Petrified

by Barbara Nadel

  They all sat in silence for a few moments in the wake of this outburst.

  Then with a sigh, Ayşe Farsakoǧlu said, ‘Mr Akdeniz, I’d like to take another look at the children’s bedroom, if I may.’

  ‘You know where it is,’ Melih murmured tightly.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She rose and made her way towards the back door.

  ‘Just don’t wake my wife, she’s only just finally managed to sleep,’ the artist added. ‘She’s in our bedroom.’

  ‘I’ll be quiet,’ Ayşe said as she disappeared into the house.

  As soon as she’d gone, İkmen sent Roditi over to the stables, which were on the western side of the property. Until Melih had built the glass extension on top of his house, the old stone stables had served as his studio. Now defunct, they were still full of old materials and abandoned works of art, things that two young constables and now Roditi were attempting to search through. Houses as old and complex as this could have any number of forgotten rooms, cellars, et cetera, into which people, particularly children, could conceivably disappear. They’d already searched the cistern on the eastern side of the garden. That had yielded a chamber that had probably been bricked up in the nineteenth century.

  İkmen put his cigarette out and immediately lit another. ‘My colleague and I walked up here today,’ he said; ‘took a stroll through the streets.’ He smiled. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve worked in Balat. It’s not a troublesome district.’

  Melih threw his cigarette end on to the ground underneath the table and then stamped on it. Tiny sparks of orange ash pierced the darkness.

  ‘It’s always been a friendly place,’ İkmen continued, ‘with a strong sense of community.’

  The artist, his expression contemptuous, trained his eyes on İkmen’s face. ‘I don’t join communities,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to. I am Balat, I’m not some incomer. People here know me and I know them and that’s where it stops. I neither want nor need their ill-informed opinions of me or what I do.’

  ‘They’re just Balat people, like yourself—’

  ‘They’re ignorant and small-minded.’

  ‘But they’re not stupid,’ İkmen said, ‘nor are they unobservant.’

  Melih’s eyes narrowed. ‘You mean they’ve got their eyes in everyone’s business.’

  ‘I mean I’m surprised that no one saw your children on Saturday morning,’ İkmen smiled. ‘It’s obvious to me from the few conversations my colleague and I have had with some of your neighbours today, that you are not exactly liked.’

  ‘Oh really?’ Melih smirked unpleasantly. ‘You do surprise me.’

  ‘But Yaşar and Nuray are liked and do have friends,’ İkmen said. ‘Now I know that you said the children got up at what you describe as early . . .’

  ‘I told you I heard their door open at six.’

  ‘Yes, when a lot of people are up and about their business. This is a hard-working district, Mr Akdeniz.’

  Melih crossed his arms over his chest as his face assumed a confrontational expression. ‘What are you trying to say? That I’m lying? About this?’

  İkmen sighed. This man was so tense it was like trying to hold a conversation with a volcano. ‘No, I’m not. But what I am saying is, could you be wrong about when the children left the house? If they left in the middle of the night then it’s highly unlikely they would have been seen.’ He made himself look into Melih’s hollow and suspicious eyes. ‘What I’m trying to do here is to open up other possible lines of investigation. If somebody did see something unusual on Friday night, an unknown vehicle or—’

  ‘They left the house at six. I know this, I heard them. I can’t help it if the people of Balat are blind and deaf.’ He turned away to concentrate on the thick tangle of bindweed that was threatening to choke one of his grapevines.

  ‘If you’re sure,’ İkmen said with a shrug.

  ‘I am.’

  And after that all conversation ceased until Ayşe Farsakoǧlu returned.

  ‘Seen anything new and significant in my children’s bedroom?’ Melih asked sourly when the young woman sat down beside him.

  ‘No, although it does help me to get more of an idea of what Yaşar and Nuray might be like,’ Ayşe replied.

  İkmen looked up, ‘Oh?’

  ‘They obviously take after you, Mr Akdeniz,’ she said, looking at the artist with a small smile.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You are, I believe, critical of the current state of Turkish society. You express this in your art work.’

  ‘You know that I do. What of it?’

