by Rik Stone
Privacy booths ran the length of one wall, but it was too dim for Mehmet to tell if they were occupied. Several tables and chairs filled the rest of the room and all but two near a half-round bar had been taken. Some men drank with men while others chatted to the hostesses. His attention veered from the bar when someone swore. A hostess came from a booth with a tray, a bottle of champagne and two glasses, and a voice yelled after her. “I’m not about to pay that sort of money for fizzy water. Do I look like an idiot?”
The girl threaded a path through a small group of men who’d left their table and were chatting with hostesses in the middle of the space. She got to the bar and leaned towards a big man sitting on a stool there. He tilted his head towards her and she said something through a cupped hand. When she’d finished, she straightened her blouse, patted her hair, picked up her tray and headed off to serve someone who was beckoning her from a table.
The big man lumbered from his stool, walked to the booth and without speaking, dragged the complainer out. Mehmet heard ripping as the heavy tore the man’s jacket open and took his wallet, retrieved what looked like all of his money, and dragged him past Mehmet towards the door.
“Put me down, or I’ll…” the man complained.
Against such a big man, Mehmet had no idea what he meant by ‘or I’ll’, but he started kicking and screaming. The heavy’s answer was to lift him off his feet and carry him. He then steadied him onto his feet, pulled the door open with a free hand and threw the man out onto the street. The man made no attempt to come back in, but he shouted a lot.
Back to work. Mehmet knew the office was to the left side of the bar, Zeki had told him and Yuri on the boat, so, not wanting to become part of the furnishings, he moved discreetly towards it.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” the barman asked, stopping Mehmet in his tracks. He wore a black dress-shirt and red bowtie. His hair was curly and his ears too big. Mehmet had noticed him on entry because he was trying it on with one of the girls, probably after a freebie. The girl now sat on a high stool facing Mehmet, blowing a line of blue smoke towards the ceiling. Her natural blond hair and blue eyes dictated that she wasn’t a Turk. When she looked at Mehmet, just for a moment, her eyes widened, but then her gaze quickly dropped. Her blouse was unbuttoned too far and she looked up in time to catch Mehmet staring at her overexposed cleavage. Her expression changed to distaste and she swivelled on her stool. Mehmet wondered a moment: why the revulsion? And then remembered he was a girl.
“I asked you a question,” the barman said.
“Oh, yes, you did,” Mehmet said in a husky voice. He’d practised lifting his tone an octave, but only managed to squeak, so he ended up with husky. “I have an appointment with Zeki.”
“He’s not in yet.”
“I know. He told me to wait in the office.”
The waiter’s demeanour changed. “What, are you starting work here?”
“Depends on whether Zeki keeps me waiting too long,” Mehmet said, smiling confidently.
The waiter grinned seductively and Mehmet began worrying that he was doing this too well.
“Well, if Zeki said it was okay, I suppose … yes, fine,” he said and the smile grew.
Mehmet shrugged his shoulders as though he couldn’t care one way or the other and went to the office.
The door opened inward and once inside, Mehmet leant his back against it and slowed his breathing, tried to steady his nerves. But lifting his gaze, the view was filled by a little boy – Mehmet was staring at the carcass of a child. He couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old. How could he ever have deserved such an unfitting end? Lying naked at the foot of a full-length mirror, his head was twisted sideways and a belt had been buckled around his neck. There were burn marks on his back where cigarettes had been stubbed out on him.
“Bastard,” Mehmet said, but the word croaked from his throat and his eyes burned.
Zeki had told Mehmet and Yuri that they had been supplying Little Dogs to Volkan, but it had been unreal, unthinkable, until this moment. Mehmet didn’t know this boy, but he had known hundreds like him, including himself.
His clothes were folded over the back of a chair next to the office desk. Mehmet took a white vest from the pile and used it to wipe the blood from his dagger. He then put the knife under the desk as if it had dropped out of sight and slipped Volkan’s ID card under the clothes. The scene was set. Mehmet waited half an hour and left the office.
