Ikmen 16 - Body Count Page 2

  ‘Posh,’ Şukru said.

  ‘In what way?’ Out of the corner of his eye, Süleyman saw a car draw up and then a large, very familiar figure haul itself out of the driver’s seat.

  ‘Spoke nice. I dunno,’ Şukru said. ‘Talked about stuff people round here don’t know anything about.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Books … art … alternative things …’ He shook his head. ‘Like those kids who come and graffiti walls with anti-government slogans. All about saving the district. It’s impossible. Why bother?’

  A lot of intellectuals and artists had become very vocal about the fate of Tarlabaşı and its inhabitants in recent years. They knew that since the razing of Sulukule it was the only place actually in the city where Roma and other poor people, including a small long-standing Syrian Christian community, could afford to live.

  ‘Do you know how long Levent Devrim had lived here?’

  ‘No. But it was well before the rest of them came and scrawled up pictures of Che Guevara and politicians dressed as fascists on old brothel walls.’

  ‘Do you know anyone who might know?’ He heard footsteps behind him, heavy and weary as they trudged through the snow.

  ‘Sugar’d know,’ Şukru said. ‘She’s an old whore, a Kurd, lives up by the Syriani church.’

  ‘Do you know her address?’

  Şukru tipped his head back. ‘No. But you can’t miss her place. She can’t work any more because she’s too old, so now she sells sex stuff – underwear, dolls, things like that. Look for a ground-floor flat with whips hanging in the window.’

  It was an exotic thought. ‘Thank you, Mr Şekeroğlu, I will,’ Süleyman said. Then, in response to a light touch on his shoulder, he turned and looked into the face of Arto Sarkissian, the police pathologist. ‘Good morning, Doctor.’

  The Armenian shook his head. ‘Well it is morning, Inspector, although whether it is good or not …’ He looked over at the small tent that had been erected over the body of the dead man. ‘Throat wound …’

  ‘His head’s almost off,’ Şukru put in baldly.

  ‘I see.’ The Armenian didn’t ask how he knew or even who Şukru was. He headed out across the snow-capped rubble and into a building entirely devoid of frontage. On one of the few pieces of masonry still standing was the image of a man Süleyman recognised as one of the high-profile developers involved in the district’s ‘regeneration’, dressed as Mussolini.

  Süleyman turned back to Şukru Şekeroğlu. ‘Did you see anyone in the area when you found the body?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s snowing, if you notice. If I hadn’t been desperate for fuel, I’d’ve been in my bed. People round here don’t have too much to get up for, especially when it’s this cold.’

  Şukru’s hostility wasn’t easy to stomach, especially so early in the morning. But as a resident of Tarlabaşı, he did have a point about having little to get up for. Few people in the area had legitimate jobs, and the wrecking ball that acted as a soundtrack to their lives had robbed them of whatever hopes they might have had for a future in the city. As Gonca’s brother, however, he aroused less sympathy in Süleyman, who knew that, left to herself, Gonca would still be with him and he, consequently, would be happy. But the father for whom Şukru Şekeroğlu had gone out collecting wood had forbidden it, and his lover had had to comply or be killed.

  ‘You called us immediately?’

  ‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I?’ Şukru said.

  ‘I don’t know, Mr Şekeroğlu,’ Süleyman replied. ‘Maybe—’

  ‘Maybe you don’t trust me. I don’t know.’

  The implication was that Süleyman didn’t trust him because he was a gypsy. He ignored it.

  Süleyman looked away, across the other side of what passed for a road, at Ömer Mungan, the thin, hook-nosed young man so recently promoted, who had come to him from the far eastern city of Mardin. Once, a few years before, Süleyman had been sent to that city in pursuit of an escaped prisoner. What he’d found when he got there had been a marvellous honey-coloured hill town full of old mosques and ancient churches and with its very own indigenous pagan goddess, the Sharmeran. He wondered whether Ömer loved ‘his’ Sharmeran as they all seemed to out there, or whether the civil war in nearby Syria and the refugees who had poured across the border into Turkey had shaken his faith in everything he had ever held dear.

  Süleyman said to Şukru, ‘I’d like you to give a statement to Sergeant Mungan.’

