III

“Now, up until this point the story I’ve told you is hardly remarkable. Bored rich man murders hapless poor man. Happens every day, believe me. What’s interesting comes next.”

Emre ran to the police station and on the way he purposely tore his clothes and scuffed his shoes. He showed up in front of the captain, who was startled from his nap to see the young man standing in his office, panting.

Emre explained he was nearly stabbed and had to defend himself from the booze-frenzied Kurd. Sobbing, he collapsed in a folding chair and covered his face with his hands.

Due process took its course. Emre showed up in court and put on a similiar performance, with Mr. Çağan showing up to testify, tearfully, to his son’s love of peace. Every man, woman and child in the room was wrapped around his finger. The evidence the prosecutor produced, solid though it was, might as well have been made of fairy dust as far as the jury was concerned.

So of course Emre wasn’t convicted. Actually he came out of it a hero.

But whatever Emre was trying to release by murdering that drunk didn’t make it out. It seemed like it would, but really it just poked out its slimy little head, looked around a bit, then receded back into Emre, digging itself in deeper.

I guess when you set out to do something, and you pull it off on the first try, it’s hard to stop there. For men with brains hard-wired for success like Mr. Emre Çağan Jr., it’s impossible.

So he goes out one night and he picks off a drifter sleeping on the beach. The cops had to have found the body eventually, but no one ever heard of it.

A month later it’s a beggar who hangs out by the exit to the old castle and bugs the tourists for their lira.

And so on.

Emre never changes his methods. You’d think a smart guy like that wouldn’t leave such an obvious clue, but then again maybe that’s how he thinks. Chokes them with a wire every time.

And he never takes a hit. Sure, he gets arrested. Guy’s been arrested dozens of times. They put him through the whole rigmarole and every time the whole town flocks to his side like gulls to a dead fish.

Find something that works, then stick with it. Choke a vagrant to death, get yourself scuffed up, play the victim. I don’t know whether he just thought his reputation was that good, or he thought his dad could buy him out of any trouble, or maybe he was just losing it.

But I’ll tell you what, it did work. Not for the reason Emre thought it would. The public let him off because he had become their representative. Their savior. Their strike back against all the Untouchables who spoil the views from their terraces, stink up their bus stations. The good hardworking citizens of Anamur hate those people, and simultaneously they hate themselves for hating them.

So when they acquit Emre they acquit themselves. And there’s one less flaw in their crystal lives.

II

In the south, on the Mediterranean coast, there’s a small fishing town, Anamur. In the summers it’s a hot spot for vacationing businessmen and their families. There are a handful of luxury hotels and gourmet restaurants, and a ferry that runs daily to Cyprus. All of these are owned by one very wealthy man, Emre Çağan.

Mr. Çağan had a son, named after himself. Young Emre led a very comfortable life, as you might imagine, growing up in a resort. Never wanting for anything, a new car each year, single but many girlfriends---you get the picture.

Tourism money doesn’t get to everybody in Anamur; some of the population still scrapes out a living on 30-year-old fishing trawlers. Those without boats work in the fields growing strawberries and taro, and those who can’t work in the fields, beg.

Sometimes when Emre emerged from his palatial home he had to step over a sleeping bum to get to his Porsche. Like young Siddhartha, the contrast disturbed him.

There was an old Kurd who used to wait by the bus station to panhandle tourists when they arrived. Everyone knew he was an alcoholic, but he had been loitering at that same station for so many years that he was considered a fixture of the neighborhood.

One night in June, not unlike any other except for an unseasonably chill sea breeze, the Kurd was sitting and rolling a cigarette. The last bus from Antalya had already arrived and departed to Adana. He thought to turn and ask the man behind him for a light, and as he did he felt a thin cord pulled around his neck with sudden violence.

After a brief, languid struggle the Kurd expired there on the cold concrete platform.

I

Annoyed with the slow-moving crowd of gawking shoppers on Sandemir marina, I stepped off the curb and nearly collided with another pedestrian.

Where I had bounced off my left foot and put my right forward, he had advanced his left, pushing off with his right. We were both momentarily startled, and I took the opportunity to raise the camera hanging around my neck and take the man’s picture.

He was squat, or squashed---he looked like he was under a lot of pressure. Thick Turkish eyebrows, nostril hairs protruding. Sweat on his neck, cuts on his fingers.

“Hey, did I give you permission to shoot my picture pal?”

“No. This is a public place, you have no reasonable expectation to privacy.”

“Well fine then, how about I take your picture?”

I couldn’t think of a reason why he shouldn’t. I handed him the Canon and watched him adjust the focus. It occurred to me that maybe I should smile, but I didn’t.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

“We can’t. It’s film. I need to get it developed.”

“Yeah, I know. There’s a photolab just over here, let’s go now.”

There was a one-hour wait, and they wouldn’t let us smoke cigarettes inside, so we leaned against a brick wall in the alley behind the place. I bought us plastic cups of cherry-colored çay from a street vendor, and we stood and smoked and sipped uneasily.

I looked up at a grey and stolid sky through electrical wires hanging in the alley and thought I saw the lines of a musical staff imposed on the clouds. A single gull flew in a diagonal and played a whole octave from low to high.

