Deep Waters, page 9
part #4 of Inspector Ikmen Series
‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Fatma,’ Samsun said, turning to look up into her reluctant hostess’s face. ‘I know that I’m the most dreadful old—’
‘Why has that lady got such big feet?’
As one, all those in the room, including eighteen-year-old Bülent İkmen who had been reading the paper up until this point, turned to look at the small boy now standing beside Samsun’s outstretched legs. Fatma, her lips pursed in anger, simply cleared her throat.
Again it was Çiçek who rescued the situation. ‘Some ladies do have big feet, Kemal,’ she said with a smile at her grave-faced younger brother. ‘Like some men have small feet.’
‘Dad’s got very small feet,’ Bülent put in before returning to his paper.
‘Yes, that’s right, he does.’ Then stretching her hand out to the youngster, Çiçek said, ‘But we don’t have to talk about that right now, do we? I mean, wouldn’t you rather go and lie down?’
‘No.’ With such an odd woman around to stare at, life was far more exciting in the living room than it was in his bedroom.
‘Gul’s gone to bed.’
‘Oh, for the love of . . .’ Fed up with her daughter’s attempts to reason with an eight-year-old, Fatma bustled forward and with some determination took a firm grip on her youngest child’s hand. ‘You’re going to bed now, Kemal, and that is the end of it.’
‘But what about my dad? I—’
‘If you haven’t got used to the fact by now that you never see your father, there really is no hope for you,’ Fatma said as she dragged the protesting youngster from the room after her.
As the living-room door slammed behind the two figures, Samsun, her eyes lowered, said, ‘I am sorry. I appear to have caused quite a scene, don’t I?’
‘Police,’ İkmen said as he thrust his identification into the old woman’s face.
‘Again?’
‘Seems so.’ He placed one foot across the threshold of Angeliki Vlora’s sparse, fried potato-scented apartment.
The old woman first tucked the stray ends of her headscarf underneath her chin and then, her eyes dark with suspicion, moved out of İkmen’s way.
‘My boys are out, enjoying a drink together, if that’s why you’ve come,’ she said as she followed him into her gloomy living room.
‘It’s you I’ve come to see, Mrs Vlora,’ İkmen replied.
‘Oh?’ Bending down to wrap up potato peelings that stood exposed on newspaper on the floor, Angeliki Vlora motioned for İkmen to sit down. ‘Why?’
‘Because you named certain members of my family to one of my officers this morning.’
Angeliki, straightening up, put one hand into the painful small of her back. ‘Oh?’ And then seemingly remembered the occasion in more detail. ‘You are İkmen?’
‘It’s what it says on my ID, yes.’ He lit a cigarette and leaned back into the damp, old chair she had allocated to him.
‘Ach,’ the old woman said tetchily, ‘I don’t read. No Albanian women of my age do.’
‘My mother did,’ İkmen remarked.
‘Only because the Turk, your father, taught her,’ Angeliki said, lowering herself onto the sofa opposite İkmen’s chair. ‘Ayşe Bajraktar didn’t need to read, in any event.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the Bajraktars were the most powerful fis outside Ghegeria. There was a time when they were in blood with many rival clans. But, with their viciousness and the curses that your grandfather threw around like mountain snow, they defeated all-comers, even the Ndreks – but you know about that.’
‘No.’
Her look of disbelief caught İkmen unawares. In fact, so shocked did she appear that her mouth hung open like a fish’s. Only when she eventually extracted a rough hand-rolled cigarette from the folds of her clothing and placed it between her teeth did she close her mouth. But although her reaction seemed extreme to İkmen, he did not dwell upon it. The hour was getting late and as the fog gathered outside to create another frozen, impenetrable night, he knew that he must finish here soon and get home to whatever mayhem awaited him in his Sultan Ahmet apartment.
‘You told Sergeant Tepe,’ he said, ‘that you thought that my cousin Mustafa Bajraktar may have informed the police about your feud with the Berishas.’
The old woman shrugged. ‘Well, didn’t he?’
