Dance with Death Read online

  ‘Çetin, it’s your cousin Menşure,’ Fatma said as she came back into the room and took the baby from her husband’s arms.

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Well, of course for you,’ Fatma said.

  İkmen picked up his ever-present packet of Maltepe cigar-ettes and a lighter from the coffee table and went out to the hall.

  ‘Is cousin Menşure the one who owns all of those fairy chimneys in Göreme?’ Hulya asked, once her father had left the room.

  ‘She owns fairy chimneys, but not in Göreme, in Muratpaşa, which is much smaller,’ her mother corrected. ‘Her father, Uncle Faruk, married your grandfather Timur’s sister, Şerefe. They were both very business-minded, made a lot of money. Menşure owns pansiyons and tour companies and lots of things. She never married. I wonder what she wants with your father?’

  They both sat in silence until İkmen, puffing hard on a Maltepe, came back into the living room.

  ‘Fatma,’ he said as he braced himself against the side of a very old and threadbare settee, ‘how would you feel about my spending some time in Muratpaşa?’

  ‘Why? Has Menşure asked you to go for a little working holiday?’ Fatma said with more than a touch of acid in her voice. Apart from Çetin’s brother Halıl, his wider family rarely made contact. When they did, however, it was usually because they wanted something from him – generally time or information. Fatma rarely saw her hard-pressed husband herself and was, as a consequence, unamused by his seeming desire to go off into the wilds of Cappadocia.

  ‘No,’ İkmen replied evenly, ‘not exactly. Menşure has a few problems . . .’

  ‘So why don’t you and Mum go for a holiday together,’ Hulya said excitedly. ‘Berekiah and I could come and look after Gül and Kemal. You’d have a great time!’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘I think that your father would prefer to go to Cappadocia alone,’ Fatma said. ‘I expect this is business, or rather . . .’

  ‘No, well, it . . .’

  ‘Well? What?’

  İkmen swallowed hard and then puffed furiously on his cigarette before saying, ‘It’s . . . well, yes, it is also a professional matter, Fatma. They’ve found a body . . .’

  ‘Oh, so the local jandarma call you in, of course, Çetin,’ she said with a huge ladle of irony in her voice. ‘They can’t possibly manage without you!’

  ‘Fatma, it’s an old body,’ he said. ‘It could be someone that I knew.’

  ‘From your many holidays with Auntie Şerefe. How many times was it, two? Or did your brother go twice and . . .’

  ‘If I can take a week’s leave then I’m going!’ İkmen said as he raised one silencing hand up in the air. ‘It’s just something that I have to do!’

  And then he walked out on to the balcony, pausing only to coo at little Timur for a few seconds as he went.

  Once he had gone, Hulya reached out to her mother and said, ‘Don’t worry, Mum, Dad won’t do anything bad, he isn’t like that. I’m sure it’s all right.’

  ‘Oh, so am I,’ her mother said as she briefly dabbed her eyes with one corner of her headscarf. She was crying with frustration and anger as opposed to actual upset. ‘Cousin Menşure has all the appeal of a bundle of twigs. No, I just worry about your father getting into trouble. You know what he’s like when he becomes involved in something. Shooting his mouth off and upsetting people, putting himself in danger . . .’

  ‘Well, he’s always been like that . . .’

  ‘Yes, but not hundreds of kilometres away,’ Fatma said. ‘Not in a place where I can’t be with him when he wants me to be. People are very religious out in the villages, Allah alone knows how many ways your father will find to offend them! Drinking alcohol! Smoking in the street . . .’

  Fatma shook her head with annoyance. Hulya did think that her father, once he had heard her mother’s raised voice, might come in to offer some words of reassurance. But he didn’t. He just stood out on the balcony looking across at the hazy sunset that was now falling across the great Sultan Ahmet mosque. Soon the faithful would be called to prayer and night, thankfully, for Çetin İkmen, would swallow what had, until only a few minutes before, been a very good day.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  Abdullah didn’t like the new ‘bedroom’ his father had constructed for him. It was on the sixth floor and after a hard day at college the last thing he wanted to do was drag his big bag of books up six flights of stairs.

  ‘But you can’t expect the tourists to climb to such heights,’ his father, Selcuk Bey, had said when Abdullah had suggested that perhaps some of the Emperor Justinian Pansiyon’s guests might like to take advantage of the wonderful city and waterway views he now enjoyed.

