Authors: Ian Mcdonald
The Dervish House (4 page)
‘Here, do you know who I saw yesterday on Güneşli Sok?’ Constantin asks. ‘Ariana Sinanidis.’
‘How long is it since she went to Greece?’ asks Lefteres.
‘Forty-seven years,’ says Georgios Ferentinou. ‘What’s she doing back here?’
‘Either a will or a property dispute. What else does anyone come back for?’ Constantin says.
‘I haven’t heard of any deaths,’ Father Ioannis says. In as small and intimate a community as the Greeks of Istanbul, every death is a small holocaust. Then the bomb goes off. The sound of the explosion echoes flatly, flappingly from the house fronts. It is a little blast, barely distinguishable from the growl of morning traffic, but the four men at the table look up.
‘How far was that?’
‘Under a kilometre, I’d say.’
‘Well under a kilo. It might well have been just the detonator.’
‘Whereabouts would you say?’
‘I would guess down towards Tophane Meydanı.’
‘No guesses. This is an exact science.’
Constantin taps up news feeds on the smartpaper lying among the tea glasses and coffee cups.
‘Necatibey Cadessi. Tram bomb,’ Constantin says.
Behind the counter, Bülent clenches a fist.
‘Yes!’
‘Bastard!’ says Lefteres. ‘What’s he made now?’
Georgios Ferentinou pulls out his ceptep. His thumb moves unswervingly over the icons.
‘The Terror Market is up twenty points.’
‘Lord Jesus Son of God have mercy on us,’ says Father Ioannis. His fingers tie a knot on his prayer rope.
‘Breakfast is on the house then,’ says Bülent.
Georgios Ferentinou never saw economics as the Dismal Science. To him it is applied psychology, the most human of sciences. There are profound human truths in the romance between want and aversion; delicate beauties in the meshing intricacies of complex financial instruments as precise and jewelled as any Isfahan miniature.The blind wisdom of the mass still amazes him as it did when he first discovered it in a jar of plushy toys. The jar had sat on the desk of Göksel Hanım, his morning-school teacher. She had brought it back from a visit to her sister in Fort Lauderdale. Seduced by the Mouse, she had gone on a plushy spree across Disneyworld. Goofies and Mickies, Plutos and Stitches and little Simbas were packed together like pickles, eyes gazing out at eight-year-old Georgios Ferentinou. Çiftçi, Göksel Hanım had insisted on calling him. A Turkish transliteration of his name. Çiftçi had found the compressed figures strangely attractive. It would be quite good, he thought, to be squeezed into a jar full of other soft bodies.
‘Guess how many there are,’ Göksel Hanım said to her class, ‘and you will win them.’
Çiftçi was lazy. He was told that every day by Göksel Hanım. Lazy and dull. He wanted the bodies in the jar so he did what any lazy and dull boy would. He asked his classmates. Their answers ranged for fifteen to fifty. Dull, lazy and reluctant to commit to decisions, Çiftçi added the answers and divided them by the number of pupils in the class, rounding up for luck.
‘Thirty-seven,’ he said confidently to Göksel Hanım. Thirty-seven there were, exactly. Göksel Hanım gave him the jar grudgingly. He stared at it for months, on his bedside table, enjoying their captivity. Then one day his mother had taken them away to clean them. She returned them all to their confinement but damp had got in and within two weeks they were green and bad-smelling and were thrown out. It was his first exposure to the power of aggregation. The mass decides.
There is a market for anything. Debts. Carbon pollution. The value of future orange harvests in Brazil and gas output in the Ukraine. Telecommunications bandwidth. Weather insurance. Buy low, sell high. Self-interest is the engine; aggregation, like the class of ’71, the gear-train. Georgios Ferentinou has merely extended the free market principle to terrorism.
