River of The Dead

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Fatma, I will try, it’s all I can do!’

  She knew it was pointless to keep on at him about it and so she asked him whether he’d like a glass of tea. When he said he would, she left for the kitchen. Love her as he did, İkmen was glad when Fatma went out because then, to a certain extent, he could relax. Alone, at least he could think his own thoughts, and they were most certainly focused on Mr Aktar. What was he going to be like after over twelve hours without heroin? And, maybe even more interesting, how was he going to respond to the news about the death of Yusuf Kaya?

  Süleyman looked down at the photograph of Bekir İkmen that Çetin had faxed over to the Mardin station the night before. He’d never actually met or even seen Bekir, but he could tell from the image before him that he was most certainly a member of the İkmen clan. He definitely had some of his father’s features and, by the sound of him, he had Çetin’s sharp intelligence too – albeit in a rather more toxic form.

  ‘This is your wanted man?’ Edibe Taner said as she looked over his shoulder at the image in his hands.

  ‘Bekir İkmen, my colleague’s son,’ Süleyman replied. ‘Although we don’t know, we think he may have had some connection to Yusuf Kaya.’

  ‘I’ve never seen him before.’

  ‘I doubt he’s ever been here,’ Süleyman said. ‘Back home he was a “soldier” for a local beggar king and small time dealer called Hüseyin Altun. If he was connected to Kaya he may come here, if he thinks Yusuf’s still alive. Or he may just come because we’re near the border and he is, after all, on the run now.’

  Edibe Taner sighed. ‘It’s horrible to be betrayed by a member of your family. Inspector İkmen has my sympathy.’ Then she picked her handbag up off her desk and said, ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He wasn’t really. In the wake of the call from Birecik, both he and Taner had spent much of the night informing Kaya’s family about his death. Their grief, especially that of his mother and his wife Zeynep, had been terrible. The women particularly kept on and on about his body and how they wanted it immediately for burial. The twenty-four-hour deadline, of course, had already passed, and getting the body to the family from the hospital in Urfa was still going to take some time. This only added to their distress which was in sharp contrast to the cold, dry grief they saw at the house in Dara later. Elizabeth Smith did not react with anything more than a hard swallow when Edibe Taner told her what had been found in Birecik. She’d stood in the middle of her wormwood-scented hall and hadn’t spoken a word. When Taner had told her that they would have to return in the morning to take a statement from her, she had only just managed to nod her head in agreement. Now, together with two constables who were going to scout round the area for the still missing İbrahim Keser, they were going out to see Elizabeth Smith once again.

  ‘We will go briefly to Mardin Prison on the way back,’ Taner said as they set off, ‘to see Musa Saatçi. Maybe we can get him out. But I can at least explain to him what has happened.’

  ‘He’s dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen replied for the third time in quick succession. ‘Yusuf Kaya is most definitely dead.’

  ‘Mm.’ Mr Aktar was sweating but his pallor was deathly grey and he was shivering. The Americans called this state ‘cold turkey’. İkmen thought how very appropriate that term was in this situation. ‘You’re sure it’s him? You’re sure he’s—’

  ‘Dead?’ İkmen sighed. ‘Yes.’ Of course, telling suspects lies in order to get them to offer up their guilt and that of others was not unknown and he could understand why Mr Aktar was so suspicious. But the administrator was also in the grip of such a wild need for heroin that he was now totally and utterly paranoid. Not that officially any connection between Kaya and Mr Aktar actually existed. He was where he was because of drug offences related to his personal use. But the mention of Yusuf Kaya’s name now, given the state that Aktar was in, had added significantly to his agitation.

  ‘You know what I want, what I need now, and so you have me at a disadvantage,’ Aktar said as he rubbed his cold dry hands together to generate warmth.

  ‘Mr Aktar, this is a police station. I cannot give you heroin,’ İkmen said.

  ‘I need to get out of here!’ He got up, paced the room once and then pointed down at İkmen. ‘Your officer assaulted me! He split my lip! I want my lawyer! Now!’

  ‘Sir, if you want your lawyer, you can have your lawyer,’ İkmen said. ‘You are entitled to pursue an action regarding alleged police brutality . . .’

