Arabesk

'You're a very silly man!' And then with a brief 'Good evening' to Erol Urfa, Akkale descended the stairs.

When they finally arrived at Ikmen's office, Erol asked, 'So are you sick then, Inspector?'

Ikmen breathed in deeply and replied on this exhalation, 'I have a stomach ulcer, but it doesn't really bother me.'

Erol placed Merih's seat on one of the chairs in front of Ikmen's desk and then riffled in the bag on his shoulder until he located a bottle of milk. Merih took the drink he offered to her greedily.

'You didn't look terribly well just now,' Erol said, feeding the child while looking at Ikmen. 'If you will forgive me saying so.'

Ikmen smiled. 'I just have a few problems with stairs sometimes,' he said as he shuffled various large piles of paper around on his filthy, beloved desk. He had missed all of this sorely – the disorder, the smell, the thrill of the chase…

With a sigh of contentment, he flung himself down into the depths of his battered leather chair and watched the young man feed the baby across the top of a mountain of files. It wasn't that he suddenly came to the realisation that the combination of children and work constituted his own personal paradise, the sights and smells around him were just a reaffirmation of what he personally was about And that felt good. Now if he just had a cigarette or two…

'So, was there anything in particular you wanted to see Inspector Suleyman about?' Ikmen said as he threw his feet up onto his desk.

Erol sighed. 'Yes. But…'

'Oh, you don't have to tell me,' Ikmen said in tones of one who really couldn't care less. 'I was just as you can imagine, a bit curious about the statement that man who was with you made.'

'You mean Ibrahim, my manager?'

'If that was the rather inebriated gentleman…'

'Yes.'

Ikmen shrugged. 'It was what he said about professional suicide. Sort of piqued my interest. But no matter.'

They sat in silence for a while, the gentle sound of the baby's feeding interrupted only by the distant strains of Arabesk music from the street below. But there was a tension around Erol Urfa that Ikmen felt signalled both a reluctance and at the same time an urgent desire to talk. At length, the policeman felt that the time had come to break the silence.

'So, if you don't mind my asking,' Ikmen said’ 'did your late wife and Tansu Hanim ever meet?' 'Yes, once, at a party.' ‘Oh?'

'It was about a year ago,' he said, looking, Ikmen felt, very sadly at his now motherless child, 'although to be honest they hardly spoke. But then they wouldn't would they?'

Ikmen smiled. 'I suppose not'

'Although Latife, Tansu's sister, was very kind to Ruya, I must say. She sat and talked to her for quite some time. Ruya was very… very awkward in company.' He smiled once again at his child and made small cooing noises to her.

'Did Tansu or her sister ever see your wife again?'

'No. From then on Ruya was alone except when I was with her.'

That was the country way, Ikmen thought recalling all those little towns he had visited as a young man, towns out east that were, to all intents and purposes, entirely populated by men drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. Which reminded him…

Both the personal appearance and home of Mr Resat Soylu came as no surprise to Suleyman. At around fifty, Soylu was a flat-capped, heavy-smoking brown nut of a peasant. And although he would probably have liked a little more material wealth out of life, the three-room apartment he shared with his veiled wife and severe-looking daughter was both clean and comfortable. Indeed, with the exception of the vast array of plants growing in old oil cans on the balcony and the hugely ornate chandelier in the living room, it was not unlike Cohen's place.

Once the preliminaries of assuring Mr Soylu that he was not actually in any kind of trouble were over, the peasant called for tea and sat Suleyman down upon the only proper chair in the room. This was directly underneath the chandelier which, the gardener told the policeman with some pride, had come all the way from Munich. When the tea arrived and Mrs Soylu had once again made herself scarce, Suleyman started to question her husband.

'I understand you garden for quite a few families in Yenikoy,' he said, 'including Mr and Mrs Ertiirk and the Emins.'

'I do have that honour, yes,' the peasant replied. 'Allah, in his goodness, has always favoured my poor hands with sufficient work.'

A little embarrassed by this effusive outpouring of religious largesse, Suleyman took a sip from his tea glass and said, 'Good.'

Mr Soylu, pleased that Suleyman appeared to approve of him, did what a lot of peasant men do and sank back into a state of contented, straight-faced silence. With a small string of plastic worry beads in his hands, he could just as easily have been sitting beneath a tree in Cyprus or in the corner of a coffee house in distant Erzurum.

'I understand,' Suleyman eventually offered as he sought to penetrate the clamorous stillness around his host, 'that you poisoned some rats for Mr and Mrs Erturk. Is that correct?'

'Yes.'

The wife, all knotted and draped scarves, put in a brief appearance until the slow lizard-like gaze of her husband caused her to flee to another part of the property.

'Could you tell me then, Mr Soylu,' Suleyman persisted, 'what sort of poison you used for this purpose?'

'Cyanide.'

He might just as well have been talking about tea, ayran or some other totally innocuous substance for all the emotion that showed, or rather failed to show, on Resat Soylu's flat, brown face.

'And you obtained this very dangerous substance from where?'

For the first time the peasant smiled, large fissures appearing around his eyes and down his cheeks, like those great, dry cracks left behind by earthquakes. 'From my brother in Germany,' he said and then, amazingly, elaborated, 'like my chandelier. Germany is a great bazaar of all good things. I have never been, but my brother has lived there for ten years now.' Shaking his head against the sheer wonder of the thing, he added, 'He drives a BMW and has a German wife. Not that her people will speak to my brother.'

'Indeed.' For Suleyman, a one-word answer seemed the safest course of action at this point. Turks had been going to work in Germany for many years, and for many years had consequently come home with quality consumer goods and, occasionally, blonde-haired wives or husbands. These Europeans, although they did not always look down on their Turkish spouses themselves, usually possessed families who did that for them – people who found the Turks both primitive and backward. Suleyman's argument that the Ottomans were taking baths and writing courtly poetry when the ancestors of so many 'Hermans' and 'Dieters' were mere excrement-encrusted vassals of the Holy Roman Empire was far too vehement for the current situation, not to mention totally inaccessible to the likes of Mr Soylu.

'And your brother obtained the substance from where?' Suleyman asked, hoping to rouse Mr Soylu from his Bavarian ecstasy.

'He works at a steel plant,' Soylu said, adding proudly, 'in the Ruhr Valley. He brought it back with him because I asked him to. German cyanide kills far more pests than ours.'

'Right' Not wishing to continue with this theme of German superiority, Suleyman said, 'So does it work for other pests too?'

'I've used it for wasps, to kill their nests.' 'Was it you who killed the nest at the Emin property?'

Soylu smiled. 'Yes. That was a huge one. But I got it Tansu Hanim was very grateful.'

Suleyman took another sip from his tea glass and then placed it on the small table beside him. 'So when you eliminate these pests,' he said, 'do you ever have any poison left over at the end of the process?'

'Yes.'

'What happens to it? Do you bring it back here with you?'

Soylu smiled again and then got up and walked out into his kitchen. During the silence that wafted in in his wake, Suleyman regarded the posters of Rhineland castles that adorned every wall with a jaundiced eye. If these