Deadly Web (2 page)

They shook hands and sat down. Zuleika arranged numerous bags around her feet as she sat, each sporting the name of an exclusive and expensive shop – Gönül Paksöy, Surreal Kılık İpek.

Mehmet tipped his head towards the bags and smiled. ‘I see you continue to prosper.’

Zuleika smiled in return. ‘Burhan is prosperous, Mehmet,’ she said. ‘I’m very fortunate.’

‘Yes.’

‘But then so are you,’ she continued. ‘How is little Yusuf?’

‘He’s fine,’ Mehmet responded quickly. Although his ex-wife and also his cousin, Zuleika didn’t know about the grim reality of his new existence. The official line from the older Süleymans was that Mehmet’s wife and child were merely visiting relatives in Dublin. Just like his Ottoman forebears, ‘Prince’ Muhammed Süleyman preferred to keep his private life ‘walled’.

As soon as the waitress arrived, Zuleika ordered tea.

‘So what are you doing here?’ she asked her ex-husband when the girl had left. ‘I don’t see this place as a haunt of policemen.’

Mehmet smiled once more. ‘Çetin İkmen’s daughter Hulya is getting married here in the hotel,’ he said. ‘I’ll be going off to the party in a minute.’

‘Oh?’ Zuleika frowned. ‘Very grand venue for someone like İkmen, isn’t it? I’d have thought that with all his children . . .’

Zuleika had never liked Inspector Çetin İkmen. Even despite his being older than Mehmet, that İkmen was senior to him was something she had never understood. İkmen, though educated, was, to Zuleika’s mind, common. But then with nine children, a raffish apartment in Sultanahmet and a wife who covered her head, how could he be anything else?

‘The groom’s uncle is actually paying for the wedding,’ Mehmet replied, his awareness growing with every passing second of all the reasons why he had left this woman.

Zuleika leaned across the table, assaulting Mehmet’s nostrils with heavy, expensive perfume. ‘Anyone we know?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Mehmet said. ‘The uncle, Jak Cohen, has lived in London for the last thirty years.’

‘Cohen?’ She frowned again. ‘No relation to your old colleague, what was his name—’

‘Balthazar,’ Mehmet cut in, ‘yes. Jak is his brother. Berekiah, Balthazar’s son, is marrying Hulya İkmen.’

Zuleika sighed. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘I suppose if İkmen’s wife has found it within herself to take a Jew . . .’

‘Berekiah is a very fine young man,’ Mehmet responded hotly. ‘Anyone would be proud to have him join their family.’ He then added acidly, ‘Anyone with any sense, that is.’

Zuleika’s tea arrived and, for a few moments, she sat back sipping it in silence. What a fool Mehmet still was! Forever fascinated by his working-class friends, wearing a watch she recognised as a street vendor fake. Burhan would rather die than be seen wearing such a thing! Burhan, her husband, with his many houses, his smart Şişli apartment, his cars, his yacht – his thin, grey hair, his teenage daughter . . .

‘I’m sure they’ll be very happy,’ she said in a conciliatory tone.

Mehmet, feeling now that he’d won some sort of moral victory, sat up straight. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘so am I.’

How handsome he still looked! Especially when he was asserting himself – so upright, regal. The pale young girl dressed entirely in black who approached the table now also shared that view. Her eyes visibly dilated as she looked at him.

‘Zuleika . . .’

‘Oh, Fitnat.’ Zuleika saw the twin lights of both desire and suspicion in the young girl’s eyes. ‘This is my cousin Mehmet Bey.’

‘Ah . . .’

Mehmet rose to take the young girl’s hand in his.

‘Mehmet, this is my stepdaughter, Fitnat.’

‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Fitnat.’

‘Right . . .’ She placed a large pile of bags on the floor, next to her black boot-covered feet, then sat down in the one remaining empty chair while Mehmet resumed his seat.

As soon as everyone was settled, Zuleika turned to the girl and said, ‘So did you get some nice, light, pretty clothes, Fitnat?’

‘Yes,’ the girl smiled, ‘lots. I’ll show you at home. I’m sure Mehmet Bey doesn’t want to—’

‘Your father will be so pleased,’ Zuleika cut in, and then turning to Mehmet she said, ‘Fitnat has been going through a “Gothic” phase of late. Black clothes, heavy make-up, all that nonsense.’

