River of The Dead

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘It’s only the priests at the church who aren’t stoned out of their minds round here,’ İzzet said.

  ‘Yes, and Kaya himself when he lived here,’ his superior agreed. ‘Until the unfortunate Tommi tried to move in on the quarter, Mr Kaya had this very big market for his products all to himself.’

  ‘Kaya never used himself?’

  Süleyman smiled again. ‘Oh, no, İzzet,’ he said. ‘Yusuf Kaya was a very good drug dealer. He never, ever touched his own products. It was because he was always straight, basically, that he killed Hana Karim.’

  İzzet frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It is said that Yusuf noticed that Hana’s behaviour changed some time towards the end of 2004. He watched her and discovered that she was having an affair with another man. If he’d been off the planet on heroin he would never even have noticed. Doesn’t mean he’s not a raving lunatic, however, as we well know. One does not cross Yusuf Kaya.’

  Tucked away behind a small suite of lecture rooms, the office of the administrator of the Cerrahpaşa Hospital was both clean and quiet. Mercifully distant from the chaotic medical business of the hospital, it was a place where, he hoped, Çetin İkmen could interview the facility’s senior managerial official in peace.

  ‘What you have to understand, Inspector, is that hospital cleaning staff come and go all the time,’ the administrator, a small, tired-looking man behind a large dark-wood desk told him. ‘Some, of course, mainly the middle-aged women with families, have been with us for years. But two young men like the ones on the security footage . . .’ He shrugged.

  İkmen had just viewed the somewhat fuzzy security tape which showed the murder of Yusuf Kaya’s guards and his subsequent escape. The cleaners and the nurses – all male – who had liberated the gangster had been both young and quick. Together with Yusuf Kaya, three of them had taken a guard or a police officer and, seemingly without any hesitation or remorse, stabbed him. In all but one instance the wound had proved fatal. İkmen looked across at the clearly shaken hospital administrator and said, ‘The surviving guard . . .’

  ‘As you know, Inspector, he is still unconscious. Dr Eldem cannot be sure when or even if the unfortunate man will awaken. Neurology is not an exact discipline, as I’m sure you know.’

  ‘Indeed.’ This wasn’t the first time İkmen had had to wait for a potential witness to come out of a coma. Some years previously he had actually had to wait for one of his own colleagues to surface before he could question him about an incident. But in this instance, he knew he had to accept that the prison guard, Ramazan Eren, might never recover. Mr Eren’s heart had been grazed by his assailant’s weapon and he had lost a vast amount of blood. Whether he would ever regain consciousness, and, if he did, whether he would still have normal mental capacity, were moot points.

  ‘As you saw for yourself, the security footage wasn’t clear,’ İkmen said as he pulled one of the administrator’s ashtrays towards him and lit up a cigarette. ‘We can’t identify any of the people caught by it, even those, like Kaya, whom we know. We may have more to go on once the images have been enhanced but that is by no means a certainty. Do you have any possible names for the cleaners or the nurses?’

  The administrator switched on his computer terminal. Hospitals were such public places! In one sense that worked against criminal activity, because of the large numbers of people around. But in another, provided the timing was right, hospitals were wide open in that regard. Yusuf Kaya had been rescued very early in the morning, when the hospital was probably at its quietest. The only problems the rescuers had experienced had to have revolved around the timing of the attempt. It had been the prison governor who had made the decision to have Kaya sent to the Cerrahpaşa in the early hours of the morning. True, he had been encouraged to make some sort of decision by members of his staff, including Ramazan Eren, who had apparently been alarmed by Kaya’s condition. But unless the governor himself was involved, the placing of the cleaners and nurses at the scene had to have been a speculative act. The hospital administrator had admitted that tracking down a couple of casual cleaners was probably well-nigh impossible, but the nurses could have been, indeed in İkmen’s mind had to have been, ‘embedded’ within the hospital for some time. Even so, on the morning in question, they had to have been activated by someone, told that Kaya was coming. And that someone had almost certainly been a person or persons inside the prison. If that person or persons was either Ramazan Eren or Cengiz Bayar or both, they had paid a very high price for their treachery. But then Yusuf Kaya, as İkmen knew from his friend Mehmet Süleyman, was a ruthless, unfeeling psychopath. The death of two ‘bent’ prison guards, if that was indeed what they had been, would simply serve to save him anxiety and money, because if cash hadn’t been involved somewhere along the line İkmen would be very surprised. In addition, there were the two dead police officers . . .

