Land of the Blind Read online

  ‘The people here don’t want any more shopping malls,’ Peri said. ‘In fact, if my colleagues are to be believed they don’t want anyone telling them what they want any more. They have decided they want this park, why shouldn’t they fight for it?’

  ‘Because the State knows best?’

  ‘Oh, come on, you don’t believe that any more than I do!’ She puffed heavily on her cigarette, which disturbingly reminded Ömer of Inspector İkmen. ‘What do they know? Eh? They certainly don’t know much about us, do they?’

  Ömer turned his head away. He’d taken an oath to protect the Turkish Republic which he took very seriously. But he also knew that in one sense he was at odds with his country. Back in the days of the old hard-line secular Kemalist republic, anyone with any religion was an oddity. In recent years the current government had made it plain they would prefer people to be Muslims. Ömer and Peri were not secular nor were they Muslims.

  ‘Remember all those battles the army had with the PKK in our streets?’ Peri said. ‘Then Hezbollah. Remember how all sides turned against our people whenever they found us? They say we worship idols, Ömer. They are ignorant. Let these people have their park is what I say. Those two men who were brought in by Dr Schell, one had a rainbow flag, you know, the symbol that gay people use. The other one told me that he was an environmentalist. He just wanted a green space for people to go to and relax. Is that too much to ask? Is it so wrong to want that as opposed to endless shopping?’

  He looked at her but said nothing.

  ‘I know you agree with me, Ömer,’ she said. ‘But I also know that you’re in a difficult position.’

  ‘What can I say?’ He shrugged.

  ‘You’re not likely to be called out to the park if this continues, are you?’ Peri asked.

  ‘No,’ he said and then he smiled. ‘It’s very unlikely.’

  Unless of course the authorities wanted detectives to mingle with the protesters under cover. But Ömer didn’t tell his sister that and he didn’t think about it either, because the prospect frightened him. He had another beer and as darkness fell he and Peri talked of other things. They even, once they’d had enough to drink, laughed.

  Chapter 3

  Rat Boy said that he found the bag of empty water bottles first. But One-Legged Nurettin said that they were his.

  ‘I saw that man throw the bag from his car,’ he said.

  ‘Where from? You were lying down in your own piss,’ Rat Boy said. ‘Anyway, I picked it up, so it’s mine!’

  Nurettin made a dive for the bag and fell over. But Rat Boy, laughing, ran away. ‘You’re out of control, you little bastard!’ Nurettin shouted after the kid.

  ‘Oh, he’s just trying to make a living.’

  Nurettin looked up and saw Emine. She was Rat Boy’s aunt and the sister of Nurettin’s wife, Beliz. She put one of her arms around his shoulders and lifted him up on to his one foot. She gave him back the stick he had dropped.

  ‘The boy is out of control and I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But the fault isn’t with him.’

  ‘I know.’

  He shuffled forwards. Behind him, Emine scoured the ground for anything worth picking up.

  ‘Mustafa Bey just deserted us,’ she said.

  ‘Because that son of a pig Öden gave him money.’

  ‘Mustafa Bey is a landlord, what do you expect? Honesty?’

  ‘I’d say that even amongst landlords honesty should be a given.’ The voice Nurettin heard was deeper than Emine’s and it was male. He looked up. The speaker was a small, thin man with a smoke-dried face and thick black and grey hair. He held out a police badge.

  ‘Inspector Çetin İkmen,’ he said. ‘I’m investigating the death of a woman called Ariadne Savva. I understand she used to come down here.’

  The Greek woman, dead? Was she really, or was this just some sort of police trick to get them to move on or give up their carts?

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Nurettin said.

  ‘She was an archaeologist,’ İkmen said. ‘A Greek.’

  Nurettin shrugged.

  ‘She used to come here sometimes with her friends and distribute food.’

  ‘We don’t know anything about her,’ Nurettin said.

  He saw İkmen look at Emine. Then he heard him say, ‘She’d just given birth to a child when she died. It’s in this city somewhere. We need to find it – soon.’

