River of The Dead (6 page)

‘What do you think about all these stories Bekir tells?’ İkmen asked his wife when he finally managed to catch her eye.

‘I’m just glad to have him back, wherever he’s been,’ she replied. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘Well, of course!’ He
said
that, but was it true? Çetin İkmen alone had, finally, had to deal with Bekir when he reached the height of his bad behaviour at age fifteen. Fatma and the other children had known about the stealing, of course; he’d stolen from every one of them. They’d also known about the cannabis and the drink. But Çetin had kept quiet about the harder drugs he knew his son was taking. The cocaine and the amphetamines had been between Çetin and Bekir, as had the former’s knowledge of the latter’s drug-dealing exploits. Bekir at fifteen had been a nightmare. Taking drugs, dealing, getting drunk, fighting . . . There had been women too, İkmen recalled, ladies of his wife’s age who, if indirectly, had helped to fund Bekir’s various drug addictions. The boy had not, his father could not easily forget, always treated those women with even the most basic kindness. Allah, but the black eyes and cracked ribs that some middle-aged women were prepared to tolerate in exchange for a firm, young body!

Fatma, her concentration on her needlework now broken, said, ‘Çetin, are you sure about that? Are you sure you’re really happy about Bekir being home again?’

She was no fool. After thirty-seven years of marriage there was little she didn’t know or couldn’t deduce about her husband.

İkmen took in a deep breath and then leaned forward. ‘Oh, Fatma,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. The circumstances of his leaving were so . . .’

‘But that was years ago, Çetin!’ Fatma said. ‘He’s changed now. Even you can see he’s not on drugs any more.’

Bekir didn’t appear to be, it was true. In fact apart from cigarettes he didn’t seem to ‘do’ anything, and that included alcohol. That, in particular, pleased Fatma, who was a sincere and observant Muslim. But all of that notwithstanding, İkmen himself was not happy. A doubt, something he often objectified by envisaging it as the voice of his dead mother whispering in his ear, was nagging. Ayşe, his Albanian mother, the local witch of the Asian district of Üsküdar, was not happy with Bekir. He made her skin tingle. İkmen made a mental note to drop by the fortune-teller’s colourful studio in Balat before he returned home the following evening.

During Ottoman times, before the Republican era, Gaziantep was known just as Aintab. Then in 1921, when what is now the Turkish Republic was fighting for its existence against the forces of France, Great Britain and Greece as well as the Sultan’s royalist soldiers, Aintab was Turkicised to Antep and given an honorific title. In recognition of the heroic resistance put up by Antep’s citizens to the French army in 1921, Atatürk, the Republic’s founder and first president, said that from then on the city was to be known as Gazi or ‘warrior hero’ Antep. Since that time Gaziantep had been a largely Turkish city, but remnants from its more cosmopolitan past remained, as Mehmet Süleyman was discovering. The house that Inspector Taner and her cousin took him to for his meal that night was a case in point. It was located in the old Sahinbey quarter of the city, an area which had a distinctly Arabian feel to it, underlining in effect the comparative closeness of Gaziantep to Syria. Once through the low doorway that led directly from the dark, narrow street into the courtyard of what looked like a great mansion, one could very easily not be in Turkey at all. In fact, Süleyman thought as he watched a pretty marble fountain bubble away gently in the middle of the chequered courtyard, places just like this existed in Damascus, Jerusalem, Amman or any other Arab city one would care to name. The pungent smell of spices that permeated the building added to the general sense of exoticism.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Taner said as she directed Süleyman towards a dining table, already set with cutlery and napkins, in one corner of the courtyard. Above it and slightly overhanging into the space below was the upper storey of the house, which was accessed by a broad marble staircase from the ground level. Up there Süleyman could see ornate doorways and delicate fanlight windows of tremendous beauty.

‘What a wonderful place,’ he said, genuinely impressed.

‘Please sit down,’ his hostess replied. She did not respond to his delight in his surroundings, nor did she tell him what the place was.

Her cousin left them and walked towards a doorway just underneath the staircase, saying something in a language Süleyman didn’t understand.

As they sat down, Inspector Taner spoke. ‘As you know, Yusuf Kaya was picked up on security cameras in a patisserie called the Nightingale,’ she said. ‘Not that that is important now. What is, however, is that Kaya has friends, of sorts, in Gaziantep.’

