Death Comes to Susurluk

The town of Susurluk is located in western Turkey, somewhere on a pipeline from the Persian Gulf. This story is based on real events that occurred in 1994, except for the assassination of the journalist. Tansu Ciller and Recip Erdoğan are historical figures, since both have served as Turkey’s prime minister, but the other characters are fictitious.

Simge was twenty-five years old and still living at home, but that wasn’t unusual for a woman her age living in modern Turkey. Like all of her friends, she was sleeping with her boyfriend, but her family hadn’t met him yet. Oh, there were signs that Simge had a man in her life. Though she only worked at a delicatessen as a cashier, she had expensive jewelry in the top drawer of her vanity chest, and fine clothes hanging in her closet. Nothing fancy, but a working-class girl in İstanbul normally couldn’t afford to buy all that stuff selling baklava and şiş kebap in a deli. When she came back from a beach on the Black Sea where she said that she was vacationing with some friends, her mother noticed that there weren’t any tan lines on her body where there should have been tan lines. Her mother thought that she knew why: Simge had been to a nude beach. Her mother suspected then that there was a man in her life, but she didn’t say anything about it. Must be, there are some things that mothers don’t talk about with their daughters once they have reached the age of majority, which is twenty-one in Turkey. Soon, her mother thought, a man would approach her husband, Simge’s father, to ask permission to marry his daughter.

However, there were a few reasons why Simge’s boyfriend would never ask her father for her hand in marriage. Number one, Simge’s boyfriend was married, his wife, ensconced in a villa somewhere on the Black Sea west of the Bosporus, like she was the mistress. Second, Simge’s boyfriend was a gangster who might have thought that he didn’t have to ask anybody’s permission to marry anybody, regardless of the custom in Turkey.

Known as Mehmet Baba, or “Big Daddy Mohammed,” Simge’s boyfriend had both legitimate and illegal enterprises. On his business card, it said that he owned a construction company. The Walther PPK that he kept in a holster under his left arm, however, said it all; he wasn’t somebody to mess with. With his massive frame, European-style coiffure and wraparound sunglasses, he looked the part of the Euro-gangster who smuggled hashish and opium from the Golden Triangle in Asia, and Afghan and Iraqi refugees into the Balkans, from where they tried to find work as “guest workers” in the rest of Europe without the required work papers. Psychologists might have classified Mehmet Baba as a sociopath because his outlook on life was decidedly fatalistic; the possibilities of a violent death or a long term in prison were just occupational hazards. If he had any trouble sleeping at night, it wasn’t because he had a bad conscience.

They met completely by chance at the deli where Simge worked. Mehmet Baba walked in to buy a sandwich or a şiş kebap, but when the girl behind the counter smiled at him, he asked for her telephone number and got it. You could say it was what the Muslims call kismet, or “fate.” Mehmet Baba was a firm believer in kismet.

A gangster usually doesn’t talk much about his business with his “moll,” but Simge once overheard Mehmet talking with one of his associates on his cell phone. It went like this, at least on Mehmet’s end: “If you don’t have enough sand for the foundation, just add more water. Don’t worry about the inspectors. I’ll take care of them.”

After Mehmet hung up, Simge said to him, “I wouldn’t want to live in one of your buildings, darling.”

“Maybe you already live in one of my buildings,” he replied.

Simge ignored his comeback and continued, “One of your buildings could collapse. If you adhere to the building code at least somewhat, you could save yourself some legal trouble in the future.”

Simge’s advice soon proved prophetic. When an earthquake struck İstanbul, resulting in the deaths of thousands, many of Mehmet’s buildings survived the tremblers because he was more scrupulous in following the building code than many of his competitors. For some time after the earthquake, contractors like Mehmet Baba were the most hated men in Turkey. With the introduction of stricter building codes, however, some of Mehmet’s buildings had to be demolished because they weren’t up to the new standards, and they had been weakened by the earthquake and its aftershocks. But such is life.