  Bloody İzzet Melik! So keen to get a result he’d gone tearing back to methods many had given up long ago and İkmen personally had always abhorred. He’d bawled him out once and, he imagined, Süleyman would have his own thoughts on the matter when he returned from Mardin. Of course İzzet had been backed up by the constable who had been with him at the Cerrahpaşa, but that didn’t make what he had done any more acceptable. Conversely it didn’t exactly save Mr Aktar either. And as he sat down in front of İkmen again, this time with tears in his eyes, it was obvious that he knew it.

  ‘Inspector İkmen, I am a weak man, I know that,’ he said. ‘I am not a fool, however, and I know, as you do, that I would sell my soul to Satan for some of my dear, vile drug now.’

  İkmen lit a cigarette and then said, ‘I know.’

  Mr Aktar sighed. ‘But I do love my wife and my two sons and although I know that I have put them at risk both now and in the past, I cannot subject them to real, actual harm.’ He looked up into İkmen’s eyes and said, ‘Do you know what I mean?’

  He was trying to say something possibly about his involvement with Kaya, but he was a junkie. Could what he was saying be trusted?

  İkmen frowned. ‘No, Mr Aktar, I do not,’ he said. ‘But why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘Do you swear before Allah that Yusuf Kaya is dead?’ Aktar said as he leaned, sweating and panting, across the interview room table. ‘Do you swear it?’

  He was clearly coming apart after his night without heroin. But was what he was about to tell İkmen, if anything, the truth? There was only one way to find out. İkmen raised his right hand. ‘I swear.’

  Aktar licked his lips once, looked over his shoulder at the absence of anything except a wall behind him and said, ‘Can I get out of here afterwards?’

  ‘Mr Aktar, that will depend upon what you are going to tell me,’ İkmen said.

  Several moments passed before Aktar breathed in deeply just the once and then said, ‘It’s called the Wormwood Route. It is, or was, going to make us all very rich. Myself and Mr Oner were going to be set up for life. Yusuf Kaya and Mr Oner were friends from way back. When Mr Oner died the plan was already in place. I knew nothing about it or who, apart from ourselves and Kaya, were involved until it happened. Kaya planned it that way. He also told me that, apart from owning up to knowing him or giving his location away, I was to give you whatever information you asked me for. I was to protect no one but Kaya. He called me to tell me specifically. He also wanted to assure me that I could have, come the day, all the junk I could ever want. Only if I betrayed him would bad things happen. If I betrayed him, he said, my wife and children would be raped and murdered in front of my eyes. He’d said the same thing to Mr Oner, his old friend. That was why he killed himself. He couldn’t back out and he knew he couldn’t go through with it either. He didn’t want his family to die. He was half mad with desperation. You are sure, aren’t you, Inspector İkmen, that Yusuf Kaya is dead?’

  The front door of the house was open, but there was no one at home. Süleyman and Taner went right through the building but found not one living soul anywhere. There were signs, however, in what had to be or have been the American woman’s bedroom, that Elizabeth Smith was probably on the move. Clothes from an open wardrobe were scattered across an unmade bed, while someone had spilled a number of aspirin tablets across the floor. Neither of the officers spoke. Occasionally one or other of them would look out
of a window at the constables searching in and around the garden. But everything out there was quiet too.

  After a while, and mainly because he just couldn’t stand the silence any longer, Süleyman said, ‘She’s gone.’

  Edibe Taner stood still for just a moment, looked at him, and then continued to go through a stack of papers on a table. Elizabeth Smith had definitely said she would see the police in the morning. But she wasn’t anywhere to be seen and neither were her guards, keepers or whatever the men who lived with her were called. Süleyman at least had a creeping sense of something happening over which he was failing to exercise control. It was not something pleasant.

  They continued looking, playing the answerphone machine, reading letters and notes in a kind of frozen fugue until eventually, and almost mercifully from Süleyman’s point of view, Taner’s mobile phone began to ring. She answered it and, although he couldn’t make out a word of what the person at the other end was saying, he could hear that he or she was shouting. When Taner finally came off the phone her face was white.

  ‘We must get back to the city,’ she said as she pushed the mobile back into her bag and got her car keys out of her pocket. ‘Something terrible has happened.’

