A Chemical Prison, page 37
‘No?’ Still and completely illogically the hope broke through into her – a hope born of a night that she couldn’t, wouldn’t stop endlessly but compulsively replaying over and over in her mind.
‘You are my friend,’ he said as he bent down to kiss her softly on the lips. ‘Just my friend.’
‘Yes, of course I am,’ she said, ‘for tonight.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘I feel warmer now.’
As the moon rose up high above the buildings opposite it looked like a round face: in fact a dead face, so pale and almost translucent was it. Not, of course, that Muhammed Ersoy was actually seeing the moon or anything even remotely celestial, but the inner eye, especially when enhanced by heavy sedation, can throw up many bizarre pictures which may or may not be real. At times he seemed, just for a moment, to catch a glimpse of a room – a pale, stark room that couldn’t possibly be his own. Whenever he caught sight of it a faint impression of fear would sweep across him before he descended once again into blackness or into some other scene that in real life would be utterly incongruous.
Perhaps this was death? It could be. Nobody had ever returned to tell what it was really like; maybe this was it after all. Perhaps one’s life simply splintered as his appeared to be doing now – breaking up and scattering like dust into the depths of the universe. He hoped that it was so. There was no pain now, which felt so good after all the screaming agonies he had endured for some reason that he could no longer understand. If death were like this then it wasn’t really bad. Just drifting was a sensation to which he knew he could become accustomed.
It was waking back up into life that made his heart jolt with fear. Quite what was waiting for him there he didn’t know, but at the moment he felt that this drifting state, whatever it was, had to be preferable. If he could just stay here, then everything would be all right. If only that stark little room would stop coming into focus, if only he could get that to go away and fall back into the darkness …
Chapter 18
Fatma İkmen sat all hunched up over her large handbag, her face set into a kind of determined stare. She didn’t want to look at any of the other women who sat in the waiting room with her, some of whom were opulently attired in tasteful French suits. Having said that, however, she couldn’t help noticing that only the colourfully dressed Kurdish woman in the corner seemed to have the same large belly as herself. Two peasants in with a load of women who had probably come for sterilisations or in order to regulate their birth control or some other wicked, secular process that the state was always trying to encourage. With a small arrogant tilt of her nose she sniffed distastefully and then hugged her bag even more tightly to her chest.
Çetin, for all his ‘reconstructed Turkish man’ act, had left her at the door of the gynaecologist’s office and then scooted back down that corridor like a kicked cat. Not nearly as ‘reconstructed’ as the smooth-faced young man who sat next to the heavily perfumed lady opposite. Obviously a lot younger than the woman, she thought that perhaps he was the lady’s son until her mind, unbidden, drifted into far more salacious areas that shocked her. If the man were this lady’s lover then perhaps they had come to see the doctor about getting an abortion. But that couldn’t possibly be so, could it? Briefly she looked up at the couple; the woman gave her a rather sad and pitying smile in return. Perhaps, Fatma thought, the woman, looking at both her size and her headscarf, thought that she was one of those country women but lately come to the city with their hungry, work-seeking husbands. Being honest with herself, she had to admit that was an understandable assumption to make, given her appearance. She toyed, briefly, with the idea of informing the couple that she had actually been born and bred in Üsküdar, as had her parents, but she gave up on the idea as a waste of effort and energy. Besides, if the woman were there for an abortion she would have much more pressing things on her mind right now, like how she was ever going to live with herself afterwards.
A great deal of thought had gone into Fatma being where she was now. When all the family women had arrived for Timür’s funeral some of them had been visibly shocked by her appearance. And when all the men had gone off to the cemetery in order to bury the old man two of her cousins had, after a little resistance on her part, managed to drag from her exactly what the problem was. Backed up, as usual, by Çiçek, she had made the decision that day to come back to the gynaecologist’s office and really talk about what could or should be done in order to ease her pain. It would, she knew already, almost certainly involve her having her womb removed – a process that up until this time had filled her with so much dread and misery. Fatma, like most people, was instinctively afraid of the surgeon’s knife, but that was not the most troubling aspect of this procedure for her. No. Not having a womb meant something much more profound than just having an operation to get rid of something that was hurting you. Not having a womb meant not having any more children – which was admittedly not very likely now anyway, but … But it also struck at something that made her the woman that she was. Traditionally men always put away, or rather these days divorced, those women who could not have children and although she had given Çetin more than enough children for any man’s lifetime, she did wonder how he would feel about her when she was sterile.