As usual, Mehmet picked up Simge a few blocks from where she lived after she got off work. He had told her to pack up enough clothes for a weekend getaway, giving her a week’s time in advance to arrange for the time off with her boss. Since Simge lived somewhere south of the posh suburb of Örtaköy on the Asian side of İstanbul, Mehmet wouldn’t have to deal with the traffic on any of the four bridges that crossed the Bosporus. It was more convenient for Mehmet to see his mistress rather than his wife and children, who lived on the European side, whereas Mehmet still lived all alone in a villa in Örtaköy.

Simge got into the car and offered her cheeks to Mehmet, who kissed them both. “Where are we going, darling?” she asked, curious.

Mehmet was deliberately vague in his response. “We’re meeting some general,” he said. “The fate of the country could hang in the balance...”

Simge knew better than to ask more questions. The wise gangster knows not to mix business with pleasure; there are only so many things that he tells his wife or his girlfriend. One of the desirable qualities in a gangster’s moll is silence. That way, if the police ever come around asking questions, she can tell them that she doesn’t know. While Simge’s advice had saved Mehmet thousands of Turkish lire in lawsuits after the earthquake in İstanbul, Mehmet made sure that Simge didn’t overhear too many things on his cell phone that could compromise him in the future. Besides, Simge had reasons of her own for not wanting to talk the police: she sometimes did jobs for Mehmet Baba; she knew how to use a gun too.

But let’s back to our sheep: Mehmet drove Simge down the long and winding roads south of İstanbul along the Aegean coast in his Jaguar XL. Simge thought that Mehmet took the turns a little too fast and urged him to slow down a few times. However, Mehmet knew that his British-made sports car, with its hardy suspension, was built precisely for taking at high speeds the sharp turns that existed in southwestern Turkey. The topography of the Aegean coast of Turkey is similar to that of England’s, with low-lying hills, meandering streams, and little tree cover. However, you have to be able to stop on a dime for the occasional flock of goats or sheep crossing the road. Sometimes, other vehicles go too slow or stall in the middle of the road and you have to pass them.

Life is old in Turkey. Turkey has long been the crossroads where East meets West. Archaeologists have found evidence of as many as nine civilizations in some of the tells or strata that they have uncovered in Asia Minor. Therefore, one should not be surprised to see a farmer riding a donkey in the countryside only a few miles from a major population centre, like İstanbul or Ankara. Animals are a much older mode of transportation here than cars.

After a couple hours of having the country highways to themselves, Mehmet and Simge stopped for the night at a little hotel on the Aegean Sea with white stucco walls and orange clay tiles for the roof. “We meet this guy here in town around ten-thirty in the morning,” Mehmet told Simge. “Then we drive out to a town on the Lebanese border.”

“Who is this general that we’re supposed to meet?” Simge asked.

“Ah, him!” Mehmet replied. “Like I said, he’s a general. I’ve done some work for him in the past. Military service is mandatory for all able-bodied men in Turkey, but my father did some construction work for free to get me out of doing military service. The general simply arranged for me to flunk the physical. God is great.”

“So you’re just going to meet this general. Why, to flunk another physical?” Simge asked. Then she kissed him on the cheek.

Mehmet knew that it was only playful bantering on Simge’s part, but his expression was suitably grave. He looked at Simge and replied, “I have arranged a meeting between the general and a representative of the Kurdish People’s Party. Must be, both sides want to end the war. The PPK isn’t strong enough to expel the Turkish army from Kurdistan, but the government has finally realized that the war will continue as long as even one Kurdish insurgent opposes it. As well, our prime minister, may God give her wisdom, wants Turkey to join the European Union, but the British, the French, and everybody else in the EU are, shall we say, uncomfortable with Turkey’s human rights record. Turkey still has the death penalty, you know, and the police torture people routinely. Nothing serious, just some beatings and fingernails pulled out. The Europeans, on the other hand, don’t execute anybody these days; they’re soft on crime, the poofs. Then there’s the Armenian Question. The Kurds know all about the massacre of thousands of Armenians during the Great War, having participated in it themselves, but most of the Turks still deny it.”

