Harem (41 page)

‘I hope you’re not going to suggest the adulteress Farsakoǧlu,’ Ardıç responded tartly.

‘She’s a good officer.’

The large man stopped in his tracks and looked down at his inferior with very hard eyes. ‘I do hope, İkmen,’ he said, ‘that this is no more than another example of your peculiar sense of humour.’ He turned and started moving again.

İkmen, following, said, ‘I don’t think it’s any more amusing than the notion that my apartment might be bugged.’

Ardıç kept on going, his broad back heaving forward in front of İkmen. ‘Ah, but you only talk about family matters there, don’t you, İkmen? Just like I do.’

İkmen raised his hands up to his tired head and rubbed his brow. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

But as he left the cistern İkmen felt as if he’d been violated. Lied to, bugged, his men attacked, one of them killed and for what? He still didn’t really know. Powerful people, somewhere, had been in danger and the resolution of that danger had cost him what felt very much like his innocence. No, they wouldn’t speak of it again. He would arrest the Müren brothers, he would feel awkward around Süleyman and İskender for a while and then life would continue as normal, the illusion restored. But there was one thing more he had to say before they left the dubious protection of the cistern – something he had to get out while he still could.

‘I want you to know, sir, that I consider and will always consider Tepe’s death an execution,’ he said.

Ardıç stopped but he didn’t answer.

İkmen stared at his superior’s back. ‘I thought you should know,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Just in case you get a chance to pass that on to someone powerful you know nothing about.’

Fatma, her hands on her hips, looked up at the girl with fury in her eyes.

‘You didn’t tell your father. You forgot,’ she said tightly.

Hulya bit her bottom lip and looked down at the floor. ‘Yes.’

‘So where is he?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hulya responded quietly. ‘Dr Halman called and he had to go out.’

Fatma turned to face the tall, rather sallow middle-aged man behind her and said, ‘What did I tell you? Always elsewhere!’

‘If he’d known that you were coming . . .’ Hulya began.

‘Oh, I admit there might have been some chance of his being somewhere in the vicinity,’ Fatma said, ‘but when your father is off out saving the world, who knows?’

‘Well, we’re here now, aren’t we?’ the man said as he sat down in one of the living room chairs and closed his eyes. ‘There’s no problem really, Fatma.’

The sound of children’s voices and feet drifted in on the hot air from distant areas of the apartment building.

Fatma, deflated now, sat down beside the man and took one of his hands in hers. ‘I’m sorry, Talaat.’

‘There’s no need.’ He opened his eyes again and smiled. ‘We got a taxi from the bus station, it was OK.’

Talaat Ertuǧrul was five years younger than his sister Fatma. Not that this was immediately apparent. Thin and exhibiting the first pale signs of jaundice, Talaat had aged considerably in the three months since his condition had been diagnosed. No longer the waterskiing, parascending lothario of old, the lines that had, almost overnight, appeared on his face were tangible proof that here was a man who had not only accepted the idea of his own mortality but had smashed up against it a few times too. And much as she had disapproved of his previous life of rampant bachelorhood, Fatma hated seeing him like this, hated thinking about where all this pain would lead.

Hulya, who had been too nervous to approach her mother, now sat down beside her. ‘Mum? I’m sorry.’

Fatma turned towards her, her anger gone. She reached across and touched her daughter’s face tenderly.

‘I’m sorry too, Hulya,’ she said. ‘I know how difficult it is first to find your father and then get him to listen.’

‘Bülent has cleared most of his things from his bedroom,’ Hulya said, ‘although there are still Galatasaray posters all over the walls.’

‘Well, as a lifetime supporter of Beşiktaş,’ Talaat put in gravely, ‘I really should get him to take them down.’

‘Oh.’

‘But I won’t.’ He laughed gently. ‘After all, it’s only football.’

‘Don’t let Bülent hear you say that,’ Fatma responded sharply. ‘To that boy it’s like religion. To so many men it’s like religion.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Hulya said, smiling now that she was no longer the object of her mother’s wrath. ‘Dad has never had any time for it and Sınan hates it. Berekiah says that it’s just like a modern version of what used to take place in the Hippodrome – gladiators and violent mobs and things. I agree with that totally.’

