River of The Dead (14 page)

‘No one,’ she replied, with harsh lack of grace that was so rough it was almost as if she had slapped him in the face.

The e-mail from İkmen to Süleyman was very typically the product of one who had grown up without either Internet access or text messaging. It began with Dear Mehmet, and it ended with his own full name, Çetin İkmen. But what it contained was informative and that was the main thing.

Apparently Yusuf Kaya had been helped to get into solitary confinement at the Kartal Prison by another inmate. ‘Glamour’ pictures had, so İkmen said, changed hands in return for this favour. However, İkmen was still not convinced that this prisoner, Ara Berköz, had been the only person in the prison involved in Kaya’s escape. The wounded guard was still in a coma and so he couldn’t enlighten anyone, but İkmen was still sure neither about him nor about any of his colleagues. In addition, the two nurses, Faruk Öz and İsak Mardin, were still nowhere to be found. Apparently İkmen had tried to call the doctor in Şanlıurfa for whom Mardin was supposed to have worked before coming to İstanbul, but no such person existed. The previous administrator of the Cerrahpaşa, a Mr Oner, had according to Mardin’s file spoken to this non-existent man. But Oner had apparently committed suicide and so wasn’t available for comment. Lole, the third nurse who had gone ‘missing’ after Kaya’s escape, had returned to work. Lole, or rather his coffee, had disquieted İkmen as Süleyman recalled. Finally there was a message, sent via İkmen, from Ardıç. It basically reiterated his desire for Süleyman to ‘beat the locals to Kaya’.

‘Inspector?’

He turned round to see Brother Seraphim standing behind him.

‘I know it’s late, but there is a man at the monastery gate, a Kurd, who is insisting upon seeing you,’ the monk continued. ‘I know him. His name is Lütfü Güneş. He is not a troublesome man in my experience and I think that he is genuine in his desire to see you.’

‘You don’t know why he wants to see me?’ Süleyman asked.

‘No, he won’t say. I’ve let him into the monastery compound but I can ask him to leave just as easily.’

Süleyman shut down his e-mail and stood up. ‘I’ll see him,’ he said wearily.

It hadn’t been İkmen’s idea to hang around Beyoğlu looking for beggars. Ayşe had been quite happy to try to find any remnants of Hüseyin Altun’s child gang by herself. It was after all a pleasant evening and plenty of people were about, visiting the clubs, bars and restaurants of İstiklal Street and its environs. But then İkmen wasn’t just with Ayşe for professional reasons. He couldn’t bear the way that his wife was obsessing over Bekir. It was excessive and it made him fear for her. Because Bekir would hurt her again; İkmen knew that to the very bottom of his soul. The boy might be back, ostensibly clean, tidy and ready to put his life back together, but that didn’t mean that his father had to trust him. Somehow Bekir was going to mess things up again, and just at the moment İkmen couldn’t bear to even be in the room with him. So he was out on the streets with Ayşe watching gangs of probably foreign children sit outside the Tünel railway station, staring at tourists’ handbags.

‘I haven’t heard one of that lot speak Turkish,’ he said, tipping his head towards a large sprawl of kids leaning against the ATM machine just inside the station entrance.

‘Eastern European Roma, I think,’ Ayşe replied. ‘Not that Altun didn’t have some of those on his payroll. No one could ever have called Hüseyin a racist. He’d allow anyone, regardless of their race or religion, to share in his criminal lifestyle.’

The sun was setting now and although the day had been warm it was still early in the year and the evenings could be cold. As they came out of the station, quite a few of the tourists stopped to put on jackets and cardigans. Sometimes as they did so they put down bags and rucksacks which the lolling kids, as well as the adult men who were always lurking around children like this, would view hungrily. Hüseyin Altun had been one of the first and probably the most notorious adult leader of a child criminal gang, but he had, in recent years, faced some very stiff competition. İkmen watched carefully as the latest group of tourists readied themselves for a night out on the town, scanning the scene for signs of small hands diving with amazing speed into unattended bags. But although the children seemed largely unaware of anyone looking in their direction, the smart men in sports wear with them did not. One, a very muscular character probably in his early thirties, stared directly at İkmen for some time before saying something to a boy of about twelve in a language İkmen couldn’t understand.

But in spite of the obvious suspicion that the men and their kids were harbouring, none of them moved. One of the antique red and gold trams that run up and down İstiklal Street disgorged people at the station and then took on more passengers just off the strange little funicular railway that carries people up the steep hill that rises from Karaköy at the bottom to the southern end of İstiklal Street at the top. A well-trodden tourist route, Tünel had been targeted by genuine beggars as well as by thieves for some years.

