The Serenity Murders

by Mehmet Murat Somer

  24.

  When Hüseyin arrived, I was lying on my bed in the hotel room, reading a book. I had tried watching television to relax my mind, and when I couldn’t find anything of interest to me, I’d gone out to buy a pay-as-you-go SIM card and a book. As the book’s description promised, it would leave the reader breathless. Before I knew it, I’d already breezed through a third of it. It was just what I needed.

  “I don’t understand what’s going on,” he said. “But when Yılmaz handed me your note, I came as quickly as I could. Why are we staying at a hotel?” he continued, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

  I put the book down and turned sideways. Placing my elbow on the bed, I rested my head in my hand. I smiled as adorably as Audrey would have.

  “You first,” I said. “How was your day? Did you sort everything out?”

  First he took off his shoes, then his socks, and then he stretched his legs out on to the bed.

  “Tiring,” he said, exhaling a long sigh. “I’m not used to running around…I always sit at the wheel…”

  He told me that he’d sorted out quite a lot. He’d even found a car he liked.

  If he could get the money together, it could be running in four or five days, and he could get back to work.

  “How much do you need?”

  He was lying next to me, staring at the ceiling, twitching his tired toes.

  “I can’t ask you for money,” he said. “I just can’t.”

  I laughed. Him and his pride.

  “I didn’t say I was going to give it to you. I just asked how much you needed.”

  “A lot,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling. “I mean, for me it is.”

  Of course I had to lend him money. What had happened to him was all my fault. But I had to find a way to overcome the tension generated by his manly pride.

  “I’ll lend it to you,” I said. “You can pay me back whenever. You know I’ve got money.”

  “I can tell because we’re staying at a hotel,” he said with a laugh.

  “I’m serious,” I said, to convince him.

  He turned his gaze from the ceiling to me.

  I could tell he was weighing our relationship. If he owed me money he would be the one in debt to the relationship. I knew he didn’t want this. While he thought of himself as lower than me on a number of levels, him owing me money too could jeopardize the relationship even more. On the other hand, he needed the money. If he got money from a pawnbroker or a bank he’d have to pay it back with interest.

  “It’s better if I handle it myself,” he said calmly. “It looks like it’s going to work out. If it doesn’t, I’ll let you know.”

  “I could give it to you, rather than you taking out a loan from the bank.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “If I can’t…”

  I didn’t mention that the psycho was planning to kill him tonight. What could he do if he did know?

  Here we were lying side by side, a polite tension between us. He didn’t have the energy for sex, and I had no inclination for it. If Andelip Turhan’s mediumistic eyes were to see us like this, she’d probably say, The tension between you is palpable. Whereas Vildan Karaca, the feng shui master, would try to melt it away with all sorts of different crystals.

  “Come on, let’s go see the girls and have your aura cleansed,” I said. “We have nothing else to do until nine o’clock.”

  “What are we doing at nine?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “Pamir called and said she has a surprise for us. She and Jihad2000 must have found something. We’re going to meet them at my place.”

  25.

  By the time it was almost nine, Hüseyin’s aura had been cleansed and we had both filled our stomachs. Bursting with powerful energy, we were ready for Pamir’s surprise.

  We hailed a passing taxi, to Hüseyin’s sad chagrin.

  I had already begun to sense something strange was happening as we drew closer to my place. There were far too many taxis lined up near the pavement, and far too much activity, unusual for our narrow little street.

  There were our girls, gathered in a crowd in front of my apartment building. They appeared greater in number than they really were due to the size of the narrow street, barely enough for two cars to pass each other.

  The watchman Yılmaz Karataş was standing behind the glass door of the building, his hands on his waist, observing the girls with a concerned look on his face, trying to figure out what was going on.

  What was happening? Had the girls decided to gang up to protect me?

  There was a commotion in the group when they noticed I had arrived.

  I saluted them all as I stepped out of the cab. I felt like a king saluting his people, a queen saluting her subjects.

  All the girls and some other people from the club were there waiting. Hasan and Pamir stood side by side outside the building door. What was Hasan doing here? What could those two possibly have conjured up? It seemed Pamir had gotten carried away playing the dominatrix in Jihad2000’s arms and gone over the top. The crowd, thirsty for an outburst, was the product of Pamir’s extreme shrewdness and Hasan’s gossip network. Whatever it was they had in mind, it was sure to be a shocking surprise.

  Pamir stepped forward as soon as she saw me. She was like a dignified general waiting for a command.

  Murmurs rose from the group.

  “How’s it going, abla?” Pamir said with a proud look on her face before kissing me.

  “What’s going on, ayol?” I asked, without seeing any need to hide my confusion.

  “Just you wait,” she said, giving me a smart-ass wink.

  She raised her hand for silence. “In a moment, I’m going to make a statement and explain everything,” she said. “But please, give me a minute.”

  The response was a mingling of discontented grumbles and mumbles of curiosity.

  “Sir, who are all these…these…?” said Yılmaz, standing behind the apartment door, his eyes wide in astonishment.

