Deadly Web

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Once you’ve sat down, we will,’ the Armenian said. ‘Please take a seat, Inspector. My chairs do not bite.’

  Dr Sarkissian looked grave. That combined with his insistence that he sit down could only mean one thing. He had AIDS. Wringing his hands compulsively, Süleyman wondered how he might retain any sense of dignity in the face of such a thing.

  ‘Doctor—’

  ‘Sit down!’

  It was an order. How dare he? Süleyman looked down at the small, elegantly dressed man behind the desk with undisguised fury.

  ‘Please,’ Krikor Sarkissian then added gently. ‘Please sit down, Inspector.’

  And almost before he could think about what he was doing, Süleyman found himself sitting in the chair in front of Krikor Sarkissian’s desk, his head down, ashamed, like a naughty school child brought before his disapproving teacher.

  ‘Now I have your test results,’ Krikor said, ‘and I’m delighted to be able to tell you that you are clear of HIV infection . . .’

  Where the tears came from he didn’t know, but it must have been a big place because there were so many of them. This, he thought as the tears just kept breaking across him, is not in the least bit dignified – and he felt ashamed. But he was also completely helpless in the face of such a release of tension, which is what this was. Aware only later of Krikor’s hand on his shoulder, his entire body shook for a good ten minutes after the doctor’s short but, to him, world-changing, statement.

  Only when he had managed to retain his composure enough to raise his head from his hands did the Armenian speak to him again.

  ‘Now can you see why I wanted you to sit down?’

  Süleyman, through sobs, smiled.

  ‘Even when it’s good news, people need to be looked after,’ Krikor said. ‘No one, whichever way the test results go, is ever prepared for this,’ he smiled. ‘Now I’m going to ask Matilde to make you a cup of coffee and then we’re going to talk.’

  ‘Yes, but I—’

  ‘Just five minutes,’ Krikor said as he held a hand aloft to silence him. ‘I think you owe me that.’

  He’d only told him things he knew already, but as Mehmet Süleyman walked out of the doctor’s office and made his way towards the station, he knew why Krikor Sarkissian had done so. In future, and if he ever wanted to have any sort of second chance with his wife, things would have to be different. But then the past few months had, if nothing else, taught him that he could control his baser urges. Odd really, he’d been a master of self-control when he was younger. What had happened to change that he wasn’t really sure. But he knew that in the future he would have to revert to his former mode of behaviour again – which was no bad thing.

  This didn’t, of course, mean that he couldn’t have sex, however. And when he went to see what Gün and Çelik had come up with as regards ‘costumes’ for the evening he felt that he probably needed it rather more than he had imagined he would. Çelik, with her long blonde hair tied into a messy bun at the back of her head, looked particularly stunning in her black lace ball gown.

  But as soon as the women had gone, Süleyman, now partnered once again with Çöktin, resolved to keep his mind on the job at hand. Tonight, with any luck, they might get some sort of idea about what was going on at the Hammer and, if they were even more fortunate, who was doing it.

  So far, Max Esterhazy’s address book had yielded his barber, Simurg bookshop and the home of a young girl who had once taken lessons from him, but was now at university in America. And when Çöktin did finally call İkmen back, on his way out to Beyoğlu, it was with mixed news.

  ‘Cem Ataman, the suicide, was one of Esterhazy’s students,’ he said. ‘But he stopped his lessons just over six months ago.’

  ‘And the other girl?’

  ‘I’ve yet to contact someone sober at the Arat house,’ Çöktin responded gloomily.

  ‘OK.’

  İkmen replaced the receiver and looked across at the exotic figure of Gonca the gypsy, lying amid numerous tomes, atop Max’s old leather Chesterfield. When she felt his eyes on her, she looked up and smiled. Momentarily dazzled, İkmen looked away. All breasts, glitter and teeth, no wonder young Yıldız kept going back for more. At nearly fifty, it seemed Gonca had lost none of her appeal to the opposite sex. But how much of this was due to her self-confessed sexual appetite as opposed to looks and outright sorcery, İkmen wasn’t sure.

