Harem

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘You observed nothing untoward during the night?’ İkmen asked as he sat down in one of the richly upholstered chairs that commanded stunning views of the Bosphorus. The water lapped and gurgled underneath the open window before him.

  ‘No. Even the commissioner was here until one o’clock.’

  ‘Mmm.’ İkmen looked across at the face of the elderly woman sitting next to him and sighed. ‘Well, Miss Sivas,’ he said, ‘it would seem that your brothers have disappeared via magical means.’

  Hale Sivas leaned her weary head back and then closed her eyes. ‘Such things are possible,’ she said. ‘As I know you know.’

  İkmen frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was born in Haydarpaşa district,’ Hale said, opening her eyes which she trained upon İkmen with great intensity. ‘Close enough to Üsküdar for me to have knowledge of the witch Ayşe İkmen.’

  ‘Yes.’ İkmen nodded. ‘Sad, isn’t it, that even with such a famous woman for a mother I am still a poor man. But with all due respect to my mother, I don’t believe your brothers just melted through the walls of this yalı, Miss Sivas.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. I think that they left via a method we don’t as yet understand. I think also,’ he paused briefly in order to light a cigarette, ‘that you know more about their motives for doing so than you are telling us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  İkmen looked up at Çöktin, indicating that he wanted him to leave them alone. When the Kurd had gone, İkmen said, ‘Your brother’s wife was not abducted and murdered for no reason. The appearance of her head in this house tells me that someone was sending a message to your brother Hikmet, a threat or a warning.’

  ‘An American,’ Hale said firmly, her lips pursed in disgust around the word.

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘I know nothing of Hikmet’s life in America.’

  ‘Oh? When I was here before you appeared to know quite a lot about how he runs around with women and works for Jews.’ She turned her eyes away from him and so İkmen moved on to another tack. ‘You know about your brother Vedat’s life, though, don’t you?’

  She shrugged. ‘Vedat works at hotels, palaces. We live here together.’

  ‘And very comfortably too,’ İkmen said as he looked around the large, tasteful salon approvingly.

  ‘We are family. I have never married. Hikmet loves us.’

  ‘I’m sure he does,’ İkmen replied with a smile. ‘Which is why it strikes me as somewhat odd that Vedat still lives the life of a poor man.’

  ‘He doesn’t,’ she snapped.

  ‘What I mean is, he’s widowed but has not remarried, and he works in humble employment.’

  ‘He chooses to.’

  İkmen flicked the ash from his cigarette into an ashtray made of solid gold. ‘Yes. Although of course none of this explains why Vedat, according to the young officer who was at the scene when your sister-in-law was taken, was so very anxious for Hikmet not to involve us in the crime. Why was that?’

  Hale Sivas’ face didn’t show any sort of emotion as she shrugged once again. ‘Vedat, like everyone, doesn’t trust the police.’

  ‘Is that so?’ İkmen smiled and rose to his feet. ‘You know, criminals are always saying that to me. Isn’t it odd?’ He straightened up and moved towards the centre of the room. ‘But maybe you’re wrong about Vedat. After all, he isn’t a criminal, is he? Nevertheless, neither Inspector İskender nor myself got the impression that either of your brothers was telling the whole truth when we spoke to them.’

  And then without another word he left the salon and made his way into the large, airy entrance hall. Metin İskender, his eyes red from lack of sleep, was leaning against a kilim which hung on one of the rose-coloured walls.

  ‘I just needed a moment,’ he said as İkmen approached. ‘Can’t seem to sleep when I’m here at night.’

  The sound of many people exploring many rooms floated to them from every part of the building.

  ‘Nothing unusual as yet?’ İkmen asked after he had stubbed his cigarette out in the golden ashtray he had carried with him from the salon.

  ‘No. But we’re working on it. Some in a rather more fanciful way than others.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Hikmet Yıldız is convinced there’s a secret passage somewhere in the house. He keeps tapping the walls.’

  ‘He may well have a point,’ İkmen said with a shrug. ‘It could explain how a large box materialised in an upstairs bedroom and how two grown men disappeared without trace.’

