River of The Dead (21 page)

‘Some members of my family, as you know, Mehmet, come originally from Cappadocia,’ İkmen replied. ‘Land of strange volcanic shapes and eerie cave houses. Seemingly quite rational Cappadocians claim to see, from time to time, the famous local fairies.’

‘Do they claim to be able to communicate directly with them?’

‘Sometimes,’ İkmen said. ‘Your Inspector Taner – rather esoteric, is she?’

‘Underneath the toughness, yes,’ Süleyman said. ‘Not that far underneath, as it happens. I respect her enormously, Çetin. She has a difficult time as both a woman and a police officer in this city. I think she’s only really tolerated by the population because her father is a member of this scorpion clan and is a Master of Sharmeran. It’s some sort of companion to the being, or . . . That said, I’m not always comfortable with her judgement when it comes to things of an unseen or spiritual nature.’

İkmen asked him what he meant and Süleyman told him about the Christian family known as Saatçi, about Musa the father and Gabriel the miracle son.

‘Mm, that all sounds very eastern indeed,’ İkmen said when he had heard his friend out. ‘Have you spoken to any of the monks about this Gabriel?’

‘I did speak briefly to Dr Sarkissian’s friend, Brother Seraphim,’ Süleyman said. ‘All he told me was that Gabriel Saatçi was perfectly fine up until the arrest of his father. Apparently Gabriel went to see Musa at Mardin police station just after the arrest was made and the cops there, Taner included, let the two of them speak in private for a few minutes. Immediately afterwards Gabriel walked out of the city and seemingly disappeared.’

‘My logical police sense would cause me to think that perhaps Gabriel is implicated in this crime,’ İkmen said. ‘After all, there are many and various terrorist groups operating in that area, aren’t there? But if he is a real Suriani . . . Living saints rarely wage war, do they?’

‘Musa the father believes that once Gabriel returns from his sojourn with God, the Sharmeran or whatever, he will make everything right.’

‘On the basis that a man who can withstand the bite of a hundred vipers is probably pretty special . . .’

‘But my point, Çetin, in all this is that there is a possibility that Musa Saatçi is guilty, that he
was
hiding arms in his house for one or other terrorist group,’ Süleyman said. ‘Inspector Taner however will not have it, not in any way. Musa is innocent, and although I know that Taner’s mind is rather more open than that of most people around here, she is still basically a person who is totally comfortable with magical solutions.’

‘Well, that’s me too, Mehmet, as you . . .’ İkmen’s voice tailed off into silence.

Frowning, Süleyman said, ‘Çetin?’

When the older man spoke again it was in a low whisper.

‘I think that Bekir has just come back in,’ he said. ‘I need to speak to him.’

‘Why?’

İkmen lowered his voice still further. ‘Certain behaviours of his I am not happy with. Certain stories he has been telling that do not wholly accord with reality. In other words a replay, in part at least, of the behaviour that years ago resulted in his leaving his parents’ home and taking to the streets.’

‘Çetin, I’m sorry. I—’

‘Must go! I’ll call you tomorrow!’ İkmen hissed and then, suddenly, he was gone.

It was well past midnight by the time Edibe Taner got back to her small apartment in the city quarter known as New Mardin. Situated on the flat plain below the old city, New Mardin is where the greatest civic expansion has taken place in recent years in the form of new apartment blocks, municipal buildings and modern hotels. Taner was just digging into her handbag for her keys in front of her own, almost completely darkened block when she became aware that she was not alone. Instead of continuing to look for her keys she put her hand in her jacket pocket and drew out her pistol. For several seconds she just stood, waiting to see what happened. But then the feeling of threat passed. Nothing so much as moved or even drew breath in or around the entrance to her apartment block, and so after a few more seconds Taner put her pistol away, took her keys out of her handbag and let herself in. Although rattled by the activation of an instinct that, over the years, she had grown to trust, Edibe Taner was convinced that whoever or whatever had been with her outside had meant her no harm. In fact, whatever it had been had, she felt, probably been a friend. Before she headed for the lift up to her fifth-floor apartment, she put her head outside the main door again and called, very softly, ‘Gabriel? Is that you, Gabriel?’