Fatma looked briefly at her watch and then sighed. That old fool Çetin would be at his precious office now. He didn’t need to be, he’d been given time off in order to mourn his father, but she knew him well enough to recognise the signs of boredom and frustration. Like Çiçek who could never wait to get back to her precious aeroplanes again, Çetin was not a lover of home and its comforts. Thinking of Çiçek again, she smiled. Of all of their children that girl was the one who had inherited most of the evil humour from her father. Like she had said when she had left just before Timür’s death, she had indeed gone shopping in London with her Captain Lazar. What she had, however, initially omitted to tell her mother was that Captain Lazar’s English fiancée had also met them there and the three of them had gone to lunch together. Rachel, the English fiancée, had even bought Çiçek a little present of cosmetics, so pleased had she been to meet her prospective husband’s friend. It was, Fatma felt, extremely modern behaviour and quite baffling.
But then the nature of life was to move on and change. Perhaps when the fibroids had gone she would get slim, which would be both interesting and satisfying. Her mother had been a woman of vast proportions when she died and Fatma had always feared such a fate for herself. Most Turkish men, especially those of a certain age like Çetin, didn’t mind a woman with a little bit of fat, but there had to be a limit; she couldn’t see that he would relish the prospect of a wife who had to be carried up the stairs as her mother had been for the last few years of her life. No, what she was doing had to be right. The posh women in their French suits could look down on her all they liked, but she was going to be brave and she was going to do this thing both for her man and for herself. It made sense, she would feel better and she would be so much more able to enjoy the younger children. Fatma sat back into her chair with a little sigh and closed her eyes.
‘What are you doing here, sir?’ Suleyman asked as İkmen pushed his way into the office. ‘I thought that you were still on leave.’
‘I am, officially,’ İkmen said as he slotted himself back behind his unruly desk with a satisfied sigh, ‘but I do, as you know, have a great deal to do.’
‘But I thought that you submitted your report on the Ersoy affair?’
‘Oh, all right then!’ İkmen snapped, but not without humour. ‘I got bored. Satisfied?’
‘Yes, but your father …’
‘My father was, as you know, Suleyman, a very practical man who had little time for such things as mourning. Two days after my mother’s funeral he was back at work and Halil and I were back at school. It’s how he was. Nothing to do with not caring for my mother – he cared about her a great deal, he just felt that sitting about being miserable about someone who was dead anyway was a waste of time. He and Atatürk would have got on well. The Ghazi had no time for such sentimental waste either. Life was what he was about and that was what drove Timür forward too.’
Suleyman smiled. It was typical of İkmen to use his avowed Republicanism as a vehicle for his own needs. ‘So did the funeral …’ he said, spreading one hand out to catch a reply, ‘Did it …’
İkmen shrugged. ‘It happened. My boys got here from Ankara in good time. Numerous awful relatives I had until then expunged from my consciousness arrived to behave in various insincere fashions and we put the old man into his grave. It’s very odd not having parents, you know, Suleyman. My brother expressed it as our “being alone now”, which we are in a sense.’
He dropped his head down just a little and then in order to distract himself from these thoughts he lit a cigarette.
‘And what of you, Suleyman?’ he said. ‘I assume that my report into your part in the Ersoy shooting has gone some way towards making those above us happy about your actions?’
‘Yes, although I think that the statement from Mr Ersoy himself has, with respect, done rather more to vindicate my actions than anything you or I could have said.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, like you said at the time, sir, Mr Ersoy said that he fully intended to kill Dr Sarkissian and that he had given me, in effect, no choice.’
