Deadline (16 page)

Floor two became floor three and Nar wondered what would have happened if she’d just walked away from Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu. In spite of the sight
of an apparently dead man in the Pera Palas bar, she could have left Ay
ş
e and just gone about her business. Even after they found that rather odd man in the fridge, she could have upped and left. But Nar knew full well why she hadn’t. All her life had been spent looking after women. Disabled women, women who had been men, she even helped the old woman who lived in the apartment next to hers with her shopping. She was a knight in shining armour in a partially female body. She just couldn’t help herself.

‘You need to get out of there!’
İ
zzet said into his mobile phone. He was trying to get dressed at the same time and was struggling to put his shirt on using only one hand.

‘I can’t do that,’ Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu replied. Her voice was calm and a little bit echoey. But then she was, she said, in the kitchens of the Pera Palas Hotel. How she’d got there and why had not been discussed.

‘Ay
ş
e, I’m reporting this,’
İ
zzet said.

‘We don’t know who these people are,’ Ay
ş
e replied. ‘Not yet. Just give me time to—’

‘I can’t do that. You know I can’t do that. Get yourself and the maître d’ out. I’m not asking you.’

He heard her voice rise into barely controlled anger. ‘And leave Nar in here on her own? No way! She’s amongst whoever these people are and she’s armed. She can try to find out
who they are and she can hopefully make contact with the inspectors and Dr Sarkissian. And
İ
zzet, until I can at least try to determine who we are dealing with I do not want our colleagues coming in here guns blazing like a bunch of Sylvester Stallone clones!’

‘You don’t—’

‘I have every right to tell you and anyone else what to do!’ Ay
ş
e said. ‘I’m here, you’re not. Speak to Ardıç. He’s not a fool!’

‘And I am?’

Why had she even been in the vicinity of the Pera Palas? What had she been doing? Had she been hanging around on the off chance of catching a glimpse of Mehmet Süleyman in a tuxedo? Every one of
İ
zzet’s fears and suspicions about his fiancée and his boss crashed through the defences he normally erected against such things.

‘Ardıç knows the meaning of restraint,’ Ay
ş
e said. ‘
İ
zzet, we could be dealing with anything. These people could have a bomb, for all we know. They are heavily armed and this hotel is full of people.’

He stopped himself alluding to Mehmet Süleyman. He said, ‘What do you need?’

‘I need you to tell Ardıç,’ she said. ‘And I need some time before the troops come blasting in.’

‘How much time?’ His heart was hammering against the side of his chest
and he could hear it making his voice waver.

He heard her pause to think, then she said, ‘I’ll call you in thirty minutes.’

‘And if I don’t hear from you?’

‘Then you call me,’ she said. ‘And if that doesn’t work out then it will be up to you. But this has to be controlled,
İ
zzet, it has to be.’

Then she cut the connection, leaving him both anxious for her safety and furiously angry. Quite how a transsexual hooker had become involved he couldn’t begin to imagine.

The mattress did have
a protective cover but there definitely wasn’t any blood on the floor. It had soaked into the bedclothes, the pillows and the victim’s clothing and been absorbed. Having established this,
İ
kmen asked the masked men if they would bring Lale Aktar back again. One went, leaving two watching them like a pair of wall-eyed ghouls. Both tall and slim, had they not been armed
İ
kmen and Süleyman could at least have had a shot at taking them on. But they had Kalashnikovs, the favoured weapon of the terrorist. The man on the right, with the helmet camera, continued to film. The police officers and the doctor waited for Lale Aktar to be brought to them in silence.

When she came in, she looked confused. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked. The blood had all but dried on her once golden sheath dress and was making it stick to her naked body beneath.

‘Can you show us what you did when you found Söner Erkan’s body?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘Show you? I told you what
happened,’ she said.

‘You said that you moved the body, in order to see its face,’ Arto said. ‘Can you just show us how you did that?’ He looked down at Söner Erkan’s body. ‘You don’t have to touch him, just . . .’

She moved round to the side of the bed furthest away from the door and nearest to the window. ‘I pulled him this way,’ she said and mimed turning the body over and towards her.

