Petrified

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘İkmen, Inspector Çetin İkmen.’

  Seemingly oblivious to the presence of Melih’s bloodied body on the ground she walked up the steps and towards the two shadow play figures. ‘So how did you arrive at this place, Inspector İkmen?’ she said.

  İkmen stood in front of her, blocking her off from her goal. ‘I was looking for your friend Melih’s children,’ he said. Now as the initial shock subsided he began to feel angry. His eyes blazed at her. ‘I’d heard that his family were originally called Nabaro. You booked Yaşar and Nuray into your laboratory under that name. So did you actually kill them, Dr Keyder, or did you just embalm the bodies afterwards?’

  Suleyman, who now that he’d finished looking at the figures, had joined İkmen at the top of the steps said, ‘What?’

  İkmen turned to look his colleague in the eyes. ‘Karagöz and the lady aren’t puppets or figures, Mehmet,’ he said as his eyes, barely able to sustain his anger any longer, spilled hot tears down his cheeks, ‘they are the embalmed bodies of Yaşar and Nuray Akdeniz.’

  Suleyman, briefly looked behind him at them once again. When he looked back his mouth remained open and dry. From somewhere behind the darkened floodlight, Yıldız said, ‘Allah!’

  ‘Well, Dr Keyder?’ İkmen hissed. ‘Did you?’

  A scuffling sound over by the open metal gates made İkmen look up. Çöktin was approaching with Reşad Kuran hopping and squinting in front of him, his arms pinned painfully to the top part of his back. As he passed the blankness that was his sister, he said, ‘It was her, Eren, she killed Melih! She’s fucking crazy!’

  ‘Keep him there,’ İkmen ordered Çöktin and then looking down at Farsakoǧlu he said, ‘Close the gates, will you, Ayşe? We don’t want anyone else having access to this “performance”. Please call the station for backup.’ He looked around the beautiful garden with disgust. ‘We’ll need to get this place cleaned up.’

  ‘If you’re going to move my exhibits,’ Dr Keyder began, ‘I’d like to—’

  ‘You’re not in a position to do anything!’ İkmen yelled.

  ‘I bring the dead back to life!’ she countered fiercely. ‘I work and slave and pin their spirits back to their bodies, just like Ara! I am the only person in this world—’

  ‘These were children!’ İkmen said as he swung one arm backwards towards the Karagöz bodies. ‘Human beings!’

  ‘But now they are liquid suns!’

  Everyone in the garden looked at Eren Akdeniz. Standing now and smiling, she looked up at what was left of the daylight and just very gently swayed from foot to foot.

  ‘My children are immortal,’ she said, ‘they are a statement for all time. Death and decay can be separate. Art and science combine to produce beauty presented here as the immortal Fool Karagöz and his wife.’ She looked at the sprawled body of her husband and frowned. ‘Melih is the antithesis of the statement – the death in life,’ she scowled. ‘The flies were coming for what the cancer hadn’t eaten months ago.’

  ‘Is that when it was decided to kill the children?’ İkmen asked softly least he wake her from what appeared to be a lucid reverie.

  ‘It is the ultimate statement,’ she said, ‘to make life you have created into art. Melih gave the children poison. There’s nowhere to go after this, he told me, no other artist on the planet can catch me now . . .’

  The garden descended into silence. From the street outside İkmen and the others could hear voices, people, probably media types, knocking on the thick front door. And there was Gonca too, just to one side of a considerable group of elegantly dressed women. Her sequined skirts shimmering in what was left of the dying day, she stood by the silent wall of the Akdeniz house and looked down at the motionless waters of the Golden Horn below. For how many years had Jews and Gypsies shared this view? Not that she would be sharing it with her Jew any more. A hole, just a small one, had opened up in her soul and she knew that Melih had gone. Someone had fired a shot – Eren, poor bitch, finally at the end of her long humiliation.

