‘I can make sahlep to warm you,’ Samsun said as she placed a clean ashtray on the coffee table in front of him.
‘That’s very kind,’ İkmen said with a smile, ‘but if I tell you I’ve just come from the mortuary would that qualify me for something a little stronger?’
Samsun smiled. ‘Kanyak OK?’
‘Old addictions still taste just as sweet,’ İkmen replied and leaned back into the depths of a huge red sofa.
After a brief retreat into the kitchen, Samsun returned bearing a large golden-coloured bottle and two glasses. Her ability to hold all of these items in just one large hand made İkmen smile.
‘So,’ she began as she sat down and began pouring out the drinks, ‘what brings this country’s most celebrated murder detective to the door of an ex-working woman like me?’
Despite being family, Samsun had never entirely trusted her cousin. The fact that he was only half Albanian, together with his profession, meant she felt the need to stress her position as an
ex
-prostitute. Her assessment of him as one who cared about such details was entirely erroneous but it was an attitude İkmen had over the years come to accept as unchangeable. Rather like her opinion of him as some sort of investigative genius, it reflected Samsun’s overblown view of the world and of everyone in it.
İkmen, as was his strangely un-Turkish wont, came straight to the point. ‘I want to know about
gjakmaria
, Samsun,’ he said. ‘I need to understand how it works.’
Samsun passed a large glass of brandy to İkmen and then took a long draught from her own glass.
‘I’m involved in something to which it may be pertinent,’ İkmen continued, trying without success to catch Samsun’s down-turned eyes.
‘If Albanians are involved in
gjakmaria
then there’s no place for you, the police, in that,’ Samsun said, reflecting the sentiments of Rahman Berisha. ‘All the worse, of course, if they’re Ghegs.’
‘Ghegs?’
She turned on him what İkmen felt was a disdainful eye. ‘You really know nothing, don’t you?’ She sighed. ‘Ghegs are from the north, Ghegeria, real mountain people, very traditional. Lek Dukagjini, who put the rules governing
gjakmaria
, amongst other things, in the book we call the Kunan, was a Gheg. The southern Tosks are more outward looking.’
‘And you are?’ İkmen asked.
‘Like your mother, I am a Gheg,’ Samsun replied.
‘But you’re not currently involved in
gjakmaria
, I—’
‘Your Turkish father must have told you that we do this sort of thing.’
‘Well . . .’
‘As far as our family are concerned, we settled all of our differences before we came to this country.’ Just briefly she smiled. ‘I have never seen a bloodied shirt at the window of any of our relatives, Çetin.’
‘The bloodied shirt meaning . . . ?’
‘That a dead man waits to be avenged. There are some villages back home where such things hang in every window.’
‘No wonder Grandfather decided to leave,’ İkmen said acidly.
Samsun sighed and leaned back in her chair. ‘If you’re dealing with a
fis
in blood, Çetin,’ she said, ‘the “something” with which you are involved will not be the end of the matter. If blood has been shed then that blood will have to be avenged. These are very deep waters, laced with a history and a tradition you barely understand. Your status as a police officer won’t help you here. You can threaten the whole lot of them with the death penalty if you wish, but it will make no difference to the outcome.’
İkmen took a long drink from his glass and then placed it, empty, on the coffee table. ‘So, assuming that I’m dealing with a
fis
in blood, in other words a clan involved in a blood feud, what happens now?’
‘When the shirt is hung, the rival
fis
will know they mean business. All of the men will stay inside the house for the time being.’
This sounded familiar, and İkmen recalled Rahman Berisha’s grave face. This in turn conjured up the look of horror on the face of Rahman’s daughter when she saw her brother’s all but severed head. A girl, little more than a child, made to follow the harsh dictates of her ‘blood’.
‘Whatever they tell you about it must be treated with caution,’ Samsun went on. ‘We have a saying that goes, “You are free to be faithful to your word; you are free to be faithless to it.”’ At this, Samsun laughed. It was, in spite of all the surgery she had had, a remarkably deep sound.
After a pause during which the full import of the saying Samsun had just quoted at him sank into his brain, İkmen said, ‘Of course I’m trying not to jump to conclusions about this. The incident may be clan related, but then it may not be.’
‘You are right to take that line,’ Samsun said and poured what looked like about half the brandy bottle into İkmen’s glass. ‘The Berishas have been in blood with the Vlora
fis
for as long as anyone from Ghegeria can remember.’
