River of The Dead (39 page)

‘I don’t care what you think!’ Taner said. ‘I don’t care!’

Her grief was getting in the way. Süleyman had to get her out of there, and quickly. But he had to find out what he was up against first, because the Wormwood Route was important. The Wormwood Route, if all the hype about it was true, was very important indeed.

‘Miss Smith,’ he said, ‘are you going to provide us with details about the Wormwood Route?’

Her answer was immediate. ‘No.’

Edibe Taner was nearly shaking herself on to the floor by this time. Süleyman took hold of her arm and pulled her to her feet.

‘Why is that, Miss Smith?’ he said. ‘What use can that information be to you in prison?’

‘Same use as it was to Yusuf,’ she replied with a smile. ‘People knew that he and only he knew it and they left him alone. Also, a lot of people were willing to help him get out.’

‘Miss Smith, if İbrahim Keser told his friend . . .’

‘Friend? What friend?’ She was frantic now. ‘Tell me his name and I’ll . . .’

‘You’ll what?’ Süleyman said. ‘Give me the Wormwood Route?’

There was a moment of silence and then she said, ‘I’ll get out.’

Aware that Taner was about to explode or collapse, Süleyman knocked on the door to attract the attention of the constable on guard outside. As soon as the man opened up, he pushed the shaking Taner through the door, and then he turned back to Elizabeth Smith.

‘If you plan to escape . . .’

‘Oh, I will escape,’ she said. ‘You won’t be able to even think about holding on to me. Solitary, putting me in some godforsaken hole in the middle of nowhere . . .’ She laughed.

‘But if those who decide these things put you in a prison with Suriani inmates you will find that your escape plans will fail,’ Süleyman said. ‘You killed their saint.’

‘You mean they’ll try to kill me?’

‘What do you think, Miss Smith? Between the Surianis and any influence that friend of your lover might have in prison, you’ll be at risk. There are a lot of Kurdish people everywhere.’

Her face froze. Had she suddenly made the connection between her lover and one of his friends who was a Kurd? Had she even known of the existence of Lütfü Güneş?

He gathered the papers and files on the table together and made for the door once again. He rapped once on the metal grille and then turned back towards the woman. ‘I would urge you most strongly to rethink your position. You can be in danger or you can be out of danger.’

‘Or I can be out,’ she said, and then she pushed her features into a broad smile. ‘Because you and I both know, Inspector Süleyman, that where billions of dollars are involved there is no such thing as an honest person. I love this land purely and truly. But when billions of dollars came into view, to ensure that I would never have to leave it, that I could in fact control it and that all I had to do to get that was to kill . . .’ She sighed. ‘Saints, sinners, foreigners, whatever, it all don’t mean diddly squat.’

There were quite a few absences from Gabriel Saatçi’s funeral. Men once resident at the house in Dara and, in some cases, their families too had just disappeared. Of course there were rumours. Because these men were known to have gone in and out of Iraq and Syria on their various errands and missions, those countries seemed to be likely destinations. There were also places not on easy terms with Turkey where one could easily fall off the radar. Elizabeth Smith wouldn’t say one way or the other. That she had been leaving the country in some way when she was captured, however, was certain. But then, after the killing of the Kaya family, how could she have stayed? Now the house in Dara, the centre of the Wormwood operation, was silent and empty. But for how long, Süleyman wondered as he looked at the long line of mourners standing in the streets waiting for Gabriel Saatçi’s funeral cortège to make its way back from Mar Behnam church to St Sobo’s monastery. It was nearly two weeks now since the monk had been killed and in the meantime Süleyman had been back to İstanbul to attend Bekir İkmen’s funeral. Apart from the fact that he still had work to finish up in Mardin, he had promised Edibe Taner that he would attend Brother Gabriel’s funeral. Dressed in a black suit and tie, he bowed his head as the coffin passed in front of him and the woman at his side began to weep. He knew her and so, in the absence of any kind of visible handkerchief, he offered her his. Lucine Rezian, Edibe Taner’s Armenian aunt from Gaziantep, thanked him.

‘My son Rafik usually takes care of me when we leave our home,’ she said. ‘But he couldn’t come today and my brother-in-law Seçkin is too busy with his daughter to be bothered with me. Not that I am complaining. Edibe is a soul in torment.’

