River of The Dead

by Barbara Nadel

  Just to clarify, İkmen asked, ‘You fought with Yusuf Kaya because he was critical of the supermodel Yıldız?’

  Ara Berköz’s face distorted briefly into something that might have been pain. ‘He said nasty things,’ he said. He moved, seemingly to put one of his hands into his trouser pocket. The guards took his arms and held them hard. Ara’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I just want to get my picture!’ he said. ‘Let me get my picture!’

  Beyond knowing that the psychiatrist who had assessed Ara Berköz after his arrest had given him a mental age of twelve, İkmen knew little about the man before him. He looked up and said to the guards, ‘Let him have his picture.’

  The guards looked at each other and then the one on the left said, ‘Ara, you can have your picture if you let me get it for you.’

  Ara Berköz made a thin whining noise in his throat. Both guards pushed his arms up and then the one on the left put a hand at the top of his hip.

  ‘Ara,’ he said, ‘do you have a blade in with your picture? If I hurt myself getting the photo out there will be repercussions.’

  The rapist, his arms raised up in the air, hands hanging into his filthy, tangled hair, looked like a trapped animal. The guard on the right leaned towards İkmen and told him what the policeman felt he knew already. ‘Ara here hurts himself when he gets upset,’ he said. ‘He likes to cut. Got a body like a war zone.’

  ‘I haven’t got a blade,’ Ara Berköz said. ‘I wouldn’t put a blade in with any of my pictures, especially not my special pictures.’

  Carefully, the guard on the left put his hand into Ara Berköz’s trouser pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. He threw it gingerly on to the table in front of the prisoner, whose eyes lit up when he saw it. Once his hands were free again, Ara Berköz very gently opened out the folded sheet and with a contented sigh smoothed it out and stared at it. It was a topless shot of Yıldız the Body lying flat out on a beach somewhere. Although thin to the point of danger, her breasts were enormous, artificially enhanced and to İkmen really quite painful-looking. Once the rapist had settled himself and seemed content, İkmen spoke to him again. ‘Ara,’ he said, ‘when you fought with Yusuf Kaya about Yıldız, who started the fight?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ Fixated on the picture, he wasn’t really listening. Or didn’t want to listen.

  ‘Did Yusuf insult Yıldız first or was there a conversation before you started to fight?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Don’t know.’ This time his voice was, if anything, even softer and more somnolent than before. Maybe letting Ara have his picture hadn’t been such a good idea. Far from helping him to relax and open up, the photograph appeared to be mesmerising him. İkmen looked up at the guards holding Ara Berköz and, seeing no interest in either of their faces, came to a unilateral decision to help things along in his own way. After all, the guards were meant to be there to protect him.

  He leaned forward and snatched the photograph out of Ara Berköz’s fingers. A howl of agony from the prisoner was followed by a terrifying break for freedom which had İkmen, until the guards managed to get their charge fully under control, cowering against the wall.

  ‘What in the name of . . . Why did you do that?’ the guard on the left said as he wrestled a spitting Ara Berköz back into his seat.

  ‘You’re lucky he didn’t bite you!’ the other guard observed. ‘Allah!’

  ‘Ara,’ İkmen said breathlessly, completely ignoring the prison officers, ‘Ara, did Yusuf Kaya or anyone around him want you to fight him the day he escaped? Did he—’

  ‘Give me back Yıldız! Give her back to me!’ He gnashed his teeth and cried at the same time. ‘Give her to me!’

  ‘We’ll have to take him back to his cell!’ the guard on the left said. ‘Can’t have him like this!’

  ‘No!’ İkmen said. ‘No, don’t do that!’ Then, looking straight into Ara Berköz’s tiny furious eyes again, he addressed him directly. ‘Ara, if you tell me exactly what happened before you fought with Yusuf Kaya you can have Yıldız back. I swear it!’

  ‘Give her back! Give her back! Give her back!’

  ‘Tell me the truth and you can—’

  ‘We’re out of here,’ the guard on the right said as he and his colleague pulled Ara Berköz out of his chair.

  ‘No!’ İkmen wailed.

  Allah, but what was this? He was supposed to be interviewing this man! But it had all gone wrong and now it looked as if his chances of getting at something, anything, were slipping away.

  ‘Ara,’ İkmen said as he walked towards the prisoner, ‘tell me what happened and you can have your picture – now!’

