Copyright © 2005 Barbara Nadel
The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
eISBN: 978 0 7553 7857 9
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Author
Dedication
Acknowledgements
List of Characters
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Author’s Notes
Glossary
Turkish Alphabet
About the Author
Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel used to work in mental health services. Born in the East End of London, she now writes full time and has been a regular visitor to Turkey for over twenty years. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for her novel Deadly Web in 2005. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Francis Hancock series set during World War Two.
To Malcolm – a real star.
Thanks to all the usual suspects in Turkey and the UK. However, special mentions go out to Jim for his magical insight, to Alex for helping me with my occult connections, and to Malcolm for his computer expertise. Also special thanks to the Göreme ‘gang’: Pat, Ruth, Jeyda, Faruk, Hüseyin, Dawn and Caroline. Time spent amongst the ‘Fairy Chimneys’ allowed me to finish this book.
LIST OF CHARACTERS
Çetin İkmen – middle-aged senior İstanbul police inspector
Fatma İkmen – Çetin’s wife and mother to his nine children
Çiçek İkmen – Çetin and Fatma’s eldest daughter
Hulya İkmen Cohen – Çiçek’s younger sister, married to Berekiah Cohen
Balthazar Cohen – ex-police constable, father of Berekiah
Jak Cohen – Balthazar’s brother, a wealthy nightclub owner, resident in the UK
Mehmet Süleyman – İstanbul police inspector, used to work for Çetin İkmen
Zelfa Halman – psychiatrist, Mehmet Süleyman’s wife and mother to his son, Yusuf
Zuleika Topal – Mehmet Süleyman’s ex-wife, married to Burhan Topal
Fitnat Topal – Zuleika’s stepdaughter
Dr Arto Sarkissian – Armenian pathologist, Çetin İkmen’s oldest friend
Dr Krikor Sarkissian – Arto’s older brother, an addiction specialist
Commissioner Ardıç – Çetin İkmen and Mehmet Süleyman’s boss
Ayşe Farsakoğlu – Çetin’s female sergeant
İsak Çöktin – Mehmet Süleyman’s sergeant – a Kurd
Kasım Çöktin – İsak’s cousin
Metin İskender – young police inspector
Alpaslan Karataş – Metin İskender’s sergeant
Maximillian (Max) Esterhazy – an English teacher and Kabbalist
Ülkü Ayla – Max Esterhazy’s maid
Turgut Can – Ülkü Ayla’s boyfriend
Gonca – a gypsy artist and fortune-teller
İbrahim Dede – antiquarian bookseller and dervish
Demir Sandal – a pornographer
CHAPTER 1
She didn’t walk on to the ferry, she skipped. The Bosphorus Tour – a long, leisurely trip up the great waterway – tourists did it every day. As she scanned the rows of seats on the lower deck for somewhere suitable, she smiled. Tourists, yes, there were a few, but there weren’t any young, single Turkish girls like her. She found a place next to a couple in their thirties who spoke in a language she couldn’t even begin to fathom, and sat down. Just being stationary on the water made her feel cooler. Summer had lingered on late this year, persisting in a fierceness that had left everyone feeling debilitated. It was so nice to be both outside and cool.
The couple sitting next to her were poring over a guidebook to İstanbul. She noticed that it wasn’t written in the Roman alphabet. The woman, all dazzling teeth and brown skin, looked up at her. The man said something in the strange language that they shared, which prompted the woman to speak to her in what she recognised as English.
‘Do you speak English?’ the woman said.
She nodded proudly. ‘Yes.’
The woman moved the guidebook over to show her. ‘Can you tell me where is the last place this boat stops?’
She looked at the map of the Bosphorus, studded with what looked more like random odd marks than words. She pointed to the small collection almost at the top of the Bosphorus and said, ‘Is Anadolu Kavaḡı, then the boat returns.’
‘Ah. Thank you.’
The woman went to turn away, back to the man, but the girl, unable to resist, continued, ‘I am going there to Anadolu Kavaḡı to meet someone.’
‘Oh,’ the woman said, probably imagining that she meant a boyfriend of some sort. ‘Have you been to the Princes’ Islands?’ she asked, flicking once more through the pages of her strange guidebook.
‘Yes, but this is not the tour of the Islands,’ the girl said. ‘This is—’
‘I know,’ the woman replied. ‘We go to the Islands tomorrow. There are some many Jewish people in the Islands, I think.’
The girl shrugged.
‘We are from Israel,’ the woman said, indicating that the man was included with her.
‘Ah.’ So that’s what the strange marks in the guidebook were – Hebrew. The girl suddenly furrowed her brow. Once, quite a time ago, he had said that it was important to understand Hebrew, for some reason. But he hadn’t mentioned it since. Perhaps that came later.
As the ferry sounded its horn and moved out into the sparkling blueness of the Bosphorus, the girl, smiling again now, closed her eyes.
He had been invited to the actual ceremony, but he couldn’t face it. Not on his own. İkmen, although he hadn’t actually said anything, had understood. When he’d said he could only make it to the party the inspector had patted him kindly on the shoulder and smiled. But then İkmen, both his friend as well as his colleague, knew.
