Ikmen 16 - Body Count (2 page)

‘Who you calling,
Ş
ukru Bey?’ The child, still apparently oblivious to how macabre his situation was, spoke with a frozen frown on his face.

‘You’d best get away from here now,’
Ş
ukru said.

‘Why?’

No one was answering the phone, but
Ş
ukru persisted. ‘Well, do you want the police to think that you killed Levent Bey?’ he asked.

The child frowned. ‘I didn’t. I’ve killed no one.’ He put his head to one side and regarded
Ş
ukru closely. ‘You calling the coppers now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because sometimes that is all that is left to do,’
Ş
ukru said. And then as someone finally answered his call he said to the boy, ‘And Levent Bey was not one of our own; he was one of theirs. Now they have taken him back.’

Police sergeant Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu knew that all she had with and of the man who was making love to her was sex. No words of affection passed Mehmet Süleyman’s lips as he took her up against the wall of her shower room. When he came, it was Ay
ş
e who panted with spent lust – he simply grunted and then immediately washed himself without looking at her. She, however, looked at him. Although middle-aged now – Ay
ş
e had first met Inspector Mehmet Süleyman when he was twenty-nine – he was still slim, handsome and very aware of his power over women. The scion of an old Ottoman family related to the sultans, Süleyman was as mercurial as he was beautiful and Ay
ş
e had been besotted by him for over a decade. Less than a year ago she’d passed up what might have been her last opportunity to marry a man who had really loved her for Süleyman. She was forty, and although she was still beautiful, her face was lined. Her eyes, for just a moment, became sad. But he didn’t notice. Married unsuccessfully twice and with a trail of failed affairs and one-night stands behind him, Mehmet Süleyman was unreliable, promiscuous, obsessed with his job and a thoroughly bad prospect. She loved him.

As he stepped out of her shower room, his phone began to ring. It had to be the station. No one else called before six in the morning. Ay
ş
e walked back into her bedroom naked, hoping that maybe the sight of her tall, slim, slightly bronzed body would arouse his passions once again, knowing that if she had to compete with his work she was on a hiding to nothing. And she did have to compete with his work. She heard him say, ‘OK, I’ll be there’ – he looked briefly down at his watch, which was lying on her bed – ‘in ten minutes at the most.’ He didn’t tell whoever was on the other end where he was coming from and she didn’t know where he was going. Leaning against the door frame of her bedroom, Ay
ş
e watched him dress quickly and tried to remember how many times she’d seen him do that in the past. Eventually she said, ‘What’s going on?’

‘A partially decapitated body in Tarlaba
ş
ı
,’ he said.

She said nothing. He continued dressing with care, making sure that his shirt was crease-free, his tie just so. He used cologne on his face and through his hair and he even ran a finger across his teeth to make sure that they were perfectly clean. How could such self-absorption be attractive? And how could Ay
ş
e concentrate on such irrelevances when apparently someone had been killed over in the poor district of Tarlaba
ş
ı
?

She sat on her bed. ‘Who called?’ she asked.

‘Sergeant Mungan.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘I have to go.’

He didn’t bend down to kiss her goodbye and it wasn’t just because he was in a hurry. He rarely kissed her. Since their on/off affair had resumed in December 2011 when Ay
ş
e had given up
İ
zzet Melik, the man who had loved her so much, there had been sex but no passion. Even when he was inside her, he was as cold as winter. She watched him leave the room and then stood by her bedroom window so she could see him get into his car in the snowy street below.

Mehmet Süleyman didn’t like Tarlaba
ş
ı
any more. From a professional point of view it had been trouble for years. Anywhere that was poor had problems. But the district’s poverty notwithstanding, and including its great brotherhood of drug dealers, was not why he disliked it. He objected to how it was being changed, which was against the will of the majority of its people.

