“Hey, let me worry about the fuckin’ Turk. The Turk ain’t gonna do nothin’.”
“And what you said, before, this thing goin’ down, it’s still on with them all?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s okay-hey, here’s a fuckin’ tip, Sally, you worry about your business and let me fuckin’ worry about mine-”
Karp cleared his throat and said, “Hold it there, Goom. Roll it back about a minute.” Guma did so; the machine squawked and played the last few sentences of dialogue again.
“What is this Turk business?” asked Karp.
“Street name. We think it could be Turk Minzone.”
“Who is …?”
“A Bollano soldier-Red Hook boy, nobody special.”
“You like him for the shotgun on the Viacchenzas?”
Guma waggled a hand, palm down. “It’s not his usual line of work. He does sports action and a little sharking. Joey could’ve called in a favor, though, had him do the hit. I mean, it’s not like he got scruples about it.”
Raney asked, “Why do they call him Turk?”
Guma said, “Turk? It’s an expression. They say, ‘Il fuma’ com’ un turco.’ The guy chain-smokes De Nobilis; he’s always got one in his face. The story is he ground one out in Jilly Manfredo’s eye when Jilly wouldn’t come up with his vig.”
Karp said, “Yeah, but he said ‘the Turk,’ not just ‘Turk.’ Why would he do that?”
“No big thing, Butch. It’s like saying ‘the Babe’ instead of Babe Ruth, no? Or, what, you got another idea?”
“Um, I don’t know. We got a murder involving an actual Turkish person.”
“What, the hit on that dip? Roland’s thing? You think there’s a connection? But that’s the vic. Why would Sally be worried about a Turk being under control if the Turk’s already dead.”
“Another Turk?” suggested Raney.
Guma wrinkled his nose and curled his lip back. “Guys, come on! This is your basic gangland slaying, like they say in the papers. Don’t fuck me over with Turks, Assyrians, Armenians, or whatever.”
“Maybe I’ll check out where Minzone spent the night of,” said Raney.
“Now, that makes sense,” said Guma.
Marlene and Harry Bello rode up the elevator in One U.N. Plaza, the undistinguished building across the street from the great glass Secretariat of the United Nations, where the missions had their offices. Like most people educated in the City, Marlene had made the ritual visit to the place in the fifth grade, and never again thereafter. Harry made no sign that he was impressed with the world body. They rode up with three men chatting in an incomprehensible guttural tongue. For all they knew, it might have been Turkish.
The second secretary of the mission, a Mr. Abdelaziz Kilic, welcomed them gravely into his small office, sat down behind his cluttered desk, and indicated chairs for them to sit in. He was a smallish man with slicked-back graying black hair and a nervous hatchet face. He was wearing a double-breasted suit that seemed to date from the first time that such suits had been popular. Marlene recalled having read that it was always 1937 in Istanbul, and she now understood what that meant. Kilic’s desk was covered with brown folders tied carefully with literal red tape.
Mr. Kilic was in no hurry to get to the meat of the appointment. Coffee was ordered and delivered by a large, swarthy woman in a severely tailored black suit. They drank the heavy, sweet brew and talked about the heat of the day, whether it was hotter than in Turkey, which Mr. Kilic pronounced Turk-iy-eh, and about the many and varied differences between the two nations. That done, the talk switched to crime in general, to crime in the City, and at last, with many a parenthesis, to the crime in question.
“A truly dreadful happening,” observed Kilic. “We at the mission were most shocked.” He shook his head rapidly back and forth to indicate the severity of the shock. “But please, you must tell me what I can do for you. As I understand it, the investigation is concluded. You have hands on the criminal, isn’t it so?”
Marlene was about to speak when Harry, to her surprise, answered the question. “Yes, we do have a suspect in custody, sir,” he said, “but in order to complete our case, it’s necessary to find out all we can about the victim of the crime, especially to discover any reasons the victim might have been killed other than the reason we tell the jury he was killed. That way the defense won’t be able to place a doubt in the jury’s mind.”
This was the longest sentence Marlene had ever heard Harry utter, and she had to struggle to keep herself from gaping at him.
Kilic registered profound puzzlement. “What doubt can there be?” he asked. “Mr. Ersoy was assassinated by Armenian terrorists.”
“And why would they want to kill Mr. Ersoy?” asked Bello. “Was he a particular enemy of Armenians?”
Kilic smiled at this naïveté. “They are terrorists, Mr. Bello. Mehmet was a Turk; one is as good as another. This man you have arrested is well known to us. He has written abusive letters to us, full of the usual provocative lies.”
Somewhat to her surprise, Marlene found herself asking, “What lies are those, Mr. Kilic?”
An elegant dismissive gesture of the hand. “They accuse us of massacre during the first war.”
“And that’s not true? The Turks didn’t kill any Armenians?”
He gave her a sharp look, then smiled appeasingly at Bello. Who is this silly woman? “It was wartime. The Armenians were allied with the enemies of the Turkish people. Some were therefore removed to places where they could not practice their mischief. Of course, there were some deaths in the traveling, but massacre? There was none. We have rejected these lies authoritatively many times, and-”
Harry broke in. “Be that as it may, sir, we’re really more interested in Mr. Ersoy’s personal affairs. For example, sir, to your knowledge, did Mr. Ersoy have any business interests in the United States?”
“Business? No, he was a professional diplomat. He was not in business.”
Bello inscribed this information into a small notebook. “How about relatives? Did Mr. Ersoy have any relatives in the States?”
This required some thought. “I do not believe so. He was unmarried.”
“But he had a family-in Turkey, I mean.”
“He had a brother, I know. A quite prominent curator of one of the national museums, and an archaeologist as well. Other than that, I would have to look up. Is it essential?”
“Not for now,” said Bello. “Did Mr. Ersoy have any close personal relations with any of the mission staff?”
“Personal …?”
“Yes, close friends, people he was always with.”
Kilic shrugged slowly and elegantly. “Mehmet was a friendly man. He was friendly with everyone.”
“Did he keep a desk diary, or did his secretary keep one, and may we be allowed to look at it?”
A significant pause. “To answer your question, I suppose he did keep a diary, for appointments, but I believe the chief of mission would have to authorize such an inspection.”
At this remark Harry scribbled again in his notebook, but this time he looked over at Marlene and fixed her with his eyes, which made at that instant a tiny motion toward the door. Then he continued with his interview. “Might we see a list of all the employees of the mission with their responsibilities?”
A list was produced. Harry read it and began to discuss individuals with Mr. Kilic. Marlene excused herself and slipped out.
She did not know quite how she knew, but she understood precisely what Harry Bello had asked her to do with his millimetric twitch of the eyes. Outside the office, at a secretary’s desk, she spotted the grave woman who had served the coffee and asked her where Mehmet Ersoy’s office had been. Following these directions, she found herself in a similar secretarial anteroom. Here the person at the desk was, fortunately, a young man. Marlene smiled and introduced herself, and perched on his desk in such a way that the slit of her maxiskirt dangled open, revealing to his gaze a rich slice of nyloned thigh.