Authors: Ian Mcdonald
The Dervish House (33 page)
That low-life rent-boy-mongering Georgian-trafficking failed-moustache homosexual transvestite wife-beating bet-welching tax-dodging money-laundering free-loading Besiktas-supporting little pathetic nonentity of a wannabe hood, who, if there’s still a God in the seven heavens, will end up some day soon in the foundations of an overpass on the E018 . . .
Leyla steps back to the grille to interrupt the gale of invective.
‘The kapici said you’d sold on the contents of the apartment.’
A pause.
‘You’re not family, are you?’
‘Not directly.’
‘Well, someone owes me two months’ rent. Two months!’
‘Mr Özkök, where did you have the personal effects sent?’
‘Bugger all I got for that pile of shite. Do you have money on you?’
‘Mr Özkök, the name of the dealers?’
‘Some place in Seyitnazam. I’m coming down. I’ll see to this personally. Stay where you are. I’m coming down.’
Leyla bolts. She runs perilously on business heels. She left Yaşar circling in the Peugeot - parking was a patent impossibility around Türkan Bey’s Inebey office. Where is he, where is he? Don’t have crashed, don’t have started a fight at traffic lights, don’t have got into anything that involves police. There, bouncing in over the tram lines. The car doesn’t stop as Leyla opens the door and drops in to the passenger seat.
‘Go go go!’
Yaşar pulls into the traffic. Leyla sees a big man with a sloping forehead, heavy jowls and a big moustache at the door of Özkök Properties looking up and down the street. As the car passes Leyla drops down in her seat but the movement draws his eye. He recognizes her from the intercom camera, thinks about giving chase, settles for waved fist and roaring.
‘Let me guess, he still wants his back rent.’
‘Just keep driving, he might still follow us.’
‘They probably taught you different in marketing, but renting property, it’s never seemed an honourable way to make money to me.’ Yaşar says. ‘Using money to make money.’
‘Isn’t that what this is about, getting finance to make more finance?’
‘This is getting finance to make something that will change the world. Notice the two little extra words in there? “Make something.”’
‘Auction houses in Seyitnazam,’ Leyla says as she takes over the steering wheel at a gas station.
Hazine Auctions
, Yaşar says almost immediately and blinks the location to the navigation system. Driving, driving, constant driving, whirling around this huge, hot city between low rent apartments in new-build suburbs and by-the-week-offices and black marble lobbies and Bosphorus view business suites. How many of the drivers and passengers around her swirl endlessly along Istanbul’s arterials and circulatories and interchanges, never reaching the centre, never reaching anywhere? This afternoon it’s a meeting with CoGo Nano!, brand leaders in mass market nano. After that it’s more calls to nano companies and private equity firms and venture capital funds. Leyla can’t imagine when she will crawl back up the creaking wooden stairs of the dervish house. Thinking of the afternoon meeting reminds Leyla of a question that has been rattling around in her head.
, Yaşar says almost immediately and blinks the location to the navigation system. Driving, driving, constant driving, whirling around this huge, hot city between low rent apartments in new-build suburbs and by-the-week-offices and black marble lobbies and Bosphorus view business suites. How many of the drivers and passengers around her swirl endlessly along Istanbul’s arterials and circulatories and interchanges, never reaching the centre, never reaching anywhere? This afternoon it’s a meeting with CoGo Nano!, brand leaders in mass market nano. After that it’s more calls to nano companies and private equity firms and venture capital funds. Leyla can’t imagine when she will crawl back up the creaking wooden stairs of the dervish house. Thinking of the afternoon meeting reminds Leyla of a question that has been rattling around in her head.
‘How do you come to be working with Aso?’
‘I met him at Ankara U and then we went on together to Bilikent University. It’s the only place if you’ve any ambitions in nano.’
‘It seems a bit of an odd pairing.’
‘Odd? What do you mean odd?’
‘Well, I mean, you don’t think of . . .’
‘Kurds.’
‘Yes, Kurds. You don’t think of them as scientists.’
‘Why? What do you think of Kurds as?’
‘Well, I’ve never heard . . .’
‘Kurds herd sheep, commit honour killings and like nothing better than a good vendetta.’
‘No!’ She hasn’t thought that, not in those words or images or clichés, but the prejudices and presumptions are a watertable, dripped into her like the irrigation of the polytunnels through family, friends, television and news and mosque and school: Kurds are conservative and insular, Kurds keep their own ways and customs, Kurds aren’t really proper Turkish citizens. They form a level on which everything she has ever thought about the Kurds has rested. She’s a down-home Demre racist. It’s an ugly truth.
