Hard Rain

Fifteen

‘It is a beautiful day to be in Istanbul, no?’ said Emir, lighting a Camel as we pulled away from the kerb.

‘No,’ I answered, agreeing with him.

‘What did you think of that?’ Masters asked.

‘Of Fatma?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I felt sorry for Mrs Bremmel — against someone like Ms Zerzavatci I don’t think she stood a chance. I also think the girl knew about as much as we did. Less, even, if that’s possible. I hate to say it, but I think Doctor Merkit’s right. We’re going to need another murder before any of this makes sense.’

‘Where to now?’ she asked.

Adem Fedai rented a room in the suburb of Fatih, west of Sultanahmet and across the Golden Horn. I used the drive time heading there to go back over in my head what we had, hoping to find something I might have missed, even if it was a question we hadn’t asked that might yield a useful answer.

Right now, the killers were probably closing in on someone else connected with the F-16 upgrade. There was a pattern of sorts here, but not the kind Doctor Merkit was used to working with.

Masters’ cell rang. She answered it, said hello to Captain Cain. She said ‘Uh-huh’ half-a-dozen times, a ‘No way’ and a ‘You’re kidding, really?’ before ending the call.

‘What gives?’ I asked.

‘Two bits of news. You were right about those blast blankets. The Istanbul police divers just recovered three of them stuffed in plastic bags 400 yards from the Portman place, weighted down with dive belts. There’s also more evidence to suggest you were right about there being two killers. In the bag, along with the blankets, were a couple of pairs of disposable coveralls.’

If I was right about the blankets, I also had to be right about there being a boat positioned to drop the killers off and pick them up.

‘Excuse, please… we are here,’ said Emir, interrupting my train of thought. ‘I cannot park on this road. I will have to drive around.’

‘What about that car there?’ I asked. Up ahead, a Fiat was stopped half on and half off the road.

‘Oh, that is polisi. They can park where they like.’

The police were staking out Ocirik’s, waiting for Fedai to return to his digs above the café, and advertising the fact. Emir was in the process of extracting a Camel, so I got out of the car before he had the opportunity to share it with me.

It was sleeting pins and needles of ice. I jogged over to an awning outside a local fast-food joint and took shelter beneath it, Masters a couple of paces behind. Inside the shop, a guy was cutting meat from an enormous cone skewered in front of a vertical grill. It made me hungry until I saw the ash from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth fall off into the shaved meat and get rolled up in the flat bread. But then I thought perhaps I was going soft and ordered two, one each for Masters and me. My turn to make a peace offering.

‘So I think, along with two killers, there has to be a support crew,’ said Masters as she pushed her hands into a pair of fur-lined gloves. Her nose was red at the tip with cold, her eyes full of blue-green fire.

‘Looks that way,’ I agreed. Perhaps we were making progress after all, even if the going was slow. I heard the call to prayer. A sprawling white marble mosque crowned the hill a couple of hundred yards further up the road. A tram rocked by in the middle of the street, almost empty. There was a fair bit of foot traffic, though I wouldn’t have called the sidewalks exactly crowded. Istanbul hadn’t quite broken for lunch.

I got a tap on the shoulder, bringing me back to the here and now. ‘Did you buy this for me?’ Masters asked, peeling the paper off the kebab. ‘The guy in there just handed it to me.’

‘Yep.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, and handed me mine. ‘I accept your apology, by the way.’

We ate in silence, scoping the premises diagonally across the road, the one we’d come to see.

Ocirik’s was a water-pipe and tea joint that put on belly dancing for the tourists at night. Ocirik himself was a famous Turkish wrestler, according to Captain Cain. While I watched people drift in and out, I wondered what Ocirik’s gimmick was when he wrestled and whether he’d ever come up against John Cena. Then I wondered if he had, who’d won. A steady stream of local guys strolled into the place along with a smattering of tourists. Adem Fedai, the manservant who came with the residence Portman leased, kept a room on the first floor at Ocirik’s when he wasn’t at Portman’s beck and call.

Before I realised it, I’d finished the kebab. It was good. Maybe the tobacco ash was a secret-herbs-and-spices thing.

‘Mmm… delicious,’ said Masters, putting the wrapper in the trash. ‘Let’s go.’ She stepped off the sidewalk into a break in the traffic.

Ocirik’s was accessed down a narrow pathway that opened out into a sheltered courtyard dominated by a large leafless tree and a type of central glasshouse. Most of the patrons sat outside, under the shelter of awnings from surrounding buildings, warmed by gas heaters scattered here and there. There was a large crowd of pre-lunch smokers sucking on hoses that snaked down into bubbling water reservoirs. If my nose wasn’t deceiving me, the air was thick with the smell of tobacco-flavoured coffee. Waiters wearing blue-striped jackets with ‘Ocirik’s’ stencilled on the back weaved amongst the crowd, tending to the pipes, popping red coals onto this one, re-stoking that one. Other waiters moved between the tables delivering tea and coffee on swinging trays.

Tucked under the awning beside us was a photo gallery featuring wrestling bouts in full swing as well as various large-breasted belly dancers. They were big and hairy and oiled up. And so were the wrestlers. The gallery orbited a life-size photo of a bunch of hirsute boulders stacked one on top of each other — Ocirik, probably. The photo was signed in the bottom right-hand corner. I wiped the glass: yeah, this was Ocirik in his prime. Cena wouldn’t have stood a chance. There’d have been no choreography in this guy’s moves.

‘Can I you help?’ came the voice behind me.

