‘No!’
‘Thinking you’re on some sort of jihad . . .’
‘I’m Jewish. Why would I go on jihad?’
And then the Star of David round the boy’s neck suddenly looked very obvious.
He waved him away.
Now he’d stopped trying to clean up after the excesses of some of his fellow officers, Mehmet Süleyman was finally tired. Fifteen minutes before, he’d received a call to say that some gravestones in Şişli Greek Cemetery had been desecrated. He’d checked, it was true, he’d spoken to one of the priests, but there wasn’t much he could do. Another example of insanity in a city that had lost its mind. He sat down next to a broken monument and lit a cigarette.
He hadn’t done his job. Teker had sent him into Gezi to be a police officer and do what he was told. But he’d spent all his time helping people get to the doctors who were trying to treat the people his fellows had injured. Some of them had gone to the Divan Hotel where thugs in uniform threw tear gas canisters in after them. Later he’d found Peri Mungun crouched behind a tree, shaking. She couldn’t speak.
He’d picked her up and carried her to her apartment. Her brother was somewhere in Beyoğlu, but he couldn’t raise him. He’d made Peri a glass of tea and she’d smoked five of his cigarettes before she’d said, ‘A police officer tried to rape me.’
She’d described some half-evolved monster from the east. She’d not got his number. But she had been rescued by a tiny girl in a headscarf who’d had a good way with a frying pan. When Ömer found out he’d want to give the little girl a medal and kill the gorilla who had tried to rape his sister.
‘I know I’m a grown woman and so rather me than some little virgin girl,’ Peri had said. ‘But policemen shouldn’t behave like that, Mehmet Bey. I know they did in the past, but not now.’
She was right. Whatever one felt about the current government, police accountability had improved. Now it seemed all that had disappeared in one night of awful violence. There had been a build-up, for weeks. But what he’d seen and heard during that night and on into the early morning, made Mehmet Süleyman want to howl with despair.
It was Father’s Day and people were going to the shops wearing gas masks even when they were many kilometres away from Gezi Park. As Çetin İkmen left his apartment, his son Kemal put his head round his bedroom door and mumbled, ‘Think you’re great, Dad.’
He smiled. That was better than any present the kid could have got him.
İkmen met Kerim Gürsel and the squad of uniformed officers he’d asked for outside the Negroponte House. The constables carried shovels and rakes and one of them held a battering ram.
İkmen wished them all a good morning and then he rang the bell on the Negropontes’ gate. He’d seen a flash of face at one window already and so he knew they were in. And where, after all, would or could Madam Negroponte go?
He rang again and then he called out, ‘Open up, Mr Negroponte, it’s the police. I gave you fair warning.’
İkmen had a warrant and so he could force entry to the premises if he needed to. He didn’t want to. But as time passed he felt that he may well have to resort to force. Then Yiannis Negroponte walked out of his front door.
‘I’ve a warrant to search your garden, Mr Negroponte.’ İkmen held the document up for him to see.
‘You’ve searched already.’
‘Not the garden,’ İkmen said. ‘We’ve a warrant to dig it up.’
Yiannis still didn’t move towards the gate. ‘Why? What are you looking for?’
‘I’ve a warrant,’ İkmen said again. ‘Open the gate, Mr Negroponte, or I’ll have to break it down.’
‘Yes, but . . .’
İkmen looked at the constable with the battering ram. ‘Yıldız . . .’
‘All right! All right!’ Yiannis ran up to the gate and unlocked it.
İkmen presented him with the warrant. ‘We won’t come into the house, Yiannis. But we have to do this.’
‘Why?’
‘Dr Ariadne Savva’s child is still missing.’
‘I don’t know anything about that!’ Yiannis said. ‘I told you!’
Hakkı Bey watched them from the front door, frowning.
İkmen looked at him as well as at Yiannis Negroponte as he spoke. ‘Yes, you told me, sir. But a man’s word is sadly not proof.’
He pushed past Yiannis and called to Kerim, ‘Sergeant Mungun, bring the men in.’
‘Sir.’