  He held the rumpled photograph out towards the wild and furious man, who stopped and looked at it. It was just out of reach. Then Ara raised his head and said, ‘Yusuf said he’d give me that lovely photograph if I had a row with him. I could even beat him, too.’

  ‘Is that the truth, Ara?’ İkmen said. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The guards were pulling him out of the room now. ‘That’s enough, inspector,’ one of them said. ‘You’re tiring the poor brute.’

  İkmen, following nervously, handed the photograph back to the prisoner and said, ‘Thank you, Ara. Now look, did anyone else know . . .’

  The guard on the left pulled Ara Berköz out of the room just as he was saying something İkmen could neither hear nor understand. The guard on the right stayed behind and said to İkmen, ‘He’s far too agitated now. He needs to cool right down.’

  There was a look that could have been alarm on the man’s face. Had it been the suggestion of some other person’s being involved in Yusuf Kaya’s escape that had got this man and the other guard so very agitated? That Kaya’s escape had been facilitated by both inmates and guards at the Kartal Prison was not a new or revolutionary notion. Now Ara Berköz had admitted that the contention was, at least in part, true. He had, in exchange for a photograph of Yıldız the Body, argued and then fought with Yusuf Kaya on the day of the latter’s escape. The fight had ensured that Kaya was put into solitary confinement, after which he had gone into his cardiac arrest routine. But if Berköz had helped him then maybe others had too. Maybe others amongst his jailers . . .

  ‘I’ll be back to see Mr Berköz again soon,’ İkmen said as he stared very steadily at the guard in front of him. ‘Make sure that he stays well, won’t you?’

  In spite of Bulbul Kaplan’s far from fashionable appearance, she and her husband were obviously wealthy. Their house, a new villa-style building with multiple balconies – just like those holiday homes of the rich down on the south coast – was full of things like plasma screen televisions, American fridges and tiny, intricate CD players. Outside, surprisingly, there was no car, but the reason for that soon became apparent.

  ‘My husband, Gazi, is resting,’ Bulbul Kaplan said as she ushered Süleyman and Taner into her considerable living room. ‘He’s elderly.’ She looked down briefly, and then added, ‘And blind.’

  Hence the lack of car, Süleyman thought. Bulbul Kaplan, once she had, like her neighbours, tutted and shaken her head at the appearance of the dead American soldier in the Euphrates for a little while, had agreed to talk to Süleyman and Taner very readily. She didn’t know what it was about, of course, but she did know that it had to concern her old home town in some way. She had indeed had the surname of Kaya before her marriage. On the way over in Inspector Taner’s car she had commented upon the policewoman’s own surname.

  ‘I knew a Taner back in Mardin,’ she had said. ‘Şeymus Taner was a coppersmith in the bazaar.’

  ‘My grandfather,’ Taner had responded immediately.

  ‘Your grandfather!’ Bulbul Kaplan had opened her big blue eyes very wide. ‘Allah! But he was a Master of Sharmeran too, was he not?’

  ‘He was,’ Taner said. ‘Now my father Seçkin has that honour.’

  ‘Seçkin? You are Seçkin’s daughter? Allah! But now I can see it in you! Yes, the good bones . . .’


  She had wittered on about how attractive, kind and intelligent Taner’s father was, although quite what the designation Master of Sharmeran might mean Süleyman didn’t know. As far as he was aware the Sharmeran was a mythical eastern Turkish snake goddess. An ugly thing, he had always felt, the Sharmeran had the head and torso of a woman and the tail and belly of a snake. To be candid, this image, which one saw occasionally on pictures and plates in antique shops in İstanbul but apparently just about everywhere east of Kayseri, gave him the creeps. What on earth did a Master of Sharmeran do, and did the fact that such a bizarre title even existed mean that the people of Mardin and places like it actually believed in the existence of that deity? Surely someone like Edibe Taner was far too pragmatic and modern to take any notice of such nonsense?