Amazed that Samsun, even allowing for her well-known ‘powers’, not to mention her addiction to gossip, would know, and reveal, such intimate details about his case, İkmen exclaimed, ‘Allah! But how do you . . .’
‘We are Albanians, Çetin.’ The transsexual smiled, ‘We are accustomed to tragedy. News of it travels fast. The cousin, Mimoza Özer, is telling everyone that Rifat Berisha’s head was almost severed from his body. That would point away from his death being blood related.’
‘Why is that?’ İkmen asked, after which he made a deliberate effort to close his mouth which was beginning to look fish-like.
‘Because to sever a man’s head is dishonourable,’ Samsun explained and then added with a shrug, ‘Not of course that this will stop the Berishas from avenging Rifat. In fact I expect that plans are well in hand to kill a Vlora even as we speak. I suggest that you enlist the services of a disinterested party immediately. That rather lovely Suleyman would do.’ Then leaning forward right into İkmen’s face she said, ‘You might like to think you’re all Turk, but if either the Berishas or the Vloras find out that you have “connections”, you could be in for some very big trouble indeed, my little cousin.’
Chapter 5
Although the pressure of Zelfa’s warm, naked body across his chest was comforting, it did not, sadly, manage to expunge completely the image of that horrified girl’s face from Mehmet Suleyman’s mind. When Engelushjia Berisha had seen what someone had done to her brother Rifat she had first vomited and then screamed so long and hard that Dr Sarkissian had been obliged to medicate her. Poor child. It made Mehmet mad to think that one so young had been forced to do that by apparently perfectly capable parents.
But when Zelfa started to stir from her post-coital stupor, he found his mind was, after all, ready to be fully occupied by her considerable figure.
‘I need a cigarette,’ Zelfa said and reared up suddenly from within a thick heap of hair and bedclothes.
‘Oh, don’t move yet!’ Mehmet said as he grabbed her round the shoulders and pulled her back down onto his chest. ‘I’ll get cold if you go.’
As a sweetener, he moved her mouth down hard onto his. And all thoughts of cigarettes momentarily disappeared as Zelfa allowed herself to be tasted and explored.
When at last he loosened his grasp on her, Mehmet, his eyes still full of lust for her, said, ‘You’re so soft and warm . . .’
‘I think you’ll find that’s the menopause,’ she replied, and with a laugh she rolled towards the edge of the bed and retrieved her cigarettes and lighter from the floor.
‘I don’t know why you bring that subject up so frequently,’ her now annoyed lover retorted. ‘It’s not romantic. Why do you do that, Zelfa?’
After first lighting a cigarette for herself and then one for him, she answered, ‘Well, firstly, because I’m a medic and I relate to the world in medical terms.’
‘Yes? And?’
‘And, also,’ she said, moving in closer the better to see his face, ‘I want to bring it to your attention, Mehmet. This process has already started in my body; I’ve put on weight, I get hot flushes, I didn’t have a period last month . . . I’m a doctor, I know this stuff. You and I can screw like rabbits but the chances of our having children are slim, you know.’
‘Yes.’ He sat up a little straighter now, angry. His face, she thought, looked very sexy when it was haughtily jutting above a long cigarette. ‘But I’ve told you that I want you more than children.’
‘You need to be very, very sure, Mehmet.’
‘Yes, I know and I am,’ he said, his voice now rising in line with his increased anger, ‘although you constantly asking me to think about my commitment to you infuriates me. You seem to think I’m incapable of knowing my own mind.’
‘I know you’re not incapable, Mehmet . . .’
‘I am not one of your patients!’ Sitting up straight now, he turned the full force of his aristocratically handsome countenance on her. ‘I come from a long line of men who have known exactly what they want – they used to rule both this country and its empire! Decision-making is second nature to us and so if I have decided that I want to marry you, Zelfa, you can be pretty certain that that is what I want for myself!’ He turned aside in order, she thought, to flick ash from his cigarette into the ashtray, but when he turned back his hands were empty.
‘Mehmet . . .’
With one quick movement, he hopped lightly across her body, pinning her to the bed with his tall, dark form.
‘Do you know how many times a day I think about making love to you?’ he said, his lips close to hers. ‘Or how often I imagine your laugh or replay your funny remarks in my head?’
Noticing only that his eyes were fierce with passion, she said in conciliatory tones, ‘Mehmet . . .’