“You’re not leaving already?” the waiter said as Mehmet came back into the bar.
“Yes, he’s had his chance.” Mehmet smiled confidently, winked and kept walking.
“Spirited young thing, aren’t you… Pity.”
“Mmm,” Mehmet replied and then checked himself for falling back into his usual deep voice. He moved slowly through the bar, but getting outside he hurried back to the quayside while trying not to use his natural gait. The last thing he needed was someone reporting a too-tall girl walking like a man. He swayed his hips and by the time he got to the jetty, thought he was really quite good at it – another worry in his fucked-up life.
“Did you have any problems?” Yuri asked as he climbed back onto the boat.
“No, no worries,” he said, not mentioning the way he had walked back. “But you made a mistake.”
“I know,” Yuri answered with resignation.
Back in the alley, Yuri had finished each man with a bullet to the base of the skull, the mark of a professional. But the killings were supposed to look non-political, amateur. He’d taught Mehmet these things himself and now Mehmet wondered whether maybe Yuri hadn’t been as calm as he’d appeared.
“Is the girl all right?” he asked nervously.
Yuri sighed. “Yes, she’s down below.”
“Did she say what she was doing there? I could see by her clothing that she works in the club.”
“She was sneaking a smoke break. When Arti and Turk came through, she hid in the doorway. Said if they’d found her, they would’ve beaten her. She didn’t know who he was, but said that Volkan was a regular. Normally, when he leaves, Zeki and his men go ape and herd the hostesses around so they can’t see what’s going on. She thought she’d stay in the alley until he left.”
Mehmet nodded, smiled and embraced Yuri before going below to introduce himself.
“Her name is Nina,” Yuri said, the words catching up to Mehmet as he went down the steps.
Chapter 19
Mehmet left Yuri in the more spacious wheel house and went down into the cubby cabin below. Nina was down there playing a game of patience with an old, dog-eared pack of cards. The cabin was cramped, she’d shuffled along the U-shaped seating and her sheath-like, black skirt had ridden up over her thighs. Her breasts fought to be free of a white blouse that could have been borrowed from her little sister and Mehmet was captivated. She was a beautiful woman, no doubt, probably twenty years old, maybe more. And that should have been enough for Mehmet to contain himself, him being a mere seventeen years of age, but he wanted her and those very reactions had him cursing his father. The fire in his stomach grew hotter as it crept downward. Knowing his father’s reputation through Yuri occasionally forgetting himself and making jokes about ‘Levent’s’ sexual prowess, he knew that it was because of those rotten genes that he was now feeling like this. He couldn’t look at an attractive woman without his loins taking over.
She lifted her head and looked him over with smouldering eyes. Their gazes clashed, she held his lecherous glare and his face caught the same fire as was going on further down. He hooded his eyes submissively. She took a long drag from a Fatima cigarette, dribbled smoke through her nostrils, tilted her head, blew a line to the ceiling and appeared as if she’d never seen him before.
Mehmet cleared his throat. “Err, Nina, I’m Mehmet. You must be quite shaken up after what has happened.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Not really, no,” she said and sniggered. “Aren’t you going to change your clo
thes, or is that the way you always dress?”
“Huh? Oh, yes, of course,” he said, unravelling the black scarf from his head and using it to wipe the makeup from his face while pushing away the deep fringe that had flopped over his forehead.
He thought he saw a flicker of interest in her eyes, but then she said. “You’ve smudged your lipstick.” She was laughing at him.
“How can you be so calm after seeing those people killed?”
“Oh, I don’t know. These things happen.”
Something tugged in his chest. “Really? Not for me they don’t. You must have had quite a life. Tell me about it.”
She took a moment, tilted her head to one side and looked confused. “You want to know about my life? Hmm, I suppose I owe you that much, but stop me when you get bored.”
