River of The Dead (3 page)

Çetin İkmen looked out over the top of the traffic jam on the coastal road, Kennedy Street, at the shining waters of the Sea of Marmara beyond. From the front entrance of the hospital, one could see the many vast tankers that had recently passed through the Bosphorus straits. One could also see much of the city of İstanbul itself. To his left, İkmen could just make out the minarets of the Sultan Ahmet or Blue Mosque. Almost encapsulating the spirit of the city in itself, the mosque had been built in a district that for ever afterwards took on its name. Sultanahmet, the very centre of the old city of imperial mosques, Ottoman palaces and the teeming Grand Bazaar, was where the İkmen family lived. Until Bekir had somehow made his way back, it had been home to Çetin, Fatma and their four youngest children. For the past nineteen years they had been, in totality, a family of ten – eight children and two parents. Now they were eleven, as it was meant to be, as was
right
. Except that, for Çetin İkmen at least, it wasn’t. His son Bekir was, to all intents and purposes, a very personable man of thirty-four. By his own admission he’d spent many years battling various addictions. He had, he said, spent the time he’d been addicted to heroin in the crime-ridden district of Edirnekapı, up around the old Byzantine city walls. Walking distance, provided one was fit, from the İkmens’ apartment in Sultanahmet.
Walking
distance! One could feel, and his wife Fatma did feel, very guilty about being so near and yet so far from a beloved child for such a long time. Çetin İkmen, however, did not. Now clean and bright and shiny and, he said, gainfully employed in the tourist industry, Bekir was still
wrong
. How, İkmen didn’t know. But that he, Bekir, was now on his own in the İkmen apartment with only Fatma for company made Çetin feel uneasy. The superstitious and suspicious blood that ran in his veins, inherited from a mother known for her witchcraft, would not allow the inspector to delight in his son’s return.

The landlord of the house where İsak Mardin had lived until a few days before was very certain that the young man had been ‘weird’ and ‘wrong’ – after he’d run off without paying his rent.

‘He was forever body-building, the woman who lives in the apartment below told me,’ Mr Lale told Ayşe Farsakoğlu. İkmen hadn’t yet arrived, so Sergeant Farsakoğlu, together with constables Yıldız and Orğa, had found the landlord of the house on Zeyrek Mehmet Paşa Alley and gained admittance to a now empty apartment.

‘Bang, bang, bang, all night long, so Miss . . . whatever her name is downstairs said,’ Mr Lale continued. He was a thin, lugubrious man of about fifty who, winter and summer, wore a thick knitted hat, as a lot of people who came originally from the countryside did. ‘Lifting weights, see,’ he said, moving his arms up and down to demonstrate, ‘and banging them down on the floor afterwards.’

‘Yes, Mr Lale,’ Ayşe said with a polite smile. ‘I do know what weightlifting is about.’

In spite of the fact that more women were joining the Turkish police all the time, Ayşe still found some male members of the public very patronising. This man wouldn’t have dreamed of doing his awful demonstration for either of the young male constables who were looking round the apartment with her. But for her, their superior, Mr Lale obviously felt he had to make himself plain. After all, Ayşe was an attractive woman in her early thirties, so it was almost unthinkable that she wasn’t stupid.

‘What someone in his profession was doing lifting weights, I don’t know,’ Mr Lale said as he lit up a cheap, rank Birinci cigarette. ‘I mean a nurse, I ask you! What kind of job is that for a grown man?’

Suspecting that this overtly macho attitude towards nursing was allied to a few other prejudicial feelings, Ayşe said, ‘So would you want to be handled by a woman if you were in hospital, Mr Lale?’

‘I’ve never been in a hospital in my life!’ He relayed this fact as if it were some sort of badge of honour.

‘Yes, but if you did have to go in . . .’ Ayşe, seeing the look of hostility on the landlord’s face, decided to give up. After all, his attitude towards this İsak Mardin was irrelevant. Where Mardin was now, what he was doing and what he had done were the only subjects she should be concentrating on now. After all, this man could have just murdered a prison guard, or one of the unfortunate police officers who had accompanied Yusuf Kaya to the Cerrahpaşa. One of their own . . .

‘Mr Lale,’ she began.

‘Sergeant!’

A call from what had apparently been İsak Mardin’s bedroom caused Ayşe to excuse herself to go and see what Constable Yıldız wanted.