  But the Sharmeran wasn’t spoken of for long and later, at the farmhouse, talk turned to other things. While Bulbul Kaplan prepared tea, she and Taner spoke of other Mardin characters, the bazaar, the new and apparently very smart hotels, and the Ocean, the great luminous Mesopotamian plain below the city. Maybe, Süleyman thought, if they did have to go to Mardin he could stay in a hotel after all. They sounded, from the way Taner described them, really quite good. That said, the monastery Dr Sarkissian had recommended just outside Mardin, St Sobo’s, would certainly be more peaceful, and the doctor’s old friend, the Syrian monk Seraphim Yunun, had sounded charming. The doctor had called to let him have Seraphim’s details just that morning. Apparently the Syrian, like Süleyman himself, was very appreciative of old buildings.

  ‘Mrs Kaplan,’ Taner said as she took a glass of tea out of the older woman’s hands and sat down, ‘we have to talk to you about your nephew, Yusuf Kaya.’

  Bulbul Kaplan looked upwards, presumably to where her husband was sleeping, and then sat down beside Taner. She looked, Süleyman felt, strained now. Up on the cliff with a dead body below her she had been fine, but . . .

  ‘I . . . I don’t see my family, Inspector Taner,’ Bulbul said slowly. ‘There was a . . . a falling-out, as I am sure someone back home would have told you.’

  ‘I know that you left Mardin in order to marry your husband, yes,’ Taner said. ‘But, Mrs Kaplan, any enmity that might have resulted from that did not I think impact directly upon your nephew Yusuf.’

  Bulbul Kaplan looked at Taner, genuinely struck. ‘Not impact? Inspector, I left my clan! You are from Mardin – you know! I married a man they did not want me to marry! How could that not impact upon the son of my brother? I know that Yusuf is a criminal but he is still a Kaya; he still protects the family honour!’

  ‘And yet, Mrs Kaplan, we have reason to believe that you have seen Yusuf in recent times.’

  ‘Who?’ Bulbul Kaplan was indignant. Again she looked upwards. She lowered her voice before she spoke, but she was obviously upset. ‘Who says that I see Yusuf? Yusuf is in prison in İstanbul!’

  ‘Mrs Kaplan, it doesn’t matter who says what,’ Taner said. ‘Have you seen your nephew Yusuf in the last few days?’

  ‘Last few days? He’s in prison! Yusuf Kaya is—’

  ‘He escaped, Mrs Kaplan,’ Taner said. Both she and Süleyman looked at the two working, if silent, plasma television screens in the room. Bulbul Kaplan, unlike her husband, could see, and if she could see she, like the rest of the country, had to know that Yusuf Kaya had escaped from Kartal Prison the previous weekend. She was lying and Inspector Taner as well as Süleyman and Bulbul Kaplan herself knew it. Not that Taner even began to allude to such a notion.

  ‘Have you seen or spoken to Yusuf Kaya in the last few days, Mrs Kaplan?’ Taner asked.

  ‘No!’ She was trying to keep her voice down but her tone was still hurt, though quite forceful too.

  ‘So did you see him before he went to prison?’ Taner asked.

  ‘No!’ Bulbul Kaplan leaned towards the other woman and said, ‘I don’t have anything to do with my family. That all finished when I married Gazi. They don’t see me, I don’t see them.’

  ‘And yet how did our informant know about even your existence if you have no contact?’ Taner asked. She would not reveal Anastasia’s name or where she lived, but she was going to use what she had said to get the truth from Bulbul Kaplan. ‘The information we received is not from a person you could possibly know. Yusuf does know this person and through him, so this person says, he or she is aware of you and of your relationship with Yusuf Kaya. Mrs Kaplan, if Yusuf Kaya came here—’

  ‘All right!’ She flung her arms up into the air and then let them rest in her lap. ‘All right, Yusuf came here.’ It was not much more than a whisper now.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last year.’

  ‘When last year?’

  ‘I don’t know! Last year!’

  ‘Why? Why did he come here, Mrs Kaplan?’

  The older woman sighed. ‘Yusuf was just a baby when I left Mardin,’ she said. ‘Last year he came and found me.’

  Taner frowned. ‘What for? Weren’t you worried about that?’

  ‘In case he took revenge on behalf of our clan? No,’ Bulbul Kaplan said. ‘He came offering the hand of friendship and I saw no reason not to take it from him. To me he was kind and polite.’

  ‘And your husband?’ Süleyman asked. ‘What did your husband make of that?’

  Clan rivalries, especially in the east, were notoriously intractable. He could no more imagine Yusuf Kaya and Bulbul Kaplan cosying up after such an incident than he could see the convict figuratively in bed with her husband.

