Deep Waters (9 page)

Yıldız looked down at the cards in his hand and then placed them face up on the table.

‘I quit,’ he said and emptied what was left of his tea into his mouth.

Tepe looked briefly at the cards in front of his partner and then laughed. ‘This really isn’t your game, is it?’ he said.

‘I don’t like these places.’ Yıldız looked around the plain, exclusively male interior of the kahvehane.

Tepe shrugged. ‘But for our purposes, they’re really useful,’ he said. ‘After all, what else do men in kahvehanes do but drink tea, play games, sit and watch. We could quite easily sit here all day without attracting attention from anyone.’

‘A pushover, our job, then,’ Yıldız answered with a smile, ‘what with one of these places on every street.’

‘Oh, there are still plenty of nooks and crannies where those of subtle disposition can go to hide themselves away,’ the older man said sagely. ‘You’ll learn all about that when you make the mistake we all do.’

‘What mistake is that, sir?’

‘The one you make when you underestimate people.’

‘So did you . . .’

Tepe smiled. ‘When I was in uniform I was assigned to a stake-out team led by Inspector İskender. He was young and inexperienced, as were we all. But we moved quickly and on what was good information to a house in Edirnekapı. When we got there, however, the place was quite empty save for the body of our dead informant, who had also been the dealer’s wife. The previous evening, just before he left for Bulgaria, the dealer had decapitated the woman and then placed her head on a spike. It was the first thing we saw as we entered the building.’ He sighed and folded his arms across his chest. ‘I was quite sick, as I recall.’

Yıldız, who had been listening intently to Tepe’s story, had nevertheless kept one eye on the goings-on across the road. And so it was he and not Tepe who first saw the small group of Albanians move quickly back inside their apartment building.

‘I wonder what’s making them shift so smartly,’ he said as he flicked his head in the direction of the retreating men.

Scanning the area with his eyes, Tepe could not immediately see anything that might obviously alarm the men. It was in fact his ears that first picked up something untoward. For what was approaching the men was, due to its small size, only noticeable by its voice, which was female, foreign and very angry.

It was not something the crowd around the owner of the voice wanted to be close to. And so they parted, revealing to the two officers the slight figure of a small headscarfed girl shouting the name ‘Mehmet’ in amongst a load of other completely unintelligible words.

Tepe stood and looked at the girl more closely. ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ he murmured, ‘that girl is Engelushjia Berisha.’

‘Are you sure?’ Yıldız asked.

‘Fairly,’ Tepe replied. As he watched, one of the windows on the first floor of the apartment block opened and a man’s mocking face appeared.

‘Mehmet!’ the girl shouted as she, too, saw the face. ‘Mehmet Vlora!’ Then flying into what must have been the most vitriolic Albanian, she nearly screamed herself hoarse. The mocking man in his turn yelled down what could only have been abuse at her.

‘I think we should get out there, just in case,’ Tepe said. He threw some banknotes down onto the table and retrieved his overcoat from the back of his chair. His partner, following in silence, kept his eyes firmly trained upon the girl who was now jumping around in her agitation.

As soon as Tepe opened the kahvehane door, the damp winter air hit him like a hammer. It made him wonder, briefly, how Engelushjia managed to survive in her thin cotton skirt – but then she had her towering anger to keep her warm.

‘I wonder why Roditi and Farsakoǧlu didn’t warn us about this,’ Tepe said as soon as Yıldız had joined him on the pavement.

‘Perhaps the girl slipped past them,’ Yıldız replied. ‘Do you think that we ought to contact Inspector İkmen before we do anything, sir?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tepe said as he watched the girl suddenly leap up the steps and into the apartment building. ‘But right now I think that we should go and observe,’ and he broke into a run.

When they reached the landing of the first floor, the two officers found Engelushjia Berisha standing with her back to them. In front of her, his hands placed arrogantly on his hips, was the man who had mocked her from the window, who the policemen assumed was Mehmet Vlora. Beside him was the other short, dark man who had, until the girl came along, companionably shared the front step with him.

Pausing only briefly to glance at the two men who had arrived at the top of the stairs, Engelushjia Berisha first spat onto the floor in front of the brothers and then took something from the pocket of her skirt.

