Land of the Blind Page 10

  On the face of it the Aya Triada was the same as it always had been. There were chickens running about in the garden and the old custodian who lived on the site was doing his car up outside his flat. The only thing that was different was a tall, thin woman who was sitting on the grass looking exhausted. He walked up to her. ‘Is everything all right?’

  When she looked up he saw a strong, angular, mannish face that was slightly familiar. ‘Just shattered,’ she said. ‘Do you have any idea why the police are firing tear gas canisters at people? I’ve treated two people rendered unconscious by canisters in the last hour. They’re not supposed to do that, are they?’

  For a moment Kerim didn’t know what to say. He knew that firing at people was strictly forbidden but he’d seen it happen. That it was occurring here was not something that pleased him, but it didn’t surprise him either. Not all of his colleagues were like Çetin İkmen.

  ‘You say you treated people, are you a doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m a nurse,’ she said. ‘Are you going to the church?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But are you all right? Is there anything I can do for you?’

  ‘Not unless you can stop the police hurting people. The irony of it is that my brother is a police officer.’ She laughed, but without humour.

  Then Kerim knew who she was. He sat down beside her. ‘You’re Ömer Mungun’s sister,’ he said.

  She widened her eyes. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘You have the same laugh,’ Kerim said. ‘I too am a detective.’ He offered her his hand. ‘Kerim Gürsel.’

  She took it. ‘Peri Mungun. You don’t know if my brother is involved in any of this, do you, Detective Gürsel?’

  ‘I believe he’s working on an historical murder,’ he said. ‘So no.’

  She shook her head. ‘I know you probably can’t say anything about what is happening here, but I think that if the authorities want to assert some real control they ought to listen to the people. They can’t keep on smashing their way through people’s concerns and telling them they’re wrong all the time. They need to listen. I go and eat my lunch in Gezi Park every day in the summer. I look forward to it. What am I going to do with a shopping mall? Or a mosque?’

  ‘People need somewhere to pray,’ he said.

  ‘I know that but I need somewhere to eat. I’m sorry if that offends your religious sensibilities . . .’

  ‘Oh, if people need to pray they can always find somewhere.’

  They both looked at the man who had come to sit with them. Wearing black robes and with a long, brownish ginger beard, he was a Greek priest and he was probably only just thirty.

  ‘Are you folk all right?’ he asked. ‘You’re welcome to sit in the garden or the church if you want to. In view of what’s going on . . . well . . .’

  ‘I’m here to see Father Diogenes,’ Kerim said.

  The priest, whose face was rather pudgy and gnome-like said, ‘Detective Gürsel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He held out his hand. ‘I am Father Diogenes.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘And the young lady . . .’

  ‘Oh, we’re not together,’ Peri said. ‘I’m a nurse. I’ve just been trying to help people with tear gas injuries.’

  ‘Bless you for that,’ the priest said.

  Peri stood up. ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said, ‘I lied to my employers so I could do it.’

  ‘Then you lied in a good cause. God will understand.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Peri left.

  ‘So, Detective Mungun,’ Diogenes said, ‘you want to know about Ariadne Savva.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then let’s go into my office in the church. This smoke makes my eyes sting.’

  His office wasn’t much more than a cupboard. It was somewhat chaotic and reminded Kerim of İkmen’s lair at Police Headquarters. Not that İkmen had a chicken under his chair. Diogenes shooed it out.

  ‘Our custodian Ali Bey keeps them for eggs,’ he said. ‘Somehow they get in.’ He waved his hands at Kerim. ‘Find a seat if you can. Move the books.’

  Every surface was covered with books in Greek and the two chairs in front of Diogenes’ desk were no exception. Kerim moved two piles on to the floor and sat down.

  Diogenes leaned on his desk and said, ‘So, Ariadne Savva. What can I say? When she came to work at the museum she joined our congregation here at the Aya Triada. Don’t misunderstand me, Detective, we have some very nice congregants here, but nobody like Ariadne. Our people talk about the Byzantine past, but Ariadne lived it. It was everything to her.’

