A Chemical Prison, page 22
Cohen bent down to look properly at the miniature, which appeared to be that of two small men or boys joined at the shoulder.
‘Well, it’s two little men, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Joined up.’
‘I can see that!’ İkmen said tetchily. ‘If I’d wanted you to state the obvious I would have said so. No, what does it mean, Cohen? What is it saying to you?’
‘Well …’ Sucking on his lips, Cohen bent still lower in order to consider the item and then announced, ‘Well, it’s two little men, isn’t it, joined …’
‘I can see,’ İkmen said with a frustrated sigh, ‘that symbolic thought is not really your strong suit.’ Then with a wave of his hand he concluded, ‘Go on, out now, I need to think about this myself.’
Cohen duly moved towards the open door leaving İkmen bending very closely over his desk and Suleyman smiling into the telephone.
Once again, this model was most exquisitely fashioned. The figures even had tiny carved facial features and, although devoid of sexual organs, they did have really very powerfully moulded chest muscles. They were undeniably male.
He heard the click of a telephone receiver being replaced and, looking up to see that Suleyman was indeed now free, he asked, ‘And?’
‘Dr Avedykian will see me when his clinic finishes in an hour.’
‘Good.’ Then, beckoning his deputy across to his desk, he said, ‘Will you come and look at this, Suleyman? Tell me what you think.’
Suleyman got up from his chair and made his way over to İkmen’s desk, looking all the while at the model in front of his superior’s face.
‘Oh, another of those things, is it?’ he said. ‘What this time?’
İkmen looked up at him and smiled. ‘Well, I know what I think it is but I want your opinion.’
He held the miniature up for Suleyman to see. The harsh neon from the lighting strip above seemed to crash through the figure, scattering its numerous colours in each and every possible direction.
‘Well, it’s Gemini, isn’t it?’ Suleyman said. ‘You know, the astrological symbol, two little joined-up men, the twins.’
‘Exactly,’ İkmen said, ‘and twins being siblings …’
‘Or as in this, more specifically brothers?’ Suleyman offered.
Indeed! And if we put this together with our other little presents …’
‘The caged bird and the Topkapı dagger.’
‘We get?’ İkmen encouraged.
Suleyman, his inspiration suddenly drained, just simply shrugged. ‘I …’
‘The old sultans used to put their brothers into cages in the Topkapı,’ İkmen said, his eyes shining.
‘Yes, but …’
‘This boy was imprisoned, possibly, for fifteen years.’
‘Yes, yes, I can see what is being indicated here,’ Suleyman said a tad impatiently, ‘but why make this particular comparison? I mean brothers were put into the Kafes because they were a potential threat to the ruling—’
‘Exactly!’ İkmen cried. ‘What he is saying is that this boy was a threat to him in some way. He therefore hid him away because of that threat!’
‘But just a moment,’ Suleyman said, ‘this is a very Turkish thing we’re talking about here, isn’t it? And yet this doctor and even the boy we think are Armenians. Mr Zekiyan is Armenian, the boy is uncircumcised, we’re looking into the lives of doctors who are Armenian … And anyway, why kill the boy after all that time? Why not just kill him at the beginning? To hold him like that for so long must have been difficult.’
‘Well …’ İkmen scratched his head, ‘yes, but …’
‘There appears, I must say, sir, to be some sort of incongruity between what we are looking for with regard to this doctor who may or may not also be Mr Zekiyan and the messages you are receiving from this unknown source. I mean, if this doctor who is helping boys to take opiates or providing boys with them is one and the same as Mr Zekiyan, then all this Turkish stuff would appear to be meaningless. And even if they are not one and the same, we are still looking, until we have evidence to the contrary, for someone uncircumcised, possibly Armenian.’
‘Oh, I accept that the two events could be totally unconnected,’ İkmen said, ‘and that with the boy prostitutes we are even quite outside our remit. But it is the supply of opiates to young boys that … I cannot help feeling that our boy, strange though we think his case is, cannot be an isolated incident. And if Dr Sarkissian’s correct then with pethidine we are definitely in the arena of the medical profession.’
