Deadline (9 page)

İ
kmen, bending as low as he could over the body without touching it, said, ‘So fiction becomes reality.’

‘Makes you wonder if this character was the one that was supposed to die in the land of fictional crime and mystery,’ Süleyman replied. Then he said, ‘I suppose he really is dead . . .’

‘Oh, he’s dead all right,’
İ
kmen said. He checked his watch, it was ten past eleven. ‘Although we will have to get Dr Sarkissian up here in order to confirm that.’ He moved his head the better to see the deep wound in the neck and then looked at the bed and the headboard. ‘Must’ve still been alive when he was stabbed in the carotid or whatever artery that is in the neck. Blood spatter.’

‘I wonder how Mrs Aktar is managing downstairs,’ Süleyman said. ‘I left Dr Sarkissian in charge of her but if she starts telling everyone about this . . .’

‘You go down and send Dr Sarkissian up here,’
İ
kmen said. ‘We’ll have to secure the building until we can get a team in here.’

Süleyman left and
İ
kmen began looking around the room, moving as little as possible. The prints from Lale Aktar’s stiletto-heeled shoes were easy to see retreating across the floor from the bed to the door of the room. There were splashes of blood on the walls and even a few handprints where the novelist
had probably tried to steady herself against the wall.

What,
İ
kmen wondered, had the boy been doing in Lale Aktar’s room? Unless she had invited him in, how had he got into room 411 and why? Had he perhaps tried to rob her and then been killed by her when she tried to stop him? Given the ferocity of the wounds he had sustained, this seemed to be unlikely. But if Lale Aktar hadn’t killed the boy, and turning up with his blood all over her did seem to be a bit of a giveaway for a cold-blooded killer, then who had?

Whether it was the sound of a woman’s screams or the gunshots he heard coming from somewhere down on a lower floor of the hotel that made
İ
kmen sprint for the door, he didn’t know. But he was out of room 411 and on to the landing before he could really think about what came first. He got there just in time to see a tall man dressed in black, his face covered by a balaclava helmet, coming towards him.
İ
kmen reached inside his jacket pocket for his phone. But then the man in black pointed a gun at him and said, ‘Take your phone out and throw it on the floor or I’ll kill you.’

İ
kmen did as he was told. The phone, when it hit the floor, skittered along the surface until it hit the man’s boot. He crunched his heel down on it and said, ‘Now you come with me.’

It was
an absolutely textbook psychological technique. They shot four people, three men and a woman, straight away, dragged their bodies into the bar and then stood in the middle of the saloon panning their guns around the survivors, asserting their dominance. People screamed in terror, some even tried to hide underneath furniture, which was exactly the effect these people had wanted. There were ten of them, that Süleyman could see, and they all wore black, anonymous jumpsuits or shirts and trousers and balaclava helmets. One of them wore a headset which Süleyman recognised as the type that included a camera, and they all wore microphones. Through his fear, Süleyman wondered what terrorist organisation the nine men and possibly one woman represented. Was it a knee-jerk assumption to brand them as terrorists? Süleyman thought not but then he remembered a recent report he’d read on the finances of one of the city’s most powerful criminal gangs and realised that perhaps his first thought had been a rash generalisation. These people could be anyone.

Everyone, including Süleyman, was down on the floor. The only exceptions were Lale Aktar who was still sitting, covered in blood, in the chair
İ
kmen had guided her to, and Dr Arto Sarkissian who was standing next to her. Süleyman could just see the four bodies of the dead through the doorway into the bar. Laid down or slumped, they had the look of
drunken sleepers – or they would have done if they hadn’t been covered in blood. One of them Süleyman thought he recognised as the owner of some sort of health club. Why him? But then why not him? When one asserted dominance through terror, it didn’t matter who got killed.

‘I want all your phones, cameras and any other mobile devices in the middle of the room now.’

The one who spoke was shorter than the others. The timbre of his voice was of a man in his middle years and when Süleyman raised his head to look at him, he saw that he was also more thickly set than his colleagues. Was he the oldest? Was he also, therefore, the slowest and least agile as well?

