Hotel Bosphorus (13 page)

Batuhan went out into the street to talk.

“They've released Mesut Mumcu. The journalist brigade made such a thing of it… but it turned out to be a false lead,” he said, when he came back inside.

“What were they expecting?”

“They thought Mesut Mumcu had had Müller killed and they expected Mumcu to confess the moment he was arrested. They were just living in hope but, after all these years, they weren't going to be handed Mesut on a plate. Unfortunately, we didn't have reason enough to keep the guy inside even for a couple of nights. If he'd said, ‘I had him killed', then what? What prosecutor would base a case on that?”

I was hearing this for the first time and immediately added it to my notebook of legal nuggets.

“But you think there was a love angle to this murder and the murderer was a woman.”

“Even if the murderer wasn't a woman…” He was less sure about this since our conversation of the previous evening. His face had turned a purplish-red colour; he gave up trying to moderate his language just because he was in the company of a woman.

“Tell me, what hit man would think of killing someone with a hair-dryer? Come on, think about it, who would bother with that? Never mind having to
take along extension leads, never mind having to find a hair-dryer… What idiot would do that? He'd pull out a gun, empty the magazine into the bastard's chest, finished, done with. And he'd go home to the arms of his lover.”

I lit the first cigarette of the day. What he said was reasonable despite the way he said it.

“I'm not saying anything against anyone. Just because Müller was put inside for drugs when he was young, the lads think he was doing a bit of business. They'll pursue that line of inquiry now and make out the prick was doing business with the Mumcu brothers. I ask you, were the bastards going to get the film crew to carry white powder stuffed in their pockets?”

As well as his face going red, his eyes were now bulging. I can't bear it when people get irate and spray spittle in my face.

“Never mind all that,” I said. “Let's have a drink.”

“Yeah of course, let's have a drink! Have you any
rakı
?”

“I was thinking of cola or something.”

“In that case, let's drink cola, my darling.”

 

As I took the cola bottle out of the refrigerator, I could sense him standing behind me. He moved aside my hair with one hand, kissed the nape of my neck and undid the belt of my shorts. He slipped his hand deep inside my knickers. When he took his hand out, he turned my face and body towards him and, gazing into my eyes, undid the zip of his trousers. His dark, swollen penis lay against my belly as if it were a gun with which he was threatening me, as if when his gun fired, my intestines would explode.

The cola bottle was still in my hand, like a link to the real world where at any moment a crime-fiction addict might come through the door, a tourist might choose my shop as the best place to ask for directions, or a friend might turn up having left work early and tired of wandering the streets in the heat.

For all those reasons, when he tried to take the bottle from my hand, I wouldn't give it to him. There, behind the orange-green-and-blue-striped curtain that separated the kitchen from the shop, I stood with my shorts and knickers around my ankles, holding on to my cola bottle like a child clutching a toy truck as he waits to receive a scolding for having wet himself.

His penis glistened like shot silk, now purple, now wine-coloured.

He was shaking his head from side to side. “You don't want me,” he said, more as a statement of fact than a question.

That was the sort of thing people say after forty years of marriage, something a woman might say to her husband before taking a sip of whisky from the glass on the bedside table and asking, “Is there somebody else?” When he said, “No way,” she'd insist, “I know there's another woman, blonde and much younger than me. I've seen you with her.” As he saw his wife gulp down one whisky after another, he'd realize this was the opportunity he'd been waiting for. He'd take a deep breath and say, “Yes, there is someone else. I'm in love with her.” The woman, her hair dishevelled, would pour another whisky and the curtain would come down. Any female spectator would then turn angrily on her husband, while a male would set off home to his crumpled, familiar sheets with dreams of a young blonde lover.

“You don't want me,” he said again. This time more distantly, not to me but to himself, as if he was trying to see himself through my eyes and work out why I didn't want him, as if it was possible to find an instant solution to this “lack of desire”.

I put the bottle that I'd been holding tight to my bosom on the little table that served as a kitchen surface.

“It's a bit presumptuous to say I don't want you,” I said, as if it wasn't me talking but someone else.

As I uttered this odd sentence, I realized his penis was now whitish-pink, paler than the rest of his body.

“What does presumptuous mean?” he asked, as he put it back in his trousers.

We both looked down at my shorts and knickers lying around my ankles. He fixed his eyes on my legs as if the answer to his question was written on my knees.

In my tiny kitchen, it took barely one step to reach my side. He dressed me with an intimate tenderness that only a man who felt genuine love would display.

If it had been anyone other than him, if he hadn't been a policeman, or if my strongest prejudice had not been against the police, I don't know how I would have felt. But at that moment, I just felt as though I had been punched in the stomach.

Once Batuhan had left to walk down to Karaköy, I decided the day would be pretty unsatisfactory unless I spoke to Ali Vardar. After dithering for about ten minutes, I finally left the shop at six o'clock, hoping the man would still be at his office.

I stood in front of the building in Asmalımescit Street, where I often used to meet Fofo, but the door was locked. Ali Vardar's name did not appear on any of the doorbells. I thought I must be mistaken so I went to
look at some other buildings. His name was on none of them, so I returned to the first building and pressed a bell that belonged to one of the law firms there. The man who answered said that Ali Vardar had moved to another office two months ago; if the hall porter didn't have the new address, I should ring the manager's bell.

It was six thirty-five when I sank into the armchair opposite the secretary's desk in Ali Vardar's new Gümüşsuyu office. “I bet there's a wonderful view from here,” I thought. The secretary had disappeared inside the office to “ask him a favour” at my insistence, because apparently Mr Vardar did not see anyone without an appointment.

