River of The Dead

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Oh, well, no harm done,’ he said. ‘Get your coat and we’ll go. There’s time.’

  At first she didn’t answer. She was thinking about something that very soon, and to Bülent’s intense irritation, became apparent.

  ‘Bülent, I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I can’t go to the dentist today.’

  ‘Mum, you have toothache, or you had it last week,’ Bülent replied. ‘You’ve got to go.’

  ‘Oh, but . . .’

  ‘Mum, if you have toothache you must go to the dentist,’ Bekir said.

  She put a hand on his arm. ‘Bekir, darling, I have so much washing to do. And then there’s baklava baking . . .’

  ‘Do the washing another time,’ Bekir said. ‘And if you tell me what time to take the baklava out of the oven, I can do that for you. I’m not going anywhere today.’

  But Fatma was adamant. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I can’t have you doing that, Bekir.’ She looked across at Bülent. ‘I’ll go and telephone the dentist. Cancel.’

  Without another word, she left the room. This, Bülent knew, was not healthy. His mother wasn’t leaving the apartment in case her prodigal son suddenly upped and disappeared again. Bekir knew it too, Bülent felt. In spite of his soothing words Bekir was sitting across the table from him looking very smug. Bülent knew he’d have to speak to his father about it soon, and also about that quite irritating musty smell that seemed to be all over the apartment these days.

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  About an hour’s drive to the east of Gaziantep (or forty minutes with Inspector Taner behind the wheel) is the town of Birecik. Sitting astride the Euphrates river, Birecik is famous for two things: the dam of the same name that lies to the north of the town and the fact that the shores of the Euphrates at this point are home to a particularly ugly, if rare, bird called the bald ibis. So unusual is this creature that every year people come from all over the world to see it. Not so the dam, the building of which necessitated the flooding of numerous local villages including the site where the fabulous mosaics of Zeugma, now in the Gaziantep museum, had been discovered. As they drove at lightning speed towards the town, Süleyman thought gloomily that he’d never managed to get to the museum on Zelfa’s behalf. Even though he knew that his wife had only mentioned Zeugma as a distraction from the fear she felt at his going away, he was sorry he hadn’t been able to see the mosaics. Now he didn’t know whether it was ever going to be possible. He and Taner had brought all their luggage with them on this trip. Chances were they were either going to stay in Birecik or move on eastwards.

  It was midday by the time they reached what was a rather scruffy town, albeit one with a fabulous Roman fortress that Taner told him had been captured by Christian crusaders in the tenth century. Not that such a span of time was considered to be that vast in the east. As the Mardin policewoman was very quick to point out, her father had older things in his yard back home.

  The Euphrates river is to the west of the town and is spanned by a bridge that was constructed back in the 1950s. It was in a teahouse on a cliff overlooking the bridge and the river below that Taner and Süleyman met the captain of the local Jandarma. Clad in the familiar green uniform of the paramilitary force that polices many rural areas in Turkey, Captain Hilmi Erdur, whom Taner had contacted by telephone earlier, was young and very tired-looking.

  ‘Sir, madam,’ he said, bowing to both Süleyman and Taner as they approached him, ‘I do apologise for my appearance. I’m afraid we had an incident last night and as a consequence I have not slept for almost two days. Please . . .’

  He pulled out chairs for them and then called for tea and a clean ashtray.

  As usual, Inspector Taner got straight to the point. ‘Captain, we’re looking for a woman called Bulbul. She comes originally from my city of Mardin and she is the aunt of the escaped convict Yusuf Kaya. I don’t know her exact age but I made a call back to the station in Mardin just before we left Gaziantep and a colleague there reckons she must be somewhere in her sixties. He, my colleague, thinks that Bulbul is probably the sister of Yusuf Kaya’s father. Apparently, or so it is said, she met a Birecik man in the bazaar in Mardin back in the late fifties and love blossomed. She left with him, and there was quite a scandal at the time. I don’t know the man’s name; apparently it is not spoken of in Mardin. All that is known is that he is a farmer and he is a lot older than his wife.’

  Captain Erdur looked grave. ‘Like everyone else, I have heard of Yusuf Kaya, and I know that his family are powerful and dangerous. I didn’t know that his aunt lived in Birecik.’