‘No. And I would prefer it if you did not, in future, throw such unsubstantiated assertions around without thinking.’ He paused briefly to knock the ash from his cigarette into the large metal stand ashtray at his elbow before continuing. ‘And you might also tell Mehmet that if I catch him threatening any member of my family again, I will personally see to it that he spends some time in our cells. There he might like to think on the error of his ways.’
‘Mehmet’s threatened nobody.’
‘From which I deduce,’ İkmen said sharply, ‘that either you haven’t seen your son since he ran away from my officers this morning or that the noble art of the Albanian lie is truly perfected in you.’
Impervious to the policeman’s insults, Angeliki Vlora simply changed the subject. ‘Well, if the catamite Samsun didn’t tell you about us and the Berishas, then who did, eh? You answer me that, witch’s boy!’
Stung by the sudden use of a term usually applied to him, but with affection, by his wife, İkmen snapped, ‘As an officer of the law, I am not permitted to reveal my sources.’
‘Unless I get my money out!’ the old woman cackled sourly. ‘Turkish men and money . . .’
‘I don’t take bribes, old woman!’ he flung back at her. ‘Like my Turkish father, I am an honest man. I owe nothing, am in blood to no one.’
‘As long as it pleases Emina Ndrek, or more to the point her surviving son,’ she said with an unpleasant smile.
‘What are you talking about?’ İkmen said. ‘Just keep Mehmet—’
‘Emina’s brother killed your mother, Ayşe Bajraktar.’
The world, for İkmen, became quite silent. Temporarily aware only of sight, he had the notion that his eyes were in fact peering out of something that had turned to stone, leaving him trapped in a body he did not know. He was suddenly and heart-stoppingly at one with the notion of men inhabiting forms not their own – the un-dead, the ghost, the werewolf . . . Indeed, when he found his voice again, its rough pitch and intensity was not unlike the growl of a beast.
‘My mother died of heart—’
‘Your mother’s throat was cut! The Bajraktar were in blood to the Ndrek for the killing of Emina’s brother.’
‘No! No!’ İkmen said, his heart pounding as he rose shakily to his feet. ‘My mother had a heart condition, she died in her bed.’ And then shouting he added, ‘I was there! I saw . . .’
‘Did you?’ The old woman’s face folded into something that now looked far darker than the visage İkmen had first seen – or so it seemed as she regarded him with contempt. ‘Think back, İkmen,’ she said spitefully, ‘and try not to impose convenient Turkish lies on your memory.’
Normally, İkmen would have reacted immediately to what Angeliki had said, to the insults she had thrown at him. But for just a moment he took a mental step back from her words and did not speak until he had regained his composure. What the old Albanian was saying was ridiculous, wasn’t it? It had to be! Both his brother and his father had seen the body of his mother after death and neither of them had ever spoken of murder. Yes, the police had come to the house that terrible afternoon but then, as İkmen well knew, they did sometimes attend the scene of sudden death. And he could remember no blood. Cut throats produced a lot of blood. And victims of gjakmaria were always male, weren’t they? The image of women going out and about on behalf of their besieged men made İkmen suddenly, and to the confusion of Angeliki Vlora, smile.
‘Oh, very clever,’ he said. ‘You almost had me going there for a moment, Mrs Vlora.’
‘I speak only the truth, I give you my word.’
‘This from a person from a country where – how does the saying go? “You are free to be faithful to your word or to be faithless to it”?’
The old woman smiled. ‘You know more of Albania than your Turkish father would have liked.’
‘Just stop trying to distract me with malicious fabrications and make sure that Mehmet and his brothers present themselves to me tomorrow morning at nine.’ He placed one of his business cards down in front of her. ‘Your boys can, I take it, read.’
She glanced at it and shrugged.
‘If they fail to appear, I will have them arrested,’ he snapped and turned towards the door.
‘Think about why your father always kept you away from your own kind,’ Angeliki said as she stubbed her cigarette out in her ashtray. ‘Consider why he might have done that.’
But İkmen, on the surface at least, ignored her words. ‘Nine o’clock tomorrow, Angeliki,’ he said, ‘or your blood feud with the Berishas will end in my cells.’
