Death by Design Read online

  ‘OK.’ The woman came towards him carrying scissors, an electric razor and a bag of other things he couldn’t yet see. She took the dressing off the wound on the side of his face. It was healing well. As she first shaved off his moustache and then coloured his hair what seemed to İkmen a most startling shade of black, the man kept on talking, telling İkmen who he was slowly but surely becoming.

  Abdullah Karabas, Çetin Ertegrul’s son-in-law, had – just like Çetin İkmen’s real son-in-law, Berekiah – sustained an injury that meant that he could no longer work. Çiçek, Çetin’s daughter, was newly pregnant. To make matters worse, Çetin Ertegrul himself had recently been made redundant from his job as a security guard at the Akmerkez mall in Etiler, possibly because his employers felt that he was too old to be seen amongst their younger and trendier customers. And so Çetin had made the decision to leave Turkey and seek more lucrative employment in the European Union. His hope was that by doing this his daughter would be able to stop worrying about money and enjoy her baby when it came.

  ‘When you get to your destination, London, you will make contact with the person listed on this mobile phone as Ayşe,’ the man said. ‘This person will be your initial contact and your story will be known to that person.’

  He handed a very slim and handsome mobile phone to İkmen and said, ‘Keep this with you at all times.’

  Once he was someone else, a person without a moustache and with very short, very black hair, the man took his photograph and then carried it and the passport away with him to another room. The clothes the woman gave him to wear were even cheaper versions of the already cheap and worn-out clothes that Çetin İkmen usually wore. The small suitcase he was provided with contained nothing that was any better. For his pockets there was a wallet containing eight hundred Turkish lire, a photograph of a woman who he was told was his daughter, a set of keys to ‘his’ flat in Laleli, the mobile phone and an ATM card in the name of Çetin Ertegrul.

  ‘This ATM card will work anywhere in the world,’ the man said. ‘The PIN number is on your mobile phone. Draw in euros or sterling. You can take out up to five thousand euros at any one time.’

  ‘Five thousand euros!’

  ‘You’re a police officer, you’re supposed to be trustworthy,’ the woman growled.

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Wherever you go in the European Union, it will cost you,’ the man said. ‘Only the old ex-communist countries are cheap. You’ll need money to pay whoever traffics you across the English Channel. It will be expensive. Now your mobile phone also contains two other numbers. One is listed under the name Wolfgang, that is your contact in Berlin. You call Wolfgang as soon as you arrive. The other is under the name Burak and that is your emergency number. You call that number if you are in trouble, if you’re about to be unmasked, if your life is in danger. Understand?’

  ‘Yes.’ There wasn’t much not to understand. There was, however, quite a bit to be worried about.

  But the man smiled even if İkmen did not. ‘Now . . .’ He picked up a hand mirror and held it in front of İkmen’s face. ‘Say hello to Çetin Ertegrul.’

  What stared back from the mirror was the very epitome of migrant Turkish desperation, thin and pallid, scarred, the short dyed hair a last-ditch attempt to appear younger. İkmen looked at his new incarnation with disgust. This person, this parody of a Turkish man, was going to go and plead to be trafficked out of Germany, beg for work in the UK. He started to feel angry until he remembered that Çetin Ertegrul wasn’t real, was merely a part he was playing in order to expose a network of crime he had only glimpsed as yet.

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  Wolfgang was not what İkmen had expected. For a start he had not reckoned upon actually meeting his contact in Berlin. Maybe he had seen too many espionage movies. Berlin, what it had been and maybe what it still was, seemed to engender such notions. He’d imagined that when Wolfgang had told him on the phone to go to the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery in one of the old East German districts of the city, he would find some sort of message waiting for him there. A scrap of paper on a gravestone, a bag with instructions underneath a tree. What he hadn’t expected was a person – in this case a tiny, wizened and ancient Jewish man.

  Wolfgang led İkmen between the large plain gravestones and into one of the most heavily wooded areas of the cemetery. ‘You know that this is the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe.’

  ‘It is?’ German was very much İkmen’s third language and he was not finding it easy to speak. He did not, he knew, practise as often as he should. It made him feel nervous, edgy about both what he was saying and what he was hearing.

