The Serenity Murders

by Mehmet Murat Somer

  Tarık arrived first. Hasan had such bad taste. Well, what would you expect from someone whose favorite actors were Daniel Auteuil and Gérard Depardieu? The guy wasn’t good-looking. He just had that fresh-faced glow of youth. If he didn’t look after himself, he was bound to start deteriorating before he hit thirty-five. I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him downstairs, motioning for him to keep quiet. The best place to talk, where we wouldn’t be heard and where I could see Cüneyt when he arrived, was the entrance of the apartment building next door.

  “It’s about Hüseyin,” I said.

  “I thought so, abi,” he said. “Traffic’s jammed anyway. If I went out to work, it’d take half an hour just to get two blocks down the road; the money’d all be spent on fuel.”

  “Can you fight?”

  He couldn’t fathom what I meant, of course.

  “Fight,” I said. “Martial arts?…Punching?…Kicking?…Karate?”

  “Sure thing, abi,” he said. “Hüseyin’s my blood brother; we’ll do whatever it takes. What sort of a mate would I be if I didn’t? Ain’t nothing like that in my book, nuh-uh.”

  I hadn’t been in his car many times or spoken more than two words to him, but this hooligan speaking style certainly didn’t suit him, especially if he was Hüseyin’s blood brother. Hüseyin was impeccably polite. Perhaps here before me stood the cause of the kahvehane jargon that Hüseyin occasionally employed, and which I absolutely detested.

  I made a sudden attack to test his reflexes. With the kick he received to his back, he buckled up on the floor. The kick had actually been a very light one; I did not intend to hurt him at all.

  “Fuck!” he said. “What’s going on, man? You knocked the wind right out of me.”

  “Just testing,” I said, trying not to laugh at the state of him. I held my hand out and helped him up.

  “Don’t leap to the front lines unless you have to,” I said, winking an eye. “You’re a bit stiff.”

  I didn’t test Cüneyt when he arrived. I knew he went down at the second blow. Best to refrain from injuring my team members.

  We were ready for operation number two.

  34.

  Apartment number three was right below me. In other words, it was Wimpy Ferdı’s place.

  With Cüneyt and Tarık right behind me, we rang the doorbell. If it didn’t open, it would only take a kick and a shoulder to break it down.

  It didn’t. I pressed the bell again, this time keeping my finger on it longer. Wimpy Ferdı was always home to spy on me when I went in and out of the building, so where was he now? The door wasn’t opening.

  “Let’s knock it down,” I said.

  I actually meant, You guys knock it down.

  “I take full responsibility.”

  It wasn’t so much my reputation on the block that concerned me, as the scolding I’d get from Selçuk if nothing came of breaking down the door. He’d have every right.

  It only took two shoulder blows to open the door. Cüneyt and Tarık stepped aside so I could enter first. Apart from a couple of refurbishments I had done to my own apartment, this one was exactly the same as mine. The lightly furnished living room was neat and tidy. The things I was looking for were not here. I made my way toward the back rooms.

  I had my first shock when I entered the room that, in my apartment, was my study. Ferdı’s walls were literally wallpapered with pictures of me. There were no blank spaces at all. Some of them had been made into decoupages, others had been enlarged. It was a virtual temple dedicated to yours truly. Some of these photographs I had never seen before. They had been shot secretly.

  I turned to look at where Cüneyt was pointing when he said, “Boss, look, you’re naked in this one.”

  Yes, he had caught me naked too. In the bath, in my bedroom standing in front of the dressing mirror, and in bed!

  “Don’t look,” I said.

  I could censor one, but what about the rest? If you looked carefully enough, there were plenty of naked pictures of me interspersed here and there. We stood in front of a gigantic Burçak Veral collage coating all four walls of the room.

  I found what I was really looking for in the room that I used as my bedroom. It was a studio complete with technological devices!

