Dead of Night (2 page)

‘They’re changing planes at Frankfurt,’ İzzet said. Then he frowned again. ‘One thing I can’t understand is why this conference
is being held in a city that is actually shrinking.’

‘Shrinking?’

‘Since the US motor industry started to go into decline at the end of the 1950s, Detroit, where the conference is taking place,
has been contracting,’ he said. ‘As I understand it, anyone with any money left years ago. Those that remain are largely poor
and unemployed. Detroit has one of the highest murder rates in America.’

Ayşe, suddenly cold again, shuddered. ‘Inşallah the inspectors will be safe in such a place!’ she said.

‘With hundreds of officers from all over the world around them, not to mention the Detroit Police Department?’ İzzet smiled.
‘It’ll be OK.’

Ayşe looked unsure. ‘With one of the highest murder rates in America?’ she said. ‘One has to ask what the police there are
actually doing.’

İzzet looked away from her and into the depths of the electric heater and said, ‘Maybe Detroit is what cities become when
they get beyond the mega-city stage. Maybe eventually everyone will just leave.’

‘İstanbul?’

He shrugged again. ‘We’re still growing. But it has to stop sometime. When no one can stand it any more, when the infrastructure
breaks down, when there aren’t enough jobs for everyone.’ He looked across at her. ‘That was what happened in Detroit. Maybe
it’s what will happen here too.’

Air travel wasn’t Çetin İkmen’s favourite form of locomotion. Not that he’d done a lot of it. Until this trip, the furthest
he had flown had been to London, which had taken all of three and a half hours. Now he was on what he considered to be an
eight-hour marathon from Frankfurt to Detroit, and less than sixty minutes into the flight, he was already uncomfortable and
bored.

Mehmet Süleyman, his one-time protégé and now colleague, had managed somehow, already, to drop off to sleep. Quite how he
had achieved that, İkmen didn’t know. Maybe it was some sort of defence mechanism against the craving he knew the younger
man would be experiencing for a cigarette. There had been no time to find somewhere to smoke when they’d changed planes at
Frankfurt airport. No one let anyone smoke in peace any more! Even his own office had been out of bounds for smoking since
the previous July. It made İkmen miserable. Now that the weather was cold, trudging out to the back of the station was a chore.
It was, he felt, ridiculous too. Almost everyone he knew was outside more often than they were in! Except, of course, his
sergeant. Ayşe Farsakoğlu had given up when the ban on smoking in enclosed spaces had first been imposed. He was proud
of her for that, even if he had no intention of following her example. He thought about his destination, about how rabid,
or seemingly so, Americans were against smoking, and it almost made him wish that the plane would crash. At least death would
end his nicotine cravings, as well as his fear of being a long way away from the ground in a sealed metal tube.

He took one of the boiled sweets his daughter Çiçek had given him out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. Recently married
to a Turkish Airlines pilot, Çiçek had been a flight attendant for twelve years, and so she knew a thing or two about air
travel and its risks and problems. She’d met her father at the airport armed with a bag of boiled sweets, a neck pillow, some
sort of headache-preventing thing consisting of a strip of cold gel one placed on one’s forehead, and a pair of long, tight
compression socks.

‘The flight socks will stop you getting deep-vein thrombosis,’ she’d said when she’d made him sit down and put them on in
Departures. ‘Long flights increase everyone’s risk. And someone who smokes as much as you do is a prime candidate.’

Mehmet Süleyman, who didn’t get a pair of flight socks, had smirked. Now, watching him asleep and apparently motionless, İkmen
wondered whether it would be the younger man, and not he, who would get deep-vein thrombosis. Çiçek had said that as well
as wearing flight socks, it was also a good idea to move around, or at least keep your feet moving. İkmen idly rotated an
ankle, and then reached forward for the Lufthansa flight magazine in the pouch in front of his seat. As he did so, Mehmet
Süleyman first frowned, then shuffled uncomfortably in his sleep. Economy seats were problematic for tall people like him.
But then the İstanbul Police Department could hardly be expected to pay for their officers to travel in business class, especially
at a time when the entire world seemed to be falling into recession.