As it often did, Gabriel Saatçi’s gentle face had come suddenly and unbidden into her mind. He could do that, her friend Gabriel,
her
saint Gabriel. Or was it because after she had dropped Inspector Süleyman off, she had remembered where she had seen and spoken to one particular guard at the American woman’s house before? The man was a neighbour of Gabriel’s father. A village man originally, and a nice enough person by all accounts. Or not. ‘Gabriel, my . . . my friend.’ Was he close by, perhaps? Was he looking at her and smiling as she wrestled with conflicting feelings of need for him and dread? Gabriel had always been a prankster.

But even after almost half a minute there was no reply and so she closed the door again and went and got into the lift. Why she thought it had been Gabriel she didn’t know. Maybe because she had grown up with him she had developed a sort of a sense as to where he might be. Or maybe it was to do with the deeper feelings she knew she possessed. But if that were the case, why couldn’t she find him? It was something that her father might be able to enlighten her about at some time. If of course Seçkin Taner was still speaking to his daughter. The meeting between her father and Inspector Süleyman had not gone well. But then how the Ottoman from İstanbul could be expected to understand Mardin beliefs and customs Edibe Taner didn’t know. At times it was a struggle for her. She hadn’t seen the Sharmeran; she’d heard her a few times, but . . . Then there was the ‘Cobweb World’ of which, apparently, Cousin Rafik’s mother had spoken to poor Süleyman. That kind of phenomenon was best kept dark but then maybe Rafik’s mother just had to blurt it out sometimes. After all, she, if anyone, was part of the Cobweb World. Just as the name of one of the suspect nurses in İstanbul was part of the Cobweb World. Lole. She would have to tell Süleyman about that name at some point and why the young man who owned it couldn’t possibly be from Mardin. The Loles had disappeared into the Cobweb World for good. Difficult if not impossible sometimes to talk about that.

Taner opened the door to her apartment and put on the light in the hall. She slipped her shoes off at the door and then walked into her bedroom.

Captain Hilmi Erdur had not expected a visit from the American military, especially not in the middle of the night. The body of the faceless American corpse was still in the mortuary in Birecik and therefore under his jurisdiction. But tissue samples and fingerprints had gone off to the Americans and Erdur was, as far as he was concerned, simply waiting for confirmation from that quarter as to the man’s identity.

According to the information on the body’s dog-tags, which had eventually been found in one of the pockets of his trousers (odd in itself), he was a Private Jose E. Ramone. His uniform, which was characterised by a blue spade insignia, belonged to the 26th infantry regiment who were, so Erdur now knew, currently stationed in Ramadi in central Iraq. Once his identity was confirmed, Erdur could release the body to the US authorities and, when a Captain Chalabian of the US 26th arrived at the Jandarma station to see him, he thought that the American had come to arrange just that.

‘Private Jose Eduardo Ramone was killed two weeks ago in Baghdad,’ Captain Chalabian said without preamble and in perfect Turkish. ‘What’s left of his body, which is in Baghdad, is waiting repatriation to the US.’

‘So what—’ Erder began.

‘What you’ve got here, Captain, I don’t know,’ Chalabian interrupted. He was tall and fair and seemed to give the lie to his obviously Armenian surname. Armenians were not, Hilmi Erdur thought, like this. ‘But that Private Ramone’s dog-tags should turn up on an unknown body is of concern to me. There’s a lot of insurgent activity in the Iraqi territories to the south of your country.’

Captain Erdur wondered whether to mention the somewhat vexed issue of active Kurdish PKK terror cells in that area, but the American got in first.

‘Whatever may or may not be said officially, the Kurds go in and out of Iraq,’ he said baldly. ‘You’ve Hezbollah also to contend with here, as do we.’

‘This is not the first time we’ve found body parts in the Euphrates,’ Erdur said.

‘Yes, I know. But, Captain, this is the first time you’ve found a US serviceman. Or not. You should know that the US military have not been able to identify the corpse.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ve run those DNA sequences and we’ve looked hard at those fingerprints but whatever we do we can’t make any of them fit any of our personnel. He could be an Iraqi, civilian or military, dressed in US uniform to disguise his identity.’

‘He has no face,’ Erdur said.

‘Exactly. Someone doesn’t want us to know who he is, do they? Look, I can run his prints and DNA past our Iraqi military colleagues, but I think we could have the body of an insurgent here.’