  ‘It was her job.’

  ‘And more.’

  There was a pause and then Kerim said, ‘Father Diogenes, did you know that Ariadne was pregnant?’

  ‘Ah.’ He looked down. ‘Yes, I did. But if you’re going to ask me who the father was, then I’m going to have to disappoint you because I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you ask?’

  ‘I did, she wouldn’t say. But she was happy about being pregnant. She seemed relaxed and so I didn’t press her. She was an adult woman, after all. I told her that when the child was born she could count on the church for support. She seemed happy about that.’

  ‘When we searched her apartment we found no clothes or equipment for a baby,’ Kerim said.

  Father Diogenes sighed. ‘Ah well, some people believe, you see, that it is bad luck to buy anything for an expected baby until the child is born.’

  ‘But she was alone, in a foreign country. Her parents didn’t even know she was pregnant.’

  ‘Then I don’t know, Detective,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think that the father of the child could have been a member of your congregation?’

  ‘Our congregants are mainly over seventy,’ the priest said. ‘And Ariadne wasn’t close to any of them. She was aloof. She came to church, sometimes she talked to me and then she left. I think that the father of the child, God willing the little one is still alive, is more likely to be a work colleague or maybe even a man she left behind in Greece. I don’t know if such a person even exists. I will speak to my congregants on Sunday and try to find out if anyone knows anything. I don’t know everything, after all. I’m not the Pope.’ And then he laughed. ‘How could I be? They don’t take Greeks, do they, the Catholics?’ His face dropped. ‘Nobody takes Greeks, not these days.’

  Turkey’s neighbour was in a terrible financial mess and Kerim left the priest to absorb his own obvious disappointment for a moment before he spoke again. ‘Father Diogenes, do you know if any of the old Greek families in the city are related to the last Byzantine dynasty?’

  ‘The Palaiologi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He smiled. ‘I could ask you why you want to know such a thing, but I won’t, because I imagine you won’t tell me,’ he said. ‘And because the answer is absolutely no. They all died during the conquest, and those who were abroad at the time died out not much later. Rumours of Byzantium’s demise, Sergeant, are not exaggerated.’

  Only the details involving spies were alien to Ömer. What had happened to the Greeks in 1955 was like the stories he’d heard whispered in his grandparents’ house in Mardin round the fire in winter. Stories about people who were ‘other’, and how that had worked against them. Started in response to a rumour that Greeks had attacked Ataturk’s old house in Salonika in Greece, hunting the ‘other’ had become the thing to do on İstiklal Caddesi for two insane days in September 1955. Businesses had been looted, women raped and people killed. Accounts of priests being forcibly circumcised made Ömer’s stomach muscles tighten. In the scheme of things, this had only happened a short time ago and there were people still living who remembered it.

  In a way he wanted to share these old, yellowing records with one person and one person alone, Peri. But he knew he wasn’t allowed to do that and he also knew that she was much more volatile than he. If Peri read these papers she’d want to go and shout at people in the street. She
’d grab hold of every man over seventy and ask him if he’d been involved.

  Just one example was that of the Mavroyeni family. They’d had a jeweller’s shop almost opposite the Galatasaray Lise. On the first day of the riots two of the female assistants had been raped, the owner Konstantine Mavroyeni had died of a heart attack and the shop had been stripped. However, because all the incidents had been witnessed by Turks who tried to help their Greek neighbours as well as by foreigners, everything that had happened was well documented. And when, in 1961, the Prime Minister at the time of the riots, Adnan Menderes, had been put on trial for violating the constitution as well as instituting actions against the İstanbul Greeks, every detail had been pored over. This included who had been injured by the mob, who had died and who was missing. The last category contained no names except that of a child under one year old. Yiannis Negroponte had disappeared from the back of his parents’ tailoring shop. But Yiannis wasn’t the man in the Lise garden. Nor was his father, Nikos, who had been killed and whose body lay in Şişli Greek Orthodox cemetery.

