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Süleyman smile. İ kmen really didn’t want to be anywhere near this event and so he was complaining about everything and everyone. In an attempt to lighten the mood, Süleyman said, ‘What’s your room like?’
    ‘I can smoke in
there
,’ İ kmen said gloomily.
    ‘Yes, but what’s it—’
    ‘It has a bed, a bathroom and a cupboard to hang my normal clothes up in,’ İ kmen said.
    There was going to be no lightening his mood, clearly, so Süleyman stopped trying. It was at times like this that the younger man felt the difference in age between them most acutely. İ kmen had always been irascible but now that trait was magnified and also he was much more vocal about what he liked and didn’t like. Formal occasions were not for him and formal occasions allied to ‘fun’ were positively poisonous.
    And, of course, it was İ kmen’s birthday. Süleyman knew it, the Sarkissian brothers knew it and everyone, as usual, was tiptoeing around it, and İ kmen, as if it was just another day. Mehmet Süleyman put one cigarette out, lit another and then watched what looked like a group of goths get out of a taxi and go into the hotel. They were, he imagined, the Bowstrings, the murder mystery theatre troupe.
    The GrandPera Ballroom was set up for the banquet which would consist of five courses plus coffee and petits fours. There were a hundred guests who would be seated at round tables set with either six or eight places each. To cater for such numbers was a major, almost military operation, which fortunately boasted an ex-solider as its orchestrator. Ersu Nadir had been a professional soldier for twenty-five years before he became maître d’hôtel at the Pera Palas. Now a handsome and highly organised fifty-year-old, he inspected every place setting on every table while his waiting staff looked on, barely daring to breathe. Ersu Bey was not one to find fault where none existed but if he did find anything wrong he would not hesitate to point out the error to whoever was responsible in front of the whole banqueting team. Finally finding himself satisfied, he called housekeeping to come and brush one of the Murano chandeliers just one more time, then he went into the adjoining Aynalı room where the theatre group had just arrived. To Ersu Bey they looked like a bunch of anarchists.
    ‘Hello, I’m Alp,’ a boy who Ersu Bey thought was probably no more than twenty-five said.
    ‘Sir, I am the maître d’hôtel, Ersu Nadir.’ He bowed.
    ‘Is it OK if we usethis room to get changed in and sort out our stuff?’
    ‘Of course.’
    There was one girl and a couple of slightly older women with Alp, plus four other men, and Ersu Bey did wonder whether he should ask if they’d like separate changing facilities but then he noticed that they were already getting undressed. Theatrical people did things like this. On the one hand, he approved – had not Atatürk himself declared that men and women should be equal? – but he was also very embarrassed.
    ‘So what is this, er, this
performance
you are giving tonight?’
    ‘We’re doing a piece I wrote myself,’ Alp said. ‘It’s based, loosely, on the novels of Agatha Christie and it’s set in the nineteen twenties. We’re all playing characters staying here at the hotel. I’m called İ zzedin Effendi, I’m a former Ottoman prince, Ceyda there is my wife Nuray Hanımefendi, plus we’ve İ zzedin’s younger brother, Yusuf, an Armenian called Avram Bey, a Dr Garibaldi, an Italian, the owner of the hotel, Nicos Bey, an American governess, Sarah, and the housekeeper Sofia Hanım.’
    ‘So one of these characters is killed?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Where is your Hercule Poirot, your Miss Marple or whatever?’
    ‘Ah, itis for the guests to discover who killed whichever one of the company is ‘murdered,’ Alp said. ‘There will be clues both in our performance and scattered throughout the hotel.’
    ‘I see.’ Ersu Bey didn’t really approve. But then he was hardly on board