Hotel Bosphorus (6 page)

In my view, it was not only strange but unnecessary for an inspector to be as polite as that. That morning at Ortaköy Police Station, when I had spoken to a policeman, whose name I'd forgotten but was undoubtedly ordinary, he had addressed me as “madam”, from which I inferred the following: the European Union should stand firm because Turkey has set its sights on becoming a member and is taking decisive steps in that direction. That was why the Turkish police were showing respect for human rights.

“Did you mean me?” I said. I jerked my head towards Petra and added, “You're probably looking for my friend Petra.”

Petra was still sitting in my rocking chair, rocking away as if she hadn't a care in the world.

The mixture of surprise and delight on Inspector Önal's face suggested that he hadn't noticed Petra until I mentioned her. However, he tried not to show it.

He glanced at the notebook that he took from his pocket, “Your friend Petra… Yes, I'm looking for Petra Vogel,” he said. This time, I pointed towards Petra. Recai was still standing outside the shop window following what was going on. To make him go away, I ordered three teas.

Inspector Önal knew English, of course. I would have eaten my hat if I'd heard any other policeman utter a single word in any foreign language, but I was not at
all surprised that he knew English. Who would have expected anything less from him?

Petra's English always used to be bad, and it still was. In fact, Petra had no talent for languages. Even her German was bad. Because Petra and Inspector Önal had no common language, I was going to have to do more than merely listen to their conversation.

Petra repeated almost word for word what she had told me ten minutes before, no more and no less. Inspector Önal didn't say a word until she finished speaking; he just made a few notes.

“Would you please ask her whether she heard anything unusual when she returned to her room last night?” he asked when Petra had finished. He was asking me, but his eyes were fixed on Petra.

I couldn't contain myself, slave to my curiosity that I am.

“What sort of sound do you mean? The sound of a gun?” I blurted out.

“The sound of a gun? Where did you get that from?” He turned to look at me.

“I don't know…. I mean… How was Müller killed?”

“Oh, that's what you mean. No, no, he wasn't killed with a gun.” He laughed teasingly. When he laughed, his gleaming white teeth were visible. I tried, with difficulty, to concentrate on what he was saying rather than on the man himself.

“Actually, you might say it was rather original,” he continued. “It happened when he was having a bath. While he was in the tub, a hair-dryer was thrown in, and it was switched on…” He stopped for a moment; this time he smiled ever so slightly and said, “A very frothy murder.”

I repeated this to myself: a very frothy murder. Fine, but was that what made it original? The fact that it was frothy?

Inspector Önal looked straight at me impatiently, “Will you please ask Miss Vogel whether she heard anything unusual last night? Did she see anything? Any information that might seem insignificant to her could be useful to us. Please would you translate this?”

I translated what he had said.

“No,” said Petra, with certainty. “I heard nothing and I saw nothing. I went to sleep as soon as my head touched the pillow. I was very tired.”

He noted down what Petra said.

“We'll have to take another statement from Miss Vogel in the presence of an authorized interpreter.” I think he thought that might have sounded rude because he hastily added, “I have to have an authorized interpreter for this to go on file.”

He then turned to Petra and continued, “Miss Vogel, if you wouldn't mind coming to the police station tomorrow… Just ask for me when you arrive. Shall we say five o'clock?”

I translated what Inspector Önal had just said to Petra, hardly daring to think how I would react if a policeman asked me to come down to the station. However, Petra calmly continued rocking back and forth. With the same calmness, she confirmed that she would come to Inspector Önal's room at five o'clock the following day.

“Would you also ask whether Miss Vogel has any immediate plans to leave Istanbul? The other members of the film crew say they are going to stay and finish the film, but if Miss Vogel has different ideas I would like to know.”

I translated this into German as well.

“No, I'm not going anywhere. We're going to finish the film, with or without Müller,” insisted Petra.