İkmen looked away. Staring at these men and their kids wasn’t achieving anything, and besides, he and Ayşe were not there to catch street urchins stealing wallets, they were there to look for remnants of Hüseyin Altun’s gang. Although ostensibly prompted by one of his ‘feelings’, the notion that the escape of Yusuf Kaya from prison and Altun’s death were connected in some way was not really mystical in origin at all. Kaya was a drug dealer who had been in the city on and off for many years, Altun a native İstanbullu had been a junkie. Both of them had wandered up and down İstiklal Street for years and had to have at least known of each other. An increasing number of people seemed to have been either killed, injured and maybe bribed too around Kaya’s escape. Why not a pathetic junkie who might or might not have harboured the escaping convict? After all, Kaya must have needed to hole up somewhere before he took off for Gaziantep. İkmen’s eyes strayed on to a dark art nouveau building known as the Botter House. It was one of his favourite city buildings and it saddened him that it was now so unkempt. With so much of Beyoğlu under repair or repaired already this building stood out as a rare sad case. The word was that apparently there was some problem over the ownership of the place. A pull at his elbow ended his musings.

‘Sir, over there,’ Ayşe whispered, ‘by the simit seller’s cart.’

He looked across the square in front of the station towards the glass-cabinet-topped cart from which an old man was selling the bread rings called simit. He was taking money from a girl with long blond hair. She in turn clung on to the simit he had given her as if her life depended on it. But then she was probably hungry. Thin though she was, the girl was also in the advanced stages of pregnancy.

‘That’s Hüseyin Altun’s Bulgarian girl,’ Ayşe said to İkmen. ‘I wonder who the father of her child can be?’

İkmen said, ‘Let’s ask her, shall we?’

They both walked over to the simit cart.

It was the man with glittering black eyes who had pushed past him outside the Kayas’ house in Mardin.

‘Yusuf Kaya has a second wife,’ the Kurd said without even a pretence of preamble.

He wouldn’t actually enter the monastery buildings, so they had to talk in the freezing cold courtyard at the middle of the monastery complex. Süleyman was wearing his overcoat but even so it was still far from warm and he remained exhausted. But the Kurd, who was himself wearing a thick woollen shawl, had insisted. He didn’t want the monks ‘involved’ as he put it. They were good people.

‘She is a foreigner,’ Lütfü Güneş continued.

Süleyman, surprised to say the least by this revelation, was also straining to understand the man’s eccentric accent. ‘What kind of foreigner?’ he asked.

‘American.’

‘American?’ That out in a place like Mardin was very, very foreign. ‘Are you sure?’

‘He keeps her in a house out by Dara,’ the Kurd said.

Süleyman didn’t know either what Dara was or where it was.

‘Dara is a village out on the Ocean,’ Lütfü Güneş explained. ‘She is an American, she is his wife and she lives there surrounded by wormwood.’

Thinking that perhaps he had misheard, Süleyman said, ‘Wormwood? As in wormwood the—’

‘Wormwood,’ the Kurd interrupted. ‘As I say.’ He held up one silencing hand. ‘But I’ll say no more. No one else will tell you that this woman exists and you need to know.’

‘Do Kaya’s mother and his wife Zeynep—’

‘Of course they know!’ the Kurd said contemptuously. ‘But they won’t speak and you need to know.’

‘Why?’ Süleyman asked. ‘Is Kaya with this American wife? Is he hiding with her now?’

Lütfü Güneş shrugged. ‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ he said.

‘If you don’t care, why are you telling me?’

The Kurd looked down at the ground. ‘I don’t want a war with the Kayas,’ he said. ‘I don’t personally bear them any ill will. But Yusuf wrongs everyone and my name should not be spoken to his clan.’ He looked up, his eyes wet with either the cold or emotion or both. ‘I rejoiced when Yusuf Kaya went to prison. Someone must put him back there and it must be someone from outside.’

‘Inspector Taner—’

‘No one will tell Taner anything,’ the Kurd said with bitterness in his voice. ‘She betrays her own kind! The only reason she is still alive is out of respect for her father.’

Seçkin Taner, the famous and mysterious Master of Sharmeran, as Süleyman recalled. ‘Master’ – whatever that might mean – of a mythical snake goddess, what nonsense! And yet it meant something powerful to these people seemingly irrespective of their ethnicities or religions. It also apparently helped to keep the local inspector breathing.

