Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘That friend of yours did not do the damage. You are correct. The damage was done by the person who caused Mina to spend the last minutes of her life in terror, believing she was going to die in that awful way. The damage was done by Aran, and he deserved to die.’ He banged his hand flat on the table, reminding Rex of the time he’d imitated a judge’s gavel. So certain. So final. He guessed Aran had already met with his ‘accident’.

  ‘You don’t think you have any responsibility for it? You knew what Aran was like.’

  Sajadi stared at him, wide-eyed, as if he’d just sung a chorus. ‘No. Why? I didn’t tell him to do that.’

  Rex was silent. Sajadi was a sharp man, yet seemingly not that clever. And this, combined with his power and his absolute self-assurance, made him frightening. He was like the parts of a man, with something missing. Like the scrawl on the sign on the housing development. Wood Green Has No Heart.

  ‘Keko will never know,’ Sajadi went on. Rex nodded. ‘He is the only person who will miss him. And, perhaps, his sweetheart, perhaps not.’

  ‘Did he have one?’

  ‘I think so.’ Sajadi stood up, proffered a hand towards the door. ‘I see you are appalled by me. Trust me – many people in your Home Office and your Foreign Office are, too. But when I have built a new Kurdistan, then I will be to you what you failed to be to my people: a protector. Kurds from Iraq, from Syria, maybe one day from Iran, too, one family at a time, one street, one town. First, my town, Yenişakir, then another, then another, but not just towns. Factories, hospitals, laboratories, internet companies – full of people like the people you see downstairs, young people, educated, with skills and ambition. There will be no need for a war – the Turks will need my Kurdistan for what it can offer them. And you – you in the West will need it too. My country will be what protects you. A stable, moderate, democratic, burgeoning economy with gas and oil. Standing between you and the maniacs from the desert, with their black flags, and their swords and their beliefs. You know about Tawsi Melek? The Yazidi God?’

  ‘This is the peacock?’

  ‘One of seven angels, banished by God for his pride, then forgiven. Placed on earth to do good. And yet, to you, to Christians, to Jews, Muslims, a devil!’ He laughed. ‘Come here!’

  Sajadi marched over to the window, beckoning Rex to follow. They looked down at the Lanes, still the place Rex loved, still that idiosyncratic crush of alphabets and languages, the garish gold and the alien root vegetables. But undoubtedly smarter now, brightly-lit windows full of people spending money. And not just on gözleme.

  ‘Seven years ago, I told Keko to stop paying Bombacılar. I didn’t tell him why. I just said – look, I got some influence now. You don’t pay them. So he stopped. And you know what happened? Nothing. You know what else happened? All these places you are looking at with me now, up and down the Lanes, they stopped paying too.’

  ‘No magazines,’ Rex said, remembering Keko’s sign, remembering all the loaded, cryptic conversations he’d had. And finally understanding. Not fund-raising for the PKK, extortion by the gangsters. A protection-racket, plain and simple, run on collective fear. And useless when people stopped being afraid.

  ‘Yes, the magazines that nobody sells and nobody buys. Well done. So you see, from being kept, just above the surviving line, by the thugs of Bombacılar, all these people began to make money. This is why you see what you see. Because your Yezidi devil brought peace here as well. Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘If you bring “peace”, Mr Sajadi, why did you blow up my house?’

  ‘I didn’t. Why do I need to? You want to know who bombed you, ask the bombers. Ask Bombacılar.’

  ‘But why would they bomb me?’

  ‘Why would I know?’ Sajadi grinned. ‘I am just a businessman.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A quirky little ska number, about a man so poor his trousers kept falling down, was playing on the speakers in the Jerk Shack, and Rex shifted uncomfortably, feeling the song could have been about him. After the explosion, HQ had authorised emergency funds for him to buy some basics – clothes and toiletries – but he’d had to get them in a hurry, from Shopping City, and he’d now spent the best part of a week in a pair of baggy Primark jeans, and a selection of shirts that seemed to have designed by someone without a basic grasp of the human form. He wondered if the sisters had played this track as a wind-up.

  Brenard brought over the coffees, along with a pair of fiery curried patties. Rex envied him his neat suit. ‘Still at Terry’s?’ the detective asked. ‘Men Behaving Badly, is it?’

