Deadly Web (41 page)

‘Mmm.’

There was a very pleasant smell of lamb on the air that, mixed with the cigarette smoke from various sources, almost made İkmen hungry. But he carried on walking. Guinness, so Mehmet’s wife, Zelfa, had once told him, contains all the essential nutrients needed by humans and so best wait for his ‘meal’ at the James Joyce. ‘I wonder how the image got from the club to the places of worship?’

‘Unless we catch the person doing it, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know,’ Süleyman said. ‘Those Goth kids are very loyal to each other and their cause.’

‘Such negativity!’ İkmen said with furious upraised hands. ‘But then I can’t blame them. Poor kids. Living in a bizarre world of constant communication, horrific violence both real and fictional, and now the threat of all-out chemical warfare. The so-called “free” world we live in is manipulated by a man incapable of pronouncing common words in his own language. What hope is there?’

Süleyman smiled.

İkmen, seeing this, said, ‘I sound like a mad old man, don’t I?’

‘A little. Even if you are right,’ Süleyman said, and then changed the subject. ‘I hear that Metin is going to be returning to work as soon as the hospital allows.’

‘Yes. I spoke to his wife. She’s not happy about it, but . . .’ İkmen shrugged. ‘Men like Metin, really poor boys, have so much to prove. The deprivation of Ümraniye still haunts him and, I mean, you saw his father. What a mess! It’s difficult for any of us to escape from our pasts. Look at Max.’

‘Yes. And he shot Metin, didn’t he?’

‘With İrfan Şay’s pistol, yes,’ İkmen sighed. ‘Having failed to pick up Çiçek’s sigil the first time he returned to the apartment he must have been desperate that second time. It’s amazing to me that he forgot it in the first place. Max was always so organised. Perhaps the strain of doing what he did, the sheer complication of the operation, caused him to lose track of exactly what he was doing. You know, the last time we spoke, before the boat and everything, I noticed that his hands shook when he picked up his coffee cup. Makes one think. Maybe he was unwell too.’

‘Or maybe you’re just looking for excuses for him, Çetin?’ Süleyman stopped to light a cigarette outside a pastane, its art nouveau window filled by a huge pyramid of sticky baklava. But when İkmen didn’t answer he went on to a different tack. ‘You heard from his sister?’

‘Yes,’ İkmen said. ‘The Metropolitan police contacted her and gave her some indication about what had happened, but then she called me. Poor woman. I said “I wish I had a body for you to mourn and to bury” – I said I wished that Max hadn’t died. You know, she told me what Max had studied at Oxford. Strange he never said. It was theology – destined for a career in the priesthood.’

‘What changed his mind?’

‘She doesn’t know. Maybe it was the conjuring club he became involved with at university, maybe it was his father, maybe he didn’t really change his mind until he came here and met Rebbe Baruh. I don’t know. But, you know, even when, at one point, I thought that perhaps he’d killed our old friend Alison all those years ago, I still couldn’t quite believe that he was totally bad. His sister said that she found an old diary of Max’s from when he was about twelve. She read out to me a sentence he’d written on the first page. It said something like, “I’m moving to the light. I pray that God will not reject me.”’

They started walking again, but silently for a little while now. There really wasn’t much one could say with regard to Max’s childish pronouncement. What he had been and what he eventually became were, they both knew, only reflections of what he had experienced. The essence of Max remained the same.

‘So how is Çiçek?’ Süleyman asked.

İkmen smiled. ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘And you’ll be very happy to know that you have resumed your place in her heart as a young uncle figure. You know, Mehmet, I really do wonder whether that spell, that sigil Max worked on Çiçek, did affect her. After all, if she hadn’t been pining over you then she would have been far less susceptible to his suggestions.’

‘They didn’t find Rohypnol in her blood?’

‘No. But then apparently it is notoriously difficult to detect. A lot like little Ülkü Ayla.’

‘Still no sign of her?’

‘No.’ İkmen sighed heavily. ‘Poor kid could be anywhere. I know she wasn’t actually dumped, but it’s not uncommon for people like Max to bring youngsters like Ülkü from the east to the city and then dispense with them. They don’t work hard enough or their manners are too rough. Thrown out, they just drift. It’s a shame because Max did, I think, really care about Ülkü in his own strange way.’

