Petrified

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘OK, I think that’s enough,’ İskender said as he led his men purposefully over to, by virtue of the clothes the pair wore – one a cleric’s robes, the other a gangster’s leather jacket – the odd-looking scene that was unfolding under the bell tower.

  Drawing their weapons as they surrounded the area, İskender’s men covered him as he moved to show his identification to the priest and his thick-lipped, bullet-headed friend.

  ‘Police.’

  The cleric gasped. ‘Police?’ His voice, as well as being heavily accented was also tremulous with fear. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Open it.’ İskender tipped his head in the direction of the box in the priest’s thin, white hands.

  ‘But it’s only—’

  ‘Open it!’

  Later, İskender wouldn’t be able to recall whether he’d actually seen or imagined Rostov’s creature smirk as the priest opened the box and released that unmistakable smell into the night. But whether he did or not, it was at this point that all the bad feelings he had about this operation became reality.

  As soon as the lid of the box landed on the ground, İskender plunged his hands into the sweet-smelling cones within with a desperate intensity. Dozens of them spilled out on to the pavement, breaking into powdery nothing as they fell.

  ‘What do you want with our incense?’ the priest wailed as he looked on horrified at the policeman’s seemingly insane antics. ‘It’s a gift—’

  ‘From Rostov?’ İskender looked up sharply.

  ‘Valery Ivanovich is a very pious and kind—’

  The priest’s flattering homily was cut short by the sudden opening of one of the Audi’s rear doors. Four handguns moved to line up what emerged from the vehicle, which was soon revealed to be a most attractive middle-aged woman.

  Smiling as she approached an increasingly nervous İskender, she held a small card up for him to see by the light from inside St Stephen’s.

  ‘Betül Ertüg, Radikal,’ she said, smiling as she mouthed the name of her newspaper. ‘Now what’s all this about the İstanbul police and their harassment of the Christian minorities?’

  Inwardly cursing Rostov to hell, İskender breathed in deeply in order to give himself some time to think of a response.

  ‘I believe it takes a certain type of mentality to find any humour in what has happened tonight,’ Suleyman said as he looked down into the deeply satisfied face of Valery Ivanovich Rostov.

  Although seated himself, Rostov hadn’t offered chairs to any of the three officers who were now standing before him in his gaudy, whiskey-perfumed salon. Probably in his early forties, Rostov, though not good-looking was so well groomed and pristine in his appearance that he almost pulled off the illusion of being handsome. Those around him, however, were another matter. There were five other men in the room, besides Rostov, Suleyman and Yıldız, four of whom were young, tall, muscular and, in the opinion of the only female present, Officer Gün, heartbreakingly handsome. The fifth man, seated beside Rostov on a couch that screamed its lack of taste unashamedly to the world, was a lot older than anyone else. Probably about sixty, if a badly preserved example of that age group, this man, Lütfü Güneş, was the source of the alcoholic miasma that currently infected the room. He was also, as Rostov had been very quick to point out as soon as the police arrived, his lawyer.

  ‘I don’t find the idea of you guys harassing honest Christians funny,’ Rostov replied as he lazily crossed one dark-suited leg over the other.

  ‘Information received had led us to believe that Father Alexei might be involved in illegal activities.’

  ‘Yes, but he wasn’t, was he?’ Rostov leaned forward and took a cigarette box from the coffee table in front of him, which he offered to his lawyer. ‘You were wrong about him just as you’re wrong about me.’

  There was no arguing with the first part of Rostov’s statement. Father Alexei, of everyone involved in the débâcle İskender had facilitated, had been totally innocent. Rostov, good Orthodox boy that he was, frequently donated incense and candles both to St Stephen’s and to St Mary Pammakaristos up in Fener. That such goods were delivered by men who looked like professional killers had never so much as entered the innocent divine’s head. Not that Father Alexei had made any trouble for İskender. He’d fully understood that İskender and his officers had to be vigilant with regard to contraband items and had said that he didn’t actually feel in the least bit harassed. That word had only been used by Ms Ertüg who, as far as Suleyman knew, was still with İskender and his officers. Only Allah, unfortunately, knew what she and her Radikal bosses would eventually decide to put into print.

