Ikmen 16 - Body Count (23 page)

It had been Çetin
İ
kmen’s brother, Hal
ı
l, who had become an accountant, who had been good with figures. Çetin had been, by his own admission, useless all his life. Now, as he listened to Professor Atay talk about the Mayan Long Count calendar, he began to imagine that his brain had started to bleed.

‘The Maya worked with a three-tier calendar system when it came to time,’ the professor said. ‘They had the three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day Haab calendar, which meshed with the two-hundred-and-sixty-day Tzok’ in calendar, which they used to identify individual days in what amounted to a fifty-two-year cycle. This did not, however, allow them to look at larger spans of time or indeed to calculate years as we would recognise them. And so they developed the Long Count calendar.’

‘This is the one some people say signals the end of the world?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘Yes,’ the professor said. ‘The Long Count allowed the Maya to look both backwards and forwards in time. It also allowed them to cut time up into epochs. This gave them history and a future. The current epoch, or Long Count Cycle, that will end on the twenty-first of December 2012 began on the thirteenth of August 3114
bc
.’

‘The twenty-first of December, you say?’
İ
kmen said.

‘Yes.’

İ
kmen looked at Süleyman.

‘Whether the world will actually end when this current cycle finishes is not known,’ the professor said. ‘However, what I believe is important for you, gentlemen, is that your victim for some reason wrote Mayan Long Count dates on the walls of his apartment. Look at this …’ He pointed to one of the original photographs of Levent Devrim’s walls on Süleyman’s desk. ‘12.19.19.17.19 = 12.19.19.17.19. Meaningless, yes? In our system, absolutely. But if we look at those numbers through Mayan eyes, they are enormously significant.’

‘In what way?’
İ
kmen asked. ‘Aren’t they the same?’

‘No! That’s just it. The first one refers to the beginning of this Long Count cycle, and, as you can see, when that cycle ends, those numbers come around again.’

İ
kmen couldn’t really see, because his brain had shut down, but he nodded his head anyway.

‘You see here.’ The professor pointed at the photograph again. ‘That date, 13.0.0.0.0, signifies the beginning date of the new cycle we will be in after the twenty-first of December 2012.’

‘What about all the other figures?’ Süleyman asked. ‘What you’ve shown us is just a sample …’

‘Oh, I’m no expert,’ he said. ‘I recognise only the Mayan dates that were pointed out to me when I was carrying out my research. I wrote a small amount about the Mayans in relation to 2012 – people like details like that. But just looking at what that man inscribed on his wall, I can see that his numbers are annotated in the way that a writer who uses standard numerals would do. The Mayans themselves used a system of dots and lines, which were read horizontally.’

‘So Levent Devrim was not a Mayan purist,’
İ
kmen said.

The professor smiled. ‘I don’t think so, but if you really want to know what all these dates mean, you will have to contact a Mayan civilisation expert. I met several when I was in Mexico, and there is a Mexican lecturer in Latin American civilisations at METU I can put you in contact with.’

Süleyman said, ‘Thank you, Professor.’

İ
kmen was less enamoured of the professor and his Mayans. Whatever weird stuff Levent Devrim had been into, it hadn’t been the Mayans who had killed him, although the fact that he, that all the victims, had died on the magic date of the twenty-first was not lost on
İ
kmen. Could it possibly just be a coincidence?

But then the professor said something that did interest
İ
kmen a lot.

‘Of course where death and the Mayans are concerned, one has to be circumspect. I know that Leyla Ablak died violently and I get the impression – although I understand you’ve not released all the details to the public – that the other victims died violently too. I don’t know how relevant this is, but the Maya did practise human sacrifice, which took many different forms, one of which was to cut out the hearts of their victims.’

Sezen
İ
pek looked at the letter again and then screwed it up into a ball. If she received any more of that nature, she’d take it to the police. They knew everything anyway. This one crude, nasty little missive could just be a fluke. Sezen felt that it wasn’t, though. She sat down on the chair by her front door, uncreased the letter and looked at it again. It was full of disgusting bile about her uncle Raf
ı
k and about what this person claimed he had done to him many years ago. Her fears made real.

