A Noble Killing (16 page)

Out in some of the distant villages of Anatolia, where honour killings were sometimes ignored or even approved, the families involved would convene in what some described as ‘councils’. These councils would generally consist of the intended victim’s male relatives (father, grandfather, brothers, uncles) as well as, sometimes, ‘concerned’ friends and neighbours. Women were barred from these proceedings, although evidence existed to suggest that sometimes mothers and sisters knew what was about to take place. Maybe these females just chose not to acknowledge what was happening. Maybe they were simply grateful that they were not in the firing line.

Çetin İkmen rubbed the side of his head to help work away the slight ache that was building up inside, and then switched on his lamp. His wife and children had gone to bed hours ago, leaving him reading the literature that Metin İskender had lent him about honour killing and the connection between the seclusion of women and the sexting phenomenon. A female relative’s chastity was important to these people. In fact, he had to admit, it was important to most men. Even his most liberal Western friends admitted to sneaking feelings of dislike for the boyfriends of their daughters. But that was a world away from actually killing anybody. There was also something deeply worrying and unpleasant about an environment where sexting could flourish. How many young people, he wondered, were involved in that distasteful and desperate practice?

The Rainbow Internet Café had failed to give up any more of Osman Yavuz’s secrets. Even Mehmet Süleyman’s information about the Ford woman and how she had given Gözde Seyhan and Osman Yavuz each other’s telephone numbers wasn’t actually pushing the investigation any further forwards. The Yavuz boy was still out there somewhere, doing who knew what. İkmen, like Süleyman, had no doubt that Mrs Ford had been telling the truth when she said she didn’t know where the boy was. Silly woman! She’d ended up feeling guilty and afraid that she’d be sent to some hellhole jail straight out of a horror movie. And she hadn’t even really done anything wrong! Not really. Someone else had burnt Gözde Seyhan to death, although he was pretty sure that it had been done because of her relationship with Osman Yavuz. What had she said to him during that final call she had made just minutes before her death? Had she known she was about to die? Had he tried to get to her apartment but then, seeing the flames, simply run away?

İkmen didn’t know whether Osman had actually loved Gözde or not. How could he? But if he hadn’t loved her, if he had just been an awkward, geeky sexter, then that was very sad. To die effectively for love, without having actually been loved, was truly tragic. But then how many girls who were killed for ‘honour’ were actually in love? He suspected not many. Honour was about so much more than purity. It was about a family not being able to look their neighbours in the face if their daughter was perceived to be bad in some way. In some places, all a girl had to do to get a reputation was go out of the house! Then it would start. The old and bitter would gossip, the holier-than-thou would sniff and then suddenly that family would not be able to buy food in the grocer’s, or do business in the coffee shop. It was an appalling situation – for everyone. It was also something that had rarely been seen in İstanbul until the mass migration from the countryside that had started at the beginning of the 1980s. Like many İstanbullus, İkmen often found himself conflicted with regard to the Anatolian migrants. On the plus side, they worked hard and did the jobs a lot of the locals would never even have considered. On the minus side, they were not ‘like us’ in any sense. Unlike Mehmet Süleyman, Çetin İkmen was not from any kind of ‘good’ family, but he was still local, and there were profound differences between him and his family and the migrants. That was not, however, to underestimate the latter in any way. Now, ‘they’ had mobile phones, just like everyone else. They had computers, accessed the internet and knew about social networks and interest groups. The city had had its effect upon them too.

And so if the sophisticated city was indeed acting upon people like the Seyhans, whether they liked it or not, in every aspect of their lives, then why not in the sphere of ‘honour’, too? In some parts of İstanbul, it was not difficult to get a girl killed. It was just a question of hard cash and how much you were willing to part with. Recent cases of suspected honour killings involved families that now seemed to be poorer than they had been before. Yet if these families were indeed contracting out their honour killings to others, then who? Established gangsters, both domestic and foreign, were unlikely to bother themselves with such ‘cheap’ work. After all, why kill some little girl for, at most, a couple of thousand lire when a criminal rival or the inconvenient wife of an industrialist could net a quarter of a million US dollars? But then maybe it was just strutting wannabe enforcers who were doing this.

