River of The Dead (12 page)

They, as in the Mardin police, would have to manage the Kurdish dialects somehow, Süleyman thought. Although relatively quiet in recent months, the whole area had been by turns closed to outsiders and under curfew for many years, in part, at least, because of the Kurdish separatists. Even through his half-sleeping state, Süleyman had noticed how much military traffic – tanks, armoured cars, troop carriers – there had been on the road east of Birecik. He looked around at the wonderful and yet frightening absence around him and, although not exactly cold, he shuddered.

‘I have just the thing for cold bones,’ a deep male voice cut in.

Süleyman turned round and saw a very upright man of about sixty standing behind him. Heavily bearded, he was dressed in a long black robe, while on his head he wore a dark cap embroidered with stars. Inspector Taner, on seeing him, first smiled and then stepped forward to take one of his hands, which she kissed.

‘Brother Seraphim.’

‘And this, I take it, Inspector Taner, is Inspector Süleyman from İstanbul.’

‘Yes, Brother.’

He held his hand out to Süleyman which, for a moment, gave the İstanbul man pause. Was he supposed to shake the monk’s hand or kiss it? Things were obviously done very differently out here, but then Brother Seraphim as a friend of Dr Sarkissian had to know that. Süleyman smiled and shook the monk firmly by the hand.

‘Come inside,’ the monk said as he led the two officers towards the huge stone monastery building. Its walls were studded with numerous arched and latticed windows and covered with intricate, if to Süleyman incomprehensible, carvings.

‘I do hope that you will like the room we have prepared for you, Inspector,’ Brother Seraphim said as he mounted the stairs towards the main door of the monastery. ‘It is simple, I am afraid, but clean.’ And then he turned round and looked upon both of them with troubled eyes. ‘We live, sadly, in difficult times.’

He put the strange dream he was to have later down to the unaccustomed location, his utter exhaustion and that damn coffee too!

Once inside the monastery, Brother Seraphim had ushered him and Taner into a very light and clean dining room. There, seated at a plain wooden table, they had been plied with a variety of food and drink, including bread, cheese, preserves and meat, fruit juice and coffee. Literally sick with tiredness by that time, Süleyman had opted just for coffee. He had not paid attention, however, to the kind of coffee he was being given.

Mirra coffee is a traditional beverage in south-eastern Turkey. Bitter and thick in a way that ordinary Turkish coffee does not even approach, it is boiled and reboiled so many times over a twenty-four-hour period that, eventually, it achieves the consistency of dark syrup. Beloved by the people of the south-east, especially Mardin, it has a kick like a bull and can stain a china cup on contact. It is also deemed exceedingly rude to refuse one of the tiny cups of mirra one is routinely offered by almost everyone on the Ocean. Süleyman eventually drank three of these thimble-sized cups which led to the kind of head-spinning experience one would normally associate with alcohol poisoning. Luckily Brother Seraphim was well aware of the rapid change of state in his guest and, while Taner carried the İstanbul officer’s luggage, the monk very gently raised Süleyman from his chair and took him to his room. As they all walked into what was a small but bright and clean-smelling chamber, the monk said, or rather Süleyman thought he heard the monk say, ‘We’ve looked and looked and still we can’t find him. I think he must have gone to
her
 . . .’

Then he lost consciousness. He was adrift on a sea of green fields being tossed and turned by what looked like vast snakes or eels. Strangely these creatures did not provoke any sort of fear, rather a curiosity that extended to the fact that although he was under water he could, somehow, breathe.

‘Inspector Süleyman. Inspector Süleyman.’ It wasn’t said along with physical movement, as in someone shaking him awake. It wasn’t even said with much urgency. But he was nevertheless brought out of his serpent-filled world by a voice that was firm in its intention.

Süleyman blinked. ‘Brother Seraphim?’

Whether the monk was smiling underneath that huge beard of his was impossible to tell. But his voice was soothing and apologetic. ‘I am so sorry to wake you, but Inspector Taner has arrived and apparently you need to go somewhere with her,’ he said. ‘Were it up to me I would have let you sleep, but . . .’

Süleyman, with some difficulty, sat up. Still fully clothed, he must, he now saw, have just collapsed on to that small but comfortable bed and then not moved a muscle. He looked out of the narrow arched window at his side and saw a huge, green ‘sea’ sweeping down into a misty nothingness, just as in his dream. He shook his head and said, ‘What time is it?’