  Constable Selahattin had never seen anything like it. He, like all Turkish men, had served in the army and had seen action and violence. Since he had been stationed in Mardin he had been witness to the aftermath of gang and clan violence. But this was off the scale.

  ‘They’re all dead,’ he said as he stood in the middle of the Kaya family’s courtyard. ‘Five adults, including Kaya’s wife and mother, and eight kids. One was a baby.’

  Tayyar, the two-year-old child had been called, Edibe Taner remembered. Conceived she imagined on some visit home when Yusuf Kaya was still free. She looked down at the splashes of blood that had settled in the dust of the courtyard and fought to hold back her tears. Zeynep had been a silly, weak and easily manipulated woman but she had once been a Taner and Edibe was sorry that she and all her poor children were dead. Even Yusuf Kaya’s indulgent mother hadn’t deserved to die.

  ‘No one saw anything, of course,’ Constable Selahattin added bitterly. ‘Thirteen people are shot and no one sees or hears a thing.’

  Ignoring the ire in his voice, Edibe Taner said, ‘If they were all shot as they slept then I expect the assailants used silencers.’

  ‘There are several sets of footprints in the house,’ Selahattin said as he pulled himself and his emotions back to business once again.

  ‘It would be difficult for one person to shoot thirteen even with a silenced weapon,’ Taner said. ‘I’d like to know exactly how many sets of footprints we have, please, Constable.’

  ‘Madam.’ He nodded his head.

  Edibe Taner looked up at Süleyman. ‘The scene will have to be forensically examined. Whoever did this cannot have arrived too long after we left last night. I can’t see that the entrance has been forced.’

  ‘No.’ He waited until Selahattin had gone to join his fellows in the family’s bedrooms before he took Taner to one side. ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘we must follow up the American and her men.’

  She frowned. ‘You think they did this? Why?’

  ‘How should I know?’ He wanted to add that he didn’t come from the back of nowhere where people believed at least five impossible things before breakfast as she did. But he just about managed to restrain himself. What had happened wasn’t her fault, but this mass slaughter was so shocking and sickening that he had to get at least some of his anger out of his system. ‘All I know, Inspector, is that these people are dead and Elizabeth Smith and her men are missing.’

  ‘You don’t think it could be some sort of power struggle, do you?’ she said. But before he could answer she saw something that made her jerk up her head and run over to the entrance to the mansion. Süleyman took the opportunity afforded by her temporary absence to think. With someone as powerful and pervasive as Yusuf Kaya dead all kinds of fault lines could open up in his family. Even Yusuf in prison had probably had a kind of control, but Yusuf dead was just a void, an emptiness which would either remain empty or be filled. He was wondering whether any Kaya family members still remained alive and if so who when Taner returned with her father, the Master of Sharmeran.

  ‘My father would like to speak to you,’ Inspector Taner said to Süleyman in what amounted to an almost sulky tone. And then she left to walk towards the stairs leading up to the family rooms on the first floor of the building.

  Seçkin Taner took Süleyman by the arm over to a far corner of the courtyard. Once there he spoke in surprisingly good English. ‘I am speaking this language because not a great many people here can say more than a few words in it,’ he said. ‘Inspector Süleyman, because of who and what I am, people do not tell me so much of their lives, if you know what I mean. I will not lie, and no one would dare try to silence me so I know very little. But there are exceptions to this.’

  ‘Mr Taner—’

  ‘I tell you because I know you will use what I say with wisdom. You are not involved,’ Seçkin Taner said. ‘Inspector Süleyman, a person known to me has told me that figures were seen coming out of this house just before dawn. One of those figures was definitely İbrahim Keser. Apparently he had been staying with Bilqis Hanım and her family since last night.’

  ‘But we were here last night, Mr Taner,’ Süleyman said. ‘Telling the family of Yusuf Kaya’s death.’

  ‘Then he was probably being hidden,’ Seçkin Taner said. ‘He was one of Yusuf’s men. They would have trusted him.’

  ‘Which would have allowed him to be here and possibly let others in to kill them,’ Süleyman said. ‘But why? Why would he do that?’

