Dead of Night (6 page)

Martha thought that he had forgotten about the Turkish policeman. But Zeke Goins didn’t forget a thing – not permanently.
This was especially so when it came to the subject of Elvis.

‘Martha, I’m going out,’ he said once he’d washed the dishes from breakfast.

It was no longer snowing, but the ground was very icy and Martha was concerned. She turned the stereo down, even though it
was playing one of her favourite songs, ‘Dancing in the Street’ by her namesake Martha Reeves. ‘You could fall and break your
leg,’ she said. ‘Neither you nor me can afford that. Where you want to go anyway?’

‘Down to the river,’ he said.

Martha frowned. ‘What you wanna go down there for?’

He shrugged. She was used to him being contrary and odd, but to go out into the thick snow for no apparent reason was crazy,
unless . . .

‘You wouldn’t be lying to me, would you, Zeke?’ Martha said.

‘Lying?’

‘Going up to Brush Park and yelling at Miller,’ she said.

‘No!’

She looked at him with an expression of doubt on her face. ‘Because it don’t do no good,’ she said. ‘One day it’ll get you
into trouble. You know how he is!’

Zeke lowered his head and said, ‘I know it.’

‘And anyway, Samuel wouldn’t like it,’ Martha said. ‘And you don’t want to make no trouble for him, not after all what he
done.’

Zeke lowered his head still further. Then he said, ‘But I ain’t going to Brush Park, Martha.’

‘Ma! I’m late for school! Can we go!’ Keisha ran into the kitchen in a whirlwind of thick scarves, school bags and gloves.

Martha raised her eyes to the ceiling and then quickly put her coat on and grabbed her car keys. ‘I have to go,’ she said
to Zeke. ‘Go to the river if you must, but be careful.’

‘Ma!’

Keisha was running to the front door. Martha followed her.

‘Don’t you even think about going to Brush Park, old man!’ Martha yelled just before she followed her daughter out into the
snow.

‘I won’t!’ Zeke called out after her. Then he said softly to himself, ‘I promise, no Brush Park, honest injun.’

The convention centre where the police were doing all their talking and entertaining of foreigners wasn’t in Brush Park. It
was indeed down by the Detroit River. Zeke took a can of Coke and a sandwich from the refrigerator for the journey, and then
put on his coat, hat and gloves. Downtown things were expensive, and he didn’t want to spend any money on fancy food.

‘Here in Detroit we call it “white flight”,’ the tall and imposing black officer said as he looked up at the PowerPoint statistics
displayed on the screen above his head. ‘But when the manufacturing base moved out of the city of Detroit and work shifted
to the suburbs, it wasn’t just white people who deserted the centre. White flight is a catch-all term that covers all the
mainly skilled auto workers who came to constitute Detroit’s middle class. They wanted to be near the new car plants and they
wanted to move away from neighbourhoods that had become colonised by gangs and drug-dealers. But this isn’t just a feature
of Detroit.’

Çetin İkmen shifted rather uncomfortably in his seat. There were few advantages to having a very thin behind. Süleyman, now
rested and no longer jet-lagged, looked by contrast finally at his ease. He’d
told İkmen that morning at breakfast that now he was accustomed to it, the snow didn’t seem to fill him with so much dread.
But İkmen suspected that he was probably happy because he was in pursuit of a woman. Sergeant Ferrari had most definitely
caught his attention.

‘In New York City, parts of Manhattan had become almost no-go areas because of escalating crime rates. People moved out of
areas like SoHo and Tribeca, now very fashionable places, because they just weren’t nice. Then the NYPD instituted their policy
of Zero Tolerance, and all that changed. Now we’ve got other areas coming into line: Queens, the Bronx. Cities can come back
to life, but law enforcement must play its part, and that part must be based on Zero Tolerance.’

Çetin İkmen had heard about Zero Tolerance. Some forces in Turkey, albeit patchily and not in name, applied it. Zero Tolerance
was a policy whereby even the most minor infringement of legislation was punished to the full extent of the law. This meant
that people would be booked for dropping litter, vagrants would be moved on without regard to their condition or state of
health, every cannabis joint would be confiscated and the offender punished. Zero Tolerance meant no hiding place. It also
meant, so İkmen had read in newspapers back home, that the criminals and their activities simply moved location. Around New
York, in parts of New Jersey, those who had originally operated in Manhattan had set up new and sometimes even more successful
criminal operations. Shifting the problem was not, as far as he could see, any kind of real solution to anything. Besides,
one had to look at every situation case by case, surely!

