It was a short walk to Gulsen’s house. Priscilla tried to persuade Anna to take the shortcut through the backyards, but Anna preferred the respectable approach, via the street. Besides, she didn’t want to pass the crime scene again, nor risk arousing curiosity from Cora.
What in the world had Mitzi been up to?
They followed the same route in reverse that they’d taken with Don Davis the night before. They passed the general’s pink mansion and turned the corner. Across the street was Gulsen and her father’s modest house. Off-white with curtained windows, it faced both the general’s and the Wingates’ houses.
Had Mitzi’s secret something to do with her opium addiction?
Gulsen’s father, dressed in a navy blue suit shimmering with silken threads, met them at the front door with a smile as wide as his face. His chin glistened, recently shaved, and his forehead shone, where his hairline receded. Behind that line, long, wispy hairs slicked back from his face.
Anna and Priscilla traded their shoes for slippers and followed him across thick carpets to a room of reds. Shades of crimson, maroon, and purple swirled across the rugs, low sofas, and heavy tapestries hanging on the walls. A sweet fragrance filled the air, reminding Anna of orange blossoms.
He waved them to a pair of sofas. “Gulsen will bring the tea momentarily.”
Anna sat down. “How nice of you, Mr. Aydenli, to ask us here.”
“Ahmet, please.”
“Ah, yes, Ahmet. Where did you learn English? It’s very good.”
“In an English-speaking university in Istanbul. It’s quite popular among Turks who admire the west.”
“Such as yourself?”
He hesitated, and a moment of awkwardness touched the air. She smoothed a pleat in her skirt, and finally he said, “It’s a complicated issue. My school was a better choice than the War College.” His smile revealed more amusement than happiness. “That is where my father wanted me to go.”
“But you resisted.”
“Yes. I did not wish to become another military man like my father. He served the last Sultan, you know, as military attaché to Berlin.”
“He must’ve been disappointed that you did not follow in his footsteps.”
“He never knew. He died several years earlier, fighting Mustafa Kemal.”
Priscilla piped up. “That’s Atatürk.”
He nodded. “Kemal didn’t take the name of Atatürk until later, not until its meaning came true: ‘Father of Turks’.”
Some Turks hadn’t wanted to be rid of the Sultan, Anna realized, and apparently Ahmet’s father was one of them. Just as she was wondering what kind of response to make that would sound neutral, maybe something about her impending Turkish lessons, Ahmet’s attention switched to a doorway.
“Here is Gulsen now,” he said, springing to his feet with an alacrity that made Anna wonder if she’d brought up painful memories for him.
The USOM bulletins warned against saying anything negative about Atatürk, and now Anna had practically made Ahmet confess that his own family opposed the Father of Turks.
While Anna worried about her blunder, Ahmet supervised Gulsen and her pouring of the tea into two glass cups. Smiling shyly at Anna, she passed the cups to the adults and then sat down in her puffy pants next to Priscilla. The two girls giggled and looked as if they were about to pop with excitement.
“Well, go on,” Ahmet said with a laugh at the girls. “Run along and play. I know you’re more anxious to play than you are to have tea.”
Linking arms, they skipped out of the room.
Anna felt grateful that Gulsen distracted Priscilla from her recent glimpses of death. No child should have to witness such a trauma. She wondered about Gulsen’s loss of her mother and how difficult it would be to accept a new one, a woman forced on her. Not willing to risk another blunder, she said nothing and took a sip of her tea, flavored with jasmine.
Ahmet finally spoke, breaking the comfortable silence. “It is a new world we face, is it not?”
She agreed, remembering that Yaziz had said something similar in his office. “How is the investigation going? You said you’d have your office check into it. Have they found anything yet?”
Ahmet flicked his head backwards in the no gesture, then set his cup down and rose slowly. He looked tired. Fingering his worry beads behind his back, he crossed the room to the heavy drapes covering a window. “It will have to wait until Monday, thanks to Atatürk.”
“Monday? Why Monday?”
