Death by Design (6 page)

‘Çetin?’

‘Arto, I am leaving to go somewhere and I will return when I do. As to whether I’m running away from anything that is no more your business than the fact that your own marriage has been a front for years is mine.’

Childless and prey to numerous health problems, Maryam Sarkissian had been Arto’s wife in no more than name for years. It was something the two men had spoken of only once, many years before when Arto had broken down during a conversation they had had in a bar. Nothing had been said since – until now. Çetin’s words, spoken almost casually, hurt. Arto looked down at the floor and said, ‘Çetin—’

‘Arto, I am going for my own reasons and whenever I return, things will be as they have always been,’ İkmen said. He could see his friend was hurt, there was no getting away from it, and deep inside he felt guilty for having inflicted such pain. But he also knew that it had been necessary. Arto, and only Arto, could so easily have wheedled everything about the London mission out of him, mainly because İkmen so longed to tell him.

After a short silence, the Armenian stood up to leave.

‘Well, Çetin, whatever is happening, you know I wish you well,’ he said. ‘You know I . . .’ He bit down on his bottom lip as if trying to hold back tears. It proved too much for İkmen who stood up, walked over to his friend and took him in his arms and kissed both his cheeks.

‘You know that I will miss you,’ Çetin said. ‘You know I only say what I do because I fear I may tell you, and only you, what I mustn’t. I’m sorry.’

The two of them stood in the middle of İkmen’s office, in each other’s arms, for a good five minutes before the Armenian finally left without another word.

When dawn broke over the great city of İstanbul the following morning, Çetin İkmen was already up and dressed. He didn’t say goodbye to any family members still sleeping in the apartment. He didn’t even look into what had once been his bedroom, where Fatma now slept alone. He didn’t want even the slightest hairline fracture in his already shaky resolve. Then, in line with the instructions Ardıç had given him, he stepped out of his apartment, carrying nothing, not even his wallet, and walked away from Sultanahmet down the hill towards Sirkeci railway station. Halfway down he turned off on to Ebussuut Street where, just before reaching the main post office, he rang the bell of an anonymous doorway beside a small electrical shop. After a short pause he was ushered up the stairs behind the doorway and into the flat above by a man of about thirty. Neither he nor the older woman with him said who they were or what they were doing and İkmen didn’t ask.

‘As you know,’ the man said as he pointed İkmen in the direction of a group of chairs in the middle of the stark, blank living room, ‘undercover work depends in part upon keeping your fake life story as close to that of your real life as possible.’ He handed İkmen a Turkish passport. ‘Your name is Çetin Ertegrul – your wife’s maiden name.’

‘Yes.’ That had indeed been Fatma’s name before she married him. Maybe, soon, it would be her name again. İkmen opened the passport and saw that it had no photograph.

‘You’re fifty-five years old, a widower, and you live in Laleli with your thirty-five-year-old daughter Çiçek and her husband Abdullah. My colleague here is going to change your appearance somewhat and then we’re going to take your passport photo.’

‘OK.’ The woman came towards him carrying scissors, an electric razor and a bag of other things he couldn’t yet see. She took the dressing off the wound on the side of his face. It was healing well. As she first shaved off his moustache and then coloured his hair what seemed to İkmen a most startling shade of black, the man kept on talking, telling İkmen who he was slowly but surely becoming.

Abdullah Karabas, Çetin Ertegrul’s son-in-law, had – just like Çetin İkmen’s real son-in-law, Berekiah – sustained an injury that meant that he could no longer work. Çiçek, Çetin’s daughter, was newly pregnant. To make matters worse, Çetin Ertegrul himself had recently been made redundant from his job as a security guard at the Akmerkez mall in Etiler, possibly because his employers felt that he was too old to be seen amongst their younger and trendier customers. And so Çetin had made the decision to leave Turkey and seek more lucrative employment in the European Union. His hope was that by doing this his daughter would be able to stop worrying about money and enjoy her baby when it came.

‘When you get to your destination, London, you will make contact with the person listed on this mobile phone as Ayşe,’ the man said. ‘This person will be your initial contact and your story will be known to that person.’

He handed a very slim and handsome mobile phone to İkmen and said, ‘Keep this with you at all times.’

