River of The Dead (13 page)

‘That is the Mardin museum,’ Taner said when she saw him looking up at it. ‘One of the newer buildings in the old city.’

‘Newer?’

‘It’s nineteenth-century,’ she said. ‘It was built as the Syrian Catholic Patriarchate. Now it’s our museum. Come.’

She led him across the square, past the 1960s kebab restaurant and into an alleyway that, in terms of architectural style, owed more to Damascus than to İstanbul. It was bounded by high stone walls, and as they walked towards Yusuf Kaya’s family home they passed many donkeys and mules laden with all sorts of bundles and baggage.

‘In Mardin we use donkeys to carry our rubbish away,’ Taner explained as they approached a tiny doorway in a very high, yellow wall. ‘You have trucks in İstanbul, we have donkeys here.’ She smiled. ‘In terms of global warming, I think we are better.’ And then she stopped. ‘Now, Inspector, when we go through this doorway we will be in the family home of Yusuf Kaya. Unlike most of the mansions of Mardin, which are divided into flats, this house is just one dwelling for one family. So everyone you will see from now on will be connected to Yusuf Kaya in some way. As I told you in the car, I interviewed his wife, his mother and a whole host of relations when he first escaped from prison and our officers have been watching this property ever since. But now I want you to meet them too. Or rather I want them to see that you, the officer who arrested him in İstanbul, is not easily going to let Yusuf go. They will be very nice and polite to you, even though they hate you almost as much as they hate me. They’ll make you drink mirra. I’m sorry.’

‘Hate you? Why do they hate you?’ Süleyman asked.

Edibe Taner, who still hadn’t slept since Birecik, said, ‘Because I’m a woman and a police officer and therefore very unnatural. I belong to a different clan, my father is a Master of Sharmeran . . .’

‘Which means? Master of Sharmeran?’

‘Come on, we must go inside now,’ Taner said, bending her head to get through the tiny door in the thick high wall. ‘We are expected.’

Süleyman, still none the wiser about the exact nature of a Master of Sharmeran, followed. As he went through he pushed past a man whose head and face were almost totally obscured by a thick woollen shawl. The man looked at him briefly though glittering black eyes and then ran off down the alleyway in the direction of Avenue Two.

Çiçek İkmen found only her youngest brother Kemal at home when she turned up at her parents’ apartment in Sultanahmet. In between their various flight shifts, Çiçek had learned enough from her brother Bülent about their mother’s behaviour to make her feel alarmed. As one of the older İkmen children, Çiçek remembered all the trouble Bekir had caused before he ran away and all the heartache his departure had left behind it. But her mother and Bekir were out, so she had to try to get some sort of view on her mother’s behaviour from her sullen teenage brother Kemal. Bülent had also mentioned some sort of smell that seemed to be suddenly present in their parents’ home.

‘Kemal,’ she said as she sat down behind her mother’s large kitchen table, ‘how are things? With our brother Bekir?’

The boy, who was fiddling rather ineffectually with the samovar, looked sheepishly across at this sister who was old enough to be his mother. ‘OK,’ he said, pushing a hank of greasy black hair away from his spot-encrusted forehead.

‘Do you think that Mum spends a lot of time with Bekir?’

‘Maybe.’ He had poured some tea into a glass for his sister and was now trying to top it up with water from the samovar, but he was trying to turn the handle the wrong way. Like almost all of her brothers, Kemal had been indulged by their mother to such an extent that he was domestically useless. Only Bülent seemed to have emerged from this child-like dependence upon women and that was because Çiçek, who lived with him, flatly refused to indulge him.

But she had to make an exception and help this boy because otherwise he was going to break the samovar. ‘Out of the way.’ As she pushed him aside she felt the heat from his blushing face. She also smelt something very unpleasant and, as Bülent had put it, ‘musty’ too. It was coming, she felt, from Kemal. Knowing, because she knew her mother so well, that it couldn’t possibly be the smell of dirty or unaired clothes, she had to assume that it came from something else Kemal was doing.

‘What’s that smell, Kemal?’ she asked as she finished making up her glass of tea.

‘Smell?’ He blushed again.

‘Yes, smell,’ his sister said. ‘Like a sort of yeasty or musty smell.’

