The Dervish House (13 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
When she was a tiny thing, Leyla had gone down with a raging tonsillitis that spread into her brain and unfolded into full fever. For two nights she had bumped along the ceiling of death, sweating, hallucinating things like these atom-crawlers; unstoppably climbing endless spirals yet never advancing one single centimetre forward. This was an unending fever-march through the molecules of her body.
She takes off the eyewriter frame.
‘What is it you want me to do?’
They go back out into the front office for the money talk.
‘We’re going to go to a production prototype,’ Yaşar says.
‘Proof of concept,’ Aso adds. This double-act is starting to grate.
‘We’ve budgeted at two hundred and seventy-five thousand euro at this stage. We’re looking for venture capital, a White Knight of some kind, even an established industry. In return we put up fifty per cent of the company.’
‘Okay,’ says Leyla. ‘This sounds do-able. I can certainly look at the business plan and draw up a funding strategy. I can also front up a pitch. Now, my fees . . .’
‘Two things before you rush into agreeing to anything,’ says Aso. He looks at Yaşar. Yaşar sucks in his bottom lip.
‘We need to move fast on this. There is a rival project. We’ve heard they’re about to move into a production model.’
‘How fast?’ Leyla asks.
‘Two weeks, max.’
‘There is another thing,’ Aso says. Yaşar winces uncomfortably.
‘The company’s not entirely ours.’
‘How much do you own?’
‘Fifty per cent. We needed money up front for the modelling farm and the software.’
‘Where did you get it?’ Leyla asks.
‘Where do you think two boys just out of post-doc with no credit history are going to get fifty thousand euro?’ Yaşar says.
‘Family,’ says Aso. ‘His family. Your family.’
‘Mehmet Ali.’
‘Who?’ Leyla asks.
‘Second cousin,’ Yaşar explains. ‘He’s one of these relatives can always get things.’
‘Is there a contract?’ Leyla asks.
‘It’s an informal agreement,’ Yaşar says. ‘A family thing. There’s a token: whoever owns it has half of Ceylan-Besarani.’
‘Why do I get the feeling this isn’t going to be as simple as just making Mehmet Ali an offer he can’t refuse?’
‘No one’s heard from Mehmet Ali for a couple of months. He’s not answering calls.’
‘And the token?’
Yaşar opens his hands in helpless supplication.
‘You have to get this token back. If some dodgy distant relation can saunter in, slap a piece of paper down and claim fifty per cent . . . .’
‘It’s not a piece of paper.’ Aso fishes in his jacket pocket and offers an object in his palm to Leyla. It’s a miniature Koran, the kind people buy as souvenirs after visiting saints’ tombs. Quite a nice one; an old family heirloom. I heard someone say it was Persian. At some point in its history it got cut cleanly in half.
The Ultralords of the Universe eat köfte at the Kebab Prophet’s kiosk across Levent Plaza from the Özer Tower. They sit in order of Elemental Mastery on their assigned stools at the tin counter and eat very good, very messy meatballs, their napkins tucked into shirt collars. They are coming down from nano-high. It works this way. First they talk a lot, incessantly, chirruping and clattering. In this stage bets are settled and forfeits like speed camera fines are paid. In the second phase everyone is very quiet, very withdrawn and introspective. Distance vision blurs so that the glass and money towers of Levent sway like reeds. Then the close vision smears so the diners at the Kebab Prophet’s have to hold their hand-meals at arm’s length to focus on them. Then comes the killing, killing low, which if it lasted any more than a couple of minutes would send you off a bridge or under a tram. And then you are just yourself again and the Ultralords of the Universe go back to being merely men.
Kemal bangs down late on to his red-topped bar stool between Adnan and Kadir Yinanç in Risk Management.
‘Element of Fire, fight with me!’ he shouts. The Kebab Prophet slaps the paper-wrapped kebab down on the mirror-bright counter.
‘Element of Air, assist me!’ Adnan cries.
‘Element of Water, wage war with me,’ says Kadir. He’s always known he has the shit line.
‘Element of Earth, empower me,’ mutters Öguz.
