Baksheesh (13 page)

“I'm managing,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means just that.”

“Are you still upset?”

“Did you call to ask me that?”

“We'll talk another time if you like. See you later.”

He hung up without even waiting for me to say goodbye. Actually, I had no intention of saying goodbye; if only he had waited. I called back.

“You hung up on me.”

“Kati, let's talk later, when we're both feeling a bit more positive.” It was pretty obvious he meant “let's talk when
you're
feeling a bit more positive”, wasn't it?

“I was feeling very positive until a moment ago. Has it never occurred to you that it might be
you
who makes me negative?”

“In that case, there's no point in us talking any more.”

“Yes, I agree. Goodbye.” This time, it was me who hung up.

I bit on my thumb to fight back the tears and counted silently up to ten. If I'd counted to a thousand, it would have made no difference. Anyway, chanting numbers is all very boring. Count sheep for insomnia, count numbers for nerves, count, count, count…

I went to the café cloakroom and washed my face. Gazing at the mirror, I asked my reflection why I'd hung up, as if my mouth was a decision-making entity completely separate from the rest of me. I got no answer, of course.

I suddenly felt a heaviness come over me, as if I'd gained thirty kilos. My weight changes constantly, depending on my psychological state. I felt like a sprinter trying to run with tightly bound ankles. I wasn't even a sporty type, so I could barely move my feet. But I needed to pull myself together because Batuhan was about to arrive at any moment. Also, there was no alternative. I couldn't go home and crawl under a blanket because Fatma Hanım was trilling out her songs behind the curtains there. And I couldn't go to Lale. You can't go crying over silly love problems to a woman who relies on antidepressants to keep herself going.

When Batuhan arrived, no one would have guessed that I'd had to work so hard to pull myself together. Getting older isn't always such a bad thing. Any woman with a shred of experience about surviving the pain of separation knows that the next time it happens she will ultimately survive again. That knowledge lies deep in the subconscious. But why couldn't the unspecified time indicated by “ultimately” have been “right now”? It's not that simple, of course. Unfortunately not. One man told me he lived his life as a series of compartments and simply closed the door behind him when he moved from one compartment to another. He had explained this with great pride. If I had such a theory, I'm not sure I'd have boasted about it to all and sundry. In fact,
what managed to pull me together when Batuhan arrived was neither the “right now” nor the compartment theory. I'd had a moment of enlightenment. I'd realized that the most important thing was that Selim hadn't given up before I had. That was hugely significant, don't you think?

I might have grown out of many things, but I wasn't too old for these little relationship games.

Batuhan arrived looking serious and in no mood for light-hearted banter. Thank God! I wasn't either.

“Do you know how much blood there is inside a human body?” he asked.

I hadn't the slightest idea.

“How much?”

“Four to four and a half litres.”

“So?” I said.

“I was just thinking. I wonder how much blood the old lady lost. It looked to me as if her body was completely drained. There was so much of it.”

Was there really enough blood to shock a burly murder-squad officer?

Batuhan continued to explain, but seemed to be talking to himself.

“He threw the murder weapon down next to the corpse. Maybe that will provide a trail that leads us to the killer. But I doubt it. Nowadays, even kids know all about fingerprints. Why would he leave the stiletto behind? Probably didn't want to take it with him because it was covered in blood. Yet he would have been covered with blood himself, especially his hands. The front door was open. He must have realized there was no one else at home. At any rate, nobody came when the woman cried out. If anyone had been at home, then… But it's not just a question of fingerprints, several other things have to be investigated. If we were to find fingerprints on the stiletto right away, then I'd say
the perpetrator was mentally deficient. But if we don't find fingerprints, then it's very odd. It couldn't be premeditated murder. An old woman like that…” he muttered to himself, as people do when they're trying to put their thoughts in order.

“Perhaps he wiped the stiletto before throwing it away,” I said.

“What did you say?” said Batuhan, turning to me with a startled look.

“I said maybe he wiped the prints off the stiletto before throwing it down.”

“It didn't look as if it had been wiped. The stiletto handle still had blood on it. If it had been wiped, the blood traces would have disappeared with the fingerprints. Did you know that just a single eyelash can lead us to a murderer these days? The man in the street may not know that much about advances in forensic science, but fingerprints… Who knows? Maybe there are still people out there who don't know about them. We've no idea what sort of person we're dealing with here. Kuledibi is hardly Manhattan.”

So even the police looked down on Kuledibi residents. I needed to look into this before deciding to move there.

“Couldn't the killer have worn gloves?”

“Of course he could. I didn't say he couldn't, did I? But in that case, our original theory doesn't hold. Why would a robber go around wearing gloves in order to take two bracelets from the arm of an old lady? That is, of course, if his original intention had been to steal the bracelets. There was no sign of force on the woman's arm. No sign that he tried and failed to remove the bracelets. Superficially, at least. Anyway, the bracelets were loose enough to come off easily. The woman had cancer. She'd lost a lot of weight recently. Or so the daughter-in-law has just been telling us. The killer could have removed the bracelets without even touching the woman if he'd wanted to. There's something odd about this.”

“So, what conclusion should we draw from all this?”

“We think the son and daughter-in-law probably did it. Or one of them acting alone.”

That's how the police mind works. If someone is killed, they go straight for the nearest and dearest. If the victim is a woman they accuse the husband, and if it's a man they accuse the wife. They probably even have statistics to back this up. However, as a good crime-fiction devotee, I always suspect the involvement of a secret lover or someone from a murky past. I'm rarely wrong.

I certainly didn't subscribe to the police theory that if an old woman is murdered, the killer is most likely to be her son or daughter-in-law. My suspicions were leading me in a completely different direction.

