Death by Design (7 page)

That night İkmen dined alone at a restaurant in one of the streets off Bergmannstrasse. Probably because it was relatively quiet in the restaurant, he suddenly felt truly alone and very exposed. All around him people were speaking a language he could not easily comprehend. His lodgings, though adequate, were cramped and unsavoury, and he was moving on to another country he hadn’t seen since the 1970s. How he would get to the UK he still didn’t know. The mysterious Wolfgang was obviously involved but whether İkmen actually trusted the old man was a moot point. After he finished his meal, he returned to his room, lay on his bed, stared up at the brown-stained ceiling and smoked.

None of the irritations, fears and even anxieties about his immediate future that he had faced so far would have been half so bad had he not had Fatma on his mind too. She had known when he was due to leave, even if she knew no more than that, but still she had refused to utter one word to him. He’d spent the night before he left İstanbul in his son Bülent’s old bed. He had been banished from his own bedroom since well before Bekir had been killed. After seventeen years on the streets, that boy had picked up where he had left off with his family – causing fights and divisions, encouraging his younger siblings to lie, cheat and take drugs. What a toxic waste of flesh Bekir had been! And yet İkmen had cried when he died. Bekir had been his son as well as Fatma’s and he hurt as much if not more from the loss of him. Not that Fatma would ever understand that. It was clear now that she didn’t want to. She blamed him for Bekir’s death and that, now allied to the fact that she had only ever tolerated her husband’s lack of faith in Islam, had apparently killed her love for him. And yet what a love it had been! Çetin and Fatma had produced nine children in their long, long marriage. She had been, he recalled, an enthusiastic and uninhibited lover right up until Bekir had come between them that final, fatal time. Now it was as if someone had turned a tap off. He couldn’t get near her. With her headscarf pulled tightly around her face and her new, long Iranian-style overcoat, Fatma was not only someone unavailable, she was also, if only in appearance, foreign too. Alien and cold, she looked down at him as if he were something dirty, cheap and offensive. For the first time in nearly four decades, İkmen wondered what it would be like to make love to another woman. Strangely, just the thought of it made him shudder. How would that work? he wondered. How would he even begin to meet a woman? And, even if one were to come along, what would a smoke-dried, hard-up father of eight have to offer such a person? A meze in one of the restaurants on İstanbul Street, accompanied by a lot of rakı followed by a terrible, fumbling attempt at sex in the early hours of the morning.

Maybe he should go with a prostitute. There was plenty of money in Çetin Ertegrul’s account. He could if he wanted to just order in some eastern European girl (there were easily as many Russians, Czechs, etc., in Berlin as there were in İstanbul) who would, no doubt, acquaint him with new and exciting sexual mores. But he knew that whatever this mythical person did, it would do neither him nor her any good. He couldn’t just ‘go’ with anyone! He hadn’t done that since he was a conscript back in the sixties. Even then he’d only done it once. Shortly afterwards he met Fatma, fell in love and had never had sex without love since. He knew that Mehmet Süleyman had had his share of illicit sexual liaisons, but he also knew that they had rarely, if ever, brought him joy. Recalling his colleague’s name made him think about İstanbul again, made him wonder what Mehmet, Ayşe Farsakoğlu and İzzet Melik were doing now. He wished he had been able to bid them proper farewells, but even that had been denied to him. To Mehmet and the others his going was an absence, a strange vacancy. Even Arto had been baffled by it. He had been hurt too. He had of course understood but he had also, İkmen knew, felt upset. They had been friends all their lives, they had shared everything. Except this. But then in İkmen’s ‘new’ world there was no Arto Sarkissian, any more than there was a Mehmet Süleyman, a Fatma İkmen, or even a Çetin İkmen. He was Çetin Ertegrul now: security guard, concerned father and general poor Turk. Çetin Ertegrul was not well-educated, he did not have friends in any of the professions and he only read the worst possible newspapers. Religious in the sense that he regularly attended the local mosque and always kept Ramazan, Çetin Ertegrul was a conservative soul who hankered after his old life back in his ancestral village in Cappadocia. He was not someone Çetin İkmen really liked very much. But he knew he would have to learn to at least live comfortably with this character for the foreseeable future. Failure to do so could conceivably cost him his life.