Those who wanted to redevelop the area – construction companies approved by the government – had tried to put a positive spin on the demolition of an established nineteenth-century central
İ
stanbul neighbourhood. But they’d failed. The locals – mainly Kurds, foreign immigrants, Roma, transsexuals and prostitutes – were not easily convinced. They knew that the brand-new flats they were being offered as compensation were in tower blocks thirty kilometres outside the city, because that was exactly what the deal had been when the Roma had been evicted from Sulukule. And that was why so many of them had subsequently moved out of those new flats and into the urban stew that was Tarlaba
ş
ı
. In spite of the presence of the very obvious wrecking balls and earth-movers, Süleyman didn’t blame them. He’d heard stories about those tower blocks; about how people cried when they moved into them because they missed their communities. And what was it all for anyway?

He pulled off Tarlaba
ş
ı
Bulvari on to some nameless street he knew would take him where he needed to be and briefly looked over his shoulder towards the back of
İ
stiklal Caddesi, the very heart of the vibrant part of
İ
stanbul known as the ‘New City’. Land there was worth a fortune. Land there was what Tarlaba
ş
ı
, once it was remodelled for the new urban middle classes, was going to become. His car bumped down what quickly turned into an unmade track, past a shop selling nothing but plugs, which was next to a derelict house that had clearly been decorated by Tarlaba
ş
ı
’s only recent new tribe of residents, street artists. What once had been a kitchen was now spray-painted with images of government ministers dressed as Nazis. Süleyman shook his head. Not so many years ago the only people ever portrayed as Nazis were the military. Now contained and curtailed by the Islamically inspired government of the AK Party, the army were not the bogeymen any more. In fact, an ongoing investigation into Ergenekon, a plot that had allegedly been devised by the generals to undermine the AK government, had made those who had once ruled into those who were now hunted. The military coups that had happened in the past in defence of Atatürk’s secular state were now no longer possible. But what had taken their place was, it seemed to Süleyman, gradually turning sour also. That was certainly the view from somewhere like Tarlaba
ş
ı
, as well as, he imagined, from the prison cells of the generals who had already been locked up pending trial for treason.

He got out of his car and walked over to where a group of people – police officers and civilians – stood and squatted in the snow.

‘This man found the body.’

Ömer Mungan was new to the department as well as to the city, and he was eager to please. He had a tendency to pull Süleyman towards whatever it was he wanted him to see, whoever he needed him to meet. It didn’t help to endear him to his new boss.

‘Yes, thank you, Sergeant,’ Süleyman said as he extricated himself from Ömer’s nervous grasp. He walked alone towards the very tall, grizzled man, whom he knew, if not well, then well enough.
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu had always had something of the look of his sister Gonca. Coming upon him and that look suddenly made Süleyman’s heart squeeze. Gonca the gypsy artist had once – and in reality, still – possessed his soul.

‘Hello, Mr
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu,’ he said. But he didn’t extend his hand in greeting.

Ş
ukru looked up at him from underneath tangled eyebrows. ‘Inspector Süleyman,’ he said.

‘You found the body.’

‘Half an hour ago.’

‘Where were you going?’

‘You know how cold it’s been.’ As if to illustrate this point, he stamped his feet on the snow to warm them. ‘This place is a building site now; I was out collecting anything I could burn to keep my kids and my father warm. Then I saw this …’ He waved a hand towards what was now a small white tent. ‘Him.’

Süleyman rubbed his gloved hands together and looked up into the lightening grey morning sky. ‘My sergeant says you knew the dead man,’ he said.

‘I knew of him,’
Ş
ukru corrected. ‘Everyone round here did.’

‘So he was a local …’

‘He was a nutter.’

Süleyman lowered his gaze and looked into
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu’s eyes. They were just as hostile as he remembered. Back when Süleyman had loved
Ş
ukru’s artist sister, Gonca,
Ş
ukru had used those eyes as a weapon in his armoury to try and terrify the policeman away. He’d never succeeded. When their affair had finished it had been because Gonca, finally bowing to family pressure, had ended it. Even in the bone-freezing cold of a January morning, with a dead body awaiting his attention, Süleyman knew that in spite of everything, he’d still smile if he saw his old gypsy lover turn the corner. He looked back at her brother. ‘Mad.’