  ‘Last night, Terry and I shared a fresh broccoli tagliatelle in front of “Great Continental Railway Journeys”.’

  ‘No. Really? Oh, I see… All right. Get knotted,’ said Brenard, realising the wind-up. ‘I was glad to hear about your missus, anyhow. Is she pleased she’s staying put?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Rex said. He’d spent a lot of time up at the convent in the past week, and the only obvious pleasure he’d observed was when he’d told his wife that Aurelie had gone back to rehab after a bout of heavy drinking. Sybille had cackled at that, as a little girl might on discovering her sister was in trouble.

  ‘So – you want to know about Eric Miles, then?’ Brenard said, changing subject as the music did. ‘Magistrate bailed him. Miles says I don’t want bail, I’m a very naughty boy. Magistrate says, tough, it’s not requests hour, mate, you’re bailed. Miles says, right, you’re an effing c. Carries on like that, trying to punch the security guards, so they’ll lock him up. Scared of going back to his mam, I reckon.’

  ‘I almost feel sorry for him.’

  ‘I don’t. Listen, butt, don’t swallow that line about, “ah it was just a few bits of paper”. Miles was in it, long-term, up to his nose hair. Him and half a dozen of them even had some fake company going, drawing salaries out of it, all taxed, N.I. stamped, totally legit-looking, except there was no company, and the cash was all washed.’

  ‘What kind of company?’

  ‘Fraud Squad are having a headache over it. There was more people on the books than we’ve nabbed at the council, though, so one theory is they’ve been offering a borough-wide service to anyone wanted their funds freshened.’ He took a sip of the coffee, burnt his tongue, and put the mug down again. Dizzee Rascal took over the speakers. ‘Don’t feel sorry for Miles. Feel sorry for the buggers who weren’t having boom-time. All them little shops and that, paying through the nose.’

  ‘What shops?’

  ‘Looks like, while the council went on the take, Bombacılar diversified too. It’s always been very ethnic, round here – well, you know, don’t you? Kurds only go after Kurds, Russians after Russians. You know – you shaft your own, leave everyone else alone. Seems, for whatever reason, the Bombers broke with tradition, left their own alone, started going after everyone else – Turks, Greeks, even Caribbeans. Factories, shops, newsagents, whatever. Green Lanes boomed, everyone saw that – because there are so many Kurdish businesses down there. Lots of others went under.’

  Rex was silent. He knew why it had happened. Because of Sajadi’s false peace. Because one lot getting a turn at the trough only meant another lot starving. That included, he now realised, the Topraks’ factory, the one next door to it, Spyridonidis, so vulnerable with its non-existent sons. And Eryl Pocock’s bakery. Suddenly, it hit him. He choked on his pasty – and not because of the chillies.

  ‘I know what the fake business is,’ he said. ‘I know who’s behind it. I know who blew up my sodding house. And I know how they’re washing the cash. Come on!’

  He stood up abruptly, spilling his water.

  ‘What’s got into you? Come where?’

  ‘We’re going to the bookie’s.’

  * * *

  On a blistering hot day at the start of September, Brenda Bond finally saw her longed-for Wildlife and Wetlands Centre completed and opened to the public. A prominent local businessman had stepped into the breach, and not only
completed the project, but arranged and funded a spectacular opening ceremony, complete with clowns, jugglers, steel bands and an assortment of exotic beasts and birds.

  Brenda, shading herself with a parasol like a lady of yore, was torn. As a supporter of the original project, she was duty bound to be delighted. As the down-to-earth, hype-rejecting Brenda, though, she thought many elements of it were over-the-top. Especially the opening ceremonies, and their various ill-fitting elements, from helicopters and Lamborghinis, to a Bratwurst stand, a disco, and camel rides.

  ‘What’s any of that got to do with our Wetlands centre?’ she grumbled. ‘Is it his helicopter?’

  ‘Probably his camel too,’ said Terry.

  Susan, just back from her stay in the States, rolled her eyes at Rex. She was still catching up on the major events of the past few months; catching up, Rex realised, without having said anything about where she’d been, or with whom.

