The Serenity Murders (7 page)

The very thought of fasting was beginning to agitate me, to yank at my nerves, pulling them taut. It turns out I had underestimated our psycho, who, in just two deft moves in less than twenty-four hours had gone from being a perv with homicidal tendencies to a straight-up murderous monster.

My phone beeped, reminding me that I had a Reiki meeting in half an hour. I’d completely forgotten. I had promised I would be there. We were going to treat a young MS patient. Reiki, which initially I’d had not an ounce of faith in, turns out to be marvelously effective against numerous illnesses and diseases, among them multiple sclerosis. I had attended a meeting upon the recommendation of a friend of mine from the beauty salon, Afet with the ketchup-red hair. “Reiki can’t make an illness any worse,” she had said. “And good for us if it provides some relief.”

Afet, who was actually a French teacher, had been introduced to Reiki by a colleague of her husband. She had immediately embraced it and quickly seen its benefits.

“The migraine that plagued me for years is gone!” she had told me. “For years I tried every medicine in the book, every folk remedy available to humankind; none of it worked. But Reiki did the trick! Now I can drink as much orange juice as I like and eat as much chocolate as I can, and nothing happens.”

During a lengthy skin-care and full-body seaweed massage session one day, she had worn me down going on and on about Reiki, until finally I agreed to give it a go myself. After all, it wouldn’t
kill
me, now, would it? “Everything on this earth, from the table we are lying on to the seaweed covering us, from the pavement we walk on to our very bodies themselves,
everything
is made up of atoms, of energy particles. All Reiki does is adjust the energy in our bodies to create a balance. After all, it’s the imbalances in our body’s energy that give rise to mental and physical illnesses. Our channels might be shriveled, crinkled, or blocked. With Reiki, we open those channels back up to create a proper balance,” she had summarized. Since I didn’t like taking drugs and I believed that scientific medicine developed its treatments by practicing trial-and-error methods upon us, this idea hadn’t struck me as odd at all. I simply had very little faith in modern medicine, which banned medications widely used just twenty years ago, ridiculed operations carried out only thirty years ago, and as recently as the 1940s had disastrously practiced barbaric lobotomy surgeries. As she polished her designer glasses that matched her red hair, Afet had explained, “I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that we should ignore Chinese medicine prescriptions dating back thousands of years and the healing methods of Tibetan monks when they can cure certain illnesses like psoriasis that scientific medicine simply still can’t.” That did the trick—I was in.

Today’s meeting was at Gül Tamay’s apartment in Emirgan. It was one of those deceptive apartments that, seen from the outside, makes you think it must have a view of the sea, whereas the truth is, it doesn’t have a view at all. It was Bahadır, the man who had been haunting my dreams, who opened the door for me. He seemed even better looking now in the daylight. He had pink shiny lips that looked as if they had just been sucked. He looked me up and down straightaway, and smiled.

“Welcome. Please, come in,” he said.

His sexy Adam’s apple moved up and down as he spoke.

And his voice, which I hadn’t been able to hear very well in the
noise of the club, was awfully sexy too. Now, why had I gone and developed a crush when the guy was Gül’s boyfriend and I had just started fasting? And what about this newly found coyness of mine, the kind more befitting a young girl? Doing my best to keep up a cool appearance, I stuck my hand out, and, as soon as we had shaken, quickly pulled it back.

“You know, there’s an old actress named Audrey Hepburn, you look just like her.”

I was undone, arrested, melting away. It was my favorite compliment. I even forgave him for calling Audrey an old actress. By some amazing feat of self-control, I managed to stay on my feet and not collapse into his arms. And then in I sailed, walking on air.

Gül was interviewing our patient in the back room in preparation for the session. Permanent fixtures of the group, the quiet Cavit Ates‚ and the tarot-reading expert Andelip Turhan, had already arrived.

With hands joined on his stomach and eyes squinted, Cavit Ates‚ sat there smiling like a Buddha who had already reached Nirvana. He greeted me from where he sat, bowing his head. The smile on his face remained serene.

