On the Bone Page 13

  İkmen said, ‘Your father-in-law was Leo Bronstein, born 1910 in Berlin. His father was a goldsmith and so I imagine the family were well off. This,’ he held up a yellowing document, ‘is a letter of recommendation to the University of Berlin from a Herr Doktor Stahl. Seems Leo wanted to study medicine. Dated 1930. I’m assuming that as a Jew, he didn’t get the chance.’

  ‘He wasn’t a doctor,’ Selma said. ‘Celal said he worked on the ferries.’

  ‘Yes, well one does what one can when one is a refugee. And then there’s this …’

  He held up a photograph of a thin, dark young man with a prominent nose and thick glasses.

  ‘Celal is tall, like his mother and one of his brothers,’ Selma Vural said. ‘His father was small.’

  ‘His brother who works in a nargile salon?’ Ikmen said.

  ‘Oh no, another one,’ she said. ‘Celal said he died.’

  Once outside the building, the two men looked at the photograph of Leo Bronstein more closely. Street kids tried to see what they were doing, but they shooed them away.

  İkmen said, ‘Bloom sufferers don’t tend to live long lives. But Leo was seventy-five when he died.’

  ‘Celal is tall,’ Ömer said.

  ‘As a carrier, he can be. If he’s a carrier. His mother was tall … His supposedly dead brother … But the fact remains that Celal disappeared on the Saturday night, so the timings don’t work,’ İkmen said. ‘And yet he has Ashkenazi antecedents, which is rare in this city. There was also some money in Celal Vural’s family at one time. Looking at the shit hole they live in, it makes me wonder whether they could be entitled to reparation from the German government. They must have owned property in Berlin.’

  ‘But Leo left all that behind,’ Ömer said. ‘People do. To forget is the only way forward. Sometimes.’

  ‘I know. I just think that that poor woman doesn’t need to live like that.’

  Ömer knew that İkmen was proud of his working-class roots, but he had less understanding about what it was to be part of a displaced minority. Discrimination could rot a person’s soul and make them cower into the comfort of any new situation that appeared to be benign. Or it could make a Peri Mungun. He wondered what she’d told her new employers about her background. Was there a reason other than professional development why she had applied to an Armenian hospital?

  İkmen sighed. ‘We won’t be able to tell whether Leo had Bloom syndrome just from this photograph,’ he said. ‘Go back inside and ask Selma Hanım if she has her husband’s hairbrush and whether she’ll lend it to us. Our budget will protest, but now I don’t think we have a choice. Vural is missing. DNA can’t be put off any longer.’

  Chapter 13

  The building looked weird without the little domed bathhouse outside the kitchen. In recent years it had been used mainly for storage and had contained a very antiquated chest freezer. That now sat in the garden, surrounded by rubble.

  Ziya the biker looked ripped in just a pair of jeans, a cement cutter in one big tanned fist. Bülent looked less impressive, but the girls just ignored him.

  ‘Why’d you have to knock it down?’ Ahu asked. ‘It was old, wasn’t it? Aren’t there laws about demolishing things?’

  ‘What, in a squat?’ Ziya laughed. He had very white teeth for a man who smoked so many cigarettes. ‘This place has been up for total demo for months. Uğur Bey reckoned it was unsafe. We had rats in there. And now that we’ve got kids in the place, who can have that going on?’

  ‘It fell down easily. All we did really was push it,’ Bülent said.

  Zenne Gül saw Ziya give Bülent an evil stare. Easy demolition didn’t sit well with Ziya’s macho image.

  ‘What about the freezer?’ Meltem asked.

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘We’ll sell it,’ Bülent said.

  ‘Does it still work?’

  Meltem had never had anything to do with anything in the old bathhouse.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s locked,’ Ziya said.

  Meltem frowned. ‘You can’t leave it unplugged like that,’ she said. ‘It’ll rot.’

  Ziya drew himself up to his full height. ‘I know that.’

  ‘We’re going to plug it in through the kitchen window,’ Bülent said.

