‘Yes, I appreciate that, but this village will fracture once the truth is known, Çetin,’ Menşure said. ‘Fingers will be pointed and unless someone makes sure that proper evidence is collected, DNA or whatever it is, then someone could end up getting hurt or worse. They do their best in Nevşehir, but they don’t have your level of sophistication . . .’
‘Or my budget,’ İkmen said with a sigh. ‘Menşure, I cannot tell the police in Nevşehir how to do their job! They will do their best with what they have available to them. They will make decisions they feel are appropriate.’
‘Some of them make decisions in line with how much money certain people are willing to pay them. The police are poor here, Çetin. Even you are wealthy in comparison.’
‘Menşure, I can’t get involved with this!’ İkmen stood up and threw his arms wildly into the air. ‘I have no power in Cappadocia! And anyway, I need to get back to my own life. Fatma is alone and, as you have so rightly said, I need to at least try to put Alison behind me now. I need to accept, maybe, that I will never know the truth about her. But I think I have to do that at home.’
‘Well, then, we’ll all have to live with the possibility that we’ll never know who really killed Aysu Alkaya, won’t we? Innocent people will have to deal with malicious whisperings, pointing fingers and knocks on their doors at midnight! I thought of you immediately that body was discovered. I thought about the English girl and how desperate you have been to learn the truth about her. I’ve kept your secret for many years despite my own misgivings. You could at least repay my thoughtfulness.’
İkmen lost his temper. How dare she try to effectively blackmail him like this! ‘You could have told me the body wasn’t Alison’s before I even got on that bus! You knew and you didn’t call me, Menşure!’ he cried. ‘That is very manipulative, you know!’
She stood up and walked towards him. She was almost a whole head taller and for a moment İkmen thought that she might just shout him down. But in fact, when she spoke, she used a very gentle tone: ‘Just talk to Haldun Alkaya, Çetin,’ she said. ‘Please.’
İkmen sighed and then sat back down again with his chin in his hands. Well, what an unusual day this had turned out to be! No sleep, no Alison and now Menşure was begging for something from another human being. He took his gaze away from her face and looked out at the fairy chimney across the road. A woman wearing a long coloured headscarf was pulling a goat up a flight of outside steps into what İkmen knew was, traditionally, the family room in houses like this. What on earth was she going to do with a goat up there? And then he realised that he couldn’t possibly know the answer to that question. This was, after all, rural Turkey, out among the chimneys where peris laughed and djinn danced and where anything and everything was possible. For just a very small moment he felt a tingle of excitement.
Quickly, before he changed his mind, he looked up at his cousin and said, ‘All right. I’ll talk to this Alkaya man but I’m promising nothing beyond that. Understand that, Menşure? Nothing.’
‘I understand,’ she said with a smile.
‘And if I am staying, I may as well make some inquiries about Alison,’ İkmen continued. ‘After all, if I am to move on, I do have to know that the past is really behind me. I mean, what if she’s living in some tiny hamlet hereabouts?’
Menşure viewed her cousin narrowly. ‘I think it’s unlikely,’ she said. ‘But if you must then you must.’
It had been a long day and what Mehmet Süleyman really wanted to do was go home and go to bed. But curiosity had got the better of him. And so here he was now, in the lee of a tall, brooding building belching steam from a rough steel chimney pipe, surrounded by several furtive-looking men.
When he had finished with Duruşan Efe, he’d decided to go on and visit the peeper’s first victim who lived in Kumkapı above his uncle’s restaurant overlooking the Sea of Marmara. Small and terrified of almost anything one could name, Şevket Tezer had appeared before Süleyman shaking almost as much as he had when he’d first seen the peeper. It had seemed almost cruel to ask this lad any more questions, but Süleyman had done it anyway. He’d also told the boy he knew he was gay. Şevket cried by way of reply. Yes, İzzet Melik had been right about at least these two boys plus Ali Ceylan, who had woken to find the peeper actually masturbating in his room. They were all, at the very least, ‘interested’ in men and they had all mentioned two places that they all had in common. This, the Saray Hamam, tucked away amid the vertiginous and seedy streets of Karaköy, was one of them.
