The Dervish House (21 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘Can I go now?’ Georgios Ferentinou asked.
‘One last question,’ said the lead interrogator. ‘Do you know Ariana Sinanidis?’
A smoke-yellow room in Üsküdar, in Asia, over the Bosphorus Bridge in a black car.
An involuntary sigh leaves Georgios Ferentinou at the sight of the Sultanahmet skyline from the Galata Bridge, the panoply of domes and minarets above the Golden Horn. From Aya Sofya and the Blue Mosque to the Süleymaniye and the Sultan Selim they wait like a holy army encamped. Ramazan ended a month ago but banners of festival lights bearing spiritual exhortations still hang between the minarets. Georgios sighs from the pure splendour of one of the world’s great city vistas but also because he cannot remember how long it is since he last looked on this parade of architecture, when he last crossed the Galata Bridge. A tram rolls past and down on to the thronged quays of Eminönü. Not even the car air-conditioning can keep out the smell of frying mackerel. The virtual Istanbuls of Georgios’ white library have no smell. Down and hooting through the crowds and on to the ferry. It is only twenty minutes from Europe to Asia but Georgios huffs and hauls himself up the companionways on to the deck. The driver insists on coming with him. Georgios suspects he may be armed. Everyone is up on the deck in the hope of some respite from the heat but there is not a breath on the Bosphorus this afternoon. Women in headscarves air themselves with little electric fans. A smooth-legged girl in hot pants and a halter top positions herself on the rail where the truck drivers can see her. The ferry breaks out past Seraglio Point and subtly adjusts its speed and course to run in behind a leviathan Russian gas tanker throbbing down the Bosphorus to the Sea of Marmara. Georgios appreciates the ferry captain’s constant instinctive calculation of relative velocities. Consciousness is not requisite for intelligence. Clear of the bridges, the big tanker has run up its kite-sails. Georgios shades his eyes to follow the lines up to where kites the size of a city block billow and strain. A kilometre up there is good wind. To the south, where the crack between continents widens up to the open horizon, the sky is black with kites.
Ariana had left Istanbul as the second wave of arrests came down. Georgios had come with her across this water. He remembers the gulls hanging over them, barely flicking their pointed wingtips as they slipped and slid around each other without ever disturbing the symmetry of the flock. The ferry had ducked in behind that long mole, into Haydarpaşa Station. Then he saw the jandarm truck parked before the station’s Teutonic front and faltered at the top of the steps. The police were leaning on a wall and smoking. Police were not part of the plan.
‘Don’t come with me,’ she had said. ‘I’ll be all right.’ Train to Izmir, then the ferry to Piraeus. In the Aegean she would be safe. He had lifted his hand in farewell as she walked past the lounging policemen. They did not even look up. She never looked back. He watched until he was sure she had made it into the station. Georgios realized that he had been afraid so long it had become part of his breathing, his walking, his sleeping and reading and bathing. He understood that what he felt now was not loss, but the end to that fear. Loss would come and it would be terrible.
No calls, no letters, he had told her. Georgios had no doubt that his mail was opened, that there was a listening ear to his home telephone, that the university lines were routinely tapped, but he had expected some word back through the expatriate network. Ariana had disappeared as utterly as death.
The ferry sweeps past Haydarpaşa, no longer the gateway to Asia now the trains bore directly under the black, bone-rotten ooze on the bottom of the Bosphorus. Engines roar as the captain manoeuvres in to the slip. The car carries Georgios along the Marmara coast, under the shadow of the great concrete bowl of the Fenerbahçe stadium, up through an indifferent straggle of apartment blocks and over the ridgeline into sudden wonder. Here, in a narrow valley falling down to the Sea of Marmara, is a hidden place. Its foot stands on the ugly shoreline sprawl and the Bursa expressway but its head is swathed in green glory. Georgios glimpses sensuous, lenticular Ottoman roofs through the canopy of Mediterranean oak and peel-barked limes. A man in a cap swings open black wrought-iron gates three times his height. A second man in a sober suit nods and touches a finger to his ceptep headset. Georgios notices several similar casually arrogant men, with their jackets unbuttoned, along the curving drive. To the seaward side pavilions and kiosks tumble down the valley between landscaped rhododendrons and azaleas. Within this cocoon of cool green there is no sight of the mould-stained white cubes of the houses ranged up and down the ridgelines. Perfumes of cedar and Aleppo pine stray into the air-conditioning.
