A Noble Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Yes, sir.’ İkmen smiled again, but then very quickly frowned. The scene of the operation was going to be overseen by a large team of men and women who would be communicating with İkmen and Ayşe Farsakoğlu inside. They would be looking for a man fitting the description of Cem that İsmail Yıldız had given them and making sure that none of the local people got to know what was really going on. And then there was the girl . . .

  Ardıç had some misgivings about that too. ‘This girl,’ he said, ‘er . . .’

  ‘Sabiha.’

  ‘What if she does not believe what you tell her?’

  The plan was for İkmen and Ayşe to take the key that her family would leave underneath the doormat and let themselves in.

  ‘Oh, she will believe us,’ İkmen said. ‘It will break the poor kid’s heart, but she’ll believe us. She’ll have to.’

  The driver took them out of the tangle of the small streets of Çarşamba and drove back to the station along the western shore of the Golden Horn. Maybe it was being close to the water and the open sky above, but only once they were near to the Horn did Çetin İkmen feel as if he could breathe easily again.

  Chapter 24

  * * *

  Both originally İzmir men, İzzet Melik and his computer support friend Şenol had a lot in common – with the exception of computers. Şenol understood them, while İzzet just got by. In discussion with Şenol about the computers at the Tulip nargile salon, it soon became apparent to İzzet that he didn’t know enough to even start to find out what Murad Emin and Ali Reza Zafir might have been looking at. And so Şenol, in the guise of a sports fan friend (which he was not) went along with İzzet when he drove to Tophane for his lunchtime smoke.

  Because the Tulip was all but empty when they arrived, İzzet found it easy to engage the owner in conversation. As ever, it was about wrestling, and this time Mustafa Bey absolutely insisted that İzzet and his friend look at all the websites devoted to the Ottoman heroes of the sport on one of his computers. For a while he looked at the sites with them, getting ever more enthusiastic as he found information about more and more arcane and obscure Ottoman wrestlers. İzzet was, he had to admit, rather taken with it himself. But for poor Şenol, feigning interest in something he personally found mindless was almost an act of will too far. It was therefore with some relief that he watched the owner go to take in a delivery of tobacco and serve a few customers.

  ‘You enjoy yourselves, take your time, İzzet Bey,’ Mustafa said as he left the back room to go back into the salon. ‘There’s no hurry.’

  But of course there was, and Şenol started the second machine up as quickly as he could once the owner had gone. İzzet largely left him to it.

  ‘You know what we’re looking for, don’t you?’ he said as Şenol looked from one machine to the other and then back again, pressing keys and pushing buttons as he went. ‘Evidence that someone has visited extremist jihadi sites,’ he added. ‘Anything extreme, violent, anti-Western, anti-democratic.’

  ‘Insane interpretations of Koranic scripture,’ Şenol said.

  ‘All that stuff.’

  Mustafa was busy with the tobacco supplier, a small hunchbacked man whose complexion was very similar to the leaves he was now holding up for his customer to see. From what the owner said, it seemed very likely that he was going to personally try the product before he committed to buying. An old man who could have been his father turned up and said that he would prepare a pipe for the three of them to share. Then another man, possibly again some sort of relative, poured some tea from the samovar for the tobacco man, Mustafa and his father, then set about serving the few customers in the salon. So everyone was occupied. İzzet, though still very much on the alert, told Şenol to take his time. There was no great hurry, and so care could be taken. Şenol lit up a cigarette, and the light from the two screens bounced against the surface of his pale blue eyes. İzzet, also smoking now, began looking at the two large stacks of DVDs under the table that the computers stood upon. The first one he found was Bambi.