‘But the boy I went to see was. on heroin.’
‘The two are, if I’m right,’ İkmen replied, ‘almost identical in effect. If this doctor could get hold of one then he could get the other too. It’s my understanding that doctors can prescribe differing analgesics as and when they wish. And if a doctor, whether Mr Zekiyan himself or not, were supplying to either himself or another, then it is possible that the temptation of trading may have occurred to him – particularly if he moves within circles where sex is for sale.’
‘I see. And as for the little models here?’ Suleyman said, looking at the example upon İkmen’s desk.
İkmen shrugged. ‘If all this Armenian doctor connection is so much coincidence, then they could signify the type of Kafes-style scenario we have discussed. Unless we explore each and every hunch and avenue then we cannot hope to arrive at anything approaching a solution.’
Suleyman picked up the little model and held it up to the light. ‘For things that are so shiny these certainly do appear to cloud the issue.’ He looked down at İkmen with a grave face. ‘Makes you wonder whether they really do come from our murderer, doesn’t it? You can buy these in almost any tourist shop in town, apparently. After all, we have no proof other than the fact that there were a lot of these in that apartment.’
‘About which who could know but our reclusive Mr Zekiyan?’ İkmen asked. ‘He didn’t exactly have the neighbours round for cocktails and he was only ever seen a few times with one other man and a child.’
‘Whom he didn’t like workmen talking to,’ Suleyman added.
‘No.’
They remained wrapped up in their own thoughts for a few moments until İkmen finally broke the silence. ‘Well, you’d better get out to Dr Avedykian anyway. If the traffic is bad it could take you an hour.’
Suleyman sighed. Precisely why he was going out to see this doctor, this long-ago tormentor of his brother, and what that would achieve, he knew that both he and İkmen were perilously unsure. It was a meeting that could prove to be very difficult indeed.
Ayşe Farsakoǧlu shouldn’t really have been anywhere near her place of work. Had a doctor examined her, it is almost certain that she would have been judged unfit for duty. She had not as yet that day spoken to anyone of her own volition. Quite simply, she was in a state of shock.
She hadn’t herself actually found the remains of the poor madman who had so suddenly and violently taken his own life in his cell the previous afternoon. She had however seen him shortly after he had been discovered, while his face was still smothered in gouts of his own blood. Indeed the cell had been quite awash with gore; she felt it was going to be absolutely impossible for her to forget the sound that her boots had made as she literally waded her way over to the body.
Had he not been arrested, would he, as the psychiatrist had said, still at some unspecified point have committed such a savage act upon himself? She, the psychiatrist, had been of the opinion that his self-destruction had been imminent anyway due to what she had termed an ‘incongruity between his delusional persona and that of his new reality’. What Ayşe thought she meant by this was that Lenin’s view of himself as ‘Lenin’ had been breaking down even as he had entered the police station in order to confess to that crime that he could not, surely, have committed. He had said, she clearly remembered, that he killed the child by stabbing it, which did not in any way tally with the actual cause of death.
None of this, however, could, as far as she was concerned, detract from the fact that his suicide had followed very quickly after his attack upon herself and his subsequent harsh treatment at the hands of her colleagues. Even under the auspices of the enlightened Inspector İkmen, those who attacked officers were generally given very little quarter. His food would have been disgusting and, stripped of his shoes (removed lest he try to hang himself with the laces) she knew that, especially in his wildly disordered state, he would have been both frightened and desperate – and with good cause. When he died he had done so in the knowledge that he was shortly to be transferred to prison to await trial and, having seen the inside of several of those institutions herself in the past, Ayşe knew that someone like Lenin would not have thrived.
She did not know how long she had been sitting on one of the low walls that partially encompassed the car park when Mehmet Suleyman stepped out of the station and walked towards his vehicle. It would be too simplistic to say that his appearance woke her from her dismal reverie, indeed when she approached him her eyes were still glazed by the conflicting thoughts and feelings that raged within her mind. The sight of him, or rather the desire for him, did however at least galvanise her into some sort of activity.