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘Look, we’re selling it, Ahu Hanım, it’s OK.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do.’

  But when the two boys went indoors, the three friends looked at each other with raised eyebrows.

  ‘They’ve made a real mess out here,’ Gül said as he surveyed the rubble-strewn garden. ‘I think I’d rather have the rats.’

  Sometimes Gül liked to sunbathe in the small garden. Now, at least temporarily, that was going to be impossible.

  ‘If there were rats,’ Meltem said.

  Ahu frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, did you ever see any?’ her friend asked.

  They wanted to come again so soon! Boris had dreaded it from the start, but now he’d had the police sniffing around, it made him even more nervous. And only one of them could speak English well.

  He’d made his misgivings known to Ibrahim, who had answered that all would be well.

  Boris Myskow thought the Turks were weird. In retrospect, he regretted buying the Imperial Oriental Hotel. But it had seemed so glamorous at the time! Istanbul had definitely been the next frontier in gastronomy. The whole place was literally hungry for new and exciting food experiences. What Boris hadn’t realised was that at least half the population were very picky about what they ate. He knew that Arabs, just like Jews, didn’t eat pork, but he’d thought that Turks did. He’d soon found out that they didn’t, and that wasn’t a tragedy. He’d worked around the ban just as he worked around the way that not everybody drank wine. But then he’d discovered that not everything was what it seemed in the land of the Turk, period. And not so long ago, he’d had the police at his door.

  Ibrahim had laughed when he’d told him that nothing had actually happened. He’d said that because of his private guests, it couldn’t. It was impossible. But it had shaken Boris. When his first private guests started coming, he’d been happy to accommodate them. But then Ibrahim and his boys had come along too, and Boris had felt overwhelmed. If only he’d been able to get his head around the language! People spoke and he didn’t know what they were talking about. All he knew was that these men were vital to his professional survival. He just cooked.

  That was what he told himself.

  The imam looked at the boy through eyes full of tears. ‘What do you want me to say to you?’ he asked.

  The child, Radwan, didn’t speak. Imam Ayan had seen him with his sons in the cistern park. They’d told him the boy was a refugee, but he’d never asked them for any more information. And now here he was, giving him hope or talking malicious nonsense. How could he know which?

  ‘I know nothing of this squat,’ the old man said. ‘What is it?’

  The boy shrugged.

  ‘And where? I have to know where it is if you’re telling me my sons are there.’

  ‘It’s by the water,’ Radwan said.

  ‘What water? Where?’

  ‘I can take you …’

  ‘Take me where? You don’t know where anything is!’

  He saw the boy cringe. Only God knew what the child had been through in his own country. When people shouted, maybe it brought it all back. The imam lowered his voice.

  ‘Radwan,’ he said, ‘the police have traced a call that Burak made to me. It was from Syria. I know you are wrong about my boys being in this squat. But I have to check out everything. Do you understand? I am their father.’

  ‘I will take you.’

  The boy Azzam, who the imam knew was a thief, had brought Radwan to his door. He’d said that the child knew where Burak and Mustafa had gone. He’d clearly been expecting some sort of monetary reward, but Imam Ayan had sent him away empty-handed. At some point he’d be back and he’d
take something from the house or the garden, but the imam didn’t really care.

  ‘Take me to this place,’ the old man said.

  ‘It was the last place I saw the boys,’ Radwan said.

  ‘If you are lying, I will punish you.’

  ‘I know.’

  The old man stood. ‘That boy Azzam told me that you talked to my sons about ISIS.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you encouraged my sons to worship them.’

  ‘They liked them,’ Radwan said. ‘They wanted to be fighters. I just told them stories. I didn’t tell them that I’d run away from ISIS.’

  The imam looked down at the child and sighed. ‘You lied to them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  General Abdullah Kavaş wasn’t proud of himself. This was the second day he’d been drunk. He’d started even before his son was in the ground. The imam who had led the prayers had noticed, he was sure. He’d looked down his nose at the whole affair. But the general didn’t care. His son was gone and his life was over. Who gave a damn if he drank himself to death?