  Today, he realised, as he sniffed in the camel dung and the sausage fat and the sun lotion, was the first day he’d been entirely unable to recall what a burning person smelt like. All he remembered of that moment now were the colours he’d seen as Mina fell: peacock-like, iridescent, ever-shifting. His memory had done that. He didn’t feel guilty about it. Memories had to wash experience like that – launder it – for their owners to endure.

  A few feet away, the beaming Rostam Sajadi was standing for photos with the newly elected Labour MP, Eve Reilly, under the impressive, futuristic entrance to Mina’s Place. The stateof-the-art animal refuge, wittily shaped like some Martian version of the Ark, was capable of housing every unwanted, crawling, hopping and climbing thing in Harringay and Tottenham, from jerboas to goldfish. Sajadi was just making a joke about this when his voice died in his throat and, as one, the entire party, politicians, press snappers and all, turned to gaze in wonder at the tall black girl, vaguely clad in a pale ivory sheet as she strode by, haughtily, on mighty heels. She walked past Rex and Susan, too, reserving for the former a short, intense look of undying contempt.

  ‘She likes you,’ Susan said.

  ‘Kyretia hates me,’ Rex replied. ‘Mainly because I got her brother sent down for money-laundering. He was funnelling cash through his dad’s moribund business, after washing it in the poker machines in the bookies.’

  ‘Strange kind of washing,’ Susan said, fanning herself with a hand. It was impossible to imagine her sweating.

  ‘It’s simple. You put a load of cash in. You bet a tiny amount. Probably lose it. Then you ask for your money back. The machine prints you a voucher that’s like poker chips – take it to the lady, lady gives you cash. Then it’s legally yours. In young Ashley’s case, he was doing it for the bent council, then he got the idea of offering the service around. He was doing it for the Bombacılar, the same people who ruined his dad.’

  ‘Aha. The Bombers. Who didn’t like you sniffing around, so blew a big skylight in your roof for you.’

  ‘Threatened me, then blew me up, classic Bombers business model, except I never made the connection. Shall we?’

  A ribbon had been cut, a round of applause had begun, faltered and been resuscitated again. The party was now moving inside Mina’s Place for the official tour, and they tacked onto the back. Rex turned round and watched Kyretia’s powerful, naked back, as she strode away over the path, back to the car park. She wasn’t going to stay, and he understood that, as he understood her anger. He still remembered the final, excised part of Mina’s YouTube valedictory, addressed to one person alone.

  “Tatlım, I lied. I love you and I’ve lied to you. They are two facts: as true as each other, yavrum. I didn’t hide because of us. I hid because of me. Because of my blood. You can’t understand. Ben Kürdüm, sevgilim. I’m Kurdish, darling. I’m hiding because they want to stop me fighting. And I have to fight. Seni seviyorum. I love you forever.”

  And he still wondered if he’d done the right thing, by sending it to Kyretia. It had scraped at his conscience until he did it. Then again, it still scraped now.

  In the muggy, biscuity fug of the animal house, they all filed sluggishly past anacondas and sloths, who eyed them beadily back. A cheeky cub from the nationals asked about the stray dogs: after all, these were the principal abandoned species on the streets, so where were they? Sajadi, with the bluntness Rex had come to know and distrust, stared at the reporter and barked, ‘We can’t keep them here, can we?’ before marching on.

  He was in lead position here, now, the man answering the questions, doing the job Eric Miles would have expected to do. It seemed as if that was the choice: rule by the secretly bent, or the openly bent. No wonder Mina had preferred the rifle to the ballot box.

  Rex wondered what she would have made of it all. She’d had some affection for animals, but clearly her main drive had been to stop people being treated like them. ‘Mina’s Place’, with its cutesy name like a café or a bric-a-brac corner, wasn’t a tribute, it was a kind of insult. He’d exchanged a couple of very basic, truncated emails with Keko – he wasn’t surprised that the old man had decided to stay away. Nor was Rex surprised that Sajadi’s path to glory continued unimpeded. He’d never been further away, in fact, from being shut down. As the fanatics, and their unique brand of lunacy spread, so more people fled from them and Sajadi’s towns grew, a Kurdistan made by numbers rather than decree. And needed, not just to keep the Kurds safe, but also the people cowering behind them in Europe.

  They’d stopped by the peacock – ‘donated’ by Sajadi himself, or rather, shunted off because he didn’t want Aran’s moody pet. The thing whined and bristled at the crowd, and then did something extraordinary, flying like a cloud of eyes to the wire and nuzzling at the fingers of one of the party, who seemed more embarrassed than pleased.

