A Noble Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Police.’ Süleyman flashed his badge very quickly and then said, ‘We’re looking for a piano teacher. A lady.’

  ‘Think you’ve got some talent, do you?’ the woman said with a laugh. ‘Funny time to have lessons.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a funny time to be sitting outside reading the paper,’ Süleyman responded. ‘It’s not summer yet.’

  ‘I know.’ She folded up the newspaper and then rammed the last piece of the pancake into her mouth. ‘So what’s it to be then, boys? A nice bit of Chopin or some good old honky-tonk piano?’

  She stood up with some difficulty.

  ‘You are Miss Izabella Madrid?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Pianoforte teacher, spinster and Jew. Anything else you need to know?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘I hope you boys are going to do something about the death of my old friend Mr İdiz,’ Izabella said as her fat face suddenly clouded. ‘We can’t have musical people getting killed in their own homes. It’s a disgrace!’

  The whole family was asleep by the time Kenan Seyhan returned to his cousin’s apartment in Fatih. He let himself in, but rather than making his way to the bedroom he now shared with his cousin and his brother, he tiptoed into the living room, where his parents were sleeping. His mother was underneath the window, her small, round body wrapped in a tattered grey blanket. Even from a distance she looked uncomfortable and cold. His father, by contrast, lay on a soft mattress covered by numerous clean, new blankets, snoring his head off. Kenan wiped away the tears that had soaked his face for hours now, and bent down until he was kneeling beside his sleeping father. The look of hatred in his eyes as he stared down at the slumbering man was like poison. Spitefully he flicked the side of his father’s face with one finger and then bent low to whisper in his ear. ‘Wake up, you son of a whore!’ he said. ‘Wake up so I can kill you!’

  A second later, Cahit’s eyes flew open. Kenan slapped a hand over the older man’s open mouth and hissed, ‘I’m going to have to kill you before you kill again! You’re not taking anything else away from me!’ Then he put his hands around his father’s throat and squeezed as tightly as he could.

  It was only luck that made Saadet wake suddenly from her slumbers just in time to save her husband’s life. As she pulled Kenan away from Cahit, she whispered, ‘Get out, son! Please! I’m so sorry! Leave now! Don’t ever come back!’

  He left as quietly as he had come. The last view he had of his parents was of his mother’s tear-stained face looking up at him with tremendous tenderness, while his father, still choking on the carpet below, stared into his eyes with raw hatred.

  ‘It was me who discovered Murad Emin,’ the old woman said as she placed glasses of tea on the small table that stood between the chairs where Mehmet Süleyman and İzzet Melik were sitting. ‘That’s why Hamid Bey wanted to keep my name on the paperwork. He knew that I, not him, made that boy. Local, see.’

  ‘He lives in Balat?’

  ‘On Çilingir Street,’ she said. ‘He’s a brilliant boy. Went way beyond my talents very early on, and that was why I recommended him to Hamid Bey.’

  ‘Who taught him free of charge,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘The Emins are poor,’ Izabella Madrid said. ‘Hamid agreed to tutor him for nothing because he is so good.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Why are you interested in Murad?’

  ‘Do you have an address on Çilingir Street?’ Süleyman asked.

  The old woman scowled. ‘You gonna tell me why you want it?’

  ‘Are you going to obstruct the police in the course of their investigations?’ İzzet Melik put in harshly.

  Izabella Madrid looked over at him with an expression of undisguised disgust on her features. ‘Oh, it’s like that, is it?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Looking now at Süleyman, she tipped her head at İzzet Melik and said, ‘He your muscle, is he? Get him to do all your dirty work, do you?’

  ‘Madam . . .’

  ‘Oh, it’s quite all right, I understand,’ she said. ‘Good-looking man like you, nice manners and all the rest of it. You can’t go frightening people and all that. We all need great ugly gorillas in our lives from time to time.’

  İzzet Melik’s face was now darkened with rage. He said, ‘Just tell us where—’

  ‘Number 19, Apartment C,’ Izabella Madrid said without even looking it up. ‘It’s above a barber’s shop.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But don’t expect the usual type of poor Anatolian migrant, because you’ll be disappointed,’ she added. ‘The Emin family may not have enough money to put proper food on their table, but they are very, very far from ignorant, as you will see.’