Tired out by the events of the past three days as well as by his own very negative thoughts, İkmen eventually and mercifully went to sleep at around midnight. At 3 a.m. he was woken by someone shaking him and whispering in German. Alarmed, İkmen started to defend himself against this man until he said to him in Turkish, ‘Get up, you fool! Get your things together! Tonight we go to Calais!’

A thousand miles to the east, in İstanbul, a sleepless Mehmet Süleyman stood in his garden and looked up at the moon. Where, he wondered, was Çetin İkmen now? More importantly, was he safe?

‘The thing about buying counterfeit goods, Graham, is that when one does so, one is, if indirectly, funding international terrorism.’

Graham Amphill was one of the BBC’s most feared and, in some circles, hated interviewers. As soon as the new and alarmingly young mayor of London had finished speaking, people all over the United Kingdom held their breath. What on earth would Graham say in response to that?

‘Oh, lord,’ Graham Amphill muttered as he looked wearily into camera four. ‘Oh, come on, Mr Üner, not that old argument! You don’t know that people selling knock-off watches and handbags on the streets of London are working for al Qaeda for God’s sake!’

‘No we don’t know—’

‘Well, if you don’t know, Mr Üner, why are you spoiling it for poor Londoners who just want a fake Rolex or pair of slightly dodgy trainers to save a few quid? Isn’t this really all about trying to stamp out what we in the west consider to be slave labour in the Third World?’

‘I—’

‘Isn’t it all just about being judgemental and nannyish?’

‘Graham, if you will let me speak . . .’ Haluk Üner, mayor of London, leaned forward in the big black chair the BBC had provided for him and smiled. A good-looking man of only thirty-five, Üner was the first mayor of London to be the son of immigrant parents. Both his parents were originally from Adana in south-eastern Turkey. They had sent Haluk to the best schools that north London could offer. This had paid off when he won a place at Oxford to study law. Haluk Üner QC had been voted in on an Independent ticket as mayor of London only six months previously after a staggeringly fast progress into the upper echelons of the capital’s local government organisation. ‘I am not against people buying what they want,’ he continued. ‘But fake goods are, we know, produced in factories both here in Europe and in the Third World in appalling conditions. Those who work in these factories are slaves—’

‘But is that our business if those factories are in Vietnam, Mr Üner? Isn’t it a bit arrogant of us sitting on our well-fed behinds here in the west to tell people in places like Vietnam where and how they can work?’

‘Possibly but—’

‘And what about places where there is no alternative but to work in these factories? And by the way, you still haven’t managed to explain where the funding of terrorism comes into this, have you?’

It wasn’t the best interview Haluk Üner had ever given. But then Graham Amphill was not giving him an easy time – not that he ever really gave anyone an easy time. But Haluk Üner was a lawyer, he was a professional and he was mayor of London. He smiled.

‘Graham,’ he said, ‘this connection doesn’t come from me. I haven’t just made it up in order to underwrite what some have described as my obsession with the counterfeiters. The acting commissioner of police tells me it is so. The Metropolitan Police, in concert with other forces across the country – notably Greater Manchester – have established links between counterfeit production in the UK and abroad, and terrorist organisations they say may include al Qaeda.’

‘May . . .’

‘Al Qaeda is by its very nature a secretive organisation,’ Haluk Üner said. ‘What ordinary people like you and me know about it is minimal, Graham. But what our security services know is rather more extensive, thank God.’

‘And so you just take their word for it?’

‘Yes.’ The mayor of London sat up straight in his chair and looked his interrogator square in the eye. ‘I have to. Without other information to the contrary, I have no choice. If the police tell me that these counterfeit operations have links to terrorism then I have to believe them. I have to err on the side of caution, I have to protect Londoners, that is my job. What would you have me do, Graham? Take risks with people’s lives? Good God, if I did that, people like you would come down on me like a ton of bricks!’

