The Dervish House (37 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘If I could see any other option I would tell you to stuff your nano up your ass but I can’t. I’m in.’
‘I’ll tell Oğuz. He needs to know.’
‘He’ll be staunch.’
‘He will. Good then, we’re agreed. I will source the nano. I leave it to you to administer it.’
‘Wait. I give it to Kemal?’
‘I’m in Oversight and Compliance. If I come down there’ll be mass pissing of pants. You’re on the Trading Floor, you see him every day. I’ll source the stuff; it’s up to you to get it to him. I’m sure you’ll think of something.’
‘Fuck you, Kadir.’
‘Everybody tries.’ He smiles weakly. ‘That’s the job of Compliance.’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Good. We know what we have to do. Shall we head back to the office?’
‘No, I want to stay here a while. God, this is a nightmare.’
The heat and reviving afternoon bustle of Beyazit Square swallow Kadir. Adnan sits on the edge of the loggia. The mosque attendant comes and sweeps deliberately around him, solicitous of a tip.
6
The ship explodes. White light, a blinding flash, a fireball too hot and pure to be mere flame. The first few seconds of destruction are in silhouette, the dark shoulders of Asia and Europe, the taut bow of the bridge between them, the flecks of ships in the channel. The world blinks back into colour. The blast has blown the centre span of the bridge upwards to tear. It tears, cables snap. The roadbed twists and plunges like an amputated snake. Cars are scattered like leaves. Trucks pour from the severed bridge. They plummet very slowly among the falling road sections. Whole sections of tanker - bulkheads, pieces of superstructure, ruptured tanks, entire engines the size of houses - are blasted into the air and fall to earth, destroying houses, highways, taking out whole columns of suddenly stalled traffic trapped on the approaches to the bridge, tumbling end over end, crushing vehicles like ants. The shock wave capsizes the squat, grubby ferries like toy yachts in a sudden blow. The blazing hulk of the tanker swings across the main channel, collides with an upbound bulk carrier. Together they settle slowly down into the deep black water. The Bosphorus is aflame with burning ships, a fire fleet of carriers and oil tankers and Black Sea freighters. A cruise liner shoots flames from every deck of shattered windows. Along the shore the blast front shatters the houses and apartment blocks of the well to do. Roofs are stripped away, cheap konaks collapse and crumble. The last of the old Bosphorus wooden yalis are swept away like straw. Cars tumble like dice, speedboats are thrown up hillsides and into trees. A fraction slower than the shock wave and the fire, the tidal wave hammers the shore communities, turning shards of roof and smouldering timbers into a rip tide of churning, crushing wood and metal. The blast-tide peaks, then ebbs, drawing cars, boats, shops, houses, clingers to the flotsam of their homes out into the Bosphorus. Sleek and prosperous Bebek and Kanlıca are shattered, lovely old Kuzguncuk burns. Gas flares from broken mains. Marshalled along their hilltops the glass towers of Levent and Maslak are eyeless, every pane of glass smashed, a hail of diamond daggers on to the streets and plazas. In a flash, in a blast, Istanbul is smashed. Finally the twin pylons of the Atatürk Bridge, trailing cable and decking plates and weakened by the fireball, break at the knees and slide into the black water. Only stumps like broken teeth remain.
‘It’s damned impressive,’ Emrah Beskardes whispers to Georgios Ferentinou, ‘but I did see this on Discovery Asia.’
The video ends. The screen retracts. The delegates of the Kadikoy Group blink and shuffle and rearrange their papers and sip water.
‘Five hundred thousand tons of liquefied natural gas,’ Ogün Saltuk says.
He sounds like a Discovery presenter
, Beskardes the zoologist writes on his magic slate, then pulls it clean.
, Beskardes the zoologist writes on his magic slate, then pulls it clean.
