Petrified (13 page)

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Of course, I do see quite a lot of the inspector’s daughter, Hulya,’ the old man continued, ‘which is a worry for him also.’

Arto, who knew something of what was going on romantically between İkmen’s daughter and Lazar’s assistant, Berekiah Cohen, just inclined his head to show that he’d heard, knew what it was about but had no answers.

‘So it’s a brooch for Madame Maryam this year,’ Lazar said, rapidly turning to more commercial matters. He patted Arto affectionately on the shoulder. ‘You wait here, Doctor. I’ll get Berekiah to bring a tray of our very best pieces to you.’

‘Thank you, Lazar Bey.’

The old man waved a dismissive hand as he slowly made his way back to the showroom. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said airily. ‘Neither these old legs of mine nor my useless grandson, off, so his mother tells me, with some American woman, nor even God himself can stop me from providing the very best gold to the Sarkissian family.’

Arto smiled. Lazar ‘the Jew’ as both his own and Çetin’s father had called him, had indeed served the wealthy and well known of İstanbul for over fifty years. Quite how old he was, no one seemed to know, but Vahan Sarkissian, Arto’s father, had frequently described Lazar as an ‘old’ man and Vahan had died in the nineteen fifties.

‘We all appreciate everything you do, Lazar Bey,’ Arto said as he watched the old man’s bowed back slip through the curtains that separated the hospitality room from the showroom beyond.

A few minutes later he was joined by a smiling young man carrying a tray of gold brooches in a variety of colours and styles.

‘Hello, Dr Sarkissian,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine, Berekiah,’ Arto replied, purposefully omitting to mention what he knew had to be a growling gall bladder problem.

‘Lazar Bey tells me you want to purchase a brooch for Mrs Sarkissian,’ Berekiah said. ‘Do you know whether she would like something of modern design or . . . ?’

‘I’m afraid I know little beyond the fact that my wife likes jewellery and loves gold,’ Arto said with a smile. ‘You’d think that after thirty years I would know these things.’

Berekiah placed the tray down on the table in front of Arto and sat down. ‘Women do keep a lot of things to themselves,’ he said, Arto felt, a little gravely. ‘They can be most puzzling creatures.’

‘Do I detect an element of recent experience in your voice, Berekiah?’ Arto asked.

The young man looked up at him and smiled. ‘It’s stupid for us to behave as if you don’t know . . .’

‘About you and Hulya? Yes, I know.’

‘And what do you think? About Hulya and me?’

‘What I think is immaterial,’ Arto said, adding quickly, lest the boy misunderstand, ‘And I don’t mean that unkindly, Berekiah. It just isn’t my business.’

‘I know.’

A moment of silence passed, during which Arto glanced briefly at the brooches before him.

‘But you see,’ Berekiah continued, ‘I thought that I was doing the right thing by asking Hulya to marry me. We’d talked about being together and she seemed to want that, or so I thought. But then when I asked her to marry me, she said no.’ He looked up into Arto’s eyes. ‘She said she wanted us just to live together.’

Arto, for whom all of this was very fresh news, sighed. ‘Well, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that as well as dealing with a woman, you are, in this case, Berekiah, also dealing with one of Çetin Bey’s daughters.’

‘Yes,’ the young man responded gloomily.

‘A very strong-minded and independent group of people,’ Arto said as he lifted a small red gold brooch from the tray and turned it over in his hands.

‘I’ve thought that perhaps it might be a form of protest,’ Berekiah said. ‘Mrs İkmen and my parents are very much against our being together and so Hulya wants to really upset them by living with me. Our mothers, it’s true, would be scandalised . . .’

At that moment, Arto’s mobile phone began to ring and so, with apologies to his young friend, he answered it. It was İsak Çöktin.

‘I’m just coming back from Miss Keyder’s house in Sarıyer,’ he said. ‘I thought I might call in, if you’re not too busy, Doctor.’

‘I’m not actually at the lab at the moment, Sergeant,’ Arto said, ‘I’m in a shop.’

‘Oh . . .’

Berekiah, who was a veteran of slipping away during confidential telephone calls, did just that, leaving Arto alone with Çöktin.

‘It’s OK now, we can talk,’ Arto said as soon as the youngster had left. ‘Did Miss Keyder have any idea who our young friend might be?’

