Harem Read online

  The next act involved certain men being pulled from their seats: Zhivkov and two of his minders; Vedat Sivas; Zhivkov’s brother-in-law, the Georgian, Lavrenti; two heavies who had belonged to Müren; and Tepe. As they started to move out of the room, it occurred to Tepe that only the Americans were staying behind. But there was, he knew, no point in questioning this. Whatever the reason for this, he would have to wait until the answer became apparent rather than question any of these faceless ones – whoever they were.

  As Tepe and the others left the room, the shivering and bloodied figure of Hikmet Sivas passed from the room that had been his temporary prison and into the room they had just come from. He was being escorted by what seemed to be a most solicitous black-clad person. Perhaps they were Special Forces, maybe even the FBI, here to try to get hold of the photographs. Was that why this was happening? If only General Pamuk hadn’t insisted they all eat before Zhivkov gave Hikmet that drug to make him talk! The foreigners wouldn’t have known any different, they understood nothing beyond what Zhivkov had told them, namely that he already had the photographs which were going to cost them dearly. But General Pamuk had talked endlessly about how this knowledge was going to give them all so much power in the future. He had monopolised Zhivkov’s attention for the entire evening. And then he had left.

  Tepe felt his whole body start to shiver. Suddenly unmindful of the gun at his head, he turned sharply to look at Zhivkov.

  ‘Pamuk set us up!’

  ‘Shut up!’ Both of them pistol-whipped him from behind. By the time they reached the stairs that led down to the place that Zhivkov and Vedat knew so well, Tepe was vomiting blood.

  Five men remained at the table, six including Hikmet Sivas.

  The oldest and certainly the fattest of the group turned his heavy Roman head round to face his captors and said, ‘So you killing us or what?’

  Two of the figures who had been conversing quietly in the far corner of the room turned around.

  ‘Well?’ The big man, whose name was Bassano, shrugged. ‘Do I need a priest or what?’

  ‘Get up!’

  Bassano was pulled out of his seat with tremendous force. The other Americans, and Hikmet Sivas, received similar treatment.

  ‘Don’t ask any more questions!’ one of the figures said as the men were moved forward by guns.

  Sivas glanced at the room where İkmen was still hidden behind the curtain but didn’t say anything. If they were, as Bassano, and indeed Sivas himself, felt, about to die, why take another innocent soul with them? They were trash to a man – Bassano, di Marco, di Marco Junior, Martin, Kaufman and himself. İkmen was something else, İkmen was what Hikmet had once been. Just a guy. And anyway these creatures, professional killers, would probably find him in the end.

  The six men were herded outside into a night filled with small animal noises and the gentle rustle of cooling plants, across the veranda and out onto the path. On the path, its back doors open, stood a dark transit van. The cab was blocked off from the rest of the vehicle. The men were pushed onto rough bench seats in the back. As he climbed in, urged on by the ubiquitous gun in his back, Hikmet fought to beat away thoughts of what these men, G’s men, they had to be, would do to him in order to get at those photographs.

  When they were all seated, the black-clad guards closed and locked the doors on them. After that there was nothing – no sound, no light, no feeling save the pounding of their hearts.

  Nobody had entered the room since the men, he assumed they were men, dressed in black had come for Hikmet Sivas. It seemed reasonable to assume they were Special Forces. They looked right, conformed to the mental picture one had of such people. But they could just as easily be gangsters or even some sort of foreign force. They had, after all, spoken to Sivas in English; the accent could have been American or English or Australian. Not that speculation of this sort really helped İkmen in any way.

  The fact was that whoever they were, they were heavily armed and they were fulfilling some sort of brief within this palace with this motley collection of lowlifes and Orhan Tepe. But if what Hikmet Sivas had told him about his photographic collection was the truth, any one of the powerful men depicted could have decided to deal with the situation in this way. Even in the twenty-first century, even in the most liberal parts of the West, photographs of this nature could bring governments crashing down. Men on state visits stopping off at their Turkish ‘club’ for a blow job given by a beautifully dressed, desperate, sad-eyed little princess and being photographed – where the hell was their security? People like that lived behind steel doors, slept in fucking nuclear bunkers! But then if they trusted Hikmet – no, more likely they dismissed him as an amusing ‘primitive’; perhaps the idea that one day he might use his knowledge of their activities to harm them had never occurred to them. It can’t have done.

