Ikmen 16 - Body Count (49 page)

Neither Gonca nor anyone else had told the old man the whole truth about
Ş
ukru. A couple of the men he’d used to follow Professor Atay around had turned up at the house asking for money not to talk to the press. But when she’d told them that her lover was a policeman, they’d quickly melted away. After all, even if they were entirely innocent of any crime, they all knew that if they ended up in a police station, almost anything could happen. Not that she’d seen much of her policeman lover in recent weeks. But she could understand that and she was fine with it. Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu had been a big part of his life both personally and professionally, and it was going to take time for the emotional wounds he had suffered after her death to heal.

She knew that he felt guilty. Had he been conscious, maybe he might have been able to save her. But he’d been entirely helpless. Gonca was just happy that he was alive and that finally, the person who had killed poor mad Levent Bey had been brought to justice. She’d heard that since the professor had been arrested, Hamid had stopped having nightmares. If only she could say likewise. Tarlaba
ş
ı
haunted her.

With the houses opposite down, it wouldn’t be long before the developers came for her father’s house. He’d been offered money, which he wouldn’t take, and a flat in some new development, which he also wouldn’t accept. And she agreed with him. But where, when Tarlaba
ş
ı
did eventually gentrify from its ragged head to its bare toes, would or could they go? The question was of course rhetorical.

In Balat there was an artist’s studio and a great big house in a garden filled with terracotta pots and olive oil cans full of flowers. Although she shared her home with two teenage sons, a daughter and a grandson, Gonca did have space for a life of her own. And when Mehmet visited, it was always as if it was just the two of them. But she had a lot of family in this house in Tarlaba
ş
ı
. There was her father, her two older, widowed sisters and now
Ş
ukru’s widow and her children, all nine of them. She couldn’t see them out on the street, none of them.

She looked at the destruction and she smoked. Once the ball had stopped swinging, a group of workmen with wheelbarrows came to start removing the rubble. One of them, a man probably in his fifties, showed his appreciation of her cleavage with a smile and a widening of his eyes. But she wasn’t in the mood.

‘In your dreams, you destructive bastard!’ she yelled at him, and then she threw her cigarette butt into the street and disappeared inside.

Fatma had been as fine as she could be with the five thousand lira he’d sent from their savings to some family they didn’t know in Anatolia. He’d given Suzan Arslan’s family the money in memory of Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu because he knew she’d liked the girl and he couldn’t bear the thought of her mother dying without a fight. Because that was how Ay
ş
e had died, without a murmur, and he knew how unlike her that was and it weighed upon him. The aborted retirement had been another thing, however.

She’d said, or rather screamed, ‘So when are you going to retire, then? At seventy? Eighty? When you die?’

He’d said what he believed, which was, ‘I don’t know.’ Then he’d assured her that his carrying on in the police in no way affected their planned purchase of central heating. It was at that point that Fatma had thrown a vase at him.

Now this was supposed to be his day off, but he’d come into the station to get some peace and be somewhere away from those eyes that bored into his guilty soul like instruments of torture. He’d thought that, in a way, his wife would have been glad not to have him under her feet all day long. But he also knew that what had happened to Ay
ş
e and to Süleyman had unnerved her. She didn’t want him to die.

‘
İ
kmen.’

He hadn’t heard anyone come in. He looked up and saw Ard
ı
ç. ‘Hello, sir.’

With some difficulty Ard
ı
ç lowered himself into the chair on the other side of
İ
kmen’s desk. ‘About retirement …’ he began.

İ
kmen held up a hand. ‘My mind’s made up, sir,’ he said. ‘My postponement has been agreed.’

‘Not yours!’ he said. ‘You’ll go on for ever. You think I didn’t know that? No, mine.’

‘Yours?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I spoke to you about it some months ago.’

‘Oh yes.’
İ
kmen remembered. ‘You’re going to be replaced by some religious—’

‘My successor will start in October. A three-month handover period. Allah, she’ll need it!’

He waited for some sort of reaction. But then he remembered that
İ
kmen was still not himself after Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu’s death. He wouldn’t be for a while. He said, ‘What I’m trying to tell you,
İ
kmen, is that your new commissioner is not going to be a man of high religious sentiment after all but a fifty-year-old lady from Gaziantep called Hürrem Teker.’

‘A woman. That’s good.’
İ
kmen smiled. ‘We need more women.’ He suddenly looked alarmed. ‘But she’s not …’

‘Religious? No. They call her “the Stormtrooper” in Antep,’ Ard
ı
ç said. ‘As tough as leather. Single. Real career woman.’

İ
kmen knew the type, or thought he did. He had a cousin who was out of that old republican, heavily secular tradition. He rather liked them.

But then Ard
ı
ç said, ‘Good to look at, too.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh don’t look so surprised,
İ
kmen,’ Ard
ı
ç said. ‘It isn’t just the little covered girls, the models and the pneumatic TV stars who can be beautiful. Your new commissioner is a stunning woman, although what she’ll make of that little boy Süleyman has from Mardin I do not know.’

‘Ömer Mungan? He’s a good officer, sir. He started slowly. I think the city was a bit of a shock to him at first …’

‘Yes, they all worship odd things down there, don’t they?’ he said. ‘The devil and snakes. Antep being just west of Mardin, Commissioner Teker will know all about it.’

‘Doubtless.’
İ
kmen had suspected for some time that Ömer Mungan probably did adhere to some unusual and probably incomprehensible religion – so many in Mardin and its environs seemed to. But then he paused for a moment to really look at the fat man in front of him. In one way or another he’d known him for over forty years. ‘I’ll miss you, Commissioner Ard
ı
ç,’ he said. ‘You’ve always been a fair man. That’s rare.’

Ard
ı
ç wasn’t often either flustered or embarrassed, but this was one of those rare occasions. ‘You’ll manage,’ he said. ‘A handsome woman to look at. You’ll have your work cut out keeping her away from Süleyman!’

İ
kmen ignored his superior’s attempt at levity. ‘You have often protected me, against your better judgement, and I know that you’ve sometimes been punished for it. I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart, Ersin Ard
ı
ç Bey.’

No one ever used Ard
ı
ç’s first name.
İ
kmen wondered as he saw the fat man’s face redden with embarrassment whether he’d realised anyone even knew it.

‘Ah well,
İ
kmen, that is very generous of you.’

‘It is my pleasure, sir.’

The commissioner began the long process of standing up.
İ
kmen always wanted to help him, but he never had and he never would. Ard
ı
ç for all his fat, had dignity. ‘So, er, now that we have Professor Atay in custody, we are, er, business as usual, I imagine,
İ
kmen.’

‘I do hope so, sir,’
İ
kmen said.

Ard
ı
ç eventually managed to achieve verticality. ‘So, well,’ he said, ‘my retirement, just between us at the moment.’

‘Of course, sir.’

Ard
ı
ç assumed a very stern expression. ‘No such luxury for you,
İ
kmen.’

‘No, sir,’
İ
kmen said. And then, just before the commissioner left his office, he added, ‘Thanks be to Allah.’

Ard
ı
ç turned, smiled, and then burst out laughing.

Two books really helped during my research into the Maya and all things 2012. They were
The Maya
by Michael D. Coe (8th Edition), which really goes into depth about all aspects of Mayan life, including the Long Count calendar. Another excellent guide was
The Everything Guide to 2012
by Mark Heley. This achieved the amazing feat of making the Long Count calendar comprehensible to me.