‘Do you know who they are?’

She took a piece of paper out of her handbag and pushed it across the table. It was a map of the centre of Gaziantep.

‘There is a house, here, just off Güzelce Lane.’ She pointed to what was, to Süleyman, a fathomless spot on the map. ‘It is a brothel.’

‘You think that Kaya might be hiding out in a brothel?’

‘A friend of his runs the place,’ she said. ‘A woman called Anastasia. Kaya put her on her back when she was little more than a child.’

‘That was in Mardin?’

‘Yes.’ Ardıç had said that Mardin wanted Kaya as much as or perhaps even more than the police in İstanbul. And if he had been turning the city’s girls to prostitution . . . ‘Do you like lahmacun?’ Taner beckoned an old black-clad woman carrying two steaming plates over to the table.

‘Er, yes . . .’

Lahmacun is a type of thin bread topped, usually, with rather spicy meat and vegetables. Because it generally involves cheese too it is often referred to as Turkish pizza. In the east, as a rather wary Süleyman knew all too well, lahmacun could be very heavily spiced indeed. As the elderly lady put the plate down in front of him he viewed the pile of slices with some caution.

‘Together with the local police I’m going to be raiding the brothel tomorrow morning,’ Taner said as without so much as a flicker she folded a great wedge of lahmacun into her mouth. ‘We’ve been watching the place since yesterday, but we don’t know whether Kaya is in there or not. However, one thing is for sure: to raid at night when the place is full of customers will only give him any cover he might need to escape. We’ll get in there while they’re all asleep.’ She smiled grimly. ‘It will be very strange for me to meet Anastasia again. I haven’t seen her for over twenty years.’

‘No?’ He would have liked to quiz Taner more closely on the matter, but as soon as he’d put the lahmacun into his mouth the whole of his alimentary canal had caught fire. The chillies were lethal!

‘Anastasia and myself are of an age,’ the inspector replied. ‘I am a Muslim, she a Suriani Christian, but we went to school together. She was very pretty, but a nice girl too, you know.’ She smiled more openly this time. ‘Not many girls are both pretty and nice, Inspector. As a man you may not be aware of that.’ Her face dropped and became altogether more grim. ‘Yusuf Kaya, who as you know is fifty this year, is a few years older than Anastasia and myself. When she was fifteen he raped her. He wanted her badly, but she didn’t like him and so he took her by force. Of course her family didn’t want her back.’

The old woman returned, this time carrying a bottle of something clear. She hovered, seemingly nervously, until Taner turned to look at her with a very casual eye.

‘Rakı?’ Taner asked Süleyman.

He’d finally managed to get through the first slice of lahmacun and was starting on his second. He was, he felt, getting used to it now, maybe because his mouth had been numbed by the pepper.

‘Yes. Thank you,’ he said.

The old woman didn’t even look at him as she poured some of the clear, viscous liquid into his glass. Then she filled Taner’s glass and left. There was no sign, or didn’t appear to be any sign, of Rafik.

‘Yusuf Kaya set up a brothel on the edge of a small village down on what we call the Ocean,’ Taner said as she topped up both their rakı glasses with water. Then, seeing his confusion, she added, ‘It’s what outsiders call the Mesopotamian plain.’

‘Ah.’

‘Even at seventeen he was enterprising. He had Anastasia because he wanted her and then he let other men have her for money. The Kayas are a very bad clan, Inspector Süleyman. But they have power, you know?’

He’d heard. The clans of Mardin, like the clans associated with some other cities in the east, were notorious for the power they wielded over their members and often over non-relatives around them too. Between the clans and the various terrorists it was difficult to know who was the most dangerous.

‘But, Inspector,’ Süleyman said, ‘you describe this woman, now, as Kaya’s friend. Surely if he ruined her life . . .’

Edibe Taner shrugged. ‘What can one say?’ she said. ‘Some women are like that. Some women adore their abusers. Psychologically it can be a way for an abused woman to come to terms with what has happened to her. If she loves her abuser then what has happened cannot be abuse. Yusuf Kaya is a married man but Anastasia Akyuz is still, it is said, in love with him. What is also said is that her daughter, also living in the brothel, is his daughter too.’

