Dance with Death

by Barbara Nadel

  Süleyman breathed deeply as he tried to get a hold on his shaking nerves. ‘OK, if you will. Well . . . Look, if you know this man, then why is he doing this?’

  ‘Killing queers? I don’t actually know,’ Mürsel replied with a shrug. ‘I have a good idea, but that isn’t something I’m prepared to share with you.’

  ‘Yes, but if you accept that input from the police is still necessary . . .’

  ‘We, as I have told you before, Inspector, will apprehend this person, not you.’ He offered Süleyman a cigarette and then took one for himself. Mürsel had, Süleyman noted with some amazement, even brought an ashtray. ‘You will, of course, continue to investigate these crimes. The public must not have any notion of any difference or oddness at play here. You will even be required to share information with us about whatever you may discover on your own account. But information will only be shared in one direction. I will ask you a question and you will answer it, you will not ask me anything.’

  ‘So we will assist you?’

  ‘If you want to look at it like that, yes,’ Mürsel replied. ‘But you will not apprehend this person. If by some miracle it looks as if that might be likely, you will contact us immediately. Let us be clear you are not to arrest this person, you are not to wound or kill him, you are not even to speak to him. After what Abdullah Aydın has told us, we are now certain that our suspicions have been confirmed. We’ve been following clues and hints of this person for some time. He belongs to us; he’s lethal and we will take care of him.’

  Süleyman smoked in silence for a few moments as he attempted to absorb what he had just been told.

  ‘Our aim is to remove him from circulation. After that these crimes will stop. Unfortunately for the police these crimes will remain unsolved which will not look good for you, but there it is.’

  ‘What will you do with this person?’ Süleyman asked. ‘When you . . .’

  ‘That’s none of your business,’ Mürsel said shortly. ‘But I’m not going to deliver a convenient body to you, if that is what you’re asking. The peeper will just simply disappear. People do it all the time.’

  Süleyman felt a cold shudder snake down his spine. Mürsel was so casual about it all. But then people like him were, or so it was said.

  ‘Now I will give you a number to ring which you can use at any time,’ Mürsel said. ‘Give me your mobile and I’ll put it in for you.’

  Süleyman did as he was asked.

  As Mürsel plugged the number into the telephone he said, ‘I’ve put it under “Haydar” who will never be very far away from you.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘You may or may not know this, but it was Haydar who first spotted you outside the hamam. We both agreed you were very obviously a policeman.’

  Süleyman put his head down a little and shrugged.

  ‘Oh, don’t be upset!’ Mürsel laughed. ‘You stared at Haydar for quite some time yourself! Lurking in that shop doorway he looked like a pervert!’

  So that was where he’d seen this Haydar before, outside the hamam in Karaköy.

  ‘Was it Haydar in the garden of my house?’

  ‘No, but I know who it was,’ Mürsel replied.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I’m not going to tell you,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I don’t have to.’ He then handed the mobile back to Süleyman. ‘Now I will inform Ardıç that we’ve had this conversation and I imagine he will want to see you. You will continue your investigations but I suggest that you now reassure your colleagues that everything is in order. Young Mr Aydın didn’t have anything of value to say on the subject of his attacker and by tomorrow he will have left to convalesce at a nice resort on the south coast.’

  ‘Which is just where he won’t be, I assume?’

  ‘We will keep Mr Aydın safe until all of this unpleasantness is at an end.’

  Suddenly aware that he could no longer hear any noise from outside the door, Süleyman said, ‘Er, I have a friend . . .’

  ‘You have dear little Mrs Cohen still lining up to get her documents photocopied and some lunatic I believe you encouraged to fight in the toilet, yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, if you promise not to leave, I will ask Haydar to find out what our young guard might have done about that.’

  Süleyman said he wouldn’t leave. Mursel’s gun if nothing else was inducement enough.

  ‘I expect your lunatic is all right,’ Mürsel said as Haydar left to go about his business. ‘You’ll tell him and Mrs Cohen that you spoke to the person you needed to see but that he had nothing of value to tell you.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  Mürsel put his cigarette out in his ashtray and then leaned in towards Süleyman. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I did enjoy our drink at the Büyük Londra Hotel. You may not be very good at hiding what you are, but you lie quite convincingly.’ His eyes sparkled with mischief, ‘And the kiss was delightful.’