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I love your kindness and your intelligence and your beauty and I know you hate the little pieces of fat underneath your skin, but—’
‘But I must be certain you won’t leave me, Mehmet!’ she said with a desperation she had not meant to impart to him. ‘Because if we married and then you left me for—’
‘You don’t leave things that you worship, you stupid woman!’
As if propelled by words that he, in his turn, had not wanted to confess to her, Mehmet threw himself off Zelfa’s body and landed heavily back on his side of the bed.
Several minutes of silence passed as both of them stared fixedly at the heavily cracked ceiling of Zelfa’s bedroom, reminding them of the all too recent upheavals in the earth. The sombreness that this evoked brought them to rather more quiet places in their minds.
It was Zelfa who finally broke the silence. ‘I do want to say yes, you know,’ she said softly. ‘I just need a few more days to explore all the implications.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like the fact that if I marry you I’ll never live in Ireland again.’ She turned to face him with a smile. ‘I know that we can visit, but . . .’
‘I can’t help feeling that all this thinking you are doing means that you don’t love me,’ he said, his face now drawn and anxious.
Zelfa placed both her hands round his jaw and kissed him. ‘Oh, but I do, Mehmet, but I have to consider all the options before I commit to anything.’
Slowly, if sadly, he smiled at her words. ‘I know. I know.’
‘If you knew just how much I love you, it would scare you to death,’ she said and then, as if to underline her point, she began moving her hands down his chest, towards his lower abdomen.
He smiled.
It was exactly the same smile that the no-show patient with the surname Suleyman had given her earlier in the day. Mr Muhammed Suleyman’s anxiety had obviously got the better of him before his appointment – either that or the old man had decided to bottle out of meeting his son’s lover, if indeed Mehmet was his son. Oh, but with a smile like that he had to be, didn’t he? Although how the old man, who according to Mehmet had little contact with him, knew about her she didn’t know. But as she caressed her lover, Zelfa decided that perhaps now was not the time to mention such issues.
Orhan Tepe had had a long, tiring day. As soon as he had finished securing what they now knew was not the site of Rifat Berisha’s murder but simply the place where his body had been dumped, he had followed Dr Sarkissian and the corpse over to the mortuary. Arriving just after the formal identification by the victim’s sister, he had seen İkmen only briefly before the latter, plus Suleyman, returned the distressed young woman to her home. İkmen and Suleyman, he thought sadly, looked just as comfortable together as they had when Suleyman used to work for the old man. The two of them had been a team, a real partnership in ways he knew was not the case with himself and İkmen. Not that he and İkmen had been working together for that long – just a year. But it was a year during which, Tepe felt, his superior had been mourning, for want of a better word, the elevation of his closest ally. Add to that the post-earthquake anxiety they all seemed to suffer from now and it was easy, if galling, to see why İkmen was not, for a ‘new boy’ like him, easy to reach. But this train of thought, he knew, didn’t ultimately help. İkmen would either come round to him or not, as Allah willed.
Orhan took a sip from the glass of tea Aysel had given him before she’d gone off to try to get some sleep – before Cemal, no doubt, woke her for a feed in the early hours of the morning. Love that child as he did, Orhan couldn’t help wondering how his wife would cope should they have another highly active baby – if, of course, they could afford to have one at all. Unfortunately, living in a recently active earthquake zone didn’t mean that your rent went down or even stablised. Becoming not only a poorly paid policeman but also a policeman in the employ of the ruthlessly incorruptible İkmen had probably not been his smartest move. Not that he was known for his good decisions – the latest of which, a somewhat tawdry affair with a colleague, was causing him more than just mild anxiety. He turned his mind away from such insoluble issues.
Although he didn’t usually attend autopsies, he had witnessed some of Rifat Berisha’s. Dr Sarkissian had spoken only to his assistants during the course of the process, but he had disclosed some of his findings when İkmen had returned from the Berishas’ home. As they already knew, Rifat Berisha had died from massive loss of blood following what the doctor said were multiple deep slashes to the throat. The weapon, which the doctor suggested could be either a hunting knife or some similar unserrated blade, had been wielded like a saw, until it almost decapitated the victim. He had suggested the assailant would have to be strong and possibly angry if not necessarily powerful. An interesting aside to this had been the small, but visible, shards of glass that were present both in the wound and in the victim’s face. Although the death blow had undoubtedly been delivered by a knife, the glass fragments had damaged Berisha’s facial skin and added to the mess that had once been his throat.