‘When I die, Krikor, or rather his clinic, will inherit my estate,’ Hovsep said.

  İkmen was taken aback. Apart from the fact that his own death was a strange thing for the old man to bring up at this time, he was astonished that he’d decided to leave his property to Krikor.

  ‘He’s been very kind to me over the years,’ Hovsep, a lifelong bachelor, continued. ‘And who else do I have to leave it all to?’

  In the normal course of events, Hovsep’s property would have passed to his only nephew. But he was dead and with no nieces to pass it on to, that left only his sister’s husband’s family, and he’d never liked them.

  ‘That’s very generous of you, sir.’

  He smiled. ‘Not really. My parents’ poor old house is . . . well, it’s not what it was. I fear poor Krikor will have to spend a considerable amount of money on it in order to be able to sell it.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s a long way off yet, Mr Pars,’ İkmen said, not really believing what he was saying but saying it anyway. The old man looked pale and sick.

  ‘Then you’re wrong, Inspector. I’m dying,’ the old man said.

  Shocked at his frankness, İkmen was left temporarily speechless.

  ‘I have cancer,’ he said. Then he looked about to see if anyone else was listening and he said, ‘Tell me, Inspector, does that monster still live?’

  İkmen thought for a moment, wondering whether he could get away with a lie of kindness. But he knew that he couldn’t. The death of the man who murdered Hovsep’s nephew would be reported in the media.

  ‘Yes, Mr Pars, he does,’ İkmen said. ‘I hear he is a reformed character now. A good Muslim, I understand.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘He is also in prison for life, Hovsep Bey. That does mean until he dies. He’s never getting out.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better, Çetin Bey?’ the old man said.

  And then Hovsep Pars gave İkmen such an accusing look that İkmen was forced to turn away. He should never have engaged in conversation with the old man and so he moved across the room so that he could hear what the fictional prince’s brother was saying. Not that he could concentrate on it. As if being at another of Krikor’s benefit events was not enough, now he had Hovsep Pars reminding him of that terrible murder he’d investigated all those years ago. Pars’s nephew had been murdered by his lover, a psychopath whom İkmen could have killed – but he hadn’t.

  ‘I am Venetian.’

  Via İzmir, Mehmet Süleyman thought uncharitably.

  ‘My name is Dr Enzo Garibaldi,’ the actor said, ‘and I will be travelling on the Orient Express tomorrow to go back to my home in La Serenissima.’

  ‘Have you been working in İstanbul, Dr Garibaldi?’ Lale Aktar asked.

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘For the family of İzzedin Effendi?’

  He frowned. ‘I do not know such a person, madam,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, he’s over there,’ Lale said, pointing to the ‘prince’.

  The fake Italian looked to where she was pointing and said, ‘No, he isn’t known to me. I haven’t been working in the city for long and so I know few people.’

  ‘Where were you working before?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘Various cities.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Oh, Urfa, Antep, İskender.’

  ‘Rather dangerous places in what has been a theatre of war,’ Süleyman said. The Italians, along with the British, the French and the Greeks, had attempted to partition what was now Turkey after the First World War. The Turks had only finally tasted complete victory in 1923 when Atatürk founded the republic. One would have thought that someone like Dr Garibaldi would have either been killed in the conflict or gone home a lot sooner than he clearly had. So there had to be a reason why he had stayed.

  ‘Prince İzzedin’s wife, Nuray Hanımefendi, comes from Antep,’ Süleyman said. He pointed her out. ‘That lady, there.’

  The Italian barely glanced in her direction. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t know her.’

  ‘Are you sure? Look again.’

  He did, shrugged, and then repeated, ‘I don’t know her.’ Then he walked away.

  ‘Mmm.’ Lale Aktar gave Süleyman a meaningful look.

  ‘We are on opposite teams,’ he said to her. ‘You should not be so much as looking at me in case I can read your thoughts.’

  She laughed. He noticed how beautiful, and perfect, her teeth were.

