Petrified

by Barbara Nadel

  Çöktin took a cigarette from the packet and then lit up both for her and for himself. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve just put Eren Akdeniz away for the night,’ she replied. ‘You know she told me she killed her husband because he asked her to?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Ayşe drew on her cigarette before replying, ‘She said that once she told Melih that we were outside and that Inspector İkmen knew that the children’s bodies were inside, he told her to kill him.’

  Çöktin frowned. ‘But hadn’t Akdeniz invited you to his performance anyway?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked up into his eyes and shook her head just gently as if in disbelief. ‘Apparently his final “statement” was always going to be to shoot himself. Standing between the two children at the end of the shadow performance. By arriving early we ruined his tableau. Infanticide and suicide as art. She also rambled on about the contrast between Melih’s rotting body and the preserved bodies of the children – something about decomposition and permanence.’ Tears sprang into her eyes. ‘She must be insane.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Çöktin shrugged, ‘I would think so. But legally it would depend upon what the psychiatrist says. Have you contacted Dr Sadri?’

  They started walking together back towards the stairs.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘He’ll come in the morning.’

  ‘She doesn’t need to be sedated then?’ Çöktin asked as he tipped his head back towards the grim row of cells behind them.

  ‘No,’ Ayşe responded with a sigh, ‘no, she’s quite happy in a strange sort of way.’

  ‘Because her husband and little ones are all together in paradise?’ Çöktin said acidly. He’d come across people like this before, those who killed their nearest and dearest in order to unite them in heaven.

  ‘No,’ Ayşe said frowning, ‘because the statement, as she calls it, is now complete. Our photographers have taken hundreds of pictures of Melih’s performance. It’s been recorded as a crime, as a news item and, so she says, as a work of art. This “event”, because we have recorded it, will live for ever.’ She shook her head again, frowning. ‘We’ve actually helped Melih and Eren. We’ve had no choice but to do so, but if I’ve got this right, we too are part of the performance, if you can understand . . .’

  Çöktin didn’t really understand anything she was saying, but he put a hand on her shoulder in order to provide her with a little comfort in her agitation.

  ‘Do you think that such a thing can be art, İsak?’ she said as she looked up into his bright blue eyes. ‘Can it really be something that hurts people? Can it really be anything an artist wants it to be?’

  But Çöktin didn’t have any answers. To him art was the statues of Atatürk in every town square, art was the graceful, soaring dome of the Süleymaniye Mosque, art was even the picture of a stag standing by a Scottish loch that hung on his mother’s living-room wall. To him, art was something that people had to like. In that way it was similar, if not the same, as alcohol.

  ‘I think we should go and have a beer,’ he said, as he led her up the stairs and away from the cells.

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘And talk about something banal, like television,’ he continued. ‘You need to stop thinking, Ayşe,’ he said gravely. ‘We’ve had a long and very odd night. We’ve moved into the land of the sick. Now we need to heal ourselves.’

  They’d never been close. In fact Çöktin didn’t always feel that he could entirely trust Ayşe Farsakoǧlu. She was, he’d sometimes thought, a rather arrogant woman. But for tonight he put that aside and took her for a drink.

  Arto Sarkissian wasn’t accustomed to being interrupted in his work. Post-mortem examinations, once begun, tended to proceed until they were complete. However, in view of the fact that the interrupter was none other than Commissioner Ardiç, Arto was left with little choice but to leave what he was doing and return to his office.

  ‘Commissioner,’ he said as he extended a hand he knew the other man would suspect of having recently left the inside of a corpse. Ardiç’s expression confirmed this.

  ‘So these mummies or whatever you like to call them and the artist from Balat are now in the building?’ Ardiç said as he eased himself slowly into a chair opposite Arto’s desk.

  ‘Yes,’ the Armenian replied. ‘As yet, I’ve only looked at the external condition of the bodies. I’m currently working on what I’m coming to believe is a female suicide . . .’

  ‘Vile business!’

  Arto sat down. ‘Suicide is always distressing.’