  When Sabiha’s brother Emir had got married back in their old village, he had stayed on to work on their uncle’s farm. Emir’s absence had made Sabiha very sad. He had been a nice brother, generous and kind. He had even liked Sami, which was amazing given what everyone else said about him. Sami was Sabiha’s guilty secret, a neighbour who was also her boyfriend. He was a year younger than Sabiha; he was also a little simple, although not, as some said, brain-damaged. Just a bit slower than others in some ways. Sami had not been slow to respond when Sabiha had kissed him. Emir had told Sabiha that he believed she and Sami should be married. But she knew that she could never tell her father about Sami. He would not approve, especially if he knew what Sami had done. Because Sami had not just kissed Sabiha. Every time she thought about the pain and also the pure pleasure of having him inside her, Sabiha glowed with excitement.

  ‘Why are you going to Sultanahmet this evening?’ she asked her mother. Her parents, especially her mother, almost never went out after six o’clock. ‘Why can’t I come?’

  Sami and his family were away, staying with relatives in the east. So it wasn’t even as if Sabiha could organise a secret little tryst while her parents were out.

  ‘Your father has business,’ her mother said as she folded the tea towels into the airing cupboard.

  ‘What business?’

  Her father was a cook at a small restaurant in Kumkapı. He worked for a family of Armenians who, he always said, treated him very well.

  ‘Is Father looking for a new job?’

  Her mother didn’t answer. She just kept on folding the tea towels, her face very straight, not looking up at her daughter. Sabiha gave up trying to speak to her and flung herself down on the sofa. It had been an odd sort of day so far. Her father had left early to go to work because, he said, he was doing the lunchtime shift as opposed to his usual evening slot. He wouldn’t say why, just like her mother would not be drawn about where he might be taking her for the evening. Sabiha couldn’t believe that the two of them were actually going out, as in, to a restaurant or a bar (they didn’t drink), or to anywhere that wasn’t quiet and pious and somewhere that her mother would immediately dislike. That said, perhaps her parents were going out for a romantic meal together after all! If she had secrets, then so could they.

  Sabiha looked over at her mother and said, ‘You know, Mum, I think you’re really pretty. I mean it.’

  Her mother deserved to go out. She was just as pretty as the free and easy secular women who went out in places like Beyoğlu and, to a lesser extent, Sultanahmet all the time. This time her mother did look up at her and smiled. But then just as quickly her smile fell into a cloud of tears, and with a face contorted by grief she ran out of the room. It was turning out, Sabiha thought, to be a very odd day.

  ‘I have done what you asked, Şukru,’ Gonca said as she stitched a hank of white horsehair on to her canvas. Some strange woman who ‘thrilled’ to her art up in Cihangir had commissioned it. A collage to represent gypsy life past. Few had horses these days, and no one still had bears.

  Her brother, once a master of bears, walked into her studio and smiled. Gonca always knew that he was near, even without looking at him. They were, and always had been, practically twins. ‘What do you want, Şukru?’

  He sat down in an old wicker chair that she kept over by the sink and looked at her. Her face, though still very beautiful, was pale from lack of sleep and the absence of make-up. Her eyes, he could see, were clearly puffed around the edges, where, presumably, she had been crying. To get rid of the policeman had been difficult for her. But then Şukru knew that it would be. Some years before, his wife had died suddenly and violently in a road traffic accident. He knew the pain of a love suddenly curtailed.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  For the first time she took her eyes off her canvas and looked at him. ‘How do you think I am?’ she said. ‘Eh? How do you think?’

  Şukru took in a deep br
eath and then looked down at the floor. In spite of the fact that he knew that what had been done had been for the good name and honour of his family, he still felt sorry for her. ‘How was he, your policeman? When you told him?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, overjoyed!’ she said. ‘Ecstatic! Just delighted to be told to go for no apparent reason!’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘But did I tell him that I loved him? That that was the reason he just had to go? Of course I didn’t!’ she said bitterly. ‘Would you have done that, Şukru? Would you have broken the heart of the person you loved?’

  She was crying now. He hadn’t seen her cry since they were children.

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Then why would I, eh? Why would I?’ she said. Finally at the end of both her strength and her patience, she stuck her needle into her canvas and leaned back against the stool behind her. ‘I wish I could just curl up and die!’

