‘But, Inspector, I don’t understand,’ Demir Sandal, his face red with tension, replied. ‘The women are just playing with rubber snakes, anyone can see that!’
‘I’m not talking about the women with the snakes, Demir.’
‘Then . . .’
‘Look, I haven’t got time to explain,’ Süleyman said. ‘Just tell me where you got this tape and I’ll be on my way.’
‘But, Inspector, for a man in my position, suppliers and distributors need to know they can trust me.’
‘Then how about I don’t mention your name, Demir?’ Süleyman smiled unpleasantly at the large heap of man in front of him. ‘How about I stop myself from beating you senseless where you sit too!’
‘The inspector isn’t playing games, Demir,’ Çöktin put in over his boss’s shoulder.
‘But that doesn’t give me any choice!’
‘Correct.’
For a few moments the pornographer wrung his hands and appeared to wrestle with various thoughts in his head until finally he said, ‘My name, you won’t mention it?’
‘No.’
‘But my friend will know it was me! How else would you have got this tape? Where else will you have got his name?’
‘Depends how many tapes there are, doesn’t it, Demir?’ Çöktin said.
‘Yes, but—’
Süleyman, finally driven half insane by this prevaricating blob of a man, grabbed him by his large, slack throat.
‘Tell me.’
Although known by almost everyone as a handsome man given to the finer things in life, like art, music and poetry, those who really knew Mehmet Süleyman knew that he also possessed a capacity for violence. It wasn’t something that, in general, he was proud of, but it was a fact of his life and it did sometimes come in rather useful.
Demir Sandal looked down into the fierce eyes of his tormenter and said, ‘Erol Burak.’
‘Who is?’
‘He works at Edirne Fotoğraf on Ankara Caddesi.’
‘Sirkeci?’
‘Yes.’
Süleyman pulled his hand away from the man’s throat and took a deep breath in order to calm himself.
‘They sell photographic equipment and electrical goods,’ Demir Sandal said. And then unable, even under these circumstances, to stop himself selling, he added, ‘If you want a VCD player, Erol will give you a very good price.’
İkmen had, for some reason that he could now no longer remember, assumed that Gonca had left the building. And so, when she wandered into his office carrying a mobile telephone, he got quite a shock.
‘Put that down!’ he said as he rose from his chair, waving his own phone as he did so.
‘Why?’
‘Well . . .’
She laughed. ‘You think I’ve stolen it, don’t you? But then why wouldn’t you think that?’
‘Gonca . . .’
‘Actually, though, it is mine,’ she said. ‘I just called one of my daughters to tell her I’d be a while yet. A gypsy without a mobile phone, İkmen, is like a kapıcı without eyes – an entirely useless waste of flesh. You know you let the magician go far too soon, don’t you?’
İkmen sat down in his chair again and nervously fingered his phone. ‘I couldn’t keep him. I don’t know that anything we talked about is true.’
Gonca reached inside her voluminous plastic handbag and retrieved a packet of cigars. ‘You know that sigil thing your İskender said he saw just before he was shot?’
‘Yes . . .’
‘You know I asked a few people about that?’
‘Do they know what it means?’
‘No. But İbrahim Dede, you know, he has a friend, a rabbi – I don’t know his name – not a Kabbalist. But anyway, this rabbi knows a thing or two, and he says to İbrahim Dede that these sigils, you know, they take a long time to make.’ She took one of the cigars out of the packet and lit up. ‘To you and me it is just a few lines on a paper, but the work behind it is amazing – spells, incense, the right hour and time. Sometimes, you know, even some of the magician’s own blood is shed in order to—’
İkmen’s mobile began to ring and so he held up a hand to silence her.
‘Yıldız – yes.’
He turned away in order to have what sounded like an intense conversation. Short and to the point, he finished it quickly and then turned back to Gonca.
‘So maybe the blood on Max’s floor that matched his group was his,’ he said.
‘It is a possibility,’ Gonca agreed. ‘Although if he did do that, I think he must have had some other sort of motive to allow the blood to stain the carpet. He must have wanted it to be there for some reason. However, now that he has gone . . .’
