Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [58]
I said nothing.
“Don’t ask me then, go ask your master,” he said.
“The master’s situation’s different,” I said.
“What about it? Self-defense or not, you deal with the consequences.”
The man he called my “master” was a prisoner we worked with in the carpentry shop. Sinan didn’t like him, not at all. He was respected by the other men, like he was some kind of ward aa or something. Two plainclothes flatfoots tried to rape his wife one night when they were coming back from Kumkapı, and he butchered the guys right on the spot. He got a king’s reception when he arrived at the prison.
Sinan was back before he’d even left. He walked into the courtyard without a word, paced a line all morning. He took it real hard every time his transfer petition got rejected. And this time, too, just like when any little thing happened to him, he felt his whole world was crumbling around him.
I went and sat next to him at lunch. I scrunched up and started eating.
“Use a fork,” he said.
“I’m gonna eat with my hands,” I said.
“Use a fork. You can’t eat like that, you’ll upset your stomach,” he said.
He always told me what to do. Whenever I spoke, he interrupted me and corrected my accent. He told me who I could and couldn’t speak to. And he rubbed my peasant roots in my face every chance he got. As if he were carving out his own little kingdom there between those walls. I continued eating. You shovel in rotten, raw meat with your bare hands, and then you savor every damn morsel, don’t you? So why use a fork just ’cause it’s cooked? I was about to say. But I didn’t.
“Don’t tell me what to do. Gets on my nerves,” was all I said.
“You a hood now, are you?” he said. “Since when?”
To him, I could fall right into the class of degenerates and scum at any given moment. I looked him in the face. I should hate him. He had a china chin, delicate as a woman’s. The veins on his forehead grew even bluer when he was sad. Tore me up inside. I kept doing my damnedest to be his equal. I started eating with a fork. It wasn’t difficult, I simply didn’t enjoy it.
“They’re going to kill me if I stay here,” he said.
“Nobody’s gonna do shit to anybody,” I said.
“Müfit’s got men in here. I gotta scat, and quick.”
“No bird flies out of here without the ward aa knowin’ about it,” I said.
The ward aa was a man in his thirties who’d been catapulted to his superior rank as soon as he set foot in here, because he’d killed seven men in a parking lot brawl. He was the man who kept tabs on comers and goers. Next to him, the guards were mere escorts.
The “Müfit! Müfit!” he whined about was the son of the man he’d killed. From what he told me, all hell had broken loose over some broad. Sinan’s childhood sweetheart. He had no idea how he slayed that man, the fat sixty-some-year-old daddy who planted himself in their way the night they tried to elope. Both men were certain of their love for Funda. I can’t imagine Sinan slapping a punching bag, he’s so damn puny. And this Müfit guy told the apartment-building doorman to let Funda know he was on Sinan’s ass. Is there really a doorman at the apartment building where Funda lives? Who knows? Hard to separate the bull from the shit when it comes to these stories. Regardless, Sinan thought he was now in the lion’s mouth. And he’d started acting extra strange the past few weeks. He couldn’t sleep at night, even started praying. He started speaking real fast, like he was mumbling prayers or something. He couldn’t sit still. And when he got like that, he’d get more annoyed with me than ever. Yet for years I’d been closer to him than anybody, Funda even.
“Besides, hard for anything to happen with it being this crowded,” I said. “Barely room to move as it is.”
“Perfect scene for the crime,” he replied. “Can’t tell who’s got whose throat in a crowd like this.”
There were men who’d been killed in here by having hot olive oil poured down their ears, or stabbed to death with a shiv. At least, that’s what