Harem (23 page)

They’d told her she could go home tomorrow. But it wasn’t good enough. Mehmet had only been to see her once today and then only for five minutes. He’d been called back to duty – or so he said.

Zelfa knew that wasn’t true. He had another woman – he had to. He was a good-looking and charming man. She, on the other hand, was fat, old and exhausted. Sometimes the detached psychiatrist in her would make a brief appearance through the many veils of depression that stifled her mind. But not for long. For most of the time now she was just like a stone, hardly noticing her baby, roused only to resentment, when Mehmet cuddled and soothed the infant.

It was the child that he wanted, that was obvious. And now that he had the child – a male, so beloved of these Turks – she was entirely redundant. He would throw her away in just the same way that her mother had thrown her father away all those many times when she ran off with boys half her age. The embarrassment as well as the hurt had damaged poor Babur. It had made him passive and under-confident. Zelfa didn’t want to be like that.

She felt tears start in her eyes but she choked them back. No time for crying now, too much to do. She already had her coat on, over her nightdress. Apart from the slippers she looked quite normal. She wouldn’t have to walk very far anyway. Just down the corridor and round to the front entrance. There were bound to be taxis on the street and at this time of night it wouldn’t take that long to get home. And as soon as she was, she would confront Mehmet. She might even find him with another woman – in
her
house. People did such things, she knew.

Zelfa swung her legs down onto the floor and picked up her handbag. It still hurt to move. It was bound to so soon after surgery, but she suspected that she might have an infection too. It had been so very hot lately and besides, she didn’t trust the antiseptic agents they used here. She didn’t trust ‘them’ at all – apart from her father. She opened the door of her room and shuffled out into the corridor, a conspicuous foreigner wearing a huge winter coat. Looking first left and then right, she moved as quickly as she could down towards the entrance. She imagined that she looked rather like one of those staunch Allied prisoners of war in old British Second World War films. Big coat, head down, trying to get past the guards without being seen. Zelfa laughed, if silently, at the image. Well, at least she could speak the language!

Back in her room little Yusuf İzzeddin slept on, oblivious to the fact that his mother had deserted him.

‘The thing is, sir,’ Hikmet Yıldız said as he hunkered down beside the small glass structure, ‘there’s a well or a gap of some sort underneath this . . .’ He struggled to find the right word and failed.

‘It looks like a frame people sometimes grow plants under,’ İkmen said with a frown. ‘Not that I’m any expert.’

‘Cellars sometimes have skylights like this,’ İskender added.

Yıldız instantly became excited. ‘Exactly!’ he said. ‘Exactly!’

Being outside in Hikmet Sivas’s moonlit garden had not been İkmen’s original plan. He had intended to tell Yıldız to go home and then take turns with İskender in getting some sleep themselves. But the boy had been so animated.

This frame or window he had discovered was on the eastern side of the yalı, attached to the building, just above ground level. And although it wasn’t possible to see what was underneath the structure, it was obvious that there was some sort of void. What was also obvious, however, was that this hole was not going to be big enough to allow even the thinnest person, such as İkmen, access.

‘So what is inside the building at this point?’ İkmen asked slowly.

‘Nothing.’ Yıldız sighed. ‘I’ve looked and looked. There’s just a blank wall. Miss Sivas says there isn’t a cellar. She doesn’t know what this . . . thing is for.’

‘And is this wall solid?’ İkmen asked, knowing that anyone looking for secret passages was bound to have checked it out.

‘No, but then there are lots of hollow walls in this yalı,’ Yıldız replied. ‘Back in the old days some pasha had those big panels put in, to make the place look more like a French castle or something so Miss Sivas said.’

‘Miss Sivas seems to know quite a lot,’ İkmen commented. ‘So what is on the first floor?’ He looked up at a darkened window nestling beneath the overhanging roof.

‘That’s Hikmet Sivas’s bedroom,’ Yıldız said.

‘It’s panelled, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but there’s a recess into the window. You have to open a set of doors to get to it,’ Yıldız replied. ‘It’s a bit weird.’

‘Let’s go and have a look at it,’ İkmen said.

Yıldız rose to his feet. ‘But sir, it’s upstairs.’