  ‘Well, yes, but we’re not exploring the interior of a Rhineland castle here.’ İskender wiped the sweat that had gathered on his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘You’ve spoken to Miss Hale?’

  İkmen lit up another cigarette. ‘For all the good it did me. By the way, why haven’t we got a female officer on site? We should have.’

  ‘Farsakoǧlu was due to relieve Gün at eight,’ İskender replied, ‘but she’s sick.’

  ‘Oh?’ Tepe, or so it had appeared to İkmen, had been somewhere he shouldn’t last night. Could it be the lady was ‘recovering’?

  İskender shrugged. ‘That’s all I know,’ he said. ‘I hear that confectioner you persisted in pursuing killed himself yesterday.’

  Angered both by the implication that he bore some responsibility for Hassan Şeker’s death and by İskender’s casual attitude towards it, İkmen said, ‘Yes, he did, Metin. But I don’t think it had anything to do with me. I would tell you what my suspicions are with regard to that situation but since I’m not yet ready to have Commissioner Ardıç privy to my thoughts, I’ll keep them to myself for the moment.’

  ‘Çetin . . .’

  ‘Well, somebody told Ardıç I was still making inquiries about Hatice İpek’s death!’

  ‘And you think I did?’ İskender shook his head in disbelief and lit one of his own cigarettes before answering. ‘Now look, Çetin, whilst acknowledging that you and I are very different men, I think that we concur in the professional respect we have for each other. I don’t like you as a person, I could never be your friend, but I have to respect the decisions you make in a case that I am not involved with and have no knowledge of. We’ve all been in the position you are in at one time or another.’

  İkmen frowned.

  ‘You wanted to continue your investigation,’ İskender said and then lowering his voice he went on, ‘Ardıç who is so very far from the ground and, let us face it, knows so little takes you away. Of course I guessed what you were doing. But on my honour and with my hand metaphorically on the Koran, I swear to you that Ardıç did not learn what you were doing from my lips!’

  In spite of İskender’s rather pompous statement about how they were supposed to have professional respect for each other, İkmen believed him. He was ambitious, inclined to be headstrong and lacked charm, but Metin İskender was not known to be dishonest. His manner made him difficult to warm to, but that was all. İkmen had looked at him closely as he gave his little speech and he was sure that Metin was not dissembling. And so for once İkmen actually apologised, albeit very quickly and without waiting around for any sort of acknowledgement.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Metin,’ he said, ‘I misjudged you,’ and he walked towards the open front door of the yalı.

  He went out into Hikmet Sivas’s lush, green garden and stared at the large fountain which stood in the middle of the driveway. Adorned with poorly executed plaster swans, it was a very bad copy of the magnificent fountain which stands before the entrance to the Dolmabahçe Palace. Perhaps Hikmet Sivas possessed regal pretensions. İkmen smiled briefly at the thought. Art imitating life or, in view of Sivas’s fantastic riches, life imitating art?

  İkmen glanced up at the house and spotted movement near a window. It was Tepe busying himself in one of the bedrooms. İkmen could just see the greyness of his face, studded with those sealed-in eyes of his. In the normal course of events İkmen would have
sent Tepe to question Mrs Şeker, but given his earlier omission with regard to the Mürens, İkmen didn’t want him anywhere near the İpek case again. Mehmet Süleyman, although still officially on leave, had readily agreed to go and see the confectioner’s wife. He must have spoken to her by now.

  Ayşe knew that soon she was going to have to do something about her situation. The weather was hot and so lying naked on top of her bed, face down, very still, was quite a good idea. The fact that she had no choice but to do this was another matter.

  How she’d got home from Orhan’s brother’s apartment was still a mystery. Oh, she knew Orhan had brought her, in his car. He’d helped her up the stairs to her apartment and had even, amazingly, managed to deliver her to her bedroom without waking Ali. What she couldn’t remember was how she’d dealt with the pain.

  It had all begun so well. As soon as they’d got to his brother’s apartment he’d started kissing her passionately, telling her how much he loved her, caressing her body as he did so. She’d been so aroused that when he’d suggested they play a game, it had simply excited her further.

