Harem (14 page)

‘Yes, Çetin Bey,’ the small, filthy man replied, exposing as he did a set of seriously damaged teeth.

‘What do you want, Rat?’ İkmen asked although he was rather more concerned with removing all trace of the man’s touch from his wrist. Rat, as well as being a somewhat casual informant, was also known to dine out at rubbish bins. Not as destitute as he looked, Rat apparently enjoyed certain aspects of the vagrant lifestyle.

‘I want to help you, Çetin Bey,’ Rat said, using his accustomed opening gambit.

‘Oh, and what do you want to help me with, Rat? Some pickpocketing ring masterminded by an eight-year-old?’ İkmen was tired. It had been a long day and Rat’s information was rarely worth the price of a visit to a public lavatory. İkmen shook his head and made to move off towards his apartment.

‘You know that there are still odalisques in this city, don’t you, Çetin Bey?’

İkmen turned. ‘Visiting gentlemen from Arab countries may have more than four wives, girls we would describe as odalisques, yes,’ he said. ‘What of it?’

‘I’m talking about Turkish girls, Çetin Bey. Girls who dress up in beautiful gowns, girls who dance and pretend to men that they are princesses.’

İkmen walked back to Rat and gripped his shoulders with his hands. ‘What do you know, Rat?’

‘I know that a girl like that died.’

‘And do you also know who killed her?’

Rat turned his head down so that he was looking at the ground, his face set and impassive.

‘If you do know who killed her, Rat, I can take you down to the station and extract the information from you without any money ever changing hands,’ İkmen said with some menace in his voice.

‘But I don’t know who killed her, Çetin Bey,’ Rat replied, completely unfazed. ‘All I have heard is that this has not, apparently, happened before.’

İkmen frowned. ‘Before? What do you mean?’

‘When men have gone with these women before, the women haven’t died.’

İkmen pulled Rat deeper into the shadow thrown by the washing the women hung at the back of the apartment building, underneath the place where the antiquated water boiler gurgled and thumped. Then, without offering one to the informant, he lit a cigarette for himself.

‘What women are you talking about, Rat?’ he said. ‘And by men are we talking about customers?’

‘It’s a great secret, Çetin Bey,’ Rat said, his eyes growing larger at the sight of the cigarette. ‘I know nothing beyond the fact that young women dress as odalisques and pleasure men. They have been doing it for ever.’

İkmen put his hand back into his pocket and retrieved his cigarettes.

‘So these men,’ he began, ‘are they . . .’

‘Oh, I don’t know who they are! I know they are important, but . . .’ Rat responded, his eyes virtually devouring the cigarette İkmen dangled in front of his face. ‘As I said, it is a great secret and has been so for a very long time.’

İkmen handed the cigarette to Rat who lit it with a fluff-covered match.

‘I presume the women do this for money,’ İkmen said.

‘Yes.’

‘But someone else organises or controls the trade.’

‘Well . . .’ Rat looked furtively over his shoulder and only when he was convinced that no one else was around did he continue. ‘No one knows who has been doing this, Çetin Bey, no one. But . . .’

‘Yes, Rat?’

‘But just lately some people involved in “family” business have, well, bought into the operation. I’ve heard that what was once one thing, unknown to all, is now quite another. Now there is blood.’

‘Where did you get all of this from, Rat?’ İkmen asked as he tried to control the familiar feeling of coldness that usually came over him at times of revelation.

‘Oh, well, it’s on the streets, Çetin . . .’

İkmen’s hand shot out and he grabbed hold of Rat’s skinny neck. He held him firmly up against the wall. The stench and feel of him was appalling, but İkmen knew from experience that there was only one way to deal with the likes of the Sultanahmet Rat.

‘Don’t fuck me about with “on the streets”, Rat,’ he spat through gritted teeth. ‘Who told you? Whose window did you listen at?’

‘I swear—’

‘I can take you down to the station . . .’

‘And I will tell you nothing!’ the now red-faced little man cried. ‘It will do you no good! You can use the bastinado for ten days at a time! I cannot tell you, Çetin Bey. This is a “family” thing, you know. There is nothing the police could do to me that could be worse than what they would do.’

