The House of Four

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Put the gun down.’

  Did the black-tracksuited boy recognise him?

  ‘Remember me? I’m Inspector Süleyman,’ he said.

  The boy withdrew still further into the shadow of the dustbin he was squatting beside. But the gun was still trained on Süleyman. It was a big, flash Beretta. He’d seen similar weapons in the hands and on the hips of gangsters more times than he cared to remember.

  When he’d been in custody, they’d never managed to identify the boy in the black tracksuit, and so they’d just referred to him as ‘Mehmet’. Any man whose name was unknown was always Mehmet.

  ‘I know that gun isn’t yours,’ Süleyman said. ‘Where did you get it?’

  As far as he knew, the boy hadn’t shot anyone. The only witness to the two shots that had been heard, a young prostitute, said she’d seen the kid point the thing at a rat. When the gun had discharged the first time, the recoil had taken him by surprise and he’d fallen back behind the dustbins. The second shot had been an accident.

  A gypsy man Süleyman recognised as one of Gonca’s relatives started to move towards him.

  ‘Stay back!’

  ‘Ah, Inspector Süleyman . . .’

  ‘Stay back!’

  The magnetism of guns never ceased to amaze him. A shot would go off, and rather than heading in the opposite direction, a large section of the population would actually run towards the report. It was madness.

  ‘Keep back and keep everyone else as far away as possible,’ he said to the gypsy. ‘Understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  But although he did keep others away, the idiot himself didn’t move very far. Süleyman had called for back-up, and was praying that it arrived soon. Being alone in Tarlabaşı with an armed man and hundreds of spectators was not good.

  He looked the young man in the eyes. ‘I don’t for a moment believe that is your gun. I also don’t believe that you mean anyone any harm.’

  ‘There was a rat.’ His voice was tremulous. Was he still fearful of the Devil, or had some other fixation taken hold of him since he’d been in custody?

  ‘I know, you tried to kill it.’

  ‘He sends them to bite us, to spread disease.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘The Devil.’

  Süleyman heard a car draw up. Gonca’s relative said, ‘They’ve arrived, Mehmet Bey.’

  He’d spoken to Ömer, and so he hoped that it was the sergeant who had come. Out of the corner of his eye he saw police uniforms and, mercifully, Ömer Mungun. He called to him: ‘Sergeant Mungun.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘I know him,’ the boy in the black tracksuit said. ‘I’ve seen him before.’

  ‘Ömer Bey is my sergeant,’ Süleyman said. ‘You can give the gun either to me or to him. It’s up to you.’

  For a moment it looked as if the boy hadn’t understood. But then he said, ‘Why would I do that?’

  Ömer Mungun approached, slowly and alone. The uniformed officers at his back trained their weapons on the boy.

  ‘Because you can’t have a gun on the street,’ Süleyman said. ‘It’s dangerous.’

  ‘Other people have guns.’

  ‘I know. Bad people.’

  ‘You have a gun.’

  ‘Yes. I’m a police officer. I’m allowed to have a gun.’

  ‘To fight bad people.’

  ‘In part,’ he said. ‘To protect—’

  ‘I’m protecting everyone,’ the boy said. ‘He means to destroy us all.’

  ‘Who?’ He knew who the boy meant, but he had to ask.

  ‘The Devil. I’ve told you before, he is at your back. He means to put an end to you! To us all!’ He began to cry.

  Ömer was now level with his superior. ‘Sir,’ he murmured.

  ‘Where did you get the gun?’ Süleyman asked the boy.

  He continued to cry.

  ‘If you give me the gun, we can talk,’ Süleyman said. ‘I promise I won’t let the Devil harm you.’

  ‘You can’t do that!’ He was laughing though his tears. ‘He’s unstoppable. Don’t you understand? Those people understood, why can’t you?’

  ‘What people?’ Ömer asked.

  The boy looked at him and frowned. Had he already forgotten who Ömer was?

  ‘What people?’ Süleyman reiterated.

  He shook his head. ‘They understood. They believed.’ He raised the gun and pointed it at Süleyman. ‘They gave me this to kill the Devil.’

