Deadline (4 page)

He washed his hair, which he noticed by the
very strong lights in the bathroom had become even more grey of late. Soon he’d have to decide whether or not he was going to dye it. But if he did that he knew that Çetin
İ
kmen, if no one else, would laugh at him. The older man was just letting age happen to him.
İ
kmen was really getting quite old now and Mehmet wondered, not for the first time, how much longer he could or would carry on working. It wasn’t a thought that he found pleasing in any way and so he pushed it out of his mind. He had to stay focused. The main thing about this upcoming event was to solve the ‘crime’ that the theatre company were going to stage and win the admiration of Lale Aktar. Now there, according to her publicity photographs, was a good-looking woman. And married to a man who was not only old enough to be her father, he was old enough to be Mehmet Süleyman’s father too.

The Event

The late shift
was going to consist of a largely casual skeleton staff who would come on at 11 p.m. when the meal was over and the murder mystery show was in full swing. Then the fun would really begin. The guests didn’t have a clue what sort of spectacle they were in for. Or how much physical activity. The dinner menu included an extensive meze, lobster, lamb shank in pomegranate molasses, a range of desserts and cheeses, not to mention different wines with each course, which would mean that most of the guests wouldn’t be in any shape to run about much. But then that was all part of the fun.

People were going to be talking about Krikor Sarkissian’s fund-raising event at the Pera Palas Hotel for ever. It was going to be one of those occasions when individuals would ask each other, ‘Where were you when you first heard the news about that nightmare that took place at the Pera Palas Hotel?’

‘Can I get an Efes?’

Arto Sarkissian raised
his eyes to the ceiling in despair. Warm and comfortable in the convivial surroundings of the Orient Bar, cushioned by soft, velvet-covered furniture and mingling with some of the most glamorous and interesting people in the city, he was being, to his mind, unnecessarily hassled by his oldest friend.

‘You want beer?’ he asked.

‘I don’t like champagne,’ Çetin
İ
kmen said. ‘It gives me hiccups.’

Arto shook his head. ‘Just go up to the bar and ask for whatever you want,’ he said. ‘They have Efes Pilsen, they have everything; drinks both lavish and plebeian.’

‘OK.’
İ
kmen eased past a very influential media couple and made for the bar. As soon as he’d got his beer, Arto knew that Çetin would take it outside into the cold so that he could smoke. He was fifty-nine years old this very day and he was still behaving like some sort of intellectual working-class snob. He wouldn’t drink champagne, especially not with the glitterati, because he didn’t approve – of either the drink or those who drank it. But they were the ones, at the present time, who made the world go round and Çetin, Arto felt, really needed to get used to it. It was all about celebrity now.

‘Doctor?’

He looked
round and saw a very smartly dressed Mehmet Süleyman standing next to him. Champagne glass in hand, he represented the type of person the Pera Palas had been built for. In a way no less of an anachronism than Çetin
İ
kmen, the easy grace and lack of glitz of a true Ottoman gave the Orient Bar a touch of regal class.

Arto Sarkissian smiled. ‘Inspector.’

‘Is that Hovsep Pars?’ Süleyman asked, pointing to a very small man sitting alone in one of the distant corners of the bar.

‘Yes.’ Arto looked down.

‘I thought he didn’t go anywhere since . . .’

Arto shrugged. ‘Family tragedies happen,’ he said. ‘One must carry on and live one’s life.’

‘Yes, but he—’

‘What Hovsep’s sister and her husband did was nothing to do with him,’ the doctor cut in. ‘It’s just tragic that it has taken him such a long time to come to terms with it. If indeed he has.’

They both looked at the small, lonely man, his head down, concentratedly drinking his champagne.

‘He came for Krikor,’ Arto said. ‘Not as a fellow Armenian or even as a man of wealth, but because he loves my brother. Everybody does.’

Çetin
İ
kmen,
now furnished with a glass of Efes Pilsen, caught Süleyman’s eye and nodded his head towards the back of the room as he made for the exit.

‘I think Çetin wants me to go outside and have a cigarette with him,’ Süleyman said to the doctor.

‘Are you going? I’d deem it a favour if you did. He’s so uncomfortable here.’

Süleyman smiled. ‘What a strange world we live in, Doctor, where Turks must smoke in the cold.’