The letter, menacingly put together from newspaper type, alleged child abuse, rape and some acts that Sezen couldn’t even fathom. He – if it was a man – wanted money or he’d tell all to the media and to the police. Didn’t he know that she didn’t have any money? Even if she’d wanted to meet him in the gardens of Y
ı
ld
ı
z Palace to hand over a bag full of cash, she wasn’t able to do that. And yet just the thought of how her family would be vilified and discredited if Rafik Efendi’s crimes ever came out in the press made Sezen sweat. In recent years their position in the country as national role models and assets had begun to be recognised. Some people, even in high places, had started to talk about a ‘reappraisal’ of the Ottoman Empire, which was most encouraging. But Rafik Efendi had represented the worst that the Empire had been, that louche, selfish, soft thing that Atatürk’s republic had almost wiped off the face of the planet. And now, from beyond the grave, he was still undermining his family.

Although she had genuinely loved her uncle, there was a part of Sezen
İ
pek that wished she’d had the courage to confront him and maybe even stop him years ago. She’d known for decades what he had been, what he’d done, and she’d turned a blind eye to it. Leyla had warned her. Just weeks before her death she’d told her mother, ‘You have to stop allowing rent boys into the house.’ But she hadn’t listened. If she remembered correctly, she’d turned Leyla’s argument against her and complained about her discredited husband. Now they were all dead. All except for Sezen.

It had been a long day for everyone, and Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu was very grateful to Ömer Mungan for inviting her to go for a drink with him once work was over. She’d put no pressure on him to do so; he’d done it out of the goodness of his heart. He was a thoughtful young man, and had she been ten years younger, she might have made a romantic play for him. But he was like the younger brother she’d never had and, further, the younger brother who knew she needed taking care of because her heart was broken. Everyone knew that because everyone knew where Mehmet Süleyman was going whenever he wasn’t going back to his own little apartment in Cihangir after work.

Ömer, who was hungry, had gone inside the little restaurant they had chosen to sit down outside in Nevezade Sokak, to look at the fish and meat on offer that evening. Ay
ş
e, who wasn’t hungry, sat with her untouched beer and smoked. When he returned, the young man said, ‘Fish is a ridiculous price.’

‘So what are you having?’ Ay
ş
e asked.

‘Chicken
ş
i
ş
.’ He sat down. ‘Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat, Ay
ş
e Han
ı
m?’

‘No thank you, Ömer.’ She smiled. He still referred to her either as Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu or Ay
ş
e Han
ı
m even when they were on their own. Acknowledging her seniority and her experience in the job they both loved.

Ömer, who was drinking red wine, said, ‘I don’t know about you, Sergeant, but I’m still reeling from today.’

‘I think we all need time to take it in,’ she said. Briefly Ay
ş
e thought, spitefully,
Except for you, Mehmet Süleyman, who are being given all the occult help you need by that whore Gonca the gypsy!

‘What do you think about this idea that the killer has some sort of fixation on the Mayans?’ Ömer said.

After Professor Atay had given
İ
kmen and Süleyman the names of his academic contacts in Turkey and Mexico, he had left.
İ
kmen had immediately called the expert at the Middle Eastern Technical University in Ankara, a Dr Maria Santa Ana. All four of them had been in
İ
kmen’s office when he’d put the Mexican on speaker phone.

‘I don’t know,’ Ay
ş
e said. She put one cigarette out and lit another. Unhappiness was turning her into her superior.

Çetin
İ
kmen had told Dr Santa Ana, who had communicated with him in English, the relevant facts about the four murder cases and had emailed – or rather, instructed Ömer to email – photographs of Levent Devrim’s equations over to her. It had been Dr Santa Ana’s opinion that if one added in the fact that three of the victims had ‘royal’ blood, the case for some sort of Mayan-influenced fixation became still stronger. ‘The Maya liked to sacrifice high-status victims to their gods,’ she’d said. ‘Better blood meant a better offering, which they believed would produce better crops in the year to come.’ She’d also told them that there had been more than one method of dispatch. ‘Everyone knows about the heart-cutting, but sometimes the Maya decapitated their victims, and there was another method too, which was to throw people into a sink hole called a cenote. This was usually done in order to propitiate the rain gods.’

