor windows of the great ochre house. ‘I hope they are found quickly, for their sake.’

‘Who are you?’ he responded sharply. Thinner and more unkempt than Nilufer had remembered him, Melih Akdeniz looked bad. ‘Why do you care?’

‘My name is Nilufer Cemal, a Turkish virgin,’ she said with an ironic smile. ‘You destroyed a ceramic of mine back in 1979. And I’m sorry not for you but for your wife and the children themselves. Little ones like that shouldn’t be separated from their parents, whoever those parents might be.’

Melih sniffed loudly – had he now perhaps taken to cocaine too? ‘Keep your pity for your own lack of talent and leave me to continue my work.’

‘As you wish, Melih Bey,’ Nilufer replied evenly, ‘but even your talent isn’t going to bring the little ones back, is it? Not even you can do that, can you?’

For just a moment he stared, his long, slit-like eyes burning into her mildly amused and strangely immobile face.

‘Bitch!’ he spat as he yanked the window closed and disappeared somewhere deep inside his eyrie.

As soon as he had gone, Nilufer turned and made her way back down the steep cobbled hill. Her face impassive now, she didn’t respond to the requests for money or offers of domestic services from any of the local children who clustered around her smartly dressed figure. Looking over their heads, she surveyed the shifting, watery vista before her, the Golden Horn and, beyond that, the Bosphorus. Massive and glimmering in the late afternoon heat, these waterways could be seen and perhaps in moments of delusion, commanded from Melih Akdeniz’s vaunting house topped by its fantastic glass studio. She pictured him sitting there, up high, his drug-addled brain seething with new and even more shocking ways to express his genius. She had envisioned him like this many times before – an arrogant sultan just ripe for a fall, like a soft, wrinkling plum. Nilufer smiled. Well, now that fall had come and there was nothing Melih could do about it. The children, his creations, had gone and, just like Nilufer had been when Melih had smashed her lovingly created ceramic, he was completely powerless to do anything about it.

The doctor removed his glasses before minutely examining the blazer, frowning as he did so.

‘This is part of no uniform I’ve ever come across, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Looks quite old.’

İsak Çöktin leaned his head to one side; a lock of dark red hair flopped across his forehead as he did so. Still slightly shaky from his recent encounter with two dead bodies – one, the owner of the Kuloǧlu apartment, the elderly Mrs Keyder, had been expected, but not the other one – being within the confines of the mortuary was not making him feel any better. Not, of course, that the pathologist, Dr Arto Sarkissian, was contributing in any way to Çöktin’s sense of unease. Rotund and, despite his profession, unfailingly jolly, the doctor had worked for the İstanbul police for almost the whole of his professional life, which, given that he was now fifty-eight years old, was a long time.

‘Do we know anything about the other body, Mrs Keyder?’ Sarkissian asked as he shifted his attention from the outside to the inside of the blazer.

Çöktin shrugged. ‘She attended St Anthony’s church on a regular basis,’ he said. ‘It was the priest, Father Giovanni, who first raised the alarm. He tried to visit her, couldn’t gain access – the kapıcı of that building is a lazy, useless creature who’d “lost” his key to the apartment – so Father Giovanni called us.’

‘The woman was a Christian,’ Sarkissian muttered as he continued to turn the blazer over in his hands.

‘Yes.’

Although a secular country, the population of the Turkish Republic is ninety per cent Muslim. There are, however, minorities who follow other faiths like this Mrs Keyder and also like both Arto Sarkissian and İsak Çöktin. Not that the latter’s faith, the native Kurdish religion of the Yezidi, was now or ever could be a topic of conversation. Sarkissian, however, like the recently deceased female body that lay in his laboratory, was a Christian. Unlike the woman, though like most of his fellow Armenians, he was Orthodox rather than Catholic.

Coming across a faded label on the inside pocket of the blazer, the doctor squinted to see what was written there.

‘Do we know what Mrs Keyder’s origins were, by any chance?’ he asked. ‘I assume from her surname that her husband was Turkish.’

‘Most people who go to St Anthony’s are Italian, aren’t they?’ Çöktin replied. ‘Her first name was Rosita.’

‘Which may well be Italian,’ Sarkissian responded, his eyes still narrowed and fixed to the time-scarred label, ‘but then it could be Spanish.’ He looked just briefly up at Çöktin and smiled. ‘It is Spanish that they speak in Argentina, isn’t it, Sergeant?’

‘I believe so,’ Çöktin replied. ‘Why?’

‘Because this jacket, blazer or whatever it is was made in Buenos Aires.’

‘We’re not certain what if anything was the connection between Mrs Keyder and the dead man,’ Çöktin said as he reached into his pocket for his cigarettes. ‘Father Giovanni was, I know, of the opinion that the old woman lived alone. That was why he was so concerned.’ He sighed. ‘In view of this new development, I’ll have to go back and speak to him again.’