He started to make his way out of the bar but then suddenly he stopped. In common with everyone else in the Orient Bar, Süleyman stared at the tall, elegant figure of a woman dressed in a full-length golden evening gown. Slim and beautiful, her shining blonde hair, which came down to her shoulders, was swept dramatically to one side in a Veronica Lake style, hiding her left eye almost completely. For a moment nobody spoke. Then conversation started again and the woman glided up to Krikor Sarkissian and kissed him. Süleyman walked back to Arto and said, ‘Is that Lale Aktar?’

‘Yes,’ Arto said. ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’

‘Even more beautiful than in her photographs!’

‘And married too, Inspector,’ Arto said with a smile. ‘Faruk Aktar is a personal friend of Krikor’s.’

The warning duly noted, Süleyman went to the back of the bar and followed
İ
kmen out into the cold.

She knew how to work a room.

‘So here he
is, the person behind the murder mystery theme,’ Krikor heard Lale Aktar say to Burak Fisekçi, his assistant. She gave him her hand which Burak gallantly kissed. An ugly lump of a man, Burak seemed both flattered and appalled by her attention, probably because it made people look at him. Krikor saw his usually sallow complexion turn bright red.

‘Dr Sarkissian did most of the work,’ Burak said.

‘He doesn’t give himself enough credit,’ Krikor said to Lale. ‘If it hadn’t been for him, this evening would just have been a simple dinner party. He is my right hand.’ Krikor patted his assistant on the shoulder. Then he turned away and introduced Lale to some of his other guests. He watched her charm them all. It was as if she’d been doing this sort of thing all her life. Sometimes it was quite difficult to remember that Lale Aktar’s first book had only been published five years before.

Written using her unmarried name of Lale Kanlı,
The Çukorova Mystery
had been a minor literary event. Some critics likened her work, which was exciting but conventional, to that of Agatha Christie. But then she’d met Faruk Aktar, married him, and everything had changed. Her next book,
Screams in the Night
, had been about a serial killer in a small Anatolian village. What so captured the public’s imagination about this book was that the killer was a woman who liked to torture her victims. Illiterate and furious, the vengeful widow Handan, the anti-heroine of
Screams
, had been an instant sensation. Feminist groups loved her, ministers of religion and other conservative elements saw the character as a threat, and Lale courted even more controversy when she told the press that some elements in
Screams
were derived directly from her own village background. She’d been raised around illiteracy, forced marriages, honour killings and dangerous folk beliefs that included the likening of strong, independent women to witches.

By the
time
Screams
came out, Lale was slim and polished and Faruk had made sure that every liberal media tycoon was right behind her career. Her life was charmed and she knew it. Lale – and Krikor admired her enormously for this – didn’t just give money to the charitable causes she supported, she got stuck in. As well as taking time to visit his clinic, she volunteered with a scheme that fed the homeless, visited prisons and hospitals, and continued to write ground-breaking crime novels that challenged the status quo. Occasionally Krikor found himself wondering what, if anything, she did for her family back in her village, or indeed for her father who was serving a sentence for an unspecified crime in a prison somewhere in Anatolia. Krikor never asked her about it and, as far as he knew, neither did her husband.

‘Krikor, where’s Arto?’

She was
back at his side with a champagne flute in her hand.

Krikor looked around and saw his brother leaning up against the bar talking to a small man wearing a red cummerbund.

He pointed. ‘Over there.’

‘Is that his friend Çetin
İ
kmen with him?’ she asked.

Krikor looked back just to check and then said, ‘No. I think that gentleman may be something to do with the Chief Rabbi’s office. We have several representatives from the rabbinate here tonight. I think that Inspector
İ
kmen is probably outside smoking. Why?’

She smiled. ‘I’ve heard Arto talk about him and I noticed from my list that he’s on my investigative team.’

‘Is he?’ Arto laughed. ‘Oh, what a naughty man my Burak is to put Çetin in opposition to his colleague Mehmet Süleyman.’ He looked around to try and see where Burak Fisekçi had gone, but he’d sloped off somewhere, probably in an attempt to be alone. Events like this were not easy for him.

‘Well, don’t change it now, Krikor,’ Lale said. ‘If I’ve got a police officer on my team then I’m not complaining.’

‘I want
to win for my own self-esteem,’ Süleyman said.

It was cold outside the hotel and a light mist was beginning to come up from the Golden Horn. But Süleyman and
İ
kmen, together with other small groups of guests who were also braving the weather, had to smoke somewhere.