  ‘How am I expected to remember anything? I’m practically fucking dead!’

  Mesrob was Arto Sarkissian’s only surviving uncle. Now eighty-five, he’d lived in New York for the past forty years. In attitude, language and accent he was entirely American. And yet he had once lived in the Peacock Yalı and had been the favourite youngest son of Arto’s grandfather Kevork.

  ‘It must be the middle of the fucking night in Turkey,’ the old man shouted down the phone line at him. ‘What are you doing up?’

  Arto explained in as succinct a way as he could to an ill-tempered old man several thousand miles away.

  ‘Oh, Papa was full of stories about pashas and princesses,’ Mesrob said. ‘I didn’t take any notice of their names. I knew he had worked at the palace as a young man. He saw the sultan, Abdül Hamid, a few times. He didn’t treat him, but he did treat his astrologer. Mad. The sultan, not the astrologer. He was just manipulative.’

  ‘The man I’m trying to find out about was a German,’ Arto said. ‘Rudolf Paşa.’

  ‘There were lots of German pashas in the First World War. Some of them stayed on when it was all over.’

  ‘Yes, Uncle, like this one, Rudolf Paşa.’

  ‘And all this is because of that Turkish friend of yours?’ the old man said.

  ‘Çetin İkmen, yes. He’s a policeman.’

  ‘Mmm. Turkish police. Always complete bastards . . .’

  ‘Uncle Mesrob, if you don’t know Rudolf Paşa, then do you remember Grandfather talking about his wife? She was called Perihan Hanım and she was a princess. This was in 1931.’

  ‘I’d only just been born then.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Perihan is a name I don’t know. How do you still manage to live in Turkey? It would drive me nuts. All that army shit they go in for, the toilets . . .’

  ‘What about the Devil’s House? Did you ever hear Grandfather talk about that? Something happened in that house in 1931, something bad. Çetin thinks that whatever it was may have caused the deaths of the four children of Rudolf Paşa and his wife Perihan.’

  There was a long silence, and then the old man said, ‘No. No. Devil’s House? No.’

  Arto felt deflated. Talking to his uncle made him feel about ten again. A helpless child in amongst a sea of loud, bitter Armenian relatives, trying to be heard.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about how my son, your cousin Levon, escaped from the World Trade Center on 9/11? Boy, now that is a story!’ the old man said.

  Arto hadn’t heard the story, but he did know it from the duplicated letter Uncle Mesrob had sent him at Christmas 2001.

  ‘Twenty-eight flights of stairs he ran down! Twenty-eight!’

  ‘Uncle, what about the name Teufel Ev?’ Arto said. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

  There was only a short pause this time. ‘Ah, you mean that confinement he had such trouble with?’

  ‘So you do remember it? That name?’

  Although what did he mean by ‘confinement’?

  ‘Sure. But I never heard it from my father. He was dead by the time that came up.’

  ‘By the time what came up?’

  Arto heard his uncle sigh. ‘Your grandmother was talking. She was pissed at the way the Turks just seemed to forget her husband. How he’d saved the lives of this prince, that princess, some court dwarf . . . I said, as gently as I could, that no one cared about the Ottoman royal family any more. She said he’d saved Turkish soldiers in the war. On and on, and I just liste
ned, or made like I was listening, and then she finally told me about my father’s one and only admission of failure. She said it never left him.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Like I say, a confinement in some place over on the Asian side called the Teufel Ev. Weird name. A woman was having a baby, a rich woman who paid him to attend. He was good at that stuff. He’d delivered babies before. But on that occasion he must’ve screwed up, because he lost first the child and then the mother. My mother said he told her he could have done more to save them. He blamed himself. But then that was typical of him. Maybe it’s an Armenian thing? I don’t know.’

  Chapter 12

  The boy in the black tracksuit was back in a police cell. The gun he’d waved at Mehmet Süleyman was at the ballistics laboratory. In the end he’d given it up quickly and easily. The rat he’d tried and failed to kill was no doubt celebrating being alive by nibbling on rubbish in the gutters of Tarlabaşı.

