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‘So one of these characters is killed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is your Hercule Poirot, your Miss Marple or whatever?’

‘Ah, it
is for the guests to discover who killed whichever one of the company is ‘murdered,’ Alp said. ‘There will be clues both in our performance and scattered throughout the hotel.’

‘I see.’ Ersu Bey didn’t really approve. But then he was hardly on board with either the murder mystery evening or Dr Krikor Sarkissian’s drug clinic. In Ersu Bey’s opinion, drug addicts belonged not in hospital but in prison.

‘We’re scheduled to start our performance at ten,’ Alp said.

‘But you and your company will eat with the guests.’

‘Yes. We’ll mingle, in character, then when the meal is over, when the coffee is being served, our performance will begin in earnest.’

Ersu Bey didn’t even pretend to understand what that meant. No performance area had been set up and so he couldn’t really picture what was going to happen. However he smiled and said, ‘Well, sir, I will be working until eleven this evening and so if I can assist you in any way at all, please don’t hesitate to ask.’

‘Thank you. Er, do you know where Dr Sarkissian is?’

‘In the Orient Bar, sir. Would you like me to get him for you?’

‘Well, actually it’s his assistant Burak Bey I really need to speak to,’ Alp said. ‘Mr Burak Fisekçi.’

Ersu Bey smiled. ‘I will have him paged for you, sir.’

‘Thanks.’

When Ersu
Bey had gone, Alp looked at his colleagues and they all laughed.

‘I thought,’ one of the women said, ‘that men like him were dying out.’

‘Oh, no,’ Alp said. ‘Men like him will always be with us.’

Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu
looked up at the famous hotel façade and squeezed
İ
zzet Melik’s arm a little harder.

‘I’m sorry, it was just impossible,’ he said. ‘But the Emperor Alexis will be nice too. We have the bridal suite, which overlooks the sea, and Fevzi Bey is providing wonderful food.’

‘And we’ve the klezmer band.’

‘And we have Sefira, the klezmer band! Everyone will eat, drink, dance and we’ll get married and live happily ever after.’ He kissed her. ‘We will, you know.’

‘Yes.’ Ay
ş
e looked into his eyes and smiled. ‘I love the Emperor Alexis,
İ
zzet, don’t think that I don’t. It’s just Çetin Bey was so grumpy about coming to the Pera Palas tonight it made me angry.’

‘He’s grumpy because it’s his birthday.’

‘I know, but he was dismissive about this place too,’ she said. ‘Going on and on about how he’d rather be at home and couldn’t wait for it all to be over. Poor Dr Sarkissian!’

‘I think
that the doctor and his brother are used to Çetin Bey by now,’
İ
zzet said. ‘What worries me is what will happen if Inspector Süleyman doesn’t win this detection contest or whatever it’s called.’

‘Murder mystery evening.’

‘If a crime novelist, a woman, beats him, he’ll be unbearable.’

‘Yes.’ But secretly, Ay
ş
e hoped he’d win anyway. She smiled and said to
İ
zzet, ‘I love you.’

‘I should hope so,’ he replied. ‘You’re marrying me.’

They shared a brief hug and then Ay
ş
e looked at her watch. They were due to meet her brother in nearby Nevizade Alley at sometime between seven thirty and eight. It was nearly seven forty-five now.

‘We’d better go,’ Ay
ş
e said. ‘Çetin Bey and the others will have just sat down for their five-course meal.’ She looked through the windows in the art nouveau front doors of the Pera Palas at the smartly dressed security personnel and the arch of the metal detector they operated. ‘They’re going to have lobster,’ she said. ‘I like lobster.’

İ
zzet laughed. ‘Well, how will stuffed mussels do as a substitute?’ he said. ‘Those I can promise you.’

She paused for just a moment then she kissed his cheek and said, ‘I love stuffed mussels.’

‘Well, that’s settled then.’

They began
to walk away. But then a taxi pulled up right in front of them, forcing them to stop.
İ
zzet instinctively held Ay
ş
e close. It was dark and there was no need for the taxi driver to pull up so far on to the pavement. As they passed the car Ay
ş
e saw a man get out carrying a very large and, by the light of the hotel entrance, what looked like a gold samovar. It was exactly like the one that had once belonged to Dr Krikor’s clinic; she remembered it well because it had such an unfortunate history. He’d sold it to help fund his clinic some years ago. How odd and also blood-chilling that it should turn up outside the hotel where Dr Sarkissian was again raising funds for his clinic. Ay
ş
e frowned. That thing represented nothing but misery.

