A Passion for Killing Page 7

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen sighed. ‘But now I’ve got to go and look for the fucking thing.’ He took a folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and then unfolded it, spreading it out across the doctor’s desk. ‘Here’s what it looks like. Melly gave me this printout of a photograph Uzun took off the Internet.’

  The black and white printout showed two men holding a carpet up between them. The man on the left of the picture was young, tall, and wore a slightly dusty-looking military uniform. The man on the right was much smaller and older and, although his features were of an obviously western European type, he wore traditional Arab robes, even down to carrying a curved knife in the belt around his waist. İkmen pointed to this figure and said, ‘That’s Lawrence.’

  ‘I gathered that,’ Arto replied. ‘With, I assume, this Roberts person you spoke of and the famous carpet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen said, ‘isn’t it.’

  Although it wasn’t possible from the photograph to see what colours had been used in the Kerman, one could deduce the approximate size of the piece, which had to be around about one and a half metres long by one metre wide. And, although it wasn’t possible to make out everything in the way of detail around the borders of the carpet, the central section was very clear to see. It was also extraordinary. A tall thin weeping willow, or Tree of Life, as Melly had described it, dominated the carpet. Delicate and at the same time sinuous, in the hands of these two foreign and, in Lawrence’s case, alien men, the Kerman was like a precious traveller from another time if not another world entirely. Its central design struck something deep inside İkmen. He didn’t know what it was, but when he had first seen this picture tears had risen, as from a great underground river, and burst across his eyes like a rain shower. The Englishman, Melly, had said he completely understood why that had happened.

  Mehmet Süleyman just wanted to get home to his wife and son, but the man he knew as Mürsel was insistent.

  ‘We can’t just talk in the street!’ he said as he led Süleyman down Meşrutiyet Caddesi towards, the policeman feared, his usual haunt of the dusty Londra hotel bar. Mürsel, as well as being what most people would call a spy, was also a very sexual being. By his own admission he was attracted to both women and men and the rather charming faded grandeur of the Londra bar appealed to many men who enjoyed the company of their fellows. For Süleyman however, it was sometimes a little too much. Being leered at by Mürsel alone was quite disturbing enough.

  Mürsel smiled. Tall, handsome and exquisitely dressed, he was probably in his early forties – about Süleyman’s own age. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ he said as he led the policeman past the Londra and seemingly up towards the even more chi chi Pera Palas hotel, ‘this place I have in mind will not be brimming with lovely young men. It will be brimming with only you and me, I hope.’

  He turned into a very grubby and unpromising-looking doorway to his left and beckoned for Süleyman to follow him. The buildings just to the south of the Londra, on the same side of the road, were also of nineteenth-century vintage. Four storeys or more in height, the grimy stucco-encrusted façades looked uniformly neglected. Open doors, like this one, frequently revealed litter-strewn halls and the usually sightless lower windows were more often than not covered in fly posters for bands and slightly fanatical political organisations. Inside there was often a rather dodgy-looking lift and this building was no exception. But Süleyman got in after Mürsel, without any questions or comments about where they might be headed. After all, if this place, wherever it was, turned out to be another venue in which Mürsel attempted to seduce him, there was nothing novel in that. Mürsel always tried, so far without success, to seduce Mehmet Süleyman. Wherever they were going in this uncomfortably small lift was unlikely to make any difference to that.

  As the lift slowly ascended, Süleyman attempted to look at anything except Mürsel’s sensual, mildly amused face. Knowing something about what people like him did, which involved a lot that gangsters also did, made the policeman cringe. There were, he knew, far less destructive and far more honourable ways in which one could serve one’s country. But then like everything else in life, being or not being a spy was a choice and he had chosen to most definitely pass on that option.

  The top floor of this particular building turned out to be the fifth. Mürsel got out first and led Süleyman along a depressingly dusty corridor towards a very nondescript door. Before he opened it, he said, ‘Welcome, Mehmet, to the most magnificent view of this city you will ever see.’