“Kemal gave us the western weekend, even though not everyone wishes to observe the days he chose for us. Still, my office follows the Eternal Leader’s dictum. By now, we Turks have grown accustomed to the imposition of western ways on our lives.”
Was there a note of sarcasm to his tone of voice, Anna wondered, or was it her own disorientation that was affecting her? “Anyway, I thought Detective Yaziz was already working on the case. Only last night, he—”
“Veli Bey is too valuable a resource to waste on such a case of tshinghiane.”
“Tshinghiane?” She stumbled over imitating his pronunciation.
“Turkish gypsies. They are not important enough to deserve the talents of a man like Veli Yaziz. He is koreli, a veteran of Korea.” Ahmet lifted one end of the drapes and peered through the crack. “But I did not invite you here today to hear myself talk.” He stood at the window several long minutes contemplating the scene outside. “There was quite a lot of activity last night. I suppose you attended the party across the street?”
Anna nodded. “You mean at the Wingates?” He probably didn’t mean the general’s gathering of men. “Do you know the Wingates?”
“Yes, but they don’t often invite anyone outside their circle to one of their parties. I couldn’t help but notice the arrival of many police last night. I gather the party did not end happily?”
“You don’t know what happened?”
“I am nothing more than an administrator, as I told you, and my office is closed. You will have to tell me the gossip.”
Anna shifted in her seat. Well then, she had been summoned here, not invited to a neighborly tea. Still, she always cooperated, and so she told him the story of the photographer’s death, and how they supposed it was a sudden heart attack. She left out her opinion: murder. And of course she left out the parts about Rainer.
His face paled throughout her tale of the night before, and he thumbed his worry beads. When she was finally done, he said, “But I know him. Young Emin is the brother to one of my employees in the rug shop that I own.” He dropped his string of beads into his trouser pocket, strode across the room, and glanced at his wristwatch. “No, I can’t believe it. A fine, young man in excellent health. It’s just not possible that he would fall dead like that. I shall have to go to the shop. You understand?”
“Yes, of course.” She stood. “The girls will be disappointed to interrupt their play. Perhaps Gulsen could come home with Priscilla and me?”
“No, no, no.” More finger drumming on his upper lip. “I’ve got a better idea. Our maid Bahar will stay with them. Here. Why don’t you come along with me? I would be honored to show you my rug shop.”
* * * * *
Yaziz palmed the broken blue beads as he stood in the shade of the covered passageway. Above him rose the crooked building where the Alekci family lived. Before him, the lone eşek slept on its feet, twitching in the sun. Already the sun scorched the air, and the day had hardly begun.
From the sound of women’s agitated voices streaming through the open windows above his head, Yaziz thought the Alekcis had been up a while, too. With one last glance at the eşek that wore no blue beads round its neck, Yaziz pocketed the broken ones he held in his palm and headed for the wooden stairs.
A withered woman with no teeth let Yaziz in through the broken front door of the second-floor apartment. She wore fear in her eyes and a forgotten head scarf falling around her shoulders.
“You have news of my niece?” she asked.
He lifted an eyebrow and shrugged. Something else he did not know.
“Meryem hasn’t come home all night,” she said in a wavering voice, on the verge of tears.
Yaziz pulled out his notebook. Flipped it open. Meryem, missing when the gypsy died, had led Yaziz to Kavaklidere last night, where Emin had died. Now, she was missing again.
“What happened to your door?” He nodded at the splintered hole beside the doorknob.
The old woman wailed instead of answering.
“The eşek in the yard below,” he said, faltering, “does it belong to Meryem?”
The wailer sniffled, quivering her knobby jaw. “T-to her,” she managed to say. “And to Umit, too. One of them has never owned anything that the other does not share.” Then, overcome, she fled the room, leaving Yaziz standing there, staring at a small boy with inquisitive eyes. He was tall enough to be five or six years old but skinny enough to be much younger.
“A bad man came and broke the door,” the boy said.
