Blood Business

by Barbara Nadel

Genres: Mystery; International Crime & Mystery; Private Investigators; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Brothers Ugur and Lokman Bulut are locked in a bitter inheritance battle and need a sample of their mother's DNA to contest her Will. But when her body is exhumed, her corpse is found to be missing and a fresh body, with its heart removed, has been put in her grave. Assigned to the case, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman quickly realises that the heart has been illegally harvested, and his team has a murder inquiry on its hands.

Meanwhile, retired inspector Çetin Ikmen is tracking down a missing person: Sevval Kalkan, a once-famous actress, who has joined an underground movement called the Moral Maze, whose mission is to help the destitute living on Istanbul's streets. The unidentified body in the grave cannot be Sevval's, but her shocking reappearance leads Ikmen to fear that she, too, is a victim of organ harvesting...

Joining forces, Süleyman and Ikmen confront Istanbul's darkest underbelly to expose the horrifying truth of a city in crisis.


(P)2020 Headline Publishing Group Limited

Release date: May 14, 2020

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 320

Sample

If he looked to his right, where only the very last outpost of the setting sun could be spotted glinting on the horizon, he could see a long, wavy line of tombstones. Melancholy grey posts topped with uniform carved turbans, these were the last resting places of nineteenth-century Ottoman men. The female version, he knew, featured a woman’s head veil, which always looked to him as if it were weeping.

Uğur Bulut knew he didn’t have to be here. The pathologist, a portly man standing beside him, had told him his attendance, or not, was up to him. But what else could he have done but be here? The grave the two burly diggers were uncovering belonged to his mother. And the exhumation had been requested by his brother. He saw the pathologist turn to Ali Dede. ‘If you’d like to sit, I can arrange for a chair . . .’

‘No, no, no.’ The cleric tilted his head. ‘But thank you.’

Fucking Lokman! If it hadn’t been for his brother, none of them would be here now. Not the pathologist, the gravediggers, the cleric. It was bad enough being an Alevi in a majority Sunni Muslim country without advertising the fact by standing beside a Dede or Alevi priest in the designated Alevi portion of the great Karacaahmet cemetery. Uğur wanted to hide, to disappear amongst the thick foliage of the cemetery’s many cypress trees. But he couldn’t. If he was going to prove to that bastard Lokman, and his lawyer, that he was indeed his mother’s elder son, and so entitled to her considerable estate, he had to go through with this. But that didn’t mean he didn’t think the whole situation was insane.

When Lokman had started this nonsense, voicing to all and sundry that he didn’t believe the two of them were brothers, Uğur had laughed – at first. He’d suggested they both take DNA tests, for comparison, each with the other, but Lokman refused. Instead he’d insisted, possibly at the behest of his lawyer, that their DNA be tested against that of their mother. Uğur had scoured his mother’s old house for a hairbrush or a piece of her clothing, knowing that he’d cleared the place of all personal items after her death. That was what she had instructed him to do. There had been nothing, which was why he was here now, in this cemetery, watching his mother’s body re-emerge into the light.

The pathologist, who usually worked for the police department, was an Armenian by the name of Sarkissian. He was an eminent man renowned for his expertise and honesty. He said, ‘When the men reach what we are seeking, you may wish to look away, Uğur Bey.’

Uğur nodded. His mother had died five years ago. She’d been old, sick and tired, and when the end came, it had been merciful. Buried in just a seamless winding sheet, no coffin to temporarily protect her body from the earth, she was unlikely to be anything more than a skeleton. Hopefully her bones would yield the DNA sample he needed so badly. Because it wasn’t just about his mother’s estate; it was also about her honour. By stating that Uğur could be an adoptive rather than a natural child of their mother, Lokman was implying that Perihan Hanım had lied to her own children. His only ‘proof’ for this assertion was that their sister, Aysel, had been adopted, plus the obvious physical differences between the two men. Uğur was tall and light skinned, while Lokman was short and dark like their mother.

Of course, what his brother really wanted was Perihan Hanım’s house in the upscale İstanbul suburb of Sarıyer, and the pastane shop in Beyoğlu she had established on her own, and which she had left to her elder son. Efforts to find the two men’s father, who had left the family when Lokman was two, had come to nothing. Uğur, who vaguely remembered him, had thought for years that he’d probably drunk himself to death.

‘Ah . . .’