  The entire rooftop area was set out like a lush garden restaurant. Funky metal tables and chairs nestled in amongst great shady palms, long-leafed tobacco plants and tubs of very brightly coloured tropical-looking blooms the policeman could not even begin to identify. It was all very gorgeous although it was as nothing compared to the enormous copper bar that stretched across the entire front end of the space. And that in turn was as nothing to the truly amazing view of the city that lay beyond the bar and its serried ranks of rakı, blue curaçao, vodka and gin bottles that reflected in a golden glow across the bar’s deep coppery surface. With the sun setting in the west, across the Golden Horn which Süleyman was now looking down upon, everything made of either stone or metal shone with a pale yellow glitter.

  Mürsel at his shoulder said, ‘So down directly below us we have Şişhane district, then the Horn, then across the water to the Old City, Balat, Fener, and all those old neighbourhoods. Then’ – he pointed across the Golden Horn towards the north-west – ‘up there, is Eyüp.’ He smiled. ‘Where your Ottoman ancestors would have been girded with the Sword of Osman, my dear Mehmet. Fancy a country boy like me knowing something like that.’

  To be girded with the Sword of Osman in the Holy Mosque of Eyüp was the Ottoman monarchs’ equivalent of the coronations performed by western European royals. When a sultan came to power one of his first acts was to show his people he was their legitimate ruler by being girded with the Sword of Osman as soon as he could. Mehmet Süleyman could indeed count several sultans amongst his ancestors but that was not something he dwelt on at length and so he ignored Mürsel’s allusion to it and sat down at the bar in order to enjoy the view.

  ‘So how do you know this place?’ he asked, aware, as promised, of the complete and utter emptiness of this wonderful place. ‘It’s amazing.’

  ‘It’s also not yet officially open,’ Mürsel said as he sat down next to Süleyman and lit a cigarette. ‘It’s a little early in the season as yet. It’ll be heaving come June, with the beautiful people, the monied set. One of our friends is the owner.’ He looked down into the street below and said, ‘Oh, look, there’s Haydar!’

  Haydar was a sort of henchman of Mürsel as far as Süleyman could tell; a lesser spy of some sort. Süleyman looked down into the street but all that he could see were a couple of young girls carrying boutique bags, a few bored-looking taxi drivers slumped against the sides of their vehicles, and a small clutch of obviously drunk homeless men. None of them looked even remotely like the tall, powerful figure of Haydar. But then Süleyman had frequently failed to notice Haydar in the past, that was Haydar’s skill.

  Mürsel got up from his seat and moved behind the bar. ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I am going to pour myself a rakı,’ he said as he grabbed hold of one of the bottles labelled ‘Altınbaş Rakı’. ‘What would you like, Mehmet?’

  ‘I don’t want a drink.’ Süleyman lit a cigarette and then added as if as an afterthought, ‘Thank you.’

  Mürsel shrugged and then poured. ‘Your choice.’

  ‘What I want is for you to tell me how I can manage to convince others that Cabbar Soylu is a peeper victim when I have no idea why that is myself,’ Süleyman said, feeling anger rising in his chest. Speaking on the telephone to Mürsel hadn’t managed to alert him to the seriousness of this situation, maybe face-to-face would do the trick. It was why Süleyman had requested to meet with this man now.

>   But Mürsel just laughed which didn’t seem like a good start. ‘Oh, Mehmet, what . . .’

  ‘This is no laughing matter!’ He said it through ground clenched, tense teeth. ‘Beyond the fact that you have told me so, I have no reason myself to suppose that Soylu is a peeper victim! And nobody except Ardıç knows about you!’

  ‘Ardıç is very important.’ Mürsel took a swig from his glass, a drag from his cigarette, looked at the amazing view, and then sighed. ‘Look, Mehmet,’ he said, ‘I can’t, as you well know, tell you much about myself or my . . . well, my department, we will call it, but the person you call the peeper . . .’

  ‘One of your agents gone wrong or mad or . . .’

  ‘A colleague for whom the strain of the important patriotic duty we perform became too much,’ Mürsel said. ‘I can tell you that his targets are not just confined to active homosexual men. Anyone not entirely in tune with the moral purity and upright standing of a good citizen can also attract his eye, shall we say.’

  Süleyman frowned. ‘So is this a religious crusade?’

  ‘Oh, no, no, no! Quite the reverse! No, our man is, shall we say, desirous of removing the morally suspect, superstitious, unthinking or brutal elements from society.’

