The Dervish House (45 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
We jeered a man into killing himself.
Engines fire up all around Adnan. The police now have something that requires their authority, officiously waving cars forward. A helicopter stoops over the bridge tower and drops down beneath the level of the roadway towards the water. You’ll find nothing there. The Bosphorus, with its double currents and dark eddies, swallows all indiscriminately. There are whole civilizations down there, in the ooze. He’ll be settling down there into three thousand years of history, Red Toyota man. Get it out of your head. It’s Deal Day. Put it away. Concentrate on the work you have to do. But he feels dirty, dirty between the toes, dirty between the teeth, soil under the skin. Dirty in the blood, like he imagines heroin addicts must feel, like there is ash swashing around inside their bodies. A policeman brusquely waves Adnan forward. He flicks the Audi into autodrive and lets it take him up over the bridge into Europe.
The lampoon is a single sheet of A
4
, laminated, thumb-tacked to the street door of Ismet Inönü Apartments. Lefteres considers himself almost as skilled with the brush as with the pen and has illuminated the three verses with a frame of intricate floral design. It is his finest work in many years, not only in a difficult formal style, but an acrostic; the initials, emboldened in red, spell ROXANA WHORE. It is those that attract the eye of the passing morning pedestrian, a double-take that draws them out of their routine to read, remark, wonder what piece of local drama they have tripped against. But the good women of Eskiköy, the Hanıms and the long-standing residents of Adem Dede Square are delighted by it. Since Bülent put the shutters up and lit the gas burners and Aydin took his delivery of simits from the little Japanese micro-truck, the old women have flocked around Ismet Inönü Apartments like starlings, peering at the art, reading the verses out to each other, scattering in a flutter of scarves at the sound of the street door rattling. Lefteres has been at the çayhane since opening, very much contrary to his habit, watching reactions, basking in approval.
4
, laminated, thumb-tacked to the street door of Ismet Inönü Apartments. Lefteres considers himself almost as skilled with the brush as with the pen and has illuminated the three verses with a frame of intricate floral design. It is his finest work in many years, not only in a difficult formal style, but an acrostic; the initials, emboldened in red, spell ROXANA WHORE. It is those that attract the eye of the passing morning pedestrian, a double-take that draws them out of their routine to read, remark, wonder what piece of local drama they have tripped against. But the good women of Eskiköy, the Hanıms and the long-standing residents of Adem Dede Square are delighted by it. Since Bülent put the shutters up and lit the gas burners and Aydin took his delivery of simits from the little Japanese micro-truck, the old women have flocked around Ismet Inönü Apartments like starlings, peering at the art, reading the verses out to each other, scattering in a flutter of scarves at the sound of the street door rattling. Lefteres has been at the çayhane since opening, very much contrary to his habit, watching reactions, basking in approval.
‘Of course, the difficult part was using the style of Attar in the context of a lampoon,’ Lefteres regales his morning tea colleagues.
‘Maybe I wasn’t paying attention in class, but I missed the “Georgian sucker of donkey dick,” in the
Parliament of Birds
,’ Bülent says gathering up empty tea glasses. He alone of the patrons of the teahouse disapproves of the lampoon. Georgios Ferentinou waddles across the street from the dervish house. ‘Hey! Georgios! What do you think of Lefteres’ lampoon?’ Lefteres scowls: he wanted the honour of the reveal himself. Georgios frowns, puzzled. Bülent pushes a copy of the lampoon into his hands. Georgios scans it, pushes it away from him.
Parliament of Birds
,’ Bülent says gathering up empty tea glasses. He alone of the patrons of the teahouse disapproves of the lampoon. Georgios Ferentinou waddles across the street from the dervish house. ‘Hey! Georgios! What do you think of Lefteres’ lampoon?’ Lefteres scowls: he wanted the honour of the reveal himself. Georgios frowns, puzzled. Bülent pushes a copy of the lampoon into his hands. Georgios scans it, pushes it away from him.
‘Yes, very good. Very clever.’
Before Lefteres can angle for further praise, Bülent cuts in, ‘Tea, or maybe coffee this morning, Georgios Bey? It’s just you seem a little distracted this morning, and one of my good coffees would just cut right through that.’
‘That’s because he saw Ariana last night,’ Father Ioannis says. ‘She was at my vespers.’
‘I did more than just see her,’ Georgios Ferentinou says. ‘I called her. I talked to her. And I am going to meet her tonight, in a restaurant.’
Now Lefteres and his lampoon are truly eclipsed.
‘Then you would have missed all the action here last night,’ Bülent says. ‘That Hasgüler boy got lifted.’ Small consternation; tea glasses upset, spoons knocked to the ground. ‘And they weren’t police either. I don’t know who they were but they were in like a knife, out of the back of a van, grab the man, in the back, close the doors and away. Right up the side there.’