Uğur looked at the doctor, who added, ‘It appears the men have found what we are looking for.’

Suddenly Uğur felt sick. He’d convinced himself he was going to be fine with this exhumation, that he was a tough, upright Kurdish man who did not cry. But now he was falling apart . . .

Dr Arto Sarkissian had seen it all before. Exhumations were rare, but when they happened, and where relatives were involved, there were always tears, sometimes vomiting. This statuesque, besuited Kurdish businessman was no exception. Gently moving Uğur Bey to one side, the pathologist stood on the edge of the hole the two gravediggers had excavated and contemplated the small piece of tattered winding sheet that stuck up from the earth.

‘All right, proceed,’ he said to the two men down inside the grave. ‘Gently.’

‘Yes, sir.’

One of them looked like a bull on heat, while the other came across as vaguely deranged. He doubted whether ‘gently’ was a word they were accustomed to. But they loosened the earth around the corpse with more ease than had been expected and, grunting as they tried to get hold of what couldn’t be much more than a skeleton, raised the clod-encrusted figure to the surface.

Normally, having contact with the dead was considered unclean and disgusting by Muslims. Arto Sarkissian, one of the few Christians left in the medical profession, though they had utterly dominated it until comparatively recently, could see that the two men were disgusted at what they were required to do, but he could also tell they were stoical. An empty coffin stood waiting for the body of Perihan Hanım on the other side of the hole. As they lifted the corpse from the ground, the smaller of the gravediggers grunted.

It was then that something happened none of them had expected.

It was just a foot. Falling through the folds of the simple cotton shroud, it was grey and gnarled and very obviously dead. But it was not the foot of a person who had died five years ago. It had nails, still polished and painted bright red. Even the gravediggers knew it wasn’t right, which was why they dropped the body, and why Uğur Bulut began to scream.

It was difficult to know who was the more eccentric looking, the boy or the man.

Çetin İkmen – former police inspector, widower and native İstanbullu – had been asleep in his chair in his large apartment in Sultanahmet when the doorbell rang. Moving his cat from his lap to the floor and hastily lighting a cigarette, he’d dragged himself to the front door. As he opened it, the cat, Marlboro, jumped onto his shoulder. İkmen groaned. Then he saw the boy.

Thin, dark, wearing a most inappropriate T-shirt featuring a topless woman, the kid was probably only about fifteen. He was also completely, stinkingly filthy.

‘What do you want?’ İkmen asked through a blowback of smoke. Eyes smarting, he coughed.

For a moment, the boy was mesmerised by the cat. A huge ginger tom, Marlboro only lived with İkmen part-time. His real life happened on the street, where he fought, stole or had sex with almost everything in his territory.

‘You are Çetin Bey?’ the boy said eventually.

İkmen took the cigarette out of his mouth. ‘Who wants to know?’ he asked.

‘Machine Bey, he ask for me to get you.’

The kid had an accent, which was probably why he was talking what sounded like nonsense.

‘Machine Bey?’

‘He make things. Kumkapı.’

Kumkapı was a pleasant district on the Sea of Marmara, a fishing port and former home to large numbers of Armenians.

The boy took a crumpled piece of paper out of his trouser pocket and shoved it into İkmen’s hand. It was a letter. Written in a very fine hand, it said:

Dear Çetin Bey,

I apologise for introducing myself in this somewhat bizarre fashion. I don’t go out and so I have had to resort to sending this missive to you with a boy who does odd jobs for us sometimes. He is Syrian and, like so many of them, almost destitute. He has minimal Turkish, but he does speak some English, a language I know you can use.

I need to speak to you about a matter concerning a friend. As a former police officer and a man of good conscience, you are the only person I can trust with this problem. I can and will remunerate your efforts.

From the bottom of my heart I would urge you to follow the boy, Hafız. He will take you to a carpet shop in Kumkapı, where a man called Berat Bey will bring you to me. All will become clear.

Your faithful servant,

Machine Bey

So the boy hadn’t been confused about the man’s name.

İkmen leaned against the doorpost, Marlboro’s bloodied furry face pressed against his. He had no idea who this Machine Bey might be. The boy in front of him could maybe enlighten him, if indeed his English was up to it. But should he even bother to consider this? He knew that many dissident types lived difficult and hidden existences, trying to keep under the radar of official scrutiny. Machine Bey could be one of those. But then again, he could just as easily be someone of quite a different nature. İkmen had always been and would always be a vocal critic of what he felt was wrong about the political temperature of his country, both before and after the ascent of the current ruling party back in 2002. His daughter Çiçek had been implicated, but then exonerated, for her supposed part in the attempted coup of 2016. And mud, as İkmen knew all too well, stuck.

