Deadline (26 page)

Çetin
İ
kmen wanted to speak. He wanted to ask the girl why she thought that the police were firing on the hostages. But he could barely breathe, much less speak.

‘Burak Bey, why were the police killing the hostages?’

İ
kmen heard their feet running along the gallery, towards room 411 and Süleyman, the doctors, Lale Aktar, Hovsep Pars. But then the footsteps came to an abrupt stop and he heard the girl speak again. ‘What do you mean, Burak Bey,’ she said, ‘about us having to get out together?’

The young man
wearing the deep red evening gown and the sparkly shoes put his hands in the air. He could hardly see any more and his brother had already been shot, what was the point of going on?

The Special Forces officer in front of him, breathing audibly through a gas mask, pointed his gun towards a small group of other oddly attired men and a woman in the corner of the ballroom. He went without comment or complaint. It had all gone very wrong. He didn’t know why. But what he was sure about was that there was never going to be any idyllic life in Bodrum for him. He sat down next to an ex-Bulgarian Mafia enforcer and kept his hands where his captors could see them.

If he personally hadn’t panicked he might have got away. As soon as their leader, Nurettin, had found and killed that Special Forces officer, he should have put some time into deciding who he was going to change clothes with. As it happened he’d just grabbed the nearest body which had been a woman with a penchant for shoes that could easily double as instruments of torture. Admittedly she was a short lady, but the heels on those things were still ridiculous. He took the shoes off and considered a life in prison. He’d been in there before. That was where he’d got this job. But last time had just been for theft. This was going to be for who knew what. Terrorism? Attempted murder? Collusion with killers? Nurettin had killed that Special Forces man as well as someone called Haluk Mert and so any attempt to try and explain that nobody was supposed to die at all would be futile. And anyway, only some of the Kalashnikovs fired blanks. Not all of them, not Nurettin’s and not his. And Mert had always been marked for death. That Greek man had wanted him gone for some reason.

Now that the air
was clearing a bit, his eyes streamed less. He could see men who looked not unlike the way he had looked until he’d ditched his clothes in favour of a dress. They wore black and some of them stood over him and his compatriots, while others moved through the ballroom doors and into other parts of the building.

Several minutes passed and then three people arrived. A fat man with a cigar in his mouth, a middle-aged macho type, and an attractive woman who looked around in the sort of way one does when one is searching for someone or something specific.

Mehmet Süleyman had never been able to resist the sound of a woman in distress. In response to hysterical weeping and what sounded like pleading somewhere outside room 411, he went to the door and opened it.
İ
kmen would have been furious with him but he had to do it. What he saw was Ceyda Ümit apparently fighting with Burak Fisekçi.

‘I don’t want you!’ he heard the girl say. Burak Fisekçi had his back to him while the girl was facing him and, as he caught her eye, he put his finger to his lips to silence her.

‘Ceyda, I will look after
you!’ Burak Fisekçi said as he held on to her wrists and tried to pull her towards himself. ‘We are meant to be together. I did this for you!’

Did what? Süleyman began to feel nauseous. He moved forward and delivered a chop with the edge of his hand to the neck of a person he’d always known as a decent man. He watched him drop unconscious to the floor. The girl, who was wearing only her underwear, ran into his arms and said, ‘Burak Bey has gone mad.’

Süleyman took his jacket off and was just about to put it round the girl’s shoulders when she said, ‘You have to help Inspector
İ
kmen!’

‘Inspector
İ
kmen?’ He dropped his jacket on the floor. ‘Where is he?’

She took hold of one of his hands and ran towards the great open space at the heart of the hotel. With his arms and legs draped either side of one of the metal joists holding the building together,
İ
kmen looked like an array of scruffy washing – with a Kalashnikov balanced precariously on a dome just below his feet.

‘Çetin!’ Süleyman leaned on the banister. ‘Çetin!’

‘Burak Bey pushed him,’ Ceyda Ümit said. ‘He tried to kill him! He’s gone mad. He must have done.’

But Süleyman wasn’t listening.
He couldn’t see whether
İ
kmen was breathing or not. He called his name once again. ‘Çetin!’

This time a guttural groan came out of the body on the joist and Süleyman thanked Allah that his friend was not dead.

