Harem (9 page)

‘Very
Midnight Express
,’ she said as she followed Hikmet out of the customs hall and into the arrivals area.

Her husband smiled. ‘I wouldn’t say that too loudly around here,’ he said. Then he caught sight of a small, suited man at the front of the crowd and threw his arms in the air. ‘Vedat!’ he cried.

The man, who was a slightly shorter, more careworn version of the Hollywood star, trotted forward into the huge, crushing embrace that awaited him.

‘Brother!’

‘Vedat, I am . . .’ and then lost for further words, Hikmet did something Kaycee had never seen him do before and burst into tears. Amid copious amounts of water Hikmet kissed his brother loudly and repeatedly on both cheeks, stopping only occasionally to gently wipe tears away from his overflowing eyes. It was, Kaycee felt, about as far removed from the sterile ‘air kissing’ that took place in southern Californian society as you could get. It reminded her of those full-blooded New Orleans funerals of her youth, occasions when the bereaved would drink and kiss and beat their breasts as they gave vent to the gut-wrenching sadness of such events. As a consequence, she rather liked what she was witnessing here.

When Hikmet finally recovered himself he took hold of his wife’s hand once again and, in English, introduced her to his brother. Rather charmingly, Kaycee thought, Vedat Sivas bowed just slightly as he shook her hand and then said, ‘May Allah make you happy. Welcome to İstanbul.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied, ‘that is very sweet.’

And then to Vedat’s surprise, which actually bordered on shock, she kissed him hard on one of his wet cheeks. Hikmet, for some reason that was lost upon Kaycee, found this very amusing and laughed.

The three of them threaded their way through the packed arrivals area and then out into the open air. It was hot, which was pleasing, but less humid than southern California. That was a relief given that Hikmet had said air conditioning was not yet de rigueur here. What was less pleasant and indeed rather disturbing was the smell that seemed to be everywhere. Kaycee couldn’t place it beyond the knowledge that it was unpleasant to her and that it was vaguely organic. But since her husband didn’t seem to be bothered by it, she kept her opinion to herself. They located Vedat’s vehicle in the car park and loaded the luggage into the boot. Although the car was fitted with seatbelts, they didn’t appear to work and so Kaycee resigned herself to placing her trust in the vehicle’s air bags. At Vedat’s suggestion, she sat in the front beside him so that he could point out places of interest as they travelled. The interior of the car, which was a new Volvo, smelt of cigarette smoke and chocolate.

Within minutes they were on the broad Londra Asfaltı highway heading into a city that at first sight looked about as exotic and mysterious as New Jersey. Unless of course you really looked: for the almost totally obscured Ottoman building in the middle of a row of apartment blocks; for the minarets peeping up from behind the shops; for the most beautiful municipal fountains in the world . . . But all of this implied some sort of knowledge which Kaycee didn’t have. It also required a little less speed on the part of the Volvo and its driver. But then as Hikmet observed as he took his first cigarette of the visit out of his brother’s jacket pocket, Vedat, as a Turk, neither knew nor understood how to drive slowly. Allah who decided the fate of every living being would take care of the outcome, whatever the speed one was doing and with or without seatbelts or air bags.

As Hikmet lit up, Kaycee wrinkled her nose in disgust. Not only was he smoking, which was gross in itself, but whatever it was smelt very bad. Unable to contain herself she fanned the smoke away from her face and said, ‘That is so nasty!’

Both men laughed. ‘Ah, but when in Rome, one must do as the Romans do,’ Hikmet said. ‘Is that not the saying?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Well, the same applies to İstanbul.’ He shrugged and leaned forward to give her shoulder a reassuring pat. ‘Before you leave you will be eating sugar, drinking rakı and dancing amongst the traffic like a true Turkish pedestrian.’ He laughed again.

Kaycee didn’t. She was, as she’d said before, prepared to make some concessions while in this country, but if Hi expected her to change her life completely, then he could think again. She turned to Vedat and said, ‘So where’s the best place to get a yoga class?’