İkmen clearly remembered the policing around the European Cup Final football match between AC Milan and Liverpool that had
taken place in İstanbul back in 2005. There had been some rowdy behaviour by both sets of fans, but unless violence had ensued,
they had been left alone. The police had been visible and clearly serious, but they hadn’t punished people for walking along
with cans of beer, or even for being drunk, unless they were causing a nuisance.
Zero Tolerance in that instance would have resulted in police cells full to bursting.

And what about ‘white flight’? Applied to İstanbul, he could see a trend in some districts that could be equivalent. But it
was nothing to do with class or colour. Some native İstanbullus were moving out of districts like Ayvansaray and Balat because
migrants from the countryside were moving in. Those areas were still relatively cheap, and so migrants were fetching up in
such places because they could afford them. In addition, because of migration, such places were becoming more religiously
conservative, something that native İstanbullus didn’t always appreciate. In İstanbul, the split was town and country as opposed
to black and white. Although in a rather curious parallel, some people did actually talk in terms of ‘white’ and ‘black’ Turks.
The white Turks were the sophisticated urban dwellers, while the black Turks were the country folk. If İstanbul followed Detroit
from boom into decline, it was a sobering thought to consider that one day the city might be almost exclusively given over
to ‘black’ Turks.

‘And of course, complicating the issue of “white flight” still further,’ the officer at the podium continued, ‘is the presence
of those people who don’t fit anywhere. People of mixed race and . . .’

İkmen thought about Ezekiel Goins and the Melungeons, and wondered how many of them, if any, had ‘flown’ Detroit’s broken
centre.

Ayşe Farsakoğlu didn’t often stop off on her way home from the station to have a drink. She most especially didn’t stop off
on her own. But the Kaktus café in Beyoğlu was a casual, freewheeling sort of place, beloved of writers and journalists and
not the sort of bar where a woman on her own would attract attention. Ayşe didn’t want to go home to the apartment she shared
with her brother, not yet. A small beer was needed, she felt, to try to wash away some of the things she had been learning
about at work.

Now that he had been released, Ayşe had been reading about the ‘career’ of the Edirnekapı serial rapist, Ali Kuban. Back in
1973/4, he had raped seven women, ranging in age from eighty down to twelve. Although none of his victims had died, allowing
Kuban to escape the hangman’s noose at the time, he had attacked them with staggering brutality. It had made sobering reading.
Although Kuban was now seventy-three years old and apparently way beyond picking up where he had left off in 1974, the fact
that he was out again was something Ayşe’s superiors were taking seriously. He was to be monitored and watched, and the slightest
piece of inappropriate behaviour would see him brought in for questioning very quickly. The world had changed a lot since
he had been incarcerated. Now sexual predators had so many more tools at their disposal, pornography online and the miracle
of the mobile phone being only two of them.

Ayşe had ordered her small glass of Efes Pilsen when she realised that İzzet Melik was sitting at the opposite side of the
café. Nursing what looked like a cappuccino, he was staring blankly down into the depths of his cup like a lost soul. With
the knowledge in her head that he desired her, Ayşe wondered whether he had either followed her or engineered this coincidental
meeting in some way. But when she went over to him, he seemed genuinely shocked to find her there.

‘I was reading some of the old arrest notes and statements on Ali Kuban,’ she said as she sat down opposite him. ‘I understand
why we need to know about him now. But you can’t carry that around in your head all the time and feel OK, can you?’

‘So you came for a beer.’ İzzet smiled.

‘I live with my brother, and he wouldn’t approve,’ Ayşe said.

‘He’s religious, your brother?’

‘No, just protective of his sister,’ she replied.

İzzet knew better than to ask her anything more. Family life was, to some extent, private or ‘walled’, as it had been in Turkish
society since time immemorial.

‘Ali Kuban is probably too old to be a problem to women now, I
hope,’ İzzet said. ‘I understand the last few years of his incarceration have been tough for him. He had cancer back in 2006,
which weakened him considerably. Now he’s sick again.’

‘Didn’t kill him last time,’ Ayşe said.

‘Maybe it wasn’t his time. Or maybe he got lucky and had a good doctor.’