He spoke to the boy in English. ‘This Machine Bey,’ he said, ‘have you actually met him?’

‘Oh yes, sir,’ the kid said. ‘He make beautiful things.’

‘Where?’

‘I cannot say.’

‘Somewhere in Kumkapı?’

‘Yes.’

İkmen got the distinct feeling that was the end of the conversation as far as the boy was concerned. Which meant that whether to go with the kid or not was up to him. After a few seconds’ thought, he took his phone out of his pocket and made a call.

According to the paperwork regarding the death of Perihan Bulut, she had succumbed to bone cancer at the age of eighty-five back in 2013. The woman they had found in the grave couldn’t possibly be Perihan Hanım.

Arto Sarkissian looked up from the body and into the eyes of a tall man clad like himself in white coveralls, way across the other side of the laboratory.

‘I remember Çetin İkmen telling me years ago that one gets accustomed to the smell of death,’ the man said. ‘But in this case . . .’

The doctor shook his head. ‘A particularly odiferous example of putrefaction, yes,’ he said. ‘But that is to be expected a week, two at the most, after death.’

‘That recent?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Although the skin has begun to detach, the marbling on it is only green, although dark in places, as opposed to black. This is why I called you, Inspector. This is not Perihan Bulut by any stretch of the imagination. And then there’s this . . .’

He pulled down the plastic sheet that had been covering the body. Whoever this was had been old. Thin, and with swellings around her joints consistent with arthritis, her entire body was covered with waves of wrinkles and patches of callused skin. But that was natural, or could be. What wasn’t natural was the large hole in her chest.

‘Her heart has been, in my view, surgically removed.’

The tall man, Inspector of Police Mehmet Süleyman, blinked. ‘Doctor . . .’

‘Which is the other reason I called you, Inspector. Tragically, you and I have both seen the results of post-operative sepsis that can set in when one has willingly donated a kidney. But a heart?’

‘Maybe she was already dead?’

‘Maybe. I will have to endeavour to find out. But if she wasn’t, what fresh hell is this, eh?’

Organ harvesting from desperate people for paltry sums of money had been going on for years. The poorer the victims, the less regard their wealthy customers showed when it came to their welfare, and many had died after being treated in unscrupulous back-street clinics or even private houses. But the possible harvesting of a heart from a living person, a woman of some age to boot, was a new low.

At the age of fifty, Mehmet Süleyman had seen many examples of the darker side of human nature, but this was, as the doctor had said, a fresh hell he hadn’t even imagined.

‘How is Mr Bulut?’ he asked.

‘Distraught,’ the doctor replied.

‘I have ordered a fingertip search of the area around the grave up to a half-kilometre radius.’

Arto shrugged. They both knew that whoever had taken Perihan Hanım’s corpse had probably disposed of it a long way away. After all, the grave didn’t look as if it had been recently disturbed, so care had obviously been taken to cover up the substitution. It would have made more sense, to the doctor’s way of thinking, to bury this fresher body on top of the original corpse, but without knowing exactly what motive was at play here, it was impossible to say why this hadn’t happened.

‘Can you compose a description of this woman I can issue to forces across the country?’ Süleyman asked.

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll see what we have in terms of missing women outstanding. Grandmothers are not usually numerous.’

‘The old die,’ Dr Sarkissian said.

‘Don’t we all,’ the policeman replied.

‘Fish.’ The boy wrinkled up his nose.

The little İkmen had managed to get out of him about his origins had resulted in his finding out that Hafız came originally from Damascus. Not a place known for its fish. Unlike Kumkapı, where every other building was a fish restaurant, and those that were not were wet fish shops.

‘Yes, it is rather pungent,’ İkmen said as he sent a text to his daughter Çiçek and then lit up a cigarette. They were supposed to be going to some nameless carpet shop, but all he could see was fish. The boy asked for a cigarette, and İkmen gave him one as they walked down towards the centre of the district, Kumkapı Meydan, in silence.