They reached the door of the pub and İkmen paused before going in.

‘And what of Zelfa?’ he said.

Süleyman sighed. ‘Well, she has at least agreed to come back and talk,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what will happen. I miss her.’

And he did. His one interlude with Gonca had been fun but, like a very rich chocolate, it aroused the senses without satisfying them. Also now it made him feel a little sick too. But then maybe that was because he, and he knew İkmen too, harboured some suspicions about her with regard to Max’s continued disappearance. Whether Max were dead or alive, it was possible that Gonca could know his whereabouts. It was possible that Gonca could have killed him too. But, as the gypsy herself had told him, there was no point in pursuing the magician any further now. And perhaps she was right.

‘Well, learning to drink Guinness properly will help,’ İkmen said as he held the door open for his friend to enter. ‘Come on, let me buy you a pint.’

Süleyman frowned.

‘It’s rather less than a litre and rather more than a half,’ he said. ‘According to an Irishman I once met in Karaköy – don’t ask how – it is what God would drink if He had a human form. Enlightenment in a glass was how he described it.’ He smiled. ‘Maybe Max should have spent less time with his books and his spells and more time in the pub.’

Süleyman, smiling also, walked ahead of İkmen into the midst of the enthusiastic Friday night crowd.

Brother Constantine had become quite a regular spectator at the drama that was the Cohen house renovation. And although Berekiah and Hulya weren’t always up at the site, they were on this occasion together with his mother and father – the latter sitting hunched up in his wheelchair in the middle of the still unruly garden.

‘Mr Cohen?’

Both Berekiah and Balthazar looked down towards the gaping hole where once a grand entrance gate had stood. When the young man saw the monk he put down the hammer he had been using to nail back a rotted window frame and went down to greet him.

‘Brother Constantine. How are you?’

‘Better than I was,’ the monk said.

‘Good.’ He had, Berekiah knew, been very distressed and disturbed by the desecration of the Church of the Panaghia.

‘What does he want?’ Berekiah heard his father say. ‘Tell him to go away!’

‘Father!’

‘Christians!’ Balthazar spat on to the ground. Estelle, infuriated, moved his chair into a corner of the garden, pushing him into a patch of briar.

‘I’m so sorry, Brother Constantine,’ Berekiah said apologetically. ‘My father is a sick man, angry at the world . . .’

‘Maybe he needs our prayers.’

Berekiah looked over his shoulder at his father swearing in the bush and shook his head. Angry, sexually frustrated and bitter, his father was gradually alienating everyone. Uncle Jak, now back in Britain, had promised he would visit again – but only once Berekiah and Hulya’s house was in a state to receive visitors. Another ‘holiday’ at the Cohen apartment in Karaköy would, Jak had said as he left, either result in his own suicide or Balthazar’s murder.

‘Anyway,’ Berekiah said, ‘what can we do for you, Brother Constantine? Would you like tea?’

‘No.’ The monk placed his hand over his heart and then smiled. ‘No, thank you, Mr Cohen. I came simply to tell you that we have discovered who has been desecrating our places of worship,’ he sighed, ‘and sadly, it was one of our own.’

‘A monk?’

‘No. But one who used to be of our number,’ he said. ‘A young man – an acolyte once – now he moves amongst some very strange people up in Beyoğlu.’ He leaned in towards Berekiah. ‘Devil worship, you know.’

‘So how did you find him? Have you told the police?’

‘He was caught in the act,’ Brother Constantine said, ‘at the Aya Triada in Taksim. One of our own, Orthodox, churches. He was known and recognised,’ he added somewhat menacingly.

‘And the police?’

‘There is no need,’ Brother Constantine said. ‘It is a spiritual matter. We will take care of him.’

‘What do you mean?’

The monk sighed. ‘I mean that when a person does such a thing it shows that his soul is sick. The poor boy is pursued by demons, his mind obsessed by this obscene picture he has copied, his every action dictated by the Devil.’ He shuddered. ‘We live in threatening times, Mr Cohen, and sometimes the way of evil can seem more attractive and less difficult than the way of God.’