  Although I knew I was going to find something, not even I was expecting this much. The ceiling, floor, and walls had been insulated. There were five different computers connected to one huge control panel that looked like those sound mixers in a music studio. All five computers were on.

  On one of the screens you could see the entrance door to my apartment. As far as I could tell, the camera had been hidden in the gas meter box belonging to the apartment opposite. It had to be one of those wireless cameras the size of a chickpea. I hadn’t even noticed it.

  On a different screen was my bedroom. Judging by the angle of the view, I guessed that the camera was near the window, inside one of the masks on the wall. I had collected the masks from places I visited; it was quite a collection, everything from an elaborate Venetian carnival mask to primitive African totem masks. It was perfectly understandable that I would overlook a camera placed among the many beads, stones, and sequins that decorated them. One could also thereby deduce Satı had not been dusting them.

  There were no displays on the other three screens, but each was labeled with a different room—one for the kitchen and one for the bedroom!

  “Boss, this place is like a space station,” said Cüneyt.

  Dumbfounded, all three of us were trying to make sense of it.

  What sort of a sick person could do all this? What was it he wanted from me? Why was he spying on me every minute, and why did he want to hear every word I said? What kind of fixation had I caused in him?

  There were shelves of CDs, organized according to date.

  My most private moments were all recorded here.

  The CD of the night Hüseyin and I had sex was at the front, carefully labeled with the date and our names. It had been marked X, in red. He was categorizing scenes from my life in a manner similar to that used for the rating of movies, like 18+, etc.

  I ran the formatting programs on all five of them to delete the systems fast. Still, it took a while, and then I shut the computers down.

  I was going to destroy this.

  All of it.

  We started breaking the CDs, one by one. My hands began to hurt after breaking only a few, but the rage inside me outweighed the pain. I went on breaking the CDs with all the vengeance of someone determined on revenge.

  Tarık stopped for a moment.

  “Abi, we’re smashing all these to pieces, which is fine, but what’s it got to do with Hüseyin?”

  “It’s all the work of the same psycho!” I said, cracking the CD I was holding.

  “So where is he, the psycho?”

  “We’ll find him once we finish here,” I said, as I continued to break CDs with tremendous zeal.

  We would, we’d find him. But just where was Wimpy anyway?

  “Boss, shall we rip the pictures up as well?”

  I hadn’t thought about that. I’d have to think about it and decide what to do, and when. It would take hours to scrape those pictures off the walls.

  “It took you long enough to get here.”

  I recognized her immediately. It was the girl with the bicycle. She stood there watching us, her arms folded, her shoulder pressed against the doorjamb. We’d been so busy breaking the CDs, and making so much noise doing so, that we hadn’t noticed her arrival.

  We stopped.

  “It took you long enough to get here,” she repeated. But we’d already heard her the first time.

  She had a clear voice, with a bit of a sneer to it.

  “The girl with the bicycle!” I said.

  “Bravo!” she said mockingly. “You’ve finally passed the first part of the test.”

  What on earth did that mean?

  “We left so many clues for you to find this place…But you kept getting stuc
k on other things.”

  She had big, cold eyes. She was arrogant.

  “What is this?” I said. “A game of hide-and-seek? What are you trying to do? All of this, it’s ridiculous! What do you want from me?”

  The sentences, which I had begun yelling in rage, soon lapsed into desperation, until my voice finally cracked and trembled.

  “A sort of payback, let’s say,” she responded.

  This one was skinny. I could see the bones of her chest through her half-open shirt collar.

  “Payback for what?” I said, squeezing my fist. “To whom?”

  “You’ll see,” she said, with a calmness that got on my nerves. “Ferdı will explain it to you.”

  Ferdı would explain! My mad psycho!

  “Where is he?” I said. “Where?”

  “Part two!” she said, grinning. “You’ve got to find him…”

  “We know who he is, his fingerprints are all over the place. The police will find him straightaway.”