  All the old fossils had come out to bury Ümit. Admirals, brigadiers, generals. Their careers finished, their names discredited, when they all walked through the cemetery it had been like a parade of the condemned. It had been good of Ümit’s friend Cengiz to come. He had troubles of his own. Also his views were not the same as those of the general. Cengiz Tanır felt that Ümit’s friends from the squat should have been invited. He hadn’t been alone in that view.

  Deniz Baydar had brought a bottle of whisky to the apartment. Belgin had almost thrown him, and it, out. But a civilised exterior had to be maintained, and so Deniz Baydar had attended the funeral and then come back to the apartment, where he’d got drunk. Like most of the men. Now that he was out of prison, Abdullah was supposed to be serious and meticulous about his religious observance. Belgin even covered her head when she went out sometimes. But Abdullah had stopped caring the moment he heard that Ümit had died. Was that really less than a week ago?

  Liberal and soft, his son had hardly been a credit to him, but he had been his only child. General Kavaş drank another glass of whisky. He’d died of natural causes, but how could his death have been truly natural with what he’d had in his stomach?

  No one had said a thing, but Abdullah knew where the blame lay.

  He looked at the pile of newspapers on his desk. Full of terrifying conspiracies juxtaposed with inane celebrity gossip. What was happening? Was everyone in the world becoming insane? He wanted nothing to do with it, or with his wife, who had gone to stay with her cousin in Ayvalık. Everyone had betrayed him. Just as he, in his turn, had betrayed his son.

  ‘Do you know anyone at the Jewish hospital in Balat?’

  Peri looked up. Her evening meal lay in front of her, hardly touched, and she was smoking. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you know we have an interest in Bloom syndrome …’

  ‘I know a Pink Angel,’ she said.

  He frowned. Sometimes it was difficult to know which conversations were strictly real and which sprang from a belief system that was alien to everyone outside a few families from the area around Mardin called the Tur Abdin. In common with the Christians of the area, Peri and Ömer’s native language was Aramaic. Like their Muslim neighbours, they were deeply religious, and they revered the sun, as did the sect called the Yezidis. But they gave their hearts to a deity called the Şarmeran, the snake goddess, whom they, with their parents, had both seen on the Mesopotamian Plain, where man and god had first made contact. It was not something they spoke about to others, and it was this silence that divided them from the rest of the city.

  ‘You should try and do something for your own people occasionally,’ she said. ‘Jews and Christians are protected.’

  ‘In law, yes,’ he said. ‘But you know how things are at the moment. Young men leaving to join radical groups every day. I wish our parents would come here.’

  ‘Why should they?’ Peri put her cigarette out and lit another.

  ‘I wish you’d eat.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject! ISIS are nowhere near Mardin,’ she said. ‘And it is Mum and Dad’s home. You know why they stay.’

  ‘There are Syrian refugee camps …’

  ‘Yes, they’re nearby and I know you fear that they may harbour radicals. They might, but what can we do about it? Until people like us can be ourselves …’

  ‘We never can.’

  She shook her head. ‘Until there is recognition that we even exist, nothing will improve. We need to stand up, join with the Yezidis and maybe even the Christians and fight.’

  ‘So why do you work in an Armenian hospital in Istanbul, then?’ he said. ‘Why aren’t you on the front line with the Yezidi militias?’

  ‘I ask myself that every day,’ Peri said. ‘More so since Gezi. But you can’t support Mum and Dad on your own. You’d have no money for yourself.’

  Ömer put his fork down on his plate. Suddenly bulgur wheat and lamb chops looked unappealing.

  ‘Dad is not going to get better,’ Peri said. ‘He needs his medication, and his condition has to be monitored.’

  ‘He can get treatment here.’

  ‘Yes, but he doesn’t want to come here. Neither of them do. Why should they be separated from their culture? Why should they have to lie?’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘We chose to,’ she said.

  They sat in silence. Then Peri said, ‘So what’s this about the Jewish hospital?’

