Deadline (7 page)

As far as he could tell, all of the guests were wealthy, with the exception of himself, Süleyman and several groups of divines – Armenian priests, Greeks, representatives from the Chief Rabbi’s office. There were nightclub owners, landlords, fashion designers, film stars, plastic surgeons, publishers and industrialists. Some he knew, some he knew of; all of them were smiling or laughing and having a good time, which was nice. Not for the first time, Çetin
İ
kmen wondered why he couldn’t do likewise at events like this. There was that twitch he was feeling inside brought on by the man he’d seen at the concierge’s desk. But was that just his mind wanting to make a mystery out of this innocent evening to somehow justify his presence at it?

İ
kmen didn’t do relaxation, he never had. In a sense that was the way he liked it but, as he got older, it was annoying too. Not being able to sit still at nearly sixty was tiring, for him and for those around him. But there was little point in trying to force himself into it.

His restless eyes and ears found the younger brother of
İ
zzedin Effendi, Yusuf Effendi, and he listened in as the boy spoke to a woman who played a bit of a flighty piece in a popular evening soap opera.

‘Our parents died when I
was just a child,’ he said. Then he lowered his voice to almost a whisper. ‘My mother, thinking that my father had died fighting in Arabia, took her own life.’

‘Oh, how sad!’ The woman had that excessive emotional edge to her voice that so many theatricals seemed to have.

‘Then my father returned.’

‘Allah!’

‘Not knowing that my mother was dead, he came back expecting to see her.’ He shrugged. ‘He was weak from fighting the Arabs in the desert and he had an accident. He hit his head and he died.’

‘Oh, so you were brought up by . . .’

‘My dear brother, yes,’ he said. ‘He has always taken care of me. Not a single kuru
ş
has been spared on either my comfort or my education. And tomorrow I will go to the Sorbonne in Paris. It is my sincerest hope to train as a linguist and so help our new nation to reach out into the world anew.’

‘That’s a wonderful ambition!’ the actress gushed.

But
İ
kmen found himself a little confused.
İ
zzedin Effendi, so he’d heard, was supposed to be bankrupt. How was he going to afford tuition fees at France’s top academy? And wasn’t this story rather too similar to one he’d heard before, one that hadn’t been fiction?

Ay
ş
e couldn’t believe that it was the
stuffed mussels that were making her feel bad. She had the constitution of an ox. That said, her stomach felt curdled and uncomfortable and she’d had to use the lavatory at the restaurant rather more than she’d wanted to. Both
İ
zzet and her brother, Ali, were concerned.

‘Are you all right?’ Ali asked the third time she returned from the tiny restaurant lavatory.

‘Yes.’ She sat down next to
İ
zzet who frowned when he looked at her.

‘You’re pale.’

‘Wedding nerves,’ her brother said with a misplaced tone of authority in his voice.

Ay
ş
e rolled her eyes but said nothing. On occasion, Ali liked to pretend his younger sister was some sort of blushing virgin bride, which everyone – including him – knew she was not.

İ
zzet poured her some water and encouraged her to drink it. She’d only had one glass of beer with her meal and so she was by no means drunk but it still wasn’t a bad idea to drink water. The two men, like most of the revellers at the tables outside the small restaurants on Nevizade Alley, were getting stuck in to a bottle of rakı. As the night had progressed, the noise level had risen considerably as people began to indulge in long, rambling story-telling sessions punctuated by bouts of happy singing. Some character down at the end of the
alley periodically sang ‘Jingle Bells’ in Turkish, to the obvious delight of everyone at his table. But Ay
ş
e was not amused, either by the ‘Jingle Bells’ man or by her patronising brother. Her mind was elsewhere.

The gold samovar she’d seen that man take into the Pera Palas bothered her. It had looked so like the one that had once belonged to Dr Krikor Sarkissian, the one he’d been given by a murderer. His name had been Muhammed Ersoy and he’d killed several members of his own family as well as his lover. He would have killed Inspector
İ
kmen, Dr Sarkissian and Mehmet Süleyman if they hadn’t captured him and put him in a psychiatric unit and then prison. She’d been sleeping with Süleyman at that time and when she’d heard that Ersoy had been holding him hostage she’d almost collapsed. Even though Süleyman was married then and so he wasn’t hers in any sense, she’d been terrified that something bad might happen to him.