‘The guy is a genius,’ Yaşar says. ‘I just do the grunt work; design the molecules, do the mathematics, compute the folds. He sees big. He’s the visionary. He’s the one looking ten, fifty, a hundred years into the future at what we’ll all be. He sees that, as clear as day. It scares the hell out of me, but he sees it, he looks right into it, like the sun, and it doesn’t blind him. Or is that something else that Kurds don’t do?’
‘Yaşar, I’m sorry . . .’
A call comes in from Uncle Cengiz to swing out to Bakirköy to pick up Cousin Naci.
‘He’s a good lad, a big lad. He does Taekwondo.’
‘Why do I need a cousin who does Taekwondo?’ Leyla asks.
‘I had tea with the Big Man and asked if he might have any idea who is in charge of things over by Felicity Apartments.’ Every town, every neighbourhood has a Big Man. He goes by various names and honorifics but they all mean Big Man. He sits, mostly. Outside, preferably. He drinks a lot of tea, and may smoke. People greet him and he has a dog that never gets indoors. He knows everyone and sorts things. He accepts small considerations and local protection. ‘I gave him your description. He said that sounded like Abdullah Unul. He used to work with Russians on the usual Russian stuff: vice, people trafficking, nasty stuff like that. The Big Man said that he’d heard Abdullah Unul was in money-lending now.’
‘So we’ve got Abdullah Unul’s money.’
‘Leyla, he also said to be very careful; Abdullad Unul did things for the Russians. Russian-style things. Leyla, I don’t think it would do any harm for you to have somebody with you. That’s why I’m sending Cousin Naci with you.’
‘Did you never think that at some point it might have been a good idea to call the police?’ Leyla asks.
‘The police?’ The shock, the shame in his voice over the tyre-noise. ‘Not with family, no no.’
Cousin Naci is loitering under the ten-metre revolving plastic dervish that advertises the Çelebi Travellers’ Restaurant far across its dusty, electric smelling edge-of-expressway industry park and the Gordian Ataköy Interchange. He’s a big, broad, slightly frowning twentysomething in track pants and a very clean white Adidas top. He smells of fabric conditioner. He moves sweetly and with effortless muscularity. Yaşar clearly hates him so Leyla can’t help but be predisposed to like him. Two men in smart pale blue overalls and sweet little rubber boots wash the car while Yaşar ransacks the shop for snack food and soft drinks. Leyla looks up at the slowly whirling dervish, one hand held up to the God, the other turned down to earth. The line of unity runs through the heart. Here the nanotech revolution was born, she’ll tell them when they interview her for the
People Who Shook The World
segment on the news.
People Who Shook The World
segment on the news.
The back seat of a 2020 model Peugeot Citicar was never designed for Cousin Nacis. Even with his knees almost under his chin he looms over the front seats. Leyla’s certain the car steers light at the front.
‘What belt are you?’ she asks Cousin Naci.
‘Black,’ he says.
‘What dan?’ Yaşar asks.
‘Fifth. I’m licensed as a deadly weapon.’
Hazine Auctions is a roll-shuttered industry unit on a business lot at the back of an apartment park off the D100 expressway. Cheapness and meanness hang in the air with the dust. The balconies are already pulling away from the apartments; rust traces little ochre fans beneath the wall mountings. Grafitti on the shutters, invocations of God and Atatürk and football. Toyota pick-ups on the street. Hazine Auctions is the bazaar of final resort. Buy from those who need to sell, mark-up affordably. Ceiling-high shelving racks of mini-motorbikes and electric guitars and weddings dresses; music systems and bicycles and designer shades. White goods, priced in felt marker on gaudy orange stars. There is a whole bin of cepteps. Each item a failed aspiration. A hope too high. It’s not a pawn shop, never a pawn shop. Pawning is usury. Pawning is haram.
Turgut Bey is very proper, in a flash suit and smile
‘House clearances, yes, we do those. The way we work is we pay a flat fee, sight unseen, then I send my boys to sort everything and box it up - I get a lot more if it’s all tagged and sorted, especially the bric-à-brac. Dealers specialize: books, china, curios.’
‘It’s this address.’
Leyla has written it down. She doesn’t like the idea of flesh-to-flesh data transfer with this man. Turgut Bey shrugs.
