Once we’d finished our dinner, we moved to the restaurant bar. I wanted to go back to the hotel, but Haldun Abi said that he hadn’t yet told me what it was he really wanted to say. I couldn’t possibly grasp the real reason he wanted me to go back to Ankara, he said, and he didn’t know what he had to do to make me understand.
“Just cut to the chase then,” I said, “and tell me.”
He began tapping out a rhythm on the glass of beer in front of him; he seemed to be mumbling a tune to himself. “Have you read The Communist Manifesto?” he asked.
“Back when I was in the police academy, yes,” I said with a smile.
“Good, then maybe you’ll recall how it starts: A specter is haunting Europe...” He began to laugh. Either he was shitting me or he was testing me. “Marx came up with this theory, shortly before his death, that the center of the world revolution had moved to the east, and everyone thought that meant Russia.” He looked at me silently, with an earnest expression on his face, as if his words held some profound meaning. “These skyscrapers are built on the bodies of revolutionaries. These deaths aren’t murders, they’re revenge.” His face was red now, but it wasn’t from all the beer, it was because he was in pain; tears had welled up in his eyes and he was trying hard to keep them in.
“So is a leftist organization responsible for this? Or is someone bigger behind it?”
“No, no. I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
I woke the next morning to the ringing of my hotel room phone. I felt like I’d been roused from a nightmare just in time.
“I’m in the lobby, Sadık Bey,” said Faruk.
A corner of the breakfast table was covered with files, and on top lay a copy of the Manifesto. I picked up the book and flipped past the prefaces. The book started just as Haldun Abi had said.
I went ahead and began eating my breakfast in silence. I could see from Faruk’s face that he had a million and one questions that he was dying to ask me.
“So what do you think about the murders?” I asked.
“There are so many questions I just can’t get my head around,” he replied. “You know the old cliché about how there’s no such thing as the perfect crime? Well, these five murders are perfect! For now, at least. The officer handling this case before you, he and I talked about it a lot. Every single person we tagged as a suspect proved where they were and what they were doing at the times of the murders. We couldn’t find any sort of connection between the murder victims and the suspects we took in. We weren’t able to turn up a shred of concrete evidence.”
“Was there any abstract evidence?”
Faruk was trying to understand what I was getting at, but I knew he wouldn’t be able to.
“I mean, did you encounter anything that seemed beyond reason?”
“Yeah, five bodies,” he said, chuckling.
My cell phone started ringing. I looked at the number and handed the phone to Faruk. “Will you take it? It’s the police department.”
Faruk grabbed the telephone and answered. A few seconds later he hung up. “The chief wants to see you at 3 o’clock,” he said.
There were five of us in the room: the police chief, the vice chief, director of Istanbul intelligence, Faruk, and me. I’d turned in a written report just two days before, but they wanted to have a face-to-face. In my report I’d written that we didn’t have nearly enough intelligence, and that the only thing the victims seemed to have in common was that they were all over fifty years old and they were all corporate executives. But this was stuff they already knew. In other words, they weren’t satisfied.
“You’ve made no progress,” the police chief scolded me.
The fresh-faced kid from intelligence was quick to put forth his self-defense. “The files we sent in were as thorough as could be; we didn’t leave out a single detail.”
The finger-pointing hardly befitted such a high-level meeting. For a moment, I wondered how they would react if I told them what Haldun had told me the previous evening. I had no choice but to insist that the investigation up until then had been inadequate.
“Either we haven’t gathered enough evidence or we’ve got a serial killer on our hands who knows how to carry out the perfect crime,” I said.
Then, whether to provoke me or to intimidate me, I’m not sure, the wise guy from intelligence chimed in: “So tell us, which building do you think is next?”
I didn’t even have to think about it. “Kanyon,” I said confidently.
“How can you be so sure?” the police chief asked.
“It’s just a hunch,” I said. “Someone’s getting back at the capitalists.”
I went to my father’s that evening for dinner. I hadn’t been able to sit down and have a real conversation with him, my stepmother, and my stepsister since I’d arrived in Istanbul.
At first we mostly talked about the past, about the good parts; they didn’t bring up how withdrawn I’d been as a child. My father had never wanted me to go to Ankara.
I still felt like a stranger when I was with them.
We had left our places at the dinner table and settled in the sofas in the sitting room. My stepsister moved to the kitchen to make coffee.
My father wore a contented smile on his face. I sensed what he was thinking, but I had other things that I wanted to talk about.
“Do you remember Haldun, Dad?” I asked.
“Haldun from the old neighborhood?”
I shook my head yes.
“Of course I do. How could I forget him? He was a good kid, may he rest in peace. I’m surprised you remember him, you were so young.”
I asked the next question not out of surprise, but out of fear.
“When did he die?” My voice was quivering.
“They arrested him after the coup. It was 1982, I think. He died during interrogation. They said it was suicide. Who were we to question the military? They buried him next to İlhan. They were such good kids, the both of them. It’s a shame.”
“İlhan?”
“You know, İlhan, he used to live on the other side of the brook. You don’t remember him? He was the only blonde in the neighborhood, curly hair, the kid was like an angel. He died before Haldun did. They shot him, threw his body into the brook. It turned up two days later in Kâğıthane.”
My stepsister brought our coffees and then settled down into one of the sofa chairs. “Can’t we forget about all those bad memories for a while? We only see each other once a decade as it is,” she griped.
“Can you take me to their graves tomorrow?” I asked. My father nodded.
The small mosque next to the graveyard in Sanayi Mahallesi had grown immensely, like a piece of fruit pumped full of hormones. When we moved through the gate to the graveyard, Faruk asked, “Which way?”
“Downhill and to the right.”
We stopped next to my mother’s and my brother’s graves. I hadn’t been to visit for nearly ten years. My father held his palms facing upwards in prayer. I opened my hands and mumbled something that I thought sounded like a prayer.
Once he’d finished praying, my father wiped his hands over his face. “It’s not far,” he said.
We walked for a few more minutes until we reached a pair of graves surrounded by an iron fence. They looked like holy tombs where pilgrims came to pray. On both stones were written the words, Martyrs of the Revolution.
I turned and faced Faruk. “You remember this name?” I asked.