Land of the Blind

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘But you’re still not happy.’

  ‘There’s something wrong here,’ İkmen said. ‘And I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘I don’t get anything from that house at all,’ Ali Bey said. ‘But we all know how you are, Çetin Bey.’

  Did he mean ‘weirdly insightful’ or just nuts? Did İkmen even care? He ended the call. It was then that he saw Yiannis Negroponte looking at him. He’d heard everything.

  ‘I take it you and your men will be leaving,’ he said. Then he went back into his mother’s room and closed the door behind him.

  They insisted on calling the baby Peri. Or rather Gonca did.

  Like a lot of gypsies, her daughter hadn’t wanted to have her baby in a hospital. So the little girl had been born in their tent in Gezi Park under constant threat of attack from the police. But Peri Mungun had stayed with her all the time. Together with her mother and other female relatives, she’d soothed the girl and reassured her and, when her time was near, she’d told her what to do. And although little Peri was small, she wasn’t as small as big Peri had feared. She also appeared to be healthy.

  Once mother and baby were settled, Gonca and Peri stepped out of the tent for a smoke. A boy juggling a diabolo ran past, laughing.

  ‘I’ve heard the Prime Minister has walked out on the Taksim representatives,’ Gonca said.

  ‘That’s not good.’

  ‘It’s a disaster,’ she said. ‘If he won’t even listen, what are people supposed to do? How can you live in a place where you don’t know what will be demolished next?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Peri said.

  They smoked in silence and then Gonca said, ‘You know one of these property developers has gone missing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ahmet Öden. Your brother—’

  ‘I’ve not seen my brother lately, but I’ve no doubt he’s doing his best to find this man.’

  ‘Well I hope he isn’t,’ Gonca said. ‘Öden killed a woman I know. I hope he’s dead.’

  Peri looked at her. ‘Killed a woman? Are you sure?’

  ‘She was a gypsy and he’s one of those pious hypocrites that use women like her. The ones that get rich all the time now. I hope he’s dead and I hope it hurt.’

  Peri knew all about passion but Gonca took it to another level.

  ‘Have you told Mehmet Bey about this?’

  ‘And why would I do that? Eh? Gülizar was a good woman and they are worth a thousand men. If Ahmet Öden is lying injured somewhere, the slower my Mehmet finds out the better.’

  ‘Çetin Bey.’

  Commissioner Teker had come into his office, apparently noiselessly. Her predecessor Ardıç, though a big man, had also possessed that skill. Did it go with the job?

  İkmen looked up. ‘I’ve received orders to attack Gezi Park at seventeen-thirty,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to know.’

  She shut his office door and sat down. ‘I’ve run out of cigarettes.’ İkmen handed over his packet. ‘You’ve drawn a blank at the Negroponte House.’

  ‘Yes.’ He lit her cigarette and then opened his window. ‘Not happy but . . .’

  ‘Why not?’

  He shrugged. ‘I feel the Negropontes and Mr Atasu know more than they’re saying. But I can’t prove it. Short of digging up their garden to look for Öden’s body there’s nothing more we can do.’

  ‘Then dig it,’ Teker said.

  ‘Seriously?’ He frowned.

  ‘People way, way up the line, almost as far as the ones who want us to attack Gezi, want Öden found,’ she said. ‘You can get a warrant this afternoon, dig first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Why not get it over with now if it has to be done?’

  ‘Because if a senior detective like you has a major investigation to pursue in the morning, I can’t very well deploy you to Gezi Park today,’ she said. ‘Some of the officers already at the site haven’t had leave for days. The protesters have been feeding and watering a good proportion of them. We need fresh blood up there. Or rather they do.’

  ‘They?’

  She looked around before she answered. ‘I think we both know where we stand with Gezi, İkmen,’ she said. ‘I can’t get out of it, attacking Gezi is my job. But if I can make sure that you don’t have to, I’ll still not be able to sleep at night, but I may be able to live with myself.’ She paused, smoked. ‘I should resign. But I can’t.’

