The Dervish House (44 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
7
It is Deal Day.
The weather on Deal Day is bright and hot hot hot. Shimmering off the highway at six in the morning hot. Tarmac glossy and melting. Turkish flag hanging like a dead bird from the pole on the top of the hill across the highway hot. Adnan has been up since the dawn azan. Prayer is better than sleep. Profit is better than either. There are Deal Day rituals to be observed. Shoes to be shined: he sits in his jockeys on a kitchen chair with a newspaper spread on the table; flecks of stray polish clean off skin more easily than fabric. The trousers are working up a cut-yourself crease in the press. Brush lint stray hair dandruff from the jacket. A Deal Day shave is like you see in the ads, close, closer, closest yet. Five blades close. Hasan would do it better, do it the proper way, with a long open razor. Afterwards. Treat yourself. Relax back into the big chair when the deal is done and let Hasan kiss your face with his steel. Adnan exhales a long, slow gasp at the stinging splash of kolonya. Adnan doesn’t believe in those magazine-marketed aftershaves with macho names like Blue Steel and Hugo Man or worse, the names of football players and golfers. Kolonya is the proper smell of a man. Doubly so on Deal Day.
Does the DJ know something, or is the music on the dawn patrol show particularly rocking? Confirmation bias, like when he bought the Audi and every other car on the road seemed to be an Audi. Adnan is ironing his Deal Day shirt when Ayşe emerges from the bedroom in just her pants.
‘You look hot,’ she mumbles, pushing at her pillow-hair.
‘Hottest one yet, the radio says. Up to thirty-eight.’
‘I meant you, in your pants and nothing else, doing your shirt. Men ironing. It’s very delicate, like men doing ballet.’
He wonders she can see him at all through the blear. Ayşe’s a hard waker. She rolls into the kitchen and fills the kettle. The pipes whistle and bang and make that strange animal roaring but at least there is water at this hour of the morning.
‘That’s only because you don’t do them right.’
‘It takes a lot of practice not to do them right.’
But she does make coffee right, wonderfully good coffee, the kind you only learn from growing up with a cook in the house. Deal Day coffee. Adnan drinks it well away from his still-iron-warm shirt. How much better will it taste on the sun-deck of his waterside yalı with the big ships sliding past? They might have to wear more clothes then. An eyeful and then some for the ship crews and the nosy neighbours. They should be so lucky. God, but she looks good, squatting down to take clothes out of the washer-drier, thighs spread above petite, balancing feet, the divine peach of her ass. Her back is incredible. He’s never really noticed it before, the perfect shapely symmetry of the muscles around the valley of the spine but it astonishes and arouses him. Everything is sharper and sexier on Deal Day morning.
‘Sorry I was late in last night, I was setting a few things up with Ahmet and Mehmet.’
‘Are you chasing something?’
He can tell she is smiling from the play of her muscles.
‘I certainly am.’
‘Are you going to tell me?’
Again the muscle-smile. ‘Certainly not. I’ll tell you when it’s done. You do your deal, I’ll do mine.’
Ayşe takes her coffee into the bedroom. By seven Adnan is dressed. Deal Day shirt, Deal Day suit, Deal Day tie and socks and shoes. She was right. He is hot. He fastens his cufflinks.
‘Right. To battle.’
Ayşe steps out of the bedroom to see him off. She’s pulled on her Japanese silk kimono.
‘I preferred you as you were,’ Adnan says. Ayşe swats at him with the sleeve of her kimono.
‘Come here you.’ Her kiss is long with a promise of fierceness and tastes of coffee. ‘Go and do it and come home a millionaire’.
‘I’ll call you when it’s done.’
The usual boys are hanging around the garages. They must loiter there all night. As always they cast glances and make small, animal noises ostensibly among themselves as Adnan opens up the Audi. Look-at-me noises are all they ever do. Adnan considers winding down the window and telling them to fuck off and go and get a proper fucking job, fucking layabouts. This time next week he’ll be out of here.
The car pulls out of the garage on autodrive but once Adnan is on the highway he flicks into manual. The discipline of driving prevents him thinking too long about what he must do to Kemal. The traffic is already heavy; the heat-haze thick as a curtain beyond the climate-controlled windshield, the radio bouncing with prophecies of temperature records for May smashed by eight o’clock. He blinks up audio of the closing prices in London and Frankfurt, the Henry Hub in Louisiana, the Vienna Hub and the mid-morning prices from the East Asian markets. Central Asia is already spiking; Baku just about to open. The big Audi thrums through the silver traffic. Ultralord coming though.
