On the Bone Read online

  ‘Celal Vural is a rabbi?’

  He laughed. ‘No, sir, but his father was a Jew, and what’s more, he was Ashkenazi.’

  ‘Interesting.’ İkmen lit a cigarette.

  ‘The family’s original surname was Bronstein,’ Ömer said. ‘Celal’s father came to Turkey as a refugee from Germany during the Second World War. Once here, he changed his name, his religion and his past.’

  ‘A lot of Jews fleeing the camps did that,’ İkmen said.

  ‘And he was old when Celal was born,’ Ömer said. ‘He died soon after that, so Celal was brought up by his Turkish mother, Bronstein’s second wife.’

  ‘How sad.’

  ‘How typical,’ Peri said. ‘Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing. It is sad, Cetin Bey, it’s also terrifying. If people can’t be honest about who they are—’

  ‘Mrs Vural says there are some papers relating to her father-in-law in her husband’s possession but she can’t read German,’ Ömer said.

  He’d cut very rudely across his sister. He usually showed her a great deal of respect. Why had he done that?

  ‘I speak German,’ İkmen said. ‘But if Mr Bronstein did have Bloom syndrome, it’s unlikely he would have known about it. I looked it up, and it wasn’t discovered until the 1950s. And anyway Vural only went missing on Saturday night so the timings don’t work unless his wife is lying, which is unlikely. But then if our victim is a relative of Vural’s … Are there photographs?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ömer said.

  ‘I’ll go and see her.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Peri Mungun finished her gin and tonic quickly and with a furious expression on her face. It didn’t disappear when she asked her brother for another drink.

  ‘And make it a large one,’ she said as she handed him her empty glass.

  Ömer said nothing.

  They hadn’t touched each other for decades. Defne Baydar had only stayed with him because he’d been to prison and because she believed he was innocent. How could he be anything else if he was her husband? She didn’t even like him. And now she was angry with him too.

  ‘The effrontery of it!’ she said. ‘Coming here asking whether my brother was a Jew!’

  The major general said nothing.

  ‘If it wasn’t for you, the police would never have asked such a question!’

  Still he didn’t reply.

  ‘Deniz Bey!’

  ‘What?’ Finally he looked at her. ‘I don’t know why the police would ask you whether your brother was Jewish. Why would I know that? I wasn’t here!’

  ‘No, you were getting drunk with Abdullah Bey …’

  ‘Because he buried his son today,’ her husband said. ‘You know, a child? Something you could never give me …’

  She tried not to react, but she failed. A sound like a growl came out of her mouth.

  ‘Oh don’t spit your poison at me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why the police asked you anything about Volkan. I thought they’d stopped looking for him months ago.’

  ‘Apparently not. Apparently even they care more than you do!’

  ‘And since when were you so concerned?’ he said. ‘You were the one who locked him in his room whenever we had guests. No wonder he got as far away from here as he could, whenever he could.’

  ‘We don’t know where my brother has gone, or even if he’s alive.’

  ‘No, because you’re too busy worrying about inane questions from policemen to go out and look for him.’

  ‘I have looked for him,’ she said. ‘Why do you think I go out every day scouring the parks?’

  He shook his head. ‘Because you’ve nothing better to do?’

  ‘I wish you’d just die, and I do mean that,’ she said.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Anyway, you should be grateful I didn’t tell him about you.’

  ‘What about me, Defne?’ he said. ‘Going to give him a list of affairs I’ve had with other women? An account of my drinking habits? Your so-called fear for my sanity?’

  ‘You talk such nonsense!’

  ‘Ach!’ He waved a dismissive hand.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she blurted out, ‘I could’ve told him about your mother.’

  ‘My mother?’ He leaned forward and spoke into her face. ‘My mother is dead. She never liked you. What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Your mother was a Jew!’ she yelled. ‘Not my brother! Not me! Your mother!’

  Major General Baydar raised his hands in a gesture of exasperation. ‘Oh for God’s sake, Defne, how many times do I have to tell you? My mother was Austrian.’

  ‘An Austrian Jew! What was her name?’

