A Passion for Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  Apart from the fact that she regularly attended the Neve şalom Synagogue, which implied at least some sort of religious faith, there was nothing that Süleyman could discover about Leyla Saban that would make her an obvious peeper victim. She wasn’t promiscuous in any way, she was certainly not a gangster, and had not, as far as he could tell, ever killed anyone. But then some of these, particularly the latter victims, were not obvious. Maybe the peeper had now really lost his mind. Maybe now anyone in the least bit ‘imperfect’ would do. It occurred to Süleyman that perhaps Leyla had just been an opportunistic victim. But if that were so, he wondered what the peeper could have been doing hanging around the Jewish Museum after it had closed.

  ‘Here is my Leyla,’ the old man said as he laid the heavy photograph album in Süleyman’s lap. ‘That’s her with her little brother, my son, İzak. He will be devastated . . .’

  Süleyman looked down at the photograph of a teenage Leyla Saban with a boy of about seven or eight and said, ‘Mr Saban, your son . . .’

  ‘İzak moved to Israel last year,’ Fortune Saban said sadly. ‘I didn’t want him to go. He said he wanted to fight for Israel. I begged him to stay here and do his military service for his real country, this country.’

  Maybe that was the flaw, Süleyman thought, maybe Leyla’s brother’s apparent disloyalty to the state was why she was killed.

  ‘My wife Zeynep passed away and so the children have been my world ever since.’ Fortune Saban began to cry. ‘Now İzak has gone and my Leyla is dead . . .’

  ‘I am so very sorry, Mr Saban,’ Süleyman said. ‘I’m sorry that I have to disturb you now, but I have to try and find out as much as I can about Leyla in order to have any chance of catching her killer.’

  ‘I know. I know.’ He dried his eyes on the sleeve of his pullover and then said, ‘Inspector, I apologise, you sitting there without even the offer of a glass of tea! How ill-mannered of me! Zeynep would have been disgusted.’

  ‘Oh, please, Mr Saban, don’t trouble yourself,’ Süleyman said. ‘It really is of no importance. However, if you don’t object, if I could have an ashtray . . .’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes, of course! I think I have one in the kitchen,’ Mr Saban said as he rose slowly from his chair and began to walk out towards the hall. ‘I don’t smoke myself. İzak does, Zeynep did, but not me or Leyla. No.’

  The Saban place was a small apartment in a nice block in smart up-market Şişli. A lot of Jews lived in the district, but not many, Süleyman imagined, lived in such shabby turmoil. There were books everywhere. Laid open on rickety sideboards with less than the normal complement of drawers, their broken spines pointing up towards the ceiling. Old clothes hung haphazardly from the backs of broken chairs – a clear sign of brains and efforts concentrated on much higher things than cleaning. He went back to looking at the photograph album. Leyla Saban had been, from her photographs, a lively young woman. What looked to be the most recent picture of Leyla showed her again with her brother, he now towering over her and smiling. İzak looked very much like his father, but Leyla didn’t.

  Fortune Saban gave Süleyman a very old Efes Pilsen ashtray and then looked with him at the picture of his children.

  ‘If you have to know everything then that is what I must tell you,’ the old man said as he sat back down in his chair once again.

  ‘Mr Saban?’

  ‘Leyla was not my biological child, Inspector,’ Fortune Saban said. His deep, dark eyes screwed up against what he had just said, all but disappeared. ‘I brought her up as my own. Leyla never knew. İzak will never know.’ He opened his tear-filled eyes and smiled. ‘Thirty years ago I was teaching at a school in Hakkari. Unmarried. I was old then! I employed a cleaner. The first was an elderly lady who eventually became too infirm to carry on, then another woman and then, out of nowhere, came Zeynep.’

  ‘Your wife was your cleaner?’

  ‘She just arrived,’ the old man said. ‘Little more than a child. No papers I ever believed were her own. My Zeynep was not the Zeynep Habib whose identity card she carried. My Zeynep was not a Jew. I had to teach her many things about our life before we came back to İstanbul.’

  ‘But your son . . .’

  ‘My beautiful Israeli son knows nothing of this. What would he do if he knew I thought his mother was a gypsy?’

  ‘Do you?’

  Fortune Saban shrugged. ‘I don’t really know. But there she was, Zeynep, in Hakkari, young and beautiful and pregnant. She didn’t ask me to marry her, I offered. I loved her from the very first moment I saw her until the second that she died. I have never known who Leyla’s father was. I have never wanted to.’