‘You know I’m having him followed. That was my man now,’ İkmen said. ‘He’s walking across the Galata Bridge.’
Gonca looked out of the smoke-grimed window at the now gentler late afternoon sunshine. ‘Night is still a way away,’ she said. ‘He has time.’
‘To do what?’ İkmen asked.
Gonca shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Disappear, I suppose. Because if he wants to finish the ritual, that is what he’ll have to do.’
‘If,’ İkmen held up a warning finger to her, ‘if that is what he is doing, Gonca. We don’t know. Max has alibis for all the time he spent away from his apartment.’
‘What about all the blood that you found?’
‘What about it?’ İkmen said. ‘Some of it, as we’ve discussed, may be his, but a lot of it isn’t.’
‘Have you tried to match it to any of the victims?’
‘We’re in that process now,’ İkmen said with a not altogether pleasant smile on his face. This gypsy was getting rather too pushy for his liking. It made him wonder if indeed she had known Max and, maybe, disliked him for some reason. It was possible and, given Max’s true background, it was also understandable. The Nazis had not, after all, had any love for Gonca’s people. Someone had once told him that the exact number of gypsies killed by the Nazis wasn’t known or even knowable. So ‘low’ were they, the gypsies didn’t even merit a figure – they’d just killed them where they stood. He looked across at her and wondered what she might be thinking, and then realising that he couldn’t even take a guess at that he changed the subject.
‘Gonca,’ he said, ‘these portals you speak of. If you’re right, they’re open?’
‘Yes.’ She rearranged various layers of netting and chiffon around her hips. ‘After the ritual has been completed he will have to close them.’
‘Does it have to be him?’
‘Every magical working is individual,’ she said. ‘This is his spell and so he is responsible for it. It won’t work without him.’
‘And the portals? What if he doesn’t close them? What if someone else tried to do that?’
Gonca shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m not a Kabbalist. But I imagine that if he doesn’t close them eventually the power within them will fade. As for another person, I don’t know. I don’t think that anyone else can do that. Maybe this is where we find these things out?’ She smiled. ‘When the demons he has summoned come pouring unfettered into this world.’
İkmen, for whom diabolism had always been an intellectual stretch, frowned. ‘Is that possible?’
‘I don’t know. But if the magician is using human blood then he is working with some very powerful forces,’ she said. ‘And don’t forget, İkmen, that even workings that are aimed towards the good of man are sometimes achieved via the intervention of devils. The truly great rituals involve the intervention of both angels and demons. One must do this in order to retain the cosmic balance. After all, how could we appreciate the goodness of our mothers without the lies of dictators to measure that against?’
It was a fair point and one that İkmen had heard before – from, he thought with a smile, his mother. Now long since dead, the witch of Üsküdar had taught him a thing or two during his all-too-short decade with her. Maybe, had she lived, A
yşe İkmen would have been able to advise him about other things he’d felt unable to speak to his father about. Maybe she might even have been able to talk to him about Alison. Given what he suspected about Max Esterhazy, it was becoming ever more difficult to shift Alison from his mind. Officially she had disappeared somewhere in the wilds of Cappadocia, although actually placing her there had been difficult. Not, of course, that İkmen had ever tried to do so. Alison had been someone else’s case for the relatively short amount of time she had been actively sought. In the seventies, a lot of young Europeans turned up stoned and hungry, and not all of them made it to India or back to their various homelands. Alison had just simply drifted on to the ‘hippy’ missing list where, no doubt, she was doomed to remain.
İkmen phoned down for tea for Gonca and himself as a way of distracting his thoughts. They then sat and waited for the tea in silence, the hot afternoon sunshine clouded as it came into the window by the vast swathes of Gonca’s cigar smoke.
They’d just had a consignment of new equipment in from Germany and so the shop was packed. Sleek young men, many of whom still shared sleeping quarters with numerous siblings and who had never ventured out of İstanbul, let alone Turkey, devoured tiny digital cameras and elegant video equipment with hungry eyes. Mobile-phoned to the hilt, these lads lived with the reality of satellite TV-infested slum housing and saw not a trace of incongruity in their situations. Mobile or food was a no-contest situation as far as they were concerned, and they were prepared to do whatever it took to secure Edirne Fotoğraf’s products and thereby enhance their reputations.