The house disappoints. The roof is too flat, the eaves too heavy; the balconies lean that little too far forwards, the effortless harmonies of classic Ottoman architecture are spoiled by over-emphasis. It is a good late-empire recreation of a minor Imperial Palace, the kind of place petty paşas were secluded in when their brothers ascended to the throne in those more polite times when rival siblings were no longer strangled on accession. Some late-era businessman will have built this, nostalgic for the brighter, clearer days when the empire was strong.
A woman in a suit samples Georgios’ scent with a wand, checks him against her list, issues a security tag and escorts him up the stairs to the main salon. All is European high kitsch; man-high golden sconces crusted with gold leaf fruit and foliage, picky-spindly furniture in the French style. Cherubs, angels, Roman gods and minor members of the Christian pantheon tumble together in the painted ceiling, easy and ecumenical among the sunbeams. They are rendered as one might expect in a culture with no tradition of figure painting.
The upstairs salon is a miniature Versailles Hall of Mirrors. Gilding flakes from the mirror frames, the glasses are blackened and patchy where the silvering has oxidized. Cheap. A waiter offers Georgios coffee and a few cubes of sweets. The salon is full of groups of men in good suits. They talk comfortably and familiarly as if they see each other every week, they balance their coffee and baklava with ease. Georgios circles around them, old and fat and self-conscious in his greasy-elbowed jacket and too-tight good shirt.
Another singleton catches Georgios’ eye and loops around the constellations of confident men. His suit is grey and mall bought, his shirt collar uncomfortable and his cuffs caught over the ends of his jacket sleeves. Identifying a fellow in social distress, he stands by Georgios in the deep window bay that looks down across the gardens with its shrubs and kiosks, over the scum of strip development to the sea. The kite-sails of ships clearing the strait fill the sky like a flock of dark migratory birds.
‘I could do with something to wipe my fingers on,’ the man says.
‘I think there are napkins by the door,’ Georgios says.
‘I meant that by way of apology for a sticky handshake,’ the man says. He’s in his late twenties, with a suspicion of beard, neatly trimmed in a way that suggests a more natural growth for normal working life. He has bright animal eyes and a brown face that has seen a lot of sun. His handshake is sticky but firm, outdoorsy. ‘Emrah Beskardes.’
‘Georgios Ferentinou.’
‘It would be dishonest to say that I’d heard of you.’
‘Oh, no one’s heard of me. Not for a long time.’
‘I can guarantee no one’s heard of me at all.’
‘What do you work in?’
‘I’m a zoologist.’ Georgios is not one to sneer at another’s field of knowledge. All learning interests him. True wisdom leaks from the joins between disciplines. ‘I specialize in how signals communicate across animal populations.’
Georgios raises his eyebrows. He hasn’t lost that tell-tale of intellectual curiosity. ‘I can see how that might be very useful.’
‘To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I can contribute,’ Emrah Beskardes says. ‘The money’s good though. Do you mind if I ask?’
‘Not at all, not at all. I am . . . I was . . . an economist. An experimental economist. I’ve been out of it a few years.’
A sudden ringing pierces the high-grade chatter; not the chiming of some fanciful ormolu clock but a man in a suit banging his spoon on the rim of his coffee cup.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to follow me through.’
‘I suppose we’d better do our part for the motherland,’ Beskardes says. He quickly and discreetly slides the nozzle of a nano-inhaler up his nose and gives a short puff. He offers the tiny cone to Georgios. Georgios declines. It fascinates him that etiquette buttons up its gloves while technology waltzes around the world.
The merchant who built this little palace spent his money on the public facade. The salon at the rear of the house is unadorned, almost dowdy in its flat pilasters, cracked cornicing, peeling paint faded from old gold to nauseous mustard. The windows overlook storerooms and garaging, the solar plant and a power line dipping down between the built-over ridges into this hidden valley. The organizers have laid out a horseshoe of tables with an old-fashioned smartsilk screen on the wall at the open end. No ceptep downloads here; nothing to take away. There are two types of water on the tables but no notepads or pens. Emrah Beskardes draws a house on the child’s magic slate set at his place and then erases it with evident pleasure.
