Deadline (27 page)

Some pressure
accompanied by a feeling of weight on the joist made
İ
kmen stop thinking about Muhammed Ersoy. Although his neck was so painful that just raising it a millimetre made him feel sick,
İ
kmen did lift his head up a little. On the joist in front of him he saw a pair of large feet in what looked like black ballet pumps.

This was no fun, looking at a toilet wall and listening to the sound of a man panting in fear. Where was
İ
kmen? Where was that Ottoman gentleman Süleyman? And where was all the blood and the fear and the delicious hilarity?

When the medical team
arrived, Krikor Sarkissian chose to accompany them and their charge, Hovsep Pars, to the Taksim Hospital. Krikor knew that the old man was in the last stages of terminal cancer and so he was unlikely to survive long. But he wanted to go with him anyway. Apparently Krikor’s wife Caroun was still in the ballroom, shaken, but she was alive. His brother Arto, together with Süleyman,
İ
zzet Melik and two Special Forces officers took charge of Lale Aktar and the man who had been the apparent leader of the gunmen. He was a very pale character with reddish blond hair and an almost Nordic cast to his features. As soon as he was fully conscious, Süleyman questioned him.

‘Who are you?’

He failed to reply.

‘What was your purpose here tonight? Did you do this for money? Notoriety? Religion? Politics? What?’

Nothing. He just looked into Süleyman’s face with his cold blue eyes and gave a Mona Lisa smile. A Special Forces officer dragged him to his feet and, because he struggled, punched him in the stomach. Süleyman turned to Lale Aktar. Still crying, she was being handcuffed by
İ
zzet Melik. ‘And you, Lale Hanım?’ Süleyman asked her. ‘What about you? What about you and Muhammed Ersoy?’

While he waited for a
response, Süleyman glanced up and caught the look of absolute hatred that
İ
zzet was directing at him. Given the way that Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu had rushed into his arms earlier, he wondered what on earth had happened between them.

He returned his gaze to the novelist. With her hands cuffed behind her back, Lale Aktar could no longer wipe her nose and so snot ran down her face and on to her blood-soaked gown. She looked dirty, ugly and disgusting.

‘Well?’

She raised her head. ‘If I tell you where the golden samovar that belonged to the Ersoy family is . . .’ she began.

Süleyman walked over to her and took her chin roughly between his fingers. ‘I do not do deals, lady,’ he said. ‘You will tell me where that golden samovar is.’

‘Or you’ll do what?’ she said.

Süleyman moved his face so close to hers that their noses almost touched. He said, ‘To you? Nothing. But remember, Muhammed Ersoy is still in prison and for every guard who admires him and gives him privileges in exchange for money there will be others who would like to beat the shit out of him.’

The ballet shoes were most
apt. Even though
İ
kmen imagined that the man who was coming to get him had to be attached to a rope or line of some sort, the way those feet moved along that joist was very elegant.

A familiar voice, presumably from the fourth-floor gallery, called out to him, ‘Hang on,
İ
kmen!’ Ardıç. Comforting but also irritating. What did he think he was going to do? Get up and run about?

‘Yes, sir,’ he mumbled. Ardıç probably didn’t hear him but that hardly mattered. And then one of the ballet pumps disappeared and
İ
kmen felt a surge of panic. Had his saviour fallen to his death among the domes of the Kubbeli Saloon?

But then he saw a shin, part of a thigh and a lean arm, a torso and finally a face in front of him. ‘I’m going to put a rope over your shoulders and underneath your arms,’ the young man said.

İ
kmen nodded his head. Somehow the young officer had lowered himself down so that he was sitting on the joist – like one of the tightrope walkers
İ
kmen remembered seeing as a child when his mother had taken him and his brother to the old fairground in Gülhane Park. Not that the tightrope walkers had been his favourites. He’d liked the snake pit best – mainly because he’d found it so very frightening.

The noose that was
passed over his head, past his shoulders and underneath his arms was smooth and even when it touched his skin, it didn’t burn.

‘Now you don’t have to do anything,’ the young officer said. ‘The noose will tighten around your chest, which will hurt, but I’ll support you all the way. Is that clear?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, then we’re going to start now.’