  İkmen, wondering just where this was leading, frowned.

  Ayşe shrugged. ‘I just think it’s very interesting, given what you do, that Yaşar and Nuray are so obviously fascinated by Karagöz and not besotted with Tarkan or Britney Spears like most children now.’ She paused to allow Melih to answer. But he remained silent and so she elaborated, ‘What I mean is that in Ottoman times Karagöz shadow puppet plays were used as artistic vehicles for social criticism.’ She turned to look at İkmen. ‘The puppets are stuck on the children’s walls, sir. No Türkpop stars, just the two main shadow play characters Karagöz and his adversary, Hacıvat.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Yes.’ Melih rose from his seat and raked a hand through his hair, ‘I believe in educating one’s children properly.’ He looked up into a darkened sky, covered with stars. ‘Give them Tarkan and they’ll grow up thinking tiles with skewed designs are art. Expose them to deep archetypal figures like those in Karagöz and just maybe they’ll understand something about what it means to be an artist and the responsibility that comes along with it. Young minds and bodies are materials just like clay, paint and fabric – we have a responsibility not to contaminate them and to treat them with respect.’ And then he looked down at the officers, his eyes full of tears. ‘I love my children,’ he said. ‘I love them more than my life.’

  CHAPTER 3

  The post-mortem on the body of Rosita Keyder revealed that her death had been entirely natural. Already the victim of a minor stroke, which her doctor had told Arto Sarkissian happened back in 1990, Rosita Keyder had died of an aneurism, that sudden rupturing of a weakened artery. Death had been almost instantaneous. There were not, as far as Arto could tell, any suspicious marks on the body or any clues in the apartment that might lead him to believe she may have been unlawfully killed. Only the young man he was now looking at laid out straight, almost militaristically, on his operating table sounded a discordant note in this seemingly ordinary saga of elderly demise.

  İsak Çöktin, rightly or wrongly, had assumed that this unknown man had died at round about the same time as Rosita. Somewhat, in Arto’s opinion, simplistic traditional police-style thinking, but justified in this instance. After all, if the man had died before the woman she would have called the relevant medical services. Had he died after her he, surely, would have done the same for her prior to his demise. But no doctors or ambulances had been called. So to assume that they had died at roughly the same time was reasonable. There was, however, a problem.

  Rosita had died, Arto reckoned, at the most, three days before. The condition of the corpse was consistent with this time frame given the current very hot temperatures. The other body, however, the man’s, had only just started to degrade. This seemed to indicate that he had died after she did. That his corpse had been stone cold when it was discovered was odd. Bodies began to rot quickly at the height of an İstanbul summer and Arto would have expected at least some liquefaction. But that hadn’t happened. With his violet-coloured glass eyes wide open and his erect bearing, the young man looked as if he were resting rather than deceased. Indeed, as Arto raised his knife in preparation for cutting into the body he felt quite nervous lest his ‘patient’ cry out in pain.

  Whimsically, he put his instrument down. Although not exactly overwhelming, Arto recognised that he was experiencing something of the old desecration anxiety that had afflic
ted him in the early days of his practice. Always fascinated by the inner workings of the human body as well as curious about how and why people came to die, he had nevertheless never quite managed to shake the idea that what he did was an act of defilement. What had once been human was cut up, taken apart and closely examined by him. And in spite of the fact that Arto wasn’t and never had been a religious man, there was still that faint notion always at the back of his mind that what he was doing was breaking an ancient taboo.

  But usually he managed either to ignore or suppress such thoughts. Quite why he couldn’t in this case he didn’t know. But whatever the reason for this was, it was growing, which was alarming. Could it be that if this feeling persisted he wouldn’t be able to perform a post-mortem on this corpse? Could it be that perhaps he wouldn’t be able to operate on any corpse?

  The idea that perhaps he was losing his nerve caused Arto to reach reflexively for his scalpel. The cold glass violet eyes looked on. So very, very dead and yet seeming so very alive at the same time. Watching . . . Perhaps if he could get rid of them and their vigilant influence over him he would feel more able to continue. But then without any reason to remove the eyes that, surely, had to be desecration. And he had no reason to remove them, did he?