A lot of people forgot how important the district of Kumkapı still was in the lives of İstanbul’s ethnic Armenian minority. Although much depleted, it was still home to a small Armenian community, and remained the seat of the Orthodox Armenian patriarchate. İkmen’s oldest friend, Arto Sarkissian, had got married in the church of Surp Asdvadzadzin more years ago than he cared to recall. Back then, there’d been a lot of fish too; there had always been fish in Kumkapı, just not quite this much, being mainly consumed by foreign tourists.

As they passed a brightly lit open-fronted restaurant, İkmen heard Russian being spoken, saw violinists warming up for a night of hard playing and watched sweating men cooking large quantities of seafood over open coal fires. For one reason or another, mainly because he couldn’t be bothered, he hadn’t eaten that day. Now he felt a stab of hunger. He ignored it. He didn’t want to pay a lot of money for a nice piece of fish only to eat just half of it. As he began to draw away from sixty towards sixty-five, he was finding that his already small appetite was dwindling with each passing year.

‘Here.’

For a moment he didn’t really see the one very brightly coloured and startlingly modern carpet completely filling the window in front of him. This was because it, and its adjacent door, was squeezed between two fish restaurants. The sign above the window was just about visible; it said Galeri Bagratid.

‘We’re here?’

Before the boy could answer, a small, dark man of about fifty came out of the shop and offered İkmen his hand.

‘I am Berat Aznavoryan,’ he said. ‘No relation to the famous French singer, as far as I know.’

İkmen took his hand. ‘I am Çetin İkmen.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Aznavoryan smiled. ‘Come in.’

İkmen walked up the few steps into the shop, but the boy, Hafız, didn’t follow him. In fact, when İkmen looked round, he had disappeared.

Tiny pinpoints of light between the trees attested to the fact that many funerals had been celebrated in the great Karacaahmet cemetery earlier that day. Some families would leave lamps burning after the funeral of a loved one, to provide illumination to the soul of the departed. Sergeant Ömer Mungun found the sight of them both comforting and at the same time unsettling.

Although he had lived in İstanbul and worked as Inspector Mehmet Süleyman’s deputy for the last ten years, Ömer originally came from the ancient city of Mardin in the far south-east of the country. Nestled high on a vast rock looking out over the Mesopotamian plain, Mardin had always been a place of many faiths – Islam, Christianity, Judaism and also far older pagan beliefs. Ömer and his family subscribed to one of the latter, worshipping an ancient snake goddess called the Sharmeran. This meant that his beliefs about death didn’t concur with those of his mainly Muslim colleagues – including the men and women conducting the fingertip search he was supervising.

He stood a few metres away and watched as rows of officers in uniform slowly fanned out through the grass, torches in their hands, some disappearing into the darkness beneath the trees. A forensic team was excavating the grave that should have contained the body of Perihan Bulut. It was possible that some fragments of her bones were still in there somewhere. But they weren’t evident, not yet.

There was a rumour, which his boss would neither confirm nor deny, that the unknown woman who had been found in the grave was a victim of organ harvesting. One of the constables who had first responded to Dr Sarkissian’s call for assistance claimed to have seen a large hole in the body. Word was it had been open and unstitched. But that didn’t make sense. People who sold their organs were always stitched up after surgery, even if they later succumbed to internal bleeding or infection.

Back in Ömer’s home town, a place now surrounded by refugee camps built to accommodate hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Syria, stories about organ harvesting were rife. Kidneys were the most common currency, although eyes were also popular. The way it worked involved a potential donor being tissue-matched to a recipient. This was done by a broker, who would also sometimes care for the donor until his or her wounds began to heal. Once a match had been established, both patients would be operated on either locally – sometimes in a private house rented for just this purpose – or in the rich recipient’s country of origin. The entire trade was predicated on the inequality that existed between the two parties. And of course it happened in İstanbul too. It happened in most places where the poor were numerous and the rich were few but empowered.

Ömer began to shiver. His father needed a heart bypass, but that wasn’t going to happen any time soon, because the family didn’t have enough money. They would if his father sold his house, but he wouldn’t do that. The old man wanted to leave something to his two children. As he’d told Ömer last time he’d gone home, ‘If you and your sister don’t inherit this house, then everything I have done to put you through school and university has been for nothing.’

