Dance with Death by Barbara Nadel

if anything, a lapsed Catholic. She knew that her husband, though once observant, also failed to keep Ramazan. So as she waited for him to arrive to see his son and talk about the divorce she’d said she wanted, Zelfa knew that food was not a problem. Unlike her own feelings which were.
    She didn’t really want a divorce. What she and her son Yusuf, who adored his father, really wanted was for Mehmet to come home and be the family man he had been before all the trouble. But how could she trust him? Adultery was one thing, but going with a prostitute and then announcing that he had to be tested for HIV . . . Oh, he’d been negative for that, which was wonderful, but the memories of that time, of the prostitute he’d screwed, of Zelfa’s own obsessive suspicions and frigidity at that juncture, remained.
    Hearing a car pull up outside the slightly shabby wooden house she shared with her father, Zelfa went to the front window and looked into the street. Mehmet, his face drawn and serious, was sitting behind the wheel of his great white BMW talking earnestly into his mobile phone. She wondered who he was talking to so seriously and then instantly wondered whether it was a woman. When he finally came into the house and took his son into his arms with a smile on his face, she asked him.
    ‘It was Metin İskender, if you must know,’ he said a little touchily. ‘He’s been speaking to someone who had some information we might be able to use.’
    ‘Oh.’
    What he didn’t go on to say was exactly what İskender’s informant had said. The peeper’s activities, it seemed, were beginning to bite into İstanbul’s gay community. The general consensus of opinion seemed to be that the peeper, far from being a homosexual man himself, was actually someone who ‘got off’ frightening and abusing other men. The mythology was that he was probably a straight man with some sort of grudge. The exotic Elma, İskender’s informant, had said that some thought that perhaps the peeper was one of those who had at some time experimented with homosexuality and then been disgusted by what he had done – or maybe by the pleasant way it had made him feel. People gathering in gay places were watchful, although there had not, as yet, been any reports, as far as Elma knew, of any odd or disturbing people on the scene. The only thing that was happening was that people were not going out in public as often as they had before. Casual encounters and those expert in that field were also not quite so common as they had been. This man, though slowly and, to most people, imperceptibly, was changing the life of the city. The old whore İstanbul, as Süleyman knew right through to his city-bred bones, didn’t like it when anyone tried to tame her wild spirit. No attempt to tackle vice in the city by Byzantine, Ottoman or Republican administrations had been even partially successful. There was going to be a lot of trouble.
    Zelfa cooked pizzas for their dinner and then they all watched a video, Finding Nemo , before Mehmet finally put Yusuf to bed at nine. When he came back downstairs, Zelfa was sitting at the kitchen table with a fan of official-looking papers spread out before her. As he entered the room she looked up into his eyes.
    ‘You’ve been busy,’ he said as he sat down and lit a cigarette.
    ‘I think that if we are going to divorce we should do it in as clean and civilised a fashion as possible,’ she said. ‘Delaying will only cause more aggravation and pain.’
    ‘If that is what you think.’
    ‘Well, don’t you?’ She lit up a cigarette and then exhaled jerkily.
    Mehmet shrugged. ‘What can I say? I’m in a position of weakness and guilt.’
    ‘You could try saying what you really think.’
    That was not an easy request and Zelfa knew it. Even discounting Mehmet’s natural pride, there was also his sense of appropriateness, not to mention his adherence to the rules of etiquette, to take into account.
    ‘Well, if you ask