The Dervish House (36 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
‘As well as you he’s working with Haluk and Hilmi.’
‘The Cygnus X boys? That’s not finance, that’s voodoo.’ Buying and selling, finding advantage, opportunities for arbitrage, the breathless, stratospheric domain of derivatives; behind the abstractions and the minutiae of timing was a physical commodity, whether heat for the widows of Marand or cool for the citizens of Istanbul. Dark liquidity, the so-called dark pools, the blind game where buyers and sellers hid their intentions from the gaze of the market, was black magic. It was a minimum information grope, it was trawling on the sea-bed. It was cold, pitiless entropy. The theory was sound and simple as a boat. Large institutional investors; pension funds, investment funds; managers who moved mega-shares, geological blocks of stock, wanted a way to buy without signalling their intentions to the market and finding hedgers and smaller, sprightlier traders taking positions against them. Dark pools allowed traders to post a desire to buy or sell anonymously - no price, no quantity, no names. Buyers and sellers groped towards each other.
To Adnan, dark liquidity would always be an abandoned cinema in Eskişehir.
‘I don’t do cinemas. Allah was good enough to give us FlickStream, why should we turn our noses up at it?’ It was his third date with Ayşe, the one where they Introduce you to Their Friends. Her friends were bloody art students but on the whole they were better looking than MBA students.
‘It’s not a movie. It’s an installation.’
On a Third Date you’re allowed a refusal - only one, you don’t want to look like a whiner - to show that you’re not a complete pussy. He should have held on to it. I don’t do cinemas, but I do installations even less.
‘It’s more like a game,’ Ayşe said, using her Third Date First Flicker of Telepathy.
The art students weren’t as good looking as he’d expected but they handed them each a laser pointer and told them to spread out through the stalls. There were already a few dozen scattered across the auditorium, crouching down in the rows, behind the curtains, the speakers, the sound baffles.
‘Is this like the army?’ Adnan asked loudly because it irritated the liberals.
‘Sort of,’ Ayşe said. Then the lights went off. Someone not Ayşe brushed past Adnan, from across the auditorium a laser beam sparkled through the dusty dark, was at once answered by five others, and Adnan got the rules. It was duelling lasers in the dark. Every shot might find a target, but it immediately flagged your location. Within fifteen seconds Adnan has tactics: listen, stick your head over the scalloped row of chair backs, shoot and move. Shoot and move. Shoot and move. The dark was velvety, dusty, warm and complete as the secret places of a body.
‘Adnan.’ He turned his laser on the whisper at his feet, then recognized the voice and took his thumb off the trigger. ‘Are you enjoying it?’ Ayşe whispered. A web of lasers criss-crossed the humid vault of the cinema.
‘More of this kind of art, please.’ Then he said, ‘It’s like the market. I never thought. You signal your intent, you take a shot, everyone knows where you are and moves against you.’
‘I would probably never have thought of it that way,’ Ayşe said. ‘I just came here because it seemed like the kind of place you could do this.’ And without any sighting or ranging or the least flicker of laser light she had her hand on his thigh.
‘So you can,’ Adnan said and pulled her down on top of him.
That has always been the difference to Adnan between the light and dark markets. The light market was the never-ceasing duel of lasers, all signalling to each other, all reacting to each other, like starlings dashing between the minarets of the Blue Mosque or cars on the Atatürk Approach. The dark was stumbling, feeling out the contours of a body, groping, whispering, recognizing, then the stifled exchange of body fluids.
Billions flow daily through pools of dark liquidity, between massive institutional buyers and sellers who risk exposure should the market sense their submarine mass move against them. But no darkness is ever absolute. Every night holds whispers. Analysts run algorithmic programmes of searing complexity, looking for statistical patterns and premonitions in the prices of stock. Raiders mount financial skirmishes into the dark to discern what might be for sale, how much and at what price. Some apply thermodynamics, looking for localized, minute decreases in the overall entropy of the dark market to game the price. The Cygnus X project is a degree of abstraction beyond even those, designed to probe the darkest of dark pools. Two terrifyingly smart quants, Haluk and Hilmi, reasoned by analogy to black holes and information theory. The darkest dark pools, the black holes, give no sign of their presence or mass until a buyer enters their gravitational fields. They swallow all information of price and quantity. A black hole has no hair, the physicists love to joke. Adnan’s never understood that. Nor can he begin to comprehend the quantum field equations and Stephen Hawking’s own formulae Haluk and Hilmi use to extract price information from the Great Dark Ones. But he can admire it. All Özer was exhorted to praise Haluk and Hilmi. Quantum Field Pricing Theory was bold, was brilliant, was the stuff of Nobel prizes. Adnan can admire it as long as it’s in the money. And Kadir says it’s not. Catastrophically not.