  ‘I mean the mummies!’ Ardiç shook his head and, the doctor observed, visibly shuddered. ‘That anyone should think that murder and that abominable embalming practice is art, is beyond me. İkmen, as one would expect, is bending his mind to the deeper philosophies behind all of this, but then that is what he does.’

  Arto smiled. However appalled his friend might be by the acts of violence and hatred that came his way, he always had to make some sense, however peculiar, out of them. Murder, he always said, had to have a reason, even if that reason was not anything that could be conventionally called real.

  ‘So when,’ Ardiç continued, ‘will you be able to start work on the Akdeniz children, Doctor?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning.’ It was late now and both he and his team of assistants were already tired.

  Ardiç nodded gravely. ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘No,’ the policeman looked up sharply, ‘no it isn’t. But I do feel that I have to warn you, Doctor, that we are expecting some more of this type of corpse.’

  ‘More embalmed bodies?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  Arto remembered what Suleyman had told him about the vogue for embalming that allegedly existed amongst Russian mobsters. But he knew better than to reveal his knowledge to Ardiç. Although he himself worked for the police he was aware of the fact that information like that, given to him by a serving officer, would be frowned upon.

  ‘I came here because I feel that you deserve to know this,’ Ardiç went on. ‘Dealing with such bodies must be particularly abhorrent.’

  ‘Yes, but when compared to a drowned body or one consumed by fire.’

  ‘It’s an abomination!’ Ardiç blustered. ‘Keeping the dead out of the ground! It’s unnatural! What do they think they’re doing? What do they do with them? I dread to think.’

  The commissioner had, Arto felt, momentarily forgotten that he originated from a society where the preservation of the dead was considered to be normal. For Arto, the main difficulty was a scientific one. Establishing the cause of death was much harder in these cases.

  When Ardiç spoke again it was in a calmer and more mollified fashion. ‘But then whatever we may think,’ he said, ‘I feel it may be prudent for you to prepare your staff and your facilities for something of an influx.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘I can’t, of course, give you any further details,’ Ardiç said as he held one silencing hand aloft, ‘but I think that if you spend some time tonight making ready you will be glad that you did so in the very near future.’

  It would appear that Ardiç was intent on finding some more embalmed corpses and since he knew only about the Russian connection it was in all likelihood that. Russian Mafiosi. Dangerous people. He wondered whether either İkmen or Suleyman might be involved, but again he knew better than to ask – either Ardiç now or his friends later. Besides, it was now well after midnight, and even if neither of them was yet in bed, they would be fully occupied – either with the outfall from the Akdeniz murder or, in İkmen’s case, with his family. He’d called the İkmen household earlier in the day and had spoken to one of his friend’s sons, Bülent. The boy had told him that Çetin’s brother-in-law Talaat had been taken to hospital. Poor, yellow-skinned Talaat, finally dying . . .

  All the lights were on when İkmen finally returned to his apartment at one thirty. And although the younger children were
safely tucked up in their beds, all of the older ones, with the exception of the eldest, Sınan, had taken up residence in his living room. Also present, he noticed, sitting beside Hulya, was Berekiah Cohen.

  After a brief cursory scan around the room, İkmen said, ‘Where’s your mother?’

  His eldest daughter, Çiçek, replied, ‘Still at the hospital. She refused to leave. We’ve only been back for a few minutes.’ She walked over to kiss her father on the cheek. ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Thanks,’ he smiled. ‘I appreciate how all of you children have rallied in support of your mother.’

  ‘You know that Sınan would have been here too if he’d been in town,’ Orhan said.

  ‘I phoned and spoke to him a little earlier,’ İkmen said as he lowered himself wearily into a chair. ‘How are things with Uncle Talaat?’

  Orhan shrugged. ‘The same. There’s no timescale when a person is in coma. He could go tonight, tomorrow, next week. In spite of everything, his heart is still strong.’

  ‘Allah.’

  ‘Mum hasn’t been alone with him until now,’ Çiçek said as she came back into the room holding a glass of tea. ‘We’ve all been there all day.’