  ‘Oh, so you didn’t lie about . . .’

  ‘I enjoy beautiful things,’ Mürsel responded. ‘I avail myself of sexual pleasure whenever it presents itself. I have been married to this woman for some years – it suits me and what I purport to be. But if circumstances were to change I wouldn’t give a thought to leaving her. She is transitory. I like women, but I like men too. I enjoyed our little frisson.’

  ‘I am not gay, Mürsel Bey,’ Süleyman said very properly.

  ‘Neither am I, but I’m sure that we could both enjoy having sex in spite of that.’ He placed one large hand on Süleyman’s thigh.

  ‘Mürsel Bey . . .’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to force you,’ Mürsel said, amused at the look of cringing horror on Süleyman’s face. ‘That wouldn’t be any fun. But you will come round, I believe, my dear Sunel Bey of the Büyük Londra Hotel. It is just too fortuitous that you became more involved with this problem of mine than you should have. I sometimes think that maybe I organised it to be this way. Having seen you . . .’

  ‘The lunatic has been delivered back to his aunt in the waiting area,’ Haydar said as he re-entered the room. Mürsel let his hand linger for just a moment on Süleyman’s thigh before removing it. It seemed he needed Haydar to see this for some reason.

  ‘Thank you, Haydar,’ he said and then looking back at Süleyman again he smiled. ‘Now you have a lot of people to reassure, don’t you, Inspector? Auntie Estelle, your lunatic, that oafish thing İzzet Melik, that pretty girl who works for Çetin İkmen . . .’

  İkmen again. ‘How do you know Çetin İkmen?’

  Haydar laughed. ‘Oh, everybody in the world knows Çetin İkmen,’ he said. ‘You might be beautiful, but he is a legend.’

  Although her son Turgut attempted to silence her, Nalan Senar pushed him roughly away from her. ‘Oh, it is over, Turgut!’ she said with a weariness in her voice that powerfully and immediately struck İkmen as absolutely genuine. ‘It is kismet. I have committed many sins and now I must pay.’

  ‘Yes, but Mother . . .’

  ‘And so must you, my son,’ she said as she looked down at Turgut with what seemed to be pity in her eyes. And then she looked away towards İkmen. ‘Not that my son Turgut killed Aysu Alkaya,’ she said. ‘I did that entirely on my own.’

  ‘You killed Aysu?’ Kemalettin Senar’s lower lip trembled with both sorrow and fury. ‘I loved her! Why . . .’

  And then he was on her, punching and clawing and screaming his misery into her outraged ears. It took Altay Salman and two of his recruits to pull him off. When he was finally removed, Kemalettin Senar was trembling violently and his mother was bleeding from the mouth. Turgut Senar, who had briefly entered the fray on behalf of his mother, had to be held away from his brother by one of the recruits.

  ‘You animal!’ he screamed at Kemalettin as the young horseman held him. ‘This is all your fault!’

  ‘Shut up and control yourself!’ İkmen yelled as he stood up in order to assert his authority over the proceedings. He then stepped forward to give Nalan Sena
r some tissues. Her mouth was not badly damaged but the bleeding needed to be staunched before they could proceed. When he eventually returned to his seat, İkmen glanced out of the window and saw to his horror that the snow was coming down even more intensely now that darkness had fallen. No going back to İstanbul for me, he thought gloomily. But then with so many criminals, or so it seemed, to deal with in Muratpaşa was that ever going to be possible anyway?

  ‘Nalan Hanım?’

  After looking first at one son and then the other, Nalan Senar stood up again. ‘My son Turgut saw his brother Kemalettin with Aysu Alkaya in the Valley of the Saints once before the girl married Ziya Kahraman and once afterwards. They were having relations in that place Kemalettin calls the cave of the mummy.’ She looked down at the floor, ashamed by her admission. ‘After the second time, my son Turgut scolded his brother. Aysu belonged to Ziya Bey, it was not his place to take her. It was then that Kemalettin told Turgut that Aysu was having his child.’