  ‘So policemen can mind-read now, can they?’ she said.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘I may be giving you false signals,’ she said as she moved closer to him and smiled. She took a sip from her champagne flute. ‘Maybe I want to confound your investigation.’

  ‘Mmm. Maybe you do.’

  ‘Or perhaps I just like looking at you,’ she whispered.

  He felt himself go cold. Women flirted with him all the time and he found Lale Aktar extremely attractive in her shimmering gold sheath dress with her lovely face and her tiny, perfect teeth. But in this context, it wasn’t right. She was in Krikor Sarkissian’s circle, she was married to one of his friends. Maybe she was merely trying to cloud his mind so that she could win.

  ‘I am afraid,’ he said, slowly, ‘that I can see right through your flattery, to a woman who is determined to beat me.’

  She laughed and held her hands up. ‘Ah, you have the better of me, Inspector.’

  ‘I thought so.’ He hid his disappointment carefully although maybe not quite carefully enough.

  Either she sensed what he felt or she was just continuing to tease him when she said, ‘But I do like looking at you. And that is not me trying to mess with your mind.’

  The meal finished with fruit and a massive cheeseboard which included the famous (according to Ayşe Farsakoğlu) Circassian smoked cheese. Because his sergeant had mentioned it, Çetin İkmen did try a piece but he wasn’t that impressed. It was, to his way of thinking, rather dry. Still a little shaken by his conversation with Hovsep Pars, he looked around the ballroom to take his eyes away from the old man. Soon they’d all go into the Kubbeli Saloon for coffee and liqueurs and he’d be able to get away. But for now he just had to distract himself.

  To his chagrin he noticed that Süleyman and Lale Aktar were enjoying each other’s company rather more than was good for either of them. But then years ago he’d decided that his friend had to have some sort of unique pheromone that made him irresistible to all women, except lesbians. In fact, watching women with Mehmet Süleyman was a good way of finding out who was and was not a lesbian – not that that was germane to anything. He looked at them again and saw the familiar stars in Lale Aktar’s eyes. He’d have to have words. If Süleyman and Mrs Aktar ended up falling into bed together and Krikor Sarkissian found out, he’d be both hurt and disgusted. Faruk Aktar was his friend and he’d never be able to look him in the face again if Süleyman had an affair with his wife.

  Over the other side of the room, both Sarkissian brothers had joined forces to talk to a man İkmen knew to be a very wealthy landlord. He was a Kurd – İkmen couldn’t recall his name – from somewhere in the east, the coastal city of Adana sprang to mind, but İkmen couldn’t be sure that was right. What he did know was that the man’s son had been shot by police in a drugs bust in Edirnekapı over ten years ago. It had been some sort of inter-gang incident and the boy, a small-time dealer, had been collateral damage en route to the big-time players who had also been taken down that day. İkmen had not been involved, but he felt for this man whose son had died. There was a sad connection between people who had lost children and İkmen had to be hard on himself not to think about his own dead son, Bekir. He too had been killed by police in the distant far eastern Turkish town of Birecik. And also in common with the Kurd’s son, he had been a drug dealer.

  As far as he could tell, all of the guests were wealthy, with the exception of himself, Süleyman and several groups of divines – Armenian priests, Greeks, representatives from the Chief Rabbi’s office. There were nightclub owners, landlords, fashion designers, film stars, plastic surgeons, publishers and industrialists. Some he knew, some he knew of; all of them were smiling or laughing and having a good time, which was nice. Not for the first time, Çetin İkmen wondered why he couldn’t do likewise at events like this. There was that twitch he was feeling inside brought on by the man he’d seen at the concierge’s desk. But was that just his mind wanting to make a mystery out of this innocent evening to somehow justify his presence at it?

  İkmen didn’t do relaxation, he never had. In a sense that was the way he liked it but, as he got older, it was annoying too. Not being able to sit still at nearly sixty was tiring, for him and for those around him. But there was little point in trying to force himself into it.

  His restless eyes and ears found the younger brother of İzzedin Effendi, Yusuf Effendi, and he listened in as the boy spoke to a woman who played a bit of a flighty piece in a popular evening soap opera.