Draksor, Ultror, Terrak and Hydror. Once there were, once there weren’t, in a land not so far away and as close as the atrium of Özer Gas and Commodities, four fresh faces and sharp suits. They had things in common. They were men, they were part of a group of new recruits starting at Istanbul’s biggest and shiniest commodities firm on the same day, and they were all mad mad Cimbom fans. The supercilious woman leading the induction had in the course of her tour given her party a glimpse of the heaven-like golden luxury of the boardroom:
and who knows, you may even make it all the way up to a seat around this table
. The cocky don’t-give-a-fuck one from the south coast made the comment,
Looks more like Slavor’s Temple of Doom
. Three caught the reference to the old kids’ cartoon and creased up in suppressed laughter. Afterwards they sought each other out and the Ultralords of the Universe were born. None have yet made it to that golden temple. Instead, they’re planning the financial coup of the decade.
and who knows, you may even make it all the way up to a seat around this table
. The cocky don’t-give-a-fuck one from the south coast made the comment,
Looks more like Slavor’s Temple of Doom
. Three caught the reference to the old kids’ cartoon and creased up in suppressed laughter. Afterwards they sought each other out and the Ultralords of the Universe were born. None have yet made it to that golden temple. Instead, they’re planning the financial coup of the decade.
Ultror, Ultralord of Fire, put the business plan together in the back office; a hundred AI devoting a fragment of their bandwidth, each a part, none comprehending the whole.
Terrak, Ultralord of Earth, will disguise it as just another Baku gas deal, barrelling down the Nabucco Line from Erzurum.
Hydror, Ultralord of Water, will conceal it in the labyrinth of Özer’s audit systems, like a mystic name of God within a mosque’s ornate calligraphies.
Draksor, Ultralord of Air, makes the deal. He gets the money. And when he has the money, when the deal is down, when the price is right and only when the price is right, he gives the word to all the other Ultralords to swing Turquoise into operation.
‘I’m seeing Ferid Bey again tonight,’ Adnan says. ‘He says he needs more information.’
‘More?’ says Kemal. He’s always been an irritable man but this is beyond nature or nano. ‘He’s got the business plan.’
‘He wants the market analysis.’
Kemal rolls his eyes again.
The heat
, Adnan thinks.
It draws the strength out of us and makes us brittle and edgy as street dogs but as long as it lasts, Turquoise lives
. Kemal offers a hand over the debris of köfte and bread. Adnan takes it.
The heat
, Adnan thinks.
It draws the strength out of us and makes us brittle and edgy as street dogs but as long as it lasts, Turquoise lives
. Kemal offers a hand over the debris of köfte and bread. Adnan takes it.
‘Here’s your fucking market analysis.’ Information sparks between them, page after page of breakdowns and charts and forecasts. It’s a fine and dark art for which Adnan has neither the talent nor the patience. The deal, the handshake, the people, those are his gifts.
‘Where are you meeting him?’
‘At a private executive bathhouse.’
‘Watch out he doesn’t stick it up you,’ snorts Öguz.
‘That’ll be the sweetest your balls have smelled all year,’ says Kemal.
‘And if he bites?’ Kadir asks. Ferid Bey is far from the first oligarch the Ultralords of the Universe have approached. But he is the first to have fixed a second meeting, the first to ask for more detail.
‘Is the Iranian still in town?’
‘I can arrange that.’
‘Then it’s champagne in the box,’ declares Adnan.
‘And the ball in the back of the net,’ chorus the Ultralords and the Kebab Prophet.
‘Did you look at that yalı?’ the Kebab Prophet asks. He is called the Prophet because he restores harmony, heals souls, subtly guides the words and thoughts of four Levent money boys blazing with autistic levels of focus and synthetic aggression. He’s the ultimate come-down treatment.
‘I certainly did,’ Adnan says. ‘And I shall make them an offer.’
‘Too close to the water for me,’ says Kemal. ‘You get vermin. Rats the size of fucking dogs. I’ve seen them. Cats are scared of them. Give me one of those new-builds up in Ulus.’
‘Sure Adnan wants to raise an old-fashioned Ottoman dynasty,’ says Kadir.
‘Well I wouldn’t raise any kids there,’ says Öguz. ‘You get bad vapours from the Bosphorus. I know what I’m talking about here. All that marine pollution just hangs there. It’s like smog. And then that double-tide thing, the water never really gets changed. Sewage can hang around for a week or even longer. And there’s worse. I know this - don’t argue - this cop friend of mine told me when something goes in off the bridges, the bodies can go up and down for months.’
