River of The Dead (2 page)

Every police officer in the city of İstanbul spent almost every waking moment looking for the escaped convict Yusuf Kaya. For three days and nights the entire city, or so it seemed to its residents, was turned upside down. Every bar, every nightclub, every bathhouse – anywhere Kaya might have had a market for his cocaine and his heroin – was raided. Every one of his old neighbours in his home district of Tarlabaşı was questioned. Those not drifting into or out of a heroin-induced haze claimed to know nothing about him. Those drugged up to the eyes didn’t know what year it was. But the investigating officer, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman, knew Tarlabaşı of old. Yusuf Kaya had in fact been arrested by the handsome and urbane Süleyman the previous summer. On what had probably been the hottest day in that July, Süleyman and his men had raided Kaya’s crumbling fifth-floor apartment and found a considerable quantity of heroin and two dead bodies. One was Kaya’s mistress, a Syrian prostitute called Hana; the other was a rival drug dealer, a Russian called Tommi Kerensky.

When Süleyman and his men raided the apartment, Hana had been dead for some days. But as the inspector’s informant had intimated, Tommi had been tortured for many hours and had only just died when the police arrived. Kaya, calmly as was his wont, was sawing one of the Russian’s legs off when he was arrested. That someone so dangerous – ‘psychopathic’, the psychiatrist who had assessed him after his arrest had said – was free once again was a frightening thought. And while his colleague Çetin İkmen worked on trying to determine from the Cerrahpaşa Hospital just who those nurses and cleaners who freed Kaya might have been, it was up to Süleyman to find out whether the prisoner had been or was back home.

Less than a week after the arrest, Kaya’s landlord had rented his apartment out to another man. Adem Ceylan was a known heroin user who was a familiar sight in rougher parts of the city like Tarlabaşı. For years he’d been living, on and off, with a German woman called Regina who was also a junkie, known to the police as a very persistent beggar in the main Beyoğlu shopping area of İstiklal Street. Filthy and screaming with hatred for just about everyone and everything, Regina could terrify even quite large groups of tourists into giving her money.

Adem let the tall inspector and his shorter, fatter sergeant İzzet Melik into what passed for his sitting room and then, breathlessly, sat down.

‘Those stairs don’t get any easier!’ he said as he coughed on a soggy hand-rolled cigarette.

Süleyman looked around, unsurprised that the place looked almost identical to what he’d seen of it the previous year. Even the chairs and tables were Kaya’s. But then junkies were not the best housekeepers going and he was simply relieved that his officers had cleaned up Tommi’s blood before they left. Both Süleyman and Melik declined the foul seats that Adem offered them.

‘You know of course about Yusuf Kaya,’ Süleyman said without preamble.

Adem nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was a bit frightened that he might come back here. Went to see my landlord as it happens, I was so worried. Not for myself, you understand, but with Regina . . .’

It was hard to reconcile the image of the spitting, cursing Regina with someone who needed to be protected, but both Süleyman and Melik nodded anyway.

‘What did your landlord tell you?’ Süleyman asked.

He had already spoken to Kaya’s old landlord himself. That too hadn’t been a comfortable experience. The landlord, though not a drug user or even a drinker, was a man unaccustomed to personal hygiene. As his many, many grime-stained children ran around their father, Süleyman watched in horror as the landlord’s hair moved to the rhythm of a million or so blood-sucking nits. It wasn’t a sight that an experienced police officer in his forties, like Süleyman, hadn’t seen before. But it was one that even now turned the stomach of a man who came from a gracious, if impoverished, Ottoman family. As it happened, the landlord had, as he always did, claimed to know nothing about anything. But maybe speaking to someone not in authority, like Adem, was different.

‘My landlord reckons the Christians know something,’ Adem said darkly.

‘The Christians?’

Adem tipped his head in the direction of the window behind his chair. ‘Over at the church,’ he said. ‘That Hana, the one he . . . Well . . . She was a Christian. Suriani. Every Sunday over at the Virgin Mary church she was. Atoning for her sins, I imagine. But Kaya, so my landlord says, was a Christian too.’

İzzet Melik rolled his eyes at yet another stupid myth. ‘Kaya isn’t a Christian,’ he said. ‘I think some people round here would like to think he’s different from them. But he’s a Muslim.’

