Dead of Night (4 page)

‘But then, as can happen with open spaces, it got hijacked,’ Diaz continued. ‘Kids playing ball were hassled by dealers until
most of them didn’t want to play ball any more and just spent their time screwing up their brains. This lot was just burned-out
cars, broken furniture, kids playing music fit to burst your eardrums, junkies, crackheads, hookers, you name it.’

It was snowing hard as they all stood on the edge of the open space, which was now under at least a quarter of a metre of
snow. All that could be seen were seven, maybe eight, small garden sheds dotted about apparently at random.

‘It stayed like that for years,’ Diaz said. ‘Then, in the summer of 2004, a sixteen-year-old boy called Luther Bell was gunned
down in a drive-by shooting just over there.’ He pointed to an anonymous snowy area in front of one of the blocks. ‘Automobile
full of cracked-out gangsters came sweeping in here and took out anyone and anything in their path. Classic drive-by. Luther
Bell, luckily the only victim, was dead before he hit the ground.’

Bell, his family claimed, wasn’t part of any gang himself, and so his death was a meaningless act. The gangsters, Diaz said,
had done what they’d done just because they had guns and they could. It had even, possibly, been part of some gang initiation
ritual. If it hadn’t been Luther Bell, it would have been somebody, anybody, else. The boy’s mother, Martha, brother Marlon
and sister Keisha had been distraught. But in Martha at least this tragedy eventually led to something else, something far
more positive. While Marlon dealt with his grief by disappearing into the arms of crack cocaine, his mother and little sister
began to build a garden.

‘First off, what I wanted was a garden to dedicate to my boy Luther,’ the attractive black woman at Diaz’s elbow said. Martha
Bell, İkmen thought, was probably in her forties. Wrapped up tight in a long tiger-print coat, she reminded the Turk of a
picture he’d once seen of the exotic dancer, and toast of Paris, Josephine Baker. Martha Bell was altogether a far bigger
woman, but she had that kind of leonine style that Josephine had possessed. She wore high-heeled patent leather boots in the
snow and she didn’t give a damn.

‘The dealers just kicked over whatever I made,’ Martha said. ‘If it wasn’t them, it would be some junkie dropping needles
all over, kids just wrecking stuff, hookers doing who knows what all over it. But every time it got kicked down, I just built
it straight back up again.’

The apartment blocks were grey, poorly maintained and depressing. When İkmen’s son Bekir had died, at least he had been able
to mourn the boy in the relative comfort of his Sultanahmet apartment. Often he had salved his emotional wounds by looking
out across Divan Yolu at the great mosques and monuments that surrounded his home: Aya Sofya, the Blue Mosque, Topkapı Palace.
He hadn’t had to deal with all the things this woman had been up against.

The snowfall began to intensify, and Martha Bell and Lieutenant Diaz took them inside one of the blocks to what they were
told was the ‘community centre’. It was a large grey room filled with chairs
and tables that had seen better days, but it was warm, and there was coffee provided by a group of young men and women, mostly
black, many of whom were very heavily tattooed. As they sat down at a table with two of the British officers, Süleyman spoke
to İkmen in Turkish. ‘This is like Ümraniye used to be at its worst,’ he said, referring to what had once been one of İstanbul’s
most troubled districts.

İkmen, who wasn’t fond of anyone speaking in a language no one else could understand unless he just couldn’t help it, didn’t
comment. Süleyman, he felt, had taken against Detroit as soon as they had landed. He’d never been a lover of the cold; it
had to have been the snow that had prejudiced him.

‘By the middle of 2005, I was almost ready to give up,’ continued Martha Bell, now hunched over a large mug of coffee. ‘And,
I’ll be honest, I would have done so if it hadn’t been for one old lady. She dead now, but Imelda Blois, she come out one
day as I was putting back some flower bulbs and she said to me, “Martha, if you stop putting in them silly bits of nothing
and grow something a person can eat, I’ll help you.”’