  Şukru shuffled his feet in the snow and said, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I,’ Süleyman said, ‘am going to look at what you’ve already seen, Mr Şekeroğlu. A man with his head almost severed from his body.’

  Nobody, except for the very poorest, had a soba any more. The large wood-burning stove that stood in the middle of the İkmen family’s hall was a constant bone of contention. Fatma İkmen, a stout but shapely woman in her mid fifties, was nearly always the one who got up early in the morning to feed the soba with wood, and she was sick of it.

  ‘Peasants in the country have sobas,’ she shouted, knowing that her husband Çetin, who was in the shower, wouldn’t be able to hear her. ‘People in cities have central heating.’

  She threw some logs into the belly of the beast and then shut the fire door. She sniffed. And it smelt – mainly of smoke, which was to be expected, but she still didn’t like it. To be fair to him, her husband probably didn’t even notice the smell. He smoked more cigarettes than Atatürk himself was reputed to have done. Although because in recent years they had gone up in price so much, he was trying to cut back – when he remembered.

  ‘Çetin!’

  He didn’t answer. All she could hear of him was the sound of the water from the shower and some tuneless singing. She went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of tea from the samovar. From her kitchen window she could see three of the major İstanbul monuments – the Sultanahmet or Blue Mosque, the Hippodrome, and, just about, Aya Sofya, once the greatest church in the world. Fatma lived at the very heart of the old city in a large apartment with her husband, who was a successful inspector of police. In many ways she was a fortunate woman. So why did she not have central heating?

  A short, thin middle-aged man with wild grey hair burst into the kitchen simultaneously knotting his tie and smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Çetin.’

  ‘Yes?’ He smiled and she almost, almost felt herself fall into the charm of his smile.

  ‘Çetin, why do we still have that soba? Please tell me.’

  Çetin İkmen rolled his black, heavily lashed eyes and puffed on his cigarette. This was an old and to him boring conversation. ‘I’ve told you, Fatma,’ he said, ‘that once I have retired we will get central heating.’

  ‘In a year’s time.’

  ‘Yes, in a year’s time,’ he said. ‘One more winter, that’s all. Allah, if I could be here now I would have it put in today! But what do you want to do, eh, Fatma? You want a house full of workmen pulling up floorboards all on your own?’

  ‘Well, no …’

  ‘And this place is full of stuff.’ He sat down at the kitchen table and she brought him over a glass of tea into which he threw four sugar cubes. ‘We’ve had nine children here, Fatma, most of whom seem to have left the majority of their possessions behind them in this apartment. We have to plan. We have to get the children to take their things away.’

  ‘Mmm.’ She leaned against the cooker. She knew that he was right about the clutter, but she also knew that he didn’t want to tackle it any more than their children did. It was a massive job and he always had something better to do and somewhere else to be. His phone had rung at just after seven, which had to be to do with his work. He had also sung in the shower, which usually meant that some sort of challenge was on the cards.

  ‘So what was your call about this morning?’ she asked him.

  İkmen put one cigarette out and then lit up another. ‘An incident, possibly a murder, has taken place in Tarlabaşı,
’ he said. ‘Mehmet Süleyman’s out there now.’

  Fatma shrugged. ‘Tarlabaşı. What is it, gypsies?’

  İkmen turned towards her, fixing her with one of his disapproving stares. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Eh.’ She turned away from him to cut bread into slices. Fatma İkmen was a good, kind woman – a pious Muslim, too – but she had prejudices that İkmen found unacceptable. Roma gypsies was one. They had no recognisable religion and they drank and so they were automatically ‘bad’. Over the years he’d tried to talk her out of such nonsense, but she had stoically refused to change. Just like he had refused to change his mind about people he liked to call ‘holy sheep’, pious people who did whatever the Koran, the Bible or whichever belief they adhered to told them, without question or thought. To İkmen, an avowed agnostic, their apparent mindlessness was not only incomprehensible; it was also, he felt sometimes, dangerous. Those not like oneself could all too easily become ‘the other’ – despised creatures to be casually discarded, ignored or blamed.

  İkmen threw what was left of his tea down his throat and stood up.

  Without turning around, Fatma said, ‘If this is Mehmet’s case, why are you involved?’