The entrée, which was a cold meze, had been, to Çetin
İ
kmen’s mind, pleasant enough. But he didn’t really eat much of it.

‘I’m saving myself for later,’ he told Arto Sarkissian as he got up from the table.

Arto, looking up at him, said, ‘The fish course will be here soon, where are you going?’

İ
kmen shrugged.

‘For a cigarette?’ Arto shook his head. ‘Are you actually going to eat anything, Çetin?’

‘Of course!’ But he walked off towards the Kubbeli Saloon which led to the
foyer and from there the great outdoors. Süleyman was sitting at Krikor Sarkissian’s table with Krikor’s young wife Caroun on one side and Lale Aktar on the other. They were all talking and laughing animatedly and so
İ
kmen banished any thought that Süleyman might want to join him for a smoke.

He walked into the Kubbeli Saloon, the Moorish-style afternoon tea venue where, later on, coffee and petits fours would be served and where the murder mystery thing would start. It was a beautiful room, with a most spectacular multi-domed ceiling. Despite his mood,
İ
kmen took a moment to have a look at it. Above the domes was a vast space and then a glass roof that, in the daytime, allowed the Kubbeli Saloon to be illuminated by natural light. When his daughter Hulya had got married at the Pera Palas, before the refit, it had been a dark and rather dusty place, but then it had also been affordable.
İ
kmen couldn’t remember what year Hulya and her husband Berekiah had got married. Their son, Timür, was at school already and so it had to be more than seven years ago. How old was Timür now? He didn’t know. He was little and yet he was at school. How old did that make him?

İ
kmen knew how old
he
was and the knowledge didn’t make him happy. His mind was still as sharp as ever but
his body was a damn nuisance. When it wasn’t aching, it wouldn’t always do what he wanted it to and even he had to admit that his lungs were shot to pieces. Stairs, in common with hills and slopes, were now his enemies. But would he stop smoking?
İ
kmen didn’t bother to dignify that with an answer even in the privacy of his own mind.

He walked down the stairs into the foyer and made for the metal detector arch and the front doors of the hotel. But then he stopped. There was a man standing in front of the hotel concierge’s desk. He was thin, a little shabbily dressed and
İ
kmen didn’t recognise him but there was something about him that made him want to stare. The concierge wasn’t in evidence and the man was casually looking around the foyer in a non-committal sort of way. Neither ugly nor particularly attractive, he was a middle-aged man just like thousands of others.

Except that he wasn’t because he was giving Çetin
İ
kmen one of those feelings that he had from time to time that always reminded him of his late mother. Ay
ş
e
İ
kmen had been a witch who read coffee grounds, tarot cards and effected cures and curses for her many devotees.
İ
kmen’s father Timür, an academic, had never understood or even really approved, but he’d loved her and her early death had brought a sadness into his life from
which he had never really recovered. It was acknowledged both within the family and beyond that Çetin had inherited Ay
ş
e’s powers of observation and insight, what some called her ‘second sight’. Now this unknown man was making something inside
İ
kmen twitch – and not in a good way.

He was on the point of going up to him and opening a conversation when the concierge returned to his desk and handed the man a piece of paper.

‘Here’s your receipt,’ he said. The man took the document. The concierge smiled. ‘I put it safely into his hands,’ he said. ‘You need have no worry.’

‘Thank you.’ The man’s voice was slightly mucoid, as if he had the tail end of a cold.

For just a moment,
İ
kmen wondered whether he ought to approach the man but then thought better of it. What was he going to say to him,
my insides are twitching, can you tell me why you might be having that effect on me?

The man left and
İ
kmen followed him out of the front door only because he wanted to go and have a smoke. But once outside, he watched him. The man hailed a taxi and when he got in he asked the driver to take him to the smart Bosphorus village of Yeniköy. What had he just delivered and why?

The pretty
young woman in the 1920s flapper dress pointed towards a handsome man at the next table and said, ‘My husband is a prince. Aren’t I lucky?’