Inspector Patrick Riley of the Metropolitan Police raised his beer can in salute. Personally he hadn’t voted for Haluk, not because he was Turkish but because he’d voted for the Liberal candidate. He always did. But in spite of his initial misgivings, he had to admit that Haluk Üner was doing a good job. Although he’d only been in office a few months, he’d already committed to new children’s play areas and announced several affordable housing schemes, in spite of the fact that economists were forecasting a recession. Downturn or not, the capital had to have more homes, it was just a fact. And then there was his stand on knock-off goods. God, but he had the bit between his teeth about that! Maybe it was the connection to terrorism that got him so agitated. Some said that it was because he was a Muslim and so wanted to prove himself willing to tackle terror plots of all kinds. Riley didn’t have any view on that, he didn’t know Haluk Üner personally or otherwise. But what he had seen of the man he liked. Giving Graham Amphill a verbal run for his money was a joy to see in itself! But then he thought about counterfeit goods once again and his face dropped. What, he wondered, was Ahmet Ülker and the even more shadowy people who ran illegal goods in the capital doing while they watched Haluk Üner on the TV? Were they sneering, laughing, shouting threats at their fifty-inch flat screen digital God-knows-what entertainment hubs?

When Riley finally reached his sparse and lonely bedroom in the early hours of the morning, he wondered where that other Turk, his İstanbul colleague Çetin İkmen, was now. If everything was going to plan he was probably on his way out of Germany.

İkmen knew that his driver, who looked like a very much younger version of Wolfgang, would not make it to Calais on the French coast that night. He had no idea how many kilometres Calais was from Berlin but he knew enough geography to know that it would take more than just a few hours. Before they left Kreuzberg, the driver stopped at an ATM machine and told İkmen to withdraw three thousand euros. He’d known this was coming and so he handed the money over without complaint. Only then did the journey begin in earnest.

The truck was carrying bratwurst and other German sausages to the UK. They apparently liked them over there and the truck was refrigerated in order to preserve the meat on its journey across Europe. If, as İkmen suspected, this man whose name he never learned was Wolfgang’s son, transporting pork products was rather a strange occupation for a Jew to be doing. But then he imagined that religion probably meant very little to someone like Wolfgang. How could anyone who had been through the camps, maybe even suffered at the hands of the Stasi afterwards, believe in anything even remotely divine?

While they travelled across Germany, İkmen rode up front in the cab with the man. Neither of them spoke although İkmen was heartened to see that his driver smoked almost as much as he did and so they both puffed the miles away in fairly convivial silence. Only on the approach to the Belgian border did this state of affairs change. The man pulled the truck into a deserted lane and told İkmen to get out. He also pulled a gun out of the pocket of his anorak. It had the instant effect of making İkmen’s heart pound.

‘What . . . er . . .’ All his German banished by fear, he spoke in English now. Had he been cheated by Wolfgang and his son? Was this where he died, in some muddy German country lane? His head began to spin. But then he noticed that the man had something else as well as the gun in his hands. It was a sandwich. He thrust it at İkmen.

‘You people don’t eat pork,’ he said. ‘It’s beetroot.’

‘Beetroot?’

‘Now you must get in here.’ The man climbed up back into the cab and opened up a small hatch behind the driver’s seat. It was a very small opening.

‘You can take the sandwich with you, for the journey,’ the man said.

‘I get in . . .’

‘It is dark and it is too small for you to do anything other than stand. But it will get you over the border into Belgium and then later across the English Channel to Dover. Get in.’

It wasn’t easy, even for someone of İkmen’s slight build. First he had to bend double and then somehow thread his body through the hatch and into the pitch-black gap behind the cab. At one point he thought he couldn’t actually do it, which was when he realised why his driver had a gun.

‘It is get in there or I shoot you now and throw your body into a ditch,’ the man said. ‘We cannot have failure. Failure for us means that we are found out. Now get in. As soon as we have cleared the border you may get back into the cab again.’

In spite of the fact that bending that low hurt like hell, İkmen squeezed himself through the gap and then very slowly stood up in the narrow, airless space.

‘Eat the sandwich,’ the man said as he closed the hatch behind him. ‘It will take your mind off things.’

And then there was utter darkness. İkmen, his hand still holding the sandwich, fought for what stale air there was in that tiny, terrifying space. Then the driver started the engine and, rendered totally blind, İkmen began his progress towards the Belgian border.