And of course he was right. İkmen loosened his grip on the scraggy neck and then smoked in silence for a while. ‘Family’ business meant that if Rat was telling the truth, İkmen had all kinds of trouble. The local Mafias, although not as famous as their Sicilian or even their Russian counterparts, were not a force to be taken lightly. For a start, no one was entirely sure where the various families involved in illegal activities were at any one time. They were heavily involved in the drugs trade and tended to move between İstanbul and the eastern provinces and travel abroad – frequently to Germany or England. In fact so mobile were some of these families that it was said informants like Rat, if caught, were never sure who their torturers were. Something else that was frequently said about the families was that the payments they made to certain police officers were considerable. İkmen sighed. With family involvement, the operation Rat had described – prostitution – would take on a much more sinister aspect. One that had possibly cost Hatice İpek her life.

‘So if family are involved, why are you taking the risk of talking to me, Rat?’ İkmen asked.

‘Well, Çetin Bey, as you know I like to help.’

‘Oh, please, spare me the usual work of fiction, Rat! You’ve taken a big risk.’

‘I need two hundred million lire to pay my landlord.’ Rat’s head sank down on his chest. ‘I need it today.’

‘I don’t have that kind of money,’ İkmen said. ‘And besides, if I’m expected to pay out on the say so of somebody like you—’

‘But it’s all true!’

‘Maybe, but unless you can tell me where this information came from . . .’

‘I can’t!’

İkmen shrugged. ‘Then you’re just going to have to get used to sleeping on the street, aren’t you? You already eat out of rubbish bins because you’re too tight to pay for food. Now you’ll have to sleep in them too.’ And he started to move off towards his apartment. He was just opening the door to the building when Rat’s voice came at him one last time.

‘The seamstresses, the Heper ladies of Üsküdar, they know.’

The women who had made the dress he’d seen in the workroom at Lazar’s shop. The women who could also have made Hatice’s gown. Although quite what two seamstress daughters of an old general had to do with prostitution and ‘family’ business, İkmen couldn’t imagine. But it was the second time that the names of Miss Muazzez and Miss Yümniye Heper had cropped up since Hatice’s death and so İkmen took notice, even if he couldn’t for the life of him work out how someone like Rat could even know about them.

He took his wallet out of his pocket and dropped notes totalling fifty million lire onto the ground.

‘You’ll have to sell your arse to a blind man for the rest,’ he said and pushed his way into the comparative coolness of the entrance hall.

After he’d made his customary evening telephone call to Fatma, İkmen made himself a glass of tea which he took out onto the balcony. Bülent had left a note to say that he was out for the evening with his friend Sami and with Hulya now back at work at the pastane, the apartment was temporarily free of teenagers. But for now he could be quiet, free to think.

Not that İkmen was exactly happy for his daughter to be working alongside Hassan Şeker once again. But then she had been insistent that she wanted to return to work even though she hated it. Something to do with ‘needing’ to buy clothes – probably for Berekiah Cohen’s benefit. Still İkmen would escort her home later and make sure nothing untoward had happened. It seemed pretty unlikely if Hassan knew he was under suspicion.

It had been a strange day. Hikmet Sivas had not been the easiest victim to inverview and, like İskender before him, İkmen was now pretty sure that his lack of co-operation and at times strange behaviour – around his sister for instance – spelled secrets. Whether or not they were connected to Kaycee’s disappearance, he didn’t know. Perhaps Sivas wanted his new young wife out of the way for some reason and had set all this up in advance of his homecoming. It was no secret that a lot of Americans considered foreign policemen to be stupid, and Sivas, clearly, was no exception. For an American to commit a murder beyond the reach of the feared LAPD would seem to be a good idea – if one could ignore Sivas’s genuine distress at his wife’s continued absence, which İkmen couldn’t.

Kaycee’s disappearance had now reached the ears of the press both foreign and domestic. İkmen had seen some of the headlines over at the kiosk. One of the papers had even printed a rather blurry photograph of Metin İskender. He smiled. Well, it made a change from seeing his own grim visage shouting ‘No comment!’ followed by a silent ‘Fuck off’ in his head. İskender by contrast had looked far more relaxed in company with the press. Silent, but polished.

