The Serenity Murders (24 page)

“Just like in the eighties! We must take action!” She beamed bravely.

Yes, “take action” was an often used phrase. In the past, “take action” meant a gang of girls would gather to cause scenes and raise a ruckus in revenge on behalf of another girl believed to have been wronged. It could mean house raids, flushing towels down toilets, making messes (fecal and otherwise), shattering windows, breaking and ruining every fragile item in a home, tearing apart pillows, mattresses, armchairs, leaving not a single electronic item undamaged, cutting clothes up into a thousand pieces, in other words, inflicting the maximum amount of damage possible. The victim or victims would be those who hadn’t paid a girl what she was owed, who had tricked one of the girls or treated her badly. There were those who raided police homes if they felt they’d been
wronged. Once, even the boyfriend of one of the girls, who’d been living with her for four years, was dealt his share of a “take action” for refusing to pay for her cosmetic surgery expenses.

“Remember,” said Pamir, “how many neighborhoods we raided during the resistance! There’s no better time than now. Go on, take action!”

She was right, but it was different in those days. What we did back then was our way of taking a stance against those who’d provoked us. Whenever a couple of narrow-minded neighborhood inhabitants went about collecting signatures, trying to persuade others to join one of those “Away With the Transvestites” campaigns, the girls would attack, breaking doors and windows, entering and wrecking homes. Due to the hefty tips they received from the girls, and because they sold goods to them at inflated prices, local business owners were perfectly content to have them as neighborhood residents and so would have no part in these campaigns. As for those local business owners who did dare to oppose them, the girls would loot their stores and make a huge mess of their shops.

When the local campaigns succeeded, the transvestites would be packed onto trains and sent into exile. As if anyone actually believed that in Eskişehir, the city they were sent to, they would magically adopt the two-faced norms of the middle class and its heterosexual lifestyle. While there may have been some who truly believed such results would occur, their hopes would soon be dashed: the girls would promptly catch the next train back to Istanbul. The “Take Action” campaigns had helped to stop these misplaced raids and evictions. Now, even though my common sense objected, a piece of that old transvestite bravery and recklessness was whispering,
What if…

Knowing that I was so dearly loved and protected and seeing that people would go to the ends of the earth for me filled my heart
with pride. Nothing can beat pride. It heals you. A feeling of warmth spread throughout my body as I looked over to the crowd, quelling the restlessness in my mind.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see drivers pulling up in their taxis and joining the crowd. This was getting out of hand. Pamir’s
perfect
plan was working.

At nine o’clock sharp we took our places in front of the door.

Pamir let out a sharp whistle. The murmuring ceased and all heads turned to face us. I made a rough count: there were more than forty people.

Though I couldn’t see them, I was pretty certain residents of the apartment building were peering out of their windows too—especially the cat lover, retired Hümeyra, who lived on the ground floor, and my nosy downstairs neighbor Wimpy Ferdı—watching so as not to miss a thing. I could clearly see that residents of the entire building opposite were already at their windows.

A gathering of dozens of transvestites and local taxi drivers at this time of night in our little street probably wasn’t making my neighbors feel relaxed. But they looked on, dying of curiosity. Something scandalous had landed right at their doorstep. They didn’t want to miss a detail. Their minds were already spinning as they thought how they would recount the entire incident for those who had missed out, embellishing and exaggerating and twisting it all around into something absolutely extraordinary!

“First of all, I’d like to thank you all for gathering here and not letting me down,” said Pamir in her thunderous voice. “As some of you might already know, Burçak is in danger. A psycho is stalking her. Threatening her. Breaking into her home. Spying on her and listening in on her. And that’s not all. Whatever it is he wants, he takes out his anger onto those close to her, onto Hüseyin, Hasan, all of you, everyone that knows and is connected to her. We are under threat. You are all under threat! This man is a murderer! He
has killed someone! Poisoned him…shot another! He set fire to Hüseyin’s car…He sends out threat after threat to the club…”

Pamir, whose outrage increased with every sentence, was like a politician delivering a speech at a public rally. She was counting on the taxi drivers to act in solidarity in support of Hüseyin, and for the girls to do the same for me. It was important. She was appealing to their consciences, their minds, and their fears.

She recounted a slightly embellished version of what I had told Jihad2000 and he in turn had told her.

“This man is not alone. He has one male, one female collaborator. The girl rides a bike…”

“Why don’t you give us the full description?” she turned to me and said. “You know better than me.”

Now she was pushing me onto center stage. I stepped forward, unwillingly yet with that same recklessness brought on by their support of me. I shared Melek’s description with them, re-creating the unknown accomplice in front of their eyes with my words. All eyes watched me curiously while heads nodded in approval.

“They have access to advanced technological devices,” I added.

Of course, most of them weren’t going to understand what I meant, so I went into detail and explained what bugging and recording devices looked like, what kinds of devices they’d needed in order to spy on me.

The crowd was getting bigger. Newcomers were trying to find out from the others what was going on.

“And here!” said Pamir, jumping at the opportunity presented by my brief pause. “In this neighborhood! In this street…he could be watching us right now…”

Heads immediately went into motion; eyes scanned their surroundings. Some of the neighbors began to look anxious.

“People are starting to look anxious,” I whispered into Pamir’s ear.

“Good,
ayol
!” she said. “The psycho killer is among them. They
should stop hiding him! They should feel guilty for not having turned him in yet!”