Fatma, who had not been a young girl herself for very many years, nevertheless felt the skin on the back of her neck prickle. Mention of a young man’s name combined with respect for his opinion and blushing was significant.

‘Berekiah Cohen?’ she said calmly.

‘Yes,’ Hulya said and turned slightly away from her mother.

Fatma and Talaat raised their respective eyebrows in unison.

‘Berekiah sometimes brings me home from work,’ the girl continued. ‘Dad’s been so busy.’

‘Mmm, well, it’s very noble of Berekiah to come all the way across from Karaköy just to escort you a few metres.’

‘There have been some terrible crimes around here, you know!’ Hulya exclaimed.

‘Yes, your father told me, and you and I spoke of poor Hatice.’

‘So then you know—’

‘I know that my daughter is besotted with a young Jewish boy.’

Hulya’s cheeks flared. ‘Mum!’

‘We won’t talk of this now, Hulya,’ Fatma said firmly. ‘I think you should really go and make some tea for your uncle.’

‘But—’

‘That would be very nice,’ Talaat said with a smile.

For a moment, Hulya did consider pushing her argument further but then she thought better of it. Her mother hadn’t, as yet, gone berserk, as she’d imagined she would, and so Hulya decided to accede to her request as gracefully as she could.

‘Of course,’ she said and rose to her feet.

‘Thank you,’ Talaat said with a smile.

When Hulya had gone, Fatma’s face assumed a strained expression. But she didn’t discuss what had just passed between herself and her daughter with Talaat. He, poor soul, had enough to deal with. After all, unknown to Hulya, Çetin or any family members beyond Talaat and herself, her brother hadn’t come back to İstanbul for any further treatment. He’d had everything he could have and none of it had worked. Talaat Ertuǧrul had come home to die.

İkmen had only been in his office for five minutes when he was told that he had a visitor. At first he was loath to receive anyone, much less a weeping young woman (another of Orhan Tepe’s conquests perhaps?). But when he found out the person’s name, all of that changed.

‘Please do come in and take a seat, Mrs Şeker,’ he said as he held the door open to allow the tear-stained young woman to enter. ‘Can I get you tea or—’

‘Inspector İkmen, I know I let Inspector Süleyman down, but I need your help,’ Suzan Şeker said as she sat down opposite the vast amount of paper and cigarette ash that covered the top of İkmen’s desk. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot and I heard what happened up at Yıldız Palace last night on the news.’

‘Yes?’ İkmen, frowning, sat down opposite her.

‘Inspector, the Mürens have sold their interest in my business to an Azerbaijani family.’

‘How do you know this, Mrs Şeker?’

She looked down at her hands and, although she was no longer actually weeping, her eyes were wet.

‘Ekrem and Celal came to see me,’ she said. ‘They told me they didn’t need my business any more and that they’d sold it on.’

‘I see. And have this new family contacted you?’

‘No. But . . .’

‘When they do you want us to be waiting for them.’

She looked up, and her face was contorted with fury. ‘I’ll never be free unless you do! They drove Hassan to kill himself! Ekrem Müren made me do a disgusting thing! How do I know these other people won’t do that too?’

İkmen sighed. ‘You don’t.’

‘You completely smashed that family who were using the palace. You killed Ali Müren! To be honest I’ve never really had any confidence in the police, but your actions last night made me think differently.’

İkmen smiled. He didn’t want to discuss the previous night’s operation but at the same time he didn’t want to dissuade this woman from pursuing a course of action that could improve both her life and her bank account. Suzan Şeker, poor woman, had suffered enough. ‘This disgusting thing you speak of—’

‘I don’t want to talk about it!’ She turned her face away from him, towards the window.

‘You will have to if the case comes to court, Mrs Şeker.’

‘Ekrem Müren made me suck him!’ She looked at İkmen’s face defiantly, her lips tight with indignation. ‘There!’

İkmen wearily rubbed his forehead with his hands. ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Şeker. But I had to ask.’

‘Yes, I know.’ She paused to wipe her eyes and regain her composure. ‘And so?’

