The Dervish House (56 page)

Read The Dervish House Online

Authors: Ian Mcdonald

BOOK: The Dervish House
9.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
‘What’s going on here?’ Ismet says.
‘This is a private matter.’
Leyla sees how Ismet sizes up the men, the truck, the stand-off.
‘These people are under the protection of the Adem Dede Tarikat.’ Ismet puts himself between Hafize and Leyla.
‘This is none of your business son.’
Then the men start to emerge from the door to the old kitchen on to Güneşli Sok. Five, ten, twenty. They form up behind Ismet. They are darkly dressed. Their faces are serious as men’s faces should be after study of the Holy Koran.
Abdullah Unul sighs, shakes his head and does the gun reveal again. Ismet clicks his tongue and makes exactly the same gesture. Time hangs, then every other tarikat moves his jacket or pulls up his T-shirt to show the weapon there.
‘Okay,’ Abdullah Unul says. The tow-truck driver starts his engines. Abdullah Unul pushes Mehmet Ali towards the truck.
‘He stays.’ Naci’s voice is clear and commanding. Abdullah Unul chews his bottom lip, shakes his head, breathes deep through flared nostrils, then goes around to the other side of the truck and gets in. Engines rev. The red tow-truck drives away through the narrow alleys of Eskiköy.
 
