Ayşe frowned. ‘Glass? You think that Altun may have been killed by the same people who killed the police officers and the prison guard?’
İkmen shrugged. ‘Altun died just after Kaya escaped. He hung out around Beyoğlu, he was a junkie, the chances are he knew Yusuf Kaya. It’s . . . well, it’s . . . Kaya has seemingly cleaned up so much in the wake of his escape, I find myself wondering whether Altun could have been a part of it.’
Still frowning, Ayşe said, ‘You have one of your . . . intuitions, sir?’
‘Maybe, maybe not, Ayşe,’ İkmen said. The further away in time he got from his late mother, the witch of Üsküdar, the more unlikely her powers and his own seemed to be. Or at least that was how he had come to feel about it recently. This was after all the twenty-first century, and no one sane believed in such things, did they?
Yet although Hüseyin Altun did not have any observed connection to Yusuf Kaya, his feeling that one did indeed exist was strong.
‘Ayşe,’ he said as they prepared to leave the hospital room, ‘you arrested Hüseyin Altun several times. Did you ever get involved with the kids in his street gang?’
‘When I or some other officer could catch them, yes,’ she said. As they left the room she added, ‘There were several boys I think I might know by sight. A girl too. Blond hair and I think she might have been foreign, Bulgarian maybe. This was years ago; they must all be grown up now. Oh, and there was a boy called Aslan too. I think that was his name, Aslan . . .’
Just before she closed the door behind her, Ayşe heard a very faint groan from the man on the bed. She and İkmen went and got Dr Eldem immediately, but he said the groan was only a physical response to the pain the patient was probably still experiencing even in coma. It meant nothing. It did not signal the end of Ramazan Eren’s sojourn in darkness. He gave him more diamorphine for the pain and all three left.
The twenty-first-century city of Mardin is actually two very different places. Both exist in the shadow of the fortress of Mardin which sits atop the peak that dominates the whole area, Mazi mountain. To the west of this huge, craggy pile is New Mardin. It consists of high-rise apartment blocks, supermarkets, bus stations and most things modern people need to lead a reasonably comfortable modern life. In the lee of the fortress itself is Old Mardin, which is quite another place. Basically, Mardin city is clustered around one street which is actually called Avenue One. Above and below this street exist the many winding lanes, alleys and literally thousands of stone steps that make up the old city. The buildings, which are made of yellow limestone, seen from the vantage point of the Mesopotamian plain below the city, seem to almost hang from the side of the mountain in waves of washing-draped confusion. Between Avenue One and the much newer road far below it that delineates the southern boundary of the city, Avenue Two, are very few places accessible to anything bigger than a motorbike. So it was that Edibe Taner and Mehmet Süleyman were forced to walk down to their destination from the place where she parked her car on Republic Square, which is about a third of the way along Avenue One.
For Süleyman, who had travelled in Taner’s car along Avenue Two in order to get into the city and had therefore stared open-mouthed at yet more immense views over the Mesopotamian plain, the main focus of the city, Republic Square, proved to be a disappointment. As well as being an important stop for the many minibuses running to and from the new city and the surrounding villages, the square also acted as a somewhat makeshift car park. Taner parked her vehicle in front of the entrance to a branch of Akbank, outside which two of her uniformed colleagues stood leaning their elbows on the stocks of their sub-machine guns. Süleyman stepped out into a thin layer of mud and litter and looked up at a range of buildings that looked as if they had originated in the 1960s. An ugly kebab restaurant with plastic flowers on a tatty upstairs veranda was only bested by a truly hideous building that announced itself as the Hotel Bayraktar. Almost Soviet in its blockishness, the Hotel Bayraktar had noticeably more bullet holes in its masonry than unshattered windows. Süleyman imagined that this had to be a legacy of the violent struggle between the Turkish army and the PKK that had caused Mardin to be closed to outsiders from time to time. He was in fact going to ask Taner about it when suddenly he noticed that he was surrounded by a group of tiny boys.
‘You like guide?’ one asked him in English.
