Harem (3 page)

For a woman like Zelfa – a professional woman, a psychiatrist, who had grown up in Ireland – to be quite so large seemed wrong and even puzzling. But then Zelfa had both craved and eaten an enormous amount of chocolate during her pregnancy, which had seemed preferable to her usual cigarettes.

‘I’m like one of those toys,’ she said as she lumbered, with her husband’s help, towards the bedroom door. ‘One of those fat clowns that won’t fall over, keeps on bouncing back.’

‘When our son is born you will feel better,’ Mehmet said. Inside his heart beat fast and his flesh trembled inside his skin. His son! At last he would be born, bringing an intense feeling of joy but also of great apprehension. Even now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a proportion of babies still died at birth. And Zelfa was, after all, nearly forty-eight and this little boy was her first and probably her last child.

As they descended the stairs Mehment hugged both his wife and his child tightly to his body.

‘The doctor says that they belonged to a girl who was not yet fully developed,’ Orhan Tepe said as he placed the photograph of pelvic and femur bones in front of his superior, Çetin İkmen.

‘OK, so you’ll need to check out the lists of missing earthquake victims in that sector,’ İkmen replied. It wasn’t the first time they’d had to try to marry up discrete body parts with names of those whose bodies had never been recovered in the wake of the 1999 catastrophe. Nearly two years on, traumatised survivors were still being shocked by the bones and flesh of the dead that their gardens and car parks kept on revealing to them. There was also the possibility that these fragments held more sinister secrets. After all, where better to hide a murder victim than in those parts of the city that were effectively graveyards? This was why İkmen and his colleagues became involved in these matters. Unlawful death was his speciality and the fight to bring those who had committed such acts to justice had been his professional mission for almost all of his working life.

At fifty-four years old, Çetin İkmen was undernourished (due to pain from his numerous stomach ulcers), underpaid and smoke-dried. In spite of these drawbacks he was passionate about his work, possessed a loving and supportive wife and nine healthy, if at times problematic, children. Over the years his formidable detective skills and keen intellect had afforded him considerable success within the İstanbul police department. This combined with the incorruptible honesty he demanded of both himself and his officers had provided him with the kind of legendary status that occasionally allowed certain breaches of procedure to be performed without comment from those above. In short, İkmen was a phenomenon and as such he was admired and even courted by others. This was not always easy for those around İkmen. His current junior, Sergeant Orhan Tepe, frequently felt that rather more was expected of him than was reasonable. It was not an attitude that had afflicted İkmen’s previous sergeant, Mehmet Süleyman, now promoted to inspector. But then as Tepe frequently observed to himself, İkmen and Süleyman were two of a kind. He was different. It was not something that made him happy. Nothing much did nowadays.

As the list of missing persons for the Ataköy area flashed up on Tepe’s computer screen, he put such personal thoughts aside and concentrated on his work. On the other side of the small, cluttered office, İkmen frowned at a pile of papers until he was interrupted by the ringing of his telephone.

He picked up the receiver. ‘İkmen.’

‘Dad?’

It was Hulya, and from the tremor in her voice, she was nervous about something.

İkmen lit a cigarette. ‘Hello, Hulya, what can I do for you?’

‘Dad, I’ve just seen Mrs İpek and she says that Hatice still isn’t home.’

‘Oh?’ Could it be that his daughter was finally going to tell him exactly what had happened when she and her friend had parted the previous evening? İkmen suspected that she was. Although whether this would be a major confession as opposed to just some juvenile nonsense he couldn’t yet tell.

‘So,’ he prompted, ‘do you have anything more to tell me about how you parted from Hatice last night, or are you just calling to keep me up to date?’

In the short silence that followed İkmen watched Tepe look up briefly from his computer screen to eye the shapely figure of Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoǧlu who was passing by the window of their office. So evident was the younger, and married, man’s lust for their colleague that İkmen turned his chair round to face the wall.

‘Well, Hulya, I’m waiting.’

‘Dad . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I didn’t actually see Hatice go back to her apartment last night.’

This was hardly a surprise, though Hulya obviously felt that it should be.

‘Where did she go then, Hulya?’ he said. ‘After work when you left her . . .’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh?’