  ‘You know what it was!’

  ‘Bergfeld,’ she said. ‘Berg-feld.’ She snapped her fingers in his face. ‘Jewish!’

  Deniz Baydar stood. ‘One more time, Defne,’ he said. ‘And only one more. My mother’s father, Heinrich Bergfeld, was seconded to the Ottoman Army in 1915. He was a Christian. Her mother was a Turkish Muslim from Antep. My mother was not a Jew …’

  ‘And yet you believe lies about our ancestors!’

  ‘What lies?’ he said. ‘If you mean do I believe that our ancestors caused the deaths of over a million Armenians, then you’re talking nonsense. I do not. Don’t accuse me of that!’

  She waved a hand across her face. ‘No, not that! I mean the rubbish you talk with your friends about how our forebears did things, terrible things …’

  ‘Oh, you mean the fact that the early Anatolians were bloodthirsty pagans who worshipped idols and murdered people? They did. It’s how they survived. Those were tough times – just like now.’

  Defne Baydar shuddered. Her husband, though not a traitor, often talked about ancient Anatolia and how their ancestors had committed barbarous acts. She didn’t want to hear it. As far as she was concerned, her ancestors were nice law-abiding Muslims who occasionally drank alcohol and never had sex outside marriage. She was not alone in this belief. A lot of people subscribed to the notion of saintly forebears. Just not her husband.

  She walked towards the door. As she left the room, she heard him say, ‘At least our ancestors got laid without guilt.’

  Chapter 12

  ‘Oh dear.’

  Meltem and Ahu were used to just walking into Zenne Gül’s bedroom. He never had anyone with him, but he was sometimes hung-over. This was one of those occasions.

  Meltem put a glass of water down beside the bed. ‘I’m sorry, Gül,’ she said, ‘but you don’t look fabulous this morning.’

  ‘Then why did you wake me?’

  Actually he did look cute, even if he reeked of alcohol. Zenne Gül was, in many ways, the brother Meltem had never had.

  ‘Because Ziya and Bülent are going to knock down the old bathhouse behind the kitchen today,’ she said. ‘The noise and the dust are going to be terrible. The boys want us out by ten.’

  ‘Ten!’ He looked at his clock. It was already nine. He flopped back on to the bed. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the bathhouse is falling down,’ Meltem said.

  ‘No. Why is it happening so early?’

  ‘To get it done in one day, I imagine.’

  ‘God!’

  He put a hand over his eyes.

  ‘You can stay here if you want,’ Meltem said. ‘But they’re going to use power tools and so it’ll be loud and really dusty.’

  Gül sipped some water. ‘But where shall I go? What are you doing? Are you at college today?’

  ‘No. Ahu and I thought we’d go to Yıldız Park and have a picnic. You can come too if you want.’

  He didn’t look impressed. The outdoors wasn’t really Zenne Gül’s thing. But he said, ‘As long as I can lie down.’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t see why not.’

  He flopped back on his pillows again. ‘And we must get a taxi. I’ll pay. I made good tips last night.’

  ‘Then I won’t say no,’ Meltem said.

  ‘I
should think not, young lady.’

  Halide Can was one of those women who had a naturally sallow complexion. Now she also had dark purple circles underneath her eyes, which made her look ill. Cetin İkmen indicated that she should sit.

  ‘You look tired, if you don’t mind my saying,’ he said.

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve never worked so hard in my life.’

  He smiled. ‘One of my sons worked in a professional kitchen when he was a student. His mother used to wait up for him to come home so that she could make up a bowl of lavender water for his feet.’

  ‘I must remember to do that,’ Can said. ‘But I’m not here to talk about my feet …’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t see Myskow last night. But I did find out that he sometimes hosts private dinners for selected guests in one of the conference rooms. It’s on the first floor, and there’s another kitchen up there, which is where he goes to prepare and cook these meals.’

  ‘Do you know who comes to these private dinners?’

  ‘Men who Aysel says make some of the girls feel uncomfortable whenever they walk through the main kitchen.’