  ‘Our parents died when I was just a child,’ he said. Then he lowered his voice to almost a whisper. ‘My mother, thinking that my father had died fighting in Arabia, took her own life.’

  ‘Oh, how sad!’ The woman had that excessive emotional edge to her voice that so many theatricals seemed to have.

  ‘Then my father returned.’

  ‘Allah!’

  ‘Not knowing that my mother was dead, he came back expecting to see her.’ He shrugged. ‘He was weak from fighting the Arabs in the desert and he had an accident. He hit his head and he died.’

  ‘Oh, so you were brought up by . . .’

  ‘My dear brother, yes,’ he said. ‘He has always taken care of me. Not a single kuruş has been spared on either my comfort or my education. And tomorrow I will go to the Sorbonne in Paris. It is my sincerest hope to train as a linguist and so help our new nation to reach out into the world anew.’

  ‘That’s a wonderful ambition!’ the actress gushed.

  But İkmen found himself a little confused. İzzedin Effendi, so he’d heard, was supposed to be bankrupt. How was he going to afford tuition fees at France’s top academy? And wasn’t this story rather too similar to one he’d heard before, one that hadn’t been fiction?

  Ayşe couldn’t believe that it was the stuffed mussels that were making her feel bad. She had the constitution of an ox. That said, her stomach felt curdled and uncomfortable and she’d had to use the lavatory at the restaurant rather more than she’d wanted to. Both İzzet and her brother, Ali, were concerned.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ali asked the third time she returned from the tiny restaurant lavatory.

  ‘Yes.’ She sat down next to İzzet who frowned when he looked at her.

  ‘You’re pale.’

  ‘Wedding nerves,’ her brother said with a misplaced tone of authority in his voice.

  Ayşe rolled her eyes but said nothing. On occasion, Ali liked to pretend his younger sister was some sort of blushing virgin bride, which everyone – including him – knew she was not.

  İzzet poured her some water and encouraged her to drink it. She’d only had one glass of beer with her meal and so she was by no means drunk but it still wasn’t a bad idea to drink water. The two men, like most of the revellers at the tables outside the small restaurants on Nevizade Alley, were getting stuck in to a bottle of rakı. As the night had progressed, the noise level had risen considerably as people began to indulge in long, rambling story-telling sessions punctuated by bouts of happy singing. Some character down at the end of the alley periodically sang ‘Jingle Bells’ in Turkish, to the obvious delight of everyone at his table. But Ayşe was not amused, either by the ‘Jingle Bells’ man or by her patronising brother. Her mind was elsewhere.

  The gold samovar she’d seen that man take into the Pera Palas bothered her. It had looked so like the one that had once belonged to Dr Krikor Sarkissian, the one he’d been given by a murderer. His name had been Muhammed Ersoy and he’d killed several members of his own family as well as his lover. He would have killed Inspector İkmen, Dr Sarkissian and Mehmet Süleyman if they hadn’t captured him and put him in a psychiatric unit and then prison. She’d been sleeping with Süleyman at that time and when she’d heard that Ersoy had been holding him hostage she’d almost collapsed. Even though Süleyman was married then and so he wasn’t hers in any sense, she’d been terrified that something bad might happen to him.

  Seeing the samovar had brought it all back. Not that ‘it’ had ever actually gone very far away. In one sense that period had been both the best and the worst time in her life. Certainly no one since excited her as much as Süleyman had, and that included İzzet Melik, the man who was going to be her husband. She began to wonder whether she should call İkmen and tell him about the samovar. If one of the hotel guests was going to display it in the hotel for some reason, it might come as a rather unpleasant surprise for her boss. But then she decided against doing that. Inspector İkmen was a grown man, he could take care of himself.

  Chapter 6

  ‘Now that Mustafa Kemal Paşa has created this new homeland for the Turks, we get few guests who are not of their kind in this hotel,’ Sofia, the ‘Greek’ housekeeper, said.

  The guests were now all seated drinking coffee and liqueurs in the Kubbeli Saloon, watching the actors perform soliloquies and play out scenes in character.