  ‘Father Alexei is, so my colleague Inspector İskender has informed me, a very pleasant and innocent man,’ Suleyman said. ‘He is obviously devoted to a simple life of prayer and meditation, far removed,’ he looked very pointedly around the expensively awful room, ‘from the things of this world.’

  ‘Just because I have things, doesn’t mean that I’m not a good guy,’ Rostov said.

  ‘That depends how you came about such things, doesn’t it, Mr Rostov?’

  The lawyer, Güneş, who had up until that time simply looked with sagging, red-rimmed eyes at the officers, spoke. ‘But all of this is beside the point,’ he said through the smoke from one of Rostov’s green cocktail cigarettes. ‘That you’re here at this property now is something I need explained to me.’

  ‘We’re here, sir,’ Suleyman said, ‘to act on information received—’

  ‘From the same source as that about the priest?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss—’

  ‘Two Christians – three, including Mr Rostov’s associate – two infringements of personal privacy, in one night? There are no issues of national security at stake here, Inspector. And if that is so, as you must know, a private citizen has a right to his or her privacy.’ Güneş shrugged. ‘It doesn’t look good, Inspector Suleyman. It looks like harassment. It could even be racial, especially given that you are a member, are you not, of the House of Osman?’

  ‘My past—’

  ‘Your ancestors, Muslim monarchs, ruled this country for over five hundred years, did they not?’ Güneş turned to Rostov. ‘There are still royalists about, you know, Valery,’ he said. ‘You see them hanging around the Royal Tombs on Yeniçeriler Caddesi, worrying about whether the Russians and other Orthodox have designs on Aya Sofya. It’s pathetic.’

  Rostov turned back to face Suleyman and laughed. In response to the unusual amount of sweat that was pouring down the side of Suleyman’s face, both Gün and Yıldız moved a little closer to their superior.

  ‘You – gentlemen – and your friends know a lot about me, don’t you?’ Suleyman said, the raised cords in his neck only hinting at the fury that was building inside him. Rostov raised his eyebrows just a fraction and smiled. If and when Suleyman eventually found the person or persons inside the department who had been so free with information about him, a crime scene would quickly follow.

  Suleyman took his mobile telephone out of his jacket pocket and held it up for Rostov and the others to see.

  ‘In a minute,’ he said, ‘I’m going to ask Inspector İskender to release a couple of his men to join me here.’

  Well, it was the only way Suleyman, Gün and Yıldız were going to get assistance this night. Asking Ardiç for more men, whether or not he knew what was currently happening over at St Stephen’s, was pointless. The only way forward with what was going to be a big job – Rostov did, after all, have an enormous house – was to involve İskender yet again.

  ‘I do hope this doesn’t mean that you’re planning to continue your imposition upon Mr Rostov,’ Güneş said with ill-concealed menace.

  ‘Oh, I’m afraid that it does,’ Suleyman replied as he indicated to his officers that they should sit down. ‘It means that we’re going to be here for quite some time.’ He looked behind him, identified a seat and sat down.

  ‘But on what grounds . . . ?’

/>   ‘We have received intelligence,’ Suleyman said as he keyed İskender’s number into his phone, ‘that has led us to believe that this house may contain illegal substances, Mr Güneş. The law, as you know, empowers me to search for and if necessary remove those substances.’

  As he put the phone up to his ear, he watched Rostov’s face drop into a scowl. Güneş, meanwhile, laughed.

  ‘Well, you’re going to be very disappointed then!’ he said. ‘There are no “substances”, to use your word, in this house.’

  Suleyman, given the décor and the men in front of him, would have begged to differ on that point. If this place hadn’t been built on drug money, he would be surprised to say the least. Long since convinced that a search for Vladimir, lover of Masha, was a thing of pure imagination, narcotics and, maybe if he were very fortunate, weapons too were now his target. He’d get Rostov for every knife his men had strapped to their ankles, every tiny trace of cocaine on his carpets, if necessary. He’d come this far, he wasn’t going back now, whatever it might cost him.