‘The theory gave them beautiful data,’ Kadir says. ‘They could see in the dark. Then they tried to get clever. They reckoned they could arbitrage the dark market.’
‘I’m trying to imagine the amount of processing power you’d need to crunch and arbitrage in real time.’
‘The kind of amount that requires sign-off from the fortieth floor.’
‘Mehmet.’ Mehmet Meral, Chief Operating Officer. Mehmet the Conqueror, he liked to call himself. His office was decorated with Janissary military antiques. He preached martial virtues: swiftness, sureness, discipline, a sipahi’s cavalry boldness. Mehmet the Cunt, they called him on the trading floor.
‘He specifically put Kemal on settlements to make sure it was covered right and, just for a moment, Kemal took his eye off the ball.’
‘Kemal doesn’t do that.’
‘He does when the ball is Turquoise.’
‘Fuck.’
‘He passed the Cygnus X account to a group of juniors on the assumption that they would keep each other right. They didn’t. They made a small mistake, they tried to hide it. Errors to cover errors. You know how it is.’
Sometimes, in the small, hot, smelly Ferhatpaşa bedroom, Adnan is wakened by a sound in the night. It’s not the roar of the highway or the television from next door beating T-pop against the wall or the shouts of youths from down at the petrol station. It’s a huge sound that fills the sky around Apartment Block 27 and the earth beneath it, an endless rip as if God were tearing apart the seven heavens and every spirit that lived there, down to the atoms. It leaves him paralysed, sweating, heart pounding unable to find sleep again. It’s the sound of the money rending. The deals are so fast, the opportunities so brief and the numbers so huge that a mistake must happen. Such is the pressure behind that hole, that flaw, that the whole thing will go, all the way down. Thousands can escalate into millions, into losses that can stagger entire economies. The money, tearing. When he married, when he bought the nasty little apartment out in Ferhatpaşa and realized that he had shamed Ayşe before her family though she would never say, that she would sleep in a gecekondu if his arm were her pillow, he heard the heavens tear almost every night. He was a junior trader, an order filler, always running, never a moment away from the indices to make sure, to check he hadn’t made a fatal flaw that could run up the side of the Levent tower and shatter it into dust. He can’t remember when he last heard that shriek but he knows he will tonight.
‘How did you find out?’
‘He told me. He thought maybe I could edit the records. I’ve looked at it. It’s terrifying. Moving losses off the balance sheet and reporting them as profits, setting up error accounts inside error accounts, using margin payments to make trades on his own account to cover losses, faking hedge trades. All the classics. It’s almost textbook.’
‘Fucking Kemal. Why did he have to try and cover it up? Just fire the bastards and take it from Mehmet the Cunt. Özer’s capitalized to much more than two hundred and eighty million.’
‘Mehmet the Cunt has problems of his own. Mehmet, Ercan, Pamir; Ozer is rotting from the head. We’re overextended in every division to six times our capitalization. We’re an accounting fiction. It’s a house of cards, but it’s Cygnus X that will bring the whole tower down. Pamir may throw Kemal to the wolves to forestall the Financial Regulation Authority launching a wider investigation into Özer as a whole.’
‘We’re exposed. Fuck!’
The mosque warden, patiently sweeping the court with a besom, looks up and frowns.
‘Can we call off Turquoise?’ Kadir asks.
Adnan rounds on him.
‘If Ozer goes down I’m not going to be the one on the ten o’clock news sitting on the steps with everything I own in a cardboard box. Turquoise is my redundancy cheque. There is a way out of this. We can do this. It’s our money. We can do this. We’re the Ultralords of the Universe; we’re still the smartest guys in the room.’