Shuffling stiffly from foot to foot in an attempt to keep warm,
İ
kmen said, ‘You sure it’s not to impress the famous novelist?’

‘Well, yes, that too . . .’

‘She is married,’
İ
kmen said.

‘I know that!’

‘Yes, and I know you, my dear friend,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Neither time nor misfortune seems to have impinged on the effect you have on women. But I don’t have to tell you how bad—’

‘Yes, yes, I think I know by now just how tediously disapproving you are of my private life.’ He took a drag from his cigarette and then said, ‘I’m not going to make a pass at Lale Aktar, Çetin. Apart from anything else, why on earth would someone like her even be aware of a penniless policeman like me?’

‘Because you are the opposing team leader.’

He shrugged.

İ
kmen raised a warning finger. ‘Competition can be very erotic,’ he said. ‘That which we are not can be highly alluring. I shouldn’t have to tell you this. Your second wife was a psychiatrist.’

The slightly
pained and also chilled look on Çetin
İ
kmen’s face made Mehmet Süleyman smile.
İ
kmen really didn’t want to be anywhere near this event and so he was complaining about everything and everyone. In an attempt to lighten the mood, Süleyman said, ‘What’s your room like?’

‘I can smoke in
there
,’
İ
kmen said gloomily.

‘Yes, but what’s it—’

‘It has a bed, a bathroom and a cupboard to hang my normal clothes up in,’
İ
kmen said.

There was going to be no lightening his mood, clearly, so Süleyman stopped trying. It was at times like this that the younger man felt the difference in age between them most acutely.
İ
kmen had always been irascible but now that trait was magnified and also he was much more vocal about what he liked and didn’t like. Formal occasions were not for him and formal occasions allied to ‘fun’ were positively poisonous.

And, of course, it was
İ
kmen’s birthday. Süleyman knew it, the Sarkissian brothers knew it and everyone, as usual, was tiptoeing around it, and
İ
kmen, as if it was just another day. Mehmet Süleyman put one cigarette out, lit another and then watched what looked like a group of goths get out of a taxi and go into the hotel. They were, he imagined, the Bowstrings, the murder mystery theatre troupe.

The Grand
Pera Ballroom was set up for the banquet which would consist of five courses plus coffee and petits fours. There were a hundred guests who would be seated at round tables set with either six or eight places each. To cater for such numbers was a major, almost military operation, which fortunately boasted an ex-solider as its orchestrator. Ersu Nadir had been a professional soldier for twenty-five years before he became maître d’hôtel at the Pera Palas. Now a handsome and highly organised fifty-year-old, he inspected every place setting on every table while his waiting staff looked on, barely daring to breathe. Ersu Bey was not one to find fault where none existed but if he did find anything wrong he would not hesitate to point out the error to whoever was responsible in front of the whole banqueting team. Finally finding himself satisfied, he called housekeeping to come and brush one of the Murano chandeliers just one more time, then he went into the adjoining Aynalı room where the theatre group had just arrived. To Ersu Bey they looked like a bunch of anarchists.

‘Hello, I’m Alp,’ a boy who Ersu Bey thought was probably no more than twenty-five said.

‘Sir, I am the maître d’hôtel, Ersu Nadir.’ He bowed.

‘Is it OK if we use
this room to get changed in and sort out our stuff?’

‘Of course.’

There was one girl and a couple of slightly older women with Alp, plus four other men, and Ersu Bey did wonder whether he should ask if they’d like separate changing facilities but then he noticed that they were already getting undressed. Theatrical people did things like this. On the one hand, he approved – had not Atatürk himself declared that men and women should be equal? – but he was also very embarrassed.

‘So what is this, er, this
performance
you are giving tonight?’

‘We’re doing a piece I wrote myself,’ Alp said. ‘It’s based, loosely, on the novels of Agatha Christie and it’s set in the nineteen twenties. We’re all playing characters staying here at the hotel. I’m called
İ
zzedin Effendi, I’m a former Ottoman prince, Ceyda there is my wife Nuray Hanımefendi, plus we’ve
İ
zzedin’s younger brother, Yusuf, an Armenian called Avram Bey, a Dr Garibaldi, an Italian, the owner of the hotel, Nicos Bey, an American governess, Sarah, and the housekeeper Sofia Hanım.’