The Dervish House (66 page)

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Authors: Ian Mcdonald

BOOK: The Dervish House
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‘What was wrong with it?’
‘Oh for God’s sake, man! It’s the wrong fucking side of the Bosphorus!’
They laugh. It’s forced and desperate but it holds a kernel of all laughter; it recognizes the ridiculousness of human existence. It celebrates it. They lie side by side, laughing the best laugh they can.
‘Madam?’ Ayşe squints up at Hafize against the chandelier lanterns. She holds out an envelope. ‘When the police had you, I sold an object to customer. A neighbour. Leyla Gültaşli ? You’d recognize her if you saw her. She lives in apartment 2.’
‘What did you sell?’
‘The half Koran. The miniature that man Topaloğlu sold you on Monday, just before.’
‘His name is never mentioned in this building again. The half Koran? Well done finding a buyer for that.’
‘I didn’t sell it. She was looking for it specifically. She gave me a thousand euro.’
Ayşe sits up.
‘That’s a hell of a lot more than it’s worth.’
‘It was worth much more to her. Madam, Adnan Bey, I overheard what you were saying about setting up a business, needing to get rid of a large amount of money quickly. I have a suggestion.’
10
It’s 1783, the Islamic year 1197, and Mahtab, the wife of Kurosh Tehranian, a civil servant in Tabriz, is drawn by a shine of silver in a bookseller’s in the city’s old bazaar. A miniature Koran, silver cased, a crystal magnifier in the cover, very beautiful. The perfect Koran for a traveller or a trader, a soldier or a pilgrim. It’s for this last that Mahtab buys it. After years of saving and economizing on his civil service pay, Kurosh Tehranian is finally going on the Hac in fulfilment of a lifetime’s yearning and obligation.
It’s 1827/1243. Salman Tehranian, a member of a diplomatic mission of the Qajay Dynasty of Tehran, travels to Constantinople to negotiate Ottoman support in the Russo-Persian war of 1826. At Konya he falls sick. The mission continues to Constantinople while he remains under the care of the hospital of the Tomb of the Mevlana. He dies three months later. He wills his most treasured possession, a silver-cased miniature Koran, to Yusuf Horozcu, who nursed him with love and dedication. The mission to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire fails.
It’s 1858/1275. Listed among the dowry goods of the marriage of Fikriye Gören to Atıf Ceylan, a furniture maker of Hacıevhattin is a miniature Koran, described as ‘of Persian make, silver filigreed, with crystal lens.’ To obtain permission to marry their daughter, Atıf Ceylan had to prove his merit as a cabinet maker and build a wonder. He made a trunk of fabulous beauty, a chest of treasures, worked with floral patterns of the greatest intricacy, but it was unlucky. At the age of sixty-three Nilufer Gören tripped, struck her head against a corner of the chest and died. The family took the chest outside and burned it.
It’s 1916/1335. Abdulkadir Hasgüler’s many plans and favours and small bribes to minor officials finally fail and he is armed and uniformed and sent down to the ferry that will take him to the train to Çanakkale and across the Dardanelles to Gallipoli. At the quay his mother gives him a keepsake to return him safe to Istanbul: the family miniature Koran, cut in half.
It will always seek to be one
, she says as the ferry belches smoke into the evening sky. By its power Abdulkadir survives the shot and shell and hell of Gallipoli and returns safe to Istanbul to found a mighty, sprawling, brawling family.
It’s 2027/1448. At a desk in the semahane of the Adem Dede dervish house, Adnan Sarioğlu and Ayşe Erkoç buy both halves of the Gültaşli Koran for two million euro. In so doing they become the owners of Ceylan-Besarani nanotech, with Yaşar Ceylan and Aso Besarani as executive and technical directors. They shake hands over the table. Leyla Gültaşli and Hafize Gülek witness the contract.
