Dance with Death (10 page)

‘You think he’s after a British passport?’ İkmen asked.

‘Oh, yes of course. But not before he’s got her to buy him a nice little pansiyon here in the village,’ Ferhat replied. ‘In his name, of course.’

İkmen raised his eyes up to heaven and sighed. But then needy European women and their sometimes rapacious beaux were not his problem. He’d seen this sort of thing before, back home in İstanbul, and he knew that such seeming exploitation was neither all one way nor all that simple.

‘So what can you boys tell me about those people connected, as it were, to this body Ferhat has just found?’ İkmen asked as he lit a cigarette and then handed the packet around to the rest of the assembled company.

‘I found it out in the Valley of the Saints,’ Ferhat said. ‘It was ghastly, desiccated . . .’

‘Yes, I know,’ İkmen said. ‘But what I’m asking is what you boys know about people like Haldun Alkaya, Kemalettin Senar and old Ziya Kahraman’s daughter.’

‘Nazlı Hanım,’ Abdulhamid Büker said. ‘She’s very old, rich, by country standards, and very mean.’

‘She’s married to a boy called Erkan,’ Ferhat added. ‘People say he married her for her money but if he did then someone else put him up to it.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, he’s, you know, he’s simple. He can’t read or write, stands around a lot with his mouth open. She’s a covered woman, Nazlı Hanım, which is OK, but she also has a beard.’ Ferhat pulled a disgusted face. ‘Nazlı Hanım had never been with a man until she met Erkan – or so it is said.’

‘People say that her father wouldn’t let her marry until he himself had a son,’ Abdulhamid said.

İkmen frowned. ‘But he never did have a son, did he?’

‘No.’

But then if Nazlı had seen her father’s marriage to Aysu Alkaya as his last chance to have a son, could she not have just ‘made sure’ that he and his young wife did not conceive? Death is, after all, a most effective contraceptive. And there were an awful lot of lemons at stake, many of which had been preserved in just the same way as poor Aysu. Although if one or other of the Kahramans had planned her fate to be so intimately connected with their business that did seem rather stupid. And, in İkmen’s experience, reasonably successful people like the Kahramans were rarely lacking in brain power.

‘She waited a long time after her father died before she got married,’ Abdulhamid said.

‘She took a long time to find someone who could tolerate her foul temper and the look of her,’ Ferhat said. ‘Like a starved old eagle!’

‘I suppose Nazlı Hanım has always lived in the village,’ İkmen said.

Ferhat rolled his eyes. ‘They’ve all always lived in the village, Çetin Bey, at least the older ones have. To give you a feel for it, you know the old man who owns the bakery?’

‘I know the bakery,’ İkmen said, ‘it’s at the bottom of the New Mosque hill.’

‘That’s it,’ Ferhat said. ‘Well, you want to listen to his story about the day he went to Ankara back in about 1960. It’s amazing. To hear him talk you’d think he’d gone to the moon! Nazlı Hanım is a bit better than that. She’s been to İstanbul, Ankara, and, of course, the coast – Alanya, I assume, where the lemon groves are; I don’t know exactly. But wherever it was, that was where she found poor Erkan.’

The baker and Nazlı Hanım had to have been around when Alison allegedly passed through the district. In fact, İkmen felt that Nazlı Hanım might be just the sort of person who might well recall the few foreigners who had got this far in the seventies. If she couldn’t, he could at least use this as a pretext to see what she was like. Until Altay Salman got back to him about whether or not he could view the body in Nevşehir he’d have to amuse himself somehow. After all, listening to more stories about the Peruvian woman schooling her Turkish husband in the vagaries of sun god worship had a limited appeal.

İftar couldn’t come quick enough for Erkan Erduran. All day, just like the day before and the day before that, he’d been starving. He knew, because Nazlı Hanım had told him, that his faith should sustain him through the hunger pangs, the raging thirst and the endless need for a cigarette. But beyond knowing that Allah existed and that Muhammed was his prophet, Erkan didn’t have a tremendous grasp of the finer points and virtues of Islam.

‘I sometimes think you have infidel blood,’ his wife said caustically as she viewed him through crepey, half-closed eyes. ‘That you should be so tormented by Ramazan is not right.’

‘No.’

Erkan turned his fresh young face to one side. Sometimes when she spoke like this, about ‘blood’ and ‘infidels’, he became fearful that perhaps she knew his secret.