He had seen his Mardin colleague earlier. Veiled and dressed in black, she could barely walk, even with the support of her father on one side and Constable Selahattin on the other. Everyone looked at her and spoke behind their hands about her. Everyone, after all, did know.

‘She has lost the love of her life,’ Lucine continued. ‘The light has gone out in her world. Her soul is in exile and there is no way back. I know.’

When he had first met this woman he had found her talk about times past fascinating. He had in fact been rather aggravated by Edibe Taner’s apparent desire to lend her words no credence and to keep him away from her. She’d described the old woman as ‘mad’ which hadn’t seemed fair then and didn’t now. But there was a hopelessness about her, a sorrow, that was disturbing.

‘Exile of the soul?’

The old woman nodded. ‘When one is detached from something so loved, just the thought of it can bring the urge to kill oneself,’ she said. And then, reading the graveness on his face, she continued, ‘It can be a person, a place, even a time in one’s life. Sometimes, as in your case, it is a time you do not even remember.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You are an Ottoman,’ she said. ‘Edibe told me. She heard it from someone she works with who had been in İstanbul. She’s very thorough. Remember when I told you about the Cobweb World? The Cobweb World is where exiles go. It is where I am. Where else would an Armenian be? Modern Armenia has nothing to do with me. It’s an awful place. I don’t belong there. As an Ottoman you don’t belong in modern İstanbul. You don’t even want to be there, not deep down in your soul.’

He watched the end of the cortège pass before him and then offered his arm to Lucine Rezian as they joined the rest of the mourners following on behind the coffin.

‘So where do I want to be?’ he asked.

‘In your palace, riding out with the Sultan, doing things that Ottomans do.’

Edibe Taner had been right after all. This woman was clearly foolish. He didn’t want to do any of those things. Did he?

‘Now you are poor like the rest of us and you have accepted that like a good Muslim,’ she said. ‘But in the dark of the night you think about what might have been had history been different. You don’t even know that you’re doing it.’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘Why do you think that people refer to you as an Ottoman?’ she asked. ‘Because they do. I know that because just the look of you tells me that is what happens.’

She was right. A lot of people did refer to him as an Ottoman. Some people resented him because of it.

‘But you cannot go back to the past any more than I can. So you do what you can. You keep your standards, you talk to the old members of your family, you live with ennui, you live
in
the Cobweb World.’

Süleyman thought about someone else possibly in the Cobweb World too. An Armenian without a name who had chosen, according to Elizabeth Smith, to take money to fulfil what he saw as his destiny. Murat Lole was still at large somewhere.

‘Madam, do you know anything about the Lole family?’ he asked.

‘The family of the architect Serkis Lole?’ She smiled. ‘All gone. Years ago.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

She looked away from him. ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘Out of the country, I think.’

‘So there couldn’t be any family members here or say in Van or anywhere like that?’

She regarded him levelly for a moment and then she said a very firm and final, ‘No.’

In spite of his reluctance to engage in any more stories of Armenians and why so many of them had emigrated from eastern Turkey, he was wary of her last answer and said, ‘Madam . . .’ But at that moment they were passed by Constable Selahattin, Edibe, and Seçkin Taner making their way to the top of the procession to walk alongside the priest of Mar Behnam, Musa Saatçi and Brother Seraphim. The dead man’s father was grey with grief, crying bitterly with every step. As she passed, Edibe Taner looked through her thin black veil into Süleyman’s eyes. The self-inflicted rents and scratches on her face aside, her eyes were so full of pain that the look of her was almost too much to bear. Behind him the many Christian women in the crowd began to ululate.

‘Arabs!’ Lucine said with a shrug. ‘They are Christians and yet they are Arabs too. They live in the Cobweb World. Islam came and it moved the Arabs to a different place. These Syrians got left behind. My niece will go there too.’

Whether she meant to the Cobweb World or into Christianity he didn’t know. But Lucine explained. ‘To the Cobweb World,’ she said, nodding gravely as she did so. ‘There is nothing for her, not now that Gabriel Saatçi is dead.’

‘But she would never have married Brother Gabriel. She is a Muslim, he was a Christian and he was a monk.’