The man sitting in the Pera Palas Hotel teashop, waiting to go to the wedding reception of the daughter of his friend Çetin İkmen, didn’t look like a man anticipating a good time. At thirty-nine, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman of the İstanbul police was both thinner and sadder than he had ever been before. And although, as his mother never tired of telling him, he was still dazzlingly handsome, Mehmet was painfully aware of what his fears and anxieties were doing to him. Smoking almost continually, he took little nourishment beyond the tea he was drinking now out of an antique
silver-encrusted glass.
He looked around the slightly down-at-heel, self-consciously ‘Ottoman’ tearoom and smiled. How well this place summed him up! The deep, brocade-covered tub seats, the ratty ostrich-feather fan suspended from the tall, dark hat stand in the corner. Faded artefacts from a past characterised by fezzes and fat odalisques, by consumptive Turkish princes drinking crates of champagne while their Empire rotted around them. Spoiled, ignorant men, self-destructing to forget – like Mehmet’s own princely grandfather. Like Mehmet.
How could he have been so stupid? To sleep with another woman when one was already married was one thing, but to sleep with a prostitute . . . He shook his head at the memory of it, disgusted with both the recollection of the act and his enjoyment of it. Whether or not he would have told his wife, Zelfa, about his unprotected liaison with the Russian whore if the girl hadn’t been diseased, he didn’t know. The reality was that she had been HIV-positive and so to conceal what he had done from Zelfa had never been an option. His first test had been negative, but as his doctor, Krikor Sarkissian, had told him at the time, it was the second test, three months after the ‘contact’, that would show whether or not he was infected. Not that Zelfa had waited around to find this out. Irish on her mother’s side, an infuriated Zelfa Halman had packed up her elderly Turkish father, closed their house in Ortaköy and returned to Dublin. She had taken Mehmet’s infant son, Yusuf, too. The memory of the little boy caused tears to gather at the corners of Mehmet’s eyes. When would he see his son again? How would he, if he were HIV-positive, even begin to ask to see the child? Mehmet looked down at his left arm, recalling the sharp stab of the hypodermic needle in his vein. Dr Sarkissian had said that the results of the second test would take at least a week . . .
Mehmet took a sip of tea from his glass and lit yet another cigarette. When Zelfa threw him out, he’d had to return to his parents’ house, live cheek by jowl with the man some still called ‘Prince’ – his weak aristocratic father, Muhammed, his snobbish, common mother, Nur, and, thankfully, his widowed brother, Murad, and his young daughter, Edibe. His old friend Balthazar Cohen had offered him a room in his apartment in Karaköy – Mehmet had lived there during the hiatus between his first and second marriages – but the place was already cramped and, with Cohen’s son now married to İkmen’s daughter, space was about to become even more scarce. And so Mehmet endured. People did – until one day they stopped doing that. Until, he thought, bizarrely in the case of the young boy he’d seen the previous week, they took their own lives. Young, intelligent and from a wealthy background, Cem Ataman had destroyed himself in a way Süleyman found hard to think about, even though he could all too easily empathise with it. After all, he – unlike Cem, with his money, his youth and his place at İstanbul University – had very little to look forward to. Now, with the results of his second HIV test looming, there was only looking back – to happy times, to his son, to the past security of his own body . . .
‘Mehmet!’
He looked up at the familiar features of an attractive woman in her mid-thirties. Rising quickly to his feet, he offered the woman his hand. ‘Zuleika,’ he said with a small, tired smile. ‘How good to see you.’
They shook hands and sat down. Zuleika arranged numerous bags around her feet as she sat, each sporting the name of an exclusive and expensive shop – Gönül Paksöy, Surreal Kılık İpek.
Mehmet tipped his head towards the bags and smiled. ‘I see you continue to prosper.’
Zuleika smiled in return. ‘Burhan is prosperous, Mehmet,’ she said. ‘I’m very fortunate.’
‘Yes.’
‘But then so are you,’ she continued. ‘How is little Yusuf?’
‘He’s fine,’ Mehmet responded quickly. Although his ex-wife and also his cousin, Zuleika didn’t know about the grim reality of his new existence. The official line from the older Süleymans was that Mehmet’s wife and child were merely visiting relatives in Dublin. Just like his Ottoman forebears, ‘Prince’ Muhammed Süleyman preferred to keep his private life ‘walled’.
As soon as the waitress arrived, Zuleika ordered tea.
‘So what are you doing here?’ she asked her ex-husband when the girl had left. ‘I don’t see this place as a haunt of policemen.’
Mehmet smiled once more. ‘Çetin İkmen’s daughter Hulya is getting married here in the hotel,’ he said. ‘I’ll be going off to the party in a minute.’
‘Oh?’ Zuleika frowned. ‘Very grand venue for someone like İkmen, isn’t it? I’d have thought that with all his children . . .’
Zuleika had never liked Inspector Çetin İkmen. Even despite his being older than Mehmet, that İkmen was senior to him was something she had never understood. İkmen, though educated, was, to Zuleika’s mind, common. But then with nine children, a raffish apartment in Sultanahmet and a wife who covered her head, how could he be anything else?