  ‘Dad, they all sit out on the terrace above my room every evening!’ Abdullah replied.

  ‘Ah, but they choose to do that, don’t they?’ his father said triumphantly. ‘They don’t have to worry about carrying bags up there.’

  ‘But the staff carry them for them . . .’

  ‘I have a pansiyon two storeys higher than that bastard next door, so my guests have the best views!’ his father raged. ‘You stay in that room and tell me the minute Ali damn Serpil starts building some awful shack on what he calls his terrace! I will be down to the Belediye before you can even cough!’

  If only it had ONLY been the pansiyon next door with which Selcuk Aydın took issue. But as well as the Çinli Pansiyon next door there was also the Aya Sofya Guest House across the road and its attendant hotel, not to mention the great Four Seasons five star hotel at the top of the street. All of them, according to Selcuk Bey, were ‘far too tall and top-heavy for their foundations’. The fact that the Four Seasons was a sturdily built Ottoman building with a finely constructed terrace seemed to elude him. ‘My place is the only place that can take great height,’ he would say if challenged on the point. But other hotels and pansiyons in the historic Sultanahmet district of İstanbul begged to differ, and behind the Sultan Ahmet mosque particularly a war to ‘capture’ the best views for one’s tourists had been hotting up for some time. Abdullah with his heavy bag of books was only one of its victims.

  But this particular day was a Sunday and so Abdullah had not been to college but had been helping his father and brothers out with the pansiyon and its guests. Consequently, and because he, like most of the observant during Ramazan, wanted to eat as much as he could before going to bed, Abdullah didn’t get up to his room until well gone midnight. So he was more than a little bit full when he did finally get into the shower and wash, but he went to bed quickly after that and fell asleep almost immediately.

  What woke him wasn’t a sound, but a feeling. Something cold and hard was pressing against his ear. As the fog in his brain began to lift, he could see that it was still pitch dark outside. He could also feel that the cold thing signified more than just a draught from a rashly opened window. The man, it had to be a man after all, the papers had said it was a man, was on the bed with him, his knife pressed against the side of Abdullah’s ear.

  ‘Turn over,’ a strangely smooth voice ordered.

  Abdullah knew instinctively what came next, and felt himself begin to sweat profusely.

  ‘No . . .’

  Quite where he found the strength to say it, Abdullah didn’t know.

  ‘Are you rejecting me, you filthy little homo!’

  ‘Yes . . .’ His heart was pounding like a hammer now. Why had he said that, why? Far away on the New City side of İstanbul the lights of Tophane and Cihangir twinkled seductively in the blackness.

  With what seemed to be a complete absence of effort, the man flicked Abdullah over on to his stomach and then made as if to position himself above him. There was no face on account of his wearing a ski mask, but that didn’t stop Abdullah from wanting to know who was about to rape him. Even through his fear he knew that he needed to know that at the very least. Using every last gram of his strength, Abdullah flung himself round on to his back and then pulled off t
he mask covering his assailant’s face.

  The knife that had been in the attacker’s hand now found a new home in Abdullah Aydın’s chest.

  ‘So if I were to grant your application for leave, when would you want it to commence?’ the very stout man with the unlit cigar in his hand said to the cadaverous individual smoking a cigarette in front of him.

  ‘Tomorrow, sir,’ Çetin İkmen said and then added, ‘please.’

  ‘So on a Monday morning you come to me, with no preamble at all, and tell me that you wish to go off to Cappadocia . . .’

  ‘On personal, family business,’ İkmen cut in.

  The large man, Commissioner Ardıç, İkmen’s superior, viewed him with reddened and unamused eyes.

  ‘I do have leave owing,’ İkmen continued, ‘I . . .’

  ‘You know that our peeper has now moved on from rape to attempted murder,’ Ardıç said gravely. ‘Süleyman and Melik are at the hospital with the victim now, for when he wakes up, if he wakes up. I’m surprised you didn’t know, İkmen. You’ve been giving Süleyman some assistance with this one, have you not?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Ardıç gestured expansively with his large, puffy hands. ‘So?’

  ‘So, what?’

  ‘So don’t you think that to just go off . . .’

  ‘Sir, this is urgent family business!’ İkmen pleaded. ‘If it wasn’t I wouldn’t dream of asking at such . . .’