‘No, but she was shocked by the whole event,’ Çöktin replied. ‘Outwardly she was very cold, talking about how she might now take possession of her brother’s property, but I could see she was disturbed.’

‘What about relatives in Argentina?’

‘Miss, or rather Doctor, Keyder doesn’t think there are any, but we’ll have to see what the Embassy come back with.’

‘Yes.’ Arto put the red gold brooch down and picked up a white one in the stylised shape of a palm frond. ‘Actually, I’m glad you’ve called, Sergeant, because there is going to be a meeting at my office, about our young friend, at five and I think you might like to attend.’

‘Oh?’

‘I had a meeting with the undertaker Yiannis Livadanios last night,’ he said, ‘which was most interesting. I won’t go into detail now, only to say that he called me this morning to arrange the further meeting at five. He wants some of his colleagues to see our boy.’

‘Why?’

‘I can’t go into it here,’ Arto said, ‘it’s far too complicated. Why don’t you and I meet at my office at four, before they all arrive?’

‘The undertakers?’

‘They’re actually professional embalmers,’ Arto said, cringing, knowing that Çöktin would be disgusted. ‘Two Greeks, one Armenian and a Spaniard who, apparently, serves the Roman Catholic deceased here in the city.’ There was another reason why Señor Orontes had been invited along with his more indigenous colleagues, which had more to do with the fabled Dr Pedro Ara than with the Spaniard’s current practice. But to go into all that phantasmagorical stuff with Çöktin at this stage would only serve to confuse him. And so once Çöktin had agreed to the meeting, Arto said goodbye and went back to looking at brooches once again.

After a while Berekiah returned. Smiling, he asked whether the doctor had found anything that was to his liking.

‘I rather like this white palm frond,’ Arto said, pointing to the modern piece that had caught his eye while he was on the phone.

‘Yes, that’s nice, isn’t it? Shall I gift-wrap it for you?’

‘Yes, Berekiah, thank you.’

The young man opened a drawer and took out a sheet of tissue paper and a piece of ribbon. ‘I do hope that Mrs Sarkissian likes it,’ he said.

‘I’m sure that she will.’ He wasn’t. Beyond the plastic surgery to which his wife was addicted, there was little that she ever expressed open interest in. It was the reason why Arto, though at heart a kind and moral man, sometimes went ‘elsewhere’ for female company.

‘Doctor . . .’

‘Yes?’

Berekiah looked up from the ribbon, which he was twisting into a bow and said, ‘I’m sorry but I couldn’t help overhearing.’

‘What?’

‘You talked about somebody having relatives in Argentina.’

Arto narrowed his eyes. ‘Yes, Berekiah, what of it?’

‘It’s just that, well, a lot of our people, İstanbul Jews, went to Argentina and Brazil and places like that years ago. My dad had an uncle in Argentina – you can ask him.’

‘The people I’m talking about aren’t Jewish, Berekiah.’

‘Are you sure?’ He placed the brooch gently into a little velvet pouch and then proceeded to wrap tissue paper around it.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I only say this because there are some of our people, generally from poor families originally, who live as others, shall we say, change their names, their religion.’ He tied the piece of ribbon around the little package so that the bow was uppermost. ‘I think in the wake of the Holocaust in Europe some people, even here, became anxious. It might be worth checking out,’ he said as he handed the finished present over to Arto. ‘It might help, I don’t know. Some years ago, I think in the fifties and sixties, Argentina was a favoured destination.’

‘Yes,’ Arto smiled, ‘I’ll give it some thought, Berekiah. Thank you.’

Once he had paid – the discounted price for a friend, of course – Arto left. The strange occupant of Rosita Keyder’s apartment was causing the doctor to move in some very odd directions. Embalmers, famous Spanish embalmers no less, Peron and his wife and his vicious corrupt regime, now South American Jews – maybe. Well, he recalled, the young man was, after all, circumcised.

‘He’s drinking with some associates in the bar at the Pera Palas,’ Suleyman said as he lit both his own and İskender’s cigarettes. ‘Perhaps he finds the whiff of Cold War subterfuge that still hovers over the place amusing.’

The rather hard-faced young woman who stood in front of the two officers looked blank.

Suleyman, who was not unaccustomed to this sort of response in his inferiors, cleared his throat. ‘Well, just watch and follow, Gün.’