  “Okay, let them find him, then,” she said, with a confidence and ease that were enough to drive one up the wall. She turned her back to leave.

  I couldn’t let her walk out like that. I jumped on top of her. Her twiglike body was fragile. I thought I was going to pull her arm off when I grabbed hold of it.

  “Where do you think you’re going, missy?” I said, jolting her arm. “We’re not finished with you yet!”

  “There’s nothing you can do with me,” she said calmly. “My job is done…”

  I could torture her and get her to talk, then hand her over to the police and have her questioned by the classical methods.

  “Speak, ayol!” I said. “Where is Ferdı?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You’ll have to find him yourself.”

  There was a wary look in her eyes. I was sure she didn’t know.

  “Oh, there you are, sir.”

  And there he stood, Yılmaz Karataş, who had left his appointed spot without permission in order to follow the girl with the bicycle, and, having completed his tour, had arrived back at the apartment.

  “I was looking for you. You weren’t home. I saw the door open and thought I’d come in…I left you a note, did you get it?”

  Yes, I had.

  “What do we do now?” said Tarık.

  I had no intention of letting the girl go. Detention by force was about to be added to my crime of breaking and entering. Since operation number two hadn’t delivered the expected, conclusive results, I would have to come up with a new emergency plan.

  I phoned Cemil Kazancı on his very private number.

  “What’s the matter? Is there a problem? Has our guy done something wrong?” he began.

  No, I was pleased with Yılmaz. I just had a new request.

  “I wonder if you could entertain a guest for me for a while, a young lady? Secretly…without letting her contact anyone…”

  He surprised me by accepting without any hesitation.

  “I’m sending her to you with Yılmaz,” I said.

  “You can’t detain me,” the girl objected when she understood what was going on. “You have no evidence against me!”

  She must have memorized these lines for the police, which was hardly relevant under the circumstances, seeing as I was detaining her in a completely illegal way and handing her over to totally illegal people.

  “Who’s pressing charges?” I said. “You’re my insurance, darling. Now, don’t get cranky on us. We wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

  We tied the bicycle girl’s hands and mouth with packaging tape so she wouldn’t cause Yılmaz any problems on the way. I sent Cüneyt along with them just in case. I wanted to hand my safety deposit over in one piece.

  I made Tarık swear every oath he knew that he wouldn’t say a word about it to anyone ever, that he’d forget everything that had happened and wouldn’t even dream of it in his sleep. Yes, I would keep him updated. I took his mobile number.

  After sending everyone off, I went to my own apartment. First things first, I found the cameras. Then I proceeded to studiously crush them in a mortar. I derived inexplicable pleasure from grinding those cheap, buglike cameras to a pulp. As I bashed the pestle against the mortar, the mica, metal, silicon, and whatever else was in them shattered, making noises that resembled the screeching yelp of an animal, noises that were transformed in my mind into the psycho Ferdı’s whining voice, begging for his life.

  The listening devices were still in my home, but I had crashed his system so that they could no longer eavesdrop on me.

  I could now go to the hospital to see Hüseyin. I could ponder what to do next, how I would pass the second part of the test, once I got there.

  35.

  As I moved along the silent corridor of the hospital, I spotted Şükrü waiting outside Hüseyin’s door. Okay, he might have chitchatted, giggled, and started getting a bit chummy with Hüseyin behind the bar, but still, two visits in a row in one day were a bit much.

  He had seen me too. With his body slanted, one shoulder hanging low, the other raised high, his head thrust forward, he sidled along like a crab to meet me.

  “Boss, we’ve got to talk,” he said.

  His voice was uneasy; so were his eyes.

  Something must have happened to Hüseyin, but what? The doctor had said that everything was fine, that he was getting better. Had there been an unexpected complication? Was he in danger again?

  The panic that had overtaken my mind must have shown on my face.

  Şükrü took my arm; leaning against me, he started leading me in the opposite direction. He reeked of alcohol.

