The Dervish House (15 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘Great!’ he roars. ‘Great.’
Ferid Bey hauls himself up from the warm glass and waddles across the floor to the steam cubicle. He is not a fat man or greasy from luxury but his chest hair is grey and he is stiff in the hips. Adnan unseals himself from the slab and follows him into the marble-walled steam room. Beneath the glass floor, subtly lit Patriarchs and Palaeologi gaze up at his balls. Ferid Bey spreads his legs wide and settles back against the marble wall. Adnan matches Ferid Bey’s comfort. For the first time in months he feels properly alive.
‘I’ve had a look through your more detailed projections,’ Ferid Bey says. Water drips from the hem of the peştemal wrapped around his waist. ‘The only obvious flaw is that you’re asking me to become a gas smuggler.’
‘We think of it as an alternative supply chain.’
‘Tell that to the judge if you get caught.’
It’s in the air. It’s that long ball crossed into the box that the wind gets underneath and floats. Anyone could get to it. Adnan must trust his own skill.
‘They’re just flaring it off. The Tabriz pipeline can’t handle the volume, so they burn it. Whoosh. Like setting a match to a suitcase full of euro.’
‘I don’t believe it’s as simple as turning a stop-cock with a spanner.’
‘Oğuz our pipeline man says it’s two commands on a computer. Close that, open this. Clickety-click.’
‘So tell me, how did you find out about this?’ The two men lean close to each other in the tomb-narrow confines of the steam room.
‘While everyone else spent their military service in the Land of Opportunity bitching and whining about how the Kurds were going to turn them into eunuchs if they caught them, I used my time a little more profitably.’
‘And how did you find the East?’
‘It’s a shit-hole. But it’s our shit-hole.’
Sweat gathers in a bead on Ferid Bey’s chin, swells, drops to the glass floor, a flaw in the eye of the mosaic saint.
‘I’m an investor not a scientist, but I need to be sure it’s safe. I can’t go irradiating Greeks, much as I’d like to.’
Adnan smiles at the joke but he thinks,
he said
I. I
can’t go irradiating Greeks. He’s buying into it.
he said
I. I
can’t go irradiating Greeks. He’s buying into it.
On that day everyone remembers, Adnan had been repairing wetsuits on the quay. That day was bright and the sun was high, it was early in the season and the first dive boats were going out to the drowned Lycian towns. Fresh-looking Swedish girls and short intense Danes were the best of the early arrivals. Scandinavians liked a man who looked busy in an intricate task. News burbled on the flatscreen set up under the awning at the Octopus Bar for the sport. Adnan worked on the quay not the boats and so always knew what was happening before anyone else, and what it might mean. So that day at the wetsuits his half-listening ear picked up the newsreaders’ change of tone and he turned his full attention to the screen. Grave expressions, a ticker along the bottom of the picture, shaky camera work of a sky lit by flashes beneath the horizon. Adnan set down the glue gun and drifted toward the edge of the bar.
Adnan’s interested
. Every head on the quayside turned. Men left their ropes, their dive gear, their boats, their vans and mopeds. The Swedes and Danes hung back, unsure of their right to participate in whatever the screens in the harbour bars were showing.
Adnan’s interested
. Every head on the quayside turned. Men left their ropes, their dive gear, their boats, their vans and mopeds. The Swedes and Danes hung back, unsure of their right to participate in whatever the screens in the harbour bars were showing.
At eleven twenty Ankara time, Fandoglu Mountain in western Iran’s Azarbaijan province had been struck by forty missile-borne thermobaric warheads. Satellite footage showed blossom after blossom after blossom of flame unfold from the mountain-creased earth; beautiful as tulips. Fireball after fireball after fireball. New pictures, cellphone shot, showed a perfect mushroom cloud of fire climbing into the sapphire sky; then another. Then another. Then the footage shook and ended.
‘Are those nukes?’ a voice asked. ‘Someone’s using nukes!’
‘No, it’s not nukes,’ Adnan said staring at the screen. ‘Vacuum bombs; they’re supposed to be safe and clean, though it’s pretty fucking academic if you get caught by one.’
‘And how would you know?’ an idle old man asked.
‘I saw it on the Discovery Channel. They’re specifically designed for use against underground bunkers.’
‘What would they have out there? It’s a hole in the ground.’
‘It is now,’ someone muttered.
‘Only one thing,’ Adnan said. ‘Real nukes.’
‘That was Qom, the UN inspected it, everyone knows that!’
‘Qom was the one they wanted you to see.’
Then a voice simply said, ‘The Jews.’ Topal had worked for twenty years out of Northern Cyprus up and down the Levant and was considered the most cosmopolitan man in Kaş. ‘The fucking Jews have finally done it!’ The Octopus Bar exploded into roaring voices and waving fists.