  He didn’t respond, but she knew what his answer would have been had he given it. He was always ‘involved’. She turned to look at him. ‘Çetin,’ she said, ‘are you really going to retire at the end of the year? Are you?’

  Çetin İkmen put his jacket on, stuck his cigarettes in his pocket with his car keys, smiled and failed to answer her question. ‘As the great Sherlock Holmes once said, Fatma, “The game is afoot!”’

  Chapter 2

  The late Levent Devrim was, or had been, fifty-five years old, according to his identity card. A spare, almost ascetic-looking man, he had also been rather handsome before someone had tried to hack his head off. Arto Sarkissian put a hand inside Devrim’s coat, under several layers of woollen jumpers, and felt the dead man’s bare flesh. He was as cold as the snow underneath and on top of him. He looked at the wound again, photographed it and then took a small sample of desiccated blood from the very far left-hand side of the cut. Both the carotid artery and the jugular vein had been severed, which was what had killed him, but then the murderer had gone on to apparently saw at his neck vertebrae too. When the gypsy had told Mehmet Süleyman that someone had tried to decapitate Devrim, he had not been lying.

  ‘Morning, Arto.’

  Sarkissian looked around; crouched uncomfortably in what was only a small tent, there was little room for an overweight man like the doctor to manoeuvre. But he could move enough to see that Çetin İkmen had just arrived.

  ‘Çetin, what are you doing here? Inspector Süleyman …’

  ‘Oh, I was just—’

  ‘Passing? No you weren’t,’ the pathologist said. ‘Who told you about it?’

  ‘Mehmet.’

  ‘Mmm. Inspector Süleyman still on your leash.’ He turned uncomfortably to look at him again. ‘He’s a big boy now, you should leave him be.’

  ‘I’m not interfering.’ İkmen held his hands up in the air, all innocence.

  ‘Much.’ The Armenian turned back to the dead man. He and Çetin İkmen had been friends for many years, even before they started working together – in fact, since childhood – and Arto probably knew more about the inspector than anyone else, including his wife. He didn’t believe for a minute that İkmen was going to retire. He’d find some way to stop the process, even though he was, like Arto himself, well past retirement age already. But then something caught the doctor’s eye that took his mind quite away from Çetin İkmen. There were fragments in Levent Devrim’s wound. He picked up a pair of surgical tweezers from out of his instrument roll and gently nudged at one of these anomalies.

  ‘What is it?’ İkmen asked as Arto lifted the tweezers up to the light.

  The Armenian squinted. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  Sugar’s real name was Tansu Barışık, and she said she was seventy years old. Süleyman thought that perhaps she was being a little bit economical with the truth, but he didn’t ask to see her ID card. Everyone, after all, knew who she was. Following Şukru’s tip, he’d been brought to her door by a man dressed in the full ecclesiastical robes and regalia of the ancient Syriani church, who had been rather less fazed than Süleyman himself had been by Sugar’s whips, rubber dolls and dildos and a strong smell of cat pee.

  Sugar set a tiny cup of coffee down in front of the policeman and then sat in a vast, broken armchair. She was fat, with feet that spilled over the sides of her flowery carpet slippers. ‘Levent was odd but harmless,’ she said. ‘But then often that’s the way with very clever people, isn’t it?’

  ‘He was clever?’ Süleyman took a sip from the cup. Turkish coffee – hot, thick and medium sweet, just the way he’d told her he liked it.

  ‘He went to Galatasaray Lycée,’ she said, as if there was some sort of connection between İstanbul’s most famous school and natural intellectual acuity. Süleyman, who had also been to the Lycée, knew for a fact that it was not necessarily the case. All you really needed were parents who were willing and able to pay the enormous fees. At least that was how it had been when he had attended the school and also, probably, when Levent Devrim had been there. But however clever or otherwise he had been, one thing was for sure: Devrim was no run-of-the-mill Tarlabaşı resident. What had brought such a person to such a place?

  ‘I heard that Levent Bey liked to make films,’ Süleyman said. ‘Was that his job?’

