A Noble Killing (22 page)

The kitchen was about as far away from her bedroom as she could get, and so Gonca took the intruder through several bedrooms filled with sleeping children and confronted him there.

‘What do you want, Şukru?’ she said to the middle-aged man who stood in front of her. ‘What do you mean by breaking into my house? My bedroom?’

Şukru spread his arms wide and said, ‘May a brother not see his sister once in a while? However eccentric she may be?’

Şukru was a few years older than Gonca. A large, dark father of eight who in his youth had been both a wrestler and a trainer of dancing bears. Now he made his living as so many gypsies did since the break-up of their largest community, in Sulukule, by moving from one unsatisfying casual job to another. The gypsies in İstanbul were not what they had been. State legislation to first stop their women dancing in makeshift bars up by the city walls, then to take away the bears and finally to dismantle Sulukule had rendered many of the men jobless and bitter. Şukru was lucky that he had a famous artist for a sister who was also very generous, and he knew it. But he was also a man who possessed traditional gypsy values. In addition, he had come on this occasion as an emissary from their father.

‘People are saying that you love that policeman,’ he said as he tipped his head in the direction of Gonca’s bedroom. ‘Is it true?’

She sat down at the kitchen table and lit a long black cigarette. ‘Yes.’ She said it simply and quickly, because the truth needed no embellishment.

‘Ah.’ Her brother sat down opposite and took a cigarette for himself. ‘You know that he is married, that he is—’

‘I know he is married, I know he is not one of my kind, I know that he is a policeman and so an enemy of my people,’ Gonca said. ‘You can tell our father that I know all that.’

Şukru would never have come of his own volition. Their father, who claimed that he was over a hundred years old and had fathered over a hundred children, had sent him. He was very prominent and powerful within the gypsy community, and this visit was all about him.

‘Gonca, you can take lovers,’ Şukru said as he lit his cigarette and began to puff. ‘We have always known that is what you do, but—’

‘I married men from our community twice,’ Gonca said. ‘Twice, Şukru! Two useless lumps of flesh who neither worked nor looked after the children they sired! Now I am beyond all that; I want something for myself!’

‘But if you love this man, then—’

‘Then that is my business!’ she said.

‘Gonca, he’s a married man!’

Contrary to what most non-gypsies believed, the people of Sulukule as well as in other settled gypsy communities were very morally proper. Gonca, with her wildly eccentric and very collectable collages, with her legions of lovers and her clear delight in the sexual act, was an exception. Everyone, including her father, knew it.

‘It has been said that you intend to marry this man,’ Şukru said with obvious concern in his voice. ‘Is that true?’

She shrugged. ‘If I want to marry him, then I will,’ she said. ‘If not, then . . .’

She shrugged again, trying to seem casual about it, even though that was very far from the truth. She was besotted by the policeman; she would have stuck her head in a fire if he had asked. If he suddenly said that he didn’t want to see her again, she’d kill his wife first, then him, then herself. She had it all planned. Never had she felt anything like this in her life. She was going to cling on to it with every gram of strength that she possessed.

‘But you can’t marry him,’ Şukru said. ‘He is a policeman. They will never allow it, not to one of us!’

She looked at her brother, who she could see was the image of herself, and then she looked down at the table. What the police authorities would make of Mehmet Süleyman marrying her had not occurred to her. Now at Şukru’s prompting she did think about it. It was not a comfortable notion.

‘And that he is married is not right!’ Şukru said. ‘Need I go on, Gonca? Need I even get to the part about how different you are from him?’

She put her head down still further and then shook it, making her floor-length hair shudder and sway towards her brother as she did so.

‘You know what can happen if you marry out, don’t you?’ he said.

She knew, but she didn’t make any sort of movement to indicate that she did. The punishment for marrying out was well known and did not need to be reiterated.

‘Father is not happy, but he is content for you to take lovers like this, as you know,’ Şukru said. ‘But love? Even when children cannot result from such a union, it’s still not right, Gonca. We cannot have that man in our family. You cannot take him away from his people.’