Once he was someone else, a person without a moustache and with very short, very black hair, the man took his photograph and then carried it and the passport away with him to another room. The clothes the woman gave him to wear were even cheaper versions of the already cheap and worn-out clothes that Çetin İkmen usually wore. The small suitcase he was provided with contained nothing that was any better. For his pockets there was a wallet containing eight hundred Turkish lire, a photograph of a woman who he was told was his daughter, a set of keys to ‘his’ flat in Laleli, the mobile phone and an ATM card in the name of Çetin Ertegrul.

‘This ATM card will work anywhere in the world,’ the man said. ‘The PIN number is on your mobile phone. Draw in euros or sterling. You can take out up to five thousand euros at any one time.’

‘Five thousand euros!’

‘You’re a police officer, you’re supposed to be trustworthy,’ the woman growled.

‘Yes, but—’

‘Wherever you go in the European Union, it will cost you,’ the man said. ‘Only the old ex-communist countries are cheap. You’ll need money to pay whoever traffics you across the English Channel. It will be expensive. Now your mobile phone also contains two other numbers. One is listed under the name Wolfgang, that is your contact in Berlin. You call Wolfgang as soon as you arrive. The other is under the name Burak and that is your emergency number. You call that number if you are in trouble, if you’re about to be unmasked, if your life is in danger. Understand?’

‘Yes.’ There wasn’t much not to understand. There was, however, quite a bit to be worried about.

But the man smiled even if İkmen did not. ‘Now . . .’ He picked up a hand mirror and held it in front of İkmen’s face. ‘Say hello to Çetin Ertegrul.’

What stared back from the mirror was the very epitome of migrant Turkish desperation, thin and pallid, scarred, the short dyed hair a last-ditch attempt to appear younger. İkmen looked at his new incarnation with disgust. This person, this parody of a Turkish man, was going to go and plead to be trafficked out of Germany, beg for work in the UK. He started to feel angry until he remembered that Çetin Ertegrul wasn’t real, was merely a part he was playing in order to expose a network of crime he had only glimpsed as yet.

Wolfgang was not what İkmen had expected. For a start he had not reckoned upon actually meeting his contact in Berlin. Maybe he had seen too many espionage movies. Berlin, what it had been and maybe what it still was, seemed to engender such notions. He’d imagined that when Wolfgang had told him on the phone to go to the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery in one of the old East German districts of the city, he would find some sort of message waiting for him there. A scrap of paper on a gravestone, a bag with instructions underneath a tree. What he hadn’t expected was a person – in this case a tiny, wizened and ancient Jewish man.

Wolfgang led İkmen between the large plain gravestones and into one of the most heavily wooded areas of the cemetery. ‘You know that this is the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe.’

‘It is?’ German was very much İkmen’s third language and he was not finding it easy to speak. He did not, he knew, practise as often as he should. It made him feel nervous, edgy about both what he was saying and what he was hearing.

‘So strange when you consider how many Jews the Germans transported and killed,’ Wolfgang continued. ‘But then central Europe has always had its problems, has it not?’

‘Ah . . .’

‘The Hundred Years War, all that business with Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, silly, silly Kaiser Wilhelm, the Nazis, then the Wall and all that aggravation.’ Wolfgang cleared some ferns away from the side of the path and revealed a small, battered bench. ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘Sit down, Herr Ertegrul.’

İkmen sat. He was red-eyed and shattered. It had taken him two days to get from İstanbul to Berlin by train and he had not travelled first class. Slumped for much of the time against the carriage wall, hemmed in by German Turks returning to their various home cities, he had been kept awake all night by blaring hip-hop music. This interspersed with ear-splitting attempts by various youths to rap in German had nearly driven him mad. When he’d arrived in Berlin he’d called Wolfgang straight away, stuttering in his schoolboy German, straining every nerve to understand what his contact was saying. After that he’d had to negotiate his way to Weissensee, a leafy, quiet area of the city that used to be part of old East Berlin.

‘And through all of the silliness that has happened in this part of the world there have always been those who seek to move from place to place without let or hindrance,’ Wolfgang continued. ‘Of course this has not always been possible. For instance under Hitler, Jews could not go outside without wearing yellow stars on their clothing, they could not go to the next town, much less the next country.’

He was obviously building up to telling İkmen something about how he might secure his own illegal passage to the UK, but he was doing it slowly and for İkmen rather tortuously.