Erdur sighed. What he’d do with the body of an unknown Iraqi civilian he didn’t know.

‘In the meantime I’d like to take a look at him, if I may,’ Chalabian said. ‘If he was someone active around our base, I could maybe recognise something that remains about him. I knew Ramone, of course, and I know it isn’t him. Ramone had his head shot to shit by a sniper.’

Erdur took his American colleague to the mortuary. On the way he complimented him on his Turkish. It was very good. However, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, Erdur knew he’d done the wrong thing. This tall blond man, he had forgotten, had an Armenian surname.

‘My father’s people came originally from Diyarbakir,’ Chalabian responded tightly. ‘My grandparents only knew Turkish. Oh, and Armenian too, of course. But no one speaks that now. Turkish was useful. My dad encouraged me to learn it. We forgot Armenian. You know?’

There was no tone of challenge in Chalabian’s voice, just a little bit of anger. Erdur thought that the American would probably want him to ignore it, which he did.

‘Here,’ he said as he pulled one of the refrigeration drawers out of the mortuary cabinet. He pulled the sheet covering the corpse aside to allow the American to see what lay beneath.

As soon as Chalabian saw the body, he frowned. ‘How long was he in the water before you picked him up?’ he said.

‘We are not yet sure,’ Erdur replied. ‘Only one of our local doctors came to him when we found him. No one else was available. The pathologist from Urfa is due tomorrow.’

‘I don’t know because I’m not an expert,’ Chalabian said, ‘but to me he doesn’t look as if he’s been in the water all that long.’

They walked out into the chilly night air and Chalabian offered Erdur a cigarette, which he took.

‘Captain, you and I both know that your borders here in the east are porous,’ Chalabian began.

‘We do our best,’ Erdur replied with some heat in his voice. Confounded Americans! What did they know about dealing with multiple terrorist threats over decades? 9/11 had been dreadful but compared to the terrorist experiences of people in Europe and the Middle East over the past forty years, it had been a drop in the ocean. ‘We have Hezbollah to contend with,’ he continued. ‘There are al-Qaeda cells operating, we know that. And then there is the PKK.’

He didn’t elaborate upon that final group. It was well known that the US government was somewhat lukewarm in its condemnation of that particular organisation. Chalabian, as if a little embarrassed, lowered his head slightly.

‘Yes, well . . .’ He cleared his throat. ‘Captain, what exercises me is the fact that Ramone’s dog-tags have ended up inside Turkey. We’ve either got insurgents slipping over the border from northern Iraq or you’ve got people coming over to our side. Backwards and forwards, there’s movement anyhow.’

Erdur puffed hard on his cigarette and then looked up at the stars. ‘There is the drug trade too,’ he said after a pause. ‘Opium grows very well in these border valleys. We try to control this trade as best we can. But during the time of Saddam Hussein things on the Iraqi side of the border were often quite unrestrained. Now, of course . . .’ He looked up at Chalabian and saw what he thought was a face that could be open to the truth. He gave it a shot. ‘Little has changed in that respect. If anything, in fact, the trade is more violent, the drugs more hotly contested.’

‘I know,’ Chalabian said with a sigh. He then, quite unexpectedly, put a hand on his Turkish colleague’s shoulder and said, ‘We’ve made a fucking mess of the whole thing, I know that. But, Captain, I knew Private Ramone and I liked him. I need to find out who stole his dog-tags and why. If people are throwing bodies carrying US ID into rivers then they have an agenda we don’t yet understand. We need to understand it, and soon.’

Captain Erdur nodded his head in agreement. ‘When the doctor comes from Urfa he will take more DNA samples. Then, maybe, we will find out who this man is.’

Çetin İkmen hadn’t been able to close his eyes. He’d tried, because he didn’t want to feel tired at work the following day. But he’d failed. Even before he’d been denied his own bed, the argument he’d had with Bekir, or rather the memory of it, had put paid to sleep. Not only had his son stuck to his grandiose lies about being a famous fighter of gypsies, he had been vicious in his resentment of his father.

‘How dare you check up on me!’ he’d roared when Çetin İkmen had told him about his conversation with the gypsy. ‘I know you resent me coming back, but—’

‘Bekir, you were a nightmare when you lived at home before,’ İkmen had countered. ‘You lied, you took drugs, you—’