‘Shut up, I want to hear what’s happening,’ Adnan shouted. What he could see of the screen showed a graphic of a red plume, like a cypress tree or a feather, going up thousands of metres into the air, leaning to the east like a pillar of smoke, towards Tabriz. The look on the newsreader’s face was beyond grave. This was apocalyptic. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ Adnan roared into a momentary lull in the uproar. There was silence. ‘Thank you. Listen. Listen!’
Adnan tried to imagine the CG simulation on to real flesh and lives. A single thermobaric strike would turn the tunnels beneath Fandoglu Mountain into hell. Shockwaves pulped human organs and shattered limbs and ribcages. The firestorm raced at near-supersonic speeds along corridors, through rooms into every level of the facility; those that survived incineration suffocated as the inferno consumed all available oxygen. What Discovery never showed was what happened when forty strikes, arriving in succession to create a continuous rolling explosion, were aimed at a pressurised water nuclear reactor. At the heart of Fandoglu Mountain, the controls were incinerated, back-ups turned to slag, fail-safes melted and jammed. Cooling systems failed, core temperature soared. Containment breached; the molten mass of the fuel core hit the cooling water. A titanic steam explosion sent a geyser of radioactive material blasting out from the tunnels and vents into the atmosphere. Carried on a westerly wind, the radiation plume was now fifteen kilometres high and a hundred long. Under Fandoglu Mountain not even a bacterium was alive.
The good-cheek-boned Swedes and the chubby Danes had slipped away.
All the Kaş men were in the bars, the restaurants, the çayhanes, watching television. In their homes the women came together around their flatscreens. The terror unfolded. The plume had touched down on the Marand gas field eighty kilometres to the east. Everything died. The field would be unusable for a generation. Tabriz was being evacuated. Prime Minister Yetkin had promised the help of the Turkish people. Adnan watched footage of an old woman hosed clean of fall-out particles. She held her hands up, turned her face up to heaven, not knowing that it was from there that the poison dropped. The Knesset confirmed in a press conference that it had attacked and destroyed Iran’s nuclear facility at Fandoglu Mountain. Silence became muttering. Two words were said again and again:
fucking Jews
. Then someone threw a stool. It struck the TV and set it swinging on its stand. A cheer went up. Hands tore down the traitorous screen. Tables were smashed, chairs broken. The bottles behind the bar were shattered one by one and the hanging mosque lamps torn down and ground into the floor. The men ransacked the Octopus Café. That was not enough. Someone set a fire. It fed greedily on the smashed wood and alcohol. When the staff tried to fight it with extinguishers the men pelted them. At midnight the roof fell in in a spray of coals and sparks. The next morning the building was still too hot to approach. Adnan could not understand it. In their anger at the Jews and their American stoolpigeons the people of Kaş had destroyed the livelihood of their own neighbours. All across Turkey, across the reach of Islam, that self-mutilation was mirrored in burnings and bombings and small pointless martyrdoms.
fucking Jews
. Then someone threw a stool. It struck the TV and set it swinging on its stand. A cheer went up. Hands tore down the traitorous screen. Tables were smashed, chairs broken. The bottles behind the bar were shattered one by one and the hanging mosque lamps torn down and ground into the floor. The men ransacked the Octopus Café. That was not enough. Someone set a fire. It fed greedily on the smashed wood and alcohol. When the staff tried to fight it with extinguishers the men pelted them. At midnight the roof fell in in a spray of coals and sparks. The next morning the building was still too hot to approach. Adnan could not understand it. In their anger at the Jews and their American stoolpigeons the people of Kaş had destroyed the livelihood of their own neighbours. All across Turkey, across the reach of Islam, that self-mutilation was mirrored in burnings and bombings and small pointless martyrdoms.
For a time the world teetered on a brink. But Israel had calculated shrewdly. Iran threatened to close the straits of Hormuz to oil traffic; the US fleet moved against it. With millions displaced, Tehran realized it could gain the upper hand by playing the victim. Pakistan blew and blustered and bombed embassies but backed down faced with the patient might of its superpower neighbour India. Afghanistan continued its long self-immolation, as exquisitely worked as a carpet. Syria’s call for the destruction of Israel was no more than posturing, a ritual shouting of insults. Those thermobaric cruise missiles and worse were only minutes from Damascus. China protested and threatened sanctions but its own slow environmental apocalypse was more intimate and threatening. India showed refined displeasure. The European Union lectured. The South Americans mouthed moral outrage but they were downwind of no one’s fall-out. The US Security Council veto blocked any formal condemnation from the UN. The Russians issued stern reprimands and thin threats but were secretly pleased that the massive western Iranian gas fields had effectively been put out of production for decades, buried beneath the slow snow of radioactive dust that was all that remained of the Fandoglu Mountain nuclear facility. The world staggered, then picked up its step again. The general dance spun on.