It was a surreal moment. He hadn’t long been awake, he was in a place that so far looked like a cross between some sort of mythical mountain land and Leningrad, and he was being spoken to by a child with a wildly divergent accent in a foreign language. For a moment, he just stood silent, like a mute.
‘He’s with me. Go away!’ was what he thought he heard Inspector Taner say, although he couldn’t be sure. What she spoke was Turkish, but only just. The little boys melted back into the almost invisible alleyway whence they had come.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ Taner said as she wandered towards him, a cigarette hanging idly from her lips. ‘Kids here can smell an outsider. And as you see, this is not a wealthy city, so if you do feel like slipping them the odd kuruş to go away, that’s up to you.’
As he looked at her, Süleyman became aware of the truly wonderful building behind her. Constructed of yellow sandstone, it was reached via a sweeping staircase made from the same material. It was a three-storey, flat-roofed building fronted by a series of graceful arches on each level. In effect the building was terraced to allow upper storeys to have semi-private spaces where one could walk, seek the shade or shelter from the rain. Unlike the Zeytounian house in Gaziantep, this mansion, as he imagined it had to be, was not surrounded by a thick, high wall.
‘That is the Mardin museum,’ Taner said when she saw him looking up at it. ‘One of the newer buildings in the old city.’
‘Newer?’
‘It’s nineteenth-century,’ she said. ‘It was built as the Syrian Catholic Patriarchate. Now it’s our museum. Come.’
She led him across the square, past the 1960s kebab restaurant and into an alleyway that, in terms of architectural style, owed more to Damascus than to İstanbul. It was bounded by high stone walls, and as they walked towards Yusuf Kaya’s family home they passed many donkeys and mules laden with all sorts of bundles and baggage.
‘In Mardin we use donkeys to carry our rubbish away,’ Taner explained as they approached a tiny doorway in a very high, yellow wall. ‘You have trucks in İstanbul, we have donkeys here.’ She smiled. ‘In terms of global warming, I think we are better.’ And then she stopped. ‘Now, Inspector, when we go through this doorway we will be in the family home of Yusuf Kaya. Unlike most of the mansions of Mardin, which are divided into flats, this house is just one dwelling for one family. So everyone you will see from now on will be connected to Yusuf Kaya in some way. As I told you in the car, I interviewed his wife, his mother and a whole host of relations when he first escaped from prison and our officers have been watching this property ever since. But now I want you to meet them too. Or rather I want them to see that you, the officer who arrested him in İstanbul, is not easily going to let Yusuf go. They will be very nice and polite to you, even though they hate you almost as much as they hate me. They’ll make you drink mirra. I’m sorry.’
‘Hate you? Why do they hate you?’ Süleyman asked.
Edibe Taner, who still hadn’t slept since Birecik, said, ‘Because I’m a woman and a police officer and therefore very unnatural. I belong to a different clan, my father is a Master of Sharmeran . . .’
‘Which means? Master of Sharmeran?’
‘Come on, we must go inside now,’ Taner said, bending her head to get through the tiny door in the thick high wall. ‘We are expected.’
Süleyman, still none the wiser about the exact nature of a Master of Sharmeran, followed. As he went through he pushed past a man whose head and face were almost totally obscured by a thick woollen shawl. The man looked at him briefly though glittering black eyes and then ran off down the alleyway in the direction of Avenue Two.
Çiçek İkmen found only her youngest brother Kemal at home when she turned up at her parents’ apartment in Sultanahmet. In between their various flight shifts, Çiçek had learned enough from her brother Bülent about their mother’s behaviour to make her feel alarmed. As one of the older İkmen children, Çiçek remembered all the trouble Bekir had caused before he ran away and all the heartache his departure had left behind it. But her mother and Bekir were out, so she had to try to get some sort of view on her mother’s behaviour from her sullen teenage brother Kemal. Bülent had also mentioned some sort of smell that seemed to be suddenly present in their parents’ home.
‘Kemal,’ she said as she sat down behind her mother’s large kitchen table, ‘how are things? With our brother Bekir?’
The boy, who was fiddling rather ineffectually with the samovar, looked sheepishly across at this sister who was old enough to be his mother. ‘OK,’ he said, pushing a hank of greasy black hair away from his spot-encrusted forehead.