I was surprised when I first heard the unusual name Andelip, which is another word for nightingale in Turkish, but it grew on me fairly quickly. As for the incessantly twittering Andelip Turhan herself, if you asked me, she had more than a few screws loose. She was a fairly short, plump brunette who constantly flipped her curly hair from side to side whenever she was in motion. As for her clothing, she wore absolutely, positively anything and everything, wrapping herself in layers of odd clothes, just like an onion, and adorning herself with an assortment of outrageous jewelry. When I first met her she was wearing a lace petticoat over her clothes and had puckered the cuffs of her pajama-like baggy trousers using massive curtain tiebacks.

“She does it on purpose,” Gül had said, after noticing the look on my face. “She thinks people will take her more seriously as a fortune-teller if she looks like a freak.”

And today she had decorated her curly hair with what appeared to be a white bonnet, but which upon closer inspection was revealed to be a pair of cotton men’s briefs. That’s right,
underwear
. Andelip had pulled the undies over her head like a bonnet, leaving her hair to stick out of the leg holes. The waistband came all the way down to her forehead, and read “Calvin Klein” upside down. Of course, she noticed where I was looking.

Wearing her sweetest smile, “I bought it online,” she said, in that chirping voice of hers. “They belonged to Kevin Spacey. He wore them for at least a day. I paid a fortune for them in an auction. I’d simply die if I didn’t parade them around a bit.”

She chuckled, her entire body jiggling.

I knew of Web sites that claimed to be selling celebrity clothes and underwear. Once, I too had bid in an auction, for the
Colt
magazine model John Pruitt’s original stained boxer shorts, but then had come to my senses upon Ponpon’s warning and withdrew from the bidding. “They’re probably fake,
ayolcuğum
,” she had said. “If people are stupid enough to buy them, I’ll start manufacturing celebrity boxers and bras myself.” Although I could hardly stomach being classified as stupid, by Ponpon, no less, I acquiesced; she was right.

I wondered what Andelip would think, what she’d say if I told her all of that.

She had already turned around to share the details of the briefs with Bahadır.

“They even had his scent on them when they first arrived. A masculine body odor, mixed with a little perfume. They arrived in a firmly closed plastic bag. But then the scent vanished. As you’ve probably guessed already, I absolutely
adore
Kevin Spacey. My
heart skips a beat whenever I see him. I don’t even know anymore how many times I’ve seen
American Beauty
. I’ve read my tarot cards a million times, but alas, he isn’t in my destiny. Oh, well. I’ll just have to make do with his briefs.”

As she said that last line, she stroked the briefs as if Kevin Spacey were in them.

I didn’t tell them about Sermet’s death. I highly doubted any of them knew him anyway. Besides, I didn’t want them to panic.

Our patient was a twenty-six-year-old woman who worked at a bank. She had been suffering from MS for four years. During her MS attacks, she experienced excruciating pain, which she could no longer bear to live with. She had contacted Gül upon recommendation.

We chatted as we sipped the tea that Bahadır had brewed and served. I like men who do housework. But I didn’t approve of the way Bahadır had settled in and become a member of the household in such a short time. It was too soon for him to be assuming the role of the host.

We had almost finished our tea when the feng shui and crystal healing expert Vildan Karaca arrived. As usual, she was late and anxious. She shook hands with one person as she spoke to the next, left her bag in one corner of the room and her jacket on a chair in another. Then she went over and started rummaging through her bag, only to return without having taken anything out. In no time at all she had successfully demonstrated her tremendous talent for spreading her anxiety like a contagious disease. She claimed that the balance of energy wasn’t right and asked everyone to stand up, and then she changed all of our places. She sat me and Bahadır down on the same couch, side by side. So our energy had been deemed balanced and compatible by a professional. I could have gotten carried away with this idea and ended up God only knows where, but, alas…

The seat-swapping exercise did nothing to alleviate her pointless anxiety. To the contrary, she’d only succeeded in infecting the rest of us. “I’ll calm down now…Calm down…” she repeated, pulling out a huge pink quartz globe from her bag and closing her eyes as she held it tightly in her hands. Under the influence of the pink quartz we all slowly calmed down. Or it felt good to believe that we did. Whatever comes to pass ultimately happens thanks to belief, to faith. Whatever we believe will make us feel better, does.

