Harem

by Barbara Nadel

  İkmen sighed. ‘I see.’ He looked at Yümniye and added, ‘I’m very sorry, Miss Yümniye.’

  She just smiled. The story of General Heper and his demise was well known. Some said that his condition had its genesis in the death of his second wife when Muazzez was just twelve, others that what he had witnessed during the First World War and the War of Independence had finally caught up with him. Others still said that his demented state was down to his genes. The fact of the matter was that sometime in the early 1950s General Heper developed a form of dementia which by 1960 resulted in his total removal from social life. He was looked after by his girls until his death in 1973. He received the best medication money could buy and through their talents with needles and sewing machines his daughters succeeded in buying the Heper house from their father’s landlord. In this way they secured both their own and his future. Now, though, or so it would seem from what had just been said, things had taken a sad turn. With Muazzez blind and Yümniye apparently in the early stages of dementia, more money than they could possibly raise would be needed. The Hepers, after all, only had each other. İkmen suddenly felt bad for having bothered them. For although her demeanour was now settled, Miss Muazzez had not been pleased when her sister had disagreed with her about the roses on the gown. She had, quite literally, turned away from the subject. That they had, far more recently, made another gown in the Ottoman style that was covered with fabric roses was not a fact that İkmen felt comfortable mentioning.

  ‘So can we know why you have an interest in the gown, Çetin?’ Yümniye asked, breaking into İkmen’s thoughts.

  ‘It has some bearing on a case I’m working on,’ he replied as he gathered up the gown and replaced it in the bag.

  ‘Oh, so it has some connection with Hikmet Sivas. His wife’s disappearance.’ Yümniye smiled excitedly. ‘I saw you on the television, in the background. Some other officer spoke, but I knew it was you. I think it was some days ago or yesterday. Is that still going on?’

  ‘But that dress can’t have anything to do with that, can it?’ Muazzez snapped, turning away once again. ‘That woman is American. She wouldn’t be wearing an Ottoman gown.’

  ‘Ah, yes, but if Çetin knows certain things about it that we do not . . .’

  ‘Actually you are correct, Miss Muazzez,’ İkmen said and smiled across at her. ‘This dress is not part of that investigation.’ He paused for only a second before continuing, a second during which he considered whether he should tell them, or rather Muazzez, the truth. He decided that he would. ‘A young girl we think may have become involved in a prostitution racket was wearing it when she died.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How terrible.’

  But İkmen couldn’t see Muazzez’s expression. She had twisted round almost completely in her chair, and her face was now entirely hidden from his gaze. As Yümniye prattled on, irritatingly now, about what an awful place the city had become and how scandalous it was that young women were still so vulnerable to such evil practices, he knew that Muazzez could feel the heat from his eyes on the back of her thick, short hair. When he was a child it had always been Muazzez who had commented on his cleverness; she’d thought it amusing then. İkmen had read from an English poetry book in this very room once when he was only four. Even then his voice had been unusually deep and sonorous and Muazzez had rewarded him with the most delicious chocolate he had ever tasted. It had come, she told him, from Paris. He’d been enormously impressed. Now, however, his presence seemed to be unnerving her. Or rather the subject of his inquiry – the provenance of Hatice İpek’s rose-covered gown. He wondered why she had been so vehement about denying her and her sister’s involvement in its production. But, amazingly, he felt sure that mention of the dress’s latest adventures had shocked her. And in view of the fact that neither of these women shrank from unpleasant words or concepts he could only deduce that something about the connection between the dress and prostitution had caused Muazzez to turn so completely from him. Perhaps as that filthy animal, the Sultanahmet Rat, had told him, the Heper sisters did indeed know something.

  ‘Are you absolutely certain that you didn’t make this dress?’ İkmen said, addressing his question to both women. ‘There is neither shame nor crime in producing gowns for working women.’

  ‘Well, I mean—’

  ‘Yümniye, we have never made anything with roses! Roses are common, they can be made by anyone!’ Her face, which was white, was turned back towards them again. Just one small tear stood in the corner of her left eye. ‘I’ve told you that we know nothing about this gown, Çetin, and we don’t.’