  ‘Mother, if you do this there will be no one left to look after that maniac!’ Turgut Senar screamed as he pointed at his brother. ‘We will lose everything!’

  But his mother just simply ignored him. ‘Turgut told me and, of course, I was horrified. My first thought was to punish Kemalettin until Turgut told me the rest of the story, which was that my younger son and Aysu were planning to run away together. I asked Turgut to try and find out when this might be taking place.’

  ‘You promised me you hadn’t told anyone!’ Kemalettin Senar said to Turgut. ‘You told me to tell the policemen that we were all in the house with Father all night. But I heard you leave, Turgut, I heard you. You lied about everything!’

  ‘Yes, Kemalettin,’ Nalan continued, ‘he lied. Turgut told me you had gone. He knew you would take Aysu to the Valley of the Saints, to the cave with the painting of the mummy on the wall. And so when you came back and went to bed, I went out. I went to the cave with the mummy and I saw Aysu. I wish I could say that I talked to her, that we argued and that the gun I had taken with me to protect myself against wolves had gone off accidentally. But it didn’t happen that way. I took the gun, Turgut’s, without his knowledge, and I went to your special cave to kill Aysu. I shot her in the cave with the mummy and then I started to panic. What if other people knew of that place and of your love for it? If Turgut knew, then why not others?’ She sighed. ‘And so I went home, got Turgut out of his bed and took him to the Valley of the Saints to see what I had done. He was so shocked. His father was dying at the time, I thought he might go mad like his grandfather . . .’

  ‘But he didn’t, did he, Hanım?’

  ‘No. No, he helped me to move Aysu’s body out of the cave with the mummy and we put it into a tiny deep cave just along the valley. When, later, the area was being searched, Turgut moved it about but we eventually put Aysu back into the cave with the mummy because we knew it was the one place that Kemalettin wouldn’t look for it. He has always been too scared to go there ever since.’

  ‘I did go back for Aysu in the morning,’ Kemalettin said. His face looked calmer now, even a little dreamy. ‘Aysu . . .’

  Altay Salman just caught Kemalettin’s hand as it began to snake down towards the front of his trousers. ‘No.’

  ‘Of course Kemalettin didn’t say anything to me about Aysu’s disappearance,’ Nalan said. ‘But he did tell his brother. Turgut said that she must have gone off somewhere but that Kemalettin wasn’t to say anything because otherwise Ziya Bey would kill him.’

  ‘And so you waited for the Kahramans to raise the alarm,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Nazlı Kahraman, who had been listening like the rest of the people in the room with a growing sense of horror, said, ‘How did you know that the child was not my father’s, Nalan Senar? I admit I knew Aysu was pregnant and I had some doubts as to whether or not the child was my father’s, but there was blood on her wedding sheet . . .’

  ‘Kemalettin told his brother that Aysu smeared blood from her arm on the sheet in order to save your father’s reputation,’ Nalan Senar replied. ‘As soon as Ziya Bey saw those feet of hers he lost his ardour completely and never touched the girl ever again. The child had to be my son’s.’

  Nazlı Kahraman shook her head in disbelief. ‘Then why didn’t my father just divorce the girl! Why didn’t he tell me?’

  No one gave an answer to this question immediately. Only after a while did Haldun Alkaya say in his old, reedy voice, ‘Because he was ashamed. He was old and had been tricked. I had tricked him.’

  ‘My father was the most powerful man in this village!’

  ‘Which was why he could not be laughed at,’ İkmen said. ‘Which was why, I assume, he would have allowed a reasonable amount of time to elapse before he divorced his young wife, probably on the grounds that she was infertile.’

  ‘She had my baby inside her,’ Kemalettin Senar said dreamily.

  ‘Which meant that she had to run away,’ İkmen said. ‘Why did you stop her, Nalan Hanım? You didn’t “officially” know that Aysu was carrying Ziya Bey’s child. You could have let the two of them run away, you could have allowed your own grandchild, your own flesh and blood, to live.’

  ‘Ziya Bey would have punished our family,’ Nalan replied. ‘As soon as it was known that Kemalettin was with her . . .’

  ‘And yet even now – Ziya Bey has been dead for years – you still attempt to conceal what happened,’ İkmen said. ‘By trying to destroy Aysu’s body, by trying to kill me . . .’