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘Don’t you tell me what to feel!’ she screamed. She was weeping so hard she was choking. ‘Don’t you dare do that, Şukru!’

  She called him names. Vile and abusive names that would have made a lesser man than him blush. She had loved that policeman so much! The force of her hatred and her passion was enormous. But Şukru just let her scream it all out in his direction. Better that than at their father. He, old as he was, was likely to kill her for less. Only when her fury had finally burnt itself out and she was lying on her studio floor sobbing into her hair did he even attempt to go over to her.

  ‘Gonca . . .’ He wasn’t going to say that he was sorry, because he wasn’t. What had been done was what had to be done. He put a hand on her shoulder and felt her body flinch underneath his touch. He pulled away and then sat back on his haunches, waiting for whatever she was going through to stop. He wasn’t going to leave her like this.

  After about ten minutes of almost silent crying, she raised her head and looked at him. Her eyes were even more puffy now, and her face was bright, bright red. Şukru felt how badly women suffered for love, even old women like his sister. Barren and wrinkled and no longer as slim as a whip, Gonca still had such presence, such dignity and even beauty. But she mourned the leaving of her lover, because as Şukru knew only too well, she would be terrified that he had been her last. After a few moments of heavy breathing she said, ‘Go, and do not come back until I send for you.’

  ‘Gonca . . .’ She had never been this upset before, not even when her first husband ran away with a girl half her age.

  ‘Just go,’ she said quietly. ‘I will recover, Şukru, because I have to. I have children.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘Just go!’ Her eyes were black with fury, the pupils glittering like tiny chips of malignant jet.

  Şukru stood up, and with a shrug began to walk towards the studio door. Just before he got there, he turned and saw his sister, now sitting up on her haunches, snarling at him like an animal. ‘I keep this family, I love this family,’ she said with pure hatred in her voice. ‘But I will never forgive you or this family for doing this to me. To kill love is a sin. It is a sin against people, against nature and against God!’

  Three of the DVDs had Murad Emin’s name written on them in marker pen. İzzet assumed that it was in the boy’s own handwriting.

  ‘I can’t find anything exactly untoward on here,’ Şenol said as he scrolled through various menus and did other seemingly arcane things. Out in the salon, Mustafa, his father and the tobacco supplier were having a very therapeutic smoke. From what İzzet could hear of their conversation, the leaf tobacco was extremely mellow and satisfying.

  İzzet looked at his watch and realised that he and Şenol had been ensconced in the small back room with the computers for over an hour. Soon Mustafa Bey would be wanting to join them again for more tales of the exploits of famous Ottoman wrestlers.

  ‘Şenol?’

  ‘Yes?’

  İzzet passed one of the three DVDs over to him and said, ‘Can you have a look at this?’

  ‘OK.’

  İzzet went back to looking through the crack in the door to make sure that they were undisturbed. He heard Şenol slide the disk into the computer, and then he heard what sounded at first like Arabesk music. But the singer’s words were not in Turkish, or in fact in any other language that İzzet could speak.

  ‘What . . .’

  ‘Something in Arabic or Farsi up on the screen,’ Şenol said as he looked very intently at one of the computers. ‘Do you . . .’

  ‘No,’ İzzet said. ‘Italian, some French and English. You?’

  ‘I can only really speak German, a little English,’ Şenol said. Then there was a sound like a muffled scream, and Şenol’s eyes widened. ‘Allah!’

  ‘What is it?’

  Reluctant though he was to leave his post and risk possible discovery, İzzet ran over to his friend and looked at the screen over his shoulder.

  ‘I could so easily have lived without seeing that,’ Şenol said with a distinct quaver in his voice. ‘My life would have been so much better without that image.’

  İzzet could only agree. As he watched the headless body of some poor soul twitch on the ground in front of the hooded men with machetes who had just executed him, he wondered what kind of person would want to do or even see such terrible things.