  The policeman, İkmen, was in there now – the witch’s child. He’d provide justice for whatever had gone on. Unlike the flawed and fatal Karagöz Melih had planned, İkmen the juggler, the foolish-looking high Magus of the tarot deck, would make it all tie together in the end. He’d come and see her too at some point, she thought as she began to walk back down the hill towards her own colourful little home. He’d tell her what he could, he liked her and, if she performed the right spells, he might even bring that very young and delicious officer with him. But then whether he did or not, it wouldn’t make any difference to what was written. She’d make that boy a man because she’d seen it in the bottom of her soul, in the same place that İkmen had viewed the Akdeniz children descending from the Lightning-Struck Tower into hell. Struggling still, their agonies were not yet over, although she knew that they soon would be. Once they were returned to the earth they would be still again. Nature would take its course. It always did, in the end.

  As she walked down the steps, Gonca heard what were three police cars pull up at the great ochre house behind her. But she didn’t turn in order to see what was happening. Back there was death, but down the hill things were still very much alive. She thought that in lieu of having that young policeman constable in her bed tonight she might go and offer herself to her husband.

  CHAPTER 19

  Dr Yeşim Keyder sat very primly behind the table in Interview Room No. 3, her large leather handbag perched on top of her knees.

  ‘You took delivery of the children’s bodies on the Friday-night, didn’t you?’ İkmen asked. Both he and Suleyman sat opposite the old woman, both smoking heavily in the dense night-time heat – the old partnership temporarily back together again.

  ‘You get a much better result if you can get hold of corpses when they are fresh,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Melih wanted his subjects to be as close to the perfection he had observed in the pictures I’d shown him of Evita as possible. Melih was very insistent that he administer the poison in the children’s own home – he could have done it in mine – but he didn’t want to alarm them.’

  ‘How very thoughtful,’ Suleyman said sotto voce.

  ‘Reşad Kuran delivered them to you?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Yes. Reşad had worked for me for a number of years . . .’

  ‘Delivering dead bodies?’

  ‘Yes,’ she shrugged. ‘He is a delivery man, he delivers things. I use him to fetch and carry corpses, what of it? Of course I didn’t know for some time that he was Melih’s brother-in-law for I didn’t realise that Melih was related to Zelda and Moris Nabaro. They were his parents; I grew up with her. But I didn’t know that until I’d been collecting his works for some years.’ She smiled. ‘I’d always liked his creations. He has a particularly Jewish style, much of which is based upon Kabbalistic theory, including the tarot, that appeals to my past.’

  ‘Reşad Kuran put you in touch with Melih Akdeniz?’

  Yeşim Keyder, seemingly amused by İkmen’s flat, sepulchral style laughed. ‘You make it sound as if we only met in order to work on his Karagöz project,’ she said.

  ‘You ended up killing his children.’

  ‘No. No, I didn’t kill the children, Inspector,’ she said, suddenly stern-faced once again. ‘If you recall, that was Melih. It was part of the statement. If I, as someone with no connection to them, had killed them, no new boundaries would have been set. Apart from the artistry inherent in my own expertise, the exhibit would have been devoid of any fresh philosophical base.’

  ‘You believe that killing children, embalming their bodies and using them as puppets in a Karagöz show is art?’

  The tone of Suleyman’s voice raised her hackles.

  ‘Art is all about statement,’ she said haughtily. ‘In Kabbalistic terms, Melih was the cosmic juggler, the Karagöz figure, if you like, at the very pinnacle of that magical system. Both creating and taking life which he and I then rendered immortal. Evita was Pedro’s s
tatement. That body told the world that it was possible for a life force to be pinned to a perfect corpse. A liquid sun is how Pedro described her, a thing of glorious immortality. But my work with the Akdeniz children took this even further . . .’

  ‘I always thought the cosmic juggler, the fool of the tarot, was supposed to be a balancing force,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Dr Keyder,’ Suleyman cut in, ‘did you, maybe guided by Ara, ever indulge in sexual acts with corpses?’

  ‘Can we please stick to the Akdeniz case?’ İkmen said.

  He was very tired now, worn out by the tragedy and insanity inherent in two young corpses – worried about Fatma and about Talaat who, although beyond anyone’s help now, deserved what Yaşar and Nuray had he felt been denied – dignity in death.

  ‘The bodies were delivered to me at around midnight on the Friday,’ Dr Keyder began, back again in her businesslike style. ‘I started working on them straight away. I used a four per cent formaldehyde solution, via gravity injection . . .’