‘Well girls,’ Adnan says wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. ‘If we’re quite finished discussing suicides, shit and the cleanliness of my testicles, let’s do some work shall we?’
Kemal scrunches up his kebab paper and shies it towards the refuse sack in its hoop at the back of the stall. He misses. The Kebab Prophet picks it up and disposes of it in the black plastic bag.
The man of words and the man of numbers see a white room differently. To the writer it’s a cube of horror, a blank needing to be filled with the spurt of imagination. It is that space you write about when you have looked at nothing else for days. It is writing about writing. To the mathematician it’s the void, the pure white light which, falling through a prism of analysis, breaks into the numbers that are ultimate reality. The walls of the white room are the walls of the universe and beyond them lies mathematics.
Georgios Ferentinou does not fear his white, one-book library, as austere as a monk’s cell. The one small window, guarded by a pierced wooden screen, allows glimpses of Adem Dede Square and its stooping apartment buildings. In the white room, the walls open on to other Istanbuls where the streets and buildings are drawn by their inhabitants’ supermarket spending habits or their diseases and medical interventions or the subtle interactions of their geographical, social and religious affiliations. There are the restless Istanbuls of traffics and tracks and tunnels. There are wiry Istanbuls, nervous as a skinned man, of gas and power and data. There are Istanbuls built entirely out of football gossip. For every commodity, for every activity that can be analysed and modelled, there is a city.
To Georgios Ferentinou economics is the most human of sciences. It is the science of wants and frustrations. It is psychology subject to the abstract, amplifying forces of mathematics. An individual bet on a news story, one elementary school child’s guess at the number of Disney plushies in a jar, is a product of value and experience. Aggregate them, by a simple average or financial instruments with the promise of future gain, and they become oracular. Mathematics is the power that lies behind the white walls of the one-book library. Georgios is an old agnostic who can’t believe in any god who would believe in him, but increasingly he feels it is a Platonic universe. Mathematics is too unfeasibly accurate in its ability to describe physical and human reality. At the bottom of everything is number. When he dies, and Georgios thinks about that a little every day, as old men should, he will evaporate into carbon atoms. He will become white and merge with the walls of mathematics and pass through them into those other Istanbuls.
Georgios Ferentinou’s thoughts meander, as an old man’s should, a walk through the intricate city of memory, to Ariana. He pictures her in Eskiköy’s steep streets. She hasn’t aged a day. She can’t have aged. Time has been suspended since he saw her walk from the ferry to the station. As the Greek community has grown smaller, it has grown tighter. He could find her easily, but Georgios wonders not if he can find Ariana, but if he dare. Why has she come back after forty-seven years?
Georgios shakes himself out of his meanderings. He looks again at the jerking footage Can sent him from his BitBot. A watching robot implies that the tram-bomber was not a lone agent. Lone killers are usually socially inept males and need the theatre of their own apotheosis. They post elaborate sermons of alienation on social networking sites before they strap on the guns and walk into the school or mall or government office. Suicide bombers, female or male, deliver diatribes of social justice and transformation and promises of Paradise. There is a structure behind this desperate, headless woman.
Turkey’s many terror groups each has its own signature. The Kurds tend to the theatrical. They need to attract global attention to themselves as a nation. The anti-EU Grey Wolf nationalists see themselves in the romantic tradition of the Young Turks and favour individual assassinations and street shootings. This is a classic Islamist martyrdom on a Number 119 tram. It is the violence of a faithful family dog that turns and rends the baby, the neighbour who stabs her husband, the unexplained suicide of a work colleague. Forces unseen and unsuspected press for years, warping lives and relationships. The organization behind the Necatibey bomb - probably a cell of three or four individuals, certainly with a ridiculous name- would want to record the moment of immolation. Wahhabist sites are full of explosions and martyrdoms, with home-brew graphics and heroic music. So why risk that information chasing the boy’s BitBot? Why the need to hack the signal? Why try to follow it back to this house? Strange indeed here. Strange is that grain of order in the seethe of randomness. Strange is information.
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