“So we might as well get to know one another,” he said, withdrawing another Camel from a pocket inside his jacket.

“I’m curious to know where you were headed in such a hurry.”

“I’ve got a letter to mail.”

I glanced at my watch. Only just after noon.

“The post office will be open for another four hours. What’s the rush?”

“That’s just how I walk. What’s your rush?”

“I was wandering.”

“Just a fast walker like me, huh?”

“On the contrary. I intend to spend all afternoon wandering, and I have no time to waste.”

The man snorted loudly and looked like he was about to spit but didn’t. Cigarette smoke curled around his knuckles.

We stood for some time, silently sipping and smoking.

“I am curious,” I said. “What would you have done had I not allowed you to take my picture?”

“Son, I would have knocked you silly.”

I almost laughed aloud and had to take a big gulp of tea to hide it.

“It’s not that I minded having my picture taken,” he continued. “You’re right; it’s a public place and in these times you can’t go anywhere public without getting on camera. But it’s the fact that you bumped into me, and then didn’t apologize.”

“It wasn’t my fault. Or yours. It was just an accident.”

“Yeah, I know that. But a man can’t go around letting people bump into him, even if it’s no one’s fault.”

“Why not?” I knew I was infuriating him.

“I bet you’re the kind of guy---” he took a slow drag of his cigarette--- “who prances around all day, taking pictures of pretty birds and sunsets and doesn’t really give two shits about the human beings around him.”

“Well yes, I do like pretty birds, and sunsets always send a chill down my spine, but it’s not true that I don’t care about people. On the contrary, I love almost everyone I see.”

He snorted again and looked at his wristwatch. “Alright, kid. Looks like we’ve got another 40 minutes, so I’m going to tell you a story. If you’re smart, it’ll really help you a lot. If you’re not smart, or you’re not paying attention, then my breath is wasted and no one can say I didn’t give you a fair chance.”

Sinta the Sharker

It just isn’t working. Like before, like the other times.

The whole process had seemed so easy when Sinta was younger, exploring alone in the comfort of privacy. The parts were made for each other, what could be more simple?

Maybe if he changes their position.

Thick forearms, bearing small scars where the fishing hooks have snagged flesh, roll her onto her back. Sinta hopes that gravity will aid him this time. But it is not gravity or strength that Sinta lacks.

Aboard his trawler, he feels assured. Sharks are terrible predators, but Sinta does not fear them. He knows sharks better than they know themselves.

He knows how to call them by flinging chum into his wake. He knows how to hold the snare pole so the beast catches its own jawbone. He knows where to apply the heated knife to remove its fins without touching the bone, and he knows how to hoist a finless shark off the deck and back into the forgetting sea.

What Sinta does not know is how to control an organ which does not seem to be a part of himself.

In the dark bedroom the flesh underneath his hands looks like the pale blue of a fish’s underbelly. A cold, quiet part of his brain conjures images of his hands and the knife, the slick animal struggling under his sure grip.

And his body continues the mechanical, pointless motions without success.

Tom the Temp Worker

A stack of envelopes on his left, an empty tub on his right. Left hand goes to the stack. With his thumb he flips the opened side to his right hand. Like a squirming earthworm his index finger finds the opening and with the thumb pries open the package, pinching its contents out.

As he stacks their folded innards neatly he tosses the envelopes to a bin at his feet, paper chaff showing on his dark slacks like snow on the wet pavement outside his window. His fingers turn blue from ink and dirt.

10:30. Break time. 15 minutes.

Watching the blind, blinding snow through the window. Coffee is free and awful. It scalds his throat and sits testily in his empty stomach. Fox Business News drones in concert with The Price Is Right on the opposite wall, both turned low.

Tom can’t help but feel like he’s underwater.

Radwa the Rumba Player

When the Leader entered, the whole room was like iron filings and a magnet. There was a sound like the wind just before a cat pounces.

Radwa rested his bow on his harp delicately. He took deep breaths, waiting for his cue, letting the aromatics of the prelude begin to warm. The bass player set to plucking with his right hand, the one missing a pinkie.

The Leader took a seat at a circular table and his entourage of co-conspirators and thugs filled the other seats like bullets in a revolver.

Kafa began working on the drums, and the beat rippled the water in the pitchers set atop each table.

But no one had touched their glasses. They were waiting for the Leader.

Gregor the Garbageman

Sometimes they are very heavy, filled with wet leaves or lumber. Gregor has a permanent crick in his shoulder where he rests the cans. Walking to the truck, his head throbs and dirty sweat beads out onto his brow.

Meanwhile the driver Martin slurps the pale brown drops pooled in the lid of his coffee cup, held in one hand while his other manipulates an oversize steering wheel. He takes several gos at a tight alley turn and then, signaling to his partner in the side mirror, shifts into Park and waits for Gregor to hop off and haul the garbage over to the truck.

Gregor listens to the throb in his head and thinks how winter is the most savage season. Children injuring themselves playing on ice. Their parents making themselves sick on strong liquor.

Just before dawn there is a terrifying stillness and while looking at all the city's alleyways and empty bus stops Gregor imagines cold blue fingers curling, tightening their grip.