There was a logic to it. Ömer’s father had no education and little money, but he’d been able to buy a house because back in the 1980s Mardin property had been cheap. That the Mungun place was now worth five hundred thousand euros was for him a vindication of all the hard work and suffering he had endured as a mere farm worker. Ömer couldn’t argue with that even if he’d wanted to. The old man was so proud of his house and his children, his own existence was almost irrelevant to him.

Not so different, Ömer felt, from those who sold their kidneys to put their children through school.

Although it only had one window looking onto the street, Galeri Bagratid actually opened out into a vast premises, which, İkmen reckoned, probably ran behind the fish restaurants on either side. The Armenian owner seemed to specialise in modern, startlingly coloured carpets.

‘While our dealers are still all right to go into Afghanistan, I can get my hands on these amazing modern designs,’ Aznavoryan said. ‘I see them as expressions of both the rage and the creativity in that country.’

‘They’re certainly striking.’

The dealer smiled. ‘You like carpets?’

‘I have very few,’ İkmen said. ‘But those I do have, I treasure.’

‘When a carpet speaks to a person, it does so for life,’ Aznavoryan said. ‘Follow me. It’s down here.’

A small stone staircase with no banisters led down underneath the shop. On one side of the small landing, a door was open onto a room with a group of women sewing inside; on the other were more stairs. Darker and more scarred than the first staircase, this second flight led down past a room full of young men staring fiercely at computers. İkmen looked up and was slightly disconcerted at how far they had descended. Many shops and restaurants in the Old City concealed other businesses both above and below their shiny exteriors. Some of them even had ancient cisterns in their basements.

The lighting above the stairs became more sparse, and soon İkmen was aware of the fact that he couldn’t easily see his own feet.

Aznavoryan, aware of his predicament said, ‘Don’t worry, Çetin Bey, almost there now.’

İkmen was about to ask where exactly when something creaked in front of him and his host opened a door into a brightly lit room that took his breath away.

All Cemal Yüksel had ever wanted to do was build a cool glass and metal bridge over the gorge that ran through his village in Cappadocia. He’d done well at university, going on to teach at the faculty of engineering, where, somehow, he’d been denounced by either a colleague or a student. Why, he didn’t know, because right up until the time he found himself in Silivri prison, he hadn’t really taken much interest in politics. Being accused of participation in the failed coup of 2016 had, however, concentrated his mind, and when he was suddenly released, with no explanation, several months later, he decided to take more notice of current affairs. But with no prospect of employment – he might be innocent, but still no one wanted to know – it was difficult for him to do anything much but sleep rough and eat out of dustbins.

‘But then I met Gold Bey,’ he told his gawping guest.

Barely aware of the steaming tea glass in front of him, Çetin İkmen said, ‘What is this place?’

It had been a Byzantine chapel. Age-blackened stone walls rose up on either side to meet in a curved barrel roof, covered with what looked like the ghosts of saintly frescos. More clearly visible were the paintings at the far end of the structure – studies in cobalt and terracotta of the Virgin and Child, the Archangel Michael, the hand and breath of God. And then there were the machines.

‘Through Gold Bey, I met Berat Bey, who allows me to live and work here,’ Cemal said. ‘I am far too old to be on the street these days.’

İkmen saw Aznavoryan smile.

‘Yes, but this . . .’

Not all of the machines moved. Some merely glinted in the light from the candles that lined the walls. Those that did move made variable noises – some whirred, some clicked, some operated in complete silence. Big or small, all of them were highly polished, constructed of different-coloured metals, and where they did move, their motion was smooth, almost hypnotic. But what they were for was not apparent.

‘I never actually practised as a civil engineer,’ Cemal said as he watched İkmen’s astonishment with some amusement. ‘I went straight into academia. Then I went to prison, and penury followed. Although Berat Bey allows me to live here rent-free, I still need to make money.’

‘From these?’

‘I always made things, even as a child,’ he continued. ‘One has to be interested in construction to even contemplate becoming an engineer. My parents were poor. I come from a village in Cappadocia, where my father raised goats. But my father’s brother lived here in İstanbul, where he worked as a kapıcı. One year he sent me a present, a Meccano construction set. You know of them?’

‘Yes,’ İkmen said. ‘I think it is a British toy.’

‘That’s right. I made all sorts of things. Bridges, houses, a train – I even made things of my own creation. Like these.’

The machines, whether moving or static, appeared to look at İkmen, as though they were sentient in some way.

‘What do they do?’ İkmen asked.

‘Nothing,’ Cemal replied.