‘Right then,’ says Adnan Sarioğlu. ‘You’re highly talented boys but you know fuck about making deals. The deal is, I make the deals. You do the science, I’ll do the money. I will be working out of this building. You will continue to work out at the Nano Bazaar. I am not having any place that calls itself Nano Bazaar on my business card, and I’m not running the risk of coming out at six o’clock and finding the Audi up on blocks. I will be out to see you but not often. You may be glad of that, I don’t care. I want to spend as little time as possible around geeks, techno-hippies, nano-fairies and idiots who wear goggles. The administrative headquarters of Turquoise Nanotech - we’ve decided that’s the name, by the way, you can retain Ceylan-Besarani, or Besarani-Ceylan or whatever the hell you want to work it, for the transcriber when you get it - will be here.’
‘This is the registered company office,’ Ayşe says. ‘Everything will be managed out of here. We’ll honour existing contracts for six months, after that, contracts are renegotiated and everything is dependent on results.’
‘Excuse me.’ Leyla Gültaşli raises her hand. ‘I still don’t have a contract.’
‘When you’re operations manager you can write your own.’
‘Operations? I was marketing . . .’
‘Adnan and I are the face of the company,’ Ayşe says curtly. ‘Leyla, operations. Yaşar and Aso, technical directors. Zeliha will continue to manage the Fenerbahçe end. Hafize, PA to me and Adnan, maternity permitting. Turquoise Nanotech is a commercial company. We’re here to make money. If we happen to change the world while we’re doing that, that’s a bonus.’
Five days is a long time in business, Adnan thinks. On Monday he only expected to pull off a gas scam, put a deposit down on a mansion and watch Galatasaray beat Arsenal. It’s Friday and he’s destroyed a major corporation, bought a nano company and missed Galatasaray play Arsenal to a draw. He could never have imagined the fall of Özer, how fast, how far. But Kemal knew, Kemal had known from the moment the first error showed up in the Cygnus X account. The same multiplying force of the financial instruments that allows the extraction of unimaginable profit also generates unlimited loss. Now the vultures pull at the corpse of Özer but he got out. He got out intact, he got out with the money. The Ultralords of the Universe always get out from the exploding base. Empires crumble but the money never rests. The money whirls around the world, never ceasing because if the money ever stops, everything stops. It’s Friday and Adnan killed a great little company.
‘We’ve work to do, right away. We’ve an advantage in that the collapse of Özer will knock out the Idiz team but even as we sit here they’re talking to money people. Our advantage won’t last. We have to get to market first. So everything goes into prototyping the Ceylan-Besarani transcriber.’
‘Besarani-Ceylan transcriber,’ Aso Besarani says.
Little letters
, Ayşe Erkoç thinks. Words written from smaller words written from words too tiny to read. In this room, at this desk the policeman Akgün had wondered whether the power of micrography grew the smaller it became. The Hurufis believed the final name of God was written into every atom. The world is written. Reality is transcribed, endlessly copied from moment to moment. The secrets of the universe may be inscribed on to the human heart.
‘Tomorrow we start.’
Yaşar raises a hand.
‘I need to know I won’t be bothered by Abdullah Unul.’
‘Abdullah Unul is a small-time hustler and coercer of cornershops. If it’s big-time crooks you’re after, just take a trip down to Levent Plaza. They’re all out there looking for new jobs. I can deal with Abdullah Unul. Now, ladies, gentlemen.’
On cue Hafize fetches the tray with the glasses and the bottle of champagne. There is pomegranate spritzer for her. It’s good for pregnant women. She tackles the champagne cork as if it is a loaded shotgun but it pops, and there is foam, and five glasses.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, Turquoise.’
The first toast is drunk.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, profit.’
As the second goes down Ayşe takes the Koran and twists it in two parts. The back she slides across the desk to Adnan. The front she puts in her bag. People who collect miniature Korans buy them for the stories they attract.
‘Profit,’ says Ayşe Erkoç.
Adnan leans across the desk to his new working partners.
‘Gentlemen, would either of you, by any chance, be football fans?’
 
The woman police officer is tall and very striking in her neatly belted uniform and gun but still Georgios is not aware of her until she speaks a second time.
‘Hm?’