‘You went round to the far side of the bed?’
İ
kmen asked. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Why? I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s further away from the door and the bathroom,’
İ
kmen said. ‘You could see there was a body on your bed when you came out of your bathroom. Why go round the bed to look at it?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know!’ She walked back towards the door.

‘You pulled him towards yourself and that was when you got the blood down your dress?’ Arto asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘As I pulled him towards me, he sort of fell against me and his blood ran down my dress. I put a hand out against the wall to steady myself because of the shock.’

They all looked down at the body for a few seconds. No one mentioned
shoes or footprints. Then
İ
kmen said, ‘You didn’t climb on to the bed to turn him over?’

She looked appalled. ‘No!’

After Lale Aktar had left, Çetin
İ
kmen expressed a desire to use the lavatory. One of their guards stepped forward to go and watch over him while he used the facilities.

Everyone was looking at everyone else and Ceyda knew what they were thinking because she was thinking it too.
Where were you just before the men in the black masks arrived?

If the policemen, the doctors, the writer, and the old Armenian man didn’t solve the mystery of who killed Söner soon, they were all going to die. And nobody was going to come. As far as the world outside was concerned, the hotel was closed for a private function and whatever was going to happen would be over by the time the sun rose in the morning. But then surely all these people around her, not to mention the police officers, wouldn’t go down without a fight?

Ceyda looked up at Burak Fisekçi who smiled at her. He’d told her he’d left to go to the toilet just before the men in black arrived. Ceyda herself didn’t have a clue about where anyone on the ground floor had been. She’d been on the fourth floor but she hadn’t heard Söner scream. If he’d screamed.

‘Do you
think that we’re going to get out of here, Burak Bey?’ she asked. They, like most of the people in the ballroom, were sitting on the floor, being watched by men with guns.

Burak Bey smiled. ‘How would I ever be able to face your father if anything happened to you, Ceyda?’ he said.

‘So you think that we’ll make it then?’

‘We are in Allah’s hands.’

‘The policemen will get it right, won’t they?’

He didn’t say yes or no, he couldn’t. No one knew what was going to happen and that was why a lot of the people in the ballroom were crying. Then she felt one of Burak Bey’s hands on her knee and she looked up at him and smiled.

‘You’ll be all right, Ceyda,’ he said. ‘You will.’

‘I hope so,’ she said. But then her face clouded. ‘You know, Burak Bey, there is one thing that I didn’t tell the police about Söner.’

‘What was that, Ceyda?’

She averted her eyes. ‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘I think I need to tell them, Burak Bey.’

İ
kmen’s eyes were everywhere. He’d already looked in the one cupboard that was in the bathroom. Now he was peeing, he was intent upon the area around the toilet. He was also very aware that one of the masked men was looking
at him. When he came still closer, Çetin
İ
kmen began to sweat. He hated being watched in the toilets at the station where he knew everybody, but here, with these people, he was very unhappy. However, if he concentrated on what he was looking for . . .

‘Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu says hello.’

İ
kmen froze.

‘Carry on peeing,’ the man behind him said.

‘Who are you?’ His voice wavered. He was in an unfamiliar bathroom, with a gunman at his back and his penis in his hands. Vulnerable was not a big enough word to cover the way he felt.

‘I know your cousin, Samsun,’ Nar said. ‘I’m like Samsun.’

İ
kmen made as if to look round but Nar stopped him. ‘Eyes front, Inspector,’ she said. ‘I’m strictly in man mode at the moment. Now what’s going on here?’

It could so easily be some sort of sick trap but because this person had mentioned Samsun,
İ
kmen went along with it. ‘These people, I don’t know who they are, are holding us hostage. If Süleyman and myself don’t deduce correctly who killed that boy lying on the bed, they’ll kill us all. It’s some deranged game to them. We’ve got until sunrise, seven twenty. Where’s Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu?’

‘In the hotel kitchen.’

‘How—’

‘Don’t ask. But they
don’t know she’s there. They don’t know the man who used to wear this gear before me is down there too. In the fridge.’

İ
kmen smiled.

One of the masked men back in the bedroom called out. ‘Hasn’t he finished?’

‘His bladder’s weird,’ Nar shot back. ‘Middle-aged man stuff.’