  ‘So strange when you consider how many Jews the Germans transported and killed,’ Wolfgang continued. ‘But then central Europe has always had its problems, has it not?’

  ‘Ah . . .’

  ‘The Hundred Years War, all that business with Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, silly, silly Kaiser Wilhelm, the Nazis, then the Wall and all that aggravation.’ Wolfgang cleared some ferns away from the side of the path and revealed a small, battered bench. ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘Sit down, Herr Ertegrul.’

  İkmen sat. He was red-eyed and shattered. It had taken him two days to get from İstanbul to Berlin by train and he had not travelled first class. Slumped for much of the time against the carriage wall, hemmed in by German Turks returning to their various home cities, he had been kept awake all night by blaring hip-hop music. This interspersed with ear-splitting attempts by various youths to rap in German had nearly driven him mad. When he’d arrived in Berlin he’d called Wolfgang straight away, stuttering in his schoolboy German, straining every nerve to understand what his contact was saying. After that he’d had to negotiate his way to Weissensee, a leafy, quiet area of the city that used to be part of old East Berlin.

  ‘And through all of the silliness that has happened in this part of the world there have always been those who seek to move from place to place without let or hindrance,’ Wolfgang continued. ‘Of course this has not always been possible. For instance under Hitler, Jews could not go outside without wearing yellow stars on their clothing, they could not go to the next town, much less the next country.’

  He was obviously building up to telling İkmen something about how he might secure his own illegal passage to the UK, but he was doing it slowly and for İkmen rather tortuously.

  ‘I have, you know, lived almost my whole life in Weissensee,’ Wolfgang said. ‘There was of course a period of time, some years between nineteen forty and nineteen forty-five when I was . . . elsewhere, but that hiatus taught me much, Herr Ertegrul. I met people willing to sell almost anything to secure transport from one place to another. For a time I became such a person myself.’

  Two small, round women, their heads covered by chiffon scarves, passed by and Wolfgang raised his hat. He was talking about the concentration camps. He had been in one. İkmen wondered how he had survived and wondered whether it had anything to do with this business of moving people from one place to another.

  ‘But I came back to Weissensee,’ the old man said with a smile. ‘I would have preferred to live in the West but . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What can you do? I was stuck with Russians, the GDR, the whole disaster. I would have been very depressed, not to mention poor, had I not remembered that earlier experience in the nineteen forties. I arranged for people to find alternatives to the GDR, Herr Ertegrul. Desperate people. I made their dreams come true and you know, in all the years that I did so, I never lost one person. Then when the Wall came down, of course I was very happy, but my business collapsed. Or rather it did for a while.’

  İkmen had imagined that Wolfgang was some sort of police officer or agent. But it seemed not. He must have seen the confusion on İkmen’s face because he smiled.

  ‘Now, of course,’ Wolfgang said, ‘many of those who would be elsewhere come from Africa and they would really rather like to be here. Sometimes they need some assistance. Sometime
s other people need assistance too. Nowadays one has such strange bedfellows, Herr Ertegrul. On occasion I even work for what they call the security services in what we all now call just Germany. I think that you should stay in Kreuzberg while you are here in Berlin. There are a lot of Turks in Kreuzberg.’

  Kreuzberg, İkmen knew, was also known as ‘Kleine İstanbul’.

  ‘There is a bookshop on the main thoroughfare through Kreuzberg, the Bergmannstrasse,’ Wolfgang said. ‘It is called Eco. Books devoted to global warming, all the ecological nonsense. Above that is a small what you Turks call “pansiyon”. It’s run by a friend of mine. There is a room there that you can have tonight. Tomorrow the next part of your journey will begin.’

  So much for first finding a trafficker and then paying him lots of money. Wolfgang himself was the people trafficker. ‘But, er, Wolfgang, why then did we not meet in Kreuzberg? Why here in this cemetery?’ İkmen asked.

  The old man smiled. ‘Oh, I always meet the people I move around here,’ he said. ‘Those who need me know it and so do the police. Fortunately these two groups do not always know each other.’