  Chapter 25

  * * *

  Çetin İkmen looked at his own clean-shaven face in the bathroom mirror and frowned. He didn’t like his face without its moustache. Hairless it seemed to highlight what he felt was a weak chin. He put a hand up and touched the rough skin that now seemed to shout at him from his left cheek. On the few occasions when he had done this in the past, he’d never liked it. He would, he knew, be growing another moustache again as soon as the operation in Çarşamba was at an end. Like the suit that Fatma was ironing for him in the kitchen, it wasn’t right, not for him. He was mustachioed, crumpled and stained; it was who he was. He was also, now that he was alone, deeply worried about what they were about to do that evening, and not just because he had already considered all the things that could possibly go wrong.

  İkmen was not, and had never been, convinced that this man Cem had anything to do with the death of Gözde Seyhan, the whole reason for his investigation into honour killing. The girl had lived a long way from Fatih, where Cem appeared to be based, and although the Seyhans had had relatives in that district at the time of Gözde’s death, they hadn’t had strong connections with the area. Cem could be involved in some way with the gangster Tayfun Ergin, who was by all accounts moving in on some businesses in Fatih. But that was in no way certain. Honour killings in the city had increased in line with the recent heavy migration from the countryside. Some people denied this, but to İkmen it was obvious. And just as people became more sophisticated when they came into contact with new and more challenging situations, so crime in the city evolved from what it had once been out in the country. For an outraged father to kill his daughter in the middle of the city was not easy. One could not count upon the silence of long-term and loyal neighbours and friends, the police were more sophisticated and more punitive over such matters, and disposing of a dead body in a built-up area was fraught with danger. To contract that murder out, even at a price poor people would struggle to pay, made sense. And yet İkmen was not convinced that Cem had killed Gözde. There was a feeling about what İsmail Yıldız had told him about this man and his operation that made İkmen think that he’d never done anything like this before. Chillingly, the possibility of several people making money out of this phenomenon was not lost upon Çetin İkmen. Where a need existed, real or perceived, so people would appear to fill that need. Sadly the need was real, and it was, apparently, increasing.

  ‘Murad’s probably on his way home now,’ his father said as he smiled and tried to look at the officers through half-closed eyes. ‘School, you know. He’s been to school.’

  It was almost as if he was trying to remind himself where his s
on had been. But then by anyone’s standards, Mr Emin was way off his head on whatever he’d taken earlier that day.

  ‘We need to speak to Murad,’ Süleyman said sternly. He had two constables and İzzet Melik at his back, and in his pocket three appalling extremist DVDs with Murad Emin’s name on them.

  ‘There’s his mobile . . .’

  ‘We need to speak to your son in person,’ Süleyman said as he pushed past the boy’s father and entered the apartment. The sharp smell of burning cannabis resin hit his nostrils immediately, but he ignored it and motioned for the other officers to follow him in. ‘We’ll wait.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Süleyman waved in Mr Emin’s face the warrant he had just obtained to search the premises, and then told İzzet and the constables to go and look in the boy’s room. Mr Emin, dismayed and agitated now, joined them. Süleyman himself went into the litter-strewn room that passed for the family’s living area. There he found, half clothed, Emin’s wife.

  ‘Oh,’ she said when she saw him, her eyes clouded by the smoke from the joint that she was holding, ‘what can I do for you? I can give you a hand job for—’

  ‘No thank you!’ He stomped over, took the joint out of her hand and threw it into an ashtray. He was furious. This woman, this broken, degraded, filthy addict, had made him, albeit unconsciously, look away from her son, a boy who at the very least was besotted with extremist propaganda.

  He looked over his shoulder to make sure that no one was listening to him, and then he hissed, ‘Last time I was here, you said something about did my wife know. Did my wife know what, exactly? About whom?’ He put a hand up to her throat and squeezed just a little. ‘Well? What did you mean by that? Speak!’