  As far as İkmen could tell, the men in the room next door had been moved out to somewhere else now. And although sound was still coming from that area he suspected that it was probably the black-clad soldiers or whatever they were. He wondered how long they would be in there, how long he would have to stay behind this curtain, in a brightly illuminated room with the door ajar, unable to have a cigarette.

  Damn. He hadn’t even thought of cigarettes until that moment. But now that he had, he couldn’t think of anything else. Perhaps if he just took one out of his pocket and placed it, unlit, between his lips . . .

  The room Tepe and his fellow captives were taken to was stunning. Windowless walls draped in shimmering gold fabric, high-class, almost iridescent kilims on the floor. The furniture was minimal, just a bed and a table covered with the accoutrements of wealth and of passion: Spanish fly, French champagne, a disposable syringe, a metal, probably gold, dildo. For the old ones who just couldn’t get it up any more. This was the room where princesses sucked on presidents, where a thousand and one delusional Arabian Nights were fulfilled.

  Apparently Hikmet Sivas had been imprisoned here since Zhivkov captured him. In this fantastic room, almost certainly he would have told Zhivkov of the photographs – the fabulous photographs. Drugs could, Tepe knew, loosen the tongues of men who may have been tortured for weeks without success.

  He wondered whether Hatice İpek had been brought here. Hassan Şeker, the confectioner, had had no idea what he was getting into when he supplied his little mistress to Zhivkov via the Mürens. And then with the girl dead, with his fingerprints, metaphorically, all over her body, he’d been scared, and only too willing to part with some cash for a little police protection. Şeker hadn’t realised that the Mürens and through them Zhivkov would be so interested in his new friend from the police force. Neither, come to that, had Tepe, not until yesterday when he’d gone to meet Ekrem Müren and found Vedat Sivas instead, and all of İkmen’s ravings about some nonsense called the Harem became a reality.

  Tepe looked at Vedat now, standing to one side of the door, unmoving, his eyes cold and glazed, while Zhivkov in contrast moved across the room towards the bed, apparently at ease in familiar surroundings. The other men, the now terrified underlings and henchmen, stood in a group, looking uneasily at their captors.

  ‘Get down, on your stomachs!’ one of them shouted in Turkish, which was obviously not his own language.

  Nobody moved.

  ‘Now!’ He raised his short-nosed submachine gun and pointed it at them.

  As Tepe slowly lowered himself towards the gorgeous pattern on the pure silk kilim, he considered the two most likely outcomes from such a scenario as this. They could be about to search them or, given that people shot in this position made less mess than those shot on their backs or standing up—

  ‘Fuck you!’

  As Tepe turned his head to look at Zhivkov, a shot rang out. The force of it threw Zhivkov back onto the richly covered bed where he lay, his mouth open, looking like an unfit if sated sultan.

  ‘Get down!’ the man repeated. ‘Heads to the floor. Don’t look at me! Look down!’

 
; Look down! Look down! There was no choice, and anyway, what good would looking up do? OK, there was something noble about looking one’s enemy in the eyes, but that was for heroes and Tepe knew he wasn’t a hero. He wasn’t even a policeman, not really, not now. Now he was one of them; like Müren and Vedat, a man corrupted by wanting what he shouldn’t. And then he smiled, wondering suddenly what his lovely Ayşe was doing now.

  The burst of gunfire lasted less than twenty seconds. Anyone still alive after that they finished off with handguns.

  Chapter 25

  * * *

  Commissioner Ardıç was rarely sick. In fact he prided himself on the strength of his stomach. But not tonight. Not with eight men dead in that blood-spattered room smelling of metal and cordite. Eight men slaughtered.

