A Chemical Prison # aka The Ottoman Cage Read online

  Not that the dream had been related in any way to his marriage. Or had it? Mehmet, although not prone to psychological introspection, realised that on one level the image of himself as prisoner was only too pertinent to his private life. But as he poured the boiled water on to the small pile of leaves at the bottom of the teapot, he cut off those thoughts to concentrate instead on the more immediate and, for him, less painful subject of the recently murdered young man.

  Dreams, odd feelings and their relevance or meaning was usually much more his boss, Çetin İkmen’s line than his. Indeed, had he been asked by İkmen about the value or otherwise of such experiences, Mehmet Suleyman would have declared them absolutely worthless. But now, on his own in the almost dark of the near dawn, things felt a little bit different. In spite of himself he wondered whether it had indeed been like the dream for the now dead youngster. Had the youth, alone in that room just as Mehmet’s dream self had been, thought it all quite normal and safe until right up to the very end? Had he too, experienced a darkening in the room – a sort of signal of what was to come? A signpost to death and the reality that nothing existed beyond the end of all our lives?

  He poured the golden tea out into a glass and then dropped one small cube of sugar into its depths. It hadn’t been so long ago that he had existed safely inside his old beliefs. If you lived a good life Allah would provide a lovely perfumed garden complete with willing little slave girls in the next, far better existence beyond the grave. Even in the face of the early unnatural deaths upon which he had worked he had continued to believe that what Islam taught about death was in fact the truth. Exactly when that had all changed so drastically, he could not now recall. But there had, there must have been a moment when it all, for whatever reason, failed to make sense to him any more. Perhaps that too had more to do with his marriage than he cared to admit? It was very possible.

  But as the watery autumn light flowed weakly across the tops of the buildings opposite his kitchen, all of these thoughts began to drift into a fog of irrelevance. Too tired to be really awake and yet still too unnerved to risk further sleep, Mehmet Suleyman watched the progress of the dawn with a glazed and hopeless blankness.

  Bulent Gürdilek had been just fourteen when he had disappeared from his family’s cramped little apartment in Beşiktaş. Although, when questioned about his son, Ahmet Gürdilek had given it as his opinion that the boy had, for some little time, been mixing in ‘bad’ company, he also felt that his son had not been unhappy with his lot. After all, Bulent had had quite a good job for a boy of his age helping out in his uncle’s garage over in Karaköy. It was indeed his uncle who had first reported him missing when he’d failed to turn up for work one Thursday in August. There’d been a couple of reported sightings in the two weeks following his disappearance and then – nothing. His mother, it was said, was almost insane with the worry of it.

  At sixteen a little older than Bulent, Aristotle Mavroyeni was a quiet and studious child with, according to his parents, his sights firmly set upon a vocation within the Greek church. When he had disappeared somewhere between his parents’ apartment in Beyoǧlu and his aunt’s house in Sarıyer it had been thought for a time that perhaps he had unilaterally decided to enter into a monastic order rather earlier than his parents had planned. But when Aristotle failed to appear amongst the ranks of the local communities, his family’s thoughts turned to more sinister explanations. Five months on there had still not been so much as a whisper about this boy.

  By far the worst month for disappearances of young men so far that year had been July. Four boys had vanished in the first two weeks: one English tourist, two Turkish teenagers and the son of a Kurdish silversmith. Worrying it most certainly was, but not atypical. Youngsters frequently ‘took off’ during the summer months, usually following the sun and fun to the resorts of the south coast. When the season ended at least some of these would either come back or would contact their families to come and get them. It was a trend that also extended to girls, typically those who came from repressive families or who were faced with imminent arranged marriages.

  In fact, the reality was that the majority of the young people who were reported as missing were eventually found. Those who had not gone south for the summer had often gone to live with secret boyfriends or girlfriends who, although routinely ‘ruining’ these youngsters with regard to their precious virginity, neither harmed nor killed them. The danger for these young people lay more with what their families would and did do to them when they returned from their little adventures. It was not unknown for an irate father to beat his immoral daughter to death in the wake of the latter’s lost honour.