‘We’re going to get you out of there,’ Süleyman said. ‘Just hang on! Just . . .’ He didn’t have a clue how he was going to get
İ
kmen out of this predicament and he knew
İ
kmen would know that. ‘I will get help,’ he said. And then he added, stupidly, ‘Stay there!’

From the void came something that sounded very much like a laugh.

The leader was coming back to consciousness. Every so often he groaned and pulled impotently against the rough selection of sheets and dressing-gown cords with which Arto Sarkissian had tied him to the bed. Together with the sound of weeping that was coming from Lale Aktar, this was the soundtrack to the Sarkissian brothers’ world in room 411.

In spite of Krikor’s attempts to staunch the bleeding from Hovsep Pars’s shoulder, his blood continued to pour out and soak everything that was pressed against the wound. Sporadic firing could still be heard from somewhere in the hotel and now that Süleyman had gone, who knew where, they were effectively on their own.

Words were useless in a
situation like this but Krikor at least had to speak in order to take his mind off the groaning of the gunman and the crying of the woman.

Inclining his head down towards the old man in his arms he said, ‘He takes warfarin.’

His brother nodded. ‘He’s an inactive old man who has suffered much, it’s not surprising he needs blood thinners,’ he said. He shook his head impatiently. ‘Where is Inspector Süleyman? And Çetin?’

Krikor shrugged.

‘If Allah wills it they will still be alive.’ Still sobbing, Lale Aktar spoke for the first time since
İ
kmen had left room 411.

Arto, who could see her face over Hovsep Pars’s one good shoulder, said, ‘So now you speak, Lale Hanım.’

‘I don’t want Mr Pars to die,’ she said.

‘Don’t you? Following my friend Çetin
İ
kmen’s thesis about this whole event and your place in it, I wouldn’t have thought that you cared about anything or anyone except the man who has come to obsess you.’

Lale Aktar looked down at the floor.

‘Muhammed Ersoy,’ Arto said.

Hovsep Pars’s eyes sprang open and Krikor shook his head at his brother.

But Arto smiled at the old man and said, ‘Hovsep Bey understands that if that devil is indeed behind this carnage then it is our duty, to the Pars family if no one else, to punish everyone who has colluded with Ersoy. And that includes this woman.’

‘Yes,
but—’

‘Arto is right,’ the old man whispered. He patted Krikor’s hand.

Arto Sarkissian looked at Lale Aktar with cold eyes. She had married one of his brother’s best friends and, it seemed, she had betrayed him. ‘Lale Hanım,’ he began, ‘what—’

‘Do you know, Dr Sarkissian, what it’s like to fall in love? I don’t mean just having a fancy for someone, lusting after them or being captivated by their personality. Falling in love is being subsumed by another. It involves being prepared to do anything,
anything
to promote that person’s happiness.’

‘And that is how you feel about Ersoy?’

Her face, which had been pale, coloured slightly.

‘But he’s never getting out of prison,’ Arto said. ‘You can have no future with him. I still don’t understand why you are involved with this.’

She paused. ‘I wanted to please him,’ she said. ‘We all did, Dr Sarkissian. But Muhammed only actually loved me.’

‘He told you that?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you believed him?’

‘Yes.’

Krikor Sarkissian,
his face dark with fury, said, ‘Have you slept with him?’

Prison was never the same for the rich and Muhammed Ersoy had been rich.

‘Yes.’

‘He bought his way into your arms.’

She didn’t reply. But that was how it must have been. Ersoy, even in prison, remained a man who commanded great wealth. Committed to a whole life sentence, he had somehow used his money to bribe his way to comfort and good food and to buy whoever he needed.

‘Muhammed was bored,’ she said. ‘Not with me, with prison. This was a diversion for him.’

The camera on one of those men’s helmets. Had Ersoy been watching every move or was this to be an entertainment for him later? It was certainly sick enough, whichever way it was presented.

Arto Sarkissian tried to digest what had just been said to him. ‘So, by proxy, Ersoy kills us all and then you and these “others” get away with it?’

She looked him straight in the eyes. ‘Oh, I never imagined I’d get clear,’ she said. ‘I can’t speak for anyone else, but I never realistically hoped to get away, ultimately, with anything.’