  ‘You know a lady fitting this description?’

  ‘A Mrs Bulbul Kaplan lives with her elderly husband Gazi on his farm just to the east of here,’ the captain said. ‘The Kaplans are involved in olive-growing. They have money and a lot of power round here. I am surprised to learn that Bulbul was once a Kaya – if indeed that is the case.’

  ‘Are the Kaplans known to be violent?’ Taner asked.

  The captain shrugged. ‘What can I say? I don’t know of any actual criminal connection. But they have money and their men have been known to defend the family honour against outsiders. The Kaplans always have the best of any clan-based fight here in Birecik.’

  A young boy brought three glasses of tea and an ashtray, set them all down in front of the officers and left.

  ‘At the time, back in the fifties, apparently people wondered why the Kayas didn’t go after Bulbul when she left Mardin with her lover,’ Taner said. ‘But if her lover was a member of a very powerful clan maybe it was deemed unwise to challenge them. After all, Bulbul was only a girl, wasn’t she? Hardly worth spilling male blood for, was she?’

  The overt bitterness in her voice made both of the men, for a moment, look away. Süleyman at least wondered just how hard life for a woman on the force in Mardin could be. He suspected it wasn’t at all easy.

  ‘But anyway,’ Taner said, recovering her composure, ‘we think that Yusuf Kaya may have been or indeed may be even now staying with his aunt here in Birecik.’

  The captain frowned. ‘You think Kaya would stay with someone who had dishonoured his family? Who told you such a thing?’

  ‘We learned that Kaya might be staying with his aunt from a woman who has been involved with him for many years,’ Süleyman said. ‘And, Captain, as for Kaya’s having any qualms about staying with someone like this aunt, he is a person entirely free of such concerns. He’s a psychopath, and as such he will use anyone or anything to achieve his objectives or preserve his own life.’

  ‘You arrested him in İstanbul?’

  ‘I did.’

  The young jandarme rubbed the sides of his face with his hands and then stared out into the distance, across the Euphrates, apparently deep in thought. Taner and Süleyman let him do so for a while, but when the silence went on the Mardin officer said, ‘Captain, what are you—’

  ‘Oh, no, not again,’ he murmured in reply. ‘Not again!’

  ‘Not again? Captain . . .’

  He rose quickly to his feet and pointed to the river in front of them. ‘There,’ he said, ‘there in the Euphrates, another present from bloody Iraq! Another creature forsaken by Allah!’

  Süleyman looked in the direction in which the jandarme was pointing, but all he could see was a small patch of what looked like sand in the middle of the Euphrates river.

  ‘So Yusuf Kaya was in here when he first became unwell,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Yes.’ The governor of Kartal Prison looked across the small room at the policeman and blinked owlishly through his thick, round spectacles. In spite of the day’s being warm it was cold in that dark little cell and the governor shuddered. ‘Kaya fought with another prisoner earlier in the day. He went berserk. He was put into solitary both to protect the other inmates and as a punishment. I’m sure you know how it is, Inspector.’

  Çetin İkmen did. Unlike, or so he had heard, most western European prisoners, Turkish inmates loathed being in
solitary for even the shortest period of time. Most of them, also unlike their western counterparts, hated two- and three-man cells as well, favouring the large dormitory style of incarceration that was now being phased out across the whole of Turkey.

  ‘Do you know what the fight was about?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘No.’ The governor was quite blunt and also seemingly unconcerned. But then that was no surprise. Prison was a harsh place; sorting out differences between individuals was not something the authorities did a lot of. As if to underline his position the governor said, ‘We keep order, Inspector İkmen, as you know. Keeping order when those in your care are murderers, rapists, terrorists and drug dealers takes up all of your time.’

  ‘I understand that, sir,’ İkmen said. ‘But I will need to speak to the prisoner with whom Kaya fought.’

  The governor looked at him steadily through his spectacles and said, ‘Do you think that Kaya might have had help to escape from within this institution?’