Kadir calls five minutes out from the bridge. The world asserts itself again. Adnan taps autodrive. Kadir’s face appears on the windscreen.
‘Hail Hydror.’
‘Hail Draksor. I’ve got the materials. Where are you?’
‘About half an hour away.’
‘I’ll wait for you in the main lobby.’
‘I’ll see you there.’
‘It’s looking good, isn’t it?’
‘Yes looking good.’
‘I mean, looking hot. Hottest one yet.’
‘Yes, hot.’
Up on to the bridge approach. Down there to the left is his yalı. That’s the way to think of it. Adnan distracts himself by calling up the real-estate agent’s brochure on to the screen. That balcony, that terrace, watching the traffic arc over the bridge knowing you don’t have to be one of them.
The car is slowing. The car comes to a halt. Gridlock on the Bosphorus Bridge, a place Adnan hates to be caught, suspended high above water on slender engineering. Large numbers of cars on autodrive sometimes fall into lock-step, stymied by over-anticipating each other’s relative motions. He knocks off the autodrive: let the sheep clear before him. Emergency braking kicks in immediately: something other than herd computing has caused this jam. Now the horns begin. Adnan scans across the drive-time channels. Reports of an incident on the Bosphorus Bridge. Highways Department report . . . an incident . . . incident. Incident to Adnan means human agency.
Adnan steps out of the car to get a better look at this incident. At once he is engulfed in blaring horns. To his immediate right a woman yells silently at her windshield, bouncing her hand repeatedly on the horn. The centre of the disruption is close, no more than eight cars ahead. Beyond, the summit of the arching roadway is empty. A lock is forming on the Asian-bound lanes as drivers slow down to gawk.
‘Can you see what’s happening?’ Adnan shouts up to a heavily moustached truck driver beside him.
‘There’s a car right across both lanes,’ the driver calls down.
‘Is he hit?’
‘Not as far as I can see. He’s just sitting there. What’s odd: whenever anyone tries to edge past him, he moves the car to block them. Whoa. Metal on metal there.’
A long distance coach is stopped behind the swearing woman’s car. Passengers pile up at the front of the bus, craning to see. Swearing woman steps out of her citicar on to the bridge.
‘Can someone tell me what’s going on?’
A man two cars ahead turns and shouts, ‘It’s a jumper!’
‘A what?’ the woman asks.
The truck driver swings down from his cab. The coach door gasps open, drivers and passengers weave up between the parked vehicles.
‘Maybe if we left him alone we might all get in quicker,’ Adnan says but people are moving, pushing past him from behind and it’s the football moment, when you just let fall and become part of the crowd.
‘Will someone please tell me what’s going on?’ Citicar Woman asks one final time, then the crowd pushes her forward. ‘My purse!’ she cries. The crowd is four deep between the cars at the front of jam. Adnan squeezes to the front: a suit is authority. No one wants to get too close to the mad man in the red Toyota pulled at right angles across the highway. The damage he has done to the cars that tried to sneak past him is obvious: fenders bashed, lights smashed, paint and carbon fibre splintered. The driver is a middle-aged man, curled haired, grey at sides and temples, with a country look to him. The Toyota is a ten-year-old Istanbul registration, an old gasoline job converted to gas. He sits with his hands on the top of the wheel, very straight, looking forward. Now that the orchestra of horns has ended with everyone leaving their cars to see the drama, the sound of his engine is very loud.
‘Here come the cops!’ a man two cars to Adnan’s right shouts. It’s an impressive sight; motorbike cops coming four abreast over the curve of the bridge and down the empty road. They park in the same smart line; the officer in charge dismounts, draws off his gloves one at a time and walks towards the red Toyota. The driver flicks his eyes towards the policeman. His fingers flex on the steering wheel. As the motorcycle cop comes up to his window he slams the clutch in, floors the pedals, smokes the tyres and blasts forward to ram the crash barrier. A great cry goes up from the onlookers. The Toyota reverses fast, the policeman just makes it out of his way. Again the driver glances at the cop, again he smokes forward and smashes the barrier. The metal is buckled and flattened. Again the driver reverses back to his position across the bridge. Adnan can see him breathing fast through his mouth. He is very very afraid. The officer in charge backs off to consult with his colleagues. Police frequencies crackle and spit.