  ‘Dr Keyder, we don’t need the specifics of your trade,’ İkmen said sharply. The woman, for all her years, looked as if she were getting some sort of gratification from her descriptions of processes. ‘Mr Kuran delivered the victims to you, you preserved them and . . .’

  ‘Melih was dying, as I’m sure you’re aware, from cancer,’ she said. ‘The Karagöz performance was to be the pinnacle of his career, his final shattering statement. I worked hard for several days afterwards. I locked myself into my laboratory. I didn’t want any distractions. I told my neighbours I’d gone away. But I could have done a better job had I had more time. I told him this. However with the inevitable investigation into the children’s disappearance plus Rosita’s death and all the questions about Miguel, as well as my usual maintenance practice . . .’

  ‘Preserving the mothers of Russian gangsters . . .’

  ‘The identity of my clients is private,’ she snapped.

  ‘With the exception of the Nabaros,’ Suleyman said.

  ‘How was I to know that name would come back from the dead?’ she responded bitterly. ‘Melih buried that years ago. How was I to know that you had any connection to the missing children investigation?’

  ‘Have you ever met a man called Rostov?’ Suleyman continued. ‘Valery Rostov?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘He says he’s met you.’

  ‘Yaşar and Nuray weren’t present in your laboratory when Inspector Suleyman visited you this morning,’ İkmen said as he yet again attempted to drag the interrogation back to the Akdeniz case. ‘When did you move the bodies?’

  ‘Last night,’ she said, ‘when I returned from meeting you,’ she looked at Suleyman, ‘at the mortuary. I knew I couldn’t use Reşad; Melih had told me about his problems with yourselves. I called a client of mine, who offered to do the job for me.’

  ‘The car that arrived at the Akdeniz house this morning,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Suleyman cleared his throat. ‘Who was driving, Dr Keyder?’

  ‘Someone totally innocent,’ she replied. ‘A foreigner.’

  ‘A Russian.’

  ‘A foreigner, yes,’ she smiled.

  ‘And yet if you hadn’t willingly owned up to being the person responsible for the body of Miguel Arancibia, we wouldn’t be in this room now,’ Suleyman said with a frown, ‘and you wouldn’t be facing very serious charges. Why did you do that, Dr Keyder? Why did you turn up at the mortuary with that peculiar Spaniard?’

  ‘Orontes?’ Yeşim Keyder laughed. ‘He was trying to break into my brother’s apartment when I found him,’ she said. ‘He was under the impression that he might find some of Dr Ara’s balm in there.’

  ‘Was he right?’

  ‘No.’ Her face became grave again. ‘That is made in only small quantities and had, I knew, been used up.’ She looked down at her handbag. ‘I engaged Orontes for my own purposes,’ she said, ‘but I claimed Miguel for myself because I had to have him buried with Rosita. If I didn’t I couldn’t take possession of Veli’s apartment.’

  ‘But surely you, with all your “clients”, your yalı, can’t need an apartment in Kuloǧlu?’ Suleyman said. After all, as he knew only too well, Yeşim Keyder lived in some style.

  She turned upon him with fierce eyes. ‘Have you ever been poor, Inspector?’ He didn’t so much as blink. ‘No, I thought not,’ she said, her voice thick with contempt. ‘Well, I have. Veli and I worked every hour in the day to get out of Balat. My brother was a brilliant man – unappreciated here, which is why we went to South America. There were a lot of Jews in Buenos Aires back in those days. My brother rose very quickly – we entered the magic circle of Peron. I met Ara and, strangely he always said for a woman, I didn’t back away from him when he told me what he did. He liked that and so he showed me his work – his perfect ballerina – frozen in mid-step, eternally beautiful. I have subsequently produced such a work myself, another dancer . . .’ She smiled. ‘You know, it was as if Ara were a god, imbued with the power of eternity. I saw through him a window into immortality as well as a way of ensuring I would never be poor again.’

  Suleyman made as if he wanted to cut in but was prevented from doing so by one of İkmen’s upheld hands.