‘I know that, Yıldız.’

İkmen, followed by İskender, was already on his way back inside. Yıldız ran to catch up with them.

‘Back in Ottoman times servants used to sleep in cupboards like this,’ İkmen said as he surveyed the small wooden cubicle, its plain glass window affording a wide view of the garden. ‘The window would have been screened then, as opposed to curtained,’ he smiled, ‘Ottoman gentlemen being most particular about their privacy.’

İskender walked into the cupboard and looked around at the ornate doors and thick, green curtains, which were open.

‘Doesn’t appear to be used for anything now,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘So why would they have taken the screens down then, sir?’ Yıldız asked. ‘Some of the other windows still have them.’

‘Who knows? Maybe this set rotted away.’ İkmen rubbed a hand against the side of one of the doors. ‘They do sometimes. Or maybe they were removed for another, unknown, reason.’

They all stood in silence for a few moments. İkmen looked around intently, frowning.

‘Although young Yıldız here is a little over-keen on the idea of secret passages,’ he said after a pause, ‘I do believe that he is only responding to something that resides in his blood and that we all share.’

İskender walked out of the cupboard and stood in front of the older man, looking confused. ‘Inspector?’

‘I don’t know whether it’s to do with this city or whether it’s to do with being a Turk,’ İkmen said. ‘But when you, Inspector İskender, said that looking for secret passages was something rather more appropriate to Europe than here you were not entirely correct.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This city is littered with underground passages,’ he said. ‘The Greeks before us tunnelled under the city to construct their cisterns.’ His face momentarily darkened. ‘Places where modern men hide young girls’ bodies, in my all too recent experience. There are also cellars and tunnels of Turkish construction across the whole of the old city district. We were the first country ever to have an underground railway with our Tünel in Beyoǧlu. As a friend of mine who comes from an old Ottoman family himself always says, the Ottomans liked their private lives to be walled. They were secretive, dark. Their sultans scuttled around the city in disguise at dead of night, picking up cheap women.’ He smiled. ‘And we are their descendants, Turks who still partly adhere to the secretive strictures of our ancestors and, of course, to the modesty required of our women by Islam.’

İskender, who had heard how İkmen could ‘go off’ when either formulating a theory or tackling a problem, cleared his throat.

İkmen smiled. ‘I expect you think I’m losing my mind.’ He walked into the cupboard and looked first around the walls and then up at the ceiling. ‘But the more I think about this . . . There is no reason to suppose that people living outside the old city didn’t build tunnels too. There are underground constructions in Beyoǧlu.’

‘In Beyoǧlu, yes,’ İskender responded, ‘and maybe even here too. But Inspector İkmen, we are on the first floor of a wooden building. Constable Yıldız has explained that there are cavities in the walls.’

‘Yes. But what he hasn’t explained or maybe even noticed is this.’ İkmen showed his colleague the end of what looked like a curtain rope pull.

‘It’s for the curtains,’ Yıldız began, ‘it—’

‘No, it isn’t.’ İkmen pointed up towards where the other end of what he was holding disappeared into a hole in the cupboard ceiling. ‘Stand clear.’

‘What are you doing?’ İskender asked as he watched İkmen unravel the rope from its cleat on the wall.

‘I’m going down into whatever lies beneath that skylight, I think,’ İkmen said.

And sure enough, as soon as he had unravelled all of the rope, the bottom of the cupboard started to move slowly downwards.

‘You see, this is a lift,’ İkmen said as his head drew level with İskender’s waist. ‘It’s primitive but it moves easily so it must have been oiled recently. I suspect the Sivas brothers may have done that.’

‘You mean Hikmet and Vedat Sivas had this thing constructed?’

‘I doubt it,’ a muffled voice from a now invisible İkmen replied. ‘It looks far too old for that. No, I think they probably found it . . . It’s very dark . . .’

‘Do you have a torch, sir?’ Yıldız asked anxiously.

‘Yes.’

İskender and Yıldız looked down into the hole where the cupboard floor had been. By the time the roof of the lift came to a halt, all they could really see was the rope disappearing down into a deep and almost tactile darkness.

‘Inspector İkmen . . .’