  Miss Izabella Madrid was not, as Süleyman and İzzet Melik soon discovered, in any way wrong. Apartment C, 19 Çilingir Street housed some very unusual people indeed.

  ‘We’re all very upset about Hamid Bey,’ Mr Emin said as he led Süleyman and Melik from a dingy hallway and into a room that was light on furniture while being very heavy on people, music and alcohol. ‘That said,’ he continued, ‘I did meet this very nice Argentinian man earlier on today, and so we are actually in the middle of a tango evening.’

  Süleyman looked into the room, where he saw an elderly man strumming a guitar to a heavy Latin beat. A young woman who looked like a prostitute drank straight from the neck of a bottle of raki, while a dreamy-looking middle-aged woman in clothes that were almost in rags danced with her body pressed up against that of a very beautiful young man. Three old-timers in flat caps adorned with red Communist star badges sat on the floor swaying to the music. The only anomaly in this very outré arrangement in conservative Balat was a white-faced boy who stood at the back of the room looking horrified.

  ‘I do think that Hamid Bey would probably have approved,’ Mr Emin said with a smile.

  Chapter 11

  * * *

  What Çetin İkmen liked to call the ‘computer retards’ had descended upon the Rainbow Internet Café and were currently doing the policeman did not know what.

  ‘You know that Inspector Süleyman’s wife once told me that in her opinion, people heavily involved in the computer world are likely to be autistic,’ he said to his colleague Metin İskender as they stood outside the café in the strengthening morning sun. Inside, various thin, bespectacled men peered at the ranks of computers and the one large and very old printer at the back of the building.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ İskender replied. ‘What I do know is that the Rainbow is well known as a haunt of gay men.’

  ‘The woman who works here recognised Osman Yavuz,’ İkmen said as he lit up a cigarette and then breathed out slowly. ‘Not that she’s seen him for a week, she reckons. Do you think the computer retards will be able to find out whether Yavuz printed any of his photographs here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ İskender replied. ‘Maybe if the printer has some sort of distinguishing fault or something. You know, like typewriters used to in the old days.’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘But I think that it’s more likely that it’s pictures of men’s arses that originate from here, rather than anything else,’ İskender said. ‘This place teems with queers, especially at night.’

  All around them the fashionable and lively district of Beyoğlu slowly began to emerge from the excesses of the previous evening and shook itself awake. The Rainbow Internet Café, which was situated in a small alleyway just north of the main thoroughfare, İstiklal Street, was in an area frequently traversed by transsexuals. When the policemen and their computer experts had arrived earlier that morning, several heavily made-up blonde ‘women’ had hissed appreciatively at them. The pavement where İkmen and İskender were standing smelt of stale beer, piss, cigarette ends and rakı. As İkmen looked around, he wondered vaguely whether his cousin, the transsexual Samsun, was hanging around in the vicinity. It often felt to him that the vast extended İkmen family seemed to be everywhere.

  After a
few moments İkmen’s mobile phone began to ring, and he took it out of his pocket and answered it. As he listened to what the caller said, Metin İskender saw his face suddenly pale. By the time he finished the call, İkmen was white.

  ‘I’m sorry, Metin, I have to go,’ he said to his colleague as he began to head towards the top of the alley and his car. ‘It seems we have another dead body to deal with.’

  It had been a strange evening. As he lay alone in the bedroom next to the one he had shared with his wife, Mehmet Süleyman recalled every second.

  ‘Murad, I’m sure you must be mistaken,’ Mr Emin had said to his son as he ruffled his fingers affectionately through the boy’s hair. ‘Hamid Bey would never have done such a thing. You must have thought you saw and—’

  ‘Dad, he was a homosexual! A queer!’ Murad Emin cried. ‘I told you ages ago! You didn’t do anything!’

  ‘Just because old Hamid Bey was a fruit doesn’t mean he was a danger to you or anyone,’ his father said. ‘He took you on and was very generous to us. Anyway, even if he did have a bit of a fiddle, he didn’t do anything to you, did he? I mean that mad chap, Crazy Ali, always yelling outside the blacksmith’s shop, he wanks himself . . .’

  ‘Dad!’

