The Serenity Murders (19 page)

Selçuk was pulling up to the curb as I rushed down. He had come in his wife Ayla’s Renault instead of his official car.

I explained the situation to him frankly. I wasn’t going to hide anything from Selçuk. I hated people who weren’t straightforward, and doing the same myself really wasn’t my style. Half surprised, half curious, he listened until the very end of my story without interrupting me. The name Cemil Kazancı wasn’t new to him.

“Only until this psycho gets caught,” I said. “You can do what you want after that.”

“Do you realize what you’re asking me to do?”

“Yes,” I said. “I know perfectly well…”

We fell silent for a while.

“It isn’t as simple as he’s made it out to be. The Drug Trafficking desk is involved, Organized Crimes, even Interpol. It’s an old, rooted network. No one, let alone me, can intervene once the wheels have been set into motion.”

“Well, have they? Have the wheels been set into motion?”

Again, a brief silence.

“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“So?” I said. “What do we do now?”

“I’m taking you back home.”

He didn’t say he would, but I was sure that he was going to try. His best and more. I knew his style.

Instead of sitting in the windowless storage room while I was out, Hüseyin, whose primary concern at the moment was filling his hungry stomach, had begun boiling pasta.

“Look what I found, darling,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.

Now that we had slept together, I had suddenly become “darling.”

When Satı had come to do the cleaning, she’d left me a note fixed to the fridge with a magnet. We had both missed it because we hadn’t gone in the kitchen since we’d come home. And I had totally forgotten that today was Satı’s cleaning day.

“Of course. She was at my place all morning.”

The note read: “Mr. Veral, the telephone people came. They fixed the problem with the phone. We’ve run out of Omo detergent. And there’s very little surface cleaner left. Thank you. Satı.”

It always took them more than a week to show up when one actually needed a repair, so it was hardly likely that they’d have turned up just like that for routine maintenance.

“So they came into the house disguised as telephone technicians,” said Hüseyin, laughing. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of it earlier!”

He was acting as if it were totally normal for people to turn up dressed as telephone technicians. Satı must have thought the same thing and let the psycho in. If she hadn’t watched them—and clearly she hadn’t—then we could easily deduce that our psycho had toured the house at his leisure, under cover of checking the cables.

The note said telephone people. People? So there were more than one. He couldn’t have been accompanied by the girl with the bicycle. Girls never become telephone repair technicians in Turkey. So he must have a third collaborator. I must be up against an entire gang.

But his coming over today disguised as a technician didn’t explain how he’d copied my desktop three days ago.

“What shall I put in the pasta? Tuna, or tomato and feta cheese? I can’t find anything else in the fridge.”

Hüseyin clearly didn’t take after his mama when it came to creativity in the kitchen.

“Whatever you’d like,” I said. I was going to call Satı.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Satı, groaning at every syllable—her way of letting me know how utterly exhausted she was. “The telephone people came. Two men. Youngish. One didn’t speak at all. They went straight to the back room to check the cables. It was taking them a long time, so I just continued with my own work. I had all that ironing to do. Broke my back, I’m telling you.”

“Describe them to me,” I said.

“I told you, they were young. One had longer hair. The way they let it grow these days. I hear they allow it in public offices too. Scrawny, they were. I didn’t stare’ cause I didn’t want to give them the wrong idea.”

“What about their height, their coloring?”

“Typical men, I’m telling you,” she said. “They were taller than me, but not short or tall. Medium…”

“Look, Satı, dear,” I said. “This is serious. You’d better jog that memory of yours.”

Little Melek had given us a perfect, detailed description.

“Oh, now, don’t you get heavy-handed with me,” she said. “I told you, I don’t remember. I’m a married lady. What business do I have looking at men I don’t know?
Ma
Ş
allah
, I have my own mister, as fit as a fiddle. If he were to find out, he’d go berserk. What would he think of me if I were to sit here on the phone with you going on and on about two telephone repairmen? He doesn’t want me to work for you anyway. And there’s always so much to do at your place. I swear, I have half a mind to never come back to that place of yours again.”

That was her ultimate threat. To leave me, not to come back ever again. She used the same threat every time I gave her a little “constructive criticism.” She had said the same thing when I cautioned
her to be more careful after she washed my two cashmere sweaters in the washing machine, reducing them to the size of baby clothes, and burned my La Perla lace G-string trying to iron it. It was a tiny little G-string; it hardly needed ironing.

“It’s up to you,” I said furiously, recalling all her past accidents. “Don’t come if you don’t want to. In fact, don’t come at all,
ayol
! I don’t want you to, not anymore.”

I didn’t even begin to catalog all of the things she had dropped and broken over the years. Thanks to her, I made routine, trimonthly visits to the Paşabahçe glassware shop.

“No, no, you’ve got the wrong idea. I didn’t mean—”

“Look here, Satı,” I said. “Please don’t come again…I’m tired of your threats.”

Certainly I would be able to find a cleaner who did less damage than Satı.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” she said. “That’s not what I said. I’m happy working for you. I said my mister was complaining, but I cut him down to size. I’m the one who makes a living here. I ought to have the say around here. But what’s he do? He idles about at the coffeehouse all day, waiting for work to fall at his feet, and then comes home to boss me and the little ones around. I ain’t taking that, nuh-uh.”

Now I was listening to her own personal version of a feminist attitude.

“I can come tomorrow if you like. I’m free. I’ll finish off what’s left. I’ll give every inch a good scrub. You don’t have to pay me. Better than being home, sniffing that man’s stinky feet…”

I gave in.

Hüseyin had made the pasta with tuna.

