Harem

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Inspector İkmen, I know I let Inspector Süleyman down, but I need your help,’ Suzan Şeker said as she sat down opposite the vast amount of paper and cigarette ash that covered the top of İkmen’s desk. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot and I heard what happened up at Yıldız Palace last night on the news.’

  ‘Yes?’ İkmen, frowning, sat down opposite her.

  ‘Inspector, the Mürens have sold their interest in my business to an Azerbaijani family.’

  ‘How do you know this, Mrs Şeker?’

  She looked down at her hands and, although she was no longer actually weeping, her eyes were wet.

  ‘Ekrem and Celal came to see me,’ she said. ‘They told me they didn’t need my business any more and that they’d sold it on.’

  ‘I see. And have this new family contacted you?’

  ‘No. But . . .’

  ‘When they do you want us to be waiting for them.’

  She looked up, and her face was contorted with fury. ‘I’ll never be free unless you do! They drove Hassan to kill himself! Ekrem Müren made me do a disgusting thing! How do I know these other people won’t do that too?’

  İkmen sighed. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘You completely smashed that family who were using the palace. You killed Ali Müren! To be honest I’ve never really had any confidence in the police, but your actions last night made me think differently.’

  İkmen smiled. He didn’t want to discuss the previous night’s operation but at the same time he didn’t want to dissuade this woman from pursuing a course of action that could improve both her life and her bank account. Suzan Şeker, poor woman, had suffered enough. ‘This disgusting thing you speak of—’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it!’ She turned her face away from him, towards the window.

  ‘You will have to if the case comes to court, Mrs Şeker.’

  ‘Ekrem Müren made me suck him!’ She looked at İkmen’s face defiantly, her lips tight with indignation. ‘There!’

  İkmen wearily rubbed his forehead with his hands. ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Şeker. But I had to ask.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ She paused to wipe her eyes and regain her composure. ‘And so?’

  ‘And so, provided you are willing to give evidence against them, I will order the arrest of Ekrem and Celal Müren. I will interrogate them and I will find out the name of the family Ekrem has sold your business to. But you must be willing to follow this through and you must be prepared for the attention, not always pleasant, that this will bring to you and your family.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘Think carefully.’

  ‘I’ve done that already,’ Suzan replied hotly, ‘and I want to do it. Hassan let these people move him around like a Karagöz puppet and then when he couldn’t stand it any more he killed himself! I don’t want to be like that, Inspector. I don’t want to pass a business that isn’t really mine on to my children.’

  ‘No. No, of course you don’t.’ İkmen looked down at his hands. He felt dizzy with tiredness. This woman had courage. By doing what she proposed she was laying herself open to intimidation from the Azerbaijani family and to the shame that her admission would bring. And she wanted to do it based upon what was in reality a lie. Those who had killed Ali Müren and the others had nothing to do with him or his men, he didn’t even know who they were, only that they had succeeded in protecting those who did what had been done to Suzan Şeker at a much higher level. Good gangsters against bad gangsters, but they were all one and the same at the end of the day. He had to somehow stop thinking about it now. Thinking could lead to unguarded words, unwise actions. The Müren boys knew nothing about the Harem, but they would be very rattled in the wake of the deaths of their father and Zhivkov. Now was an excellent time to get them for extortion and sexual assault.

  İkmen lifted his telephone receiver from its cradle and dialled a number. ‘Let’s set this in motion,’ he said as he took a cigarette from his packet and lit up.

  Suzan Şeker smiled.

  To say that there are many attorney’s offices in Los Angeles is rather like saying that İstanbul has some mosques. The stars, for all their money, power and influence, still need representation by persons qualified in the law should their charmed lives take unexpected and messy turns. The man had made it his business to know all the most prestigious names; he knew where they all worked, lived and jogged. He’d even spoken to some of them during the time he had worked on this Sivas thing. None of them had known anything about Hikmet Sivas or his photographs.

  The Turk, it would seem, placed little trust in lawyers. The photographs were where they had always been apparently: at the bottom of an old writing paper box in Hikmet Sivas’s bedside cabinet.