The room, which contained little beyond an ancient-looking metal bedstead and the built-in cupboard Yıldız was looking into now, overlooked the Golden Horn. The nineteenth-century wooden house had five storeys and this apartment was on the fifth. So even though there were buildings behind the house, because they were smaller than Mr Lale’s place İsak Mardin had had a wonderful view. Even with the thunderous traffic on the Atatürk Bridge pounding across to hip and happening Beyoğlu over the water, the sight of the great inlet with the European city beyond was still absolutely breathtaking. And on a wonderful spring day like this one it would, under normal circumstances, have made Ayşe want to sing and shout from the sheer joy of simply being alive in such fabulous weather. But the circumstances were far from normal.

‘I found this in this cupboard,’ Constable Yıldız was holding a thin red and gold scarf very gingerly by one corner.

‘That’s a Galatasaray scarf,’ Mr Lale said from the doorway, once again anticipating complete ignorance on Ayşe’s part. ‘He supported that lot.’

Mr Lale, by referring to what is probably İstanbul’s most famous football club as ‘that lot’, signalled that it was not a particular passion of his own. Ayşe, whose brother was a fanatical Galatasaray fan, smiled.

‘Bag it up for forensic, please, Constable,’ she said to Yıldız. ‘Thank you for that, Mr Lale.’

Any examples of DNA found on the scarf or indeed on the bedding or the other, very few, items in the apartment could be useful; although, as her boss Inspector İkmen had told her earlier, İsak Mardin was probably a pseudonym. Yıldız had just put the scarf into a bag when İkmen, his thin face red and flustered, arrived.

‘I apologise for being late, Sergeant,’ he said to Ayşe Farsakoğlu as he tipped his head in greeting to Mr Lale. ‘But I’ve just had a telephone call from Commissioner Ardıç. We need to get back to the station – now.’

Try as he might, İkmen couldn’t get away from the fact that the man on the screen had to be Yusuf Kaya. ‘Where did this film come from?’ he asked as he watched again the short movie footage of Yusuf Kaya eating a plate of pastries.

‘A patisserie called the Nightingale is where it was taken,’ the large, heavily sweating man puffing on a cigar across the desk replied. ‘When was yesterday lunchtime, twelve thirty.’

‘I didn’t know that patisseries had security cameras,’ Mehmet Süleyman said as he sat down next to İkmen and ran the small snippet of film yet again.

‘Where does not have at least one camera these days?’ the large man responded gloomily. ‘I don’t know how many speed cameras there are between the centre of the city and Atatürk Airport, but if it goes on like this all traffic officers will lose the use of their legs. Sitting in rooms looking at screens all day long!’

Commissioner Ardıç, who like İkmen was in his late fifties, was not a man with whom new technology sat easily. He had gained enough knowledge to be able to operate his own computer and his mobile telephone and that, to Ardıç, was enough. Wall-to-wall security and speed cameras were, he felt, neither right nor necessary. Except in this one instance.

‘Fortunately for us the proprietor of the Nightingale thought he’d seen this particular customer before – on TRT News – and so he took this down to his local station yesterday evening.’

Yusuf Kaya’s image had been all over the media since he’d absconded.

‘So where is the Nightingale?’ Mehmet Süleyman asked. ‘It’s not a name that is familiar to me.’

Ardıç lowered his considerable behind into his groaning leather chair. ‘Gaziantep,’ he said.

‘Gaziantep!’

İkmen, still fixated upon the images on his superior’s computer screen, said, ‘Look at him! An intelligent operator like Kaya must have seen the cameras in that place. You know, I think he’s actually enjoying being observed. Arrogant bastard!’

‘Yes,’ Ardıç said to Süleyman, ‘our friend does seem to have got very far east in a very short space of time.’

‘If he’s eating, as he must be, baklava from Antep, then I envy him,’ İkmen said as he leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. ‘The centre of the pistachio nut universe, Gaziantep. They make the most sublime, nut-crammed baklava.’

‘I didn’t think that food was very high on your list of priorities, İkmen,’ Ardıç said, one bushy eyebrow raised.

İkmen looked up, took a long drag from his cigarette and smiled. ‘I make an exception for baklava and chocolate, sir,’ he said. ‘They are so very bad for one.’

Ardıç, who had to be at least twice İkmen’s weight, said, ‘Quite.’ He turned back to Süleyman. ‘On the basis that Kaya originates from Mardin and that much of the profit from his crime empire here in the city went back to his home town, we think that’s possibly where he’s headed. However, it is also known that he has friends in Antep, and so an Inspector Taner from Mardin has been despatched to investigate that connection. You, Süleyman, will rendezvous with Taner at Gaziantep airport tomorrow night.’