And so Martha, the old woman and then a few other people began a vegetable garden. They called it the Luther Bell Food Patch,
and anyone who agreed to work on it or help keep it safe was entitled to a share of its produce. The first year they grew
potatoes, carrots, onions and collard greens, and for some families this meant that their food bills went down. Working in
the garden became fun, especially in the summer, and the following year more people and more land produced even more food.
People who had never talked to each other before became friends, and when Martha suggested they all get rid of the burned-out
cars and the old broken furniture, a lot of them were willing to help her do that. The dealers and the gangsters stayed, but
began to get pushed into more and more distant parts of the space. Unspoken was the knowledge that the dealers and the gang
bosses just helped themselves whenever they felt like it to the now many
vegetables that grew in the garden. But they didn’t oppose it any more. There were too many people who liked it and worked
at it, and anyway, no one actively opposed the gangs. People just got on, ignoring them and slowly growing things. Some of
the gangsters, if a little reluctantly at first, even helped out themselves. Funding came in too. From local council officials,
from the city, and eventually from the police.

‘Then, one day about two years ago, the dealers not involved in the garden just weren’t on the ground out there no more,’
Martha said. She looked down for a moment as if to collect herself. After all her struggles, to finally triumph like that
had to be almost unbelievable. But then Martha looked up again and she smiled. ‘Lieutenant Diaz saw what we done; he been
involved from the start, helping us, fund-raising. PD do us proud now. So we help them too, it’s mutual. And that’s why you’re
all here today.’

‘Things like the Luther Bell Food Patch are what will bring parts of this city back to life,’ Diaz said. ‘I am a Detroiter
born and bred, and it offends every bone in my body to see what unemployment, gangs and drugs have done to this city. But
this is one way forward, and it’s things like this that the Detroit Police Department are actively engaging with and supporting.
And the Luther Bell Food Patch doesn’t just grow food any more, does it, Martha?’

She told them about the groups that ran out of that dingy one-room community centre. Art classes, rap for the kids, mothers’
groups, therapy for the bereaved, the mixed-up, the repentant gangsters, the addicted. It was impressive. She, Martha Bell,
was impressive. İkmen looked over at her and smiled, but she didn’t smile back. There hadn’t been so much as a whisper about
any sort of male partner helping her to bring up her three kids in this rough, dour project. She had the look of a woman who
had done with men. Men, or boys, had killed her son. Men, or boys, had probably had a hand in getting her other boy addicted
to crack. Only when Martha looked at her daughter, a pretty young girl İkmen reckoned to be about twelve, did she smile.
But then the girl, Keisha, was her baby, the precious child who had helped her with her garden, and probably her last hope
of a genetic footstep into the future.

Lieutenant Gerald Diaz told them that if the police wanted any say in or influence over what happened in communities that
were blighted by poverty and lawlessness, they had to engage with them.

‘Folk talk about a war against drugs,’ he said. ‘But it’s a war we’re going to lose unless we start getting real. We’ve got
to stop cuffing people and start trying to see the world from where they are.’

İkmen saw several of the Detroit officers who had come along to support Diaz look at him in a somewhat less than approving
manner, Sergeant Donna Ferrari in particular. But then Diaz was not, as far as İkmen could tell, sticking to the US government-approved
zero-tolerance line on illegal drugs.

‘If people don’t feel hope, if they don’t see themselves having a stake in their own future, they will go with their instincts
and settle for short-term instant gratification,’ Diaz continued. ‘Ask yourselves: why wouldn’t they?’

Marisa was a woman of no more than forty who looked more like a sixty year old. She’d been on heroin since she was fourteen,
had worked as a hooker for fifteen years and had given birth to three drug-addicted babies that had all been taken away from
her within days of their birth. At one time she’d been a dealer herself. Now she was on a programme, and although not yet
‘clean’, she was trying. She told İkmen that the first time she’d eaten vegetables from the garden, she’d thought she was
hallucinating.

‘It was a head-fuck, you know?’ she said. İkmen didn’t, but he smiled anyway. ‘I wasn’t tasting anything. When you’re on junk,
you don’t care. You stick junk in your veins, put crap in your mouth, when you think of it – burgers, French fries, any old
shit. It don’t matter! But . . .’

‘The vegetables . . .’

‘Everyone working on that ground, and then that taste.’ She smiled. ‘Onions was what it was. An onion, raw and sweet and . . .
I hadn’t never tasted nothing like that. I didn’t think that anything could taste like that.’