Simge put her arms around Mehmet from behind and kissed him on the cheek. “Come to bed, darling,” she murmured with a pout. “I’m lonely...”

Mehmet brushed back her black hair streaked with brown highlights with his hand and gazed into her light brown, almond-shaped eyes. Then he laughed to himself and kissed her hard on the mouth. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, he thought, even if she was a former beauty queen in İstanbul. Maybe she was a little too skinny and a little too petite with her aquiline nose and olive skin. He preferred the paler Turkish girls with blond hair and blue eyes that looked European rather than those with olive skin who looked Middle Eastern like Simge. But he liked her mysterious smile and her almond-shaped eyes. A smile revealed much about a person’s character, he thought, and the eyes: they revealed everything else. The eyes, they say, are the light to the soul.

Simge sometimes compared Mehmet with other lovers, too. He knew how to please her, but there was once a little Frenchman that knew how to make her scream. The Frenchman would shrug his shoulders afterwards and say, “A man should be able to make a woman come at least three times: with his mouth, with his hands, and with his pine...”

The relationship that existed between Simge and Mehmet had no real future but existed only in the context of an Eternal Now. Because Mehmet Baba was involved in organized crime, he could be snuffed out by his enemies, who were legion, at any moment. Therefore, marriage held little attraction for either of them. Simge was beginning to understand that Mehmet's reach extended far beyond his little construction business in İstanbul towards both the Turkish military and the Kurdish separatists. Whether Turkey maintained its grip on Kurdistan or the Kurds successfully broke away, it hardly mattered even to most Turks, except as a matter of national pride. Mehmet Baba was merely thinking like a business man, he said to himself, trying to prepare for the uncertainties of the future. He was only trying to “look at The Big Picture.”

Then Mehmet did something with his mouth that he had never done before, and Simge gasped, “Oh, yes! Right there! Ô là-là...”

That phrase, ô là-là, was something that she had learned from her Frenchman.

Maybe Mehmet could make her come three times, too, like her French lover, if he had the time and the inclination...

*****

Early the next morning, Mehmet showed Simge a 9-mm Beretta PX4 Storm subcompact pistol. “I want you to take care of some business,” he said. “I would do it myself, but I have a meeting with the general.”

He handed her the pistol and she scanned its length with her eyes as she held it in her right hand. Then she sighted it. Once she verified that there was no clip or round in the chamber, she aimed at her reflection in the mirror and pulled the trigger. There was very little resistance in the trigger mechanism, she thought; she should have no trouble getting off a shot at her victim. Simge handed the pistol back to Mehmet, and Mehmet inserted the clip.

“I’m supposed to meet him at the bazaar this afternoon,” Mehmet said, “but I’m meeting the general today. You walk up to him, say hello, and shoot. I chose this gun because it’s small and I want you to get close to him. You push the gun up to his stomach and tilt it at an angle where the bullet will enter his heart and exit from his back into the ceiling. One shot should prove fatal, if it’s done right.”

Mehmet demonstrated how he wanted her to point the gun at her target.

“In the ensuing panic,” he continued, “you make your get away. You drop the gun and ditch the scarf. I want you dressed like a good Muslim girl, with the raincoat and the hecap. After that, you can go back to being a modern woman again.”

Then he looked at her hard and warned, "I want no innocent bystanders killed. I want a clean hit."

“Who were you supposed to meet?” Simge asked.

Mehmet showed Simge a photo of the man from his cell phone. He looked like a civil servant near retirement, well past the age of sixty. Simge guessed that he was either a politician or an academic figure, probably a leftist. Maybe he was a writer who had “insulted Turkishness” by suggesting that Armenians had been massacred by the Turkish army during World War I. He didn’t look at all dangerous, but she decided not to ask Mehmet why he wanted him dead.