Yes, Mehmet had seen the so-called ‘Goths’ in and around Taksim Square and İstiklal Caddesi – young black-clad kids, listening to dirges on their CD Walkmans, talking about suicide. Not that they ever, in his experience, were any more prone to it than others. Maybe even less so. Cem Ataman, whose blood had oozed into the shoes of the officers who had found him, only had, as his parents had put it, Gothic ‘interests’. He hadn’t, or so it appeared, been one of the actual black-draped brigade like this girl.

‘But you’re done with all that now, aren’t you, darling?’ Zuleika said as she put a hand out to stroke Fitnat’s thick, artificially black hair.

‘Yes . . .’

‘She’s still only very young, you see,’ Zuleika said as she watched the girl watch her ex-husband’s every move and gesture. ‘Sixteen. Just a child really.’ Fitnat, stung not so much by what had been said, as by the spite that was implied within it, turned to look at her stepmother. Zuleika smiled. ‘And so in order that she might find a nice young man of her own age, she does need to take advantage of her prettiness,’ she said, ‘not hide it all under ugly black bags. Plenty of time for that when you’re old, like Mehmet Bey and myself, Fitnat.’

The girl looked into the beautiful face of her stepmother with both lack of comprehension and not a little hurt.

No trip out to Anadolu Kavaḡı would be complete without lunch at one of the little fish restaurants clustered around the harbour. The Israeli couple, as well as a young Frenchman the Turkish girl had briefly spoken to on the ferry, thought so and went straight for it.

But she was too excited to eat. Even though the meeting wouldn’t, couldn’t take place until sunset, just the thought of it . . . Impulsively she hugged her arms to her chest, smiling, her features distorting when viewed through the steam rising from her tea glass. The other people at the çay bahçe – a fisherman, a middle-class woman and her daughter – thought she looked a little odd at the time. But then they didn’t know what she knew, couldn’t know what delicious torment she was in.

She’d saved herself for this day, deliberately and with what she now knew was joy. It hadn’t been easy but then nothing that was really worth anything ever was – that’s what she’d been told, that’s what she had learned. That wasn’t what her father had told her. But then what did he know? Nothing. Nobody knew anything because she’d been so good – just like a young bride should be. She smiled, finished her tea and, through dreamy half-closed eyes, she watched the street cats fight and play outside the tiny police station on the waterfront.

Apart from the accent, which was now, to İkmen’s way of thinking, decidedly weird, Jak Cohen had changed little in the thirty-something years since he’d left İstanbul. Still, like his brother Balthazar, small and thin, Jak in middle age actually looked better than he had done during his hungry, semi-orphaned youth. When İkmen offered him a glass of champagne, which was one of the few contributions the policeman had made to the festivities, Jak declined.

‘No, thank you, Inspector,’ he said as he held one hand aloft to signal his refusal. ‘I’ve never touched it and never will.’

İkmen shrugged, took a glass for himself and sipped from it with pleasure.

‘If you remember my father . . .’

‘Of course Çetin Bey remembers our father! Everyone remembers our father!’

Both Jak and İkmen looked down at the shrunken man in the wheelchair clutching, as if for his life, on to a glass filled with white, cloudy liquid – the local anise spirit rakı, mixed with water.

‘Yes, Balthazar,’ Jak replied gravely, ‘they do. Drinking yourself to death while neglecting your children does tend to attract attention.’

The man in the wheelchair cleared his throat. ‘Ah, he had his problems. It was his way.’

‘It was a bad way.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘But today we mustn’t think of the past, only look forward to the future,’ İkmen interjected quickly. He’d known the Cohen boys, Balthazar, Jak and Leon, since childhood, which, given that İkmen himself was now fifty-five, was a long time. He knew how, even now and despite Jak’s generosity, disagreement could escalate between them.

‘Your daughter and my son, mmm,’ Balthazar frowned, ‘a Muslim and a Jew to become lovers in this world filled with hate.’

‘A Muslim and a Jew to show the way forward in this world filled with hate, I hope,’ İkmen said as he lit cigarettes for both himself and Balthazar.

‘You did agree to this marriage, Balthazar,’ Jak began. ‘I—’

‘I agreed because I knew it was inevitable,’ the man in the wheelchair retorted. ‘I called you,’ he looked up at his brother, scowling, ‘because if it had to be done I wanted it done properly.’

‘I am your brother. I love you. I’ll do anything I can for you.’

‘And I’m grateful, Jak. Just don’t ask me to be happy, because I can’t do that.’ He placed the cigarette İkmen had given him firmly between his lips and began to wheel himself away.