‘I don’t understand why Constable Yıldız can’t carry on,’ Halide Gün said miserably. ‘These gangsters live in a man’s world. I’ll stick out—’

‘Yıldız is the one who’s “sticking out” at the moment,’ Suleyman responded sternly, ‘solely because he is a man – a young and attractive one.’

‘Rostov likes them like that,’ İskender interjected.

‘So why—’

‘Yıldız came upon Rostov and his men at the airport simply by chance,’ Suleyman said. ‘I would never have assigned him to that duty because of the Russian’s proclivities. As soon as you take over, he’ll be much more comfortable and you’ll be quite safe.’

‘Stick with him, report where he goes and who he sees and you’ll be relieved at six,’ İskender added.

‘So what happens after that?’ Gün asked as she slipped her mobile telephone into the inside pocket of her jacket.

‘That isn’t your concern,’ Suleyman said.

Gün shrugged. She was a constable and as such she was used to being kept in the dark about many and various things. As soon as she had gone she knew that the two men would talk about whatever it was they were all doing, which they did.

‘So what about this trunk Rostov picked up at the airport?’ İskender asked.

‘A couple of his men drove it straight back to his house.’

‘I wonder what’s in it.’

Suleyman sighed. ‘Probably antiques, knowing Rostov. I doubt even he would be so obvious as to bring anything “hot” through the airport. Not when the land and sea borders are so much easier.’ He cleared his throat. ‘So when are you and your men going to move into the area?’

‘At seven,’ İskender replied. ‘The drop is supposed to happen at eleven, which will give us good time to get our bearings, see what’s happening, come and go from the actual site.’

‘There’ll be five of you?’

‘Yes.’

‘At least you know, even if nothing does happen, where you’re going and what you’re looking for.’ He stubbed his cigarette out in his ashtray and then lit another. ‘I have no idea where I might be at eleven o’clock tonight. I could be at Rostov’s house, I could be halfway to Bulgaria.’

‘You wanted to pursue it, Mehmet,’ İskender said – a trifle harshly, Suleyman thought.

‘Ardiç agreed,’ he responded defensively. ‘I’m being set up, we know that. We have to see where this is going to lead.’

İskender sat down in what was usually Çöktin’s chair. ‘It’s all a bit clumsy, though, don’t you think? I thought Rostov was supposed to be one of the cleverer mobsters.’

‘He is.’ Suleyman turned and made his way over to the seat behind his desk.

As he moved the chair backwards, İskender sighed. ‘You know,’ he said, biting nervously on his bottom lip as he spoke, ‘and don’t misinterpret this, but you were with that Russian girl for a very long time . . .’

‘She had a lot to tell me,’ Suleyman smiled, ‘and besides, we had to make what we were supposed to be doing look real. I mean, I know she was only playing a game, but I had to go along with it.’

‘She and Rostov must know that you were just playing along.’

‘Maybe.’ Briefly, but to İskender, significantly, Suleyman averted his eyes.

He had been with that whore an awful long time. İskender himself had almost had to go with one of her fellows just to make his presence there plausible. It was something Suleyman should have taken into account. But then when he’d come out of the woman’s room, he hadn’t looked as if he were taking much of anything into account. He’d looked ruffled, flushed, in fact just like some of the ‘real’ punters that İskender had seen coming and going from those awful greasy rooms at the back of the pavyon. The thought that Mehmet would, could go with such a creature had to be ridiculous – and yet it wasn’t an idea that was going away easily. And indeed, the more he looked at those still slightly averted eyes, the more the possibility of it grew inside his head. Mehmet hadn’t been happy, in his personal life, for a while. In spite of the privacy of his nature, a lot of people had deduced that Suleyman had problems – the rows he had with his wife, who made no secret of her marital dissatisfaction when she came to the station to see him, were legendary. However, to confront his colleague head on about his conduct was not, İskender knew, the way forward. Whatever had or had not happened, Suleyman would deny involvement with the girl. All that İskender could hope was that if anything had happened, Suleyman had been careful – in every sense of the word.

‘If no actual deal takes place but Rostov’s men appear for another purpose, you have the right to question them about their activities,’ Suleyman said, breaking through into his colleague’s secret but, both of them knew, suspected thoughts. ‘We are, after all, acting upon information received.’

‘And if no one appears and nothing happens?’