Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [68]
“Where did you hear these things, son?”
“It’s fresh news to me. I just found out … Okay, so did you electrocute her?”
“I’m telling you, we didn’t have those kinds of things at our station. We didn’t know anything about them.”
“Did you …” His eyes widened. “Stick … anything up her?”
“Have mercy! God forbid!”
“Okay, how did she break her foot and her back?”
He was silent again. Then: “She tried to run, fell down the stairs.” A pause. “Down two flights.”
“And you mean to tell me you guys did not throw her down?”
“No, no, I swear.”
“And then?”
“We took her back to the neighborhood.”
He was silent again. They left the woman on the street. Her legs, her back broken. Up until then, I thought that she’d been taken to the hospital directly from school. At the hospital, those butchers, so-called doctors, somehow failed to see the damage to her back.
“Son,” he said, “you’re young and still naïve. You don’t understand. A divorced woman, her mind up in the air, misguided.”
Okay. Either a poor, wretched woman, or a witch. The same old story. Then on with the patronizing, on with the witch hunt. I kept quiet this time.
“Look,” he said, “I have money, take it, let me go, I beg you …”
I put on my gloves. I went through the apartment. I didn’t have to dig around for long before I turned up his service gun, in a closet in the bedroom. A .45 caliber Kırıkkale. And next to it, bullets wrapped in cloth. His truncheon made of black rubber. I pocketed the gun and the bullets. In the same closet I found three bundles of American dollars.
“There must be some fifty, sixty thousand dollars there,” he said.
There’s a retired civil servant of the state for you! Ha! I didn’t bother asking him where he got that kind of money.
“Take it all, just leave me alone now. Go.”
That’s when I moved behind his chair. I took out the garrote I’d made in my hotel room. I swung it before his eyes. He let out a low-pitched scream. I held the wire by the handles and in a single, swift motion had it firmly around his neck. I leaned in and, my lips nearly touching his earlobe, asked: “How’s that? Does it hurt? Here’s your chance to see for yourself which is more effective: Palestinian suspension, rope, an oiled noose, or”—I tugged at the wire—“this. You came into this world without a prayer, punk, and now that’s how you’re gonna go.”
I heard the liquid dripping from the chair. He was soiling himself. I remembered my grandmother again. Those times when she was incontinent. I stopped. I thought. They say one nail drives out another, but does it really? Fuck it! Is that the way you’re going to deal with this goddamn monster?
I met Pandeli in one of those workers’ coffeehouses. I put the photograph on the table and took a good look. Yep, that was him. The police chief. The young hero of those infamous “incidents” of September 6 and 7. As they say, You can tell the make of a man from his baby shit. And there he was in his baby-shit days. He must have lost the mustache later. The gold tooth too. He didn’t need to be showy. Judging from those piles of bills he’d secretly stashed away, he’d been a virtuoso of the fine art of skimming.
Finally, Pandeli laid it all out there for me, unloading himself like a dump truck. His father’s store had been raided during those “incidents.” I’d heard a lot about those lootings, which went on for several days, from my mother and grandmother; the excuse was that Atatürk’s home in Saloniki had been bombed. They said that you couldn’t walk on Istiklal Avenue without stepping on goods from the gutted stores.
Pandeli’s father was never able to recoup his business. Nor his head. The family emigrated to Greece. The poor guy killed himself when Pandeli was still young. Pandeli found this photograph among his father’s belongings. He recognized