  ‘You kept them here?’ he said as he shuffled through the large stack of mainly black and white photographs.

  ‘Yes.’

  Although it was his bedroom and the man was sitting on his bed, Hikmet was loath to sit down beside him. Instead he placed himself in a wicker chair opposite; he could just see the tops of his palm trees through the window behind the man’s head.

  ‘I told no one where they were,’ Hikmet continued. ‘Not even Vedat. I felt it was safer that way.’ He laughed, but without humour.

  The man shuffled and riffled, his eyes fixed on the images, showing acts sometimes odd, sometimes sensual, often distasteful and sadistic. The only thing they had in common besides sex was that the male participants were all well-known. More official images of them had appeared in newspapers all over the world or in files held by criminal investigation organisations. As he shuffled, the man tried to work out what a collection like this might be worth to its owner and decided that it was totally incalculable.

  ‘It amazes me that you never tried to use any of this, Hikmet,’ he said. ‘You could have been a billionaire.’

  ‘I have enough for my needs,’ Hikmet replied tightly. ‘As I’ve said before, I only took them to protect my life here. It was the only way I could make sure that a young man from Turkey would be listened to, respected.’

  ‘But you never had to use them, right?’

  ‘Right. But I never knew whether I would have to. I had to protect myself.’

  The man looked up and smiled unpleasantly. ‘Shame about your brother then.’

  ‘I should never have revealed what I was doing to him.’ He shook his head. ‘I should never have allowed him to run the Harem without me.’

  ‘Did Vedat take pictures too?’

  ‘In recent times, yes. He was fine until he met Zhivkov.’

  ‘How’d they meet? D’you know?’

  Hikmet sighed. ‘In a little street of bars we call Çiçek Pasaj,’ he said wearily. ‘Vedat has always gone there. But in recent years a lot of mainly foreign gangsters go there too.’

  The man looked down and started sorting through once again, his brow furrowed in concentration.

  ‘So it was like an accident, a coincidence?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, Hikmet.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There are no coincidences,’ the man said harshly. ‘This could still rear up and bite us on the ass unless we tie up every loose end.’ He paused, raising a single photograph up in front of his face. ‘Oh, well, look here.’

  ‘That’s the one that you want?’

  ‘It’s the only one that could change the face of the world map, yes.’ The man regarded the image from several angles before continuing. ‘Some ambition you must have, Hikmet, to allow someone like him to do something like that to them.’

  Hikmet Sivas looked down at the floor. ‘His appetites . . . He demanded . . .’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  Hikmet’s anger flared. ‘Well, would you have said no? To him?’

  ‘No,’ the man replied simply. ‘But then people like me are paid very well by people like him to say yes all the time. It’s also an idealistic thing, if you know what I mean. I take care of the world as we know it, I keep it that way.’

  ‘So a
re you going to destroy that one?’

  ‘I’m going to destroy them all, Hikmet.’ He spread the whole stack out on the highly polished wooden floor and then looked at them each in turn once again. ‘You developed them here.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hikmet said, ‘as I’ve told you.’ Then suddenly he smiled. ‘My friend Ahmet and I learned how to develop pictures when we worked in Egypt. One of the cameramen taught us. The first one I ever did was a picture of Ahmet. I was so pleased.’

  ‘And the negatives?’ The man hadn’t been listening, just looking at the pictures, thinking.

  ‘All of them are in my darkroom downstairs.’

  The man stood up, pulling on the waistband of his trousers as he did so.

  ‘Good job it’s all going then, isn’t it, Hikmet.’ He smiled. ‘And, sadly, that means you’re going to have to go too.’

  ‘What?’

  The two men who had accompanied the man into Hikmet’s house emerged from the shadows, one with a can of petrol, the other with a knife.

  Hikmet was terrified. ‘But if you kill me someone will investigate, someone will know!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s any chance of that happening,’ the man said calmly. Then the taller of his two associates cut Hikmet Sivas’s throat as if he were a common hillside goat. ‘Bye Hikmet.’