And in Turkey, by the turquoise Mediterranean, on the day after that day everyone remembers, a seaside surf-shop boy bought in a case of cheap ninety-nine-bead rosaries and sold them all within the hour at three hundred per cent mark-up. While Kaş waited for the sky to open and the Mahdi utter the secret hundredth name of God to end the world, Adnan witnessed a different miracle, that of the market.
Fifteen years after Fandoglu Mountain western Iran is still a radiological burn zone, the border closed and its pipelines internationally embargoed. But that same surf-shop boy turned trader has found a way to channel unsaleable gas through a long disused, almost forgotten branch into the Nabucco pipeline that runs from the Caspian Sea to the Adriatic. Gas so cheap the Iranians are almost giving it away, gas that will net a fortune in the crazy heat of the Istanbul spot markets.
The deal is clever and intricate but robust. Adnan sets up the deal with the Iranians. The White Knight - Ferid Bey - puts up the liquidity. The Ultralords swap full price Caspian gas for cut-price Iranian at a pumping station out in the deep east where the old, sealed off Green Line from Iran meets the Nabucco pipeline from Baku. Everyone profits when the gas is sold on the spot market in gas-hungry Istanbul. Everyone ends in the money. But the deal is dead until Ferid Bey’s chop is on the contract.
‘When do you close the deal?’ Ferid Bey leans back against the hot marble. His belly lolls over the cheap plaid-weave cloth.
‘The day before the weather breaks.’
‘You can predict the weather? Then what do you need my money for? Tell me, I’m not the first; who else turned you down before you came to me?’
To let Adnan into this hot room, this hararet, this private Turkish bath, Ferid Bey will have researched him so thoroughly he will spot a lie before it’s on Adnan’s lips.
‘A fair few of them are here tonight.’
And you’ve already talked to them.
And you’ve already talked to them.
Ferid Bey stands up, slaps his thighs, his belly, shakes drops of sweat from his thick hair.
‘Right. Enough of this. Come and rinse off. I like you, Adnan Bey. I know your paperwork, I know your figures, but I don’t know you. You’ve got balls but I don’t like to do business with people I don’t know. Come to dinner, tomorrow. My place on Heybeliada. There’ll be a boat at Eminönü at eight. Are you married, have a significant?’
‘My wife’s Ayşe. She trades in religious artwork.’
‘Does she now? I like that. Women should have careers. I’d like to meet her.’
‘There are the others I work with.’
‘You’re the one I’m doing the deal with; you come and bring your wife. I’ll have a few other friends over.’
‘So when can I expect a contract?’ Adnan says as Ferid Bey slips into his wooden hamam clogs and totters across the wet glass to the basins.
‘Plenty of time. We’ll talk tomorrow. Dress informal.’
Adnan Sarioğlu bows his head and lets sweat beads roll down either side of his nose, merge at the tip to swell and drip on to the glass floor. He breathes in the hot, aromatic vapour. It burns his nostrils, but it smells of money.
The air in the bedroom is hot and clinging and motionless but Ayşe in her underwear shivers and dives into the new dress. Once you leave your childhood bedroom you can never be comfortable or warm in it again. She shakes the dress down over her breasts and shoulders, adjusts the fall and hang then turns to look at herself in the mirror on the old closet. So many reflections, so many dresses and undresses in that mirror, so many admirings of herself; the flatness of her belly, the fullness of her breasts, the cut of her jaw and the firmness of her arms, the quest for the first curl of a pube or the proud swell of a tit that marked the end of childhood and the flowering of womanhood. Ayşe remembers the first set of killing lingerie she smuggled in at the age of seventeen from the bold and brash new Agent Provocateur at Cevahir Mall, the long, luxurious ritual of putting it on, item by item, hooking and buttoning and strapping up all its complicated and inefficient fastenings, getting her pose just right so that when she turned to face the mirror it would be like a model swirling on a catwalk or a smoky twentieth-century lady-spy meeting a contact in her red velvet boudoir. The static rub of thigh against thigh had amazed her, the tiny pink bows placed just so: that she could be so sexy. She could not keep her fingers away from the lace and mesh and gloss. She felt worth all the riches in Istanbul. Ayşe had lounged for hours on her bed exploring the sensations and emotions five pieces of gauzy fabric could bring out in a seventeen-year-old; catching sight of herself as a wild thing in that plain, stolid wardrobe mirror. She sat, legs wide, on the edge of the bed, smoking, studying her image. She dreaded and half-hoped that the bedroom door would open and her mother catch her. She had discovered a sensual woman in this old room with its posters of girlie popstars on the walls.
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