  Süleyman put the photo album down beside his chair and then lit a cigarette. The town of Hakkari was turning up again in this peeper ‘drama’. He wondered whether it was relevant, part of a pattern . . . ‘That is quite a story, Mr Saban.’

  ‘To be only between ourselves, Inspector,’ the old man said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Then Fortune Saban pointed to a large photograph of an extremely beautiful and striking woman which stood upright on the lid of an old piano in the corner of the room. ‘That is Zeynep,’ he said. ‘See how lovely she was!’ Again he cried. ‘To lose that which you love the most is the hardest test God makes us take.’

  Süleyman let him cry. There was nothing he could say that would ease the old man’s pain. Years of experience working with the relatives of murder victims had served only to underline his complete lack of utility.

  When Fortune Saban had finished crying he said, ‘Mr Saban, didn’t you ever ask Zeynep about her background? Where she came from?’

  ‘Not really,’ Fortune Saban said. ‘She didn’t like it. If I did ever quiz her, all she would ever say was that she came from poverty and brutality a nice man like me couldn’t even imagine. I have always believed, Inspector Süleyman, that Leyla was the result of my poor Zeynep being raped. Out east families throw girls so dishonoured out, don’t they?’

  Süleyman left the Saban apartment as much saddened as intrigued by what he had discovered there. Unwittingly, Leyla Saban had lived a lie. She wasn’t Jewish, even her ‘Israeli’ brother wasn’t really Jewish. Was the lie she led what had caused offence to the peeper, or was it her brother’s seeming desertion of the armed forces of the Republic of Turkey? Family secrets. Süleyman knew a thing or two about them. The way the casually cruel, frequently intoxicated princes that were his forebears were still revered as great and courageous Ottomans. The way his mother would insist upon telling people that his wife Zelfa was not only a full-blooded Turk, but she was also the same age as he as if Zelfa being older than he was was dishonourable or indecent in some way. He considered gloomily whether being economical with the truth about one’s background was just a middle- and upper-class ‘thing’ . . .

  ‘Inspector Süleyman!’

  Mürsel, extremely stylish in a slim-cut black suit, was standing in the little park that was opposite the apartment block Süleyman had just left.

  ‘What a beautiful spring day!’ he said with a smile as Süleyman approached. ‘You know I’m really beginning to feel as if we are at last leaving the winter behind us.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So where have you just been, Inspector?’ the spy said as he lit a long, green cocktail cigarette.

  ‘You know exactly where I have been, Mürsel Bey,’ Süleyman responded, now smiling himself. ‘You know everything that I do and when I do it.’

  Mürsel’s smile faded. ‘I’m glad that you recognise and accept that now,’ he said.

  ‘What choice do I have? I get the impression I can only find out what you want me to. Hakkari . . .’

  ‘Where you’ve sent the unfortunate İzzet Melik . . .’

  ‘Is . . .’

  ‘From my point of view, wholly irrelevant.’

  ‘Mr Saban lived there.’

  ‘So he might have done. But now you’re pushing, which I don’t like,’ Mürsel said with a smile.
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  Had Süleyman been planning to try and seduce what he felt Mürsel knew about the peeper out of the spy at that moment, then he knew that he hadn’t made a good start. But then it soon became apparent that he really didn’t need to try too hard.

  Mürsel laid a long, slim hand on his shoulder and said, ‘You know that we are closing in, don’t you, Mehmet? I’m appalled that Haydar died, he’d been with me for years, but . . .’

  ‘When is his funeral?’

  Mürsel put his head on one side as if struggling to think and then he said, ‘It was this morning, I believe. I . . .’

  ‘But forensic . . .’

  ‘Yes, it was this morning. I remember now.’ He smiled again.

  ‘Did you not go?’ Süleyman was almost frightened to know what the answer might be.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Mürsel moved his arm along Süleyman’s shoulders and then snaked his other hand around his waist. ‘You’re shocked?’

  Süleyman shrugged. If Haydar had already been buried the chances were that those who should have performed forensic tests on his body had probably not done so.

  ‘Grief affects people in many different ways,’ Mürsel said as his lips came within just centimetres of Süleyman’s face. ‘Personally, I prefer to celebrate a person’s life rather than waste time in useless misery. Would you like to help me celebrate Haydar’s life later on this evening, Mehmet?’

  This was a very good opportunity and it was coming not from him, but from Mürsel. But Süleyman was suddenly afraid, and for several seconds his mouth just flatly refused to utter.