‘It is midday,’ the monk replied. ‘I have telephoned my friend Arto Sarkissian to tell him you have arrived. He sends his greetings and was relieved to know that you were safe.’

Safe? Süleyman rubbed his face with his hands and tried to make his brain think straight. Now that he was in the east, of course people would routinely enquire about his safety.

‘I need to have a wash,’ Süleyman said at length. ‘Can you please tell Inspector Taner I’ll be with her as soon as I can?’

‘Of course.’ The monk rose to his feet and began to walk back towards the door.

‘Oh, Brother Seraphim?’

He turned. ‘Yes?’

‘Do you know if Inspector Taner has managed to get some sleep too?’

Brother Seraphim shook his head. ‘Oh, no,’ he said as if this were the most natural thing in the world. ‘She doesn’t need to.’

‘Doesn’t . . .’

‘Her father, Seçkin Taner, is a Master of Sharmeran,’ the monk said gravely. ‘Those people are not like the rest of us, Inspector, as I am sure you will very soon learn.’

It was difficult to see what the prison guard Ramazan Eren really looked like. Lost underneath a spider’s web of tubes, canulas and tapes he could have been any age; almost, İkmen felt, any sex. Dr Eldem, Eren’s physician, standing on the other side of the bed from İkmen and Ayşe Farsakoğlu, said, ‘He sustained one stab wound to the chest which grazed his heart. We’ve stopped the bleeding, but as to the damage caused . . .’ He shrugged. ‘To be honest with you, Inspector, this man is lucky to be alive on any sort of level.’

‘I know it is impossible to say when he may regain consciousness,’ İkmen began. ‘However—’

‘However nothing,’ the doctor responded shortly. ‘It is not
when
he regains consciousness, it is
if
.’

‘His brain is exhibiting electrical activity,’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu said as she looked up at the monitor above Eren’s head.

The doctor, offended as some physicians can become when confronted with a non-medic with some knowledge, blustered, ‘Just because his brain is showing activity doesn’t mean that he will ever recover. If he wakes he may be perfectly normal in every way but then again he may emerge a blithering idiot. One must be patient, madam. He who owns patience, owns Egypt, as is said!’

It was not a saying with which either İkmen or Ayşe was familiar, but they got the gist of it anyway. İkmen, who thought the whole conversation had become far more hysterical than it needed to be, said, ‘I’m going to continue to post a guard at the door of the ward just in case one of Kaya’s people should try to come back and finish Mr Eren off.’

‘You do as you wish,’ the doctor said as he made his way over to the door leading out of the room. ‘Whether this man recovers or not is in the hands of Allah!’ And then he left.

Ayşe Farsakoğlu breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Not very helpful,’ she said, watching Ramazan Eren breathe with the aid of a respirator.

‘What else can he say?’ İkmen shrugged. ‘None of us can know when or if this man will wake. Until he does, of course, we can’t know exactly what happened when Yusuf Kaya was rescued. All we do know is that Eren was supposed to die and so we have to guard him for the foreseeable future. By the way, Ayşe, did Sergeant Melik tell you about Hüseyin Altun?’ He knew that she’d arrested the beggar a few times in the past when she was still a constable working the beat.

‘Yes,’ she said without emotion. ‘No loss.’

‘Stabbed, wasn’t he?’

‘Apparently,’ she said, still without any great interest.

İkmen took his eyes off the waxen figure beneath the pipes and the tubes and looked into Ayşe’s face. ‘I spoke to Dr Sarkissian’s assistant. It was she who performed the autopsy on Altun earlier this morning,’ he said. ‘Apparently he was stabbed with a serrated metal blade of some sort. Not glass.’

Ayşe frowned. ‘Glass? You think that Altun may have been killed by the same people who killed the police officers and the prison guard?’

İkmen shrugged. ‘Altun died just after Kaya escaped. He hung out around Beyoğlu, he was a junkie, the chances are he knew Yusuf Kaya. It’s . . . well, it’s . . . Kaya has seemingly cleaned up so much in the wake of his escape, I find myself wondering whether Altun could have been a part of it.’

Still frowning, Ayşe said, ‘You have one of your . . . intuitions, sir?’

‘Maybe, maybe not, Ayşe,’ İkmen said. The further away in time he got from his late mother, the witch of Üsküdar, the more unlikely her powers and his own seemed to be. Or at least that was how he had come to feel about it recently. This was after all the twenty-first century, and no one sane believed in such things, did they?