Hatice İpek’s bedroom wasn’t dissimilar to the room that Hulya occupied. Her bed, like Hulya’s, was covered with an assortment of soft toys, jeans and jackets were casually strewn about the floor, posters mainly featuring young male singers covered the walls. In every way it was a teenager’s room – with one exception.

It had been Canan, Hatice’s young sister, who had first drawn İkmen’s attention to the stack of exercise books on top of the dead girl’s bureau. Most dated from her high school days: lists of English verbs, historical essays and mathematical calculations. One, however, was much more personal in character. Labelled on the front cover, in a childish hand, ‘My Diary’, it made disturbing reading for any father of a young woman.

Sitting on the chair beside Hatice’s bed, İkmen flicked through the book, stopping at random at what, he soon realised, were typical entries. Frowning, he read:

Another entry, rather closer to the date of Hatice’s death, caught İkmen’s attention because it mentioned Hulya.

Written, İkmen calculated, two weeks before her death, this entry revealed a side of Hatice that neither he nor Hulya knew. Selfish and sexual, Hatice hadn’t just wanted to be an actress, she’d wanted to be a star. And, no doubt encouraged by Hassan Şeker’s reaction to her body, she obviously thought that these people she had somehow come into contact with before her death would help her achieve her ambition. She’d only told Hulya about her opportunity on the eve of her appointment – too late, thankfully, for Hulya to arrange to accompany her. She had told her sister that she had a plan to make their poor little family richer, but she didn’t go into detail. Canan, like her mother, only knew Hatice as the chaste and lovely girl she had always been.

When İkmen felt he had read as much as he could bear, he left the grieving İpek family and paid a brief visit to his own apartment.

Hulya, who hadn’t been back to the pastane since the discovery of Hatice’s body, was at home alone. Unusually, when her father arrived she made him a glass of tea and then threw her arms round his neck.

‘You will find who killed Hatice, won’t you, Dad?’ she said through yet another flood of tears.

İkmen put his arms round her shoulders and drew her towards him. ‘Of course I will,’ he said, as ever keeping the doubts that always assailed his mind at the beginning of an investigation firmly to himself.

‘Uncle Halil phoned this morning, just after you left,’ Hulya said, referring to her father’s elder brother. ‘He’d read about Hatice in the papers because some of the articles mentioned you.’

İkmen gently let go of his daughter’s shoulders and sat down at the kitchen table. ‘What did Uncle Halil want?’

‘Just to let you know he’d read about you.’ Hulya joined her father at the table, wiping the tears from her eyes. ‘I told him that you would find out who killed Hatice and he agreed. He said that if anyone could find out, it would be you.’

İkmen smiled. It was nice to know that his family placed so much confidence in him, but it was also a pressure. And with the added stress that came from the fact that his daughter’s best friend was the victim in this case, life was not going to be easy for a while.

At some point İkmen knew he should discuss Hatice and her behaviour with Hulya rather more fully than he had done so far. But not now. Now he just drank the tea she had prepared for him and, smiling, changed the subject.

‘When I finish work today, I must go to the gold bazaar,’ he said, ‘and beggar us all to buy a coin for Mehmet Süleyman’s son.’

A look that only the most keen-eyed parent could detect passed across Hulya’s face; it brought a slight flush to her cheeks. ‘Did you have any particular shop in mind?’ she asked as she looked not at her father now but at the wall behind his head.

İkmen, ever the tease, mentioned first the place that did not employ the young man she was sweet on, but when he saw her face drop he relented and told her the truth.

‘I will go and see old Mr Lazar,’ he said, naming the goldsmith he knew best and also the one that employed his old colleague Balthazar Cohen’s son Berekiah – the boy his daughter liked. ‘You can come with me if you want,’ he added. ‘Lazar always gives me credit, but I could still do with someone to control my spending.’