  None of this, however, could detract from the fact that for a small but significant minority of these young people, the missing state did eventually resolve into homicide. The streets were not a good place to be for those with no money and little experience and, furthermore, they were full of enough pimps and drug dealers to make not falling into unwise practices very difficult indeed.

  The young clerk whose job it had been to turn up this information looked at the latest pertinent missing report and frowned. On 28 September eighteen-year-old Bedros Mazmoulian had failed to arrive home after a party at a friend’s house and had not, so far, been seen or heard of again. Bedros was a student at the university and his grandfather at least suspected that he may have had some experience with illicit drugs. More pertinent still was the fact the young man was Armenian. Inspector İkmen had told the clerk to look out for this particular detail and, when he placed the files on his superior’s desk, the clerk made sure that Bedros’s details were on the top of the pile.

  Chapter 5

  Arto Sarkissian waited until the midday call to prayer had finished before leaving his office to join the two people who were waiting for him in the ante-room. Although only a minority of his staff members did actually respond to the call it was better not to be seen as conspicuously otherwise engaged when the legendary thousand muezzins of İstanbul invoked the power of Allah. Although still adhering to the principles of secular government as laid down by Atatürk in the 1920s there was now a significant minority within the country for whom Islam was rather more important than conventional politics. Some of these people had, in recent years, even obtained posts within the government and although the Turkish Republic was far from being an Islamic state like Iran or even the far more liberal Jordan, it was still as well for people who were not Muslims to adopt a low-key profile with regard to religion. Not that Dr Sarkissian was religious in any way, but as an Armenian he was nominally Christian. It also had to be admitted that, being of that race, problems with just about every other racial group in the region were not historically unknown to him. As he stood up from his chair he smiled across at his assistant, Selma Bilge, who had just finished reading the few notes her superior had written down during his recent conversation with Inspector Çetin İkmen. They covered briefly some details about who was currently waiting for them in the ante-room.

  ‘Shall we go then, Selma?’ the doctor asked.

  The young woman’s face looked strained; she disliked this part of her job, he knew, which was why he had used a gentle tone to rouse her from her reading.

  ‘Yes, Doctor. Do I need …?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled in a way that he hoped was reassuring. ‘No, just bring yourself. I think that the more normal, for want of a better word, we look the better.’

  He opened the door to allow her to pass and then followed her down the long, grey corridor that led to the ante-room and the laboratories beyond.

  There were actually three people in the ante-room when the doctor and his assistant arrived. Two of them were, as he had expected, an elderly couple, probably in their seventies, both wrapped up rather extravagantly against what was, as yet, not a bitterly cold autumn. It was, however, their eyes rather than their clothes that caught the doctor’s attention. In both cases, they were quite hollow; eyes that had seen not only what they did not want to see but what they should not either. During a long-ago visit to his cousin in Paris, Arto Sarkissian remembered seeing photographs of eyes like theirs in the pictures he had been shown of the Armenians the Turks had allegedly forced to march across Anatolia during the Great War, those terrible marches that had or had not happened according to who one was. Was it just a coincidence that this strange, sad little couple were Armenian too? Or was he slipping into the trap that he was aware so many of his fellow Armenians fell into – of giving themselves the monopoly on suffering?

  The third member of the party was a young uniformed police constable who had, he suspected, been sent by Çetin İkmen to bring the old couple to the mortuary. He nodded briefly in recognition of the policeman and then turned to the couple, extending his hand to the man as he approached.

  ‘Professor and Mrs Mazmoulian?’

  The old man took the doctor’s hand and shook it as firmly as his trembling arm would allow. ‘Doctor.’