  Sugar smiled, idly and thoughtlessly fiddling with a nearby dildo as she said, ‘Levent didn’t work. I don’t know what he lived on. The camera was a hobby. Just little bits of film of the kids in the street, the buildings and the market, you know. He thought he was Stephen Spielberg, I think, but …’

  ‘Did anyone ever object to him filming their home or their children?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ she said. ‘He was just Levent Bey, you know? A bit strange, spoke a bit posh – bit like you, as it goes – wore clothes even the Roma beggars wouldn’t touch …’

  ‘He didn’t care about his appearance?’

  ‘It meant nothing to him!’ Suddenly realising what she was doing with the dildo, Sugar threw it down. Süleyman saw a rat scamper past where the sex toy had landed. His hostess appeared completely oblivious. ‘Levent didn’t want or need nice clothes, just like he didn’t want or need nice food, drink or women.’

  ‘So what, Sugar Hanım, did he need?’

  Before she spoke, she paused, and then she said, ‘You say he’s dead, right?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  She sighed. ‘Levent liked a smoke, and I don’t mean tobacco. Allah alone in His wisdom knows what brought him to Tarlabaşı in the first place, but I know what kept him here.’

  ‘Cannabis.’

  ‘I’ve never known such a massive pothead! Day and night! I don’t think I can remember him straight in what has to be twenty-five years since I’ve known him.’

  ‘He was young when he came here?’

  ‘Yeah. But as I say, I don’t know why he came. That’s one of the great things about this place: no one asks you where you’ve been, where you’re going or what you do. It’s the end of the line, or it was until they started knocking it down.’

  ‘Do you know who his dealer was?’

  She shrugged. ‘Pick any kid on a street corner,’ she said. ‘Drugs were never my thing. I spent time with Levent, but I never smoked with him.’

  ‘What did you do with him?’

  Sugar looked at the very handsome man sitting in her house and she said, ‘We talked, and sometimes, yes, I fucked him. When we first met, I didn’t look like this and he was a nice-looking young man. He didn’t treat me like shit and I could talk to him, which was nice.’ She leaned forward, her shoulders straining as they pushed down against her enormous bosoms. ‘I told you that Levent was clever, but I’m no slouch myself. I finished high s
chool, even if it was in the back of beyond.’

  ‘Where?’

  She named some town he didn’t recognise, which she told him was in the far eastern province of Van. Kurds often came from places no one else had ever been to except other Kurds.

  ‘Then when I got sick, he looked after me,’ Sugar continued. ‘In 2003 I got diabetes. Speak to people here and they’ll tell you that if Levent Bey hadn’t looked after me, I would have been dead. He took me to hospital, wouldn’t leave me until they’d found out what was wrong with me.’ For the first time since she’d been told of Levent Devrim’s death, Sugar’s eyes filled with tears.

  Süleyman let her have a moment to herself, and then he said, ‘Did he have any enemies?’

  ‘No.’ She wiped a couple of tears away from her eyes with the sleeve of her holey cardigan. ‘Or rather, not that I know of. Maybe one or other of the dealers had a grudge because he couldn’t pay for his smoke, but I never heard anything like that.’ She shook her head. ‘He was always kind and polite, he never robbed anyone, never slept with anyone’s wife, never lost his temper … Oh, except for once, but that was years ago.’

  ‘It must have been significant for you to remember it,’ Süleyman said. ‘Who did he lose his temper with?’

  ‘I don’t know. A man, about sixty I suppose, came to see him one day at his flat. I didn’t recognise him and he wasn’t from round here. I’d baked Levent Bey some börek, which he always loved, and I was taking it round as the man was leaving. Levent was like a lunatic, shouting at the man to fuck off and leave him alone. The man didn’t reply; he just went.’

  ‘Did you ask Levent Bey who the man was?’

  ‘He pre-empted me,’ she said. ‘Took the börek from my hands, told me to fuck off and then I didn’t see him for days. When he did finally surface he was his old self again and so I never asked. But the man was well dressed. It has to be twenty years ago now. I wondered whether he was Levent’s father.’

  ‘Did they look alike?’

  She thought for a moment, and then she said, ‘I don’t remember. Maybe? Maybe not? I’ve seen a lot of men in my life, Inspector; a point comes when they all start to look the same.’ But then, fearing that she might have offended him, she added, ‘Present company excepted, of course.’