Our healing session lasted approximately forty-five minutes. We saw our patient off and then began to chat.

Vildan, the feng shui expert, started the conversation by saying she had seen me on TV. They all confessed one by one that they had watched me too.

“Sweetie,” said Vildan, “as long as you’ve started going on TV shows, why don’t you join Buket’s program as well? She mentioned it the other day. She wants to invite the tantra practitioner Hakan Akıncı and me. I’d rather be on the show with you than with that sex-crazed pervert. We’d have a much better conversation. The man won’t stop going on about tantra and he sees sex as the purpose of everything.”

“How delightful…” Andelip sighed.

Vildan, considering the remark nothing short of impertinence, responded, “
Ayol
, I’ve been there, done that…It takes hours.”

“Even better!” said Andelip, ogling. “What more could one possibly want?”

“It’s not at all like you think, darling. The male doesn’t ejaculate. And in the meantime, you end up contorting yourself into a million and one acrobatic positions. Your back, your hips, your shoulders…The next day you’re stiff all over.”

“Yes, but sweetie, that’s all perfectly fine with me…And if it makes
you
stiff, perhaps that’s because you’re too out of practice…”

“Yeah, right!
Ayol
, believe me, it’s nothing like wearing a man’s undies on your head and prancing around with ‘I’m horny’ written all over your forehead. I’ve tried it, I know, and I’m telling you, it’s unpleasant. But you won’t believe me!”

The invitation I had just received to the new TV program got lost in the muddle of Andelip and Vildan’s quarrel. She’d call me if she was really serious about it. And I’d think about it. I’d been on television once, and look what had happened; I didn’t want to even begin imagining what would happen if I were to go on again.

Gül, unable to suppress her curiosity, intervened. “Vildan, do you mean to say you slept with that disgusting Hakan Akıncı?”

No one could possibly argue that Hakan Akıncı was good-looking, or even charismatic. The man was simply ugly and sullen.

“Yes,” said Vildan nonchalantly. “To get some practice…”

“Might your discontent be due to the man himself?” suggested Gül, with sincere curiosity. “Because tantra is actually quite nice.”

Cavit Ateş, whom I’d forgotten even existed, emitted a few strange noises to express his agreement.

What? Gül and Cavit had done tantra too? Okay, I could understand Gül. She was an attractive woman, a presentable woman, but Cavit! Cavit, who looked like the Buddha! Was I the only innocent in this fold?

“I’ve never tried it,” I said naïvely.

“No need to,” burst out Vildan, “You must,” insisted Gül simultaneously. I looked at one and then the other.

As Gül reached out to hold Bahadır’s hand, “My personal opinion,” she said coyly.

So the two of them…Tantra…By the look of the lad’s proud posture, the answer was clearly yes.

O
n my way back home, I received a message on my cell phone. It was one of those pay-as-you-go numbers. I opened the message, hoping that it was one of the spruce but penniless men I’d given my number to, asking to be called back so he didn’t run out of credits.

“I know where you are and who you’re with,” it read. That was it!

I immediately called back the number that had appeared on the screen. It rang, but of course there was no answer. So my psycho had gotten hold of my secret number! Considering his accomplishments so far, I could tell that he was a force to be reckoned with. And clearly he wasn’t bluffing.

So he was following me around. I had never developed the paranoid habit of checking to see if I was being followed or not. So even if he had followed me, I wouldn’t have noticed. I turned around and looked behind me involuntarily. We were inching forward in tight traffic. He could have been in any one of the surrounding cars. Heat rushed to my face. “What’s the matter, sir? You all right?” asked the driver, who was dressed in casual apparel, as he watched me in the rearview mirror.