Şerif and Kerim Burak, though probably no older than their enthusiastic customers, were somewhat cooler in their approach. They did, after all, sell this stuff and had, therefore, had time to accustom themselves to all the clever things that their photographic ‘toys’ could do. They were actually quite keen to carry on ignoring what looked to them like two rather less hip older guys when Süleyman, ID in hand, pushed his way through the crowds and forced the issue.
‘I want to see Erol Burak,’ he said to the older-looking of what was obviously a pair of brothers.
Şerif, immediately defensive, said, ‘My father’s done nothing wrong.’
‘Where is he?’
The innocence stance didn’t impress Süleyman; he’d experienced too much of it.
‘He’s in the back.’ The young man flicked his head in the direction of the counter. ‘My brother will take you.’
Kerim, his eyes hooded by suspicion, led Süleyman and Çöktin through into a room filled with cardboard boxes. There were, Çöktin at least noticed, three, maybe more, different kinds of digital camera, video equipment galore and, as Demir Sandal had predicted, some very smart-looking VCD and even DVD players. Like a lot of these little photographic and electrical shops, space was at a premium, especially for storage, and when Erol Burak was finally located he was squeezed between a cardboard tower block and what looked like a pre-Republican sink, which he was using as an ashtray. Small and somewhat downtrodden-looking, Erol Burak possessed the sort of middle-aged world-weary look that one almost instinctively attributed to those involved in the sex industry.
‘I want to know where you got this,’ Süleyman said as he held Demir Sandal’s videotape aloft.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s called Women with Sea Snakes,’ Süleyman replied somewhat haughtily.
‘What of it?’ He wasn’t obviously worried about it, which led Süleyman to suppose that he knew only of its official content.
‘I want to know where you got it, Mr Burak.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s my business.’
Burak looked up and shrugged. ‘Look, this isn’t my main business,’ he said. ‘Not the tapes. This shop—’
‘I’m not interested in you or your shop,’ Süleyman responded hotly. ‘I just want to know where you got this.’
Burak put his cigarette out in the sink and then cleared his throat. ‘The tapes are for the boss,’ he said. ‘He’s a little nervous around some of these people in that sort of business. Religious family, you see. Where did you get it?’
‘Never mind. Now this boss—’
‘He owns the shop,’ Burak said. ‘I manage it for him. But he also does a bit of . . . film work, you see. Not anything strong, if you know what I mean. Girls and snakes – they’re rubber, you know – girls and men and . . . none of it real, if you know what I’m saying . . .’
‘Mr Burak, we are not here to investigate either you or your employer with regard to legitimate business. I just want to know who—’
‘Mr Şay gives me the tapes and I distribute them to interested parties.’
Süleyman turned first to Çöktin, who raised an eyebrow, and then back to Burak once again.
‘This is Mr İrfan Şay,’ he said, ‘electronics sultan?’
‘Yes.’ Burak coughed. ‘Filming’s an interest of his. It makes him quite a bit of money too. But the wife and kids can’t know, if you know what I mean.’ He smiled. ‘The wife is very pious; she wouldn’t like to see all of that on the screen.’
‘All of what?’
He lowered his voice. ‘Women’s bodies. Not that it isn’t tasteful, the way Mr Şay does it, but—’
‘Do you have Mr Şay’s telephone number?’
‘Well, of course, but—’
‘Right, I need to call him,’ Süleyman said. ‘He and I, I feel, need to talk.’
Erol Burak, although not entirely happy with what was happening, nevertheless bowed to the inevitable and led Süleyman and Çöktin through into his tobacco-and-tea-stained office. Mr Şay wasn’t going to be too pleased when he got a call from the police, but Erol knew better than to try to oppose them. Mr Şay could be both vicious and unreasonable, but the police – well, in his experience they were quite something else. The police could shut you down, lock you up and threaten to throw away the key. All this over a pair of thick American tarts and a metre of rubber piping!