  ‘I did not! How . . .’

  ‘It was very unfortunate for you that I survived,’ İkmen said as he moved in towards the now very frightened-looking woman in front of him. ‘Why didn’t you finish me off, eh, Nalan Hanım? It would have been very easy to just get hold of that old Colt of Turgut’s and put it up to my head. I mean, I assume you do still have the weapon . . .’

  Mehmet Süleyman went to the İkmens’ apartment as opposed to just going straight home. He’d already lied – under the direction of Mürsel – to Estelle Cohen, İbrahim (who had a black eye and bleeding lip and was really very happy) and to İzzet Melik on the telephone. He wasn’t yet ready to lie to his wife and so he went to visit Fatma and some of her brood, none of whom knew or could know what he was now involved with. After all, who could, outside of fiction, even dream about such a thing? A ‘spy’, if indeed that was the right word to use about this person, gone ‘wrong’ in some way. It was fantastic, troubling and, if Ardıç hadn’t been involved at some level, Süleyman would have dismissed Mürsel’s story as the fantasies of an obviously wealthy and probably bored libertine. But it was true, and the threat to himself if nothing else was very real.

  As Fatma bustled around him making tea, shouting at her youngest son, Kemal, and cooing over Hulya’s baby, Timur, Süleyman found himself thinking about the character he knew as the peeper. Mürsel had implied that this person had worked or rather served abroad at some time. He wondered where. Spies, of course, went everywhere, even to friendly countries where he imagined their presence was both known of and tolerated. But Mürsel had implied that the place the peeper had been sent to had been dangerous; a place of ‘tension’ was the way he had expressed it. Where had this man been? To one of the wilder former Soviet Republics? Or maybe to Afghanistan or even Iraq . . .

  ‘Arto Sarkissian has told me the snow has got even worse out there now,’ Fatma said as she set a glass of tea and an ashtray down beside her guest.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘In Cappadocia.’ She sat down opposite him with a tired sigh. ‘That Çetin in that thin suit of his survived at all out in such a terrible landscape is a miracle for which we must thank Allah.’

  Süleyman shrugged his agreement. ‘Do you know when he’ll be getting home?’

  ‘No. Arto says it is like January or February out there. So bad.’ She shook her head and then continued, ‘And of course Çetin is meddling.’

  Süleyman smiled.

  ‘They tried to kill hi
m, those country people!’ Fatma said. ‘Arto says it is very exciting, that Çetin is solving a mystery that is decades old. But I am still angry with him, Mehmet.’

  He knew that she didn’t have a clue about Alison and so it couldn’t be that. ‘Why?’

  ‘For being manipulated by that Menşure Tokatlı. That woman has never needed help with anything related to business in her life and yet what do I get? Some rubbish about her not being able to cope. Why he didn’t just come out and say that Menşure wanted him to try to solve some old mystery in the village, I don’t know. What am I, a monster that he doesn’t tell me these things?’

  As Fatma turned away to shake her head in despair, Mehmet and Hulya shared a smile. No, Fatma wasn’t a monster, but they both knew that she didn’t like him leaving the city no matter what the reason.

  ‘And as usual my husband has involved others in his schemes, too,’ Fatma continued. ‘I don’t yet know how, but in some way Arto Sarkissian was in Muratpaşa and ended up searching for Çetin. Then there was his cousin Atom from Germany.’ She looked over at Hulya who was now laughing. ‘You may snigger but it isn’t very funny for innocent people who get caught up in your father’s investigations.’

  ‘But it sounds as if Çetin is doing a good job out there in Cappadocia,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘The police in a place like that have few resources,’ he continued. ‘They need help from those of us in the cities sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, but the people out in such places just feud and fight all the time!’ Fatma said. ‘I read the papers. If I were policing such places I’d give up, let them do what they want to each other! But Çetin . . .’

  ‘As an outsider Çetin can make clear-headed, unbiased judgements . . .’

  ‘Even when those barbarians try to kill him?’ She was, as usual, hiding her concern and her affection for her husband very badly.

  ‘Of course,’ Süleyman responded. ‘You know how he is. He cares.’