River of The Dead (8 page)

Before the woman could answer, one of the Gaziantep officers put his head out of an upstairs window and shouted, ‘Inspector Taner!’

She looked up at him, shielding her eyes from the early morning sun with one long, thin hand.

‘Something you might like to see, Inspector,’ the officer said.

‘I’ll come up,’ Taner said. She turned back to Anastasia and pointed rudely into her face. ‘If you have been concealing things from us, Anastasia . . .’

She walked back into the house and up the stairs. The raid itself had been a pretty standard hit on a brothel in that it had involved a degree of wanton destruction, women well past their prime crying and screaming and unattractive men attempting to escape across neighbouring rooftops. Neighbours and passers-by gawped, and some of the younger police constables looked decidedly sheepish. Süleyman had seen it all before and, if he were honest, he hadn’t had enormously high hopes of finding Yusuf Kaya in this brothel. Psychopathic he might be, but Kaya was far too devious to make the mistake of staying with someone as obvious as Anastasia.

In truth, Süleyman was still puzzling over what the old woman at the Zeytounian house had meant by the ‘Cobweb World’. If it was that such places were stuck in the past by virtue of neglect, he could understand it. But whether intended or not there had been, he felt, something more esoteric behind what she had said. Unlike Çetin İkmen, who had a natural sympathy with and understanding of things unseen, Süleyman was far from comfortable with the metaphysical, in spite of the old woman’s words. And yet he’d felt something in that room beyond natural curiosity, and the old woman had said that going to Mardin was going to expose him to more of the Cobweb World. The thought of it made him shudder. Now that Kaya was not, it seemed, in Gaziantep, it was very probable that he’d gone back home to his dreadful clan in Mardin, apparently the epicentre of the Cobweb World. In his mind he conjured pictures of his befezzed Ottoman ancestors. Would he feel them at his side when he went to Mardin? Was the Cobweb World a kind of permanent and possibly tangible haunted state of being? He was linking that thought to why, possibly, Inspector Taner had been so keen to get him out of the Zeytounian house when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

‘She’s not right, you know.’ Anastasia Akyuz blew a lungful of cigarette smoke into his face.

‘I’m sorry?’ It was like waking violently from a very peculiar dream.

‘Edibe Taner,’ the woman continued. ‘I knew her at school. She wasn’t right there either.’

Süleyman frowned. ‘What?’

‘Well, why would she want to go and join the police? Why would any woman?’ Anastasia moved in closer to Süleyman and looked him critically up and down. ‘I heard her say you are from İstanbul.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘You know Yusuf.’

‘Yusuf Kaya is known to me,’ he said. He didn’t tell her he’d arrested him.

‘Edibe thinks that I still keep in touch with him, but I don’t,’ she said. ‘Why does she think that I send my daughter to university in Syria? I am Suriani, yes, but Turkey is my country. I send Gülizar to study in Damascus because I don’t want her father to find her. I know what Yusuf is, even—’

‘Anastasia!’

She looked up. The voice came from the top of the tatty stone and mud brick house. Inspector Taner was waving what looked like a small piece of paper at her.

‘You need to see this.’ She disappeared from the window.

Anastasia shook her head and closed her eyes. ‘God!’ she murmured.

Outside with Süleyman and the brothel keeper again, Taner pushed the paper underneath Anastasia’s nose.

‘Why is there a photograph of Yusuf Kaya underneath your bed, Anastasia? I think it was taken recently, and it was taken here in this house.’

Briefly, the brothel keeper put her head in her hands. Then she looked up and said, ‘Look, Yusuf came here last year, I admit it. Maybe two months before he was arrested. I . . . Look, Edibe, I admit I still had a thing for him then, we went to bed . . . but I don’t let him see Gülizar and I don’t know where he is now. I haven’t seen him since that time, I swear to God.’

‘Why should I believe you?’ the Mardin policewoman said. ‘You told me you hadn’t seen Yusuf for years. That was a lie.’

Anastasia groaned. Edibe Taner put the photograph into a small plastic bag and slotted it into her handbag.

‘Miss Akyuz,’ Süleyman said urgently, ‘if you know anything at all about where Yusuf Kaya might be you must tell us – now. Aiding and abetting an escaped prisoner is, as I am sure you know, a very serious offence.’