She pushed the cards away, parked the cigarette in an ashtray next to a crushed cigarette packet and sat upright – and again, his eyes were drawn to her breasts.
“I grew up in Naples, in Italy. My mother was a puttana, a whore.”
Mehmet slapped the side of his thigh. “Yes! I knew it… Oh, I err, I meant… when I first saw you I had an idea you were Italian.”
She huffed through her nose. “You did?”
Mehmet nodded.
She raised her eyes. “Okay, my life… I never knew anything about my papa. But I don’t suppose my mother could have told me much if she’d wanted to. And she wouldn’t have wanted to. She treated me like one of the city’s stray cats: a pat on the head followed by a kick up the ass.”
He grinned. She didn’t.
“On my twelfth birthday she was in the bedroom turning tricks. I could hear her laughing and groaning on cue. And then it stopped for a minute. Then she shouted, ordered me into the bedroom.”
“Oh, she didn’t expect…”
Nina nodded. “Yes. I nearly ran away. I wanted to, I should have, but to where? So, trailing my feet and sobbing, I went into the bedroom.”
Mehmet could see in her eyes that Nina was reliving every moment. He wanted to stop her, but felt compelled to hear her out. She licked indecently full lips and drew in a deep breath before continuing. Mehmet stared as her cleavage grew with the intake of air and felt guilty because the heat continued burning in his lower gut.
“Anyway, it happened, and after that Mamma realised there was more money to be made by including me in her bag of tricks. She got a slot prostituting in a nightclub near the port. I was too young for admission, so I became her hook to get the punters back home.
“One evening, the police raided the club. My mamma slipped out the back and ran across the street. She was hit by a police car as it sped to the scene. She died.”
Mehmet wanted to say ‘served her right’, but held his tongue.
“I thought God had smiled on me that day and I swore to him I’d never sell myself. Then I was thrown out of the hovel where we’d lived. I remained determined. I even spent the next couple of years living on the streets, begging. I made it through until I was eighteen, but a couple of years ago I saw an advert for dancers in Turkey. Mamma had lived with a Turkish man for a few years when I was a child. He was probably her pimp because she still sold herself during her time with him. Indoors, he insisted we spoke Turkish, so I got to speak your language as well as I speak my own.”
Mehmet understood that. He and Yuri only spoke Russian when there was no one else around.
“What happened to the Turk?”
“I heard he knifed someone and was caught by the police, but I’m not sure whether that’s true. Never mind that, the advert seemed a wonderful opportunity. But thinking back, I was such a scruff. I should’ve known better. Why would they want someone like me for a dancer? But I was accepted. They brought me to Turkey and they kept me poorly fed so that I would stay slim enough for the clothes they’d given me. When I wasn’t with a punter, I was locked in a room with other girls. Always different girls, so I never made friends. When my masters believed I was broken, the beatings lessened.”
The hairs on Mehmet’s neck rose and he wanted to kill somebody.
She sighed. “So, you see, Mehmet, it was just the surprise of seeing the carnage that made me catch my breath. Other than that, I was glad to see the bastards die.”
Mehmet backed up the steps. “One thing you were wrong about, Nina. You would have made the most beautiful dancer I’ve ever seen.”
She looked away and began laying out the cards and then she picked up her cigarette and tapped the long ash from it. As she took a drag he noticed her fingers were trembling.
Chapter 20
By the time they got back to the Ottoman house, midnight had tipped over into a new morning. Yuri stayed long enough to make sure Mehmet and Nina were okay and then left for Eminonu. Down at the boat, he cast off and motored across the strait with thoughts of the task spinning circles in his mind.
Mehmet could never have guessed how Yuri had felt when Arti lunged at him. To begin with, he’d never told him about the general stationing him in Istanbul because he’d lost his nerve. The truth was, in the alley he’d had plenty of time to shoot Arti, but he froze. The gun became heavy, he dropped it and if it hadn’t been for Mehmet…
The thoughts moved to Nina and they worried him because he knew any other Spetsnaz agent would have killed her. Probably another failure on his part, but he would do the same thing again and not just because of Mehmet. Mehmet had only put an end to his procrastination.
