Petrified (24 page)

‘A woman? How old?’

‘Early twenties.’ Arto stooped down in order to pick up his briefcase.

‘Blonde?’

The Armenian moved upwards, smiling. ‘Peroxide. Why?’

Suleyman stood up slowly and sighed, his hands braced against the back of his chair. ‘I think I might need to take a look at her, Doctor,’ he said. Looking up into Arto’s drawn and exhausted features he added, ‘I’m sorry.’

Ever since Güney had called him to tell him about the light, İkmen had been unable to sleep. It had unsettled him. That and the disturbed groans and shuffles that continually emanated from Talaat’s bedroom. The sound of a mind and body locked in mortal combat with a deadly, growing foe.

In order to get away from the stifling heat inside the apartment, İkmen had come out on to the balcony. Below on the normally bustling Divanyolu thoroughfare, not a soul save a few straggly cats, moved. Across the road, the brooding bulk of the Sultanahmet Mosque, now in the dead hours of the morning, un-illuminated and sombre, loomed over the Hippodrome, that once bloodied centre of the distant Byzantine Empire. How many, İkmen wondered as he drew on yet another Maltepe cigarette, had perished in that place for the purposes of entertainment? He’d never understood the word games as applied to the activities that used to take place in the Hippodrome. How could anything that killed people be a game? And yet over the years he had, from time to time, come across those who killed for their own entertainment. Mercifully they were rare. Generally they were fairly inadequate people possessed of little power and influence – which as Suleyman’s wife had once told him was why they took pleasure in the death of others.

Sometimes, however, such people did attain power and influence – Hitler, for instance. And some, notably the American government, had placed the Iraqi Saddam Hussein also in this category. It was being said that the Americans, having failed to secure the arrest of the man they believed had mounted the 11 September attack on the World Trade Center in New York, were going after Saddam and his lieutenants. It could mean war. İkmen frowned at the thought of it. The Turkish Republic, a member of NATO, a friend to America and a neighbour of Iraq. Not being involved wasn’t going to be an option, either for him or for his country. And his son Bülent was due to be conscripted into the army in less than six months.

İkmen put his cigarette out and then lit another. He looked across the darkened rooftops and monuments of Sultan Ahmet once again and sighed. The Akdeniz children, Nuray and Yaşar, were out there somewhere, lost, alone and, he knew, in pain. If only, may Allah forgive me, İkmen thought, that image were not so fixed in my mind. If only I wasn’t experiencing a growing conviction that they are probably dead . . .

‘Talaat is very restless tonight.’

The familiar female voice roused him from his reverie.

‘Fatma, what . . . ?’

‘I can’t sleep in this heat,’ she said as she lowered herself into the chair beside her husband. A hank of her long black and grey hair flopped over on to his shoulder as she sat.

‘Worrying about everything probably isn’t helping either,’ İkmen said as he reached out to take one of her plump hands in his.

‘I can’t help that,’ Fatma said bluntly. ‘There’s a lot to worry about. What with Talaat, Hulya – not to mention all these rumours about the Americans and Iraq.’

İkmen raised an eyebrow. Fatma didn’t generally pay much heed to world affairs.

Seeing the surprise on his face, made her smile. ‘You’d be surprised what I pay attention to,’ she said a little caustically. ‘Politics affects housewives just as much as it affects policemen.’

‘Fatma, I’ve never been in any doubt about your intelligence.’

‘In the current climate for a Muslim girl to be marrying a Jewish boy . . .’ She shrugged. ‘I know you think my disapproval is all about my faith, but it isn’t.’ She turned to look her husband straight in the face. ‘It’s also about my fears – for both of them. The world gets less tolerant every day, or so it seems to me. What hope can there be for Hulya and Berekiah with all this hate?’

İkmen shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said on a sigh, ‘but if they get some comfort from being together . . .’

‘They won’t be very comfortable if someone takes against them.’

‘Life is risk. Every day could be our last. You could walk out of the house and get run down by a car, we could all perish in an earthquake.’

‘Do not remind me of that!’ She closed her eyes against the images that still, nearly three years after the last great quake in 1999, persisted in haunting her mind.

İkmen lit a fresh cigarette from the smouldering butt of his last smoke. ‘I’m not going to oppose Hulya and Berekiah. I won’t be a hypocrite, Fatma.’

‘I didn’t think that you would be,’ she sighed. ‘Much as it pains me in this case, you wouldn’t be the man that I married if you went along with my opinions. You know, I think that Estelle might share your views, Çetin.’

