Hotel Bosphorus (15 page)

“Well how do you say it?” I said, instantly realizing that the Turkish should have been ‘one in five people'. “Yes, I translated it. So what? Turks translate lots of things from English. For instance, did the expression ‘Take care' always exist in Turkish? I translate from German, not English. Anyway, I'm bored with your attitude; you sound like a headmistress, psychiatrist or Chairman of the Turkish Language Association,” I said. She could tease me about anything, apart from my Turkish!

I went downstairs to look for my bag and car keys, and Lale came running after me like a naughty child.

 

Regret is futile, and broken hearts are not mended with a couple of sweet words.

 

I found a parking space right in front of the door to my apartment block. I had slept until midday so I wasn't
feeling the least bit tired, but my head was swimming from the smell of garlic I was exuding and from the bickering with Lale. All I wanted was to drink gallons of water, brush my teeth and take a warm shower.

The moment I opened my apartment door, I sensed something odd had happened. It was my habit to double-lock the door, but that night the door opened after one turn of the key.

“I obviously forgot to double-lock when I went out this morning. It must have been because of the migraine,” I mused, and thought no more of it.

I took off my sandals in the entrance hall and walked barefoot on the cold stone floor to the kitchen where I drank a large glass of water. In Istanbul we have to buy bottled drinking water because Istanbul tap water contains enough bacteria and microbes to kill an ox. I can't complain about having to carry water from the corner shop to my apartment because the shop boy does that, but I really miss turning on the tap for a glass of water.

Without going into the front room, I headed straight for the rear part of the apartment, where my bedroom and Fofo's, the bathroom and my study were. I undressed in front of the bathroom mirror and got into the shower.

Regretting that I'd thrown my favourite pink shorts and Donald Duck T-shirt into the laundry basket that morning, I put on a flowered dress and covered my shoulders with a towel to absorb the drips from my hair.

I then went into the front living room to watch television. If, instead of going into the living room, I'd gone straight to my bedroom, counted a few sheep and
gone to sleep, the poor man wouldn't have woken me up. He would have simply left and that meeting would never have happened. However, I went into the living room.

 

The bright light from the entrance hall made the living room seem dark and I didn't see the man sitting in the armchair. People usually only see what they expect to see. However, when I turned on the lamp that stood on the table between the sofa and the armchair, I couldn't help but see him. He was right in front of my nose.

“I wonder if he'll disappear if I close my eyes?” I admit that was the thought that seized me, despite it resembling a line out of fiction. But the fact that Mesut Mumcu was waiting for me in my living room was as absurd as fiction.

He was sitting in my armchair, looking much more impressive than his photograph in that morning's newspaper. He was both impressive and smartly dressed. He wore a linen suit in the colour they call Turkish-Parliament blue, a mauve shirt and black moccasins. He had short black hair, large thick lips and a self-confidence born of his ability to create fearful respect in those around him. I have to admit that until ten years ago, men like him, whose ego and presence filled the room, were immensely attractive to me. However, in recent years, as the wrinkles around the eyes have increased, I've begun to seek out different qualities in men; perhaps it's the wisdom of age or something. I'm sure that you, my dear readers, know what I mean.

Apparently worried that I'd cry out in fear, Mesut Mumcu took the trouble to stand up, point towards the sofa and say, “Do sit down.” I wasn't really used to
anyone showing me hospitality in my own home and in my confusion I came out with a stupid remark.

“So, it was first come, first served for the armchair this evening,” I said. I pulled away the towel that I'd put over my shoulders to catch the drips from my hair and spread it over the arm of the sofa. I was trying to maintain at least a little composure, despite my hair looking as though it had been licked by a cat. Mesut studied me hard, starting with my shoulders, dwelling at length on my bra-less breasts, and roaming down to my bordeaux-coloured toenails. Finally, he leaned his head to one side, indicating his pleasure and approval of what he saw.

