Chapter 25
* * *
‘It was in effect a violent putsch,’ Süleyman said to Edibe Taner. ‘Everyone who was in the way, knew too much or was a threat had to go.’
The interrogation of Elizabeth Smith was going on well into the night and they were taking a short break before going back in to speak to the woman again.
‘Elizabeth Smith identified two types of people she could target,’ he continued, ‘those local people who secretly disliked or actively hated the Kayas and those outsiders who didn’t know or care about Yusuf Kaya. It was all motivated by greed, of course. Makes you wonder how Miss Smith ever managed to get even a thug like Kaya to marry her. After all, it was the place, here, that she was in love with, not Yusuf. But then she says, and Zeynep Kaya told us too, that their marriage was a business arrangement on Yusuf’s part also. She wanted an “empire”! Allah!’
‘She had all the Kayas killed,’ Edibe Taner said as she hugged her tea glass to her chest. She was cold with weariness and grief, and what they had just been told by Elizabeth Smith had made her feel no better.
‘And that was always the intention,’ Süleyman replied. ‘At least some of the arms that İbrahim Keser blackmailed Musa Saatçi into hiding for him were to be used against the Kayas. The rest I imagine were to further her own power and influence in the Tur Abdin. To terrorise. But then this thing, this route, is worth billions and so of course you’re going to use guns and grenades and even rocket launchers to protect it. She wanted the Wormwood Route to herself and so wanted no pretenders to rise up in the future to challenge her authority. Not even Kaya’s children. And as an outsider that made perfect sense. Her men could have defected to Zeynep or any other Kaya family member had they thought there was some advantage to be had there. Elizabeth, by killing the whole family, prevented a war. Very sensible.’
‘But she killed Gabriel too,’ Taner said as yet again she descended into her grief. If he were honest, Süleyman had to admit that his colleague was of little use in the current interrogation. From the searing misery at the death of the monk she had now slipped into a quiet, horrified hopelessness. In the interrogation she hardly spoke. She regarded their prisoner simply with a cold, implacable hatred. But then she wasn’t alone in that. Even at nearly midnight those who had loved Gabriel Saatçi still ringed the station, waiting to catch a glimpse of or maybe even mount an attack on the woman responsible for the death of their saint as well as, in some cases, their own relatives too. Süleyman knew that the situation was volatile. He also knew that he had to remain calm. Others around him may very well lose their heads, but that was not an option for him. He had to remain in control.
‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘I have two priorities here.’
Edibe Taner looked up from her drink and said, ‘Oh?’
Süleyman offered her a cigarette, which she took, and then lit one up for himself. ‘To trace exactly how Yusuf Kaya escaped from prison – who helped him, who died, et cetera – plus the exact circumstances of his death. And secondly we must try to get this Wormwood Route out of her. We know that heroin and other drugs passed through here and that part of the operation involved packaging the drugs with bundles – or whatever one calls such things – of wormwood flowers.’
‘Do you think that Elizabeth Smith knows all the details of the Wormwood Route?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That was clearly her intention and she must have got something out of Yusuf before he died. But then we don’t know the exact circumstances of that yet, do we?’
‘No.’ She sighed. ‘Inspector, who was it who told you about Elizabeth Smith and her men out at Dara?’
Although he had intended to tell her for some time, he now realised that he still hadn’t. ‘Lütfü Güneş, a Kurd,’ he said.
She frowned.
‘What?’
‘Oh, his family are poor. They, like a lot of people, have by turns been given employment and hospitality and then bullied by the Kayas,’ she said. ‘There is no love lost there. Yet Lütfü has – or had – quite a surprising best friend.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He and Elizabeth Smith’s right-hand man, İbrahim Keser, were friends since their school days. Like brothers, they were.’
Çetin İkmen knew that he would never be able to sleep. Even without the noisy ladies’ henna party in one of the rooms at the bottom of the hotel.
‘A lady, she getting married,’ the hotel owner had explained to İkmen in his fractured, slightly guttural Turkish. Şanlıurfa was far too ‘east’ for İkmen. Most people communicated amongst themselves in a variety of languages and dialects, none of which he could speak. Not that that was what was exercising his mind as he lay on his bed now, awake and motionless save for the lifting of his hand up to his mouth as he smoked cigarette after endless cigarette.