  ‘Imagine we’re in the cells,’ he’d said, ‘and you are my prisoner.’

  He’d made her strip. He’d enjoyed watching her. Then he’d taken his handcuffs out of his pocket. She should have stopped it then, but she hadn’t. She had let him put them on her wrists; it was exciting, kneeling between his legs, pleasuring him, cuffed. And when he’d come, he’d called her filthy names which, because they were playing a game, was perfectly permissible and, again, exciting.

  But at some point things changed. It was all a blur now. He ordered her to tell him how good he was, which she did, and then, somehow, she was cuffed to the bed. She thought he was just simply going to enter her from behind, he’d done it before . . . But she should have known something different was about to happen.

  ‘I’m going where Prince Mehmet has never been,’ he’d said breathlessly. The pain as he’d pushed himself into her anus was excruciating. She’d begged him to stop, but he’d just carried on, hitting her on the head as he did so, gasping words into her ears. ‘Tell me I’m better than him! Tell me I’m bigger!’

  And she had. In pain and terrified, she had still done what he asked.

  ‘Filthy whore!’ he’d said when he’d finished. ‘Tell me again!’

  ‘You’re fabulous,’ she’d lied, ‘the best lover in the world!’

  ‘Better than Süleyman?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Then for a while there had been silence. Too frightened now to look round to see what he was doing, Ayşe just lay on the bed, panting with fear. Her real ordeal was yet to come.

  ‘I do wish I could believe you,’ he’d said and then his belt came down across her back. She’d screamed as the leather and the thick metal buckle bit into her flesh.

  ‘Flaunting your body in front of that Müren scum!’

  ‘No! Orhan, no!’

  Eventually she had passed out for a few moments. And when she came round he had mercifully stopped hitting her. But her respite was short-lived. She could hear his breathing, rough and laboured, somewhere behind her. Slowly she turned her head to see what he was doing. Naked now, one knee on either side of her buttocks, Orhan Tepe was masturbating onto her bloodied back, his eyes intent upon and fascinated by her wounds. As soon as he had obtained relief, he toppled forward onto her and kissed her face and hair with passion and tenderness.

  ‘I do love you, you know,’ he’d said afterwards as he’d helped her gently back into her dress. ‘I love you so much, I need to be inside your flesh. I need to fuck every part of you.’

  There had to be something wrong with Orhan to make him say and do such things. What he’d put her through hadn’t been a game. It was sadism. He’d always been a very hard and masculine lover who enjoyed taking and giving pleasure roughly, but she’d never, until now, considered him a beast. But that was what he was, and he was consumed with jealousy of Mehmet Süleyman. The two men could not be more different. Mehmet was in a different class altogether. Sophisticated, considerate and skilled as a lover, he knew that you didn’t batter a woman to give her pleasure. That was why she thought about him all the time, yearned for just a smile or the occasional touch of his body as he brushed past her on the street or in one of the station corridors.

  Hot and dehydrated, Ayşe reached over to the cupboard beside her bed for her bottle of water. As she did so her hand caught against something hard and sharp. Oh yes, the jewellery. Earrings and a matching bracelet, gold and diamonds. Orhan had given them to her at Rejans. Where he’d got the money from to buy them, she couldn’t imagine. She picked up the bracelet and looked at it. She would have to give it back. She couldn’t possibly keep anything of his, not after what he’d done. But that would mean having to see him alone again. Just the thought of it made her flesh tremble with fear.

  More immediately, however, she would have to try to encourage her body to heal as quickly as possible. Tomorrow she would have to resume her duty. To do anything else would excite comment and may arouse suspicion. İkmen, if no one else, knew that she and Orhan had some sort of ‘arrangement’ and the last thing Ayşe wanted was for the inspector to turn up on her doorstep. How she would explain the blood to him she didn’t know. As it was, she would have to wash her sheets and the clothes from the previous evening before Ali returned.

  But that would have to happen later. For now all she could do was lie on her bed under her open window and pray that the tiny breeze from the Bosphorus soothed her bleeding wounds.