The Erduran family had always lived in the Aegean coastal town of Ayvalık – where Erkan had met Nazlı Kahraman. Even when the then new Turkish Republic had traded families, like the Erdurans, with Turks from Greece in 1923, Erkan’s family had chosen to remain. But then his grandfather, Spiros Kazan, had changed both his name and his religion some years before the declaration of the Republic and so, naturally, he chose to remain with his fellow Muslims. Erkan’s own mother was actually Turkish too, which was good. But his father remained ‘close’ about his origins, especially now that his son was married to ‘money’. ‘Now listen, Erkan,’ he had said to his son on the eve of the latter’s wedding to Nazlı Kahraman, ‘this lemon queen has a lot of money which you can have provided you keep her happy and never, ever mention the . . . you know, the Greek connection.’ Erkan had said that he wouldn’t and he hadn’t. He’d not mentioned anything about Greece and he had done everything that Nazlı Hanım asked of him. He had even taken her virginity, which had proved to be nothing like the sex he’d had with the tourist ladies on the coast. Nazlı Hanım had only wanted him the once. Ever since then there had been nothing, which was probably for the best. Nazlı Hanım wasn’t pretty.

But Nazlı Kahraman was unconcerned. Ever since her sixtieth birthday, when she finally reasoned that she had mourned for her beloved father enough, she had been having and doing exactly what she wanted. Outside of Ramazan she ate, smoked and drank whenever she felt like it and Erkan was a lovely boy who looked good at her side. She did care for him and had indeed made some small provision for him in her will. That the bulk of her inheritance would still go to her cousin Gazi upon her death was more to spite Erkan’s rapacious and so obviously Greek father than to upset the boy. Sitting beside her marble fountain in her vast courtyard overlooking the village, Nazlı Kahraman soaked up what was going to be the last hour of daylight like a sponge. Soon the girl she employed to cook and clean would call out to say that the iftar meal was ready and then all that would remain would be to wait for the call that signalled sunset had arrived. Then both she and Erkan would light their cigarettes simultaneously and she at least, would smile with pleasure.

But before any of that could happen, someone rang the bell outside the gate and Erkan, still unused to letting the ‘help’ do things, answered it.

Dr Zelfa Halman Süleyman didn’t keep Ramazan. Brought up in Ireland, her mother’s country, she considered herself, if anything, a lapsed Catholic. She knew that her husband, though once observant, also failed to keep Ramazan. So as she waited for him to arrive to see his son and talk about the divorce she’d said she wanted, Zelfa knew that food was not a problem. Unlike her own feelings which were.

She didn’t really want a divorce. What she and her son Yusuf, who adored his father, really wanted was for Mehmet to come home and be the family man he had been before all the trouble. But how could she trust him? Adultery was one thing, but going with a prostitute and then announcing that he had to be tested for HIV . . . Oh, he’d been negative for that, which was wonderful, but the memories of that time, of the prostitute he’d screwed, of Zelfa’s own obsessive suspicions and frigidity at that juncture, remained.

Hearing a car pull up outside the slightly shabby wooden house she shared with her father, Zelfa went to the front window and looked into the street. Mehmet, his face drawn and serious, was sitting behind the wheel of his great white BMW talking earnestly into his mobile phone. She wondered who he was talking to so seriously and then instantly wondered whether it was a woman. When he finally came into the house and took his son into his arms with a smile on his face, she asked him.

‘It was Metin İskender, if you must know,’ he said a little touchily. ‘He’s been speaking to someone who had some information we might be able to use.’

‘Oh.’

What he didn’t go on to say was exactly what İskender’s informant had said. The peeper’s activities, it seemed, were beginning to bite into İstanbul’s gay community. The general consensus of opinion seemed to be that the peeper, far from being a homosexual man himself, was actually someone who ‘got off’ frightening and abusing other men. The mythology was that he was probably a straight man with some sort of grudge. The exotic Elma, İskender’s informant, had said that some thought that perhaps the peeper was one of those who had at some time experimented with homosexuality and then been disgusted by what he had done – or maybe by the pleasant way it had made him feel. People gathering in gay places were watchful, although there had not, as yet, been any reports, as far as Elma knew, of any odd or disturbing people on the scene. The only thing that was happening was that people were not going out in public as often as they had before. Casual encounters and those expert in that field were also not quite so common as they had been. This man, though slowly and, to most people, imperceptibly, was changing the life of the city. The old whore İstanbul, as Süleyman knew right through to his city-bred bones, didn’t like it when anyone tried to tame her wild spirit. No attempt to tackle vice in the city by Byzantine, Ottoman or Republican administrations had been even partially successful. There was going to be a lot of trouble.