  He picked the telephone receiver up and dialled yet another number. The woman who answered sounded vaguely familiar. But he went into his usual routine of introducing himself – until she stopped him.

  ‘You work with my ex-husband,’ she said.

  And then he remembered. Zuleika Süleyman. Allah, but what a life she had led poor Mehmet all those years ago! Always buying things, forever, just like his current wife, suspicious of his every move.

  ‘Zuleika.’

  ‘Yes, now Zuleika Topal.’

  ‘Congratulations, Mrs Topal.’

  ‘So how can I help you, İkmen?’ she said, resorting to the high-handed tone she had always used with him when she was married to Mehmet. ‘And how did you get this number?’

  İkmen told her about Max and how he had possibly disappeared.

  ‘Well, that’s very odd,’ she said.

  ‘Why is that, Mrs Topal?’

  ‘Because my stepdaughter, Fitnat, has a lesson with Mr Esterhazy tonight. She’s on her way, or rather she told me she was on her way to his apartment now.’

  ‘You know for certain that she had a lesson with him tonight?’

  ‘Yes. Well, I believe so,’ she said. ‘Mr Esterhazy telephoned her yesterday.’

  ‘Did you take the call?’

  ‘No, Fitnat did.’ There was a pause during which he thought he heard her smack those disapproving lips of hers. ‘Oh, unless . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fitnat likes to hang around with all those weird Goths at Atlas Pasaj. She knows I disapprove, but—’

  ‘Mrs Topal, does Fitnat have a mobile telephone?’

  ‘Of course! If she’s doing something she shouldn’t, it will be switched off, though.’

  ‘Can I have the number anyway? I really do need to track Mr Esterhazy down.’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked the number up and gave it to him. ‘Will you let me know if you manage to get hold of her?’

  ‘Of course,’ İkmen said. ‘I may even meet her. I’m at Mr Esterhazy’s apartment myself.’

  ‘But what about if she’s gone to Atlas?’

  İkmen knew what Süleyman had planned for the Hammer, but he didn’t mention that to her. ‘I’m sure that if she’s there without your permission, we can pick her up,’ he said.

  ‘I would be very grateful, Çetin,’ she replied.

  İkmen, holding back the laughter her unaccustomed use of his first name caused, said that he would do what he could and then, as soon as he’d put the phone down, he tried to call the girl’s mobile without success. And so it was then that he contacted Süleyman.

  He’d wanted to speak to him anyway.

  ‘What did Krikor Sarkissian have to tell you?’ he said, coming straight, and rapidly, to the point.

  ‘I’m clean, thank you, Çetin,’ his friend replied. ‘Thanks be to Allah.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ İkmen agreed. Though in no way a religious man, he had secretly said one or two prayers for Süleyman. He’d also, as he was doing now, shed one or two tears for him too, although this time his silent tears were of relief rather than anxiety.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ Süleyman asked. He was obviously unaware of the effect this news was having on İkmen. But then, when it came to his private life, he could be somewhat closed off even with intimates like İkmen. The latter cleared his throat. ‘The name Fitnat Topal mean anything to you, Mehmet?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I know Fitnat,’ his friend said with more than a touch of disdain in his voice. ‘A little flirt.’

  ‘Did you also know that she was one of Max’s st
udents?’ İkmen said. He then went on to report his conversation with Zuleika.

  Süleyman was shocked. ‘But if she heard from Max yesterday . . .’

  ‘If she did,’ İkmen corrected. ‘Fitnat took the call herself and so until we speak to her, we won’t know. Zuleika thinks she may well have gone to Atlas Pasaj.’

  ‘Well, we’ll soon find out, won’t we?’ Süleyman replied. ‘Gün and Çelik have just gone in.’

  ‘Tell them to keep a lookout for her,’ İkmen said. ‘And if and when you find her I will need to speak to her.’

  ‘OK.’

  İkmen replaced the receiver and then looked across at Gonca once again. This time she was deep inside the books, scribbling her findings down on a pad of paper.

  ‘Problems?’ she asked, not looking up as she spoke.

  ‘Complications,’ İkmen replied.

