Dead of Night (3 page)

İkmen and Süleyman got out of the lift and looked for a door marked Suite Twelve. It took them several minutes to find it,
mainly because the numbers on the doors were so small. All the while they looked, Süleyman groaned with weariness. İkmen ignored
him. As soon as they’d landed and the younger man had seen the snow, he’d descended into exhaustion and despair. He had not,
apparently, brought very thick clothes with him. He had not, as İkmen – or rather his wife Fatma – had done, packed thermal
underwear. But then the twice-divorced Süleyman no longer had a loving woman to do that or anything else for him.

İkmen opened the door to Suite Twelve and walked inside. It was a plain, again vaguely tobacco-scented suite of rooms that
looked clean and adequate. After all, if the İstanbul Police Department was paying for a hotel suite, it would not be elaborate,
at least not for the likes for İkmen and Süleyman. İkmen walked into the smaller of the two bedrooms and put his case on the
bed. The slightly dusty window at the end of the bed allowed him to see a range of skyscrapers capped with snow and in some
cases decorated with long, witch’s-finger-shaped icicles. Buoyed up by the prospect of new and possibly exciting sights and
experiences, he had just started to smile again when he heard Süleyman, from the next room, mutter, ‘I can’t believe it! What
is this?’

İkmen, his face unsmiling now, went to see what the problem was. He found his friend and colleague in their shared bathroom,
pointing at something above the bath.

‘Fingermarks!’ he said furiously. ‘Red fingermarks!’

‘You mean blood?’

‘Who knows? Maybe it’s just hair colouring!’ Süleyman shrugged. ‘Fridges in the corridors, blood, maybe, on the walls, dust!
What kind of place is this?’

‘It’s Detroit.’

‘Yes, I know . . .’

‘A city with problems,’ İkmen said. ‘That’s why we’re here. No point in talking about urban issues in a city where everything
is perfect. We’ve come to talk about gangs and drugs and drive-by shootings and—’

‘Talk, yes, experience, no,’ Süleyman said as he angrily put a cigarette into his mouth and lit up. ‘I knew I should have
taken Tayyar up on his offer! I knew it!’

Süleyman’s cousin Tayyar, a journalist, had worked in Detroit for two years and had a very nice house in the smart Grosse
Pointe district. When Süleyman had told him that he was due to come to the city for a conference, Tayyar had offered both
him and İkmen rooms in his house. But as İkmen had pointed out, it was a long way from there to the conference centre downtown
where they were obliged to go every day for nearly a week. Now, however, although quite happy with the hotel himself, İkmen
did rather regret having said no to Tayyar’s offer. Süleyman was furious, and was already on the highest of very high Ottoman
horses. İkmen watched as, in an attempt to rail about the state of the suite to reception, his colleague wrestled with his
bedside phone, which did not, it seemed, work.

The bullet had gone clean through one ear and clean out the other. It was probably just a fluke, but Gerald was nevertheless
impressed.
If he carried on being impressed by the details, then maybe he’d forget how young the kid was – and how dead.

Brush Park district looked even more spooky than it normally did in the snow. Jagged ghosts of houses pushed up through the
whiteness, their glassless windows like gouged-out eyes surrounded by the tatters of once-luxuriant ivy. Gerald knew it as
a place where rich motor executives and industrialists had once lived. Now, although bits of it were being restored, for the
most part Brush Park, at least in its northern quarter, was a place of spectres, of grand, dying buildings, of coteries of
crackheads in what were once someone’s servants’ quarters, and, just occasionally, of the odd weird kid exploring. Had the
fifteen year old Gerald now knew had been called Aaron Spencer been one of them? He’d had his school bag with him, pens and
books flung out everywhere as he fell, now stained with snow and with Aaron Spencer’s blood.

One of the youngsters in uniform came over, looked down at the kid and said, ‘Drive-by.’

‘Maybe.’ Gerald shrugged. He was much taller than the young officer, much darker too.

‘You know it, Lieutenant,’ the officer said as he slouched away, going back no doubt, Gerald guessed, to the warmth of one
of the squad cars. But then who could blame him? It was fucking freezing, and besides, it wasn’t as if anyone could do anything
for Aaron Spencer now. They probably wouldn’t even find who had killed him, or be able to tell the kid’s parents why their
son had died. Gerald hadn’t verbally agreed with the young officer’s assessment of the situation, even though he knew in his
heart that the boy had been right. This was a drive-by shooting. One young black kid, all smart for school and with well-thumbed
books, killed for kicks or, if anything, for the little bit of cash he may have had on him for his lunch. Blasted out of existence
by crackheads or junkies for not even the price of a fix.

