Harem (22 page)

Ayşe knew that soon she was going to have to do something about her situation. The weather was hot and so lying naked on top of her bed, face down, very still, was quite a good idea. The fact that she had no choice but to do this was another matter.

How she’d got home from Orhan’s brother’s apartment was still a mystery. Oh, she knew Orhan had brought her, in his car. He’d helped her up the stairs to her apartment and had even, amazingly, managed to deliver her to her bedroom without waking Ali. What she couldn’t remember was how she’d dealt with the pain.

It had all begun so well. As soon as they’d got to his brother’s apartment he’d started kissing her passionately, telling her how much he loved her, caressing her body as he did so. She’d been so aroused that when he’d suggested they play a game, it had simply excited her further.

‘Imagine we’re in the cells,’ he’d said, ‘and you are my prisoner.’

He’d made her strip. He’d enjoyed watching her. Then he’d taken his handcuffs out of his pocket. She should have stopped it then, but she hadn’t. She had let him put them on her wrists; it was exciting, kneeling between his legs, pleasuring him, cuffed. And when he’d come, he’d called her filthy names which, because they were playing a game, was perfectly permissible and, again, exciting.

But at some point things changed. It was all a blur now. He ordered her to tell him how good he was, which she did, and then, somehow, she was cuffed to the bed. She thought he was just simply going to enter her from behind, he’d done it before . . . But she should have known something different was about to happen.

‘I’m going where Prince Mehmet has never been,’ he’d said breathlessly. The pain as he’d pushed himself into her anus was excruciating. She’d begged him to stop, but he’d just carried on, hitting her on the head as he did so, gasping words into her ears. ‘Tell me I’m better than him! Tell me I’m bigger!’

And she had. In pain and terrified, she had still done what he asked.

‘Filthy whore!’ he’d said when he’d finished. ‘Tell me again!’

‘You’re fabulous,’ she’d lied, ‘the best lover in the world!’

‘Better than Süleyman?’

‘Yes!’

Then for a while there had been silence. Too frightened now to look round to see what he was doing, Ayşe just lay on the bed, panting with fear. Her real ordeal was yet to come.

‘I do wish I could believe you,’ he’d said and then his belt came down across her back. She’d screamed as the leather and the thick metal buckle bit into her flesh.

‘Flaunting your body in front of that Müren scum!’

‘No! Orhan, no!’

Eventually she had passed out for a few moments. And when she came round he had mercifully stopped hitting her. But her respite was short-lived. She could hear his breathing, rough and laboured, somewhere behind her. Slowly she turned her head to see what he was doing. Naked now, one knee on either side of her buttocks, Orhan Tepe was masturbating onto her bloodied back, his eyes intent upon and fascinated by her wounds. As soon as he had obtained relief, he toppled forward onto her and kissed her face and hair with passion and tenderness.

‘I do love you, you know,’ he’d said afterwards as he’d helped her gently back into her dress. ‘I love you so much, I need to be inside your flesh. I need to fuck every part of you.’

There had to be something wrong with Orhan to make him say and do such things. What he’d put her through hadn’t been a game. It was sadism. He’d always been a very hard and masculine lover who enjoyed taking and giving pleasure roughly, but she’d never, until now, considered him a beast. But that was what he was, and he was consumed with jealousy of Mehmet Süleyman. The two men could not be more different. Mehmet was in a different class altogether. Sophisticated, considerate and skilled as a lover, he knew that you didn’t batter a woman to give her pleasure. That was why she thought about him all the time, yearned for just a smile or the occasional touch of his body as he brushed past her on the street or in one of the station corridors.

Hot and dehydrated, Ayşe reached over to the cupboard beside her bed for her bottle of water. As she did so her hand caught against something hard and sharp. Oh yes, the jewellery. Earrings and a matching bracelet, gold and diamonds. Orhan had given them to her at Rejans. Where he’d got the money from to buy them, she couldn’t imagine. She picked up the bracelet and looked at it. She would have to give it back. She couldn’t possibly keep anything of his, not after what he’d done. But that would mean having to see him alone again. Just the thought of it made her flesh tremble with fear.