Some sort of mechanical sound was accompanied by the worst chest pain Çetin
İ
kmen had ever experienced in his life. As well as pulling him upwards, the noose crushed his already broken ribs which made his head swim with pain.

The officer, now slowly and elegantly rising on to both feet and supporting
İ
kmen’s body, said, ‘Talk, Inspector, and keep talking if you can.’

He wanted to make sure that he didn’t pass out.
İ
kmen was inclined to think that he’d need some luck with that. But he managed to mumble, ‘OK. So what’s your name then, officer? It’s all right, you don’t have to answer, I’m just making noises with my mouth . . .’

He was in screaming agony, his eyes were not focused and he felt all the food he’d eaten at dinner rear up inside his stomach, but
İ
kmen eventually stood. Supported by the Special Forces officer and attached, just like the young man, to a rope connected to a winch, he began to shuffle painfully along the joist until he was actually in the officer’s arms. Then the two of them were pulled up over the void, raised and eventually deposited by the mechanical arm of the winch on to the fourth-floor gallery.

İ
kmen just
heard Ardıç yell the word, ‘Medic!’ before he fainted on the floor.

‘You know you should drink more,’ Nar said to Ersu Nadir. She was already halfway through a bottle of vodka and several cans of Fanta lay empty on the table in front of her. ‘That would help the pain in your leg.’

‘I don’t like to drink,’ the maître d’ said. ‘People do stupid things when they drink. And then sometimes they become addicted. Addiction is a terrible thing.’

Nar waved a slack, dismissive hand. When all the Special Forces officers had departed, closely followed by the police officers, Nar and Ersu had been left alone with one young constable and the owner of the pub who was clearly a very generous man.

‘Fucking military!’ Nar continued through a miasma of cigarette smoke. ‘I got shot in the thigh somewhere over towards Syria. Midyat.’ She shook her head. ‘Fucking Kurds! But I was lucky, the bullet just went through flesh and muscle, not bone. Not like you, Ersu Bey. But I still get pain and so I drink. Works every time. You should try it for your leg. Trust me.’

It was odd sitting with
someone like Nar. Ersu Bey had heard of men who liked to sleep with transsexuals, but it was not a fancy he had ever shared. Nar was taller than he was and, by the look of her biceps, she could probably completely destroy him in an arm-wrestling bout. She was braver than he was too. If that police sergeant had asked him to go back into the hotel undercover, he didn’t know what he would have done. Probably died of fright.

That said, he cared about the hotel and everyone in it. Like Nar, he’d heard the shooting and the sound of breaking glass when the Special Forces had broken in and it had horrified him. How many people were going to die? How many would be injured and how much of his beautiful hotel would be left intact when all this was over? Although he had a small flat of his own, the Pera Palas was his real home. Just after his divorce he’d been made redundant from his job at a hotel over in Sultanahmet. A period of casual and really unpleasant labour had followed and then the job at the newly refurbished Pera Palas had come up and Ersu Bey had felt his luck change. Was it going to hold now? After all this?

Nar pushed the bottle of vodka across the table at Ersu Bey. ‘Oh, join me,’ she said. ‘Come on!’

He’d already, without thinking, downed a large glass of rakı and was feeling a little hazy but as he looked at the bottle of vodka and then at Nar he thought, why not?

He poured what had to be
a triple measure of vodka into his rakı glass, topped it up with Fanta and drank. It was disgusting but he smiled anyway.

‘There you go,’ Nar said as she matily patted one of his knees. ‘Now that is what you need for a happy life, Ersu Bey. Trust me, I may have tits, a booze problem and a few other little addictions, but I’m a veteran too.’

There were two sensations that overruled all others. Firstly the feel of the cold, early-morning wind on his face and then the bright if fuzzy goldness that was in front of his eyes. Çetin
İ
kmen tried to sit up but found that he couldn’t. Whether he was tied down in some way or just simply unable to do so, he couldn’t tell. But it was impossible.

He blinked. The goldness came more into focus and he heard Süleyman say, ‘You were right about the samovar, Çetin. Here it is.’