‘Do you think that Mum spends a lot of time with Bekir?’
‘Maybe.’ He had poured some tea into a glass for his sister and was now trying to top it up with water from the samovar, but he was trying to turn the handle the wrong way. Like almost all of her brothers, Kemal had been indulged by their mother to such an extent that he was domestically useless. Only Bülent seemed to have emerged from this child-like dependence upon women and that was because Çiçek, who lived with him, flatly refused to indulge him.
But she had to make an exception and help this boy because otherwise he was going to break the samovar. ‘Out of the way.’ As she pushed him aside she felt the heat from his blushing face. She also smelt something very unpleasant and, as Bülent had put it, ‘musty’ too. It was coming, she felt, from Kemal. Knowing, because she knew her mother so well, that it couldn’t possibly be the smell of dirty or unaired clothes, she had to assume that it came from something else Kemal was doing.
‘What’s that smell, Kemal?’ she asked as she finished making up her glass of tea.
‘Smell?’ He blushed again.
‘Yes, smell,’ his sister said. ‘Like a sort of yeasty or musty smell.’
He didn’t respond. She took, she knew, an evil delight in his embarrassment. But then he was a moody, awkward and tedious boy. Her mother had been over forty when she’d had him and he’d aged her. ‘You must be able to smell it, Kemal.’
‘Cream for my spots,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s a new one. Smells a bit.’ His entire head was red now and she noticed he was actually sweating. Finally she felt ashamed of herself. Poor Kemal. He was the only one of her siblings to have suffered horribly with acne and now he was having to apply vile-smelling creams in an attempt to alleviate his misery. But at least there wasn’t some sort of damp or rot in the apartment that she needed to tell her father about. Not that Çetin İkmen would exactly go into overdrive in order to fix such a problem. He was nothing if not totally careless about his home. But it had bothered Bülent enough, together with their mother’s behaviour, to warrant a visit from Çiçek, and now that the smell was dealt with she went on to other matters.
‘Kemal,’ she said as she drank her tea and then lit up a cigarette. ‘Mum and Bekir—’
‘I’m not going to say anything against him if that’s what you think! You’re just like Bülent, just totally jealous and stuff!’ her still brick red brother flared. ‘Bekir’s cool! I like him!’
And without another word he stomped out of the kitchen and went to his room. Çiçek, alone in the kitchen now, was frankly rather shocked. Kemal had never been easy even as a small child, but one thing he had never been before was in any way partisan with regard to his siblings. He had, in the past, either hated or disregarded them all with equal force. Now suddenly he had a favourite. Çiçek wondered why. But then, recalling how manipulative her brother Bekir had been when they were children, she thought that perhaps Kemal’s behaviour wasn’t that difficult to understand. Bekir, as she recalled, had always delighted in playing people off against each other. He’d done it with her and her older brothers who had actually fought, basically over Bekir. What, she wondered, was he doing with Kemal now? Who was he pitching the boy up against, or was it everyone?
Later, bored with Kemal’s seething silence and fed up with waiting for her mother, Çiçek left. As she walked down the hall to retrieve her shoes from the rack by the front door, the musty smell if anything got even stronger.
The house the Kaya family and their attendants now lived in had once been the home of a wealthy Syrian Christian family. The two-storey house was arranged in the traditional way in that the family lived on the upper storey and used the courtyard and the rooms down below for cooking, storage and servant and animal accommodation. Not that they had servants, as such. Those wild-eyed men who served Süleyman and Taner with mirra coffee at the request of the women of the house were not like the ancient retainers the man from İstanbul could remember his grandfather employing. These were no soft-spoken remnants from a previous age, not with guns in their belts and resentment on their faces.