  The old woman, looking on, spoke in a small but surprisingly firm voice, her nervousness showing only in the small picking movements she made with her tiny fingers against the sleeve of Sarkissian’s white coat. ‘This is so terrible,’ she said, ‘so terrible, and yet we were both so relieved when Timür İkmen’s young boy told us that the pathologist was an Armenian. If that is Bedros in there I would hate to think that his body had been touched by unchristian hands.’

  Noticeably, both the police constable and Selma Bilge turned away at this point. In order to cover his own embarrassment and to avoid further discussion of things Armenian, Arto Sarkissian concentrated on his own mild amusement at the notion of his friend Çetin being ‘Timür İkmen’s young boy’. ‘You worked with Dr İkmen, I believe, Professor,’ he said.

  The old man smiled. ‘Yes. His son is your friend, I understand. It was good of him to arrange for us to be here so quickly. You must tell him that when you see him. This morning, I just couldn’t …’

  His voice trailed off as tears entered the corners of his eyes – a signal, Arto felt, that what had to be done had to be done very quickly.

  ‘Right,’ he said, marshalling his most doctor-like air, ‘in a moment we will go into that room there’ – he pointed to a door at his right – ‘where I will ask you to stand beside the table on which the body is currently resting.’

  ‘Oh, may I go blind if it is our grandson!’ the old woman cried.

  Her husband, shushing her gently, put a comforting arm around her shoulder and nodded his assent to the doctor.

  ‘I will then remove the covering from the face,’ Arto continued, ‘which is when you may have as long or as short a time as you need to make your identification. Do you understand?’

  In a voice that was already thick with tears the old man said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when you wish me to replace the cover, just either tell me, if you can, or raise your hand. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now,’ he said, knowing of old that who was going to do what in situations like this was not always clear, ‘is Mrs Mazmoulian coming in too?’

  ‘I want to,’ the old woman replied, ‘but then I don’t if you know what I mean. I cannot let Kevork go alone, Bedros was – is – the last part we had of our poor dead son and …’

  ‘I understand.’ Arto Sarkissian motioned to his assistant to move somewhat closer to the party. ‘Miss Bilge will be on hand to assist you. Miss Bilge?’

  The young woman, with a small smile, came and took the old woman’s hand in hers. Then, without any further words, the old couple, the doctor and his assistant passed through into a room that was covered from floor to ceiling by stark, white tiles. The constable remained behind, sat down and lit a cigarette.

  Although, by virtue of the fact that they were fitted, the walls of the room were lined with sinks and work benches, everything that could distress those visiting, like instruments or trolleys laden with dishes and gauzes, had been removed. All that remained in the room, all that needed to be there, was a large metal table bearing an unmistakably human-shaped form covered by a white sheet.

  Try as he might, and Arto could see that he was screwing every gram of courage up in order to cope with the coming ordeal, the old man just couldn’t bring himself to stand by the table of his own volition. Like his wife and the attendant Selma Bilge, Professor Mazmoulian stood just inside the door, one hand held up to his nose against, the doctor imagined, the awful smell of preserving fluid. However, to allude to the fact that the old man might be afraid was not, the doctor knew, the done thing. It was therefore to Selma that he appealed, saying, ‘Would you like to bring Mrs Mazmoulian over here, please, Miss Bilge?’

  As he had suspected, as soon as the women started moving forward the old man followed; as the three of them got closer to the table, he even tucked his wife and the doctor’s assistant behind his back. In this part of the world, as all four of them knew, a man protected his women whatever the cost.

  Once all the actors in what Arto had come to think of as the identification drama had composed themselves, the doctor looked across at the old man and raised one eyebrow. ‘Are you ready, Professor?’

  The old man took in a very deep breath before replying. ‘Yes. If you will please, Doctor.’