‘Inspector İkmen told me just before he left that he remembered Kuban,’ Ayşe said. ‘He was very young at the time, the inspector,
but he said that when Kuban was caught, a great wave of relief broke across the city.’

‘It must have done,’ İzzet said. ‘He’d terrorised Edirnekapı for eighteen months. His behaviour was escalating – little girls,
old women.’ He frowned. ‘To be honest with you, Sergeant Farsakoğlu, it isn’t Kuban as such that worries me now he’s out.
It’s . . . well, it seems he achieved something of a legendary aura or status with certain people during his time in prison. Those
of a misogynistic type; boys aroused by too much internet porn, too much information.’ He laughed. ‘Listen to me! Complaining
about the age of information as if I can do anything about it! Like an old man!’

But Ayşe agreed with him. High-profile offenders like Kuban, and even more sensationally like Mehmet Ali Ağca, the man who
had tried to kill Pope John Paul II back in 1979, attracted both those who wished to follow in their footsteps and sometimes
also those who wished to love or even marry them. The idea of someone copying Kuban’s crimes, possibly in a bid to attract
his attention, did not bear thinking about. And so İzzet changed the subject. ‘Would you like to have some food here?’ he
asked, his voice just wavering a little as he did so. He did not, after all, want her to confuse his offer with some sort
of date. He didn’t want to scare her. ‘It’s quite good, the food here.’

Ali, Ayşe’s brother, was, she knew, dining with a client. If she went home, it would only be her and a bowl of the soup she’d
made and put in the fridge. İzzet wasn’t bad company, even if he did have
feelings she would rather he didn’t have for her. But even with that as a consideration, what did she have to lose? She’d
seen several very nice plates of food come out of the Kaktus kitchen since they’d been there. ‘OK,’ she said after a moment.
‘That would be nice.’

İzzet Melik beamed.

There were shades of Elvis Goins’ death that hung around the murder of Aaron Spencer. Both kids had been shot, both of them
young, both in Brush Park. In both cases no one had seen or heard anything, and so the likelihood of any justice coming along
for Aaron Spencer was slim, as it had been, for different reasons, for Elvis Goins.

Back in the seventies, when Elvis had died, there had been people apart from Grant T. Miller living in the area, and so it
was possible that someone could, even now, claim to know who had killed him. But Aaron Spencer had almost certainly been alone
up there outside the Royden Holmes House. That part of the district, with the exception of Miller’s place two blocks away,
was almost entirely empty.

A curious, rather bookish kid according to his mother, Aaron had gone to Brush Park to explore, as boys could and should be
able to do. But someone had killed him, and now Aaron’s curiosity was stilled. Gerald Diaz walked towards the Cobo Center
slowly and in a decidedly unenthusiastic mood. In spite of real strides towards community engagement, with involvement around
organisations like the Luther Bell Food Patch, and with cannabis use for medical purposes legal in the state of Michigan,
the old police orthodoxy was still there. Don’t talk, arrest with Zero Tolerance as the ultimate Holy Grail. But that, to
Gerald’s way of thinking, was one of the things that was perpetuating the gang/drug lifestyle. Popping up elsewhere when the
heat got too strong was becoming a game with some of the gangs. To take back the inner city, everyone needed to be on board,
and that included the gangs, the crack dealers and the junkies. It was the only way to prevent ‘godfathers’ of drug supply
from rising to prominence as they had done in the past; as they continued to do.

Engaging with local people, even users and gang thugs, was possible. Martha Bell had her own way, and it worked. Or rather,
it could work. Gerald pulled his Lucky out of the corner of his mouth and breathed out smoke into the frozen air. Inside the
Cobo, Leonard Crosby had just taken a session preaching his gospel of Zero Tolerance. All the foreign officers would be talking
about it. From a policing point of view, it was easier than doing it Gerald’s way, Martha’s way.

Gerald walked up the steps towards the glass and concrete building and saw that Crosby’s session had already ended. A big
group of officers were braving the sub-zero temperatures to have a smoke. They were all talking and laughing, most of them
swinging their arms around or stamping their feet in an attempt to keep themselves warm. Over to one side, alone except for
his compatriot, was the Turk, Inspector İkmen. Gerald was wondering why he and his colleague were set apart from the others
when he saw that they were not actually on their own at all. Ezekiel Goins was with them, and he was speaking very earnestly.