‘Do you not think he might need medical attention, Brother Constantine? I mean, as well as your own ministrations.’

‘No. No, it is his spirit that wavers, Mr Cohen, not his mind.’ And then the monk smiled. ‘But I appreciate your concern. I also appreciate that Mrs Cohen’s father is a police officer – but if we could just keep this to ourselves . . .’

Berekiah wasn’t happy with this, but he agreed to keep the monk’s counsel anyway. After all, provided the desecration had come to an end, there was no need to involve İkmen in what sounded like just a very sad story.

And so after a little discussion about the house and its progress Brother Constantine left. However, instead of walking back up towards the house and his family, Berekiah wandered out into the street for a while. It was just getting dark now and soon the sunset call to prayer would ripple across the city like a great wave of devotion, an entreaty to a higher beneficent power. Well, they needed something – Muslim, Christian, Jew – whatever. As the monk had said, they lived in threatening times and if they didn’t appeal to something both good and powerful to come to their aid then what could they do? Descend like that poor acolyte into some sort of twisted perversion that poisoned the mind and frightened all those who came into contact with it? That, surely, had to be the route to chaos and they had enough of that to deal with as it was.

Berekiah looked up at the dome of the great Greek School and then sighed. What would war do to places like that? Would they and other, maybe even more important buildings, be bombed? Would people be gassed or poisoned? What was in the minds of people like Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush? Berekiah’s own brother-in-law Bülent would join the army in the New Year – just as he had done himself once. He shuddered: chances were, he knew, that anything he had experienced in the army would be far worse for Bülent. And Bülent’s sister, his wife? Hulya had told him only yesterday she thought there might be a chance she was pregnant. Very quick, but then she was very young – and excited. If only he felt the same. But Berekiah, in spite of the fact that he didn’t show his wife this, could only feel anxiety and depression. A baby? Into this world? Berekiah looked up and down his silent, trouble-free street and then started to make his way back to his ruined old house. As he walked through the entrance the sunset call to prayer began and he watched as Hulya, beautiful, her eyes full of hope, came out into the garden to listen to it. And so, with a smile on his face at the sight of her, Berekiah went to join Hulya. What better place, after all, and despite everything, was there for him to be?

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTES

T
HE
T
URKISH
R
EPUBLIC

The Turkish Republic, which was created by its first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and his supporters, was formally declared on 29 October 1923. A democratic and secular system, the republic replaced the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic theocracy which, at its height, ruled the Middle East and much of Eastern Europe. Although the population of modern Turkey is ninety per cent Muslim, the republic remains secular, is currently a full member of NATO and is also an associate member of the European Union. Turks use the European calendar and take Sunday and sometimes Saturday too, instead of the traditional Friday, as their official weekend. Freedom of worship for all faiths, although enshrined within the constitution, does not extend to the practice of magic, which is still, officially, forbidden under laws designed to prohibit sorcery.

K
ABBALAH

Kabbalah is the magical system devised and practised by Jewish occultists. Although its actual genesis is lost in the mists of time, two of its key texts, the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar, are known to date respectively from the sixth and twelfth centuries AD. Study of Kabbalah was traditionally centred around certain learned men or rebbes, and schools of Kabbalah are known to have existed in Spain, Portugal, Italy and across the Ottoman Empire.

At the most basic level Kabbalah is a system of relationships or correspondences that, theoretically, open up access to the inner reaches of the mind. Based around a diagram called The Tree of Life, Kabbalah teaches that both man and the universe are one and the same and therefore interchangeable. Following the magical adage ‘as above, so below’, it is therefore possible to manipulate or influence the divine by using those corporeal forms (tarot cards, perfumes, colours) that correspond to whichever angel or demon may be asked for assistance in the unseen world. Although Kabbalah is neither strictly ‘white’ nor ‘black’ magic, the ultimate aim, which is union with the god-head, is perceived to be desirable. It is said that all the greatest Kabbalists do indeed eventually dispense with corporeal reality and literally disappear.