The woman’s dark, make-up-smudged eyes darted round nervously for a moment until she said, ‘I haven’t seen Yusuf this year, I swear. I swear! But I know that one of his aunts lives at Birecik. She broke from the Kaya clan in Mardin and married this farmer from there. They don’t speak to her, but I know Yusuf has used her place in the past. He’ll use anyone.’ She cast her eyes downwards. ‘Her name is Bulbul, that’s all I know. She lives on a farm outside Birecik with her husband. He’s a lot older than her, I think.’

‘Where is Birecik?’

‘South of here,’ Edibe Taner said. ‘It’s on the Euphrates.’ She smiled at the woman and said, ‘Thank you, Anastasia. You did the right thing.’

Furious now, Anastasia Akyuz turned away with tears in her eyes.

Inspector Taner flicked her head at Süleyman, indicating that they should go. But before she left she put one of her hands on Anastasia’s shoulder and said, ‘And next time, if there is a next time, Yusuf seeks the warmth of your bed for the night, be kind to yourself, Anastasia, and say no.’ She let go of the woman and took Süleyman by the arm.

‘Where are we going?’ Süleyman said, looking down at Taner’s strong hand on his bicep.

‘To headquarters here and then on to Birecik,’ she answered casually. ‘No point being here if Kaya is elsewhere.’

‘Ssh! Ssh! Ssh!’ Fatma İkmen put her fingers to her lips and waved her other hand as if in warning. ‘Bekir is still asleep!’

‘Mum, it’s eleven o’clock,’ her son Bülent replied. ‘Even I’m up!’

When he had returned from performing his military service the previous year, Bülent, who was now in his early twenties, had gone to live with his sister Çiçek in an apartment near Atatürk Airport. Like his sister, Bülent worked as cabin crew for Turkish Airlines and, again like Çiçek, he flew all over the world on a regular basis. Unlike his sister, Bülent didn’t really remember his brother Bekir. He did not therefore share her apparent joy at seeing him again. In fact, Bülent found the older man not a little patronising and his mother’s attitude towards him irritating in the extreme. Fatma was behaving as if Bekir was a baby.

‘So what tasty little treat have you been cooking up for him today?’ Bülent said as he entered the kitchen, which smelt strongly of cooked sugar and butter.

‘Bekir was always a great one for baklava,’ Fatma said as she turned the heat up on the samovar in the corner of the kitchen. ‘Tea?’

‘Yes, thank you. You’re making baklava?’ Bülent said, astounded. ‘Mum, you can buy that stuff from the patisserie down the road. Did you make the pastry and—’

‘Yes, yes, yes! What is wrong with that?’ his mother interrupted angrily. ‘Do I have to ask you what I may or may not do in my own kitchen?’

‘No, of course not,’ her son said. ‘But Mum, I know that if you make baklava from scratch, as in you make the pastry too, it’s really hard and time-consuming, and—’

‘My mother did it without complaint,’ Fatma said, pouring tea from the samovar pot into a small tulip glass for Bülent.

Baklava, which consists of nuts, a lot of sugar and layer upon layer of very thin buttery filo pastry, is not an easy dessert to make. All but the most enthusiastic cooks did as Bülent had suggested and bought the stuff ready made from a pastry shop. Fatma İkmen did indeed like to cook, but even she had, to Bülent’s knowledge at least, always drawn the line at baklava.

‘So where have you been this week, my son?’ Fatma said as she ushered Bülent, a tall and still very thin young man, into a chair by the kitchen table.

‘Holland,’ he said, slipping a hand into his denim jacket and taking out a packet of cigarettes. ‘We were meant to be just shuttling there and back but on Tuesday the plane developed some sort of engine trouble and we had to lay over for the night.’

‘Oh?’ Fatma sat down across the table from her son and watched him light up a cigarette. Just like his father. She didn’t approve, but she accepted that smoking was something that most of her children did. ‘In Amsterdam?’

‘Yes.’ There was another smell underneath the sugar and the butter that was really quite unpleasant. What it was, Bülent couldn’t imagine, beyond knowing that it was organic in some way. Something of rot or mould . . .

‘That you are having the opportunity to visit so many places is very nice for you,’ Fatma said. ‘But also you must be careful too, Bülent. In some of these places . . .’

He knew full well what this was about. ‘Mum, in Amsterdam I did not, I promise you, use either drugs or women of easy virtue,’ he said. To use even the word ‘prostitute’ would have outraged her. That said, he wasn’t lying. He’d got very drunk in Amsterdam but he hadn’t done anything else beyond look at what others got up to. ‘I’m not stupid, you know. Not now.’