Hulya, still not looking at her father’s face, shrugged. ‘If you think I can help you.’

‘Yes. Yes, I do,’ he said and watched the quick rush of excitement send a shiver down his daughter’s slim spine. He could remember feeling like that himself. In fact he had felt just so excited the last time he and Fatma had slept together, the night before she left to go to Antalya. Grey-haired, overweight and tortured by varicose veins, Fatma İkmen was nevertheless still a beautiful, passionate woman and Çetin adored her. He was, he felt, an extremely lucky man.

‘Then of course I’ll help you,’ his daughter answered, as she yet again flung her arms around her father’s neck. ‘Shall I meet you there or will you come home first and pick me up?’

‘I’ll come and get you first,’ İkmen said. ‘So make sure that you’re ready.’

‘Yes.’

And then Hulya lapsed into silence, her eyes glazed. She was, İkmen thought, probably trying to decide which outfit was the best to wear for the occasion – mulling over what might most impress a young Jewish boy. And although he knew that his wife, who was religious, would disagree with him, İkmen inwardly wished his daughter and the object of her desire well. After all, Berekiah Cohen was a very nice young man who, unlike his crippled father – or maybe because of him – treated all women with great respect. So different from the men who had raped Hatice İpek – and also unlike the outwardly benign Hassan Şeker. Bad men all. Men a father would not want his daughter to even look at.

When Hikmet Sivas made his name as Ali Bey in the Hollywood of the 1960s, one of the first things he did was buy a grand house back home in İstanbul. A native of the working-class Asian district of Haydarpaşa, once furnished with dollars, Hikmet had chosen to stay on that side of the city, albeit in the more salubrious suburb of Kandıllı.

As he now explained to Kaycee, the house that he had bought at that time had mainly been purchased to fulfil the dreams and ambitions of his mother. She was the person to whom, after all, he owed everything. Widowed at twenty-five when his father, a railway worker, died in an accident, Gülnüş Sivas had even done hard physical labour, men’s work, to support her three children and to enable her handsome Hikmet to get the education he needed. Now dead, she of course never knew that while the English lessons she slaved for were of great value to her son, what he did first on cheap and greasy casting couches and, more importantly, later in Las Vegas casinos was far more pertinent to what he became than his language skills. Not that he alluded to any of that now. Kaycee wanted to know what his house was like and so they talked about that.

His house, or yalı, as Bosphorus villas are called, was now lived in and retained by his brother Vedat and elder sister Hale. The yalı, which was the traditional rose-red kind, even possessed that elegant embellishment the cumba, or large bay window, which overhung the water and gave the light in the living area a sparkling, luminous quality. The business he had to conduct here in İstanbul meant he would have to leave Kaycee in the yalı for some considerable time by herself, so he trusted she would find all the features – the pools and ponds and antiques – of some interest. At the very least, out in Kandıllı she would be spared the smell of old İstanbul, that hard, subterranean tang of elderly, overworked sewers, sour cisterns and dusty Byzantine tunnels. Not that she had mentioned the smell, but Hikmet had seen by the expression on her face that she’d experienced it as soon as they arrived.

Vedat, who so far had managed to keep up a reasonable, if nervous, commentary on the subject of buildings and streets of interest, turned off the main Yeniçeriler Caddesi just after the Mosque of Sultan Beyazıt. This part of the city, which is actually called Beyazıt, is both cultured and raffish at the same time. As well as encompassing the İstanbul University complex, it boasts several imperial mosques and excellent libraries. Side by side with this, however, are teeming streets of uncertain cleanliness where businesses both openly suspect and of a more subtly ‘dodgy’ nature survive. Here, for all the world to see, those from Chechnya, Georgia and other now impoverished ex-Soviet republics ply their trade in just about anything, including their large-boned blonde-haired women. These females, the ‘Natashas’ as they are known locally, are only slightly less obvious than the businesses themselves which openly advertise their wares in Cyrillic characters.