With shaking hands people began to throw their phones and cameras into the middle of the floor.

‘Don’t try to conceal anything from us,’ the man said as he watched the people empty their pockets. ‘We’ll be searching every one of you. Hold anything back and you’ll end up like them.’ He pointed at the dead bodies.

Süleyman threw his phone into the middle of the room but not before he’d put the device on and pressed 155. Hopefully the operators at the police emergency control room would hear what he was hearing, at least for a short while. But as the phone flew through the air one of the masked men shot it and his colleagues all laughed. Then their leader walked
over to Süleyman, and said, ‘Nice try, Inspector Süleyman.’

Every cell of Süleyman’s body turned cold. ‘How do you know who I am?’ he said.

The man poked the side of his head with the muzzle of his submachine gun. ‘Everything will become clear soon enough,’ he said. Then he beckoned one of his subordinates over and told him to search the policeman. He pulled what had been an expensive jacket so hard that one of the arms ripped at the shoulder.

‘Even when my daughter got married here I never actually used this beautiful lift,’ Çetin
İ
kmen said as he climbed into the Pera Palas’s glamorous wooden elevator. He realised that he was babbling but then what else could he do under the circumstances? A faceless man was pointing a gun at his head for no reason that he could as yet understand.

‘Sit.’ The man pointed to the velvet-covered seat at the back of the lift and then shut the doors and started the mechanism.

İ
kmen sat. Under normal circumstances this short journey to the ground floor in the historic Pera Palas lift would have been a joy and a delight. But with guns and screams and at least one murder already committed, there was very little levity to be found in the situation. Just before he’d been pushed into the lift,
İ
kmen had seen two of the actors, the
ones playing the older prince and the Armenian gentleman, being hauled out of a room on to the landing and pushed to the floor by two other anonymous creatures in black. He’d heard at least one of them grunt with pain but what had happened after that he didn’t know.

The lift creaked. ‘Amazing how this thing has kept going all these years,’
İ
kmen babbled. The eyes above the balaclava face mask looked at him with what the policeman interpreted as pity. He probably thought he was a stupid old bastard, way past his prime. He was wrong – probably – but
İ
kmen was quite happy for that to be the impression he gave.

‘Of course we could observe the normal pleasantries and I could ask you your name, but I don’t suppose you’d tell me,’
İ
kmen continued. ‘I could just call you “faceless, frightening person who wants to kill me” but that is somewhat long-winded and also I don’t actually know that you actually want to kill me per se—’

‘Shut up.’

‘In reality I have absolutely no idea about your motives at all. To me this all looks a bit like that film. The one with Bruce Willis. What was its name?’

The masked man didn’t respond.

‘I can’t remember,’
İ
kmen said. ‘But he was in some office building when a group of people who at first seemed like terrorists attacked and Bruce got into all sorts of terrible
situations as he tried to stop them. Then it turned out that the villains weren’t terrorists at all—’

‘Shut up!’ This time he shoved the muzzle of his gun up against the side of
İ
kmen’s head. Then he leaned down and whispered in his ear. ‘Don’t try the silly old man act with us, Inspector. We know you.’

İ
kmen said nothing. The lift creaked to a halt on the ground floor and he got out without another word. So whoever these people were, they knew him. Whether that was a good or a bad thing,
İ
kmen didn’t know. But what he had deduced was that the man in the lift was on a hair trigger, which could or could not work to his advantage.

Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu
got all the way home and had even put the television on before she decided that she didn’t want to be in her apartment. Her brother hadn’t returned with her but had gone out to a nightclub with a group of his friends from work and probably wouldn’t be home until the morning.
İ
zzet had headed back to his own place in Zeyrek.