The smashed-up doorway where Aaron’s body had fallen led into
a mansion still known as the Royden Holmes House, named for some early Detroit lumber baron. Gerald recalled that as a kid
in the sixties he’d been told that an old woman lived there all alone. He’d imagined that she was probably a descendant of
the lumber baron, and he and his brother Ronaldo, both under ten at the time, had staked the place out in the hope of seeing
her. They’d succeeded. But rather than discovering some romantic reclusive gentlewoman, the last of a once-noble line of luminaries,
all they’d actually found was a wild old junkie who cawed like a mad crow when she saw them. More than forty years on, Gerald
still shuddered at the thought of it. But then, as he was all too painfully aware, he was not the sort of person for whom
time healed. He’d seen his first dead kid with a bullet hole in his head over thirty years before, and he could still recall
it in minute detail.

‘Lieutenant Diaz?’

He looked away from the child’s body and towards the pretty young woman at his side. ‘Addison.’

‘Sir, you supposed to be at that conference downtown,’ she said.

Policing in Changing Urban Environments
. Yes, Gerald Diaz knew. But, he thought grimly to himself, I have my own, sadly most decidedly unchanging urban environment
to deal with right now. Kids killing kids; was there ever any way that was going to stop? One thing was for sure as far as
Gerald was concerned, and that was that no amount of talking in overheated rooms with a bunch of foreigners was going to make
a jot of difference to situations like poor dead Aaron Spencer.

‘Sir, you gotta take some of those foreign cops out to Cadillac Project this afternoon,’ Rita Addison said.

‘Yeah, I . . .’ Gerald put his head down as he looked once again at the prone, snow-spattered body of the schoolboy.

‘This a drive-by,’ Addison said. A tough Detroiter, at twenty-six she had already seen her share of death in the city, just
as Gerald had done at her age. ‘You know it’s so.’

Gerald Diaz looked at her and smiled. Just very faintly, he saw
her cheeks colour. Tall, slim and loose-limbed, even at fifty-three Gerald Diaz was a very handsome man. Women were attracted
to him, even young women.

He shrugged. ‘Leave you with it?’

‘To tell the parents?’ She looked sad. ‘I’m used to that shit.’

‘Sorry.’

She shrugged.

‘Oh, and get the guys to try and find the slug,’ Diaz said. ‘Could be embedded in the house, the ground, who knows.’

‘Sure.’

Gerald Diaz took one more look down at the dead child and then made his way towards his car. Addison was right: there was
nothing more he could do for Aaron Spencer. The boy’s body would be dissected, the bullet hopefully recovered from somewhere
on the scene, the parents told and sympathised with. Then one newspaper report, max, a funeral, a burial and a statistic.
End of.

During the first coffee break, İkmen and Süleyman kept themselves to themselves. Everybody, or so it seemed, was staying in
ethnic groups. One female officer, a Brazilian, looked across and smiled at Süleyman, but there was nothing new about that,
whatever the context. She was a woman and so she fancied him. He had that effect upon them.

At lunchtime, though, things changed. While Süleyman looked down at his plate of chilli with a mixture of horror and incomprehension
on his face, İkmen stirred his food around and made conversation with a Detroit lieutenant called John Shalhoub.

‘We came here from Beirut back in the early fifties,’ Shalhoub said. ‘I was just a baby. We’re Arabs, Christians. Although
I’m an all-American boy myself, with ex-wives and kids at university and a mortgage. I guess you guys, being from Turkey,
you’re Muslim.’ He smiled. ‘You know we have some great halal restaurants here in the city.’

İkmen smiled back. ‘That’s very kind of you, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘But there is no need on our account.’

Shalhoub was joined by a woman, this time a sergeant. ‘Donna Ferrari,’ she said as she offered her hand first to İkmen and
then Süleyman. ‘Sorry you people have to eat this slop.’ She looked around the vast, cop-filled convention-centre restaurant
and continued, ‘You’d think Detroit’s finest would be able to get a bunch of caterers to cook properly!’

İkmen, in diplomatic mode, said, ‘Oh, please, Sergeant Ferrari, this is perfectly adequate. It’s—’

‘So why isn’t he eating it?’ Ferrari asked as she pointed over at Süleyman. ‘It’s disgusting, right?’ she said to him.