More immediately, however, she would have to try to encourage her body to heal as quickly as possible. Tomorrow she would have to resume her duty. To do anything else would excite comment and may arouse suspicion. İkmen, if no one else, knew that she and Orhan had some sort of ‘arrangement’ and the last thing Ayşe wanted was for the inspector to turn up on her doorstep. How she would explain the blood to him she didn’t know. As it was, she would have to wash her sheets and the clothes from the previous evening before Ali returned.

But that would have to happen later. For now all she could do was lie on her bed under her open window and pray that the tiny breeze from the Bosphorus soothed her bleeding wounds.

By the time the pastane re-opened for the evening, Hassan Şeker, who had blasted his own life away only the night before, was in his grave. His widow, despite the disapproval of her father-in-law, had gone straight from the graveside back to the pastane.

‘I need the money,’ she’d told Kemal Bey when he had tearfully croaked his displeasure at what he perceived as her lack of respect for his son. ‘My husband spent so much of what we had keeping gangsters happy.’

Well, she had told Inspector Süleyman about the Mürens, why not Kemal Bey? It wasn’t as if he hadn’t suspected. Hassan had tried to be one of the ‘lads’ with the thugs who terrified him, welcoming them in and gaily socialising with them. Suzan had already decided that things were going to proceed much more straightforwardly now that she was in charge of the business – much more, in truth, like the way Kemal Bey had run things. That was why she’d told Inspector Süleyman about the Mürens. Let them come and threaten a widow woman, she’d told him defiantly; I’ll have nothing to do with them. Now, however, Suzan wasn’t so sure she’d done the right thing.

Inspector Süleyman had been impressed. He had also been worried. The Müren family was controlled by a powerful crime sultan. They had, it was believed, connections to very frightening people in narcotics and racketeering. They would make trouble for Suzan and her children if they knew she had spoken to the police. And so he had told her that if either Ekrem or Celal came to see her, she was to be as pleasant as she could and say she would get some money to them soon. If they even let her speak and didn’t just beat her. The boys, so Inspector Süleyman had said, were due a visit to his cells. Apparently Hulya’s father Inspector İkmen had some business with them. He had been investigating that little slut Hatice İpek’s death . . .

‘Mrs Şeker?’

And here suddenly was Hulya İkmen, friend and cohort of the whore who had obsessed her husband. The girl looked very cool and pretty in her long blue cotton dress. All of Suzan’s pent up anger spilled over.

‘What do you want?’ Suzan said, eyeing Hulya and the tall young man with her distrustfully across the confectionery display case.

‘I didn’t think that you’d be opening the pastane today,’ Hulya began.

‘Yes, well, you were wrong.’ Suzan reached into the cabinet to get a chocolate éclair for the man sitting on his own at the front window.

Although Hulya was unnerved by both the lack of customers in the usually bustling pastane and by the widow Şeker’s hostility, she went on, ‘But you can’t work alone, not—’

‘I can do what I like!’ Suzan’s face was bright red now and the tendons in her neck pressed tightly against her flesh. Berekiah Cohen, alarmed by this fierce visage, placed a protective arm round Hulya’s shoulders. Unfortunately this one small gesture of affection inflamed Suzan Şeker to breaking point.

‘Get out of my pastane, Hulya İkmen!’ she screamed. ‘And take your latest conquest with you!’

‘But Mrs Şeker—’

‘You didn’t waste any time taking up with another pair of trousers as soon as my Hassan had gone, did you!’

The man who was patiently waiting for his éclair over by the window cleared his throat in a very obvious manner. But Suzan only gave him the briefest of glances before she continued her tirade.

‘You think I’m stupid?’ she shouted into Hulya’s shocked face. ‘You think I believe that Hassan completely bypassed you when he gladly fucked every other young girl who ever worked in this place!’

‘No, It’s . . . that’s not true!’ Tears, more of anger than of misery, sprang into Hulya’s eyes.

Suzan moved quickly round the counter and approached her, the éclair and the plate upon which it sat trembling in her hands. The man over by the window quickly folded up the newspaper he had been reading and left.

Before she had time to resist, Berekiah Cohen moved Hulya behind him and put his hand up to Suzan.

‘Now, madam—’

The pastry caught him right between the eyes, chocolate and whipped cream dripped down his nose and onto the front of his shirt. Suzan Şeker, as if suddenly coming to her senses, put her hand over her mouth and burst into tears.