I
t was best we get ready and go see my eccentric tarot card reader Andelip Turhan before it got too late. Yes, our psycho had given us until midnight, but I wasn’t about to stay at home all that time in a paranoid state of mind, madly searching for secret traces he might have left behind. Then again, what else could I do but be paranoid? He had entered my house (twice!), and was watching me. Veni and
vidi
had been accomplished, but
vici
—not yet. I wasn’t going to let him. No way!

This time Hüseyin and I showered together. We dried each other’s backs. We whistled and shaved side by side.

“Have you started working out?” I asked him.

He’d built up some muscle since I’d last seen his naked body up close.

“You like?” he responded, smiling at me in the mirror.

He had slyly struck a pose when he noticed I was looking at his body, sucking his tummy in and opening his arms slightly to the side to reveal his lats.

“Nice,” I said, as I carried on shaving.

“I sit at the wheel all day. I noticed my belly was starting to show…
Hüseyin, man
, I said to myself,
the only solution is to get yourself a gym membership
. It’s been eight months. I go three days a
week, in the evenings, regularly. I’m not looking too shabby now, am I?”

Everyone enjoys being admired.

The first unpleasant surprise was in my underwear drawer. All my bras had been cut up into shreds. When Hüseyin heard me cursing up a storm, he rushed in to see what was wrong, and didn’t ask a single question when he saw the lacy shreds in my hands.

“Goddamn bastard,” he hissed through clenched teeth.

Oh, well, I’d just have to go braless until I had a chance to buy new ones the next day. I could go without breasts. Audrey didn’t have breasts her whole life. The singer Nükhet Duru was as flat as a board until she got new apple-shaped ones. I never was after Jayne Mansfield–style rocket tits, or grand ones like Dolly Parton’s or Nigar Uluerer’s, anyway. Elegant fullness always seemed sexy enough for me.

I got dressed quickly, still mumbling to myself. What a barbaric method he had chosen. Not even psychos in movies did things like slashing underwear anymore. Hüseyin put his clean clothes on too. We were both dressed in black, from tip to toe.

“
Men in Black
,” I said cheekily.

Of course I wasn’t expecting him to understand or remember the film. He wasn’t one to go to the movies much, as he was always driving his cab, trying to make a living.

“You mean the agents that chase those aliens…” he said, surprising me. “What was his name? The black guy with the cute face. You know, the one who’s a singer as well…He has video clips too.”

He really did know him.

“Will Smith,” I said.

“That’s the one,” he said, snapping his fingers.

Andelip Turhan lived in one of those tiny apartments in Levent that banks had built to give as prizes. Before the government relinquished
its control over interest on deposits, banks lured new customers by having drawings to give out presents to their depositors. My aunt who was a banker used to tell us all about the lotteries whenever she was recalling her career. She’d then go on about how Istanbul used to be. Back then, apparently Levent and Etiler weren’t in vogue like they are now. No one fancied living there. The only people who lived in the area were a few antisocial and artsy types, a category into which my aunt lumped anyone and everyone who, to her, gave off an air of strangeness, and to which homosexuals too naturally belonged.

As soon as Andelip Turhan opened the door, a dense cloud of incense came wafting out. A different stick must have been burning in every corner of the itsy-bitsy flat.

I had warned Hüseyin beforehand about Andelip’s weird taste in fashion, but not even I was expecting this. She was wearing a long navy kimono that brushed the floor. Compared to Ponpon’s kimonos, which were embroidered on the front and back, Andelip’s rather plain kimono might even be said to qualify as perfectly acceptable. But instead of a sash she was wearing a lace garter belt around her waist. Over the kimono! And as if this weren’t enough, she had attached tiny handkerchiefs of different colors to the belt’s stocking clasps. She had four on each leg. She had pulled back her curly hair using a cord made by tying the same color combination of handkerchiefs to each other. With a different ring on each finger and countless bracelets on her wrists, the woman looked like a walking Christmas tree.

She put on a little show for us, twirling twice right where she stood, so that her stocking clasps and the handkerchiefs attached to them lifted into the air and seemed to take flight.

“Cute, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Very,” I said, thinking the look on my face wouldn’t give me away.

I’d always wondered who could possibly wear those clothes by wild designers like Vivienne Westwood—I didn’t need to anymore.

“Darling, wearing special clothes is an essential part of tarot rituals. Clothes that you wear
only
during tarot readings. And mine is this garter belt and colorful handkerchiefs that help balance energy. Why else would I be dressed like this? Right, sweetie?”

The scent wafting from the apartment combined with the view before him was clearly making Hüseyin have second thoughts. I had to grab him by the arm and shove him inside as I introduced him to Andelip.

“Yes, this is him,” said Andelip, adding, “I recognize his aura,” as she stroked the confused and wary Hüseyin’s face.

Just two more steps and we were in the middle of the apartment.

“Please excuse me, this place is a mess. My thoughts are so preoccupied with you two I couldn’t even tidy up. I see you in each and every reading. This isn’t normal at all. Then again, what is? Right, sweetie?”

The overfamiliar “sweetie” was directed at me. She wouldn’t address Hüseyin, whom she had only just met, as sweetie. I swallowed my irritation.

The mess she was talking about wasn’t a mess made over two or three days. It seemed there wasn’t a single closet in the entire apartment. Everything was just lying about. The TV was on. A muted Kevin Spacey film was playing.

“I was watching a film while I waited for you.”

She fished the remote control out of the mess with the kind of expertise that only comes with practice, and paused the DVD.

“I’ve seen it God knows how many times already. I know it by heart.”

We looked for somewhere to perch. Alas, the huge divan by the window and the two armchairs next to it were buried under heaps
of junk. Accessorizing the divan was a mountain of magazines, newspapers, clothes rolled up in balls so that you couldn’t tell what was what, bits and bobs all tangled up, and at the summit, an orange. Now, that’s what I call a still life.