‘Of course, that’s a special effects piece from a television programme you might have seen a few months ago about the particular vulnerability of Istanbul to a concerted terror attack on a Russian gas carrier. I actually served as a technical adviser on that programme . . .’ (
Told you
, Beskardes scribbles) ‘but the details are accurate, with a little televisual licence. But half-million tonners regularly pass down the Bosphorus.’ A ship clicks up on the screen, a monstrous floating monolith of a thing, bridge and accommodation units squatting low behind the monstrous, coffin-shaped pressure body. ‘This is the
Ararat Star
; the largest gas carrier currently afloat, a Russian three-quarters-of-a-million tonner that began operating five months ago. You might have seen it; it’s been through the Bosphorus four times already. It will make a passage through the Bosphorus on April 19th. What you saw in the excerpt was based on a ship smaller even than the half-million tonners that have become industry standard. The
Ararat Star
has twice the capacity. Twice the destructive power. That has to be irresistible to a terror group.’
Told you
, Beskardes scribbles) ‘but the details are accurate, with a little televisual licence. But half-million tonners regularly pass down the Bosphorus.’ A ship clicks up on the screen, a monstrous floating monolith of a thing, bridge and accommodation units squatting low behind the monstrous, coffin-shaped pressure body. ‘This is the
Ararat Star
; the largest gas carrier currently afloat, a Russian three-quarters-of-a-million tonner that began operating five months ago. You might have seen it; it’s been through the Bosphorus four times already. It will make a passage through the Bosphorus on April 19th. What you saw in the excerpt was based on a ship smaller even than the half-million tonners that have become industry standard. The
Ararat Star
has twice the capacity. Twice the destructive power. That has to be irresistible to a terror group.’
‘To whom?’ Georgios hears himself ask. His voice holds a quiver of anger; he can’t take much more of this stupidity. ‘Who would want to destroy Istanbul? Kill eighty thousand people? What would that achieve? The Islamists aren’t blowing up symbols of Western decadence any more. The jihad is on the streets. I know, I’ve seen it. Tarikats, kadıs, shaykhs; they solve problems, make the peace, keep social order, judge in a dispute. There’s a new shariat: street law. It works. People use it.’
Ogün Saltuk chews on his bottom lip. ‘Turkey has always had enemies, within and without; even more now that we are the front door of Europe. We’re seen to have made a decision, aligned ourselves.’
Georgios Ferentinou would speak but a louder voice talks over him, ‘Surely we have tight enough security at the Black Sea and Sea of Marmara; you see them out there every night, waiting for security clearance to enter the Bosphorus. A three-quarter-of-a-million-ton gas tanker can’t be that easy to hijack.’
‘They are on autopilot through the Bosphorus, to prevent accidental collisions. That could be hacked,’ a new voice says while Emrah Beskardes whispers to Georgios, ‘I think I saw that movie; it was an old one. The cook saved the day. He was good with knives.’
Ogün Saltuk chimes his water glass with his pen.
‘If you could just hold on to all that creative energy, we have time scheduled for small group work. We’ll break and do some big blue thinking and then come together in circle time to pool our thinking. Remember, imagination allowed.’
Georgios looks enviously on as Emrah Beskardes heads with his group out to one of the airy pavilions in the garden. He is sent to a damp-smelling ante-chamber with cracking cornices and mould stains on the plaster. The ceiling is high, the surfaces hard and echoing. On his gilded chair, Georgios glimpses a turquoise triangle of sea between the tree tops. The other group members are young aggressive men who like talk of megatonnage and megadeaths and the banks of the Bosphorus burning, so he is pleased to find Selma Özgün a fellow group member.
‘We haven’t met, but I am an appreciator of your work. Georgios Ferentinou.’
She peers at him quizzically. ‘Ferentinou of Cihangir?’
‘I was indeed, but I moved to Eskiköy. Adem Dede Square.’
‘I know a neighbour of yours. Owner of an art gallery, specializes in hooky religious art? Gallery Erkoç?’
‘Madam, I live upstairs from it.’
‘In the old Mevlevi tekke? How delightful. It’s a very interesting place, the Adem Dede dervish house. One of the last few seventeenth-century wooden tekkes not to burn. So you know Ayşe? By the way, I didn’t really mean it about the hooky art. What is your line of work?’
‘It was - I’m retired - experimental economics. Economics as a real science rather than a set of mathematical conceits.’