  Ömer felt a twinge of disappointment. If the body wasn’t Greek then identifying it was going to be difficult. So far, old murder cases from the time had also yielded bodies that had been identified. A spy had to be a possibility, which had a frisson about it, but which was almost impossible to follow up. Some spies had been in the country legally, but under false names, others had got in illegally. The author of the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming, had been in the city at the time and he had worked for British Intelligence. But the body wasn’t his. Whose was it?

  Only a Cem Atasu, a man of around the right age who had been reported missing in 1954, even remotely fitted the profile. But he’d had rickets and so it wasn’t him. In spite of everything, Ömer held on to the idea that the body in the Lise had to be Greek. Was it possible that the body was that of a Greek man who had no family? There weren’t many Greeks living in İstanbul any more; most had moved out post-1955. But they existed and Ömer knew he could track them down. If no one else, then Inspector İkmen would know where they were. He knew everyone. But it was tricky. Not only was İkmen busy with the death of, coincidentally, a Greek, he and Ömer’s boss Mehmet Süleyman were not really communicating. Speaking to İkmen would have to be something Ömer did when he was alone.

  As his men began to drive their vehicles away from the front of the Negroponte house, Ahmet Öden seethed. In retrospect he should have gone higher than Commissioner Teker. It was well known that she was no friend to people like him. But he had imagined that his name would frighten her. It hadn’t. Now he’d have to do something else. The idea had crystallised when he’d been talking to Çetin İkmen. Although he hadn’t imagined he’d have to actually use it.

  The first part was relatively easy. He’d wait for the retainer to go out and then he’d speak to Negroponte through his gates if necessary. He’d be awfully conciliatory. Getting to the old woman, however, would be another matter. That would take planning.

  Chapter 9

  Gezi was exploding. Nar Hanım and Madonna had been there all day and Nar had phoned to tell her all about it.

  ‘Pembe Hanım, you have to come here,’ she’d said. ‘They’re giving out gas masks and everyone you can think of is in Gezi. There are some gorgeous young men . . .’

  But Pembe hadn’t been able to leave Sinem. When she’d woken that morning, just after Kerim left for work, she’d been in a bad way. Although she’d slept all night, it had been a drugged sleep which had left her feeling sick. She hadn’t eaten all day. Kerim wouldn’t be pleased.

  Pembe poured herself a glass of wine and sat in front of the television.

  ‘Why isn’t there anything on the news about Gezi?’ Sinem said.

  She was even paler than usual and her cheeks were dark and hollow.

  ‘You know who controls the media,’ Pembe said. ‘Why do you even have to ask?’

  ‘Because I hoped that maybe I was having a bad dream.’ She shrugged. ‘Do you think that these protests will change things?’

  In districts like Şişli and Cihangir people had started coming out at night in support of the protesters. Housewives banging pots and pans, old men waving pictures of Ataturk. There were rumours of other protests in other parts of the city, and extra police were being drafted in from all over the country. But they were up against the State, a freely elected and legitimate government.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Pembe said. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘They might draft Kerim in. That’s what worries me. He will feel torn.’

  ‘Kerim Bey knew what he was doing when he joined the police,’ Pembe said. ‘Even if he does get drafted to Gezi, he’ll do what’s right. You know that. But he’s working on the death of that woman who was pregnant.’

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘Some Greek.’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’

  ‘Yes.’ She lit a cigarette.

  Sinem looked sad. It was more than the pain. She had that all the time.

  ‘He cares for you more than anyone, you know that, don’t you, Sinem?’

  As her face lost weight Sinem’s eyes were beginning to look huge. She had the appearance of someone young and yet very old at the same time. Pembe often found it hard to look at her these days.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But you know it’s not enough.’

  ‘If you mean what I think you mean then that could be taken care of. Easily.’

  There was some kids’ programme on TV involving weird, brightly coloured balls of fur.