And with that he walked out of her apartment and down into the now barely visible street below.
On several occasions since his father had contacted him that morning, Mehmet Suleyman had thought about telephoning his brother Murad. Sometimes he had been distracted from the task by other matters, but in the main he had not yet called because he really didn’t know what to say. From what his father had told him, it was obvious that Murad was in favour of them all meeting up again. But it still felt odd and also somehow wrong to just cover over with a mere meal what for both of them had been years of deep parental disapproval. And even if their father hadn’t been the prime mover in the Suleyman brothers’ personal misery, he had undoubtedly acquiesced in their unhappiness. But it was late now, and all the psychological tricks Mehmet had employed earlier to keep himself from Murad had gone. His brother would most definitely be home – after all, where else could single fathers go at this advanced hour of the night?
He pushed a pile of as yet unattended paperwork to one side and pulled his telephone towards him. Just to talk to Murad wouldn’t do any harm – he talked to him a lot, always had. Besides, he had promised his father he would and as a man of his word he would just have to do it. His fingers got as far as the receiver before he heard the knock on his door.
‘Come in,’ he said, his hands retreating from the phone.
The door opened to reveal a middle-aged man in uniform.
‘Hello, Roditi,’ Suleyman said. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘A patrol over in Ortaköy has found an abandoned Mercedes underneath the Boǧaziçi Bridge.’
‘Oh?’ Suleyman prepared to return to his telephone. ‘And this concerns me how?’
‘The inside is drenched in blood, sir,’ Roditi said, his voice betraying his discomfort with this image.
Suleyman frowned. ‘And whose blood is it?’
‘Oh, the car is empty, sir,’ Roditi said. ‘The men are searching the area for either a body or somebody who might be wounded.’
‘I’d better get out there.’ Suleyman slipped his jacket from the back of his chair and put it on.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Roditi said as he watched his superior check his pockets for keys, cigarettes and the like. ‘I mean, it might not be a murder, but from the description we’ve been given of the car’s interior, I can’t see how death in some form can’t be involved.’
‘Well, you’d better get ready to come with me then,’ Suleyman said, moving across determinedly towards his colleague.
Roditi took a deep, hopefully calming breath before he spoke.
‘Right, sir,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll go and get my overcoat.’
‘Oh well now, what a turn of events, eh, Mother?’ İkmen said as he hunkered down in front of the small marble slab that was his mother’s gravestone. ‘I’m cold, it’s dark, I’m not supposed to be here and it’s foggy. I feel like I’m about to star in some sort of horror movie.’ Shivering violently he added, ‘But then after the things that ghastly old woman said to me, I just felt I had to come. Seeking inspiration I suppose. Closeness to you.’
Trying to keep his coat off the damp grass beneath him, İkmen leaned forward to touch the chilly tablet that announced that his mother, Ayşe İkmen, had died on 3 May 1957. A long time ago now – a time when the Turks lived without television and young men still spoke about their heroic deeds on the battlefields of Korea. Try as he might, İkmen had never been able to recall seeing his father’s face on the day of his mother’s death. All he could remember was how Timür İkmen had held on tightly to both his and Halil’s hands at the funeral, standing grimly over this spot, his hair touched with hints of grey. Some people claimed that the grey hairs had arrived overnight, but perhaps his father had been going grey for some time before that. After all, what notice at that age, did the young Çetin take of his father? The man was usually out working and anyway it was Ayşe that he adored with all his soul, her that he really knew, or thought that he did.
‘Mother, if someone killed you, I will need to find out who that was.’ İkmen fought to choke back tears that had started to rise at the back of his eyes. ‘I didn’t see you on the day you died and so what that old bitch Angeliki said could be true for all I know. But then if it were, surely Timür or Halil would have told me about it? I mean why keep such a thing a secret after over forty years . . .’
Unbidden, tears of grief and frustration ran down his thin face.
