Ikmen 16 - Body Count (25 page)

She gazed at him through glassy, tear-washed eyes, but this time she didn’t speak.

He looked at her, and for a while he was silent too. Then he said, ‘Whatever happens now must be practical. I can’t do anything about what your uncle did or what you didn’t do. Not right now. But blackmail is a crime, and in addition, until we catch this man, we can’t be sure that he isn’t also your uncle’s murderer.’ He doubted this but he didn’t tell her that. This blackmail just looked opportunistic to
İ
kmen.

‘So what do we do?’ she asked.

İ
kmen looked down at the second letter again and said, ‘Well, Sezen Han
ı
m, you keep this appointment with this man in the gardens of Y
ı
ld
ı
z Palace this afternoon at four.’

Her eyes bulged in horror. ‘But I told you I don’t have any—’

‘You won’t need any money,’
İ
kmen said. ‘All you will need is a bag that looks as if it is full of money, and a strong nerve. I assure you, Sezen Han
ı
m, we will do the rest.’

Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu had come into
İ
stanbul with a group of Edirne gypsies. Given the fact that he didn’t want to attract too much attention, particularly from the police, he felt more secure in the company of others. They’d taken a ferry across the Bosphorus from Kad
ı
köy to Karaköy and then he’d joined them, dancing and begging, as they made their way along the coastal road to the village of Ortaköy. There, they’d danced through streets lined with coffee shops and chichi restaurants, playing the whole H
ı
d
ı
rellez thing for the rich people who found such activities authentic enough to give money to.

Ortaköy wasn’t
Ş
ukru’s usual stomping ground, but it was near to where he needed to be in order to do a bit of business he should have done some time ago. In spite of everything, Tarlaba
ş
ı
wasn’t going to last long and soon they’d have to be on the move again. And despite his various business interests that had over the years made him quite a bit of money,
Ş
ukru knew that he could always do with more. The business with the kid Hamid had caused him a lot of grief, and that needed to be recompensed.
Ş
ukru took off the hot bear costume he’d put on in Edirne and which had so entranced the people of Ortaköy, and put on the suit he’d folded up into his rucksack. Looking at himself in the window of an art shop near the old synagogue, he was pleased with what he saw. Being in Edirne with three doting aunts had given him a chance to clean himself up. He almost looked respectable, which, given where he was going, was a good thing.

He put the fedora one of the other dancers had given him on his head and rang his sister from his mobile phone.

‘I’m coming home and then I’m moving the family on,’ he told her. ‘Soon as I can.’

‘Moving on? Where to?’ Gonca asked. ‘Some smart Bosphorus village?’

‘I’ll find somewhere,’ he said.

‘How? They want everyone to go outside the city.’

‘Maybe I’ll have money,’ he said.

He heard her gasp. He knew what she was thinking. ‘Oh
Ş
ukru, nothing dangerous!’

‘You think I’d put myself at risk while you’re fucking a policeman? No,’ he said. ‘Not dangerous, Gonca.’

He said nothing about illegal – she knew that was a given – or immoral, but then he was aware that that wasn’t the way her mind would move. Like him, Gonca’s morality was a thing that shifted with the time, the place and the person.

‘Well come and see me before you take my father who knows where,’ she said.

‘And your policeman?’ he said.

She snorted. ‘Oh
Ş
ukru, don’t you know me? I will tell Süleyman you’ve been to see me when you’ve gone.’

He smiled. ‘OK. But I have some business to attend to first.’ He finished the call and began to make his way north out of Ortaköy towards the village of Arnavutköy.

There was a time when Çetin
İ
kmen would have joined his colleagues secreted in the trees and flower beds around the Malta Kiosk. But the afternoon was overly warm and he found that as long as he could see Sezen Han
ı
m from his vantage point in the lee of the baroque kiosk, that was good enough for him. Unless whoever she was meeting knew him somehow, he, or she, wouldn’t give a slightly scruffy man in sunglasses, smoking furiously, a second look. But then how likely was that anyway? In his heart of hearts,
İ
kmen knew that no one was coming.