  ‘Clever old bird,’ murmured Susan. ‘Knows an influential friend when he sees one.’

  Outside: more milling about, terrible speeches, considerably better wine. A Kurdish Shiraz, from Sanliurfa. Glass in hand, Rex went over to the bratwurst stand, debating whether to join the long queue.

  ‘I’d get your face painted instead,’ said a curly-haired woman, standing by the next stall. ‘Far less demand.’

  He laughed. ‘Hello, Diana.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said. She was wearing a straw hat and a pretty, 1950s-style dress. A dark-haired girl was currently on the stool, being turned, rather badly, into a lion.

  ‘That’s one of your nieces, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mm. Jessica. And this…’ she said, hauling a pram-pushchair device round to display a fat, pink, chortling baby. ‘Is Chaya.’

  He felt an urge to squeeze one of the fat legs. Resisted it. ‘Well their mum’s getting a good deal out of you,’ he said.

  ‘Chaya’s mine, Rex. Mine and Kjell’s.’

  A cork popped over by the VIPs. Sajadi telling a story, full of gestures. Acting it all out, not to make things clearer, but to make things less clear, hide who he really was. Rex looked back to Diana, then from her to the cute, blue-eyed kid, and back again. ‘I thought you’d… I got the impression you’d come back on your own.’

  ‘I came back with Chaya. Kjell is…’ Diana shrugged, a silvery bra-strap emerging against brown skin. ‘I don’t care, really. Saving lives somewhere. He didn’t want Chaya, so we don’t want him.’ She bent over and squeezed a fat leg.

  ‘Tough on your own.’ In his case, at least, it was more than a platitude.

  ‘My mum helps.’ She smiled. ‘And Uncle Lawrence. Babies love Uncle Lawrence, you know.’

  ‘I can imagine. The same demonic power he uses on old ladies.’

  ‘The surgery’s been really good too – letting me do odd hours. I’m going in for the late shift this afternoon. It’s all okay. It’s more than okay. It’s good. Isn’t it?’ She addressed this to the baby, then looked back at him. ‘Come and see us, Rex. Don’t… don’t not come and see us.’

  ‘I won’t. I mean – you know – I will. I’ll come very soon.’

  He meant
that, although he didn’t know if she understood that. She was just kissing him softly on the cheek when Chaya started to grumble. Diana started to tuck a sheet around the child.

  ‘Would you believe it, this kid is cold. She was born in Cambodia. She thinks this is winter. We’re going to have to get you one of those big horrible parkas…’

  He was halfway back to his colleagues and the crush at the booze table when it struck him like a sudden headache. The big, ‘balloon coat’ that Peter had talked about. A photograph he’d seen once on a wall. A strangely friendly peacock and its choice in friends. And the killer of Bilal Toprak.

  The Personal Assistant proved unwilling to assist, until he told her to say just two words to her boss. He had to spell them out, and within less than a minute, she was back on the line, sounding very different. ‘Mr Toprak?’ she said, getting his name and his message mixed up, ‘Sorry for the delay. Can you come to the office in an hour?’

  He arrived just a little late, on account of a detour he’d made to make via Seven Sisters, and a call he’d had to make to one Vonda Paul, which had clarified things further. The office, as he’d expected, was now devoid of occupants except for one. He took the photograph right off the wall. He wasn’t stopped.

  ‘I looked up Vardo. It’s in the far north of Norway. I guess that’s why everyone in the photo’s bundled up in huge coats. You – I can see you there. What about Aran? Where’s he?’

  Eve Reilly took the photograph from him and pointed, wordlessly, to a shape in a huge, blimp-shaped parka.

  ‘Incredible biodiversity,’ Rex said. ‘Almost as many bird species pass through Vardo than are resident in the Amazon. Did you and Aran get it together there or later?’

  ‘There,’ she said, pale-faced and blotchy in the heat, a look of hate in her eyes.

  ‘Not much else to do in the evenings, I guess. So for – how long was it? – ten years, you and Aran were an item. But the papers describe you as single, you’ve never turned up uncle said he only suspected that Aran had a girl. Why the secrecy?’