The market is played this way. A network of a thousand traders is strung across Istanbul. They range from economics students to schoolchildren and their mothers to real traders on the Stamboul Carbon Bourse. All night AI sift the news networks - those deep channels that Georgios Ferentinou took with him when he left academia, and less exalted sources like chatrooms, forums and social and political networking sites. By dawn they have drawn up a long list of potential future news. Georgios Ferentinou’s first task of the day, even before he takes his breakfast tea at the Adem Dede teahouse, is to draw up that day’s list of tradable contracts in his pyjamas and slippers. By the time he shuffles across the square to his table, the offers are out across the city like soft-gliding storks and the bids are coming in. I’ll buy twenty contracts at a settlement price of one hundred on Galatasaray beating the Arsenal two one on Thursday. How much do you want to pay for them? That depends on how likely you think it is that Galatasaray will beat Arsenal two one. This is the easiest future contract, a straight sporting bet. There is a clear termination point at which the contract is fulfilled - the sound of the referee’s final whistle in the Galatasaray Stadium - and a simple pay-out. All you have to do is decide how much you will buy that pay-out for, and for others to decide how much they will pay to buy that contract off you. All trading is betting.
How much would you pay for a contract with a settlement of one hundred on a bet that the price of gas will rise by fifteen per cent by close of trade next Monday? Thirty? Fifty, for a hundred pay-out? What if you see the price rising on the Carbon Bourse? Seventy, eighty? Turn those prices into percentages and you have a probability; you have a prediction of future news.
Thirty, fifty, one hundred, what are these? Kudos: the artificial currency of Georgios Ferentinou’s Terror Market. A light, odourless virtual money, but not without value. Kudos are not points in a game. They can be exchanged for other virtual-world or social networking or online-game currencies, some of which can be converted up into real world, pocketable cash. They can be traded. That is another one of Georgios Ferentinou’s behavioural economics experiments. Kudos is worth something. Georgios Ferentinou understands there is no market without real gain, and the possibility of real loss. The money makes it work.
Here’s another contract. Settlement price one hundred kudos. There will be a suicide strike on Istanbul public transport on a major arterial during the current heatwave. Do you buy it?
Georgios Ferentinou checks the closing price. Eighty-three kudos. High, given the plethora of speculative factors: the time since the bombing at the bus station; Ankara’s announcement of a clampdown on political organizations opposed to the national secular agenda; the possibility that the heatwave might break in glorious lightning among the minarets of Istanbul. Then he tracks the price since the contract was offered. It has risen as steadily as the thermometer. This is the miracle of the Terror Market. Buying and selling, petty greed, are more powerful prophets than the experts and artificial intelligence models of the National MIT Security Service. Complex behaviour from simple processes.
The woman who runs the religious art shop in the bottom of the dervish house crosses the square. She squats down to unlock the security shutter. Her heels come a little off the ground as she balances on the balls of her feet. She wears good boots and patterned tights, a smart skirt not too short, a well-cut jacket. Hot for this weather but stylish. Georgios Ferentinou watches her run up the shutter with a rolling clatter. Such unconscious ease costs gym fees. Her ceptep rings, the calltone a spray of silvery sitar music. Georgios Ferentinou looks away with a small grimace of regret. He was admired once too. A disturbance in the air draws his eyes up, a shiver like heat haze, a plague of tiny mites, the visual equivalent of the glittering glissando of the art-shop woman’s calltone.
The swarm of gnat-sized machines swirls in the choked air of Adem Dede. Even the boy bringing the sesame-dusted simits from Aydin’s kiosk looks up. Then the cloud of nanorobots pours down Vermilion-Maker Lane like water over a weir, following the stepped terrain beneath them, flowing around the schoolchildren, the women, old Sibel Hanım labouring up and down the steps. Follow the flock. Avoid near neighbours but try to maintain an equal distance from them. Cohesion, alignment, separation. Three rudimentary rules; the well of complex liquid beauty.
In the corner of his vision Georgios Ferentinou glimpses the little monkey-bot go helter-skelter across the electricity line and jump to the offending Georgian woman’s balcony.
A strange world that boy inhabits
, he thinks. A world of whispers, of distant tintinnabulations on the edge of hearing, like angel voices. But is it any stranger than four old Greeks, flotsam adrift for decades in the crash and suck of history, gathering over tea and doughnuts to divine the future?
