Petrified (30 page)

‘The work is complete,’ she said. She looked so happy.

‘Yes. Yes.’ İkmen straightened up and looked across at Suleyman and Yıldız. ‘The brother-in-law, Kuran, should still be around,’ he said nervously.

‘There was a noise from inside the house,’ Suleyman replied. ‘I think Çöktin’s gone off to investigate. What is all this, Çetin?’

The big white and now red screen was strung between two trees at the top of a small flight of steps. İkmen put his foot on to the first one and said, ‘I fear we’re about to see the place where art and science meet.’

And then before his nerve failed him he ran up the remaining steps and pulled the screen down with one adrenaline-fuelled tug.

It was obvious that Akdeniz was dead. Half his head had simply disintegrated. But İkmen felt for a pulse anyway – it was just something you did. It also gave him a few more seconds before he had to look at what else had been behind the shadow play screen.

Yıldız pushed past the Karagöz puppet and switched off the floodlight.

İkmen, looking now out of the corner of his eye, saw Suleyman approach one of the other traditional figures and say, ‘Whatever one may think of Akdeniz’s art, he was certainly a skilled craftsman. These are exquisite.’

İkmen felt a painful squeeze in the pit of his stomach as he very slowly stood up and looked into the face of Nuray Akdeniz. He recognised the costume from his youth. All the old shadow play men used to represent women like this. She wore a long red coat called a ferace, which covered her whole body. On her feet she wore little red velvet slippers, while her head was encased in a blue bonnet called a hotoz. The thin yaşmak that covered the lower half of her face did nothing to hide those familiar features from İkmen’s gaze. But then the yaşmak in Karagöz had never been about modesty – it was about teasing, about the power women have over men and about the transparent nature of false modesty. İkmen extended a shaking arm towards the figure and took a corner of the ferace between his fingers. Up close he could see that the whole ensemble had been made up from red designer labels. It must have taken Akdeniz forever – which means he must have planned.

İkmen looked across at Karagöz, slumped in front of a picture of a hamam painted on to camel skin. The huge penis-like nose that had been attached to the lifeless face might have thrown anyone else, but İkmen had seen, studied so many photographs . . .

Somewhere, possibly from the Greek Boys’ School, a clock struck the half-hour. Seven thirty, almost showtime.

‘I wonder if he actually made them himself,’ Suleyman said as he took one of Karagöz arms in his hands. ‘I know not all artists do these days.’

‘In a sense you could say that he did,’ İkmen began.

‘It was, however, myself,’ an elderly female voice cut in, ‘that transformed them into art.’

İkmen looked down to where she stood in front of a now motionless Eren Akdeniz.

‘You’ve come to see the show, Dr Keyder?’ he said.

The embalmer looked beyond İkmen into the shocked face of Suleyman.

‘I take it from your expression,’ she said to him, ‘that you didn’t make the necessary connection yourself.’ She looked across at İkmen, ‘But you did, er . . . ?’

‘İkmen, Inspector Çetin İkmen.’

Seemingly oblivious to the presence of Melih’s bloodied body on the ground she walked up the steps and towards the two shadow play figures. ‘So how did you arrive at this place, Inspector İkmen?’ she said.

İkmen stood in front of her, blocking her off from her goal. ‘I was looking for your friend Melih’s children,’ he said. Now as the initial shock subsided he began to feel angry. His eyes blazed at her. ‘I’d heard that his family were originally called Nabaro. You booked Yaşar and Nuray into your laboratory under that name. So did you actually kill them, Dr Keyder, or did you just embalm the bodies afterwards?’

Suleyman, who now that he’d finished looking at the figures, had joined İkmen at the top of the steps said, ‘What?’

İkmen turned to look his colleague in the eyes. ‘Karagöz and the lady aren’t puppets or figures, Mehmet,’ he said as his eyes, barely able to sustain his anger any longer, spilled hot tears down his cheeks, ‘they are the embalmed bodies of Yaşar and Nuray Akdeniz.’

Suleyman, briefly looked behind him at
them
once again. When he looked back his mouth remained open and dry. From somewhere behind the darkened floodlight, Yıldız said, ‘Allah!’

‘Well, Dr Keyder?’ İkmen hissed. ‘Did you?’

