The Serenity Murders (30 page)

“I’ll take a look when I’m back,” I said. “Don’t throw it away.”

“Your friends came to visit,” he said. “They brought flowers and cologne; it was very kind of them. We had bought some already, but still…”

Who? Panic alarms went off in my head. No one knew Hüseyin was there except for Hasan and Ponpon. Hasan was at the hospital all morning, and must have been at home resting right now. The Ponpon I knew would never go visit.

“Who did you say came to visit?”

“Your friends,” he said. “Şükrü and his friend.”

What was Şükrü doing at the hospital? It had to be that blabbermouth Hasan. He’d just die if he didn’t tell everyone the latest news. Good thing I warned him not to!

Şükrü I understood, fine, but who was his friend? Had he dragged the new boyfriend I’d just seen with him down to the hospital? Maybe he thought I’d be there too, and that I’d be more cooperative this time due to the setting, and he’d be able to introduce me to my shy admirer.

I went into the toilet with Yılmaz Karataş’s note in my hand, and sat down.

He had written the time and date on the top of the page, and “TOP SECRET” in block capitals in the middle, and underlined it. He sure was weird.

“The wanted female with the bicycle visited the Veral apartment building, apartment three, at 2:27. She was wearing the helmet previously described. The same female had visited yesterday without her bike, and gone upstairs. (Please see my report dated yesterday.) I think I’m on the right track. Keeping the urgency of the matter in mind, I shall have to leave my appointed location without your permission and follow the bicycle.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I read it over from start to finish. The bike had been here yesterday? Yılmaz was proving to be pretty handy. It seemed he was going to pass this test with flying colors, assuming none of those pesky bureaucratic obstacles got in the way.

It is indeed a fact, not a myth, that time in the toilet enhances brain functions. “Hurray!” I said to myself.

I went out to make my phone calls, given that the house was still bugged.

First I called the hospital again. This time Hüseyin picked up.

“I knew it was you,” he said.

I asked to speak to his father.

“I’m better,” he said, as if I’d asked. “When are you coming? I told my parents you’d be back. They’re going to leave.”

I asked to speak to his father again.

“The note we were just talking about,” I said. “The one you found in the bag. I’m going to ask you a couple of questions about it, if that’s okay?”

“I don’t have my glasses with me,” he said, embarrassed and self-conscious about the fact that he’d gotten old and could no longer read without glasses. “I’ll give it back to Hüseyin.”

It was easier making myself understood to Hüseyin. He knew what I was looking for.

Yes, the information I was looking for was in yesterday’s note. I had been stupid enough to miss it. At any rate, it meant only one
thing: the girl on the bicycle was directly collaborating with someone who lived in my apartment building. In apartment three.

“You’re wonderful,” I said cheerfully.

“I knew you’d realize that someday,” he replied.

I really should have told him it wasn’t him but the situation that was wonderful, or the retired sergeant from the intelligence service Yılmaz Karataş, who prepared such thorough reports; but he was in the hospital. He might be in need of a little love and compassion.

“When are you coming back?” he asked once again.

“When I’m done,” I told him.

Now what I needed was backup. I wasn’t going get the police involved. When Selçuk found out, he’d flip his lid and rip me a new one, but there were going to be no police. I was going to sort it out on my own, with my own special forces unit.

Cüneyt, the bodyguard, though a bit feeble in the mind, certainly liked to show off his muscles. He was, after all, a bodyguard by profession.
And now here is his chance, an opportunity to prove himself
, I thought. I phoned and told him to come straight over, no questions asked.

Then I contacted Tarık, whom Hasan had always described as good-looking, and who I knew to be Hüseyin’s friend from the taxi stand. He seemed like a strong guy.

While I waited for them to arrive, I did some of the exercises I had been neglecting for days, to stretch myself and warm up a bit. I lifted my legs up one by one and put them against the wall. I realized as I was stretching them that my inner thighs had become stiff. In the corridor I tried two somersaults: the first touching the floor with my hands, the second in midair. I almost hit the wall and smashed my skull to pieces. I focused on the midair backward left-footed head kick I always found so challenging. It’s good to be prepared.

Tarık arrived first. Hasan had such bad taste. Well, what would you expect from someone whose favorite actors were Daniel Auteuil and Gérard Depardieu? The guy wasn’t good-looking. He just had that fresh-faced glow of youth. If he didn’t look after himself, he was bound to start deteriorating before he hit thirty-five. I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him downstairs, motioning for him to keep quiet. The best place to talk, where we wouldn’t be heard and where I could see Cüneyt when he arrived, was the entrance of the apartment building next door.

“It’s about Hüseyin,” I said.

“I thought so,
abi
,” he said. “Traffic’s jammed anyway. If I went out to work, it’d take half an hour just to get two blocks down the road; the money’d all be spent on fuel.”

“Can you fight?”

He couldn’t fathom what I meant, of course.

“Fight,” I said. “Martial arts?…Punching?…Kicking?…Karate?”

“Sure thing,
abi
,” he said. “Hüseyin’s my blood brother; we’ll do whatever it takes. What sort of a mate would I be if I didn’t? Ain’t nothing like that in my book, nuh-uh.”

I hadn’t been in his car many times or spoken more than two words to him, but this hooligan speaking style certainly didn’t suit him, especially if he was Hüseyin’s blood brother. Hüseyin was impeccably polite. Perhaps here before me stood the cause of the
kahvehane
jargon that Hüseyin occasionally employed, and which I absolutely detested.

I made a sudden attack to test his reflexes. With the kick he received to his back, he buckled up on the floor. The kick had actually been a very light one; I did not intend to hurt him at all.