Sarkissian put the blazer down on his desk and looked up. ‘I can’t help you much until I’ve finished my examination,’ he said. ‘I’ll be able to give you some more information about that tomorrow.’

Çöktin lit his cigarette. ‘That’s fine. Provided Inspector Suleyman doesn’t need me, I’ll go out and see Father Giovanni later this evening.’

‘Inspector Suleyman is, I take it, busy at the moment?’ Sarkissian said with a smile.

‘My boss is always busy, Dr Sarkissian.’ Çöktin exhaled on a sigh. ‘You know some of the lads say that he’s becoming more like Inspector İkmen every day.’

Sarkissian laughed. Çetin İkmen was currently the most experienced and successful detective in the İstanbul homicide division. Famous for his almost maniacal approach to his work, he was also Sarkissian’s oldest and dearest friend.

‘Well, Inspector Suleyman did work for Inspector İkmen for quite sometime, you know, Çöktin,’ he said, ‘and Çetin Bey’s “enthusiasm”, I shall call it, is infectious.’

‘Yes,’ Çöktin allowed his head to droop down towards the floor, ‘I know. But sometimes I wonder . . .’

‘What?’ Sarkissian, hearing the gravity in the younger man’s voice, frowned. ‘What do you wonder, Sergeant?’

‘Well, it’s not a criticism, you know, Doctor, but . . . look I’d do anything for Inspector Suleyman, he’s been very good to me . . .’

‘But?’

‘But, well, you didn’t hear it from me, but I know that he’s got a Mafia boss in his sights. He’s been after him for some time. There’s information about this man all over his desk.’ He looked up into the doctor’s face. ‘He’s Russian.’

‘Oh.’

Russians
en masse
had been coming to live and work in İstanbul ever since the disintegration of the old Soviet Union. Attracted to the relative affluence of the city, the Russians had almost taken over certain districts of İstanbul. And although the majority of these people wanted nothing more than just to make new and better lives for themselves in Turkey, some, like the pimps who sold their own women on the streets, had other, more criminal objectives. Others still, like the Mafia bosses who controlled sometimes vast and extremely wealthy crime organisations, moved to even blacker and more frightening rhythms. And although it was good that someone might finally be trying to tackle what had become an enormous problem for law enforcement in the city, the thought of it made both Çöktin and Sarkissian go cold. Just because the handsome Suleyman was an honest man didn’t mean that everyone he came into contact with or even worked alongside was of a similar mind. Less than a year before, the whole department had been rocked by the activities of an Eastern European gangster, Zhivkov, who had possessed an informant inside the department. Taking on organised crime, even though Zhivkov was now dead, was not something to be done lightly, and although Arto Sarkissian had no idea upon what basis Suleyman was acting, he just hoped that he knew what he was doing. The doctor had over the years seen at first-hand what these people did to those who opposed them. Just the memory of these incidents made him wince.

‘I’d better go,’ Çöktin said as he first ground out his cigarette in the doctor’s ashtray and then rose to his feet, ‘leave you to your work.’

Sarkissian also stood up and started to move towards his office door. ‘We will speak tomorrow, Sergeant.’ He placed his fingers around the door handle and made ready to wish his guest goodbye.

‘Yes. Thank you, Doctor.’

‘Goodbye, Sergeant.’ He opened the door out into the corridor.

However, instead of going through it, Çöktin stopped, his face suddenly grave as if something troubling had just struck him.

‘Sergeant?’

Çöktin bit his bottom lip. ‘Doctor, I assume that the man in the Keyder apartment must have been blind.’

‘He had two glass eyes,’ Sarkissian replied, ‘and so I’d say that was beyond reasonable doubt.’

‘But then don’t you think it’s very odd that he was wearing a military uniform? I mean, if he was blind . . .’

Arto Sarkissian sighed. He’d seen so much that was odd or out of the ordinary over the years that sometimes he almost missed certain, less obvious strangeness, like this seeming anomaly with the unknown man’s corpse.

‘Oh, I don’t know, Sergeant,’ he said wearily. ‘People deal with situations in a variety of ways. Perhaps he used to be in the military and continued to wear the uniform after he lost his sight. Perhaps he couldn’t quite get over not being in the military in Argentina or wherever he came from.’ He shrugged. ‘But then perhaps he just bought the blazer from a second-hand clothes stall. Maybe Mrs Keyder bought it for him. I don’t know. Time will tell, or not.’

‘I know,’ Çöktin said as he moved past the doctor into the corridor beyond.

‘İnşallah, all will be revealed in the fullness of time,’ the Armenian concluded.

And with that expression so redolent of all things Islamic, the Christian and the Yezidi parted.

C
HAPTER
2

‘I feel,’ İkmen said as he leaned back in his battered leather chair and sucked hard on his Maltepe cigarette, ‘that some clarification about why Melih Akdeniz was planning to take his children out to Sarıyer is needed.’

The attractive young woman sitting opposite, frowned. ‘Why? They didn’t go; they’ve not been spotted over there.’