  İkmen took a deep breath of the fetid, damp air around him. ‘I don’t know, sir, but—’

  ‘Because, Inspector,’ the governor added quickly, ‘if you think that any of my officers were involved you are very much mistaken. Apart from anything else, officer Bayar died during the course of the escape, while officer Eren is still fighting for his life. Other prisoners are one thing, but my officers . . .’

  ‘Sir, you said yourself that no other officers apart from Eren and Bayar were involved with Kaya that night,’ İkmen said. ‘We can’t speak to Eren yet, but we have spoken to the other significant person, your doctor, who gave it as his opinion that Kaya was only experiencing a panic attack that night.’

  ‘Yes, I know that. I—’

  ‘You, sir, as far as I can tell, on the advice of Officer Bayar made the decision to send Kaya to the Cerrahpaşa because you and or Bayar were afraid that he might be having a cardiac arrest.’

  The governor sighed. ‘Our doctor, between you and me, Inspector, is sometimes . . .’ He frowned. ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Sir, we know that the doctor drinks,’ İkmen said. ‘I can understand why you sent Kaya to the hospital, believe me I can. But what interests me is how he got there.’

  ‘How?’

  İkmen looked down at the small hard bed built into the cold cell wall and decided that he didn’t need to sit down that much, however hard his back was aching.

  ‘Sir, it occurs to me that if Kaya had not been in solitary that night the chances of your detecting his supposed cardiac problems would have been slim. On the dormitory his cries for help may well have been drowned out by the moans and cries of other men, as well you know,’ İkmen said. ‘As you also know, when Kaya escaped from the Cerrahpaşa he ran out of there like a teenager, and so I think that we can safely say that he was faking his cardiac arrest. The doctor’s assessment was therefore accurate – any prisoner just about to put an escape plan into action would be panicking and his blood pressure be raised. So now I need to speak to the prisoner he had been fighting with earlier in the day. Because it is that prisoner who put Kaya into solitary. That prisoner, sir, whether by accident or design, allowed Yusuf Kaya to escape from this prison.’

  Three of Captain Erdur’s men were on the shoreline when Erdur, Süleyman and Taner arrived. Two of them made sure that people stayed as far back as possible while the third waded out into the river to retrieve the dead body.

  ‘This is what had me up all night last night,’ the captain said wearily to the two visiting officers.

  ‘Another body in the Euphrates?’ Süleyman asked, genuinely surprised.

  ‘When I said they came up from Iraq, I wasn’t lying,’ Captain Erdur said.

  ‘You mean from the conflict with the Americans?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Erdur said. ‘Insurgents, terrorists – whatever they’re called – maybe. Often I think just poor ordinary people caught up in that nightmare over there. We’re rarely able to identify them. The one we found last night was a woman, a young one.’ He looked down for a moment and then muttered, ‘It’s tragic.’

  Inspector Taner, whose stiletto heels were sinking a bit in the thick river mud, said, ‘What do you do with them? Do you repatriate, or—’

  ‘Captain Erdur!’ The man in the middle of the river with the apparently yellow-clad body was waving.

  ‘Yes?’ Erdur said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘This is an American soldier,’ the young jandarme said.

  ‘What!’ Without another word Captain Erdur plunged into the waters of the Euphrates and waded towards his man and the waterlogged body.

  Süleyman, alone now with a decidedly unsteady Inspector Taner, said, ‘Can it really be an American soldier, do you think?’

  ‘I’ve heard stories about Iraqi bodies being found in the Euphrates,’ she said. ‘It’s been happening for a while. But I’ve never heard anything about any Americans. Maybe it isn’t. Let’s see.’

  She stumbled a little as the mud sank beneath her, but Süleyman resisted the temptation to assist her. She would not, he felt certain, appreciate it. As a woman in what was very much a man’s world, Taner felt she had a lot to prove. Female officers were somewhat like this in İstanbul, although there the distinctions between men and women were much less marked than he imagined they would be in Mardin. His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of retching coming from the middle of the Euphrates. The young jandarme who had originally gone to retrieve the body was being sick.

  ‘Yüksel! Güzer!’ Captain Erdur yelled over at his remaining men on the banks of the river. ‘Come and help!’

  The two young men left the few curious locals they had been talking to and ran into the water. As they went in so the other officer came out, looking decidedly white around the face. Süleyman went up to him and said, ‘Are you all right?’