“Did you see him?” Yaziz asked.
The boy nodded. “But auntie was already gone. I think he was looking for her.”
“What’s your name?”
“Mustafa.”
“What did the bad man look like?” Yaziz asked, his pencil poised over a fresh sheet of paper in his notebook.
“Rich.”
“He looked rich? How could you tell?”
“From his coins.” Yaziz supposed that everyone would look rich from the perspective of this boy.
“Mustafa!” said a woman—another one—from the doorway into the second room of the apartment. She held a bald baby in her arms. “Go play with your sister.”
The boy gave Yaziz one more bashful look, then slunk away, past his mother, into the other room. The woman with the baby stepped closer.
“You have found my husband’s killer?” she said.
Yaziz jerked his head back. No.
She choked on a sob. “My sister-in-law is dead, too, isn’t she? Is that what you’ve come to tell us?”
Instead of confessing his ignorance, he asked, “Where did she go last night?” He already knew where she went. It was after the disruption of the American’s scream that he’d lost her again.
The widow shrugged. “Who knows where? Umit used to go with her sometimes. Meryem had to go alone last night.”
“Did your husband never tell you about their night-time business?”
“He said they read fortunes for the gadje. That’s what gypsies do.”
“Do you know whose fortunes they read?”
“As long as the customer has money, it doesn’t matter who they are. They’re all the same.”
Yaziz pulled out the broken beads. “Do you recognize these?”
She shielded herself with the baby and let out a soft gasp. “Where did you find them?”
“At Anit Kabir. The day your husband was murdered there. These beads belonged to your eşek, didn’t they?”
“I...I don’t know. They all look alike. Maybe they belonged to the ox that was stolen last night, from the yard below, right under our neighbor’s nose, the baker.”
Yaziz jotted down notes, but there was nothing he could do about those problems just then. “Meryem and the eşek were with your husband that day he was murdered, weren’t they?”
“They were supposed to be working their rounds.”
“And now they’re gone.”
“You don’t think...but she couldn’t have killed him.”
“Did your husband and sister-in-law take the eşek with them at night when they read fortunes?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you know why these beads are broken?”
“The beads have nothing to do with reading fortunes.”
“They would crush, don’t you think, if someone stepped on them?”
“I suppose so, but what does that have to do with my husband’s murder?”
“Think, Bayan Alekci. Who were your husband’s customers?”
“I know nothing.”
“Who else might know, if you do not? It is important. If we are ever to track your husband’s killer.”
“You think where Meryem went last night to read fortunes is where my husband’s killer was?”
He shrugged again. He doubted the general had done it, but he could not account for where the sister had gone after she was done at the general’s. After he’d lost her. “How did they find their customers?”
“You think Meryem knows who killed Umit?”
“Yes,” he lied. “We must find her, if we are to find your husband’s killer. Where did they get these beads?”
“Well... I suppose you could ask Ozturk Bey.”
“Ozturk Bey?”
“Yes. He’s a merchant near the bazaar.”
“I know where he is.” Yaziz tensed. “What is your connection to him?”
Her eyes widened, and she shrank backwards a step or two. “Nothing. He’s a wise one. A hoça. He knows everything.”
“He’s not a hoça, Bayan. There is no place for such religious men today in Atatürk’s Republic. But Ozturk Bey does sell beads like these. Is that where these came from?”
“Yes! Yes! That’s how we know him. That’s all.”
Clearly, that wasn’t all. Yaziz pocketed his notebook and took his leave. He’d already thought of Ozturk Bey while on his roof that morning, as a possible source of the opium bribe. And if it hadn’t come from him, then that old poppy farmer would know where else it had come from.
But what he hadn’t understood, until the matter of the beads just now, was why Ozturk Bey should have an interest in seeing the police drop the investigation of a gypsy. He still did not know why, but for some reason, Ozturk Bey was protecting this family.
That’s why he’d given them blue beads. When the widow saw them broken, she’d known her protection had shattered as well as her world.