After Inspector Önal had noted that down, he got up and shook her hand. Before extending his hand to me, he asked whether he could come to the shop again later.

“Why?” I gulped. “This has nothing to do with me. I simply know Petra, that's all.”

“I didn't say I was coming to ask anything about the murder. I wanted to chat to you about crime fiction. I read a lot of thrillers too.”

I have to admit that made me feel more at ease. I screwed my face up into an awkward smile and said, “Actually, I want to ask you something too. How did you find me?”

“Madam, that's our job. We believe we can learn something from anyone who might have some connection with a murder, however remote.”

“Yes, but that doesn't answer my question,” I said.

For a moment, he studied my face carefully.

“The film crew said that Miss Vogel had a friend who is a bookseller in Istanbul. It wasn't difficult to find your shop.” He spoke as if mine was the only bookshop in Istanbul, but I didn't question him further. There was no point. I needed to save my energy for later.

Once Batuhan had gone, I suggested that Petra should stay at my place. She didn't want to. I didn't really insist. It was up to her.

She got into a taxi and returned to her hotel.

The next morning, I woke up at nine o'clock, which surprised even me. Excitement has a good effect on me. It was nearly ten o'clock and the temperature was soaring towards thirty degrees by the time I'd settled myself in the local corner café with the newspapers.

It was front-page news in all the Turkish press. I read every word, but there was nothing I hadn't heard from Petra or Inspector Önal the previous day. Only one of the newspapers gave any information about the film director: Kurt Müller was born in Bielefeld in 1952. He had made two films,
The Night After the Rain
and
In the Footsteps of Eternal Love
, neither of which had achieved any success. I'd never even heard of them.

All the newspapers agreed that this film,
A Thousand and One Nights in the Harem
, was likely to provoke comment. The film set was intended to conjure up the images in the best-selling book of that name by the famous Italian writer Giacomo Donetti. The managing director of Mumcular Films, which was co-producing with a German company, was Yusuf Selam. He had issued a written statement the previous day saying, “Our art and artists have been touched and tainted by this evil.” If you ask me, his claim was a bit much, but never mind.
Yusuf Selam added that they would resume filming as soon as possible despite this tragedy, and do everything to ensure the film's success.

After reading all that, there was one point I couldn't erase from my mind: if it was based on a novel by Donetti, one of today's best-selling writers, why had it been handed over to a second-class director like Müller?

The temperature was now rising rapidly to forty degrees. The sun was burning down on my head as I flew along the steep streets of Çukurcuma towards my air-conditioned shop. Once there, I went straight onto the Internet, the greatest human invention since the wheel.

News about the murder appeared in most of the German newspapers under the same headlines: Murder on the Bosphorus. Any documentary or novel about Istanbul inevitably squeezes in the word “Bosphorus” somewhere or other.

The news items in
Westdeutsche Zeitung
and
Tagesblatt des Ostens
were a bit better than the others, but there was still no proper information about Kurt Müller in either of those papers.

Who was this Kurt Müller? I tried putting his name into my favourite search engine, which produced a total of 1,634 Internet sites. A wave of despair swept over me. However, given that one in four Germans is called Kurt or has the surname Müller, that number was not at all surprising.

I opened up a hundred or so of the 1,634 websites, until I got bored. Only a handful of them contained anything to do with the Kurt Müller I was looking for, and those only showed recent press items about the film and murder.

I was about to thump my computer when I remembered my friend Sandra, a retired doctor living in Bielefeld. If Sandra didn't know this man, she would undoubtedly know someone who did. I got on the phone immediately.

 

I had just eaten an early supper of Trabzon pitta bread and was washing it down with gallons of green tea, when I caught Inspector Önal gazing through the shop window. Pelin had left work early and gone to the cinema.

This time, Batuhan Önal was in plain clothes. But don't assume that wearing plain clothes meant he was well dressed. His grey flannel trousers and short-sleeved white shirt were a poor substitute for his uniform. However, to be honest, he would have looked good in a sack.