He can’t lose it. He won’t lose it. Not now, not after all he’s done, after all the work and the contacts and the meetings and the careful deals and the planning, years of planning, from that first casual question out in the east on military service,
So where does that pipe go?
To the moment, so clear in his memory, so bright and crystalline, deep as a turquoise, riding up in the scenic elevator with Istanbul’s hills and waterways at his feet, when the idea of the most audacious gas scam of the century came to him, made him choke with suppressed laughter at the whole ballsiness of it; Turquoise, whole and entire by the time the door opened on to the trading floor. He can’t let his grip relax, see it fall away from him swashing down through the dark water. Lost.
So where does that pipe go?
To the moment, so clear in his memory, so bright and crystalline, deep as a turquoise, riding up in the scenic elevator with Istanbul’s hills and waterways at his feet, when the idea of the most audacious gas scam of the century came to him, made him choke with suppressed laughter at the whole ballsiness of it; Turquoise, whole and entire by the time the door opened on to the trading floor. He can’t let his grip relax, see it fall away from him swashing down through the dark water. Lost.
Water drips from the battered copper spouts of the çesme. Adnan stoops, fills his cupped hands, dashes cold water from the deep aqueducts and cisterns beneath Istanbul into his face. Again, it runs through his fingers, he splashes the heat and the tiredness from his face. He gasps at the purity of the cold.
‘If we were drug dealers, or even the security police,’ Kadir ventures.
‘We’re not those men,’ Adnan says fiercely. ‘We’re not even going to think like those men. I don’t want to hear that again.’
‘I had to float it though.’
‘Consider it floated.’ Beads of cold water run down Adnan’s neck and under his collar.
‘Have you any better suggestions?’
‘Better ones, meaning ones that don’t make us murderers and land us in jail? No. How do you silence a man who knows too much?’
‘Maybe he doesn’t have to be silenced,’ Kadir says. Always the well-spoken and educated one, an old Istanbul name from an old Constantinople family; now he is his most Ottoman. ‘’Maybe he just needs to forget the salient details.’
‘What, designer amnesia?’ Water spills have turned Adnan’s shirt translucent and glued it to his chest. His body hair makes spiral, animal patterns.
‘The nano gives and nano takes away.’ Kadir is the Ultralords’ dealer, little racks of plastic vials, from the grey market in the underpass at Galata tram station. Adnan’s been there once, a piss-reeking tiled toilet of neon-lit stalls selling cigarettes, replica guns and non-prescription nano. ‘Designer amnesia, no, that’s beyond us. Memories are stored holographically, in multiple locations. The nano would have to locate and bind to the memory locations and repolarize the neurons without affecting any other memories using that architecture. Editing specific memories is maybe ten, twenty years away. However, for every scalpel there is a baseball bat. We all make jokes to the Kebab Prophet that we’re the pharmacological front line, experimenting on ourselves, a neurological time-bomb waiting to go off. What if it did?’
‘Do you mean, overdose Kemal?’
‘No, it’s unreliable; we mightn’t get the desired effect. Kemal might end up dead anyway. The nanoware designers can’t edit specific memories, but general amnesia might be achievable.’
‘You’re talking about giving him a chemical lobotomy.’
‘A moment ago we were floating the possibility of killing him so I think it’s a moral improvement. It would be nothing like what you say; the technology exists to target locations in the brain that correspond to different types of mental activity; emotions, smell, short-term memory. Short-term memory I think is the way to go. I can make some enquiries. It will have to be customized, and it will cost, but once the manufactory is programmed they have it for us next day. I think I can guarantee what will look like a massive short-term amnesia. We’ll point to his work-load, pressure to deliver, increasing reliance on nano to meet deadlines. Does he have anyone? Apart from his mother? We’re even doing Ozer some good; who knows what else he’ll forget along with Turquoise?’
‘God between me and evil,’ Adnan says. ‘You are a cold fucker.’
‘Do you have another suggestion?’
‘You know I don’t. Temporary amnesia.’
‘I can’t guarantee it.’
Adnan turns his face up to the cascade of domes. Water everywhere in this mosque; in the heart of every mosque.
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