  ‘By killing them,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mmm.’ He put his head down for a moment and smoked in a concentrated fashion. ‘The morally suspect, superstitious, unthinking and brutal elements represent a large proportion of any population in any country. That is a lot of killing.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And yet’ – Süleyman shook his head – ‘is he not morally suspect himself, this peeper of yours? If I remember correctly when he was simply terrorising young men in their own homes, he masturbated in front of them. He tried to rape that boy Abdullah Aydın, the only one so far to have actually seen his face.’

  ‘Safe now, in our custody,’ Mürsel said with a smile.

  ‘What gives him the right to make these judgements about people?’

  ‘I didn’t say he was right or that the situation was one of rationality,’ Mürsel said. ‘We believe this individual is on a form of mission . . .’

  ‘How does he decide who to “hit”?’ Süleyman asked. ‘Why Cabbar Soylu? There are plenty of other gangsters in this city, some even more vicious than he.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mürsel replied. ‘How could I? I am not insane, am I?’

  ‘And he is?’

  Mürsel shrugged.

  ‘And yet you know him?’ Süleyman asked.

  Again Mürsel just shrugged. But of course he knew him! Those sorts of people, the ones whom Mürsel and the peeper worked for, wouldn’t send someone who didn’t know the offender out to track him. That would be both stupid and a waste of resources.

  ‘There must be something that singled Cabbar Soylu out as the peeper’s first mobster victim,’ Süleyman said as much to himself as to Mürsel.

  ‘Maybe, but it’s nothing I have any knowledge about,’ the other replied. ‘Soylu was just a thug without whom the world is far better off.’

  ‘You sound like you share some of the peeper’s opinions,’ Süleyman responded sharply.

  Mürsel leaned across the bar and placed one of his hands against Süleyman’s left cheek. ‘I do wish you’d come to bed with me,’ he said. ‘You’d have to do nothing but enjoy yourself. I can be very tender and sensual . . .’

  ‘No.’ He pulled his face away from Mürsel’s hand and stood up.

  ‘You know you want to really,’ Mürsel purred.

  Süleyman, flustered, said, ‘No I don’t! I’m married. I love my wife. I love all women.’

  ‘And yet I see the lust for men in you, Mehmet.’ The spy sighed. ‘Oh, but I am so intoxicated by boys and girls who play hard to get! It is my curse!’

  ‘What nonsense!’ Süleyman pulled his jacket down and straightened his tie. ‘I’m surprised you’re not afraid of ending up as one of the peeper’s victims yourself,’ he said.

  Mürsel moved around from behind the bar and stood in front of the policeman. ‘Oh, he could never catch me. He and I know too many of the same tricks. He wouldn’t get you either, if you were with me.’

  Big brown flashing eyes glittered at Süleyman in front of the now dramatically setting sun.

  ‘I’ll take my chances on my own,’ he said and then with a small bow he began to make his way back towards the dusty corridor and the cramped little lift.

  ‘Leaving so soon?’ Mürsel said.

  ‘I need to find some sort of plausible way to tell my colleagues that the peeper is on a moral crusade,’ Süleyman said, ‘and that we have absolutely no way now of predicting any future victims. Gangsters, gay boys . . . What next? Whores? Deserters from the military? Religious leaders?’

  He left, to Mürsel’s frustration, as he found Süleyman so very alluring. But he took his mobile phone out of his pocket and called down to Haydar, who was in taxi driver gear on this occasion, and asked him to follow Süleyman to make sure that the policeman got home safely. He then made another call, which meant that he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the evening without further masculine company.

  Not too much had been said about anything in the Melly household since Peter had returned home that evening. As usual his wife Matilda had prepared their meal with great care and precision and her husband had enjoyed it so far as he could enjoy anything very much. Unknown to Matilda, Peter had given one hundred and twenty thousand pounds to a man who was now deceased. He had a receipt, of course he did, he wasn’t a total fool, but it didn’t say what it was in respect of. Although signed by Yaşar Uzun it could have been a receipt for anything. At the time, Yaşar had said he felt it best not to specify anything on the docket about the Lawrence carpet. The existence of the rug was to be their secret; his, Peter’s and Matilda’s (Yaşar never knew how much Wim Klaassen did or did not know) – not, of course, that Matilda Melly had any idea about how much her husband had been willing to pay for his beloved carpet. And now that she knew that Yaşar Uzun was dead she seemed to be rather more concerned about him than about the Lawrence Kerman.