  In the short silence that then occurred, İkmen finished his tea and lit a cigarette. And after that conversation of a polite and general nature ensued until he finally left about half an hour later.

  Troubled and also confused, his feet dragged as he made his way back to where he’d left his car in the street behind the property. Surely the Heper sisters couldn’t have anything to do with those who had assaulted Hatice? But if they didn’t, why had Muazzez been so keen to distance herself and her sister from the gown? Even more confusingly, why had she given him a reason to tell her about Hatice anyway? She could have just let Yümniye prattle on about his involvement with Hikmet Sivas and left it at that, couldn’t she?

  As he walked down the weed-choked pathway that ran along the side of the Hepers’ garden, İkmen looked back up at the house. Yümniye and Muazzez were shouting at each other in front of the closed French windows. And the red-haired woman he’d seen earlier, watching him intently from the Hepers’ gate, was still there, her eyes trained unswervingly on his face.

  With the setting of the raging summer sun came customers. Although moderately busy during the day, the pastane really came into its own in the evening. Local revellers, tourists and weary business people popping in for a refreshing glass of iced tea or even a sinfully sticky pastry made up the bulk of the business, which was considerable in the summer months. But then if it hadn’t been, the Müren family would never have so much as looked at Hassan and his profits. Suzan Şeker glanced anxiously at the door to her husband’s office and then turned with a smile towards her customer.

  ‘Good evening, sir. What can I get you?’

  ‘I’ll have an iced tea and a glass of water.’ The man was good-looking in the way that a professional person, perhaps a lawyer, might be.

  Suzan wrote his order down on her pad. ‘Very good.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He turned his fine head and his attention back to the newspaper he had been reading.

  As she replaced her pad in the pocket of her apron, Suzan wondered idly whether this ‘lawyer’ sulked and sought attention from his wife in the same way that Hassan did from her. He’d been locked in that office for hours now, alone and silent. She’d been in briefly at lunchtime, but she’d heard him turn the key in the lock so she’d kept away. Hassan did such things when he was upset and he was, it had to be admitted, miserable at the moment. But to expect his wife to comfort him for the loss of his mistress was too much. Suzan was happy to keep away from him and willing to do the work of both of them, but she wouldn’t show him any sort of affection until this mood was out of his system. If he wanted to stay in his office all night that was all right with her.

  Suzan was about to make her way over to the counter to fulfil her various orders when the explosion happened. Or at least that was what she thought it was, though it neither knocked her from her feet nor damaged any of the customers. Their faces, however, were filled with the fear that she also felt at the huge booming sound that had come from Hassan’s office.

  ‘Is this your place?’ The good-looking lawyer man was on his feet, one hand curled tightly round Suzan’s wrist.

  ‘No, it’s my husband’s, he—’

  ‘Who’s in that room?’ he hissed. Several of the other customers had also risen to their feet.

  ‘Well, just my husband,’ Suzan replied.

  �
��Please stay where you are,’ he commanded, his gaze scanning the pastane. ‘I am a police officer.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘If you’d all please go to the front of the building.’ He waved them away from the partition behind which was the room where the explosion had come from. A strange burnt sort of smell was now emerging from it.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Suzan asked as she assisted him in ushering the customers forward.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But keep them away. I’m going to take a look.’ Then he reached inside his jacket and drew out a pistol.

  Suzan, shocked, slapped a hand across her mouth.

  ‘Is your husband alone?’ he asked as he made his way up past the partition and towards the office door.

  ‘Yes, um, but the door is . . . it’s locked.’

  ‘OK.’

  Now standing to one side of the door, he motioned for Suzan to join her customers at the front of the building.

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘It’s my husband . . .’

  Inspector Mehmet Süleyman pushed her roughly back behind the flimsy partition and then with a sharp twist of his body he kicked the door in. The wood splintered easily under his foot and the full force of that smell he’d noticed just after the explosion hit him. Smoky and faintly acidic, he knew it had little to do with the overflowing ashtray which stood beside the outflung bloodied arm upon the desk. Somewhere, there had to be a firearm.

