Baksheesh (18 page)

Meanwhile, my whisky had arrived, thank goodness. I took my first sip of the evening. My excitement of a short while ago was turning to boredom and I was beginning to think it wasn't going to be easy to tolerate this man if I had a clear head. Perhaps one of the achievements of feminism had been to enable women actually to put up with men like this. My house-trained types were certainly much better company.

“Do you know someone called Osman Karakaş?” I asked.

“I did. Osman was killed,” he said, and immediately shouted to the waiter for him to bring over some white cheese.

“So you know he was killed,” I said.

“Of course I do. I was at his funeral yesterday. We came from the same town. I was on holiday when he was killed. At a place I go to every year in Kemer. I couldn't do anything to help the family, but I went to his funeral,” he said, shaking his head thoughtfully. “He wasn't the eldest member of the family, but he
was the wisest. A good kid.” He frowned and added, “So, what's your link with Osman?”

“Do you know Osman's office?” I asked, making my question sound so casual that I decided I must be the real actor.

“The one at Kuledibi? I've been there a couple of times. Why?”

“I wanted to buy that apartment, to live in—”

“Why there?” he interrupted. “Find a decent area to live in. I'll get you an apartment on our estate. We have the best views in Istanbul. Watchman on the door, swimming pool, tennis court – everything you could want. Kuledibi is no place for a woman to live.”

“It suits my budget. And anyway, I don't like estates,” I said. He looked at me as though I were a green-eared alien.

“So, you're a bit of a bohemian then?”

“More than a bit,” I said, suddenly feeling that his attitude towards me had gone cold. He seemed to be having difficulty restraining himself from calling for the bill and leaving.

“Fine, so the link between you and Osman is that you wanted to turn his office into a place to live. But where do I come into this?”

“The police think I killed Osman,” I said, immediately realizing I'd said the wrong thing. If he'd been at Osman's funeral, he would have known who the police suspects were.

“What, you kill Osman? No way. It was probably that bastard of an uncle who killed him. Do his brothers know that you're a police suspect? Wait…” he said, taking out his mobile phone.

“Just a minute,” I said. “The uncle is the number one suspect, I'm number two.” I was really making a mess of it this time. Everything I said seemed to be proclaiming “I'm a liar”.

“Just tell me everything from the beginning, babe. What exactly happened?”

I told him the story of the ashtray. From the look in his eyes, I could tell I was regaining his respect. He heard me out without saying a word.

“Well, what do you want from me?”

“I thought you might know who Osman did business with and who might have done this.”

“Yeah, I get you, but what's it to you? He's dead, whoever killed him. Get on with your own life. The cops haven't carted you off as a murderer, for God's sake!”

“But,” I said solemnly, “the problem is that I was at home on my own at the time of the murder. I have no alibi. If it turns out that the uncle didn't do it, then the police…”

“Alibi? Nobody's going to accuse you.”

“You have an alibi for that night, don't you? I don't,” I said.

“Well yes, I was on holiday. Anyway, I don't need an alibi. What's it got to do with me?” he said, sounding somewhat perturbed.

“Don't you understand?” I said. “If this isn't cleared up, they'll interrogate all of us. Ask us where we were that night.”

He shrugged his shoulders. Had I not known this man was an actor, I would certainly have concluded that he had no connection with all this. But can an actor be trusted?

“I was on holiday from 12th August. They can ask anyone at the holiday village. I'd been filming a big summer series and I went there to recuperate. Didn't even set foot outside the holiday village,” he said, bristling like a male chicken, I mean cockerel.

“Why the hell should the police question me about any of this? Because I knew the man? Have you any idea how many million people I might know in this country? If one of them gets bumped off, what's it got to do with me?”

“Do you know who Osman did business with?”

Ä°smet Bey was starting to get suspicious about me.

“Why are you bothering your pretty little head with all this?” he said. “Come on, let's go and eat.”

We got into the Range Rover with great ceremony. The waiters lined up outside to say goodbye to us, or rather him. It was already clear that the subject of Osman wouldn't be broached again that evening and I would gain nothing from going for a meal with this man. The best thing was to jump in a taxi, collect my car and go straight home. While we were still fairly close. Before it got too late. That is if I was sensible. I could hear Selim's voice in my head saying all this.

But something, which I couldn't quite control, was telling me I should go out for this meal. When I have to choose between a wise and an unwise option, I've never yet chosen the wise one.

The same thing happened this time.

 

We edged our way slowly through the dreadful traffic towards Ortaköy. The back seat of the Range Rover was so narrow our legs were touching.

“The press mustn't see us together,” said Ä°smet.

“What do you mean?”

“They'll be waiting outside the restaurant now. Why don't you get out here and get a taxi for the rest of the way?”

“Taxi? It's just up there, isn't it?”

“Are you going to walk it then?” he said, laughing.

“Of course I'll walk,” I said. The only sport I did was walking. Now that I was using my car so much less, I walked as much as it was possible to walk in Istanbul. One should try to change one's lifestyle as one gets older.

“As you wish,” he said, making it clear that he didn't like the idea.

The place we were going to was an Italian restaurant. There were groups of paparazzi outside the door, waiting for anyone worth photographing. They didn't give me a second glance.

