Authors: Ian Mcdonald
The Dervish House (55 page)
He reaches out to touch Can’s arm. Quick as a knife Snake lifts his head and stabs it at the young man. He recoils into his neighbour, a middle-aged woman, proper and traditional.
‘It’s a snake, he’s got a snake!’
‘It’s a toy, it’s a toy!’ Can shouts, holding his arm up. But the damage is done, the alarm is spread. A man is talking into his ceptep. He could be calling IETT staff. The metro train brakes into the next station and Can is out through the doors as they are still opening. He vanishes into the crowd on the platform, turns his back to the train and slips Snake off his arm. He loops tail into mouth and slings him around his neck, a bling chain, hidden by his plain and anonymous T-shirt. He’ll take the next train. A Boy Detective is always resourceful.
‘You live here?’ Aso asks as Leyla turns the Peugeot into Güneşli Sok beside the Fethi Bey teashop. ‘I didn’t know there were any of these really old tekkes left.’
‘It’s cheap,’ Leyla says. ‘I don’t care about the history.’
Cousin Naci unfolds from the back of the car. It’s like a late night TV show where a woman in a sparkly catsuit unfolds herself from a perspex box. ‘Cool.’
Aso surveys the balconies leaning out over the cobbles, the shuttered gallery beneath the beetle-brow of the roof. ‘This really is something. This could be seventeenth Christian century.’
‘The plumbing is certainly seventeenth century,’ Leyla says. Aso ducks down Güneşli Sok, pulls himself up the wall to peer over. She watches him scrape the toes of the new shoes she made him buy.
‘There’s an old dervish graveyard in the back,’ Aso calls. ‘Original Mevlevi grave pillars.’ He drops back to the greasy steps. ‘It’s amazing that an old wooden tekke has survived this long.’
‘Especially given the wiring.’
‘You’re so lucky to live here.’
Practical Cousin Naci has gone to the front of the dervish house.
‘You should see this.’
The double doors of the Erkoç Gallery, the old wooden doors of the Adem Dede Mevlevi house carved with the Tree of Life, iron rivets between each branch, have been cross-banded, corner to corner by yellow
Police Incident: Do Not Cross
tape.
Police Incident: Do Not Cross
tape.
‘It is one thing after another,’ Leyla shouts. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’ Dealer after auctioneer after crook, obstacle after obstacle. Beyond every achievement a frustration because it would never do to get too far, to be too successful. That would be impious. Now it’s the police. This has a simple solution. Leyla reaches out to rip the tape away.
Naci clears his throat and points to the top right corner. Concealed among the cobwebs and silk egg-purses of true spiders is a police surveillance bot, all legs and eyes.
‘Are you looking for Ms Erkoç?’ The man who owns the teashop across the square is calling. He’s called something like Bülent; Leyla doesn’t like either of Adem Dede Square’s çayhanes. The guys are pervy, the way they sit and watch, and watch.
‘What happened?’
‘The police arrived at about ten this morning, went in, spent maybe about an hour in there, took a few things away and then taped the place up. That’s twice in two days the cops have been here. I’ve just got the paint off from their last visit.’ Leyla’s balcony is still orange polka-dotted. Some of it had spattered into a blouse and pants she had stood out to dry. When she gets paid she’ll get a cleaner. That’s what Ms Erkoç would do.
‘Do you have any idea what they took?’
‘No, but you could ask Hafize.’ Leyla frowns, puzzled. ‘The girl who works there. She’s over in the Improving Bookstore, waiting to see what happens.’
Hafize, is it? Leyla’s private name for her is Miss Priggy. Leyla has caught many a glance, a sniff of disapproval from her when she trusts her business heels on Adem Dede Square’s cobbles or saunters across to Aydin’s stall for a gossip magazine in her short house-shorts or puts out the empty wine bottles for the recycle. Husband and a headscarf. They grant an unwarranted sense of moral superiority. Disapproval from a glorified shopgirl, who’s five years younger than her as well.