A scuffling sound over by the open metal gates made İkmen look up. Çöktin was approaching with Reşad Kuran hopping and squinting in front of him, his arms pinned painfully to the top part of his back. As he passed the blankness that was his sister, he said, ‘It was her, Eren, she killed Melih! She’s fucking crazy!’

‘Keep him there,’ İkmen ordered Çöktin and then looking down at Farsakoǧlu he said, ‘Close the gates, will you, Ayşe? We don’t want anyone else having access to this “performance”. Please call the station for backup.’ He looked around the beautiful garden with disgust. ‘We’ll need to get this place cleaned up.’

‘If you’re going to move my exhibits,’ Dr Keyder began, ‘I’d like to—’

‘You’re not in a position to do anything!’ İkmen yelled.

‘I bring the dead back to life!’ she countered fiercely. ‘I work and slave and pin their spirits back to their bodies, just like Ara! I am the only person in this world—’

‘These were children!’ İkmen said as he swung one arm backwards towards the Karagöz bodies. ‘Human beings!’

‘But now they are liquid suns!’

Everyone in the garden looked at Eren Akdeniz. Standing now and smiling, she looked up at what was left of the daylight and just very gently swayed from foot to foot.

‘My children are immortal,’ she said, ‘they are a statement for all time. Death and decay can be separate. Art and science combine to produce beauty presented here as the immortal Fool Karagöz and his wife.’ She looked at the sprawled body of her husband and frowned. ‘Melih is the antithesis of the statement – the death in life,’ she scowled. ‘The flies were coming for what the cancer hadn’t eaten months ago.’

‘Is that when it was decided to kill the children?’ İkmen asked softly least he wake her from what appeared to be a lucid reverie.

‘It is the ultimate statement,’ she said, ‘to make life you have created into art. Melih gave the children poison. There’s nowhere to go after this, he told me, no other artist on the planet can catch me now . . .’

The garden descended into silence. From the street outside İkmen and the others could hear voices, people, probably media types, knocking on the thick front door. And there was Gonca too, just to one side of a considerable group of elegantly dressed women. Her sequined skirts shimmering in what was left of the dying day, she stood by the silent wall of the Akdeniz house and looked down at the motionless waters of the Golden Horn below. For how many years had Jews and Gypsies shared this view? Not that she would be sharing it with her Jew any more. A hole, just a small one, had opened up in her soul and she knew that Melih had gone. Someone had fired a shot – Eren, poor bitch, finally at the end of her long humiliation.

The policeman, İkmen, was in there now – the witch’s child. He’d provide justice for whatever had gone on. Unlike the flawed and fatal Karagöz Melih had planned, İkmen the juggler, the foolish-looking high Magus of the tarot deck, would make it all tie together in the end. He’d come and see her too at some point, she thought as she began to walk back down the hill towards her own colourful little home. He’d tell her what he could, he liked her and, if she performed the right spells, he might even bring that very young and delicious officer with him. But then whether he did or not, it wouldn’t make any difference to what was written. She’d make that boy a man because she’d seen it in the bottom of her soul, in the same place that İkmen had viewed the Akdeniz children descending from the Lightning-Struck Tower into hell. Struggling still, their agonies were not yet over, although she knew that they soon would be. Once they were returned to the earth they would be still again. Nature would take its course. It always did, in the end.

As she walked down the steps, Gonca heard what were three police cars pull up at the great ochre house behind her. But she didn’t turn in order to see what was happening. Back there was death, but down the hill things were still very much alive. She thought that in lieu of having that young policeman constable in her bed tonight she might go and offer herself to her husband.

C
HAPTER
19

Dr Yeşim Keyder sat very primly behind the table in Interview Room No. 3, her large leather handbag perched on top of her knees.

‘You took delivery of the children’s bodies on the Friday-night, didn’t you?’ İkmen asked. Both he and Suleyman sat opposite the old woman, both smoking heavily in the dense night-time heat – the old partnership temporarily back together again.

‘You get a much better result if you can get hold of corpses when they are fresh,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Melih wanted his subjects to be as close to the perfection he had observed in the pictures I’d shown him of Evita as possible. Melih was very insistent that he administer the poison in the children’s own home – he could have done it in mine – but he didn’t want to alarm them.’

‘How very thoughtful,’ Suleyman said
sotto voce.

