‘That said, he was a contradictory old bugger,’ Flower continued. ‘As soon as he got some “darling” or “honey” or whatever and was floridly in love, he’d have to treat himself to a casual tart, apparently just for the hell of it.’
‘He’d go to İstiklal for some al fresco sex?’
‘Oh no, he did that all the time anyway,’ Flower said. ‘No, he’d actually pick up or meet some boy or young man, take him home and let him fuck him. It really excited him. He told me once that he often came before any of them even got anywhere near his arse. Fancy that.’
‘Indeed.’ But Süleyman knew exactly what Flower was talking about, exactly how Hamid İdiz was and why. He himself was married, he had Gonca, and yet it still wasn’t enough. There were still girls and women, faceless entities in retrospect, all the time. Women he’d flattered and sometimes paid, just for their looks or their ability to make him come. ‘Do you know who any of these men are?’ The twenty-five-year-old man the
kapıcı
had said had come to the building on the day that Hamid İdiz died was still unaccounted for.
‘No. Hamid and I were not close. They were just men, boys, whatever. This city is full of queers, darling. You know that.’
Süleyman did. He also knew that quite a lot of them, particularly in the more working-class areas of the city, were very closeted. Finding out the names of Hamid İdiz’s conquests was going to be difficult. But then the forensic evidence was still being assessed, and provided whoever had killed Hamid İdiz had a criminal record, there was just a chance he could be traced from that.
‘So you couldn’t point me in any particular direction?’ Süleyman asked.
‘No. Or rather I could do, but . . .’ Flower threw his hands in the air in a theatrical gesture of frustration and said, ‘Oh, take me to the café, I am gasping for a coffee!’
He began walking very quickly towards the exit.
Süleyman, in hot pursuit, caught hold of his shoulder. ‘Flower . . .’
Flower stopped and put his hands on his hips, a very acid expression on his face. ‘Yes, Inspector?’
‘What do you mean?
Can
you point me in the right direction or
not
?’
Through the Vivaldi, the echoing sound of a woman’s laughter bounced off the damp, vaulted walls.
Flower looked suddenly nervous. ‘Look, you are a policeman and I know that you protect such people and—’
‘What? Who? What people?’
But Flower remained silent. People were walking towards them now, and Süleyman was aware that he must not lose this moment, whatever it may or may not mean. ‘Flower,’ he said, ‘imagine I’m not a policeman if it helps. But whether I am or not, you can tell me anything with absolutely no danger to yourself. I know you laugh at what you call my Ottoman ways, but as an Ottoman gentleman I give you my word that this will go no further.’
There was a beat, and then Flower sighed and said, ‘You should be looking at the religious types. Those who persecute the queers. Mehmet Bey, this sort of crime is still happening. Look to those bastards for Hamid İdiz’s killer; I think you will find him amongst their number.’
In spite of the fact that most Fatih people, if pressed, would have expressed support for Cahit Seyhan and what remained of his family, not many actually wanted to engage with him or his relations. He’d lost a daughter in a suspicious fire and a son to what some said was suicide. There was something wrong with the Seyhan family and no amount of outward piety was managing to sway the good people of Fatih. When İsmail Yıldız went to his local grocery store, everyone was talking about it.
‘Kenan Seyhan was a sodomite,’ he heard one man say. ‘And so to take his own life could be considered an honourable act. Given his nature.’
‘Suicide is never right,’ another older man said gravely. ‘To end one’s own life without allowing Allah to determine one’s natural span is an abomination.’
A young lad, little more than a boy, who stood at the older man’s side said, ‘The daughter was bad too. Girls who die like that have always known men.’
Whether the men knew that İsmail was the brother of a police officer or not, they stopped their conversation as soon as they saw him. He didn’t know any of them and so busied himself deciding what he was going to prepare for dinner that night. Eventually he decided that he would roast some aubergines with garlic and olive oil. The men left just as he took the ingredients up to Rafik Bey at the counter.
‘The aubergines are good today,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘I think that you and your brother will be pleasantly surprised.’
‘I hope so.’
He handed over a ten-lire note and waited for his change.
‘Oh, that work I was telling you about,’ Rafik Bey said as he took a handful of notes out of the till and handed them to İsmail, ‘I spoke to someone who said he would be interested in discussing it with you. Can you be at the Gül Mosque for sunset
adhan
?’
