Hotel Bosphorus by Esmahan Aykol

further. There was no point. I needed to save my energy for later.
    Once Batuhan had gone, I suggested that Petra should stay at my place. She didn’t want to. I didn’t really insist. It was up to her.
    She got into a taxi and returned to her hotel.

5
    The next morning, I woke up at nine o’clock, which surprised even me. Excitement has a good effect on me. It was nearly ten o’clock and the temperature was soaring towards thirty degrees by the time I’d settled myself in the local corner café with the newspapers.
    It was front-page news in all the Turkish press. I read every word, but there was nothing I hadn’t heard from Petra or Inspector Önal the previous day. Only one of the newspapers gave any information about the film director: Kurt Müller was born in Bielefeld in 1952. He had made two films, The Night After the Rain and In the Footsteps of Eternal Love , neither of which had achieved any success. I’d never even heard of them.
    All the newspapers agreed that this film, A Thousand and One Nights in the Harem , was likely to provoke comment. The film set was intended to conjure up the images in the best-selling book of that name by the famous Italian writer Giacomo Donetti. The managing director of Mumcular Films, which was co-producing with a German company, was Yusuf Selam. He had issued a written statement the previous day saying, “Our art and artists have been touched and tainted by this evil.” If you ask me, his claim was a bit much, but never mind.
Yusuf Selam added that they would resume filming as soon as possible despite this tragedy, and do everything to ensure the film’s success.
    After reading all that, there was one point I couldn’t erase from my mind: if it was based on a novel by Donetti, one of today’s best-selling writers, why had it been handed over to a second-class director like Müller?
    The temperature was now rising rapidly to forty degrees. The sun was burning down on my head as I flew along the steep streets of Çukurcuma towards my air-conditioned shop. Once there, I went straight onto the Internet, the greatest human invention since the wheel.
    News about the murder appeared in most of the German newspapers under the same headlines: Murder on the Bosphorus. Any documentary or novel about Istanbul inevitably squeezes in the word “Bosphorus” somewhere or other.
    The news items in Westdeutsche Zeitung and Tagesblatt des Ostens were a bit better than the others, but there was still no proper information about Kurt Müller in either of those papers.
    Who was this Kurt Müller? I tried putting his name into my favourite search engine, which produced a total of 1,634 Internet sites. A wave of despair swept over me. However, given that one in four Germans is called Kurt or has the surname Müller, that number was not at all surprising.
    I opened up a hundred or so of the 1,634 websites, until I got bored. Only a handful of them contained anything to do with the Kurt Müller I was looking for, and those only showed recent press items about the film and murder.

    I was about to thump my computer when I remembered my friend Sandra, a retired doctor living in Bielefeld. If Sandra didn’t know this man, she would undoubtedly know someone who did. I got on the phone immediately.
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    I had just eaten an early supper of Trabzon pitta bread and was washing it down with gallons of green tea, when I caught Inspector Önal gazing through the shop window. Pelin had left work early and gone to the cinema.
    This time, Batuhan Önal was in plain clothes. But don’t assume that wearing plain clothes meant he was well dressed. His grey flannel trousers and short-sleeved white shirt were a poor substitute for his uniform. However, to be honest, he would have looked good in a sack.
    I beckoned him inside. He didn’t wait for me to do it again. As soon as he entered, I said, “Would you like some green tea?