  ‘Poor Yaşar,’ she said as she worked away at the knitting that seemed to be continually in her hands. ‘How dreadful!’

  ‘Yes . . .’ Her husband sighed. God, what a predicament! How he was going to get his hands on the carpet now he couldn’t imagine. Who, for a start, would he buy it from? It wasn’t as if Yaşar had been selling it through Raşit Bey’s business, after all. No, the Kerman had been just between the two of them, Yaşar and Peter, a private sale. Well, he could kiss goodbye to the one hundred and twenty grand he’d paid up front, that was for sure! Not that that mattered at all. The Kerman was what mattered, the bloodstained Lawrence Kerman.

  He’d seen it once, held it in his hands in all its old bloodied glory. What a piece! Its emotional impact had been instant, history raw and immediate, like a kick in the guts. Yaşar had brought it and the sandalwood box in which it had, apparently, been kept for many years over to the house about a month after Peter had first seen that picture of Lawrence, Roberts and the Kerman in Cairo. His hands had sweated and trembled as he touched it. Dappled in places with old brown bloodstains, the colours of both the features and the ground were stunning. The light blue of the background rendered it startling but the whiteness of the wool used to make the carpet was beautiful. The outer borders were decorated with a mass of gorgeous flowers, in red, blue and deep magenta. In the middle, however, inside the feature known as the ‘mihrab’ or prayer niche was the source of the Kerman’s power for Peter Melly. A tree of life in the form of a golden weeping willow. A symbol not only of earthly beauty but of paradise beyond the grave, woven in awe at the path of the divine. He’d known right from that moment that he had to have it, whatever the cost of the piece might be. It didn’t matter. And so negotiations had opened at that moment, but he still didn’t know where the Kerman was kept. He assumed it had to be somewhere in Yaşa
r’s apartment, but he didn’t know where that was; Yaşar would never tell him. Of course, with hindsight, he should never have told the police about the Kerman at all. He should have gone straight away to Raşit Bey and demanded to know Yaşar’s address. He was a diplomat, an important person, he could do that. Armed with that information he could have attempted to break in and get what was really, at least in part, his property. But he hadn’t known that Yaşar was dead until that İkmen chap had told him. Then he’d been so shocked the whole lot had just come tumbling out of him like verbal vomit. But someone had killed Yaşar, it seemed, and that was truly terrifying because neither Peter nor the police knew why. Was it because of the Lawrence Kerman? Had someone as yet unknown killed him in order to get hold of the piece? If Peter knew of its existence he imagined that others over the years must have done so too. After all, Yaşar hadn’t exactly been backwards in coming forwards about it to him. Lawrence’s name had simply come up casually in conversation in Raşit Bey’s shop one day and the next thing Peter knew, Yaşar was on his doorstep. He wondered again where the precious carpet was and just the thought of it made him break out into a sweat.

  ‘I can’t think why anyone would want to kill poor Yaşar, can you, darling?’ Matilda wittered over the top of her knitting. She was a plump woman who looked exactly what she was which, Peter had felt for years, was very boring. Knitting, fiddling about in the kitchen making gooey cakes, going to dull little Anglo-Turkish dos with equally dull local women – that was Matilda. He tried to convince himself that he owed her little, and anyway, the house back in the UK was only in his name. He’d bought it just before they got married. He could in theory do whatever he wanted with it. Except that to do that would upset Matilda and, strange as it was, he was really averse to doing that.

  ‘No,’ he said in short reply to her wittering. They should have had children. There was so much silence and just sheer, albeit comfortable, boredom between them. If they had had children, maybe, Peter felt, he wouldn’t have become quite so obsessed by oriental carpets. He idly scanned around the vast, white sitting room – a space almost identical to that of the Klaassens’ – with the exception of more than a few carpets. There were village rugs, kilims, early Anatolian rugs in bold primitive designs, a rare Kumkapı silk Hereke of dazzling beauty as well as Bandirma and Giordes columned prayer carpets. A wonderful collection by anyone’s standards. But Peter Melly would have given them all up for just a hint as to the whereabouts of the Lawrence Kerman carpet.