She was right, I was sure of it: the psycho was among them. It was going to take time for them to digest what Pamir had said. I quickly scanned their faces. As their unease got louder, I raised my hands to silence them.

“What I ask of you—”

It would be best if no one did anything rash, I thought, but Pamir had something different in mind.

She grabbed me by the arm, pushed me back, and stepped forward again.

“Look!” she said. “What we’re going to do is simple…”

Next she explained that we were going to search the neighborhood, by knocking on every door. In groups of twos or threes, starting at the building where I lived. We would then widen the circle. She repeated what we were looking for: a blue bike, a helmet with flame stickers and a hologram on it, red or purple Converse shoes, multichannel receivers likely connected to an ordinary computer, and, quite possibly, a sound mixer and an editing bay.

“I know these items won’t be that easy to find, but if we find them all in once place, we may find our psycho.”

She pulled out the cell phone tower area map Jihad2000 had drawn, and clearly outlined the borders of the area we’d be searching. Technology was such a wonderful thing. Jihad2000 had discovered which cell tower functioned in what street, and the apartment building number where each cell tower changed.

Someone was knocking on a window behind me. I turned to look. It was Hümeyra, motioning for me to come over.

“Yes?” I said, lowering my voice.

“Dear, they stole my bag on the street the other day. Thieves. From our neighborhood. In broad daylight. My black leather bag. It has brass ring handles. If you’re doing such a thorough search,
could you keep an eye open for my bag? Maybe you’ll come across it. I don’t care about the money, but my grandchildren’s pictures and my marriage certificate were in it…”

I didn’t know what to say.

Those at the front who overheard had already started giggling.

“Okay,” said Hüseyin, standing next to me. “We’ll keep an eye out for it, ma’am.”

“It’s black,” repeated the old doddering dear. “With brass rings…” She proceeded to hold her hands out indicating the bag’s size.

“All right, ma’am, we get it,” said Hüseyin.

“Thank you, son,” she said, and closed her window.

Our crowd was ready for action.

“Hold on a minute,” called Hasan. “Don’t get started just yet…”

It was natural for Hasan to want to say a couple more things, now that he’d found a ready crowd of listeners. He’d never miss the chance to take charge. Sure, our posse was ready to take action, but not all of the local residents would be so ready and willing to open up their doors to them and have their homes searched. Thus there were going to be doors that would remain closed.

“We’re going to give you these maps,” he said, waving the photocopies in the air, “so you can mark which apartments you’ve searched, which ones didn’t answer, and which ones didn’t let you in! Street by street…”

Clearly they had put a lot of work into this.

“If they don’t let us in, then they must have something to hide,” rang out a voice that was clearly prepared to riot.

“We’ll force our way in, then!” said another.

“No-no-no-no…Friends,” I said, feeling the need to intervene. “We will not use force…Just explain the situation and ask nicely. That’s all. If they don’t let you in, they don’t let you in.”

“But mark those apartments,” said Hasan, “so we know who they are.”

“What if we made them swear on the Koran that they weren’t hiding the psycho?”

This question had to be from one of the girls. It was obvious from the tone and the naïveté. Many people did not take such oaths seriously these days. What made her think that people here would?

“That will never work,
ayol
!” said Pamir, trying not to laugh. On the one hand, we had Hümeyra, who wanted us to return her stolen bag, and on the other, our girls, who would be perfectly satisfied by an “honest to God oath”…It wasn’t going to be easy to catch our psycho, but if we were relentless, perhaps we could pull it off.

“Does anyone else have any questions?”

The girls and some of the drivers were clearly ready to cause a commotion.

“Now, please, let’s get into search groups,” said Hasan, with all the authority of a military commander. “Twos or threes…Then everyone can take one of these sheets and each unit can start searching its own area!”

We were ready to embark upon our desperate operation.

The start signal had been given.

J
ust as Hasan finished, two police cars and one police van with blue and red police lights flashing on their roofs arrived. They closed off both ends of the street.

Our tiny little street was turning into a circus.

“All right, everyone, come on, clear out,” they began, the words blaring through the vehicle megaphones. “C’mon, now, clear out!”

They were more than ready to charge at us.

The girls weren’t afraid of the police; to the contrary, they were capable of standing up to them, even openly defying them. But the taxi drivers weren’t like that. The drivers shrank back immediately.

Someone had called the police.

It could have been a neighborhood inhabitant who was alarmed at what was going on outside her window, or even our psycho himself.

Clearly the police didn’t want to miss this opportunity. They always saw transvestites as trouble (from whom they were nevertheless plenty eager to demand free sex whenever they caught us alone in a quiet corner), and now those same transvestites had fallen into their clutches en masse; they were ready to play it rough. We were ready to give it right back to them.

I remembered what Hakan Gülseven, a journalist I admired, had once written: “Doubtless the wheels will continue to turn this way until the security forces realize it is their duty to save people’s necks, not break them.”

I was the cause of all this. It would have been unfair for Pamir or Hasan to be blamed just because they were the organizers.

I stepped forward.

I would accept all responsibility as the leader of this gang, on the condition that no one else was taken into custody. They invited me to the police station in an extremely polite manner I found difficult to fathom.

Even though Pamir tried to intervene—“No way,
abla
, you won’t go alone!”—I was having none of it.

“Stay out of this,” I said. “This has nothing to do with you.”

This motley crew crowding the small street was her doing, it was true, but I was the one who had let it go on. I could have stopped it. I hadn’t. So I had become responsible.