Seeing the samovar had brought it all back. Not that ‘it’ had ever actually gone very far away. In one sense that period had been both the best and the worst time in her life. Certainly no one since excited her as much as Süleyman had, and that included
İ
zzet Melik, the man who was going to be her husband. She began to wonder whether she should call
İ
kmen and tell him about the samovar. If one of the hotel guests was going to display it in the
hotel for some reason, it might come as a rather unpleasant surprise for her boss. But then she decided against doing that. Inspector
İ
kmen was a grown man, he could take care of himself.

‘Now that
Mustafa Kemal Pa
ş
a has created this new homeland for the Turks, we get few guests who are not of their kind in this hotel,’ Sofia, the ‘Greek’ housekeeper, said.

The guests were now all seated drinking coffee and liqueurs in the Kubbeli Saloon, watching the actors perform soliloquies and play out scenes in character.

‘An Armenian man is in room four thirteen. Şeymus, one of the drivers here, says he was an arms dealer to the Russians during the war.’ Looking over her shoulders to make sure that she wasn’t being overheard, Sofia went on, ‘Ourselves and the Armenians had hopes that the Russians would save us back then. But they didn’t. The Turkish princess who is staying here tonight, her father and brothers fought the Russians in the east. The governess, the American, she told me that all the men in the princess’s family were killed in battle with the Russians. I don’t know how a person gets over such a thing – if they ever do.’

Çetin
İ
kmen looked
at his watch. The meal had overrun and it was now ten fifteen. He was actually ready for his bed and would have just sneaked off to his room had Krikor not put him on Lale Aktar’s investigative team. She was, so she had told him, relying on his investigative skills to help her win.

‘The young prince, the one the older prince and his wife are taking to Paris tomorrow, is, so the Armenian, Avram Bey, told the concierge, Monsieur Maurice, very wealthy. When his father died he left separate sums of money to each of the sons and the boy apparently has a lot,’ Sofia continued. Then her face dropped into a frown. ‘How I resent that! The Turks lose the Great War, they take my home in Fener away from me and make me work like a common servant! I am not just some Greek woman from the country! I am a Fenariote, a Greek of old Byzantium! We were here a thousand years before these Turks and now they want us out. I hate them! But I especially hate the old Ottomans who ruined this country and made way for people like this new government in Ankara. Princes like these young men who are staying here tonight deserve to die for what they did to this country!’

Albeit in a fictional form, these old enmities that Sofia and others were displaying were still,
İ
kmen knew, very alive in the present day. It was sad to think that Turkey still had issues with Greece and Armenia but it was a fact, and it was one that not
all of the audience appeared to be comfortable with. But then Sofia left the Kubbeli Saloon and, from different ends of the chamber,
İ
zzedin Effendi and Avram Bey the Armenian approached one another. When they got close, the prince put an arm out as if to ward off the Armenian.

‘I have nothing to say to you, sir!’ he said as the other man eyed him narrowly. ‘Tomorrow I will be on my way to Paris and there will be an end of it.’

‘I do not think that is so, effendi,’ the Armenian said.

The prince put his nose in the air. ‘Oh? And why is that, Avram Bey?’

He smiled. ‘Because you need me, effendi,’ he said.

‘I do not!’

The Armenian moved closer to the prince. ‘I think you will find that you do,’ he said. ‘I think you will find that if you try to continue without me, that will not be possible.’

The prince scowled. ‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘Are you threatening me?’

Avram Bey shrugged. ‘I would not use such a word myself, effendi,’ he said. ‘But without me it is possible that bad things may happen. I would not like it to be so but . . .’

‘I will not listen to any more of this!’ the prince said as he stormed past the Armenian and out of the room.
İ
kmen noticed as he passed that he
had tears in his eyes.

Beyond the fact that the racial types on show were stereotypical (the slimy Armenian, the hate-filled Greek), the performances were good and
İ
kmen, at least, could deduce some subtlety and layering in their acting. On the face of it the exchange they had just witnessed seemed to have been about money. The prince was bankrupt and had, possibly, borrowed money from the Armenian. But there had also been a fairly heavy dose of sexual tension between the two characters as well and
İ
kmen wondered if the prince and the Armenian were lovers. But then he found that he wasn’t comfortable with that notion and he decided that it couldn’t possibly be so.