  Yeşim Keyder, now seemingly quite far away from them, continued, ‘He let me work with him maintaining Miguel. It was electrifying.’ She sighed. ‘But then when Peron’s regime fell apart Veli and I, together with Rosita, had to come back here. There was nowhere else to go. We brought Miguel, I maintained him, but we had no money. Veli got a poorly paid job in a department here. We all lived in one small room . . . But then one day Rosita came back from church and told me about a little old lady who wanted to have her husband embalmed but couldn’t afford the outrageous prices the Greeks and the Armenians were charging.’ She looked up. ‘It grew from there. I made the money that funded my brother’s famous experiments. I looked after Miguel and Rosita. And in answer to your question, no I don’t need the Kuloǧlu apartment, but who knows if I might do in the future? Besides, it’s mine, I’ve earned it.’

  İkmen spent a few moments in silent thought. It was, he felt, very fitting that Dr Keyder should be so fixated on what was hers. Preservation and just simply ‘holding on’, as she was with the apartment to what was hers, represented her entire life. Selfish. Not to let the dead go was selfish. Putting all of this effort into preserving what had gone had to be an act of desecration. Maybe, he thought, the old Turkish idea about the soul of the deceased being in pain until the body was buried had a more practical application that extended beyond mere superstition. Perhaps that custom had sprung, originally, from the desire of learned men to see people move on – to prevent that protracted fall from the Lightning-Struck Tower and to ease the soul’s torment.

  ‘You will be charged with aiding and abetting a murderer,’ İkmen said dully, ‘but then I imagine that, in view of the fact that Melih’s “performance” was to be a public display, you always anticipated this possibility.’

  ‘Yes,’ she sniffed unpleasantly. ‘My work has been in the shadows for too long. I’m old now, I need the world to see my genius before I die. And besides, I didn’t kill those children, I have nothing—’

  ‘But you knew what Akdeniz was going to do!’ İkmen yelled.

  ‘Yes, although he was going to shoot himself in front of the press . . .’

  ‘You knew that one crime had been committed and that a suicide was about to take place, but you didn’t report it did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you must share in the responsibility for these three deaths!’ İkmen, his hands shaking with both anger and tiredness, ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Like Melih Akdeniz you are evil, Dr Keyder. Even human life is subsumed beneath this unhealthy passion you still possess and he did have for your “work”.’

  ‘Embalming isn’t work,’ Dr Keyder said contemptuously, ‘embalming, as I learned it from Ara, is a magical art. Meli
h knew this. That Christian pathologist Sarkissian, for all his professional veneer, was staggered by Miguel.’

  ‘Perhaps as a scientist, yes,’ Suleyman said, ‘but Dr Sarkissian didn’t like what he saw. There was nothing pleasing . . .’

  ‘Art isn’t meant to be pleasing!’ she laughed at him mirthlessly. ‘Art is about making people think. It’s about saying things we all want to say but are too afraid to do so. Nobody wants their loved ones to die, nobody actually wants to die themselves. My art is about the expression of those desires and, because Ara taught me to capture the very spirit of the subject, it’s about re-establishing a mystical link with the deceased too. Every body is a unique work of art. Melih’s death, my incarceration – these are such small prices to pay for the opportunity to make such a gigantic statement. For me to be able, at last, to show my unrivalled skills to the world.’

  İkmen just shook his head in disbelief. He looked at Suleyman and said, ‘I can’t listen to any more of this now. Take her down to the cells, constable.’

  They all thought that Dr Keyder would continue either to resist still further or carry on talking about her work. But she didn’t. She just let the constable place the handcuffs around her wrists and lead her out of the room. As soon as she had gone, İkmen keyed a number into his phone and placed his head in his hands as he waited for someone to answer.

  Ayşe Farsakoǧlu was standing in the corridor outside one of the cells when İsak Çöktin and one of his men approached with Reşad Kuran. As soon as the artist’s brother-in-law had been pushed, silently, into what Çöktin knew to be one of the hotter station cells, he approached her.

  ‘How are you?’ he said. She looked very pale, her eyes were glassy and had a sore appearance. The discovery of Yaşar and Nuray’s bodies had affected everyone very badly. What had been done to them had been so bizarre, the reasons behind it so mad, none could quite take it in.

  ‘You know Inspector İkmen had one of his feelings about the children,’ she said as she took a packet of cigarettes out of her handbag and offered it to Çöktin.