  ‘An Armenian man is in room four thirteen. Şeymus, one of the drivers here, says he was an arms dealer to the Russians during the war.’ Looking over her shoulders to make sure that she wasn’t being overheard, Sofia went on, ‘Ourselves and the Armenians had hopes that the Russians would save us back then. But they didn’t. The Turkish princess who is staying here tonight, her father and brothers fought the Russians in the east. The governess, the American, she told me that all the men in the princess’s family were killed in battle with the Russians. I don’t know how a person gets over such a thing – if they ever do.’

  Çetin İkmen looked at his watch. The meal had overrun and it was now ten fifteen. He was actually ready for his bed and would have just sneaked off to his room had Krikor not put him on Lale Aktar’s investigative team. She was, so she had told him, relying on his investigative skills to help her win.

  ‘The young prince, the one the older prince and his wife are taking to Paris tomorrow, is, so the Armenian, Avram Bey, told the concierge, Monsieur Maurice, very wealthy. When his father died he left separate sums of money to each of the sons and the boy apparently has a lot,’ Sofia continued. Then her face dropped into a frown. ‘How I resent that! The Turks lose the Great War, they take my home in Fener away from me and make me work like a common servant! I am not just some Greek woman from the country! I am a Fenariote, a Greek of old Byzantium! We were here a thousand years before these Turks and now they want us out. I hate them! But I especially hate the old Ottomans who ruined this country and made way for people like this new government in Ankara. Princes like these young men who are staying here tonight deserve to die for what they did to this country!’

  Albeit in a fictional form, these old enmities that Sofia and others were displaying were still, İkmen knew, very alive in the present day. It was sad to think that Turkey still had issues with Greece and Armenia but it was a fact, and it was one that not all of the audience appeared to be comfortable with. But then Sofia left the Kubbeli Saloon and, from different ends of the chamber, İzzedin Effendi and Avram Bey the Armenian approached one another. When they got close, the prince put an arm out as if to ward off the Armenian.

  ‘I have nothing to say to you, sir!’ he said as the other man eyed him narrowly. ‘Tomorrow I will be on my way to Paris and there will be an end of it.’

  ‘I do not think that is so, effendi,’ the Armenian said.

  The prince put his nose in the air. ‘Oh? And why is that, Avram Bey?’

  He smiled. ‘Because you need me, effendi,’ he said.

  ‘I do not!’

  The Armenian moved closer to the prince. ‘I think you will find that you do,’ he said. ‘I think you will find that if you try to continue without me, that will not be possible.’

  The prince scowled. ‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘Are you threatening me?’

  Avram Bey shrugged. ‘I would not use such a word myself, effendi,’ he said. ‘But without me it is possible that bad things may happen. I would not like it to be so but . . .’

  ‘I will not listen to any more of this!’ the prince said as he stormed past the Armenian and out of the room. İkmen noticed as he passed that he had tears in his eyes.

  Beyond the fact that the racial types on show were stereotypical (the slimy Armenian, the hate-filled Greek), the performances were good and İkmen, at least, could deduce some subtlety and layering in their acting. On the face of it the exchange they had just witnessed seemed to have been about money. The prince was bankrupt and had, possibly, borrowed money from the Armenian. But there had also been a fairly heavy dose of sexual tension between the two characters as well and İkmen wondered if the prince and the Armenian were lovers. But then he found that he wasn’t comfortable with that notion and he decided that it couldn’t possibly be so.

  Now that the kitchens were clean and tidy and the head chef had gone home for the night, Ersu Bey decided to let all but two of his staff members leave early, just over half an hour before the night shift came on. He himself would stay until every cup and liqueur glass was safely back in the kitchens but most of the guests had finished their drinks now and so there was very little left to do except pick up the odd cup and saucer.

  He didn’t trust the night shift, which was even smaller than usual for this one exclusive party, to do a proper job, not really. They were only casual staff anyway and he lived in fear of coming into the kitchens the following morning and finding dirty cups and glasses all over the work surfaces. Apart from anything else, Chef Roberto would go insane with fury.