He heard her swallow. ‘No, honestly, Dad, I don’t.’

‘So if you don’t know where she went, do you know what she might have been doing?’

‘But Dad, I promised I wouldn’t tell.’

İkmen swung himself back round to face the front of his office again, his features stern. Mercifully Tepe was back at his work. Not that İkmen took much notice, he was far too irritated by his daughter to be bothered by his sergeant’s peccadilloes. As İkmen knew from bitter experience, promises between teenagers could be very dangerous things.

‘Hulya, you’re going to tell me otherwise you wouldn’t have telephoned and so I would just get on and do it,’ he said.

‘Oh, Dad, but you’re going to be so angry.’

‘Seeing as I’m already furious, you have nothing to lose, do you!’

‘Dad . . .’

‘So if it has anything to do with Mr Ahmet Sılay or any other theatrical type you girls have talked to about your ambitions . . .’

‘How did you know?’ She sounded outraged and truly shocked. ‘Have you spoken to Mr Sılay?’

‘No,’ İkmen replied sharply, ‘but I think I’m about to.’

‘But this has got nothing to do with him, Dad!’

İkmen puffed heavily on his cigarette. ‘What does it have to do with then, Hulya?’ he said.

He heard his daughter sigh and then with an almost visible shrug in her voice she gave in, as was her wont with her father.

‘Hatice had another job after work last night. It was a great entertainment opportunity. Lots of money.’

İkmen, who had heard such stories many, many times before from girls even younger and more innocent than Hulya, put his head in his hands.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he said wearily. ‘Some nice men wanted her to dance for them.’

‘Yes, and act too,’ Hulya replied simply. ‘How did you know? Have you met . . .’

‘I think you ought to come down here now, Hulya,’ İkmen said as he stubbed out his cigarette and lit another.

‘What? To the police station?’ She sounded appalled.

‘Yes,’ her father replied through his teeth. ‘It’s where I work, Hulya. I’m a policeman. You have information about someone who might be missing and in danger. Please get yourself over here. Now!’

Tepe, startled by his superior’s sudden, enraged bellow, accidentally printed the list on his screen.

Although Turgut Fahrı possessed a voracious intellectual appetite, his enthusiasm for physical pursuits was rather more muted. OK, so his mother was no longer young, but why was it that he always had to carry all the tools when they went on their expeditions into the underworld? He was the brains of the family. Both his mother and his sister told everyone so and, when he was alive, his father had agreed with that analysis also. It was, after all, Turgut who had put the whole cistern idea into Adnan’s head in the first place, although his mother always referred to these forays as attempts to fulfil her husband’s dreams.

The cisterns which riddle the foundations of the old city were built by the Byzantine emperors. Fed with water from the Belgrade Forest by aqueducts, these enormous spaces ensured that despite drought or siege, the city of Constantine never went thirsty. It was a very successful system – for a time. During the Ottoman period, however, the cisterns fell into disrepair and were only ‘rediscovered’ by a sixteenth-century French traveller, who was amazed by stories of locals fishing underground. It was not until the twentieth century that any of them were extensively explored. And even then it was only one, the Yerebatan Saray, which since the 1980s had hosted daily sound-and-light entertainments for tourists. It wasn’t therefore to the Yerebatan Saray that Turgut and Neşe Fahrı and their tools were headed. No. If Turgut’s theory was correct and Greek treasure of unimaginable value was hidden in the cisterns, it was not going to be in the one that had already been comprehensively excavated. It was going to be in one of the others which lay undisturbed beneath bazaars and cafés, houses and apartment blocks, gently rotting into its own thick dark silt. A cistern just like, in fact, the one that Turgut was entering now.

Via a combination of amateur detective work and bribery, Turgut and Neşe had identified this particular cistern some months before. Rumours of a small cistern just north of the great Binbirdirek Cistern – which was currently under excavation – had been circulating for a while. It had only been a matter of time before the intrepid Fahrıs tracked it down. Situated in the garden of an old house on Türbedar Sokak, the entrance to the cistern was a hole in the ground which, until recently, had been covered by a rough wooden lid. Now helpfully removed by the elderly woman who owned the house, access to the entrance was currently costing the Fahrıs almost half of Turgut’s weekly wages. Age had not, apparently, dimmed the owner Mrs Oncü’s desire for the cheap jewellery this little enterprise allowed her to purchase.