‘I was interested in what you said about street shariat,’ Selma Özgün says. ‘You see, I rather like the idea of community justice. It’s personal, and I think it works rather better than institutional justice because it sees the parties concerned on a day-to-day basis. When you see not just the other party down at the supermarket every day, but the judge as well, that makes for a well-ordered society. There’s a lot to be said for the old Ottoman millet system when every community was free to abide by and be judged by its own social and legal systems; provided they didn’t conflict with Imperial law. I think that rather than automatically clamping down on it as some kind of threat to anti-secularism, the government should be looking at ways of incorporating it into the existing legal system. We organize religion on the community level, why not law? No, I’m rather in favour of your street shariat - do you minds if I steal that expression darling? - provided they don’t go trying to ban alcohol and make me wear a headscarf.’
‘I can’t be that hopeful,’ Georgios says. ‘They have a shaykh. He sees djinn.’
‘Now that is interesting,’ says Selma Özgün. ‘A shaykh in the old Adem Dede dervish house. Do tell, sweetie.’
Georgios Ferentinou talks about Necdet the freeloader who was caught in that bombing down on Necatibey Cadessi and now sees karin, talks to djinn and is the confidant of Hızır the green saint. As he talks he notices that Selma Özgün is not the only interested listener. While the Big Blue thinkers argue about what to write on their flip chart pad an older man on the edge of their clique, a man with the straight bearing, neat moustache, bad suit but well polished shoes of a career military man, has been increasingly leaning to catch Georgios’ and Selma Ozgun’s conversation, straining to overhear, turning towards them and away from the arguing men.
‘I am a connoisseur of spontaneous outbreaks of the marvellous,’ Selma Özgün says, clapping her pudgy, be-ringed fingers in soft delight. ‘An avid collector of village miracle workers and street seers and latter-day dervishes. It proves to me that the age of wonder is not past. That’s the fourth now.’
‘What do you mean?’ Georgios asks.
‘Seers of the strange and marvellous. There’s been a fresh outbreak. I read all the local news sites; it’s amazing what you find between all the uncredited aggregating and name calling.’
‘Others are seeing djinn?’
‘Well, not djinn exactly - it all began with this woman in Ereğli who started to see into souls and tell fortunes: the peri were whispering it to her, apparently. Then there’s this businessman in Nevbahar: he’s very interesting, very up to date; it’s not fairies or djinn; it’s robots. Those swarm-robots that build up into all kinds of different robots. But at some level it’s the same; he finds lost things and gives prophecies.’
‘Ereğli.’
‘And Nevbahar’
‘Eskiköy. And the fourth?’
‘Firuzağa.’
The parquet floor seems to drop beneath Georgios. He clutches for the gold braid of his imitation Parisian chair. It’s cheap and badly fitted and comes away in his fingers.
‘Oh,’ he says, the only word his whirling imagination can shape. Ereğli, Nevbahar, Firuzağa, Eskiköy, all within walking distance of the Topkapı-Yesilçe tramline. Can, the boy, the robots; did he get any photographs, can he get any footage of the bomb? A woman, a businessman, Necdet. They should be easy to find.
‘Are you quite all right, sweetie?’ Selma Özgün asks. ‘You look a bit peeky all of a sudden, I’ll get you some water.’
‘No, it’s quite all right, the room, it’s very stuffy, horribly musty.’
‘Hızır, now; that I would very much like to see,’ Selma Özgün continues but an MIT staffer comes to call the group back to the main conference room. She takes the flip-chart pad - they will be destroyed after the session for security. The group files back out of the damp, stifling salon. The military man hangs back to talk with Georgios.
‘Major Oktay Eğilmez.’
‘I am Professor Georgios Ferentinou, retired.’
‘Oh, I know. We have met before. It was a long time ago; the Haceteppe Group? Like this, only in Ankara. I was very junior then.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t . . .’
‘As I said, I was very junior. Interesting stuff there. My thought is; if this is supposedly a think-tank put together to think the unthinkable, surely we shouldn’t be limiting ourselves in what we can think about?’ He pauses to let Georgios through the door and in the moment of physical closeness whispers, ‘I did express reservations about Saltuk’s suitability to lead this group.’ He glances down. Georgios Ferentinou follows his eyes. The major holds his magic slate at waist height. Three words on it:
Eminönü Ferry: 16:30
. He erases it with one pull of the cardboard tab and slips the slate into the inside pocket of his unremarkable suit.
Eminönü Ferry: 16:30
. He erases it with one pull of the cardboard tab and slips the slate into the inside pocket of his unremarkable suit.
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