The residents had wanted to talk to the foreign police officers. Whether or not they had been addicts themselves, they wanted
the foreigners to know what had been achieved at Antoine Cadillac, what they had done and how hard it had been. Something
else İkmen noticed was how much they all spoke to Lieutenant Diaz. Not only did he support these people; they liked and respected
him too. It was more than could be said for Sergeant Donna Ferrari. If looks could have killed, Gerald Diaz would have dropped
where he stood after his speech about the unwinnable war on drugs. Süleyman, he saw, was talking to Sergeant Ferrari now.

‘So where you say you come from again?’ Marisa asked.

‘Oh, er . . .’ İkmen was briefly distracted by the sight of Süleyman with yet another attractive woman. ‘From İstanbul in Turkey.’

‘Turkey?’

Someone grabbing his arm was accompanied by the sound of an old, cracked voice somewhere to İkmen’s left. ‘Turkey?’

‘Yes?’

The old man, who had been sitting almost asleep in a chair, pulled himself up on İkmen’s arm and looked deep into his eyes.
Not only was he very old; he was also very dark and very troubled-looking too.

‘You a Turk from Turkey?’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’ İkmen said. ‘My name is Çetin İkmen. I am a police officer from İstanbul.’

The old man continued to just stare at him for a moment. Then a single tear tracked down his face and he said, ‘A police officer.
From İstanbul, Turkey. Praise to God. You don’t know how long I have been waiting for this, son. You and me, we’s kin. Now
everything’ll come clear! Now the criminal’ll finally come to justice!’

‘
Meraba
!’ the old man said in very bad Turkish as he threw his arms around İkmen’s neck and gave in to deep, aching sobs. İkmen didn’t
know what to do. This elderly American seemed to be unduly impressed by the fact that he was a Turk. It was entirely a mystery
to him why that should be. But although somewhat taken aback, he wasn’t uncomfortable with the old man’s embrace. The American
seemed gentle enough, and no one was pulling him away, as they certainly would if he was known to be dangerous in some way.
In fact Lieutenant Diaz and the formidable Martha Bell were looking on with something approaching approval.

Not so the fiery Sergeant Donna Ferrari. ‘Come on now, Zeke, that’s enough,’ she said to the old man as she pulled his arms
away from İkmen’s shoulders.

As he disengaged, he looked at her, and the expression on his face changed from benign to malicious. ‘Get your hands off of
me, you fucking bitch!’ he snarled.

‘Ezekiel!’ Martha Bell came over and put her arms around him. ‘No need for that,’ she said gently. ‘No need, old man.’

Everyone in the room was watching. Now apparently focused on Martha, the old man’s face softened instantly as he looked up
into her eyes and smiled.

‘It’s been a long day,’ Martha said. ‘Come on, I take you home for a rest.’

She began leading him towards the door, while people round and
about spoke in small groups. İkmen, still rather taken aback, heard the old man say as he left, ‘We go to see Elvis now, do
we?’

The poor old character had to be mad. Süleyman, now at İkmen’s side, said, ‘I’d heard about Americans still believing that
Elvis Presley is alive. But I never thought I’d actually see it.’

‘It was as if my being Turkish meant something to him,’ İkmen said. ‘Something special.’

‘Ezekiel Goins is nuts,’ Donna Ferrari said as she came over to offer the two Turks some more coffee. ‘How Martha looks after
him, I’ll never know. She’s a saint.’

‘Mrs Bell takes care of the old man?’

‘Four years, to my knowledge,’ Ferrari said. She poured them both some more coffee and then went off to other groups. İkmen
watched her. Although she was polite and smiling to the foreign policemen, she looked as if she barely tolerated the residents
of Antoine Cadillac. But then from the looks on some of their faces as she approached, the feeling was clearly mutual.

Going outside to smoke was something that Çetin İkmen had become accustomed to. Turkey had taken the plunge into smoke-free
workplaces the previous July. Even so, venturing out into the snow was something of a mission, and it was one that he found
he couldn’t interest his colleague Süleyman in.

‘It’s far too cold,’ Süleyman said, when İkmen finally managed to take his attention away from Sergeant Ferrari for more than
a moment. It was, although in truth Süleyman was probably lining Ferrari up for a romantic conquest at some point too. Now
single yet again, he was rarely if ever without some sort of female in his life, however casual that might be.

İkmen went outside and lit up. The snow was falling so hard that he could barely see the apartment block opposite. Shivering
underneath someone’s battered concrete balcony, he thought he was alone until he heard a voice say, ‘Another sinner. I like
that.’