Yıldız, who was standing rather deeper in the shadow of the stairs than Tepe, nevertheless had a clearer view of the scene before them. Leaning forward to whisper in his superior’s ear he said, ‘She’s got a knife.’ Which, given the obvious mirth this object elicited from the girl’s intended victims, seemed somewhat incongruous.

Everything changed when Mehmet Vlora produced a rather larger weapon of his own. Looking briefly across at the two men in the shadows, a smirk just catching his coarse features, Mehmet Vlora raised the hunting knife high enough for it to be exactly level with the girl’s throat. Then, slowly, he growled something out in Albanian. The girl’s back visibly stiffened, as did the arm in which she carried her knife.

‘I’m going in,’ Tepe murmured to his partner. He drew his service revolver from the holster under his arm and stepped out of the shadows, holding his police ID out in front of him. ‘Police!’ he shouted ‘Stay where you are!’

‘Don’t move and nobody will get hurt!’ a similarly armed Yıldız added as he, too, moved out into the thin landing light.

And for a moment nobody did move. The girl, her mouth now open in shock, looked too confused to react, as indeed did the Albanian men – for just a moment. When the spell broke, movement came with wild rapidity. Using what seemed to be only the power in his eyes, Mehmet Vlora ordered his brother back into the apartment and slammed the door hard shut behind him.

Rushing forward to try to stop the door from closing, Tepe only narrowly missed getting his foot crushed in the process. Swearing with frustration, he took hold of the now screaming Engelushjia Berisha in one hand and waved his gun at the door with the other.

‘Well, break the fucking thing down, Yıldız!’ he shouted at his partner.

‘Yes, sir!’

Two well-placed kicks were all that it took to reduce the poorly constructed door to broken panels and matchwood. The Vlora brothers were no longer behind it. As the two officers dragged a screaming and unintelligible Engelushjia into the Vloras’ apartment, it was easy to see in the paucity of that place that the men were not there. The only occupant was a tiny old woman, her head covered in a thick, black veil.

‘They must have gone down the fire escape,’ a panting Tepe said to Yıldız and then, turning to the old woman, he barked, ‘Where’s your fire escape?’

‘I imagine it’s somewhere on the side of the building,’ she replied in heavily accented but perfect Turkish. ‘They usually are.’

Tepe shot the woman a vicious glare and told Yıldız to search all the rooms. While he was doing that, Tepe turned to Engelushjia Berisha for the first time. ‘Bit of a mistake to come here, wasn’t it? I—’

‘Why are you here?’ the girl screamed by way of reply. ‘Why are you interfering in people’s private business?’

‘It’s a good question,’ the old woman said, ‘and one to which I, personally, feel I deserve an answer.’

‘Well, when people start threatening other people with knives,’ Tepe began, slowly as if to an idiot.

‘A scene you just obviously “happened to be passing”,’ the old woman jibed.

‘Well, er . . .’ Tepe stumbled. Knowing what İkmen had said about not allowing the protagonists in this drama to realise that they were being watched did not make convincing this astute old woman any easier – not to mention the deeply suspicious Engelushjia Berisha. ‘Yes, we were,’ he said, ‘and as—’

‘Nothing at all on the fire escape, sir,’ Yıldız said as he re-entered the main room, his revolver now held limply at his side. ‘Given the time involved I reckon they must have climbed into another apartment and got out that way.’

‘Is that what happened?’ Tepe demanded of the seemingly amused old woman.

‘Maybe. Maybe not,’ she said with a shrug and then added slyly, ‘Our men do as they wish, just as you people do.’

‘Madam—’

‘And besides,’ she said, flicking her eyes across at Engelushjia before she continued, ‘my boys were only joking with my young friend here, is that not so, young lady?’

‘Well, yes. Yes, of—’

‘Oh, so knives are some sort of toy now, are they?’ retorted an increasingly agitated Tepe. ‘Just having some sort of a laugh with sharp instruments, were you?’

A pause during which a frightened-eyed Engelushjia Berisha appeared to lose the power of speech passed in what felt to Tepe like a dangerous silence. Looking nervously across at Yıldız, he noticed that the younger man was eyeing the old woman with open revulsion.

‘It is, I believe, up to this young lady,’ she said at length, ‘to decide whether making a complaint against my three boys is appropriate. If it is not, then I think that you gentlemen will have to go.’ And then smiling at Engelushjia she added, ‘Well?’