He had not spent long at the hospital. Just enough time to formally identify his dead son. Bekir had looked as if he were sleeping. He’d been shot in the back, basically in the lungs which, as İkmen knew only too well, made a hell of a mess. Blood poured out of the mouths of such people. But the hospital, to their credit, had cleaned him up and apparently Mehmet Süleyman had done his best to make sure that the body was not further damaged when it was taken to the mortuary. But it was still dead and it had still been his son. Whatever Bekir might have done he would always be that. First thing in the morning he would fly back to İstanbul with the body and then they would put him in the ground. There were no questions about how or why he had died. The jandarmes and the Mardin policemen who had shot Bekir, İsak Mardin and some man called İbrahim Keser had had legitimate cause. The three men had just executed a defenceless monk. Just the thought of it made İkmen want to cry, even though he knew that he wouldn’t be able to. It was as if his tear ducts had run out of moisture.
Fatma had of course been relieved that the boy would be buried soon. Not that any of that meant much to İkmen. But it was important for his wife, whose voice when he had spoken to her on the phone earlier had been as cold as winter. She didn’t so much blame him for what had happened as feel nothing for him. Whether this was temporary or not he couldn’t know. But he had an unpleasant feeling that nothing would ever be quite the same again. The happy and united İkmen family had somehow produced a killer from its midst and the reverberations were going to take years, if not decades, to subside. Because even if the drugs and the drink were put to one side, Bekir İkmen had not been like other people. Even as a child he had not wanted to conform to the norms that governed what was a very liberal household. There’d always been a kind of itch inside that boy, a something that agitated and threw off balance even his sometimes sincere attempts to fit in and make himself agreeable. All the children had had moments of adolescent angst and awkwardness but with Bekir it was as if something extra had entered his soul somewhere along the line, something that had ultimately killed it.
‘It was Hüseyin Altun, the beggar king or whatever you call him, who got Yusuf a car,’ the American woman said. It was well past midnight now and she was looking shadowed, pale and exhausted. But that was not Süleyman’s problem.
‘He stole it?’
She shrugged. ‘Yusuf dropped İsak Mardin off somewhere outside the city to hole up and then drove to Birecik. Hours and hours and bloody hours.’
‘While Hüseyin Altun was being murdered by Bekir İkmen?’
‘Yes.’ She shrugged again. ‘I guess. I don’t know when he killed him exactly.’
‘Who was involved in the plot within Kartal Prison?’ Süleyman asked. He already had a list of names but he wanted it to be absolutely comprehensive.
‘The two guards.’ She shook her head as if to try to get it to work properly now she was so tired. ‘He bribed some prisoner to pick a fight with him.’
The simple Ara Berköz.
‘The governor?’
‘No, but there were other guards too.’
‘Names?’
‘I don’t know
.’ She looked up and yet again shook her head. ‘Honestly. Look, I’m bushed. Can we rest?’
‘No.’ He leaned across the table and said, ‘Tell me what happened when Yusuf got to Birecik. Did he get any more help along the way?’
She looked as if she might be close to tears. But she didn’t cry. ‘Not that I know of. I think he may have stopped briefly in Gaziantep . . .’ she said. ‘I was waiting for him at Bulbul Kaplan’s house.’
‘Why did you agree to meet there?’
‘It was all part of Yusuf’s plan,’ she said. ‘To hole up at Bulbul’s. No one knew, or rather the police couldn’t make any connection between him and her. She was just this woman, you know? Not related to him. It was very finely calculated.’
‘And he knew that you were going to be there?’
‘I’d called him, yes,’ she said. ‘He was happy about it.’
‘Yusuf Kaya had a phone?’
‘Hüseyin Altun gave it to him. It was registered in the name of a foreigner, a Syrian. Once Yusuf was at the Kaplan house we, Bulbul and I, got rid of it.’
‘So’, Süleyman said, ‘you had Yusuf Kaya at his aunt’s house with the intention of getting information from him that he had killed, put his own life at risk and spent a lot of money to protect. Did you think he was just going to tell you because you were his wife? Did you think you might seduce—’
‘Oh, I had sex with him shortly after he arrived,’ she said coldly. ‘He expected that.’