Leyla’s never been in the Improving Bookstore. It smells like an elementary school, of cheap paper and phenolic inks, poorly bound and covered in that thin card that is smooth on the outside and teeth-on-edge scratchy on the inside. The windows catch the sun full and in this sun Hafize sits at a little table with tea.
‘It was the art crime squad. They were led by an officer called Haydar Akgün. He’d been in before to see Madam Erkoç, I remember him. I didn’t like the look of him then. I asked him why he was here and he said that I didn’t need to know and he didn’t have to tell me but Madam had been charged with obtaining antiquities under the meaning of the 2017 Antiquities Act with a view to selling them illegally to persons outside Turkey. He said this was a very serious charge and that I was to render him all assistance or I would be charged with obstructing a police investigation which is a very serious charge as well. That’s the way they talk, policemen, when they want to intimidate you. Of course I asked to see his identification. He got annoyed about that but he showed it to me. He had to. That’s the law.
‘I saw him taking prints and miniatures and the computers and then the police women ordered me out and sealed the gallery up.’
‘Miniatures?’
‘Paintings. Persian miniatures. The Isfahan masters, they’re the most sought after.’
‘Not a miniature Koran? Not the other half of this?’ Leyla sets the contract on the tea table.
‘Persian, silver cover, eighteenth Christian century. Yes, I’ve seen the other half of that. I remember it well because it’s a sign of disrespect to do that to a holy Koran.’
‘Or a sign of great love,’ Leyla says.
‘Madam Erkoç bought it as part of a job lot from a man on Monday.’
‘Topaloğlu.’
‘Yes, from the Grand Bazaar. I didn’t think much of him, he tried to hoodwink Madam with a poor fake of the English artist Blake. We saw through them at once. I settled up with him, Madam doesn’t handle money. I remember wondering where the other half was.’
‘It’s here,’ Leyla says.
‘I can’t offer to buy it off you,’ Hafize says. ‘Madam Erkoç makes all the buying decisions and she can’t do anything until she’s finished with the police. Even then, she won’t give you very much. It’s pretty but they were mass-marketed for pilgrims.’
‘I don’t want to sell it,’ Leyla says slowly. ‘I want to buy the other half. Can you sell it to me?’
‘The police have closed the gallery. I’m only here until I’m told what to do next.’
‘If we could get into the gallery, could you sell it to me?’
‘I don’t want to annoy the police.’
You irritating, idle, docile, sanctimonious woman. Well you suit Miss Priggy.
‘I need this now. Aso, tell her.’
Hafize prefers studying her manicure to Aso’s explication of the irregular financial set-up of Besarani-Ceylan. Leyla is not sure how much she understands of the white heat of the new entrepreneurialism and the asymptotic curve of twenty-first-century nano-engineering development. Leyla cuts Aso off as he starts on the technical specifications of the Besarani-Ceylan transcriber.
‘I will give you a thousand euro. Deal?’
Money she understands. Deal.
‘A thousand euro?’ Aso whispers to Leyla as she leads him, Hafize and rearguard Naci up the narrow wooden staircase off Güneşli Sok.
‘We’d have that between us. Kenan has an ATM in his shop anyway.’ The stairs open on to the north side of the gallery that overlooks the garden. ‘I live in there.’ But Aso is more interested in the fountain in the courtyard.
‘You’ve got your own garden. I’d never be out of that. Who’s your landlord?’
At the end of the gallery a door leads to a narrow, dusty, cobwebby corridor. A high window in the right wall has been cheaply boarded up.
‘That’s the Professor in there. On the other side of this wall is the main stair case that goes up to the kid’s apartment.’
‘How did you discover all this?’ Hafize asks. Something you don’t know, shopgirl.
‘You know the kid has these toy robots that change shape? I caught him watching me with them once. He tried to get away but I followed them. He’s got runways and boltholes all over this building. He never did it again.’
‘Not that you can see,’ Hafize says.
A door on the right opens into a forgotten gallery that runs along the tekke’s front. Shreds of hot light stream through the latticed window. Leyla is directly over the main door of the gallery. A spit would hit the cobbles of Adem Dede Square but this is a world away, a hidden place. Where the gallery turns right to follow Vermilion-Maker Lane Leyla stops at a painted-up door.