  The Master of Sharmeran shrugged. ‘That I don’t know,’ he said.

  Chapter 20

  * * *

  ‘If it had been just a large amount of heroin then the idea that everyone not absolutely key to the operation was expendable would not have been worth the risks involved,’ Mr Aktar said. ‘The Wormwood Route is—’

  ‘About getting heroin into the city amongst packets of wormwood leaves,’ İkmen said. His face was dark, bitter at the thought of what he had found in Bekir’s rucksack. And the terrible boy hadn’t even cared! Holed up with his very convenient police officer father! Had Bekir helped Yusuf Kaya to escape from the Cerrahpaşa, or from the prison? Had he killed his old boss Hüseyin Altun for that, that . . .

  ‘No, it’s more than that,’ Mr Aktar said as he gulped greedily from the bottle of oral morphine İkmen had requested for him from the police station doctor. Already he’d drunk enough to knock over a camel, but Mr Aktar was a junkie and so it just had the effect of making him calmer, more ‘normal’. ‘The Wormwood Route is what it purports to be: a route, a way in which, basically, heroin can get out of Afghanistan, through Iraq and into this country.’

  ‘So it’s a mapped-out route, a safe route through friendly towns and villages?’

  ‘In part,’ Mr Aktar said. ‘I don’t know the details. I was only interested in the product, you understand. I was promised money but I wanted my fix. That’s it, that’s . . .’ He sighed. ‘The Wormwood Route is more than a map. It’s also contacts, names, faces, drop-off points, bribable border guards . . . Apparently it took some years to organise and only Yusuf Kaya, it was said, knew every detail of it. My predecessor Mr Oner knew Yusuf Kaya as a child; they went to school together. He told me before he died how ruthless Kaya was. He told me that he killed the Russian Mafia boss, the one he was sent to prison for, because the Russian had been competing for parts of the Wormwood Route. I should have got out then. Gone. Where? I—’

  ‘Mr Aktar,’ İkmen said, ‘are you sure that Kaya was the only person to know the precise details of this route?’

  ‘That is what Mr Oner said.’

  İkmen sat back in his chair and briefly looked up at the ceiling. Kaya was dead and so, possibly, if what Aktar had said was true, was the Wormwood Route. But that
was assuming that whoever killed Kaya hadn’t managed to get the information from him first. ‘Mr Aktar – the nurses, Lole, Mardin and Öz,’ İkmen began.

  ‘Öz, or whatever his real name was, was some relative of Yusuf Kaya. Mr Oner knew him too,’ Aktar said. ‘Anyway, Mr Oner gave him a job. Lole was a friend of Öz, but I knew nothing about him. Apparently his name is Armenian and that was some sort of joke to Mr Oner, although I never understood it myself.’

  Lole, İkmen recalled, had been the name of Mardin’s greatest architect. Clearly a ‘joke’ only for those in the know.

  ‘Whether Lole and Öz were recruited to help in Kaya’s escape, if they actually did, I don’t know,’ Mr Aktar said. ‘But I have always been suspicious about İsak Mardin, the third nurse. Mr Oner took him on not long before he . . . before he died. They spoke a lot, Mr Oner and Mardin. Maybe he was brought in for . . . You have to understand my role was to know nothing. Nothing!’

  ‘And so Dr Eldem . . .’

  ‘Did Dr Eldem kill the prison guard? I don’t know,’ Mr Aktar said. ‘If he did then it was via an arrangement with Kaya that I know nothing about. You have to understand, Inspector, that things like the Wormwood Route are only secure so long as as few people as possible know exactly what is going on. This route is worth billions of dollars! People die for this thing!’

  ‘We will provide you with protection.’

  ‘What?’ Mr Aktar laughed. ‘You’ll what? Inspector İkmen, with all due respect, even with Kaya dead, your men can’t protect me. Half if not more of the people involved in this will know of my existence at least. They will know when someone talks. They’ll have contacts in the police. I could be shot dead leaving this station now. Not that it matters.’ He leaned forward across the table and frowned. ‘Look after my family. With Kaya gone they might stand a chance. But forget me. If they want me dead for talking to you, that is what they will have. Save my wife and children. They are innocent.’