İkmen lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. Music, which Bülent had once informed him was called ‘rave’, thudded rhythmically out of the apartment below, the one just recently let to newlyweds. İkmen didn’t like it but he didn’t allow it to force him back into the stuffy apartment. Like most Turks he just put up with it and, in his case, thought of something else.

Ahmet Sılay. Now there was an oddity. Like Hulya he had freely stated that Hatice and Hassan Şeker were intimate. He was also, coincidentally, if one believed in such things, an old friend of Hikmet Sivas. In fact it appeared that Sılay made almost a profession out of his long-ago connection with the Hollywood actor. People apparently bought him drinks to encourage him to reminisce at length. What an excellent strategy for an alcoholic. Sivas, for his part, had rather less charitable memories of his old friend.

When İkmen had casually dropped Sılay’s name into their conversation at the house in Kandıllı, he had made it clear that the elderly actor was helping the police with another, unconnected, inquiry, which İkmen did not specify. What Sivas had said then, however, had given İkmen pause.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t place too much emphasis on what Ahmet tells you, Inspector,’ Sivas had exclaimed with a snort of a laugh. ‘He’s a total fantasist, always was.’

He had then proceeded to give İkmen several credible examples of Ahmet Sılay’s fantasies and their subsequent exposure. What seemed to be emerging was a picture of a spoilt, wealthy man possessed of both artistic and working-class aspirations. Not overly endowed with talent, Sılay had always been jealous of his more successful friend, who had apparently tried to help him and had even entertained him in America. But Sılay’s bitterness and his drinking had put paid to all that some time ago and Sivas had heard not a word from him in five years.

This did rather undermine Sılay’s observations with regard to Hatice and Hassan Şeker. Even a mediocre lawyer could argue that evidence given by a known fantasist was at best unreliable. This left only Hulya’s observations and Hatice’s diary which that same lawyer could argue constituted only girlish yearnings. İkmen strongly disagreed, but that didn’t count for anything.

And then only ten minutes ago he had been treated to an audience with Rat. What Rat had said was that someone had been supplying women to act as old-fashioned Ottoman odalisques – a group that could include Hatice İpek. This had been going on for some time but now, for reasons unknown, the business had been taken over by one of the families. Quite why anyone in this day and age would want a heavily robed odalisque when they could have a completely naked Russian woman willing to do anything for virtually nothing, İkmen couldn’t imagine. Why he had never heard of this before was also a mystery.

As for the delightful Heper sisters, it was certainly possible that Miss Muazzez and Miss Yümniye had made the gown Hatice had been wearing when she died. But to say that they
knew
something about the use their work was put to had to be ridiculous. Although raised by a man who had been born an Ottoman and who had served in the Sultan’s army, the girls, like their father, had been enthusiastic converts to Atatürkism and were consequently both independent and emancipated. Indeed local Üsküdar legend had it that the general’s wife, the girls’ mother, had been the first woman in all of Turkey to ride a bicycle, unveiled. The Hepers were entirely respectable. İkmen remembered them with affection from his childhood. Miss Yümniye had made his mother’s wedding dress – he would have to be careful not to think about this when he presented the ladies with the gown Hatice had been wearing when she died. Because, whatever the truth of it was, he would have to go and see Miss Muazzez and Miss Yümniye and he would also have to persuade Arto Sarkissian to ‘lend’ him the dead girl’s gown – without, of course, alerting Ardıç to this fact. Kaycee Sivas, İkmen knew, was the only young woman he should have on his mind now. Kaycee, who could still be alive somewhere, unlike poor, dead Hatice. But then what Ardıç didn’t appreciate was that İkmen had promised his daughter he would find those people who had abused her friend and punish them. And Kaycee Sivas or no Kaycee Sivas, that was what he was going to do.

‘Where are we, İskender?’ Ardıç didn’t even look up from what he was doing.

Metin İskender, as was becoming his custom, sat down before his superior offered this privilege.

‘Nobody’s talking, sir,’ he said as he lit a cigarette with the very stylish silver lighter his wife had bought him. ‘Significantly, not even my most desperate informants are coming forward.’

Ardıç looked up from his papers, his large face appearing split by the enormous cigar in his mouth. ‘And ransom demands?’ he said. ‘Anything?’