  ‘Going to be another boiling day,’ Ömer Mungun said as he looked out of Süleyman’s office window at the rising sun.

  Processing and questioning the young man had taken a long time. Then they’d had to circulate his description of the couple who had given him the gun. It hadn’t been exactly comprehensive, but the boy had mentioned the woman’s light, almost luminous eyes. Both officers had been up all night, and in a few minutes they’d be on the move again – back out to Tarlabaşı.

  ‘If they’ve got any sense they’ll have left the area,’ Ömer said as he watched Süleyman light up yet another cigarette.

  ‘I don’t know that sense comes into it,’ Süleyman said. ‘According to the boy, the woman just walked up to him and gave him the gun.’

  ‘In order to protect the city from the Devil.’

  Süleyman shook his head. ‘It can’t really have happened like that. The boy’s clearly suffering from some sort of psychosis.’

  ‘And yet his description of the woman’s eyes conforms to what we’ve been told about our hit-and-run female killer,’ Ömer said.

  ‘Maybe he read it somewhere . . .’

  ‘And maybe he didn’t. Maybe he saw that woman. What we don’t know is whether she really did give him the gun.’

  ‘A Beretta Centennial is a limited edition,’ Süleyman said. ‘It’s hand-carved. It’s the sort of thing far-right American politicians like – and gangsters. Something big and powerful to wave around.’

  ‘Perhaps if this couple are the same ones who killed Hasan Dum and his henchman in Yeniköy, it’s the gypsy’s gun.’

  ‘If that’s the case, why give something so hard-won and valuable to a mad vagrant on the streets of Tarlabaşı?’ Süleyman said.

  Ömer shrugged. Then he frowned. ‘Sir, wouldn’t the henchman also have been carrying?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. But he was clean when Forensics examined the body.’

  ‘Which means there is potentially another gun still on the street.’

  ‘Yes.’ Süleyman checked his own weapon in the holster underneath his armpit. ‘If we’re lucky, we’ll find it. If we’re really fortunate, we’ll also find this couple.’ He stood up. ‘Come on. Inspector Cıngı and his officers are waiting to give Tarlabaşı a rude awakening.’

  Barçın Demirtaş hadn’t been able to sleep. Maybe it had been the conversation she’d had the previous evening with İkmen about magic and the Devil that had kept her awake. Or perhaps she’d come to the station before dawn to make absolutely certain that she saw Inspector Mehmet Süleyman before he left to go about his business.

  In the short time she had managed to sleep, she’d dreamed about him. It was just lust. She thought how disdainful her friend Turgut Zana would be if he knew. It made her laugh. Turgut’s struggles with the foreign land of emotion sometimes made her look at herself in ways that could be useful. Pining over a man who was with someone else was a hiding to nothing. Turgut had described Süleyman’s lover, Gonca Şekeroğlu, as a ‘massive gypsy’. Barçın laughed again. How massive was ‘massive’? Was the woman obese? Was the inspector one of those who liked to fuck fat women?

  When she’d arrived at her office, the entire corridor had been dark. But now she noticed light coming in through her window. Outside in the station yard, cars and vans were being started up and their lights switched on. There were voices, and groups of officers wearing riot helmets and bulletproof vests stood about in groups, talking and smoking. Something was going on. But she wasn’t part of it. She was a simple traffic officer, temporarily employed as some sort of expert. Soon enough it would be back to speeding fines and parking violations for her.

  She picked a document off the top of the pile of letters nearest to her. It was dated 1 July 1955.

  My dear brother Kanat,

  I know you won’t believe me, but I need you to be acquainted with the notion that I have had some success. A mere glimmer only, it is a presence of sorts. I even believe it has voice. If this is no false dawn, then maybe we can all soon begin our lives again. With newly clean souls, who knows what we may yet achieve? Please do reply, dear Kanat. You are my brother and I love you.

  Ever yours,

  Kemal

  The noise outside the window increased. Barçın looked out and saw Inspector Mehmet Süleyman putting on a bulletproof vest. She wondered what was happening. Sergeant Mungun by his side, Süleyman climbed into a van full of uniforms in riot gear. She’d only have to say the word and Ömer Mungun would take her out and treat her like a queen. He was young, attractive and intelligent. He was clearly into her. But . . .