  ‘Don’t be too eager, will you?’ the spy said acidly into the silence.

  ‘Oh, er, yes, yes, I would like to mark, er, his passing . . .’

  ‘Good. Meet me in the bar at the Pera Palas at eight.’

  And then he walked off back through the little park and disappeared. Süleyman, shaking now, realised for the first time that he was sweating.

  ‘So what do you think about the notion that Sergeant Ergin’s wife Handan was having an affair with Yaşar Uzun?’ İkmen said as he spooned another heap of pilaf into his mouth.

  Ayşe Farsakoğlu first swallowed her mouthful before she said, ‘But sir, there’s no connection between them.’

  ‘Her husband’s gun shot Uzun,’ İkmen elaborated. ‘Ergin has no real alibi for the night of the killing and Handan Ergin has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth leaving her baby son behind her!’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  They both turned to look at the headscarfed woman at the top of the table who continued with, ‘The things that go on these days . . .’

  ‘Fatma, it happens,’ her husband said. ‘People have affairs. It’s life.’

  ‘Well it shouldn’t be,’ his wife replied.

  Ayşe Farsakoğlu, herself a veteran of several affairs of the heart, one long ago with Mehmet Süleyman, looked down and paid close attention to her food. Although aware of the fact that whilst information was still building in the case of the dead carpet dealer he had to keep on working, İkmen nevertheless knew he had to make some sort of concession to his wife. So after leaving Nikolai Stoev’s shop they made a detour to the İkmen apartment in Sultanahmet and a rather late lunch that Fatma İkmen insisted they both eat.

  İkmen turned back to look at Ayşe again. ‘Metin İskender’s search of Ergin’s apartment hasn’t turned up anything of note.’ And then he immediately changed tack and said, ‘I wonder if Handan Ergin is at Uzun’s place in Bulgaria!’

  ‘Sir, Mrs Ergin disappeared after Mr Uzun had been killed.’

  ‘But before we found his body.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘So maybe she shot him. Maybe it was some sort of lovers’ argument that they had . . .’

  ‘On the road out of Peri in the middle of the night?’ Ayşe said. ‘Mrs Ergin doesn’t drive and she had a baby to look after that night. Also, how would an ordinary lady like Mrs Ergin have the presence of mind to cover up tyre tracks in the forest?’

  ‘Mmm. Point taken,’ İkmen said. ‘Ayşe, that sixty thousand pounds sterling that Uzun deposited in his Yapı Kredi account – do we know whether he withdrew all or any of that?’

  ‘No, sir, but I’ll check it out.’

  ‘Do so.’

  ‘You’re not eating!’ Fatma İkmen stood up and went around the table towards Ayşe Farsakoğlu with a saucepan.

  ‘Fatma Hanım . . .’

  ‘How you can ever expect to get a decent husband if you don’t eat, is beyond me!’ Fatma said as she spooned great dollops of rice on to Ayşe’s plate.

  ‘Fatma!’

  She looked over at her husband with a challenging expression on her face and said, ‘Yes?’

  Not wanting to get involved in any sort of argument about how one should and should not speak to younger guests, İkmen held his hands up in submission and said, ‘Nothing!’

  ‘But to get back to Mrs Ergin, sir,’ Ayşe continued, ‘Handan had a passport which was still at her home. Constable Yıldız told me that she was born in Germany you know – although she came back to Turkey as an infant. But anyway, she’s either still in this country or . . .’ She looked first at Fatma İkmen and then at her husband.

  ‘Ergin or someone else, as yet unknown, has killed her,’ İkmen said, finishing off the statement Ayşe had not felt able to. ‘You don’t know how thoroughly Inspector İskender was intending to search the Ergin apartment, I suppose, Ayşe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’d like to know whether or not he’s lifted the floorboards, or dug around in the garden.’

  İkmen’s mobile phone began to ring. He took it off the table and answered it, his face soon cracking into a smile. ‘Ah, Metin,’ he said, ‘yes, we were just talking about you. I gather Handan Ergin’s passport was in the apartment.’

  ‘Yes, but in spite of almost ripping the paint from the walls, my boys have found no sign of the woman herself,’ Metin İskender replied. ‘However . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  Fatma İkmen smiled at Ayşe Farsakoğlu and then took a plate of sweet pastries out of a cupboard and pushed them towards her.