‘Yes, but my landlord says that the Christians at the church—’

‘Kaya comes originally from Mardin, which is a city with a considerable Christian population,’ Süleyman said. ‘But he himself is not one of them. As you say, his unfortunate victim was, and you may remember that many people, including myself, attended Hana Karim’s funeral service at the Virgin Mary church. The clergy over there know little of Kaya.’

Adem shrugged. ‘I’m just going on what my landlord said.’

İzzet Melik turned his heavily mustachioed face towards his boss and shook his head. There was no point in continuing the conversation with Adem. He obviously had some sort of fixation, whether in reality taken from his landlord or not, that Yusuf Kaya was a Christian. Anything more about the escapee he claimed not to know.

Once outside the rotten and peeling apartment building, both İzzet Melik and Mehmet Süleyman lit up cigarettes.

‘What do you think, Inspector?’ İzzet said as he looked down the litter-strewn street, through the tall line of dilapidated nineteenth-century apartment buildings. The church, to the left of where the men were standing, was the only building in the whole quarter that looked cared for.

Süleyman sighed. ‘I don’t think Kaya came back here,’ he said. ‘Why would he? His old henchmen are either long gone or dead. I think he’s probably abroad by now.’

‘The people who sprang him were certainly professional,’ İzzet Melik said.

‘Absolutely. To kill three officers and effectively disable, probably permanently, a fourth takes some doing.’ He looked around at the hot, filthy street with distaste, and then added, ‘You don’t find people like that in Tarlabaşı. Or rather’ – he smiled – ‘I don’t think you do.’

‘It’s only the priests at the church who aren’t stoned out of their minds round here,’ İzzet said.

‘Yes, and Kaya himself when he lived here,’ his superior agreed. ‘Until the unfortunate Tommi tried to move in on the quarter, Mr Kaya had this very big market for his products all to himself.’

‘Kaya never used himself?’

Süleyman smiled again. ‘Oh, no, İzzet,’ he said. ‘Yusuf Kaya was a very good drug dealer. He never, ever touched his own products. It was because he was always straight, basically, that he killed Hana Karim.’

İzzet frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It is said that Yusuf noticed that Hana’s behaviour changed some time towards the end of 2004. He watched her and discovered that she was having an affair with another man. If he’d been off the planet on heroin he would never even have noticed. Doesn’t mean he’s not a raving lunatic, however, as we well know. One does not cross Yusuf Kaya.’

Tucked away behind a small suite of lecture rooms, the office of the administrator of the Cerrahpaşa Hospital was both clean and quiet. Mercifully distant from the chaotic medical business of the hospital, it was a place where, he hoped, Çetin İkmen could interview the facility’s senior managerial official in peace.

‘What you have to understand, Inspector, is that hospital cleaning staff come and go all the time,’ the administrator, a small, tired-looking man behind a large dark-wood desk told him. ‘Some, of course, mainly the middle-aged women with families, have been with us for years. But two young men like the ones on the security footage . . .’ He shrugged.

İkmen had just viewed the somewhat fuzzy security tape which showed the murder of Yusuf Kaya’s guards and his subsequent escape. The cleaners and the nurses – all male – who had liberated the gangster had been both young and quick. Together with Yusuf Kaya, three of them had taken a guard or a police officer and, seemingly without any hesitation or remorse, stabbed him. In all but one instance the wound had proved fatal. İkmen looked across at the clearly shaken hospital administrator and said, ‘The surviving guard . . .’

‘As you know, Inspector, he is still unconscious. Dr Eldem cannot be sure when or even if the unfortunate man will awaken. Neurology is not an exact discipline, as I’m sure you know.’

‘Indeed.’ This wasn’t the first time İkmen had had to wait for a potential witness to come out of a coma. Some years previously he had actually had to wait for one of his own colleagues to surface before he could question him about an incident. But in this instance, he knew he had to accept that the prison guard, Ramazan Eren, might never recover. Mr Eren’s heart had been grazed by his assailant’s weapon and he had lost a vast amount of blood. Whether he would ever regain consciousness, and, if he did, whether he would still have normal mental capacity, were moot points.

