Hotel Bosphorus (16 page)

“I don't know if you've noticed, but there's something strange about this business,” I said. “The writer of the book you had made into a script is very famous. The book's constantly on the best-seller list; it's very widely read and has been translated into over thirty languages. However, your director… I mean your former director, Kurt Müller, is a fourth-rate cinema man with no decent film to his name; he was just a good businessman. That bothered me right from the start. Why was Kurt Müller chosen to be the director?”

“That's how it was. He was very famous. Ali, our lawyer, said so. You must know that too because we spoke to Ali this evening. We'd asked Yusuf about Müller, but didn't get involved after that. Yusuf went to and from Germany setting up all the agreements. We have too much work and not enough time. We can't do everything, so we left it to Yusuf. We had nothing to do with it.”

“OK, but what did Yusuf say? Why that film script and that director?”

“It was because of that Italian guy that we went into this business. The German production company had bought the film and was looking for a Turkish partner.”

“Do you mean they bought the film rights to the book?” I asked.

“Yes, yes. Something like that. Yusuf thought it would be a good start for our company. That director wasn't yet on the scene. We don't really know anything about it; you should talk to Yusuf,” he said. Then he leaned his head over his left shoulder and turned to the right as if wondering why he was saying all this.

“Hey, I've forgotten how we got onto this.”

I'd noticed before that when people, especially men, started talking to me, they'd open up and say more than they should, all sorts of things they shouldn't say. But this time, I'd surpassed myself. Every man who set foot in my sitting room seemed to end up singing like a nightingale.

“Forget about Yusuf and who the murderer is. That kind of thing isn't for you. You look after your own business. If anything bad happened to you, we wouldn't like it either,” he said, frowning.

He rose and held out his hand.

“Thank you for the whisky. Sorry for disturbing you. Don't hesitate to call if you need anything.” He took a visiting card from his pocket and pressed it into my hand. I didn't know that gangland bosses had visiting cards.

“Write my mobile number down,” he said. “It's my private number. Only two or three colleagues have it.” He took a chunky black Mont Blanc fountain pen from his jacket pocket and handed it to me.

As Mesut Mumcu moved towards the door to leave, I said, “I want to meet Yusuf.”

He turned towards me with one eyebrow raised.

“Yeah, of course you can meet him. But I don't know what Yakut would say.” We were standing opposite each other in the entrance hall where the light lit up his whole face. He scrutinized me with a carnal gaze and a half-smile that did not detract from his seriousness.

I drew back slightly and covered my mouth with my hand so that he would not smell the garlic on my breath. “I'm serious,” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. “So are we,” he said. “Come to our beach house in the morning and we'll talk there. You'll see Yusuf, and we'll see you.”

As he turned towards the stairs, I whispered behind him, “What time? Where's your beach house? How will I find it?”

“We'll send the boys to fetch you. Nothing to worry about. Don't worry, my darling,” he said finally, and disappeared down the stairs.

 

After Mesut Mumcu had left, I didn't even attempt to go to bed. I wouldn't have been able to sleep anyway. I watched the ice melting in the glass and downed another glass of whisky. Even if I couldn't find the murderer, nobody could say I'd been wasting my time after the mass of admiration I had received over the last week from the police and
mafiosi
. Instead of being greeted by cats rubbing around my legs, like most single women living in Cihangir, I had gangland bosses waiting for me in my sitting room. In that respect, my situation was definitely better than theirs. Given the choice, which woman would prefer a cat to a man? Of course, I mean a
choice in the real sense, not the choice between a pale, hairless, male German ecologist and a cat.

Despite the pink sleeping pill, I only managed to go to sleep as dawn was breaking.

 

I was woken up by the doorbell.

Opening one eye, I saw that the clock by my bed showed ten fifty. Whoever was at the door had stuck his finger on my bell and was making it ring continuously. Summoning all my willpower, I managed to get my body out of bed. I made my way towards the door and leaned out of the sitting-room window to see who it was. It was a man I didn't know.

“Who do you want?” I called out.

“Miss Kati,” he said.

“That's me,” I said.

“Mr Mumcu sent me to fetch you. He's waiting,” he said.

“Wonderful,” I thought, as if I had planned to get up early to get ready. Once again, I'd turned off the alarm in the hope of sleeping late.

“Will you wait a moment? I'm just coming,” I called out, and without wasting any more time ran straight to my bedroom. Running about inside the apartment saves quite a lot of time. After all, my apartment is about four times the size of one in Germany.

It took me ten minutes to decide what to wear, and at least the same to do my make-up. By the time I was finally ready and downstairs, I thought the man would have tired of waiting and left, but I was wrong. The driver must have passed a severe tolerance test as a result of hanging around outside hair salons for the women in Mesut's life, because he didn't seem at all perturbed
at having to wait twenty minutes in the middle of the street. With a politeness that was at odds with his large frame and his face, scarred from left cheek to eyebrow, he opened the rear door of the brand-new Jaguar that was standing in front of my apartment building and invited me to get in.

Inside the car, a device, which was clearly expensive judging from the volume of its sound, was thumping out a folk song:

Before switching on the engine, he shouted to make himself heard, “Do you mind the music, miss?”

“Perhaps you could turn it down a little,” I shouted back.

There was no further conversation. We passed some guards standing in front of the awesome outer gate of a villa in Yeniköy and drew to a halt in the garden. I jumped out without waiting for the driver to open the door. A woman was standing on the steps leading up to the house. She was wearing a maid's uniform of white miniskirt and white blouse. Seeing me alight from the car, she hopped down the steps towards me like a little bird, speaking in Turkish with an almost incomprehensibly thick accent. “Welcome Miss Kati, Mr Mumcu is waiting for you,” she said.