Yet although Hüseyin Altun did not have any observed connection to Yusuf Kaya, his feeling that one did indeed exist was strong.

‘Ayşe,’ he said as they prepared to leave the hospital room, ‘you arrested Hüseyin Altun several times. Did you ever get involved with the kids in his street gang?’

‘When I or some other officer could catch them, yes,’ she said. As they left the room she added, ‘There were several boys I think I might know by sight. A girl too. Blond hair and I think she might have been foreign, Bulgarian maybe. This was years ago; they must all be grown up now. Oh, and there was a boy called Aslan too. I think that was his name, Aslan . . .’

Just before she closed the door behind her, Ayşe heard a very faint groan from the man on the bed. She and İkmen went and got Dr Eldem immediately, but he said the groan was only a physical response to the pain the patient was probably still experiencing even in coma. It meant nothing. It did not signal the end of Ramazan Eren’s sojourn in darkness. He gave him more diamorphine for the pain and all three left.

The twenty-first-century city of Mardin is actually two very different places. Both exist in the shadow of the fortress of Mardin which sits atop the peak that dominates the whole area, Mazi mountain. To the west of this huge, craggy pile is New Mardin. It consists of high-rise apartment blocks, supermarkets, bus stations and most things modern people need to lead a reasonably comfortable modern life. In the lee of the fortress itself is Old Mardin, which is quite another place. Basically, Mardin city is clustered around one street which is actually called Avenue One. Above and below this street exist the many winding lanes, alleys and literally thousands of stone steps that make up the old city. The buildings, which are made of yellow limestone, seen from the vantage point of the Mesopotamian plain below the city, seem to almost hang from the side of the mountain in waves of washing-draped confusion. Between Avenue One and the much newer road far below it that delineates the southern boundary of the city, Avenue Two, are very few places accessible to anything bigger than a motorbike. So it was that Edibe Taner and Mehmet Süleyman were forced to walk down to their destination from the place where she parked her car on Republic Square, which is about a third of the way along Avenue One.

For Süleyman, who had travelled in Taner’s car along Avenue Two in order to get into the city and had therefore stared open-mouthed at yet more immense views over the Mesopotamian plain, the main focus of the city, Republic Square, proved to be a disappointment. As well as being an important stop for the many minibuses running to and from the new city and the surrounding villages, the square also acted as a somewhat makeshift car park. Taner parked her vehicle in front of the entrance to a branch of Akbank, outside which two of her uniformed colleagues stood leaning their elbows on the stocks of their sub-machine guns. Süleyman stepped out into a thin layer of mud and litter and looked up at a range of buildings that looked as if they had originated in the 1960s. An ugly kebab restaurant with plastic flowers on a tatty upstairs veranda was only bested by a truly hideous building that announced itself as the Hotel Bayraktar. Almost Soviet in its blockishness, the Hotel Bayraktar had noticeably more bullet holes in its masonry than unshattered windows. Süleyman imagined that this had to be a legacy of the violent struggle between the Turkish army and the PKK that had caused Mardin to be closed to outsiders from time to time. He was in fact going to ask Taner about it when suddenly he noticed that he was surrounded by a group of tiny boys.

‘You like guide?’ one asked him in English.

It was a surreal moment. He hadn’t long been awake, he was in a place that so far looked like a cross between some sort of mythical mountain land and Leningrad, and he was being spoken to by a child with a wildly divergent accent in a foreign language. For a moment, he just stood silent, like a mute.

‘He’s with me. Go away!’ was what he thought he heard Inspector Taner say, although he couldn’t be sure. What she spoke was Turkish, but only just. The little boys melted back into the almost invisible alleyway whence they had come.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Taner said as she wandered towards him, a cigarette hanging idly from her lips. ‘Kids here can smell an outsider. And as you see, this is not a wealthy city, so if you do feel like slipping them the odd kuruş to go away, that’s up to you.’

As he looked at her, Süleyman became aware of the truly wonderful building behind her. Constructed of yellow sandstone, it was reached via a sweeping staircase made from the same material. It was a three-storey, flat-roofed building fronted by a series of graceful arches on each level. In effect the building was terraced to allow upper storeys to have semi-private spaces where one could walk, seek the shade or shelter from the rain. Unlike the Zeytounian house in Gaziantep, this mansion, as he imagined it had to be, was not surrounded by a thick, high wall.