‘Reşad Kuran delivered them to you?’ İkmen asked.

‘Yes. Reşad had worked for me for a number of years . . .’

‘Delivering dead bodies?’

‘Yes,’ she shrugged. ‘He is a delivery man, he delivers things. I use him to fetch and carry corpses, what of it? Of course I didn’t know for some time that he was Melih’s brother-in-law for I didn’t realise that Melih was related to Zelda and Moris Nabaro. They were his parents; I grew up with her. But I didn’t know that until I’d been collecting his works for some years.’ She smiled. ‘I’d always liked his creations. He has a particularly Jewish style, much of which is based upon Kabbalistic theory, including the tarot, that appeals to my past.’

‘Reşad Kuran put you in touch with Melih Akdeniz?’

Yeşim Keyder, seemingly amused by İkmen’s flat, sepulchral style laughed. ‘You make it sound as if we only met in order to work on his Karagöz project,’ she said.

‘You ended up killing his children.’

‘No. No, I didn’t kill the children, Inspector,’ she said, suddenly stern-faced once again. ‘If you recall, that was Melih. It was part of the statement. If I, as someone with no connection to them, had killed them, no new boundaries would have been set. Apart from the artistry inherent in my own expertise, the exhibit would have been devoid of any fresh philosophical base.’

‘You believe that killing children, embalming their bodies and using them as puppets in a Karagöz show is art?’

The tone of Suleyman’s voice raised her hackles.

‘Art is all about statement,’ she said haughtily. ‘In Kabbalistic terms, Melih was the cosmic juggler, the Karagöz figure, if you like, at the very pinnacle of that magical system. Both creating and taking life which he and I then rendered immortal. Evita was Pedro’s statement. That body told the world that it was possible for a life force to be pinned to a perfect corpse. A liquid sun is how Pedro described her, a thing of glorious immortality. But my work with the Akdeniz children took this even further . . .’

‘I always thought the cosmic juggler, the fool of the tarot, was supposed to be a balancing force,’ İkmen said.

‘Dr Keyder,’ Suleyman cut in, ‘did you, maybe guided by Ara, ever indulge in sexual acts with corpses?’

‘Can we please stick to the Akdeniz case?’ İkmen said.

He was very tired now, worn out by the tragedy and insanity inherent in two young corpses – worried about Fatma and about Talaat who, although beyond anyone’s help now, deserved what Yaşar and Nuray had he felt been denied – dignity in death.

‘The bodies were delivered to me at around midnight on the Friday,’ Dr Keyder began, back again in her businesslike style. ‘I started working on them straight away. I used a four per cent formaldehyde solution, via gravity injection . . .’

‘Dr Keyder, we don’t need the specifics of your trade,’ İkmen said sharply. The woman, for all her years, looked as if she were getting some sort of gratification from her descriptions of processes. ‘Mr Kuran delivered the victims to you, you preserved them and . . .’

‘Melih was dying, as I’m sure you’re aware, from cancer,’ she said. ‘The Karagöz performance was to be the pinnacle of his career, his final shattering statement. I worked hard for several days afterwards. I locked myself into my laboratory. I didn’t want any distractions. I told my neighbours I’d gone away. But I could have done a better job had I had more time. I told him this. However with the inevitable investigation into the children’s disappearance plus Rosita’s death and all the questions about Miguel, as well as my usual maintenance practice . . .’

‘Preserving the mothers of Russian gangsters . . .’

‘The identity of my clients is private,’ she snapped.

‘With the exception of the Nabaros,’ Suleyman said.

‘How was I to know that name would come back from the dead?’ she responded bitterly. ‘Melih buried that years ago. How was I to know that you had any connection to the missing children investigation?’

‘Have you ever met a man called Rostov?’ Suleyman continued. ‘Valery Rostov?’

‘I don’t know . . .’

‘He says he’s met you.’

‘Yaşar and Nuray weren’t present in your laboratory when Inspector Suleyman visited you this morning,’ İkmen said as he yet again attempted to drag the interrogation back to the Akdeniz case. ‘When did you move the bodies?’

‘Last night,’ she said, ‘when I returned from meeting you,’ she looked at Suleyman, ‘at the mortuary. I knew I couldn’t use Reşad; Melih had told me about his problems with yourselves. I called a client of mine, who offered to do the job for me.’