‘So Kaya is very likely to be with them.’

‘He was seen just yesterday here in Gaziantep. It’s possible.’ She took a swig from her rakı glass and then looked up at the darkening sky above and sighed. ‘Inspector, I have spent most of my professional life fighting these clans. They’re clever. I can’t guarantee what, if anything, will happen tomorrow. But if you want to come along with me, provided you are content to let the Gaziantep police take the lead, you may do so.’

Was that stuff about letting the Gaziantep police take the lead some sort of code for ‘we know how arrogant you İstanbullus are, we know you always want to take over’? If so, then it was probably best to let it just go over his head. After all, what did a country bumpkin like Taner know about him? She might be wearing a smart suit and expensive make-up, but that didn’t stop her being merely a big fish in a very small pool. He said he’d like to observe the raid just as the next course, ribs of lamb that appeared to be stuffed with rice, appeared. It was then that Taner’s mobile telephone rang.

She looked down at the instrument and said, ‘I have to take this.’ Then, without another word, she got up and left the table.

‘You’ll want to wait for her, I suppose,’ the old woman, who was still standing by the table waiting to serve them, said. ‘To eat?’

‘Oh, er, yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I will, thank you.’

‘As you wish.’ There was a slight foreign tinge to her voice. But then a lot of people in this part of the country did not speak Turkish as their first language. Maybe the old black-clad woman was an Arab? Perhaps that was the language he had heard Rafik speaking earlier?

She was just about to leave when Süleyman, his curiosity piqued by this place he knew absolutely nothing about, said, ‘What is this building? Can you tell me?’

The woman, who was small and he could see now was very angular, almost like one of those pictures of witches one sometimes saw in books of European fairy stories, stopped. ‘You want to see the Zeytounian house?’ she said.

Süleyman instantly recognised the name as one of Armenian origin. The old woman, who did not give him her own name at any point, led him up the stairs to the first floor of the building. Just to the left of the stairs was a large doorway surmounted by a very ornate stained glass fanlight. The door was ajar and Süleyman could just make out that the interior was lit by a flickering flame, possibly candlelight.

‘The house was built by Dzeron Zeytounian in the nineteenth century,’ the old woman said. ‘The Zeytounians were rich, educated people.’

She pushed the door open and he found himself looking into another world. The old woman quite clearly knew this, because what she said next indicated that she had, perhaps, read Süleyman’s mind.

‘These rooms belong to the Cobweb World,’ she said. ‘They exist in a time not even I can remember.’

He could see three rooms, all with worn but still beautiful parquet floors. Curtains faded almost to white hung at the few windows, and the rooms were indeed lit by four large collections of flickering candles. Although the furniture was sparse, Süleyman could see that it was both old and very good. Two sagging but still regal armchairs graced one room, their once bright brocade covers nibbled by vermin. In another room, on top of a small bamboo and teak table was a radio almost as big as a modern TV set, the international stations on its dial given in French: Londres, Maroc, Allemagne.

But it was not the furniture or even the fabulous floors that really held his attention. The walls and the ceilings, which were panelled in ornate cream-painted wood, were also covered with paintings. Great fluffy clouds above his head barely concealed cherubs casually leaning upon golden harps. At picture rail level, large arched hunting scenes predominated: illustrations that looked as if they would be more appropriate for the country house of an English gentleman than the mansion of a wealthy Armenian. Finally, between panels painted with a Grecian urn motif and cupboards fronted with delicate wooden filigree, there were portraits. The women, unveiled and wearing clothing typical of nineteenth-century Europe, stared out solemnly from hooded oriental eyes. The men wore fezzes, their faces also solemn but this time in some cases recognisable.

‘That is Dzeron Zeytounian,’ the old woman said as she pointed to a particularly severe-looking portrait. ‘This one here is Midhat Paşa.’

Midhat Paşa Süleyman knew. It had been Midhat who had tried to persuade the autocratic and paranoid Sultan Abdul Hamid to grant his people a modern constitution back in the 1870s. He had paid for his social concern with his life. Strangely, next to Midhat’s portrait was one of the sultan concerned, his dark skin and hooded eyes making him look as if he could almost be related to the Zeytounian ladies.