Reaching the eastern shores of Sirkeci, he pulled the boat in alongside a jetty, tied up and left for the city centre. When he got to Pinar Yeter’s door, the misgivings faded. But they were soon replaced by a heartbeat that was all over the place. There was no denying it: he was falling in love with this one. No, face it, he thought, you’ve already fallen in love with her.
Pinar lived in an apartment block, a fourth-floor penthouse overlooking the Bosporus – but from a distance. A plush building, but he had to climb the stairs to get to her front door. However, that wouldn’t be for much longer. An electric elevator was in the middle of construction. Because of this, it had been messy on the stairway, but the builders were yet to reach her corridor and the smell of polish and scented spray filled a spotlessly clean space.
He knocked, the door flew open and arms had encircled his neck before his hand was back down by his side. Pinar snaked herself around his body.
“Oh, Yuri,” she said, sounding near to tears. But then she beat a tattoo on his chest. “How could you make me go through that?”
“There was never anything to worry about. Everything went according to plan and civil war is off the agenda… Pinar, I, I missed you. When we were out there, my only concern was that if I was killed I would lose you.”
She giggled dismissive. “Silly.”
His shoulders relaxed and he leaned into her, kissing her with a passion. She pulled back to catch her breath. “Calm down, big boy, we have all night – or do we?”
“Yes, in fact I can stay over a couple of nights if you can put up with me. I have to see a young policeman later this morning. He, uhm, works for me. I need him to find something at the club – or at least bear witness to it being found. I left Mehmet with someone at the Ottoman – a girl…” Yuri paused, searching his jacket. “But I’ll tell you about that later. This should help you with your article,” he said, putting a notepad on the hall cabinet and gently pulling her towards the bedroom.
Not so long after, they lay in a pool of sweat and Yuri told Pinar of Nina and that Mehmet now knew about their relationship.
“Well, if you told him, you must be serious,” Pinar said and threw her arms around his neck, pulling him towards her. “And don’t you go thinking the feeling isn’t mutual.”
*
Yuri had returned from Sirkeci the previous evening and now, the following morning, he nipped out of the Ottoman house for a copy of the Hurriyet newssheet. He came back indoors with the paper wrapped so close around the front of his face that it obscured his v
iew and he bumped into the living room table where Mehmet sat with Nina. She sniggered, but Mehmet felt worry tingles on his neck; Yuri wasn’t clumsy without reason.
“Shit, why can’t things stick to plan?” Yuri said,
“Has something gone wrong?”
“Yes, Mehmet, something’s gone wrong. Read it for yourself.”
He handed over the paper and Mehmet opened it out across the table. Nina had also picked up on the worry and stood behind him to read the article over his shoulder. Her left breast pushed against his upper arm. He knew he shouldn’t have taken notice, but he did. Warmth began relaxing the tightness in his lower stomach, but he snapped himself out of it and began reading the piece by Pinar.
General Murat Volkan, Adnan Menderes’s leading adviser, was killed on Friday evening near one of the nightclubs of Galata, in the Beyoglu district. He was found in an alley near The Sultan’s Choice along with two doormen who worked at the club. After being gunned down, each of the men were shot in the head.
The method of operation used to kill the victims initially led police to believe a professional assassination had taken place. Yesterday, however, Captain of Detectives, Emin Iskander, the lead officer in the case, reported at a press conference that evidence had come to light suggesting a different scenario.
The detective insisted there would be no cover-ups in the case and told reporters that the body of a young boy had been found in the nightclub’s office after General Volkan had left the premises. The boy had been tortured and sexually assaulted before being strangled with a belt.
The reasons for the killings in the alleyway are still unclear, but the manager of the club, a man with known criminal associates, is currently being sought for questioning. A club hostess is also missing and is thought to be involved.