‘That wouldn’t surprise me,’ İkmen smiled. ‘Her family were never religious. That Balthazar is so adamant is beyond me. I’ve never seen him go near a synagogue and the only thing his father ever worshipped was rakı. But he’s got this thing about his Jewish heritage.’

‘Perhaps it’s because Berekiah is the only child he has now,’ Fatma said, referring to the fact that Cohen’s eldest son, Yusuf, was an inmate of a psychiatric institution. ‘Maybe it’s all that much more important now.’

‘Maybe.’

İkmen placed an arm across Fatma’s shoulders and hugged her to his thin chest.

‘Perhaps I’ll go and talk to him,’ he said wearily, ‘not to try and change his mind, just to let him know that I do understand. I don’t like being his enemy. I’m not his enemy.’ He smiled. ‘Disgusting old gossip that he is, I have a lot of affection for Cohen. He gave Mehmet Suleyman a home and a family when he needed all the support he could get. I know he’s had his problems with women and—’

‘Problems!’ Fatma pulled away from him quickly, her eyes wide with amazement. ‘Balthazar Cohen has slept with every loose woman in this city and countless foreigners.’

‘I know. I know.’

‘Estelle has cried for days.’

‘Yes . . .’

‘Men!’ She shrugged her hands upwards as if appealing for inspiration from above. ‘You talk so glibly of such things! And to think of my daughter married to the son of such a man.’

‘Berekiah isn’t like that, Fatma!’

‘You think,’ she tutted petulantly, ‘but my mother used to say the same about Talaat! Oh, he’s a good boy, she’d say, not at all like your Uncle İsmet. You know Uncle İsmet?’

‘The one who had a mistress in İzmir.’

‘A whore in Gaziosmanpaşa and some Italian woman who used to visit him every July. But Talaat was worse than that,’ she exclaimed, ‘with his foreign beach girls and the sophisticated women from Ankara . . .’

‘Yes, well, now he’s got cancer, all that’s at an end, isn’t it?’ İkmen said acidly. Weary now of his wife’s tirade against significant men, he added, ‘Talaat had a good time in the way that he wanted to.’

Fatma lowered her head and looked down at her hands. ‘And now he’s dying.’

‘Yes.’

Her eyes filled with tears, which glistened in the light from the streetlamps as she raised her head up to look at her husband once again. ‘Oh, Çetin!’

He put his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. ‘We all die, Fatma,’ he said gently, ‘time runs out.’

‘And then we go to Paradise.’

‘Maybe,’ he shrugged, ‘I don’t know. One thing that I do know, however, is that we should try to be happy while we’re here.’ He looked down at her and smiled. ‘Which is why I will help Hulya and Berekiah in any way that I can. After all,’ he said as he lifted one hand to stroke his wife’s thick hair, ‘I would be a miserable old bastard if I denied them what we’ve had all our married lives.’

‘And what is that, Çetin?’

‘True love,’ he responded simply.

Fatma reached up and pulled his face down towards hers. Soon dawn would come, the hour of prayer bringing with it the muezzin’s earnest call – a time when base urges like those she felt now should be washed away from the minds of all the Faithful.

C
HAPTER
15

Commissioner Ardiç leaned back into the softness of his new swivel chair and observed the younger, slimmer man in front of him with a critical eye. ‘In view of what you believe might have happened, I’ve decided to assign İskender to liaise with Rostov,’ he said. ‘I feel it’s best.’

‘It was definitely my informant, sir,’ Suleyman said, as he shook his head slowly and wearily from side to side. ‘She was drowned.’

It had been the prostitute herself who had told him about how Rostov disposed of his enemies. Like the Sultans of old he favoured drowning. What was it Rostov had said so coldly when Suleyman had asked him about Masha?
I don’t know anyone of that name, Inspector. No one of that name exists.

He’d killed her. Used her in some game with the police first – a game that none of them as yet, or so Suleyman felt – truly understood. Surely there had to be more to what had happened over the past two days than the search for some mythical boy called Vladimir followed by the clumsy discovery of Tatiana’s body? However clever Rostov was, it was really suspicious that they hadn’t found anything incriminating at his home.

‘Yes, but we don’t know whether it was Rostov and his men who did that, do we?’ the Commissioner cut across Suleyman’s thoughts with blunt practicality. ‘What is more to the point,’ he continued, ‘is whether this disgusting trade in preserved bodies might give us access to other mobsters’ houses. In view of the fact that you discovered nothing of any interest at Rostov’s place . . .’