‘And?’
‘And I knew that wouldn’t work. I’m not a fool. I just did it to relax him, get him off his guard.’
‘And so?’
She sighed. ‘Inspector, what can I say? You’re a man, you know how men are when they’ve just had sex.’
He did not respond and for a few seconds no one spoke. Then the American said, ‘We tortured him.’
‘You and . . .’
‘Bulbul. She threatened to put out his eyes. We . . .’ She looked up and blurted it out seemingly as quickly as she could. She was clearly not one of those people who took pleasure in such things. It had been a purely fiscal expedient. ‘We tied him to the bed and then it was stuff like burning him with cigarettes, cutting. I held a gun to his head at one point. I tried to pull a tooth, but . . .’
‘But he didn’t talk?’
‘No. It was only when Bulbul Kaplan had a knife at his eye that . . . He told me something, Inspector. It was detailed and it all made sense.’
‘How did he die?’ Edibe Taner asked.
Only then did Elizabeth Smith give vent to what was, what had to be, a terrifying ruthlessness. ‘We cut his face off,’ she said calmly.
Süleyman felt his heart jump inside his chest.
‘It had all been planned,’ the American said. ‘Several of my guys went in and out of Iraq at that time. We got a US army uniform. We put him in it. Threw him in the river.’
‘Thinking no doubt that both ourselves and the US authorities would be fooled into thinking that the body was that of an American serviceman,’ Süleyman said. ‘Miss Smith . . .’
‘We were supposed to be long gone when you came to the house that day,’ she said, referring to the first visit Süleyman and Taner had made to the house in Dara.
‘Long gone where?’
‘I had people ready to run the operation from this end when we’d gone,’ Elizabeth Smith said. ‘We’d slip over the border into Syria and stay there until it was safe to return. In Turkey or not we’d still be making money. The Kayas were going to die that night.’
‘Get rid of any possible competition.’
‘They knew. Even though she didn’t know much herself, Zeynep knew about the existence of the Route. I couldn’t have my guys changing sides. I, or rather İbrahim, had persuaded them to change once and so I feared they would do it again. No one can be trusted, can they?’ Then suddenly she looked up and said, ‘So who told you where we were?’
‘How did you, or İbrahim Keser, get your husband’s men to change sides, as you put it? And why?’
‘İbrahim hated Yusuf,’ she said. ‘He always had. İbrahim told me about the Wormwood Route quite independently of Yusuf. Of course I knew already, but İbrahim didn’t know that.’
‘Why did he do that?’ Süleyman asked.
‘Because I slept with him,’ she said. ‘I fancied him and I slept with him and he told me everything. He was much better in bed than Yusuf. We decided to double-cross him together. İbrahim had the confidence of the other guys and, of course, money talks, as I am sure you know, Inspector.’
Süleyman sighed. ‘Because you desired İbrahim Keser . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Miss Smith, the only way in which any judge will even consider leniency is if you tell me everything you know about the Wormwood Route.’
In that cold room in the middle of the night the murderess and torturer laughed. ‘And what kind of leniency might that be?’ she said. ‘My very own mattress complete with bedbugs just for me? Inspector, no judge is going to hand down anything less than life. Who told you about me?’
‘Miss Smith,’ Süleyman said, ‘your lover Mr Keser had other friends.’
‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘You mean that İbrahim told someone else, someone outside, about the Route?’
‘I don’t know. Miss Smith, did Yusuf Kaya, to your knowledge, tell you the truth about the Wormwood Route?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Miss Smith . . .’
‘Tell us or you’ll be sorry.’ It had been said very quietly but that was what made Edibe Taner’s words all the more threatening.
‘There’s nothing you can do to me . . .’
‘You killed a saint. A saint!’ Edibe Taner said. ‘You don’t think you’re going to get away with that, do you?’
Süleyman reached across and put his hand on his colleague’s arm. She was shivering with rage.
‘Inspector Taner . . .’
‘I get the feeling you two aren’t working from the same script any more,’ the American said. ‘You want the Wormwood Route but all she wants is revenge. That won’t work.’ She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest.