  Gonca laughed. It was a deep, throaty sound. ‘What do you expect of a magician?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He lit a cigarette and then leaned back in the chair and looked up at the ceiling. ‘You know, Gonca, I’ve been a friend of Max Esterhazy for thirty years and yet I’ve not known him at all.’

  ‘İbrahim Dede told me that the Englishman was the only pupil the old Kabbalist Rebbe Baruh would ever take,’ she said.

  İkmen shook his head. Knowing what he now did about Max’s past, that seemed incredible. What had Max done? Had he, like Hitler before him, sought to rob the Jews of their magic by force? He couldn’t imagine it and yet . . . There had, he recalled, been a violence in Max that day they had argued about Alison. He’d accused İkmen of all sorts – wanting the girl for himself, meddling in things he didn’t understand.

  Gonca, as could be her wont, suddenly lost patience with what she was doing and threw one of the books to the floor.

  ‘I could go on with these correspondences for ever,’ she said. ‘Meaningless unless we know what your magician might have planned. And as for this . . .’ She held the drawing that İskender had made in the hospital aloft for İkmen to see. ‘When I first saw it I thought that maybe it was the Lightning Flash.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, it’s the way the practitioner draws divine light down from the top of the tree, the God-head, into his own material body at the bottom,’ she said. ‘Kabbalists can’t work without doing that – I think. It’s very complicated, all this, you know, İkmen. I’m just a simple gypsy . . .’

  At that moment, Karataş, who had been making coffee for them all, came in from the kitchen.

  ‘If anyone comes to the door, I want to answer it,’ İkmen said as he watched the big man place a cup in front of Gonca. ‘It may be one of Max’s students.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So, Gonca, look, if you don’t think the thing İskender drew was this Lightning Flash then what is it?’

  But Gonca, true to her nature, was rather busy looking at Karataş.

  ‘Allah!’

  Only when he had left them did she return to their previous conversation.

  ‘I think it’s a sigil,’ she said. ‘A written or drawn talisman. Magicians use them to capture the essence of something or someone. If you have someone’s sigil you can, so they say, control that person. I don’t know what they mean and even looking through these books isn’t helping.’

  ‘But if Max came back to the apartment to get this . . .’

  ‘Sigil. Maybe he wants or needs to have control over that person,’ Gonca said. ‘But then do we know that it was Esterhazy who came here and shot your colleague?’

  ‘No.’ İkmen sighed. ‘No, but if Max is dead then surely I would feel – something . . .’

  ‘Would you?’ she smiled. ‘By your own admission, you don’t know him as well as you thought you did. There’s a lot of power in this place, you know, İkmen,’ she said. ‘Trust me.’

  And then she got up and started walking towards the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  She shrugged. ‘To the kitchen.’

  İkmen raised his eyes heavenwards and said, ‘Please leave Sergeant Karataş alone, will you, Gonca? For me? He’s had a very bad couple of days and he needs to keep his mind on his job.’

  But Gonca just kept on walking, her long red skirts swishing seductively around bare ankles encircled with jingling bracelets. But then what, really, did İkmen expect? As his wife was always saying, ‘If you will always engage these outcasts to help you, you can’t expect them to be reliable.’ Which was true. Over the years he’d worked with a variety of people ‘on the edge’ as it were – transsexuals, gypsies, soothsayers, beggars. And sometimes they’d helped and sometimes they’d hindered. But what they had always consistently done was their own ‘thing’. Whatever the problem he needed help with, whatever the urgency of the information required, these sorts of people – those most like him, in reality – had always done whatever it was to the beat of their own drum. Not unlike Max. He’d gone for help to Max. He had sought him out over that Goat of Mendes image – the desecration of the holy places. Something, İkmen thought, the Nazis had done. But Max? No, Max wanted to do good. His sister had said so; İkmen himself had always believed it. But then, yet again, he thought, how well do I or did I know this man?

