Petrified (25 page)

‘Sir, I’d like to take three officers with me out to Dr Keyder’s yalı,’ he said as he made to open the door out into the corridor.

‘As you wish,’ his superior responded. ‘Just make sure that one is female. We don’t want Dr Keyder getting upset.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Very well.’

And with a wave of one hand Ardiç dismissed him.

Once out in the corridor, Suleyman pondered on what he’d just been told. So Yeşim Keyder was Jewish, was she? He wasn’t aware that they routinely practised embalming, but perhaps they didn’t; perhaps her interest only came about because of Argentina and her experiences in that country.

Suleyman lit up a cigarette. Amazing that Dr Keyder, who now lived, according to Çöktin, in a very luxurious yalı had been born in Balat. Many years before, when he was still a sergeant, Suleyman had worked, with İkmen, on a case involving an old Jewish communist up in Balat. It was, he recalled, a picturesquely shabby place. Funny that its name should come up again and at the same time as İkmen was involved in looking for the Akdeniz children up in Balat. Synchronicity. Suleyman smiled. But then, if İkmen was to be believed, maybe not. I do not, he recalled İkmen saying once, many, many years ago, hold with synchronicity, Suleyman, and neither should you.

Eren Akdeniz left the house at ten thirty. Alone, she carried nothing except a handbag and hadn’t, at least not within Constable Gün’s hearing, bade farewell to anyone inside the house. And since neither Melih nor Reşad Kuran had been spotted by Güney during the night it was probably safe to assume that the two men were still sleeping.

As she descended the steep flight of steps that led down into the centre of the district, Eren threw a patterned scarf over her head. Gün, who was out of uniform for this particular assignment, was similarly attired. It wasn’t a mode of dress that she liked but she could appreciate why it was necessary. In spite of its smattering of artists and its recent application for World Heritage Site status, Balat was still essentially a working-class district and as such its people, particularly the women, tended to dress modestly.

When the woman first left the house, Gün, whose orders had been to follow Kuran, had wondered what to do. A brief phone call to İkmen had confirmed that she was to follow Eren and report her movements. Another female officer, Sibel Yalçin, daughter of one of the department’s oldest and admittedly slowest detectives, had been ordered to take her place. Once she’d finished the call, Gün put her mobile back in her handbag and followed the artist’s wife down the steps.

It was already very hot and the air had that sticky, humid quality that characterises high summer in İstanbul. As Gün looked out across the tops of the old Greek and Jewish houses towards the Golden Horn, her vision was blurred by the heat haze that hung like a tacky rug over the great waterway. She didn’t like summer in the heart of the city. But unless one happened to be very wealthy one was more or less stuck with it. The rich could escape to summer houses in one or other of the Bosphorus villages. Gün, her eyes once again pinned to the back of Eren Akdeniz’s pattern-wrapped head, wondered idly whether Inspector Suleyman’s family still retained one of these places.

At the bottom of the steps the artist’s wife turned right on to some nameless street where little bits of activity were taking place around a general store and a barber’s shop. A group of middle-aged and elderly men stood outside the latter, their hair just slightly overgrown, smoking. They spoke in low voices, each one waiting his turn to sit in the barber’s chair and have the short, neat standard Turkish haircut. As Eren, a plain and also headscarfed woman passed, they didn’t so much as flick their eyes in her direction.

More surprisingly, she was also ignored outside the general store with its knot of headscarfed women and their many bags of shopping in tow. Groups of thin, excitable children played around them like insects, occasionally stopping to berate their mothers for not buying them this or that in the shop. Like a small patch of darkness she passed beside them, and two tiny white kittens flew from in front of her feet as she went.

A little further up the road, on the opposite side of the street from a vast, vine-covered mansion, the sound of hammers on metal signalled the existence of a coppersmith’s workshop. Entered via a fenced yard at the front, it was typical of the small-scale artisan businesses that had always characterised Balat. Without looking to either left or right, Eren entered the courtyard and, by the time Gün had caught up, she had disappeared from sight. The hammering inside the building stopped.