The stomach upset she’d apparently developed during the course of the evening wouldn’t go away. Uncomfortable rather than painful, she knew it wouldn’t let her rest easily and so Ay
ş
e decided to go back up to
İ
stiklal Street again and see whether she could walk whatever it was off. She put her coat on and just took her keys and cigarettes out of her handbag. Her mother, had she still been alive, would have prescribed yoghurt for a stomach upset, but then her mother had recommended yoghurt for everything from colic to cancer. Inspector
İ
kmen called yoghurt ‘Turkish antibiotics’, which always made her smile.

Ay
ş
e walked up
İ
nönü Street
and into Taksim Square. It was just after eleven thirty and so the town was still heaving with revellers making for home, as well as more robust souls heading into clubs and late-night bars. As she skirted around the edge of the square, Ay
ş
e saw a couple of transsexuals she knew by sight melt into doorways as she approached, their eyes expressing both fear and resentment. They had to know by this time that she, of all people, wouldn’t bother them unless she had to. She actually liked most of them. But she was still ‘the police’ and so of course they’d feel at the very least ambivalent towards her. Most of them, after all, were street prostitutes. With the exception of a few high-profile entertainers, it was almost the only profession that was open to them. Even Inspector
İ
kmen’s cousin, Samsun, had worked the streets when she was young.

Ay
ş
e turned on to
İ
stiklal Street and found herself almost immediately surrounded by a group of young tattooed and pierced students. They hardly noticed her but she was impressed by their energy and their joy as they cavorted underneath the festive lights that were strung across the famous thoroughfare. Some people called them ‘Christmas’ lights, others ‘New Year’ decorations. But it didn’t really matter. They cheered up the dark winter nights and were appreciated by all but the most austere Muslims and there weren’t many of those wandering
about on
İ
stiklal in the middle of the night.

Walking at a steady pace, Ay
ş
e found that as she drew level with the Catholic Church of St Antoine, she was beginning to feel a little better. Sometimes being with her brother
and
with
İ
zzet at the same time could be a strain. They both so wanted to look after her and, if she was honest, she didn’t really appreciate it. Maybe she’d been single for too long.

She turned off on to Kallavı Alley. It wasn’t until she was over halfway down that she realised where she was going. Kallavı joined directly on to the end of Me
ş
rutiyet Street, which was where she’d walked arm in arm with
İ
zzet some hours before and where the Pera Palas Hotel was. As soon as she’d acknowledged it, she felt the pull of the grand old hotel, or rather the lure of who was inside.
İ
kmen and Süleyman, especially the latter.

When she reached Me
ş
rutiyet, Ay
ş
e stood and stared down the street at the hotel and wondered what she thought she was doing. Süleyman was at a private party that was probably in full swing and to which she had not been invited. The hotel security staff weren’t going to let her in and even if she did get in, what was she going to say?

The truth was that beyond some vague notion about wanting to tell
İ
kmen and Mehmet Süleyman about the gold samovar she’d seen going into the
hotel, she didn’t know. Was it even the same gold samovar that had once belonged to Dr Sarkissian? She was about to be married and yet here she was wanting to talk about a piece of ornate kitchen equipment to a man who had once been her lover.

She loved
İ
zzet, she felt safe with him, he was kind and generous and he loved her with all his heart. But she didn’t
want
him. There had only ever been one man she had wanted so much she would have crawled over open cans to get to him and he was in the Pera Palas Hotel no doubt making big brown eyes at some other woman. Ay
ş
e had to put a hand up to her mouth to stop herself from screaming.

Putting aside the great pile of broken mobile phones and cameras in the middle of the room,
İ
kmen could have imagined himself inside some sort of Agatha Christie novel. A lot of very elegantly dressed people – as well as some Pera Palas staff – were sitting and standing around, looking anxious, in a most impressive orientalist saloon. Some of them, the actors, even wore clothes from the 1920s. It was all very . . . theatrical.
İ
kmen, now mercifully free of his personal captor, sidled up to Süleyman.

‘Ideas?’ he whispered.

‘They know my name,’ Süleyman replied.

İ
kmen had a feeling they knew
his too, although none of them, as yet, had actually used it. But now the one figure who could have been female was looking straight at them and so they both became silent.