  Murad Emin was, Süleyman could plainly see, far less liberal than either of his parents. Originally from Gaziantep in the far south-east, Mr and Mrs Emin had come to İstanbul in search of a lifestyle that was more easy-going than that of their home. Unfortunately, and in spite of both being university-educated, they had arrived with no money and two small children to support. So Mr Emin, who described himself as ‘a committed socialist’, had taken the only work he could get at the time, which had been tour-guiding for a rather dubious chain of small, cheap hotels. Currently he was unemployed. His wife, the woman Süleyman had seen dancing the tango with a man who he later realised was her pimp, worked as an unlicensed street prostitute. Intellectual, atheistic and poor, the Emins did not fit into either the educated middle class or the impoverished religious working class. They were, he realised as he talked to the father and his son, unique. They were possibly on drugs as well. To him they were likeable, but as Miss Madrid had pointed out to Süleyman and Melik when she’d first told them about the Emins, they were very far away from the usual image of the Anatolian peasant.

  ‘Mr Emin,’ Süleyman said to the man, ‘if your son says that Hamid İdiz masturbated in front of him, then we have to believe that is what happened. Mr İdiz was a very active homosexual, and apart from that, he does allude in his writings to an unrequited fancy for your son.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The boy looked at his father with fury on his face and said, ‘I told you! Islam proscribes such things! They are unnatural! Sinful!’

  Murad Emin, unlike his thin and heavily-lined father, was a well built and attractive boy. His clothes, though not in the height of fashion, were nevertheless well looked after. His hair was attractively styled and he had a clear complexion. His parents must, Süleyman felt, have some care for him and his younger sister.

  Mr Emin took Süleyman away from the tango and into his small, spare kitchen. ‘What you have to understand, Inspector,’ he said, ‘is that my son is a very gifted boy.’ He waved his thin arms around the room. ‘You can see how we live. My wife . . . she has a degree, we both do, and yet she . . .’ His eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Sir, I am not here to pass judgement upon what men and women have to do to survive,’ Süleyman said. It was very obvious by this time just what Mrs Emin was. ‘My aim is only to make sure that Hamid İdiz’s pupils are safe, and also, if I can, to find his killer.’

  Mr Emin bit down hard on his thin lower lip. ‘Miss Madrid, Murad’s first piano teacher, spotted his talent,’ he said. ‘He still used to go to her to practise after school even when Hamid Bey had taken him on. We don’t have a piano . . .’

  ‘You say he used to go to Miss Madrid?’

  ‘Murad took a little job at a nargile salon in Tophane. Week nights The owner has a piano. He lets my son practise. It’s convenient.’

  Süleyman nodded.

  ‘Hamid Bey was so impressed by my son that he wouldn’t take payment for his lessons,’ Mr Emin said. This reflected exactly what both Ali Reza Zafir and Izabella Madrid had told Süleyman. ‘He said that my son could go all the way. Join one of the great orchestras. Get out of this.’ He looked around the dank kitchen with sad eyes. ‘I knew what Hamid Bey was, what he would sometimes do. My son told me. But he never touched Murad, never hurt him. I would never have tolerated that. Maybe I was wrong in what I did tolerate.’

  ‘Your son, though unhurt, is not happy, Mr Emin,’ Süleyman said. ‘But no crime has been committed and so my work here is done, with the exception of the fact that at some point I will have to interview your son formally about Hamid Bey. I will have to interview all of his pupils.’

  ‘Of course.’ And then suddenly his face brightened. ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘do you happen to know whether the Turco–Caucasian Music Festival is still going ahead? Murad is so silent these days, there’s no point asking him, and his poor mother was so looking forward to it.’

  Süleyman said he had some information. Then they had returned to where the tango was happening, and together with İzzet Melik he had looked on politely and in silence. It was only just before they were about to leave that the thing that now haunted him happened. Mr Emin’s wife, the prostitute, showed them out. As Süleyman passed, she smiled and whispered, ‘Your wife know, does she?’

  He felt his face drain. He wanted to ask her ‘About what?’ but İzzet was with him and he wasn’t sure that his deputy had actually heard what the woman had said. Did the Emin woman know about Gonca? Was that what she meant, or was he just seeing connections where none existed? In the lukewarm light of early morning, he really didn’t know.