‘We were only playing, Mehmet and his brothers and—’

‘So why did they run when they saw us?’ Tepe snapped.

‘I imagine it is because the Turkish police enjoy persecuting Albanians,’ the old woman said, surprisingly calmly. ‘My sons were afraid, an emotion exacerbated, no doubt, by the idea that you would completely misunderstand the game they were playing with Engelushjia – which of course you have.’

‘Madam—’

‘You people do not take any time to get to know us,’ she said. ‘You do not learn our language, you misunderstand our customs . . . Of course a few, a very few of my kind, do allow you the odd glimpse into our world.’ Then looking up sharply into Tepe’s eyes, she continued, ‘One such is Mustafa Bajraktar.’

The name meant nothing to Tepe. He shrugged and was about to turn his attention back to Engelushjia Berisha when the old woman added, ‘But then Mustafa is related by blood to one of your fellows.’

‘What, a Turk or a police officer?’ Yıldız asked.

The old woman laughed. ‘Why, both, you stupid boy!’ she said, flashing him what once must have been a very attractive grin. ‘Mustafa, or Samsun as he is known here, has a cousin in your police force.’

‘Oh? And?’

‘And so,’ she said, grinning widely at both officers, ‘perhaps I am thinking that Samsun the catamite has perhaps spoken with his cousin, the son of Ayşe Bajraktar, the witch. You may know him, the İkmen boy. Samsun’s relationship with him could explain your presence here now.’

Tepe’s mouth opened unbidden, but he didn’t speak – he was too shocked for that.

İkmen, as was his custom when he was particularly agitated, was smoking furiously.

‘So tell me again,’ he said as he lit the end of a new cigarette off the butt of the old one, ‘this woman, this . . .’

‘Angeliki Vlora, sir,’ Tepe said as he stood very straight in front of his superior’s desk. ‘She said that some person called Samsun is related to you and that your mother, Ayşe Bajraktar—’

‘But I had never even heard of a family called Vlora until yesterday!’ İkmen exploded, then added, more to himself than to Tepe, ‘How this woman knows of my mother I can’t imagine. I mean, I knew all of my mother’s friends, not by name admittedly. Great crowds of Albanian women used to take us children to the hamam . . . Mind you, I suppose Mother did read cards and cast spells for many, many—’

‘She was quite clear on this point, sir,’ Tepe said, feeling the need to cut across İkmen’s self-absorbed musings.

‘Yes, well . . .’ İkmen looked down at his desk with a troubled, almost haunted, expression on his face. When he looked up again, his face had cleared and, although still frowning, he appeared to be himself once more. ‘So you have Engelushjia Berisha down in the cells, Tepe? Is that right?’

‘She bit Yıldız on the neck,’ the young man said. ‘I—’

‘Oh, it’s all right, I do understand,’ İkmen replied and wearily waved his sergeant in the direction of a chair. ‘Sit down, will you, Orhan.’

He did as he was asked.

‘Look, I know that her assault on Yıldız gave you really very little choice but to arrest Miss Berisha, but I did tell you not to intervene.’

‘Well, if you’d told us your informant was a member of your family perhaps we wouldn’t have!’ Tepe answered hotly. ‘Besides, that girl and the Vloras were armed with knives, sir! Serious knives! Somebody was going to get hurt at the very least.’

‘Yes, yes, I appreciate all that, Orhan, but an Albanian blood feud is not a game, you fool! I was given confidential information about these families by an informant you may well have now put in danger.’

‘Oh, come on, sir, that’s hardly fair! Angeliki Vlora knew all about this Samsun person.’

‘She speculated, Tepe! She saw policemen, thought about how we could possibly know about her family and made an educated guess. The Vloras are not obviously connected to the recently bereaved Berishas. The only way we could have known about the family link is if someone told us and the most likely candidate for that is someone connected to Turks in some way!’

‘Well, the cousin of Aliya Berisha is married—’

‘People “in blood”, as they say, do not talk to policeman!’ İkmen banged his first down hard on his desk. ‘No, it would have had to come from someone outside that situation. And because it would seem that every Albanian in the world apparently knows that Samsun and I are cousins, she is the most likely contender.’ Cigarette still in his mouth, İkmen bowed his head and placed his hands on his ears. ‘Oh, Allah!’