  ‘There are three male nurses who have not reported for duty since that morning,’ the administrator said as he peered at his screen. ‘İsak Mardin from Zeyrek, Murat Lole from Karaköy, and Faruk Öz, who lives in Gaziosmanpaşa.’

  İkmen frowned. Yusuf Kaya, it was well known, came originally from Mardin. What were the chances of one of these nurses having that name?

  ‘I’ll need their contact details,’ he said. ‘All of them.’

  The administrator frowned. ‘You’ll contact these men?’ He looked over at his computer screen once again. ‘Lole and Öz work in the same department, orthopaedics. I believe their supervisor has already tried or maybe even succeeded in speaking to them. Would you like to speak to someone in the department?’

  ‘Yes.’

  İkmen, or rather some of his officers, would almost certainly be paying all the missing nurses a visit in the very near future, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to speak to their colleagues and superiors too.

  Several hours later, when he emerged from the Cerrahpaşa, İkmen had a slightly clearer picture about İsak Mardin, Murat Lole and Faruk Öz. Both Öz and Lole worked on the orthopaedics ward, as the administrator had said. Mardin’s speciality was cardiac care, which made sense in relation to his possible appearance on a corridor leading to the cardiology clinic. Lole had been contacted by his superiors since the Kaya incident and was apparently at home with a bad cold. İkmen himself had spoken to the man on the telephone and Lole had readily agreed to be interviewed by the police. Mardin and Öz were seemingly uncontactable. After lighting up a cigarette in the lee of the ambulance station, İkmen called his sergeant, Ayşe Farsakoğlu, and told her to assemble a squad of officers to meet him at İsak Mardin’s address in Zeyrek.

  When he’d finished the call, İkmen dropped his mobile telephone into his pocket with a sigh. In spite of the seriousness of having a murderer like Yusuf Kaya on the run in the city that was both his home and his passion, İkmen was finding it hard to concentrate. All he could think about was the son who had come home after nineteen long and, for his wife Fatma particularly, painful years. A difficult and at times violent child, Bekir İkmen had begun to take drugs – just cannabis to start off with – from the age of thirteen. No threats about endangering his own liberty or putting his father’s career at risk had had any effect, and Bekir had quickly tired of cannabis and gone on to cocaine, acid, amphetamines – anything he could get his hands on. By the time he ran away from home two years later, his brothers and sisters, as well as Çetin İkmen himself, were almost relieved. Living around Bekir and his drug-fuelled rages had been difficult and it was only Fatma İkmen who actually cried when it became clear that her third-born son was not coming home.

  Çetin İkmen looked out over the top of the traffic jam on the coastal road, Kennedy Street, at the shining waters of the Sea of Marmara beyond. From the front entrance of the hospital, one could see the many vast tankers that had recently passed through the Bosphorus straits. One could also see much of the city of İstanbul itself. To his left, İkmen could just make out the minarets of the Sultan Ahmet or Blue Mo
sque. Almost encapsulating the spirit of the city in itself, the mosque had been built in a district that for ever afterwards took on its name. Sultanahmet, the very centre of the old city of imperial mosques, Ottoman palaces and the teeming Grand Bazaar, was where the İkmen family lived. Until Bekir had somehow made his way back, it had been home to Çetin, Fatma and their four youngest children. For the past nineteen years they had been, in totality, a family of ten – eight children and two parents. Now they were eleven, as it was meant to be, as was right. Except that, for Çetin İkmen at least, it wasn’t. His son Bekir was, to all intents and purposes, a very personable man of thirty-four. By his own admission he’d spent many years battling various addictions. He had, he said, spent the time he’d been addicted to heroin in the crime-ridden district of Edirnekapı, up around the old Byzantine city walls. Walking distance, provided one was fit, from the İkmens’ apartment in Sultanahmet. Walking distance! One could feel, and his wife Fatma did feel, very guilty about being so near and yet so far from a beloved child for such a long time. Çetin İkmen, however, did not. Now clean and bright and shiny and, he said, gainfully employed in the tourist industry, Bekir was still wrong. How, İkmen didn’t know. But that he, Bekir, was now on his own in the İkmen apartment with only Fatma for company made Çetin feel uneasy. The superstitious and suspicious blood that ran in his veins, inherited from a mother known for her witchcraft, would not allow the inspector to delight in his son’s return.