Something was blocking the light. I turned and saw the biggest man I’d ever laid eyes on. He looked familiar. Ocirik. The guy was a monster, maybe twenty years older than the rock pile in the photo. I pulled my shield from my back pocket and gave him a good long look at it. ‘Mr Ocirik, you speak English?’

‘A little,’ he said, demonstrating by holding his thumb and forefinger together. His thumb was almost as thick as Masters’ forearm.

‘I’d like to ask you some questions about Adem Fedai. You know this man?’ I enquired.

Masters pulled a small snapshot of Fedai and showed it to him.

‘Yes, he live here.’

‘Does he still live here?’

‘Yes.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘I see him in one week.’

‘You saw him a week ago?’

‘Yes. He give money for the room. I tell you this already.’

‘You told who? Us?’

‘Polisi.’

‘Would you mind showing us his room, Mr Ocirik?’ I asked.

‘I show polisi already.’

‘We are different polisi, Mr Ocirik,’ said Masters.

‘There is nothing to see. He has only a bed.’

‘Has he taken his clothes?’ asked Masters.

‘No. His clothes are there.’

‘Has he gone away before? Left for a week or more?’

Ocirik didn’t get it, the overhang on his bus-shelter-sized brow furrowed with confusion. Masters repeated the question a couple of times in different ways until the meaning sank in.

‘Yes, sometimes he go away.’

‘When does he need to give you more money for the room?’ Masters asked.

‘He must give money in three weeks.’

‘Did he always pay rent one month in advance?’

Ocirik shook his huge, bony noggin. ‘I no understand.’

‘Did he always pay rent by the month?’

Ocirik shrugged. It was clear this was one 300-pound language barrier we weren’t going to push through.

‘I couldn’t help but overhear,’ said a man who’d been sitting nearby sucking away on a water pipe. ‘Perhaps I can help?’

‘That depends,’ Masters said. ‘You speak Turkish?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he replied with a smile, indicating his Turkish-language newspaper and tucking it under his arm. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘We want to know if his lodger always paid rent a month in advance.’

‘Okay,’ said the impromptu interpreter. He put our question to Ocirik, and Ocirik gave him an answer. ‘He says no — the man usually pay his rent after two weeks.’

‘Thanks,’ said Masters.

‘Anything else I can ask him for you?’

‘Ask Ocirik whether he’ll change his mind and open up the lodger’s room for us,’ I said, giving Ocirik my public-relations smile. ‘Just in case he’s wavering on the point.’

The stranger put it to Ocirik.

‘Ocirik says he’ll change his mind if the lodger doesn’t return and his rent falls due.’

‘Fair enough,’ I agreed. Masters and I had no legal means of forcing him to comply anyway.

Another man almost as big as Ocirik, but maybe only half his age, came up and tapped him on his shoulder. This had to be Ocirik’s son. The younger man — K2 to the old man’s Everest — pointed impatiently to a couple of crowded tables across the courtyard. Ocirik said, ‘I must go now.’

‘Anything else?’ asked our interpreter.

‘Well, we’d like two apple teas and a water pipe with cappuccino-flavoured tobacco,’ Masters told him.

‘Sure. I get for you,’ said Ocirik, there being nothing wrong with his menu English.

‘Before you race off…’ I said to him.

Ocirik grunted.

‘You see Fedai, you call.’ I held out my card and added a little mime to get this request over the line.

Ocirik examined the card before slipping it in his pocket. ‘I call,’ he promised, walking off into a cloud of tobacco smoke.

Masters thanked the stranger for his assistance. He gave us a nod, deposited a couple of notes on his table and left.

‘Cappuccino-flavoured?’ I asked her.

‘Can’t you smell it? The tobacco’s flavoured here. You can get all kinds.’

‘So this is what, a carcinogenic Baskin-Robbins?’

Masters shrugged. ‘When in Rome…’

‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I said, taking a seat.

‘I don’t. The last time I smoked was when I was last in Istanbul.’

‘When you met the colonel.’

Masters ignored the comment. ‘So, what do you make of Fedai?’ she asked instead.

‘I think he’s lying low somewhere. Maybe he got scared and thought someone might want to hang Portman’s murder on him. I think he’s coming back here, or intended to come back. Otherwise, why bother paying a month’s rent in advance? He’d have just skipped.’

Masters thought about it, then said, ‘He might have paid to give himself a head start, and make everyone think he was coming back.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

Ocirik’s gargantuan offspring brought the water pipe and picked at the nuggets of burning tobacco with a long pair of tongs. Masters then sucked on the pipe so that its water reservoir bubbled away and the tobacco glowed orange and then red. The tea appeared, brought by another waiter.

‘If it’s okay with you, I want some time off tonight,’ she said, blowing smoke at the empty table beside us.

‘I’m not your boss,’ I informed her. I sipped the apple tea and it reminded me of Doctor Merkit.

‘No, but I’m giving you the courtesy of letting you know.’

‘Fine by me,’ I said. It wasn’t, but there was nothing I could do about it anyway. If Richard Wadding was what Anna Masters wanted, then I’d misjudged her. I doubted that, but my options on that score had been cut to zero.

‘So, that means you’ve got the night off, Vin. What are you going to do with it?’

‘Pack.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘We’re going to Incirlik Air Base.’

‘Why?’

‘We’ve done all we can here. Maybe the people Portman and Bremmel were dealing with can throw some light into the darkness for us. The upgrade on these F-16s seems to be the only real link that I can see.’

‘Agreed,’ said Masters with a nod.

‘What’s that like?’ I asked, gesturing at the water pipe.

‘Like inhaling cappuccino-flavoured smog on a cold day.’

‘He’s not right for you, Anna.’

‘And I suppose you are?’