Anastasia recognised İkmen’s voice even if she couldn’t hear what he was saying. He’d come back, as she’d known he would, because he too knew that something was wrong. First the young woman had disappeared, then the property developer had given up, and now she knew what Hakkı was, she felt unsafe.
He’d tried to come into her room but she’d screamed and although he’d begged and pleaded, he’d had to go. Yiannis had been in the bathroom and hadn’t heard. But even if he’d been there she couldn’t have formed the words she needed to make him understand. Now she just had to hope that the Albanian witch’s son would find his mother’s tarot card and understand what it meant. The breathing coming from the walls was very shallow now, the scratching non-existent. Time was short.
Pembe had found Madonna weeping and bleeding outside the Divan Hotel. She’d taken refuge in there with a journalist but then the police had tear-gassed the hotel. She’d had to get out to breathe. She’d been sick twice on the short journey to Sinem and Kerim’s apartment.
Once indoors, Madonna went straight to the bathroom.
‘She’s lost her front teeth,’ Pembe said. She shook her head. ‘Bastards!’
Apart from a big tear in her top and some very matted hair, Pembe looked all right. Uncharitably, Sinem wondered if she’d holed up somewhere until the worst of the violence had passed. Even though she didn’t have, and didn’t want, a sexual relationship with her husband, Sinem still resented Pembe at times.
‘They took Madame Edith away.’
‘Where to?’
Pembe shrugged. ‘Who knows? Where’s Kerim?’
‘At work,’ Sinem said. ‘Not Gezi, somewhere in Sultanahmet.’
‘You should call him, ask him where Madame Edith is.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Sinem said. ‘He won’t know. He’s digging a garden trying to find the body of this missing baby.’
Pembe curled her lip. ‘He might know.’
‘He won’t.’
She put her hand out. ‘Oh, give me your phone and I’ll call him. Come on.’
Pembe wouldn’t call from her own phone because Kerim had said right from the start that he would never answer her calls when he was at work.
‘No.’ Sinem held her phone close to her chest.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s at work. Because I don’t want to worry him.’
Pembe’s face reddened.
‘I’m his wife,’ Sinem said. ‘I care about—’
‘You’re only his wife in name,’ Pembe snapped. ‘Anyway, what are you getting all protective about Kerim for? You don’t even like cock.’
Sinem looked down. ‘Kerim is my best friend,’ she said. ‘We’ve known each other since we were children.’
This time Pembe looked away. She was right. Sinem and Kerim had grown up together and there was a love between them that went beyond sex. It was something Pembe knew she couldn’t reach. She also knew that if Kerim were to have to make a choice between her and Sinem, she would be the one to go.
‘All right,’ she said. She looked at Sinem. Shrunken and twisted, she was in the kind of pain not even the Oramorph could touch. How could she even think about being jealous of a crippled woman who was also a lesbian? ‘I’m sorry, Sinem.’
‘It’s OK.’
Madonna walked into the room and lisped, ‘What am I going to do about my teeth?’
The guilt was bad but it was also useless. Pembe couldn’t undo the fact she’d spent the night with a butch gold dealer in some part of Tarlab
aşı even she’d never seen before. They’d done an awful lot of poppers but she’d needed to. The gold dealer had been a brute.
Pembe went over to Madonna and kissed her on the cheek. ‘We’ll get you implants,’ she said.
Madonna sat down next to Sinem who put a hand on her knee. ‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘I dunno,’ Pembe said. ‘Maybe I’ll go to that government rally this afternoon and demand compensation.’
‘What government rally? Where?’
‘Over in the Old City somewhere,’ Pembe said. ‘The unions are calling for a general strike and so the State has to rally its forces. It’ll be full of men baying for the blood of perverts.’
‘Us.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, they won’t give you any money for my teeth,’ Madonna said.
Pembe sighed. ‘I was being ironic,’ she said. ‘I’d be lucky if those people just threw shit at me.’