This seemed to İkmen to be a very strange turnaround after what Ersoy had whispered to him at the time. In fact it made him wonder whether somebody had actually ‘got’ to Ersoy before he made his statement. Arto Sarkissian had, he knew, been to see the patient at least once since the latter’s admission to hospital. It was perhaps possible he’d spoken to Ersoy in an attempt to make him see sense about Suleyman?
But İkmen kept his counsel on this subject and simply smiled. ‘You know I feel very satisfied that Mr Ersoy is going to stand trial for his crimes, Suleyman,’ he said. ‘It is not often, thankfully, that one meets a truly wicked person, but if anyone is that thing then that person is Muhammed Ersoy.’
‘Yes.’
They both looked away from each other for a few moments in silence until Suleyman, changing the subject, said, ‘I have to go out for a few hours at midday today, if that is all right with you, sir.’
‘Yes. Why?’
Taking a deep breath in, Suleyman then released it on a sigh. ‘I have to go and visit my lawyer.’
‘Oh?’ İkmen flicked ash down on to the floor and then leaned slightly forward. ‘May I know …?’
‘You might as well,’ Suleyman said, his face if anything a little flushed, ‘You’ll have to in the end … I’m getting a divorce.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Suleyman,’ İkmen said, getting up from his chair and moving around to the front of his desk. ‘I hope that you …’
‘There is – no one’ – he looked up briefly at İkmen, his eyes containing what looked to his superior to be just the ghost of a challenge – ‘else – if you know what I mean, sir.’
‘Ah.’ This was obviously an allusion to the rather intimate embrace İkmen had witnessed between Suleyman and the lovely Sergeant Farsakoǧlu. But he kept his counsel on this subject too. A man, even İkmen, did not speak about such things.
‘So,’ İkmen said, ‘you will I suppose be returning to your parents’ home?’
Suleyman turned away and looked down at the papers on his desk. ‘No, sir. As you know the apartment belongs to my wife so I will have to leave there but I am, in the short term at least, going to stay with the Cohens. Both their boys are in the army now and Mrs Cohen is happy for me to rent a room.’
‘Well,’ İkmen said with a sigh, ‘at least you’ll be on the doorstep of all the action at Cohen’s place.’
‘Yes. He’s told me that one of his neighbours is a pimp.’
‘Just don’t wear your watch when you come out in the morning is all I’ll say,’ İkmen concluded. ‘Either that or be prepared to fight somebody for it.’
‘I know.’
‘Ah, well.’ İkmen stubbed his cigarette out in an ashtray and then lit another.
A sharp knock upon the door followed by Cohen’s face roused them both from their reverie.
‘There’s a lady to see you,’ he said to Suleyman and then, looking towards İkmen, added, ‘oh, hello, Inspector, we weren’t …’
‘No, I’ve come back a little early, Cohen. Who is this lady?’
‘Oh, it’s Dr Halman,’ Suleyman said, ‘she promised to come and see me this morning to update me on Muhammed Ersoy.’
‘Oh, well, that should be interesting,’ İkmen said. He waved Cohen about his business. ‘Bring her in.’
Zelfa Halman, or ‘Bridget’ as she was known to her intimate associates, was a small blonde woman who, if she knew a person well, would occasionally own up to being the forty-five years old that she was. For much of that time she had worked as a consultant psychiatrist – first in Dublin, which was actually her home city, and then more recently in İstanbul. The result of a Turko-Irish marriage, Zelfa Halman’s father had met her mother while practising as a paediatrician in the Irish capital where Bridget, which was her correct name, had been born. Coming to Turkey, which she had done with her father when she had been in her mid-thirties, she had adopted her second name Zelfa which, she reasoned, had to be a lot easier for the Turkish tongue to cope with. Although she had done well during her time in İstanbul she had not, as her father had hoped, found what he had described as ‘a nice Turkish man to look after you’. But then having attended a school with the name ‘The Convent of Our Lady of Mount Carmel’ and having an uncle who was a Catholic priest did not, Zelfa thought, make her a tempting prospect vis-à-vis Turkish men. And this together with her age …
‘Hello, İkmen,’ she said as she breezed into the office, tossing her blonde curls over the back of her shoulders. ‘You look like you need a holiday.’