  There was an arrangement obviously. On some level Wolfgang was allowed to do what he did best, what he had done for many years in the GDR under the noses of the hated Stasi. In return he did things like this, transporting people across borders for the police. The British policeman had told him nothing about this. But then maybe he had not known about it himself. Perhaps this was something between Wolfgang and the German police and them alone.

  Slowly and painfully Wolfgang began to rise from the bench. ‘Oh, and get some money out tonight,’ he said to İkmen. ‘Three thousand euros will be a start. I understand that you can draw anywhere in Europe. We will have some more in France. It has all been agreed.’

  ‘Has it?’ İkmen felt like a child. Alone, out of his depth, forced to go along with whatever was suggested simply because he didn’t know any better.

  ‘Trust me,’ Wolfgang said with a smile and slowly walked away from the bench.

  İkmen took his mobile phone out of his pocket and brought up the name Burak, his emergency contact. But he didn’t call the number. After five minutes’ cogitation he put the phone back in his pocket, stood up and began to walk out of the cemetery.

  ‘Kleine İstanbul’ was both familiar and unfamiliar. The streets were full of headscarfed women getting their shopping from grocers that sold everything one could ever want from ‘back home’. But these places also sold German cigarettes, German biscuits and German lottery tickets too. The young people spoke German almost exclusively, even amongst themselves. Even men of İkmen’s own age seemed to prefer to speak the language of their adopted country as opposed to their native tongue. A case in point was the owner of the pansiyon where Wolfgang had reserved a room. Shouting rather than speaking, he waved a hand in the direction of İkmen’s small and rather smelly room and told him that he’d have to share the bathroom down the hall with a group of bricklayers from Albania. İkmen said that he had no problem with this at which the pansiyon owner shrugged and then walked back to his office.

  That night İkmen dined alone at a restaurant in one of the streets off Bergmannstrasse. Probably because it was relatively quiet in the restaurant, he suddenly felt truly alone and very exposed. All around him people were speaking a language he could not easily comprehend. His lodgings, though adequate, were cramped and unsavoury, and he was moving on to another country he hadn’t seen since the 1970s. How he would get to the UK he still didn’t know. The mysterious Wolfgang was obviously involved but whether İkmen actually trusted the old man was a moot point. After he finished his meal, he returned to his room, lay on his bed, stared up at the brown-stained ceiling and smoked.

  None of the irritations, fears and even anxieties about his immediate future that he had faced so far would have been half so bad had he not had Fatma on his mind too. She had known when he was due to leave, even if she knew no more than that, but still she had refused to utter one word to him. He’d spent the night before he left İstanbul in his son Bülent’s old bed. He had been banished from his own bedroom since well before Bekir had been killed. After seventeen years on the streets, that boy had picked up where he had left off with his family – causing fights and divisions, encouraging his younger siblings to lie, cheat and take drugs. What a toxic waste of flesh Bekir had been! And yet İkmen had cried when he died. Bekir had been his son as well as Fatma’s and he hurt as much if not more from the loss of him. Not that Fatma would ever understand that. It was clear now that she didn’t want to. She blamed him for Bekir’s death and that, now allied to the fact that she had only ever tolerated her husband’s lack of faith in Islam, had apparently killed her love for him. And yet what a love it had been! Çetin and Fatma had produced nine children in their long, long marriage. She had been, he recalled, an enthusiastic and uninhibited lover right up until Bekir had come between them that final, fatal time. Now it was as if someone had turned a tap off. He couldn’t get near her. With her headscarf pulled tightly around her face and her new, long Iranian-style overcoat, Fatma was not only someone unavailable, she was also, if only in appearance, foreign too. Alien and cold, she looked down at him as if he were something dirty, cheap and offensive. For the first time in nearly four decades, İkmen wondered what it would be like to make love to another woman. Strangely, just the thought of it made him shudder. How would that work? he wondered. How would he even begin to meet a woman? And, even if one were to come along, what would a smoke-dried, hard-up father of eight have to offer such a person? A meze in one of the restaurants on İstanbul Street, accompanied by a lot of rakı followed by a terrible, fumbling attempt at sex in the early hours of the morning.