  He went for the left eye first. He told himself it was OK because he’d probably need to dissect out the head anyway. He’d put it back later when he closed up. As he’d anticipated the eye came out easily, plopping coldly into his latex-covered hand, just like a marble. Large and round and clean – which was how it would have stayed had Arto not dropped it on the floor.

  Removing the eye was one thing, but looking into the socket behind it was quite another – especially if what was there was unexpected. Arto just stood staring into the socket as the violet eyeball first bounced and then shattered across the floor.

  ‘I’ll have to speak to Estelle about this,’ Zelfa said as she reached into the back of the car to remove her child from his baby seat. ‘She’s supposed to look after him at her apartment, not keep exhibiting him here like some fairground attraction.’

  ‘You know that’s not what it’s about,’ her husband said.

  ‘Do I?’ She moved backwards out of the car and when she was clear she shuffled the beautiful brown-eyed infant on to her hip. ‘What’s that then, Mehmet?’

  Inspector Mehmet Suleyman sighed. He’d had this conversation with his wife several times over the past few weeks. Estelle Cohen, their baby Yusuf’s nanny, had taken to visiting her friend Fatma İkmen with the child in tow. Through their policemen husbands, the Cohens, the Suleymans and the İkmens all knew each other very well. Estelle and Fatma were born within a year of each other and despite the former being Jewish and the latter a Muslim, they shared a lot of interests, many of which revolved around the home, children and other things decent middle-aged ladies should like. Zelfa Suleyman was, however, another matter.

  Though just a few years younger than Estelle and Fatma, Zelfa had been married to her handsome ‘toyboy’ husband for only eighteen months. That their child had to have been conceived a long while before their marriage was well known but accepted. Zelfa was, after all, both a foreigner and a doctor and so could therefore, to Estelle and Fatma’s way of thinking, be forgiven. What the ladies didn’t know, however, was that Zelfa didn’t really like this current arrangement and that actually delivering the baby to Fatma’s as opposed to Estelle’s apartment was the last straw.

  ‘Having Yusuf around really cheers Fatma up,’ Mehmet said. ‘Her brother’s dying—’

  ‘Yes, around my baby!’ Zelfa spat, and then slipping into her native English she said, ‘Christ knows what it’ll do to his mind! Having those yellow hands touching his cheek, the smell of death and morphine . . .’

  ‘Talaat will be going into hospital soon. He’s not going to die in front of Yusuf.’

  ‘Oh, you know that, do you?’ She walked towards the entrance to the İkmens’ apartment block, her blonde head held high and petulant.

  ‘As far as I’m aware the doctors have said—’

  ‘And what do they know?’ She turned to look at him, her eyes hard.

  ‘You’re a doctor,’ Mehmet said smoothly as he wrestled to maintain control over his temper.

  ‘I’m a psychiatrist,’ his wife retorted, ‘a good, Irish psychiatrist who sees a lot of people whose problems are basically physical. Many of these have come about through bad practice by Turkish doctors. Unless they’ve been trained abroad, they’re useless. Do you know—’

  ‘No, I don’t know whether Fatma’s brother’s doctor has been trained abroad!’ Mehmet raked his hands nervously through his hair. ‘For the love of Allah, Zelfa!’

  ‘I’m not going to have my baby taken over by Turks.’ She paused just briefly to look and smile at her child, who happily gurgled back at her. ‘I’m Irish . . .’

  ‘Your mother was Irish.’

  ‘I was born and brought up there; it’s my home.’ Zelfa cleared her throat. ‘I don’t want an exclusively Turkish life for Yusuf. Estelle on her own is fine, but together with Fatma it’s all boncuks, evil spirits, Maşallah . . . Christ, I’ve agreed to have my child raised as a Muslim, what more do you want?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Oh, apart from sex, of course,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘Zelfa!’ Instinctively Mehmet looked around to see whether anyone was listening.

  Zelfa raised her eyes impatiently up to the sky. ‘I’m speaking English, Mehmet,’ she said. ‘No one can understand.’