“Fuck!” he said. “What’s going on, man? You knocked the wind right out of me.”

“Just testing,” I said, trying not to laugh at the state of him. I held my hand out and helped him up.

“Don’t leap to the front lines unless you have to,” I said, winking an eye. “You’re a bit stiff.”

I didn’t test Cüneyt when he arrived. I knew he went down at the second blow. Best to refrain from injuring my team members.

We were ready for operation number two.

A
partment number three was right below me. In other words, it was Wimpy Ferdı’s place.

With Cüneyt and Tarık right behind me, we rang the doorbell. If it didn’t open, it would only take a kick and a shoulder to break it down.

It didn’t. I pressed the bell again, this time keeping my finger on it longer. Wimpy Ferdı was always home to spy on me when I went in and out of the building, so where was he now? The door wasn’t opening.

“Let’s knock it down,” I said.

I actually meant,
You guys knock it down
.

“I take full responsibility.”

It wasn’t so much my reputation on the block that concerned me, as the scolding I’d get from Selçuk if nothing came of breaking down the door. He’d have every right.

It only took two shoulder blows to open the door. Cüneyt and Tarık stepped aside so I could enter first. Apart from a couple of refurbishments I had done to my own apartment, this one was exactly the same as mine. The lightly furnished living room was neat and tidy. The things I was looking for were not here. I made my way toward the back rooms.

I had my first shock when I entered the room that, in my apartment,
was my study. Ferdı’s walls were literally wallpapered with pictures of me. There were no blank spaces at all. Some of them had been made into decoupages, others had been enlarged. It was a virtual temple dedicated to yours truly. Some of these photographs I had never seen before. They had been shot secretly.

I turned to look at where Cüneyt was pointing when he said, “Boss, look, you’re naked in this one.”

Yes, he had caught me naked too. In the bath, in my bedroom standing in front of the dressing mirror, and in bed!

“Don’t look,” I said.

I could censor one, but what about the rest? If you looked carefully enough, there were plenty of naked pictures of me interspersed here and there. We stood in front of a gigantic Burçak Veral collage coating all four walls of the room.

I found what I was really looking for in the room that I used as my bedroom. It was a studio complete with technological devices!

Although I knew I was going to find something, not even I was expecting this much. The ceiling, floor, and walls had been insulated. There were five different computers connected to one huge control panel that looked like those sound mixers in a music studio. All five computers were on.

On one of the screens you could see the entrance door to my apartment. As far as I could tell, the camera had been hidden in the gas meter box belonging to the apartment opposite. It had to be one of those wireless cameras the size of a chickpea. I hadn’t even noticed it.

On a different screen was my bedroom. Judging by the angle of the view, I guessed that the camera was near the window, inside one of the masks on the wall. I had collected the masks from places I visited; it was quite a collection, everything from an elaborate Venetian carnival mask to primitive African totem masks. It was perfectly understandable that I would overlook a camera placed
among the many beads, stones, and sequins that decorated them. One could also thereby deduce Satı had not been dusting them.

There were no displays on the other three screens, but each was labeled with a different room—one for the kitchen and one for the bedroom!

“Boss, this place is like a space station,” said Cüneyt.

Dumbfounded, all three of us were trying to make sense of it.

What sort of a sick person could do all this? What was it he wanted from me? Why was he spying on me every minute, and why did he want to hear every word I said? What kind of fixation had I caused in him?

There were shelves of CDs, organized according to date.

My most private moments were all recorded here.

The CD of the night Hüseyin and I had sex was at the front, carefully labeled with the date and our names. It had been marked
X
, in red. He was categorizing scenes from my life in a manner similar to that used for the rating of movies, like 18+,
etc.

I ran the formatting programs on all five of them to delete the systems fast. Still, it took a while, and then I shut the computers down.

I was going to destroy this.

All of it.

We started breaking the CDs, one by one. My hands began to hurt after breaking only a few, but the rage inside me outweighed the pain. I went on breaking the CDs with all the vengeance of someone determined on revenge.

Tarık stopped for a moment.

“
Abi
, we’re smashing all these to pieces, which is fine, but what’s it got to do with Hüseyin?”

“It’s all the work of the same psycho!” I said, cracking the CD I was holding.

“So where is he, the psycho?”

“We’ll find him once we finish here,” I said, as I continued to break CDs with tremendous zeal.

We would, we’d find him. But just where was Wimpy anyway?

“Boss, shall we rip the pictures up as well?”

I hadn’t thought about that. I’d have to think about it and decide what to do, and when. It would take hours to scrape those pictures off the walls.

“It took you long enough to get here.”

I recognized her immediately. It was the girl with the bicycle. She stood there watching us, her arms folded, her shoulder pressed against the doorjamb. We’d been so busy breaking the CDs, and making so much noise doing so, that we hadn’t noticed her arrival.

We stopped.

“It took you long enough to get here,” she repeated. But we’d already heard her the first time.

She had a clear voice, with a bit of a sneer to it.

“The girl with the bicycle!” I said.

“Bravo!” she said mockingly. “You’ve finally passed the first part of the test.”

What on earth did that mean?

“We left so many clues for you to find this place…But you kept getting stuck on other things.”

She had big, cold eyes. She was arrogant.

“What is this?” I said. “A game of hide-and-seek? What are you trying to do? All of this, it’s ridiculous! What do you want from me?”

The sentences, which I had begun yelling in rage, soon lapsed into desperation, until my voice finally cracked and trembled.

“A sort of payback, let’s say,” she responded.

This one was skinny. I could see the bones of her chest through her half-open shirt collar.