Mehmet and Simge met with the Turkish general out under the terrace of the hotel restaurant. They greeted each other with the “wolf signal,” which looked like the Heavy Metal Salute. The general introduced himself as Mehmet Kerivan. The general’s countenance was very dour, not very inviting. With an army uniform, some ribbons, and some aviator sunglasses, he would have looked more like a general, but instead he looked like a tourist out on a weekend that he clearly didn’t look forward to, dressed in a white polo shirt and some beige slacks. One would have expected to see a wife in tow who equally hated their little holiday. Clearly, the general had not come here with pleasure in mind. That worried Mehmet Baba, because the general seemed out of place. Both had reason to fear the Turkish police, because this meeting was supposed to be clandestine. The general was a high-ranking official of the National Intelligence Service (MİT), Turkey’s military intelligence agency. Both Mehmet Baba and Kerivan had ties with the Grey Wolves, a right-wing terrorist group. Hence the wolf signal.

“How was your drive from Ankara, my general?” Mehmet Baba asked politely while shaking the general’s hand.

“The drive was pleasant enough,” Kerivan replied, frowning. “It’s preferable to be on the sea than in Ankara this time of year, with the summer well under way. The heat is unbearable in Ankara, and government bureaucrats are insufferable this time of year.”
“God is great,” Mehmet replied, noncommittally.
Like many of the top officers in the Turkish military, the general was openly hostile to the politicians, particularly the female prime minister, Tansu Ciller, though Ms. Ciller had given the military carte blanche to do whatever it felt necessary to cleanse Kurdistan of Kurdish insurgents. Perhaps Tansu Ciller could have passed for an “iron butterfly” in other countries with her unapologetic stance vis-à-vis the Kurds, but many Turks believed that she was merely a front for the military; it was the military that was really calling the shots, they said.
Mehmet Baba introduced Simge to the general, who smiled, kissed her hand, and complimented her for her beauty. Then they all sat down at table for lunch. Simge ate in silence while Mehmet Baba filled the general in on the Kurdish guerrilla leader that they were supposed to meet. “This guy is somewhere between a field commander and a member of the nomenclemature of the PPK in their chain of command,” Mehmet explained. “In other words, he’s like you. If the Kurds had a real army, he might be a general, too.”

“Who is this guy?” Kerivan asked brusquely.

“You know that I can’t tell you that, my general, at least not now. For security reasons, you understand...”

The general merely grumbled and picked at his food, like it was something to be conquered rather than savoured. He was eating lüfer, which is a flaky white fish found only in the Black Sea.

During the meal, Mehmet signaled with his eyes towards the restaurant door the moment when he wanted Simge to leave for the bazaar. Simge excused herself and went into the women’s room. She balled up her hair at the neck and put on the Muslim head scarf, the hecap. Then she removed a pale green raincoat from her hand bag, put that on as well, and put on some large round sunglasses. Since lots of young Muslim women in Turkey dressed as she was dressed now, it was an effective disguise, particularly in a small town on the Aegean Sea where the people were mostly observant Muslims.

Though it was just past noon, the bazaar was still teeming with people. Then, in the middle of a green space in the bazaar, she saw the man that she was supposed to kill. The man looked nervous, impatient, like he had been waiting all morning. He was tall and thin, with a homburg on his head and a beige raincoat over his right arm. He was wearing a brown suit and a thin red tie. With his grey, pencil-thin mustache and his pale blue eyes, he looked more like an Englishman than a Turk. He looked like a retired civil servant or professor, like he did in the photograph.

Simge pulled the Beretta from her hand bag and approached him with the barrel pointed to the ground. When the man saw her, Simge smiled at him and said pleasantly, “Merhaba! How are you?”