The lawyer is a junior in a first work suit but his shoes are decent. Adnan thinks of commenting that the firm could have sent someone more senior, but he’s no dazzling paragon in his Galatasaray shirt and jeans. He blends too well with the street thieves, brawlers, pick-pocketed tourists and travel insurance scammers. The kid can’t pick him out until Adnan nods to him.
‘Mr Sarioğlu, I am Cengiz Bekdil, from Ozis Turan Kezman.’ They’ re a big commercial practice used by Ozer that still keeps a small criminal division on the basis that modern business practice is a complex thing.
Don’t switch companies yet
, Adnan thinks.
You may be about to have a major career boost
. Bekdil’s handshake is as good as his shoes. To the desk sergeant, ‘Is there somewhere we can talk in private?’
The sergeant frowns at the disturbance — the Cup Tie burbles at the frustrating edge of audibility on his radio — but lifts up the counter and nods Adnan and Bekdil through to a statement room. The table is covered in empty tea glasses.
‘What’s the score?’ Adnan shoots back to the sergeant as he closes the door.
‘One all.’
Adnan winces. Bekdil sits across the table from him, leaning forward. His hands are lively and dancing.
‘The situation is this, Mr Sarioğlu. Your wife has been arrested on a charge of smuggling antiquities out of Turkey.’
‘What’s their evidence?’
‘She was allegedly caught transferring a rare historical piece to her gallery in Eskiköy with an intention on selling it out of the country without proper export documentation. The object is currently at the gallery. The police have cordoned off the area. Ms Erkoç claims to have found it quite legitimately through her own research. Against that, and what makes our case slightly more tricky, is that she was arrested as part of a larger operation against organized antiquity smuggling.’
‘Ayşe is not a smuggler.’
‘Of course, Mr Sarioğlu. However, she did in confidence tell me that many of her pieces — religious artwork, that’s her speciality? — have come from irregular sources. Of course, we’ll argue that it’s entrapment.’
‘Yes, good, but what are you going to do right now?’
Bekdil has a trick where he pulls in his bottom lip when concentrating or irritated.
‘I’ll apply for bail. I’m confident she’ll get it, though it may be quite substantial. Are you in a position, Mr Sarioğlu?’
‘I’ll post the bail.’
‘Excellent, excellent.’ Bekdil clasps his hands and shakes them in pleasure. He may wear a twenty-year-old’s suit but in his heart, in his inner spiritual age, the one you are all your life, he is an Anatolian great-uncle, the kind who gives you money for school uniforms and his old pick-up for your first car. ‘Between ourselves, and off the record, I suspect the prosecutors will offer a plea bargain.’
‘Ayşe’s not pleading guilty to any minor charge. If you get a name as a traitor in her business, no one will ever deal with you again.’
‘With respect, that is for my client to decide, Mr Sarioğlu. I’m going to go and see if I can set bail.’
They rise from the table of sugar-silty tea glasses.
‘One last thing: this object, what was it?’
Bekdil sucks in his lower lip.
‘Have you ever heard of a Mellified Man?’
‘What is that?’
‘I don’t know either, Mr Sarioğlu but, it’s worth somewhere in the region of a million euro.’
‘Just gone two one,’ the sergeant offers as he lifts the counter for Bekdil and Adnan.
‘Cimbom?’
‘Arsenal.’
Adnan mouths a silent
fuck
. The sergeant turns the radio a fraction so that Adnan, leaning against the desk, can listen to it.
‘Volkan’s been substituted. Van Rijn went for his bad leg in a sliding tackle on the edge of the box. Should have been a penalty and a red card; we got a yellow and a free kick and they’re talking about Volkan being out for six months.’
‘Russian referee,’ Adnan says. The sergeant’s mouth forms a wise O. Behind the wire-toughened glass Bekdil argues with two policemen in well-ironed suits. One is short, nicotine-skinned, balding. He looks too warm. The other is tall, well-groomed in a nanoweave suit that shifts from blacker on black to a dizzying moire mesh of patterns. Silver at his cuffs. He makes Bekdil look cheap. Flash fucker. Bekdil’s hands spell
negotiation:
open to plead, palms down to reject, beckoning in to reason, weighing up, scissoring to cut through to clarity. Detective Flash Fucker does all the police talking. Nods all around finally. Bekdil slips into the interview room. Adnan glimpses a hand on a table, silver rings on the fingers, antique silver at the wrist. Ayşe. Then the door closes.
‘As I suspected, the bail is substantial,’ Bekdil says, returning to the front office. Flash Fucker is looking at Adnan through the glass. What kind of cop affords a suit like that? They should be checking him for corruption, not hard-working gallery owners trying to make a go in Queen Bitch City. ‘We can arrange for it to be deposited from our funds . . .’
‘How much?’
‘Twenty thousand.’
‘I said I’ll get it.’
‘We take cards,’ the sergeant says. ‘Not Amex, though, and there’s a two per cent surcharge on credit cards.’ He proffers the reader. Adnan taps in the zeroes and they seem to be the mathematics of this day’s jarring incongruities. Zero times zero is zero. Zero times anything is still zero, but divide by zero is infinity. That’s the logic of this day. Ayşe arrested. An antiquity smuggling ring. A million euro. A Mellified Man; he can’t even begin to imagine what that is. All the while the game burbles away on the desk radio. Adnan watches the money vanish from his account into the Istanbul Police account. The sergeant tears off the printout receipt with a flourish.
‘You can apply for repayments either online or on our twenty-four-hour bail-bond hotline.’ He picks up the phone and calls through to the police behind the glass. Flash Fucker opens the interview room door and there she is: Ayşe. She is tired and furious but her eyes are bright. Her hair is mussed, there’s a ladder in her tights. The toes of her boots are scuffed, but her face, her make-up is perfect. Her eyes hold that dark light deep in them that Adnan has learned over years to recognize and respect. Her bag is pulled aggressively up high on her shoulder. It is possible to wear a bag aggressively. It is as if he hasn’t seen her for years. Then she is out in the front office. Flash Fucker catches Adnan’s eye, nods in acknowledgement.