  The landlord of the house where İsak Mardin had lived until a few days before was very certain that the young man had been ‘weird’ and ‘wrong’ – after he’d run off without paying his rent.

  ‘He was forever body-building, the woman who lives in the apartment below told me,’ Mr Lale told Ayşe Farsakoğlu. İkmen hadn’t yet arrived, so Sergeant Farsakoğlu, together with constables Yıldız and Orğa, had found the landlord of the house on Zeyrek Mehmet Paşa Alley and gained admittance to a now empty apartment.

  ‘Bang, bang, bang, all night long, so Miss . . . whatever her name is downstairs said,’ Mr Lale continued. He was a thin, lugubrious man of about fifty who, winter and summer, wore a thick knitted hat, as a lot of people who came originally from the countryside did. ‘Lifting weights, see,’ he said, moving his arms up and down to demonstrate, ‘and banging them down on the floor afterwards.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Lale,’ Ayşe said with a polite smile. ‘I do know what weightlifting is about.’

  In spite of the fact that more women were joining the Turkish police all the time, Ayşe still found some male members of the public very patronising. This man wouldn’t have dreamed of doing his awful demonstration for either of the young male constables who were looking round the apartment with her. But for her, their superior, Mr Lale obviously felt he had to make himself plain. After all, Ayşe was an attractive woman in her early thirties, so it was almost unthinkable that she wasn’t stupid.

  ‘What someone in his profession was doing lifting weights, I don’t know,’ Mr Lale said as he lit up a cheap, rank Birinci cigarette. ‘I mean a nurse, I ask you! What kind of job is that for a grown man?’

  Suspecting that this overtly macho attitude towards nursing was allied to a few other prejudicial feelings, Ayşe said, ‘So would you want to be handled by a woman if you were in hospital, Mr Lale?’

  ‘I’ve never been in a hospital in my life!’ He relayed this fact as if it were some sort of badge of honour.

  ‘Yes, but if you did have to go in . . .’ Ayşe, seeing the look of hostility on the landlord’s face, decided to give up. After all, his attitude towards this İsak Mardin was irrelevant. Where Mardin was now, what he was doing and what he had done were the only subjects she should be concentrating on now. After all, this man could have just murdered a prison guard, or one of the unfortunate police officers who had accompanied Yusuf Kaya to the Cerrahpaşa. One of their own . . .

  ‘Mr Lale,’ she began.

  ‘Sergeant!’

  A call from what had apparently been İsak Mardin’s bedroom caused Ayşe to excuse herself to go and see what Constable Yıldız wanted.

  The room, which contained little beyond an ancient-looking metal bedstead and the built-in cupboard Yıldız was looking into now, overlooked the Golden Horn. The nineteenth-century wooden house had five storeys and this apartment was on the fifth. So even though there were buildings behind the house, because they were smaller than Mr Lale’s place İsak Mardin had had a wonderful view. Even with the thunderous traffic on the Atatürk Bridge pounding across to hip and happening Beyoğlu over the water, the sight of the great inlet with the European city beyond was still absolutely breathtaking. And on a wonderful spring day like this one it would, under normal circumstances, have made Ayşe want to sing and shout from the sheer joy of simply being alive in such fabulous weather. But the circumstances were far from normal.

  ‘I found this in this cupboard,’ Constable Yıldız was holding a thin red and gold scarf very gingerly by one corner.

  ‘That’s a Galatasaray scarf,’ Mr Lale said from the doorway, once again anticipating complete ignorance on Ayşe’s part. ‘He supported that lot.’

  Mr Lale, by referring to what is probably İstanbul’s most famous football club as ‘that lot’, signalled that it was not a particular passion of his own. Ayşe, whose brother was a fanatical Galatasaray fan, smiled.