  The young man shuddered and then said, ‘Not really, sir.’

  ‘Had you never seen a body before?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve seen bodies before, sir. Several, actually, but never like that. Not ever like that!’

  His eyes had a glint of horror in them. It was something, this shocked and appalled look, that Süleyman had seen many, many times before amongst victims of crime.

  ‘Was it an American soldier?’ Taner asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the young man said. ‘I recognised the uniform. But . . . but – madam, sir – the body, it . . . it had, it has, no face! Someone has . . .’ He leaned forward, retching again. When he stopped he said, ‘Someone, some . . . some animal has scraped it all away!’ He vomited, missing Süleyman’s shoes by at most a centimetre.

  Süleyman looked up at Taner and then at the figure of Captain Erdur emerging slowly from the river. His face, though not white and shocked, was grey with both strain and fatigue. When he got close to the little group he said, ‘Nightmare! An American soldier without dog-tags. Where do I even start?’

  ‘You’ll have to pass it up to your commander,’ Süleyman said. ‘The American military will have to be informed.’ It was self-evident, but he said it anyway. ‘Captain, the face of the body . . .’

  ‘Gone,’ he said, confirming what his still heaving officer had just told them. ‘Looks like it’s been hacked off with a knife. Anything goes over in that poor wretched country these days! People are turning into beasts.’ He looked down for a moment and then scanned the cliff behind them, where a few local people had gathered. Then he frowned. Touching Süleyman on the arm, he said, ‘Inspector, turn round and look behind you.’

  ‘What?’ But he did as the captain had asked and turned round to look up at the cliff, the track that led up to the top and the tea garden they had just left.

  ‘Up there, on top of the cliff,’ the captain said. ‘The lady with the green headscarf, that is Bulbul Kaplan.’

  Süleyman squinted up into the sunlight and saw a short, dumpy woman whose head was indeed covered with shiny green silk. Unlike the rest of the onlookers, she was, he felt, looking not so much at what was happening in the river a
s directly at him.

  İkmen didn’t as a rule have a lot of time for prison guards. In his experience they were often people who were really frustrated police officers. Having failed to make the grade for the police, many prison guards slotted resentfully into the incarceration service and spent much of their time taking out their ire on the prisoners. But they had their uses and at this moment İkmen was very glad that he had a couple of big brutish examples with him. The governor had agreed that, provided he didn’t take Ayşe Farsakoğlu with him, he could interview the inmate who had fought with Yusuf Kaya on the day of his escape. Apparently the man in question, Ara Berköz, was a violent rapist on whom just the sight of an attractive woman acted as a provocation. İkmen entered the room the governor had set aside for the interview and found himself looking at a huge, black-bearded man with small but intensely bright blue eyes. On his shoulders were the firmly planted hands of the two guards always allocated to Ara Berköz every time he had a visitor. The rapist, the governor had told him, had a tendency to bite when agitated and so letting him sit without restraint of some sort was not really an option. İkmen told the huge man who he was and why he was asking for help.

  ‘You fought with Yusuf Kaya, just before he escaped, out in the yard, didn’t you, Ara,’ he said.

  Ara Berköz didn’t speak for a very long time. Irritating though this was, it did give İkmen a chance to take the man in. On first glance one saw only the bulk and those extraordinary eyes, but now that İkmen really looked he could see the scarring too. Not just on his barely clad torso but on what could be seen of his face also, tens if not hundreds of sealed-up cuts. İkmen wondered where he’d got them, who had inflicted them. Less mysterious was the way in which Ara Berköz’s black, tangled hair moved in rhythm to a plague of hungry headlice.

  ‘Anyone,’ the deep, low voice said menacingly, ‘who criticises Yıldız the Body is going to have it coming.’

  İkmen blinked. Yıldız the Body was a young supermodel. Born in the very run-down and troubled district of Edirnekapı, Yıldız Efe had been dubbed ‘the Body’ by the modelling agency that had hired her, aged sixteen, in 2003. Three years later she was a multimillion-lire industry and owned one house in İstanbul and another one somewhere on the south coast. Girls all over Turkey idolised the Body mainly because she was so very, very thin.