  Maybe he should go with a prostitute. There was plenty of money in Çetin Ertegrul’s account. He could if he wanted to just order in some eastern European girl (there were easily as many Russians, Czechs, etc., in Berlin as there were in İstanbul) who would, no doubt, acquaint him with new and exciting sexual mores. But he knew that whatever this mythical person did, it would do neither him nor her any good. He couldn’t just ‘go’ with anyone! He hadn’t done that since he was a conscript back in the sixties. Even then he’d only done it once. Shortly afterwards he met Fatma, fell in love and had never had sex without love since. He knew that Mehmet Süleyman had had his share of illicit sexual liaisons, but he also knew that they had rarely, if ever, brought him joy. Recalling his colleague’s name made him think about İstanbul again, made him wonder what Mehmet, Ayşe Farsakoğlu and İzzet Melik were doing now. He wished he had been able to bid them proper farewells, but even that had been denied to him. To Mehmet and the others his going was an absence, a strange vacancy. Even Arto had been baffled by it. He had been hurt too. He had of course understood but he had also, İkmen knew, felt upset. They had been friends all their lives, they had shared everything. Except this. But then in İkmen’s ‘new’ world there was no Arto Sarkissian, any more than there was a Mehmet Süleyman, a Fatma İkmen, or even a Çetin İkmen. He was Çetin Ertegrul now: security guard, concerned father and general poor Turk. Çetin Ertegrul was not well-educated, he did not have friends in any of the professions and he only read the worst possible newspapers. Religious in the sense that he regularly attended the local mosque and always kept Ramazan, Çetin Ertegrul was a conservative soul who hankered after his old life back in his ancestral village in Cappadocia. He was not someone Çetin İkmen really liked very much. But he knew he would have to learn to at least live comfortably with this character for the foreseeable future. Failure to do so could conceivably cost him his life.

  Tired out by the events of the past three days as well as by his own very negative thoughts, İkmen eventually and mercifully went to sleep at around midnight. At 3 a.m. he was woken by someone shaking him and whispering in German. Alarmed, İkmen started to defend himself against this man until he said to him in Turkish, ‘Get up, you fool! Get your things together! Tonight we go to Calais!’

/>   A thousand miles to the east, in İstanbul, a sleepless Mehmet Süleyman stood in his garden and looked up at the moon. Where, he wondered, was Çetin İkmen now? More importantly, was he safe?

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  ‘The thing about buying counterfeit goods, Graham, is that when one does so, one is, if indirectly, funding international terrorism.’

  Graham Amphill was one of the BBC’s most feared and, in some circles, hated interviewers. As soon as the new and alarmingly young mayor of London had finished speaking, people all over the United Kingdom held their breath. What on earth would Graham say in response to that?

  ‘Oh, lord,’ Graham Amphill muttered as he looked wearily into camera four. ‘Oh, come on, Mr Üner, not that old argument! You don’t know that people selling knock-off watches and handbags on the streets of London are working for al Qaeda for God’s sake!’

  ‘No we don’t know—’

  ‘Well, if you don’t know, Mr Üner, why are you spoiling it for poor Londoners who just want a fake Rolex or pair of slightly dodgy trainers to save a few quid? Isn’t this really all about trying to stamp out what we in the west consider to be slave labour in the Third World?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Isn’t it all just about being judgemental and nannyish?’

  ‘Graham, if you will let me speak . . .’ Haluk Üner, mayor of London, leaned forward in the big black chair the BBC had provided for him and smiled. A good-looking man of only thirty-five, Üner was the first mayor of London to be the son of immigrant parents. Both his parents were originally from Adana in south-eastern Turkey. They had sent Haluk to the best schools that north London could offer. This had paid off when he won a place at Oxford to study law. Haluk Üner QC had been voted in on an Independent ticket as mayor of London only six months previously after a staggeringly fast progress into the upper echelons of the capital’s local government organisation. ‘I am not against people buying what they want,’ he continued. ‘But fake goods are, we know, produced in factories both here in Europe and in the Third World in appalling conditions. Those who work in these factories are slaves—’