But later, as if they were some kind of family curse, Sevgi ran across the wolf-trap cuffs herself.
“She’s a cop, Stefan.” Marsalis, there at her shoulder, filling in for her sudden drop into silence. “I reckon she’ll be familiar with the hardware.”
She had been a cop, but only just, less than two years in, when she developed her familiarity with the hardware. Internal Affairs landed on the 108th like a bomb, brought a case against a group of detectives she knew who’d used the cuffs on hard-core suspects, apparently—but who the fuck could really fathom the logic of it—in an attempt to scare up a usable confession. During the interrogation, the pressure got cranked up a little too high. A young Sevgi Ertekin got dragged into the mix by association, was rapidly cleared, but still had had to stand in a field in upstate New York at dawn, watching mist cling just above the fallow earth, listening to the precise scrape—crunch rhythm of machine spadework, and, finally, gagging as the IA digging robot gently exhumed the three nine-week-old corpses and their cuff-severed hands.
Welcome to NYPD.
Small consolation—look at it this way, Sev, an uninvolved brother officer suggested at the time—that the cuffs, long outlawed in the Union, had come surreptitiously to the 108th via a Jesusland brother-in-law to one of the convicted detectives, a senior officer for a private policing outfit in Alabama, Republican law enforcement—of course—still making widespread use of the cuffs in defiance of three international treaties and a nominal federal ruling yet to be ratified anywhere except Illinois.
Look at it this way, Sev;
IA backed off from her speedily enough to avoid Officer Ertekin being tarred as a collaborator; better yet, her exemplary balancing act between loyalty to her fellow officers and duty to her calling was noticed by senior heads who would, years down the line, smooth her entry into Midtown Homicide.
Look at it this way, Sev;
The dead men in the field would not be much missed—all three had prior convictions as cross-border sex traffickers, hoodwinking young women from the Republic with promises of lucrative casual labor among the bright lights, then disciplining them via rape and battery until most went numbly to work providing orifices for New York’s low-end paying males.
She looked to the small consolations, as advised. All that spring she looked at it that way, but in the end it still came down to the remembered reek of decomposed human flesh in the early-morning mist. Something changed in her that day—she saw the recognition of it in Murat’s eyes when she came home to him afterward. It was the day he stopped trying to persuade her there were better career paths than the police, perhaps because he saw that if she didn’t quit for this then she never would.
Nevant dropped his pants leg over the cuff, and she blinked back to the present. A small bubble of quiet expanded in the waiting area.
“I thought those were illegal in Europe,” she said, to break the silence.
“On humans,” agreed Nevant, darting a glance at Marsalis. “With thirteens, though, well, you can’t be too careful. Isn’t that right, Mars man?”
The black man shrugged. “Depends how bright they are, I’d say.”
He watched Yavuz take the Frenchman out and put him in the dedicated UN teardrop without speaking again, or moving. His face could have been carved from anthracite. Only when the vehicle pulled softly away did he glance up at the dance troupe on the screen above his head, and something happened in the lines around his eyes. Sevgi made it for disgust, but she couldn’t have said with any certainty at what or whom it was aimed, and she wondered if Marsalis could, either.
So they went back to the apartment, and there was a kind of gathering potential in that, a sense that they’d left something back there that needed to be collected. They walked, because it wasn’t really cold outside or really late, and maybe because they both needed the time and the sky. They got lost, but neither minded much, and rather than use the street-finder holo in the keytab, they navigated vaguely for the waterfront, followed it as closely as was feasible until they wound up at the far end of Moda Caddesi and a slight but steady slope back down toward the COLIN-owned block. The glue along Carl’s wound itched in the cool air.
At one point, Ertekin asked him the obvious question. “When did you know he was going to try for you?”
He shrugged. “When he told me. Couple of minutes after you and Battal left us alone.”
“And that didn’t bother you enough to call us back?”
“If I’d done that, he would have kicked off there and then. Without telling me anything.”
They walked in silence for a while. The apartment blocks of Fenerbahçe loomed over them, balconies trailing foliage, some of it still dripping stealthily from recent watering. One blank-sided wall bore a massive artist’s impression of Atatürk, sharp-eyed, clean-browed, and commanding, head haloed with the proclamation he’d seen enough times in other visits to know the meaning of. NE MUTLU TURKUM DIYENE. What joy to say I am a Turk. Someone else had climbed up, probably using gecko gloves, and drawn a speech bubble filled with jagged black spray-can Turkish he couldn’t read.
“What’s that say?” he asked her.
She groped after a translation. “Uhm, ‘male-pattern baldness—it’s a bigger problem than you think.’”
He stared up at the national hero’s receding hairline and chuckled.
“Not bad. I was expecting something Islamic.”
She shook her head. “Fundamentalists don’t have much of a sense of humor. They would have just defaced it.”
“And you?”
“It’s not my country,” she said flatly.
At a second-story balcony ahead, an old man leaned amid pipe smoke and watched the street. Carl met his eye as they passed underneath, and the old man nodded an unforced greeting. But it was clear his eyes were mostly for the woman at Carl’s side. Carl glanced sideways, caught the line of Ertekin’s nose and jaw, the messy hair. Gaze tipping downward to the unapologetic swell of her breasts where they pushed aside the edges of the jacket she wore.
“So did you get anything useful out of Nevant?” He wasn’t sure if she’d caught him looking, but there was haste in the tone of her voice. He went back to watching the pavement ahead.
“I’m not sure,” he said carefully. “I think we need to go and talk to Manco Bambarén.”
“In Peru?”
“Well, I don’t see him taking up an invitation to New York in a hurry. So yeah, we’d have to go there. Apart from anything else, it’ll suit his sense of things. It’s his ground.”
“It’s your ground, too, isn’t it?” He thought she smiled. “Planning to disappear into the altiplano on me?”
“If I was going to disappear on you, Ertekin, I would have done it awhile ago.”
“I know,” she said. “I was joking.”
“Oh.”
They reached the end of the block, took a left turn in unison to beat an obvious cul-de-sac. He wasn’t sure if he’d followed her lead, or vice versa. A hundred meters farther on, the street ended at a steep bare slope set with dirty white evercrete steps and a cryptic sign inscribed with the single word moda. They climbed in hard-breathing silence.
“That cuff,” she said as they spilled out at the top, then had to grab her breath back before she went on. “You knew Nevant was wearing it.”
“Never really thought about it.” He thought about it. “Yeah, I guess I knew it’d be there. It’s standard tract procedure.”
“It didn’t stop him trying to kill you.”