  İkmen frowned. ‘What, you left the kids?’

  ‘No, no, Berekiah looked after them,’ Çiçek said, glancing across at the tired-looking Jewish boy with a smile. ‘We couldn’t have managed without him.’

  İkmen took the glass from his daughter’s hand and drank a small sip of tea. ‘Thank you, Berekiah.’

  ‘I think that Mum now thinks Berekiah is some sort of saint,’ Çiçek continued, accompanying her words with a nervous laugh.

  İkmen looked up, quickly taking in the way that his two sons and two daughters all shared a brief, knowing look. They were nice children, Orhan, Çiçek and Bülent. They wanted their sister Hulya to be happy and were unanimously, for he knew that Sınan felt likewise, coming out in support of her union with the young man that she loved. He had, he felt with some satisfaction, taught his children well.

  ‘You must have been busy to have to go, Dad?’ Bülent said.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid that I ended up witnessing a most distressing incident,’ İkmen said with what he alone in that room knew was massive understatement.

  ‘Oh, not those poor children from Balat?’ Hulya put her hands up to her face and shook her head slowly.

  ‘You know I can’t tell you anything about it,’ İkmen replied.

  ‘Have to wait for the news, I suppose,’ Orhan observed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  A moment of silence ensued during which everyone in the room, with the exception of İkmen, pondered upon just how odd his life actually was. Peppered with confidences, secrets and almost unimagined tensions, sometimes the İkmen children felt as if they were living on the edge of some sort of espionage – their father a grey and troubled spy.

  ‘You know what upsets me most?’ Bülent said. ‘The look of him.’

  ‘Who?’

  The youngster looked down incredulously at his father. ‘Uncle Talaat, of course. Laying on that bed, with the machines, all yellow . . .’

  ‘Don’t!’ Çiçek put her hands over her eyes as if trying to block out the actual sight of their relative.

  ‘He was always so cool, Uncle Talaat,’ Bülent continued, smiling just a little at the memory. ‘Young and out on the beach with lots of girls . . . He looks like an old man now, wrinkled up like a mummy.’

  Or not, İkmen thought. Although technically mummified, what he had seen of the Akdeniz children had, even he had to admit, been more like the product of some artistic process than the result of scientific principles. What Dr Keyder had produced had been, well, beautiful. Smooth-skinned, clear-(if glass) eyed, stunning. Like great, gorgeous dolls . . . And yet Dr Keyder’s assertion that she had pinned their spirits to them had been incorrect. There was something – İkmen always shied away from calling it a ‘soul’ – that irrevocably set the living and the dead apart. Even when people were very ill, in coma or close to death, there was always something alive about them. When it went a change took place that you knew not in your mind so much as in your gut. It was something very primitive, probably allied to self-preservation – the dead, after all, could host all manner of bacteria and parasites. Unless, of course, someone like Dr Keyder got to them first.

  İkmen drained his tea glass in one gulp. ‘I think we all need to rest,’ he said as he rose stiffly from his chair. ‘I know I do.’

  ‘But what if Mum calls?’ Çiçek asked anxiously.

  ‘Then one of us will hear the phone and do whatever is appropriate,’ İkmen replied. He looked across at Orhan and said, ‘I’d be grateful if you’d take Berekiah and Çiçek home.’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘But I want to stay!’ Çiçek said, her eyes filling with overtired tears. ‘I want to be here.’

  ‘Well, if that’s what you want of course you can,’ İkmen said, and then with a wave of one exhausted hand he left the room.

  He heard Orhan and Berekiah leave about ten minutes later, an event that was preceded by the sound of Hulya and the young Jewish boy kissing in the hall. Shortly afterwards Bülent went to what had been his, but had become Talaat’s bedroom. And then there was silence – until he both heard and saw Çiçek at his bedroom door.

  ‘Dad . . .’

  ‘What?’

  She walked into his bedroom and shut the door behind her. ‘Dad, you know that Hulya has refused Berekiah’s proposal of marriage.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ İkmen pulled his duvet up round his neck as he sat up.

