Death by Design by Barbara Nadel Read Free Book Online Page B

slim and handsome mobile phone to İkmen and said, ‘Keep this with you at all times.’
    Once he was someone else, a person without a moustache and with very short, very black hair, the man took his photograph and then carried it and the passport away with him to another room. The clothes the woman gave him to wear were even cheaper versions of the already cheap and worn-out clothes that Çetin İkmen usually wore. The small suitcase he was provided with contained nothing that was any better. For his pockets there was a wallet containing eight hundred Turkish lire, a photograph of a woman who he was told was his daughter, a set of keys to ‘his’ flat in Laleli, the mobile phone and an ATM card in the name of Çetin Ertegrul.
    ‘This ATM card will work anywhere in the world,’ the man said. ‘The PIN number is on your mobile phone. Draw in euros or sterling. You can take out up to five thousand euros at any one time.’
    ‘Five thousand euros!’
    ‘You’re a police officer, you’re supposed to be trustworthy,’ the woman growled.
    ‘Yes, but—’
    ‘Wherever you go in the European Union, it will cost you,’ the man said. ‘Only the old ex-communist countries are cheap. You’ll need money to pay whoever traffics you across the English Channel. It will be expensive. Now your mobile phone also contains two other numbers. One is listed under the name Wolfgang, that is your contact in Berlin. You call Wolfgang as soon as you arrive. The other is under the name Burak and that is your emergency number. You call that number if you are in trouble, if you’re about to be unmasked, if your life is in danger. Understand?’
    ‘Yes.’ There wasn’t much not to understand. There was, however, quite a bit to be worried about.
    But the man smiled even if İkmen did not. ‘Now . . .’ He picked up a hand mirror and held it in front of İkmen’s face. ‘Say hello to Çetin Ertegrul.’
    What stared back from the mirror was the very epitome of migrant Turkish desperation, thin and pallid, scarred, the short dyed hair a last-ditch attempt to appear younger. İkmen looked at his new incarnation with disgust. This person, this parody of a Turkish man, was going to go and plead to be trafficked out of Germany, beg for work in the UK. He started to feel angry until he remembered that Çetin Ertegrul wasn’t real, was merely a part he was playing in order to expose a network of crime he had only glimpsed as yet.

Chapter 6
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    Wolfgang was not what İkmen had expected. For a start he had not reckoned upon actually meeting his contact in Berlin. Maybe he had seen too many espionage movies. Berlin, what it had been and maybe what it still was, seemed to engender such notions. He’d imagined that when Wolfgang had told him on the phone to go to the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery in one of the old East German districts of the city, he would find some sort of message waiting for him there. A scrap of paper on a gravestone, a bag with instructions underneath a tree. What he hadn’t expected was a person – in this case a tiny, wizened and ancient Jewish man.
    Wolfgang led İkmen between the large plain gravestones and into one of the most heavily wooded areas of the cemetery. ‘You know that this is the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe.’
    ‘It is?’ German was very much İkmen’s third language and he was not finding it easy to speak. He did not, he knew, practise as often as he should. It made him feel nervous, edgy about both what he was saying and what he was hearing.
    ‘So strange when you consider how many Jews the Germans transported and killed,’ Wolfgang continued. ‘But then central Europe has always had its problems, has it not?’
    ‘Ah . . .’
    ‘The Hundred Years War, all that business with Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, silly, silly Kaiser Wilhelm, the Nazis, then the Wall and all that aggravation.’ Wolfgang cleared some ferns away from the side of the path and revealed a small,