I had recently read an article saying that in the Muslim world the home is considered a sacred place and is untouchable. For instance in Iran, the Revolutionary Guards would only attack a house if they were sure someone had been murdered in there, which meant everyone could drink alcohol and fornicate at home. Clearly Mesut Mumcu knew nothing about this culture of the home being sacred in the Muslim world. He was probably also unaware that he would have to sweep up the salt he had wasted.

“How did you open the door?” I asked.

“The boys opened it,” he said. He wasn't the sort to let such minor details bother him. But I'd sensed that before he'd said anything.

I even wondered if Mumcu's boys had kept the parking space in front of the apartment free for me.

“We couldn't find an ashtray,” he said.

It was clearly intended as a favour to me that, having been unable to find an ashtray, they had not smoked. They might have smoked and stubbed out their cigarette
butts on my beautiful Hereke carpet. However, my problem now was about there being a second person in the apartment rather than about my carpet. It meant someone else was somewhere in the darkness of the other half of the sitting room.

Determined to keep calm at all costs, I said, “There's an ashtray next to the sink in the kitchen.” I spoke in a voice that could be heard at the other end of the room.

Nobody moved.

I'd had enough and wasn't prepared to put up with any more. “I'm going to have a whisky. Would you like one?” I asked, again in a loud voice.

“With ice,” said Mesut Mumcu. The other person didn't make a sound.

When I returned from the kitchen with the whiskies, two iced and one with ice and soda, and an ashtray, Mesut Mumcu was comfortably settled in my armchair with his legs crossed. The other man or woman, whoever it was, was still nowhere to be seen.

“It was you on the telephone yesterday, wasn't it?” he said.

“Yes,” I replied. He was referring to my call from Petra's room.

“I understand you saw Ali today.” He meant Fofo's former lover.

“Yeah,” I said.

“And I understand you spoke to a fellow from the tribe yesterday.”

“Who? Who did I speak to?” This time I really didn't understand.

“From our tribe. What's his name? He works for a newspaper.”

He meant the crime reporter I saw the previous day.

“Now I know who you mean. Yes, I met him,” I said. I remembered how he had written my name and telephone number on the back of a cigarette packet.

Before drinking his whisky, he lifted up his glass saying, “May our worst days be like this.”

“Not mine,” I said. Apart from finding the parking space in front of the door, nothing very good had happened to me that day. I wondered whether I should tell the other person to come and get his whisky, but decided against it. He would if he wanted to.

Mesut was offended, being the sensitive person he was.

“It was very unseemly for us to enter your home like this. You're a guest in our country and what we did is unacceptable. We feel ashamed about that. But we can't turn up in the daytime and ring the bell, nor can we come to the bookshop to buy a book. Everyone would laugh at us. And, don't get me wrong, it wouldn't be good for you either. This was the best way.”

He could have been right. It would probably not have been good for me to have been seen consorting with a gangland boss so soon after a policeman. Anyway, it was unlikely they'd read my diary while they were waiting since, to save money, they had just sat there in the dark without even switching on the lights.

“OK, we'll suppose this was the best way of seeing me, but why do you need to see me?” I said, without giving any clue that I was a strong woman who was used to danger.

“Why are you getting mixed up in this business?”

“Which business?”

“This murder business.”

“To find the murderer, that's why.”

“Finding murderers is police business. All this isn't right for you. You could find yourself the target of some stray bullet, anything might happen. Don't get me wrong. We've clinked glasses together. Nothing will happen to you because of us. I swear to God that we'd never lay a finger on a woman, but you never know what will happen in this world.”

“So, do you think someone from ‘this world' is behind the murder? Or was Müller killed to settle some score?” I'd taken courage from what he said and started throwing a series of questions at him.

“Who it was and why it happened, we don't know either. It might have been one of our enemies, it might have been someone trying to muscle in on our patch. We have a lot of enemies in this world. Many didn't want us released and would like us back inside. It could've been anyone. We won't have any peace until the murderer is found,” he said. He'd become nervous and he put his right hand in his pocket to pull out some amber worry beads.