  Emine put a hand up to her face. ‘A baby?’

  ‘Do you know where Ariadne’s baby might be?’ İkmen asked. ‘Just newborn . . .’

  ‘Oh Allah, I didn’t know she was pregnant!’ Emine said.

  Nurettin was furious that she’d fallen for the policeman’s lies. ‘Shut up, woman. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He turned to İkmen. ‘We don’t know of any such woman.’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Emine insisted.

  ‘The woman is delusional,’ he said. ‘She talks nonsense.’

  Emine hit him. ‘Delusional? Me?’ She turned to İkmen. ‘I apologise for him, Beyefendi,’ she said. ‘He’s old and crazy and he’s missing a leg. Ariadne Hanım is very dear to us. She has tried to help people here. Why is she dead? What has happened to her?’

  ‘We think she may have been murdered,’ İkmen said.

  Emine began to weep. ‘Oh the monster!’ she said. She hit Nurettin again and then crouched down on her haunches to cry.

  Accusatory black eyes powered into Nurettin’s soul. ‘All right, all right, we knew her,’ he admitted.

  ‘Ariadne Savva.’

  ‘Yes. We live by picking up rubbish, we always have,’ he said. ‘There’s no dishonour in that. At least there wasn’t until we all got evicted from our homes and the bulldozers moved in. When you are homeless you cease to exist. You become a squatter and a pariah. But that Greek lady knew better. She knew that when the police arrested us for vagrancy they were going to take our carts and then make us pay to get them back. You know about that, do you?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Huh. She argued with the police and with the bastard who created all this mess here in Gizlitepe. And I don’t mean our landlord.’

  ‘He means Ahmet Öden,’ Emine said.

  Was it wise for her to tell an unknown policeman about that? Nurettin wondered. But then, did it really matter now? Öden had taken their homes and had them chased from pillar to post; what was there left for him to do? And Nurettin was sad about Ariadne. She’d been a nice lady.

  ‘Ahmet Öden threatened Ariadne if she kept on helping us,’ Emine said.

  ‘Threatened her how?’

  ‘He said that if she carried on coming here he’d make her sorry. He’s capable of anything. He even beats his own men. If you’re looking for Ariadne’s baby you’d better start searching his house. Are you sure that Ariadne was pregnant? She—’

  ‘Yes.’

  Nurettin shook his head. ‘That such things can happen . . .’

  And then he saw that İkmen was being joined by two more, this time uniformed, police officers. Nurettin narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s this?’ he said.

  ‘We’ll need to search the area,’ İkmen said.

  He offered Nurettin a cigarette which he thought about taking and then refused.

  ‘Why do you need to search?’ Nurettin said.

  ‘For the baby.’

  ‘Then why look here?’ he said. ‘We told you, we didn’t know that Ariadne was pregnant. Why would we have her baby here in all this filth we have to live in anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ İkmen said. ‘But you knew her and so we have to do it.’

  He ordered the two uniformed constables into the rubble and dirt that represented all that was left of old Gizlitepe.

  ‘That bastard Ahmet Öden knew her too!’ Emine yelled. ‘But you won’t search his great mansion out at Bebek, will you?’

  ‘I will if it’s necessary,’ İkmen said. ‘I am aware, madam, that the worst villains in the world live in nice clean hou
ses and wear suits. I may be many things, but I’m nobody’s fool.’

  Not sleeping didn’t work for Kerim Gürsel. First he’d had to watch Sinem when she took her medication and then he’d been distracted by the comings and goings to and from Gezi Park in the early hours of the morning. More people had arrived and then more police.

  Sinem had never taken such a high dose of pain control before. Her doctor had left instructions at the pharmacy to call him if her breathing became laboured. It hadn’t but Kerim had been worried. She was only thirty-eight and already the arthritis he’d always known her to have was threatening to push her over into a drug dependency he knew she’d hate.

  Now he was with a man he suspected felt just as helpless as he. Mr Abdülhamid Akar was a senior official at the offices of Kadıköy Municipality. But he was a man who clearly knew the limits of his power.