As Süleyman looked up at the forbidding black bulk of the hamam he wondered at why he’d never noticed this place before. He had, after all, lived in Karaköy for a number of years with his old colleague Balthazar Cohen when his first marriage to his cousin Zuleika had come to an end. A voracious appreciator of women with no morals, Cohen had quickly shown Süleyman all of the local whore houses, pavyons and gazinos that the district had to offer, but he’d never shown him this. Perhaps Cohen didn’t know that this place even existed. One could be forgiven for overlooking such an ugly structure and men, after all, had never been to Balthazar’s taste in any shape or form. There had been a time when he had suspected his friend Mehmet Süleyman of such practices, when the latter had, indeed, been young and painfully repressed. But that was a long time ago and Süleyman was now both a father and an erstwhile lover of his wife and, at times, of other women too. So this was a whole new world . . .
As he leaned up against the shuttered doorway of the hardware store opposite, he watched as the men around the hamam conformed to what seemed to be a standard routine. This started with hanging around looking as if one didn’t know or even care where one was, perhaps accompanied by the lighting of a cigarette, either from one’s own or another’s lighter. Moving closer to the building and sometimes to other men in the vicinity then ensued, followed by a final dash to the main entrance at the side of the great, brooding structure.
Süleyman, now with a lighted cigarette of his own, watched it all. The eye contact, the almost imperceptible pout of the lips, the bolder holding up of the OK sign made with the thumb and index finger which, in this society had another, more directly sexual meaning.
‘Trying to decide what to do?’
Süleyman turned quickly to find himself looking at a very good-looking man of about his own age. Expensively dressed, he smoked, like Süleyman’s father, his cigarettes through a long, metal holder.
Süleyman smiled and said, ‘Yes.’
‘Well, I think you’ll find a very . . . diverting group of people inside,’ the man said. ‘I think many might really take to you.’
‘Oh.’
The man had a very sensual mouth that smiled easily and eyes that, Süleyman noticed, gazed quickly up and down his body with practised intensity.
‘But it’s up to you,’ the man said with a shrug. ‘It’s always ultimately up to the individual, isn’t it?’
And then he made his way forward towards the building, his thick dark overcoat swishing about his tall, elegant form as he moved. What had he been, Süleyman wondered, the man who had come on so casually to the lone policeman? A lawyer? An advertising executive, or someone ‘big’ in PR? Whatever he was he had wanted to get into the hamam and he had wanted to take Süleyman with him. For just a moment, he smiled. He’d only ever briefly entertained thoughts that he might be homosexual and, although he was now sure that he wasn’t, it was still flattering to have been ‘hit on’ by another attractive man.
He was just about to leave when he saw another figure in another doorway about fifty metres down from where he was standing. Silhouetted against a glittering backdrop that featured distant glimpses of the Galata Bridge and the Golden Horn, he was tall, quite still and he was looking intently at the entrance to the hamam. Although he didn’t want to stare, Süleyman tried to keep this unmoving party in at least the periphery of his vision. He would, the policeman imagined, eventually make a move towards the hamam at some point. It was not, as had been very well demonstrated earlier, always easy for these men to visit such places. The desire was obviously evident, but so were the guilt, the shame and any number of other attitudes towards homosexuality that had been drummed into them at home, at school and at work. However, thus far, they all seemed to manage to conquer their fear and to eventually go in – except for this man, seemingly pinned to his doorway. He, like Süleyman himself, just watched.
Time passed. Half an hour, an hour . . . Although he wasn’t actually propositioned, Süleyman had to light a considerable number of cigarettes for people – unlike the watcher in the doorway further down the hill. No one, it seemed, except Süleyman, noticed him. The man, in his turn, watched the policeman back.
‘Mehmet?’
The voice was familiar and so Süleyman turned around quickly towards it. ‘Berekiah!’
It was his friend Balthazar’s son, Berekiah Cohen, Çetin İkmen’s son-in-law.
‘What are you doing here?’ the young man asked.
Süleyman, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t doing anything illegal or immoral, felt his face flush. ‘I’m, er, I’m’ – he lowered his voice so that only Berekiah could hear – ‘I’m working, actually, Berekiah . . .’