‘I have, you know, lived almost my whole life in Weissensee,’ Wolfgang said. ‘There was of course a period of time, some years between nineteen forty and nineteen forty-five when I was . . . elsewhere, but that hiatus taught me much, Herr Ertegrul. I met people willing to sell almost anything to secure transport from one place to another. For a time I became such a person myself.’

Two small, round women, their heads covered by chiffon scarves, passed by and Wolfgang raised his hat. He was talking about the concentration camps. He had been in one. İkmen wondered how he had survived and wondered whether it had anything to do with this business of moving people from one place to another.

‘But I came back to Weissensee,’ the old man said with a smile. ‘I would have preferred to live in the West but . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What can you do? I was stuck with Russians, the GDR, the whole disaster. I would have been very depressed, not to mention poor, had I not remembered that earlier experience in the nineteen forties. I arranged for people to find alternatives to the GDR, Herr Ertegrul. Desperate people. I made their dreams come true and you know, in all the years that I did so, I never lost one person. Then when the Wall came down, of course I was very happy, but my business collapsed. Or rather it did for a while.’

İkmen had imagined that Wolfgang was some sort of police officer or agent. But it seemed not. He must have seen the confusion on İkmen’s face because he smiled.

‘Now, of course,’ Wolfgang said, ‘many of those who would be elsewhere come from Africa and they would really rather like to be here. Sometimes they need some assistance. Sometimes other people need assistance too. Nowadays one has such strange bedfellows, Herr Ertegrul. On occasion I even work for what they call the security services in what we all now call just Germany. I think that you should stay in Kreuzberg while you are here in Berlin. There are a lot of Turks in Kreuzberg.’

Kreuzberg, İkmen knew, was also known as ‘Kleine İstanbul’.

‘There is a bookshop on the main thoroughfare through Kreuzberg, the Bergmannstrasse,’ Wolfgang said. ‘It is called Eco. Books devoted to global warming, all the ecological nonsense. Above that is a small what you Turks call “pansiyon”. It’s run by a friend of mine. There is a room there that you can have tonight. Tomorrow the next part of your journey will begin.’

So much for first finding a trafficker and then paying him lots of money. Wolfgang himself was the people trafficker. ‘But, er, Wolfgang, why then did we not meet in Kreuzberg? Why here in this cemetery?’ İkmen asked.

The old man smiled. ‘Oh, I always meet the people I move around here,’ he said. ‘Those who need me know it and so do the police. Fortunately these two groups do not always know each other.’

There was an arrangement obviously. On some level Wolfgang was allowed to do what he did best, what he had done for many years in the GDR under the noses of the hated Stasi. In return he did things like this, transporting people across borders for the police. The British policeman had told him nothing about this. But then maybe he had not known about it himself. Perhaps this was something between Wolfgang and the German police and them alone.

Slowly and painfully Wolfgang began to rise from the bench. ‘Oh, and get some money out tonight,’ he said to İkmen. ‘Three thousand euros will be a start. I understand that you can draw anywhere in Europe. We will have some more in France. It has all been agreed.’

‘Has it?’ İkmen felt like a child. Alone, out of his depth, forced to go along with whatever was suggested simply because he didn’t know any better.

‘Trust me,’ Wolfgang said with a smile and slowly walked away from the bench.

İkmen took his mobile phone out of his pocket and brought up the name Burak, his emergency contact. But he didn’t call the number. After five minutes’ cogitation he put the phone back in his pocket, stood up and began to walk out of the cemetery.

‘Kleine İstanbul’ was both familiar and unfamiliar. The streets were full of headscarfed women getting their shopping from grocers that sold everything one could ever want from ‘back home’. But these places also sold German cigarettes, German biscuits and German lottery tickets too. The young people spoke German almost exclusively, even amongst themselves. Even men of İkmen’s own age seemed to prefer to speak the language of their adopted country as opposed to their native tongue. A case in point was the owner of the pansiyon where Wolfgang had reserved a room. Shouting rather than speaking, he waved a hand in the direction of İkmen’s small and rather smelly room and told him that he’d have to share the bathroom down the hall with a group of bricklayers from Albania. İkmen said that he had no problem with this at which the pansiyon owner shrugged and then walked back to his office.