‘May it come easy,’ Mrs Oncü said as she passed the shovel down into the cistern to Neşe.

Turgut switched his torch on and flashed it around what had, over the weeks, become a grimly familiar scene. Silted over until almost halfway up the columns that supported the roof; much of the filth in the cistern, Turgut reasoned, must have originated from pre-Ottoman times. So far they had not so much as glimpsed the floor.

Neşe walked over to the small pit they had dug last time and began to rake away at the dirt with a trowel. As she bent towards her work, she put one hand into the small of her back and groaned.

‘I don’t know how much longer I can carry on doing this,’ she said as she watched her son begin his heavy, rhythmic digging. ‘May Allah forgive me, but I just don’t always feel strong enough. My heart is good, but I am old.’

‘No, you’re not,’ her son panted as he shifted the muck onto the pyramid of filth they had constructed beside their excavation. ‘And anyway, all this will stop when we find what we’re looking for.’ He paused for a moment in order to wipe his brow and catch his breath. ‘It’s well known that when we conquered the city, the Greeks didn’t have nearly so much gold as Fatih Sultan Mehmet thought that they would. It must have gone somewhere. And just like Dad always said, it has to be somewhere that people haven’t been to before. Like this.’

‘Yes, yes, I know all that,’ Neşe replied as she tetchily scraped away at the shifting sludge underneath her feet. ‘I’m just saying that for me—’

‘For you it is the same as it is for me,’ Turgut responded. ‘Hard work with only Dad’s dream to keep you going.’ And he turned away from her and started digging again.

He dug for some time, steadily, with purpose, unaware that for quite a while his mother had stopped her labours. But when he did notice, Turgut became concerned. Seemingly frozen in her painful stooping position, Neşe had one hand stretched shakily out in front of her.

Alarmed Turgut threw down his shovel and moved towards her. ‘Mum!’

But she didn’t answer. Her eyes glassy, Neşe just made a small gurgling sound in her throat – the sort of noise those who have just experienced a stroke might make.

‘Mum!’

Turgut grabbed her around the shoulders and tried to pull her up towards him. But Neşe, frozen to the spot, would not come. Mesmerised by some place just in front of her, she kept on looking ahead until her son saw what had caught and paralysed her attention.

It was Turgut’s turn to gasp as the beauty of the ancient crown hit him in the eyes. The light from his torch played across the artefact. There was gold and jewels also – emeralds, rubies, diamonds the size of babies’ fists . . .

Turgut, his whole body trembling with emotion, reached past his mother and touched it gently with his fingers. The crown felt strangely warm.

The two of them took their seats in silence. Dressed in shorts and brightly coloured T-shirts, their faces almost completely obscured by dark glasses, they didn’t look anything out of the ordinary – for Angelinos. Had they been in New York or Seattle, they would have seemed weird, but not here in the City of Angels.

Not that the dark glasses fooled anyone. Angelinos are trained from birth to see celebrity through brick walls, if necessary. And besides, the glasses weren’t meant to actually hide anything – they were part of the uniform. Vitamin pills, small scars behind the ears, Tiffany jewellery, dark glasses.

Some of their fellow travellers, the women particularly, did recognise them. But as they were, as always, travelling Club Class, none of the women actually
said
anything to them. He knew, however, that on such a long flight it was only a question of time. They would, he thought, probably use the topic of his recent marriage to Kaycee as an opener. He turned to her and smiled, watching as she attempted to make her seatbelt small enough to hold her emaciated hips.

‘My God,’ she said as she smiled back, her deep Southern voice drawling with intelligent contempt, ‘if I get any thinner I’ll be joining the spirit world!’

Her husband, the most successful Hollywood actor ever to originate from Turkey, laughed. ‘When we arrive in İstanbul, you can eat exactly what you like,’ Hikmet Sivas said. ‘In fact if you don’t, my sister Hale will be very offended.’