‘And so, provided you are willing to give evidence against them, I will order the arrest of Ekrem and Celal Müren. I will interrogate them and I will find out the name of the family Ekrem has sold your business to. But you must be willing to follow this through and you must be prepared for the attention, not always pleasant, that this will bring to you and your family.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘Think carefully.’

‘I’ve done that already,’ Suzan replied hotly, ‘and I want to do it. Hassan let these people move him around like a Karagöz puppet and then when he couldn’t stand it any more he killed himself! I don’t want to be like that, Inspector. I don’t want to pass a business that isn’t really mine on to my children.’

‘No. No, of course you don’t.’ İkmen looked down at his hands. He felt dizzy with tiredness. This woman had courage. By doing what she proposed she was laying herself open to intimidation from the Azerbaijani family and to the shame that her admission would bring. And she wanted to do it based upon what was in reality a lie. Those who had killed Ali Müren and the others had nothing to do with him or his men, he didn’t even know who they were, only that they had succeeded in protecting those who did what had been done to Suzan Şeker at a much higher level. Good gangsters against bad gangsters, but they were all one and the same at the end of the day. He had to somehow stop thinking about it now. Thinking could lead to unguarded words, unwise actions. The Müren boys knew nothing about the Harem, but they would be very rattled in the wake of the deaths of their father and Zhivkov. Now was an excellent time to get them for extortion and sexual assault.

İkmen lifted his telephone receiver from its cradle and dialled a number. ‘Let’s set this in motion,’ he said as he took a cigarette from his packet and lit up.

Suzan Şeker smiled.

To say that there are many attorney’s offices in Los Angeles is rather like saying that İstanbul has some mosques. The stars, for all their money, power and influence, still need representation by persons qualified in the law should their charmed lives take unexpected and messy turns. The man had made it his business to know all the most prestigious names; he knew where they all worked, lived and jogged. He’d even spoken to some of them during the time he had worked on this Sivas thing. None of them had known anything about Hikmet Sivas or his photographs.

The Turk, it would seem, placed little trust in lawyers. The photographs were where they had always been apparently: at the bottom of an old writing paper box in Hikmet Sivas’s bedside cabinet.

‘You kept them here?’ he said as he shuffled through the large stack of mainly black and white photographs.

‘Yes.’

Although it was his bedroom and the man was sitting on his bed, Hikmet was loath to sit down beside him. Instead he placed himself in a wicker chair opposite; he could just see the tops of his palm trees through the window behind the man’s head.

‘I told no one where they were,’ Hikmet continued. ‘Not even Vedat. I felt it was safer that way.’ He laughed, but without humour.

The man shuffled and riffled, his eyes fixed on the images, showing acts sometimes odd, sometimes sensual, often distasteful and sadistic. The only thing they had in common besides sex was that the male participants were all well-known. More official images of them had appeared in newspapers all over the world or in files held by criminal investigation organisations. As he shuffled, the man tried to work out what a collection like this might be worth to its owner and decided that it was totally incalculable.

‘It amazes me that you never tried to use any of this, Hikmet,’ he said. ‘You could have been a billionaire.’

‘I have enough for my needs,’ Hikmet replied tightly. ‘As I’ve said before, I only took them to protect my life here. It was the only way I could make sure that a young man from Turkey would be listened to, respected.’

‘But you never had to use them, right?’

‘Right. But I never knew whether I would have to. I had to protect myself.’

The man looked up and smiled unpleasantly. ‘Shame about your brother then.’

‘I should never have revealed what I was doing to him.’ He shook his head. ‘I should never have allowed him to run the Harem without me.’

‘Did Vedat take pictures too?’

‘In recent times, yes. He was fine until he met Zhivkov.’

‘How’d they meet? D’you know?’

Hikmet sighed. ‘In a little street of bars we call Çiçek Pasaj,’ he said wearily. ‘Vedat has always gone there. But in recent years a lot of mainly foreign gangsters go there too.’

The man looked down and started sorting through once again, his brow furrowed in concentration.

‘So it was like an accident, a coincidence?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, Hikmet.’

‘What?’