Deep Waters (11 page)

‘Oh?’

‘And at the junction of Babıali Caddesi and Divan Yolu, as Çiçek and my cousin stopped to gossip, a small middle-aged man, speaking Albanian, first accused Samsun of being an informant and then threatened her. He was, so Samsun says, Mehmet Vlora. My cousin is apparently at my apartment now, distraught to the point of collapse, according to my daughter.’

‘Oh, sir, I—’

‘In trying to prevent an escalation of this blood feud, it would appear I have made matters very much worse.’ İkmen started to walk towards the end of the street where his car was parked. ‘I have implicated my own family.’

‘You did what you thought was right,’ Tepe said as he followed after him. ‘You knew that the Berishas would go after the Vloras in the wake of Rifat’s death. You also knew, as I do, that they didn’t necessarily kill him and that until the truth about his death is established—’

‘I think that the only way round this problem is for me to go and see Angeliki Vlora,’ İkmen said gloomily, cutting across Tepe’s loyal speech. ‘I need to eliminate them from our inquiries, if that is possible. If I can speak to her and perhaps gain willing access to Mehmet and his brothers . . .’

‘Do you want me to come with you, sir?’

İkmen paused. He didn’t look as if he was actively considering what his sergeant had just said, but when he replied it was obvious that he had been. ‘No, Orhan,’ he said and patted the younger man gently on the shoulder. ‘You go home to your wife and family now.’

‘But . . .’

İkmen looked up at what was now a very large and bright full moon. ‘No,’ he said with a cracked laugh, ‘those of us of Balkan origin should meet alone on nights like this.’ He turned back to Tepe. ‘If Angeliki turns into a werewolf, you, as a Turk, might be alarmed.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, come on, Orhan!’ İkmen said impatiently. ‘You must know that the world’s most disordered legends have come out of eastern Europe. Werewolves, vampires, the fucking un-dead. Only they really understand this rubbish. I was simply saying that as someone who has received half his blood from such a source I am rather more adapted to deal with it than you are. It was, if you can appreciate this, something of a joke.’

‘Oh.’

‘But don’t worry about that for the time being, Orhan. You just get off home now. It’s OK, really.’

‘Well, if you’re sure.’

‘I am,’ İkmen said as he drew level with his car and unlocked the door. ‘I mean, even if Angeliki Vlora should turn into a beast right in front of my eyes, how bad can it be, eh?’

And then with a twinkling smile that was almost evil, he slid into the driving seat, turned on the engine and left. It was only when he was halfway down the road that the memory of just how much his wife disliked his transsexual cousin came back to him. With Samsun in the apartment, even if she were being looked after by Çiçek, Fatma would be at the very least in a foul mood when he got home.

‘Shit,’ he said out loud and then burst into laughter as he tried to decide whether he would rather face his wife in a mood or Angeliki Vlora as a werewolf.

He concluded that the latter possibility was less painful.

Whether or not Samsun Bajraktar had learned to behave like a woman from watching too many Turkish historical movies was not known. That her femininity was of the nineteenth-century ‘fainting with anxiety’ variety was, however, evident to everyone in the İkmens’ apartment that night. Not that this heightened emotion had a great deal to do with the threats of Mehmet Vlora now. No. Since being almost carried back to the apartment by her cousin’s daughter, Çiçek, some hours before, Samsun had spent a considerable amount of fruitless time trying, without success, to contact her lover, Abdurrahman. He was not in his leather shop or their apartment, and she could not imagine where he could be. Even his mobile was switched off, which, for the technology-addicted Abdurrahman, was unheard of behaviour.

‘If he’s with some girl . . .’ Samsun began as she accepted yet another glass of tea from the sympathetically attentive Çiçek.

‘I’m sure he isn’t,’ Çiçek replied soothingly. ‘From what you’ve told me, he sounds really very nice.’

‘Why don’t you peer into a bowl of oil and find out,’ a sharp female voice from the kitchen retorted. ‘It’s what your aunt would have done.’

Çiçek moved towards the kitchen, her face set in anger. ‘Mum! I—’

‘Look, if Samsun’s in danger, he’s welcome to stay as long as he likes,’ Fatma said as she appeared, red-faced and headscarfed, from the kitchen. ‘I have never turned anyone in need of help away from my hearth. But if he’s going to go on about his relations with other men . . .’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Fatma,’ Samsun said, turning to look up into her reluctant hostess’s face. ‘I know that I’m the most dreadful old—’

‘Why has that lady got such big feet?’

