River of The Dead

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘The Wormwood Route. You or your people have just killed for it as you’ve gone along, haven’t you, Miss Smith?’ Süleyman said. ‘That’s what it’s been about all the time – money.’

  ‘Yes and no,’ she responded. ‘Very good detective work.’ Then she turned to the man at her elbow and said, ‘Bekir, this is Inspector Süleyman.’

  The young man was far from the image of his father but he was enough like Çetin İkmen for the experience of seeing him to take on an air of the surreal. Süleyman stared. To be killed by someone who looked like his friend, was indeed part of his friend, was a monstrous concept. Bekir looked at him with barely contained glee. It was almost as if he were looking forward to it.

  ‘You need money to survive in the cradle of civilisation,’ the American said. ‘Money buys you immunity from all sorts of clan violence and terrorist activity. Like the Persians and Byzantines, Inspector Süleyman, I want my little empire and I want it to be here. Yusuf would have squandered the money on women and shitty apartment blocks in new Mardin. Now get over to the pit.’

  Pushing and shoving, the American’s men lined them up behind the pit where Bulbul Kaplan and Captain Erdur lay. Like a firing squad. Every part of Süleyman’s body was cold and although he wanted to turn to Edibe Taner and tell her he was sorry for not having at least attempted to protect her, no part of him could actually move. As the three men now in front of them prepared their weapons to fire, Süleyman inwardly railed at the fact that İkmen’s child was part of this. And all for what? For a method whereby death-giving drugs were about to swamp every city, town and village not just in Turkey but in many other countries as well. All because Elizabeth Smith wanted to live in some sort of eastern fantasy.

  ‘Put your weapons down.’

  For just a moment he thought that they were saved, that maybe the other Mardin constables and the jandarmes they were with had come to rescue them. But the voice that urged Miss Smith and her men to give up their violence was neither demanding nor in any way alarming.

  ‘Put your weapons down and just go,’ Gabriel said. ‘You were leaving anyway, so leave. We will not follow. You’ve taken the officers’ weapons and telephones. What can we do if you go?’

  He was, Süleyman noticed, moving very slowly towards the American and her cohorts.

  ‘Go!’

  ‘Brother Gabriel!’ Süleyman said.

  The monk turned, and by the light of the truck’s headlights Süleyman saw him smile.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s fine.’

  And then he began to run towards them. Edibe Taner screamed. ‘Gabriel!’

  All three men shot at him and all three men had terrified expressions on their faces as they did so.

  ‘Allah, what was that!’ Bekir İkmen said as he turned to the man on his left. ‘What happened there?’

  Edibe Taner, screaming, threw herself across Gabriel Saatçi’s body and shook him by his lifeless shoulders.

  ‘That was a saint,’ İbrahim Keser said with both arrogance and fear in his voice. ‘You killed a fucking saint! I killed a fucking saint!’

  ‘Bekir,’ Süleyman began, ‘you—’

  It was like a curse at first. There was nothing to hear and yet suddenly there was blood. Pouring out of Bekir İkmen, out of İbrahim Keser and out of the mouth of the other man who stood beside them. They’d killed a saint and now they were paying. And to think that he, Süleyman, hadn’t believed in any of this! To think that Edibe Taner, an officer hidden away and obscured in the country, had known what he had not. There was something, there was a—

  ‘Don’t move, Miss Smith! If you move I’ll kill you too!’

  Whose voice was that? He couldn’t make any sense of it until he heard Taner screaming once again.

  ‘Selahattin! Selahattin, help me!’

  And then the men came forward out of the darkness. Two Mardin policemen and three jandarmes. They all held pistols with silencers attached. Two of them grabbed the American by her arms and then forced her down on the ground so that they could search her.

  ‘Madam!’

  Constable Selahattin ran to Taner and helped her to cradle the monk’s head against her shoulder. Her clothes were drenched in his blood, her mouth full of it where she had kissed and kissed and kissed his face.

  Once he could speak again, Süleyman said to Private Yüksel, ‘How did you . . . how did you get here?’