Reluctant actually to follow her into the ramshackle little workshop, Gün stood beside the opening into the yard and surveyed the area. Large cauldrons, some of which were obviously there to be repaired, lay carelessly on the ground outside the workshop, which was little more than a wooden shed. At the back of this building there was a wall, to which it appeared to be attached or at least leaning against. The wall, Gün observed, was old and crumbling in places, but that wasn’t unusual in this area. Long ago it had probably been part of something – a house or maybe even a church or synagogue.

When, a few moments later, the hammering started up once again, Gün moved slightly back on to the street and waited for Eren to reappear. But seconds passed into minutes and with no Eren in sight, Gün decided to go in and see what was happening.

The workshop, which was stacked from floor to ceiling with copper – pots, pans, plates, kettles – only supported one workman. Small and elderly, he sucked heavily on a home-made cigarette as he brought a small hammer down on to a currently very misshapen plate. He seemed, from the look of wrapt concentration on his brown weathered face, to be contented in his solitude. However, when he saw Gün he stopped what he was doing and looked up.

The policewoman could see at a glance that there was no one with him.

‘Good morning, uncle,’ she said to the old man. ‘Did a lady come in here just now?’

‘Yes,’ the old man replied, ‘Eren Hanım. But she’s just gone.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘But, uncle, I didn’t see her leave. I’ve been outside in the street.’

The old man smiled, his eyes almost disappearing into the heavy lines that surrounded them. ‘She left by the back door,’ he said as he waved a hand towards a rough-looking plank in the back wall, ‘out on to Mürsel Paşa Caddesi.’

Without even asking if she could do so, Gün sprang forward and pushed the plank roughly to one side.

‘Young lady!’ the old man said disapprovingly as he watched her make a most unladylike exit.

There was a small piece of rough scrubland just beyond the door which fell away sharply towards the fast-moving Mürsel Paşa thoroughfare and the glittering Golden Horn beyond. On the side of the road, standing beside a now stationary yellow taxi stood a woman in a patterned headscarf. As Gün struggled to maintain her footing on the powdery scrubland the woman turned just before getting into the vehicle. Eren Akdeniz first said something to the driver and then, with a smile directly at Constable Gün, she got into the vehicle and sped away in the direction of the Atatürk Bridge.

‘People who purchase my expertise pay me a lot of money,’ Yeşim Keyder said as she placed a large buff folder into Suleyman’s hands. ‘They expect me to operate in legal and sanitary conditions. You’ll find everything pertaining to my conformation with City and Government regulations in this file.’

‘I have never questioned the legality of your practice, Dr Keyder,’ Suleyman said as he briefly glanced through the documents in the folder.

‘Just its morality,’ she returned sharply.

‘You weren’t exactly forthcoming about your profession when Sergeant Çöktin first spoke to you about Miguel Arancibia.’

‘I feared the lack of understanding you are exhibiting so graphically now, Inspector,’ Dr Keyder retorted. ‘I work, as I’m sure you can appreciate, in a very discreet and confidential world. It isn’t, in general, Muslim practice to embalm the dead.’

‘No.’ He put the folder down on a bench, which looked very similar to those used by Dr Sarkissian at the mortuary. Dr Keyder’s laboratory, which was situated in the basement of her yalı, was a somewhat unnerving place. Various instruments were visible, the function of which was only too easy to imagine. Çöktin, who had been given access to a filing cabinet in the corner, briefly looked up.

‘I must confess,’ Suleyman continued, ‘that I find it very odd that you chose to practise in Turkey, Dr Keyder. Surely you could make a far better living in Western Europe or even back in South America.’

‘Turkey is my home,’ she said shortly. ‘I left it once before, but now I’m too old to leave.’

Suleyman shrugged. ‘I was only thinking that professionally—’

‘I make a living, a good one, as you know,’ she sniffed as if there were suddenly a bad smell under her nose. ‘My work is without equal. People will pay almost any price. And anyway,’ she added, her voice now just tinged with spite, ‘some of my clients are Muslims. Not everyone is who he or what she seems.’

‘No,’ Suleyman replied, smiling, ‘that’s true. Some Jewish people for instance . . .’

‘Look, if you’re trying to make something out of the fact that my parents were Jewish then don’t bother,’ the old woman said as she lowered herself down into the chair behind her desk. ‘Just because I don’t publicise my origins that doesn’t mean that I keep them secret. I am a Jew, I was born in Balat.’