Zelfa cooked pizzas for their dinner and then they all watched a video,
Finding Nemo
, before Mehmet finally put Yusuf to bed at nine. When he came back downstairs, Zelfa was sitting at the kitchen table with a fan of official-looking papers spread out before her. As he entered the room she looked up into his eyes.

‘You’ve been busy,’ he said as he sat down and lit a cigarette.

‘I think that if we are going to divorce we should do it in as clean and civilised a fashion as possible,’ she said. ‘Delaying will only cause more aggravation and pain.’

‘If that is what you think.’

‘Well, don’t you?’ She lit up a cigarette and then exhaled jerkily.

Mehmet shrugged. ‘What can I say? I’m in a position of weakness and guilt.’

‘You could try saying what you really think.’

That was not an easy request and Zelfa knew it. Even discounting Mehmet’s natural pride, there was also his sense of appropriateness, not to mention his adherence to the rules of etiquette, to take into account.

‘Well, if you ask my worthless opinion . . .’

‘Oh, Christ!’ Zelfa cried out in English. ‘Not those bloody Ottoman niceties again!’

Polite conversation in Ottoman court circles involved a process of constant self-abasement. Obvious arrogance was considered a sin and so a system of exaggerated self-deprecation evolved as each party in a conversation attempted to create a mismatch between themselves and the person being spoken to. This human ‘doormat’ phenomenon could only be brought to a close by one or other of the communicants reminding the assembled company that they were all, whatever their status, equal under God.

‘Zelfa . . .’

‘Look, do you want a divorce or don’t you?’ she interrupted, this time in Turkish. ‘Because if you don’t and you intend to fight me on this, then I think I deserve to know.’

His face wore an expression that had nothing to do with any sort of compassion. ‘No, I don’t want to divorce you,’ he said.

Zelfa, furious, slipped back into English once again. ‘Fucking great!’

‘I don’t want to lose my son,’ Mehmet said. ‘I know I am not the best man or the best father in the world, but I do love Yusuf. Even a stopped clock shows the correct time twice a day.’

Zelfa leaned across the table and pointed with one long, red-tipped finger into Mehmet’s face. ‘If you try to take my son away from me I will rip your head off and spit down your neck!’

‘I’m not trying to take him away from you!’ Mehmet said. ‘And besides, you were the one who took him off to Dublin when all of this business began.’

‘You mean when you fucked that tart!’

‘I only did it because you were so cold at that time!’ He stood up and walked round the table to stand in front of her. ‘It was you I really wanted, it was you I thought about as she . . .’

‘Bollocks!’ She rose to her feet too, literally in order to stand up to him. ‘You wanted a shag and anything female would have done!’

He reached one hand out towards her.

‘Don’t you dare raise a hand to me!’ she said.

‘I’m not,’ he said, then suddenly he pulled her towards him. For just a moment she stared, half angrily and half fearfully, into his eyes.

‘I’m doing this,’ he said, and then he leaned down and kissed her full on the lips.

‘Even in the 1950s we had people visit the chimneys from abroad. Some of them – Americans, I think they were – were black. People stared, amazed,’ the old woman said as she leaned forward in order to let İkmen light her cigarette. ‘But then in the 1970s we had a lot of foreigners passing through.’

‘Yes, I appreciate that now,’ he said.

Shortly after he had arrived at the Kahraman house, İkmen had been invited to join Nazlı and her ludicrously young husband for iftar. It had only been macaroni with cheese and tomato sauce and so it hadn’t been too difficult to eat even for one as disinclined towards food as Çetin İkmen. But now that iftar was over and everyone could smoke he was much more at his ease even if this very lined and rather forbidding woman was more than a little disconcerting. Nazlı Kahraman, with her thick, weighty headscarf, her impossibly high-heeled shoes, ‘from İstanbul’, and her pale eyes of stone was not someone İkmen liked to think of as the wife of a young boy. Every time she looked at Erkan, İkmen felt a distinct shudder pass along his spine. For someone who had been a virgin for seventy years, Nazlı Kahraman had taken her revenge upon life in a most brutal manner.