A Chemical Prison, page 35
‘No, no,’ she said, raking her fingers through her hair in what seemed to Cohen a distracted fashion, ‘I don’t need the sergeant just now. It’s just that …’
‘What?’
She lowered her head to ensure that only he could hear. ‘If the inspector were in trouble then surely it would be Mehmet, Sergeant Suleyman, who would initially go to him, wouldn’t it?’
Cohen shrugged again. ‘It might be,’ he said and then added somewhat evilly, ‘you’re a bit worried about him, aren’t you?’
‘What? The inspector? Well …’
‘No! Meh— Sergeant Suleyman! I mean he’s such a nice man – I like him myself.’
‘Oh, do you?’ she said with the sort of expression on her face that could be used to sour milk. ‘Well if that is the case I suggest that you—’
Suddenly the room went eerily quiet as all of those present realised that Ardiç had entered.
‘All right,’ he said as he waved a very obviously lit cigar into various people’s faces, ‘I want you all to listen very carefully to what I have to say.’
As soon as Suleyman entered, Muhammed Ersoy’s face broke into a smile, which, given that he was holding a gun to the doctor’s head at the time, was creepily incongruous.
‘Avram was right about you,’ he said as the younger man came to a halt in front of him, ‘you have grown both taller and slimmer than your brother.’
‘Yes,’ Suleyman said, stopping himself snapping back with some smart, acidic remark, trying hard to remember what Dr Halman had told him. ‘Well, I’m here now, Mr Ersoy. Perhaps you could tell me what you want and then I can see what I can arrange.’
‘Want? What do you mean?’
‘In return for releasing the inspector and the doctor. What do you want. What are—’
İkmen very gently tapped him on the elbow, bringing Suleyman’s speech to a sudden halt. ‘I think you’ll find,’ he said, ‘that Mr Ersoy has no demands as such, Suleyman.’
‘But …’
‘Oh, Çetin is quite right,’ Ersoy said, still retaining both his smile and his hold upon Arto Sarkissian’s throat.
‘So …’
‘So, young Suleyman, if I may call you that?’
Suleyman bowed in reply. ‘You may.’
‘So, young Suleyman, it is now up to you to decide what happens next.’
Suleyman gave Ersoy and then İkmen a quizzical look.
‘What I mean,’ Ersoy continued smoothly, ‘is that I know what my aims are in this little venture. But do you know what yours are?’
‘Eh?’
Ersoy laughed, the movement of his body against the doctor’s causing the medic’s large frame to vibrate incongruously under his grasp. ‘I am correct, young Suleyman,’ he said, ‘in assuming that you are vainglorious enough to have come here armed?’
Instinctively, one of İkmen’s hands shot forward to restrain his colleague. ‘Don’t!’
Suleyman looked from İkmen to Ersoy and then back to İkmen again. ‘I …’
‘In order for you to do what I want you to, I think that you should take your weapon out now, young Suleyman,’ Ersoy said, enjoying the fact that his use of the phrase ‘young Suleyman’ was obviously beginning to grate on the sergeant’s nerves.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ İkmen muttered at his sergeant’s elbow.
‘Çetin?’ İkmen looked up into a pair of eyes that bore into his with almost visible venom. Clicking the safety catch of his weapon off, Ersoy then added, ‘Don’t.’
With a sigh, İkmen moved slightly backwards and then just shrugged helplessly at Suleyman. ‘You’d better do as he says.’
Slowly, lest his movements alarm his opponent, Suleyman reached into his pocket and withdrew the pistol, handle first, until he was holding it horizontally out in front of his body. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to place it down now?’
‘No.’
Suleyman looked up into Muhammed Ersoy’s mocking eyes, suddenly finding himself completely incapable of speech.
‘I want you to turn the gun around and then point it at me please, my dear sweet little soul,’ Ersoy said, pouting the words as if propositioning the officer as he spoke.
‘But …’ Looking first at İkmen and then at the doctor, Suleyman cast around trying to find an explanation for this somewhere; finding none he reiterated, ‘But …’
‘My demands, if you like,’ Ersoy said, jamming his gun still harder into the side of Arto’s head, ‘are that we all play a game together.’