  I turned around to look at the crowd again. He was right in not knowing what to call them. The girls were each as colorful as could be; big and tall, they stood like Amazons ready for battle. The diversity in clothes, makeup, and wigs was truly indescribable.

  “Transvestites,” I said. “My friends.”

  One could tell from the look on his face that he didn’t approve of the girls and that this gathering was not to his liking. “MaŞallah, there are so many of them,” he said, smiling halfheartedly. There was that missing tooth again.

  Pamir pushed me into the building. Hasan followed, and we almost knocked Yılmaz Karataş over. As he stepped back, peeking at the notes he was holding in his hand, he recounted in a single breath everything that had happened during the day, who went in and out of the building, and everyone who had passed by. My eyes lit up when I heard the word “bicycle.”

  “We’re going to catch your psycho on the job, abla,” Pamir began, her eyes shining with excitement as she explained. “We know he’s here. The bastard is hiding somewhere in these two streets.”

  It was a genius plan, if you asked her. My mind boggled at her organizational skills.

  “I’ve sent news to all our girls and all the taxi drivers that know Hüseyin. They’re on their way…”

  Are you mad? I wanted to ask her, but not a single word escaped my mouth. My eyes were wide with astonishment; I simply listened. Hasan nodded at everything she said, and Yılmaz Karataş, who was clearly struggling to grasp what was going on, kept asking questions that were left unanswered.

  “Just like in the eighties! We must take action!” She beamed bravely.

  Yes, “take action” was an often used phrase. In the past, “take action” meant a gang of girls would gather to cause scenes and raise a ruckus in revenge on behalf of another girl believed to have been wronged. It could mean house raids, flushing towels down toilets, making messes (fecal and otherwise), shattering windows, breaking and ruining every fragile item in a
home, tearing apart pillows, mattresses, armchairs, leaving not a single electronic item undamaged, cutting clothes up into a thousand pieces, in other words, inflicting the maximum amount of damage possible. The victim or victims would be those who hadn’t paid a girl what she was owed, who had tricked one of the girls or treated her badly. There were those who raided police homes if they felt they’d been wronged. Once, even the boyfriend of one of the girls, who’d been living with her for four years, was dealt his share of a “take action” for refusing to pay for her cosmetic surgery expenses.

  “Remember,” said Pamir, “how many neighborhoods we raided during the resistance! There’s no better time than now. Go on, take action!”

  She was right, but it was different in those days. What we did back then was our way of taking a stance against those who’d provoked us. Whenever a couple of narrow-minded neighborhood inhabitants went about collecting signatures, trying to persuade others to join one of those “Away With the Transvestites” campaigns, the girls would attack, breaking doors and windows, entering and wrecking homes. Due to the hefty tips they received from the girls, and because they sold goods to them at inflated prices, local business owners were perfectly content to have them as neighborhood residents and so would have no part in these campaigns. As for those local business owners who did dare to oppose them, the girls would loot their stores and make a huge mess of their shops.

  When the local campaigns succeeded, the transvestites would be packed onto trains and sent into exile. As if anyone actually believed that in Eskişehir, the city they were sent to, they would magically adopt the two-faced norms of the middle class and its heterosexual lifestyle. While there may have been some who truly believed such results would occur, their hopes would soon be dashed: the girls would promptly catch the next train back to Istanbul. The “Take Action” campaigns had helped to stop these misplaced raids and evictions. Now, even though my common sense objected, a piece of that old transvestite bravery and recklessness was whispering, What if…

  Knowing that I was so dearly loved and protected and seeing that people would go to the ends of the earth for me filled my heart with pride. Nothing can beat pride. It heals you. A feeling of warmth spread throughout my body as I looked over to the crowd, quelling the restlessness in my mind.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see drivers pulling up in their taxis and joining the crowd. This was getting out of hand. Pamir’s perfect plan was working.

  At nine o’clock sharp we took our places in front of the door.

  Pamir let out a sharp whistle. The murmuring ceased and all heads turned to face us. I made a rough count: there were more than forty people.

  Though I couldn’t see them, I was pretty certain residents of the apartment building were peering out of their windows too—especially the cat lover, retired Hümeyra, who lived on the ground floor, and my nosy downstairs neighbor Wimpy Ferdı—watching so as not to miss a thing. I could clearly see that residents of the entire building opposite were already at their windows.

  A gathering of dozens of transvestites and local taxi drivers at this time of night in our little street probably wasn’t making my neighbors feel relaxed. But they looked on, dying of curiosity. Something scandalous had landed right at their doorstep. They didn’t want to miss a detail. Their minds were already spinning as they thought how they would recount the entire incident for those who had missed out, embellishing and exaggerating and twisting it all around into something absolutely extraordinary!

  “First of all, I’d like to thank you all for gathering here and not letting me down,” said Pamir in her thunderous voice. “As some of you might already know, Burçak is in danger. A psycho is stalking her. Threatening her. Breaking into her home. Spying on her and listening in on her. And that’s not all. Whatever it is he wants, he takes out his anger onto those close to her, onto Hüseyin, Hasan, all of you, everyone that knows and is connected to her. We are under threat. You are all under threat! This man is a murderer! He has killed someone! Poisoned him…shot another! He set fire to Hüseyin’s car…He sends out threat after threat to the club…”

  Pamir, whose outrage increased with every sentence, was like a politician delivering a speech at a public rally. She was counting on the taxi drivers to act in solidarity in support of Hüseyin, and for the girls to do the same for me. It was important. She was appealing to their consciences, their minds, and their fears.