‘Sir?’

This seemed, to Süleyman, to be somewhat of an over-reaction. Surely if Mardin were on to it, this Taner person could deal with Kaya without help from İstanbul.

Ardıç looked narrowly at Süleyman. ‘It was you who originally apprehended Kaya and he was serving his sentence in this city when he absconded.’ He paused to relight his cigar, which had gone out during the course of their conversation. Then he lowered his head a little and added, ‘And besides, this time Kaya and his people killed our own.’

Süleyman exchanged glances with İkmen, who drew a long, thin breath into his lungs.

‘I don’t think that either of you knew Constable Mete or Constable Kanlı.’

He was right. Neither İkmen nor Süleyman had known either of the men who had been killed by Yusuf Kaya’s people.

‘Didn’t know them myself,’ Ardıç continued. ‘But what I do know is that the only thing those officers were doing that night was their duty. They were called upon to provide escort to a prisoner, which they did, and they died for their pains.’ He pulled himself up very straight in his chair then and said, ‘Know them or not, Mete and Kanlı were İstanbul police officers. If Kaya is out east, I want him brought back here. I don’t want some eastern types getting hold of him.’

‘Sir, Kaya was, as you say, imprisoned in İstanbul,’ İkmen said. ‘Surely, if he is caught, we—’

‘Mardin have issues with Kaya,’ Ardıç said contemptuously. ‘His crime empire here in the city apparently helped to fund still more illegal activities amongst his relatives in the east. They want him and so do we.’ He looked across at Süleyman and frowned. ‘Make sure you get hold of Kaya, not this Inspector Taner. We want him serving time in İstanbul. He
will
serve time in İstanbul.’

Süleyman sighed. ‘So it’s a competition, then, between myself and Taner. İstanbul versus Mardin.’

‘If you wish.’ Ardıç cleared his throat. ‘It is one that we will win.’

‘Sir, Mardin is a very small city with limited resources and a lot of problems,’ İkmen began. ‘I don’t think—’

‘You, İkmen, will continue the investigation here,’ Ardıç said. ‘Your own sergeant as well as Süleyman’s deputy Sergeant Melik will assist you. Now, I understand some male nurses have gone missing from the Cerrahpaşa.’

İkmen told Ardıç about the three men he was currently pursuing, while Süleyman descended into silence. In spite of being a professional woman herself, his wife Zelfa wouldn’t like the idea of his going away for an uncertain length of time. For a woman who was half western, and had indeed been brought up in her mother’s country of Ireland, she was intensely possessive. But then Mehmet, much as he adored his intelligent and considerably older wife, hadn’t always been faithful to her. That said, going to Gaziantep and then maybe on to Mardin was not like going to Paris. Antep was famously dull and ugly and, at only fifty-eight kilometres from the Syrian border, Mardin was the back of beyond. As far as Süleyman was concerned it was not a city famed for its alluring women. In summer Mardin was infested with snakes that, without even visualising a serpent, made Süleyman shudder. Not that the snakes were what really bothered him. Mardin had other associations too – with terrorism and with the internal war Turkish troops had been fighting against the separatist Kurdish organisation, the PKK, for decades. The conflict was bitter and vicious and loss of life on both sides was heavy. In addition, now there were other dimensions too. Hezbollah were known to be operating in the area and there were rumours of al-Qaeda cells also. Anyone, even out of uniform, who represented the Turkish state was at risk. Snakes were nothing compared to that.

Murat Lole lived in a small second-floor apartment on Büyük Hendek Street in Karaköy. It was a location that was sadly familiar to İkmen because it was close to the Neve Şalom synagogue which had been attacked by al-Qaeda-inspired suicide bombers back in 2003. His son-in-law, Berekiah Cohen, who had lived opposite the synagogue had been badly injured in the explosion. The union of İkmen’s daughter Hulya, a Muslim, and his old friend Balthazar’s son, a Jew, had seemed like an example of tolerance and hope for the future when the two youngsters first got married. But now that Berekiah could no longer work and Hulya by contrast had to work all the time, cracks were beginning to show. The apartment where the Cohens had once lived was now repaired and repainted, which pleased İkmen, even if it did only serve to underline how easily buildings could be fixed compared to people.