  Private Yüksel put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘It was the river again, sir.’

  ‘The river?’

  ‘When we got into town some kids reported seeing a vehicle down this way in the river. They said they thought it might be a jeep.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And, sir, we don’t know yet,’ Yüksel said as he looked down at the dead body of his former boss, ‘but I imagine it was probably . . . his.’ He grimaced. ‘Sir, the river gives and takes – bodies, vehicles, everything.’

  ‘I must go to Inspector Taner,’ Süleyman said. And he stepped over corpses and mindlessly went to her.

  ‘Edibe . . .’

  Her eyes were blasted. A for ever sleepless, tortured and brutalised animal. She folded herself over the dead body of her love and then she began to ululate her grief. A trilling mourning overpowering and snuffing out the sounds of the American being led away, and the death agonies of the three men on the ground in front of her.

  Chapter 23

  * * *

  Bekir İkmen didn’t actually die until he had been in the ambulance on the way to hospital in Şanlıurfa for nearly half an hour. Süleyman, who chose to ride alongside his old friend’s son, saw all the efforts that were made to save his life, but he knew inside that none of them would work. The young man’s internal organs were shattered by bullets. There was no way back.

  When the vehicle arrived at the hospital he was given the option of having the doctor who pronounced life extinct call Çetin İkmen. But Süleyman said he would do that himself. He owed it to İkmen to let him know that he had failed. Bekir İkmen had proved impossible to save.

  ‘You didn’t kill him,’ İkmen said when Süleyman’s story finally came to its bloody and horrific end. ‘And even those who did, did so for a good reason.’

  His voice was not only tired, it was dead too. Like a ghastly horror movie one can only just stand. In the background the sound of Fatma İkmen screaming a hellish soundtrack.

  ‘Çetin, I am so sorry.’

  He didn’t reply. The screaming continued and then he just said, ‘I will get the first flight that I can.’

  Süleyman heard his friend light a cigarette and then he heard his wife berate him for it. İkmen did not react at all. İkmen was just doing what he always did, getting everything done. There was almost no option, for Süleyman at least, but to take the same stance himself.

  ‘I have to go back to Mardin,’ he said. ‘Inspector Taner needs me. She can’t interview the American woman without some support. And . . .’

  ‘And you want to know how this all came about,’ İkmen said. ‘Of course you do. Of course you do.’

  ‘Çetin, I will tell you everything. I—’

  ‘My dear Mehmet,’ İkmen said, ‘we already have part of the picture. If this American is to be the key to more knowledge about the Wormwood Route . . .’

  ‘I think she knows it,’ Süleyman said. ‘I mean all of it. I hope that is the case.’

  ‘So . . .’

  ‘It’s my belief that Elizabeth Smith orchestrated almost everything.’

  There was a pause and then İkmen said, ‘Well, you get her then, Mehmet. You get her so that she never sees the outside of a prison again.’

  And then he ended the call. Alone until Constable Selahattin arrived to take him back to Mardin, Mehmet Süleyman stared into the night with still, exhausted eyes.

  The small community of monks at St Sobo’s monastery were not accustomed to keeping irregular hours. Times for sleeping, eating, praying and working were strictly prescribe
d by rules going back millennia. But death is no respecter of tradition and when Edibe Taner knocked on the great gates of the monastery at four o’clock that morning she knew that she was about to turn their world upside down. Not that she cared. Leaning on her father’s shoulder for support, she looked down at the litter the two young constables had carried to the gates in front of her and wept all over again. By now, not just her colleagues and her father but almost all of Mardin knew that their saint was dead.

  ‘He died to save the rest of us,’ she said to Brother Seraphim once the other monks had taken the body away to be washed. ‘None of us knew that help was on its way and Gabriel just . . . he . . .’

  ‘God was working through Brother Gabriel,’ Brother Seraphim said as he took the shattered woman and her father into the monastery refectory. He sat them down and then poured mirra for them both to drink. The three of them sat in silence for a long time. Seçkin Taner, though stunned by his daughter’s news, was nevertheless trying to maintain at least an aura of composure for her sake. Seraphim didn’t really know anything beyond the fact that Brother Gabriel was dead. He had died protecting others, which was something that Seraphim could easily imagine happening. But how had he died? How had he got into a situation where others had wanted him dead?