“Who are you?” the man asked warily. He hadn’t seen the gun yet, Simge realized, but he sensed that something was up. She concluded that he had to have been a journalist; maybe he was promised a scoop if he interviewed a gangster who was also a member of the Grey Wolves.

“I’m sorry,” Simge said, still smiling, “but Mehmet Baba couldn’t meet with you today. He sent me instead...”

Then Simge put the Beretta up to the man’s stomach with the barrel angled towards the heart. When she pulled the trigger, her victim crumpled to the ground as if he had been punched hard in the solar plexus. Though the crowd heard a loud blast, nobody could immediately ascertain where the shot had come from or who had been shot.

Simge made her getaway in the confusion. She calmly dropped the gun and walked away from the scene. When she saw a grey metal door marked BAYANLAR in capital letters, she walked towards the door and entered the room behind it; it was the women’s room. She immediately pulled off her sunglasses and her head scarf and put them in her hand bag. Then she took a moment to unball her hair, brush it out, and put on some make-up. Before she reemerged from the women’s room, she made sure that there was no blood on her raincoat. Then she turned it, since it had pockets both inside and outside; she was now wearing a brown raincoat. Nobody noticed when Simge walked out of the women’s room; everybody was too busy milling around the scene of the murder.

When Simge returned to the restaurant, Mehmet Baba and General Kerevan were still eating lunch. The general had hardly touched his lüfer. “Did you find what you wanted at the bazaar?” Mehmet asked as Simge sat down next to him.

Simge kissed him on the cheek and replied, “No, darling; just the usual raincoats and scarves.”

Mehmet understood then that she had successfully done the job and was satisfied that she hadn’t led the police to him.

*****

Mehmet Baba and General Kerevan ate the rest of their meal in silence before they continued in Mehmet Baba’s Jaguar towards their meeting with the Kurdish fighter. Again, Simge complained about the speed at which Mehmet Baba took the turns, but Mehmet wanted to reach their rendezvous point with the Kurdish guerrilla before too late. The longer that the Kurd had to wait, Mehmet knew, the more anxious that he would be. The Kurd had wanted to meet close to the Lebanese border so that he could easily escape into Lebanon, if the police decided to close in on him. He was wanted by the Turkish police and had even been sentenced to death by a military tribunal in absentia.

They arrived four hours later, towards dusk, at a little café in the hills near the Lebanese border. The man that they were supposed to meet was waiting for them, a short man who called himself Mustafa Walid Salah. He hardly looked like someone who had spent any time hiding in the mountains of Kurdistan, since he was more than a little pudgy. He tried to fit in with the native populace by dressing in Western clothes and trimming his mustache, rather than the turban, the flowing robe and the beard of Kurdish men in Kurdistan. In Turkey, facial hair is everything. The Islamic fundamentalists wear full beards, for instance, while Westernized liberals often wear no facial hair at all. The conservatives, those who follow the ideology of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Republic of Turkey, merely wear mustaches. However, Salah’s Kurdish accent gave him away, though he spoke Turkish and Arabic as well as Kurdish.

When Simge knew that the men wanted to go out to a café, she took this as a cue to do some shopping. In Turkey, men go out to cafés and drink rakı while the women either stay home or go shopping, depending on the time of day. Sometimes, the men will then go out for a night on the town to watch female belly dancers, usually late at night. However, Simge was soon bored with shopping. There were no shopping malls in this town like the Grand Bazaar on Istiklal Boulevard in İstanbul, just a little depot that attracted buyers and merchants from both Turkey and across the border in Lebanon, as well as Syria and Iraq. Every day, trucks from several countries crossed back and forth across the border to deliver merchandise, some from as far away as Israel. You could buy everything from Turkish rugs to fake lava lamps, as well as compact disc players and iPods. Merchants even sold openly articles of Islamic clothing like hecaps, or head scarves, as well as turbans and burqas, which are illegal in modern Turkey (though women still wear them). However, this bazaar had nothing that Simge wanted. Besides, there was no room to stash a Turkish rug in Mehmet Baba’s Jaguar, and Simge wasn’t a religious Muslim to the extent that she was willing to wear a hecap, except, of course, when Mehmet sent her out on a job.