“I'm meeting Ä°smet Akkan,” I said to the waiter who blocked my way.

The waiter retreated rapidly.

“Please, madame. This way,” he said when he came back.

 

Ä°smet Bey kept asking me questions during the meal. By the time we were on our main course, I was beginning to think I had no secrets left in my life. Whether it was because actors are experts at getting people to open up or whether I'd had a bit too much to drink I really didn't know and was in no position to know.

We were nearly at the dessert course, or rather he'd just ordered it, when he suddenly put his hand on my leg. I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but I was wearing a skirt. A fashionable one: flared, with a hemline that rose from the knee on one side to mid-thigh on the other. His hand was touching my leg on the short side of the skirt. Before feeling his way upwards towards my thigh, he glanced sideways at me, waiting for a reaction. Not knowing how to react, I waited too. To see what reaction I came up with.

At such moments I let myself go with the flow. Whatever that means. I suppose I should say the flow of desire. As far as I'm concerned, you can't use reason once desire comes into it. Anyway, there are so many situations that require reason, why spoil everything for yourself by using reason to control desire? Reason should be used in marriages, or in relationships. Relationships!

Selim! My master of common sense!

Thinking of Selim made me blush all of a sudden. Or if I didn't, I felt as if I did. I could feel my temperature rising.

Events, emotions, desires – whatever they were – I was in no position to allow myself to give free rein to whatever was pulsating inside me. My future might not have been assured, but I was a woman in a relationship. I was the type of woman who needed monogamy. The sort who needed to go out for meals with her lover, her lover's friends and their wives, who needed her lover
to accompany her to the cloakroom, who needed to say “cloakroom” when she meant “lavatory”.

The irony of fate! A woman sitting next to a man whose hand was wandering up her leg was also a woman who dined with the immaculate wives of lawyers.

If only someone could have appeared with a set of tarot cards to tell me what was going to happen that night if I didn't immediately, without hesitation, push his hand back, or at least pull my leg away.

But you needed to believe in the cards for that, didn't you?

Never mind the rest of that evening then – what about the following day? Would I be having breakfast with this man the next morning? Or would I be trying to scuttle away before he awoke? Or even before dawn? How did I feel?

Did I just claim there was no need for reason? Forgive me. It was an old habit, a principle left over from times when I wasn't in a steady relationship. As you see, my life was now alternating between lurid cloakroom adventures and civilized evenings with respectable men and their perfect women.

I don't want to bore you with the fears I had about losing my identity to middle-class values, but you couldn't lead the double life I was living without fear of losing something. However, it was certainly worth trying to have it all!

I hope I've explained myself sufficiently well.

Anyway, reason surfaces whether you like it or not, whether it's necessary or not. It just keeps whirring away all the time. Not everybody's of course. But mine never stops.

So, what was the situation? Let's recap. Both for me and for you, dear readers:

I started to stroke the hand that was on my leg.

Don't get me wrong, we were still sitting on those uncomfortable chairs, there were waiters and customers coming and going all around us, and the man beside me was as easily recognizable as a multi-coloured dog.

And I was drowning with excitement.

“Let's get out of here,” I muttered in a husky tone of voice, almost licking his ear as I said these silly words.

“We can't leave together,” he said, almost licking my neck, rather than my ear, as he uttered his equally stupid words, which meant I didn't hear exactly what he said.

“What?”

“The paparazzi are teeming outside. We can't leave together and get into the same car,” he said.

Clearly, an evening of passion with a famous person brought its own problems.

If I hadn't been so fed up with my life, I'm not sure I'd have put up with all this.

 

But why not?

“You go on ahead and take a cab to my house,” he said.

“Very well,” I said with a meekness that didn't suit me at all. What a pity it wasn't like it is in films and that we hadn't got up to go to the cloakroom one minute apart and then returned to our seats one minute apart. I've never yet worked out how people have sex in the toilets. It can't be very clean. And you don't have to be a hygiene fanatic to think that. What's the best position for sex in a toilet? I can think of several options, all of them equally excruciatingly uncomfortable. It's beyond me how people take pleasure in adopting those gymnastic positions. How on earth do you wrap your leg around your neck? And why, when there are civilized positions you can adopt in bed, on the sofa, kitchen table or hall carpet?

I'm not turned on in the slightest by the fear of discovery, or seeing the feet of some desperate person outside the door who is hammering to get in. If it took that much to get aroused, better not have sex with him at all.

In the end, it was for this reason that I thought it better for us to get up and leave separately rather than go out to the toilet one at a time.

 

However, to be honest, until I got into the taxi, I had been thinking of nothing except that hand on my leg.

 

I hope I'm not boring you by my constant changes of mind. I would love to have been able to oblige you, dear reader, with a story of unbridled sex that lasted until morning. The man in question certainly had what it took to arouse a woman. Or at any rate, he had that effect on me.

However, we just have to accept that by the time I got into the taxi, on my own, the whole tone of the evening had changed.

Sitting in the back seat of the taxi gave me time to consider whether I wanted to go to the other side of the Bosphorus, seek out the address I was clutching in my hand, enter a completely strange apartment and spend the night with a man whom I hardly knew and had thought might be a murderer until a few hours ago. What's more, I was no longer particularly aroused. Reason and sense. In short, all my thoughts were of Selim.