In all the years that he’d known him, İkmen had only come across this side of Balthazar’s character in recent times. Until the great earthquake of 1999, which had been responsible for putting him in his wheelchair, Balthazar Cohen had been the cheerfully adulterous Constable Cohen. A rather slovenly officer, he had sometimes helped and sometimes hindered İkmen in various investigations over the years. That he never exhibited any sort of religious sensibility had led İkmen to believe that he possessed few feelings about his origins. But then along came his own catastrophic injuries, coupled with the mental disintegration of his eldest son, Yusuf, and suddenly Balthazar was only too aware of his five-hundred-year-old heritage as one of İstanbul’s ancient families of Sephardic Jews. Maybe it had to do with the fact that Berekiah, İkmen’s new son-in-law, was Balthazar’s only avenue into the future . . .

‘Balthazar tells me that you work in the entertainment business over in London, Jak,’ İkmen said, changing the subject for everyone’s sake. ‘You’ve done well.’

Jak laughed. ‘I get by, Çetin,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I’ve a flat in Docklands, a house in Surrey and an ex-wife with expensive tastes. It costs me to keep Daniel, that’s my son, at Cambridge. But, please God, when he does finally get his degree it will have all been worth it.’

‘You know I’m very . . .’ İkmen struggled with the words of gratitude he knew were neither expected nor required, ‘grateful to you . . .’

‘Your daughter is a very decent and beautiful girl, Çetin Bey,’ Jak said, changing his form of address to the more respectful ‘Bey’. After all, monied though he may now be, Jak could remember only too clearly when he and his ragged-arsed brothers had felt privileged to be allowed to play with Çetin and his brother, Halil – the İkmen boys, clever sons of the university lecturer Timur İkmen and his ethereal-looking wife, Ayşe, the Albanian, the famous witch of Üsküdar.

İkmen looked across the room at the slim, handsome young man hand in hand with his eighteen-year-old daughter. Resplendent in white and gold, Hulya İkmen, now Cohen, looked like a bride from a fairy tale. Beside the couple, standing a little distant from them, was another attractive female, somewhat older and, to İkmen’s way of thinking, a little sadder than Hulya.

‘I am very happy to welcome Berekiah into my family,’ İkmen said, and then tipping his head in the direction of the young woman beside the couple he added, ‘I just wish that my Çiçek could find someone.’

Jak, following the policeman’s gaze, looked at the young woman and smiled. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think you’d have too much trouble there,’ he said. ‘I mean, look at that fellow there. He’s very attractive and he’s moving in on your Çiçek, by the look of it.’

For just a moment, İkmen thought that perhaps some new and exciting young man he’d never seen before had come on the scene. But when he saw that it was Mehmet Süleyman, he turned away from Jak and looked out of the open French doors across the terrace towards the Golden Horn and the great Imperial Mosques of the Old City.

‘I don’t think that he’s entirely suitable,’ İkmen said, more to himself than to Jak. ‘He’s got too much past.’

And then the music began, softly at first, echoing up into the marble galleries that lined the upper storey of the function room. The Pera Palas Hotel, built for the elegant passengers arriving in İstanbul on the Orient-Express, erstwhile residence of Atatürk, Agatha Christie, Jackie Onassis, various Ottoman princes – including now Mehmet Süleyman. Poor Mehmet, childless, wifeless, worried, talking earnestly to Çiçek – about something. İkmen shook his head as if to free worrying thoughts from his mind and went to join his headscarfed wife and her sisters out on the terrace.

The climb was steep and after a short while she began to pant. It wasn’t so hot now – around 5.30 p.m. – but, though young, she was mildly asthmatic and so it was hard. The asthma, so her doctor said, was a nervous condition, brought about by her anxieties. He’d given her medication for it. That the condition persisted now that she didn’t have any more anxieties, hadn’t had them for a while, was strange. Perhaps the medication, had she taken it, would have helped. She climbed on, gasping, using, where she could, the stout trunks of the trees to support her.

Above, the Byzantine castle of Yoros loomed. At the height of summer, even this late in the afternoon, this area wouldn’t be deserted as it thankfully was today. A combination of late season and rumours of an impending war between America and Turkey’s neighbour Iraq had meant that İstanbul as a whole had done badly for tourists in recent weeks. In some quarters it was being said that perhaps this war could affect Turkey herself. Even İstanbul, some said, was close enough to Iraq to make gas or chemical attack a possibility. Her breath became more laboured, dizzying her head with lack of oxygen.