Actually, I never got tired of talking to Batuhan, especially about murder. I certainly didn't want him to stop talking about the Osman murder. Yes, I know, I'd only just decided to stop sticking my nose into things that didn't concern me, but listening to a murder-squad officer fishing around in the dark for ideas didn't really constitute being nosy, did it?

“There's something I don't understand,” I said, changing the subject. “How can a person die from a bullet wound in the leg? In films, people get shot in the leg as a threat. Then they appear in the next scene hobbling around with a wounded leg, not in a graveyard surrounded by a crowd of weeping mourners.”

He took hold of my leg to demonstrate. At least I hoped that was the reason.

“An artery runs from here to here. This artery was lacerated by the bullet. If he'd been shot in the knee, or anywhere else in the leg, there would have been no danger, as you said.”

“Was the shot deliberately aimed at that point?”

“You mean the thigh?”

“Did the killer deliberately shoot at the thigh?”

“There's no way of knowing. I think it was an unfortunate accident. The infamous uncle is unlikely to know that much about anatomy. Anyway, now it's your turn. Why did you talk to Özcan?”

“Well, I was a suspect in this murder case, wasn't I? So I had to collect evidence to clear my name.”

“If I'd known you were going to take it so seriously, I wouldn't have played that joke on you. You made a statement at the station, didn't you?”

“I did. And that's why I was sure you weren't playing a joke on me.”

“What did you sign yourself as on the statement? Because you seem to have become an amateur detective.”

“Nobody told me who or what I was supposed to be while I was there.”

“What do you mean? It would have been at the top of the statement that you read and signed. It must have said ‘suspect'.”

“So I was a suspect, was I?”

He repeated what I said, apparently amused by it. I guess he thought I was flirting.

“Why do you always put down policemen and lawyers?” he said. “Do you think you're the only person in this country with any brains? If a poor car-park owner gets killed, especially by a gun, do you really think we're going to arrest an unassuming proprietress of a bookshop two streets away?”

“Don't you dare try to tell me how brilliant the police are,” I said, my voice possibly sounding sterner than intended. I've never wanted to be described as unassuming. “I have serious doubts about the brilliance of the police, especially the Turkish police,” I continued. “Only last year, you arrested a scrawny shoe-shine boy for the murder of a burly businessman, didn't you? So, why not repeat this success by arresting ‘the proprietress of a bookshop two streets away'.”

His face reddened. He'd never been the pale and pretty type, but now he looked darker than usual. I hardly ever read the newspapers, yet even I could list at least ten cases of scandalous police behaviour. But it was no use attacking an individual police officer. You had to go after the institution. As far as I was concerned, Batuhan was not a true representative of the institution to which he belonged.

There was a silence. I found myself fervently wishing for one of our phones to ring, just to break the silence. At times like that, my mother would say, “An angel has just passed over us.” If there were such an angel of silence, I'm certain it would never come within a hundred miles of Istanbul. No angel would be able to tolerate the noise of this city. Anyway, it wasn't that kind of silence.

I lit a cigarette.

“Was the gun used to shoot Osman licensed?”

“Our work isn't usually that easy,” he said, mockingly. “We have to use our heads occasionally.”

“But you must know the sort of gun it was from the bullet.”

“We do.”

“What was it?”

“What do you intend to do if I tell you?”

I shrugged my shoulders. Indeed, what did I intend to do?

“We found a 9mm bullet lodged in the wall. It had been fired from a revolver. So, having learnt that, what are you going to do now? Did you understand what I just said anyway?”

“No, I didn't,” I said. But the fact that I hadn't understood didn't mean I wouldn't find a way of understanding. My brain might have failed to register any information about guns since childhood, but I was still an avid crime-fiction devotee.

 

Yet again, Batuhan had become annoyed and stormed off. Our relationship seemed to get more nauseating by the day. I had no idea why he was still hanging around. In fact, until our encounter
the previous Friday, I had thought I'd got shot of him because he hadn't called me for over a year. Yet when we met up again, we had carried on exactly where we left off. Was there anything left of the eternal love, sexual attraction, passion or whatever his feelings had been for me?

I was forty-four years old and still couldn't claim to understand men. Why they do what they do, or not, as the case may be, made no sense to me whatsoever. In fact, I'd more or less given up trying to understand. I often wondered if women became lesbians because they'd wearied of men, or asexual if they'd had enough of both men and women. But then, how would people become necrophiles?

No, that was too much, even for me.

 

I have to say that if you have a mobile phone, you do expect friends to keep in touch with you on it. Istanbul's streets were brimming with people whose phones rang constantly. So people certainly used these devices. I seemed to be the only person whose friends still behaved as if I didn't own a mobile and insisted on calling me on my landline, either at home or at work. When I arrived at the shop, Pelin handed me a long list of people who had phoned. The first person I called was Lale, to ask why she refused to contact me on my mobile.

“You can't talk easily on a mobile,” she said.

“I think you're just being stingy. Go on, admit it.”

“Darling, you're the German, not me. I'm told that in your language you say ‘suitably priced' instead of ‘cheap'. Nothing is ever cheap according to Germans. Isn't that right?”

“Of course, darling, you're right,” I said, in a voice that made it clear I was humouring her.

Normally, I never missed an opportunity to squabble with Lale, but I had too much on my mind for that. Apparently, Lale also had plenty on her mind, because she didn't elaborate further.

“Shall we go out for a meal this evening? We need to make up for Friday evening,” she said.

“Are you inviting me?” I asked.

“Oh no. We'll do it German style. Each pays for what they eat.”