  When the house was well and truly soaked with petrol, the man threw a match into it and left. Separately and silently, he’d shot his two associates just before he torched the house. They’d been kindly supplied by di Marco, trash he’d been wanting to offload anyway.

  The man left the house, the state and then the country. There were other things to be done elsewhere.

  Despite the best efforts of the Los Angeles fire department, only the great crescent-shaped pool at the back of the house remained intact; everything else burned to the ground.

  Hürrem İpek stared fixedly out of her kitchen window, her eyes focused on nothing. The sky was darkening now and the man who sat with her, on the other side of her table, looked more like a shadow than a person.

  ‘So this Zhivkov, this monster, is dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen replied. ‘We killed him last night. In the operation up at Yıldız.’

  ‘Who?’ She turned away from the window, her eyes seeking his. ‘Who killed him?’

  ‘We . . .’

  ‘Which officer? What is his name?’

  İkmen, blinking hard just to stay awake, glanced away, edging to the corner of the lie.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It was all very violent, very confusing.’

  ‘I’d like to kiss him,’ Hürrem said hollowly. ‘I’d like to take him in my arms and kiss him. You know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He avenged my daughter. I owe him everything I have.’ She put her head down and silently started to cry.

  ‘He also did his duty,’ İkmen said softly, not enjoying the deception but nevertheless feeling that he had to elaborate it for her sake. ‘His reward and yours is that Hatice can now rest in peace.’

  She was crying too hard to answer him. Her head was in her hands, her whole body heaving with grief, tears running through her fingers and down her arms. And for İkmen, too, there was pain here in this small, darkening kitchen. This poor woman deserved the whole unexpurgated story, she should be aware that many years before, forces over and above the terrible Zhivkov had in fact set up the apparatus that had led to Hatice’s death. But to tell her would be to put her at risk and he couldn’t do that. Bad enough that somebody, somewhere, might come and ask him about what and who he knew in this affair. Somebody with power he couldn’t even imagine.

  ‘And you,’ Hürrem said, raising her head, ‘you promised me you would do this for me, Inspector. You did it. I throw myself at your feet!’

  Which is exactly what she did. Falling from her chair she prostrated herself before him, her sodden face pressed down into the cheap linoleum on the floor.

  İkmen, shocked and embarrassed, leapt to his feet. ‘Mrs İpek!’

  ‘I am not fit to pour out water for you to wash your hands!’

  That expression again. Almost word for word the same as Hikmet Sivas had said to his sister Hale when he attempted to atone, just a little, for the shortcomings of his lifestyle. The formulaic creation of a mismatch between one person and another, that old remnant of the rigid Ottoman system of lofty exaltation and cringing servility. Even if Hürrem’s total abasement at his feet had been deserved, İkmen would have felt uncomfortable; under the current circumstances it made him feel fraudulent and tainted. Beyond discovering much that he shouldn’t know up at Yıldız, he’d done nothing. He hadn’t made Zhivkov pay for anything, no one had. The Bulgarian had lived a violent, no doubt exciting and rich life, exploiting and killing wherever he went, activities he enjoyed. Even in death he’d been fortunate. Cleanly shot dead, no pain at all. No time for retribution, no payment exacted for crimes committed, at least not here on earth.

  No. Zhivkov was free, whereas this grieving mother? İkmen began to feel tears of misery, weariness and frustration well up in his eyes and so without another word to the woman still cringing at his feet he left that apartment and went out onto the landing. There, in front of his own apartment door, he slid down onto his haunches and wept. Beyond the door, the entrance to what he had always considered his own private and secure space, he listened to the sound of his younger children’s games. As he wept he wondered who else might be listening and for just a moment the rage within him was so strong that it frightened him. How dare they! Whoever they were and whatever their motives, how dare they do this to him, to his family, to the few certainties of his way of life.

  Chapter 28

  * * *

  Celal and Ekrem Müren were eventually tracked down in the early hours of the following morning. Holed up in their dead father’s apartment, they were both angry and distraught with grief. Despite this they didn’t allow the police to come in without a fight. And so the man leading the small group of arresting officers, İsak Çöktin, gave the order to break into the apartment. Leading as ever from the front, Çöktin only narrowly escaped a bullet from Ekrem’s gun. One of the other men took a shot in the leg.