‘If only I could reach you, Mother,’ he said, ‘sometimes I know that I can but . . . I’m so lost. I just need an idea, somewhere to start . . . I don’t care if this gjakmaria nonsense is part of your culture, it’s wrong. If you died in blood then I need to know that. I need to understand and come to terms with that.’
Then standing up he called out to the cold winter wind. ‘A young boy lies dead. Possibly killed just because of his name. And his people, your people, Mother,’ he said as he looked down at the gravestone, ‘are messing with my head. And because of what they know about you, and because I love you, they’re succeeding!’
Away on the distant Bosphorus, a ferry sounded its fog-horn. As he looked across the top of his mother’s stone, the faint smudge of numerous other tombstones made İkmen feel that he was at the end of the recognised world. Now, in some poisoned anteroom of death, he felt desolate in almost every respect: as a bereaved son, as a man wrestling with professional difficulties, as one possessed of enough knowledge to realise that one day either the earthquakes or the growling pain he felt now in his stomach from his ulcers would put him into this same rancid earth. As if bowing to the inevitable, he lowered his head to the harsh wind.
‘It was Halil who found you,’ he said to the gravestone, ‘so I should, I suppose, go and talk to him. Not that he’ll like it. We’ve always avoided talking about that day. It’s too painful. But,’ he shrugged, ‘it would appear I have no choice. If he reiterates the tale we have always believed, I’ll feel relief, as well as anger towards that Vlora woman. But if I do discover that Halil has been lying to me, well, I don’t know what I’ll do.’
Turning away from the gravestone, away from the wind, he pulled his cigarettes and lighter out of his coat pocket and lit up. It was, he felt, time to move on from this ugly, toxic place. His mother was dead. Only her bones remained, rotting now beneath the feet of her younger son. And, as he started to walk back towards the entrance to the cemetery, İkmen wondered why he’d even attempted this vast trek over to the Asian side of the city.
However, halfway down the hill, İkmen suddenly stopped. Whether the thought that came to him had, as he felt, been suddenly inserted into his mind or whether his fevered cogitations had just simply sifted the idea out from what was already there, he didn’t know. But wherever it came from the thought was both helpful and logical.
Vahan Sarkissian. Of course! Like his sons, Arto and Krikor, Vahan Sarkissian had been a doctor. Indeed he had been the doctor who had come out to the İkmen house in response to Halil’s request for help. Vahan it had been who, all those many years before, had declared Ayşe’s life extinct. So logically Vahan would have been obliged to keep records of that incident – if, of course, such things still existed after all this time. Vahan had died only a few months after Ayşe İkmen. Who could know what may have become of his possessions after so many years? İkmen suddenly felt deflated. Well, either Arto or Krikor could have his things . . . But it was worth a try, rather than contacting Halil immediately. And so, thanking whatever power had allowed him to uncover this thought, he continued to stride through the dampness towards the cemetery entrance.
It was unusual for Arto Sarkissian to be up after 11 p.m. when he wasn’t working. But his wife, Maryam, had watched a video of the film Gladiator earlier in the day, which, she had declared, had been very good. And so, as soon as Maryam had retired to bed, Arto had slipped the tape into the machine and then settled down on one of his enormous sofas with a glass of tea and a big bowl of aşure. The deranged son of the Caesar Marcus Aurelius was just descending into thoughts of incestuous perversion when the phone at Arto’s elbow rang.
Pausing the tape, Arto picked it up. ‘Sarkissian,’ he said. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello, doctor,’ the familiar voice of Mehmet Suleyman replied. ‘I do apologise for disturbing you so late into the night.’
‘It’s not a problem, Inspector. I assume you require my assistance.’
‘Not, happily, in person, no,’ the younger man said and the doctor heaved a sigh of relief. ‘I’m in Ortaköy at the moment standing beside an empty car, the interior of which is drenched in blood.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. There’s no body, but I’m having it moved after forensic have taken samples for analysis. What I need from you, doctor, is a sample of Rifat Berisha’s blood. Could you send it over to the Institute in the morning?’
‘You think he may have died in your car of blood?’
Suleyman sighed. ‘I think it’s possible. We must, after all, explore every eventuality.’