Someone clearly knew about Sezen
İ
pek’s uncle’s crimes and was trying to frighten her, but
İ
kmen didn’t think that he or she was about to make good on those threats. For a start, the location for the ‘drop’ didn’t make sense. The Malta Kiosk, which was a very smart café in the centre of the Ottoman palace of Y
ı
ld
ı
z, was a very public place. It had CCTV cameras and, while busy, was not busy enough to provide cover for any nefarious activities that might be taking place on its premises.

But from
İ
kmen’s point of view it was a pleasant enough place to be. Sitting at the back of the palace’s outside terrace, he had a fine view of the Bosphorus and he was drinking very nice coffee, which was on expenses. The woman he was watching was tense, as were the officers who had positioned themselves around the kiosk, but
İ
kmen himself, although a little hot, was perfectly calm. In the scheme of what he’d had to face over the past few months, a little blackmail was a very small crime. And anyway, the real ‘victim’, if the odious Raf
ı
k Efendi could be called such a thing, was already dead.

İ
kmen concentrated on the back of Sezen
İ
pek’s neck. Although he didn’t like her, he had to admit that she was an attractive woman. She had that air about her that a lot of the old nobility had. It led to good posture and a certain attitude towards grooming that was very far in advance of his own. The Osmano
ğ
lu clan had a sheen. And yet it was something their most prominent representatives in the past had not always had. Sultan Abdülhamid II, whose palace Y
ı
ld
ı
z had been, had looked like a thwarted crow in the ill-fitting greatcoat he had always seemed to wear when he’d been photographed. His predecessor, his brother Murad V, had looked like the lush he had been, and their father, Abdülmecid II, had been a tiny sliver of a man who had lived his life in the shadow of tuberculosis.
İ
kmen wondered what John Regan’s creation Tirimujgan had looked like. If, as he had contested, her mother had been a blonde Belgian, had the girl been a blonde too? Her imperial father had been very dark indeed, so dark in fact that rumours had circulated about the possibility of his mother having been from an Armenian family. Had the girl had that sheen
İ
kmen always saw in the modern Osmano
ğ
lus?

A young man passed in front of Sezen Han
ı
m’s table, looked at her briefly and then moved on. It was four fifteen already and so the blackmailer was late. Had he or she worked out that some of the people on the pathways and in the arbours around the kiosk were police officers? It was unlikely, as the team had assembled only slowly across the course of the day, with
İ
kmen appearing last, at three thirty. There was no way of knowing until and unless he or she contacted the press with the story Sezen
İ
pek did not want told. But
İ
kmen, for his part, found it impossible to be worried about that eventuality. However back in vogue the old Imperial family might be, they, just like the republican generals who had followed them, couldn’t escape their past. The old generals had mounted coups designed to consolidate their power in the 1960s and the 1980s, for which soldiers like General Ablak had been rightly brought to book, even if his involvement in the alleged modern version, Ergenekon, was open to question. But the Osmano
ğ
lu still had cases to answer, not least of which was the terrible sense of entitlement that people like Raf
ı
k Efendi still believed they had. However, even that did not give whoever had taken Raf
ı
k’s heart from his chest the right to behave with such barbarity.

In the days since he’d talked to Professor Atay and Dr Santa Ana from METU,
İ
kmen had read bits and pieces about the ancient Mayans on the Internet. They had undoubtedly been brutal to their enemies. They had also practised some extreme forms of self-mutilation. But these acts had been performed for practical reasons, in order to propitiate the gods that they believed in, to encourage them to bless the Mayans with healthy crops or rain or whatever it was that they needed. But this modern Mayan he was trying to apprehend, if indeed such a person actually existed, had another agenda. It had been the academics’ contention that the individual who could be killing all these people in
İ
stanbul was doing so in order to affect the end of the current Mayan time cycle in some way. And that might indeed be the case. But
İ
kmen also felt that there was something more personal in the horrors that had been inflicted upon these people. As he imagined someone he didn’t know smearing Rafik Efendi’s blood on some fat-tongued idol, he felt a hatred there too that made him shiver. In time with his spasm, he saw Sezen
İ
pek shudder just a little also, and he wondered what she’d either seen or what had just passed through her mind.