He didn’t respond. She took, she knew, an evil delight in his embarrassment. But then he was a moody, awkward and tedious boy. Her mother had been over forty when she’d had him and he’d aged her. ‘You must be able to smell it, Kemal.’

‘Cream for my spots,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s a new one. Smells a bit.’ His entire head was red now and she noticed he was actually sweating. Finally she felt ashamed of herself. Poor Kemal. He was the only one of her siblings to have suffered horribly with acne and now he was having to apply vile-smelling creams in an attempt to alleviate his misery. But at least there wasn’t some sort of damp or rot in the apartment that she needed to tell her father about. Not that Çetin İkmen would exactly go into overdrive in order to fix such a problem. He was nothing if not totally careless about his home. But it had bothered Bülent enough, together with their mother’s behaviour, to warrant a visit from Çiçek, and now that the smell was dealt with she went on to other matters.

‘Kemal,’ she said as she drank her tea and then lit up a cigarette. ‘Mum and Bekir—’

‘I’m not going to say anything against him if that’s what you think! You’re just like Bülent, just totally jealous and stuff!’ her still brick red brother flared. ‘Bekir’s cool! I like him!’

And without another word he stomped out of the kitchen and went to his room. Çiçek, alone in the kitchen now, was frankly rather shocked. Kemal had never been easy even as a small child, but one thing he had never been before was in any way partisan with regard to his siblings. He had, in the past, either hated or disregarded them all with equal force. Now suddenly he had a favourite. Çiçek wondered why. But then, recalling how manipulative her brother Bekir had been when they were children, she thought that perhaps Kemal’s behaviour wasn’t that difficult to understand. Bekir, as she recalled, had always delighted in playing people off against each other. He’d done it with her and her older brothers who had actually fought, basically over Bekir. What, she wondered, was he doing with Kemal now? Who was he pitching the boy up against, or was it everyone?

Later, bored with Kemal’s seething silence and fed up with waiting for her mother, Çiçek left. As she walked down the hall to retrieve her shoes from the rack by the front door, the musty smell if anything got even stronger.

The house the Kaya family and their attendants now lived in had once been the home of a wealthy Syrian Christian family. The two-storey house was arranged in the traditional way in that the family lived on the upper storey and used the courtyard and the rooms down below for cooking, storage and servant and animal accommodation. Not that they had servants, as such. Those wild-eyed men who served Süleyman and Taner with mirra coffee at the request of the women of the house were not like the ancient retainers the man from İstanbul could remember his grandfather employing. These were no soft-spoken remnants from a previous age, not with guns in their belts and resentment on their faces.

Süleyman had seen Yusuf Kaya’s wife, Zeynep, before. She, together with one of her sons and some other women, had attended her husband’s trial in İstanbul. Compared to many gangsters’ women he had come across in the past, Zeynep Kaya was very low-key indeed. Whereas some would scream, curse and even fight those around them when their men were sentenced to long prison terms, Zeynep Kaya had remained silent behind the chiffon scarf that had covered her head and mouth for the whole of the proceedings. One of her sons, a boy in his early teens Süleyman reckoned, had done enough of the other sort of thing for both of them. But this time no young boy, nor indeed any children, were in evidence. There was just Zeynep and an old veiled woman who Taner told him was Yusuf Kaya’s mother, Bilqis.

As they sat down on the floor beside the table upon which the mirra was being served, Taner said to Süleyman, ‘Bilqis Kaya speaks only Arabic. I will translate.’

As they sat, Zeynep Kaya followed them solemnly with her dark, wrinkle-encrusted eyes. She looked to be about the same age as her husband, but now that her face was uncovered Süleyman could see that much of what she must have felt at Yusuf’s trial had settled bitterly around a mouth that was small, tight and mean. There was something else too: a tattoo which she wore on her left cheek. Süleyman could see that it was a scorpion.

The older woman growled something which Taner told Süleyman was a greeting. In his turn he thanked her for her hospitality, which she seemed to understand. She then told him to drink his mirra, something which Edibe Taner translated with some hesitation. Her guest so obviously did not like the stuff. But Süleyman gamely raised the small cup he had been given to his lips and took a sip without so much as a murmur.

‘I haven’t seen my husband and neither has any of our family,’ Zeynep Kaya said without looking at either Taner or Süleyman.