When Süleyman had called him earlier to tell him about Mrs Ford, he’d also said that he was planning to pull in an informant he had who was a rather elderly rent boy on İstiklal Street. The late Hamid İdiz had used such people quite extensively, and there was a chance that the piano teacher’s murderer had been one of them. The character Süleyman called ‘Flower’ would, possibly, have a view on that. İkmen too would have to spread his net wider. Whether any useful information came back from Kars about the Öz family or not, he was going to have to pry around in the seedy world of the small-time enforcers for a while. They would, after all, sell their rivals down the river for sometimes as little as the price of a shot of
raki
. One of them, once, had been Tayfun Ergin.

Süleyman always answered his phone, even if he was off duty and at home. İzzet Melik looked down at his own phone once again and then put it in his pocket. He’d left the Tulip over half an hour ago and had been trying to contact his boss ever since. But to no avail.

İzzet lit a cigarette and blew smoke out on a sigh. Süleyman was, in all probability, with the gypsy woman. It had been a bad day when he’d taken up with her again. If he occasionally picked up a dancer or a tourist, nobody apart from his wife cared, because it never seemed to distract him. He got on with his work with no problem. But with the gypsy, things were different. It was said that she couldn’t keep her hands, or anything else, off him. How flattering that had to be to one’s vanity. And Allah, did the inspector have vanity! İzzet had always liked and admired Süleyman, but he had never been impressed by either the preening regard he gave to his own appearance or his delight at his role as a fantasy figure for women. The sergeant was no prude, but it wasn’t seemly for a police officer to behave like that, and besides, it took Süleyman’s mind, if infrequently, off his job. Hamid İdiz, the music teacher of Şişli, had been murdered, and Süleyman was apparently blithely choosing which lines of inquiry he wanted to pursue. İdiz’s pupils
were
legitimate avenues for exploration. Just because they were children did not exempt them, not as far as İzzet was concerned. And now that he’d seen Murad Emin together with Ali Reza Zafir at the Tulip, he had a nagging feeling that there was more to these boys than had at first met the eye. For a start, they both worked at the Tulip, and so what Ali Reza had told Süleyman about them only meeting for brief words after their music lessons was wrong. Also the boys, when İzzet had seen them, had been exchanging hostile, if muted words. He had no idea what said words might be about, but the look of the two boys together had made him uneasy and he had wanted to tell Süleyman about it.

İzzet tried to call his boss one more time before he just gave up and began to walk towards the Karaköy tram stop. He’d seen the gypsy, Gonca, once and he had to admit that he’d been struck by the force of her presence. Now he imagined his superior with that woman in his arms and it made hi11m scowl.

Everyone knew Flower. Short, middle-aged and fat, with wiry black facial hair, his appearance belied his behaviour, which was frequently beyond what anyone would agree was outrageous. Süleyman’s wife, who had seen him several times over the years in and around İstiklal Street, described him as being ‘as camp as Christmas’. To Süleyman himself, this appellation did seem rather sacrilegious coming from a Christian woman, but he knew what she meant. Flower was someone you met away from other people, in a darkened room. Not that the Yerebatan Saray, the Byzantine cistern underneath the streets of Sultanahmet, was exactly a darkened room. But it was sufficiently anonymous and dimly lit to give both the policeman and his informant a measure of security.

The Yerebatan Saray had been built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in ad 532 to store water for the city during times of drought. A complicated series of pipes and aqueducts, some still extant, ensured that water could be carried to every part of İstanbul. Now a ghostly tourist attraction, where Justinian’s great water tank with its soaring classical columns could be viewed against a background of classical music and softly phasing coloured lights, it was a place that Flower’s compatriots in Beyoğlu would not often care to go.

‘This is all very well for the odd tourist pick-up,’ he said as he wrinkled his nose in very obvious disgust, ‘but one does not generally troll across the Golden Horn. Not enough backpackers, too many imams.’

‘The district has changed,’ Süleyman said. ‘Although there are still hotels and pubs, and I think you will find that backpackers can still be found.’

‘Oh, I’m sure they can,’ Flower replied. ‘Although all the ones I’ve come across in recent years seem to be on cultural or religious quests.’

