Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [69]
We were silent for a spell. Then I told my story. A weird kind of confusion had overcome me when my mother was sick and dying. I don’t recall exactly, but I think I believed I was the Grim Reaper or something. I was in a hospital for a while. I heard about the things done to my mother from a friend of hers who visited me there. From Leyla Teyze. The poor woman didn’t really have any desire to talk about such things at a time like that, but she was sick and, I think, afraid of dying before she’d had the chance to tell me.
“Okay, look,” said Pandeli, “the Spaniards are after Pinochet. But that sort of thing will be a long time coming in these parts.”
What could I say? I smiled bitterly.
“So are we just going to let this guy off the hook?”
Good question. We paused and thought for a moment.
“Is there anybody you can think of who knows the city well enough and could find the people we’re looking for?” Pandeli asked.
“Yes,” I said, “there is, there sure as hell is …”
He was right: We were each worse than the other.
I found Pamuk in his coffeehouse in Tophane and convinced him to take a break and come back to Aksaray with me.
“Look,” he said, “I’m doing this for your mother’s sake, not yours!” Fair enough. We both were Aksaray kids, we went way back; he knew my mother, and he knew other people who had been tortured too.
The three of us gathered at a table back in the workers’ coffeehouse. Pamuk looked at me. “So what’s your beef this time?” he said.
I was sitting on one side, and on the other Pandeli was leaning toward Pamuk and rattling on in his ear. Pamuk, all serious, was giving him his full attention. Pandeli turned to me. “Let’s give him something, at least for his expenses,” he said. I gave Pamuk an envelope containing five thousand dollars.
“Finish the job and you’ll get another five grand,” I said.
“You got it!” he replied. He finished his tea. “Enjoy your teas, fellas. I’ll excuse myself now, if I may.” In fact, Pamuk was not the kind of guy who asked for permission for anything. He stepped out of the coffeehouse, fading like a huge shadow into the Aksaray evening.
“All right,” I said. “Great. What now?”
“Give it some time,” Pandeli said. He knew something. Then he told me of his intention to leave for Vienna soon. We kept our goodbyes brief. One never knew.
I was getting restless. I was about to swing by Dolapdere and look for a job. Then one day I read it in the papers: The Scalpel Slays Again! This time it had cut up a retired police chief who lived on Çıngıraklı Bostan Street. To shreds. And you didn’t have to look too closely to figure out that these were not your ordinary serial killings, not your ordinary serial killer. Some person was clearly rubbing out torturers.
I mailed copies of the newspaper articles to Pandeli in Vienna, just in case. The way he had told it, while looking at the photographs in the papers, he’d remembered some scalpels he had seen during his residency and developed a hunch as to who the killer might be. Then he sent Pamuk, not to do the deed himself, but to tip the killer off that he was in the know, to point the killer in the right direction: in the direction of the chief. Okay, that part I understood. According to this version of the story, the killer had been hanging out at the medical school at some point in the past. Yes, those scalpels were not something you’d forget. Still, how come no one else had remembered them and identified the killer? Was Pandeli the only one close enough to the killer back then to have the privilege of seeing his or her handmade tools? Could the killer be a woman? Was there more than one killer? Could Pandeli be one of them? Was he up to something in Greece too? I didn’t understand, I couldn’t understand. I was taking that old advice: Eat the