Yes! It
was
a samovar and it was gold. He thought he said,
But is it definitely the samovar that Muhammed Ersoy gave to Krikor Sarkissian?
But Süleyman just said, ‘It was in room four eleven.’

İ
kmen didn’t remember it being there. When he’d last seen the samovar it had been outside a room further along the fourth-floor gallery. But then the goldness went away, there was the sound of a door slamming and whatever he was lying on began to move.

He felt a pressure on
his left arm and then he heard a man say, ‘BP’s ninety over sixty.’

A woman said, ‘And dropping?’

The pressure on his arm started again and then it released. The man said, ‘Yeah.’

‘OK, let’s get him in.’

And then there was a very familiar noise. It was a siren.

There was confusion. It was, Süleyman felt, a very planned chaos. There were bodies – of those who had died both before and during the firefight when the Special Forces officers had broken in. There were terrified guests, some of whom were blindfolded and some of whom were half naked. There were men and women dressed in black whose faces had once been covered by balaclava helmets, and there were people in smart evening wear who were currently in handcuffs. Apart from the gunmen who had taken
İ
kmen, Süleyman and the others to room 411, the rest of the group had forced some of the hostages to give them their clothes. Those officers who entered via the hotel kitchens found this cohort as they attempted to make their escape. Not buying into the story that these ‘hostages’ were armed because they had overpowered their captors, the officers had disarmed and handcuffed some of them. But some of them had fought and now they were dead.

Süleyman looked
down at the golden samovar in his hands. He noticed that a middle-aged man who was being handcuffed and searched was looking at it too. His expression was one of furious, thwarted lust. Süleyman shook his head. He remembered this artefact so well. Ten years before, Muhammed Ersoy had given it to Krikor Sarkissian at an ornate dinner in his Yeniköy palace. Ersoy had presented the samovar to Krikor’s drug rehab foundation as a vehicle for raising funds for further community involvement. This had been only a matter of a fortnight at the most after Ersoy had killed his own brother and just before he killed his lover, Hovsep Pars’s nephew, Avram Avedykian. Now imprisoned, his vast fortune apparently in the hands of some cousin, Muhammed Ersoy had come back to haunt those who had put him away, those who had hated him and even some who hadn’t known him at all. He’d even, somehow, managed to get his old samovar back from wherever it had been after Krikor Sarkissian had sold it. It was going to be most interesting finding out just how he had managed to do all this. But then Süleyman remembered someone that he couldn’t recall having seen for some time. Ceyda Ümit. When he’d rescued her from what had looked like the amorous advances of Burak Fisekçi, Ceyda had run away. But where had she run to?

He slipped out of
the toilets with the camera underneath his arm. He’d discarded the helmet and the jumpsuit, which left him just in his white vest and a pair of jogging bottoms he’d put on before the operation because he was cold. He stood out and he knew it, but he had to make some sort of attempt to get away because if he didn’t, apart from getting himself arrested, he’d also probably be kissing goodbye to the considerable reward he’d been counting on. If he got that, he could secure his family’s future in Van as well as buying himself a really good car, like a Mitsubishi Evolution or maybe a Nissan Skyline.

But things hadn’t gone to plan and so now he had to improvise. He looked into the camera and whispered, ‘Now, Beyefendi, we get out of here.’

He actually managed to reach the open front door of the hotel – which was good going – before he felt a heavy, official hand fall on his shoulder.

Burak Fisekçi had
gone. When the Sarkissian brothers were finally relieved in room 411, there was no sign of Burak Fisekçi whom Süleyman had knocked out cold – or so he’d thought – just outside on the gallery. He looked up and then down the gallery. The winch that had finally brought
İ
kmen to safety was still in position but no one was doing anything with it now. Süleyman ran to the banisters and looked down into the central void above the Kubbeli Saloon. Nothing.

Where had Fisekçi gone and where was Ceyda? The girl had been in her underwear and frightened and he just hoped that she was all right. Lale Aktar had apparently been taken to police headquarters, along with those people who had, so far, been identified as gunmen. This group had included three of the people who were apparently ‘shot’ when the building was first taken over: Yiannis Istefanopoulos, Aysel Ökte and Ra
ş
it Demir. The fourth ‘victim’, Haluk Mert, was really dead. Why just him?