I beckoned him inside. He didn't wait for me to do it again. As soon as he entered, I said, “Would you like some green tea? It's fresh.”

“Don't trouble yourself,” he said, which in Turkish means “That would be very nice.”

“Has there been any progress with the investigation?” I asked as I went to the kitchen to fetch a cup.

“Very little. We haven't been able to speak to all the members of the film crew yet. Taking statements through an interpreter is a slow process. Actually, I doubt if the statements will produce anything more of interest. Everyone says roughly the same thing.”

“OK, but what do you know about the victim?” I called out from the kitchen.

“Victim? You know…” He stopped. I was standing with a cup in my hand in front of the striped curtain separating the kitchen from the shop.

“Who'd want to kill the poor man? And why? I understood him to be a quiet, harmless type,” I said.

“Would you call him harmless? I don't know. You're right that in his capacity as a film director he was harmless. He didn't amount to much as a film-maker and it's unlikely that that was his main job.” There was a silence. My heart jumped as I took in what he was saying. Had I got it right – that Müller's murder was linked to his lifestyle and relationships?

“Of course, these… These are not things you should talk about in public,” he said. I didn't understand what he meant just at that moment, but I would soon find out.

“It's a complicated case, as far as I can see,” I said, all the while wondering how I was going to get him to say more.

“Yes, it's pretty complicated.”

“Was the film director mixed up with drugs?” I said out of the blue. This possibility, which had just occurred to me, almost flew from my lips of its own accord. I'm not usually so indiscreet.

Batuhan looked startled: “Where did you get that idea from?”

“It's one of the first things people think of.”

He looked at me admiringly and then, thinking he'd changed the subject rather skilfully, started telling me about how much crime fiction he'd read. Actually his knowledge of detective stories wasn't bad at all, and he loved reading Raymond Chandler. After about half an hour of him rattling on like that, I managed to escape to the kitchen, saying, “I'll make some more tea.”

He looked at his watch and, without lifting his head, said, “It's a bit late for tea.” When he raised his head, he
didn't look at me. He spoke in a voice that was almost inaudible.

“What if I asked you out for dinner? We could talk more comfortably,” he said.

I replied in German, “
Sie sind schneller als die Polizei erlaubt.
”

Very politely, he said, “Excuse me, I don't know German.”

I'm not so polite. I translated it into Turkish as “You're a fast worker.”

In fact, the Trabzon pitta bread I'd consumed just before he arrived was lying undigested in my stomach like concrete, but there was no way I was going to refuse Batuhan's dinner invitation. I had to look after my own interests. Ever since the previous morning, I had been flapping about trying to find something about the murder but had so far made little progress. The only way was to get Batuhan talking. A good meal, some wine… I changed this to
rakı
when it occurred to me that this man, who grinned half bashfully, half shamelessly when glancing at the open neck of my blouse, was actually a policeman. A kebab with
rakı
would have Batuhan warbling like a nightingale.

Without appearing too eager, in fact as if I was doing him a favour, I accepted the dinner invitation. Immediately I added, “But, I'm going to choose where we go. OK?”

There's no harm in being open with you. I was afraid he would either suggest going to one of the wine bars in Beyoğlu where my friends go, or to some haunt whose only customers were his police colleagues. Normally, I leave the business of choosing a place to the man; if it turns out to be awful, I'm as good as the next woman
at expressing my views through facial expressions and gestures.

I did a quick mental scan of all the possible places we could go to and finally settled on a kebab restaurant in Yeşilköy.

Although Yeşilköy is on the European side of Istanbul, it is quite a long way from the triangle of Beyoğlu, Cihangir and Kuledibi where I lived and worked; in fact it's a long way from anywhere. To give readers who don't know Istanbul an idea of the distance, Atatürk Airport, where I went to meet Petra the other day, is in Yeşilköy.