  ‘When developers move in, single municipalities have limited power over firstly what they buy and secondly what they build,’ he said. ‘Privately owned land, such as that in the Gizlitepe district, can be bought and sold freely.’

  ‘But surely you as the local authority have the power to enforce local planning regulations,’ Kerim said.

  ‘Indeed.’ he adjusted his glasses. ‘We will oversee new development. The plans submitted conform to our regulations – so far.’

  ‘And yet a proportion of the population of Gizlitepe have been made homeless.’

  ‘Sadly, yes.’ There was an awkward pause and then he said, ‘Sergeant, it is a sad fact of life that when a municipality is subject to the higher authority of a city government we cannot always get what we want or fulfil the expectations of our residents.’

  ‘So—’

  ‘A great many people in Kadıköy do not want our famous Haydarpaşa Railway Station to be developed into a hotel,’ Akar said. ‘The city of İstanbul, on the other hand, thinks that it is an excellent idea. If I am being realistic, and in light of our redevelopment plans that have come to fruition in the city, I imagine that the many people of Kadıköy will be disappointed. Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’ Kerim knew there was a political dimension too, Kadıköy being under the auspices of one party, while the city of İstanbul was under that of another.

  ‘However, I take your point about the rubbish pickers of Gizlitepe. Provision has not been—’

  ‘Mr Akar, did you ever come across the woman who, we believe, became their advocate?’ Kerim asked. ‘Ariadne Savva?’

  ‘Not personally. But I knew of her,’ Akar said.

  ‘How?’

  He smiled. ‘Via the complaints of colleagues,’ he said. ‘This lady was making some legitimate points about issues we could do nothing about. You know the rubbish collectors are few in number and they choose to stay where they are?’

  ‘Where else can they go?’

  ‘Unless they try to find somewhere, how will they know?’

  ‘Maybe they’ve tried to find somewhere and failed.’

  Mr Akar smiled. Suddenly Kerim didn’t like him as much as he’d thought he did. ‘You know, Sergeant,’ he said, ‘between the demands of the very rich and the cries of the poor we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. We do our best. But if people will not move along gracefully . . .’ He opened his arms in a helpless gesture. ‘Unfortunately we cannot always have what we want.’

  Kerim didn’t feel that having somewhere to live was an unreasonable ‘want’ but he said nothing. Mr Akar was a man under pressure, which meant he was like ninety per cent of local government officials. He wondered what he made of the Gezi Park situation and decided that he would probably be very non-committal on the subject.

  Both French windows were open so he could make the most of the breeze coming in from the Bosphorus. Out on the balcony he watched Kelime play with her dolls. Ahmet Öden smiled. He knew people wondered how he coped with her on his own but she was such a good girl. And he had Mary for the more unpleasant tasks.

  He looked again at the plans the architect had submitted for a radical new apartment block in Kadıköy. He’d thought it was very innovative until the English nanny had seen it.

  ‘Oh Mr Öden,’ Mary had said, ‘that looks just like the Shard of Glass in London.’

  She’d Googled it for him, his well-spoken English nanny, and he’d seen that what she’d told him was quite true. His architect’s building looked almost identical to what was now apparently the tallest building in London. Why did people always try to cheat him? Did they think he was a fool?

  Ahmet Öden was an İstanbullu born and bred. His family, who had lived in Eminönü for generations, had been poor. For fifteen years after he’d left primary school, he’d worked mainly with his father in every low waged, manual job he could find. The city had offered many temptations and he could have turned to crime on several occasions, but he hadn’t. His father, Taha, whom some had called a bigot, had been a religious man, and so Ahmet had known that the pious life was the only option for him from an early age. He’d accepted his lot, married a pious Muslim girl, Kelime’s mother, and busied himself promoting the notion of moderate Islamic government. He’d never imagined that his beliefs would become mainstream. But in 2002, when the Islamically rooted AK Parti had come to power, Ahmet’s political dreams came true. In the three years that followed that victory, he got in with a group of like-minded Islamic movers and shakers and eventually he managed to start a small building company of his own. He’d worked on building sites for years, he was eloquent and pious, and so it wasn’t hard for him to persuade people to invest. Also, then, he had wanted to build low-cost, decent housing for poor but observant people, like his parents.