Now that the kitchens were clean and tidy and the head chef had gone home for the night, Ersu Bey decided to let all but two of his staff members leave early, just over half an hour before the night shift came on. He himself would stay until every cup and liqueur glass was safely back in the kitchens but most of the guests had finished their drinks now and so there was very little left to do except pick up the odd cup and saucer.

He didn’t trust the night shift, which was even smaller than usual for this one exclusive party, to do a proper job, not really. They were only casual staff anyway and he lived in
fear of coming into the kitchens the following morning and finding dirty cups and glasses all over the work surfaces. Apart from anything else, Chef Roberto would go insane with fury.

Ersu cleared away a few more cups and then he told his remaining two waitresses to go. With no wife or family waiting for him at home, Ersu Bey wasn’t in any great hurry to leave and so if he did stay on after 11 p.m. to wash up the remaining cups and glasses, that was up to him.

He managed to gather up ten small liqueur glasses and four coffee cups and made his way down to the kitchens. Büket, the last of his waitresses, was just slinging her bag over her shoulder and going out of the back door when he got there.

‘Goodnight, Ersu Bey,’ she said as she passed a couple of young men, night staff, walking in the opposite direction.

‘Goodnight, Büket,’ Ersu Bey said. ‘See you tomorrow.’ Then he pushed his tray of dirty glasses and cups at one of the young men and said, ‘Wash these up.’

‘OK.’

Ersu Bey went back up to the Kubbeli Saloon smarting a little at the casual language that the boy had used with him. It was OK,
Ersu Bey
to people like him! He shook his head with irritation and had to take a moment to compose his features before he faced his guests once again.

‘Burak!’
İ
kmen beckoned
Krikor Sarkissian’s assistant over and Burak Fisekçi duly lumbered across the Kubbeli Saloon towards him.

‘Çetin Bey?’

‘Now that all of our fictional villiains and innocents have apparently gone to their beds, do I have time to slip out to have a cigarette?’ he asked. Soon, or so he imagined, something grisly would happen.

Burak looked at his watch. As principal organiser of the event he of course knew how the evening was going to proceed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You have time.’ Then he smiled. ‘But don’t walk all the way out to the front entrance, go out the back door, through the ballroom, it’s closer.’

‘I will.’

When
İ
kmen got outside, he found that he wasn’t alone. An elderly rabbi he knew by sight, plus a lot of rather elegant-looking men that he didn’t know at all were also availing themselves of the ashtrays outside the ballroom. And then there was Süleyman.

‘Saw you deep in eye-to-eye contact with Lale Aktar,’
İ
kmen said as his friend came and joined him.

Jumping up and down on the spot in order to keep warm, Süleyman said, ‘Just chit-chat.’

‘Yes, and I am the Shah of Iran,’
İ
kmen replied acidly. ‘I know you, Mehmet, don’t even try to fool me.’

Süleyman lit a cigarette and then smiled.

‘Even if she offers herself
to you on a plate, you mustn’t do anything,’
İ
kmen continued. ‘Krikor is very good friends with her husband, he’d take it as a betrayal. I’d take it as a betrayal.’

Süleyman didn’t answer. He looked up at the elderly buildings that remained on Me
ş
rutiyet Street and wondered whether the old Londra Hotel, diagonally opposite the Pera Palas, was still like some sort of dusty belle époque museum. He didn’t want to think about what
İ
kmen had just said to him and he certainly didn’t want to make him any sort of promise. Lale Aktar was a very attractive woman who had run one of her smooth, slim legs up against his thigh several times during the course of the dinner. But luckily for him,
İ
kmen changed the subject.

‘So who do you think is going to get killed?’ he asked. ‘Will it be the prince? The princess? The young brother? The Armenian? The governess? The Greek woman?’

Süleyman, glad to be far away from the subject of Lale Aktar, said, ‘Mmm. I’ve a feeling there is some serious business between the prince and the Armenian.’