  Shivering as she spoke, Edibe Taner said, ‘I killed him. I put him in the way of danger. It was my fault.’

  Seçkin Taner grimaced in pain. ‘Edibe . . .’

  ‘My dear, I’m sure you didn’t cause Brother Gabriel’s death,’ Brother Seraphim said. ‘You loved him. And he loved you. You were the very best of friends, I know that. Edibe, if Gabriel died protecting you then I know that he died a happy man.’

  But his words just seemed to inflame her. ‘Tell me this, Brother,’ she said bitterly. ‘Why did Gabriel survive the bites of the snakes but die with just three bullets? If Allah was looking after him, if he was an immortal saint, then . . .’ She broke down and wept, howling her pain on to her father’s chest as he stroked her hair and cooed into her ear.

  Brother Seraphim, clearly upset by her words, said, ‘I don’t know the answer to that question, Edibe. I wish I did. Maybe Gabriel needed his Sharmeran by his side for God to protect him. Maybe our brother was just too good for this wicked world. Who knows?’ And then he too put his head in his hands and wept.

  They put the American woman into the smallest cell they had. If they had been able to find one that was actually windowless they would have pushed her into that. Nothing was too bad. Not because she was American, not even because she had killed or ordered the deaths of people that they knew and sometimes loved. The young constables put her where they did, said the bitter things they did to and about her, because she had killed their saint. Muslims to a man, the Mardin constables had all grown up with Gabriel, all knew him to be a special person, and they had all, without exception, liked and respected him. If this woman didn’t go away for ever they would want to know why. The police were not alone, either. As dawn broke over the Tur Abdin people began to come into the city and position themselves in the streets, tea gardens and cafés around the police station. Lütfü Güneş stood at the head of a small group of his people outside the Sehidiye Medrese. As Süleyman passed him on his way to the station, the Kurd smiled enigmatically in his direction. The İstanbul man wondered, as he had done before, just how and why this man had known about Elizabeth Smith, but he didn’t dwell upon the question long on account of the restive nature of the crowd around him. Whether they all knew who he was he couldn’t tell because none of them, so it seemed, was choosing or able to speak Turkish. In fact, amongst the many languages that he could hear around him there was only one word that he could recognise and that was ‘Gabriel’. Their saint, who was dead and whom it was obvious they wanted some sort of justice for. That was his job, or rather it was partly his job. When he reached the front entrance to the station the crowds behind him parted and he turned to see Edibe Taner walking towards him. Dressed in black, her face as white as paper, she wore an expression of such hatred that it took Mehmet Süleyman’s breath away.

  Chapter 24

  * * *

  ‘It is my intention to conduct this interview in English,’ Süleyman said as he sat down in front of the American woman. He looked briefly over at Taner, who just shrugged before folding herself stiffly into the seat beside him. ‘This is because,’ he continued, ‘I want to have no mistakes, Miss Smith. I want you to understand exactly what I am saying and I want your answers to be free from any ambiguity that may arise if you have to translate what you say into Turkish. Do you understand?’

  She shrugged. The fact that she didn’t actually answer him was annoying. But the irritation he felt was nothing compared to the anger that had flooded him as soon as he was once again in her presence. Not because of Brother Gabriel, whom he had hardly known, but because she had albeit indirectly been responsible for the death of İkmen’s son and she it was who had turned Edibe Taner into a silent, shadowy, almost ghost-like figure.

  ‘Miss Smith,’ he said before he could think too hard or too deeply about his own feelings, ‘I understand that you do not wish to have a lawyer.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That is your choice,’ he said. He looked down at his notes and then briefly at Taner again, but her face was as blank as the wall behind Elizabeth Smith’s head. ‘Miss Smith, let us be rational, shall we?’

  She frowned.