  ‘Tell me something, İkmen,’ Ardıç said as he tapped his lifeless cigar fruitlessly against the side of his ashtray, ‘how are you going to get out to this village of Fairy Chimneys?’

  ‘Well, sir, there’s a bus that leaves at eight p.m., direct, getting in to Muratpaşa at around seven tomorrow morning.’

  ‘From which I may infer, I suppose, that you are already packed and the ticket has been purchased.’

  İkmen lowered his head as if he were a naughty schoolboy. ‘Yes, sir.’

  With a grunt reminiscent of that often heard on tennis courts, Ardıç pulled himself up by his desk and then moved rather painfully towards his open office window. Pigeons were feeding out on the small flat roof over the front office. Ardıç, with his ever-ready supply of bread and seeds, made sure that they always came to his window. ‘You know, İkmen,’ he said as he threw yet more scraps out on to the pitted and damp-stained flat roof, ‘a lot of people consider these birds to be vermin. My wife, for one. But I like them. They’re greedy, aggravating and totally ubiquitous. Such a drive towards survival can give one a glimmer of hope in this world of suicide bombings and idiotic wars.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  First the World Trade Centre tragedy in New York and then the War that was supposed to be over, but wasn’t, in Iraq had changed Ardıç considerably. He could still, on occasion, explode with anger in just the same way he had done before these events, but in general, wild tantrums were now a thing of the past. Of course such events were kismet and had to be accepted as such, but Ardıç, good Muslim that he always tried to be, struggled sometimes now. Ramazan was hard this time around, hence the unlit cigar he clung to so fiercely.

  ‘How many children do you have, İkmen?’ He was still feeding the birds, his head out the window, talking to the blue, autumn sky.

  ‘Nine, sir. And one grandson.’

  ‘Don’t be offended, İkmen, but I have for some time seen you in very much the same light as these birds.’ He slowly moved his head back into his office and then sat down. ‘Survival. You just keep on producing, you are both admirable and ubiquitous. You don’t look too nice, but . . . Oh, go wherever it is you need to go. Family is important, family is a gift from Allah.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  He hadn’t doubted for a second that Ardıç would allow him to go. He had thought that he might have to argue it, but apparently, that wasn’t going to be necessary.

  ‘So I’ll just finish up . . .’

  ‘You’ll go and see Süleyman,’ Ardıç interrupted as he looked back, smiling, at the feeding birds once again. ‘He’s over at the Taksim Hospital, waiting. The boy, the peeper’s latest victim, is in a coma, I believe.’

  İkmen, who had been slowly backing out of his boss’s office for some time, edged his way closer to the door. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Oh and İkmen . . .’ Ardıç looked around suddenly and assumed a very serious expression.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘You know that the Fairy Chimneys don’t really look like fairy chimneys, don’t you?’

  ‘Um . . .’

  İkmen couldn’t be at all certain what his boss was going to say now, but from the look on his large face it had to be something really quite serious.

  ‘They look like male members,’ Ardıç said with an utterly straight and unmoving face. ‘But you try to get a Cappadocian to admit to that! Pah!’

  He waved one dismissive hand and then turned back towards the pigeons again. It took a lot of effort, but İkmen did manage to hold his laughter in until he got back to his own office – just.

  It wasn’t really İzzet’s fault, Süleyman thought as he sat and watched the older man suck his own teeth in lieu of having a drink. That everything about İzzet irritated him, including his personal habits, was unfortunate but nobody was actually to blame. The way he spoke, moved, ate, and even smoked, grated on him. However, it was the one thing that Süleyman could, to some extent, control that really rankled more profoundly than anything else. His sergeant’s opinions and even some of his beliefs were, to Süleyman at least, beyond the pale.

  ‘They’ve got to be queer, this man’s victims,’ İzzet said as he sat with his superior outside Abdullah Aydın’s hospital room. ‘That kid in there, he has to be queer.’

  Heroically squashing down an urge just to tell him to shut up, Süleyman said, ‘Why do you think that, Sergeant?’

  ‘Well, if some man tried to have sex with me, I’d fight to the death,’ İzzet responded passionately. As he spoke his eyes shone with an almost fanatical intensity.

  ‘Well, maybe Abdullah Aydın did just that,’ Süleyman said. ‘After all, he is fighting for his life in there.’