For İkmen, space was not too much of an issue. Short and thin, he had no problem with his leg room, or even with the fact
that the
person in front of him had now tilted his own seat backwards. İkmen flicked through the magazine, which fortunately for him
was in English as well as German. English and French plus some German was what he spoke. Süleyman spoke English too, but was
far more fluent in French, which reflected his decidedly privileged and Ottoman background. The old royalists had all spoken
French, which they considered very cultured. Süleyman’s father, the son of a prince, albeit a deposed one, had been no exception.

The articles in the magazine ranged from cookery to the architectural delights of the German capital, Berlin. But the beautiful
photographs of cafés and cathedrals made İkmen frown. Where they were headed wasn’t going to be anything like that. His youngest
son, Kemal, who was turning out to be quite a computer geek, had shown him some websites about the city he was going to visit.
Detroit, it seemed, was characterised by urban decay. Once the ‘Motor City’, an industrial giant, geared up to providing sustenance
to the US’s endless love affair with the automobile, it was now apparently in decline. As far as İkmen could tell, it was
full of poor, unemployed people living lives blighted by gang warfare and drugs in houses and apartments that were on the
verge of collapse. An urban nightmare with a history of civil unrest and a reputation for being almost impossible to police,
Detroit provided a vision of a post-industrial future that could spread across the western world – and that included the Turkish
Republic. İkmen baulked at this at the same time as he accepted that it was a possibility. Even cheap Turkish goods couldn’t
compete with cheaper Indian, Chinese or Korean imports. New players were emerging on the world stage, players whose efficiency
and expertise could leave the more traditional industrial nations high and dry. But then if Detroit had been chosen as the
best place to host a conference about policing changing urban environments, there had to be more to it than just pointing
out the city’s failings.

‘It seems Detroit is coming back to life,’ his boss, Commissioner Ardıç, had told him when they had first discussed the conference
back in June. ‘Don’t know how. You have to find that out. Policing remains a challenge. There have been numerous corruption
scandals in the past. But the Detroit Police Department have already gone where some of us have yet to imagine. They’re finding
solutions, it seems; the people of the city as well as the police.’

Ardıç wanted İkmen and Süleyman to find out how the Americans were dealing with their gangs, with the drug culture that seemed
to go with that phenomenon, and with the reality of mass unemployment and the resultant poverty. Officers were coming from
all over the world to observe, ask questions, listen and learn, and also to share their experiences with each other. It would,
İkmen felt, be a full and interesting week, if not a particularly pretty one.

The old man sat so still in that battered garden chair of his that for a moment, the girl thought he might be dead. It was
snowing, and she was cold and didn’t really want to be outside at all. But her mother had told her to.

‘Go out and get Mr Goins inside,’ she had said when she’d seen the old man sitting motionless in amongst where they grew the
vegetables. ‘He’s too old to be sat out in the snow like that.’

The girl, Keisha, had put her coat and snow boots on and run out of her apartment and down the stairs to the gardens outside.
From her kitchen window, three floors up, her mother watched in case anyone approached her daughter. Antoine Cadillac Project
had been turned into a place of peace, of self-sufficiency and urban beauty, but that didn’t mean that the boys with knives,
the gun-toting drug-dealers and muggers didn’t pay them a visit once in a while. Kids were particularly vulnerable, and Martha,
Keisha’s mother, had already lost one child, with a second almost gone to crack cocaine, in spite of her best efforts to steer
her children away from drugs and gangs.

Keisha nudged the old man with one gloved hand. ‘Mr Goins!’ she said, her breath turning to ice as she spoke. ‘Ma says you
gotta come in now!’

His eyes closed, he didn’t move. Only the very faintest of mists coming from his mouth gave Keisha any indication that he
was even alive. His face was a very weird colour – blue. She shook him again. ‘Mr Goins!’

This time he grunted, sniffed and then opened his eyes. Like Keisha’s, the old man’s eyes were as black as crude oil. He looked
around him without seeing the girl, and then said in that southern accent, just like Keisha’s grandpa Wally had had, ‘Where
in the name of the Lord is that boy? Where he about?’

Keisha knew some of what this meant.

‘Mr Goins,’ Keisha said, ‘your boy ain’t here! You gotta come inside now. It’s snowing.’

He turned and looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time, and said, ‘What you doin’ here, child?’