‘Of course not. Edibe worshipped from afar. But that was enough,’ the old woman said. ‘Now he has gone, however, now he is no longer in the world, her life has no meaning. She will enter the Cobweb World with the rest of us. Her life will be one of compromise, regret and sorrow.’

But wouldn’t Edibe Taner one day recover? People did, after all, weather the storms of bereavement and somehow come through them. He had visited the İkmen family when he had returned briefly to İstanbul. Grief there was in degrees, from not much more than an awareness of it amongst Çetin’s younger children, those who had known Bekir only briefly, right up to the black despair of Fatma İkmen. His friend, as usual, was getting on as he always did. But then Çetin, for all his deeply unfashionable traits like agnosticism and smoking, was a modern man. The fact that his mother had been a witch notwithstanding, Çetin lived in the now because with so many children to support and think about he just had to. The Cobweb World, as far as Süleyman could perceive it, was where the lonely and disjointed and only they could afford to go. And he saw himself with them. As he walked in procession towards St Sobo’s monastery and the last resting place of Gabriel Saatçi the saint, it became clear. He sprang from a past that could hardly be imagined any longer. Old people blithely called his father a prince and gave him respect because of that, but the reality was that he was an elderly man with little money who was a prince of nowhere. Like Süleyman himself. Had Mehmet Süleyman lived the life of his ancestors he would have had a harem and had lots of sons who would probably now be adults. In his head he was an honourable man of some standing but he wasn’t royal and other men were coming up in the police force behind him now, younger, fitter, more in tune with a city that wanted to be
modern
– something he just was not. He was a dinosaur. And yes, just as Lucine Rezian had told him, he did think about what might have been in the dark, dark watches of the night. He was there with the rest of them: the Armenian woman, the dead saint, the Master of Sharmeran and the hordes of ululating women behind him. In the Cobweb World.

Because Ayşe Farsakoğlu knew the girl anyway there was no problem about Sophia’s gaining access to the police station.

‘She’s with me,’ she said to the officer on the front desk, who had been just about to shoo the dirty girl and her filthy bundle away when Ayşe came into the building.

‘I want to see Inspector İkmen,’ Sophia said as Ayşe ushered her through the reception area and into the station. The filthy bundle in her arms was making small snuffling and squawking noises. Given Sophia’s radically different shape, Ayşe assumed it had to be her new baby.

‘Where have you been, Sophia?’ she asked as she led the girl up the stairs towards her superior’s office. ‘Inspector İkmen and I have been worried about you.’

The girl looked down at the bundle and said, ‘I have baby.’

Ayşe both did and did not want to see the dead man’s baby, the child of a murderer. Her boss Çetin İkmen had been so marked by what had happened. He was going through the motions of his daily life because that was İkmen, that was what he was. But the death of a child, even a troublesome, even an ‘evil’ child, leaves whoever suffers it irreversibly changed. İkmen had aged and he was, Ayşe had noticed, just occasionally drinking brandy again.

‘Did you have a doctor?’ Ayşe asked as she led the girl down one of the long green-and-white-painted corridors on the top floor of the building.

‘I go to hospital,’ Sophia said simply. Probably one of the social security hospitals, where one didn’t pay but one did wait, sometimes until it was far and away too late.

When Ayşe reached İkmen’s office door, she knocked on the glass before calling out, ‘Sir, someone to see you.’

A very smoke-dried voice from within said, ‘Who?’

‘Sophia, sir.’

She waited for him to come and answer the door, which he did with alacrity. Stinking of cigarettes and with eyes red from weeping and lack of sleep, Çetin İkmen was not a pretty sight. As soon as he saw the girl he looked down at the bundle in her arms and said, ‘Is that . . .’

‘I call him Aslan,’ the girl said. ‘For his father.’

İkmen looked across at Ayşe and said, ‘Does she . . .’

‘I know your son is dead, Inspector İkmen,’ Sophia said. Her eyes were quite dry and she showed no emotion. ‘I come to show baby.’

He ushered her into his office and Ayşe Farsakoğlu, even without a sign from her boss, left. She had no place in whatever conversation was to pass between them. She went back to Süleyman’s office where she and İzzet Melik were following up on possible sightings of the nurse Murat Lole.