The Kurd took a cigarette out from underneath the folds of his shawl and lit up. ‘Go to the American wife,’ he said, ‘and find Kaya. Only a person without a clan can arrest him without starting a war in the city and out in the Ocean.’

He turned to leave, but Süleyman put a restraining hand on his shoulder. ‘Have you seen Kaya since he escaped from prison? Have you seen him here in the Tur Abdin?’

The Kurd looked at him with obvious distaste. ‘No, I have not,’ he said. ‘Why would I?’

‘And wormwood? What—’

‘Ask your unnatural woman about that,’ he said, echoing the sentiments, Süleyman recalled, of the Kaya women. Taner was unnatural because she was a policewoman and maybe for other reasons too. Maybe her being the daughter of a Master of Sharmeran put her in an ambiguous place. Maybe people around her were both jealous and fearful, admiring and awestruck in equal measure.

The Kurd left and then, in spite of the lateness of the hour, Süleyman called Edibe Taner.

The Bulgarian girl told İkmen and Ayşe Farsakoğlu that her name was Sophia. Whether that was in fact her real name was not ascertained at that point. She did not however, whatever her name was, want to talk about Hüseyin Altun. Nevertheless, mainly due to Ayşe Farsakoğlu’s easy and tactful manner, she was persuaded that accompanying the officers to one of the cafés in the lovely Belle Époque-style passage known as Tünel Geçidi was going to be far more pleasant than going with them to police headquarters. As she plonked herself down grumpily in one of the wrought-iron chairs amid the luxuriant plants that almost overwhelmed the passage she said to Ayşe, ‘I want latte and a piece of tiramisu.’

Ayşe looked at her boss for confirmation. ‘Get the lady what she wants, Ayşe,’ he said. ‘I’ll have tea if places like this do tea.’

She went into the indoor section of the café they had chosen to sit outside – mainly because no one else was sitting there – and ordered. İkmen, although anxious to discover what, if anything, Sophia might know about Hüseyin Altun’s associates, kept quiet until his deputy returned. He did not, after all, know this heavily pregnant, and heavily accented, girl at all.

‘So, Sophia,’ Ayşe said when she re-joined them at the table, ‘it’s been quite a while. I see that you’re pregnant. Congratulations.’

The girl looked up at Ayşe with a sneer on her lips. ‘What you want, Sergeant Farsakoğlu?’ she said. ‘I don’t do nothing now, you know.’

‘Sophia, I didn’t see you begging,’ Ayşe said. ‘I just want to talk.’ She fixed the girl with her eyes. ‘About Hüseyin.’

Sophia shrugged. ‘Is dead, I hear.’

‘Yes, he is dead,’ Ayşe said. ‘Someone killed him.’

‘Hüseyin, he was a bad man, he use heroin,’ Sophia said without either surprise or emotion. ‘I am away from him.’

‘Sophia.’ İkmen smiled at her. ‘I am Sergeant Farsakoğlu’s superior. I know you’ve done nothing wrong. But we need to find out if Hüseyin knew a man called Yusuf Kaya. He was a drug dealer, lived over in Tarlabaşı.’

Sophia did not respond in any obvious way to this. ‘A lot of drug dealers in Tarlabaşı,’ she said.

‘Yusuf Kaya is a middle-aged man. Tall, dark, apparently attractive to women,’ İkmen said. And then he added, ‘Last year he was convicted of the murder of a Suriani prostitute and a Russian drug dealer known as Tommi Kerensky.’

At this last name, Sophia looked up. This time there was fear on her face. ‘Tommi? The man who kill Tommi? Is in prison—’

‘Is out of prison now,’ İkmen said. ‘Escaped.’

Whether consciously or otherwise, Sophia’s hands grasped her enormous belly and she said, ‘That is very bad, I think.’

‘Sophia, do you, or rather did Hüseyin know this man, this Yusuf Kaya?’

The waiter appeared then and so at least a minute was spent organising drinks while İkmen took in the enormous size of the cake Sophia had made Ayşe order for her. As the girl spooned the first great cream-laden glob into her mouth she briefly closed her eyes. Only when İkmen repeated his question did she open them again. Then she frowned.

‘Some years ago and once only I go to the apartment of the man who kill Tommi,’ Sophia said. ‘I recognise the place from the television last year. They show this as the place Tommi died.’