She’d come to sit beside Krikor Sarkissian and opposite Mehmet Süleyman, who was charmed. Had the country not become a republic back in 1923 he would have been a minor prince of the Ottoman Empire himself. The handsome man at the next table wore a long frock coat, known as a Stambouline, and a red fez.

‘I am actually a distant relative of the Imperial Family myself,’ the pretty young woman, Nuray Hanımefendi, said, ‘but I’m from Antep and so all of this big city sophistication is still new to me.’

Entering into the spirit of the murder mystery event, which was set in 1925, Krikor asked her, ‘So, Hanımefendi, you and your husband remain in
İ
stanbul even though the Sultan has fled?’

She smiled. ‘Ah, yes, but sir, my husband, although related, was never a member of the royal household.’

Very much like the Süleyman family, Mehmet thought. Atatürk and his government had allowed his great-grandparents and their children to remain in the country for just that reason. And because they had rescinded all and any claims to titles, money and property beyond a couple of very shabby wooden palaces, they had been left alone, overlooked and forgotten.

‘So you’re
staying in the Pera Palas . . .’

‘Tomorrow we will take the train to Paris,’ she said.

‘The Orient Express?’ Lale Aktar’s eyes shone with the romance of it.

‘Yes. Have you been on it, madam?’

‘No, I’m afraid I haven’t,’ Lale said. ‘But I’ve heard it’s very luxurious.’

‘Oh, it is indeed – or so I am told. We are going to Paris to deliver my husband’s young brother to his studies at the Sorbonne,’ Nuray said.

‘Will you also go shopping?’ Caroun Sarkissian asked.

She giggled. ‘Oh, I do hope so!’

‘I hope so too,’ Caroun said. ‘Paris has some of the best shops, especially for clothes and accessories, in the world.’

‘I know. I am so excited!’ Then she put her head to one side, looking a little sad now, and she said, ‘I just hope that my husband will be able to accompany me if I do go shopping. He is always so busy.’

‘He is in business?’ Süleyman asked.

Nuray Hanımefendi pursed her lips slightly. Ottoman gentlemen, even in the mid-1920s and down on their luck, would not generally have been ‘in business’. ‘There are cotton fields, in Anatolia,’ she said. ‘But that is not his concern. No, my husband has literary interests, sir. He
attends a great many literary salons in
İ
stanbul. Now he intends to investigate Paris.’

‘He’s published?’

‘Oh, no!’ She looked at Lale as if she’d just asked whether her husband was some sort of pervert. ‘No, it is just a fascination, madam.’

‘But it’s one that takes up a lot of his time?’

She lowered her head. This girl was, Süleyman felt, a very good little actress. ‘It does, yes,’ she said. ‘I am quite frequently left to my own devices and it is . . .’ She leaned forward across the table and whispered, ‘Sometimes I entertain fears that maybe
İ
zzedin has a mistress or perhaps he visits loose women of the streets! Men do such things. I know that this is probably madness on my part, but I cannot get it out of my head! I must always please my husband and be everything that he wants me to be. If I lost
İ
zzedin I would have nothing to live for. Nothing!’ She put a small handkerchief up to her face and then stood up. ‘I’m so sorry!’ she said. ‘I have said too much!’ And then she ran from the table back to her previous place at another table at the rear of the room.

Süleyman smiled. ‘So
İ
zzedin Effendi may have interests that go beyond the mere literary,’ he said.

Krikor and the two women laughed.

During the meal, which was currently between the fish
and the meat courses, the characters moved around the tables, making themselves known to the guests. So far Krikor and his party had spoken to Nuray Hanımefendi and a character called Nicos Bey who ‘owned’ the hotel. He was an anxious and somewhat volatile Greek whose mind was almost entirely taken up with planning what was going to be Turkey’s first ever fashion show.

‘It actually took place in nineteen twenty-six,’ Krikor said after Nicos had gone. He and Arto had always been passionate local historians. ‘Apparently every guest was given his or her own nargile pipe and the only drink served was champagne.’

Süleyman was rather more interested in what clues Nicos might be planting in their minds. Nicos had revealed that he was worried that
İ
zzedin Effendi might not be able to pay his bill. Apparently it was well known in the city that although he sent his brother to the Sorbonne and employed servants and governesses, he was bankrupt.