‘We can get a car to take you home. It’s not a problem.’
‘Oh no, no no no, I’ll wait.’
‘The doctors have said they won’t let anyone other than immediate family in today.’
‘That’s all right. I’m more than happy to wait. You see, I have something of his.’ Georgios lifts the heavy-duty supermarket bag-for-life on his lap.
‘Can I get you a coffee or something?’
‘No, no, I’m fine, thank you.’
Georgios sits on the centre of the three plastic chairs outside the door of the private cardio ward. He sits very upright, ankles and knees together, hands clasped around the bag in his lap. Institutional sitting. The hospital corridor is painted the same diseased-lung yellow as the interrogation room in Üküdar. The smell is leaking back through the years. Or perhaps it is not memory; a hospital could very well smell the same as a secret police cell: body fluids, fear, hope, terror. Death. He’s read all the notices on the wall three times. The health warnings are either irrelevant or would have killed him by now.
The policewoman touches her ceptep to the vending machine, waits, touches it again, bangs it. Bangs it again.
‘I’ve something to give him, you see,’ Georgios says, hoping that the policewoman will ask what he has in the bag. ‘I’m returning something to him.’
The machine grudgingly disgorges half a cup of tarry coffee. Georgios peeps into the carrier bag. The interior swarms with insect motion. The BitBots, broken down into their individual component microbots, hiving like wasps, a ceaseless boil of blind robot energy. Mindless automata in their individuality, intelligent in society. Intelligence as an emergent property, a property that cannot be predicted from the behaviour of the individual components. He would assemble them but he doesn’t have the control unit. Later he’ll take the bag over to the free charge point to power up.
He found them swarming like silver wasps in the gutter at Kayişdaği Compression Station, a pool of liquid light, after the ambulance drove away. A dog was sniffing at them, leaping back when the threatened BitBots reared up in their preprogrammed defensive reaction. The çayhane owner had a plastic shopper - the one Georgios now carries - and was trying to work out a way of scooping them in. Beyond the police cordon the news men jockey for pictures.
‘Those aren’t yours!’ Georgios cried. ‘They belong to the boy. They’re his pets.’
‘Pets?’ the çayhane owner said.
Toy
, Georgios had meant.
‘I’m going to the hospital. I’ll give them to him.’
Together they corralled every last BitBot in the bag-for-life. Then the Terrorist Incident police who had corralled everyone away from the compression station noticed people they had not yet processed and came over to take details and ask questions. They took Georgios into the back of the mobile control room van.
‘So were they trying to launch a nanoagent attack through the gas supply?’ Georgios asked the questioning officer.
‘Who, sir?’
‘The terrorists. Were they trying to introduce a nanoreplicator into the distribution system?’
‘I can neither confirm nor deny that, sir.’ The policeman frowned. ‘I can say that this has been a major incident. Can I see some identification, sir?’
Georgios fumbled out his Kadiköy identity tag. The officer ran it through his scanner.
‘This is an MIT security clearance, sir.’
‘Yes, officer, I was doing some work for them recently, a security service think-tank. We were investigating the possibility of a terror attack using a nanotechnology agent. There was a boy, a nine-year-old, he has a cardiac condition, a very serious cardiac condition. He was taken to hospital; do you know if he’s all right?’
‘You’re the one rescued the boy.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Are you family?’
‘I’m a neighbour. A friend of the family. He’s like a son to me. A grandson.’
‘I can arrange to have a car take you down there.’
‘That would be very good. Thank you.’
‘There are some officers at the hospital. I’ll let them know you’re coming. I’ll need contact details; we will have to question you in some detail.’
‘I understand, officer. If I can help in any way, officer.’
‘Is that your bag, sir?’
‘Yes, just some of my old stuff. I carry far too much around with me.’
Old men, plastic shoppers, street mutterers and pigeon feeders.
‘Was it a nano attack?’ Georgios asks quickly.
The policeman gave no answer but as Georgios was helped down the steps to the waiting cruiser the officer said, ‘Professor,’ and when Georgios looked, he nodded curtly.

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