It was her day off and so Mary Cox had decided to make the long journey from Bebek to Kazlıçeşme for the government rally. It was what Ahmet Bey would have done. But he couldn’t. As she covered her hair with the scarf he’d given her for her last birthday, she cried. Where was he? Was he even alive? She had felt that she had finally managed to manoeuvre her way into his affections and then he’d disappeared. People meant him harm. It was the same with all men of vision. She’d seen those awful slums Ahmet Bey had redeveloped and so she knew how much he’d improved those areas. Why did people think that was a bad thing?
If Ahmet Bey had met an untimely end, would the family keep her on to look after Kelime? No one would want the child. Her mother was dead and Ahmet Bey’s siblings would probably want to sell his house to pay for Kelime to be put into a home. She couldn’t argue with them.
Mary took a plain brown coat out of her wardrobe and put it on. It was going to be hot outside but if she didn’t dress modestly she’d never get in to the rally. Also, she knew that Ahmet Bey preferred women to be modest. She didn’t care what people said about his mistress in Moda. She had been a one-off. And Mary didn’t believe he’d run away because he’d killed that women either. He hadn’t, she was sure of it.
She put on a pair of flat shoes and went out of the house to get the bus to Beşiktaş. Then she’d change on to a tram. Given the traffic and all the detritus from the rioting, it would take her a few hours to get to the Old City. Once there, however, she’d feel, she hoped, a little closer to Ahmet Bey. They were his people and she admired them. Mary hoped her Turkish was good enough for her to be able to follow the speeches.
‘Don’t cut that down, you moron!’
Çetin İkmen grabbed the constable’s arm and pulled it and the machete it held away from the mulberry bush.
‘That’s an ancient mulberry,’ he said. ‘You don’t chop the thing up!’
‘But how do we dig the garden if we can’t knock it all down?’ the man said.
İkmen raised his eyes to heaven. Then he pointed to the gnarled trunk of the bush and its deeply embedded roots. ‘I challenge you, Constable Baran,’ he said, ‘to find a way of burying a baby underneath this bush without damaging its root system. We’re looking for disturbed ground. Get it? Disturbed ground.’
‘All right.’ He went to the flower bed beside the bush and started to dig.
‘Thank you.’ İkmen lit a cigarette. Kerim Gürsel, who had watched the altercation, came over.
‘Nothing so far, sir?’
‘Just morons who think that it’s possible to bury the body of a baby underneath a bush without disturbing the soil,’ he said. ‘Where do they find them these days? Baran’s not a child and yet he shows no common sense at all.’
‘I think sometimes, sir, that a lot of city boys these days just don’t have any contact with agriculture. They all live in apartments, without gardens.’
İkmen sighed. ‘Yes, of course, you’re right,’ he said. ‘Poor stupid bastard’s probably only ever left his concrete hell to do his military service.’
‘And that was probably in some—’
‘End of the world shithole that’s off the map,’ İkmen said. ‘I take your point, Kerim. There’s no excuse for my middle-class ravings. I’m not even middle-class—’
‘Aaaaggghh!’
Constable Baran was holding one hand up as if it were hurt or poisoned.
İkmen said, ‘Have you injured yourself?’
But he just screamed again.
İkmen walked around the mulberry bush to the flower bed Baran had been digging. ‘What the hell is it, man?’
Kerim followed.
Baran pointed at something on the ground, his eyes wide with fear.
‘What is it?’ İkmen asked.
Kerim Gürsel saw it first. ‘This,’ he said as he leaned forward to pick something up.
‘Don’t touch it, sir!’ Baran flinched away. ‘It’s witchcraft!’
‘Oh, don’t be so—’
And then İkmen saw what Kerim had in his hand. It was the Devil, more specifically it was his mother’s Devil tarot card. He looked up at the front of the Negroponte House and noticed that Madam Anastasia’s window was directly above.
Chapter 31
‘This is a sign, for me, isn’t it?’ İkmen said.
The old woman nodded her head.
There was no way Anastasia would have dropped one of Ayşe İkmen’s precious tarot cards out of her bedroom window unless she had a purpose.
İkmen took one of her skinny brown and purple hands in his. ‘I know it’s hard for you to talk—’
‘Then leave her alone!’