Süleyman had seen Yusuf Kaya’s wife, Zeynep, before. She, together with one of her sons and some other women, had attended her husband’s trial in İstanbul. Compared to many gangsters’ women he had come across in the past, Zeynep Kaya was very low-key indeed. Whereas some would scream, curse and even fight those around them when their men were sentenced to long prison terms, Zeynep Kaya had remained silent behind the chiffon scarf that had covered her head and mouth for the whole of the proceedings. One of her sons, a boy in his early teens Süleyman reckoned, had done enough of the other sort of thing for both of them. But this time no young boy, nor indeed any children, were in evidence. There was just Zeynep and an old veiled woman who Taner told him was Yusuf Kaya’s mother, Bilqis.
As they sat down on the floor beside the table upon which the mirra was being served, Taner said to Süleyman, ‘Bilqis Kaya speaks only Arabic. I will translate.’
As they sat, Zeynep Kaya followed them solemnly with her dark, wrinkle-encrusted eyes. She looked to be about the same age as her husband, but now that her face was uncovered Süleyman could see that much of what she must have felt at Yusuf’s trial had settled bitterly around a mouth that was small, tight and mean. There was something else too: a tattoo which she wore on her left cheek. Süleyman could see that it was a scorpion.
The older woman growled something which Taner told Süleyman was a greeting. In his turn he thanked her for her hospitality, which she seemed to understand. She then told him to drink his mirra, something which Edibe Taner translated with some hesitation. Her guest so obviously did not like the stuff. But Süleyman gamely raised the small cup he had been given to his lips and took a sip without so much as a murmur.
‘I haven’t seen my husband and neither has any of our family,’ Zeynep Kaya said without looking at either Taner or Süleyman.
‘To hide Yusuf, who is a convicted criminal under prison sentence, would be counted as an offence,’ Taner responded in, Süleyman noticed, the same rather harsh accent as the gangster’s wife. ‘Whatever your feelings might be, Zeynep, you have children to consider.’
‘And my husband is the father of those children,’ the woman snapped with now raw and open hatred. ‘They are my world, all of them.’
‘Zeynep, you’re not a fool,’ Taner said. She calmly sipped her coffee and then lit a cigarette. ‘Yusuf has other women from here to İstanbul, and probably beyond. He—’
‘Yusuf is my husband—’
‘Yusuf killed the prostitute he was living with in İstanbul,’ Taner butted in forcefully. ‘He murdered her, as you know from the trial. When Inspector Süleyman here arrested your husband, Yusuf was in the process of sawing the legs off a business rival he had just tortured to death!’
The old Arab woman said something that, to Süleyman, sounded vicious and spiteful. Edibe Taner responded, he noticed, in kind. When she had finished speaking the Mardin officer said to Süleyman,
‘Bilqis Kaya has just reminded me that as a native of Mardin I should not be helping outsiders against my own kind.’
Süleyman raised an eyebrow.
‘I have told her,’ Taner continued, ‘that her son Yusuf is in no way “my own kind”, that she herself should want her very dangerous and disturbed son to be caught for his own sake if nothing else, and that anyway you as well as all your colleagues in İstanbul will not rest until Yusuf is apprehended.’
‘Anyway, how could my husband even get into the city without you seeing him?’ Zeynep said, leaning across the table towards Taner. ‘No one does anything without you having your eyes and ears everywhere, knowing—’
‘And now I have an officer from İstanbul with me,’ Taner responded with a smile on her face. ‘Someone you won’t be able to even think about influencing. Zeynep, if you or any member of your family knows where Yusuf is and I find out, I will make sure that as many of you as possible are punished for it.’
‘Oh, you are so spiteful, Edibe Taner!’ Zeynep Kaya said. ‘Spiteful and alone!’
There was a moment of silence while Taner looked at Zeynep Kaya with a studiedly casual expression on her face. They were of an age, Taner and Yusuf Kaya’s wife, the latter maybe a few years older. But one was married and one was not and in places like Mardin that would always give a woman like Zeynep the higher status whatever job her rival, as it were, might choose to do.
‘You only persecute those no longer in your circle,’ the gangster’s wife pushed on. ‘At least we don’t harbour guns for terrorists. Not like your Christian friends—’
So quickly did Taner jump to her feet that for a moment Süleyman wondered whether she had accidentally dropped her coffee in her lap. She certainly looked as if she might have been scalded.
River of The Dead Page 10