Suleyman slowly turned his gun around to face Muhammed Ersoy and then said, ‘What do you mean, a game?’
‘It is,’ Ersoy said with a twinkle, ‘a form of Russian roulette, except that all of the chambers of both of our weapons are full – well, my own is not quite, on account of Avram, but … Anyway, all of the chambers are as good as full and it is either the doctor here who is going to die, because I will shoot him, or it will be I who dies, because you can, if you wish, kill me.’
Suddenly Suleyman lost his composure. It came as almost as powerful a shock to him as it did to everyone else in the room. ‘You’re insane!’
Ersoy’s face darkened for just a moment and then, inevitably, he smiled once more. ‘The choice is yours, young Suleyman. You can kill me now and save the doctor or you can wait for me to blow his head off and then kill me. The only uncertain element in this equation is, as far as I can see, the life or death of the doctor. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, but …’
‘He’s bluffing, Mehmet,’ İkmen said, now clutching at his rapidly pounding chest. ‘He’s got this crazy notion about wanting to die. He—’
‘Can you be absolutely certain about that, Çetin?’ Ersoy said, grinding the muzzle of his weapon ever further into Arto’s temple. ‘After all, I have absolutely nothing to lose if I kill the doctor.’
‘But if you do that, how do you know that Suleyman and I won’t just take you on without killing you? You must know that if a shot is heard coming from this apartment, our colleagues will come piling in here like a bunch of stormtroopers?’
‘Who will,’ Ersoy said lightly, ‘in all probability kill me when they see what I have done.’
‘Not if I can help it!’ İkmen said, barely controlling his anger. ‘Whatever happens today, you are going to finish it alive and on your way to prison!’
‘Then it would seem, if that is what you want, that you will have to trade the doctor’s life for that particular pleasure.’
‘No!’ Instinctively, Suleyman took the safety catch off and pointed his weapon at what he could see of Ersoy’s chest.
‘Don’t!’ İkmen said, only just restraining himself from grabbing at the younger man’s hand. ‘Don’t get involved in his game, Suleyman! Don’t play!’
Ersoy’s eyes, which had until then been quite hard, suddenly softened as he looked across into Suleyman’s face. ‘Oh, come along now, Mehmet,’ he said, ‘we are both gentlemen, aren’t we? And as gentlemen we keep our word, do we not?’ Suddenly becoming steely once again he added, ‘And so if I tell you that I’m going to kill the doctor I mean what I say. Don’t listen to this peasant, believe the word of a gentleman and do what you and I both know you really want to do. I was, after all, quite unpleasant to your poor brother Murad for—’
‘Don’t for the love of life let him get inside your head!’ İkmen now almost screamed into Suleyman’s ear. ‘He’s trying to mess with your mind!’
‘You and I are, after all,’ Ersoy continued smoothly, ‘of a type. We both dress well, we are both well born, we are both, essentially, Ottoman gentlemen, are we not?’
Suleyman hesitated. his face dissolving into a morass of confusion, he averted his eyes briefly towards İkmen. ‘He’s going to do it,’ he said.
‘No, he isn’t!’ İkmen cried. ‘If we talk to him, he—’
‘You don’t understand!’ Suleyman replied and then, looking Ersoy deep in the eyes, he said, ‘Please move away from Dr Sarkissian, Mr Ersoy. I will do as you wish, but—’
‘Oh, please do not even attempt to insult my intelligence, dear boy!’ Moving just fractionally back from the doctor’s head, Ersoy took very careful aim and said, ‘I will give you to a count of three. One.’
‘If I shoot you, Ersoy, I will not aim to kill you.’
Ersoy laughed. ‘Both you and I know that there can be no guarantees of that sort, especially when one is as nervous as you so obviously are.’ Turning his face towards his proposed victim once more, he said, ‘Two.’
Arto Sarkissian raised the fingers of one hand up to his head and crossed himself.
‘Mr Ersoy!’ İkmen began.
‘Time is up,’ Ersoy said, screwing up one eye in order to see down the sight of his pistol. ‘Three.’