‘As you saw for yourself, the security footage wasn’t clear,’ İkmen said as he pulled one of the administrator’s ashtrays towards him and lit up a cigarette. ‘We can’t identify any of the people caught by it, even those, like Kaya, whom we know. We may have more to go on once the images have been enhanced but that is by no means a certainty. Do you have any possible names for the cleaners or the nurses?’

The administrator switched on his computer terminal. Hospitals were such
public
places! In one sense that worked against criminal activity, because of the large numbers of people around. But in another, provided the timing was right, hospitals were wide open in that regard. Yusuf Kaya had been rescued very early in the morning, when the hospital was probably at its quietest. The only problems the rescuers had experienced had to have revolved around the timing of the attempt. It had been the prison governor who had made the decision to have Kaya sent to the Cerrahpaşa in the early hours of the morning. True, he had been encouraged to make some sort of decision by members of his staff, including Ramazan Eren, who had apparently been alarmed by Kaya’s condition. But unless the governor himself was involved, the placing of the cleaners and nurses at the scene had to have been a speculative act. The hospital administrator had admitted that tracking down a couple of casual cleaners was probably well-nigh impossible, but the nurses could have been, indeed in İkmen’s mind had to have been, ‘embedded’ within the hospital for some time. Even so, on the morning in question, they had to have been activated by someone, told that Kaya was coming. And that someone had almost certainly been a person or persons inside the prison. If that person or persons was either Ramazan Eren or Cengiz Bayar or both, they had paid a very high price for their treachery. But then Yusuf Kaya, as İkmen knew from his friend Mehmet Süleyman, was a ruthless, unfeeling psychopath. The death of two ‘bent’ prison guards, if that was indeed what they had been, would simply serve to save him anxiety and money, because if cash hadn’t been involved somewhere along the line İkmen would be very surprised. In addition, there were the two dead police officers . . .

‘There are three male nurses who have not reported for duty since that morning,’ the administrator said as he peered at his screen. ‘İsak Mardin from Zeyrek, Murat Lole from Karaköy, and Faruk Öz, who lives in Gaziosmanpaşa.’

İkmen frowned. Yusuf Kaya, it was well known, came originally from Mardin. What were the chances of one of these nurses having that name?

‘I’ll need their contact details,’ he said. ‘All of them.’

The administrator frowned. ‘You’ll contact these men?’ He looked over at his computer screen once again. ‘Lole and Öz work in the same department, orthopaedics. I believe their supervisor has already tried or maybe even succeeded in speaking to them. Would you like to speak to someone in the department?’

‘Yes.’

İkmen, or rather some of his officers, would almost certainly be paying all the missing nurses a visit in the very near future, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to speak to their colleagues and superiors too.

Several hours later, when he emerged from the Cerrahpaşa, İkmen had a slightly clearer picture about İsak Mardin, Murat Lole and Faruk Öz. Both Öz and Lole worked on the orthopaedics ward, as the administrator had said. Mardin’s speciality was cardiac care, which made sense in relation to his possible appearance on a corridor leading to the cardiology clinic. Lole had been contacted by his superiors since the Kaya incident and was apparently at home with a bad cold. İkmen himself had spoken to the man on the telephone and Lole had readily agreed to be interviewed by the police. Mardin and Öz were seemingly uncontactable. After lighting up a cigarette in the lee of the ambulance station, İkmen called his sergeant, Ayşe Farsakoğlu, and told her to assemble a squad of officers to meet him at İsak Mardin’s address in Zeyrek.

When he’d finished the call, İkmen dropped his mobile telephone into his pocket with a sigh. In spite of the seriousness of having a murderer like Yusuf Kaya on the run in the city that was both his home and his passion, İkmen was finding it hard to concentrate. All he could think about was the son who had come home after nineteen long and, for his wife Fatma particularly, painful years. A difficult and at times violent child, Bekir İkmen had begun to take drugs – just cannabis to start off with – from the age of thirteen. No threats about endangering his own liberty or putting his father’s career at risk had had any effect, and Bekir had quickly tired of cannabis and gone on to cocaine, acid, amphetamines – anything he could get his hands on. By the time he ran away from home two years later, his brothers and sisters, as well as Çetin İkmen himself, were almost relieved. Living around Bekir and his drug-fuelled rages had been difficult and it was only Fatma İkmen who actually cried when it became clear that her third-born son was not coming home.