  And then, finally, Lale his wife had got pregnant and for the first time in his life Ahmet felt content. The memory of it made Ahmet’s smile fade. It had been obvious that Kelime had not been right from the moment of her birth. Tiny and limp, her mouth had been fat and her eyes had slanted upwards like, as Ahmet had put it, ‘a Chinese person’. One of his new friends got the couple an appointment with a paediatrician who told them that Kelime had Down’s syndrome. She was ‘bad’, apparently, and would need twenty-four-hour care. Lale had just cried but Ahmet had been like stone. Unwilling to allow himself to feel, he’d poured all of his energies into finding ways he could make the money he would need to give his daughter everything a ‘normal’ child would want. And more.

  He watched her play and then when she looked up, he waved. Kelime had every Barbie doll that could be bought in Turkey. She loved them all and never tired of making up stories about them. He heard her chattering, holding each doll up to her face and smiling. At twelve Kelime was overweight in spite of Nanny Mary’s efforts to make her walk more. She loved ice cream and so he gave her every flavour that existed. Just because he couldn’t have it didn’t mean his daughter should be denied. Mary had, gently, told him off. Apparently the diabetes he suffered from could be inherited. And eating lots of high-fat, sugary food made that more likely. But Ahmet had told Mary that she was a nanny, not a nurse, and he didn’t pay her such a huge salary to criticise him. Mary had shut up. When he finally decided to take a new wife, distant though that was, Ahmet had promised himself that he would sack the English nanny and get a cheaper, local woman. She wouldn’t have the same cachet as the English woman, but Ahmet had already made his point about his wealth to anyone who mattered years before.

  Kelime’s condition had only crystallised a greed Ahmet had always known he had. Once he’d completed the social housing project, he’d looked for other clients of a different sort. As his developments became more and more elaborate so his charges increased. His influence grew. There were elaborate dinners (men only, no alcohol) and charitable activities around education and support for the poor. Lale had been left alone with Kelime during that time. Ahmet knew she found it hard; he watched her get thin, fall into silence and wander the house at night talking to herself like a sad ghost. One day when her mother took Kelime out in her buggy for a f
ew hours, Lale drank a bottle of disinfectant. And as soon as he’d buried his wife, Ahmet worked even harder. Now he was a multi-millionaire, which meant that he and Kelime could have whatever they wanted.

  A much younger version of Ahmet walked into the room and said, ‘You’ve heard about these protests in Beyoğlu?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Semih Öden was fifteen years younger than his brother. Dressed in tight jeans and a designer tee shirt, he looked a lot like some of the young environmentalists who were still, in spite of police efforts, gathering in Gezi Park.

  ‘I think it will pass,’ Ahmet said. ‘People want to shop. Look at all the malls in this city. Of course they do. What use is a park?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some of them look a bit crazy. But maybe they have a point—’

  ‘Like what? This country will never go back to what it was before,’ Ahmet said. ‘They’re just making a fuss because they’re not at the top of the tree any more. Forget it. We’ve got more important things to think about.’

  Semih looked at Kelime absorbed in her dolls.

  Ahmet nudged him and gave him an envelope.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘My latest offer to the Negropontes,’ Ahmet said. ‘Returned unopened.’

  ‘You know they don’t want to sell. I don’t know why you bother with it.’

  ‘You know exactly why.’

  Semih turned away.

  ‘And that plot could be very lucrative,’ Ahmet said. ‘Right in the middle of Sultanahmet. I could build a hotel to rival the Four Seasons.’

  ‘Couldn’t you do that using the existing building? It seems to me it’s a nice house and—’

  ‘No! Why do you even ask? You know why!’

  Semih shrugged.

  Ahmet said, ‘I can make something new and individual. Those old houses are a fire risk and they cost a fortune to equip with the kind of technology billionaire guests will expect.’