  Arto gently folded the sheet downwards, finding beneath a face whose skin had sagged a little further since last he had looked upon it. This, though quite normal, made the young man appear slightly older, although when one really looked one could nevertheless see that he had been a good-looking boy. He had a strong, straight nose and his eyes, although closed, slanted upwards in long, smooth crescents edged by thick, dramatically curling lashes. Even the mouth was sweet, opened just a little as if gently inhaling the rarefied air of that terrible place. Someone, possibly Selma Bilge, had combed his hair, which though long and originally unkempt, now framed his face in dense, black waves. It made him, Arto felt, look so much more ‘normal’ than the wild, disordered drug addict that he had first seen in that strange apartment in Sultan Ahmet. But then that was often the way with bodies that were ‘tidied up’.

  He moved his gaze, gently lest he appear to be hurriedly curious, from the boy’s face to that of the old man before him. There was no way of knowing from the blank look in his eyes how he was feeling or what he was thinking. Everybody behaved differently in this situation. During the course of his long career, the doctor had experienced people crying, tearing their own bodies and clothes in anguish, fainting, pleading to God for mercy and also having no discernible reaction at all – behaving, in effect, like those in a waking nightmare.

  But when the old man did finally speak, it was in a voice full of strangled tension that seemed strangely inappropriate to the words. ‘It’s not him,’ he said, ‘this is not Bedros.’

  His wife, whose head had until now been buried deeply against Selma Bilge’s shoulder, crossed herself and murmured, ‘Thanks be to God.’

  ‘Are you absolutely certain, Professor Mazmoulian?’ It was essential that Arto get either a definite yes or no on this identification.

  ‘I am certain,’ the old man replied and then, turning to his wife, he said, ‘Am I right, Sylvie?’

  His wife just glanced quickly at the body on the table before tilting her head backwards to indicate that it was not her grandson.

  Arto Sarkissian replaced the sheet across the boy’s face, thanking the couple for their time and effort. Even though the boy had not been their grandson, he could see that the identification had been a terrible ordeal for these tired, worried old people. What puzzled the doctor though, was that they did not seem to be relieved at all.

  But then as he led them back out into the ante-room, Mrs Mazmoulian did partly explain this. ‘I don’t know what to feel now, Doctor,’ she said. ‘When Timür’s boy told us there was a body here which could possibly be our grandson, I made myself face that awfulness. I prepared myself before God.’

  ‘You think such things,’ her husband added, ‘when your children go missing. The night Bedros’s father was killed, I knew. And like Sylvie I thought I knew again now. But I was wrong.’

  ‘It could mean that your grandson is safe and well,’ Arto said.

  The old man smiled, but not out of happiness. ‘Oh, I don’t think that I dare to hope for that, Doctor.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we know that our boy was involved in drugs and we also know that no good can ever come of that.’

  ‘People can recover from addiction, you know,’ Arto replied, ‘with help and—’

  ‘But Bedros isn’t getting any help, is he, Doctor?’

  ‘No, but …’

  The old woman, who was once again picking nervously at the sleeve of Arto’s white coat, said, ‘Don’t even begin to give us false hopes, Doctor. I know that you mean well, but … to hope is not a thing that Armenians dare to do. You must know that.’

  ‘Yes, well …’ Arto turned away, embarrassed yet again by another reference to his race. ‘I will leave you with the constable here who, I hope, will take you home?’

  The young policeman snapped to attention at this, grinding a half-finished cigarette out on the floor as he rose. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good.’ Arto shook hands with both the Mazmoulians and thanked them again. As he went to leave, however, the old man called him back again.

  ‘Oh, Doctor?’ His face was troubled in a way that it had not been before.

  ‘Yes, is there something else?’

  The professor shrugged. ‘Only something you might find stupid.’

  ‘I’m sure that I won’t, but … If you don’t want to tell me, I don’t mind.’

  ‘It’s just that …’ He looked at the floor briefly, then, snapping his gaze upwards again, he said, ‘That dead boy in there is not Armenian, you know.’

  ‘He isn’t?’

  Quite how the old man would know such a thing was beyond Arto, but he was interested nevertheless. ‘How …?’