Hulya, not really knowing whether to go to her or help Berekiah clean himself up, moved forward with one hand outstretched. Suzan, however, refused this gesture.

‘No!’ Suzan cried and then ran weeping towards the back of the building. ‘I’m so sorry!’ She disappeared into the room where her husband had taken his life and closed the door.

Berekiah had by this time removed the éclair from his face and was cleaning his nose. He looked at Hulya. ‘It has to be grief,’ he said quietly. ‘Mum said a few crazy things too when Yusuf became ill.’

‘I didn’t ever sleep with Mr Şeker, you know,’ Hulya said as she passed him a stack of paper napkins from the top of the counter. ‘You must believe me.’

Berekiah took the napkins from her and smiled through chocolate and cream. ‘But of course I do,’ he said, and then as if truly he lent Suzan’s outburst absolutely no credence, he added, ‘We’d better get this place cleaned up or she’ll lose even more business.’

After glancing around to make sure no one new had entered the empty pastane, Hulya reached up and kissed him on the cheek.

Although not entirely fruitless, the day had proved frustrating for those involved in trying to solve the riddle of how Hikmet and Vedat Sivas had left the yalı without being seen. Every room, every wardrobe, every outhouse and abandoned old ‘oriental’ lavatory had been pulled apart, investigated and in some cases turned upside down. But to no avail.

‘There’s nothing even a little odd about this house or any of the things in it,’ İskender said as he wearily joined İkmen at one of the windows overlooking the now dark Bosphorus. From another part of the property the sound of anxious feet on stairs and floorboards was vaguely registered by the two exhausted men.

‘Çöktin just called in from the palace,’ İkmen said as he offered İskender one of his cigarettes. ‘Vedat hasn’t appeared.’

İskender took the cigarette with a nod of thanks. ‘Did you expect him to?’

‘No. But Çöktin and Avcı are going to stay and look around. Yıldız Palace is a big, dark and mysterious site. They are, apparently, getting the guided tour.’

‘He was definitely supposed to be working at the palace tonight?’ İskender asked.

‘Yes, the hotel manager was adamant that Vedat Sivas was not due to work at Ciraǧan again until next Tuesday. They were expecting him at Yıldız.’

‘You don’t think that Vedat himself, in his distress about recent events, just got confused?’

‘It’s possible,’ İkmen said. ‘Yıldız Palace Museum, Ciraǧan Palace Hotel – I can see where confusion could arise. But there’s a chance that Vedat was lying in order to steer me away from Yıldız Palace because that is where he and possibly his brother had planned to be for some reason. A very clumsy deception, if that’s what it was.’

A Bosphorus ferry, alive with lights, if not people, passed in front of the yalı, heading for the Kandıllı boarding point. Very few people would get on now that darkness had fallen. In all probability the ferry would just continue its journey up to the very brink of the Black Sea at Rumeli Kavaǧi, eerily free of human cargo.

İskender wiped away the sweat that clung to his face like a sickly mask in the humid night. ‘I can’t really see them meeting representatives from the Cosa Nostra in the grounds of Yıldız,’ he said.

‘Stranger things have happened,’ İkmen replied and then as if the sound of running feet he’d been vaguely aware of for some time had suddenly increased in volume, he said, ‘What is that noise?’

‘It’s Constable Yıldız,’ İskender said wryly, ‘still convinced this yalı hides secret passages, no doubt concealing a lot of Greek gold. He runs from room to room. The mystery is driving him insane, like the rest of us.’

‘One brother we could lose through incompetence, but two?’ İkmen shook his head. ‘Even the stupidest constable surely couldn’t be that useless, let alone someone as sharp as Çöktin.’

‘I’m just grateful that Ardıç was called away to Ankara,’ İskender responded darkly. ‘Of course we’ll have to face him eventually.’

‘Yes.’ İkmen stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. ‘After I’ve faced the children I’ve been neglecting.’ He smiled weakly as he looked at İskender. ‘My wife is away looking after her sick brother and so I’ve been left with our two teenagers.’

İskender nodded. ‘Ah.’

‘I tremble to think what they might have done to the apartment,’ İkmen said and turned to walk away from the window. ‘Come on, let’s go and tell Yıldız to give up for tonight. The thought of him running about like that is exhausting.’