  İkmen picked the piece of paper bearing the sigil up off the floor and looked at it. Utterly, as Gonca had said, meaningless. Just a squiggle in biro. And they didn’t even know whether it had anything to do with whoever came into the apartment and shot İskender or not. Maybe it was just a pattern – an innocent, zigzag doodle İskender had spotted somewhere in Max’s bedroom just before he hit the floor. İkmen put the piece of paper in his pocket and then scowled when he heard Gonca’s deep laughter coming from the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 16

  The atmosphere, as well as the décor, inside the Hammer wasn’t what they had expected. There were no artificial tombstones, no fake cobwebs, not even a dark corner in which to be miserable. And although the clientèle was almost entirely made up of people in black clothes, with black make-up and heavily scarred arms, the harsh neon lighting gave the place more of a modernistic, Huis Clos feel than something Frankenstein’s monster might find familiar. Looking around now that they’d had a chance to get drinks and find a banquette on which to sit, the two officers admitted to each other that they felt overdressed. These Goths, or so it would seem when they compared the Hammer to other establishments in the Pasaj, were both super cool and serious about what they did – or didn’t. Getting to talk to people was, they both felt, going to be very difficult unless, of course, someone came to talk to them first.

  ‘That doesn’t seem very likely,’ Gün said as she tried to stare without hope into the depths of her mineral water.

  ‘Does seem to bear out the idea that this might be the place to come to get into more serious stuff, though, doesn’t it?’ Çelik replied.

  ‘I’ve seen no evidence of Satanism, have you?’ Gün, who was older and more experienced, responded.

  Çelik looked down. ‘No . . .’

  ‘No, so don’t make any assumptions.’

  The heavy trance music that had, until just a few moments before, thundered through every fibre of the building started up again. Çelik, who quite liked trance herself, started to move her head to the beat. Gün, on the other hand, shook her head in despair and then signalled to her colleague that she was going to try to find the toilet. The girl at the bar, a thin, drugged-out-looking individual with a spectacular scar at her throat, pointed Gün in the direction of the basement.

  Down there, surprisingly, it was as bright as it was up in the bar and as she walked down the bright white corridor towards the toilet, Gün felt as if she were going into an operating theatre. Pictures lined the walls – some, like the doctored reproduction of that famous shot of Marilyn Monroe standing over an air vent, made her laugh. Marilyn with fangs and a tail! But then there was another of what looked like a genuine dead man that made her cringe. The one that really caught her attention
, however, was a simple framed line drawing. She took her mobile phone out of her handbag and called Süleyman immediately.

  Gülizar had been making money on the side like this for several years now. Her father drove a phaeton, taking trippers and sometimes naval cadets up to the monastery, but that didn’t earn him very much. And although her family had only the meanest sort of shack on the waterfront, there were fourteen of them and so extra money was always welcomed. What Gülizar did, therefore, was both useful and justified. Not that she was actively looking for work when she met him. It was dark and she’d just gone out to get some water when she saw him walking down the hill from the direction of the monastery. Thinking of anything but work, she walked over to see what he was doing. It wasn’t, after all, usual to see someone coming away from St George’s at this time of night. It very quickly became obvious what he wanted.

  ‘All right,’ she said. He gave her the money and she pulled him behind the nearest tree.

  ‘Not here!’ he said as he shoved her hand away from his crotch.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Up at the monastery.’

  Gülizar frowned. It was quite a long climb up there, and deserted too.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s what I want!’ he hissed. ‘Now are you coming or—’

  ‘I’ll need an extra ten million,’ she said, ‘for the time and trouble.’

  ‘All right! All right!’

  It wasn’t a long climb, but it was steep and she was too breathless to speak even if she’d wanted to. But then men in his condition – she’d felt he was already hard – didn’t usually want to talk – only sometimes they wanted her to when she did them.

  When they reached the walls of the monastery, he told her to take her clothes off. Gülizar didn’t like this. ‘I told you,’ she said forcefully, ‘that I’m not doing the lot – only pulling you off.’

  All this fuss just for a wank! She should have known . . .

  ‘Get your clothes off!’

  Something in his tone told her that she should really do as she was asked. And so she removed her clothing and, ragged as it was, she piled it neatly on the ground beside her. Strangely, she felt very exposed and almost ashamed. Naked wasn’t something she was accustomed to being, most of her customers settling for just some quick, fumbling relief.