A strange world that boy inhabits
, he thinks. A world of whispers, of distant tintinnabulations on the edge of hearing, like angel voices. But is it any stranger than four old Greeks, flotsam adrift for decades in the crash and suck of history, gathering over tea and doughnuts to divine the future?
And Ariana is back. Almost half a century and she is in Eskiköy. No deal, no play of trades and future outcomes could have predicted that. Ariana is back and nothing is safe now.
The yalı leans over the salt water, balcony upon balcony. Adnan opens the roof terrace’s wooden shutters. The heat of the morning beats in mingled with coils of cool from the Bosphorus. The current is dark. Adnan has always felt the Bosphorus to be dark, dark as blood, dark as the birth-canal. It feels deep to him, deep and drowning. He knows where this fear comes from; from his father’s boat and the endless sunlit afternoons of a childhood lived on water. This is why his seal of success has always been a place by the edge of the water. It is the lure of the fear, the reminder that everything you have won may be lost in an unconsidered moment. The early sun turns the side of a Russian gas carrier into a wall of light. It is a monster. Adnan Sarioğlu smiles to himself. Gas is power.
‘One million two hundred you say?’
The real estate agent waits by the door. He isn’t even properly awake, but he’s shaved and suited. You have to get up early to sell to the gas lords. A dealer knows a dealer.
‘It’s a very sought-after location and, as you can see, you can move straight in. You have your own boat dock and waterside terrace for entertaining.’
Adnan Sarioğlu shoots some video.
‘We’ve had a lot of interest in this property,’ the realtor presses. ‘These old yalıs do go fast.’
‘Of course they do,’ says Adnan Sarioğlu. It is not a real yalı, those were all bought up long ago, or are collapsing under the weight of their decaying timbers in forgotten coves along the Bosphorus, or have burned decades since. It is a fake, but a good fake. Turkey is the land of the masterful fake. But it is far far from that hateful little eighth-floor apartment huddling between the roar of the expressway and the blare of the mosque.
He pans the ceptep across the terrace. Already he is filling the space with skinny Scandinavian furniture. This could be an office. It would just be leather sofas and old Ottoman coffee tables, lifestyle magazines and a killing sound system. He would come in in the morning and summon his avatars to spin around him hauling in spot prices from Baku to Berlin. The big dealers, the Paşas, all work this way; from the boat club, from the gym, from the restaurant. Perfectly weightless. Yes, this is a house to start his dynasty. He can’t afford it. The realtor’s background checks will have disclosed that. But they will have shown that he is the kind of man who could have money, very very much money and that’s the reason the agent has got up in the pre-dawn and showered and shaved and scented and put on his good suit.
He pans the ceptep across the reach of the waterway. He blinks the zoom in on to the pastel houses along the European shore. Bigger cars, faster boats, deeper docks, further from their neighbours’ shadows. Money and class have always clung to the edge of Europe. He double-takes, pans back. Between the shiny slick twenty-first century yalıs with their low-sloping photosynthetic roofs is a pile of timbers, grey and lone as a widow, roof caved in, front wall slumping towards the water, window frames eyeless and half closed. A ghost of a house, abandoned and neglected among its young, tall, brilliant neighbours. A true yalı. It may have stood, decaying year upon year, from the Ottoman centuries. He blinks closer on to its empty windows, its sagging lintels and eaves. He cannot begin to imagine how much it would cost to return it to habitability, let alone make it a place to raise a family, but he knows where he will go next. He begins here, he ends on the shadow of the bridge, on the toes of Europe.
On the edge of his vision he glimpses smoke. The plume goes up straight as a flagpole into the clear blue air. In an instant he has zoomed in on it. A map overlay gives him a location: Beyoğlu. Now a news mite bursts into the steady procession of gas spot prices across his retina:
TRAM BOMBING ON NECATIBEY CADESSI. PIX TO FOLLOW.
TRAM BOMBING ON NECATIBEY CADESSI. PIX TO FOLLOW.
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