All their thoughts had gone back to the image of Leyla Ablak floating, dead, in that therapy pool. But it was what Dr Santa Ana had said just before she’d had to go to give a seminar to her students that had really chilled the four police officers. ‘The Maya believed that the blood they spilled, when collected and smeared on to idols or significant buildings, ensouled those items, giving them power to enter the world of men and influence their lives. High-status blood would have a particular power especially at a time like this when a Great Cycle is coming to an end. According to how Mayan belief is interpreted, we are in a dangerous place in time where the cycle may end successfully and peacefully or everything may just explode.’

İ
kmen had said, ‘The end of the world?’

‘The coming of Ah Puch, the god of death,’ she’d said.

Ay
ş
e sipped her beer. ‘But why here, Ömer? This is Turkey; nobody believes in gods of death here.’

‘No, but have you heard about the village of
Ş
irince?’ he said.

‘No. Where’s that?’

‘Somewhere near Efes. There’s a movement building amongst New Age people to put it forward as a place where the Mayan apocalypse won’t reach.’

‘How can a global apocalypse not reach everywhere?’

‘I don’t know.’ His chicken
ş
i
ş
with bulgar wheat and salad arrived and Ömer began eating.

‘How do you know that?’

He chewed on a nugget of chicken, swallowed and said, ‘Oh, my sister works as a nurse in the German Hospital and they get all sorts of people through. She found this magazine about astrology and fortune-telling and there was an article about
Ş
irince in there. The local people are going to open up more pansiyon rooms to cope with the demand they are expecting.’

Ay
ş
e shook her head. When she’d been a child in the 1970s, such superstitions had been frowned upon. Now that religion was having a resurgence, so, apparently, were a lot of other beliefs and practices that until very recently had been discouraged by the state. She couldn’t find it in herself to approve.

‘A lot of people do believe in the Mayan Long Count calendar and they are frightened that the world will end on the twenty-first of December this year,’ Ömer said.

‘And our victims have died on the twenty-first of each month since January.’

‘Yes.’

‘So, as Inspector
İ
kmen said, we have to take that into account, but without jumping to conclusions.’ When
İ
kmen had put the phone down on Dr Santa Ana, he’d told his colleagues that although he felt that the Mayan connection could be significant, he believed that something else had to be present as a motive to kill too.

Ömer finished his
ş
i
ş
and said, ‘Maybe he just dislikes aristocrats, Levent Devrim excepted, of course.’

‘Or maybe he fears them,’ Ay
ş
e said.

‘Fears them? Why?’

She frowned. She knew why
she
feared them, or rather one of them. But for other people the issue was not personal.

‘Those who admire and maybe always have admired the Ottomans feel free to talk about them positively now,’ she said. ‘For some people the Empire was a golden age. Our new bogeymen are our military, like General Ablak. Republicans …’

‘You don’t approve, Ay
ş
e Han
ı
m.’

But she said nothing. In light of the sensitive Ergenekon investigation, Ay
ş
e didn’t want to lay her cards on the table even with Ömer.

‘Well, whatever the rights and wrongs may be, it must be nice for someone like Inspector Süleyman to feel that he and his kind are valued again,’ Ömer said. He said it thoughtlessly and without malice, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth he knew he had done wrong.

Ay
ş
e drank her beer quickly to try and cover the fact that just the mention of his name had made tears spring to her eyes. But Ömer saw.

Even though he didn’t tell the police where he was going, Arthur Regan had copied his son’s work on to a disk, which he left at his apartment in Beyo
ğ
lu. The computer John had used to write his book on had been given back to him by
İ
kmen the previous week. He took only a paper copy of his son’s novel with him to
Ş
i
ş
li. Just in case.