When he was a teenager, Bülent had had the odd brush with drugs, but nothing, Fatma knew, on the scale of Bekir’s involvement. What had happened to her third son and what he had done as a result of it was unique within the İkmen family. Only the day before she had learned that there had been a period in Bekir’s life when he had begged for money for drugs. Then, apparently, he had been literally on the street. Cold in spite of the fierce summer heat, he had pulled at the clothes of rich European and American tourists to get their attention. Then he’d asked for money for some mythical child’s life-saving operation, money he would later use to buy heroin.

‘I think I’d feel better if at least some of my children paid attention to religion,’ Fatma said. ‘I know your father doesn’t care for Islam but you know, Bülent, at times, for me, my religion has been the only thing that has sustained me. I—’

‘Oh, Mum, not religion.’ The voice was tired, smoke-scarred and lazy. Bülent looked up into the tanned and rather amused face of his errant brother.

Fatma, instantly on her feet and alive with what could have been anxiety, said, ‘Bekir, my son, do you want a glass of tea? I’m cooking baklava for you, and—’

‘Mum, calm down!’ Bekir said as he watched Bülent light up another cigarette. ‘Can I have one of those, brother?’

With a shrug Bülent tossed a Marlboro across the table. Fatma almost ran towards the samovar.

‘Mum, it’s OK,’ Bekir said. ‘There’s no hurry. You don’t need to fuss.’

But she did and Bülent at least knew why. His mother was afraid that if she didn’t do exactly what Bekir wanted, he’d leave again. The first time he left, apparently, it had been because he wasn’t getting his own way all the time. But he’d been a teenager back then.

‘So, Mum, are you ready for the dentist?’ Bülent said once his mother had given his brother some tea.

‘Dentist?’

Bülent rolled his eyes. ‘Mum, that’s why I’m here,’ he said. ‘You’ve an appointment at midday over in Beyoğlu, remember?’

Fatma put a hand up to her mouth and said, ‘Oh, my . . .’

She had forgotten. ‘You’re always frightened and one or other of us always takes you,’ Bülent said.

‘Oh, Bülent, I . . .’

‘Oh, well, no harm done,’ he said. ‘Get your coat and we’ll go. There’s time.’

At first she didn’t answer. She was thinking about something that very soon, and to Bülent’s intense irritation, became apparent.

‘Bülent, I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I can’t go to the dentist today.’

‘Mum, you have toothache, or you had it last week,’ Bülent replied. ‘You’ve got to go.’

‘Oh, but . . .’

‘Mum, if you have toothache you must go to the dentist,’ Bekir said.

She put a hand on his arm. ‘Bekir, darling, I have so much washing to do. And then there’s baklava baking . . .’

‘Do the washing another time,’ Bekir said. ‘And if you tell me what time to take the baklava out of the oven, I can do that for you. I’m not going anywhere today.’

But Fatma was adamant. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I can’t have you doing that, Bekir.’ She looked across at Bülent. ‘I’ll go and telephone the dentist. Cancel.’

Without another word, she left the room. This, Bülent knew, was not healthy. His mother wasn’t leaving the apartment in case her prodigal son suddenly upped and disappeared again. Bekir knew it too, Bülent felt. In spite of his soothing words Bekir was sitting across the table from him looking very smug. Bülent knew he’d have to speak to his father about it soon, and also about that quite irritating musty smell that seemed to be all over the apartment these days.

About an hour’s drive to the east of Gaziantep (or forty minutes with Inspector Taner behind the wheel) is the town of Birecik. Sitting astride the Euphrates river, Birecik is famous for two things: the dam of the same name that lies to the north of the town and the fact that the shores of the Euphrates at this point are home to a particularly ugly, if rare, bird called the bald ibis. So unusual is this creature that every year people come from all over the world to see it. Not so the dam, the building of which necessitated the flooding of numerous local villages including the site where the fabulous mosaics of Zeugma, now in the Gaziantep museum, had been discovered. As they drove at lightning speed towards the town, Süleyman thought gloomily that he’d never managed to get to the museum on Zelfa’s behalf. Even though he knew that his wife had only mentioned Zeugma as a distraction from the fear she felt at his going away, he was sorry he hadn’t been able to see the mosaics. Now he didn’t know whether it was ever going to be possible. He and Taner had brought all their luggage with them on this trip. Chances were they were either going to stay in Birecik or move on eastwards.