  She recounted a slightly embellished version of what I had told Jihad2000 and he in turn had told her.

  “This man is not alone. He has one male, one female collaborator. The girl rides a bike…”

  “Why don’t you give us the full description?” she turned to me and said. “You know better than me.”

  Now she was pushing me onto center stage. I stepped forward, unwillingly yet with that same recklessness brought on by their support of me. I shared Melek’s description with them, re-creating the unknown accomplice in front of their eyes with my words. All eyes watched me curiously while heads nodded in approval.

  “They have access to advanced technological devices,” I added.

  Of course, most of them weren’t going to understand what I meant, so I went into detail and explained what bugging and recording devices looked like, what kinds of devices they’d needed in order to spy on me.

  The crowd was getting bigger. Newcomers were trying to find out from the others what was going on.

  “And here!” said Pamir, jumping at the opportunity presented by my brief pause. “In this neighborhood! In this street…he could be watching us right now…”

  Heads immediately went into motion; eyes scanned their surroundings. Some of the neighbors began to look anxious.

  “People are starting to look anxious,” I whispered into Pamir’s ear.

  “Good, ayol!” she said. “The psycho killer is among them. They should stop hiding him! They should feel guilty for not having turned him in yet!”

  She was right, I was sure of it: the psycho was among them. It was going to take time for them to digest what Pamir had said. I quickly scanned their faces. As their unease got louder, I raised my hands to silence them.

  “What I ask of you—”

  It would be best if no one did anything rash, I thought, but Pamir had something different in mind.

  She grabbed me by the arm, pushed me back, and stepped forward again.

  “Look!” she said. “What we’re going to do is simple…”

  Next she explained that we were going to search the neighborhood, by knocking on every door. In groups of twos or threes, starting at the building where I lived. We would then widen the circle. She repeated what we were looking for: a blue bike, a helmet with flame stickers and a hologram on it, red or purple Converse shoes, multichannel receivers likely connected to an ordinary computer, and, quite possibly, a sound mixer and an editing bay.

  “I know these items won’t be that easy to find, but if we find them all in once place, we may find our psycho.”

  She pulled out the cell phone tower area map Jihad2000 had drawn, and clearly outlined the borders of the area we’d be searching. Technology was such a wonderful thing. Jihad2000 had discovered which cell tower functioned in what street, and the apartment building number where each cell tower changed.

  Someone was knocking on a window behind me. I turned to look. It was Hümeyra, motioning for me to come over.

  “Yes?” I said, lowering my voice.

  “Dear, they stole my bag on the street the other day. Thieves. From our neighborhood. In broad daylight. My black leather bag. It has brass ring handles. If you’re doing such a thorough search, could you keep an eye open for my bag? Maybe you’ll come across it. I don’t care about the money, but my grandchildren’s pictures and my marriage certificate were in it…”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Those at the front who overheard had already started giggling.

  “Okay,” said Hüseyin, standing next to me. “We’ll keep
an eye out for it, ma’am.”

  “It’s black,” repeated the old doddering dear. “With brass rings…” She proceeded to hold her hands out indicating the bag’s size.

  “All right, ma’am, we get it,” said Hüseyin.

  “Thank you, son,” she said, and closed her window.

  Our crowd was ready for action.

  “Hold on a minute,” called Hasan. “Don’t get started just yet…”

  It was natural for Hasan to want to say a couple more things, now that he’d found a ready crowd of listeners. He’d never miss the chance to take charge. Sure, our posse was ready to take action, but not all of the local residents would be so ready and willing to open up their doors to them and have their homes searched. Thus there were going to be doors that would remain closed.

  “We’re going to give you these maps,” he said, waving the photocopies in the air, “so you can mark which apartments you’ve searched, which ones didn’t answer, and which ones didn’t let you in! Street by street…”

  Clearly they had put a lot of work into this.

  “If they don’t let us in, then they must have something to hide,” rang out a voice that was clearly prepared to riot.

  “We’ll force our way in, then!” said another.

  “No-no-no-no…Friends,” I said, feeling the need to intervene. “We will not use force…Just explain the situation and ask nicely. That’s all. If they don’t let you in, they don’t let you in.”

  “But mark those apartments,” said Hasan, “so we know who they are.”

  “What if we made them swear on the Koran that they weren’t hiding the psycho?”

  This question had to be from one of the girls. It was obvious from the tone and the naïveté. Many people did not take such oaths seriously these days. What made her think that people here would?

  “That will never work, ayol!” said Pamir, trying not to laugh. On the one hand, we had Hümeyra, who wanted us to return her stolen bag, and on the other, our girls, who would be perfectly satisfied by an “honest to God oath”…It wasn’t going to be easy to catch our psycho, but if we were relentless, perhaps we could pull it off.