  By the time the pastane re-opened for the evening, Hassan Şeker, who had blasted his own life away only the night before, was in his grave. His widow, despite the disapproval of her father-in-law, had gone straight from the graveside back to the pastane.

  ‘I need the money,’ she’d told Kemal Bey when he had tearfully croaked his displeasure at what he perceived as her lack of respect for his son. ‘My husband spent so much of what we had keeping gangsters happy.’

  Well, she had told Inspector Süleyman about the Mürens, why not Kemal Bey? It wasn’t as if he hadn’t suspected. Hassan had tried to be one of the ‘lads’ with the thugs who terrified him, welcoming them in and gaily socialising with them. Suzan had already decided that things were going to proceed much more straightforwardly now that she was in charge of the business – much more, in truth, like the way Kemal Bey had run things. That was why she’d told Inspector Süleyman about the Mürens. Let them come and threaten a widow woman, she’d told him defiantly; I’ll have nothing to do with them. Now, however, Suzan wasn’t so sure she’d done the right thing.

  Inspector Süleyman had been impressed. He had also been worried. The Müren family was controlled by a powerful crime sultan. They had, it was believed, connections to very frightening people in narcotics and racketeering. They would make trouble for Suzan and her children if they knew she had spoken to the police. And so he had told her that if either Ekrem or Celal came to see her, she was to be as pleasant as she could and say she would get some money to them soon. If they even let her speak and didn’t just beat her. The boys, so Inspector Süleyman had said, were due a visit to his cells. Apparently Hulya’s father Inspector İkmen had some business with them. He had been investigating that little slut Hatice İpek’s death . . .

  ‘Mrs Şeker?’

  And here suddenly was Hulya İkmen, friend and cohort of the whore who had obsessed her husband. The girl looked very cool and pretty in her long blue cotton dress. All of Suzan’s pent up anger spilled over.

  ‘What do you want?’ Suzan said, eyeing Hulya and the tall young man with her distrustfully across the confectionery display case.

  ‘I didn’t think that you’d be opening the pastane today,’ Hulya began.

  ‘Yes, well, you were wrong.’ Suzan reached into the cabinet to get a chocolate éclair for the man sitting on his own at the front window.

  Although Hulya was unnerved by both the lack of customers in the usually bustlin
g pastane and by the widow Şeker’s hostility, she went on, ‘But you can’t work alone, not—’

  ‘I can do what I like!’ Suzan’s face was bright red now and the tendons in her neck pressed tightly against her flesh. Berekiah Cohen, alarmed by this fierce visage, placed a protective arm round Hulya’s shoulders. Unfortunately this one small gesture of affection inflamed Suzan Şeker to breaking point.

  ‘Get out of my pastane, Hulya İkmen!’ she screamed. ‘And take your latest conquest with you!’

  ‘But Mrs Şeker—’

  ‘You didn’t waste any time taking up with another pair of trousers as soon as my Hassan had gone, did you!’

  The man who was patiently waiting for his éclair over by the window cleared his throat in a very obvious manner. But Suzan only gave him the briefest of glances before she continued her tirade.

  ‘You think I’m stupid?’ she shouted into Hulya’s shocked face. ‘You think I believe that Hassan completely bypassed you when he gladly fucked every other young girl who ever worked in this place!’

  ‘No, It’s . . . that’s not true!’ Tears, more of anger than of misery, sprang into Hulya’s eyes.

  Suzan moved quickly round the counter and approached her, the éclair and the plate upon which it sat trembling in her hands. The man over by the window quickly folded up the newspaper he had been reading and left.

  Before she had time to resist, Berekiah Cohen moved Hulya behind him and put his hand up to Suzan.

  ‘Now, madam—’

  The pastry caught him right between the eyes, chocolate and whipped cream dripped down his nose and onto the front of his shirt. Suzan Şeker, as if suddenly coming to her senses, put her hand over her mouth and burst into tears.

  Hulya, not really knowing whether to go to her or help Berekiah clean himself up, moved forward with one hand outstretched. Suzan, however, refused this gesture.

  ‘No!’ Suzan cried and then ran weeping towards the back of the building. ‘I’m so sorry!’ She disappeared into the room where her husband had taken his life and closed the door.