As one, all those in the room, including eighteen-year-old Bülent İkmen who had been reading the paper up until this point, turned to look at the small boy now standing beside Samsun’s outstretched legs. Fatma, her lips pursed in anger, simply cleared her throat.

Again it was Çiçek who rescued the situation. ‘Some ladies do have big feet, Kemal,’ she said with a smile at her grave-faced younger brother. ‘Like some men have small feet.’

‘Dad’s got very small feet,’ Bülent put in before returning to his paper.

‘Yes, that’s right, he does.’ Then stretching her hand out to the youngster, Çiçek said, ‘But we don’t have to talk about that right now, do we? I mean, wouldn’t you rather go and lie down?’

‘No.’ With such an odd woman around to stare at, life was far more exciting in the living room than it was in his bedroom.

‘Gul’s gone to bed.’

‘Oh, for the love of . . .’ Fed up with her daughter’s attempts to reason with an eight-year-old, Fatma bustled forward and with some determination took a firm grip on her youngest child’s hand. ‘You’re going to bed now, Kemal, and that is the end of it.’

‘But what about my dad? I—’

‘If you haven’t got used to the fact by now that you never see your father, there really is no hope for you,’ Fatma said as she dragged the protesting youngster from the room after her.

As the living-room door slammed behind the two figures, Samsun, her eyes lowered, said, ‘I am sorry. I appear to have caused quite a scene, don’t I?’

‘Police,’ İkmen said as he thrust his identification into the old woman’s face.

‘Again?’

‘Seems so.’ He placed one foot across the threshold of Angeliki Vlora’s sparse, fried potato-scented apartment.

The old woman first tucked the stray ends of her headscarf underneath her chin and then, her eyes dark with suspicion, moved out of İkmen’s way.

‘My boys are out, enjoying a drink together, if that’s why you’ve come,’ she said as she followed him into her gloomy living room.

‘It’s you I’ve come to see, Mrs Vlora,’ İkmen replied.

‘Oh?’ Bending down to wrap up potato peelings that stood exposed on newspaper on the floor, Angeliki Vlora motioned for İkmen to sit down. ‘Why?’

‘Because you named certain members of my family to one of my officers this morning.’

Angeliki, straightening up, put one hand into the painful small of her back. ‘Oh?’ And then seemingly remembered the occasion in more detail. ‘You are İkmen?’

‘It’s what it says on my ID, yes.’ He lit a cigarette and leaned back into the damp, old chair she had allocated to him.

‘Ach,’ the old woman said tetchily, ‘I don’t read. No Albanian women of my age do.’

‘My mother did,’ İkmen remarked.

‘Only because the Turk, your father, taught her,’ Angeliki said, lowering herself onto the sofa opposite İkmen’s chair. ‘Ayşe Bajraktar didn’t need to read, in any event.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the Bajraktars were the most powerful
fis
outside Ghegeria. There was a time when they were in blood with many rival clans. But, with their viciousness and the curses that your grandfather threw around like mountain snow, they defeated all-comers, even the Ndreks – but you know about that.’

‘No.’

Her look of disbelief caught İkmen unawares. In fact, so shocked did she appear that her mouth hung open like a fish’s. Only when she eventually extracted a rough hand-rolled cigarette from the folds of her clothing and placed it between her teeth did she close her mouth. But although her reaction seemed extreme to İkmen, he did not dwell upon it. The hour was getting late and as the fog gathered outside to create another frozen, impenetrable night, he knew that he must finish here soon and get home to whatever mayhem awaited him in his Sultan Ahmet apartment.

‘You told Sergeant Tepe,’ he said, ‘that you thought that my cousin Mustafa Bajraktar may have informed the police about your feud with the Berishas.’

The old woman shrugged. ‘Well, didn’t he?’

‘No. And I would prefer it if you did not, in future, throw such unsubstantiated assertions around without thinking.’ He paused briefly to knock the ash from his cigarette into the large metal stand ashtray at his elbow before continuing. ‘And you might also tell Mehmet that if I catch him threatening any member of my family again, I will personally see to it that he spends some time in our cells. There he might like to think on the error of his ways.’

‘Mehmet’s threatened nobody.’

‘From which I deduce,’ İkmen said sharply, ‘that either you haven’t seen your son since he ran away from my officers this morning or that the noble art of the Albanian lie is truly perfected in you.’