‘To hide Yusuf, who is a convicted criminal under prison sentence, would be counted as an offence,’ Taner responded in, Süleyman noticed, the same rather harsh accent as the gangster’s wife. ‘Whatever your feelings might be, Zeynep, you have children to consider.’

‘And my husband is the father of those children,’ the woman snapped with now raw and open hatred. ‘They are my world, all of them.’

‘Zeynep, you’re not a fool,’ Taner said. She calmly sipped her coffee and then lit a cigarette. ‘Yusuf has other women from here to İstanbul, and probably beyond. He—’

‘Yusuf is my husband—’

‘Yusuf killed the prostitute he was living with in İstanbul,’ Taner butted in forcefully. ‘He murdered her, as you know from the trial. When Inspector Süleyman here arrested your husband, Yusuf was in the process of sawing the legs off a business rival he had just tortured to death!’

The old Arab woman said something that, to Süleyman, sounded vicious and spiteful. Edibe Taner responded, he noticed, in kind. When she had finished speaking the Mardin officer said to Süleyman, ‘Bilqis Kaya has just reminded me that as a native of Mardin I should not be helping outsiders against my own kind.’

Süleyman raised an eyebrow.

‘I have told her,’ Taner continued, ‘that her son Yusuf is in no way “my own kind”, that she herself should want her very dangerous and disturbed son to be caught for his own sake if nothing else, and that anyway you as well as all your colleagues in İstanbul will not rest until Yusuf is apprehended.’

‘Anyway, how could my husband even get into the city without
you
seeing him?’ Zeynep said, leaning across the table towards Taner. ‘No one does anything without
you
having your eyes and ears everywhere, knowing—’

‘And now I have an officer from İstanbul with me,’ Taner responded with a smile on her face. ‘Someone you won’t be able to even think about influencing. Zeynep, if you or any member of your family knows where Yusuf is and I find out, I will make sure that as many of you as possible are punished for it.’

‘Oh, you are so spiteful, Edibe Taner!’ Zeynep Kaya said. ‘Spiteful and alone!’

There was a moment of silence while Taner looked at Zeynep Kaya with a studiedly casual expression on her face. They were of an age, Taner and Yusuf Kaya’s wife, the latter maybe a few years older. But one was married and one was not and in places like Mardin that would always give a woman like Zeynep the higher status whatever job her rival, as it were, might choose to do.

‘You only persecute those no longer in your circle,’ the gangster’s wife pushed on. ‘At least we don’t harbour guns for terrorists. Not like your Christian friends—’

So quickly did Taner jump to her feet that for a moment Süleyman wondered whether she had accidentally dropped her coffee in her lap. She certainly looked as if she might have been scalded.

‘What others may or may not be doing is nothing to do with you!’ Bent at her slim waist, she hissed down at the gangster’s wife still seated by the table on the ground.

‘You believed him, your “saint”,’ the woman continued. ‘Can’t believe your own blood, no! But some monk whose own family are terrorists—’

‘Shut your mouth, Zeynep, or I will shut it for you!’ Taner looked as if she might be about to spit at the woman before her. ‘And don’t you talk to me about blood, don’t ever talk to me about blood!’

The police officers left, Süleyman in Taner’s furious wake. She explained nothing about whatever had just happened in the Kaya house beyond saying to Süleyman, ‘Well, now the bitches know who you are!’

In silence they passed up the litter-strewn alleyway that led back to Republic Square. Distracted by the overwhelming smell of mirra that seemed to be coming from almost everywhere, Süleyman didn’t notice the old man come up behind them until he was actually level with Taner. When she saw the old man, a small flat-capped peasant in a sheep’s-fleece jerkin, suddenly and spectacularly Taner smiled. Then, after a short and tender embrace, they spoke. What they spoke in, Süleyman couldn’t even begin to fathom. All he knew was that it was neither Turkish nor Kurdish nor even Arabic.

They talked, Taner and the man, for minutes rather than seconds, the policewoman saying not a word by way of explanation to the clueless Süleyman. During the course of their conversation her face was by turns grave and joyful and, when the old man finally left her to disappear down some tiny, dark passageway, she bade him farewell with a smile and a kiss. Then, her face set straight once again, she was going to walk on without another word when Süleyman challenged her. ‘Who was that?’ he asked.