For a few moments there was nothing. The two officers looked from one to the other, their eyes suddenly anxious. İskender was beginning to think that he should never have allowed İkmen to enter an unknown place on his own. OK, the older man was known to be impetuous, but that didn’t necessarily absolve İskender from any blame should anything untoward occur. He could have got into the lift with him. Allah alone knew what might be down there.

‘There’s a passageway.’ İkmen had to shout to make himself heard.

İskender breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Come up,’ he said. ‘We’ll go down with you.’

‘All right.’

Something from the depths of the hole started moving upwards once again.

İskender looked across at Yıldız who blurted, ‘I told you it had to be a secret passageway – sir.’

İskender, unusually in the face of even mild insubordination, laughed.

Hale Sivas wasn’t aware of the existence of the tunnel that led, via that strange and archaic lift, from her brother’s bedroom to the row of small Ottoman houses that stood outside the garden walls. Built on a dirt track which ran along the eastern side of the garden, these tumbledown structures were completely deserted – or at least they were when İkmen and his colleagues climbed out of the tunnel and into the kitchen of the middle house. Not that they had told Miss Sivas any of this – yet.

‘The little houses belong to the yalı,’ she said as she sat herself down in one of the chairs that faced the now jet black Bosphorus. She couldn’t understand why Ayşe the witch’s son had roused her from her sleep to talk about the property when Vedat and Hikmet were still possibly in some sort of danger. Pulling the edge of her headscarf as far round as she could without completely obscuring her face, she added, ‘Hikmet has never done anything with them. I would have objected anyway had he wanted to. They are in a terrible state.’

‘What were they used for?’ İkmen asked, lighting his own and İskender’s cigarettes. ‘They look nineteenth century to me.’

‘Yes, they are,’ she replied, her face now tauter than it had been before, as if it were closing in on something difficult or unpleasant. ‘It is said that they were built by Mahmud Effendi.’

There was a silence during which she averted her eyes.

‘Mahmud Effendi?’

‘The Paşa who owned this yalı at the time,’ she said. ‘An unpleasant and immoral man. I told Hikmet he shouldn’t buy this place, that no good could come of it. And I have been proved right.’

‘Meaning?’ İskender asked.

‘Meaning that some places are haunted by misfortune,’ she said, looking all the time at İkmen. ‘You know what I mean. They say that Mahmud Effendi was one of those who supplied the Sultan Abdul Hamid with information about people – untruths. Those people would then be tortured. Many died.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Other stories tell of his unnatural vices. The houses you were asking about are where he kept his real harem – of boys. I have even heard tell that he had a passage built underground from this yalı to the houses, so that he could visit the boys whenever he wanted without being seen. But that may be just a myth. People’s lives were walled in those days.’

‘You’ve never found such a passage?’ İkmen asked.

‘No.’

İkmen, İskender and Yıldız exchanged glances.

İkmen cleared his throat. ‘You said that, in your opinion, no good could come of owning this yalı.’

‘It has an ill-omened history.’ She hesitated. ‘Not just Mahmud Effendi . . . I wouldn’t tell you this if Hikmet and Vedat were here but,’ she looked at each of the policemen in turn before she continued, ‘my brother bought this house with dirty money.’

‘What do you mean, Miss Sivas?’ İkmen asked.

She paused for a moment before replying. ‘I only went to visit Hikmet once when he moved to America. Vedat goes every year. But when I went, Hikmet had only just finished his second Hollywood movie. He took me to Las Vegas. I saw Frank Sinatra sing with Dean Martin. Then Hikmet introduced me to them.’ She smiled. ‘They were very charming to a young Turkish girl with no English.’ Her face darkened. ‘But then later when we met some of his, shall I say, closer friends, things were not so good. I have no English and so I don’t know what was actually said, but . . . I am not stupid. I have eyes to see when money changes hands, I have ears to hear the sounds of unnatural acts in big hotel bedrooms. Hikmet often looked strained . . .’

‘Strained?’

‘I don’t know what Hikmet is or was involved with, or Vedat. I only say that Allah will punish them in the end and Hikmet, I know, is torn to pieces inside.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us any of this before?’ İkmen asked.