  ‘Madam—’

  ‘Get a warrant, go in the morning,’ she said. ‘Take your sergeant and try and find some other bodies to do the labouring. Normally you could have five or six constables . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Your boy out of the park now?’

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen said. ‘But I have a cousin there and Sergeant Mungun’s sister has remained.’

  ‘The demonstrators have been told that seventeen-thirty is the deadline,’ Teker said. ‘Anyone found in the park after that time will be treated as a terrorist. There are officers out there who haven’t slept for three days. What they’ll do . . .’ She shrugged again. ‘My orders are to deploy them.’

  ‘Then maybe I should go,’ İkmen said. ‘Possibly they’ll listen to me . . .’

  ‘What, functionally illiterate farm kids from Anatolia? I come from Urfa, I worked in Gaziantep. Luckily for me my parents had money so I had an education. But I went out to the villages, saw the kids with genetic defects because of inbreeding, saw the women beaten black and blue by illiterate husbands who see women as their possessions. Why do you think I never married? They won’t listen to you, İkmen. You, and I, are anathema to them.’ She stood up. ‘Obtain your warrant and go home. Tell Sergeant Gürsel to go home too. And make sure he stays indoors. He lives in Tarlabaşı, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d recommend he keeps his windows closed,’ she said and then she left.

  Çetin İkmen allowed himself a moment of grief for his country and then he called Samsun.

  Chapter 29

  Madonna wasn’t even in the park. She’d decided to leave with Madame Edith, who felt she was too old for an all-out police offensive. They got as far as the Church of St Antoine before they were grabbed by men in riot gear and beaten. Edith, in full Piaf get-up, was kicked between the legs so hard she felt her testicles would burst. There were teeth on the ground that Madonna realised were hers.

  Some of them dragged Edith off but others carried on kicking Madonna until they got bored. However, when they left, others came in their place and they punched her. One of them threatened to fuck her and a young girl who had just appeared at her side. Through broken teeth, Madonna managed to shout, ‘Fuck me? You’ll be lucky, bastard!’ That got her a punch to the kidneys. But she heard the young girl say, ‘If you like, sir.’

  Members of the press corps, plus Samsun Bajraktar, had taken refuge in the Divan Hotel. People were sneezing and vomiting from the effects of tear gas and pepper spray and when she arrived, the whole of the reception area was covered in sick. Just the look of it made her heave.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  A smart woman in her forties took Samsun’s arm and led her to a chair.

  ‘Yeah.’ She was. Her eyes stung from the effects of the gas but she hadn’t been sick and she could speak. The main thing that was upsetting her was that the police had burned the Gezi Wish Tree.

  ‘The Gezi Wish Tree?’

  ‘It’s where we put all our hopes on little bits of paper,’ Samsun told the woman. ‘They burned it. They burned our future.’

  And then she cried.

  No local TV station even referred to Gezi. Kemal İkmen alternated between BBC World and CNN.

  ‘I should be with them,’ he said to his father.

  Çetin İkmen looked like a ghost. White and unfed. ‘I promised your mother I’d keep you home,’ he said.

  Fatma İkmen had gone over to his sister’s apartment in Gaziosmanpaşa earlier in the day and was unable to get back. Çetin had brought cakes home for his and Kemal’s dinner, but he hadn’t eaten a
ny.

  ‘They’re mad with tiredness and hunger,’ İkmen said, pointing at the baton-wielding officers on the screen. ‘And they come from places in Anatolia that don’t have names. It’s like letting a pack of wild dogs loose.’

  Kemal said, ‘I should still be there. Auntie Samsun’s there.’

  ‘I know. I don’t like that either, Kemal, and I can understand why you want to be in Gezi now. But what good will it do?’

  ‘Why aren’t you there, Dad? CNN said that the police had deployed every available officer.’

  İkmen shook his head. ‘I got lucky,’ he said. ‘I have a good boss.’

  ‘Teker excused you?’

  ‘She assigned a job to Sergeant Gürsel and me at first light . . .’

  ‘What, at Gezi?’

  ‘No. Nothing to do with that. I don’t have anything to do with that, Kemal. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing . . .’ He shrugged.