  Çiçek sat down on her parents’ bed and looked at her father with grave eyes. ‘She told him she’ll live with him, but she won’t marry. He, Berekiah, thinks she’s doing this because she wants to shock Mum and Mr Cohen.’

  İkmen, who really didn’t need any more problems in his life at this time, sighed.

  ‘She told me,’ Çiçek continued, ‘that because of all the trouble she and Berekiah have had, she can’t face marriage and all the heartbreak that will bring to everyone. But she also really loves Berekiah and she doesn’t want to give him up.’

  ‘Poor Hulya.’ İkmen shook his head. ‘Poor Berekiah.’

  ‘You’ve got to do something, Dad,’ Çiçek said as she leaned forward and stroked her father’s face. ‘You’ve got to get Mum and Mr Cohen to see sense and tell Hulya that if she marries Berekiah she’ll be bringing this family so much joy. Allah knows but we need something happy in this family,’ she said as her eyes filled with tears. ‘What with Uncle Talaat, and Bülent going to the army. Oh, Dad, I’ve heard people at work talking about war.’

  She started to cry so İkmen leaned forward and took her gently into his arms.

  ‘Sssh, sssh,’ he said as he rocked her to and fro in his arms, just like he’d done when she was little. ‘It’s going to be all right, Çiçek.’ He kissed her on the top of her head. ‘I’ll make it all right, I promise.’

  ‘Oh, Dad . . .’

  ‘Sssh, sssh.’

  He rocked her, as it happened in the end, until she eventually fell asleep in his arms. Just like the old days, İkmen thought as he lay back down, with his daughter, on his pillows. Çiçek was never a child to be easily put to bed – just like Hulya had never been a child to be easily pleased. But then in the current situation, being pleased didn’t really cover what she wanted. This was about how much in love she was with someone who was, İkmen knew, a fine person. She would, he decided, marry Berekiah, and he would make it happen. And then suddenly and shatteringly he was asleep. Exhausted, İkmen’s sleep was so deep it was thankfully even beyond the reach of dreams.

  CHAPTER 20

  Three homes owned by men who had once been Russian nationals were raided at dawn. All three were, or had been suspected of, racketeering at some time since their arrival in the city. Wealthy beyond the imagination of most people Messrs Vronsky, Malenkov and Bulganin had, so C
ommissioner Ardiç, who headed one of the raids personally, thought, very strange tastes. Vronsky, who at fifty-five was quite elderly for an active mobster had his deceased mother of ten years sitting in his study, for Malenkov it was his child, a small daughter. Bulganin, the most ardent devotee of them all, had three examples of Dr Keyder’s art in his possession and lived with the dead bodies of his wife, his mother and a cherished mistress. Obviously totally unprepared for a visit from the authorities, the gang bosses also provided the police with quantities of heroin, cocaine, crack, cannabis, guns, knives and even a small amount of the date rape drug, Rohypnol.

  Ardiç, who had used only officers previously unconnected with this affair to lead these raids, was pleased. The unburied bodies had given him justification to go into the three properties. The drugs and arms – though fully expected – had been a bonus. And now with some very significant people in custody, possibly for quite some time, he felt that he had more than earned his wages for that day. True, there were still significant numbers of people who had worked for the three bosses at large in the city, many of whom were probably totally unknown to the police. Assuming they had formed a connection between their friend Rostov and the raids, the three bosses could get word out to their free cronies about him. But then if someone should take it into his head to shoot or stab Rostov, Ardiç certainly wouldn’t lose any sleep, or express any sympathy over it. Provided the mobsters kept it amongst themselves and avoided all-out war, they could all kill each other with impunity for all he cared. Sometimes, as his superiors had told him when he’d sought their approval, risks had to be taken. And with a general election pending, the party currently in control of the city was keen for people to know that they were serious about fighting organised crime. A little late in the day as far as Ardiç was concerned, however . . . Rostov, in any event, would have to give up his ‘mummy’, willingly or by force – whatever it took.

  Ardiç picked up his phone and called Metin İskender to tell him of these developments.