‘It could be that we only find bodies at the other locations, sir,’ Suleyman put in. Perhaps it was all some sort of elaborate plot hatched by all of them. Maybe there were no other bodies?

‘Yes, it could, but then if that is the case at least we’ll be able to remove these ghastly corpses,’ Ardiç responded tersely. ‘There is a moral and a health issue here.’ He looked down at the cigar sticking out of his mouth and re-lit its extinguished end. ‘And who knows what else we may find during the course of a very thorough search of Sergei Vronsky’s home and who’s that other gangster . . . Malenkov?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘All of which may prove very fruitful.’ He looked up, frowning. ‘Now, Dr Keyder, the embalmer.’

‘I think it’s very likely, sir, that she may wish to conceal or even destroy records that relate to this work. If she’s any awareness of how these people operate, she’ll know that one doesn’t give information about them to us.’

‘Mmm.’ Ardiç puffed heavily on his cigar for a few moments. ‘But then if we have Rostov’s testimony . . .’

‘I don’t think he’d be very happy if he knew we were going in to, say, Malenkov’s place, solely on his advice,’ Suleyman said.

‘Do we care?’

‘If such a situation could start a gang war, then yes.’

Ardiç sighed. ‘But if we have, effectively, taken possession of his daughter’s corpse . . .’

‘Oh, we currently have a hold over him, yes, sir. He’s very concerned about what may or may not happen to that corpse.’

‘Mmm . . .’ Ardiç put his hands together in front of his chin and grunted. ‘All right, Inspector,’ he said gravely, ‘get over to Dr Keyder’s place and see what you can find.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Suleyman moved his chair back from his superior’s desk and stood up.

‘I’ll authorise a search but don’t intimidate the woman, she only treats these bodies, she’s not a criminal and, besides, in the wake of your little misunderstanding with the Bulgarian priest the last thing I need is for the Keyders to get involved.’ He paused in order to let the memory of the Father Alexei incident sink in. He hadn’t exactly savaged Suleyman about it. His response in view of the rumours about another possible Middle East crisis, was very restrained. Incidents with minorities, particularly those of a non-Muslim persuasion, like Father Alexei and Dr Keyder, were not what Ardiç wanted.

‘What do you mean, sir?’ Suleyman said frowning. ‘How can Dr Keyder be “involved” with Father Alexei?’

‘She isn’t.’ Ardiç, annoyed at his inferior’s seeming lack of grasp, sighed. ‘There are all sorts of rumours going around, as I’m sure you’re aware, about another conflict brewing in this region,’ he said. ‘The Americans want to have another go at Saddam Hussein. That and the up-coming election is making me a little tense about our public image. I’ve told you to be careful of Yeşim Keyder because I feel it would be unwise to upset our Jewish population.’

‘She’s Jewish? Dr Sarkissian thought she might be.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Ardiç responded breezily. ‘Her brother, Dr Veli Keyder, was a famous biologist, served in the army with one of my cousins. Born in Balat, the Keyders. Poor family, apparently, got to where they wanted to be through sheer hard work. Can’t understand why the sister became an embalmer, though.’ He shook his head confusedly. ‘I always thought she was an anatomist.’

‘It would seem that the time they spent in South America had a great influence on her.’

Ardiç looked up. ‘Through this Dr Ara. Yes.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘South America. What a place that is,’ he said. ‘You know that the Aztecs or the Incas, can’t remember which, practised human sacrifice? They used to cut hearts, still beating, from their “offerings”. Then they’d mummify what remained – Allah alone knows why. Barbarians!’

‘That was a very long time ago, sir,’ Suleyman responded. ‘I don’t think that Aztec practices have anything to do with the preservation of dictators’ wives or the children of gangsters.’

Ardiç, who didn’t appreciate being disagreed with, simply grunted.

Suleyman took his jacket off the back of his chair and put it on. Later on he would have to explain to his wife why he had been so late home last night. How he had needed to spend time at the mortuary with Dr Sarkissian and his corpses, but not why. He wouldn’t mention how he had stared and stared at Masha’s corpse until his eyes felt like they would crack. Not a word would he speak about the test the Armenian was going to perform in order to discover whether the girl had been HIV positive. That, together with the appointment Dr Sarkissian had made for Suleyman with his brother, Krikor, was not for Zelfa’s consumption. Not yet.