  When he’d cleaned himself up and had a drink of water, he went outside. A tall figure wearing a thin summer suit greeted him on the veranda. He offered Ardıç a seat, one that was usually used by diners, and then sat down himself, smiling.

  ‘Your assistance has been invaluable, Commissioner,’ he said in a voice which though obviously not Turkish in origin spoke the language perfectly. ‘Without yourself and Pamuk things would have been so much more difficult.’

  ‘You shot one of my officers.’

  Ardıç was offered a cigarette. Unusually he accepted the offer.

  ‘Yes,’ the man replied smoothly, lighting both his own and Ardıç’s cigarette.

  ‘You told me that Tepe would be given back to us.’

  The man shrugged. ‘I lied.’

  ‘Yes, you did, you—’

  ‘I lied, you chose to believe me, end of story.’

  Ardıç, angry now, roared, ‘I didn’t choose to believe you, I did believe you!’

  ‘Well, that was foolish of you, wasn’t it?’ The man narrowed his eyes at Ardıç. ‘When you came to Ankara it was agreed that every loose end in this situation should be tied up. Your officer knew far too much.’

  ‘Oh, and Zhivkov’s other heavies don’t?’ Ardıç retorted.

  ‘Not now,’ the man replied with a thin smile. ‘My goodness but the İstanbul police have been busy cleaning up this town tonight!’

  Ardıç, speechless, stared at the man with horrified eyes.

  ‘You won’t have to bother about that small quarter of Edirnekapı for some time.’ The man continued and then looking into the commissioner’s grey tinged face he said, ‘Don’t worry, Commissioner, we were very careful, very neat.’

  ‘I have no doubt that you were,’ Ardıç said thickly.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Quietly and with calm efficiency, black-clad figures began coming out of the kiosk carrying body bags. A closed army truck down on the path was their destination. Ardıç glanced at this grisly scene then turned back to the pale features of the man sitting in front of him.

  ‘And the sons of Ali Müren?’ he asked. ‘What of them?’

  ‘Oh you’ll need some live bodies in order to tie all of this into an ordinary gangster scenario of kidnap, murder and prostitution.’

  ‘Which it was,’ Ardıç interjected.

  The man laughed. ‘On your side of things, yes, Commissioner.’

  ‘And on yours?’

  The man’s face assumed an impenetrable expression. ‘You know what it was from our side, Commissioner,’ he said, ‘so don’t fuck with me. The Müren brothers at the very least disposed of the girl’s body once she so very inconveniently died while Zhivkov and his horrors were ‘interviewing’ the poor bitch. She was very pretty, that girl. We know that the Mürens were also involved in killing some local character, a vagrant who had spoken to your man İkmen. Zhivkov’s guys killed the old woman, the seamstress. Through the Mürens, Zhivkov got to hear that she might say something unwise to İkmen. Although he didn’t know precisely what the connection might be at that time, your young officer passed the information on like the good little doggy he was.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because we had their meeting room wired for sound.’

  ‘Nothing I can use, I suppose,’ Ardıç replied bitterly.

  ‘No.’ He ground his cigarette out on the marble floor. ‘And by the way, I’ve had your two officers, İskender and Süleyman, taken to the American Admiral Bristol Hospital.’

  Ardıç peered at the man, horrified. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Three of your officers decided to see what was going on up here tonight. Very remiss of you not to know about that, Commissioner, but I’ll let it pass. The two younger ones may be rather disorientated for a while. You’ll have to explain to them that they really shouldn’t get involved in special operations against the mobs in future. Next time the gangsters could kill them. As for İkmen—’

  ‘İkmen!’ Ardıç felt his heart jump in his chest. If İkmen wasn’t with İskender and Süleyman . . .

  ‘Don’t worry, he’s alive,’ the man said pleasantly. ‘He’s still hiding in the room where they kept old Hikmet. I expect he spoke to him. Perhaps you’d like to find out what they talked about for us. We’d be grateful.’

  ‘What, so that you can—’

  ‘We agreed no loose ends, Commissioner.’

  ‘So why didn’t you just shoot him like you did Tepe!’