  ‘Is he all right?’ The woman’s voice was tight with anxiety. ‘Can—’

  ‘Stay where you are!’ Süleyman commanded. ‘Keep away!’

  Of course she would have to see her husband at some point. Or rather what remained of him. The gun had been fired directly underneath his chin. The result was that part of his skull and most of his brains had hit the wall behind. Süleyman, feeling slightly sick now, looked down at the ground where, sure enough, a shotgun lay beneath the man’s desk. It wasn’t exactly what he had been expecting when he called in here for a cool drink. Had Çetin İkmen been at home when he called in there he wouldn’t even be here now. He took his mobile telephone out of his pocket and punched in a number. As he waited for the thing to start ringing, he noticed a large envelope on the desk in front of the ashtray. It had just one word written on it: ‘Police’.

  ‘I’m not saying that Talaat should necessarily come to stay with us,’ Fatma said. ‘What I am saying is that he should come back to İstanbul. He’ll get better treatment at home.’

  ‘Yes. Possibly.’ İkmen pushed the telephone receiver hard into the side of his head and then held it in place with his shoulder. He lit a cigarette.

  ‘Well, definitely, or so Talaat’s doctor has told him,’ the disembodied voice of his wife replied.

  İkmen exhaled smoke. He knew exactly where this conversation was going, as did Fatma.

  ‘Yes, but he’ll have to stay somewhere when he arrives, won’t he?’ İkmen said tetchily. ‘And forgive me, Fatma, but I just can’t see him living with either of your sisters.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Nilüfer has even more young children than we do and I don’t think that Sibel’s cleanliness rituals could accommodate a middle-aged man with cancer, do you?’

  ‘My brother does have money, you know!’ Fatma said, launching into familiar attack mode. ‘He would only need to be with us until he found an apartment of his own.’

  ‘Which I and my sons would have to help him move into. And which you would visit on a daily basis to see how he was.’

  ‘Talaat is my brother and he’s in trouble!’

  İkmen slumped down onto the chair beside the telephone table. To be fair, Fatma hadn’t called him at the most opportune time. The phone had started ringing as he was opening the door to the apartment, tired and disgruntled after a day of severed heads, Ardıç and the strange and impenetrable doings of the Heper sisters. The last thing he needed right now was the prospect of his brother-in-law coming to stay. The man talked about nothing but beach life, water sports and stupid foreign girlfriends half his age. Though he probably didn’t talk about such things now. Ever since February when the pain in his gut had finally been diagnosed as cancer of the colon, Talaat had been much more preoccupied with life-threatening surgery and drugs that made his hair fall out. Poor man. İkmen now felt bad about his lack of generosity and so he did what he always did with Fatma and capitulated gracelessly.

  ‘Well, if the doctor feels it’s better for Talaat . . .’

  ‘It’ll take us a few days to settle Talaat’s business affairs here,’ Fatma said in the businesslike fashion she tended to adopt when she’d just won an argument with her husband. ‘Haldun has already said that he’ll take over the running of the apartments until Talaat is well enough to return.’

  ‘Right.’

  Of course it had all been decided before she’d rung.

  ‘So where is he going to sleep?’ İkmen asked. ‘This place is like a stuffed vine leaf.’

  ‘Talaat can have Bülent’s room,’ Fatma replied. ‘He can move back in with his brothers.’

  İkmen’s head started to pound. Bülent’s shrine to Galatasaray football club was not a room that could be easily disassembled – at least not without a fight. ‘Well, you can tell him, Fatma,’ he said wearily. ‘He waited years to get into that room.’

  ‘Yes, which he’ll have to leave soon when he goes into the army.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But if you want me to tell him, then I will. I’m sure that when he hears he’s giving it up to poor Uncle Talaat, he’ll be only too pleased to do so.’

  İkmen, through gritted teeth and cigarette, said, ‘Well, let’s hope so.’