İ
kmen stifled an urge to snap.

‘The sergeant has called this incident in,’ Nar said.

İ
kmen stopped peeing and zipped up his fly. ‘They mustn’t come in heavy-handed,’ he said. ‘They’ll kill us all.’

‘She knows that. How many of them are there, do you know?’

İ
kmen turned to face Nar. There was no way of telling that he was in fact, at least in part, a she. ‘I thought there were ten but now there seem to be more like fifteen,’ he said.

‘Come on!’ the other masked man in the bedroom shouted.

Nar raised a hand in salute.
İ
kmen noticed that some of its fingers showed traces of blue nail polish. ‘OK!’ Nar replied and she pushed
İ
kmen forward. Then she said to him, ‘I’m going to find a reason to get back to the kitchens and tell the sergeant I’ve made contact. Like you, Çetin Bey, I did
my army service. I know exactly how to use this weapon.’

The more Krikor Sarkissian looked at his guest list, the more disquieted he became. Lale Aktar had suggested that maybe one or more of his guests was working with the gunmen, that this person or persons had somehow let them in. But Krikor was much more inclined to believe that if they did indeed have any fifth columnists amongst their number, they were members of the hotel staff. Each guest either had some sort of longstanding connection to his addiction centre project or had been hand-picked by himself or Burak as a representative of another philanthropic or ethically aware financial organisation. Then again, anyone could be corrupted or persuaded to do terrible things if enough money was involved. And it would depend also on why this was happening.

Everyone was terrified. He could hear some of them crying in the ballroom as he sat, impotently, in the Kubbeli Saloon. At one point he thought he heard Caroun’s voice.

‘I need a drink.’ Hovsep Pars broke into Krikor’s thoughts. ‘A rakı or maybe absinthe if they have it.’

Krikor looked at the old man and said, ‘There’s nothing left.’

‘There’s a bar just through there.’ Hovsep pointed a crooked finger
at the door to his left. ‘I’m an old, dying man and I feel the cold. I need alcohol.’ Then he leaned in so that only Krikor could hear him. ‘And if they deny me it then we’ll know that they’re Islamic fundamentalists.’

Krikor wasn’t so sure about that but he called one of the masked men over and asked him if his friend could have a drink from the bar. At first the man was obstructive. ‘No!’ he said. ‘Enough alcohol has been splashed around here tonight!’

But Krikor pleaded with him. ‘If you don’t want to get it for him, I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Come with me into the bar and I’ll get it.’

The man thought for a moment. Hovsep Pars gave Krikor a meaningful look. In his mind this proved that the gang were most definitely Muslim fundamentalists.

Eventually the man said, ‘OK,’ and he stood aside while Krikor stood up and then walked behind him.

‘Make it a large one,’ Hovsep Pars said as he watched Krikor Sarkissian go.

The Pera Palas Hotel bar was softly lit. Dominated by tones of wine, dark wood and maroon, it was not easy to make out fine details, especially at night. But Krikor could see that the bodies of the four people the gunmen had already killed had been removed. There was blood on the carpet, which made an unpleasant squelching noise as he walked towards the service area. The last time he’d got a drink from
this room, champagne, he’d been laughing.

The masked man followed him over to the optics and Krikor looked to see what was available.

‘Just pour something and let’s go,’ the man said impatiently.

Krikor shot him a glare he hoped was sufficiently vicious. ‘I’m not getting him anything he doesn’t like,’ he said. ‘He wants absinthe.’

The man regarded him with what Krikor interpreted as disgust. ‘It’s all alcohol.’

‘There’s alcohol and alcohol,’ Krikor said. ‘But then I can tell that you’re clearly not a drinker.’

‘No.’ But he didn’t expand as to why that might be and Krikor didn’t ask. Behind the bar he found some very impressive whiskies, both Scottish and Irish, several brands of rakı, four different types of vodka, one gin—

‘Come on!’

He was looking for green, a green bottle . . . Ah, absinthe. He took hold of a long, thin, emerald-coloured bottle and poured a generous measure into a highball glass. Poor Hovsep Pars was dying, a big drink was the least he was due. As he poured he said, ‘I see you’ve removed the bodies of the people you killed.’