‘What what what?’ Georgios Ferentinou asks. Bülent’s news has cleared his bewilderment better than any coffee. ‘Who was taken? What, where?’
‘Djinn-boy,’ says Constantin.
‘Necdet Hasgüler? What happened? It is most important that you tell me.’
‘Well, I didn’t exactly see it,’ Bülent says. ‘The only one who saw it all was the deaf kid.’
‘He’s not deaf,’ Georgios says. The Greeks chorus,
It’s a heart condition
. ‘If Can saw it, I must talk to him.’
It’s a heart condition
. ‘If Can saw it, I must talk to him.’
‘Whoa, whoa whoa, hold on there,’ Lefteres says. ‘I have just written a superlative lampoon, not only witty but literary as well, with the express purpose of diverting the attention of the Turks, who get mightily exercised by this kind of thing, away from us Greeks, and an old, single Greek man wants a one to one with a nine-year-old Turkish boy? No no no.’
‘You don’t understand, this is hugely important,’ Georgios cries. ‘I feel it may be a matter of national security.’ But Lefteres has succeeded in diverting conversation back to his lampoon, and now he has spotted a young man in a good leather jacket with a courier bag slung over his shoulder shooting it on his ceptep.
‘I will bet he is one of my fans,’ Lefteres says, ‘the ones who run the websites and fan groups.’
Bülent is still not impressed with the lampoonist and his work and when he sweeps Georgios’ empty tea glass up on to his tray he asks quietly,
‘This national security, is it anything you can tell me?’
‘I believe that young Mr Hasgüler, and others on that tram, were deliberately infected with nanotechnology agents, that the group responsible monitored them with surveillance robots, and now they have taken him to observe at first hand whether their experiment has succeeded.’
‘What experiment?’ Bülent asks.
‘To see if religious belief can be artificially created.’
Bülent’s mouth and eyes widen but his verbal response is never made for at that moment the street door of Ismet Inönü bangs open and the Georgian woman herself rips off the lampoon. She shouts at the photographer. Her words are almost unintelligible, lost in a scream but the tone is clear. The young man backs away,
whoa, I mean, hey, no offence, relax . .
. He was only ever a rehearsal.
whoa, I mean, hey, no offence, relax . .
. He was only ever a rehearsal.
She storms across Adem Dede Square, her flat-heeled slippers slapping on the cobbles. She is dressed in three-quarter-length leggings and a loose yellow T-shirt. Ornate silver ear-rings, tiered like pyramids, swing and glitter. She has put on make-up for the street.
‘You filthy men, you filthy men!’ she screams. Her Turkish is weak and heavily accented. ‘What filthy things you say? Me, a poor woman, a woman who work hard and never say a bad thing about anyone. I come to Istanbul, I come to strange city of strange people, no language but I work hard, I never say a bad thing about anyone, but you call me whore and dirty, you call me a dirty Georgian whore. Filthy things, filthy things. Look at you, old men, only brave when you are together. And you have a priest with you. Hide behind his robes, old men. Hide like children under your mother’s skirts. Hide behind your piece of paper, can not say this to my face, no; you must put up a piece of paper, in the night, when no one looks. And look at you: a priest! Aie! This I cannot believe, a priest of God. This maybe I expect from Muslims, but Christians! I am good woman, I work hard, what have I done to you Christian men?’ Her rage breaks into tears now. This is shaming. Georgios cannot look and cannot look away. The Georgian woman slaps the laminated sheet down on the table. ‘I am not ignorant, I can read Roxana Whore. Oh you bad, filthy men. To say such this of a poor woman on her own in a foreign city. And you, Father.’ In the end the tears and the words run out and all that remains is her anger and humiliation and dignity. She turns. Halfway across Adem Dede Square she stops and shouts up in a sobbing, torn voice to the balconies and shutters, ‘Bastards! I know you all, filthy bastards.’ She closes the street door behind her with barely a click.
There is an Ottoman bearing, Adnan observes. A firmness, an uprightness, yet elastic, born lightly. He’s seen it most in old military and civil service families who understood that their country would always need them. Kadir is instantly recognizable on the floor of Özer’s cavernous, sun-showered atrium. Straight, graceful, easy.
‘You’re late,’ Kadir says. No Hail-Draksor-Element-of-Earth-assist-me shit.
‘You know when they say on the traffic feeds that there’s been an incident? I found out what that means.’
‘You could have called. If Kemal’s already prepped for the day . . .’