With his hands in the air as if in prayer Muslim style, and wearing a busily-coloured paisley-design cravat, Ali Vardar waltzed in crying out, “Kati, what a surprise!”

“Seeing me might be something of a bad surprise, Ali,” I said.

He pretended not to hear. Those men are like that; they pretend not to hear anything that disturbs them. Ali put his hand between my shoulder blades and pushed me firmly into his office. “What would you like to drink?” he asked.

When he asked this, I felt for the first time a twinge of sympathy towards this disagreeable man.

“Something strong. Have you got any whisky?”

“Of course I have. Ice?”

“Ice and soda, if you have both,” I said. In this heat, I needed it.

As Ali went out to get the whisky, I asked if I could use the telephone. I had phoned Lale before leaving the shop, but her secretary had said she was in a meeting and not taking calls. I hoped the meeting was now over.

Hearing Lale's voice filled me with pleasure. I told her I needed her advice about something and would be at her place by nine o'clock at the latest. I felt better for having spoken to her.

Ali returned with two glasses. One of them was filled almost to the brim with whisky, ice and soda, the other with an orange-coloured liquid.

Unable to contain my curiosity, I asked what he was drinking.

“Campari Orange. I had it last year for the first time when I was in Italy. Do you want to try it?” He pushed the glass across the table towards me.

“Thanks, but I know it,” I said.

Actually, I loved the way these new crazes caught on, like the Montgolfiers' hot-air balloons.

“I must say, it's a drink that suits your new image,” I said.

“I doubt if you came here to discuss drinks with me,” he retorted.

“I saw your picture in the papers this morning. That's why I came.”

“Picture? What picture?” He wasn't pretending.

“It was taken with Mesut Mumcu, somewhere near Fethiye. I don't know when.”

“My photo was taken? I'm so busy I never look at the papers. I'll tell the girl to get some.” He picked up the phone and called his secretary on the internal line.

After putting the phone down, he said, “I don't get the connection between my picture being in the papers and your being here.”

“I'm interested in a murder and Mesut Mumcu's name came up.”

“What do you mean you're ‘interested in a murder'?”

“My friend Petra Vogel is the star of
A Thousand and One Nights in the Harem
, which is to be filmed in Istanbul.”

“Do they suspect her now?”

I fobbed him off with a fatuous argument.

“No. But she happened to witness certain events. It's aroused my curiosity and I want to find out about this murder.”

“I'm not the person you need to see.”

“Don't talk like that, Ali. I just want you to tell me what you know, that's all.”

“The only thing I know is that Mesut Mumcu had no connection with it.”

“I didn't say he had any connection with it anyway. Whoever heard of a gangland boss ordering his men to throw a hair-dryer into a bathtub to kill someone? And no hired killer would have such imagination. I don't suspect Mesut Mumcu either. What I find suspicious is that Mumcu handed such a costly project to someone as inadequate as Müller. The screenplay was written by one of the best writers of this century, yet the director was to be Müller. Don't you think there's something strange about that?”

“Who wrote the film script?”

“Giacomo Donetti.”

“Ah,” he said. I felt sure that, despite his holiday in Italy last summer, he had no idea who Donetti was. But we weren't competing in a general knowledge quiz.

“I think this Donetti story is a coincidence.” He pronounced the name of the great Donetti in such a way that I had to bite my lip to stop myself from laughing. “I doubt if Mesut would be capable of finding a famous scriptwriter.” He stopped. “He set up the production company for Yusuf, his brother-in-law, so
maybe Yusuf found this writer. Or maybe the German partners engaged him. But I can assure you that Mesut had nothing to do with it.”

“Fine, but your client has been investing a lot of money in the film. Why would he squander his money on Müller? Surely he must have done his research and weighed up Müller against Donetti and Petra Vogel? After all he is a businessman of sorts, and he undoubtedly wants to make money.”

Ali murmured to himself, “Businessman… businessman…” I felt as if I must have been the first person ever to call a gangland boss a businessman, yet I'd had no intention of straining either Turkish definitions or the intelligence of a Turkish lawyer.

“Yes, you could call him a businessman,” he said finally.

Again, I couldn't resist it.

“If you don't think the term ‘businessman' is right for this man, why have you taken on his case, for God's sake?”

“He may not be a businessman, but everyone has the right to a defence,” he said without hesitation.

It was a good line, but one that would only impress a dusty academic. I didn't bother to ask my second question.

“What I meant was, whether he's a businessman or not, he's in it to make money, isn't he? Like everyone else.”

“I understand what you're trying to say. You're saying that, if he wanted to make money with this film, why work with someone like Müller? OK, how do you know that he didn't make money from Müller's films? Maybe his films made a lot of money.”

I admit I'd made a logical mistake, which Ali had spotted straight away. In the film business, as in all businesses, there was no connection between making a profitable product and a good one.

“You're right. Fine, but why do you think they bought the film rights to Donetti's book? Surely there's something odd there at least.”

“I'm sure he has something to say on the matter but, as I said, I'm not the person to talk to about these matters.”

“You're right,” I repeated, like the agreeable sort of person I am. I immediately moved on to my second set of questions.

“Why did the police arrest your client and why did they release him? I can at least talk to you about that, can't I?”

“Did they arrest and release him? Where did you hear he'd been released?”

I forced down the mouthful I'd just taken from my glass, trying to find a plausible reason for my knowing about Mumcu's release.

“Well, I thought he'd been released, but has he in fact?”

“Yes, he was released this afternoon, a few hours ago.” Ali hadn't suspected anything. Actually, he'd never have become a lawyer if his imagination had been fertile enough to conjure up visions of me flirting with policemen.

“Why did they release him?”