  In Tarlabaşı, Sergeant Kerim Gürsel looked out of his firmly closed window. The streets below were alive with his neighbours banging pots and pans in protest while plastic bullets flew through the air. Two officers grabbed a man and hauled him into a custody vehicle. One of them raced after a woman who tried to run away but he brought her down and then carried her to the van as well. As he put her inside he punched her.

  Sinem was asleep on the sofa with BBC World blaring out on the TV. Episodes of old British sitcoms were interspersed with scenes from Gezi that looked like something Dante might have dreamed up. Kerim lit a cigarette. He didn’t usually smoke but Pembe was still somewhere in the park and the last time he’d heard from her she’d said that if they, the police, were going to kill her, she was going to take a few of them out first. And because he loved her so much, he had wanted to tell her just to come back and not put herself at risk. But he couldn’t. It was what she wanted to do and if he really loved her, he’d let her.

  What she’d had for her supper was now not even a memory. But Anastasia Negroponte remembered Ayşe İkmen. A tiny dark witch with a weird foreign accent and always accompanied by her two sons – one tall and blond, the other small and dark and quick as a firecracker. She looked at the strange, frightening cards he’d given her. Their names were written in Albanian so she couldn’t always tell what they were. An image of a man looking up at the stars, his clothes tattered, one shoe being eaten by a goat, was, she thought, the Fool. But that wasn’t appropriate.

  She slowly moved the cards in her hands. Swords were scimitars and empresses veiled. Because Albania had become a communist country after the Second World War people had forgotten it had once been a Muslim enclave in Europe. It had been an Ottoman province. The Magician followed the Tower, which had peasants and kaftan-clad nobles falling from its battlements. And then there was Shaitan. She knew that he was right. The Devil. A djinn made of smoke whispering into the chests of veiled women, suggesting sin. Ayşe İkmen had always interpreted this card as indicative of slavery and bondage. When it had arisen, she had asked her what things in her life were oppressing or trapping her. In those days there had only been her father. Now there was so much. It had to end.

  But would the witch’s small, firecracker son understand?

  Anastasia put her feet to the floor for the first time that week. She couldn’t walk. But if she held on to furniture she could pull herself short distances. She put the Devil between her teeth and put her hand out to the sideboard beside the window. She’d asked Yiannis to open it so that she could get some fresh air. He’d argued, saying that there was a pall of tear gas over the city because of the protests in Gezi Park. Yiannis was agitated because the police had called to tell him they were coming back. But she’d insisted. The window was only open a little but it would be enough. In the morning Çetin Bey and his men would arrive and find it. Hopefully he would understand. Then she knew that snake in her house would run away. What else could he do? Because if he’d buried a man alive once before, Hakkı Bey could do it again. And he had. Anastasia could hear him crying.

  She dropped the tarot card into the mulberry bush a second before Yiannis came into her bedroom.

  ‘What are you doing, Mother?’

  But he didn’t wait for her to even try to form a reply. He picked her up and put her back to bed. Then he closed the window.

  Ömer had begged Peri not to stay in the park, but she’d ignored him. She’d stayed with the gypsies until they’d all left to take their children away. Gonca had said she’d come back and so Peri had remained in their tent where she’d been joined by a group of Sufis. Now they too had moved on and it was just her and a big man in full riot gear.

  For a moment they just stared at each other. She couldn’t see his eyes, which were hidden behind a black visor. But she could see his mouth, which smiled.

  ‘A nurse,’ she heard him say. His accent was rough and eastern and it reminded her of the worst, most notorious families back in Mardin. ‘I’ve always wanted to have a nurse.’

  He was going to rape her. Peri said the first thing that came into her head. ‘I’ve got chlamydia,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ He grabbed her arm with one of his great, gloved hands.

  He didn’t know what chlamydia was. Which could mean that he had it.

  Although every part of her body shook with fear, Peri landed a punch on his jaw. It did nothing but infuriate him.

  ‘Whore!’

  She tried to twist out of his grasp, but she couldn’t. He put his other hand inside his trousers and pulled out his cock. Peri screamed. She’d seen plenty of those before, but she’d never had one used against her in anger until now.