  The man looked down and sighed. ‘Well, in truth, we were rather slow getting to him, and if he really doesn’t know anything . . . He’s something of a character, shall we say, in the force. I don’t think his death would be very good for police morale. It was never our intention to damage you.’ He smiled. ‘We contained the situation and neutralised the threat.’

  ‘The situation as you call it got rather out of hand, in my opinion,’ Ardıç snapped. The man’s hand whipped across the table and gripped Ardıç’s throat.

  ‘I don’t care!’ he hissed. ‘You are nothing. The images on Hikmet Sivas’s photographs are everything.’ He let go of Ardıç’s throat as quickly as he had taken hold. ‘I’m paid to maintain the status quo.’

  Despite being red-faced and obviously frightened, Ardıç said, ‘So you protect the Mafia.’

  ‘The one we understand, yes,’ the man responded. ‘Some people have so much knowledge, Commissioner, that they become untouchable. Hikmet Sivas is strictly an amateur, taking photographs for insurance purposes. The “foreign” gentlemen here tonight have something on almost everyone of great power a man can name. We know how they operate, we know they will only use their knowledge under certain circumstances and that those circumstances can be dealt with without altering the status quo. He smiled unpleasantly, ‘Hikmet was a wild card, didn’t understand the rules.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s a loose cannon, he took those photographs to protect himself, they could end up anywhere. He’ll give them to us, of course he will, but he would’ve given them to Zhivkov, in the end. And Zhivkov,’ a shadow crossed his features, ‘would have used them.’

  ‘Yes, but the Mafia, your Mafia . . .’

  ‘Those we understand, we can control,’ the man said. ‘Those we don’t, those who may wish to buy plutonium, for instance, with just one of these images . . .’

  ‘He could have blackmailed your government?’

  ‘Governments.’ The man emphasised the last syllable. ‘I don’t work for a government, Commissioner. I work for democracy; it’s a very big club.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ardıç threw down the long ago dead cigarette butt. ‘And if İkmen does know something?’

  ‘I will know,’ the man replied gravely.

  ‘And what will you do?’

  The man rose from his chair and pushed it neatly back under the table. ‘I will neutralise the threat,’ he said and then with yet another smile he turned and made his way back towards the marble stairs.

  It was only when he had gone that Ardıç realised that so had everyone else. No black-clad figures from Allah alone knew what part of the world, no bodies, no blood – nothing. Just himself, the welcome sight of his car in the car
park, and İkmen, somewhere inside the kiosk.

  For a while Ardıç toyed with the idea that he might go and seek him out. But then he decided against it. Knowing İkmen, he would have pieced together quite a lot of information. The pale man, however, was a shadowy figure about whom Ardıç knew little. He could not judge the degree or extent of his power, or what access he had to what information. Listening devices could have been planted on both himself and İkmen, for all Ardıç knew. There was no way of knowing with such people, that much had been apparent in Ankara. No, best leave İkmen. He would find his way out, get home; İkmen was good at that sort of thing. Ardıç stood up and looked down at his car. He would see İkmen tomorrow. Yes. Give him the chance to lie about his knowledge. İkmen was sensible – sometimes; he’d know what to do for the best.

  The truck took the men out onto the tarmac, right up to the plane which was already fuelled, cleared and ready to go. As far as Hikmet Sivas could see, nothing else was moving, only them.

  As the anonymous figures that had brought them to the airport ushered them up the steps and into the plane, Hikmet said, ‘Where are we going?’

  One of the men, a particularly tall example, shouted, ‘Have a good flight, sir,’ through air thick with heat and fuel fumes.

  Hikmet continued to climb the steps, questions juggling for supremacy inside his head. Where was Vedat? Curse his soul to hell! Whatever he had done, he was still his brother and Hikmet needed to know where he was. Where were G’s men taking him? What would happen to Hale? He would have returned to his sister after he’d dealt with that Zhivkov scum. She must be worried. And Kaycee. Poor, darling Kaycee. Where was she, her body? Had it been given a Christian burial?