‘The groom’s uncle is actually paying for the wedding,’ Mehmet replied, his awareness growing with every passing second of all the reasons why he had left this woman.
Zuleika leaned across the table, assaulting Mehmet’s nostrils with heavy, expensive perfume. ‘Anyone we know?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Mehmet said. ‘The uncle, Jak Cohen, has lived in London for the last thirty years.’
‘Cohen?’ She frowned again. ‘No relation to your old colleague, what was his name—’
‘Balthazar,’ Mehmet cut in, ‘yes. Jak is his brother. Berekiah, Balthazar’s son, is marrying Hulya İkmen.’
Zuleika sighed. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘I suppose if İkmen’s wife has found it within herself to take a Jew . . .’
‘Berekiah is a very fine young man,’ Mehmet responded hotly. ‘Anyone would be proud to have him join their family.’ He then added acidly, ‘Anyone with any sense, that is.’
Zuleika’s tea arrived and, for a few moments, she sat back sipping it in silence. What a fool Mehmet still was! Forever fascinated by his working-class friends, wearing a watch she recognised as a street vendor fake. Burhan would rather die than be seen wearing such a thing! Burhan, her husband, with his many houses, his smart Şişli apartment, his cars, his yacht – his thin, grey hair, his teenage daughter . . .
‘I’m sure they’ll be very happy,’ she said in a conciliatory tone.
Mehmet, feeling now that he’d won some sort of moral victory, sat up straight. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘so am I.’
How handsome he still looked! Especially when he was asserting himself – so upright, regal. The pale young girl dressed entirely in black who approached the table now also shared that view. Her eyes visibly dilated as she looked at him.
‘Zuleika . . .’
‘Oh, Fitnat.’ Zuleika saw the twin lights of both desire and suspicion in the young girl’s eyes. ‘This is my cousin Mehmet Bey.’
‘Ah . . .’
Mehmet rose to take the young girl’s hand in his.
‘Mehmet, this is my stepdaughter, Fitnat.’
‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Fitnat.’
‘Right . . .’ She placed a large pile of bags on the floor, next to her black boot-covered feet, then sat down in the one remaining empty chair while Mehmet resumed his seat.
As soon as everyone was settled, Zuleika turned to the girl and said, ‘So did you get some nice, light, pretty clothes, Fitnat?’
‘Yes,’ the girl smiled, ‘lots. I’ll show you at home. I’m sure Mehmet Bey doesn’t want to—’
‘Your father will be so pleased,’ Zuleika cut in, and then turning to Mehmet she said, ‘Fitnat has been going through a “Gothic” phase of late. Black clothes, heavy make-up, all that nonsense.’
Yes, Mehmet had seen the so-called ‘Goths’ in and around Taksim Square and İstiklal Caddesi – young black-clad kids, listening to dirges on their CD Walkmans, talking about suicide. Not that they ever, in his experience, were any more prone to it than others. Maybe even less so. Cem Ataman, whose blood had oozed into the shoes of the officers who h
ad found him, only had, as his parents had put it, Gothic ‘interests’. He hadn’t, or so it appeared, been one of the actual black-draped brigade like this girl.
‘But you’re done with all that now, aren’t you, darling?’ Zuleika said as she put a hand out to stroke Fitnat’s thick, artificially black hair.
‘Yes . . .’
‘She’s still only very young, you see,’ Zuleika said as she watched the girl watch her ex-husband’s every move and gesture. ‘Sixteen. Just a child really.’ Fitnat, stung not so much by what had been said, as by the spite that was implied within it, turned to look at her stepmother. Zuleika smiled. ‘And so in order that she might find a nice young man of her own age, she does need to take advantage of her prettiness,’ she said, ‘not hide it all under ugly black bags. Plenty of time for that when you’re old, like Mehmet Bey and myself, Fitnat.’
The girl looked into the beautiful face of her stepmother with both lack of comprehension and not a little hurt.
No trip out to Anadolu Kavaḡı would be complete without lunch at one of the little fish restaurants clustered around the harbour. The Israeli couple, as well as a young Frenchman the Turkish girl had briefly spoken to on the ferry, thought so and went straight for it.
But she was too excited to eat. Even though the meeting wouldn’t, couldn’t take place until sunset, just the thought of it . . . Impulsively she hugged her arms to her chest, smiling, her features distorting when viewed through the steam rising from her tea glass. The other people at the çay bahçe – a fisherman, a middle-class woman and her daughter – thought she looked a little odd at the time. But then they didn’t know what she knew, couldn’t know what delicious torment she was in.
She’d saved herself for this day, deliberately and with what she now knew was joy. It hadn’t been easy but then nothing that was really worth anything ever was – that’s what she’d been told, that’s what she had learned. That wasn’t what her father had told her. But then what did he know? Nothing. Nobody knew anything because she’d been so good – just like a young bride should be. She smiled, finished her tea and, through dreamy half-closed eyes, she watched the street cats fight and play outside the tiny police station on the waterfront.
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