‘And so amusing Ersoy was the entire point?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Absolutely.’

He saw Commissioner
Ardıç first. Then Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu flung herself into his arms. It was as much a shock – and indeed an entirely unwanted one – to him as it was to the commissioner and a smouldering
İ
zzet Melik. He pushed her aside roughly and said to his superior, ‘Sir, Inspector
İ
kmen is suspended above the Kubbeli Saloon on a metal joist. I don’t know how much longer he can hang on.’

Ardıç resisted the urge to ask why
İ
kmen was in the predicament he was and called two Special Forces officers over and told them to go wherever Süleyman took them. Süleyman duly began to lead the officers up the staircase, still shrouded in residue from tear gas canisters. Then he turned and called down to Ardıç, ‘And we need medics to go to room four eleven. A man called Hovsep Pars has been shot.’ He put Ardıç and an apparently nascent domestic situation between Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu and
İ
zzet Melik behind him and ran.

When he reached the fourth floor he jogged over to the banister, hoping against hope that
İ
kmen was still managing to hold on. ‘Çetin!’

This time, via what Süleyman imagined was a vast act of will,
İ
kmen actually managed to raise his head and look at him.

‘We’re getting you out of there!’ Süleyman said. Then he turned to the two Special Forces officers and asked them, ‘How do we achieve this?’

‘Do we know
if he’s broken any bones?’ one of the officers said. ‘Principally his back.’

‘Well, he can move his head and he is holding on with his hands,’ Süleyman said. ‘I think I’ve seen a foot move. So no, I don’t think he’s broken his back.’

Both the officers looked at the figure lying on the joist, then they looked at each other and nodded. The taller of the two said just one word, ‘Tightrope.’

There was a lot of shouting and what sounded like heavy machinery or something being heaved around. Loud thuds reverberated through the joist, making hanging on to it even more difficult than it already was. How he had come to land on the joist, he had no idea. He remembered that Burak Fisekçi had thrown him. But the actual fall itself was a complete blank. One moment he had been on the fourth-floor gallery and the next he had been hanging from the joist like a broken toy. But how broken?

İ
kmen had determined that he was probably reasonably all right by virtue of the fact that he was now actively holding on to the joist with his hands. Some ribs had certainly been broken, that was a given, but he could move his feet – although doing that hurt, and so he may have broken a leg or an ankle or possibly both. But he hadn’t broken his back.

Why had Burak Fisekçi thrown him over the banister? Ceyda Ümit had been about to tell him something regarding the man with the camera on his helmet; he’d stupidly cut her off and then Burak had hurled him into the void. Why?

A noise like
a cable being unravelled tempted
İ
kmen to try and see what was going on but he resisted it. Moving his neck in any direction hurt and he was in quite enough pain with his ribs and his legs without risking any more forays into the world of agony. Instead he focused on Burak Fisekçi.

Good and faithful Burak, dedicated assistant to Krikor Sarkissian for more years than
İ
kmen could remember. Burak Fisekçi, Muslim Armenian, listening ear for the bad, the mad, the addicted, the friendless, Burak Fisekçi, bachelor. Was Burak Fisekçi really implicated in what had happened at the Pera Palas?

Burak had engaged the theatre company. He’d been involved in developing the ideas and the script for the murder mystery evening and he had had a big hand in inviting the guests. Could he have betrayed Krikor? Why?

Like Lale Aktar and that prison reformer Aysel Ökte, Burak sometimes went into jails. Krikor’s clinic provided services to both ex-offenders and those on remand. Had Burak been to Silivri Prison and, like the novelist, met Ersoy? In all his long and varied career, Çetin
İ
kmen had never encountered anyone like Muhammed Ersoy. Rich, opinionated, handsome, educated and completely without conscience. He drew people to him of all races, genders and religious persuasions in a way that put Süleyman’s sexual power over women not just in the shade but in darkness. He’d been sent to prison for life, his assets had passed to a distant cousin from the east and yet
İ
kmen knew for a fact that Ersoy still lived in some comfort. Money passed from the relative to the convict although how or in what quantities,
İ
kmen didn’t know. And then what of the golden samovar? He’d seen it. He hadn’t dreamed it.