‘Not so much sex and drugs.’

‘Sadly not.’ They walked down one of the many wooden walkways that criss-crossed over the metre or so of water that remained in the cistern. Carp made fat by all the scraps from the little café at the entrance to the cistern swam languidly beneath their feet. Then the music began, not loudly or intrusively, although it prompted Flower to say, ‘Why is it always Vivaldi in these places?’

Süleyman, amused, shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. But we must talk about Hamid İdiz.’

They continued on as if moving towards the two columns in the north-west corner of the cistern, known as the Medusas. Each was supported by a large carved head at its base, providing a very good site for numerous tourist photo opportunities. Süleyman and Flower turned away from this and went right into a long corridor of columns lit by phasing lights of blue, red, yellow and green. Once they had gone about as far away from other people as they could get, Flower stopped, leaned against one of the handrails and looked down into the water below.

‘Hamid İdiz gave the impression of being a very joyful queer,’ he said. ‘I liked him. He’d sashay up İstiklal dressed to kill and he wouldn’t give a damn. He’d size up all the trade in the back streets and then make his pick and pay whatever was asked without any argument. Being from that class, your class, Mehmet Bey, he felt that haggling was beneath him.’

‘Did he like young boys or—’

‘Mehmet Bey, dear,’ Flower said with obvious forced patience, ‘no one wants to be tossed off by a grandfather. Well, there are some. If that wasn’t the case, I’d have no business. But Hamid liked young men, and what he paid for was some hand relief or a bit of oral. A furtive fumble in a disused shop doorway, that sort of thing. It turned him on.’

‘Did he ever have any trouble with any of the boys?’

‘Well of course he did! Who doesn’t?’ Flower laughed. ‘We’ve all been ripped off, dear. But I don’t think that Hamid İdiz was any more sinned against than the rest of us. He liked to drink at the Kaktus and would eat at Rejans if he could. He wasn’t one for gay clubs and bars. As I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, it all goes off in the toilets and half the punters are trannies.’ He wrinkled his nose in disgust again. ‘Hamid wasn’t into that. Al fresco fiddling was his thing. That and the big romances he had from time to time.’

‘With whom?’

Flower shrugged. ‘Who knows? We weren’t joined at the hip, Hamid and me. All I know is that every so often there would be “someone”. Usually a younger man, sometimes a lot younger, and sometimes a bit on the rough side too.’

‘Do you know if he liked violent men?’ There was no evidence for this in the piano teacher’s diary, but then maybe that wasn’t really his thing and he left it out. Some people who loved a violent partner were, on one level, ashamed of it.

‘I don’t know,’ Flower said. ‘I doubt it. Hamid was very particular. I can’t imagine him dealing well with black eyes or blood up the walls. What I do know is that he was a bitch in bed.’

Süleyman thought he knew what this meant but he asked Flower about it anyway.

‘He liked to be fucked,’ Flower said baldly. ‘And you and I both know that there are plenty of takers, of all types, for that sort of action, don’t we?’

There was more than a little twinkle in Flower’s eye. Süleyman looked down into the carp-filled water below. The fish were so used to humans, they followed them around and literally begged for food. Of course he knew about passive gay men and how they were regarded. At least since Ottoman times, they had been viewed as the only true ‘sodomites.’ The men who penetrated them were different. They were real men, not homosexual at all. They could use a man like Hamid İdiz and go home to their wives or girlfriends with absolutely no anxieties about their sexuality. They, so hundreds of years of tradition dictated, were entirely heterosexual. It wasn’t something that Süleyman actually agreed with, but he said, ‘Yes. Yes, we all know about that.’

‘In Hamid’s mind, these men he had relationships with were his romances,’ Flower said. ‘He called them “darling” and “baby” and other nauseating things.’

Süleyman thought about Kenan Seyhan, and wondered whether with him, Hamid İdiz had at last found his one true love. In part at least, Hamid’s death had caused Kenan to take his own life.

Some German-speaking women began to walk towards them, clanking as they moved with numerous cameras and tripods. Süleyman and Flower went still further to the right and into a series of columns only touched on one side by the lights.