  ‘Bag it up for forensic, please, Constable,’ she said to Yıldız. ‘Thank you for that, Mr Lale.’

  Any examples of DNA found on the scarf or indeed on the bedding or the other, very few, items in the apartment could be useful; although, as her boss Inspector İkmen had told her earlier, İsak Mardin was probably a pseudonym. Yıldız had just put the scarf into a bag when İkmen, his thin face red and flustered, arrived.

  ‘I apologise for being late, Sergeant,’ he said to Ayşe Farsakoğlu as he tipped his head in greeting to Mr Lale. ‘But I’ve just had a telephone call from Commissioner Ardıç. We need to get back to the station – now.’

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  Try as he might, İkmen couldn’t get away from the fact that the man on the screen had to be Yusuf Kaya. ‘Where did this film come from?’ he asked as he watched again the short movie footage of Yusuf Kaya eating a plate of pastries.

  ‘A patisserie called the Nightingale is where it was taken,’ the large, heavily sweating man puffing on a cigar across the desk replied. ‘When was yesterday lunchtime, twelve thirty.’

  ‘I didn’t know that patisseries had security cameras,’ Mehmet Süleyman said as he sat down next to İkmen and ran the small snippet of film yet again.

  ‘Where does not have at least one camera these days?’ the large man responded gloomily. ‘I don’t know how many speed cameras there are between the centre of the city and Atatürk Airport, but if it goes on like this all traffic officers will lose the use of their legs. Sitting in rooms looking at screens all day long!’

  Commissioner Ardıç, who like İkmen was in his late fifties, was not a man with whom new technology sat easily. He had gained enough knowledge to be able to operate his own computer and his mobile telephone and that, to Ardıç, was enough. Wall-to-wall security and speed cameras were, he felt, neither right nor necessary. Except in this one instance.

  ‘Fortunately for us the proprietor of the Nightingale thought he’d seen this particular customer before – on TRT News – and so he took this down to his local station yesterday evening.’

  Yusuf Kaya’s image had been all over the media since he’d absconded.

  ‘So where is the Nightingale?’ Mehmet Süleyman asked. ‘It’s not a name that is familiar to me.’

  Ardıç lowered his considerable behind into his groaning leather chair. ‘Gaziantep,’ he said.

  ‘Gaziantep!’

  İkmen, still fixated upon the images on his superior’s computer screen, said, ‘Look at him! An intelligent operator like Kaya must have seen the cameras in that place. You know, I think he’s actually enjoying being obse
rved. Arrogant bastard!’

  ‘Yes,’ Ardıç said to Süleyman, ‘our friend does seem to have got very far east in a very short space of time.’

  ‘If he’s eating, as he must be, baklava from Antep, then I envy him,’ İkmen said as he leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. ‘The centre of the pistachio nut universe, Gaziantep. They make the most sublime, nut-crammed baklava.’

  ‘I didn’t think that food was very high on your list of priorities, İkmen,’ Ardıç said, one bushy eyebrow raised.

  İkmen looked up, took a long drag from his cigarette and smiled. ‘I make an exception for baklava and chocolate, sir,’ he said. ‘They are so very bad for one.’

  Ardıç, who had to be at least twice İkmen’s weight, said, ‘Quite.’ He turned back to Süleyman. ‘On the basis that Kaya originates from Mardin and that much of the profit from his crime empire here in the city went back to his home town, we think that’s possibly where he’s headed. However, it is also known that he has friends in Antep, and so an Inspector Taner from Mardin has been despatched to investigate that connection. You, Süleyman, will rendezvous with Taner at Gaziantep airport tomorrow night.’

  ‘Sir?’

  This seemed, to Süleyman, to be somewhat of an over-reaction. Surely if Mardin were on to it, this Taner person could deal with Kaya without help from İstanbul.

  Ardıç looked narrowly at Süleyman. ‘It was you who originally apprehended Kaya and he was serving his sentence in this city when he absconded.’ He paused to relight his cigar, which had gone out during the course of their conversation. Then he lowered his head a little and added, ‘And besides, this time Kaya and his people killed our own.’

  Süleyman exchanged glances with İkmen, who drew a long, thin breath into his lungs.

  ‘I don’t think that either of you knew Constable Mete or Constable Kanlı.’