She looked up at him with disgust. They were all quite happy for her to have a policeman as a lover while she could potentially find out information from him, while they could whisper in her ear periodically, as they did, that she should think about blackmailing him. ‘So I can fuck his brains out, but I cannot love him?’

‘Sister, you—’

‘What?’ He was halfway across the table now with his fingers at her throat. ‘Don’t want to think about your sister with a cock inside her? Oh, you are a hypocrite, Şukru,’ she said. ‘You who take so readily the money that the world outside the gypsy city gives me!’

He loosened his grip on her neck and stood up. ‘I come as a messenger from the family,’ he said. ‘I come for all of us.’

‘To come into my bedroom and frighten me half to death!’

‘No,’ he said as he once again leaned down on to the table and took her by the throat. ‘No. To tell you, Gonca, that if you do not give this man up and stop this stupid pining for something you cannot have, you will be killed. You and your policeman both. That way, if in no other, his family and ours may regain some honour, some dignity and some self-respect.’

He left then. Gonca, no longer angry or confident or defiant, sat at the kitchen table shaking and drinking
rakı
on her own until dawn broke. Only then did she return to her bedroom and look down at the sleeping body of Mehmet Süleyman. Then, and quite at odds with her usual way of expressing herself, Gonca very quietly cried.

They’d asked him why he’d gone back to the Rainbow Internet Café and were amazed at the mundanity of his answer.

‘I had to pick up my e-mail,’ Osman Yavuz had told İkmen and İskender towards the end of his interview. ‘It had been ages. I was worried.’

‘About what?’ İkmen had asked him. ‘What on earth could be that important that it caused you to risk your liberty?’

‘I needed to know if I had any messages,’ he’d said. ‘If you’re not on line, then you just don’t exist, you know?’ It had sounded so limp, so bloody stupid. Which it was.

What had also been stupid was the sexting. He’d never got Gözde involved in that; he’d never shown her picture to anyone. But the fact that he had shared pictures of other girls in the past with friends and acquaintances meant that the police didn’t believe him. They wanted to know who else he’d shown Gözde’s picture to, and he just couldn’t tell them, because it had never happened.

‘You have not convinced me, at least,’ Inspector İskender had said, ‘that you did not abuse that girl’s trust, that you did not in fact kill her when she threatened to tell her parents that you forced her into providing that photograph.’

‘I didn’t kill her, I loved her!’

‘Then why did you make her send a naked photograph of herself to you?’ İskender said. ‘What were you going to do with it if you didn’t share it with your friends? Use it to masturbate?’

‘No!’ Osman felt his face flush at the word, and yet he
had
used pictures to gain relief, just like all the other nerds he knew around and about İstanbul. He’d even, to his shame, used that picture that Gözde had sent him. But why not? In spite of what the American woman had told him, in spite of what he had told his love, he was never going to actually be with Gözde. They were never really going to run away together and live happily every after. That never happened in real life. Something, usually parents, always got in the way. ‘When my grandma told me that the Mersin Apartments were on fire, I knew,’ he said.

‘Knew?’

‘That it was Gözde,’ he said. ‘That they had killed her. I ran into the street and I saw that it was the ground floor that was alight and I knew!’ He put his head down and sobbed.

İskender looked at İkmen, who appeared to be genuinely sorry for the boy.

‘Osman,’ the older man said gently, ‘we will have to know the names of the people you shared photographs with.’

The boy continued to weep.

‘Osman . . .’

‘Osman Yavuz,’ Inspector İskender said tartly, ‘we need to know who the other men you exchanged photographs with were, and we need to know that now!’

‘But I . . .’ Osman Yavuz raised his tear-stained face and looked into the hard features of his interrogator. ‘They were just people I met at the Rainbow sometimes. Anyway, I told you, I never showed any of them that picture of Gözde.’

‘The fact that you shared lewd pictures at all is appalling and against the law!’ İskender roared.

‘But I don’t know who they are!’ Osman wept. ‘We meet, we talk, I don’t know their names! Not all of them!’

‘Well then, we’ll have the names that you do know!’ İskender slapped a pen down on the table in front of the boy and said, ‘Get writing!’

