Reflecting what Lieutenant Shalhoub had told İkmen and Süleyman, he said, ‘There’s a big Lebanese population in Detroit, mostly out at a suburb called Hamtramck. Cafés and restaurants with names like the Cedars and Beirut all over that area. It’s easy to get foodstuffs. Tahini, köfte, börek, baklava, you name it.’ Çetin İkmen put another square of baklava into his mouth and savoured both the sweetness of the dessert and the warm comfort of Tayyar’s massive home. For a man who lived alone, a four-bedroom house with a double garage seemed, to İkmen, excessive. But then apparently, if one was just reasonably well off, that was the American way. Property prices compared to Turkey, and particularly when measured against western Europe, were cheap. And that especially applied to Detroit. ‘This place would probably sell for around three hundred thousand dollars,’ Tayyar had said when he’d showed them around his home. ‘But this is a suburb.