  She shouted, ‘Rape!’

  ‘If you’re lucky,’ her attacker said.

  Peri kicked out at him, but she missed. He punched her in the face and the world exploded into a million stars. Then he kicked her in the stomach. She’d seen her brother in those boots. Suddenly she wanted to cry.

  ‘Donkey fucker!’ she rasped. ‘Son of an infected whore!’

  The old oaths she’d learned as a child who had spent her time with the rough country kids who roamed the Mesopotamian Plain came back to her.

  He pushed her to the ground and stuck his hand roughly up her skirt. Then he took his helmet off. Did he do it because he wanted to delight in her discomfort? He was ugly and he had to know it. He looked like a frog.

  Peri crossed her legs. He slapped her. ‘Bitch!’

  Her face was swelling where he’d punched her and so Peri could only see properly out of one eye. It was a shock to her when he fell on top of her without pushing himself inside her. For a moment she just lay underneath him without moving. Then she turned her head.

  A tiny covered woman was standing behind the fallen man holding a frying pan. She said, ‘Push him off, get up and then let’s get out of here.’

  ‘Thank you—’

  ‘No time for that, sister,’ the little woman said. ‘We have to get away.’

  ‘My husband’s in Gezi Park.’

  Aylın Akyıldız put her hand near to but not on the bones of the man with the double-headed eagle sword.

  ‘Shouldn’t you go home? It’s terrible in the park. He might need you,’ Professor Bozdağ said.

  ‘He won’t.’ She looked down at the body again. ‘But he might.’

  ‘Him? You’re not still receiving threats, are you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But we’d be fooling ourselves if we thought that he was safe.’

  ‘Dr Akyıldız—’

  ‘Ariadne knew,’ she said. ‘In her bones. She knew he was Greek and she knew he was special. Professor, if these protests are quashed, those who don’t want to acknowledge anything except our Ottoman past will destroy him.’

  ‘No, I don’t—’

  ‘No, you don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I’ve thought and thought and thought it over and I can only come to one conclusion, which is that Ariadne told someone else about him. Someone who hates him.’

  ‘Whoever he is,’ the profes
sor said. ‘Really, Dr Akyıldız, his identity is entirely speculative . . .’

  ‘I don’t think it is, though! I think that Ariadne knew it and I think she told someone she shouldn’t. Maybe the father of her child. And then he killed her.’

  Exhausted, she sat down.

  ‘I don’t think she told him where Palaiologos was,’ she continued. ‘But it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to work it out, especially if they were lovers.’

  ‘This is all speculation. I think you should go home.’

  ‘I want to stay here.’

  She put a hand on the table where the body lay. Dr Savva’s death had affected everyone who had known her, badly. But Aylın Akyıldız had suffered more than most. It had been Aylın who had kept Palaiologos secret, then received death threats. Finally she’d had to hand him over to the museum. Now in a city beyond boiling point she feared he would be looted by the same people who wanted to turn Aya Sofya back into a mosque.

  The professor thought that was a remote possibility. But he didn’t try to convince her. She was in the grip of a fear that almost amounted to an obsession. Also, given the chaos in Taksim, would she even be able to get home? He knew he wasn’t going to risk it.

  After a moment he said, ‘Well, I have work to do and so I imagine I will be here all night. I have tea and börek which you’re welcome to share.’

  At first she didn’t appear to have heard him, but then he saw her smile.

  Chapter 30

  A boy wearing expensive sports kit and trainers that probably cost a month’s wages casually kicked a gravestone. He didn’t even look at it. Had he done so he would have seen the tall, slim man standing beside it. This man grabbed the boy’s arm.

  ‘Why did you kick that gravestone?’ Mehmet Süleyman asked.

  The boy shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Would you have kicked it if it had been your grandfather’s? Or your mother’s? Or any member of your family? Would you have kicked it if it hadn’t been Greek?’

  ‘No! And what’s it to you? Who are you?’

  ‘I’m a police officer,’ Süleyman said. ‘We received reports that this place was being vandalised. Was it you?’