‘Well, um . . .’

‘Listen, you don’t have to be polite,’ Ferrari said. She got up and began to walk over to the service counter. Catching one
of the server’s eyes, she said, ‘Hey! You!’

John Shalhoub noticed the Turks’ embarrassment immediately. Making a fuss in a foreign land was something he knew polite Middle
Easterners didn’t do. He tipped his head towards Ferrari and said, ‘The sarge, she’s a little bit, you know, ballsy . . .’

İkmen, who knew exactly what this meant, smiled. ‘Ah.’ Far more expert in the fine art of idiomatic English than Süleyman,
he turned to his confused colleague and said in Turkish, ‘Sergeant Ferrari has spirit.’

‘Clearly,’ Süleyman replied.

‘So you’re in the group out to Cadillac Project this afternoon,’ Shalhoub continued after a pause. ‘Should be interesting
for you, I hope.’

‘Yes, although I am a little confused,’ İkmen said. ‘A project here in America is a public housing block, isn’t it? And yet
Cadillac is I think something quite revolutionary.’

‘Antoine Cadillac Project was, just as you said, Inspector, standard public housing,’ Shalhoub said. ‘Like many of these urban
projects
it was started in the 1960s, and due in part to the poverty of the people living in it, it soon became crime-ridden. Drugs,
alcohol, weapons, gangs. Man, we were in and out Cadillac every day until it began to turn around five years ago.’

‘What happened?’ Süleyman asked.

‘Well, you’ll hear more about it when Lieutenant Diaz leads you out there this afternoon,’ Shalhoub said. ‘But in a nutshell,
eight years ago, a woman called Martha Bell moved into Cadillac. She had three kids, and when one of them died in a drive-by,
she decided to create a garden in his honour. Then, that not being enough for Martha, she decided to grow food there. Then
she roped in her neighbours. She is one remarkable lady.’ He leaned forward and looked at the two Turks very seriously. ‘But
I’ll let Lieutenant Diaz fill you in on Cadillac. He’s its greatest supporter. To him, Martha Bell and Cadillac are the future
of this city.’

If anyone could look after herself, it was Ayşe Farsakoğlu. Intellectually, İzzet Melik knew this. Just because Ali Kuban,
the infamous serial rapist of Edirnekapı, was due to be released from prison later on that day didn’t mean that Ayşe, or indeed
any other woman for that matter, was immediately at risk. Kuban had exercised his reign of terror over the women of Edirnekapı
back in the early 1970s, when he was in his late thirties. Now in his seventies, he was hardly a threat to anyone, and had
actually been released on compassionate grounds because he was physically ill. But İzzet still fretted about it. He fretted
about Ayşe, and anything that might adversely affect her, a lot.

As he walked past İkmen’s office, he saw her leaning over her computer terminal. She didn’t see him. The station heating system
was working properly again, and so she was getting on with her paperwork. Just looking at her stirred him. Not that his obsession
was completely about sex. Yes, he desired her, and thinking about her made him aroused, but he really cared for her too. She
was a good person, and he hated considering how spurned he knew she had felt after Süleyman rejected her. The rumour was that
years ago she had loved the inspector, completely given herself to him. But then he’d thrown her over for the woman who then,
for a while, became his wife, and Ayşe, on the rebound, had got involved with a fellow officer who mistreated her.

İzzet knew that he would never do such a thing. He would only love her, only do nice things for her, never make her unhappy.
Not that such a thing could ever happen. In his fantasy, the two of them
married, went to Venice for their honeymoon and then set up home in some nice apartment in Beşiktaş, where they had sex every
night and during the daytime too on occasion. It was all sentimental, vaguely pornographic nonsense. He continued walking
until he came to his own office, and then went inside and closed the door behind him.

Antoine Cadillac Project consisted of four low-rise blocks of apartments arranged in a square around a large open space. It
was in an area known as the Cass Corridor. It had been, and to some people remained, a notorious district given to drug abuse,
lawlessness and prostitution.

‘Originally this area between the blocks was all car parking and two ball courts,’ the tall, dark, slightly stooped officer
said. He was called, İkmen recalled, Lieutenant Diaz. Unlike the Turk, Diaz was not shivering. Thermal vests aside, İkmen’s
clothes were not really up to Detroit, and Süleyman was visibly shaking. The rest of the group, Mexicans and some British
officers, all looked a bit cold too.