  CHAPTER 9

  Some men like to share certain details about their romantic successes with others. Unlike women, they rarely, only when they are very young, joke about such things. But they will talk anyway in a stilted, limited kind of way. Other men, however, are completely closed books when it comes to love and sex. İsak Çöktin was a case in point. As yet unmarried, he knew that it was only a question of time before that changed. At some point his parents would travel back to the tiny cluster of villages they came from and then return with a girl, probably illiterate, certainly a nervous virgin, who would become his wife. A nice Yezidi girl whom he would care for and have children with in order to perpetuate his ancient culture and religion. He may even come to be quite fond of her – in time. One thing that was certain, however, was that he would never love her in the way that he loved Döne, his secret and passionate Turkish lover. Even looking at her across the cat-infested kitchen, cooking him a breakfast of eggs with bread, made him smile. Döne’s usually sad dark eyes lightened when they connected with his.

  ‘There’s a newspaper on the chair,’ she said, tipping her head towards the seat beside him, which was currently occupied by a large white cat. ‘It’s underneath Osman Paşa.’

  The cat didn’t want to move, but after a little gentle goading he was persuaded to do so. Çöktin took the paper and placed it on the table in front of him. He liked a paper in the mornings, a paper and breakfast to start the day, quietly and slowly. Döne, for all her independent, liberated-woman stance, always did these things for him whenever he came to visit her at her little ground-floor apartment in Balat. One of the relatively new influx of artistic types who had come to the district in the past few years, Döne, who was a writer, lived the kind of life that, had she not been so discreet by nature, would have scandalised the majority of her neighbours who were still, for the most part, conservative. However, with İkmen working up at the Akdeniz house less than a minute from Döne’s place, Çöktin had taken a considerable risk in spending the night with her at this time. Not of course that İkmen, if he found out, would actually say anything about it to him. It was the others he was nervous about – Roditi, Avcı, Güney – bluff types who would drive him crazy with their prurient questions if they knew he had a girlfriend.

  Çöktin opened the paper at the arts pages. There was going to be a general election in October and, although he knew he should give the very serious issues around this event the attention they deserved, he was almost as bored and exhausted by this topic as he was by the endless accounts of celebrity marriages, affairs, divorces, et cetera. So he looked at the pretty pictures on the arts pages – until, that is, one name leaped out at him from the text.

  ‘Yeşim Keyder,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘Dr Yeşim Keyder.’

  Döne, a plate of eggs in one hand and a loaf in the other, came over and placed the food down in front of him. As she did so, she first kissed the top of his head and then looked at the paper spread out in front of him.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Yapi Kredi are having a retrospective of Melih Akdeniz’s early work. That’s interesting – given his current situation.’

  Çöktin looked up.

  ‘With his children having gone missing,’ Döne elaborated. ‘Quite unfortunate that the bank should choose to exhibit him, what with all the stuff in the papers. But then maybe it was planned a long time ago.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Çöktin looked back at the photograph of a Melih Akdeniz work – a furious swirling of blues and reds – entitled Love, and read once again the card beneath it, which said it had been ‘Kindly loaned by Dr Yeşim Keyder.’

  ‘Just try and eat something,’ Fatma said as she placed a plateful of bread, cheese and honey in front of the jaundiced man at the head of the table.

  Talaat Erteǧrül smiled by way of reply.

  Fatma, a little sad-eyed, smiled too as she walked out of the kitchen, leaving the two men at the table to their breakfasts.

  İkmen, for whom breakfast was always four cigarettes and a cup of coffee, pushed his plate to one side as soon as his wife had gone.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t encourage you,’ he said as he offered his packet and lighter to his brother-in-law, ‘but . . .’

  ‘But the dying should have everything they want,’ Talaat finished as he helped himself to a cigarette and lit up.

  ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘No, I did.’ Talaat smiled at his usually strident brother-in-law’s obvious discomfort. ‘I don’t mind talking about death, my death. It’s going to happen, Çetin, and when it does that will be that. And so if I don’t smoke, laugh, drink and think wicked thoughts now, I’ll lose the opportunity.’