“You mean until the police find the murderer,” I said. Either he did not understand, or he ignored what I said. He continued to twiddle his worry beads with agile fingers.

“We're looking for the murderer as well. Whoever it is, he certainly didn't kill the man as a favour to us. Look, who do the police think of first? Us. Has anyone thought why we would want to kill the director of a film that we'd invested in? Are we such idiots that we'd bring the man here from Germany and then kill him? Have our arms shrunk or something? What do they think we are? We'd have killed him in Germany, wouldn't we?”

That was one point of view of course.

“Why did you go into this film business?” I asked, ignoring, or trying to ignore, all this talk about killing and having people killed.

“We went into it because my sister Yakut's husband wanted it, and we said he could look after it.” So we'd finally got round to the brother-in-law Yusuf, who had been mentioned so often over the last few days. But first, there was something else I needed to sort out.

“When you say ‘we', who do you mean?” I asked. I was ready to enjoy some sort of cat-and-mouse game trying to get this out of him.

“Us?”

“Well, you keep on saying things like, ‘We said he could look after it'. Who do you mean by ‘we'?” I kept my eyes fixed on the darkness.

However, Mesut waved his hand at his chest and said, “Well… us.”

“Hah!” I said. He was using the plural whenever he referred to himself. While referring to me as
sen
, meaning “thou”, he referred to himself as “we”. It was a good way for a feudal lord to put a distance between himself and his villagers.

I poured the other whisky I'd prepared into my glass, spilling half of it on the coffee table, took a large sip and reminded him where we'd got to so that he would continue speaking.

“You said you went into this business for Yakut's husband,” I said, going straight to the point. I wasn't going to stand on ceremony with him any more.

“Yakut's husband!?…” He frowned for a moment as if trying to remember the man's name. “Hah! Yusuf! Yusuf! Yakut's husband became a Muslim and took the name Yusuf. His real name is German.”

When he uttered the word German, he remembered that I too was German. He scrutinized me from top to toe again.

“You're German, but you speak Turkish so well,” he said. I admit I was gradually beginning to like Mesut.

“Our Yusuf hasn't managed to learn it. In fact, he and Yakut always speak German at home. We keep telling her, ‘Let the man learn Turkish'. But no. Our sister has good German and French. Our older brother Maksut, bless him, he's a progressive type. He said, ‘I'm going to educate this girl.' Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“It's more important for girls to study,” I said. That's what my hairdresser's sixteen-year-old apprentice always says when I go for a blow-dry. He takes pride in working so that his sister can go to school.

“Of course, it's more important,” he agreed. “Men do the hard work and earn the bread, so what are the girls to do? Are they supposed to become… excuse me, but are they supposed to become whores?”

After all those years, I now understood what my hairdresser's apprentice meant when he said, “Miss, it's more important for girls to go to school.” What strange ideas these Turks and Kurds have.

“We have property. Our brothers aren't dependent on anyone. But you never know what God has in store. You must look to the future and never rely on the past,” he said.

“Yusuf…” I said again, wanting to return to the main subject. There'd been enough coffee-house philosophy.

“Yusuf?” he asked in surprise, obviously thinking we'd finished with that subject. Wasn't it possible to talk to someone about the same thing for even ten minutes? He remembered where we'd got to and continued.

“Yusuf had business dealings in Germany. When he came here… Well, he couldn't learn the language, so what could the kid do? We didn't want him working with Yakut. You can't have a man working alongside his wife. That wouldn't do at all. So, we offered to do some business with the Germans. Of course it had to be something suitable for Yusuf. The kid plays the piano and so on, did you know that? He's interested in the arts. It was he who suggested this film-production business, and we accepted. If only we'd known what was going to happen!” He shook his head in disgust. “Disasters appear where you least expect them.”