  ‘One of the Ergins’ neighbours, a woman whom I get the impression spends much of her time spying on those around her, said she saw a woman go into the Ergin apartment on the night of Uzun’s murder,’ İskender said. ‘Apparently she went in just after Abdullah Ergin went out to his brother’s and then she left about half an hour after that. The informant told me that the woman was a foreigner, a European of some sort. Wasn’t Mrs Ergin supposed to be involved with a group of European women?’

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen said. ‘The main one being a Mrs Monroe, a Canadian. Oh, and also the wife of the man Uzun was in the process of selling the Lawrence carpet to, a Mrs Melly.’

  ‘Mmm,’ İskender said. ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘Yes.’ And then İkmen went on to tell him what he and Ayşe had discovered from the Bulgarian Nikolai Stoev.

  ‘So how are you going to proceed?’ İskender asked at the end of İkmen’s exposition.

  ‘I think that perhaps Ayşe should go and pay a visit to the Bulgarian Consulate to follow up Uzun’s properties and I, I suppose, had better take another trip out to Peri.’

  ‘To see these consular women?’

  ‘Yes. They knew Handan Ergin and, I get the feeling, they might have at one time supported her linguistic ambitions in the face of Abdullah’s disapproval, but whether that actually has any bearing on this case is another matter. İnşallah, all will become clear.’

  ‘İnşallah.’

  And so their telephone conversation ended and shortly afterwards Ayşe Farsakoğlu and her boss left the İkmen apartment and went their separate ways. As she put her shoes back on at the front door, Ayşe was presented with a large box of sweets by Fatma İkmen. ‘For your journey,’ she said as she pushed them into the younger woman’s hands. Çetin, whose journey was at least five times th
e distance of his sergeant’s, shook his head in both despair and amusement as he walked down the stairs ahead of a now smiling Ayşe.

  It was only four o’clock when Mehmet Süleyman arrived home. But then he’d hardly spent more than an hour at his pretty little house for the past week. Situated in the Bosphorus village of Ortaköy, Mehmet Süleyman and his wife and son shared their charming wooden cottage with Zelfa’s aging father, Dr Babur Bey. But when Mehmet arrived there was no one in and so he went straight up to his bedroom and took a shower. Then, after choosing what he was going to wear for his meeting with Mürsel, he lay down on his bed to think – or rather to worry.

  What if his bad feelings about Mürsel were misplaced? What if what he said about the peeper was all absolutely true? He had, after all, believed every word Mürsel had said on the subject when he had first come into contact with the spy. He wasn’t alone, either; Ardıç had underwritten everything that he had been told. But then that was before the peeper apparently went off-script. At the beginning he had been a serial offender whose hatred of homosexuals had eventually escalated to murder. Apart from the fact that he was, unlike most killers, highly trained to do just that, his actions did not diverge from what was generally accepted knowledge about offenders of his type. But then there was Cabbar Soylu, the Jewish girl and, significantly, Mürsel’s sidekick, Haydar. According to Mürsel, Haydar had died because the peeper had been just too quick for him. But people like Haydar did not die easily and besides, by Mürsel’s own admission, there had been two of them and only one of him. There was something wrong. He didn’t know what, but he felt it in every bone and organ of his body. This ‘instinct’ was something that didn’t make itself apparent to him every day. Çetin İkmen at times lived his life by such gut feelings, but not him, not Mehmet Süleyman the rational Ottoman gentleman. Not for him cases involving semi-mystical carpets that had once belonged to a probably deranged enemy of the old empire. Leave all that to İkmen and good luck! But then what İkmen didn’t have to deal with was the possibility of either inflaming or infuriating the spy Mürsel. Because as a strategy, the promise of sex in exchange for truth about what was actually happening was fraught with danger. For a start, he had – or, rather, he told himself he had – absolutely no intention of satisfying Mürsel sexually. If of course, once the seduction began, the agent gave him the choice of not going ahead. Although no bigger than Süleyman, Mürsel was almost certainly more highly trained in the arts of both attack and defence. What if he overpowered him? What if, worse still, Süleyman found himself giving into Mürsel in an act of sensual curiosity? What if he liked what happened then? In the past, he had always managed to successfully suppress those occasional sexual feelings he had for other men. What if suddenly he could not? And then there was also the fear that what he was proposing to do would be for nothing anyway. What was he going to do if Mürsel just denied everything? What was Mürsel, once in possession of the fact that Süleyman suspected him of something, going to do with him? Would he have him flung into some ghastly secret service jail? Would he kill him?