  ‘Unless, of course, Çetin is still at home,’ Mehmet said as he pointed up towards the İkmens’ top-floor apartment.

  ‘Afraid İkmen’ll find out you’re not getting fucked?’ She turned and started walking towards the apartment building again, cooing at the child as she went.

  Stung by her words, Mehmet didn’t follow. He’d always loved her so much, but this sexual problem she was experiencing was straining their relationship. She’d always had problems living up to what she perceived was his superior physical attractiveness. Not that he’d ever seen it that way. But what had started as low self-esteem had become poisoned by the physical discomfort during sex that she, or so he felt, had almost wilfully failed to address. Instead of consulting one of her medical colleagues she had just simply railed at him about other women she imagined he was going to run to for sex. Now in a sense she was almost pushing him to do that. The previous evening he had almost complied. Mehmet sighed. The only thing he could do for the moment was concentrate on his work – on Rostov and his cohorts. There had to be a way to make the Russians commit some error that would lead to their arrest and conviction. But then that would have to come without the intervention of young Masha . . .

  He watched as Zelfa handed Yusuf over to Fatma, who had come down to greet them. Contact with the child seemed to, at least temporarily, remove some of the strain from İkmen’s wife’s face. Poor woman. How Zelfa could want to deny her a little light in the midst of her dark world, Mehmet couldn’t imagine. Watching someone you loved die had to be awful; he couldn’t imagine how he’d feel if his brother were terminally ill. One always hoped that oneself would go first . . .

  ‘And let him play with his leprechaun,’ Zelfa said as she handed over the strange green and red doll her uncle in Dublin had sent for Yusuf.

  Fatma, a little taken aback said, ‘A doll . . .’

  ‘It’s a leprechaun,’ Zelfa corrected. ‘It’s called Sean. Make sure he has it. He loves it.’

  ‘OK.’

  Yusuf started crying as soon as the leprechaun was placed beside him. He always did. But then with Zelfa becoming more Irish by the minute there was no point arguing with her.

  She walked back towards the car and got in without another word. Mehmet smiled tiredly at Fatma, who was attempting to encourage the now screaming Yusuf to wave at his parents, and then slid down into the driving seat.

  On reflection, İkmen could have done with a day outside the city. Melih Akdeniz
had mentioned the fish restaurants on the waterfront at Sarıyer where he and his family had been due to go and eat on the morning of the boys’ disappearance. Ayşe Farsakoǧlu had gone over there to check out them and other possible connections. Melih might have with that district. İkmen, as was only right and proper, remained in Balat to supervise operations and also to make connections. One of these had turned out to be a large gypsy woman called Gonca. Like Melih Akdeniz, Gonca was an artist who, although not nearly so successful, exhibited her work all over the country. Unlike the famous man, however, Gonca was very sociable, particularly with other artists. When İkmen called she was entertaining her friend Nilufer Cemal.

  Framed in a doorway draped with many brightly coloured sequined fabrics, Gonca was quite a sight. Probably in her mid-forties she was extremely dark, tall and excessively curvaceous. Every part of her silk-swathed body that could be covered with jewellery was, and her hair, which was the very densest black, hung down to no more than a few centimetres from the floor. A fat dark cigar between her very white teeth completed an ensemble that brought back many happy childhood memories for İkmen. His mother, the Albanian ‘Witch of Üsküdar’, had been very partial to visiting the gypsies in the district of Ayvansaray, which borders on Balat. There she would treat her children to dancing bears, the wailing music of the zurna and the sight of, to İkmen, the very ‘forward’ gypsy girls dancing barefoot and bejewelled in the street. While all of this was going on his mother would talk of tarot cards and movements in the heavens with the elder ladies of the tribe – large, scary women, just like Gonca.

  When she’d heard why İkmen had come, Gonca led him into her studio where Nilufer Cemal was already taking tea and eating something that looked sticky from a small terracotta pot.

  ‘It’s zerde,’ Gonca said, flicking her wrist in the direction of Nilufer Cemal’s food. ‘We generally make it for wedding feasts, but I like it so I make it all the time. Would you like some?’