  Bulbul Kaplan looked down at the floor. ‘Gazi was in hospital at the time. His eyes . . . He has operations from time to time . . .’

  ‘So Yusuf Kaya came to visit you when your husband was in hospital,’ Taner said. ‘Did it not occur to you, Mrs Kaplan, that perhaps that was planned? For Yusuf to see you alone? To accept your hospitality . . .’

  ‘Yusuf appeared and I have no doubt that it was planned, but . . .’ She smiled a little. Her face was round and pleasant, only her amazing blue eyes giving a clue as to the beautiful girl she must once have been. ‘My husband’s family have been good to me, but they are not my blood. Yusuf,’ she looked up and said simply, ‘is. He’s a nice man, at least he was to me. What he has done—’

  ‘Yusuf has killed people,’ Süleyman said. ‘Until we arrested him he was one of the most powerful drug dealers in İstanbul.’

  Bulbul Kaplan shrugged. ‘He is my nephew. When I spoke to Yusuf it was like talking to my father once again.’

  ‘Did he ask you for money?’

  ‘I gave him food and drink, he stayed one night,’ she said. ‘He came because he was curious to meet me, that was all.’ She sat up straight and added, ‘I appreciated it too. But I haven’t seen him since. I couldn’t allow it anyway, not with Gazi . . .’

  ‘No.’

  She seemed to be genuinely sad about not being able to see her nephew again. They must have got on well but, as Süleyman at least knew only too well, whatever their relationship might be it was purely on Yusuf Kaya’s terms. Bulbul Kaplan might think that Yusuf Kaya loved her, but that was unlikely. Yusuf Kaya loved only himself. He’d come to her in all probability because he needed somewhere in the Gaziantep area, apart from Anastasia’s brothel, to hide out at the time.

  After they left, Inspector Taner confirmed his suspicion. ‘Kaya was seen back in Mardin in March of last year,’ she said. ‘We received a report that he and his brother Metin, another delightful character I do not think, were doing drug deals with some of the gypsies out on the Ocean. But when we arrived the two men had gone and we were left with one young boy with powder round his nose and a woman out of her mind on ketamine. I assume Yusuf headed up here after that.’

  ‘He wasn’t seen again in Mardin?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘No, but Metin was,’ she said. ‘I found him myself with his head down the toilet of a local restaurant. Dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Coke overdose. That or his brother made him snort enough to kill him. T
hat would not be outside Yusuf’s range of behaviours, as you know. Not of course that his family would ever believe that.’

  Süleyman looked up above the olive trees outside the Kaplan house towards the now darkening sky. It had been a long and ultimately frustrating day. ‘What now?’ he said to Taner as she fired up the engine of her gutsy Volkswagen Golf.

  Taner lit a cigarette and said, ‘If Kaya isn’t in Gaziantep any more and he isn’t here . . .’

  ‘You don’t think he’s here in Birecik?’

  She shrugged. ‘Bulbul Kaplan could be lying. She did lie, as we know, when we first spoke about Yusuf. Her relationship with him, if it indeed exists, is odd for those involved in clan business. I will ask Captain Erdur to keep watch on Bulbul Kaplan and her farm.’

  ‘And so . . .’

  ‘And so on to Mardin,’ Taner said with a smile. ‘As far as we know Kaya has not left the country and if he hasn’t done that then he’ll be with the people who love him most. His family.’

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  There was no way anyone could have got any sort of idea what the Mesopotamian plain looked like under cover of darkness. All Süleyman knew as he sat beside Taner as she wrestled her car over uncomfortably rutted road surfaces was that he was exhausted. After a night of very little sleep, he’d been up since the crack of dawn and now here he was powering on into the back of beyond where the only lights that could be seen came from tanks on their way out east to fight the Kurdish separatists, the PKK. Someone – an informer, the local Jandarma had reckoned, Taner told him – had been beheaded by one or other group of terrorists in a village near to Mardin. It was not, after all, just the PKK who operated in this area. There was also Hezbollah and possibly al-Qaeda too, Taner expounded breezily, as well as some other little splinter groups – Marxists, religious fundamentalists, ultra-nationalists. That she seemed to be happy going back to what to Süleyman appeared to be a hotbed of violence was odd. But then Edibe Taner was not your run of the mill policewoman.