‘You do know,’ she said as she approached him, ‘what has happened?’
His eyes, which exhibited both fear and weariness, darted about him nervously as she approached. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know. But I can’t talk now. I’m just on my way out.’
‘But I need to talk to somebody.’ She moved forward as if to touch him, but seeing him flinch she pulled back and said, ‘I need to talk to you.’
He slid his key into the lock of his car door. ‘Why me?’
‘Because you were involved too.’ Then she added quickly, ‘What other reason could there be?’
Not meeting her gaze, he shrugged. ‘None that I can think of.’
‘Right.’
‘I can’t talk now. I’ve got to go and meet somebody.’
‘Well, later then! After work.’ Her eyes started to weep uncontrollably, as if possessed of lives of their own. ‘Please, Mehmet!’
He cast yet another quick glance around before replying and then said with a sigh, ‘All right, all right, I’ll meet you.’
Her whole body, or so it seemed to him, appeared to soften with relief. ‘Where? And when?’
Nervously he chewed on his bottom lip with his teeth as he tried to think of a place where they would not be observed.
‘I sometimes go to the Vitamin for my evening meal,’ she offered, ‘I’ve never ever seen other cops in there in the evening.’
He tried to think of an alternative that might prove even more discreet, but couldn’t, so he nodded his assent.
‘I’ll be there from about seven,’ she said. ‘Will you …?’
‘I’ll be along when I can,’ he answered. ‘The way things are at the moment I cannot give you an exact time but if you wait I will be there. I will not let you down.’
‘I know,’ she said, and then looking down at the floor, ‘You’re very good to people, you’re a good—’
‘I really have to go now, Sergeant,’ Suleyman said, cutting off what he was finding a most embarrassing moment. ‘I will see you tonight as we have discussed.’
‘Yes, thank you, Mehmet,’ she said as he got into his car and fired up the engine. ‘I will, I promise, wait for you.’
When he had gone, she went back and sat down on the wall once again where she promptly returned to her previous coma-like state. Cold as it was and without even the benefit of her coat which she had left at her apartment, she sat quite perfectly still right up until Commissioner Ardiç’s secretary came to tell her that her boss wanted to see her in his office.
‘As you can see,’ the gold merchant said, indicating the pane of his door with a sweep of his hand, ‘I do accept all the major credit cards.’
‘Yes,’ said İkmen a trifle impatiently, he’d already been through this routine once with the proprietor of the previous shop, ‘but if we could just get back to the issue at hand?’
‘Oh, yes, yes!’ said the merchant, turning once again to the large leather-bound ledger on his counter. ‘Zekiyan was the name, was it not?’
‘Yes.’
‘And a crucifix ring in emerald and diamond.’
‘Yes,’ İkmen once again confirmed, this time with a tired sigh.
‘Mmm.’ The merchant turned the pages slowly, running one finger down each section as he went. ‘I have quite a number of customers for this type of item.’ He looked up with a smile. ‘Christians.’
‘Many of them clergy, right?’ İkmen asked, looking as casually as he could at two ropes of gold that must, he reckoned, be each one metre in length.
‘Oh yes. Even patriarchs,’ the merchant replied with an almost dismissive wave of the hand. ‘Others too, of course. Like your Armenian gentleman and more recently people from er’ – here he faltered a little, smiling in an embarrassed sort of way – ‘across the Black Sea, if you know what I mean.’
İkmen laughed. ‘Our Russian friends who presumably pay in cash?’
‘Well, yes, often.’ The merchant looked most pointedly back at his ledger and then muttered almost underneath his breath, ‘American dollars.’
‘Oh how surprising!’ İkmen said with more than a little irony in his voice.
‘Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with that,’ the merchant added quickly, ‘I mean as far as the honest trader is concerned money is money and provided it is not counterfeit …’
İkmen placed one hand firmly on to the merchant’s fingers and said, ‘Look, it’s not, I know, any of your business where they get the money and besides, I’m not here about that, am I? If you could just look for Mr Zekiyan?’