Apart from her accent, it was crystal clear that she had come from some remote corner of Russia or the Balkans to work in Istanbul. However, her Turkish was not so much like that of a Slav but more like… I couldn't work out what it reminded me of.

“Where is Mr Mumcu?”

“Please,” she said, indicating the door at the top of the steps.

As I ascended the marble steps behind the woman, I looked around carefully. A man was standing guard at each corner of the garden, thus making the security hut by the front door superfluous. I wondered if the nearby house where former Prime Minister Tansu Çiller lived was as tightly guarded as this.

As we went through the front door, the woman raised her right hand and said, “This way, madam, please.”

I thought she must have memorized the five or six words of Turkish needed to show people around. A person capable of constructing a sentence in any language would never speak with such a strange accent. I put aside the questions that preyed on my mind about which language she used to communicate with Mesut and his men, and followed her.

The sitting room we entered made my apartment, whose size usually made me feel so proud, seem like the kitchen of a tiny shack. I couldn't help but exclaim, “Wow!”

“Extraordinary, isn't it?” said the woman.

It was interesting that someone who had memorized half a dozen words should have the word “extraordinary” in their vocabulary.

“It really is extraordinary. You're living in paradise here. Gazing out at the Bosphorus like this adds years to
your life. And the longer you live here the happier you must be,” I said as quickly as possible. My reason for making these fatuous remarks was to check whether or not the woman understood me.

“I've been here for two years, ma'am,” she said, clearly understanding every word I said.

“Two years here, but you'd been in Turkey before that, hadn't you?” I asked. The way I'd phrased that last sentence couldn't have been understood by someone with only two years of Turkish.

“No, no. I came from Bulgaria and this is my first job here.”

“OK, but where did you learn Turkish?” I asked in amazement, and with some envy.

“I speak Turkish with the other people who work here. You just pick it up after a while,” she said, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to learn a language by ear. “But Turkish is really difficult,” she was polite enough to add.

I realized that the few words the woman had said were not spoken with a Slavic accent, but with the accent of the Kurds who had taught her Turkish. My friend Mithat, who is from Hakkâri, says that the strongest regional accents are found among Kurds living in cities with large numbers of local Turks, such as Diyarbakir, where they learn Turkish in the street as children. On the other hand, Hakkâri Kurds learn to speak Turkish without any accent because they go to regional schools attended by the children of middle-class Turkish civil servants who are posted to the area. Clearly, most of the Kurds in the house came from Diyarbakir or its surrounding areas.

“Sit down, and I'll let Mr Mumcu know,” said the woman. I asked if I could wait on the veranda, before she moved away with surprising agility.

I was gazing at the opposite shore when Mesut entered, wearing a white bathrobe. “Well, this is an honour indeed,” he cried. He lit a cigar and we shook hands.

“We'll just get dressed and be right back. We always have a dip in the pool as soon as we get up, winter or summer, whatever the weather. That is of course if we're not in jail.” He laughed loudly. I laughed heartily too. In this world, one could never be sure what would happen or why.

“Have you had breakfast?” I shook my head indicating “no”. “Good, we'll have it together. We'll tell them to prepare it. But we'll be in the sun here, so we'll have it round the other side.”

He moved away and gave orders to the two men who shadowed him everywhere. Clearly Mesut and I had the same life rhythm. We both got up towards midday.

The moment that thought passed through my mind, I jumped up from my seat. The shop? What about the shop? I'd forgotten to telephone Pelin. With some difficulty, I pushed back the iron chair and started to make my way into the sitting room, when a large well-built man appeared from nowhere and blocked my path.

“Yes, madam?”

“I… I want to make a telephone call… Or I did want to…” I said in confusion. I realized that I had been under surveillance.

“Please sit down, I'll bring a telephone to you, madam,” he said.

I turned back and sat down. There was a strange contradiction between these burly henchmen and the smart, tastefully furnished house with its servants and antiques. Of course, Mesut himself was a man of contradictions, but this was excessive. I wondered whether Mesut had ordered the henchman to keep me under observation. People didn't seem to act on their own initiative very much in this world. If not directly by Mesut, he'd obviously been ordered to keep an eye on me by someone of authority. What were they thinking? Did they think I'd make off with the family silver?

Barely a moment had passed before the blond henchman was standing to attention next to me with a cordless telephone in his hand.

“You may go,” I said.

“Make your call,” he said.

With the bodyguard standing over me, I called Pelin. I confess it did occur to me to have a long conversation with my friend Cindy in Australia, as some sort of revenge. Why did this man insist on standing right next to me?

When Mesut appeared in the doorway that opened from the sitting room onto the veranda, standing in his beige linen trousers and fuchsia-and-white-striped shirt, I heaved a sigh of relief that I would be saved from the bodyguard at my side. If anyone had said twenty-four hours ago that I would feel relief at seeing Mesut in front of me, I would have said, “You're out of your mind.” Life is certainly full of surprises.

“Let's go round the other side,” he said, guiding me with one hand round my waist.

“Yusuf is coming too, we've sent for him. You can ask him everything you want to know,” he said. The way he
spoke suggested that he was used to meeting a woman's every demand, and not just demands for fur coats. As he spoke, his hand slipped a bit below my waist.

“But first, promise me that you won't put yourself in any danger,” he added.

“Promise,” I said, happily. “I won't put myself in any danger.” Even my mother had never showed this much interest in my welfare.

When Yusuf arrived, we were wiping our mouths with starched table napkins, having finished our breakfast accompanied by four bodyguards who, with their backs towards us, appeared to be gazing continually at some distant spot on the horizon. We bowed to each other like people from the Far East. Yusuf, speaking in English, asked Mesut how he was. Mesut made a hand movement indicating that he had no time for such niceties and gestured towards me.