  ‘I’d like to be in love,’ Sinem said. A red fur ball screamed and a yellow one laughed. ‘I’d like to know how that feels.’

  And before she could stop herself, Pembe said, ‘Wouldn’t we all, darling.’ And then she realised what she’d said and she lowered her head.

  ‘I knew nothing of this,’ Professor Bozdağ said.

  Sitting in İkmen’s office he looked far less venerable than he had when they’d first met at Arto Sarkissian’s laboratory. He was also tired – it was late – and he was upset.

  ‘Constantine Palaiologos died with his troops when Mehmet the Conqueror took the city,’ he continued. ‘His body was never found. Why would Dr Savva suddenly and miraculously dig it up and have DNA she could compare it with? It’s a fantasy.’

  ‘Not according to Dr Akyıldız, the forensic archaeologist,’ İkmen said.

  ‘And what was she doing concealing what Savva had found? That isn’t professional. What did she have to say for herself?’

  ‘Only what I told you,’ İkmen said. ‘Dr Savva believed that the body she had found was that of the last Byzantine emperor. But she wanted to be absolutely sure about that before she presented her evidence to you and the rest of the department.’

  ‘Akyıldız should have come to me as soon as Savva approached her.’

  ‘This meant a lot to Ariadne Savva.’

  ‘Of course! And she was trying to keep all the glory for herself!’ He shook his head.

  İkmen’s late father had been an academic. As a child Çetin had seen his father’s colleagues figuratively stab each other in the back many times. He recognised the form that the professor’s rage was taking. Ariadne Savva had tried to hold on to what would have become Bozdağ’s ‘find’ had she told him. And by doing a DNA comparison to boot she had clearly been planning to present him with a fait accompli. She may even have gone on to publish a paper if the body had proved to be that of Constantine Palaiologos. But how could that be?

  ‘All the Palaiologi died.’ Bozdağ’s words mirrored İkmen’s thoughts.

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen said. ‘Although I imagine there must be descendants somewhere. You probably heard about the case of that English king where a relative was discovered in Australia or somewhere . . .’

  ‘Richard III, yes,’ the professor said. ‘Mmm. That was a long shot. But is it the exception that proves the rule? As far as we know the last Palaiologos died in Barbados in the seventeenth century, without iss
ue.’

  ‘Perhaps Ariadne Savva knew different.’

  ‘Well if she did then she should have shared that information with her colleagues.’ His face reddened. ‘Her particular interest had always been expanding knowledge about the life of the Empress Zoe, as far as I was concerned. Had I known I couldn’t trust the wretched woman I would never have employed her.’

  ‘Well, we will never know,’ İkmen said. ‘But Professor, I will have to re-interview your staff in light of this new information. It’s possible someone else knew about Ariadne’s find.’

  ‘Whoever made her pregnant!’ he snapped.

  ‘That could be the case, yes.’

  What sounded like the march of a Roman battalion out in the corridor made speech temporarily impossible. It went on: the scraping of riot shields against the walls, the clicking sound of plastic bullets being loaded. İkmen watched the professor shudder and only just managed to conceal his own antipathy.

  When the many boots had passed he said, ‘I am told they are reinforcements from Mersin.’

  ‘For Gezi?’

  ‘That is my understanding,’ İkmen said.

  The professor was looking into his eyes and İkmen returned his gaze. They both knew what the other was thinking although neither of them acknowledged it. But when the professor left, İkmen did offer him an escort back to his home in Nişantaşı.

  ‘You have to go past Gezi,’ he said, ‘it may be dangerous.’

  ‘In what way?’ Bozdağ said. ‘You think kids and fellow academics are going to have at me with knives?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘No, I didn’t think so either,’ he said. ‘I think I would be at far greater risk from your men from Mersin, don’t you?’

  Peri was soaked. But, unlike the woman she’d seen lifted off her feet by a jet of water from the TOMA cannon, she wasn’t bruised. And it was preferable to the tear gas which had made her fear her eyes might melt.