Keisha sighed. Mr Goins forgot things. Sometimes it was where he was, sometimes it was who people were, sometimes it was his
own name. There was only one thing that he never seemed to forget, but Keisha, young as she was, knew that she should never,
ever start that subject up with him. Most times he raised it himself, as he had just done when she woke him.

‘Ma’s made some hamburger. Come inside,’ Keisha said as she put one of her small hands underneath his arm and began to pull
him up on to his feet.

From her kitchen window three floors up, Martha Bell wondered yet again how and why she’d come to take some mad old white-looking
man into her home. But then she knew the answer to that question just as surely as everyone else on Antoine Cadillac did.
Somebody’d had to.

‘It started coming down about five hours ago and it hasn’t stopped since,’ the hotel receptionist said with a smile. ‘But
that’s winter for you.’

İkmen looked at Süleyman, whose face was, if anything, whiter than the snow they had just come in out of. It had only taken
seconds for the two officers to get out of the taxi, pay and enter the hotel, but it was enough to freeze them both almost
solid. On top of the almost empty streets, the ghosts of buildings hinting at urban desolation, the shock of the frigid temperatures
was intense.

‘Yes.’ İkmen attempted to smile.

The Lakeland Plaza was an old hotel in the grand tradition of early-twentieth-century Detroit buildings. It was huge, almost
Soviet in its four-square functional facade, while inside it was not unlike some of the grander nineteenth-century İstanbul
palaces. High ceilings, vast gilt mirrors and heavy, dusty chandeliers projected a feeling of venerable, if faded, worth.
İkmen rather liked what he had seen so far, although Süleyman, chilled to the marrow and beyond, just wanted to have a wash
and get some sleep before the conference began in a little under three hours’ time.

‘You’re in Suite Twelve, sir,’ the receptionist said as she handed a swipe-card key across to İkmen.

‘Thank you.’ Suite Twelve sounded very grand indeed, and İkmen, glazed and dazed after the flight, began to feel slightly
dizzy. In the last twenty-four hours he had not only entered a new continent; he
had also, after nearly fifty-eight years on the earth, taken possession of the key to his first hotel suite.

The receptionist pointed to a couple of doors way, way across the vast wastes of marble flooring and said, ‘Elevators over
there, gentlemen. Floor fourteen. Have a nice day.’

Süleyman, at least, had expected some sort of help with their luggage, but no bellhop or porter materialised. The two men
picked up their suitcases and walked towards the lifts through a crowd of people who all sounded American. Although grand,
there was a slight dustiness about the reception area that İkmen, at least, had not expected. The United States, he had always
believed, was a country that had the highest standards of hygiene in the world. They got into a lift that had a few bits of
litter in one corner, and İkmen pressed the button marked 14. The lift, however, had a mind and will of its own.

First stop was floor three, which, though dimly lit, was heavily carpeted and had an ornate, rococo feel. Floor seven was
rather plainer and brighter, and a couple of besuited men stood and stared at the Turks for a few moments before the lifts
doors closed again.

‘Obviously going down,’ İkmen observed. Süleyman, tired beyond patience, didn’t answer. The lift started again; this time
it stopped at floor eleven. This was somewhat different from the floors the men had seen before. When the doors opened, they
found that they could barely make out anything much through the gloom. If the doors hadn’t got stuck as they attempted to
close again, they would have seen nothing. As it was, the temporary malfunction in the lift allowed them not only to smell
an odour that was a mixture of cigarette smoke, cooking meat and urine, but also to see that the floors were uncarpeted, and
that just across from the lifts, against one stained, gloomy wall, was an old, abandoned fridge.

As the doors closed, this time successfully, Süleyman, who had been silent up to that point, said, ‘May Allah protect us.’

İkmen smiled. Undecided himself when it came to divine entities, he said, ‘Well, at least that wasn’t our floor.’

Süleyman, a thunderous look on his pale face, retreated back into silence.

When the lift did finally reach a juddering halt at floor fourteen, the Lakeland Plaza had clearly regained its mojo. The
floors were carpeted, the walls clean and the only smell was that of air-freshener mixed with the very faintest tinge of tobacco.
The latter, in a world that was becoming increasingly hostile to cigarettes, made İkmen smile. America’s fearsome reputation
as an enemy of smoking had made him wonder how he would cope, and even whether he would be arrested for smoking at some point
during this trip. But then maybe Detroit was an exception to this rule.