‘Of course! Of course!’
As the merchant trawled through both the old ledger and hopefully his own memory too, İkmen took some time to look again at his surroundings. These gold emporiums had always fascinated him. Not one either to wear or even desire jewellery himself, it had always amazed him that so many outlets for this stuff could survive all closely packed together in what was not, if one took the whole population into account, a wealthy city. But then Islam, as well as Christianity, could be quite intensive with regard to these things. What with wedding rings, ‘Masşallah’ talisman to protect, particularly the new-born, plus the blue boncuk beads to keep the ‘eye’ at bay, not to mention the custom of giving one’s wife a gold bangle for every year one had been married … This latter tradition together with the knowledge that Fatma only possessed two, filled İkmen with momentary guilt and so he turned his mind away from the subject.
There were the tourists too, of course. Gold was relatively cheap in Turkey and that, together with the reputation the bazaar had for fine workmanship, attracted them. And as for all the shops being herded together in one quarter of the bazaar, well, that was traditional which, in a way, made it even more appealing to those from outside the city. It must seem, or so he supposed, quite charming to those who did not come into regular contact with it. During the course of his one and only sortie out of the country, which had been to London back in the 1970s, just the mere mention of the words ‘Grand Bazaar’ had, he recalled, evoked from his audience a plethora of words like ‘exotic’, ‘exciting’ and ‘mysterious’. That he had felt much the same about Oxford Street had for some reason elicited considerable mirth.
‘Well,’ said the merchant, rousing İkmen from his gold-edged cogitations, ‘the man that you name is not among my lists of regular customers. I will look to see whether there is a ticket for a commission of a bespoke item, but if you have no idea when he might have purchased it, such a search may take me some time.’
‘Would you only make such an item to order?’ İkmen asked.
‘Not always,’ the merchant, who was an elderly, white-haired man, said. ‘Both emeralds and diamonds are popular stones and so it is possible the gentleman may have just seen the item in the window and then come in to purchase it. With more unusual or less popular stones I would have to raise an order.’
‘So if he bought it from the window there would—’
‘Only if he paid by credit card, unless it was very recent, would I have a record. And then if the credit transaction was a long time ago …’
İkmen sighed. This was, he felt, rapidly turning into a waste of time. Without even an approximate date of purchase and with the possibility that the elusive Mr Zekiyan could, especially if he paid by cash, change his name at will, it was like looking for a bus ticket on an overflowing desk in the dark.
There was, however, one other name that he could try, although it was an unlikely, not to mention mischievous connection on his part. He thought, after a few seconds’ consideration, that he might as well give it a go.
‘Does the name Avedykian mean anything to you?’ he asked.
The merchant smiled. ‘Oh yes, we do a lot of work for that family. Sevan Avedykian is, as you, Inspector, must know, a noted lawyer and with his brother in the church—’
‘Do you know Avram Avedykian, a doctor?’
‘Mr Sevan’s son? Oh yes, he has been many times to our shop with his mother. Why?’
‘Oh, just asking. What sort of things do they …’
‘Oh, ladies’ brooches, chains and suchlike. Nothing for men as I recall.’ He leaned forward a little conspiratorially across the counter. ‘With the exception of Mr Sevan’s brother they are not a religious family.’
‘No?’
‘No. Dr Avram is very good to his mother though, buys her a lot of nice things.’
‘Oh, does he?’
‘I could check to see what they are and with regular customers it will be a little easier but,’ he sighed, ‘it will still take me some time. I mean I will have to get back to you.’
‘That’s all right.’ İkmen smiled and then, taking a small card out of his wallet he placed it on the counter. ‘If you just ring me on this number?’
The merchant took a pair of spectacles out of the top pocket of his jacket, put them on and then peered myopically at İkmen’s card. ‘Mmm,’ he said as he held it away from him and then, looking up, added, ‘Dr Avedykian isn’t in any sort of trouble, is he?’