  İkmen considered whether young women were the only weakness these men had. Sequestered away from the main restaurant with experimental chef Myskow, they could be doing anything. Maybe eating anything.

  ‘Local?’

  ‘Turkish. Some are apparently celebrities. But no names were mentioned. I have to be careful what I say even to Aysel, so I didn’t push it. But nothing like that was on last night. It was just the main restaurant service. I did find out that Celal Vural was not popular with the management, though.’

  ‘We know he didn’t get on with his manager, Ali Buyuk.’

  ‘One of the waiters told me that Vural tended to be a bit mouthy.’

  İkmen frowned. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘It sounds like he’s a bit of a socialist,’ she said. ‘Very keen on getting people to unionise.’

  ‘I don’t suppose that went down well.’

  ‘He’d been up on a disciplinary, but that was some months ago. Lately, apparently, he’d toned it down. They know what we know.’

  ‘That he’s missing?’

  ‘Yes. The day he disappeared, he did his shift as usual and said he was going home. What I did see was a group of incongruous men who sat at a table in the restaurant away from everyone else. They were dressed very casually, and if you’d asked me, I would’ve been inclined to say they were undercover cops.’

  ‘Would you?’ İkmen thought he knew who they were, which was not a million miles away from Can’s observation. Or Arto Sarkissian’s.

  ‘Aysel reckons they come often.’

  ‘Do they eat?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And they’re very quiet. Looking at them, I’d expect them to be noisy and drink lots of beer, but they don’t drink at all.’

  If they were on duty, which they almost certainly were, they wouldn’t drink.

  ‘Did you see the freezers?’

  ‘I saw them, but I didn’t have any reason to go anywhere near them,’ she said. ‘I’ll try to have a look tonight. But all my job consists of is washing up, sweeping the floor and cleaning down after the chefs. It’s constant. Service begins and it’s chaos until it finishes.’

  ‘Then what happens?’

  ‘Then I have to clean up. There’s three of us. Me, Zerrin, who is an older lady and the mother of a friend of Myskow’s – don’t know who – and a student called Birce. The cooking staff go out the back for a smoke; the cleaners try to go but don’t always make it. I’ll see if I can have a look around tonight, but I had to work myself in first, sir.’

  ‘Of course. You did the right thing,’ İkmen said. ‘If you’d gone digging around in freezers when you didn’t need to, it would have looked odd. In the meantime, I have some news for you, which is that Celal Vural was, or is, half Jewish.’

  ‘Oh. So’s Myskow.’

  ‘Yes, I know, and so is our unknown victim,’ İkmen said. ‘It may mean nothing and it may mean everything, I really don’t know. But you should be aware of it.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Hopefully I will find out more later today when I go and see Mrs Vural. And you should go home and rest up for your shift tonight.’

  There had been spite behind the old woman’s words. It was entirely irrelevant whether or not her husband’s mother had been Jewish, and yet she seemed to have delighted in making a special phone call to tell him.

  Kerim remembered when her husband had been arrested, but there hadn’t been anything in the press about Jewish antecedents. And given that Deniz Baydar had been up on charges of treason, it would almost certainly have been common knowledge. Kerim wrote a quick note about it and then went back to the photograph Süleyman had given him.

  Although according to his father, the imam, the photograph of Burak was a year or more out of date, Kerim doubted whether the kid had changed much in that time. Small, thin and wearing a straggly beard, he was an unsmiling youth by the look of him. He also wore a lot of clothes. Religious kids did tend to, but Burak Ayan looked as if he was kitted out for winter. Maybe he was. But the picture was bright and full of sunshine.

  Inspector Süleyman had told the boy’s father that there was nothing they could do to try and get him back, but Kerim had been told to circulate this picture to police and jandarma posts near the borders with Iraq and Syria. He suspected that Süleyman felt sorry for the old imam and so felt obliged to do something even if it was futile. Kids like Burak Ayan were trying to get to the caliphate every day. Stopping them was difficult largely because ISIS had handlers all over Europe and the Middle East who were skilled at getting the youngsters to the front line.