İkmen turned and looked at Yiannis Negroponte, who stood in the doorway to his mother’s bedroom.
‘She’s demented,’ he said. ‘She can’t do anything. She probably threw the card out without even knowing what she was doing.’
İkmen looked at Kerim Gürsel. ‘Get him out please, Sergeant.’
‘Yes. Sir.’
Yiannis Negroponte had already been warned when he’d tried to stop İkmen entering his mother’s bedroom. Now he screamed, ‘No!’
Kerim enlisted the help of one of the constables and took Yiannis out of the room.
İkmen looked into the old woman’s deep black eyes. ‘I know it’s hard for you to speak,’ he said. ‘And I know that I should understand what the message you have sent me means. But you’re going to have to help me.’ He smiled. ‘I’m not my mother, I can’t read people’s minds.’
She smiled back.
‘Madam, if I remember correctly, the Devil in the tarot deck indicates deception.’
‘In . . . part . . .’
‘So someone is deceiving. You?’
She said nothing. Her injuries all those years ago had rendered her functional only at times. İkmen looked down at the Devil card again.
‘Scapegoat.’
He looked up into her eyes again. ‘Yes, that’s another interpretation,’ he said. ‘The fact that the Devil has the hooves of a goat means we can make him the reason why we do bad things rather than taking responsibility for ourselves.’
She grimaced. In the few audiences he’d had with Madam Anastasia, İkmen had recognised when she was straining to say something. Frustrated, she beckoned him forwards. İkmen put his face close to hers and she scratched his cheek, lightly, with one twisted finger.
He shook his head. ‘What do you mean?’
He could hear Yiannis arguing with Kerim outside. He heard Kerim say, ‘If you want to get arrested, carry on!’
She heard it too. İkmen saw the panic enter her eyes and then she took a deep breath in. ‘Prisoner,’ she said.
‘Prisoner? Where?’
‘Here.’
‘In this house?’
She scratched his face again and said, ‘The walls . . .’
Professor Bozdağ put a hand on his chest.
‘It’s the Red Room,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ İkmen said, ‘I know.’
‘I don’t think y
ou do,’ the professor said. ‘What do you mean when you say the words “red room”?’
‘A rather extraordinary, in my opinion, Byzantine room made entirely of porphyry,’ İkmen said. He touched the stone as if to make his point.
Professor Bozdağ had to be in late middle-age and yet he ran around that room like a child. ‘Yes, but it’s also the Red Room,’ he said.
‘Yes?’ İkmen really wanted to get on with the process of somehow dismantling the walls. That was why he’d called the museum, so it could be done under academic supervision. If possible. Because if someone was trapped behind the tonnes of porphyry in the walls, he’d have to prioritise that person’s survival whatever objections Professor Bozdağ might make. A forensic team already had a listening device normally used after earthquakes, slowly moving across the surfaces.
‘The Red Room, the only entirely porphyry dressed room in the whole empire, was where Byzantine empresses gave birth to future rulers,’ Bozdağ said. ‘That is what being “born to the purple” means. When one was “born to the purple” one wasn’t just royal, one was also born in this room. Arguably it was the most important room in the Great Palace. And one of the reasons why women could sometimes rule the empire unopposed was because they were born in this room. Dr Savva’s favourite study, Empress Zoe, was born here. This is the Byzantine archaeological find of the century. You do know this?’
‘Professor, I’ve reason to believe that someone is being held hostage behind one of these walls,’ İkmen said. ‘I’m very impressed with what you’ve told me, I’m amazed actually, but I have to get this person out. I asked you here to advise how we might do this without wrecking the place.’
‘I accept you need to find where this person is,’ Bozdağ said. ‘But I do hope you won’t just break these precious walls down without—’
‘That’s why we’ve got the listening equipment. It picks up noises the human ear can’t,’ İkmen said. ‘If the team hear anything they think might be signs of life, I will have to give the order to break down whatever conceals it.’
‘Smash up the walls.’
İkmen saw him shudder. ‘Unless we can get it off in blocks or sheets. I know nothing about it. How thick is it? Do you know?’
Land of the Blind Page 33