‘Oh, right.’ Berekiah smiled. He was young and had a really lovely face – a fact not lost on at least one other man in the vicinity who first smiled and then raised his eyebrows at the young man. Obviously accustomed to this sort of reaction in what was his home district, Berekiah just simply pulled a face and shook his head by way of reply.
‘I’d better let you get on then, Mehmet,’ he said to his friend and then he made his way off in the direction of his father’s apartment.
Süleyman, sweating a little bit now in spite of the cold, gave thanks to Allah that it had only been Berekiah who had observed what he was doing. If it had been the lad’s father, that voracious gossip Balthazar, then a story about Mehmet Süleyman having sex with another man in the street would already have begun to circulate amongst the law enforcement community. Süleyman breathed a sigh of relief and then turned back to look for his mysterious doorway man once again. But there was nothing to be seen. Some time during the course of his short exchange with Berekiah, the man had completely disappeared. As he started to move away, however, the attractive man who had spoken to him earlier emerged from the hamam. Passing Süleyman on his way up to Beyoğlu he smiled, exhibiting many shining teeth as he did so.
Allah alone knew what Menşure had told this poor old man about him! Probably a load of nonsense about how famous and powerful her cousin from İstanbul was. But whatever she had said had made Haldun Alkaya, a man already in grief, almost prostrate with humility and respect.
Even as a child on holiday with his parents, İkmen had never really had much to do with the really poor villagers. His uncle and aunt were wealthy and his father, whose forebears had originated from Cappadocia, had friends in the region who were, again, well off and educated. Places like Haldun Alkaya’s semi-derelict chimney house were extremely alien. Halfway up one of the steep hills that led out of the village towards the road to Nevşehir, Alkaya’s place consisted of just one conical chimney surrounded by a courtyard, the walls of which were topped with bundles of twigs. Usually chimneys, although at the heart of an individual’s property, made up only part of the Cappadocian’s home. Nearby caves would sometimes be utilised and for centuries people had built attractive stone houses on to the front or backs of existing chimneys. But that presupposed the occupants had money. Haldun Alkaya with his spare, two-room chimney lit only by the light from candles and his wood fire, was not one of them.
‘The only thing I had, the only thing I have ever had, was my daughter,’ the old man said as he lit his hand-rolled cigarette with a piece of paper dipped into the fire. ‘I accepted she was dead long ago, Çetin Bey. But still it is hard. Allah’s plan for us is sometimes difficult to bear.’
‘Yes.’
There were no chairs, only those saddle seats, the more ornate varieties of which were frequently sold to charmed tourists. Old ‘real’ ones like these were, however, far from charming to a middle-aged İstanbullu with a rather spare behind. The thing was hard and hideously uncomfortable.
‘Menşure Hanım has told me something about your daughter and the circumstances surrounding her disappearance,’ İkmen said, ‘so can you tell me, Haldun Bey, why she married Ziya Kahraman? I understand she had feelings for a boy of her own age, that he had feelings for her and that you knew about this.’
‘I did.’ The old man smiled, sadly. His face, like so many of the old, really hardworking peasants, was deeply lined and, in spite of the autumn weather, as brown as the earth. ‘Kemalettin Senar was a lovely young boy in those days,’ he said. ‘He had eyes for my Aysu and she had eyes for him. But I am a poor man, Çetin Bey, a widower since the day my little girl was born. Her little dowry was of no interest to Nalan Senar. When I spoke to her of it she made it very clear that she thought her son could do a lot better than Aysu. Her own people were very bad stock but she married money and so she thought she was something. As it has turned out, Kemalettin remains unmarried to this day, so maybe Allah has punished Nalan’s arrogance and greed.’
İkmen smiled. The majority of the villagers were religious, which was not something he was unaccustomed to, but, nevertheless, it wasn’t something that he was necessarily comfortable with.
‘When Aysu found out that Kemalettin’s mother was against their union, she was very upset,’ the old man said. ‘In fact, for a time, I feared that she and the boy might try to run away together. I kept her inside. But then that wasn’t really in Aysu’s nature. She loved me. She would never have left me. She was a good girl.’
Haldun Alkaya paused for a moment while he dried the tears that had flooded into his eyes on the cuffs of his fraying shirt.