  “Please,” he said, “listen to me for a minute. I have to explain.”

  No, I wanted to find out, to see what had happened to Hüseyin immediately. I broke loose of his arm and rushed into the room, which now had a NO VISITORS ALLOWED sign hanging on it.

  And froze.

  Part two was already in production.

  Poor, withered Hüseyin lay there with languishing eyes, drugged up and ready to pass out, and at his bedside, the psycho I was looking for: Wimpy Ferdı.

  There was no one else in the room. Kevser and İsmail Kozalak, the safe hands into which I had entrusted Hüseyin, were gone.

  “Finally,” said Ferdı, his crazy psycho-man voice replacing that of my whiny neighbor.

  Şükrü had followed me into the room and shut the door behind him.

  “I can explain…Please!” he said.

  Şükrü’s new boyfriend couldn’t possibly be my psycho Ferdı!

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  I had been betrayed by my own employee, Şükrü, and those irresponsible parents Kevser and İsmail Kozalak had left their son in the hands of a psycho.

  Psycho Ferdı had jabbed an empty syringe into Hüseyin’s drip tube, and now stood ready to take the next step, his ink-stained thumb resting on the syringe press.

  “Do you know what this is for?” he asked.

  When the air bubble entering the vein reached the heart, it meant sudden death. The heart would stop. Even kids knew that.

  I nodded.

  “Good,” he said, in an authoritarian voice that I found didn’t quite suit his build. “Sit down and listen.”

  Şükrü held my arm again, and sat me down on the armchair this time, and perched on its armrest.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I can explain everything…”

  What was he going to explain? He was clearly collaborating with psycho Ferdı. He had been working for me for years and now he was repaying his debt with betrayal. He had sold me out. He had sold Hüseyin out. The guy was about to die. There could be no explanation for this.

  “Remove the syringe first,” I said, begging him. “Please…”

  The edges of Ferdı’s lips curled up in disdain.

  “We know what you’re made of. It’s not worth the risk.”

  “What do you want from him? What do you want from me? Why is your house filled with pi
ctures of me? You’ve bugged my house, you spy on me! What kind of a psycho are you? What the hell is your problem?”

  I’d been beaten. I knew it.

  I was about to cry.

  “Easy does it,” he said. “One at a time…”

  Why didn’t a nurse or caretaker come into the room to check in on Hüseyin, and see what was going on? Were we paying all that money to stay in a deserted hospital? What on earth had happened to their quality-certified service perfection? Scenes of nurses flirting with doctors, while those that weren’t flirting chain-smoked outside and gossiped about patients, or crowded into a tiny room to watch the most shameless of gossip programs on a tiny TV screen, flashed through my mind. There had to be a reason why they weren’t turning up. Okay, they may charge the price of a five-star hotel, but that shouldn’t give them the right to act like one, leaving their patients for dead, completely unattended, all in the name of “not disturbing” their guests.

  “All right, I’m listening,” I said, banishing the nurses and caretakers from my mind. “Go ahead, tell me…”

  “First,” he said, “you’ve got to understand the situation. You’ve got to see the bigger picture. You are an arrogant fool blinded by details. The devil may very well be in the details, but you’re missing the bigger picture.”

  My eyes widened; I waited curiously to hear what he would say next. He was in a mood for philosophizing.

  “Who am I? Have you ever thought about that? Ever wondered?”

  He was my nosy downstairs neighbor. His fingers were ink-stained and nasty.

  “Yes, I moved in downstairs. I didn’t even know you at first. But once I understood who you were, I thought highly of you, I saw that we had things in common. Then I began looking out for an opportunity to meet you, to talk to you. I kept trying to approach you. Did you pay any attention? Did you ever think about me? Let me answer that for you: no! You were so preoccupied with yourself and your own world! You lived in the cocoon you had built around you, thinking it would protect you. Closed off to the outside world, to those on your doorstep, to their problems…”