The nights were, Hikmet Yıldız felt, beginning to arrive a little earlier now. Although still hot and bright, it was now obvious when late afternoon had arrived and so he knew that it had to be about four without even looking at his watch. September, it was an odd month, and could just as easily have been as cold as it was now hot. Not that thinking about the weather was germane to anything except the passage of time. He’d been following Mr Esterhazy for hours now and had, as a consequence, visited some parts of the city he hadn’t been to for some time. The walk across the Galata Bridge, with occasional stops to ask what this or that fisherman had caught, had then turned into a ride on Tünel, the underground funicular railway, up the Galata hill and into Beyoğlu. In and out of various shops along and around İstiklal Caddesi – including the gloriously named Ottomania rare books shop – it was obvious that Esterhazy, who had to have recognised him, knew he was there. It was just simply a matter of time – and will – in determining if and when Esterhazy escaped and if and whether Yıldız would be able to keep up with him. Looking at him as he jovially wandered in and out of shops, talking so easily with everyone that he met, it was hard to equate this man with the world of demons and devils. But if he was, in fact, a magician, then that was what he did – or rather that was what Yıldız, who had been privy to only some of İkmen’s researches – understood to be so. But then maybe Gonca would explain more about that to him later.
Taksim Square was up ahead now, Esterhazy moving smartly towards the park around the Monument of Independence and its attendant crowds.
Gonca, Yıldız knew with all of his soul, knew everything. Her house was full of magical stuff and her mother, an elderly crone with no front teeth, read cards and oil with, it was said, amazing accuracy. ‘You are here,’ Gonca had said that first night he’d met her and then followed her back to her home, ‘because I performed spells to make that happen. You cannot help but be here.’ His first sexual experience had followed that remark – almost fully clothed, standing with h
is back against one of the gypsy’s artworks – a collage. Later she’d taken him to her bed where she’d taught him things he’d never even seen in those magazines his little brother Süleyman bought. Gonca might be old but she was beautiful, and she certainly knew how to make him feel good.
Yıldız followed the magician across the park and into Cumhuriyet Caddesi. Apart from the Military Museum there wasn’t much that Yıldız could think of to interest Esterhazy up here. But he drifted along, amid a small cloud of sexual memory and some attention, anyway. Maybe the Englishman wanted to do some shopping in Şişli or Nişantaşi. People with money went up there to do that sort of thing and the Englishman had to have money just because he was an Englishman.
Yıldız continued to walk and drift. Now they were moving uphill it was fortunate that the Englishman didn’t walk too fast. It was, after all, still hot. In fact he was actually moving really slowly now, which meant that Yıldız, as he had done on a few occasions before, should attempt to overtake him. So without too much effort he did just that. Pushing up to just beyond the museum it had been his intention to slip down Mim Kemal Öke Caddesi and then pick his quarry up again after he passed, but as he turned, Yıldız looked at the man – and got a shock. It wasn’t him! In fact it wasn’t an Englishman at all but a tall, middle-aged Turk complete with moustache. Same jacket and trousers, yes . . .
Yıldız’ heart began to pound. When and how had the Englishman metamorphosed into this tired-looking Turk? He’d not taken his eyes off him, not once, he was sure! Or was he? Wearily Yıldız put his hand in his jacket pocket and took out his mobile phone. This man, this Esterhazy, had to be some kind of super magician! He pressed the button for the station and, once he was through, he spoke to İkmen.
‘I’ve lost him, sir,’ he confessed. And then in response to the furious words from the other end, he added, ‘I don’t know where, sir, no. All I do know is that what was once an Englishman is now a Turk and I don’t have a clue as to how he did it.’
When he did finally manage to replace his phone in his pocket, Yıldız discovered something that he didn’t remember having been there before. At first he thought it was just a blank scrap of paper, but further inspection revealed that there was something on it – of sorts. For some reason that Yıldız couldn’t really articulate, it made him feel slightly cold.
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