Sergeant Farsakoǧlu handed Cohen back his box of matches and then breathed deeply on the smoke from her cigarette. Watching her shrewdly out of the corner of one eye, Cohen sighed a little before uttering what he knew had to be a most out-of-order, if not downright insulting question. But although surrounded by dozens of their fellow officers, they were quite alone crouched down behind the wing of the car, awaiting, as was everybody else, developments.
‘You really care for Mehmet, don’t you?’ he said.
She gave him the kind of look that made him instinctively pull his cap hard down over his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well …’
‘If you’re suggesting that anything of an improper nature has occurred, then—’
‘No …’ But he sounded just unsure enough to cause her to rise in anger.
‘Well, it hasn’t, Cohen!’ Clearing her throat, she added a little more softly, ‘Sergeant Suleyman and I enjoy only a professional association. I admire him but only in the way that lots of other people do, both women and men. And any rumours or talk you might have heard or even spread yourself is—’
‘I don’t spread rumours!’ he said, genuinely hurt that she should think such a thing. ‘Mehmet is my friend.’
‘Then be a friend and keep all of your prurient speculations to yourself!’
‘Well, I was only—’
‘Shut up!’ hissed Ardiç, who was positioned just behind the pair over by the scrub in the yard opposite.
Cohen lowered his head and then, pushing his cap up with the barrel of his pistol, wiped away some of the rain-soaked sweat that was gathering on his brow.
‘I only mention this,’ he said, whispering now into her ear, ‘because—’
‘Ssh!’ she said, her eyes still riveted to the explosive face of Ardiç behind. ‘Shut up!’
‘But …’
The sound of the shot, when it came, was muffled because they were some distance from the apartment. But that it was a gunshot was indisputable; this group of people knew only too well what such things sound like.
With a sharp gasp, Sergeant Farsakoǧlu threw one hand across her mouth, her eyes staring in terror. And as all hell broke loose around them, Cohen pressed one small but consoling hand down upon her shoulder.
For a moment, which, in retrospect as indeed it did at the time, seemed like a small eternity, Suleyman just stood with the gun still outstretched before him, the barrel smoking gently in the chill silent air. Somewhere, someone started to weep with heart-stopping bitterness; for a moment he imagined that a woman had strayed unbidden into the room.
It was, finally, only the screaming that brought him to his senses – a sound that was both agonised and furious, like that of some hellish being, half human and half animal, squealing through a throat that was neither wholly with nor without a recognisable mortal soul.
‘May I go blind!’ Arto shrieked as he struggled to remove the tape from his shaking ankles. ‘May God take my sight from my eyes!’
‘Get an ambulance, now!’ İkmen yelled as the window behind his head, plus its shutter, exploded down on to the floor. ‘You!’ he said, indicating the shocked and gun-toting figure of the emerging Öztürk. ‘Get out front and tell them that we have no men down. Do you understand, no men down!’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And get an ambulance, right now!’
With just a brief glance at the spreading pool of blood on the floor, Öztürk sprang across the room towards the front door of the apartment.
Sinking to his knees beside the prone figure of Muhammed Ersoy, İkmen took the man’s wrist between his fingers, feeling for a pulse. As soon as he had located one, albeit faint, he looked across at Arto and yelled, ‘Get over here and do some doctoring, Arto!’
‘I …’
‘Now, man!’
As the doctor moved heavily across the floor, Suleyman placed his gun back into its holster and said, ‘Sir, I …’
‘Not now, Suleyman!’ İkmen said with a wave of one bloodstained hand. ‘We’ve got to try and keep this bastard alive.’
‘His shoulder is completely shattered,’ the doctor muttered as he, with shaking hands, pressed down hard upon Ersoy’s damaged carotid artery.
‘Can I speak to Mehmet, please?’ Ersoy’s voice, thickened by trauma, still retained its smooth and slightly mocking quality.
İkmen looked down into those narrowed but still amazingly bright eyes and then he said, ‘Suleyman! Over here!’
As various heavily shod feet plunged into the room, their presence headed by the furious sound of Ardiç’s voice, Suleyman moved quickly across to İkmen’s side, his feet slipping in the large amounts of blood that he had just shed. Then bending low across Ersoy’s prone form he said, ‘Mr Ersoy?’