  ‘It’s a long shot, because most of their patients are Sephardic Jews,’ Ömer said. ‘This genetic disorder, Bloom syndrome, affects Ashkenazis. But most of them left the country a long time ago.’

  ‘You want to know if there’s anyone at the Or-Ahayim Hospital who has this disorder.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So ask. You’re the police.’

  ‘It’s a problem.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘What we’re investigating isn’t straightforward,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you any more than that.’

  Peri had been in the dark about Ömer’s work before. She’d never got used to it. When they were kids, they’d shared everything. It was what had kept them strong.

  She shrugged. ‘I’ll speak to Rosa. As it’s you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘But don’t hold out too much hope. She’s not a doctor or a nurse,’ Peri said.

  ‘What is she then?’ her brother asked.

  ‘I told you, she’s a Pink Angel.’

  He’d heard about this place. A squat called the Art House. Full of intellectuals and, some said, atheists. Why would Burak and Mustafa spend time at such a place? Imam Ayan looked at Radwan and said, ‘I don’t understand. Why did you all come here?’

  The boy, who was probably damaged beyond repair, was extremely frustrating to talk to.

  ‘Radwan!’

  Barely clad young people danced outside a bar across the street, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and talking loudly. It was almost midnight, but Karaköy was humming with noise and colour.

  ‘We used to throw stones,’ Radwan said.

  ‘At that building?’

  ‘And shout at people. They’re all infidels.’

  Imam Ayan had never liked that word, ‘infidel’. People had used it about his Zanubiya, even when she was dying. People never forgot …

  ‘Well what you have told me has made me ashamed,’ he said. ‘If those people had thrashed the lot of you, I wouldn’t have blamed them.’

  ‘This is where I last saw Burak and Mustafa,’ the boy said. ‘They told me to go round the back of that bar, and when I returned, they had gone.’

  The imam looked at the brightly lit bar again. ‘Why did you go to the back of this place? Were you stealing?’

  ‘No! They throw food away,’ Radwan said. ‘It’s a sin. The boys were hungry.’

  ‘Were they?’ The picture this child was painting of his sons was not one that Imam Ayan liked.r />
  ‘I went and I found cakes. But when I came back, they’d gone. I looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find them.’

  ‘And this you interpret as evidence that the people in that house killed my Mustafa.’

  ‘The last time I saw him—’

  ‘Yes, was outside a house where the three of you had misbehaved,’ the imam said. ‘I accept that you looked for my boys, but you couldn’t ask anyone because you don’t speak Turkish. And the fact remains that Burak called me from Syria.’

  ‘Maybe they killed Mustafa …’

  ‘And maybe they did not.’

  ‘One of the men had a baseball bat!’

  Green and pink light from a sound system lit up the boy’s eyes, which were not fanatical but were in what looked like shock.

  ‘Radwan, my boys went to Syria,’ the imam said. ‘They tricked you into looking for food and then they left.’

  ‘Yes, but you must tell the police …’

  ‘Oh, I will. I will.’ He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘But only because maybe the people inside saw my sons go. I imagine they would remember it if they did. They must have been relieved.’

  Chapter 14

  She needed sleep. But Halide Can knew she wasn’t going to get any until she had spoken to Cetin İkmen. She lay back on her pillows and put her phone to her ear. As it rang, she looked at her feet. Were they swollen, or did she just think they were?

  İkmen answered, and Halide launched straight in.

  ‘Boris Myskow was in last night,’ she said. ‘So the atmosphere was tense to say the least.’

  ‘Did he spend much time in the kitchen?’

  ‘No. But just having him in the building seems to make most members of staff quake. I suppose it’s because he’s the boss. But he doesn’t shout or act up like a lot of celebrity chefs. At least he didn’t last night. The restaurant’s head Turkish chef, Tandoğan, does, but then he speaks the language, so he has to keep the staff in line.’

  ‘Do you know why Myskow was there last night?’

  ‘Taking delivery of some equipment for his kitchen upstairs,’ Halide said. ‘No idea what it was because I was pretty much chained to the restaurant kitchen. But I did take a look in the meat freezers.’