  Çetin İkmen didn’t have to go far to find his dead body. Propped up on a bench in the corner of the Kaktus Bar on Imam Adnan Lane, it was only a five-minute walk from the Rainbow Internet Café. What was more, the identity of the corpse was far from being a mystery to him.

  ‘He’s called Kenan Seyhan,’ İkmen told the two constables who had been called in by the owners of the Kaktus when the body was discovered. The customers, a random selection of media types and those of a generally left-wing nature, stood outside in small shocked groups. They had imagined that the man sitting quietly in a corner was just having a little sleep.

  İkmen picked up the tall, empty glass from the table in front of Kenan Seyhan and sniffed it. Rakı. ‘So he’d been drinking,’ he said. ‘I wonder what else.’

  One of the constables said, ‘The doctor’s on his way.’

  İkmen leaned in as close as he could to the body without actually touching it. Kenan Seyhan had not been dead for long. He was still slightly warm and his face had not yet dropped from what looked like an expression of fear into the slack death mask with which İkmen was all too familiar. Even in death, Kenan Seyhan looked haunted. İkmen called through to Ayşe Farsakoğlu and told her to assemble a squad of uniforms to go and pick up Kenan’s parents and his brother. At least one of them would have to formally identify the body. At the same time, Lokman Seyhan in particular would need to be questioned about his recent movements. If indeed he was still in town. He and Kenan had had some very serious ‘issues’, as the Americans put it. Had he somehow killed his brother in this funky lefty bar and then just run away?

  It was while İkmen was looking closely at the corpse that he noticed that Kenan Seyhan had a piece of paper sticking out of the top pocket of his shirt. He picked a clean napkin up from one of the nearby tables and wrapped it around his fingers so he could draw the paper out without touching it. Opening it up, he found four statements written on it in childlike block capitals. They made his hair stand on end.

  Even if they didn’t know his name, all the men in the coffee house knew what Hikmet Yıldız did for a living. No one really liked the fact that he was a policeman, alth
ough the oleaginous owner always insisted he accept free tea. It was too much bother to argue.

  Hikmet sat down at an empty table over by the door. Like every other coffee house in the country, this one was sparsely furnished with plain wooden tables and chairs, swathed in cigarette smoke and full of dour men. Away from their wives, they all did as they pleased. Some played backgammon, some watched the endless football matches that always seemed to be on the television over by the samovar in the corner. Others talked in low voices, nodding their flat-capped heads in agreement with each other from time to time. They all smoked, with the exception of the small group of ultra-religious Muslims who sat at a table right at the back of the coffee house, drinking tea, telling their prayer beads and debating. Everybody in Fatih was observant, but these men and boys were different; they looked at Hikmet with active hostility. Clearly, he reasoned, they felt he was an enemy, an agent of a secular state of which they did not approve. They wanted, so he imagined, Sharia as opposed to secular law, just like his brother.

  He’d only been sitting down for a minute when the oleaginous owner bustled over and put a glass of tea down in front of him. ‘Ah, Constable,’ he said, over-enthusiastically, ‘what a glorious morning Allah has seen fit to give us, eh? Warm, but not too hot.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A fine day for quiet contemplation in one’s favourite coffee house.’ He smiled. ‘I assume, Constable, that you are free from your very important duty today?’

  ‘Yes.’ The creepy man had noticed that he was out of uniform. Although quite what he was going to do with his day off, Hikmet didn’t know. Being at home with his unemployed brother was depressing. That was one of the reasons he generally started his days in the coffee house – even old men mutely playing backgammon and the mutterings of religious fanatics was better than that. He was wondering whether he might just head on up to Beyoğlu and spend the day in a bar when a group of smart men wearing sunglasses and some very chunky jewellery swept in and sat down at a table in the middle of the coffee house. All the men were young and unknown to him, with the exception of the slightly older character at the centre of everyone’s attention. Hikmet instinctively turned his head away so the man in question couldn’t see his face. Not that Tayfun ‘The Smoker’ Ergin would necessarily have recognised one of the many insignificant police constables who had come to arrest him the previous August. He had, after all, been entirely exonerated by the wife he’d almost beaten to death. When it came to the crunch, she just hadn’t been able to follow through and put him away. Now, apparently, the couple were divorced.