You think you know me, do you? Well, you do. I am your enemy.
Ayşe picks up the paperwork from the desk sergeant and brushes past Adnan’s open arms.
‘Not here,’ she whispers. ‘I wouldn’t give those bastards the satisfaction.’
Adnan and Bekdil follow her out on to the hot street. Ayşe angrily flicks out a cigarette, lights it, inhales with tight pleasure. Smoking on the street be damned.
‘Well Ms Erkoç, I’ll keep you apprised of developments,’ Bekdil says. Ayşe waves away his offer of a handshake. ‘It’s a complicated case so it will take some time for the Public Prosecutors to formulate charges. I’d be surprised if anything happened before the summer, but I’d still like to arrange a meeting early next week to present you with the likely chain of events and your options. There is a very good lawyer specializes in art and antiquities; if I may, I’d like to retain him. He knows his stuff. Mr Sarioğlu.’ Bekdil’s details jump to Adnan’s ceptep in a handshake. ‘If you need anything, don’t hesitate to call.’
Then he is hurrying away along Imran Oktem Cadessi with rather short steps for a man.
‘I’ll call the car,’Adnan says. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’
‘I don’t want to go home,’ Ayşe snaps. ‘I want a coffee or something. I stink of police.’ She looks around her at the flat grey face of the street, that not even spring sun can inspire. ‘Not here.’ Her boot heels clop down the cobble of Terzihani Sok. Adnan follows her across the sun-dazzling Atmeydanı, the ancient Roman Hippodrome, dodging tour buses and taxis, Chinese tour groups following high-held umbrellas, keeping enough distance to fully appreciate the magnificence of her anger. No regret, no remorse, never a waver of guilt: how he loves her. She bangs down on to a stool at a çayhane in the wall of the Sultanahmet Mosque. Patrons stare, even in the heart of tourist Istanbul this is traditionally the world of men. ‘Two coffees,’ she orders and then sits, chain smoking. Adnan knows she’ll talk in her own due time.
‘Do you know what the final score was?’ Adnan asks the waiter as he sets down the tiny cups of coffee.
‘It was a draw. Two all. Second leg at the Emirates next week.’
‘That’s all right,’ Adnan says. It makes him feel ridiculously better.
‘Not bad, though I’m a Beşiktaş man myself.’
Ayşe throws her coffee down in one.
‘They fingerprinted me. That stuff doesn’t come off, it’s all over this dress, it’s ruined, not that I’ll ever be wearing it again. They took my DNA; they made me open my mouth and stuck a swab in, like I was a common car thief or something.’ She lights another cigarette, throws her head back, draws in the smoke and flutteringly exhales it in a wisping blue veil in that way that has always aroused Adnan with its unconscious movie-star sophistication. ‘I had it. It was in my hands, I opened the sarcophagus and looked in, the first eyes in two hundred and fifty years to see it. I touched it. I tasted it. It was sweet, like nothing has ever been sweet before or ever will be again. I had it in my hands.’
‘Bekdil seems all right.’
‘Fuck Bekdil. No; Bekdil is all right. He’s about twelve years old but he’s good. How much did he tell you?’
‘That you’d been lifted as part of a larger operation cracking antique smuggling.’
‘That doesn’t make me feel any better. No, did he tell you what it is, this antiquity I’m accused of trying to sell out of the country?’
‘Something like a “Mellified Man”?’
‘Do you know what that is? It’s a legend. It’s a fairy tale. It’s a roc egg or a djinn lamp or a flying carpet. It’s the jewels of Aya Sofya and the tears of Mary. It’s a human body mummified in honey. It shouldn’t exist at all but I found it.’ Ayşe lights another cigarette. ‘Honey trap was what it was. I don’t think that bastard Akgün even knew it existed, he just gave me enough clues to make it plausible. And dangled a million euro in front of me.’
‘I can’t follow this.’
‘A client came to a gallery; well dressed, knowledgeable. He had a provenance of the existence of an eighteenth-century Mellified Man from Iskenderun and would pay me one million euro if I would deliver it to him. And I did — Adnan, the things I’ve seen. I got him his Mellified Man but he was a cop from the antiquities division. Fucker, I should have known; that cheap airport aftershave. He knew that my looking for a Mellified Man would bring out every statue-seller and icon pedlar from here to Bursa. Fucker.’
‘A million euro. Ayşe, if it’s money . . .’
Ayşe suddenly touches Adnan’s face. ‘Adnan; it was for me. A purely selfish exercise; to show I can do the deals too. I can make the money. I can play the big game.’
A shadow crosses the table. Adnan squints up at the unexpected drop in temperature. There is a cloud across the sun, a small, laughable bubble of vapour but there is another behind it, and another, and behind it a wall of cumulo-nimbus towering behind the dome of Aya Sofya. Adnan’s heart kicks; now the enormity of what he has achieved in Turquoise has a solid, physiological form. The proof is written across the sky.
‘I was the bait. I was set up from the start. I should have known. I was blinded by it. A Mellified Man — to find a thing like that, one of the last wonders of the world; could you have refused?’
Adnan shakes his head, mouths the word
no
.
‘They try and scare you in there. Çandar, the other one; he’s just a station plainclothesman, no idea what this is about except he’s supposed to play bad cop to Aykut’s good cop. Jail, fines, losing the business, bankruptcy; I can’t go to jail. It would kill my mother. I did bad enough marrying you, Adnan. Then they try and play Prisoner’s Dilemma — please. Just a fine, maybe a suspended jail sentence — that would still finish it. The game is over and there isn’t any other game that interests me. If I can’t see another Ashkenazi Pentateuch or an Isfahan miniature or a Blake illustration . . . there is no life without Blake. It’s as simple as that. I can’t go to court; I can’t lose the gallery. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!’ Ayşe stabs her cigarette out in the ash tray.

Other books

Venus on the Half-Shell by Philip Jose Farmer
Lemon by Cordelia Strube
A Forbidden Storm by Larsen, J.
Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans
In the Moors by Nina Milton
The Mortal Nuts by Pete Hautman
Cavanaugh’s Woman by Marie Ferrarella