Then a voice shouts, ‘Aren’t you going to do something about him?’ A second voice joins in, ‘Move him, get him out of there or something!’ Citicar Woman now, with her purse left on the front seat, cries, ‘You know, some of us have jobs to go to. Jobs that pay your wages!’ A passenger from the coach, for whom this is excellent drama at the end of a long, tedious bus journey, shouts, half-joking, ‘You’ve got a gun, can you not just shoot him and get it over and done with?’
The officer in charge turns at that. He takes off his helmet to stare out the crowd but his attempt to cow the onlookers only stokes their defiance. Adnan has smelled this kindling, pheromonal mob-sweat at matches just before a fight breaks out in the stands.
‘How long do you expect us to stay here?’
‘It’s your fault, we’d’ve had it sorted by now.’
‘Haul him out!’
‘Come on, get on with it.’
‘The man’s right, shoot the bastard.’
The Toyota driver looks deeply scared now and revs his engine. Silence on the bridge, then a single voice behind Adnan shouts, ‘Hey you, yes you!’ The driver looks around, terrified. He can’t find the face accusing him. ‘Yes, you! Why don’t you give us all a break and just do it? You want to, so why not? Do it!’
Other voices in the crowd take up the cry.
Do it! Do it! Be a man, for once
. At Adnan’s side the mightily moustached truck-driver mumbles, ‘God be merciful; what are we doing?’
You’re right
, Adnan wants to answer the truck driver,
this is monstrous, we are beasts
. But the rhythm of the crowd pulls him. He sways, his heart tunes to its beat. He knows what is happening, he has felt it many times at Aslanteppe. Go on go on. Cimbom Cimbom. Go on go on. Cimbom. And he is shouting with them,
Go on go on. Do it. Do it!
A roaring wall of voice, not hatred, not cruelty, nothing emotional, just the mind of the mob.
Do it! Do it! Be a man, for once
. At Adnan’s side the mightily moustached truck-driver mumbles, ‘God be merciful; what are we doing?’
You’re right
, Adnan wants to answer the truck driver,
this is monstrous, we are beasts
. But the rhythm of the crowd pulls him. He sways, his heart tunes to its beat. He knows what is happening, he has felt it many times at Aslanteppe. Go on go on. Cimbom Cimbom. Go on go on. Cimbom. And he is shouting with them,
Go on go on. Do it. Do it!
A roaring wall of voice, not hatred, not cruelty, nothing emotional, just the mind of the mob.
The man in the red Toyota shakes his head. He looks up as if he can see heaven through the roof of his old car. He reverses back. The crowd raises a cheer. The man smiles in surprise, delighted. The audience love him. He spins the wheels, screams the tyres, smokes the blacktop, then pops the brake. The car shoots forward so fast the front end slides sideways. The crowd’s guttural cheer falls starkly silent as the red Toyota hits the flattened crash barrier obliquely and flips up in a spinning twist. The car seems to sail a long way out over the Bosphorus. It hangs in the air. Its arc down to the water is very slow and theatrical. Still turning belly-up, the roof makes a huge splash where it hits the water. It goes straight down.
There is a silence beyond silence, where all sound is dead and the air is dumb as lead. Adnan’s eyes throb, his breath flutters in his chest. He has just seen a car drive off the Bosphorus Bridge and plunge into the water. That can’t be. He egged a man on to kill himself. Him and a hundred others. The exoneration of the mass. No one voice is to blame. But his voice was there.
Go on go
, he shouted. He would have done it anyway. Yes, the crowd was just giving him what he wanted. Why choose the middle of the Bosphorus Bridge, the middle of the rush-hour to suicide if you don’t want an audience? He smiled, he waved at his audience. You couldn’t have done anything to stop him. Go on. Drive on. Have your day. Everybody else is making their way back to their vehicles. You have a deal to make. And a neurological beating to deliver. It seems not so bad after goading a man into killing himself.
Go on go
, he shouted. He would have done it anyway. Yes, the crowd was just giving him what he wanted. Why choose the middle of the Bosphorus Bridge, the middle of the rush-hour to suicide if you don’t want an audience? He smiled, he waved at his audience. You couldn’t have done anything to stop him. Go on. Drive on. Have your day. Everybody else is making their way back to their vehicles. You have a deal to make. And a neurological beating to deliver. It seems not so bad after goading a man into killing himself.
The truck driver shakes his head and climbs back up into his cab. The coach passengers file back on to their bus, not looking at each other. Citicar Woman is tearful and swearing again, a soft, edge of breath
bastard bastard bastard
, as if Red Toyota man is the one at fault, not her.
bastard bastard bastard
, as if Red Toyota man is the one at fault, not her.
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