But when it came to it, Osman couldn’t. He couldn’t think straight, much less remember the names of people he hardly knew. They’d just been boys swapping pictures they’d taken off their dad’s phone, their elder brother’s BlackBerry. Nameless nerds, just like him. Because he couldn’t remember, and because they still did not entirely believe his story about Gözde, the police decided to detain him. Osman sat in a small, cold cell and tried not to cry when he thought about what his grandma might say.

Ismail Yıldız paced back and forth across the small kitchen he shared with his brother Hikmet, nursing his silent mobile phone in his hands. Hikmet, who was trying to eat his breakfast in something resembling peace, said, ‘Will you sit down, İsmail? You’re making me dizzy.’

‘I just want him to ring,’ İsmail said. ‘Cem. He said that he had a girl lined up. Why doesn’t he just call me?’

‘Because he isn’t ready yet,’ Hikmet said as patiently as he could. ‘We wait for him, remember? You can’t force anything. If you do, it will look very suspicious and he will back off. Remember what Çetin Bey said.’

‘Yes, I know, but . . .’

‘I understand that you’re scared,’ Hikmet said. ‘Going under cover is always frightening, but you won’t be alone. You’ll have the whole team at your back. As soon as we’ve found out who this Cem is and what he’s doing, we can pull him, and hopefully the others he works with too.’

İsmail sat down at the table and watched Hikmet shell and then eat a hard-boiled egg. ‘Do you really think that he works for that gangster? Tayfun Ergin?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hikmet replied. ‘Ergin has been active in this area lately. It’s possible.’

‘Oh.’ İsmail put a nervous hand up to his lips, his face white with tension and lack of sleep.

Hikmet laid a hand on his brother’s wrist and said, ‘It will be all right.’

But İsmail was not convinced. He’d asked his brother the same set of questions almost continually ever since they’d left the station the previous afternoon. It was because he was scared, because he wanted whatever was going to happen to happen quickly and be done with. But there was no hurrying something like this. A link had been made with a man who apparently arranged honour killings for money, and it was now up to this man, Cem, to take the process to the next level. What Hikmet didn’t tell his brother was what İkmen had told him, which was that he was half expecting Cem and his ‘business’ to be entirely chimerical.

‘This man has to know you’re a police officer,’ İkmen had confided to him. ‘It could so easily be a feint, a distraction, even a wind-up.’

‘My brother is known as a very religious man, Çetin Bey,’ Hikmet had countered. ‘Maybe in this fashion they seek to distance him from me?’

İkmen had accepted that that was possible. He’d sent his officer and his officer’s brother home to do what they were doing, which was to wait.

‘Hikmet, if something goes wrong . . .’

At that very moment İsmail’s mobile began to ring.

In his panic he almost dropped it. ‘Allah!’

With terrified eyes he looked over at his brother, who said, ‘For heaven’s sake, answer it!’

With fingers that sweated and shook so much he could barely control them, İsmail Yıldız eventually managed to push the receive button and then said, ‘Yes?’

There was a tense second before Hikmet saw him take a deep calming breath and then say, ‘Oh, hello, Mother, how are you?’

Cem, whoever he was, was not going to call when İsmail or anyone else wanted him to. As Hikmet had known right from the start, this was going to be a waiting game.

The American woman, Mrs Jane Ford, had expressed little surprise when Osman Yavuz’s name had been brought up by Mehmet Süleyman. But then the young man had told İkmen that Mrs Ford had, once upon a time, been his English teacher. Later, in his cell, he’d told İkmen that she’d been something else to him, too.

‘I didn’t want you to think that I was close to him,’ Jane Ford told İkmen when he and Ayşe Farsakoğlu visited her at her apartment. Her husband was at work and so she was alone, working on her Make the Most of İstanbul website, when they called.

‘Why not?’

Mrs Ford looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Osman and myself . . . well, look, I had a little bit of a fling with the boy. So unserious, so much an aberration! This was before he became besotted with Gözde. I was glad when he got so stuck on her! What was I thinking! So I helped him to meet her. She was sweet and he was all sexed and romanced up!’