  Another man from the east? Barçın cringed. She hadn’t been with a man for two years because of her last boyfriend. Şeymus had come from just outside Mardin and he too had been handsome, intelligent and really into her. In fact he’d been so into her he’d threatened to kill her when she’d refused his proposal of marriage because she wanted to work for a while longer before she became a wife. He’d also told her the bike had to go. That had been non-negotiable. Disentangling herself from Şeymus had taken almost a year and had involved a move to İstanbul. She didn’t want to go there again.

  She went back to the letters. What did Kemal mean? What was the success he spoke about? And how could it have a voice? What was ‘it’? And was knowing that Kemal was apparently a sort of magician making her think he had created a being of some description?

  She wondered whether Kanat had ever replied, and if so, what he’d said. She’d loosely arranged the letters into piles according to who had written them. Kanat had been the least enthusiastic writer and so that pile was small. She began to sort through it, looking for anything in 1955.

  Ali was crying.

  ‘We don’t have time for this shit!’ he said. ‘We have to move!’

  Elif didn’t respond. If her eyes hadn’t been open, he would have thought that maybe she was asleep. There was also the issue of the gun she had pointed at his head.

  She’d given the other gun to some mad boy she’d got into conversation with. The boy was convinced the Devil was after him and so she’d given him the gun so he could protect himself. Had she believed him? Or had she done it for a laugh? Or to increase her own notoriety? If he was any sort of man he would kill her. But he couldn’t.

  ‘The police will be back,’ he said. ‘They took the boy away and he will have told them about us. You know what they are like. They can get blood out of stones. We have to get out of here!’

  When the police had come to arrest the boy, Ali had pulled her into a derelict building, where they’d hidden underneath rubble for what had seemed like an eternity. Only when the streets had become calm again had he dared to look around. What he’d seen had made him shudder. Uniformed officers still wandered Tarlabaşı, and he had been certain they would be found at any moment. Then, about an hour ago, they had suddenly all disappeared.

  ‘We have to go before the cops come back!’

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  Why?

  ‘Because they’ll fucking arrest us,’
Ali said. ‘Because you gave a gun to a nutter!’

  ‘He needed to protect himself . . .’

  ‘You don’t believe that!’

  But he knew that was very possibly untrue. Elif believed all sorts of strange things. She swore she’d seen a monstrous beast swimming in the Bosphorus one day. He’d not seen anything. But then he knew all too well that smack talked to its addicts in unpredictable ways. That was what he’d always liked about it: the way it took you away from reality.

  When he’d found her, she’d been working selling bonzai in Edirnekapı. She was addicted to the stuff, and her skin had already started to crack and bleed. The gross Syriani gangster who ran the operation made her have sex with him when she wasn’t out peddling the synthetic cannabis half the city seemed to be dependent on. Ali had been stealing heroin from his father’s surgery for years. It hadn’t taken much effort to get a bit more for Elif. She’d liked it, and had quickly switched from bonzai to smack. And then his father had caught him.

  ‘People have to know who I am!’ she said. ‘I told you that, and why!’

  She’d never said who her parents were, or where she’d come from. The Syriani had been father, mother and husband to her since before she could remember, by turns brutalising and loving her. When she wasn’t either working or sucking him off, her mind was fixated on trash television. Reality shows, inane chat, talent contests and soap operas coloured her desperate world; when Ali met her, she was addicted to high drama and the notion that anyone could be famous and rich provided they wanted it enough. Once, he’d taken her to an audition for That Voice is Turkey, a singing competition based on some European show. She’d sounded like a scalded cat and had been laughed off the stage. It was the cruellest thing Ali had ever seen. She’d self-harmed for months.

  He pulled her to her feet.

  ‘We don’t have time for this!’ he said. ‘You might want to get yourself arrested, but I don’t.’

  ‘So fuck off then!’ she said.

  ‘I mean I don’t want either of us to get arrested!’ he said.