  At forty, Kerim Gürsel was hardly an old man, but he’d seen the world change out of all recognition. On a personal level he’d seen acceptance of gay lifestyles grow in Turkey to the extent that, at one time, he’d almost felt able to come out in public. Sinem had shared those feelings. But then, almost out of the blue, conservative voices had begun to attract attention – and power. Of course this hadn’t really happened out of the blue at all. With sectarian violence endemic in neighbouring Iraq, and the devastating arrival on the international scene of al-Qaeda in 2001, new forces had been rising for some time. None of them tolerated homosexuals.

  Why were kids like Burak Ayan attracted to such illiberal ideologies? When Kerim had been that boy’s age, he’d been ragingly left wing. Why would anyone want less freedom? But then he looked at the photograph again. A small boy in thick, shabby clothes clutching his puppy. Neither of the Ayan brothers had been able to find a job. And so, decent upbringing aside, what did they have to look forward to?

  The reality was that the boys had been an easy mark for the extremist recruiters. The caliphate had probably given them something to live for even if it had sent Mustafa to his death. They would never get Burak home.

  Radwan watched the imam. He was sure the old man didn’t see him. But Azzam did.

  ‘You should tell Imam Ayan what you did,’ he whispered. ‘Only then will you feel at peace with yourself.’

  But Radwan was scared. If the imam knew what he’d said to his boys, he’d kill him.

  ‘I don’t speak Turkish,’ Radwan said.

  ‘But the imam speaks Arabic,’ Azzam said. ‘You know this. The boys’ mother was Syrian.’

  Radwan began to sweat. Who was this boy and why did he keep bothering him?

  ‘Go away!’

  Azzam laughed. ‘If you don’t tell the imam, then I will.’

  ‘Why? What business is it of yours?’

  He wanted to tell him to fuck off, but he didn’t dare. Azzam was bigger than he was, and there was no one else in the park. It was midday and hot and the whole area looked dead.

  ‘Why do I think you should tell the imam?’ Azzam swung from a tree branch and then dropped expertly to the ground. ‘Well, it’s the right thing to do,’ he said. ‘And I know that you made it al
l up and so you do need to be punished. But most of all I think you should tell him because you were with Burak and Mustafa on the day they went missing. I saw you. You came back alone. Did you watch them get on a bus to the Syrian border? If you did, you should tell their father. He cries all the time now, just like I did when I had to come to this country without my family.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything to your family! Leave me alone!’

  ‘Making you feel guilty?’

  He was. Radwan knew he should have been to see the imam as soon as he’d realised the boys had gone off somewhere. Except that all this business about Syria was nonsense. The boys had been taken by the weirdos in the squat. He’d been trying to get them out so that their father didn’t have to. But he’d failed. He knew that the imam would go crazy at him when he found out, but what choice did he have? If he didn’t do something, then Azzam would, and if that happened, the imam would probably kill him.

  ‘My husband wasn’t a real Jew, bey efendi.’

  The woman’s apologetic demeanour made Ömer Mungun cringe. If Peri had been with him, she would have screamed. But Cetin İkmen was more conciliatory, at least on the surface.

  ‘Nobody is saying that your husband is a Jew, Selma Hanım,’ he said. ‘Not that being a Jew is a bad thing. It isn’t. But you told Sergeant Mungun yourself that his father was.’

  Selma Vural sat down. ‘Yes.’

  She had some papers in her hand. Two of her children clung to her legs as she sweated in the heat of one of the hottest days of the year. The poor woman had to be worried. Alone, she couldn’t pay the rent or even feed her kids.

  She showed the papers to İkmen. ‘I don’t know what these are,’ she said. ‘My husband said they were in German.’

  ‘I can speak German, let me see.’

  İkmen sat opposite the woman. She placed the papers in his hands. ‘There’s a photograph as well,’ she said.

  İkmen scanned the documents and the photograph while Ömer looked over his shoulder. According to his co-workers, Celal had been something of a socialist, which was no wonder given where he lived. Just minutes from upmarket Etiler, the Vurals’ apartment block was a run-down sewage-scented disgrace.