‘I don’t care what you think!’ Taner said. ‘I don’t care!’
Her grief was getting in the way. Süleyman had to get her out of there, and quickly. But he had to find out what he was up against first, because the Wormwood Route was important. The Wormwood Route, if all the hype about it was true, was very important indeed.
‘Miss Smith,’ he said, ‘are you going to provide us with details about the Wormwood Route?’
Her answer was immediate. ‘No.’
Edibe Taner was nearly shaking herself on to the floor by this time. Süleyman took hold of her arm and pulled her to her feet.
‘Why is that, Miss Smith?’ he said. ‘What use can that information be to you in prison?’
‘Same use as it was to Yusuf,’ she replied with a smile. ‘People knew that he and only he knew it and they left him alone. Also, a lot of people were willing to help him get out.’
‘Miss Smith, if İbrahim Keser told his friend . . .’
‘Friend? What friend?’ She was frantic now. ‘Tell me his name and I’ll . . .’
‘You’ll what?’ Süleyman said. ‘Give me the Wormwood Route?’
There was a moment of silence and then she said, ‘I’ll get out.’
Aware that Taner was about to explode or collapse, Süleyman knocked on the door to attract the attention of the constable on guard outside. As soon as the man opened up, he pushed the shaking Taner through the door, and then he turned back to Elizabeth Smith.
‘If you plan to escape . . .’
‘Oh, I will escape,’ she said. ‘You won’t be able to even think about holding on to me. Solitary, putting me in some godforsaken hole in the middle of nowhere . . .’ She laughed.
‘But if those who decide these things put you in a prison with Suriani inmates you will find that your escape plans will fail,�
�� Süleyman said. ‘You killed their saint.’
‘You mean they’ll try to kill me?’
‘What do you think, Miss Smith? Between the Surianis and any influence that friend of your lover might have in prison, you’ll be at risk. There are a lot of Kurdish people everywhere.’
Her face froze. Had she suddenly made the connection between her lover and one of his friends who was a Kurd? Had she even known of the existence of Lütfü Güneş?
He gathered the papers and files on the table together and made for the door once again. He rapped once on the metal grille and then turned back towards the woman. ‘I would urge you most strongly to rethink your position. You can be in danger or you can be out of danger.’
‘Or I can be out,’ she said, and then she pushed her features into a broad smile. ‘Because you and I both know, Inspector Süleyman, that where billions of dollars are involved there is no such thing as an honest person. I love this land purely and truly. But when billions of dollars came into view, to ensure that I would never have to leave it, that I could in fact control it and that all I had to do to get that was to kill . . .’ She sighed. ‘Saints, sinners, foreigners, whatever, it all don’t mean diddly squat.’
Chapter 26
* * *
There were quite a few absences from Gabriel Saatçi’s funeral. Men once resident at the house in Dara and, in some cases, their families too had just disappeared. Of course there were rumours. Because these men were known to have gone in and out of Iraq and Syria on their various errands and missions, those countries seemed to be likely destinations. There were also places not on easy terms with Turkey where one could easily fall off the radar. Elizabeth Smith wouldn’t say one way or the other. That she had been leaving the country in some way when she was captured, however, was certain. But then, after the killing of the Kaya family, how could she have stayed? Now the house in Dara, the centre of the Wormwood operation, was silent and empty. But for how long, Süleyman wondered as he looked at the long line of mourners standing in the streets waiting for Gabriel Saatçi’s funeral cortège to make its way back from Mar Behnam church to St Sobo’s monastery. It was nearly two weeks now since the monk had been killed and in the meantime Süleyman had been back to İstanbul to attend Bekir İkmen’s funeral. Apart from the fact that he still had work to finish up in Mardin, he had promised Edibe Taner that he would attend Brother Gabriel’s funeral. Dressed in a black suit and tie, he bowed his head as the coffin passed in front of him and the woman at his side began to weep. He knew her and so, in the absence of any kind of visible handkerchief, he offered her his. Lucine Rezian, Edibe Taner’s Armenian aunt from Gaziantep, thanked him.
River of The Dead Page 30