‘You told me when we first spoke,’ Çöktin interjected from across the room, ‘that your family had become wealthy because of their involvement with the Republican movement, that your father knew President İnönü.’

‘No, what I said,’ Dr Keyder corrected emphatically, ‘was that my father fought with İnönü. Like many people at that time, my father was in the Republican army. I told you further that we had done well as a family, but by virtue of our intelligence and not because of some sort of favour from İnönü. My brother, Veli, was a brilliant biologist. Because of my involvement with Dr Ara, I am the world’s premier embalmer.’

Suleyman leaned back against one of the benches and looked down at her. ‘So do you have assistants?’

‘I use those endowed with more muscle than brain to assist in the delivery and placement of my subjects, yes.’

‘But you perform the process?’

‘Like Dr Ara, I work alone,’ she answered shortly. ‘The more people you have in a laboratory the more likely it is that contamination will be transferred to your subjects. Others bring them in, set them down here and take them out, but only I do the work, Inspector.’

‘Quite stressful for—’

‘An old woman?’ she smiled. ‘Ara taught me well. I know all the tricks, all the shortcuts, all the right ways in which to do everything. I need no one and nothing.’

‘Except that you once needed Ara,’ Suleyman said. ‘I assume from what you’ve already told us that you met him through Rosita’s family?’

‘Yes. I went with Veli and the rest of Rosita’s family to view what he had done with Miguel and,’ suddenly she smiled, dazzlingly, ‘it was magical. So perfect, so alive! Señora Arancibia, Rosita’s mother, cried with joy. Dr Ara could bring back the dead, I could see that. I wanted to have that skill for myself.’

‘Dr Ara didn’t think it odd that—’

‘I, a woman, should want to do such a thing? No.’ She looked down, Suleyman felt, a little coyly. ‘Pedro was a brilliant, fascinating man. An artist. We . . . we got on well. We shared a philosophy about the preservation of beauty. Beauty should never die. It’s too precious and rare. That’s why Pedro refused to work for the Soviets. Using his skills to preserve the likes of Lenin and Stalin was anathema to him.’

‘And yet some of your subjects must be old and unattractive,’ Suleyman said.

‘I am not Pedro.’

‘You know he was accused of necrophilia?’ Çöktin put in.

Yeşim Keyder’s eyes blazed. ‘Don’t talk about things you can’t understand! Pedro Ara was my soul-mate. Everything he did was aimed at the preservation of beauty. Everything!’

‘Dr Keyder!’

The three of them looked up towards the door at the top of the stairs leading into the basement. Roditi, corpulent and slovenly, stood in front of it, looking vaguely horrified at the scene below.

‘You’ve got a visitor, Dr Keyder,’ he said, ‘a lady.’

‘All right, I’ll come,’ she said, and then rose from her seat. ‘Excuse me, gentlemen.’

She walked up the stairs towards Roditi, who escorted her out of the basement.

Suleyman, now that she’d gone wrinkling his nose up against the strong smell of formaldehyde that pervaded every part of the laboratory, walked across to Çöktin, who was still busy with the filing cabinet.

‘Anything?’ he enquired as he watched the younger man flick through the contents of a large green file.

‘If you mean have I come across the names Vronsky, Bulganin and Malenkov, no I haven’t, sir,’ the Kurd replied. ‘Most of these records are in excess of five years old.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t suppose she’s volunteered any names.’

‘No.’ He looked down at the floor, lost in thought for a moment. ‘I wonder if she gave them code names or numbers.’

‘None of the other records are compiled like that; they’re all very explicit,’ Çöktin said. ‘She must have destroyed them.’

‘Is there anything recent? She works all the time.’

Çöktin sighed. ‘There are records for Miguel Arancibia and for a male and female by the name of Nabaro.’

‘Mean anything to you?’

‘No, sir.’

Their conversation was temporarily cut short by the arrival of Constable Roditi. He was alone, and from the expression on his face he was somewhat troubled.

‘Roditi?’

The constable drew rather nearer to his superior than he usually did and said, ‘Sir?’

‘Yes?’

He looked once over his shoulder towards the stairs before proceeding. ‘Look, sir,’ he said, ‘it might not mean anything but . . . you know I’ve been working on that Akdeniz missing kids case with Inspector İkmen?’