  It took the police longer than they had hoped to bring the situation under control. The brothers fought with a reckless ferocity that eventually resulted in Ekrem sustaining a chest wound and Celal’s death. It wasn’t the outcome they had been hoping for and so Çöktin, rather than call İkmen who he knew was exhausted, informed Ardıç directly. After all, Ekrem would have to be treated in hospital before he could be questioned by İkmen and Celal’s body would need to be removed to the mortuary. As the officers were leaving, Alev Müren, the little sister from hell, arrived with her grandmother from the old woman’s home on Türbedar Sokak, having been alerted by sympathetic neighbours. Both women screamed at the police, calling them ‘Bloody murderers!’ while the neighbours peeped silently at the scene from behind their curtains and blinds. And Çöktin, ever obliging, duly rewarded this strange, silent vigil by arresting both women when Alev attacked Constable Yıldız. Even by Beyazıt standards it was a very dramatic event.

  İkmen, in contrast, began the morning at a very slow pace. Last night he had, with no more than three words to his family, fallen into bed and a mercifully dreamless sleep. When he did finally wake it was to the unusual sight of a high sun outside the window and Fatma watching him intently from where she stood at the end of their bed.

  ‘Çetin, I’m sorry,’ she said as she polished the old brass bars that made up the bed’s footboard, ‘but you have a visitor.’

  ‘Ardıç . . .’

  ‘No. No, if it had been work I’d have sent whoever it was away,’ Fatma responded tartly. ‘No, this is a friend, Çetin.’

  ‘Oh.’ His voice was husky and cracked and he coughed violently as he swung his legs over the side of the bed and retrieved his clothes from the floor. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s Arto,’ she said, rem
oving more dust than she was accustomed to from her furniture, ‘and Miss Yümniye Heper.’

  İkmen looked up, his eyes bleary with weariness and surprise.

  ‘Poor Miss Muazzez,’ Fatma continued. ‘I didn’t know she had died. Such a terrible thing!’

  İkmen walked over to her. ‘I’m so glad that you’re back,’ he said.

  She smiled and then he kissed her, a long, lingering kiss that spoke more effectively than words ever could about how much he had missed her.

  The doctor and Yümniye were sitting at the kitchen table when İkmen entered. Yümniye, away from her normal surroundings, looked somehow older and smaller than usual. The two men embraced and then İkmen seated himself opposite his guests, while Fatma, who had followed him in from the bedroom, gave them all coffee. She then left to attack the rest of the apartment which was, by Fatma’s standards, filthy.

  ‘I’m going to release Miss Muazzez’s body for burial today,’ Arto Sarkissian said as he stirred an enormous amount of sugar into his drink.

  ‘I was so pleased when I heard Arto’s voice this morning,’ Yümniye said, smiling at both of the men. ‘It was so nice to know that her poor body had found its way into friendly hands. I can still remember you two playing with your brothers in our garden when you were little boys. You were all such good boys.’

  İkmen and his friend shared a small, secretive smile. Yes, they’d all really liked General Heper’s garden, it was true. Plenty of fruit to steal from the trees.

  ‘I brought Miss Yümniye to see you,’ the Armenian continued, ‘because she’d very much like both of us to attend Miss Muazzez’s funeral.’

  ‘I have only distant family now that Muazzez has gone,’ the old woman said sadly, ‘and you both remember her when she was young and vital. You’ve both tried very hard to do your best.’

  ‘We’re still looking for the car that ran Miss Muazzez down,’ İkmen said as he lit his first cigarette of the day. ‘I have hopes . . .’

  ‘That you will find those responsible for the Harem?’ Yümniye shook her head. ‘Ah, but you won’t, will you, Çetin? No.’ She looked up into the confused face of Arto Sarkissian and shrugged. ‘People don’t keep things like that a secret for forty years only to lose it all over an old woman. I never did know anywhere near as much as Muazzez, but I do know that. I don’t suppose that idiot Sofia—’