  ‘Miss Smith, you ordered my death and the deaths of my colleagues,’ Süleyman said. ‘I was there. I heard you. You witnessed the death of Gabriel Saatçi. Jandarma Private Güzer was killed by a man clearly associated with you and you were apparently aware of the place where Mrs Bulbul Kaplan and Captain Erdur of the Birecik Jandarma were buried. Captain Erdur we know was unlawfully killed, Mrs Kaplan we have yet to receive forensic evidence about. So, Miss Smith, make no mistake, you are going to prison. It is highly unlikely that you will ever get out. So when I say you must be rational what I mean is that you must look to your future, in prison, and you must consider how you might make that as easy or comfortable or however you wish to express it for yourself.’

  ‘You want me to spill?’

  ‘I want you to die,’ he heard Edibe Taner say in Turkish under her breath. He put a hand on her arm and held up a warning finger. The last thing he needed, because he was exhausted and furious himself, was a loose cannon at his side.

  Whether Elizabeth Smith had heard what Taner had said he didn’t know. She didn’t respond until he said, ‘I want you to tell me everything. Miss Smith, we do not have capital punishment in the Turkish Republic and so the most a judge can sentence a criminal to is life in prison. I think we both know that that is already very possible for you.’

  ‘You want I should finger other people?’

  ‘I want you to start at the beginning and talk until your story is finished,’ Süleyman said. ‘I want you to tell me what happened when your husband Yusuf killed the Russian gangster, Tommi Kerensky.’

  Çetin İkmen went to Atatürk Airport accompanied by his son Bülent. Because the young man worked for Turkish Airlines he had managed to talk to those who could get his father quickly on to a flight out to Şanlıurfa.

  ‘Dad, you mustn’t worry about Mum. She will be all right again, in time,’ Bülent said as he placed a hand on his father’s sloping shoulder. They both stood in front of the large departure board in the middle of the domestic terminal, İkmen openly smoking underneath a new No Smoking sign.

  ‘Your mother blames me,’ he said. ‘And maybe she is right.’

  ‘Dad, you couldn’t have prevented Bekir’s death. You told me he’d just killed a man. How could the officers who shot him have done anything else?’

  ‘No. No, I know I couldn’t have . . .’ He sighed. ‘Bülent, I did very little to find Bekir when he left home all those years ago.’

  ‘Çiçek told me he was a nightmare,’ Bülent said. ‘He stole from everyone. Mum was always in tears.’

&
nbsp; ‘But he was fifteen!’ İkmen said. ‘He walked out of our apartment and he was on the streets at fifteen!’ His eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, I looked for him in all the obvious places at the time. But I didn’t really get stuck in. I didn’t go to the terrible, awful places.’

  ‘You probably couldn’t imagine him in that sort of context,’ Bülent said. He was having some trouble feeling anything about this brother who had appeared so late on in his life, disgraced himself and then run away and died. ‘Dad, you and Mum brought us up well. In some ways it’s a curse.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ His emotions sharpened by grief and tiredness, İkmen puffed on furiously.

  ‘I mean I couldn’t possibly have gone on the streets like Bekir did,’ Bülent said. ‘I think I speak for all of us, Dad, when I say that we as a family are all too pampered to be capable of such a thing. You’ve looked after us all much too well.’

  ‘Except Bekir.’

  ‘That was his choice,’ Bülent said. ‘He wanted to take drugs and beg and get involved in criminal activity. We didn’t and so he left.’

  It was all so simple to Bülent. But then he’d been just a child when Bekir left; he’d never had any sort of relationship with his brother really. And although he was as shocked and sad as the rest of the family he did not feel any pain. İkmen looked up at the departure board and saw that his flight was boarding.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said.

  Bülent put his arms round his father and kissed him. ‘We will start to make funeral arrangements,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll do my best to bring my son home tomorrow if I can,’ İkmen said. ‘But as I told your mother, it may be that Bekir’s body has to remain in Urfa until . . .’ He swallowed hard. ‘Your mother cannot understand why the body may have to be treated as evidence. She just hates me.’

  ‘Dad, go and get your flight,’ Bekir said.