‘Yes.’ Although İsmail was unsure. In spite of the fact that he would be meeting this stranger at a mosque, he was still a stranger.
‘He wants to meet you at the mosque because he is a good person,’ Rafik Bey said, as if reading İsmail’s mind. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
İsmail took his change with a frown on his face. All this seemed a bit too cloak-and-dagger for him, the brother – if reluctantly – of a police officer. ‘How will I know this man?’ he asked. ‘How will I find him?’
Rafik Bey smiled and tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially. ‘He will know you,’ he said. ‘Have no fear of that.’
It was halfway through the afternoon when Çetin İkmen got back to his office. The days were beginning to heat up a little now and he was sweating.
‘Well,’ he said to Ayşe Farsakoğlu as he slumped down behind his desk and lit a cigarette, ‘what a deeply unpleasant morning that was.’
Ayşe smiled. Her superior had spent the morning, to use his own words, ‘down among the sub-gangster wannabes, the pitiful gangland fan-boys’. He had a sad little contact in the form of a crippled man-boy called Ali, who had reached the dizzy heights of playing court jester to the Tayfun Ergin gang. Basically he got rebuffed by the various women other members of the gang dated, and Tayfun and his heavies laughed. In return for this humiliation, Ali was given food and lodging above one of the bars that Tayfun protected. Although hardly the brightest star in the sky, Ali knew what was happening to him and was not forgiving. His occasional involvement with İkmen was his way of getting his own back.
‘I met a friend of Ali’s,’ İkmen said, ‘a boy of at most nineteen who apparently amuses members of the Karabey gang up in Edirnekapı with his hilarious impression of a human ashtray.’
Ayşe winced.
‘Believe me, I tried to take the boy to hospital, but he wouldn’t have it. Still glamoured, it would seem, by old Hakan Karabey and his whores, his jewels and his explosions of mindless violence,’ İkmen said gloomily. ‘Why do these kids still want lives like this? We shot Hakan’s son last autumn. The shock of it killed his wife. What’s to like?’
‘The whores, the jewels and the mindless violence, I imagine, sir,’ Ayşe replied. ‘Little boys with big guns.’
‘Yes, little boys who will be stopped by our big boys – in the end.’
Ayşe smiled. One of the things she really admired about İkmen was his unfailing belief in the power of good. Evil might have its day, but good would triumph in the end. At least that was what he always said to her. ‘So did you find anything out?’ she asked.
‘I found out that Ali’s friend rather approves of honour killings, like his boss Hakan Karabey,’ İkmen said. ‘But I don’t think he has actually performed one. I don’t think he’s mentally capable. Ali, on the other hand, is against such killings and was very open to the idea of keeping his ear to the ground amongst his fellow gangster fans. He said he’d never heard of or even imagined such a thing as payment for honour killing. He said that Tayfun certainly wouldn’t bother himself with such a venture, and I am inclined to believe him.’
‘But on one level Ali loves Tayfun . . .’
‘Yes, I know, but the amount of money that could ruin someone like Burhan Öz or Cahit Seyhan is just about what Tayfun spends on bottled water,’ İkmen said. ‘No, I think that if what we are looking at is a business, then it is small scale. It’s fan-boys, baby gangsters . . .’
‘Religious nutcases? I don’t mean people in al-Qaeda. I mean those on single-handed disorganised missions to rid the streets of sin.’
‘But they wouldn’t take money,’ İkmen said. ‘It would destroy their credibility. If indeed anyone is taking money. Oh, of course talking to Ali did also give me a chance to check out Constable Yıldız’s assertion that Tayfun might be moving into Fatih.’
Ayşe lit a cigarette and sat down. ‘And is he?’
‘It seems he is putting out feelers,’ İkmen said. ‘He’s finding out who controls what and what that business might be worth.’
‘I wonder why he’s bothering with a district that seems to have so little to offer someone like him.’
İkmen sighed. ‘There is money in religion: artefacts, and shops that sell them. There are many coffee houses in Fatih, too. But yes, it is quite limited when you think of what Tayfun does elsewhere. Any news about Burhan Öz?’
‘Kars say that if he is the same Burhan Öz, born 1954, from the village of Gazimurat, then he hasn’t been seen out there for years and neither have his family.’