‘You’d have to talk to the boys.’
Boys they are, sons and cousins in leather jackets, drivers of vans and tappers of keys. In the glass box that is Hazine Auctions back office Turgut Jnr drags and taps spreadsheets across his silkscreen.
‘Twenty boxes sundries, sorted,’ Turgut Jnr announces. It’s hot and dusty in this concrete warehouse. It smells of small sorrows.
‘We’re looking for a specific item,’ Leyla says. ‘It’s a family heirloom, one of those miniature Korans, but there’d be only half of it. You might have noticed it.’
‘To be honest we get so much stuff,’ Turgut Jnr says, flicking itineraries across the screen. ‘We wouldn’t catalogue anything so small as that. One box assorted religious paraphernalia. You’re in luck.’
‘Could I ask who bought it?
‘Now that’s commercially confidential.’
The first of the day’s petty cash twenties leaves its silk harem. Zeliha had handed over the cash grudgingly. Leyla must remind her again about that contract.
‘It was bought by this guy. He’s one of our regulars. He likes the religious clutter.’
Turgut Jnr swooshes the receipt across the screen. The box went for twenty euro, what she has just paid out. Of course, there is no guarantee the hemi-Koran was in the box, or that if it was, that the buyer hasn’t sold it on again. That Abdullah Unul isn’t prising it from Mehmet Ali’s fingers with a claw hammer. The Taekwondo Black Belt Deadly Weapon is looking at scrambler bikes. Leyla hopes he’ll be enough.
Topaloğlu Art and Antiquities. Kavaflar Sok, Grand Bazaar. Leyla’s hopes wilt. Miniature Korans are just the kind of souvenir - authentic, oriental, portable, vaguely transgressive - tourists love to buy. Half a koran might be a less appealing buy. So unattractive this Topaloğlu might have thrown it out. She could go head-spin crazy second-guessing motivations and possibilities. The certainty is that she and Aso have a meeting with CoGoNano! in two hours and she needs a shower, a change and a pitch rehearsal.
She’s getting used to Cousin Naci filling the rear-view mirror. Fabric conditioner is a preferable odour to the car’s natural fug of nanotech designer and mouldering food. The driver’s footwell is carpeted in a layer of pulverized snacks. This is not good for her shoes. Leyla accelerates up the inbound on-ramp and drops the Peugeot into a gap that wonderfully opens between a taxi and a tow truck. Until she took this commission she’d never noticed how many tow trucks there are out on the roads.
When the bus took Adnan Sarioğlu in his uniform away from Erzurum after six months in the Land of Opportunity, he had sworn on his father’s honour, his mother’s life, his brother’s masculinity, his sister’s purity and his prophet’s beard that he would never set foot there again. God, knowing people, thinks little of honour or purity or even life, but vows made on his prophet he loves to confound. So it was by the direct will of Allah that Adnan Sarioğlu found himself back at Erzurum seven years after finessing a transfer from there to the tourist police at Dalaman: why risk an idiomatic English speaker to an IED? Not
in
Erzurum,
at
Erzurum. At Erzurum Airport. On the bare tarmac in the peeling wind of early March, with sleet threatening by the squall and three men in Istanbul suits and shades.
in
Erzurum,
at
Erzurum. At Erzurum Airport. On the bare tarmac in the peeling wind of early March, with sleet threatening by the squall and three men in Istanbul suits and shades.
‘What the fuck are we doing here?’ Kemal said, hung-over and oppressed by the hugeness of the sky.
‘I want you to see it so you understand it,’ Adnan said. ‘I don’t trade in something I haven’t seen.’
‘You trade in natural gas,’ Oğuz said. ‘And little packets of digits you call contracts.’
The story they had told their colleagues in the back office, in the compliance department, in pipelines, on the trading floor, was that it was a bonus-week lad-about, a city-boy stag weekend; trail-biking in the Wild East. The flight arced them high over ochre, desiccating Anatolia and the painfully blue lakes of the Tigris and Euphrates dams. There were eight seats in business class on the little Embraer city hopper. The Ultralords of the Universe took them all, shouting across the tiny curtained off cabin to each other. Kemal drank the entire flight and tried it with the hostess. Her face was stiff with disapproval and perfect foundation.
‘They have a water melon festival here,’ Kadir said as they trudged across the wet, wind-whipped apron from the plane to the waiting charter helicopter. ‘I read it in the in-flight magazine.’
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