‘He won’t. Everything that got backed up on the Bosphorus Bridge will have been diverted on to the Fatih Sultan Bridge. Kemal will have been caught up in that.’ Adnan couldn’t have called. He couldn’t do anything other than he did. He can still see that car, elegant as a competitive diver, twisting in the air. He’ll be seeing it for a long time. Kadir moves his hand the slightest fraction and like a conjuror there is a plastic nano vial between his fingers.
‘What will it do?’ Adnan asks.
‘It was the best they could come up with in the time. It puts holes in your medium-term memory and then fills them with random junk. Pseudo memories, false memories. The theory is that it puts so much noise into the system no one will be able to tell what’s real and what the nano put there.’
‘Theory.’
‘Stuff like this, you can’t test it. You have to trust the designers.’
‘How much were these designers?’
‘Eight thousand euro.’
‘For an untested product that has to work first time. And not kill anyone. No, not anyone, Kemal. Or turn him into a psychopath, or just plain brain-mezze.’
‘Now you have scruples. It’s money, Adnan. That’s all it’s ever been. The market opened twenty minutes ago. Are you going to do this or not?’ Kadir has the magician’s touch, the vial disappears with a flick from his fingers, reappears.
‘Give it to me,’ Adnan says and snatches away the vial into the safekeeping of his fist. It’s still there, folded snug against the lifeline of his right palm, as he leaves the elevator and takes the short walk — hellos, good mornings, how-the-devils to the usuals he meets in those few steps — to the back office. Kemal sits at the coffee table, a saucer of tea in front of him. Beside it is his vial of enhancement for the day’s work. It’s his morning ritual; tea and nano. Beyond the glass the Money Tree is as brilliant with lights as a tree in the orchard of Paradise.
‘I wouldn’t mind a drop of that tea.’
‘You never drink tea.’
‘Today’s different.’
‘Fuck, it is. Tea for Lord Draksor.’ It’s instant cay, powdered piss; Adnan can’t drink it but Kemal at the kettle is all the distraction he needs to make the switch. Open the palm, close the palm. Done. So simple. He takes his red and silver trading jacket from his locker. The ceptep writer hooked over his ear, the laser-head positioned a centimetre in front of his right eyeball, that’s the finishing touch. Ayşe’s right: accessories do make the outfit. He slips the stolen nano into his pocket.
‘I presume you got caught in that thing on the Bosphorus Bridge,’ Kemal says, boiling the kettle. ‘What was it, some old dear deciding she’d left the gas on and throwing a u-turn?’
‘No.’ Adnan says. ‘It was a suicide.’
‘Fuck,’ says Kemal.
‘A guy drove his car off the bridge. Straight over the edge into the air.’
‘You saw this?’ Kemal stirs in sugar. The crystals swirl in the bottom of the glass.
‘I told him to do it. Me and about fifty other people. We all stood there and shouted at him, go on, do it. And he did.’
‘Fuck,’ says Kemal again. He sets down the tea glass on the coffee table, beside Kadir’s pirate nano. ‘I mean . . . fuck.’
But Adnan’s no longer in the back office of Özer’s trading floor. Neither is he on the bridge, watching the red Toyota spin its wheels on air. He’s in Kaş, at summer’s end, on his father’s gület. In the gentle eyebrow of coast beneath the Taurus Mountains, the season dawdles into October. Kaş has always sold itself as a sanctuary, a hidden place, moving to a subtler rhythm than the dance-beat of the Aegean resorts. Kaş has seen their mistakes and resolved never to make them. The rag-end tourists, blowing in on the first fresh wind of coming autumn, bring with them a particularly easy, undemanding attitude. They have sun, and warmth and turquoise water as deep as time. Adnan’s just turned four. He’s on his father’s boat taking snorkellers out to dive the drowned Lycian tombs. He wanders between the bikini women and the speedo men sprawling on their mats on the foredeck. The women coo and cluck at him, the men smile. He’s a cute kid, with the enquiring frown-smile of children who grow up in the sun.
The swimming snorkellers look like great pale starfish. The tombs are jumbles of pale stone, shimmering under long drowning. Adnan’s father cooks köfte on a little gas grill that hangs over the side of the boat; then it is time to rendezvous with Uncle Ersin’s gület, who will bring more beer and vodka for the snorkellers and take Adnan back. Adnan’s father doesn’t like him being around drinking people. Uncle Ersin brings his gület in alongside; the two boats bob an arm’s length apart, rocking gently on the cat-tongue sea. Close enough to pass the crates of beer and vodka one way and Adnan the other. Maybe it’s the cat-tongue wind gusting up as it can, capriciously, along this mountain-fringed coast, maybe it’s Adnan’s father and Uncle Ersin careless from long habit. Maybe Adnan’s a heavier four-year-old than they think. But, as he’s swung out over the side, a grip is lost, a hold fails and he drops into the water.
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