‘So we will need to access his bank account records,’ İkmen said wearily. ‘He would have got almost nothing for that old car of his, so I imagine that it was the family’s savings that went. The son couldn’t carry on at university and the rent was only partially covered by Burhan’s wages, hence the move. Two thousand lire is all that stands between most middle-class people and complete ruin, and I don’t suppose the Öz family are any different. Do you know if the Seyhans came from the same village?’
‘No, they didn’t,’ Ayşe said. ‘Twenty kilometres away. Out east it might just as well be twenty thousand.’
Chapter 17
Mehmet Süleyman had only been mildly interested in what İzzet Melik had told him about the boys Murad Emin and Ali Reza Zafir. It was unexpected that Ali Reza also worked at the Tulip Nargile Salon and that the two boys seemed to know each other rather better than either of them had let on to the police. But the inspector, so he said, didn’t feel that it actually meant anything.
‘Maybe they didn’t own up to their friendship because it is or was rather more than that,’ he said with a slight twinkle in his eye. İzzet mused upon the fact that everything Süleyman seemed to say had some kind of sexual connotation. That gypsy was ruining him!
‘If you think that the boys need watching, then I have no objection to that,’ he continued. ‘But I don’t want you approaching them. There’s nothing to connect either of them to İdiz’s death and I don’t want their parents getting the idea that we’re harassing their children.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Personally, I still think that there is virtue in trying to pursue Mr İdiz’s admittedly many lovers,’ he said. ‘Although how that might be achieved, I don’t know. With so many men in this city unforthcoming about their sexual preferences, it will be difficult. I’m wondering if we need to put someone on the streets, undercover . . .’
İzzet knew that such an operation would most certainly not involve him, for which he was very grateful. There were, he felt, some virtues in being overweight and ugly. Maybe Süleyman himself would have to do it if no one else would volunteer. In spite of his age, he was pretty enough to be queer.
‘There’s something else too,’ Süleyman said, cutting across İzzet’s thoughts.
‘Sir?’
‘My informant was of the opinion that attacks by religious zealots on the gay community are increasing. Now I don’t know if the figures we have bear this out . . .’
‘Queers don’t always report it when they get beaten up,’ İzzet said.
‘No, they don’t. But some do, and so I’d like to look at those offences and maybe pull in those who have a history of this sort of crime.’
‘You think that a religious type could have killed İdiz?’
‘It’s possible,’ Süleyman said. ‘I mean, I know that Cahit, the father of Hamid Bey’s lover Kenan Seyhan, couldn’t have killed him, in spite of what his son believed, because we now know he was working at the time of İdiz’s death. But that type of religious person is a possibility.’
‘What type, exactly, do you mean?’
‘The type that could well murder a daughter for the sake of honour.’
‘Inspector İkmen still thinks that the Seyhans killed their girl?’
‘Yes, he does,’ Süleyman said. ‘There is a type of person, whatever their religion may be, who takes its tenets to the ultimate extent. Ignorant, without ambition but often secretly envious of others who are successful in the world, they use religion as a reason for their existence and a prop for their own sense of self-importance.’
‘You’re talking about Anatolian villagers,’ İzzet said. Originally from İzmir, Turkey’s third largest city, İzzet gave the lie to his macho-man image by being very much a son of that traditionally cosmopolitan Mediterranean city. Village or small-town Anatolia was not for him.
‘Some of these people would have a rural background,’ yes,’ Süleyman said. ‘But not all. I am not talking about hard-line religio-political fanatics. Not
jihadis
, not al-Qaeda. They’re far too clever to bother with a couple of men kissing behind an antique shop. They play the numbers game and anything less than mass slaughter will not do. I think we are, or may well be, looking for a nasty, hate-filled loner. Could be a neighbour, a local shopkeeper, anyone who has been offended by Hamid İdiz’s presence. He may not ever have even spoken to the man.’
The two of them spent the morning looking at the faces and records of men in two discrete categories: those accused of ‘lewd’ acts and those responsible for attacks on men engaged in such practices. Some they knew and some they did not. At one thirty, Süleyman went out to a prearranged lunch appointment with some officers from the Iraqi police force who were visiting İstanbul, and urged İzzet to stop for a while and eat before he looked at any more records. İzzet did stop, but he didn’t go out to eat. He got in his car and drove over to Tophane and the Tulip Nargile Salon.