The Serenity Murders (31 page)

“Payback for what?” I said, squeezing my fist. “To whom?”

“You’ll see,” she said, with a calmness that got on my nerves. “Ferdı will explain it to you.”

Ferdı would explain! My mad psycho!

“Where is he?” I said. “Where?”

“Part two!” she said, grinning. “You’ve got to find him…”

“We know who he is, his fingerprints are all over the place. The police will find him straightaway.”

“Okay, let them find him, then,” she said, with a confidence and ease that were enough to drive one up the wall. She turned her back to leave.

I couldn’t let her walk out like that. I jumped on top of her. Her twiglike body was fragile. I thought I was going to pull her arm off when I grabbed hold of it.

“Where do you think you’re going, missy?” I said, jolting her arm. “We’re not finished with you yet!”

“There’s nothing you can do with me,” she said calmly. “My job is done…”

I could torture her and get her to talk, then hand her over to the police and have her questioned by the classical methods.

“Speak,
ayol
!” I said. “Where is Ferdı?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’ll have to find him yourself.”

There was a wary look in her eyes. I was sure she didn’t know.

“Oh, there you are, sir.”

And there he stood, Yılmaz Karataş, who had left his appointed spot without permission in order to follow the girl with the bicycle, and, having completed his tour, had arrived back at the apartment.

“I was looking for you. You weren’t home. I saw the door open and thought I’d come in…I left you a note, did you get it?”

Yes, I had.

“What do we do now?” said Tarık.

I had no intention of letting the girl go. Detention by force was
about to be added to my crime of breaking and entering. Since operation number two hadn’t delivered the expected, conclusive results, I would have to come up with a new emergency plan.

I phoned Cemil Kazancı on his very private number.

“What’s the matter? Is there a problem? Has our guy done something wrong?” he began.

No, I was pleased with Yılmaz. I just had a new request.

“I wonder if you could entertain a guest for me for a while, a young lady? Secretly…without letting her contact anyone…”

He surprised me by accepting without any hesitation.

“I’m sending her to you with Yılmaz,” I said.

“You can’t detain me,” the girl objected when she understood what was going on. “You have no evidence against me!”

She must have memorized these lines for the police, which was hardly relevant under the circumstances, seeing as I was detaining her in a completely illegal way and handing her over to totally illegal people.

“Who’s pressing charges?” I said. “You’re my insurance, darling. Now, don’t get cranky on us. We wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

We tied the bicycle girl’s hands and mouth with packaging tape so she wouldn’t cause Yılmaz any problems on the way. I sent Cüneyt along with them just in case. I wanted to hand my safety deposit over in one piece.

I made Tarık swear every oath he knew that he wouldn’t say a word about it to anyone ever, that he’d forget everything that had happened and wouldn’t even dream of it in his sleep. Yes, I would keep him updated. I took his mobile number.

After sending everyone off, I went to my own apartment. First things first, I found the cameras. Then I proceeded to studiously crush them in a mortar. I derived inexplicable pleasure from grinding those cheap, buglike cameras to a pulp. As I bashed the pestle against the mortar, the mica, metal, silicon, and whatever else was
in them shattered, making noises that resembled the screeching yelp of an animal, noises that were transformed in my mind into the psycho Ferdı’s whining voice, begging for his life.

The listening devices were still in my home, but I had crashed his system so that they could no longer eavesdrop on me.

I could now go to the hospital to see Hüseyin. I could ponder what to do next, how I would pass the second part of the test, once I got there.

A
s I moved along the silent corridor of the hospital, I spotted Şükrü waiting outside Hüseyin’s door. Okay, he might have chitchatted, giggled, and started getting a bit chummy with Hüseyin behind the bar, but still, two visits in a row in one day were a bit much.

He had seen me too. With his body slanted, one shoulder hanging low, the other raised high, his head thrust forward, he sidled along like a crab to meet me.

“Boss, we’ve got to talk,” he said.

His voice was uneasy; so were his eyes.

Something must have happened to Hüseyin, but what? The doctor had said that everything was fine, that he was getting better. Had there been an unexpected complication? Was he in danger again?

The panic that had overtaken my mind must have shown on my face.

Şükrü took my arm; leaning against me, he started leading me in the opposite direction. He reeked of alcohol.

“Please,” he said, “listen to me for a minute. I have to explain.”

No, I wanted to find out, to see what had happened to Hüseyin immediately. I broke loose of his arm and rushed into the room, which now had a
NO VISITORS ALLOWED
sign hanging on it.

And froze.

Part two was already in production.

Poor, withered Hüseyin lay there with languishing eyes, drugged up and ready to pass out, and at his bedside, the psycho I was looking for: Wimpy Ferdı.

There was no one else in the room. Kevser and İsmail Kozalak, the safe hands into which I had entrusted Hüseyin, were gone.

“Finally,” said Ferdı, his crazy psycho-man voice replacing that of my whiny neighbor.

Şükrü had followed me into the room and shut the door behind him.

“I can explain…Please!” he said.

Şükrü’s new boyfriend couldn’t possibly be my psycho Ferdı!

“What’s going on?” I said.

I had been betrayed by my own employee, Şükrü, and those irresponsible parents Kevser and İsmail Kozalak had left their son in the hands of a psycho.

Psycho Ferdı had jabbed an empty syringe into Hüseyin’s drip tube, and now stood ready to take the next step, his ink-stained thumb resting on the syringe press.

“Do you know what this is for?” he asked.

When the air bubble entering the vein reached the heart, it meant sudden death. The heart would stop. Even kids knew that.

I nodded.

“Good,” he said, in an authoritarian voice that I found didn’t quite suit his build. “Sit down and listen.”