Meanwhile, the men smoked a narghile, or Turkish water pipe, at the café and drank copious amounts of rakı, which is an anise-flavoured alcoholic beverage like ouzo, except that the Turks don’t burn off the dregs before they sink to the bottom of the glass like the Greeks do. If you have a glass full of dregs at the end of the evening, it means that you have drunk a lot of rakı.

The men were at the café merely to have a good time rather than negotiate the fates of Turkey and Kurdistan. The belly dancers had a good night, too, making money like water in tips from their table. By the time Simge came to get them, the men were feeling good, though they might see things differently in the morning.

*****

The next morning, Mehmet Baba was the first to wake up, because he seldom slept more than a few hours at a time, even when inebriated. Seeing Simge lying in bed next time, still asleep, he felt amorous, so he put his arms around her from behind and started kissing her neck and shoulders while squeezing her breasts until she began to wake up. She looked different to him now, more beautiful than he had ever seen her, and he couldn’t remember feeling so alive. Simge still wanted to sleep, but she silently lifted her right leg and inserted his penis inside of her. Then she curled up in a fœtal position with her back to Mehmet Baba and massaged her clitoris until she came. After Mehmet ejaculated, they both went back to sleep, with Mehmet’s arms still around her.

When Mehmet and Simge woke up a couple of hours later, they showered, did their toiletries, and went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. Downstairs, first Kerivan and then Salah met them while they were still eating and joined them for breakfast. Both the Turkish general and the Kurdish insurgent were hungover from the night before, with their faces feeling numb and immobilized from all the rakı that they had drunk. After they finished eating, Mehmet Baba announced his intention to take Kerivan and Salah to yet another undisclosed location. As the general and the guerrilla fighter climbed into the back seat of the Jaguar, Simge whispered to Mehmet, “Are you all right to drive, darling?”

Though he was also feeling hungover, Mehmet merely nodded his head and climbed into the driver’s seat while Simge climbed into the passenger’s seat on the right side.

While racing down the narrow country roads of western Turkey, Mehmet got his Jaguar XL up to speeds of 150 km per hour. The reason that he drove so fast was because he didn’t want to be driving down these roads at night, when visibility was almost nil. However, Simge still wasn’t used to his driving and urged him several times to slow down. “Don’t worry, my dear,” Mehmet replied. “I’ve got this thing under control.”

He would slow down to mollify her, but he eventually had the needle of the speedometer well over to the right like it was before. His foot seemed to have a mind of its own.

Then, as they passed through the little down of Susurluk, a Volvo delivery van pulled out the town’s only service centre. Since the Jaguar was still going about 80 km per hour, about 55 mph, the Jaguar had no room to brake. Mehmet veered to the shoulder of the road to avoid hitting the van, but he collided head on with a Mercedes Benz 300 SD coming from the opposite direction that had crossed the centre line to avoid hitting the van. The driver of the van escaped serious injury, but he recalled hearing a woman’s scream because Simge had her window rolled down.

The police found the wreckage of both cars by the side of the road. Only Mustafa Walid Salah survived the crash, and he suffered amnesia; he couldn’t remember anything, including his name. The press had a field day; the accident was on the front page of all the newspapers because of the people involved: a Turkish general, a Kurdish guerrilla leader, a gangster and the gangster’s girlfriend. In the scandal that followed, Prime Minister Tansu Ciller’s government collapsed in 1996. Turkey now has an Islamist prime minister, Recip Tayyib Erdoğan.

Simge’s parents knew the identity of her boyfriend only when the rest of the country did, because Simge had been discrete about her private life until the moment of her death. Then details began to emerge that she was a hired assassin. This was the biggest blow of all, because no one had suspected that Simge was a murderer.