‘What a very bad shot you are, Mehmet,’ Ersoy growled, gasping now in order to find the breath that he needed to speak.
‘I told you that I would only wound you if I could.’
‘You have dishonoured me!’ And then, raising his head just slightly from the ground, Ersoy spat into Suleyman’s face.
Arto Sarkissian pushed Suleyman roughly out of the way. ‘I don’t want him talking any more!’ he said. ‘Get away!’
Several officers that Suleyman knew, but at that moment could not even begin to name, pushed past him, making, at İkmen’s request, towards a room on the right of the apartment. ‘There’s another body in there,’ he said, ‘a Dr Avram Avedykian.’
‘Don’t touch anything in there!’ the doctor added. ‘We’ll need forensic to secure the scene!’
‘Right.’
İkmen, his eyes now fixed once again on Ersoy’s increasingly greying face, said to his friend, ‘Will he live?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you all right, Arto?’
‘Having been held hostage all night and then almost killed I would say no at this moment. But I will do.’ There was an edge to the doctor’s voice which, İkmen felt, was directed solely at him.
‘I don’t believe that he would have killed you, you know, Arto. If I had—’
‘What you thought, Çetin, was immaterial!’ Arto said curtly. ‘That gun at my head was, however, very real, and I will be grateful to Suleyman for the rest of my life for what he did here today.’
‘Arto …’
‘Look, I don’t blame you for—’
‘If,’ Ersoy, his eyes now open and wide once again, rasped, ‘three hadn’t worked, I would have gone to five or …’ Taking one final gasp of air, he lurched backwards. He did not appear to breathe again.
Without even hesitating, Arto Sarkissian launched his mouth down upon that of Ersoy’s and breathed his air into his patient’s lungs.
Realising that there was nothing he could do here now, İkmen stood up and made his way across to Suleyman who was standing quite still and silent in the midst of the growing madness around him.
‘You did a good job, Suleyman,’ he said as he drew level with the younger man.
‘How can you say that?’ the other snapped.
Controlling his own rising anguish in the face of yet another outburst from a friend and colleague, İkmen continued, ‘You saved the doctor’s life.’
‘I thought you’ – Suleyman said the last word with some venom – ‘thought that Ersoy was bluffing.’
İkmen sighed. In all probability Ersoy was going to die anyway and so what did it matter? ‘He just said that he wasn’t,’ he lied. ‘I was wrong. I got messed up in a psychology that I didn’t understand and I … I made an error.’
‘And I just killed a man, İkmen,’ Suleyman said, rudely using his superior’s last name in a way his ancestors must have done to very powerful effect. And then, with one last withering glare at the inspector, he made his way out into the hall.
‘But you …’ İkmen began but stopped as he realised that talking to Suleyman now was going to be impossible. OK, it had been Suleyman’s decision to shoot Ersoy – he, İkmen, had tried, for better or worse, to stop him. But none of that detracted from the fact that his sergeant was in a state of shock and …
‘There was an urgent call for you, Inspector,’ said Cohen, who had, as was his wont, simply materialised at İkmen’s elbow.
‘What could possibly be more urgent than this?’ İkmen replied, looking around the room and then down at his own bloodstained body. ‘What was it, Cohen? When was this call?’
‘It was your brother, sir,’ Cohen answered. ‘Just before we left the station.’
‘Halil?’ İkmen rolled his eyes dramatically just as two members of an ambulance crew arrived and pushed roughly past him. ‘What did he want?’
‘I think that perhaps you should ask him yourself.’ Cohen proffered a mobile telephone to İkmen who took the instrument with a grunt.
Chapter 17
Halil İkmen was standing outside the main entrance to the hospital staring into space when his brother arrived. He was, strangely, smoking a cigarette, which was something that Çetin hadn’t seen him do since Halil had been in the army. But then, given the circumstances, perhaps it wasn’t so odd.
His brother was also, Çetin noticed, completely oblivious to what the rain, which was now pouring heavily across the whole city again, was doing to his beautifully coiffed hair and expensive Italian coat. As Çetin approached him, Halil just nodded his head slightly at his brother and then looked back out at the nothing he had been observing earlier.