‘Oh come, Machine Bey, they feed the soul,’ Berat Aznavoryan put in.

‘Maybe, but they are without function.’

Aznavoryan turned to İkmen. ‘I think you will agree, Çetin Bey, that these hand-made items are works of art.’

‘Absolutely!’

Cemal shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But as you know, Berat Bey, they deliberately have no function. That,’ he looked İkmen in the eye, ‘is their point.’

They were all going to eat together. That had been the plan. But then her father had contacted her to say he was going out to see someone in Kumkapı, and her boyfriend had sent a text to say that he’d be late. This left Çiçek herself and the other resident of the Sultanahmet apartment, her dad’s elderly transsexual cousin, Samsun Bajraktar.

Radiant in red velvet, Samsun sat opposite Çiçek on the family’s balcony, drinking Campari and soda.

‘You should have a drink and relax, Çiçek,’ she said as she lit a cigarette and then coughed expansively. ‘You know how they are.’

Çiçek didn’t reply. In her early forties, she couldn’t recall a time when meals hadn’t been disrupted by her father’s job. When her mother had been alive, she’d given him hell about missing or being late for meals. When Çetin İkmen retired, Çiçek remembered her mother breathing a sigh of relief. But then Fatma İkmen had died. Involved in a road accident on the night of the attempted coup, she had succumbed to her injuries and died in her husband’s arms. And now Çiçek’s father was working again, albeit unofficially.

‘I’ll leave it a bit longer . . .’ she said.

Samsun poured her a drink anyway. She’d seen it all so many times before. Women waiting for men and men just doing their own thing anyway. But in spite of this, she was glad that Çetin was getting out and about again. When Fatma died, the entire İkmen family had wondered whether her husband would survive. But he had – just – even though he didn’t come truly back to himself until he started working.

In an attempt to wipe the miserable expression off Çiçek’s face, Samsun said, ‘I’ve decided to call our kitchen guest Yiğit.’

Ever since just before Fatma İkmen’s death, some members of the family – principally those who took after Çetin’s mother Ayşe, a well-known witch – had reported the presence of a djinn in the family kitchen. Creatures of smokeless fire who lived between the human world and that of the angels, djinn were generally mischievous creatures who shared some characteristics with Western poltergeists. Samsun, Çetin, Çiçek and her brother Bülent could all see its hairy, snarling face and unpleasantly slack body much of the time.

‘Why?’ Çiçek asked. ‘Personally, I wouldn’t call it brave. Creeping up on us in the dark.’

‘Which is why it is Yiğit,’ Samsun said.

Belatedly, Çiçek worked it out.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘after the—’

Samsun held up a warning finger. Even in the privacy of their own homes, people avoided making jokes about politicians or others in power. She handed Çiçek a very strong Campari and soda.

‘Samsun . . .’

‘Oh, if you can’t cook by the time the men get here, I will,’ she said. ‘It’s only pasta, after all. Your father will barely eat any of it anyway, and if I know him, Prince Mehmet will be too busy looking into your eyes.’

Çiçek pulled a sour face. ‘You think?’

‘I know,’ Samsun said. ‘I’ve been studying Mehmet Süleyman ever since he started working with your father all those years ago. He’s been married twice and had numerous lovers, including that mad gypsy woman over in Balat. But I’ve never seen him as stuck on someone as he is on you.’

‘And yet he stands me up . . .’

‘Oh don’t be silly,’ Samsun said. ‘He’s working. You know all about that. So far you’ve kept him keen by playing unconcerned. Don’t come across desperate now or he’ll think he’s got you and take you for granted. You’re a clever, beautiful girl and he’s lucky to have you. Make sure he never forgets that.’

Çiçek had been going out with her father’s former colleague for almost a year. She was, although she’d never admit it, deeply in love. She sensed he felt the same way about her. But she also knew that this scion of an old Ottoman family connected to that of the sultans was often presented with temptation. Even at over fifty, he was still handsome and charming, while that whiff of danger in his manner made him irresistible to many women.

But she also knew how passionate he was when they were alone together, and the thought of it made her smile. Samsun noticed, and smiled too.

‘So the machines are works of art?’ İkmen said.

‘No.’

‘Then . . .’

‘People can dub them works of art if they wish, if they need to put a label on them,’ Machine Bey said. ‘But their true purpose resides in their lack of functionality. My time i. . .