‘I’ve just had one actually, Doctor,’ İkmen replied with a smile. She did not, he thought, know about the death of his father and it was not something that he wanted to get into again.
Suleyman walked across the room and retrieved a chair from the corner which he placed down in front of his desk.
‘Please have a seat, Doctor,’ he said. ‘Would you like some tea?’
‘Tea would be nice,’ she said and then, turning to İkmen as Suleyman called outside for drinks, she said, ‘You know that little bastard just wouldn’t start this morning. I had to come here on foot, for God’s sake!’
İkmen laughed. Both her direct manner and the fact that she was the only person he knew in the city who drove one of those weird little Austin Mini cars amused him immensely. It was, nevertheless, probably a contributory factor to why this wonderful but eccentric little woman was always on her own.
‘Well, if you will insist upon driving something for which getting parts must be a nightmare …’
‘Yes,’ she said with a scowl, ‘Father says much the same.’
Suleyman, who had now re-entered the room, sat down in front of his guest and smiled. ‘Thank you for coming, Dr Halman.’
‘I wanted to give you an update on my patient,’ she said. ‘I think you’ll find it interesting and it might, I hope, provide you with some closure regarding the affair.’
‘Closure?’
‘It’s psychiatric speak for finishing the case, Suleyman,’ İkmen put in.
She turned to him just briefly with a mock scowl on her face. ‘Jesus, but you’re a cynic, aren’t you, İkmen?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ she said, turning back to Suleyman, ‘as you know, Mr Ersoy is still under guard at the hospital recovering from his wounds, which I must say he is doing remarkably well with.’
‘So how often do you see him, Doctor?’
‘I’ve had five sessions with him so far. All very interesting, I can tell you.’
‘So what do you make of him?’ İkmen asked. ‘In your professional opinion.’
‘I think he’s very clever,’ she said, taking out a packet of cigarettes and then lighting up. ‘He is also personality disordered to a degree that I have rarely experienced before.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Mr Ersoy is what we used to call a psychopath. What this means is that he is anti-social in the sense that he can neither appreciate nor empathise with the experiences or views of other people. With regard to his wants and needs he is autistic, in that he sees them and only them – living as it were without reference to others.’
‘So why—’ Suleyman began.
‘Why is he like this?’ she sighed. ‘Some people believe that psychopaths are born and others that they are made via their early experiences.’
‘The Freudian view,’ İkmen put in a tad acidly.
‘No, not as such,’ she said. ‘Of course I could, as could any practitioner, talk about the unresolved Oedipus complex he may have experienced as a result of the death of his mother but …’
‘You would lose these two rather ignorant officers in the process,’ İkmen said.
‘You said that, not me,’ she said pointing an accusatory cigarette at his head.
‘So are you saying that you believe that Ersoy was just born like this?’ Suleyman said.
‘No. Not exactly. From discussions I have had with him I do think that his father had much to answer for with regard to Muhammed’s subsequent behaviour. However, Muhammed is a most accomplished liar and so we cannot be absolutely certain about anything he tells us.’ She paused briefly to draw upon her cigarette and then continued. ‘As far as old Mr Ersoy was concerned, young Muhammed could do no right. His mother, the woman the old man loved, died giving birth to the boy, which was the initial resentment. Then when Muhammed appeared to have an “alternative sexual orientation”, the old man’s fury became absolute. Muhammed was, he said, an insult to his noble Ottoman past and so he wounded the young man in the most profound ways that he could, firstly by marrying again and having another son and secondly by paying some dodgy doctor to certify Muhammed as unfit to perform national service.’