Time ticked and the hour of four became five and then six, and then darkness began to fall over Y
ı
ld
ı
z Park and eventually
İ
kmen took Sezen
İ
pek home. The rest of the team stood down.

Her daughter gave birth on the night of H
ı
d
ı
rellez, and so Gonca didn’t think about
Ş
ukru until the festival was over. As soon as the child, H
ı
z
ı
r, had been born, Gonca had taken him into the garden and danced with her daughters around the mulberry bush to which they had all tied their wishes. The baby’s mother, her unmarried daughter Hürrem, had stayed in the house drinking mint tea. Her mother had shown the child her one wish, a red ribbon with the name Mehmet Süleyman written on it.

But once the festival was over and little H
ı
z
ı
r was feeding contentedly from his mother, Gonca began to look around at her world, and when her father telephoned to ask after her brother, she realised that
Ş
ukru was missing. To begin with she consulted the cards, but they were unclear. The reading was confused, and although she wouldn’t always interpret an unclear reading with misfortune, this made her feel uneasy. She told Hürrem she was going to call Mehmet Süleyman.

Her daughter was contemptuous. ‘Why? Uncle
Ş
ukru is always going here and there. Why are you worried now? If you want Süleyman to come and have sex with you, then why not just ask him? He’ll come.’

Hürrem, like the rest of Gonca’s family, didn’t like Süleyman or any other kind of police officer. But Gonca ignored her. She called Süleyman, who said that he’d be with her as soon as he was able. Gonca went out into her garden and looked at his name written on the ribbon tied to her mulberry bush, and she hoped that the sick feeling she was experiencing was just a little bit of food poisoning.

‘I’ll need to take photocopies or scans,’ Çetin
İ
kmen said as he waded through the stack of papers that constituted the Osmano
ğ
lu family trees in the possession of Bo
ğ
aziçi University.

‘Of course.’ Professor Atay smiled. ‘Anything the university can do to assist you, Inspector. However, given the size of the problem …’

İ
kmen looked up. ‘Oh, I can’t hope to protect all these people, Professor,’ he said. ‘I will have to think carefully before I even warn them. Those closest to the victims we already have are only too aware that a pattern could be emerging. Do those relatives oblivious of a connection to the deceased need to know? I’m not sure. But I need to know who they are.’

Professor Atay picked up his phone. ‘I’ll ask one of our students to scan them for you.’

‘Thank you, sir. I appreciate your seeing me like this. To be honest, given the size of this family, coupled with your noted expertise, I didn’t know where else to go.’

‘It’s no problem.’

While the academic organised the scanning of the family trees,
İ
kmen sat down and considered the professor’s office. Bo
ğ
aziçi University, formally the American-run Robert College, was housed in a group of elegant turn-of-the-twentieth-century buildings in the fashionable Bosphorus village of Bebek. A highly respected institution, it had produced a slew of famous alumni, including government ministers, artists, writers and of course some celebrity academics such as Cem Atay.

While the professor was on the phone,
İ
kmen let his eyes wander around what was a very diverting room. There were some fantastic terracotta pots which looked as if they probably came from Italy, a framed print of one of the bulbous mother goddess idols from the ancient Anatolian site of Çatalhöyük and a large wooden panel that, to
İ
kmen, looked like something the Mayans or the Aztecs might have produced. When Atay had finished his call, he said to
İ
kmen, ‘It’s a copy of a sarcophagus lid from Palenque in southern Mexico. It shows King Pakal the Great descending through fleshless jaws into the Underworld. Above him is a bird god or monster, I’m not sure which. But he is passing from this life and into another, which to my way of thinking doesn’t look too comfortable.’