The delegates seat themselves. Georgios notes that they stay with the same social clusters they had formed in the main salon. Only three women. A tall, thin man with impossibly long hands bustles through the double doors to take up a position at the open end of the court of faces and Georgios experiences two sensations, both linked, he never expected to feel again. One is a tightening in the base of his belly; muscles long-buried there remember their duty to armour the body against threat. The other is slow, prickling contraction of his balls. Georgios knows this man. The last time he saw him was across an arrangement of tables like this, with bottled water sparkling and still, at the meeting that forced him into retirement. His name is Professor Ogün Saltuk. He is Georgios’ eternal enemy.
Age has been kinder to you than me
, Georgios thinks as he watches Professor Saltuk slowly scan the room.
We were skinny young men, wiry on work and theory. Your hair went first but you were wise enough to shave it off entirely and your beard still holds some black
.
, Georgios thinks as he watches Professor Saltuk slowly scan the room.
We were skinny young men, wiry on work and theory. Your hair went first but you were wise enough to shave it off entirely and your beard still holds some black
.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Professor Saltuk says. ‘Thank you all for coming today to this inaugural meeting of the Kadiköy Group. I’m sorry if it’s all seemed rather James Bond, but undertakings of this kind - as experimental as this - of necessity must be carried on behind closed doors, in secret, on a need to know basis. I appreciate that some of you have come at short notice and from a considerable distance today, I hope your hotels are comfortable. I assure you we will sort out that billing issue. Well now; introductions: I am Professor Ogün Saltuk of the University of Istanbul School of Economics.’ He pauses for a small sip of water. Emrah Beskardes is already drawing him as a lizard on his magic slate. Saltuk continues. ‘We’ve been deliberately chosen from a wide range of disciplines: experimental economics, materials physics, epidemiology, political and economic analysts, historians, a psychogeographer, even our very own science-fiction writer.’ He nods to a stocky, middle-aged man with a greying beard, who manages to look gracious.
‘Zoologists,’ Beskardes whispers and erases his reptile-Saltuk.
‘Many disciplines and backgrounds; you’d wonder if we could possibly have anything in common. I’ll not be so gauche as to say, love of this great country, but I will say, we all care about it. We care about it very much. Each of us, in his - or her - own way is deeply concerned about this great nation; its past, its present and yes, its future. Whatever other political entities claim our loyalty, first and foremost we are all good, concerned citizens of Turkey.
‘In our five thousand years of civilization, our history has often been the handmaid of geography. We lie exactly midway between the North Pole and the Equator. We are the gateway between the Fertile Crescent and Europe, between landlocked Central Asia and the Mediterranean world and beyond that, the Atlantic. Peoples and empires have ebbed and flowed across this land. Even today sixty per cent of Europe’s gas supply either passes down the Bosphorus or runs under our very feet through pipelines. We have always been the navel of the world. Yet our favoured location by its very nature surrounded us with historical enemies; to the north, Russia to the south, the Arabs; to the east, Persia and to the west, the Red Apple itself, Europe.’
The Red Apple, the myth of Ottoman imperialism. When Mehmet the Conqueror looked out from the parapets of his fortress of Europe at Constantinople, the Red Apple had been the golden globe in the open palm of Justinian’s statue in the Hippodrome, the symbol of Roman power and ambition. Mehmet rode through the crumbling Hippodrome, the decaying streets of dying Byzantium and the Red Apple became Rome itself. The truth of the Red Apple was that it would always be unattainable, for it was the westering spirit, the globe of the setting sun itself.
‘Now we find ourselves caught between Arab oil, Russian gas and Iranian radiation and we found that the only way we could take the Red Apple was by joining it.’
This is poor stuff
, Georgios thinks.
You would not insult undergraduates’ intelligence with this.
, Georgios thinks.
You would not insult undergraduates’ intelligence with this.
‘This group has been convened as an informal think-tank working in parallel with the Haceteppe group in Ankara. I had been working with MIT on the idea of a pure blue-sky group for some time but circumstances have forced our hand. As you know, there was a bomb attack yesterday on a tram in Beyoğlu. We’re in possession of additional information that has led MIT to raise the general security level to red one. I’m not going to tell you what that information is; that’s the idea behind the group. You may have heard of my work; I published a book . . .
Great Leap Forward: How Ignorance Really is Bliss?
No? It was an English-language publication . . . Anyway, the thesis is that intelligence, working on minimal information, can make leaps of intuition far beyond those achievable by directed thinking.’
Great Leap Forward: How Ignorance Really is Bliss?
No? It was an English-language publication . . . Anyway, the thesis is that intelligence, working on minimal information, can make leaps of intuition far beyond those achievable by directed thinking.’
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