Ş
ukru shrugged. ‘He made films. Not with a video camera, with an old film camera.’

Süleyman took out his notebook. ‘Films of what?’

‘Of Tarlaba
ş
ı
. The streets, the people, I don’t know.’

‘Do you know his name?’ Süleyman asked.

‘Levent Devrim. Did you know him?’

Süleyman frowned. ‘No. Why should I?’

Ş
ukru shrugged again. ‘He was like you.’

In view of the fact that
Ş
ukru had recently described the dead man as ‘a nutter’, this was hardly complimentary.

‘Posh,’
Ş
ukru said.

‘In what way?’ Out of the corner of his eye, Süleyman saw a car draw up and then a large, very familiar figure haul itself out of the driver’s seat.

‘Spoke nice. I dunno,’
Ş
ukru said. ‘Talked about stuff people round here don’t know anything about.’

‘Like?’

‘Books … art … alternative things …’ He shook his head. ‘Like those kids who come and graffiti walls with anti-government slogans. All about saving the district. It’s impossible. Why bother?’

A lot of intellectuals and artists had become very vocal about the fate of Tarlaba
ş
ı
and its inhabitants in recent years. They knew that since the razing of Sulukule it was the only place actually in the city where Roma and other poor people, including a small long-standing Syrian Christian community, could afford to live.

‘Do you know how long Levent Devrim had lived here?’

‘No. But it was well before the rest of them came and scrawled up pictures of Che Guevara and politicians dressed as fascists on old brothel walls.’

‘Do you know anyone who might know?’ He heard footsteps behind him, heavy and weary as they trudged through the snow.

‘Sugar’d know,’
Ş
ukru said. ‘She’s an old whore, a Kurd, lives up by the Syriani church.’

‘Do you know her address?’

Ş
ukru tipped his head back. ‘No. But you can’t miss her place. She can’t work any more because she’s too old, so now she sells sex stuff – underwear, dolls, things like that. Look for a ground-floor flat with whips hanging in the window.’

It was an exotic thought. ‘Thank you, Mr
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu, I will,’ Süleyman said. Then, in response to a light touch on his shoulder, he turned and looked into the face of Arto Sarkissian, the police pathologist. ‘Good morning, Doctor.’

The Armenian shook his head. ‘Well it is morning, Inspector, although whether it is good or not …’ He looked over at the small tent that had been erected over the body of the dead man. ‘Throat wound …’

‘His head’s almost off,’
Ş
ukru put in baldly.

‘I see.’ The Armenian didn’t ask how he knew or even who
Ş
ukru was. He headed out across the snow-capped rubble and into a building entirely devoid of frontage. On one of the few pieces of masonry still standing was the image of a man Süleyman recognised as one of the high-profile developers involved in the district’s ‘regeneration’, dressed as Mussolini.

Süleyman turned back to
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu. ‘Did you see anyone in the area when you found the body?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s snowing, if you notice. If I hadn’t been desperate for fuel, I’d’ve been in my bed. People round here don’t have too much to get up for, especially when it’s this cold.’

Ş
ukru’s hostility wasn’t easy to stomach, especially so early in the morning. But as a resident of Tarlaba
ş
ı
, he did have a point about having little to get up for. Few people in the area had legitimate jobs, and the wrecking ball that acted as a soundtrack to their lives had robbed them of whatever hopes they might have had for a future in the city. As Gonca’s brother, however, he aroused less sympathy in Süleyman, who knew that, left to herself, Gonca would still be with him and he, consequently, would be happy. But the father for whom
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu had gone out collecting wood had forbidden it, and his lover had had to comply or be killed.

‘You called us immediately?’

‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I?’
Ş
ukru said.

‘I don’t know, Mr
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu,’ Süleyman replied. ‘Maybe—’