  After that, Fatma wisely moved the conversation on to less contentious territory. They talked about their children, moaned about rising prices and finally spoke briefly about how they missed one another. At this point İkmen called a halt to the conversation. Fatma, for all her forcefulness, sometimes cried at this juncture and he, selfishly he knew, couldn’t bear to hear her.

  He’d just replaced the telephone receiver when the front door opened and Hulya entered the apartment. İkmen looked at his watch.

  ‘You’re early,’ he said, frowning. ‘I’d have come to get you.’

  ‘Hassan Bey is dead,’ she said.

  ‘Dead?’ Belatedly İkmen noticed how strained she looked.

  ‘Mehmet has closed the pastane. He was there, having a drink.’

  İkmen walked over to Hulya and took one of her hands in his. It was ice cold. He led her though into the living room and then sat her down on one of the divans. Despite the still cloying evening heat, he placed a blanket over her knees and then lowered himself down beside her.

  ‘Mehmet?’

  ‘Süleyman,’ she replied. ‘He came in for a drink when it happened. I was in the kitchen. There was a shot.’

  She told him how Mehmet Süleyman had broken into Hassan Bey’s office and found his body, and how Suzan Şeker had, against advice, looked through the office door and screamed like a maniac when she’d seen what was in there.

  ‘Uncle Arto had just arrived as I was leaving,’ she said, referring to Dr Sarkissian. ‘So I guess if Uncle Arto has been called and Hassan Bey was shot he must have been murdered.’

  ‘I don’t know, Hulya,’ İkmen said as he pulled her small, cold body in close to his own. In truth, he was beginning to feel slightly chilled himself. Who would want to kill Hassan Şeker? Or had he shot himself? Either way, why?

  Rather than go home when he left Hikmet Sivas’s Kandıllı mansion, Orhan Tepe went to Ayşe Farsakoǧlu’s apartment on Inönü Caddesi. He telephoned ahead to tell her he was coming and then waited outside her building in his car. Ayşe’s brother Ali, with whom she shared the apartment, was not certain of Tepe’s status in his sister’s life, but he had in the past made it very clear that he both disliked and disapproved of her ‘colleague’. And since Ali was indeed at home at the present time, Tepe’s decision not to see him was probably f
or the best.

  When he’d phoned her, Tepe had asked Ayşe to wear something special for their date. Where they were going people only wore good clothes and ate good food. For once, he had enough cash and access to more should he need it later. It was nice to be in control, of his money and entertainment like this, he thought. And as he saw her walk purposefully towards the car, her long dark hair swinging provocatively across her naked shoulders, he hid the rather more troubling thoughts that lay at the back of his good fortune behind a winning smile.

  Although her dress was revealing at the top, the red circular skirt covered the length of her fine legs. It was something that she wore often, but he liked it. As she got into the car she had to gather up the full material and pull it inside lest it catch in the door.

  ‘So where are we going?’ she asked as she finally shut the car door and turned towards him.

  ‘Well, I thought we’d start with a meal at Rejans,’ he said, slipping the car into gear and moving off into the stream of traffic.

  ‘Rejans!’

  As well as being expensive, Rejans Restaurant is one of the oldest in İstanbul. Established in the 1920s by White Russian émigrés, it has been favoured by the city’s elite for many years. It is and was not the sort of place where an ordinary policeman and his mistress might be found – unless of course that policeman happened to be Mehmet Süleyman. Ayşe Farsakoǧlu, only too aware of this, said, ‘But what about Süleyman? What if—’

  ‘His wife is still in hospital,’ her lover replied, smiling. ‘He won’t be there. His family might be, but we don’t know each other.’

  ‘But it’s so expensive!’

  ‘Think of it as an early birthday gift,’ he said, turning back up towards Taksim and then on to Galatasaray.

  ‘You said we were going out to Tarabya.’

  He shrugged. ‘We can still do that. After all, my wife and her family are no more likely to be in Rejans than in Tarabya.’

  ‘But the money! How . . .’

  ‘I just reorganised my finances.’ He laughed. ‘It was easy enough.’ He looked across at her, feeling as he did so that familiar rush of passion to his loins that she so often evoked in him. ‘I wanted to please you.’