  ‘Strange the way religious belief seems to be limited to the women in your family,’ İkmen said as he lit his cigarette and leaned back in his chair.

  Talaat laughed. ‘Yes, Ali, Father and I were always in awe of the way mother and the girls believed in all of that perfumed garden after-life stuff. Mother was convinced that it was going to be sherbet, lokum and chocolate all the way for good Muslims. She always saw everything in terms of food – even death.’ He frowned. ‘But I just couldn’t see it. Still can’t.’

  ‘You believe that death is the end.’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked up into İkmen’s smoke-wreathed face. ‘I know that you have other ideas, Çetin, things you got from your mother . . .’

  ‘The witch.’ İkmen laughed, a thick bronchitic sound. ‘You know, Talaat, I sometimes think that my mother taught me too much.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  What İkmen actually meant involved things that he couldn’t say, not to his brother-in-law, not to anyone. Yaşar and Nuray Akdeniz were caught up in a horror beyond understanding. What form this torment might take and who might be doing it to them, he didn’t know. But just as one look into Talaat’s yellow-tinged eyes told him that this brother-in-law would be dead by the end of the week, so that brief glimpse into Gonca the gypsy’s heart had revealed the truth about the Akdeniz twins. There had to be a connection, between Gonca and the children or their father – probably the latter. Gonca had had sex with Melih – of course she had – Gonca would and did have sex with many men. Her blood had mixed with his and his with hers . . .

  ‘You know it’s at times like this I can all too easily understand how you confuse my sister.’

  İkmen, only just roused from his musings, said, ‘What?’

  ‘You with all your background in the occult,’ Talaat said. ‘Your oblique references to things that others, people like Fatma and me, couldn’t understand. Just now you said that your mother taught you too much.’

  ‘She did.’ İkmen put his cigarette out and then immediately lit another.

  ‘Yes, but what?’

  ‘It’s not important.’ İkmen looked down at the floor, smoking in a concentrated fashion.

  ‘Ah, but it is, though, isn’t it?’ Talaat replied. ‘In fact, it’s s
o important, so frightening even, that you have to lock us out, keep it to yourself.’

  İkmen looked up and regarded his brother-in-law sharply. Now lined with pain, humbled and shaded with death, Talaat Erteǧrül, one time beach bum and lothario, had finally arrived somewhere close to understanding.

  ‘You know I used to wonder why you chose to specialise in murder,’ Talaat said as he too put his cigarette out and then, like İkmen, immediately lit another.

  İkmen frowned.

  Talaat moved his chair closer to İkmen so that he could easily whisper in his ear. ‘I know you have experience of what it is to die, what men go through,’ he said, ‘and I know that sometimes you know when it is coming, as it is for me.’

  ‘Talaat . . .’

  ‘Just don’t tell my sister when it’s her turn – that’s all I ask.’

  İkmen turned away, just as he always did when he got the feeling that he might see death or pain in someone that he loved.

  ‘And don’t tell her that the perfumed garden for the good Muslims doesn’t exist.’

  ‘What makes you so sure that it doesn’t?’ İkmen said, and then in response to a ring on the doorbell he got up and left the kitchen.

  Mehmet Suleyman rubbed a hand across his tired, greying features and sighed.

  ‘So nothing,’ he said to the small equally weary group of officers standing in front of him, ‘you’ve found nothing. Not even in the trunk they brought from the airport?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Hikmet Yıldız replied.

  ‘You’ve been everywhere? Searched everyone?’

  ‘Almost. There’s two enormous kitchens in the basement.’

  ‘Then get down there,’ Suleyman said as he looked out of the window at Rostov’s garden, a lush oasis now flooded with sunlight. It had been a long, hot and frustrating night.

  As the officers left the salon, Rostov and his lawyer, Lütfü Güneş, returned. Although the two men hadn’t actually followed the police around as they searched they had remained awake and, in Rostov’s case at least, obviously attentive to what was happening.