Şükrü held my arm again, and sat me down on the armchair this time, and perched on its armrest.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I can explain everything…”

What was he going to explain? He was clearly collaborating with psycho Ferdı. He had been working for me for years and now he was repaying his debt with betrayal. He
had sold me out. He had sold Hüseyin out. The guy was about to die. There could be no explanation for this.

“Remove the syringe first,” I said, begging him. “Please…”

The edges of Ferdı’s lips curled up in disdain.

“We know what you’re made of. It’s not worth the risk.”

“What do you want from him? What do you want from me? Why is your house filled with pictures of me? You’ve bugged my house, you spy on me! What kind of a psycho are you? What the hell is your problem?”

I’d been beaten. I knew it.

I was about to cry.

“Easy does it,” he said. “One at a time…”

Why didn’t a nurse or caretaker come into the room to check in on Hüseyin, and see what was going on? Were we paying all that money to stay in a deserted hospital? What on earth had happened to their quality-certified service perfection? Scenes of nurses flirting with doctors, while those that weren’t flirting chain-smoked outside and gossiped about patients, or crowded into a tiny room to watch the most shameless of gossip programs on a tiny TV screen, flashed through my mind. There had to be a reason why they weren’t turning up. Okay, they may charge the price of a five-star hotel, but that shouldn’t give them the right to act like one, leaving their patients for dead, completely unattended, all in the name of “not disturbing” their guests.

“All right, I’m listening,” I said, banishing the nurses and caretakers from my mind. “Go ahead, tell me…”

“First,” he said, “you’ve got to understand the situation. You’ve got to see the bigger picture. You are an arrogant fool blinded by details. The devil may very well be in the details, but you’re missing the bigger picture.”

My eyes widened; I waited curiously to hear what he would say next. He was in a mood for philosophizing.

“Who am I? Have you ever thought about that? Ever wondered?”

He was my nosy downstairs neighbor. His fingers were ink-stained and nasty.

“Yes, I moved in downstairs. I didn’t even know you at first. But once I understood who you were, I thought highly of you, I saw that we had things in common. Then I began looking out for an opportunity to meet you, to talk to you. I kept trying to approach you. Did you pay any attention? Did you ever think about me? Let me answer that for you: no! You were so preoccupied with yourself and your own world! You lived in the cocoon you had built around you, thinking it would protect you. Closed off to the outside world, to those on your doorstep, to their problems…”

He was good at insulting me and he had the gift of gab. I was waiting for him to get to the point.

“But who am I? Who is Ferdı Aktan? Let me tell you…”

He was raised in an orphanage. There he was given a name and a surname. He had no idea who his family was.

“You can’t imagine what it means to grow up without love,” he said. “You always had people who loved you. There is no love in an orphanage. There’s only one feeling: fear. Punishment, beatings…There’s the hope that a family will come and adopt the cutest child among us, raise him with love, and there’s jealousy of the ones chosen. Can you imagine what it’s like waiting to be chosen, to want it so badly you could die? I don’t think so…And not being chosen. No one ever wanting you. Feeling so much resentment toward the cute, the beautiful, the one that has a chance of being chosen. And if this is indeed a competition, seeking ways to eliminate the other contestants…Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“You’ve got a blank look on your face. Are you daydreaming again or what?”

“No, I’m listening,” I said.

It was impossible not to listen.

“Have you ever visited an orphanage? Have you seen the looks on those children’s faces? The fear in their eyes, the way they fawn all over every visitor for an ounce of attention they mistake for love? We were shameless in our attempts to curry favor…We’d do anything for a pat on the head, or, if we were lucky, a hug. And the grand prize was to be kissed! Even once was enough! We’d dream about it for days afterwards. It was a like a fairy tale that fed our fantasies again and again.”

I was beginning to feel pretty rotten. The boy had a sad story. Still, it didn’t give him the right to torture me or kill Hüseyin.

“And rape,” he said. “You must have heard about it before. Everyone knows. No one lifts a finger. The abuse of juvenile bodies begins at a young age…Only the fit and the strong survive anyway. The rest just perish. No one even hears about them. The older kids rape the younger ones. Strangers visit every now and then, slip a few coins into the caretakers’ pockets. It was fine by us. In fact, a lot of us liked it. Just think about it, getting close to someone! Being wanted for a moment, no matter how or why; being liked by someone! Ohh! It’s an intoxicating feeling. The pain in your ass doesn’t even matter. Someone wants you. You’re being desired. It grows on you. And the more you want love, the more you want what you think is love: abuse! And every child in there is hungry for love. A vicious circle, right? But that’s the way it is!”

I was moved to tears. I found it difficult to swallow.

“Hatice is from the orphanage too,” he said. “The girl who dropped off the letter at Hüseyin’s place.”

So the girl with the bicycle’s name was Hatice.

“They throw us out once we come of age. Hatice and I got thrown out on the same day. So you see, we share a common fate, hence our solidarity!”

I felt sorry for Hatice too. I hoped she wasn’t being mistreated by Cemil Kazancı’s men.

“We were lucky, because we were smart. We were curious and we understood at a young age that knowledge was valuable. We read a lot. We learned. We tried to educate ourselves by our own means. We did quite well. We were able to find ourselves jobs after we got thrown out.”

An achievement certainly worthy of congratulations, I had to admit.

“Now, to get to the key matter,” he said. “AIDS! The illness. You must know! After all those unidentified rapes, I, as you might guess, caught AIDS. Hatice’s got AIDS too. Hers is from a blood transfusion from back when she was a kid. Her family abandoned her when they found out she had AIDS, saying they didn’t want a cursed child. Actually, they hadn’t wanted her anyway because she was a girl, so the AIDS bit just gave them an excuse to get rid of her. Another element of our common fate! We’re carriers, for the time being…It’s inactive…But you know, negative can turn positive anytime.”