‘Has anyone got a knife?’
Naci unfolds a multitool. Leyla flicks at wedges of paper packed into the doorframe. Dust flies up, sparkling in the grid of sunsquares. A headscarf is not so bad an idea. The last wedge falls to the floor, Leyla inserts the blade into the frame and levers the door ajar. She opens it a crack. A plane of light cuts the air of the old gallery. Leyla squints through the gap.
‘It’s clear.’ She opens the door on to the gallery of the semahane of the Erkoç Gallery. ‘This was all one gallery originally and at some point someone thought it was a good idea to split it in half.’
Aso leans on the rail. He takes in the octagonal gallery, the old wooden dervish cells, the brass chandelier, the railed-in dance floor where the smaller treasures have been displayed in glass cases.
‘I’ve seen old hamams converted to carpet shops but this is just beautiful.’
Hafize covers her mouth in horror at the desecration. The walls have been stripped half naked. A few thin volumes remain on the display shelves. The manuscript pages have been scattered like leaves in the Storm of Mother Mary. She stoops down to lift the sacred texts but sits down on the floor, overcome by the scale of the offence.
‘Later,’ Leyla says gently.
Some of the cases have been hacked with lock-pick nano. From the scant remains Leyla guesses they held Christian crosses. Where the old dede would have stood when dervishes danced in this hall is the case with the miniature Korans. It’s untouched. There it is. Oh, there it is.
‘Have you got a key?’
Hafize opens the case. Leyla lifts the prize. Back in her left hand, front half in her right. A thought would unite them. She doesn’t. She knows that if she did thunder would crack, a djinni appear, or a superhero, or she would bring some terrible nano-doom down on Istanbul, devouring the towers and minarets from the top down. Superstition, but in a place like this superstition is strong.
‘Let’s go.’
‘A thousand euro, madam,’ Hafize says.
They scrape it. Hafize counts it forwards and counts it backwards and hands them fifty euro back for blessing. She handwrites a receipt.
‘Now can we go?’
They come down the creaking dusty steps on to shadowy Güneşli Sok to find the car blocked in the street by a big red tow-truck parked across the mouth of the lane. The driver hangs his arm out of the window. Abdullah Unul leans against the cab drinking tea. Another man is with him. He’s young, tall, hair going Afro, sunken cheeks emphasizing good cheekbones. Stubble, pale blue eyes. Where did the DNA for those come from? He looks nothing like how Leyla has imagined Mehmet Ali.
‘I do rather like birds,’ Abdullah Unul says. ‘They’re busy, active little things. They make do. Have you ever thought, if Istanbul were to have an official bird, what would it be? I bet you’d think stork straight away. Maybe a sparrow. Me, the official bird of Istanbul would have to be the seagull. What do you see dancing around the Ramazan lights, what’ s following the ships up and down the Bosphorus, what’s facing into the wind on the rocks down by the water side. The common or garden gull, that’s what. For all those reasons, the seagull for me is Istanbul, but mostly because it practises kleptoparasitism. You may not have heard of that. I’ll explain. It’s a behaviour when one animal takes prey from another that has the job of catching or killing it. In seagulls it’s letting some other bird do all the hard work of catching the fish or a bit of bread and then taking it off them as they’re about to eat it. It’s the reason they’re the success they are. So, I’ll have that Koran. Both parts. To be honest, I’d prefer cash, but I imagine there’s a market for that gadgetry you have out there in Fenerbahçe.’
Naci steps forward. Abdullah Unul twitches back his jacket to show an ivory handle.
‘No, son.’
Leyla rages. It’s the rage of helplessness, of having no options but needing to do something. She is so angry and powerless she could do something silly. Launch herself at Abdullah Unul and bite out his throat. Run back up the stairs on a mad chase through the dervish house. Drop both halves of the Koran down the drain grating at her feet. Resorts of desperation. There is no brilliant solution to this one. This one she loses. She hears a door open behind her. She glances around. The spooky guy who thinks he’s some sort of dede.
‘Shaykh Ismet,’ Hafize shouts.
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