Impervious to the policeman’s insults, Angeliki Vlora simply changed the subject. ‘Well, if the catamite Samsun didn’t tell you about us and the Berishas, then who did, eh? You answer me that, witch’s boy!’

Stung by the sudden use of a term usually applied to him, but with affection, by his wife, İkmen snapped, ‘As an officer of the law, I am not permitted to reveal my sources.’

‘Unless I get my money out!’ the old woman cackled sourly. ‘Turkish men and money . . .’

‘I don’t take bribes, old woman!’ he flung back at her. ‘Like my Turkish father, I am an honest man. I owe nothing, am in blood to no one.’

‘As long as it pleases Emina Ndrek, or more to the point her surviving son,’ she said with an unpleasant smile.

‘What are you talking about?’ İkmen said. ‘Just keep Mehmet—’

‘Emina’s brother killed your mother, Ayşe Bajraktar.’

The world, for İkmen, became quite silent. Temporarily aware only of sight, he had the notion that his eyes were in fact peering out of something that had turned to stone, leaving him trapped in a body he did not know. He was suddenly and heart-stoppingly at one with the notion of men inhabiting forms not their own – the un-dead, the ghost, the werewolf . . . Indeed, when he found his voice again, its rough pitch and intensity was not unlike the growl of a beast.

‘My mother died of heart—’

‘Your mother’s throat was cut! The Bajraktar were in blood to the Ndrek for the killing of Emina’s brother.’

‘No! No!’ İkmen said, his heart pounding as he rose shakily to his feet. ‘My mother had a heart condition, she died in her bed.’ And then shouting he added, ‘I was there! I saw . . .’

‘Did you?’ The old woman’s face folded into something that now looked far darker than the visage İkmen had first seen – or so it seemed as she regarded him with contempt. ‘Think back, İkmen,’ she said spitefully, ‘and try not to impose convenient Turkish lies on your memory.’

Normally, İkmen would have reacted immediately to what Angeliki had said, to the insults she had thrown at him. But for just a moment he took a mental step back from her words and did not speak until he had regained his composure. What the old Albanian was saying was ridiculous, wasn’t it? It had to be! Both his brother and his father had seen the body of his mother after death and neither of them had ever spoken of murder. Yes, the police had come to the house that terrible afternoon but then, as İkmen well knew, they did sometimes attend the scene of sudden death. And he could remember no blood. Cut throats produced a lot of blood. And victims of
gjakmaria
were always male, weren’t they? The image of women going out and about on behalf of their besieged men made İkmen suddenly, and to the confusion of Angeliki Vlora, smile.

‘Oh, very clever,’ he said. ‘You almost had me going there for a moment, Mrs Vlora.’

‘I speak only the truth, I give you my word.’

‘This from a person from a country where – how does the saying go? “You are free to be faithful to your word or to be faithless to it”?’

The old woman smiled. ‘You know more of Albania than your Turkish father would have liked.’

‘Just stop trying to distract me with malicious fabrications and make sure that Mehmet and his brothers present themselves to me tomorrow morning at nine.’ He placed one of his business cards down in front of her. ‘Your boys can, I take it, read.’

She glanced at it and shrugged.

‘If they fail to appear, I will have them arrested,’ he snapped and turned towards the door.

‘Think about why your father always kept you away from your own kind,’ Angeliki said as she stubbed her cigarette out in her ashtray. ‘Consider why he might have done that.’

But İkmen, on the surface at least, ignored her words. ‘Nine o’clock tomorrow, Angeliki,’ he said, ‘or your blood feud with the Berishas will end in my cells.’

And with that he walked out of her apartment and down into the now barely visible street below.

On several occasions since his father had contacted him that morning, Mehmet Suleyman had thought about telephoning his brother Murad. Sometimes he had been distracted from the task by other matters, but in the main he had not yet called because he really didn’t know what to say. From what his father had told him, it was obvious that Murad was in favour of them all meeting up again. But it still felt odd and also somehow wrong to just cover over with a mere meal what for both of them had been years of deep parental disapproval. And even if their father hadn’t been the prime mover in the Suleyman brothers’ personal misery, he had undoubtedly acquiesced in their unhappiness. But it was late now, and all the psychological tricks Mehmet had employed earlier to keep himself from Murad had gone. His brother would most definitely be home – after all, where else could single fathers go at this advanced hour of the night?