  ‘Maybe the peeper did him up the arse before he stabbed him . . .’

  ‘It’s unlikely,’ Süleyman said as evenly as he could in the face of such bald language. ‘If there had been any sort of penetration Mr Lewis would have heard something, wouldn’t he? After all he was alone up on the roof terrace and it was very late.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  But İzzet was not, he knew, convinced. Even the peeper’s early victims, those he had just stared at and masturbated in front of, İzzet had treated with barely disguised contempt. George Lewis, the elderly New Zealander who had responded to young Aydın’s screams when he was stabbed, and who had probably saved Abdullah’s life, İzzet had dubbed an ‘old homo’ on account of his unmarried state. Not even the fact that Lewis was a widower could sway the sergeant from this seemingly intractable opinion.

  ‘You do know, İzzet, that this is not necessarily about sex, don’t you?’ Süleyman said.

  İzzet wrinkled his already craggy brow. ‘How do you mean?’

  How do you mean, SIR would have been nice, Süleyman felt, but decided to let it go. After all it was an idea he wanted this Neanderthal to consider now – accepted procedure would have to wait. ‘When one man forces himself on another man in a sexual act, he is exerting power over that individual,’ Süleyman said. ‘In exactly the same way as a man who rapes women is exerting his power over them, male on male rapists are making a statement about their feelings with regard to other men. Such men generally suffer feelings of inadequacy, of powerlessness within their own milieu, whatever that may be.’

  ‘Oh, bravo!’ a heavily smoke-stained voice said. ‘Psychology at its finest.’

  Süleyman looked up to see the thin face of Çetin İkmen smiling down at him. He stood up and embraced the smaller man immediately.

  ‘This is a bad business, Inspector,’ İkmen said,
mindful of the presence of İzzet Melik at his friend’s side.

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘But can’t this peeper,’ İzzet, obviously confused, put in, ‘can’t he just want to fuck them?’

  ‘Well, that too is possible,’ İkmen said with a smile. ‘But we have to look at every possibility and theory available to us, don’t we? But look, Sergeant, I need to speak to Inspector Süleyman alone for a moment, so if you could just go outside and have a smoke for a few minutes . . .’

  ‘Sir, it’s Ramazan, I . . .’

  ‘Oh, of course, of course. Well, look,’ İkmen said, ‘if you could just go and, I don’t know, look around at nurses or something . . .’

  As soon as he saw İzzet’s sartorially inelegant form disappear down the corridor, İkmen came straight to the point.

  ‘I’ve got to go to Cappadocia,’ he said. ‘It’s possible the local jandarma have found Alison.’

  ‘Çetin . . .’

  ‘Look, I know that this peeper thing is very serious and that you’re not having the best of times with Sergeant Reactionary, but Mehmet, it’s Alison, you know. My and Max’s Alison.’

  Süleyman looked into eyes that were close to tears, sighed, and then smiled. For his mentor to go away now was inconvenient to say the least, but if it was about Alison then Süleyman knew that he could hardly argue. Back in the 1970s İkmen had met and fallen in love with a young British backpacker called Alison. A married man with children even then, he’d never done anything about this infatuation, which never progressed beyond a kiss and yet his friend Max, an English teacher who had also been in love with Alison, had been very jealous. The girl had, apparently, preferred İkmen over her own countryman and it had wounded the Englishman badly. In fact, so badly that Max, who was a man fascinated by and gifted in the occult arts, had brooded on what he saw as İkmen’s betrayal for over twenty years. And when he finally arrived at a punishment he deemed suitable for the Turk, Max had pursued his chosen course with fanatical intensity. He had kidnapped İkmen’s daughter Çiçek whom he incorporated into a bizarre ritual designed, so Max maintained, to protect İstanbul against ‘dark forces’. Ultimately he had been unsuccessful in this aim and had subsequently died in what İkmen still felt were mysterious circumstances. The point was, and had always been for İkmen, that just after Alison left İstanbul to continue with her trek along the hippy trail, she had disappeared. The last sighting of her had been in August 1978 in Nevşehir, the regional capital of Cappadocia. Alison was and remained for him unfinished business. Although no longer in love with her, he still cared about what might have been her fate. Süleyman, who had also been instrumental in preventing Max Esterhazy from completing his twisted ritual, was one of the few people who knew about the Alison connection.